excuse me, just organizing my thoughts

reading an essay by david graeber. what i think he is saying is:
when we make a social contract, we need to base it (or its enforcement) on something outside of the contract itself (ie the formation of a constitution cannot be done by constitutional means).
the more alien to us the mechanism we choose in order to do this, the more alien the social contract (alien? outside? different? abstract?). or vice versa - the more abstract the social construct, the more abstract its mechanism of enforcement.

Stop slamming the fucking door (an exercise in resisting closure)

Setting:

three walls of transparent plastic covering brown bag insulation striped with red wood

one wall of massive sliding windows, taped blue x's for safety

digression: "Safety does not come first. Goodness, truth, and beauty come first" - the prime of miss jean brodie (1969)

digression-digression: 1969 was the year after 1968 the year in which cosmogonic myths of social disturbance were born. burn her inside her vehicle and remember to support small business.

Tapestry plywood floor, massage table, two beds, two chairs, one white dresser covered in cellophane

plastic sheeting over electrical wiring on raked wood ceiling.

Well, Gloria, ahem, excuse my forwardness but as I recall blue duct tape was featured in VOGUE of Fall Two Thousand Eight.....

Motherfathersisterpullouthergutsslidethemuphisanusworkitspitsomelubemotherbecarefulofmynipplesyeahharderharder

confessyouturnedonthegasinthechamberthepoorcurlyheadedjewishboysfloggingthensuckingimnotwetyet

Face up in a skeleton of potential luxury. My house is beautiful, it is a skeleton framed by sunshine lavender and white roses. Four vegan restaurants on the same street, and in the middle flows a river of carrot beet apple puree, the new golden-skinned generation sucks it through biodegradable straws right off the sidewalk and we only vomit on sundays.

FAITH THROUGH ALLITERATION

(fortune, fairy-tales)

like a dream but verifiable by other articulate beings

I had a slice of enlightenment handed to me just a night ago, and it was delicious. just one of those timeless spaces you enter where every thought presents itself with the light of day, hits the tongue and ripples off.

all of it with such ease and meaning. you are connected to everything living and vibrating in this universe, and although you've always known it with your rational and systematizing mind, you now feel it coursing through every fiber of your being. open system.

like a container, your body opens and begins to let in -- drinking the world in through large licorice pupils. like the 80% water that you are, you begin to resonate with the exact frequency of everyone and everything that encompasses you.

breath is full&deep, rhythmic, sweeps those cobwebs out of your chest.

you're probably taking in a higher dose than you normally do of the dear ones in your presence and the particles they're shedding into their chemical aura. they're probably breathing with the same depth and tempo and taking in from you too.

did you know that the literal meaning of "inspiration" is to breathe in?

food for thought

communication is flawless -- what isn't accomplished through a simple shared glance is given through a gentle hand and few small words. (!!!)

if that doesn't sound like close to perfect information retrieval, i don't know what is!

you're reminded of love.

love for the people who are not physically present but who linger in your mind exactly because you've been waiting and looking for some external inspiration to finally tell them -- tell them how you feel.

love for yourself and all these lovely people who perhaps at other times in other places can be monsters but who in this moment and underneath it all are beautiful children who just want to be held and told that they are good and have big hearts and that everything's going to be alright.

--rant to be continued and related to scifi, fear, e=mc^2, feedback loops, information processing, dance, the physical manifestation of harmony (it's structure and anatomy)--

hark, it is the dawning of the

brrrrr i c symphonic collusions on all sides
reminds of a waterfall in a nether world
rush & shush & rush & shush
suddenly BLAM! KERPLAM! (just kidding).

at the dinner table i am an elitist
[and? so? i've traveled galaxies, fought wars, raised monuments - i've lived for so long my beginnings are lost to memory - i love myself and i love you - so yes, i am a lelitist]

at the gay club i am a spectacle
[and what about the 35 year old lumberjack wearing a thong and tight leather pants pulled down under the thong, grinding on a metal bar - why are all the middle-aged guys watching chris and i? why did we bother with 21+ night?]

at night, wrapped in sweaty limbs, believe it or not, i am a star -
[i didn't see it coming - they and they and they didn't see it coming - but in the end, everybody is coming]

but only in pittsburgh.

Fanfare for Ms. E. F. C

Meine Dame Und Herren und everything in-between or beyond that spectrum,

I give you Em Le Fay
Erstwhile Englishwoman in the County of Fyfe (after the Thane thereof)
Scholar and Soon-to-be Asset Manager
Cross-Atlantic Nomad
All-Around Encyclopedia of Minutiae
Former Co-President of the Dramatic Society
Receiver of a Glass of White Wine
and
my friend, Former Citizen of My Heart

Quoth the Economics Student, "It's not like I'm going to be happy anyway, so I might as well do a job that makes me a good deal of money. Then I can retire and do what I like." Quoth the Follower of Dr. Johnson and Adam Smith, "It's hard to do a thing you love, why ruin it? Get out, while you can." Quoth she, "No one around me has got their head screwed on right."

I give you Em Le Fay
Wearer of Sensible Winter Coats and Good Jeans
Attendant of Assessment Pools
(which I gather are rather like group auditions)
Applicant to the Financial Giant J.P. Morgan Stanley
Half of Matt and Emma
Recaller of the Tiny Details of the Political Machinations of the Alma Mater
(and Extensive Recounter thereof)
Drinker of Blue Drinks
Giver of Earfuls
Former Partner-In-Crime

I can't really remember half the people she mentions in conversation. My mind is going is my excuse. That time I puked so hard vessels burst in my eyes cleared away most of 2004-2005. Don't mind me, I'm listening.

She says, "You know, [insert favorite teacher here] once told me that she was worried about you. Sort of unsure of where you would end up. Of who you'd be." I open my mouth to speak as this is news to me, but these days it's hard to get a word in edgewise. The last time we saw each other, she was but two days out of the removal of her wisdom teeth and still talked my ear off for nigh on seven turnings of the hour. I think, "We're not all that different, you and me, scrabbling for happiness on this unhappy plain."

I think, "Remember the evening when we were at school late and no one was around and it was pouring (like it is tonight) and we ran out onto the field made of ASTROTURF and dumped cans of Coke onto their precious and expensive lacrosse/field hockey pitch in an act of nascent radical violence? Before we knew those words? And how we howled in the night and ran giggling back inside to the stares of our less-bedraggled classmates and winked at each other for the offense we had committed? Do you remember? Well, do you?"

Exit Em Le Fay
Helena to my Hermia
Shylock to my Bassanio
One Half of a Pair of Strange Little Girls
Citizen of My Heart

BAO!

nothing happens Here or There

back.

back to a bedroom with walls striped of posters, of song lyrics carved into doorframes, windows meant to be “picturesque”—catch a glimpse of a frozen retention pond, a plastic snowglobe deflating on someone’s lawn.  catch a glimpse of the neighbors who make people nervous because they Drink (the husband sits in his garage all night, calls out to me sometimes, used to be lewd until i cut my hair), the neighbors who make people nervous because the husband is Black and the wife is Puerto Rican but they are Very Successful Doctors so it must be some kind of mistake—they’re White like everyone else. 

back to drawers stocked with forgotten clothes, shelves stacked with books read before i really “got it”—before all of the genderfucking, the fucking, the privilege-examining, the late nights spent talking, talking, talking about what it all meant, before i positioned myself in a context where Before was something that Never Actually Happened.

