Monday, November 27, 2006

Snake on Nintendo



new super smash brothers brawl for the wii. comes out in march i think? fuckin' check out snake. higher res video here.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

the clock strikes 1. we sigh and wait, until it strikes 2.

Tomorrow already feels strange. Can’t sleep. There are no sounds. I like to hear cars driving by in the dead of night. But my street is quiet and so is my house. I get nervous thinking about Norway. I don’t know a lot about that. But it is far away. And I am someone here. So will I leave and be something there. Then bring it back and replace an old shell that I left in a dusty house with motes and sunlight all yellow on the wooden floors.

I feel nervous. I think maybe because I know I won’t be going to some classes. When did ditching become a thing so different. We used to do it all the time in high school. Now it almost feels horrible. Like I am swallowing the wrong pill. None of my body feels tired. I wish sound filled me up but everything around me just makes things buzz. I want to be on a creaking old row boat with a mist of rain pouring from the sky. Like a shrouded covering they cannot see us as we sit in timid water that barely ripples. There is a warmth surrounding me and the air is thick with moisture. I want to close my eyes but I can’t. Half of me feels charged and the other half feels exhausted. They cannot reconcile with anything.

I haven’t read enough this week. I haven’t been doing much except getting paperwork in order. It is almost done and then I can submerge in figuring out how best to keep warm with the clothes I must purchase. There is no light either.

I don’t count the dim orange glow of the concrete street lamp outside. I’m too energized for street lights. I’m too exhausted but lacking to be peaceful.

But at least we all met again and it was wonderful. I love my family. They are a lot of fun.

---

We rise in shallow water,
With plenty of breath left.
We face the sun and the yellow light,
With smiling faces and plenty of life.
When we submerge again,
The seagulls circle,
The waves rise,
And the oceans swirls.
We rise far away,
From anything.

---
hush little darling, don’t you cry
mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

the way sound fills

In the middle of the night we smiled and looked down the long parking lot. With our eyes I scanned for the both of us and felt that the cars were moving too fast. So I moved us along quickly and the horns were loud when there was no one else walking. It must have meant they were honking at us. I smiled again and felt the touch of her hand; it was cold and she didn’t wear gloves. I liked how she didn’t care and would rather feel the world around her than cover her tiny fingers in the warmth of wool or cotton. As if masking her skin would somehow diminish the experience of living.

When the moon was at its tiniest, we were far away from the parking lot, over the concrete mountains. In the back there was the distant sound of the street. Lights hummed and I could hear almost nothing except her shallow breathing. Then in an instant we fell…

Tumbling down and down. There was a lot of swishing past my ears. The sound of air moving so fast that I couldn’t even see or think. All I did was rub my nose as we fell. Because it was so cold that it became numb. Her hand was still in mine, and when we stopped we had stopped on a cold patch of wet lawn. The streets were so far away now. The lights were gone and it was almost nothing. Just the tiny moon overhead casting faint shadows on the green grass. She shined so bright. The stars were gone and it was black in the sky. A dull mist was high up and she told me all sorts of things. But I wasn’t really listening, just taking in the noise itself. She knew it, that’s why I guessed none of it was important. What was important was that we talked to kill the silence. It was like filling a city with people.

Empty towns can be one of the most depressing things ever she told me one night before. And that’s what I remembered now as I filled in the lack of streetlights and cars. The lack of any other people. When she let go of my hand and went home it was terrifying. Because here I was alone so far away from everyone. Her voice was gone and the world was emptying itself out again.

It made me truly understand how important she was to me. She was probably the most important thing in my life. And I meant it. I didn’t tell her but I knew. Mostly it was this great thing inside of me. Like when you try and size something up for someone and they do it with both hands. Stretching them out longer and longer until it reaches that perfect width and height. She meant this much to me and I stretched out as far as I could.

