|
|
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
| |
12:44 am - This thing is on.
|
|
The real problem with this society is that we are constantly asked to do absolutely insane, unnatural and irrational things while behaving as though everything is sane and normal and rational.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Monday, February 1st, 2010
| |
10:06 pm - She's making sense now.
|
So you didn't get famous,
and the world is ending,
but it's no big deal,
I mean you were there for it all,
all that stuff you did that felt so amazing and what you laughed at when no was around and what was so beautiful you had to stop and take deep breaths just to stay standing,
you knew yourself better than any outsider ever could have anyway.
And what's the point in being famous?
So you can pretend that you're a thing
that exists suspended like a hologram
in the minds of endless, countless masses?
So you can endlessly negotiate your identity back and forth with an inbred teeming mass?
I don't see that as some desirable goal,
but I might be jealous
and denying the reality
that
we are built to destroy.
Sort of simple-like:
monsters.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, January 29th, 2010
| |
10:40 am - Button. Noodle. by a Heat rock.
|
I love your tangled hair
and waking up in the morning
you lean over to play with our birds
I love your sitting there
how the windows are frozen
and the sky is just so large
I love all this possible and able
It is all just enough
Let me call it back again and again
Though I may lose my fingers on the way to you
Let me come to it over and over
It is all so very much
I am all this "possible" and "can" and "able"
while the sky is so large
and the windows freeze over
I'd love to go outside with you -
just think of Spring for a while,
and know it shall return.
I love your tangled hair
and the pictures I've taken of you that I always think of.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
| |
9:54 am - Every student needs to read this.
|
David Foster Wallace, for the win:
Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do?
Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.
The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.
All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels.
Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
| |
2:50 pm - Hospital morning
|
Got bit by a dog named Barkley (a Coonhound) while I was grooming today. The dog panicked and bit me pretty good, leaving an inch-long gash with a deep puncture wound on my left pinky finger. Blood was literally flowing out of the wound for about five minutes. I felt lightheaded by the time we got to the hospital from bleeding.I gleaned more information about my injury and what to do for it from listening to the nurses and doctors talk to each other than I was told directly by anyone. The hospital was a surreal building that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, and the weather was so cold it burned.
They can't stitch dog or cat bites because it increases the risk of infection, so I got some sterile tape (butterfly bandages?) on it, 5 days worth of penicillin and 4-5 days off of work. I'll probably lose $300 or so because of the injury; worker's comp insurance will pay 100% of the medical costs but I don't think they'll reimburse lost wages in my case.
Today I learned that hospitals are hilariously inefficient, that fingers bleed a lot more than you'd think and that there's no accessory as awesome as a hospital wristband.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
| |
9:30 pm - the bridge
|
Lately I am preoccupied with extending thoughts to their "logical" conclusions, which means that I perpetually imagine events to have larger consequences than they really do. If I hit my hand, I think of being an old man and the hand not working any more. If I see a date, I imagine seventy or eighty years beyond that date. If I see your picture, I think about you growing older and older and older. The world seems to have made a case to me that it's going to continually morph into older states. I've never seen it do anything else, anyway. But why does the binding of time have to have such fatalistic emotional consequences? My feelings can turn like a teeter-totter because of some noisy construction workers. My feelings turn to their irrationally deathly conclusions as a crane worker dips his scoop into a barge carrying scrap metal on the way to work: metal recycling plant. There's no choice but for them to register all of the Latino guys driving around in old GMC trucks collecting scrap metal...there's so many of them, and they all have little plaques on their trucks now that show their 4-digit recycler number and their name splayed out real big. You see those guys creeping around in back alleys just lurking for metal. Hungry for metal. It's worth more than you'd probably think. Gas isn't cheap and they just drive around in fully-loaded American junkers all day looking for that precious, precious. There's a guy named Efrain at my work, he's Latino (I don't know his nationality) and he's worked there for years and years. He used to make shoes but now he cleans all of the dog kennels which involves spraying disinfectant, scrubbing all of the surfaces after the disinfectant has sat there for ten minutes, hosing it all down and then using a giant squeegee to dry the surfaces. So much shit and piss. He keeps a nice chart of the poo-poos and the pee-pees. He's had four heart-attacks and still works himself into a lather every day from 7am until 1pm, still eats shit food and runs around like a fool. He drives a little Nissan minivan that I've never seen anywhere else. He's the maintenance man. He maintains it, really well. It is nonetheless shocking to see yourself in an old person like him sometimes: toiling so desperately in a confined space repeatedly. It generates a strange effect on the imprint a person has. I take twenty minutes to contemplate things each way to work and I've found myself often angry at drivers. I can't believe how close they get, but moreso...I guess it's just the oppressive nature of the car-culture on a biker. It's inevitable to feel jealous when you're in bad weather and see people speeding past; there's plenty of time for scoffing when I pass the traffic in minutes, time the lights and make quick turns when there's no traffic...you can't really beat me in a car, in polite society, for the first 50 yards (sorry).
