Meet Björn and Benny!

2011-02-04T22:21:00.001-08:00

she's totally the person I was talking about 2 posts down okay

2011-02-04T22:20:00.000-08:00

well blog, herer I am Spose it's been a while. Just been taking the piss and patronizing the local chip shop. Yipyipyip.! !@!!

LOVE U ALL BLOG COMMUNITY! KEEP ON BEING THERE 4 me.

ps i love kelsey too

The internet on the internet

2010-02-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning and went online, like always. I signed in and saw a face that I dreamed sex with, over and over, that very night. My imagination had remade her in the dream, taken away her away from Farmville. Facebook objectively said "not worth sex, ignore your impulses, she just has this one frozen expression and these few words, not worth it."

Later I lost a friend, I realized only because I 'clicked' on her profile, to see what user generated content she had grown in the night, and was greeted with the closed green 'add friend' door.

I channel my father, I drink and I dissect what's in front of me. I like an honesty that can only happen when you're unattached to your sense of self or your words, wherein it just spills out, so many unattended bastard child ideas to claim partial responsibility for.

I want the institutions and prevailing opinions of my environment to crumble with the same pitiless certainty that any sense of stability or self has for me crumbled. It's not that I want destruction, I just want no man to be able to tell me things are knowable again, and I want everybody else to be as starved for philosophical salvation as I am.

I realize historically people only get this privilege in a society where 80% of people get permanent marginalization, toiling in fields, but I am enrolled in an institution of the remaining 20, and we're all acting a surf.

Or turning eachother off. I lament the death of this friendship, even if all that's died is my sense of detachment and independence from facebook. Now I have to act differently to real life people because of decisions made in that arena, and it makes me feel smaller than a computer.

The "city of wonder" in Rihanna's Disturbia is clearly web 2.0. I will elaborate on this claim in real life, if there is any remaining tendon between that place and this place, such that these ideas and you and I can meet up and discuss while absorbing vitamin D, and not minimizing windows and self selecting a sensory experience of reinforcement and boring.

I love lies too though, don't get me wrong.

two days

2010-01-24T14:47:00.000-08:00

The storm took a long time to subside. I had a mini-hibernation this morning, out long enough to wake up depleted, exhausted, finished.

Thursday had a paper and an impending weekend, interrupted by a call from Adam. We drove to Felton, four hands sharing a steering wheel, a sneak a toke, and some cigarettes. It was the sweet soul music, rain and redwoods.

I finished my paper that evening, no problem. Found a room to print it, Halloween orange and black redwood canopy is not insulation. Brr. Beer. Bed.

And then class, coffee, ciggies. I got suited and dropped LSD afterwards because I wanted to transcribe all those pictures and movies onto the scene. Adam and I drove up the Pacific coast highway, rainbows and hail and all sorts of Neptune shit. I got good at opening the hood and charging the battery, the alternator was not down for the speeding beach tripout driving party. Johnny Cash's last one, Personal Jesus.

Peaked at like, in-n-out in Daly City. The man cutting the fries gave us a resolute thumbs down as we jumped the car in the drive-thru. Proud fry man was shaking, I was shivering, the burger came in all of its seperate component pieces, limp on top of one another. I made myself eat it, made myself stop before crossing the boundary into Adam's fries, and found that I was Mick Jagger at the end of the 280, She's So Cold.

Adam walked me to where he was to perform Tony N' Tina's Wedding that night. Fucker made out like a bandit with it, playing a disheveled hippy uncle or some shit, a departure from his true self by like, three and a half inches. The Swiss Louis was alive with neon, I let Adam go and had a crisis of deliberation, crisis of freedom. Coit tower looked at me and I looked back, climbing from the pit of overheard foreign banter and mall replication that is Pier 39 up into the moneyed European Concession of North Beach.

Gorgeous tho. French family with a kid that has that awesome arc nose to where I imagine my ancestors as hawk people. Gross, fighty, hawk people. The view South from Coit tower was gorgeous. In further pursuit, I found a place down that street where one can sit over an undeveloped lot, the city a bowl of starry lights and art deco promise, honeyed porridge. I breathed it in along with more ciggies than advisable for a good hour or so, walked down towards Broadway. Single room occupancy unit tenements line the broken car-free streets overhanging that neon vice district, Chinese of all ages.

I remember around Stockton that I like comfort just as much as adventure, and walking in pursuit of neon and overheard insight into the Chinese people can't bring me comfort. Washington Square Park, corner of Union and Stockton, a bench overlooking all of those cafes with the expansive ceilings, great Parisian halls of a neo-Belle Epoque; and their less glamorous sister restaurants, the type dependent on hustling doormen convincing passersby they're family. This bench was great, people dress good on Friday. Fellow travelers, albeit more homeless, ghetto blaster equipt came by with some Disturbia dancing display that I was all about, albeit not visibly. I followed them off the bench, but not so far as to risk exposure. It was getting to be time to go back. Up Coit tower again. More European gentry walking their undersized dogs around the concession, having phone conversations in which they agree to meet their friend down by the church, izza easier for'uh you and me. Mexico was right to disallow foreigners from owning property, Greece is right to insist on less than 50% foreign ownership to this day.

I got back to Pier 39 after a second in-n-out run. Adam had just exited stage, it was obvious it was a stage and not a dinner. For one thing, the costumes were elaborate and unusual enough to make it a room full of Withnails. For another, these people outnumbered audience members. I came in and sat down because Adam had to wait for his paycheck. A table of hen party atmosphere chatted us up, he about his character, me about my suit and lack of character. I kept being asked my age. They kept asking each other to guess my age. My lap was sat on. frozen hands to my side embarrassed. Exposing myself in the parlor in front of elder patrons, 88 dollar tickets. Adam kept up an argument with some elderly probation officer about pot, but eventually got his check. We left, but had to come back, as Adam had forgot to validate his parking. The lap sitter saw me, was with a new friend, gave me a kiss and her friends face immediately constipated and overspiced, "Oh my god but you're married". I related this story later to somebody unfamiliar with LSD, she asked "so wait did that really happen?"