Then I walked home with the pale moonlight glowing, like those streetlights that now lined the sidewalk to my room. And from the window I fell asleep in silence thinking about her, bathed in the white light, making my dreams these surreal landscapes with no people, and only the sounds of before to fill it all up and make it worth dreaming. I think in that moment of lucidity, after having spent the whole night with her, all of this clicked. And it stained itself on the inside of my head. Like paint running along concrete and filling in all the cracks. It became this vivid message, and I clung to it like gold. It was the most valuable thing ever.

---
the bear.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Camping for a Wii

We camped out from 11:30 pm to 9:00 am to get our hands on our Wii's. It was quite a struggle and very cold, but we did it. And oh was it worth it.


Covered in an obnoxious amount of layers while the sun finally came up.



Monsieur Pennington in all his grandeur



Jake slept through the entire night. He realized that sleeping on hard concrete, in the cold, is the worst thing ever. Oh, he also fell asleep next to a swastika. The sleep nazi.



Paolo with his towel scarf and awesome beanie. Our spiritual guide and documenter, photographer.



The Line going down Charleston



The valuable ticket that got you your Wii



Faithful comrades who visited throughout the night with food and blankets.



The Final Countdown (cue Gob's stage music)


Success after like 10 hours of camping.


The Final Product

Its seriously the coolest fucking thing ever. And thanks to Paolo for documenting the whole adventure. Totally worth it.

---
pswii. let's get wiitarded. play with my wii. don't you want to play with my wii? i like my wii. don't touch that wii. wiination. wii are the people. wiiating.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

credit

I've managed to remove myself from the national credit and consumer reports list. It was the most arduous process I've ever embarked on. I'm still not home free. I have to sign some letter in the mail and then mail it back. Otherwise in five years they put me back on the list. I think, Julian, these people can't stop offering you credit cards.

But I already have a credit card.

Exactly.

When will it stop Julian.

Never.

---
2.

magazine

I'm starting to feel that my mail-person is slipping my egms beneath the seat and enjoying them at home in the comfort of an easy chair. I can't be certain, but I do know that shifty things happen, and that this sort of thievery cannot, not, exist.

---
1.

birthday celebration time

Oh, bonfire, birthday, 21'st bash is on for December 3 (Saturday). Unless something happens or needs to be changed. that's the date of the extravaganza.


a social night

Washing my clothes now. The gentle hum of the washing machine makes today feel even more like a Sunday. It whirs around and round. The time is noon. I think I have things to do. But none of it is pressing for tomorrow. So its hard to get it done. My list:

-Rewrite Hemingway paper. (Focus on thematic response, not plot summary)
-Work on World Lit. Research Paper
-English 101 Reading
-Japanese History Reading
-Watch Seppuku for Jap. History
-Read Tobias Wolfe for Amer. Short Stories
-Work on Jap. History Research Paper

Those are my pressing matters, which will need to be dealt with all at some point in November.

---

Last night I saw the Rolling Stones thanks to Brian. They were pretty fucking rad. I enjoyed myself. I guess I wouldn’t have bothered to see them on my own, so its cool that the opportunity came up where I didn’t have to shell out that ticket price to go watch them.

It was really weird seeing who attended. Mostly all these baby boomers and old people. All rocking out. Now they have the time and the money to see this band of their era and they were thoroughly enjoying it.

---

We went afterwards and ate at The Social House down at the TI. That place is insane. Its this super chic, new sushi joint. It’s really awesome, and the food is great. Brian and I just kept at it with the sake and let my mom drive home. Which, hanging out with those two is strange, but really funny. Because at night I never realized they become these characters straight out of a Fitzgerald novel. Brian with like 3 different drinks in his hands wandering around telling his life story to all these people. And my mom bouncing around with him laughing and telling jokes. And they get really dirty which is awkward but again funny. Brian likes to point out all the hot women and he calls them Bone Smokers.

I ended up finding Raj down at the pit too and he walked around with us. Devo, your dad rules. We have to go to The Social House at some point man. Its really dope.