 

back to where they first started staring, started asking that broken record of a question: are you a Boy or a Girl?

answer: Sometimes.

i am writing this blog in the closest thing to a Local Café.  i am writing this blog at Panera.

two soccer moms are loudly pondering which bathroom “It” will use when “It” looks as though It might be heading in that direction, towards the pair of gendered doors where It might reveal Itself.  Boy or Girl.  A or B.  (in high school I was notorious for overanalyzing multiple choice tests; talked my way into writing papers instead).  they are sorely disappointed.  “It” just wanted a glass of water.

back.

back to filling up days with documentaries, unnecessary tasks on To Do lists, five hundred pages into fiction.  escape escape escape.  wake up breathing hard because It was dreaming about fucking again but It couldn’t figure out how It was doing It.  body thrown into uncertainty worse than before because now It has two and It brought the Wrong one back Here, the Here where That Shit Is Fucked Up.  always.

Chicago in five days—back to too many phonecalls and connections.  organize, organize do the “good work” because someone has to, because It is selfish enough to want things for Itself that must be granted by Others.

escape escape escape bodies and politics in theory, in costumes, in play.  how?

i am stuck in places the way songs stick in my head.

to be read aloud in one or many funny accents

Left alone in the tumbling mass,
Up smoke and hopeful hate,
Ahead is not the past,
Tomorrow was my fate.

Ahem:
There is a dream where
hyenas rain in catfish dance
in pitter-patter lockstep gears,
twitching, clutching -
and sniffing tells the inescapable truth
of the tornado
which is just a hyena catfish,
after all.

Alas-
In inter-strung webs I weep.
What it means is up to the lantern,
but as of now straight laters toss up angled, noble heads
and open gnarled, able mouths
and unleash the call of honest complaint,
but it's hidden - drowned! out
by a mile,
out by the shush-a-rush and that old thing, the frown,
old and solid like a smell in the dark
until next time when it'll be just the same but you know -
I'm here and I write what I hear.

Clearly there are tunnels with
purpling wispy fingers and
other stalks which extend,
in boom and bloom,
and then heave up from out the ground.
And when they heave out, unbeknownst to them,
they also heave in,
for all is tunnels, and all tunnels look alike.

Ahem.
You have a cushion
I have a cushion
Your voice is orange-green crystal tubes
and full pitchers of sangria seaglass
My voice is ash.
If you squint and tilt your head just a little,
like this,
you'll see that my name is Gerard,
my nose is courageous,
my hair is wispy and fair,
my glasses askew,
and I come bearing baguettes.

tonight i took time

to say hi-hellow to each of the trees
and most of the stars and a snowdrunk deer
...and they said hello back!

coconut milk coffee

mucus spittle dirty snow exhaust fumes, stolen glitter to glisten on our black black shoes our pale faces and the frozen black bananas.



Proposition Hawaii: PEOPLE ARE HAPPY IN PARADISE. Everything is one (what do you mean? a tree? a root? how do you see it? no, just everything. you don't see it, you feel it. what kind of feeling? pre-conscious, conscious? just a feeling, a giant crashing wave)



The organic farmers here are young and dreadlocked, beaming with the quiet energy of having sat by a fire for a week brewing shamanic potions. debord is shrinking in my pocket, theft has been replaced by eating coconuts and papayas from the trees, smoking abundant bird-feeder weed with papaya branches.



the next few months are going to be exhilirating. why fight capitalism when you can escape it? (HOHOHOHOHO)

nastiness, critical theory, anarchy, sm have been saving graces in a cold world whose pleasures are not in the stars or close to earth. but it's been a bubble all the same, university but also cities, having always lived in mega megalopolises.

I can't imagine that digging my hands into the earth for two months will entirely replace years of twisted fascinations with funeral oratories to president bush, singing transvestites, slapping, clowning--- the CULTURE AND SOPHISTICATION OF CITY LIFE. but but but my body is ready to get off the grid.



baohaus love! A different altar that even in paradise shoves itself up my ass. detox detox detox (ahi fish? chicago? paradise?)I miss each one of you hard.

too quiet too long

i'm wondering how many deaths i've learned about through facebook. might have learned about them anyway, should i even be surprised or fascinated that i'm stumbling into not-yet-autopsied pop corpse accounts through an online social network that i'm now told amounts to "5% of collective internet usage worldwide?" im fascinated. it was brittany murphy today, last was michael jackson. my curiosity rarely sticks long enough to follow up when there's further information. he is dead, his family is sad, he did a lot, special people are trying to figure out why he died to satisfy destiny/fate instincts/cravings ingrained in the sad people.

ive said for years that when i die id like a close friend to sign into my account and post the status "____ is dead." the idea is less apt now that the facebook format changes all the time, but i'm still a little obsessed with the idea. what the fuck does that mean? kids i knew in high school would probably learn about my death via facebook. someone else's status update posted on their "newsfeed" trickles down the digital shitstream and they receive it...where? just after waking up? in a subway? in an airport? "_____ is dead." oh shit! did you even know him? you've learned about it so quickly that you can't read my obituary (would i have one?). you could maybe find an account of someone's intention to figure out my cause of death. i imagine someone with a set of dentist's instruments delicately lifting up sections of skin to see what's inside. oh shit! it's a kidney. but chances are if im dead it was a car crash, a freak fall off the roof. maybe a riptide drowning. hows the weather in LA? it's so great it's pulling me under the surface and im dead. oh shit! it's a lung, and it's full of salt water.

speaking of death, i might go see the most expensive movie ever made today.

free glitter for all

phew...i tried to talk to my sister today about paying for glitter at a huge chain (or anything, really) is dumb.

she kept asking: if everyone stole, wouldn’t they shut down the store and then the people who worked there would be worse off? she said she could get on board with liberating bread/food (the necessaries) but not glitter since i make well enough money to buy glitter.
(of course, this isn’t quite the point...nobody should be paying $5 for glitter, unless they want to.) she was into the idea of gift economies, freestores, how dumb it is that all of the excess of clothes/craft supplies/etc. in peoples’ basements can’t somehow be put back into a free exchange system...but the idea of liberating glitter “made her stomach turn.”

any tips on sharing the pleasure of freeshopping? connecting these liberal-altruistic principles to a sense of injustice/outrage/subversion? or even just talking about “liberation” and getting past the stigma/fear/shame...? (do you see it as a way of coping in a shitty capitalist world and/or a strike against the chain itself?)

i imagine this is something many of you have talked/worked through in your own thinking or with others...any advice or zine/reading recs i could pass along, by comment or email, would be much much appreciated.

seven feet, four inches, five hundred and forty pounds

a quick shoutout (from my realm of pittsburghian sneakitude and snowaccrued) to the new squids and inkful mammals in our midst...heather [can fly], margaret inglosolunbe/terr[or]ence, and foxfur-beee[ankh]uh, welcome to this strange dwelling which perhaps you might return to enough to call some kind of home.

tmo's post about being home resounded a lot with me--the sneakitude, the stars, the weight of rules, regulations, and roofs in the name of "love." (here's a thought, snatched crudely from politics is not a banana: we kill each other more than we kill our enemies, and that's a problem.)

my attempts to break through the layers of gardentalk, jobtalk, schooltalk with my mother have resulted in the repeated prod: "whew, you like these deep conversations. i just want to enjoy your company while you're here." i turn over and over in my mind what kind of "pleasantry" is possible when every domestic conflict is a painful-to-watch-[for-me] spectacle of miscommunication, money money money and a desire to feel attached and together, gone about in all the wrong ways (faith, malls, movies...)

concretely, then,
i've been chilling with the lelster a lot, finding our way around the quiet pittsburgh nightlife scene (funny, since the last time i was here pittsburgh was full o riot-ready cops) looking for the loud queermos whose voices don't quite echo as far as the suburbs. on thursday we went to lawrenceville, in and out of bars too loud for talk and we played a game of pool at remedy. yesterday, we organized a meeting of families, went to the warhol museum and saw this exhibit on shepard fairy (OBEY/andre the giant has a posse/etc.) i wonder if my sneakers will ever be in a museum. my parents/sister had bought tickets to the pittsburgh renaissance choir (a gay men's choir and gay women's choir) show, which turned out to be a spectacle of charity and money and balding white sweatervested gay couples. i watched the ASL interpreter and learned the signs for "king" and "lord" and "christmas day." then i darted off to explore lawrenceville some more, danced a little to gaga et al at brillobox and then had a beer with some gorgeous drag queens at blue moon.

so-though,
as easy as it is to be critical, i've been struggling to find optimistic reframings. i've been fighting regret, refusing to entertain the concept in myself and rooting it out in others....regret (and the resulting shame, guilt, self-pitying, self-hatred, loss of agency, complaining, sadness) seems to me to invite a sense of paralysis. life is not as easily accessible and editable as a google doc. in lieu of existential "back" buttons, i'll keep you updated on my campaign against regret.