We got back to Sebastopol, I stayed with my friend, he had beer ponging crew in the house, but I got sleep eventually, three hours of it. Breakfast with mom. My friends left me in Emeryville, I walked to the Ashby BART through a part of Emeryville that seemed to be home to a lot of warehouse space, and consequently, edgy young white person dream businesses. Two trucks drove by, carrying billboards on them, that you read, favoring a particular cell phone company. Telecommunications in this country is the wet dream for corp. execs I'm sure, wild west mentality, development at a time when money writes its own legislation, an extension of its right to free speech. Hence, the daring dude who decided billboard space is less expensive (and I find this too to be particularly magical) than just running a truck around a busy area all day, in terms of exposure. America has its priorities right, long term.

BART was stopped for police inspection. I was not the runaway felon but I wish him luck. Most people got off at Fruitvale. The southern part of the East Bay is beautiful. I waited for the bus from Fremont and quickly was chatted up by a wheelchaired man named Nony. I know all about Nony.

L. "Nony" Kaizer was born in El Dorado County in the early 60s. At the age of 13, on vacation with his family, he ate some acid with a 16 year old girl in Camp Meeker and went into the Russian River naked, an event which he would reference several times during our conversation. Nony enjoyed a liberated existence at this time, embracing rock and roll acts wholeheartedly, chasing women, and hitch-hiking into Berkeley every weekend. Nony got into a car accident on January 23, 1975 which injured his spine and left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It is unclear to me what happened to Nony after this to make him decide to put down some money to buy property, but this is what Nony did. Soon he would own five houses in El Dorado county, making money in real-estate and tiling for the next few years. Nony follows sports closely, collecting Warriors memorabilia as well as old playboys and T-shirts. He showed me one from Yellowstone (which he refered to as Yosemite and as being in Montana, alternately) and another from the playoffs the warriors were in. Nony managed to get pictures of himself with Elvis, Emmylou Harris, and attend many notable parties. He has family all over, his sister started the blog-turned-book Spontaneous Smileys, and his rock and roll buddies have relocated all over the world. In this he sees an opportunity, knowing from visiting them things like the price of Pork in Bangkok, the rent in Krakow, and generally good things about Buenos Aires. He gave me a buisness card for some Trattoria that I might have very well walked past in Emeryville with his info stamped on the back. He explained the address was his mothers, he did not want the law coming to him if shit went bad. "Artist, GLOBAL FUN travel tours".

Nony was taking public transit because after leaving a friend he visited in Davis, on the way to deal with tenancy issues in El Dorado county, he incurred a debt to society that he is now repaying. Once this is done, he will be ready to live. The relative proportion of ones life lived per day being larger and larger as one ages. He was now seeing the girl he had swam with that morning in Camp Meeker. She wasn't as fast as she once was. 6-10 hours a week she gives him, he says. She taxis him about and if they go by Costco or Trader Joes, they will stop and he'll get her food. Sometimes, he complains, the 20 y/o daughter is hungry and they have to stop for fast food.

I told him about my stuff, girl wise. He said I wasn't being sleazy in any way. He said "Love the one you're with". It meant a lot to hear that, even from a guy like Nony. I'm looking for a more solid foundation. As ridiculous as this weekend was, I got a nice pair of skin I get to wear. Comfortable in it. Cold wet leather like the leaky shoes I won't throw out. I love the San Jose-Oakland-San Francisco Consolidated Statistical Area.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Taking the Magic Out of College

2009-12-06T23:57:00.000-08:00

So I have decided to start writing again. I am afraid I sound like this
When I write. For this reason, I have decided to start writing again. Practice.

Also I want a place to put videos like this now that the 'rents are on the facebook.

I've come to terms with what I've written on here over a year ago.

Reading it made me remember that writing motived me to get out in some weird sense of journalistic obligation. I also saw a lot of examples of me snubbing people. Journalistic obligation to snub. Crazy year, '08. Well documented for me, at least until things got real.

Changes I hope to make in my writing? More readable, not as mean. Less snideness towards people who might google themselves and be justifiably upset by the snideness they discover slanderously written about them here. That last one I promise.

Also, more of this kinda shit, because, y'know, I have a public persona to maintain:

First of all want to thank my connect

2008-08-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

Sugar tits is a lioness
she sees in the mirror a terrible fish
clothes can't be removed fast enough
her eyes closed like an English class
Elsewhere but paying enough attention
to fake it when asked

I'm told without asking she doesn't fuck in the morning
Coffee would be nice
about that
I don't think
we should
be too close, you know?

Surprise invitation to a noontime gala
don't come back until you're suited and booted
ABBA records between the three of us
the special gift of anal sex
what did I think the tie was for
Knowing me, knowing you (ah-hah)
Pharrell story
Bones in her closet

Anna Karina

2008-08-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

I notice my smegma
what was McCain thinking?
Mooseburger Mom
Inuit investigator
Nobody reads my spreadsheet
Feed me
Areva, Lipps Inc.
talk about it
talk about it
talk about
Moving

Dear Rukiya Shabazz

2008-08-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

I love you.

I miss San Francisco, R. Brautigan (WHO WROTE THESE THINGS)

2008-08-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

THE OLD BUS

I do what everybody else does: I live in San Francisco. Sometimes I am forced by Mother Nature to take the bus. Yesterday was an example. I wanted to get some place beyond the duty of my legs, far out on Clay Street, so I waited for a bus.

It was not a hardship but a nice warm autumn day and fiercely clear. An old woman waited, too. Nothing unusual about that, as they say. She had a large purse and white gloves that fit her hands like the skins of vegetables.

A Chinese fellow came by on the back of a motorcycle. It startled me. I had just never thought about the Chinese riding motorcycles before. Sometimes reality is an awfully close fit like the vegetable skins on that old womans hands.

I was glad when the bus came. There is certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.

I let the old woman get on first and trailed behind in classic medieval tradition with cantle floors following me onto the bus.

I dropped in my fifteen cents, got my usual transfer, even though I did not need one. I always get a transfer. It gives me something to do with my hands while I am riding the bus. I need activity.

I sat down and looked the bus over to see who was there, and it took me about a minute to realize that there was something very wrong with that bus, and it took the other people about the same period to realize that there was something very wrong with the bus, and the thing that was wrong was me.

I was young. Everybody else, about nineteen of them, were men and women in their sixties, seventies and eighties, and I only in my twenties. They stared at me and I stared at them. We mere all embarrassed and uncomfortable.