I managed to get the keys from Brian who got plastered. And then I let my mom drive that truck of his. Which they parked on the first floor because security said we didn’t meet the clearance for anything higher in the garage. My mom ended up continuing her character by driving on the wrong side of the road at fucking 3 in the morning. Some men in trucks had to point her in the right direction.

It was an interesting night. The sushi and sake was bomb, so was the place, and the music was good too. Can’t wait to go back to that place again.

---
we find some time, in-between the shouts and screams of the people’s rush.
they make the sounds, of the crashing plane.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

athf

Trailer for the new movie. I think its less of a trailer and just like the first minute or so of the actual movie.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

its tuesday evening.

Gary falls at about the 6:20 mark. Get romance advice from Busey.



Here, are more links to this forgotten gem of a show--and man.

---
never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around, and
desert you.

macintoshhh.


Another computer has joined my collection. Finally got my hands on a Mac. This is a G4 Powerbook. The Macbook Pro replaced these models but it's still pretty fast, has a gig of ram and everything on it. Darlene Ensign said I could have it since I got her a new one. It had some cracks on the casing and the older OS. But I super glued the exterior back together, formatted, and installed OS X Tiger. Then slapped office, photoshop, and some other stuff on.

The nicest thing is the screen. Really pretty.

---
I cannot hide when you're outside
and hope soo out hide to the streets

Monday, November 06, 2006

first post from my mac

Listening to some Sun Ra and letting the night slip away. I don’t think I’ve watched television in weeks now. I don’t know what happened, but now there is all this time. I don’t know what to do with all that free time. Perry plays Wow and I sort of putter around in the solitude of the night until things wrap up and we part our separate ways to sleep. But it’s clear that it’s not horrifying. It just seems strange. Like we are in Purgatory. Waiting for a train that will come soon. On that train it will take people to all these places. Some far and other just around the corner. As we wait we smoke and chat. We sip wine and beer and let the sun fade out as a dying cancer on an old man’s thumb. When the break is done, the time in-between will be the most cherished, and all around we will mutter where did it go? What happened to that train station? I knew that waiting was…and we’d find no more words but just that same sun now steadily climbing in a noon-time sky.

---

We rode along,
On shores of gold sand
With your beautiful face,
Those long black strands of hair.
That dipped and covered your face.

When we were tired we shook ourselves,
And let the sun tell us when to rest.
When we smiled it was the end of time,
When the day stopped we smiled and felt the waves and breeze of the salty air.

On that golden sand,
We made images of trees and flowers,
That shone in the afternoon sky,
And when we had to leave,
I didn’t care.
I didn’t mind because you were still there,
And all those moments that made it…
They made us part.
With that sparkling shore.

---

Sometimes when I’m watching people look at each other I see their faces and recognize that same face in someone else. Because the interaction was the same. The intent was similar or almost identical, so what I’m doing is recognizing the meaning behind the lips, or smile, or eyes—downcast and dark brown. It produces huge bouts of nostalgia. It sits funny inside of me. Like it wont happen again but I’m viewing as a stranger. When he sits alone and faces the end of the day. He recognizes in himself how small a man he was. He is a small man and he drinks champagne and chews on ice until they throw him his clothes in the tiny cell.

This is not the life he had planned out. When he was a boy he imagined riding on trains until he died. With a beautiful woman that made ham sandwiches and she smiled as she sipped clear mountain water. Cold. It was refreshing. But he was not there. Instead the stars were overhead and in the interminable moments. He could be caught holding his breath as if the guns would somehow stop.

But when the men took their positions at the firing line and they remarked that he was a pitiful man. In a sorry state. That he should convict himself and take the revolver. This was a waste of time one soldier commented and the other man agreed. They took hits from a snifter, then blew smokes rings from clove cigarettes as the Marshall read out loud the sentence.

