Indoor weekending

Self sustaining personal mythologies come and go for me, but I think these days mine is particularly dependent on my idea of vulnerability.

It's too bad, because I'm not really that vulnerable, and it's only a set of learned behaviors I have grown so comfortable with holding me in this stasis.

I'm scared for the wrong reasons, I should say, because there life threatening forces are milliseconds or millimeters of protective chassis away from taking what we've decided entitlement to.

My fear has me as somebody I don't know today, doing things I'm not comfortable now doing. I've invested in the today myth to be the self, I've fed into it's legitimacy so I may keep going about my tit for tat daily affairs, confident I am worth everything I know is being deprived of me.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/lpvi1b
http://www.sendspace.com/file/uq0nlb
http://www.sendspace.com/file/xe9mjh
http://www.sendspace.com/file/xmoyfz
http://www.sendspace.com/file/oua215
http://www.sendspace.com/file/rgns0y

What's in YOUR wallet?

Fuck if I know what they sell, but cavemen looking like 21st century middle class latte dudes wearing argyle dissect the television they are watching in a 30 second piece I've seen on TV quite a bit.

More successfully, the credit card Vikings inquire about the contents of my wallet. I do not remember if the idea was that they were a metaphor for the barbarism exhibited by competing credit card companies, or what exactly they represented other than excitement. They had axes. They had animal values. And, as the cavemen from the ad before would say before explaining to the bad cop caveman what it meant, mis en scene.

Oh, to be a renter in the fiefdoms of America today. For a Byzantine especially, the Occident is bending over to present itself in a way once again deserving of respect or value. It still smells of ass. Many a California style gourmet wine kitchen is now highly reduced in value.

Economics is made spooky and complicated and left to experts in animal skins with beards. A bridge collapses in Minneapolis. They convince us all they've got the moneytree and hidden it downtown, maybe in a skyscraper somewhere. And so all we have to do is sit here waiting, circled around their miracle in our annuity secured, ticky tacky houses, buckets out to receive the rain.

But they were just bullshitting, only it's more dangerous than that, because they've taught us all how to bullshit too. Let the fratricide begin!!!

AWWWWW FREAK OUT!

But I can easily convince myself that I believe the lyrics to in fact be

AWWWWW WORK OUT

Which I just did for the first time in a while.

And it was just as wedding appropriate as Chic. I shaved so it's now the fabled Hazlewood mustache, plus Cerrone burns and hair that encroaches upon my chastity.

I am going to try and do this daily. I think the off switch to this particular spell of depression I've been on since returning from Portland has been found, and it is the realization that in no time I will have to present myself to New Jack City.

My dad asked me a while back if he felt I would prefer if he were here more often or less often, and I just looked at my shoes without feeling like I could even call it a gaze and said I didn't know. I think I do know now, and it's less often. At least in these precious moments of mania, when all I want to do is rip off my skin like it's some archaic cocoon.

I earned my pity.

New week's resolution: take care of myself.

hibernated nazi

I found a box at the salvation army today with vintage funk and soul records from 1970-1978 or so. Al Green's Let's Stay Together, Marvin Gaye's Let's Get it On, James Brown's Sex Machine, both of the Ohio Players albums with the sexy covers, the 12" version of Do It 'Till Your Satisfied, Sylvester's first album, Innervisions, Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, Mothership Connection, and maybe a dozen or so other records that had clearly been owned by the same couple, as they had signed them all, sometimes individually.

I think I am going to a party tonight for the first time in like eight decades.

Apparently there is going to be vinyl related dancing as acts two and three of the night. I wonder if I could hook my record player into my car stereo, competitive sound stage for two sevens clash. Music which speaks life as combat just sounds better when shot out of a noize tank.

I forgot what it feels like to be hot. Cold weather at least presents no challenges when it comes to fluid retention. I have no problem with the idea of eating laboratory manufactured meat culture. They would keep the temperature on that shit steady.

Mp3 uploading is hard so I'm mp3ing at people mostly in muxtape form. I changed the track list this morning to have less Jamaican music. Now there is no Jamaican music. But I will be enjoying my records and the company of others in a social setting on this particular evening.

http://michaelparadis.muxtape.com


And this Ilxor poster understands me.