6. somehow half my clothes are too clean and the other half smell like pee and come. hmmmm.

7. i miss the baohaus already.

8. i hope you are all alive and in touch with your vitality. to new squidlings: post without thinking, don't wait for the "right" idea to strike and instead strike with something bumpy and malformed. (anyway, that's how i like it.)

love,
elz
(soundtrack: something bollywood...)

AHH SQUIDSTERS

ESPECIALLY MEG TREP

NEK CHAND FANTASY ROCK GARDEN

http://www.nekchand.com/

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=nek+chand+rock+garden

my own pictures, forthcoming wowowowowoww

dead leaves and the dirty ground

so that cigarette you thought you wanted
and eventually got in a pure act of sneakitude
didn't fix that headache
and now you're not sure what's wrong with you
or if you'll ever be un-tired again

but

now we don't put much stock in the poets
in their iambs and so on
but oh
oh
oh
oooooooh
have i told you about the sky out here at night?

f u c k i t i s n ' t o r a n g e
saw every single constellation you could think of last night
pinhead clear and sparkling
the swan and both dippers
orion and the bear
all up there twinkling
like twinkling is still a thing you can do in this day and age

so much that if john donne or even that idiot wordsworth
were to sneak up behind me
and whisper something about the majesty of nature
i would hear it
and
possibly believe it

the veins of twigs and branches
the slashes of trunks across the sky
thrown up against the convex lens above us
AND THE WIND
the lone voice in the silent woods
roaring down the backroads with something to say
shouting

hey! hey! hey!

be afraid, be very afraid

there's something coming out of the trees

put that cigarette out behind a rock to hide the evidence
kick your boots off at the door
wrap yourself up tight in that blanket
and watch the creeping woods
til you can watch no more

lesson learned

life is long

but this moment is short

"guilty robots"

check this out-- scroll down to "guilty robots" on time magazine's "year in ideas"

"This July, the roboticist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech finished a three-year project with the U.S. Army designing prototype software for autonomous ethical robots. He maintains that in limited situations, like countersniper operations or storming buildings, the software will actually allow robots to outperform humans from an ethical perspective...but being an ethical robot involves more than just following rules. These machines will have something akin to emotions - in particular, guilt."

the chunk on "gourmet dirt" is pretty good too.

a small anecdote of utter unimportance

figure A: toward a theory of soap (1)

personally, i find foam much less intimidating than soap. perhaps not quite spiritual, but certainly pleasing. on the other hand, i have some concept that it is altogether fake and therefore not to be trusted. when i have encountered foamy things in nature, i tend to also think that they are unnatural--faux-mold and faux-mushrooms, cheaply made, placed by the invisible armies of civilization to make the forest experience more photo-friendly. (the same armies who are responsible for mobilizing bird to move from tree to tree and slowly plucking leaves from trees to preserve the illusion of autumn.)

i suppose there's something in the idea that people relate to their own dirtiness differently based on the soap they choose (or avoid).

mostly i would like
to fill your mouth
with my foam
and your foamy saliva
inject with my lips-o-suction
until we are dry
and curseless
and all of the jargon is gone,
replaced by oooooooooooze.
(say it say it do it do it)

and preemptively, expectantly i will add: corey where are you? are you here yet?

oh and also, i hope ev's last post can create some reallife conversations here at the bao...i'd rather tackle feelings in realtime sometimes rather than commenting on posts, but i think we can collectively agree that we are all in the habit of seeing/reading/consuming more than we can acknowledge or are expected to/expect ourselves to engage with. the blog is perhaps the closest place i've seen on the web to some kind of reciprocity. and i like how it weaves in and out of conversation and life. so i'm glad you posted ev and i hope it can be a bridge between webworld and the living room to have some kind of further conversation or something.
< / meta-mediation-of-mediatedness >

back to the paperbox, bye!

1. internet, the. "useful knowledge for useful people or psychoanalytic queries into banality or !!!???)0()(;;;;!!!." baohaus living room: "roland barthes on dirt," google search engine, MILK TIME and republished at the end of the world. link to full exploration of the luxuriousness of foam here.

2. at right, figure B. "foam or shit?" from "the abbreviated index of poor materials for sharpening giant pencils" (2)

This is how I heard it.

I spent a lot of time thinking last night.

It's the little things, it's always the little things.

Is it a big deal for one of us to ask another person to stop doing something if it bothers them? No. Of course not, but for the record, I felt like I was talked to last night for a split second like a dog or a stupid child. Even if it wasn't intentional, even if maybe Eliot or Tamara or Eli don't "see" it that way, I felt humiliated and angry because I felt like someone had said, "BAD DOG" to me.

I know I have a short fuse, I know that as a result, I "ruined" the rest of the game, which I had been thoroughly excited about, and I'm sorry about that, sincerely. I know that my anger was perhaps disproportionate to the offense, but I felt belittled and disrespected. The room felt tense immediately after I was yelled at.

BAD DOG BAD DOG BAD DOG BAD DOG

and yet no one said anything until I had made a fool of myself. So I felt doubly stupid. Stupid child feels humiliated because teacher yells, "STUPID CHILD" but none of the other children say a word.

"Hey, Evelyn, could you stop doing that, it's bothering me."
"Sure."

I spent a really long time trying to figure out how I felt about this, and I don't like that when I tried to explain it this afternoon, I was told that how I felt wasn't valid. That only reaffirmed that I was being treated as lesser, invalid, and like a stupid child or dog. It doesn't matter if you didn't mean to make me feel that way, you succeeded, triumphantly.

insights from the world of cultural studies

weed + acid =
postmodernism

deep deep deep in an underground vault with no walls: a short essay on essays

figure 1. extending boundaries to enable depth

alack, alack!
the hail earlier today hit my face sharply, a welcome relief from the nebulous cloud of nonsense (see fig.2) that i breathe in when i try hard to focus on the cloud without thinking about its units of nonsense. (but what is a unit of nonsense? and would not the cloud bring me greater nourishment than a tiny unit thereof?)

figure 2. the possibility of borders

fuck time, i will refuse to disintegrate and somehow forge forward.

figure 3. a question of borders

it is hard to remember to take pleasure
in contradictions
when they begin
to melt
all over
my
glasses

figure 4. on the edge of concern, there is just one more thing

enough, i say! enough!
i demand more!
it's too much! do you really need to--
totally overlooked.

figure 5. the desire to draw boundaries induces dilemma

now is the time.
(how can the time be now? i'm not ready yet!)
the world is as it is because it is as it should be and
all is how it should be because it is how it is
(***reference proof for "why giraffes go up in lifts," car cemetery 12(4):2009)

figure 6. the recent discovery of additional dimensions to the problem has dire implications for the accessibility of shimmering intergalactic portals to contemporary youth culture

and of all possibilities
we are left with the comfort that:
all things are possible
which we can conceive of as possible!

figure 7. a statistical abnormality suggests the need for new methods of analysis



comment!, e.g. with your favorite little screenshot of brain2.0?
(these invisible mediators, these quiet prompts)

film updates

i cant believe i havent shared any of my film experiences (of which there aren't many).

here's one:

I was in a dance class this quarter where I learned some stuff, first we learned one minute of choreography to a song "Hadippa!" from the movie Dil Bole Hadippa. Preeti (our teacher) told us the movie was bad and we shouldn't see it, but samantha bought it anyway and we all got pretty obsessed. it's a bollywood version of "she's the man" featuring the beloved amanda bynes, which was based loosely off of twelfth night. with rani mukherjee alternately as Veera and Veer. oh and playing opposite shahid kapoor, sigh. anyway the music is awesome, especially "discowale khisko." we told Preeti that we liked the film, and asked why she said it was bad and she said "that's not believable that she could be Veer, how could he not notice she has the same face?"

anyway, if you can get your hands on it, it's lovely mindless entertainment and good music.