He closed his eyes and told himself he did not want to see the ends of their guns. That the champagne had been delicious, but he remembered it had been bitter, and ended up not lying to himself this time. In the end he only wished for the quiet breaths of the train. Passing along the smooth rail as a silent bullet. And those same fragments of metal. They had been removed from a Russian railroad years later and been formed into long shells, caught him in the gut and he bled to death on the cold night ground. His body bathed in white moonlight, and the end of his life was nothing but a series of exclamations that another traitor was dead. That the people could sleep soundly in the night. When the mortician came in the morning he found half a body. Most of it was stripped bare by ants and scavenger owls. He prayed and threw some holy water before striking a match and burning the rest.

It had occurred to him right before he died that Tolstoy had been right. That man continued to survive as an ever-present idea of the human condition. That love, and courage, anger, and remorse were merely dead souls clinging on. Feeding those who were alive. And in that way the Great Russian author claimed immortality for a race that needed it so badly.

But when he died he only felt cold and remarked once again how bitter the champagne had been.

---

The time is now 7:40. It feels static. There is nothing. When Hemingway wrote he removed and stripped the character to a set of actions. Invoking a white space where the reader intended to fill that space in, inferring what was never said. He is rejecting the old world view. One in which, only led to a war that showed the terrible cruelty in mankind. Hemingway asks himself, what is there now but the end. With nothing but the capacity for evil, what have the old ways taught us but how to wage war with the world. He communicated this, in his work, and went about trying to discover how man can face these sad truths with a form of dignity. So it is immanent, that when we read this author’s work, we strive to move past his woman hating and simple use of description to the ideas he leaves off the page. When he talks of suicide, his characters almost always fail. Why would this be the case? Is he not hoping to end the pain of these miserable creatures?

These men, are not merely sad and wretched, they are fighting against nature. They are trying to assume a higher plane, where they mean something. When he writes he talks of this nothing as an enemy. Like a bullfighter facing the bull. It is unknown whether he speaks in complete metaphor, but unlike the Structuralists, we may assume the ideas we wish to form, create a moral compass for ourselves. They fail in killing themselves. To become examples of a losing fight, but not giving up until the very moment that we must.

It brings us back to the white space. Hemingway, in all his power, is creating a question for the reader to answer. He wants this reader to assume a role of responsibility, and think for themselves, what is my purpose? When faced with a character that finds himself struggling with his place in a burnt out world, we look at our world and question the foundations with which we stand on. In his attempts, he strips past the romantic and pretty to a very core foundation. It is like looking at the skeleton of a sabertooth, or the blueprints of a home. He does not want to write any more than that. If he does, he falls within the parameters of the old. And it is most certainly not his goal to teach ways that have failed mankind.

So Hemingway poses us the question of meaning. The same question that Camus and Sartre, that all the French Existentialists asked. Where does human meaning lie? What does that make the human condition? Are we tragic, are we courageous in this end, where we will never win? And the answer is never given. It is decided by the reader to fill in the blank trees and rivers, the answers and conclusion to conflicts, to fashion an answer, or at least a weapon to fight the problem.

Hemingway’s solution is to write. In fact, Camus himself states that there are 4 different solutions.

1. There is the hedonist. Who exists to blank out the problem with pleasure.
2. There is the actor. Who does not exist as a solid human, and lives as changing characters. He has no form to face the problem.
3. There is the leader. The one who assumes control. To take those under him and create his own meaning through leadership. The God complex.
4. There is the artist. Who fights this nothing by his own creation. A slap in the face towards that nothing.

So we see, here, that there are structures that perhaps bind man. That we are all one of those things. Regardless of whether this is true, they offer a choice for those not knowing that such a choice existed. Whether each one is ‘good’ or not is hard to judge. It is then the task of man to create a structure he himself holds strongly too while at the same time regarding humanity through a moralist stance. Perhaps it is too much to ask though, and it may be that this nothing has, over time, broken down man’s will. It merely predicts our end simply by existing. And defeats the thing that continues to survive us. Our morality.

