Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
If they're boys
http://www.sendspace.com/file/le816u
I was up at five this morning, proving that it isn't my dad doing something fishy that wakes me up, or at least it doesn't have to be. He took the red eye to Mexico, and I wrote an essay about something involving cause and effect, while naked.
I went to school about two hours early because I was done with the essay and the novelty of my aforementioned condition was as worn off on me as my clothes had previously been. Rock and roll evoking tribalism makes the most sense when it's this sunny, singing along to Brian Eno's The True Wheel even after the song stops, projecting unity with the mustard fields and the weekend. This(seemingly decades)after I ended the group editing session in English by inadvertently making one of the group members cry. Jessica, once again I am sorry. I should not have been so thoughtlessly amused when you mentioned that your sister had had bulimia as to say that it had taken a while for that to come up in the conversation. For you it was a deeply painful thing that you were very brave to mention, and for me it was just pattern recognition. And it was rude for me to at the beginning of that session assume that your essay was unedited, especially since you volunteered to work with me. Sucky shit all around.
I wanted to post the Meatyard picture of the boy holding the mannequin hand, but I could not find it on the internet. This was before tears, when I was just on a Vitamin D rush.
I just made a really good quesadilla. I remember the first month or so in the city, what with all the drinking, options, robe wearing, and mission sense of an exploring conquistador in search of plunder and tenderness. That was also a month of great quesadillas and gastronomic expansion.
It's less than ten days, but some of that is back, in this leap year with the house to myself. Leap year of the fall of the house of Clinton. Leap year Of people conversing on the internet with strangers over obscure topics they don't know about and cross referencing all the while, of lolcats and Souljah Boys.
I am going to have a lot to answer about to little Omar and Toussaint Paradis.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/my2au0
I was up at five this morning, proving that it isn't my dad doing something fishy that wakes me up, or at least it doesn't have to be. He took the red eye to Mexico, and I wrote an essay about something involving cause and effect, while naked.
I went to school about two hours early because I was done with the essay and the novelty of my aforementioned condition was as worn off on me as my clothes had previously been. Rock and roll evoking tribalism makes the most sense when it's this sunny, singing along to Brian Eno's The True Wheel even after the song stops, projecting unity with the mustard fields and the weekend. This(seemingly decades)after I ended the group editing session in English by inadvertently making one of the group members cry. Jessica, once again I am sorry. I should not have been so thoughtlessly amused when you mentioned that your sister had had bulimia as to say that it had taken a while for that to come up in the conversation. For you it was a deeply painful thing that you were very brave to mention, and for me it was just pattern recognition. And it was rude for me to at the beginning of that session assume that your essay was unedited, especially since you volunteered to work with me. Sucky shit all around.
I wanted to post the Meatyard picture of the boy holding the mannequin hand, but I could not find it on the internet. This was before tears, when I was just on a Vitamin D rush.
I just made a really good quesadilla. I remember the first month or so in the city, what with all the drinking, options, robe wearing, and mission sense of an exploring conquistador in search of plunder and tenderness. That was also a month of great quesadillas and gastronomic expansion.
It's less than ten days, but some of that is back, in this leap year with the house to myself. Leap year of the fall of the house of Clinton. Leap year Of people conversing on the internet with strangers over obscure topics they don't know about and cross referencing all the while, of lolcats and Souljah Boys.
I am going to have a lot to answer about to little Omar and Toussaint Paradis.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/my2au0
School essay minus proofreading
Michael Paradis
English 5
40 Acres and a Mule
The unique history of exploitation and injustices endured by black America deserves both greater recognition and economic correction. This correction need come in the form of providing better housing, infrastructure, schools, and most importantly jobs to black communities nationwide. The long struggle blacks have endured can be divided into three unique eras, each misrepresented in the mainstream historical narrative, but each equally detrimental to our ideals as a Republic for all. These are the period of traditional slavery, the period of sharecropping and Jim Crow, which lasted from the end of Reconstruction until the second world war, and the great migration through today. Although the nature of exploitation endured by black America may have changed during these three time periods, the pattern of exploitation is clear and demands those specific corrections. Other American communities have legitimate claims to equally horrific grievances as black America there can be no doubt, but as the exploitation of black Americans was the economic backbone that allowed the founding fathers the idealism and freedom we associate with this country and it’s origins, their struggle is at the root of our struggle.