ALSO

try to watch "Aladin"... with amitabh bachchan as the genie. hilarious.

ALSO

twilight and new moon just came out here but i didn't see it

ALSO

amitabh's movie coming out this weekend is "Paa"-- he plays a 13 year old boy who has Progeria, so he is dressed up to be an octegenarian, and his son, Abishek Bachchan, plays his father. the tagline for the film is "a unique father-son-son-father story"... only here are off-screen relations actually interwoven into the plot of a film; i don't think you'd ever see this done so explicitly in the states.

ALSO

this weekend a movie Kurbaan came out, where kareena kapoor and saif ali khan apparently have sex (!!!!!!). i read the plot and it looked way to complicated to understand without subtitulos. the tag line is "some love stories have blood on them" because the twist is that he's a terrorist. and her dad warned her not to marry a muslim.

okay। that's all; just doing my share.

boarding a train in 4 hours (at 3am) to head to chennai. goodbye pune, hello leave of absence!

ക്യാ ആപ് വ്ഹോയ ഐ അം വ്രിതിംഗ് ഇന്‍ തമിള്‍

வெயிட் தட் இஸ் மலையாளம்

థిస్ ఇస్ తెలుగు

ದಿಸ್ ಇಸ್ ಕನ್ನಡ -- ವ್ಹಿಚ್ ಇ ಸವ್ ಅ ಲೋಟ್ ಆಫ್ ಇನ್ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ

चेविंग गम है जा पि जा, हैण्ड पुमप है जा पि जा, लाइफ सा जूस है करती जा, फिकरे करे फिकरे , हरिप्पा!

wow. i didn't know i could do that. first is malayalam, then tamil, then kannada, telugu, then hindi. i wrote mostly in english and it transliterates it... shit that's cool. okay good night. or good morning.

Exhortation now that we're older

Goal One: Learn to love structure or perhaps the destruction of it or perhaps knowledge of it to reconstruct it and make it new again. Resist the common urges of your synapses to wander and wiggle through the world of your brain stew. STRUCTURE STRUCTURE STRUCTURE IT. Not in a necessarily WMP-y kind of way or a bell curve or a Aristotelian tangle but enough to say exactly what you mean. Spill no more milk, tumble no more tunes from lips, button up. Will you be able to say in a year "Limitation inspires creativity" when you do not believe it now? Probably not (secretly you will still believe that you yourself already contain so many limitations that further limitations would only offer less and not more). Think about how rules that you could make up could be AWESOME. Is this subversion or is this acceptance of a rule-based, competition-driven, have/have-not societal mode? In a year, will the opposite be true and will you cycle back to where you are now?

Learn to interact with, face up to, acknowledge, and form opinions on

• borders
• edges of bodies
• skin and cell membranes
• tripartite religions and storylines and how every bullet pointed list must contain more than three bullet points
  
• spacing in text
• silence and noise (John Cage and his listless mumble)
• line breaks
• the place where exhaling ends and inhaling begins or the other way around
• lines, queues, waiting
• age

Goal Two: Ask yourself - "When the words come out and on to the page, why do they come out in a block?" or "Why do you like things that are parallel as opposed to perpendicular?" Really answer these questions.

Goal Three: Stop ignoring these questions. Stop ignoring structure. You must decide whether or not it is your friend. Prose is not the only model of living. But also, don't jolt awake when your dreams follow some semblance of reality, when there is story-line. Regard every impulse with suspicion. See if you can reformat not only your words but your very neurons.

basically
unlearn your functions

hop over here
and here

and over there
because
well
the thing is

there isn't enough time to stay the same.

for your consideration...

i think this is a pretty interesting article that conflicts interestingly with this whole line of thinking i've been doing about alienation, labor exploitation under capitalism, greed, excess, money...for me, this makes me want to think more about the language i'm using to describe the system and where i'm placing (or depriving) people of agency/desire to do good. (what is the desire to "do good?") anyway. i'd love to hear your thoughts.

whole text is at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/02/army-of-altruists.html

"Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good
By David Graeber
Harper's Magazine 2007

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq. -- Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)

Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country's call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. -- Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona)"

(continue reading here)

from the warm&quiet isolation of the regenstein,
elz

fuck all states

i cant, i wont, i dont have time. im supposed to be writing, or thinking, or sleeping, or buying a plane ticket to singapore, or dancing,  or or orrr or

my visa expires in six weeks. i dont want to leave. i have to leave and spendspend spend sending my money to jetairways or kingfisher so they can buy petrol and shoot me over to the land of fast bureaucracy where visas are fast and plentiful, 

if i can

if they allow foreigners to put their life and lineage and intentions on a PDF and pay $150 and get a stamp in a book and get punted back across the bay, sea, ocean to the land of slow bureaucracy and classical dance festivals and trains to the mountains

at this point it's just cheaper to come home in six weeks

fuck everything

i have a 10 page paper due about ________ by sunday morning (it's friday night). i have one paragraph written. all my friends are leaving tomorrow by 7pm. alex and chloe are ready to go, samantha never wants to leave, hannah is going to delhi to meet her parents and "do" rajasthan. i'll see her in chennai later. then pondicherry, ooty, and back to delhi? names names names and places i've seen so many places. im writing about temples... when they are sacred and when they are not. ive been in 9 active temples, 9 places of ambiguous or informal worship, and 18 abandoned temples. if there is no image in the center shrine, and if the image is not bathed and fed and adorned daily by a brahmin, there is no normatively sacred space but i still take my shoes off and stay quiet like a museum. why are ruins museums? 

hannah has returned to use her computer

now my room is hoppin

life is complicated

i hate a lot of things

but am confused and feeling so many thingswordswordswordsss

from my journal, laden.

stoned rantings 12/4/09 1am

building on last week's lengthy show
and all being equal (compared to what?)
certainly headworms' collidyskope sighs
collect, suspect in fortune and blue
as surely as the bureaucrats
turn cartwheels in the dew

anti-globalization + conditions of possibility

from across the world, or something, here's what i'm listening to...check it out. (listened to in reverse order, ideally with lots of instruments around)

(all available on youtube.)

kala - ali farka toure and toumani diabate - in the heart of the moon
mouse on mars - diskdusk
uske orchestra - mouse on mars remix
aphex twin - rubber johnny - (with movie by chris cunningham)
von sudenfed - fledermaus can't get it - (movie by chris cunningham)
aphex twin - windowlicker
aphex twin - come to daddy
christian zehnder - wat i no
concerto for violin, mvmt 1 - debussy
mr. ozlo - flat beat
stimmhorn
micheal herges (guitar)
summertime - sarah vaughn (sp?)

add 1 bottle of wine per person, or substitute.

love,
elz

dead birds

My grandmother is crying.  She has been crying since my cousin decided to leave unannounced and move in with her boyfriend in Texas.  She has been crying since her friends moved into hospitals and nursing homes, crying since I shaved my hair in some places and let it grow in others.

