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The above was dinner. I hope, as you look at this picture, you laugh with me. Because, honestly, I was looking down with more broccoli in my mouth and I laughed. This is my dinner? Tomorrow will be a salmon pasta attempt with glass of water and a smirk on my face if it comes out well. If it turns out to be a buttery hell like my last salmon-cooking attempt, then I'm going to 'feel like a lobster' like Perry says, and end my career with salmon.

Last night I was walking home from Tori's after the show and it was around 1 in the morning. Dark out with the wind blowing. I had my jacket zipped up and I was moving slowly just thinking. I don't know whether I was thinking about anything in specific but I passed a Norwegian house party and saw a bunch of kids smoking on a porch and smiled. The trees are the scariest things at night. Tall and reaching high into the sky full of stars and no one around, with no street lights. Sometimes my mind feels like those dirt paths striking off in the distance. I look up at the mountains and don't see anything.

The show before down at Garage was good. Sitting at a table and we took turns dipping a coin into the candle wax and Tori had a beer while I looked around every so often watching the place fill up. There was an endless stream of kids going in and out of the place. Norwegians with suits and ties, and hoodies, black shoes brown shoes. The bar downstairs only serves beer in plastic cups. Apparently a safeguard against the rampaging 18 year olds of Oslo. The first singer told us a story about a man who lost his wife and put her in a cooler and took her to an evangelical revival in Pensacola, Florida. Where he asked them if they could bring her back to life.

It was eerie. The Mountain Goats were more than good. The singer bursting into monologue about his parent’s divorce and his drug habit in Portland were things I had never experienced at a live show. Usually they play their songs and say a joke in-between. But at the end the whole crowd was singing along. And the second encore was with just the bass player, and the singer shaking about madly, dashing across the stage to crowd while everyone snapped their fingers in the strangest show spectacle I've ever known. He sang without a mic and belted the song out so loud, then quieted for the last bit and kissed the crowd goodbye, leaving the stage in a flurry like an actor from a long time ago. With the bass player playing the last bass lines on stage, smiling with the biggest grin. Tori dancing along slowly and I was hovering just watching everything in awe until he quieted the bass, told the crowd how amazing they were and he left too. Leaving everyone with the feeling that no one had actually been there, up on stage playing. That 'what' they had seen was, in fact, 'religion.' And that this was a pivotal moment in all their lives. When the lights came back on and the music switched back to the stereo cd changer everyone’s face went back to normal, and the world was as it was before. But I think maybe they all carried something tucked in their pockets or purses. Cradling it back at home as the dearest thing to them to come across this day. Then putting it away somewhere, deep, inside, where there is a single light and lots of drawers, chests, scraps of paper and shirts scattered about. The drawers filled with feathers and the like. All sorts of colors in brilliant dancing revelry. The sort of memories that are dreams and the sorts of important things that sit with dying eyes in a lonely bed in the last moments of the final breathe. That’s the sort of thing that makes me think about clocks, ticking clocks. And jewels and gemstones brilliant and shining. With battered gods bleeding, torn, passing away in shuffling steps as they cross a green hill to a castle that overlooks a sea.



Now I have spent much of the day shopping for food, as the above picture suggests, drinking water out of this delightful coffee mug.

I also met a fascinating woman named Vivi who is an Art History major in Oslo and works over in the museum. But I don’t really know. I tend to forget about anything quickly, and I don’t want to be bored with anything. But everything, my books, my drawings, my bottles, this computer. It all just gets boring. I get so horribly indifferent and get so cold as if I was freezing and then froze and everything slowly sunk deep into a pool of water. People, are always, the most awesomely intricate things ever. And there seems to be an abundance of them. There is a strange sense of dis-clarity. Confusing, would be the proper term. I keep hearing Pynchon brought up in conversation whenever I start talking to someone about books. 'Oh, I'm reading Pynchon.'

'Oh,' I reply back. Incredibly intimidated that all these people pick him up so casually. Like a Harry Potter novel or something; not that I’m ‘dissing’ Harry Potter. 'Oh,' I reply and shrink back into my corner. ‘Well, uh, that is very post-modern,’ I say after and feel completely retarded about the response. In total, I should read some of him so I have more to say. And can only ever retreat further to, ‘yeah, my friend Tom really likes him. Gravity's Rainbow someday.’ And decidedly someone will burst forth with a new topic and we will all run away from the sun.

My sheets are clean. Wednesdays are the best days for laundry. In the beginning of the afternoon. When the world is still nursing hangovers. And the sun has just started to move past and away from everyone's window. Instead beating down at an odd angle. The strangest thing is how extreme everything moves, instead of up its all shifting to the side. I don't ever know where the fucking moon is going to be. Just up in the clouds while I am walking around in the night looking out amongst the trees and shadows.

Shadows are the best friends of the lonely. And the lonely is everyone. They just don't know it. And deep down inside there are beasts lurking, waiting to eat everything up. Smiling in the dark with bright white teeth and grins that can kill. I look down and look back up. And think, that should be terrifying. It really is. It’s the scariest thing, thinking that everything can fall apart in a snap. Crack! And it all disappears or shatters and falls. The worst is imagining the best unfold to the worst. And then becoming so motionless and sick it never unfolds at all.

Sometimes the world is a bleak place.
'Sometimes you paint the bleakest pictures,' and I nod and sigh. I suppose so. And I go back to the page and keep painting.

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gravity what?