Traditional slavery is a concept as complicated as it was destructive. As recently as 50,000 years ago, or roughly 2,000 generations, humanity existed only in Africa. Since then, economic geography and forces of nature have spread humans across the globe, and developed unique phenotypes to handle the separate environments, creating lighter and darker skinned people as a result. It wasn’t until the 1619, some 200 years after the Chinese set up trading posts in East Africa, that Europeans began to establish the institution of slavery as it existed in the Americas until Brazil (now home to more blacks than any other non-African country) abolished the institution in the 1890s. What this means in the United states, writes Joe Feagin in his article “Racism Causes Serious Social and Economic Inequality”, is that “For nearly two thirds of their total time in North America, African Americans were enslaved”. The African was taken on a perilous journey chained to a floor damp with feces, urine, menstrual blood, and the cries of others across the Atlantic, separated from their family and made to labor continuously. The categorization of blacks as sub-human, as a commodity or a tool, was justified by whites because of the supposedly enlightened lives it allowed the American aristocracy to live. The intellectual environment which gave birth to America happened because black labor enriched these people for generations. The cultural effect this had on blacks was to create the culture of resistance and of what would later be co-opted by white rebels as ‘cool’. Blacks, for all of the trauma they endured, elated themselves by flaunting their culture and bawdy selves, in effect saying that while you may own my body, you will never own my soul. This, alongside the economic and intellectual developments of the United States in the antebellum period can be seen as the only lasting benefits of an otherwise horrific institution.
Because slavery developed into being a regional phenomenon in the United States, the Union victory in the civil war offered America a chance to re-examine the roll of blacks in American society. Before his assassination, it was Abe Lincoln’s expressed desire that black America be "returned" to Liberia, or Haiti, or some other exclusively black place, as it seemed the safest way to achieve his ultimate goal of national unification. This also reflected the pessimism that would win out in the reconstruction period and keep black America in a position of near enslavement for another century. In opposition to such pessimism originally stood radical Republicans such as general Sherman, whose order of the forcible “donation to liberated slaves of "40 acres and a mule." “, as Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his case entitled "Debt of Honor," was the historical equivalent of the corrections I am proposing for black America today. The Republican efforts were sabotaged by a President who believed it was the slave owners who should receive compensation for their losses. The freedom black America retained from the reconstruction era was not enough to prevent a system of sharecropping and peonage to emerge as a successor to slavery. Generally, blacks were unable to participate or access government, education, social services, geographical and social mobility, or anything else society could withhold from them. Black America was still largely trapped in the South, owing back rent to white landowners unwilling to give up their lifestyle or social caste system, even in light of their military defeat. Victims of terror and intimidation by the Klu Klux Klan, black America grew a stronger sense of self and place in that dark century following the civil war, as their communities were largely forced to do without government or societal aid or intervention. Lynching, the phenomenon of vigilante justice visited upon blacks or supporters of blacks, only peaked at the end of the 19th century, showing that progress was by no means guaranteed or steady after the end of the civil war. This era was only really brought to an end by changing economic and demographic factors, which during the world wars caused the greatest migration of people this country has ever seen. General Sherman’s promise once again seemed like a possibility.
In the period beginning in 1910 and ending after the second world war, it is estimated some 6.5 million blacks left the south for cities in the north and west. More often than not, the communities blacks moved into were previously owned by underclass whites and already areas poorly served by economic geography and notable for substandard building conditions. Nevertheless, the well paying industrial jobs the north offered allowed for at least two generations of Blacks to prosper and participate like never before on this continent. With the money the uneducated factory workers earned, they raised stable, middle class, educated families. Their children would be the first blacks to move out of exclusively black communities and into the suburbs. This was truly a golden age, black culture finding a real sense of vibrancy and dynamism in the north with the Harlem renaissance, the glamor of the jazz era, and finally the pure elation of soul music.