How had this happened? Why were we suddenly the players in this cruel fate and could not take our eyes off one another?

A man about seventy-eight began to clutched desperately at the lapel of his coat. A woman maybe sixty-three began to filter her hands, finger by finger through a white handkerchief.

I felt terrible to remind them of their lost youth, their passage through slender years in such a cruel and unusual manner. Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?

I got off the bus at the next possibility. Everybody was glad to see me go and none of them were more glad than I.

I stood there and watched after the bus, its strange cargo now secure, growing distant in the journey of time until the bus was gone from sight.

DONNER PARTY

Forsaken, Fucking in the cold

Eating each other, lost

Runny Noses,

Complaining all the time

Like so many

People

That we know

First Day Off

2008-08-24T15:12:00.001-07:00

NYT has pictures up of suburban overreach in Merced. The retraction this time reflects the sunken grandeur of American ambition; lawns and security. Detroit's overreach is of a different era. Skyhugging Gothic masterpieces awaiting respect and vision, enclosed in barbed wire skirts like a bad metaphor for the city itself. Tyrone's House.

GDP goes up when we burn more gasoline in traffic. The last room in the Motown Museum tour is the garage studio in which every song from the label was recorded from 1959 to 1972. The guide got sassy when asked about a small white piano a tie wearing churchgoer insisted used to sit in the corner. He said it's probably in the basement somewhere, he doesn't know. Barry Gordon is straight chillin' in Miami. Rejected was Thomas Jefferson's idea for the seal of the United States: Hercules standing before either the flowery path of self indulgence or the rocky uphill path of public service. The Sun Belt continues to prosper, and the tour guide is fine so long as he can stick to the script.

The first room has the watercolor from which Innvervisions got it's cover. We pause and make time for the Europeans to translate what was just said, encourage them especially to hit the gift shop, and notice the diamond earrings sported by their menfolk. I leave the place desperate for an oldies station, catch the last thirty seconds of "Everyday People" and drum ballisticly into my steering wheel. Uplifting elation for the length of the street, dozens of homeless lined up bare witness, kneeling as they were in front of the old General Motors research building, saved from the fate of so much of Detroit's glory only because the state now operates out of it.

Hello Jesus. Jesus children. Jesus loves you, Jesus children. Hello children Jesus loves you of America.

2008-07-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

To the pinned out button expressionists who spend time concealing Hot Topic purchases, Music is not your boyfriend.

Music is your music, and any potential boyfriend will be a mortal dude who (showing my age here) played Mortal Combat, and does not ride around the galaxy on waves like Doppler.

I am leaving San Francisco to volunteer for Obama in Detroit in two weeks time.

CRAZY!

SFC

2008-07-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

The Occident is a pile of garbage and skyscrapers
Citizen tourists live stale mythologies
A theme park over several zip codes

Horse enthusiasts grow up to saddle Schwinns
Correctly skinny vintage maidens
Counterculture crownin' while you're just clownin'

Lost youth believe what they hear,
End up in the Haight Ashbury yelling "Nugs"
Loitering in the Disney Land Parking Lot

Pampered and handily wiped,
The dollar goes here to feel better about itself
Echo chamber for the distraught and overchoiced

Civilization feels too guilty about itself to rape as it once did
San Francisco is the capitol of post-rape Civilization
Repressed, Victorian, hypocritical civilization
I am tired of this shit.

Post-humanism

2008-07-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

I hope he made millions, the dude who came up with the fake cavemen are people too non-profit looking envelopes Geico uses as solicitation. If I were not so young, wise to the trickery of Babylon and the stated goal of advertising agencies to saturate my every waking minute and subvert my every private thought with their product-lifestyle, I might fall for it and think them extremely clever. As it is though, I just look at the envelope as I'm sorting the mail and think "Nice try, Geico, but you are no SubGenius!"

The best part about Shakespeare is that English teachers invariably lose the class during discussions and have to instead talk about all of this auxiliary knowledge they were tested on at some point in graduate school involving 16th century European belief systems composed of charts.

I love these charts, because they're premised with "I know it's impossible for you guys to believe that at one point Europeans had faulty explanations for life and the natural world, BUT-". It's like we walked into the classroom thinking our belief systems universal and timeless, if we considered them at all. The idea of a world where alchemy is the central consideration, or demons exist in people, whose sole purpose is to tempt us into damnation, will one day make as much sense as a world in which money is the central consideration, and demons exist in people, whose sole purpose is to tempt us into Islamofascism. I guess we haven't gotten very far.

My textbook is the best part of that class. Langston Hughes and I met for the first time in it's pages, and a poem on Goya's figures as the realization of humanism with America as it's conclusion, that was good shit. I think about history a lot, to the point where the Angela Davis sponsored History of Consciousness Major offered at UC Santa Cruz makes perfect sense to me. As the natural world does it's best to wake us all the fuck up, challenges us by exposing our lifestyles as unsustainable, our core beliefs alien to any natural order or process, I think we're entering a new era of understanding in terms of humanity and our place in the world. The past four hundred years may have seen (more or less) the universal ascension and empowerment of man, at the expense of the power of nature. The 21st century will be about harmony, or we will not be here at the end to record it's passing. Simple as that.

On a different note, I didn't have coffee yesterday, but I sweat tremendously at the exact moment I would have drank coffee. Constipation was another side effect of going without, and it generally lead to a an unpleasant day of not knowing what the fuck my body wanted, and being unable to provide it. It made me decide to be alone, though that decision made me go online.

Smoking less pot this week (because the stash is visibly depleted) but in more of a daze. I think about how excited I can get sometimes, and wonder if that's not just a long overdue chemical release in my brain that lasts for a week or so at a time, the end result of a month's freeze on the production of that happy chemical, inside depression. I wonder if it would matter if it was, I am a walking puddle of chemical processes and reactions, none intrinsically more legitimate. I wonder about the earth, also composed of about the same amount of water as my body, also teeming with simplistic life forms simultaneously indifferent to the greater consciousness but also dependent on it for survival. I wonder if the earth also gets high. Whole swaths of China as bags of airplane glue.