"I don't like to ring people up or email them etc because generally I feel like... if they wanted to know me, then they'd get in touch, which seems clearly hypocritical, but I rationalise it as being fair because they're cooler than me or more social or whatever, so if they phoned me then obviously they'd be doing me a favour, but if I phoned them I'd be a boring imposition butting into their day and making demands of them.

Also, I like seeing people, but I am very bad at committing to plans. I get nervous, oh no, WHAT IF. What if what? I don't know. "What if I need to be somewhere else, or I can't find transport?", but I fear also "what if I'm kind of tired that day and would prefer to sit around doing fuck all and then regret doing fuck all yet again?", probably.

Plus I feel like if I'm going to get in touch then I should have NEWS or EXCITING IDEAS FOR ACTIVITIES or at least be charming and hilarious and entertaining, and I never have the first two and can't live up to the last part, so I think "eh, I'd like to, but I'm tired now and don't have anything to say, but maybe tomorrow I will be sparklingly witty and able to think of some fun and non-awkward hanging-out proposition other than 'hey, we should meet up some time... but i don't know where or when or what we could do except stare nervously at each other a bit, so... whatever'."

SORRY EVERYBODY!

Attentionizing

Maybe because of instruction, or maybe just to make the job more folksy tolerable, the old self respecting golf hat wearing grandfatherly black clerk inspected and then encouragingly commented on every item after scanning it's price into the computer.

There was too much distance between us for any communication not to be awkward and foggy, not that I didn't want it to happen, especially when he saw the Steve Martin record and said "bless his soul", but clearly we lived in different worlds. After nodding like a receptive pupil I headed towards the door, and without breaking his smile "I know you're in a hurry but I just wanted to say, you know where the real value is these days?" I shake my head, and his eyes lead his head over his shoulders, "two dollars for a double burger", it returns for a wide smile revealing teeth brushed with zen. "Some places charge you two dollar cup of coffee, but I never heard of a cup of coffee filling you up."

I am getting sick from being inside and inactive. I feel unemployed. Sitting in the backyard, arboreal squirrel mischief answering my question about whether the dead squirrel I saw in the street meant they wouldn't be around anymore. Nuclear furnace in the sky providing a fresh high on the skin and fake denmin, I overhear my neighbor and her mother. "Where did you end up going?" "Sequoia Burger", she said like she didn't believe what she was reading. Her mom felt her daughter's tone was appropriately concerned, "You didn't have a burger did you?" "No I just stole some of Rob's fries, because they gave us so many fries", giggles of relief from both parties, "Good girl!", and a return to gardening. Edmond Burke would argue that there is a collective wisdom at work in her mother's values, I think it's just slightly gross.


Bob Dylan is around every corner. Robert Zimmerman under two or three rocks. I change my outfit several times a day, the scenery is more static. I'm barely connected to the world, like the innermost seeds of a pumpkin.The pulp is slippery and undefined. When they say moist on the cake packages, I fall into pornographic shades. The brightness of the prepared foods aisle transcribed onto your colons and into your feathers.

Selfish and stupid in his imagine. Rubbing them out like it's a third kind of digestive product. As long as it's still beating with alarming irregularity.

2 Midterms Today

http://www.sendspace.com/file/312awl
http://www.sendspace.com/file/772vps
http://www.sendspace.com/file/stjhw4

Global food riots, depreciating wealth generated through unregulated speculation, boots with the fur.

My work desk is lined with mugs and cups, cold coffee and warm coffee therapeutically stinking up the place in soaked paper towels and separating happening to the half and half.

World war three, raceway race war, climate change, and 30 rock expected shortly.

I want to learn gunsmithery, chicken farming, and revolution from the Guyanese, in every language there spoken, a splash of kool-aid and space color.

Commodity prices change the value we place in ourselves. Jesus figures masturbating into dough, bread without boundaries.

Jumpy happy squirty farty people stealing peoplehood.