It has not gotten like this easily
Maybe it won't be so tough to wind down
Long phrases of conscience will pour out like syrup
I will feel the air change as you bristle
Our voices like engines just roaring and revving
My options dispersing, I'm thinking of laughing
I'm dancing under the pressure
You game me
Who thinks that some know
but won't say?
We'll know what we're doing
as we burn the lake
we will know what
we are doing
as we torch the fields
shooting ourselves in the foot just to make a point
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
| |
5:19 pm - Institutions
|
A dysfunctional system cannot be made miraculously functional no matter how many rational, well-intentioned and high-functioning agents are injected into it.
It is like suggesting a new bulb for a broken lamp. The problem is not the bulb. The problem is the lamp.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Monday, January 18th, 2010
| |
11:46 am - MLK Jr.
|
December 18, 1963. MLK Jr. at Western Michigan University.
Modern psychology has a word…”maladjusted.” Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.
But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination.
I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry.
I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.
I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence, and the alternative to disarmament. The alternative to absolute suspension of nuclear tests. The alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. This is why I welcome the recent test-ban treaty.
In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment–men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos. Who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Saturday, January 16th, 2010
| |
6:07 pm - Strange discrepancies
|
we shall go off on a nighttime journey and not be sure where it leads
i imagine fields of wheat blowing around in moonlight
and cool air blowing past your smiling faces on rural highways
i am not sure what my motives are or how to shape them
could i be a playdough shape in judgmental hands
melting in and out of a real sure form
reducing down to pure substance
becoming a smaller thing
than it was before
i don't know
yes, no,
maybe.
i wanna
be a billowing
sail in whatever
wind happens to find you.
don't call me out for
that i think it's
not too much
to ask.
i wanna
look like them.
standing up tall above
weird lucky constructions,
as if in flight.
as if aflight.
take me as if by surprise i won't be surprising
click click click a little sound brings me out
come on let's getamoveon
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| |
12:08 pm
|
|
Kick the terrible people off the thrones that make them demons
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, January 15th, 2010
| |
8:38 pm - SMILE
|
|
| |
3:47 pm - No, it's ridiculous to be so vain as to think that man can alter the world.
|
|
| |
3:38 pm - A-S0-COUNT:// Adrag.letmeagoin.
|
The economy is not a morality game, it is completely devoid of morality. So devoid of morality that trying to apply moral scruples to it is mainly an exercise in self-righteousness.
I've observed that the most important and influential artifact of the corporate media is the creation of artificial controversies and divisions.
This is probably an example of your mind working overtime to generate a reality that conforms to your expectations.
There is, actually, something seriously wrong with never leaving your house. You don't need to dismiss peoples' legitimate concerns because you question their motives.
Fine, just don't expect to have cheap and easily accessible energy in the long term (and definitely don't complain when you don't). Fine, just don't expect to have cheap and easily accessible energy now. It isn't either of those things. It is a rough tab to see.
Well-educated people who cared about their education understand that it is a lifelong process.
I would not trust smug and overly cocksure people no matter their level of education!
The simplest explanation is that they're all cooking the books.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
| |
1:29 pm - The dates are starting to look unreal
|
"I thought I did do it." I paused and tried to perceive whether or not I was writing a memory in that moment. Later, when I rode past the same spot again, I couldn't remember what I tried to remember but I definitely could recall writing the memory. Anterograde amnesia is when a person is unable to write new memories. I don't have amnesia. Right? I think so. I don't remember what they said, but I'll always recognize a face (certainly not faceblind). But this is about finding yourself in a long repeating pattern of days.