The civil rights era was the ultimate expression of an ascendant black America, but they were a fragile development dependent on continued national prosperity. The end of the 1960s saw the pendulum swing once again against black America, as whites largely left the cities and the industrial jobs dried up, once again taking away from black America it’s 40 Acres and mule. Urban black communities became isolated centers of poverty, as far out of the reach of the national government as the isolated sharecroppers one or two generations before. This decline reached it’s low point in the late 1970s, as the South Bronx burnt itself out and a then incumbent President Carter asked while touring the destruction “see which areas can still be salvaged”. In the mid 1980's, the former industrial powerhouse of St. Louis’ top export was recycled bricks from old buildings. Since the 1980's, Americas cities have made dramatic improvements, but these have not been felt and have often been at the expense of the black community. Gentrification has gone hand in hand with the war on drugs, a war actively fought against urban black communities by the US government. The astronomically disproportionate black incarceration rate in American prisons when combined with the statistic that most federal prisoners are there on drug related charges would not be so shameful if it had the effect of ending the drug trade. But instead, the drug trade is more prevalent than ever in urban black communities because it not only provides economic opportunity but is the only source of power those neighborhoods have access to. The corner, as David Simon wrote in his expose of the drug trade in west Baltimore of the same name, “is the savanna watering hole” for the urban black community. Everybody has to come there to drink sometime. The metaphor is apt because it remains the only life source for these communities. Urban blacks risk jail time not out of the maliciousness our punishing laws would suggest they intend upon society, but out of economic necessity and societal expectation. Culturally, Black America had abandon the integrationalist overtones of the soul, rock, and disco eras and began pushing into more defiant and inventive territory, mirroring the economic changes that ended integration and increased segregation geographically. The defiant sense of cool that was so uniquely a contribution of black America was co-opted in the 20th century by whites, and once it was clear that the situation for blacks wasn’t improving, black efforts to reclaim their culture became more aggravated, especially with the development of hip hop. The 20th century ended with most of black America without their 40 acres or their mule, with the suburban black middle class a notable exception.
Historical causality is a complicated notion. Because nothing happened in isolation, and because there will always be data from the past we do not have, there can be no certainty when saying that certain events happened because of certain other events. Even so, it is clear to me based on the patterns established above that the position of black America today is the direct result of their continued exploitation and betrayal on the part of the larger American society. It is because of this I feel we must actively invest in black America so as to stop this terrible historical injustice that until it is addressed will continue to stand in opposition to our deepest values as Americans and human beings. The effects of such policies in finally ending our uneasy relationship with our past and our identity would be the best thing for white and black America, as our interests in citizens of this continent have always been fundamentally the same.
UPDATE:
going to also include this article somehow. I mean, my gosh! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
English 5
40 Acres and a Mule
The unique history of exploitation and injustices endured by black America deserves both greater recognition and economic correction. This correction need come in the form of providing better housing, infrastructure, schools, and most importantly jobs to black communities nationwide. The long struggle blacks have endured can be divided into three unique eras, each misrepresented in the mainstream historical narrative, but each equally detrimental to our ideals as a Republic for all. These are the period of traditional slavery, the period of sharecropping and Jim Crow, which lasted from the end of Reconstruction until the second world war, and the great migration through today. Although the nature of exploitation endured by black America may have changed during these three time periods, the pattern of exploitation is clear and demands those specific corrections. Other American communities have legitimate claims to equally horrific grievances as black America there can be no doubt, but as the exploitation of black Americans was the economic backbone that allowed the founding fathers the idealism and freedom we associate with this country and it’s origins, their struggle is at the root of our struggle.
Traditional slavery is a concept as complicated as it was destructive. As recently as 50,000 years ago, or roughly 2,000 generations, humanity existed only in Africa. Since then, economic geography and forces of nature have spread humans across the globe, and developed unique phenotypes to handle the separate environments, creating lighter and darker skinned people as a result. It wasn’t until the 1619, some 200 years after the Chinese set up trading posts in East Africa, that Europeans began to establish the institution of slavery as it existed in the Americas until Brazil (now home to more blacks than any other non-African country) abolished the institution in the 1890s. What this means in the United states, writes Joe Feagin in his article “Racism Causes Serious Social and Economic Inequality”, is that “For nearly two thirds of their total time in North America, African Americans were enslaved”. The African was taken on a perilous journey chained to a floor damp with feces, urine, menstrual blood, and the cries of others across the Atlantic, separated from their family and made to labor continuously. The categorization of blacks as sub-human, as a commodity or a tool, was justified by whites because of the supposedly enlightened lives it allowed the American aristocracy to live. The intellectual environment which gave birth to America happened because black labor enriched these people for generations. The cultural effect this had on blacks was to create the culture of resistance and of what would later be co-opted by white rebels as ‘cool’. Blacks, for all of the trauma they endured, elated themselves by flaunting their culture and bawdy selves, in effect saying that while you may own my body, you will never own my soul. This, alongside the economic and intellectual developments of the United States in the antebellum period can be seen as the only lasting benefits of an otherwise horrific institution.