Which is the point of what Hemingway is doing at his core. Through everything, these people do not fail morally, and thus Hemingway, in his white space, creates a feeling that even in great sadness, we cannot fail to become less than who we are. Even in the face of death, we are good people.


---
welcome to neptune, welcome to space, welcome to the world of jazz

Saturday, November 04, 2006

pause--do not exceed medication past 6 doses in 24 hours--resume

I dragged myself off from the couch because I thought I should put something down. I saw these pictures and I don’t really know how to articulate the feelings. But it’s very dark in my house, especially if I take the time to look around. When the sounds, typing click away, there is a sound of typing. That typing sound is clicking. There is clicking in the dark house. There is the sound. And its dark if we look around…

That repetition. That’s how I feel right now. Over and over in a loop that changes but not a lot. If it were enough I wouldn’t be sick, and I wouldn’t be drugged out. When I close my eyes I see flashes of knives and people humped over reading while looking down at the gutter. Then the music is a scene itself. It paints trees that dip along as we watch the stars and the night is cold. So I have to throw a blanket and let the warmth circle up, past the knees, up to my hands and I crouch. I try and move but if I do I feel the sting of the cold.

The curiosity builds. When there is a field of shrouded faces, and you wonder what all those faces are doing.

We climb over wired fences

Playing with each other’s hair,

While smiling at the deep crevasses,

Of those places shrouded in sleep.

When the guitars are droning onward,

And the sound is quiet and above.

The dial turned up just a little,

Enough to make me hide.

…we look through the darkness. In the house there is typing. We don’t know who is typing, but know that they are there.

---

someone else, the sound of the sea and spray of salt along the coast, we sailed searching for someone else

Friday, November 03, 2006

killing time.

i'm sitting here in the ensign house waiting for photos to transfer from one mac to the other. its got to be the slickest fucking file transfer system i have ever seen. all i have to do is hook both macs up with a firewire cable and then boot the host mac up in firewire mode (hold down T while it starts up). then on the mac i want the pics on i can just browse the other computer like an external hard drive. and every program auto detects the files you can import. so i point iphoto towards the correct directory and i'm done. now i just wait for 8,000 pics to upload. which, mind you, takes a long fucking time.

---

today, i'm not sure, where my day has gone. at some point i checked my world lit. grade and then recieved an email that eased my fears about my american literature class. perry and i were driving back from carlo's and we wished there was a party to go to. the nice thing about parties is the convergence of people on a single location. and you are there too, and we all can be silent but its fine. its just nice to be among the flux, the pulsating beat and the eyes and hearts of all those people.

i think we are going to cracker barrel tomorrow. has to be sometime in the afternoon. most likely around 2ish. if anyone wants to take a 200 mile roundtrip to eat at a place that makes you say, "I just don't want to be in a cracker barrel," then you are more than welcome. I think the country fried steak has my name on it. Just the legions of people making way on a Saturday afternoon in Bullhead City will be payment enough. I just imagine when we were in Bakersfield, and there was that line for the buffet near the Shakey's Pizza. It'll be like that, except, you know, these country folk are serious about their food.

---

The Wii is going to be very interesting indeed. The mere fact that it will play games of yore is satisfying. Yet, now, you can think that it will also be like a DS, but better, and with more juice. You think that the games coming out for that thing are fun, well then, be ready for an injection of extreme.

---

They still won't tell me if I'm going to Norway. I want to know. Will I be up in the frozen North, with the Northern Lights playing across my happy eyes? I swear I'm taking a train even further in the cold to witness the event. Its like a sea of light, and those lights are so alien they remind me how tiny this rock is.

---

Anthony Bourdain's book is really entertaining. Talking about it just makes me want to go try out different places to eat even more. And we were discussing the merits of the book; you just want to explore the backs of kitchens and the incredible sub-culture that exists, but that I don't ever think about. Not ever, in the past. Now, yes. And that's really neat.