Fuckin' Gonuts

2008-07-08T09:27:00.001-07:00

Franchise Comfort Seeker
Hear my Symbology!
Dip and Dunk America
Fuckin' Gonuts Friday

The Bayview Library has VHS's of blaxploitation films, only they're not blaxploitation because they were made before World War II and are all about sticking to a Christian path. I guess I only evoke blaxploitation because I can't imagine anybody other than a bamboozled audience or a curious descendant sitting through them. It's too bad old shit is so boring sometimes.

They also had DVD's of The Flip Wilson show, I watched the episode with George Carlin and one of his sketches has him as the radio news announcer, a lot of dark "99% of non-smokers die" type of non-sequitors, apparently you could do anything you wanted in the early 1970's. He was interspersed with Miss Black America contestants covering Dionne Warwick songs and Joe fucking Namath.

Another episode guest'd Johnny Cash and his lovely wife (And I mean without cosmetics or DVD lovely) and had a skit where Johnny played Captain Ahab to Flip's Ishmael. Ahab got called out as the jive Turkey he was. The show adressed issues of race quickly: a chess game, what side to pick, they're both the same, then I'll pick black because black is beautiful, okay well white moves first type of jokes. Others fall a bit more flat, like a card game Namath and Carlin play with Flip where they make up all of the rules, and Flip loses all of his money, only to catch on at the end to the white man's trickery by producing from his coat pocket a book of rules for the game, showing I guess Flip's ability to overcome structural impositions, but being a bit too symbolic for a workable punch line.

My favorite line in the show was during a sketch where a voice actor was pretending to be a series of auditions for the new National Anthem, and he began one saying his name was LeBrawn Stevens, and he is from any Ghetto In America. He starts the song with the lines "You lock up all your blacks", and immediately is shut off with a not-so-loud-as-to-anger-the-black-guy "NEXT". Flip Wilson was ahead of his time, though I'd have trouble thinking of anybody who was definitively of the time of the Variety Show, as I've never seen Sullivan.

There's a reggae store that says it's Retail/Wholesale on Third Street which never seems to be open. I could see Rasta keeping odd hours, but I think this is just an indication that the whole thing is a front. NOT ONE DOLLAR OF GOV'T MONEY GOES INTO THIS BUSINESS, reads an adjacent storefront. I went for the Chicken and Waffles, after surprising another patron just by walking in who said "How you doin' Cuz, ordering happens over there". I like being called Baby as an obligatory suffix to "What do you want to order". I realize for the first time that OBAMA '08 signs in storefronts might be the most lucrative, bridge building decision merchants can make, and I wonder how that good will could translate into governing. Fireside youtube chats with the President elect at the local library, all of us huddled in our Norman Rockwell coats and finery? We shall see!

Fourth of July Weekend as a Salvia trip

2008-07-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

I am in a room somewhere in the Berkeley Hills overlooking Sebastopol listening to side 3 of The Basement Tapes rolling a joint and taking in fireworks over the shoulders of social strangers, piss drunk and totally sober. I'm talking to a girl I met at a party while on LSD the night before moving here, and she is a Sister of Mercy, in the Cohen sense. I'm holding in the butane fueled purple smoke and expecting pixelized vision, impatient but no longer afraid.

Talking animals about a simulated normality, too many details to know, blue shirts without context. They go about their individual businesses like wind-ups, like scripts. Wood forms on walls compose the sterilized cool of an electric guitar base, I nob. Flowing color, sinking contentedness, baseless reality, I move. Cool as a cucumber, I remember, these are my friends. I remember, I am on drugs. I remember, They too are on drugs, we're doing fun together. Experience show, take I and my baggage away and leave stuff- colors, movement, feelings. I try and answer a question about Michael Paradis, I slur, I am back.

Three days, more like four with Thursday chores ending at 9:30AM. Only bits of it worth repeating are the aforementioned salvia experience, the box of infinite joint rolling and record library at the Berkeley Hills BBQ, and spending Sunday being with somebody so interested in what I had to say as to make me believe I could change them, that I was insightful.

I ate a lot of other people's foods, drank from their cups and piggy backed on their virility. My skin grows thick and I wear flare on my pants and out of my head, an androgynous warning that the rules do not apply.

I am, I realize at the end of the trip, Michael Paradis, and these are my friends, and we're all on drugs together, pretty much all the time.

2008-07-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

Monday was hot, and I wore a coat defiant of that fact. The cars were being redirected at the Presidio gate, and when I kept walking some pork chop said "Sir, WHERE do you think your going?"
"To my house, I live here."
"The area is closed, we found munitions we have to explode"
"What do you recommend I do then?"
"The area is closed"
Awesome. I walked up Jackson and hopped over the wall at the end of Cherry Street and got in that way. I heard the explosion, should be allowed back in. Pork Chop Patrol has a cavalry. He didn't notice me until I walked up past him, and then it was all "AREA IS CLOSED!" like an earless prick. There were rich people playing tennis up ahead. I said I was just going to the tennis courts. Best not to try and convince him I need anything he cannot then see.
I took a different route home than usual, past where the cavalry had parked their unlocked trucks forcing upon me the regret of not jacking their fascist backpacks. I pack a bowl and sit on my porch as a static helicopter looks out over a decidedly closed area.

The next day I come home and there's a sign on the door from Comcast saying they believe they have given us cable service erroneously. The sign is full of offers, like the bank representative in Stroszek, nicing up the feudalism. It makes me remember when I later see a dead rat, straws on the camel's back. I'm getting kinda depressed.

Busrides still enlightening. Freckled creole repeating into his cell phone "You're ruining the game, You're ruining the game, You're ruining the game." It doesn't matter if you make a profit, if other people charge more than you'll be out of buisness. Don't try and undercut the competition, is his reasoning, because then they'll just buy your junk and sell it back to your customers and make your profits. And by junk, he insists he means computers. He gets off at Haight, asian highschool girls get on. The plan for them is to do the Zoo and then to see Wall E. Wallyzoo... Zoowally... She is happy with her inadvertant wordplay and repeats this last one to her friends as they sit down, zoowally. They're talking about why baggy clothes are popular, saying they make things bigger, like shoulders and legs. One of them then also points to the stomach and says "Also here", and they giggle shamefully. One gets off before the rest, and is then accused of talking "white". So many shames.