I found myself in a strange cycle. Well, actually: I knew I was entering this cycle when I first walked into it. It felt heavy, daunting. High probability of spinning. Nauseating spinning with angry voices screaming at a victim in a pit. It isn't that every day is the same, it is that the angles of each moment are so similar when you walk in so many circles. Days are vast spaces, but with very certain confines (the morning to the afternoon to the evening). Our minds take us for a walk in the snow and discuss so many things that occur to us, the cycle continues on in a pleasantly sloping way.
There's a slight downhill tilt to the entire city.
"What's wrong with you?" Hair flies everywhere. Water droplets coat stainless metal. Whimpers, whines, loud motors turning blowing fans. The animal sits patiently and waits to be taken back to a comfortable place, not this limbo. Anything but this limbo.
I bike over water that's been frozen into black mud-tar and it gathers on my backpack and raincoat. Cars get way too close for comfort when they rev their engines to pass me, sometimes I'll give a very belligerent driver the finger (which requires pulling back the top half of my mitten and exposing my fingers to the cold, a painful exercise even for a few seconds). Buses don't care if you're near a puddle - they will splash you anyway. A good trick is to use your body as a shield and take wide berth. I avoid the door zone that's about 3 feet away from any car and try to just cut the edge of the slush-road boundary that forms as the snow is pushed aside by thousands of cars driving over it. I go slowly these days because my back brake has begun sticking, making it difficult to stop without making a terrifying squeal with my front brake. Wide tires and slow travel in cold weather over breathtaking bridges, around unfamiliar but often identical neighborhoods, dodging foolish drivers.
Breath comes out in sparkling clouds.
You are offended that I bike? I am offended that you drive. I am offended that our entire city, state and nation was built around cars. I am offended by it, and I should be. My indignation is righteous. I am offended by the automobile. I am offended that there are more cars than drivers. I am offended it has to sit on the street and make everywhere ugly. I am offended it makes biking so messy. I am offended it smells bad, sounds bad and is bad. Make your excuses and go about your day in your dream-carworld, but remember that I am angry and I am righteous. Fill her up.
No supplies. What is going to happen to the new generation? No supplies. Please, tell them why: we thought it was a rehearsal.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Saturday, January 9th, 2010
| |
6:08 pm - Oh, I've heard this song
|
Wanted:
Must possess good reading and writing skills - preferably exquisite so that no detail is lost. Should be tall, slim and dark. An appropriately resourceful-looking backwoods or redneck type could also suit. Must have no moral qualms about finance or destruction. Needs to be able to hold tightly to ideas so that they stay solidly supported, like a good foundation or a fine soil. Excellent organizational skills a must. No cats (sorry). Strange ticks and hang-ups about possibly real or possibly imaginary phenomena a bonus. Applicants will be placed higher in admissions queue for possessing good fashion taste, particularly in gloves. Please call 314 620 0790 to apply, most days.
Another thing.
The bird is getting freaked out because it thinks it might have a voice soon. The bird is speaking. There are tongues moving and shapes shifting behind glassy eyes the size of buttons. You think she might have a brain tumor. Hell, you thought you might have had a brain tumor and were really worried that one night that you wouldn't wake up the next day. "I tell you what: I'd get up if I knew I'd fell." I tell you what: falling is like a way of life for us these days. They built all sorts of problems into the model to bring you down, to wear you down a little bit, to demoralize you just that tiny sliver more. You wonder what happened to rich people you met on airplanes who flashed $100 bills: did they lose their fortunes in the spiral? Did they drop all their pennies into some foolish machinery probably not too far from the giant plastic penny-swirling device that's in all the malls or did they stash them in mason jars on dusty shelves? Look, there's no way she can escape her environment. You kind of turn into whatever noise is floating around your skull. There's a lot of sirens and gray slush. There's a lot of gray slush and a lot of sirens. There are lots of siren calls and the gray slush carries on. In the gray slush I can spot the lights from the sirens coming even if my ears are plugged up.
It's meant to spread out and scatter into a million little shattered fragments and stick to your insides like a bomb filled with glass. Perhaps that's too violent an image. Prescribe us something that doesn't only say no: it's meant to cover you like a spiderweb in the morning woods. What kind of vain stuff are you into now? What's not vain stuff? I looked at a picture and it gave me a thought and I present this idea to you here now. Things are plainly plain and painting them isn't worth it. Sell enough art to make a beautiful little row of flowers. I hope this works out. I am spreading my wishes around as fertilizer on a lush bed of bulbs. There shall grow thin vines and thick thorns while the flower blossom up toward a looming daylight sun.