Uncircumsized but that's only b/c I am a boy with limited experience.

I think London might be too expensive and filled with people with established roles for themselves rather than the still curious. but then I also think I am at my core a selfish and blind gripping premature birth almost person, so it would be that they would appear giants.

flip flop patterns comfortably laying down the tracks for the riddim train, infantile sensationalism drooling glasses wearer bops into orange pink fruity sunkist ant attracting sunsets.

Giant, killer, space razer, boy attracting ants.

I for one welcome our new insect overlords.

Sipping on my coffee. Der Smiles hammpft!

Spring Break

http://www.sendspace.com/file/rrlsqq
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pdbxet
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pb7y4f

My computer broke. It's last successful boot was at Santa Rosa Computers, where one of the mechanics used it as part of a video response on a Crown Victoria message board to say that Dells were loud, comically so.

I took it home and it didn't boot. Without flickering lights, I was left only with the idea of fleshy archaic activities for I could only guess how long. I rented a lot of Herzog and read about music I might potentially find at thrift stores. I remembered previous periods of mania, how much I enjoyed throwing pittance away on fried chicken to otherwise dead towns along interstates. At least then I wouldn't be in the space with the hole on my desk and wouldn't have the possibility of just giving up and going to bed. I decided to go to somewhere. Los Angeles or Portland. I was at the I-5 when Migo wouldn't answer, making the default choice Portland.

Cola and cigarettes on the hour every hour, a bowl off the road in the shadow of mount Shasta, and a needlessly reckless 3 AM Oregon rest-stop jay on 80 dollars worth of gasoline. My body was heavy with musk and clenched muscles when I arrived shortly before dawn. Conor was asleep on one of three couches, and I had to giggle at the idea of how close I had come to death or legal entanglement to be there and how little any of it mattered before I could finally join him.

I woke up early like I had spent the entire drive asleep, and what was a hostile network of single unit houses which last night existed only to camouflage and disguise my ultimate destination among their dew covered lawns was now a block of homes. On at least two of the porches were pajama wearing newspaper reading coffee drinking community members. I went out to my car too embarrassed to see their reaction as I got some clothes and some pot out, getting myself ready for a morning walk into the extraordinary. Once my senses were untrustworthy, I hit the blocks, finding where the train ran and trying to find out what sort of economy and culture sustained this awfully wet place. I bought a popsicle at a latin corner store that I had circumnavigated three times, making sure they didn't have horchata. The rice particles from the Popsicle got in my beard and I remembered that motorists watch pedestrians. I was happy to show them what a second generation Californian looks like, corduroy and disregard for time and place in favor of my own exotic agenda.

Back in my mind and the house again, Portland had expanded from his block with the coffee drinkers all the way to the street with the waffle joint. Brick buildings and the downtown of some now incorporated satellite city now welcoming the young and the Southern. It is a place designed for the young families of hopeful G.I.'s, the space between houses that was once such a virtue as to provide safety and expanse for toddlers now seems like a mechanism for prohibiting interaction through dead space. It is more true, the rents are cheaper, and the faces less white, the further east one goes. Public housing in Portland is green and integrated. Rail transit is extending the life cycle of these otherwise obsolete residential communities. Pedestrians make the whole place look vaguely unamerican.

Conor, Ethan, and I come up with a list of things to do. Without spending money, we see the various people's landmarks and I get a brief walk through an impressive downtown I think my hosts are now bored of. Voodoo donut makes me feel like I could write for Via or an airline travel magazine if they would only give me the chance. Older girls ask with what is not an undetectable amount of sexual tension about a severed bird foot they find on the sidewalk. We speculate a bit about it's origins and head toward the library. Tribal affiliation guides Conor from the rotunda to the periodicals section, where a bin full of zines gets combed over like a thrift store bin. We leave with How To Make Your Own Alcohol and me one layer of clothing thinner. Conor keeps it in his messenger bag. I am the one without a messenger bag in this city.