Everything about her sags—skin sagging off the bone, sagging until it sways and dips into the gravy that I cannot and will not eat.  This is her first Thanksgiving without my grandfather.

The new baby is all badsmells and bugeyes.  My little cousin sings politcally-incorrect songs about Indian chiefs.  Oh, happy day of mass genocide!  Oh, happy day when aunts and uncles gorge themselves with beer and birdmeat!

And they ask me how is school and I say "fine."

I dreamed that you were stringing dead birds onto a thread.  They were small and black and their eyes were like shriveled raisons.  I think they were crows.  And you were peering at me from behind those too-round glasses and smirking like I knew what you doing.   You tied the string around your neck and tried to kiss me but you smelled like death and I pulled away.

word vomit

hum hum hum hum of the machine in my room in my brain
churning burning twirling whirling
fucking my shit UP
there are scratches at my door and scars all down my left side
from impromptu costume design when feeling feels hard
grasping at straws, trying to breathe,
trying to ease into some happiness here,
smooth pill-shaped, bed-shaped, hear under the cracks of the door
the life that is still desired to be living

scuttle my way to catville
a place of dirt and spit and dry food spilt on the floor
where my shit's cleaned up
and i can't walk two feet without some motherfucker picking me up
moving me, touching me, dirty hands grabbing me, wanting me
what, dude, i just gotta be chasing ghosts in the hallway
protecting your shit
and you're messing with me?
one night i will purr subliminal messages into your ear
and how will you like feeling turned on by vegetable human?
yeah that's right, gotta go sleep.

an alpine rendezvous

ingredient list:
50 academics/pedagogists/PhD students
3 teachers
3 nervous undergraduate students
a team of cute submissive students
1600 wires, any color*
a wide diversity of ideas (5 or 6, max)
7 handfuls of laptop
5 cups of meta
a buffet
30 clementines
a bootful of snow, boot included
1 part "i'm not advocating for the destruction of schools, it's just..."
6 more than 2 many cigarettes, handrolled

the recipe:
add 12% german people in authentic bavarian dress. mix with beer and pour into a boot. then spit in it and pour it out of the boot into your throat, toe up (this is the trick for splashing it all over yr face/being a true bavarian man). vom it all back up and add the rest of the ingredients. put it all into a seminar room. mix until thoroughly beaten and sufficiently nebulous. pour in all other ingredients. if the 1 part radicalism is still chunky, extract grant money from the bootcider. climb a mountain. find a torch. drink gluhwein, sprinkle liberally with jokes about blondes, bitches, and whores, untranslatable words in french/spanish/german/portugese....and have a rendezvous. add web 2.0 if desired. enjoy with contradictions!

deLICious.

emily and i arrived here, in garmisch-partenkirchen, on tuesday morning by train and then a long walk down hauptbahnhofstrasse. garmisch is a tinyish town, super touristy/expensive looking, full of ads for permanent anti-aging makeup and hats for ruddy aryan men and their sons. we-ord yo. the hotel perched, full of precarity, on a hill by a ski jump. this guy named gerhardt gave a pretty sweet lecture on "cultures of participation" and how the education/university system produces this discontinuity between passive learning and then the expectation of self-motivated learning/living. lots of graphs and shit here. they're kind of pretty i guess...still amazing to me that people do this stuff full timeish. (that is, transcribing, coding, studying cooperation and collaboration in technology/educational settings...etc.) and i think i forgot about how just absurdly some people can question and jest about women's intelligence and all these smart smart people being so dumb dumb in some ways. don't try to tell me that "that's what she said" is a feminist joke, asshat. that night at the bar almost made me sick/cry, i didn't know what to do and then people were turning to me, "so how do you feel about this? what's the difference between sex and sexuality? why? how do you tell if it's time to clean the kitchen? is this a sexist/racist joke? if i tell a racist joke it means i'm NOT racist, you know? do you hate men? oh don't talk about that now there's a feminist in our midst."
dumb dumb dumb. come on. i forget to expect this from the world sometimes.

i do like the mountains here though. looking at them, that is. and there's a fair amount of snow; when we climbed up to the top, there was a ton of snow and lots of free food. i still stick things in my pockets, collect clementines and rolls for later or maybe tomorrow...mmmmm.

the workshop-y stuff today was kind of cool and kind of exhausting. my presentation is over and i survived. i have a lowlowlow tolerance for sitting still for a long time, so i squirmed a lot, slept a little bit, and had a lot of cigarettes and munched in the lobby with the student organizers from LMU. i've slept like 4 hours in the past 2 days...was up till 5 or so last night finishing up this presentation. blech blech blech.

but now it's done! i'm in a working group on "design principles for a utopic educational setting" tomorrow and then head back to munchen to hang with christian for another day and then to homeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. this presentation was freaking me out--> not sleeping, kind of panicking all the time about how much i have to do. in lieu of weed [zum kiffen] to manage my stress, i've been breathing a lot and collecting moments of ecstatic calm...now i have a lot to write/do but blah blah blah.

wow i loved reading the baohaus housemeeting notes. you guyz. i'm missin you allz (official baohausers and otherwise)...speaking of which, where's corey?

xxxich-will-auf-dein-gesicht-spitzenxxx
that squiddly dutched-up batface homofreak


*must be produced by Mac

plenum und barbaren

hello fellow squids,
i find myself on a couch in schwabing-west, afloat in my head up to my ears.

i made it to the airport on friday in high spirits. the stewardpeople on lufthansa just kept offering us glass after glass of wine and then brandy/bailey's...absurd. e, my travelbuddy and "colleague," fainted twice on the plane for mysterious, possibly malarial reasons but we landed without catastrophe. couldn't find a way to call our couchsurfing host, christian, so we just showed up at his house which worked out okay after all.

that night, we went to the ludwig-maximillian-universitat where the students are striking, occupying the main student center (which is fucking echoingly huge) to demand free university education, democratization of education. in the plenum, they were also talking a lot about "bildung" vs "ausbildung"--something like self-edification/intellectual nourishment vs job training. tons of universities across germany, austria, and some of the university of california schools are occupied.

this place had been occupied ("besetzt") for about 2 weeks and this weekend i happened to walk into the international students' plenum on education reform. classes are stopped and apparently the students have a right to protest there (or so i was told), which is why they haven't been forcibly removed. i talked to a lot of people about their participation and why there is little organizing of a student movement (at uchicago, or among lots of schools, or internationally) in the US. of course a lot of it is privatization--how much can you protest when you've paid, or someone has paid, so much money for you to be at that institution? the accountability of administration and investors to the students and faculty is also clearly quite different at private US universities as compared to here in munich.

anyway, it was a pretty amazing thing to see...so many signs, people (a huge lecture hall full...maybe 300, 400? more?), lots of crusty-looking freaks and queermos and lots of "normal-looking" and impassioned kids...and all of this discussion about the facticity of science and what the purpose of the university is, whether happiness matters...happening openly, in the main lecture hall of the school with no "adults" in sight.

so yeah, that was cool. then some band started playing and e, jeanne, christian and i danced on the desks and drank and talked to kids. we did a radio interview...i'll let you know if i can ever find it online.

today, sunday, e and i slept till about 3p.m. and christian made pfannkuchen/german pancakes and then we wandered to this huge art/market festival (tollwood...some kind of semiannual thing) and i liberated So Much. it was the perfect setting--huge crowds, tiny booths, overpriced beautiful things...mmmm. i have some new little instruments for our house. then we found our way to this place that was doing reggae/jazz-improv (lelz you were basically there with me but you would have been able to jump onstage). also the walls in this place were fucking sick...there was a huge octopus (picture forthcoming), vomiting panda bears, lots o little buddies and tags [howyousayuhhhh] out the wazoo...