Maybe it isn't worth rambling on about, I don't know, I can't tell because my goggles keep fogging up but not because I'm breathing on them, just because it's so damn wet outside.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Friday, January 8th, 2010
| |
1:43 pm
|
|
| Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
| |
12:11 pm - Real events
|
Traveled to STL to spend NYE with familiar faces. They were pretty faces, and difficult to align with. Living so often in the morning means that night becomes a hazy blur. I always have more energy for life when I'm on my feet, outside. Got to skate the Sylvan Springs skatepark, which is strangely designed but a lot of fun - small, chunky transition and thin coping that you can't hang up on as well as a big wave-inspired quarter pipe to use as a launch. Supposedly that king-of-kings, Tony Hawk, had some role in designing it - yet I seriously doubt that accusation. It's half-finished, with only the bottom level being skateable. Once the top is finished, I expect some serious high-speed assault from skaters of all ages since the entire park heads downhill. I dropped in at the top and had to run out because I had too much speed.
Skateboarding is a beautiful activity. I cannot wait for the climate to change to "acceptable" rather than "astoundingly, painfully cold." I want to open an indoor skatepark in Chicago (hello long-term). There isn't one in the city, which is unacceptable in a place that is snowy, cold and dark for 6 months out of the year! Makes my bones ache for SF, LA - any place that doesn't really have a winter - especially since so many of my former skating partners in crime are "living the dream" in the strange, unstable state of California.
Saw a giant funk band with about 15 people play bassy, loopy, high-energy songs and a country-flavored band play drippy, slow, methodical songs about mythical creatures. Danced. Got a grapefruit thrown at me, caught it, ate it a few days later. Saint Louis is turning into a wasteland, slowly but surely, after signs that it wouldn't. There is just too much emptiness. Everything used to be, now it is in disuse. The buildings wait for occupants but they never arrive.
Sat on the bus in the dark. The driver got a speeding ticket. I tracked our progress with my phone, which lit up my face in that unnerving blue-screen color. Everyone has a smart phone now. This happened in the past two years. How's that cash cow? Information overload, information withdrawal, information absorption. I can feel the facts dropping from me: down, down, down.
My parents got a dog named Sheba. She bites and jumps and is just a bundle of floppy, clumsy puppy - smooth black coat and big expressive ears. Animals bring us great joy because they remind us about our very basic selves: confused, lost, wordless, restless, acting without fully understanding why. We are no better, but our hands work nicely at shaping our environment and our words lend interaction a false precision.
I thought I was very sad for a while when I was in STL. Then I realized I was only being enchanted by familiarity. The winds of change are permanent, though, and that fragile bubble was broken by revelations about the lives of others. Nothing is as perfect as it seems. Everything must be earned through some effort. The relationships do not arrive unpacked and sprawled out on the floor like so many gifts on Christmas morning.
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Sunday, December 27th, 2009
| |
3:14 pm
|
|
| Monday, December 21st, 2009
| |
10:17 am
|
it's
a
sweetheart
deal
designed to
scratch
backs
and cozy up
to large
company
men
it's
a
dead-end
deal
meant to
flip the country
round
onto its
delicate
head
there's
many ways
to
say
"it is not what I want"
why then
must it
be so
dire?
it may
disagree
with courtesy
and sense
but
it is no
death sentence
we'll emigrate to some
place more like
what we have
envisioned
we'll arrive and figure
it is not the place
at all, only
our thoughts
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, December 18th, 2009
| |
10:08 am
|
Time reaches its end and casually rewinds itself to the beginning at the same speed
In your grasp I unravel like eleven loose clementines out of a plastic sack onto the floor
On some very basic level I reject myself,
Some other place is where there is movement, you can't do anything here
After the day has worn our teeth to dry bone
She says: why can't I find the right one
And just to prove he could, he did it both ways
No worry about the concrete and the speed.
Riding wooden toy with grasping toes proves easier
Backed by relaxed dreams and lazy faith in balance
|
|
(comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|