I took the T last night all the way out because without cable or internet, my room is actually just a room and not a launchpad into parallel realities. It goes all the way out and all the way back, the spinal chord of a gentrified Southeast. MUNI is running an ad campaign showcasing the neighborhood treasures, part of a co-ordinated effort by money to take back the last toe hold of working class culture in the city. Mam, MAM, and then a poke on the shoulder. I turn around and she says, "Oh sir I'm sorry", and her boyfriend smiles.

Yes, this train goes to BART you provencial twat.

I'm tired, maybe a legacy of being sick so recently, but it's not a good place. Not the relief tired but the disinterested tired. I'm driving to Sebastopol today, and we'll see what that does for me.

Democracy Now

2008-07-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

Joe the Lion seems to be a song built around the spoken word bit towards the middle, if David Bowie's voice on record could ever really qualify as "spoken word". It's Monday, slither down the greasy pipe, so far so good no one saw you, Hobble over any freeway you will be like your dreams tonight. It's David Bowie singing Life During Wartime, J.G. Ballard novels.

When the fog is heavy enough in the morning, it rains. Normally wet pastels, southern San Francisco with it's inter war large scale housing developments comprised of unique and faux European detached single unit homes, one wouldn't even know they were large scale developments if they didn't have fucking brick and metal arches at their loose sidewalk borders, after such a heavy fog they glisten and shine. From the top of the hill it's Islamic geometry, all the glittery tesora and rooftops shrinking into one another like a diorama-rama.

These houses were made possible by the automobile. Economies of scale and of oil gave our country to the workers. Maybe we were too busy focusing on the red menace to understand at the time, but in America the common god fearing man was made king, 100 million coronations taking place in 100 million different track homes starting an era of 100 billion served. The jungle was reshaped, reimagined, and tamed on the mostly humble and reptilian requirements of you and I. Now there is fruit in every home, and every man is the master of his destiny. God is still here, for it was his grace that gave this blessed nation the ability to be so generous, so righteous, and we will never forget him.

Generations grew up under the guidance of the masses, accepted their playground of moral relativism and the virtues of faith. Trash was the thing we made a lot of, so those who would be overdone by their own misanthropy were it not for making salvation out of culture started to celebrate the trash. The great masses of the people lead the government not deliberately, but through attitude and disregard. Government emulates Americans, and just as the newly enfranchised millions of the oil economy borrow and boast, so too does our government. Mutual expectations have shrunk into mutual suspicions and shared cynicisms. Democracy wasn't the best thing to ever happen to the world. True democracy was achieved in the post-war suburbs, and it is ugly. It is common. It is American communism like no 19th century philosopher could have ever imagined, the tyranny of the well fed, well intentioned, god fearing masses upon the concepts of change and limitation.

It is time to reinvent the American idea, the democratic idea. Upwards and onwards works when you're building railroads or subjecting natives, but as a personal philosophy, and America is only personal philosophy imposed on a global scale, even Jesus knew that shit was whack, unsustainable.

I slept terribly. I woke up and a third of my weight was gone, in the form of cold saltwater, all over my bedsheets. I am fucking sick.

Didn't stop me from smoking all the pot last night and watching Rockers with Ben and Max. I had forgotten the scene where Horsemouth goes to the soundclash. The rub-a-dub MC (Dirty Harry?) is presiding over a congregation of Saturday Night Fever outfitted red stripe drinking Lil' Wayne dreadding Jamaican cats, not deserving of the anonymous status granted them by the night and the crowd. There is dancing and rapping, a footnote to the story of Jamaican music as they thought westerners should hear it at the time, unaware that from the niced up style would emerge hip hop. It makes sense, Soundclash being the most commercially focused of the Jamaican genres, with the entire thing staged to sell booze, that American MCs would turn it into the soundtrack of Capitalism. Horsemouth stands around some of these cats just long enough for us to feel normal, and then one of them yells "BABYLON!" and the police bop some ganja smokers up, cue Junior Marvin.

I feel hungry, else I'd write more. I also need to buy my July Muni pass. They don't like making it obvious where they sell them. West Portal station was broken yesterday. Some asshole kid must've split orange over his Lionel. I waited for the 43 as an alternate, and found some leather gloves in a bush while waiting. I put the gloves on, and they were filled with pincer bugs. Reminds me of the old saying, "Don't put on found gloves, they will be filled with pincer bugs".

2008-06-30T13:24:00.001-07:00

Pride Weekend almost killed me. It started with a text urging me out to Pink Saturday, I smoked a hearty bowl, got dressed, and waited for the 33 at the Children's hospital with some guy in a marijuana themed doo-rag. The driver looked like a fat Morgan Freeman, and was telling a loud and BLACK BLACK BLACK passenger about how he loved the night shift, because he could just get a little high and drrrive. Marijuana obviously meant a lot to all of us, and the bus got smaller.

Too small, in fact, because at Geary we are raided by femmy high schoolers and their Avril tie wearing gay companions. Swigging from the plastic bottles that said Mountain Dew but smelled spiked I was immediately crowded upon by people representative of the reason I thought it was a shitty idea to go to this dance in the first place. I left my seat and went to the back of the bus at the next stop, which left me across from some twee Asian kid who did everything he did so as not to be noticed, but clearly wanted to exchange smiles. The guy in front of me used to be -one second, as I'm typing this at the school library, somebody keeps saying "It's GENO!", and I'm thinking of Dexy's- somebody I served coffee to at Whole Foods, a quiet Britisher with bad taste in cafes. Geno woman is insisting that "she gave it to me", and I am no longer thinking of Dexy's. The youth on that bus kept erupting in their early alcohol experience, the normal politic of high school amplified by raging emotions and chemistries and public exposure. They were the reason I stayed on the bus after the stop of the dance, with it's simplistic bass fast enough for MDMA, young enough to make the cops wear pink wigs.

I instead got beer and tacos. They say anorexics do what they do because they can't accept adult sexuality, and the girl who lured me out there seems to be on the verge of overcoming that. Which is to say, she was comfortable with adult sexuality, but only when it was the conclusion of a series of errors and non-decisions on her part that left her standing naked in somebody else's room. I am sniffing the white powder again, and it is everything that metaphor suggested it would be, except it doesn't make me a total asshole two hours after the fact. She woke up at seven to participate in the Pride parade, and I waited for my mom to give me her usual post-church call and meal. I found her bracelet next to my bed this morning, an archaeologist to my own civilization. The condom wrappers still litter my room to give it that spunky, jazzy smell I know and love as my own. One of the Cockettes used to bake cum bread, the "secret" ingredient being his own ejaculation. The Cockettes are a shining example of pride done right, pride for the right reasons.