all in all, it's great to be speaking german, great to talk to other people who are traveling or working or doing cool stuff, push away some of my anxiety and come face-to-face with other anxieties (hrmhrmfinals, these things "queer" and "radical," what is awkwardness, the place of art in my life). i am missing the baohaus like woah and my attachments to people in general. i have so much of you inside of me.

love,
eliot

more info on the LMU occupation if you're interested
someone at the plenum talked about this site for int'l student movement

i can tell that we are gonna be friieieieieinds

I go to the FRAK EASY last night. I sleep first and then I wake up and it's time to go but the crew is asleep at the helm and we are veering off course. far, far off course. but then I know that the car can keep me company on the road and I glitter up and head off, always 2 lanes ahead of the sunrise. Old Unreliable makes it over the freeway.
The FRAK EASY is definitely best between 4 and 9 in the morning.
This is it - we finally come to a moment that I wait for all my life.
Now I can finally be the life of the party and get my sleep.

there is a beautiful kid who I recognize - otter's zombie buddy from halloween FRAK EASY - all pierced and tattoooood.
we dance and then dance. I feel groovy.
we sit and cuddle. I feel yummy.
We dance more.
Everybody beams and eats pie and pancakes and scrambled eggs that xenon makes. All my friends smile like upsidedown rainbows.
and then Old Unreliable makes it back over the freeway and I read anthropology book by david graeber, "possibilities - essays on hierarchy, rebellion, and desire".
the FRAK EASY is more interesting and I don't like the "comma-and" construction in the title.

who are we?

message received, loud and clear. lesson learned. topic exhausted.
I don't really think we can pass the midterm, but I'll still stay up studying the night before.
except when the sun comes up, I'll realize we've been playing instead and we haven't read a word.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

get it? fuck it.
spent all morning writing one email.
will spend all afternoon running around the block. always counterclockwise.
the forces that hold my soles to the pavement are weakening, widening, stretching - imagine stepping on pink chewing gum and then pulling away, farther, fürther, gone. bakaw!

who can say who's saying what: the toy piano baroque

gentle please
this fucker - this buttfucker
can i explain this to you please

FOOOOOOO
FOOOOOOOO
this is the sea horse
here we have the eye eye
here here we have the cheek
it's the wonderful spiral down to the mouse
the nooooooose
FOOOOOO

then the nose and the feet
we have his regal hat
the sea horses perfet hat
he's a general
he is a colonel
colonel chicken
then we hyave the fin wing
because he is half humminbirg
we have the claw foot and then we have the tail and this his second tail
do you see



do you see
...
do you seee

what?
'are you kidding'
i could work at the renassiance festival
i would be queen anne or elizabeth
or the sherriff or Robin hood

i would be colonel custer
in the liberry with the knife

nooooooooooo
do not
IDK
chevre
fromage

what's with this glove
what scuse me?
what? I hope you starve
what?

squeak squeak squeak

you jerk. uhuh
ra ra ra ra ra ra rururarauararuar
mmmmmuh muh muh muuuh

this is actually a love story

why i connected the grease burned slowly fading red and raw points of concentrated remnants of actualized pain with a thin black ink: i was so fascinated by their beauty, in their temporariness, in how they're changing all the time and how i can make them change, and i wonder why i am so fascinated by these sites of experience on my own body to the point of obsession, the burns the scars the little red lines the bruises the pimples (zits pussballs) the open sores on my cuticles the way my fingers turn blue and white when they're cold --------- the ways i change these changing marks and the way that feels and changes my perspective

why i feel something (an intensity! when i am affected, ok alright) by these beautiful wounds but more by what i do to them: i am obsessed with novelty: i am bored a lot: i am bored by myself: which is to say i don't feel emotionally attached to myself: which is to say i am not in love with myself: which i find to be the source of MUCH of my ambivalence toward and detachment from specificity and concreteness: these moments of connectedness with myself as a grounded object in the world, seeing myself through my own eyes which is different than looking in a mirror, attach me to the thrumming grooving vitality of the world and i am in love with myself and can look unmediated through my own eyes and be connected with things that are of my own experience, with my own history with my own relationships with my own creations and i can feel something about them
inspired by something of my own origination


it seems that there are people who don't experience the world in this way, what an interesting way in which they must experience the world, which is to say i wish we could share our neurons

Bits and pieces on my mind

Revisting:

the songs woven into my brain under the dust of many years and putting them back where I can see them

from grandad:

• The Skye Boat Song (and inevitably the dream of Scottish nationalism)
• I Belong to Glasgow
• Ma Cabane au Canada
• Beautiful Dreamer
• My Old Man Says Follow the Van
• Hashivenu
• The Well Below the Valley
• I Painted Uh
• that one about Jerusalem that's in Russian and is now only a trickle of music

from endless car rides through the wiggles of road, from assemblies and services:

• Regina Angelorum! (seriously please ora pro nobis)
• Golden Slumbers
• Lying Eyes
• he chastens and hastens his will to make known, right?
• I'm Just a Poor Wayfaring Stranger
• chunks of Porgy and Bess
• Non Nobis Te Deum
• Dou Robyn
• Alice's Restaurant
  

my ears
and my voice
were built and trained
to hear and sing
only
songs about
fear so crippling it makes you cower
ecstatic relief in moments of reprieve
loss of home, hearth, country, self
remembering wars centuries gone but still stinging
of next year in another city
and a dirty ditty or two

THANK GOD I DISCOVERED ELECTRO

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A and B are standing at a bus stop. A is homeless and looking for something to eat.

A: rata-tat-tat i fumble my bumble
have you got a penny to spare
so i can buy a new shiny bangle
and each one'll be part of a pair

B: can't you ask someone else?
i'm concerned about the tingle in the ether
i'm worried about my quickening pulse
things aren't getting any easier

A: we've all got problems
but you've get less than me
your glittery eyes speak volumes
about a house where they serve a lot of tea

B: tea and coin will be forgotten
don't you smell it in the air?
these warm days tell me something is comin
for both of us things will not look so fair

A: quoth she! quoth she!

B: disbelieve me if you want
there's no stock for me in your faith

A: quoth she! quoth she!
ring out the bells, we got a seer on our hands!

B: wait and see, the sky will press down on our heads and squash us all. no matter the coins in our pockets, we will all be crushed indiscriminately between earth and air. we cannot leave this lump of rock.

A: that may be, but i'd like to see the sky float away into nothing just to prove you wrong.

an xtra reading assignment

speaking of smoke, rhythm and incidental rocks, if you have a free 30 minutes this was a pretty incredible article about the search for a (post)modern opium den:
opium
I've been in a few places that people have described as opium dens, but always metaphorically - there was never any opium! I've tried to guerrilla-plant poppies in hyde park, but they didn't grow. In italy someone gave me a tiny sliver of opium, but that's a long story for another day.
I think all signs point to Thailand - the bus leaves in september '10 - and only you can decide if you'll be on it.

accidentally stoned on an incidental rock

hullo world, i'm ready.
well, never-ready-but-ready-enough-anytime.

my days have been slipping by in smoke, rhythm, and gusts of cold wind. i confess: i have been in the reg. no, no, i take it back, wait: i was only there to print enough pages to make people wait awkwardly while i answer my cell phone unavoidably, talking in short bursts of reception in the quiet 1st floor. so where does the time go? how to patch together a rhythm of holes and gaps?

crisis averted then,
leli might add peanut butter. (or cheese? and.) i say chili powder, always.
i'm living on apples and bread and free cookies and when there's a meal it's an excellent meal.

maybe tomorrow i will theorize something. i would like to theorize a very nice rock.

for now, we play and we dream and we play

w p d

hey preacher man,

shed some light on that

white puffy dick.

so i can learn how to design

the stage.


don't do theater.

if you have interest in anything else,

do that.

hey preacher man,

go fuck yourself.


i am here.

here's where i'll be.

eating cookies.

to SAVE MY FACE.