Because slavery developed into being a regional phenomenon in the United States, the Union victory in the civil war offered America a chance to re-examine the roll of blacks in American society. Before his assassination, it was Abe Lincoln’s expressed desire that black America be "returned" to Liberia, or Haiti, or some other exclusively black place, as it seemed the safest way to achieve his ultimate goal of national unification. This also reflected the pessimism that would win out in the reconstruction period and keep black America in a position of near enslavement for another century. In opposition to such pessimism originally stood radical Republicans such as general Sherman, whose order of the forcible “donation to liberated slaves of "40 acres and a mule." “, as Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his case entitled "Debt of Honor," was the historical equivalent of the corrections I am proposing for black America today. The Republican efforts were sabotaged by a President who believed it was the slave owners who should receive compensation for their losses. The freedom black America retained from the reconstruction era was not enough to prevent a system of sharecropping and peonage to emerge as a successor to slavery. Generally, blacks were unable to participate or access government, education, social services, geographical and social mobility, or anything else society could withhold from them. Black America was still largely trapped in the South, owing back rent to white landowners unwilling to give up their lifestyle or social caste system, even in light of their military defeat. Victims of terror and intimidation by the Klu Klux Klan, black America grew a stronger sense of self and place in that dark century following the civil war, as their communities were largely forced to do without government or societal aid or intervention. Lynching, the phenomenon of vigilante justice visited upon blacks or supporters of blacks, only peaked at the end of the 19th century, showing that progress was by no means guaranteed or steady after the end of the civil war. This era was only really brought to an end by changing economic and demographic factors, which during the world wars caused the greatest migration of people this country has ever seen. General Sherman’s promise once again seemed like a possibility.
In the period beginning in 1910 and ending after the second world war, it is estimated some 6.5 million blacks left the south for cities in the north and west. More often than not, the communities blacks moved into were previously owned by underclass whites and already areas poorly served by economic geography and notable for substandard building conditions. Nevertheless, the well paying industrial jobs the north offered allowed for at least two generations of Blacks to prosper and participate like never before on this continent. With the money the uneducated factory workers earned, they raised stable, middle class, educated families. Their children would be the first blacks to move out of exclusively black communities and into the suburbs. This was truly a golden age, black culture finding a real sense of vibrancy and dynamism in the north with the Harlem renaissance, the glamor of the jazz era, and finally the pure elation of soul music.
The civil rights era was the ultimate expression of an ascendant black America, but they were a fragile development dependent on continued national prosperity. The end of the 1960s saw the pendulum swing once again against black America, as whites largely left the cities and the industrial jobs dried up, once again taking away from black America it’s 40 Acres and mule. Urban black communities became isolated centers of poverty, as far out of the reach of the national government as the isolated sharecroppers one or two generations before. This decline reached it’s low point in the late 1970s, as the South Bronx burnt itself out and a then incumbent President Carter asked while touring the destruction “see which areas can still be salvaged”. In the mid 1980's, the former industrial powerhouse of St. Louis’ top export was recycled bricks from old buildings. Since the 1980's, Americas cities have made dramatic improvements, but these have not been felt and have often been at the expense of the black community. Gentrification has gone hand in hand with the war on drugs, a war actively fought against urban black communities by the US government. The astronomically disproportionate black incarceration rate in American prisons when combined with the statistic that most federal prisoners are there on drug related charges would not be so shameful if it had the effect of ending the drug trade. But instead, the drug trade is more prevalent than ever in urban black communities because it not only provides economic opportunity but is the only source of power those neighborhoods have access to. The corner, as David Simon wrote in his expose of the drug trade in west Baltimore of the same name, “is the savanna watering hole” for the urban black community. Everybody has to come there to drink sometime. The metaphor is apt because it remains the only life source for these communities. Urban blacks risk jail time not out of the maliciousness our punishing laws would suggest they intend upon society, but out of economic necessity and societal expectation. Culturally, Black America had abandon the integrationalist overtones of the soul, rock, and disco eras and began pushing into more defiant and inventive territory, mirroring the economic changes that ended integration and increased segregation geographically. The defiant sense of cool that was so uniquely a contribution of black America was co-opted in the 20th century by whites, and once it was clear that the situation for blacks wasn’t improving, black efforts to reclaim their culture became more aggravated, especially with the development of hip hop. The 20th century ended with most of black America without their 40 acres or their mule, with the suburban black middle class a notable exception.