---

i want to start a bead and breakfast called fools rush in

ichiza

Fish is delicious. This is terrifying. The ocean is huge yet we can manage to fuck that up too. All I remember now is this play I saw as kid. And these actors had a bare stage almost the whole time. It was about these men who traveled back into time to study the oceans and the way people treated them. In the future they had become flat deserts where you wore a mask over your face or you'd die from salt inhalation. The land was just a swirling mess of dust and salt. They had over-used the oceans and needed to go back in time to figure out how to stop it.

---

we must make faces when we smile. because they smile back.

the sound was silence. and it hurt my heart, to where i couldn't listen anymore

I feel alienated. Almost alone, not quite, because there are still some people who feel natural. They aren’t away like a distant sun. I can relate and that is good. I am poorly depressed. I don’t know about the things I do; they have been shaken and it scares me. Almost to a point of defeat. But I told myself that it’s important to have things that last a lifetime. Those things are your meaning, and I want that. So that is the case. It is just terrible when those things spit at you, or die, or they frown. They are nothing at some points and it is terrifying all in the whole.

---

I watched this video. And it was strange because I had no motivation. It was there and I pressed play and it was a girl and the only words that were on the screen were, “I Remember.” Which was odd, remember what? What exactly did the girl think? I had the sound turned off so it made the video feel more alien. This great solitude. Maybe it’s that damn book, engraving what it is onto my own form. Like cavemen chiseling on stone tablets. If that’s the case then a millstone is in order. To wrack a hole in the center and cease it from being the case. Turning the piece into dust and the wind will blow it away. What troubles me is the aspects around me.

---

There is an intuitive grasp I hold onto. It is what guides me because there is nothing else that I trust more. Not because it’s easy but because it’s right. Now I know what is around me because it tells me so. There is a feeling. The air reeks of it. I don’t want to smell it. I can taste it when I breathe in. The people are covered and they drip of the stuff. The horrible thing is I don’t know what it is. Just am aware of its existence. That’s the problem. As long as it’s like that it keeps me on the outside. And it’s not like I’m being lazy or think it’s easier this way. I don’t belong in that place. Maybe because I don’t want to. I know that it isn’t right, I know this and can’t step in. The water is too cold mother. We are flapping our wings but there is no point going higher. We don’t belong in the cold. And the cold took us. So when the spillover occurs, the rush of water will be very strange. Because I knew about the water, but when I drink and see what it truly is, it will all have happened or been cemented as either this or that.

---

It is selfish to think that people do not do all they are capable of. What that means is it is selfish if you discredit people for trying; thinking they aren’t. Especially because maybe you think they would rather have it easy. Or have it not be their problem. Or it’s shaking off responsibility. That isn’t fair because it’s incredibly complex and we are not you and I am a person and humans are separate at their cores and can only strive to build a bridge. They can build it but faith holds its string. It’s not religious, it is just trust.

---

We rode along in the red train. Passing by farms and old windmills. There was no wind so they simply stood there, like statues in the sun and still air that was cold with winter chill. We were quiet and smiled pleasantly. Our faces were red from the cold, our hands in wool gloves and the cabin-man would pass out hot chocolate which I had to always decline, the two times he came to our room. As the day passed there was an incredible silence that built up all around us. Until I had to leave my skin as a soul and glance along to make sure we were the only ones. I had to know, because if we were, there surely was a problem with us. These problems were the tip of something greater. And in the end we would both be lying on separate steamships, staring straight up at the sky in the bottom of the ocean, with our mouths open thinking about other lovers and why the world is such a terrible place for young people. There were blue fish with red spots I thought, and then the accident flashed and I was crying in her imaginary arms.

We lost our child,

And on the ocean.

We faced a wave,

A terrible wave with teeth,

that were sharp and white.

Like the hills of fuji.

Covered in a sea of fury.

The sound was loud,

Its crashing broke my ears.

And the cabin shattered,

With the sunlight dying,

The faces of all the people,

Throwing overboard with their fear.

---

we were a house, but it ended quickly.
there is a house, that slowly burns all its light to dust.