My mom did eventually call, and we saw Mongol. The geezers and I in a very hot theater, tensions raised to twenty, such that one of them says to no one in particular "Man the cinematography is just breathtaking". I used twenty minutes of the movie for a private shit, film related muzak pumping me through the occasion, overlooked by the face of Warren Beatty on a film poster barely visible through the crack of the stall. Hi, Warren Beatty, I will be done in a second.

I didn't smoke that evening because my throat was at this point primarily just a sensor for pain, as it was abused by all the fucking and drinking and smoking and night walking I put it through. As a result, my dreams were remembered. San Francisco was starting some kind of Dub institution, a minaret of reggae and rasta preaching. A lot of specific people were involved, but mostly I just remember a kind of Sumerian temple, blood red, with beats. I feel like I know Marcus Garvey personally.

Even if the person at the transcendental spirituality bookstore made fun of me for asking if she had books about him. They totally did, despite her scuffaw and overt reminder that I was in the transcendental spirituality bookstore.

Jeru the Damaja is friends with Rasta Powers, and so am I.

Dead Clothes

2008-06-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

Nick Waterhouse and I were on the 71 at the same time. Wildly different experiences and spacially inconcievable differences, sure, but it was the same bus. He, black on the face limited to the ray bans and in no way a product of growth or age or experience. He, dapper to the point of being imprisoned by so many jazzy blue note lines and prints, suits not to ask the reason why. In the middle of our venn diagram would probably be that we were both hung over, it being Saturday, but I was enjoying it as just another stewy internal expression, not carrying myself like a mannequin.

I guarantee he did not notice me. Joe Payne looked up to this cooltown fascist when they all lived at state, and hipsters' avenue was a wider and more visible thoroughfare. I later followed his girlfriend briefly on the internet, drawn in by her Marin Headlands origins, Feist-y brown hair, and sense that she was made of dingy fabrics in maroon, evergreen, and eggshell. I think she is the reason I see the shorties and the fatties and the inconcievably mismatched in the counterculture western boots. She has a younger sister who Tyler Johnson is probably fucking at this very moment, more power to him, and I don't feel like I need to meet this people.

The only time Nick and I did that he was laying down his Saturday night routine of affection overdrive on my entirely too self-aware roomate as I drank and called him foolish pride. He was over the table, on the side of his lips, and with foot magnetism teddy rubs. The ray bans were transparent this time, because it was night. I wonder if he really needs them. I mean, medically.

I was at a bar last night with a fake internet company paying for my drinks, presumably on credit since the only revenue so far has come from one of the founder's clicking repeatedly on banner ads. I did a lot of them, drinks and pees, before the bar was crowded enough to warrent a doorman. Alpha testing music critics were there, one with a spinal tap t-shirt, one whose novelty in being female is sort of description enough for all assembled, and one who had a beard and a bag of falafel to share. They had burritos and bubbles, blabber about recent releases and rival resumes. The Cure causes a bit of shaking.

One of the co-founders is reported to have said that she is a lawyers' daughter from small town Ohio. She says despite this, she feels as though she is the smartest person she has ever met, a real Nick Waterhouse in personal experience. I say that this is a ridiculous thing to say, that it seems to me more born of the first idea, that of being the daughter of a lawyer in small town America and therefore constatntly being in a position of having to personally justify the treatment she recieved, the privledges she has had, and the impediments she has never faced. We stop talking, and she stops asking me if I want more rounds.

Then one of the rock fan dudes who I spoke like four sentences with about Guitar Wolf pays for Ben, he, and I to take one of two cabs which will take our party to the Hayes Valley. I smoke the cab riders out on the corner and think that marijuana will never be legal because it has been forever if you have money. Inside the bar they have no PBR but I'm handed a Pacifico, and it is good. The DJ plays some Radio Michael Jackson and the white energy is as throbbing as it is flaccid.

I met David Sedaris two nights ago, and last night realized that he and Dan Savage are two different people. I knew something was up when they looked totally different, but I had just assumed time works differently in the Pacific Northwest. The person who invited me to the signing asked him to sign her chest, and wanted me to agree with her that this was an unreasonable refusal on his part. I did not. In fact, I would go so far as to say the way she monopolized our face time with the man with her confessions of affection and theories of cosmic sameness were downright embarresing, even wtihout the chest remark. But I have hair like David Sedaris's boyfriend, and the looks he gave me were equal part an acknowledgment of that and an expression of pity. He signed all three of the books, doodled a dinasour, depricated the dinasour he had just drawn, and seemed all in all like a nice, totally not Savage Love authoring man.

There is a rifle sitting in the living room of 817F Quarry Road, a pot smoker sleeping directly above, a guy described only as a lover of Dominos Pizza next to him North, and a silent Asian toilet seat cacaophonist next to him North. If there wasn't so much alcohol everywhere all the time, it'd be kinda funny, but instead I feel like one of us is not going to live to see the end of the lease. We are the Balkans of the Presidio Military Family housing, memories of a recent divorce being the only driving force in our culture and action. Custody of unwanted children the border states being pawned about by the Great Powers. The hipster culture makes people hear Beruit and tell everyone they're really into Balkan music.

People are racecar drivers, a vessel for sloganeering, advertisements, and flameouts. It doesn't matter what you wear, just as long as you are there. But they keep moving, really really fast.

Don't Friend Request Strangers

2008-06-26T13:06:00.000-07:00

Corey Sleazemore found me on the facebook. I think he sent blanket invites to all who are friends with Blow Up. His personal information is just a long list of mp3 remix hypemachine bands. I feel like the genre is validated by the Missy and Joy Division mashup "Love Will Freak Us" but is still mostly a vehicle for young people to gain a sense of exclusivity.

I did not accept or deny the friend request.