Historical causality is a complicated notion. Because nothing happened in isolation, and because there will always be data from the past we do not have, there can be no certainty when saying that certain events happened because of certain other events. Even so, it is clear to me based on the patterns established above that the position of black America today is the direct result of their continued exploitation and betrayal on the part of the larger American society. It is because of this I feel we must actively invest in black America so as to stop this terrible historical injustice that until it is addressed will continue to stand in opposition to our deepest values as Americans and human beings. The effects of such policies in finally ending our uneasy relationship with our past and our identity would be the best thing for white and black America, as our interests in citizens of this continent have always been fundamentally the same.
UPDATE:
going to also include this article somehow. I mean, my gosh! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Laconic Bionic
Analogue synthesizers and snare drums tweeting laser war in my room.
Burning cyborg flesh buzzes it was just me loving me loving you.
Sculpted space hero says fuck that, groove armada warp speed.
Burning cyborg flesh buzzes it was just me loving me loving you.
Sculpted space hero says fuck that, groove armada warp speed.
The Best of Blog House
http://www.sendspace.com/file/nxzy2k
http://www.sendspace.com/file/wgut35
http://www.sendspace.com/file/7qyjpp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/twkc9a
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q4n6ti
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vf6qof
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fi4lqm
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vbdam6
http://www.sendspace.com/file/me20f
Pretty interesting past couple of weeks. I didn't do anything this weekend, playing the hermit and digesting internet content like I had seven stomachs to fill. Trout Fishing in America as a prop, my back spread out against the warm concrete entryway to the school library, I tell myself I'm doing everything I can to meet people.
But what's with this obsession with novelty in folk, anyway? New people don't know how little I've followed my dreams, how disrespectfully I treat myself and how that effects the way I treat others. They're just consuming the image I've made for popular consumption, fresh and new to them, petrified and stale for me, and they like it. I affirm the cool and love to get others to join in my affirmations because I don't feel I'm worth shit according to anyone else's value system.
Not that I shouldn't be trying to meet people, I wouldn't think so poorly of myself if I weren't alone thinking all the time.
I have a job interview at Bungalow Tea in two hours. I hope it works out, both because I haven't given up on the BNAC ambitions, and because I need shit to do, motherfuckers.
I don't know that I was always this passive and silent and hurt. I remember hardly anything from before my parent's divorce, but I remember coming out of it thinking everything would work out if I just carried myself with a stiff upper lip. Momma decided she was done raising families. Dad yelled awful things at mom I heard through the heater vent from the opposite room, and I turned up the volume on my videogame. I get to have two christmas, as though the measurable uptake in material goods resulting from the divorce in some way cancels out the unmeasurable. Mom notices I'm upset, and for most of middle school she buys things to make her house equally full of digital distractions to dads. I go back and forth, careful above all else not to show favoritism, because their affairs weren't my place. I was always affected, they were always careful to point out I wasn't involved, and I got used to people telling me how things were going to be. Hold the motherfucking tears in, pack the duffle bag, and go to your mom's house, it's been half a week, or 3.5 days.
I can't relate to either of them in 2008. I can barely speak more than a sentence to my dad. I think they expected me to do better with everything than I did. High school I was going to get a C and suddenly it was flip the fuck out time for everybody involved, and I went to the junior college. There I've sat, watching the rest of the world move forward and grow into bigger and fuller selves as I've sparked thousands of dollars away wondering where the fuck it was I've fell, and how best to avoid seeing people who might know what a pulsating shameball I really am at this point.