Always with gray, I drove across the city a few times. The highway is unmarked southbound, and I had a lot of trouble finding it form Martin Luther King street. Rusty factories and sheet metal no-go zones make the river interesting and awesome. Conor took me to a place next to the university where the kids have tagged an empty warehouse up and down, art resistance that make the boomer parents feel like the spark is still in their children. Skateboarding culture, he says, has a lot going for it. Consumption like everything else, I argue.

I disagree with this kid again in the future. A soul food restaurant that was lucky enough to receive our sauced and stoned patronage and that had different prices for soda refills depending on the size of your cup refused to give our boy a free glass of water. Conor feels wronged, I defend the restaurant.

A girl that was mislead enough to offer us free Cold Stone ice cream was not informed by Conor upon receiving his ice cream that he had been with another girl the night before, leaving me in the dark about his location until that afternoon. She said it was too bad I was just visiting like she was used to flirting and knew what a power she had at it. They were both real game players making me want something I don't far away from home, all the while it's gray and I'm listening to His N' Hers with Conor in my car. Conor and I raise our voices to one another after he disingenuously responds to my discomforted conversation with a fake laugh. I tell him fuck you, I tell him I told him a thousand times, and he says like he knows each word long before it leaves his mouth "Well you just talk figuratively half of the time".

Don't I know it. The day before, at the Goodwill, he asks if a sweatshirt he found looks nice, I tell him the shoulders are weird, and he asks me to buy it for him anyway. I kinda laugh, wondering under what justification does he have me doing this? That it is just too nice of a sweatshirt? He says it's by weight, so it'll be like, less than a dollar. Once the register lights up, I hand him two dollars, and he takes the change from the transaction as well as the receipt, and throws them in the garbage. Motherfucker.

Boys not getting along had to happen. It is part of being boys, which boys will do. I saw Lewis & Clark a couple of times. Weak marijuana and Seinfeld DVDs remind me that no matter how frustrating being forced witness to a rich kid denying his background, resigned middle class kids have less fun.

The real joy, the real highlight, was in the house of the Laws. I did not know these people, Brandon and Richard, but they are the real deal. Kitchen as a wikipedia entry on Asian foodstuffs, homegrown bok choy and chickens on the outside, moog synthesizers and musical miscellanea on the inside. Richard described his experiences going through the most remedial and prison like of Sonoma County's schools, the physical terror that accompanied an incarcerated and meth'd up student body without hope of a legitimate career. Richard distrusts institutions. Richard knew a lot about himself, his ideas, and drugs. Brandon had the privilege of having to decide which tracks would be selected for some Portland indie-pop compilation. He included us in the process, and in the bland white styling of so many local musicians I heard the hopes and dreams of the stuff white people like liking city I had spent the weekend in.

The next morning, sick of the cold and faux poverty bullshit, I drove home. Conor left his messenger bag in my car, full as it was with applications to burger king and local grocers that had yet to be filled out and I received a couple of calls that day asking that I mail it back to him. I finally got around to doing so today, as I was able to make my mom pay for it. There's feeling guilty, and there's accepting that American society is all about permanent infancy.

I got a new computer and was able to move most of my music onto it from my ipod. It took a few days of computer games before I finally thought to try and discover new music and internet about it. The chronological distance made me realize I really do put a not insignificant amount of me into this and it is both stressful and rewarding as a result. My new computer has the hard drive space of ten of my old computers, and my music consumptive patterns have not caught up to these new possibilities. I can have more tomorrow than I could listen to by years end.

Newark burns and MLK gets shot every time I heard it through the grapevine happens. A radio station cleverly adopts the melody and she heard it on KZST. Four syllables are four syllables, and a nice melody is forever. My beard is legit now, and my hair wild man style. I know that America needs to see this shit, because it feels good. Hillary and I went to the reservoir and I found a CD on the street from Maximum Homeless Guy. The future of record distribution will have recordings in increasingly appropriate and ironic places.

I am back, facebook, okcupid, soulseek, ilxor, flickering lights. You need to stop being so indifferent about it.





I sent my application to BUNAC today. Harpers magazine is a very nice thing. The library and I are closer now than ever. Same with me and the Temptations. Art history class is nice and makes me feel like I might get laid again, maybe.