James Joyce's Araby is not something I read closely, but I got the jist of it. I am telling Bren Sutter in a car about all of these supposed feelings I've been having, labored interpretations of post-sexual affection, not even in my own words but in a second rate Elephant Six song. She claims to get it, beetroot faced flattery, and I feel love for love.

I never so much as touched her. I was not interested in knowing her even. I was just pushing for triumph and esteem. I get sick thinking about it, my transcription of fulfillment onto a vessel completely unprepared and unable to provide it, but I guess I'm not the only person to be so stupid.

Hence, Araby.

Now I would like to tell you if you would let me about the chai I drank today. There are shit tons of Indian buffets in the city, some virtuous, some perilous. The one I tried today was at the end of the N line, and also serves Pizza. I assumed it was only able to survive because of the beach blanket Babylonians, but apparently the pizza is good enough that yelpers travel for it.

Most of the helpings were unremarkable. The Tikka had that vague starchy aftertaste like the secret ingredient is a KRAFT mac n' cheese packet, which would also explain how a drop of the shit was able to permanently stain my shoelace. One of the curries had hard boiled eggs in it, and it was unclear when the trays were last empty. I would not have any desire to ever return to this place again, were it not for the chai being so fan fucking tastic.

It's as though they commissioned the same people who make the flavor compounds that revive frozen McDonald's food and told them to work on the perfect clovesauce. Carefully measured drips of the stuff from an eyedropper are placed into a cauldron of angel milk, which is then heated and cooled six times for no fucking reason. After this stage, the black tea is added and the resulting compound is placed inside a chamber of supreme containment and thermal retention, or a thermos.

Then I drink it, and I can only think to text message friends and family about the miracle liquid. And I do, the only person in the goddamn restaurant.

Last night I saw Ramon Sender (he was the guy I posted the youtube video on here of with the breathing exercises) and his amazing hat. He was part of a panel discussion at the library about the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The songs they played as part of the demonstration could have been totally off the wall ballsy crazy if it were 1963 and I had never heard of Pierre Henry or John Cage or music with the electrons now, but it is not 1963, and most of the stuff sounded righteous in it's own distortion and disregard for song structure.

Cryptic people are no genius, but they did bring toys, including a synthesizer that had a panel of red lights on the front and looked at least as interactive as a vending machine. It was an hour before the event was to begin, and the old beardos were trying to align their looping tapes, I stood in the corner and tried learning stoic.

Online dating websites are weird, and fairly uncharted cultural territory when it comes to the kind of idle class analysis those raised on Ira Glass demand of life. I think I am prone to mini-Arabys on the Internet, except I'm older now and have a kind of resigned, cynical, adult sexuality that doesn't allow me to dream.

I have ten more minutes on this library computer. I like my young body but I wish I wasn't such an old soul. I wish I wasn't alone typing articulations of mistakes I made when I was seventeen and thinking about the next smoke, shit, and sit down. I'll be a friend to get a friend, if I have to. Do whatever it takes to retain people I know in the pocket, so I can't see that I'm falling.

X's and O's would be nice but I honestly don't jones for it anymore. It's like cocaine in that I'm sure if I had some, just remembered how good it felt, I'd do what it takes to get a hold of it, but it's gone from my system entirely. Smoke, shit, sit down.

I think I was a lover. I certainly think the bride is beautiful in that video.

Inspired by actual witnessed events

2008-06-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (FUCK TOM WOLFE)