I hope this job interview goes well. Fuck you, mom.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/wgut35
http://www.sendspace.com/file/7qyjpp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/twkc9a
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q4n6ti
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vf6qof
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fi4lqm
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vbdam6
http://www.sendspace.com/file/me20f
Pretty interesting past couple of weeks. I didn't do anything this weekend, playing the hermit and digesting internet content like I had seven stomachs to fill. Trout Fishing in America as a prop, my back spread out against the warm concrete entryway to the school library, I tell myself I'm doing everything I can to meet people.
But what's with this obsession with novelty in folk, anyway? New people don't know how little I've followed my dreams, how disrespectfully I treat myself and how that effects the way I treat others. They're just consuming the image I've made for popular consumption, fresh and new to them, petrified and stale for me, and they like it. I affirm the cool and love to get others to join in my affirmations because I don't feel I'm worth shit according to anyone else's value system.
Not that I shouldn't be trying to meet people, I wouldn't think so poorly of myself if I weren't alone thinking all the time.
I have a job interview at Bungalow Tea in two hours. I hope it works out, both because I haven't given up on the BNAC ambitions, and because I need shit to do, motherfuckers.
I don't know that I was always this passive and silent and hurt. I remember hardly anything from before my parent's divorce, but I remember coming out of it thinking everything would work out if I just carried myself with a stiff upper lip. Momma decided she was done raising families. Dad yelled awful things at mom I heard through the heater vent from the opposite room, and I turned up the volume on my videogame. I get to have two christmas, as though the measurable uptake in material goods resulting from the divorce in some way cancels out the unmeasurable. Mom notices I'm upset, and for most of middle school she buys things to make her house equally full of digital distractions to dads. I go back and forth, careful above all else not to show favoritism, because their affairs weren't my place. I was always affected, they were always careful to point out I wasn't involved, and I got used to people telling me how things were going to be. Hold the motherfucking tears in, pack the duffle bag, and go to your mom's house, it's been half a week, or 3.5 days.
I can't relate to either of them in 2008. I can barely speak more than a sentence to my dad. I think they expected me to do better with everything than I did. High school I was going to get a C and suddenly it was flip the fuck out time for everybody involved, and I went to the junior college. There I've sat, watching the rest of the world move forward and grow into bigger and fuller selves as I've sparked thousands of dollars away wondering where the fuck it was I've fell, and how best to avoid seeing people who might know what a pulsating shameball I really am at this point.
I hope this job interview goes well. Fuck you, mom.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Frederick Douglass
Happy birthday, you! The first summer I heard The Violent Femmes I also visited the house you died in. I can see how you would have liked being so close to our nation's capitol, but damn, Anacostia is far away from the reach of our government, save the National Monument service, which was thankfully in full effect around your house. Fuck Robert Frost. I remember getting off of the subway and waiting at the Main Astoria bus terminal with my sister, feeling all white and vulnerable all of a sudden, finally able to attribute some of my DC summer wetness to nervousness. To my credit it wasn't only racial tension that was scary that summer, seeing the fireworks on the capitol lawn in 2002 was scary if you in any way believed Al Qaeda was real and wanted to kill you. They tested water bottles at like, the National Portrait gallery. Paranoia on the Potomac produces fear from Foggy Bottom. Chaos in Chocolate City confuses Christian Coalition kids from Kansas. I'd say it's insular in DC, but I think it's more insular within DC. Most of America's problems are pretty well on display in some form or another, plenty of inspiration for a Mr or Ms Smith, should our fictions ever decide to save us.
Anyway. I always liked your beard, Mr. Douglass. It's a legitimation of everything you did and said on par with changing your last name to 'X'. Disowning our aesthetic standards in favor of your own conclusions, making sure every child who sees your picture immediately knows you tell people what it's about. I would write more but I'd rather use this morning to rewrite an essay, changing it's subject matter from some vague disowning of America on my part (I'm not alienated, America's just busy right now, is all) to something more tangible and therefore, uh, likely to get me a decent grade. Defiance is for weekends and kids with fake IDs.