Talking the talk.

It's winter today, I realize. For once, I have gloves. I usually never have gloves.

Today, I am bored in class. Not just in math (which honestly is a given), but in design as well. We go to the theater and we are told how it works. This always breaks my heart a little. "I know, I know," I want to say, "but can I climb on this?" And the TD tells us all about how hard it is to make art. "I know, I know," I want to say, "but can I climb on this?" By this time, I have to remember that the feeling of my heart breaking comes from my brain and that I am, in fact, dandy.

I go to art school for the first time today. I am a little nervous because of some ingrained message from the time I spent as an "upright citizen" that makes art schools seem so...precious to me, but there is something wonderful in the weird triangular staircase down to the basement, in the metallurgy workshops, the buzz of people, the high industrial ceilings with sweet hand-painted signs to tell you where you are, and clanging echo. It is very different that what I am used to. I spend a handful of hours playing, my head often close to the ground or falling out of a spin. My hip hurts because I push a little to hard, but I am no worse for the wear.

Today, I sit on the bus back from downtown and I look at faces. Michelle has recently told me a story. She says, "I saw a woman on a bus and she was like this (big wide-eyed, amazed face) and like 'new shoes really, I just bought these, but I think I'm going to return them' face never changing and just a mask!" She makes the face again. I make the face. I look like a blow up doll. I promise myself I will practice in the mirror. So on the bus home, I look at faces hoping to find Michelle's woman. But, everyone is tired and falling asleep so I spend my time staring at what look like death masks to me. It is a little frightening. To be less scared, I look at the notes the man next to me is writing in his limegreen notebook with red pen. His handwriting is terrible but I read something like this, "Are there certain humans born with spiritual capabilities? I have the impulse to say so. Yes, I suppose you could reach awareness and then through awareness enlightenment. But there is a long distance between awareness and enlightenment." He leaves a big space. He writes, "I imagine!" He leaves another big space. Then he writes a block of words I can't read from my angle. He gets off at 47th street. His writing has made me feel better, oddly.

Which is to say, today I have been vague and cloudy, but watching. Peering, listening, creeping even. I wonder how much watching I can do and how much I have done and what that watching all adds up to. Do you know?

its getting to be too much, the trauma of waking up every day with expectations, how do I CLEAR MY MIND but still create windy moments of awe?

another weekend passed. love and disappointment smashed. talktalktalktalktalktalk. action? actioooooon? sob sob sob defacto motivation let's talktalktalktalktalk

spicy tofu.

the winners rewrite history

it's funny, but I think being sick (finally! - the worst part was waiting for the inevitable) has helped focus me on a few things. things in my head.
I'm not suggesting the body as a distraction from anything important. A careful distinction - I'm suggesting involvement in the daily routine as a distraction, an involvement that normally requires a healthy body. It's been great to get out of the routine a bit and regroup.
reshrink.
recapitulate.
I don't know if anybody but me ever obsessed over the boardgame Risk (nevermore - I promise), but the winning strategy was always careful containment of power, to never spread oneself thin, until the very end - the moment of truth.
Social dynamics a bit like risk (where's the verb in this preceding sentence? hiiiiiding). We have multiple moments of truth in our game whose different sizes (importances? truthinesses?) are relative to the risk required to attain them (triumph over the moment, not the truth - but maybe it's the same thing [how cynical!]), but the basic strategy remains the same - keep your energy close around you until you really need it.
We can see another analogy in gravitational dynamics (as always - I hope this doesn't come as a surprise) - those heavy little stars last much, much longer then the big, spread out ones that end up collapsing or blowing up.
collapsing or blowing up - this is the consequence of overextension.
Not that I'm trying to judge - both of these are equally valid forms of creative-destruction/destructive-creation/change - but (applied to all the metaphors at once now) until I want my little pieces of star/plastic tanks and horses to mix with all the other colors and planets and shiny bits of flesh around me, that is to say, until someone buys a better board-game than Risk, I think I'll play it close and choose tact over excess.

memories, mountain lions

REM to reality in ten minutes flat.  I awoke convinced that Eliot had adopted a baby mountain liong--through a microwaved cup of tea through a frantic bike ride through three gulps stolen coffee--until I saw Rolly (sleepy-eyed, always in that corner, writingwritingwriting) and came close to asking, 

"And how is the mountain lion today?" 

before I realized that I had been dreaming.

Perhaps I should have asked anyway.

I am reading about memory.  An author told me that memories are not, in fact, stored as accurate images in the corners of our heads, just waiting for the right tools to scrape them out; but rather, they are reconstructed.  This book is fucking me up.

Now memories are interrupting my day (Danny Umlauf passing out on the lawn, sticking grass up his nose until his mother told us he had a seizure).  

I cannot complete 

(walking down railroad tracks with my father at night, etching lines into rusted rails with my fingertips) 

a thought without 

(Act 1, Scene 4 in Miracle on 34th Street)

a moment clamping down on

(6AM on a bus to southern Indiana, a blonde head asleep on my shoulder)

my brain, insisting that

(a funeral for someone I do not know)

I record it

(particular glances, carnival rides, books read only at night)

immediately.

And how is the mountain lion today?  I almost forgot to ask.

for the good life is out there somewhere, so stay on my arm you little charmer

from my journal at 7:30am today, or 8pm on monday 4 u, 

dunno if it will be interesting at all

what IS interesting, is that it is RAINING

not as hard as it did i'm sure during winknight's stay in summer 05, but wow i was soaked earlier walking to and from dance. i haven't seen a rain like this in... who knows. certainly not in washington nor in pune so far. so june or july in chicago. it's wonderful except that the water on the street is full of ambiguous matter.

ok ok.

i'm at home [in hyde park] talking to justin on gmail, skype, phone or something. he is at the baohaus, i have to go soon [to india? somewhere permanent, so there is an urgency] but i want to see justin before i leave but i project that he is reluctant or doesn't think it is important [or like seeing me when i'm about to leave would just open up new wounds or something so it's better not to see each other at all... a familiar train of thought for me]. i go there and find my vest/package, sand, no rock, cigarette wrapper from cigs i bought in bombay. justin is kinda sorta in the other room[i originally typed 'kinda aorta'!].. i don't think i actually physically see him. [second or third dream where this happens! i havent seen justin in weeks]. i go through give away boxes of clothes and take a striped shirt from ali. 

SWITCH

i'm wrapping electrical chords around irons, playing "like a virgin" by madonna, britney, and christina [remember that vma performance where they kissed and it was scandalous?]. then scene change to wearing wobbly high heels (like from the kingfisher swimsuit calendar model reality tv show) at a dilapidated opera house. amulya mandava is claiming something about rewriting/organizing some great music masterpiece of orchestral music by a composer i don't like but i can't remember who, now. the stairs are difficult. i hear someone say "it won 2 tonys". when we get to the lobby i'm with granny, granddad, and mom. the opera-food-place is baking $3 cookies and granny remarks that they're finally baking their own, and needs to throw something out. 