Neat hat, guys.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/68mwzn
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ecwsut
http://www.sendspace.com/file/b0qwy5
http://www.sendspace.com/file/7p6ygp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/zi8omy
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jrkfdy
Anyway. I always liked your beard, Mr. Douglass. It's a legitimation of everything you did and said on par with changing your last name to 'X'. Disowning our aesthetic standards in favor of your own conclusions, making sure every child who sees your picture immediately knows you tell people what it's about. I would write more but I'd rather use this morning to rewrite an essay, changing it's subject matter from some vague disowning of America on my part (I'm not alienated, America's just busy right now, is all) to something more tangible and therefore, uh, likely to get me a decent grade. Defiance is for weekends and kids with fake IDs.
Neat hat, guys.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/68mwzn
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ecwsut
http://www.sendspace.com/file/b0qwy5
http://www.sendspace.com/file/7p6ygp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/zi8omy
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jrkfdy
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Dancehall Stylee
Friday I cleaned my room, leaving a desk clear of all that didn't require some kind of dusting, and the now moldy informational pamphlet com cast left me upon installing my cable internet back in August. It was allowed to stay on the desk because on it I had consolidated all of the details I had about my upcoming traffic school visit, which I then further consolidated onto a single business card.
Traffic school is pretty much just a state-sponsored adult time out. One is told they're not to leave during lunch or they will not get the certificate. One is told they are not to drink alcohol or get stoned during lunch or they will not get the certificate. Instructors are not to swear. 1990's teaching materials were in full effect, with VHS SNL drunk driving skits giving her a break from the dry erase and throat. My eyes wandered more than once, and to my type, the smart type, they offer money. You're already here, why not get paid??? I'd seriously consider becoming a cheap school professor like the sign offered if I thought I could command the attention and respect of old people. Also, if I could get stoned during lunch.
Outside the hotel breakfast room we were taught in, thin black plastic barriers shook violently around construction areas in what was a consistent downpour. The swimming pool at our Corte Madera hotel had so much tape and imitation coral reef looking concrete rubble around it as to look unplanned. The older men in sailing loafers said if it was the east coast, it'd have been a hurricane. The parking lot was underwater, with a few imported palm trees shaking like on TV. I got in my car and drove through some affluent Bangladesh, and really enjoyed listening to Sugar.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ab5il5
That night I went to the city and got my shoe back. It seems like longer ago then it was, because I was also in the city Tuesday to give my traffic school certificate of completion to the court. I wore my best suit, black and white to accentuate the Obama for President button with the I voted sticker above the name Obama. I couldn't find my car keys that morning when the polls opened at seven so I took my bike down there to be first in line. I went into Santa Rosa with twenty seven of the 30 Shepard Fairey Progress Obama posters I had printed that morning to put up around campus, keeping three for my car. I fell asleep after the last polling places in Alameda county closed that night, Brandy and anxiousness having much the same effect now.
And now it's what? Thursday? Time to listen to club music out on the porch in the afternoon, sitting, hands in cheeks, sighing repeatedly. I'm liking this sun, but feeling strangely akin to it these moments in the idea that I am a nuclear furnace, and that I am blindingly bright to look at and totally without willpower. I approached a girl I didn't know today who looked at me as I passed her by who was smoking. I said my name was Michael and waited for her to say something, but she didn't and I saw her hairs were all dyed teal so I asked her what she was doing and she said waiting here and then going there to be waiting for a bus. I wanted to be too busy to impose and it didn't feel like my popping her bubble resulted in the immediate deflating discharge of steam and gas I thought it would. Plus, she seemed boring. That's not fair, but I was bored. I drove home and Chris was still painting the house. Turn on the sleeping gas, getting ethereal... The Russian humor page on wikipedia is awesome. Ethnic stereotypes translate from culture to culture as comedic poetry. I am on my own for dinner.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/c0swcs
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q011n7
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0omp45
http://www.sendspace.com/file/yggfjv
Traffic school is pretty much just a state-sponsored adult time out. One is told they're not to leave during lunch or they will not get the certificate. One is told they are not to drink alcohol or get stoned during lunch or they will not get the certificate. Instructors are not to swear. 1990's teaching materials were in full effect, with VHS SNL drunk driving skits giving her a break from the dry erase and throat. My eyes wandered more than once, and to my type, the smart type, they offer money. You're already here, why not get paid??? I'd seriously consider becoming a cheap school professor like the sign offered if I thought I could command the attention and respect of old people. Also, if I could get stoned during lunch.
Outside the hotel breakfast room we were taught in, thin black plastic barriers shook violently around construction areas in what was a consistent downpour. The swimming pool at our Corte Madera hotel had so much tape and imitation coral reef looking concrete rubble around it as to look unplanned. The older men in sailing loafers said if it was the east coast, it'd have been a hurricane. The parking lot was underwater, with a few imported palm trees shaking like on TV. I got in my car and drove through some affluent Bangladesh, and really enjoyed listening to Sugar.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ab5il5
That night I went to the city and got my shoe back. It seems like longer ago then it was, because I was also in the city Tuesday to give my traffic school certificate of completion to the court. I wore my best suit, black and white to accentuate the Obama for President button with the I voted sticker above the name Obama. I couldn't find my car keys that morning when the polls opened at seven so I took my bike down there to be first in line. I went into Santa Rosa with twenty seven of the 30 Shepard Fairey Progress Obama posters I had printed that morning to put up around campus, keeping three for my car. I fell asleep after the last polling places in Alameda county closed that night, Brandy and anxiousness having much the same effect now.
And now it's what? Thursday? Time to listen to club music out on the porch in the afternoon, sitting, hands in cheeks, sighing repeatedly. I'm liking this sun, but feeling strangely akin to it these moments in the idea that I am a nuclear furnace, and that I am blindingly bright to look at and totally without willpower. I approached a girl I didn't know today who looked at me as I passed her by who was smoking. I said my name was Michael and waited for her to say something, but she didn't and I saw her hairs were all dyed teal so I asked her what she was doing and she said waiting here and then going there to be waiting for a bus. I wanted to be too busy to impose and it didn't feel like my popping her bubble resulted in the immediate deflating discharge of steam and gas I thought it would. Plus, she seemed boring. That's not fair, but I was bored. I drove home and Chris was still painting the house. Turn on the sleeping gas, getting ethereal... The Russian humor page on wikipedia is awesome. Ethnic stereotypes translate from culture to culture as comedic poetry. I am on my own for dinner.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/c0swcs
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q011n7
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0omp45
http://www.sendspace.com/file/yggfjv
Friday, February 1, 2008
Expatriation is the answer
In my most wildly enthusiastic dreams I have always been a soldier. When outdoors, this means an overgrown boyscout with a rifle and a Red Dawn style invading army, or an exploratory mission, like that unwillingly presented to the Japanese pilot who survived being shot down over the island of Kimono only to face unknown dragons. I feel the pride of some older order and step with the force of a missionary, I am the monotheistic tradition, the susceptibility to demagoguery and fascism, and the inflated ego of the human instinct. I am stepping without regard for the tapeworms and slug life, to do the work of the angels.
I don't worry that these feelings are so appealing, that my nature, while tame and middle class, is necessarily also one of violence and hierarchy. I do worry that I'm not going to get a job in the immediate future that is both easy and clean. I want this, because I want to save money (3K) to go to the UK with a permit to work for six months. Ideally, I will be able to find a place up Mile End, and I can put off being in four year school for yet another slippery amount of months. This idea is exciting to me. But maybe I need more shame and discipline and less excitement. I'm starting to watch The Up Series. It doesn't pay well.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/v2p23v
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9fspcd
http://www.sendspace.com/file/rb5edy
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ekxvdh
I don't worry that these feelings are so appealing, that my nature, while tame and middle class, is necessarily also one of violence and hierarchy. I do worry that I'm not going to get a job in the immediate future that is both easy and clean. I want this, because I want to save money (3K) to go to the UK with a permit to work for six months. Ideally, I will be able to find a place up Mile End, and I can put off being in four year school for yet another slippery amount of months. This idea is exciting to me. But maybe I need more shame and discipline and less excitement. I'm starting to watch The Up Series. It doesn't pay well.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/v2p23v
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9fspcd
http://www.sendspace.com/file/rb5edy
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ekxvdh
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