SWITCH

in a mildly dilapidated grand building [the opera house after being abandoned in 50 years? which reminds me of the train station in bombay... marble floors and nice stairs, but dirt and funny smells everywhere]. i'm finding anastasia and ali, they're in class or something. i'm doing something with blue ink. it's raining and coming through the roof. i pee while walking down the grand-ish stairs [same scene as walking down stairs in opera house, only no high heels and i'm with a&a] . i'm not wearing pants. there might be more. a&a are nonchalant, not interested in me.

then? the interview with the nice couple, how they met. through craigslist. a cute ad. they have fun! they do such n such! then i see he has a computer. on the side of the building. it is big, about 3 feet tall-- looks like "tsunami dream" comp of my dad's. outside, still colonial bombay architecture, 

THEN do i go to the part where i am part of a murder scheme? i waylay someone (the target?) by reading something to them, and then a guy down the street shoots them. i move on and question the ethics of what i just did. maybe that person was hannah because i also dreamt that i read a long sentence from a yellow paper that was my high school transcript with multiple clauses, conflicting imagery, weird vocab, also claiming that india was in africa. hannah said "what does that even mean?" ad we're like yeah wtf i dunno. 

also at some point i'm stretching in some kind of gym class and my legs look more like granny's and a little diamond-like shaped (like harlequin babies) and some dude shares that he used to know a kid who had it who could never poop. but that when he was a kid his poops were too watery. maybe the kid with weird skin died? or had some other strange ending. 

============

that's the end of my journal entry. wow it was boring, but i was so excited writing it this morning. i can pretty much clearly identify where all of these images situations and feelings come from in my conscious life, so in a way, i thought that sharing this with you all lets you know how my unconscious is processing the stuff i'm seeing thinking feeling and talking about. instead of writing those things down directly. home, love, place, bodily discomfort, language, death, buildings, art, where the fuck i am/am i.

Poopsicle.

"On these warm days, I feel a strange sense of foreboding, as if something is about to go terribly, terribly wrong," quoth I to Ricky Dicky Micky Sticky Licky Douchebag. "I love marijuana cigarettes," quoth he to me. I think, "I should be a wall, not a person."

Today, this week, this month I find myself incapable of abstraction but capable of abstract psychology. I whirl around naming hang-ups and neuroses. "Seek counseling" quoth the counselor. "You would," quoth I. But I am far too busy analyzing to be analyzed. I refuse the flocked chaise but I'm putting baby there all the time. Brecht and Artaud gather snot in their noses to smear on me at a later date. "Look at yourself, concerned with persons not people!" Then they mime masturbation. I feel sassed.

Inevitably, I come back to the fact that there is often a cat in our bathtub chasing his tail or cats hissing at each other in the hall. These are points of contention for me above all others. I cannot name this feeling, because it is not so much a feeling as a symbol that has no signifiers but feels like a symbol for my life anyway. When I see them I think, "Am I waiting for grown-upness to happen to me? I wait for a lot to happen to me. I am in the waiting-room all the time. In the waiting-room reading the boring-ass, crappy fucking magazines about things I don't care to know." Cats make me think. Maybe it's the smell.

What I am saying is, I fold. Count me out.


I am too childish to play this game. My dad beats me at Monopoly, he's been doing it for nearly twenty-two years and I still tear up a little. "Look at yourself," quoteth Brecht and Artaud, "sell back our books to the bookstore and give back that one you 'borrowed' because your fingers are stinging our pages." "You would," quoteth I. Then I snot on them before they can snot on me. "Ha" I say. "You would" quoth they.

So much for being a sophisticate. For being urbane or academic. So much for being abstract. I guess I won't be the caftan wearing type.

tooth decay got me down

a privy for your thoughts

today's been pretty average so far:
I listened to a goose symphony
I explored two different forgotten ruins (one tiny and dirty, one vast and unclean)
I skipped two lectures (one physically, one mentally [note: the second lecture hasn't ended yet. I think])
I thought about money and class in multiple contexts
I lost my favorite hat (it'll show up at the grounds - or it won't! so therefore I can tell the future)

and then in the process of losing my hat, I realized that there was something nagging at me all day long, metanagging if you will, I kind of annoyance at having to wonder what's bothering me, the kind of thing that can only be solved with a nice, sting-y tentacle-slap.
but I think I'm tired of being slapped by the same tentacles all the time.

A thought experiment:
I think I figured out ruthlessness.
You can only be ruthless when you know the end (the goal, the conclusion, &c.).
Then you can ignore all the distractions en route (and thus the chief virtue of ruthlessness is its efficiency towards the thing you want to do).
I would argue that if you already know the end
that is to say, think you know the end
then you've already done something wrong - and here's why:
say you know the outcome of a thing.
you're either right, in which case, why bother doing the thing?*
or you're wrong, in which case, maybe ignoring all the distractions en route wasn't such a hot idea after all.

Very abstract, yes, but we can now apply this, for example, to show why my papers always get mediocre grades (left as an exercise to the reader).
*A bonus critical thought question: how does the above theory apply to xtianity? to your own metaphilosophy?

To conclude this particular ramble,
I desperately need more ruth in my life.

HIHIHI

ELIOT THE BAT.

polyamory can get so complicated

i've had a number of extended intimate relationships with ideas today. i've curled around a few of them and let them poke their edges into my sternum. i got smacked around a little bit, i played a fair amount. and some of the ideas i threw out the window, but i put little strings on them because i know deep down that i'll probably want them back someday soon.
the point is, i've been nestling around with a lot of different theories and practices and i'm getting tested at the scc on monday but i'm not sure i have the kind of insurance coverage to detect the insidiousness of ex-ideas and self-doubt that are lingering and stalking my brain. leli suggested i be more ruthless with my ideas. i imagine i am probably better at disciplining other people than disciplining myself.

on the other hand, if i've learned anything, it's that intellectual monogamy would be terribly boring.

also, hello squidders--haven't posted in a while, but i've been reading and appreciating and nestling (and more) with your thoughts.

In-class, internetical conversation between T'mo and Toast

T'mo: i feel like i can't use words in this room

for fear of offending people

Edoobs: same, i hate it here

my mood is instantly worse

i hate everything

life sucks

ive never felt so sad and lonely

i am completely drunk

my veins are filled with heroin

i can hardly see straight

but strangely my spelling is largely unaffected

my hearing is shot

my eyes are filled with pus, i dont know why

1:47 PM i forgot an apostrophe in the contraction above, i think it's because i'm so drunk and obliteratedly high

everyone looks like chicken thighs to me

i forgot to look at the coupon booklet for the local cvs this morning

my grandmother will never forgive the extra cents i will spend on my afternoon gatorade which she will count when i get home

after counting all of those wasted cents

she will detract all of them from my marshmellow allotment in my hot cocoa

1:48 PM which she makes from a box of packets she bought in paris during WWII

which is secretly a douch-ing kit

but i've never had the heart to tell her

people simply thouhgt that douch-ing was improved by the use of cocoa in WWII

me: you are making a fool of me right now

Edoobs: this statement has been proven false numerous times and it's appalling that she still thinks so

i can't shit but i can pee freely, an unexpected turn of bowel events

1:49 PM the clouds are closing in

the sun is dying

this is both metaphorically and literally true

when it dies, which can only seem likely to happen in my lifetime, today or later this week

i will be sad, and literally, dead

1:50 PM this turn of events will come, probably suddenly, but with open arms from my end

because im so depressed and blindly and deafly drunk and hig

h

i have lost my will to live anyhow and have decided, until my imminent death

to pursue a major in human development

which i find ironic because i've made up my mind that no human develops, only wallows further in the great mire of human turds and elephant shit

1:51 PM i have no strange or specific love for elephant shit, it is simply the nature of reality

pure and squarely simple

i've called out for help but grandma stifles my cries with exotic fruits she hurls at me with a water balloon launcher, an appartus she bought on sale and often reminds me of

my ability to type slows, the darkness descends

i ask jesus to pull my plug from the great cosmic machine to which it is attached

1:52 PM he grins and with a jowly and somehow jaundiced drool tells me assuredly that he will not help

i died.

1:53 PM T'mo: el oh el