The big one finally hit San Francisco on the evening of June 30, 2008. For those affected, it came as a shock (how else earthquakes could come I am not sure) completely unforeseen. Well, I guess that's not entirely true, there were pink haired muralists and cyber punks who would later claim that they foresaw the whole thing in a Mayan Codex, and the evangelists who always had it out for the homosexuals and the hippies would later claim God had told them it was to happen, but for the rest of us it was quite surprising. People died while applying the knowledge acquired from PSAs that told them to cover their necks, hide under doorways, and stay in their cars. The bridges both collapsed and the BART tunnel flooded, filling the lungs of rush hour commuters with a salty and immediate death. There were no centennials still alive to compare the happening to 1906, but based on an understanding of the calamities as presented on youtube, the destruction seemed comparable.
I was celebrating the end of an era that began with my waking up that morning, and was now ending, eons of bullshit later, with a neatly packed bowl. From where I was sitting in the Eucalyptus grove, the sunset had become backwards, with the light all coming from the city to my East, suggesting the sun was a decided Orientalist. No sooner had I sparked my California Medicine did the bam began. The forest has a certain violence to it on calm days, with the tops of trees swaying into one another and sounding like a Scottish log throwing competition. But this cacophony suggested uprooting, this earth was throwing up and I wondered what it was I had just smoked and giants tumbled. The sunset righted itself immediately, the East went black and I still held it in my lungs. "Oh shit", the THC said using my lips, "Oh shit".
Electricity was gone from the Peninsula, and in its place North San Francisco tried putting the sense of whimsy that kept New York afloat after the 2003 blackout. Spontaneous brotherhood is less suited for situations with collapsed buildings and widespread devastation however, and the "it's just like camping" attitude only lasted as long as it took the invalids to find their way to Sacramento Street. People felt their resources limited, and most squatted on their lots of incomplete rubble, guarding whatever water or food they had purchased in the less demanding world of a few hours ago.
The police and fire department was on the scene with as many officers as they had on duty that evening, but since the rest of the force found the East and South Bay more affordable than San Francisco, most were unable to reach the scene. Army helicopters flew around the plumes of smoke now visible from a once again illuminated downtown, picking people up from the last rooftops but carefully excluding media from their ranks, there would be no images of bloated black corpses floating in the bay.
Men with guns stood at the tops of hills, from which the scale of the devastation could be taken in and their former residences defended. Makeshift barriers of car chasis and other props from the apocalypse sprang up like coffee shops in a gentrifying neighborhood. It was almost as much of a shock as the quake, seeing all of those thick rimmed glasses looking down the sight of rifles and into the eyes of neighbors. I didn't think white San Francisco owned so many guns, hidden away for the moment society drops its civilized pretenses.
I ran away from the forest as the trees slapped the ground and the earth itself seemed to rise up in protest against the injustices visited upon it by our fair city. It's a good thing I was so high, the explorer in me just happy to have finally achieved history just by being there. It was about a half mile from the forest to the Presidio gate, and I made the trip in about a half minute. Animals were freaked the fuck out, in so much as I had trouble distinguishing between them and my neighbors, all shrieking, all scared.
Presidio Heights had fallen, the faux French style apparently not seismically counter effective. The one house still standing had a fake brick pattern to its exterior, ridiculous because brick structures are the most likely to fall in the event of an earthquake, meaning this was clearly a lie house. I wondered if the occupants were home, somebody emerged from a port-a-potty halfway down the block, though exposed piping made the whole area feel like a toilet. I knocked on the door with the same instinctual calmness that prevented that person from just shitting in the street, and was answered by another guy from behind.
“Fuck”, he said.
I looked over my shoulder and a middle aged man dressed in clean white shorts and a dress shirt was holding a leash and through it attached to a Pomeranian. He had on a backpack which seemed like it hadn’t been worn in years, the messenger bag being the briefcase of the 21st century.
“Yeah, holy shit, right?” I said with some giggles, happy still to be stoned.
He was walking North, to where a placard outside of the Presidio Golf Course displays historical pictures of refugee camps set up on the green following the 1906 quake. The wind was picking up, and a great deal of soot was climbing the Berkeley hills and obscuring the ugliness. I looked around at the block before knocking again, Corinthian pillars blasted away as if by Turkish cannon. No answer. The man and his Pomeranian were gone, the day worker’s port-a-potties like bizzaro blue English phone booths, all off the line.
We would later learn that it was in the first hour that most of the Western Addition and Mission district were incinerated. Shotgun houses at the neck of their occupants, an underground trigger, fire. The sunset had emptied and its residents were huddled around themselves on the beach, tide rising slowly, ethnically sorted like a reversal of Brown V. Topeka. Downtown was leveled, the top story occupants falling in less than a second into a bloody mesh of panhandlers, crack addicts, and modern furniture. The Haight Ashbury emptied into Buena Vista Park, much to the vocalized frustration of the crusty hippies whose sleeping bags were discovered and crowded. The media reported looting in Bayview, The Visitacion Valley, Excelsior, and everywhere else sensation is married to racial overtones. Accusations of wrongdoing were premature and unheard in the city, as everything combustible was still burning.
North seemed to be the popular direction for people to move in, maybe because people didn’t realize the bridges were down, or maybe because people assumed that the Marina and Pacific Heights would receive aid sooner than their forgotten block or neighborhood could hope to. Relief came mostly in the form of fog, obscuring the damage and cooling overexerted survivors. People didn’t sleep, or if they did, it was to prove to themselves that it had all been a dream.
I scoped out what I could of the wound situation from the eerily deserted block of Cherry street where the house still stood. The hospital at the end of the street had fallen, the NO SMOKING HOSPITAL ZONE now a BBQ of human flesh and spoiled bedpads. There was no urgency to anything, I wasn’t hungry or thirsty and had no intention of finding out if those I knew were still alive, just because I couldn’t imagine what that process would feel like. In 28 Days Later, the flyers posted around London for Missing People would soon become defictionalized, I figured, so what was the rush? Besides, I had no MS Paint, and never really thought my handwriting legible. I went around the house, each side prominently displayed a sign for FOX ALARM SYSTEM, but there were was no evidence of foxes or systems. I had a THC moment and decided I didn’t know what I was really doing there, what I was doing without school tomorrow, and ended up nesting with some now exposed wardrobe, burying myself in the silky Boutique of dirty free undergarments.
When I woke up the street was once again alive, the smell once again of ocean air. Skinny people dressed for the Marin Outdoors were sticking together, some with guns, some with provisions, and some with distressed appearances getting the full panoramic view of exactly how much was lost. Downtown was still on fire, but the air traffic was more frequent and we could see little Durnkirks to the North and West. My block was staying put. We had too much to lose, in our statues of Aphrodite, immobile but still valuable sports cars, and calorically empty imported foods. I watched as they watched through binoculars the situation at Mason and Geary, where the public housing used to stand, and there were now young mothers tethered to the rubble by their immobile children. We looked to make sure they didn’t come this way, the New California Market being our collapsed pantry and nobody else’s. We weren’t sure how long this thing would last, if we were going to be able to return here, and we felt at least entitled to our own survival.
I went back into the park to my old room. Before the collapse, weekdays meant packs of dogs pawing through the Presidio like they were born of wolves, as the professional dog walkers shun leashes and come with dozens. Now there were people, not joggers, but people. The youngest among them were still plugged into their ipods, but you could tell their parents were finally embarrassed for their offspring’s insistence on unreality. They had with them the things one would need to live, but their clothing still spoke of values of exclusion, of identity, of plenty. I walked North with them until I got to my apartment, where my things had been shuffled in with 70’s construction materials and plastic crap the Chinese Empire and children’s imaginations were built upon. I didn’t know what if anything to take, my favorite rags are not warm enough.
The dogs were here still but they had leashes. Some even had clothes. I sorted the destruction that was at least half mine, giving me something to do and to think about as this exodus happened around me. Injured people, sad people, dog people. There would be room on the boats for them all. My neighbors had been military men, family men, proud dog owners. They were gone, heroically volunteering alongside Sean Penn and the organization of Jimmy Carter, saving people save a limb or two, following the noses and instincts of the dogs. I was hungry. No Indian buffet or Dim Summery would be cooking today, but I smelled pork bun. I climbed the junk pile, and could see in my neighbor’s lot a contained fire. Around it sat a Chinese family, guarding shamefully their action. I jumped down and they heard me, speaking in Chinese to one another. My neighbor’s dog was dead, pieces of it in their hands and over the fire and in my nose.
“That’s disgusting”, said a young white refugee, noticing because of my interest what lunchmeat was being enjoyed. Soon more people were looking over, and the Chinese family stood up and started walking West.
“That could have been my dog, you asshole!”
“Yeah, fuck you guys!”
They hurried their pace, veterinary school specimens in hand, as the frustrated and recently homeless mob started to rush them. Like ants on molasses the crowd engulfed the family and beat the meat from their hands and body and face. We loved that dog. We understood that dog’s language, at the very least, and for it to have survived an earthquake only to be eaten by people was simply appalling inhumanity. We couldn’t understand what had just happened to us, but we were moral people, not the type to hurt a defenseless animal. No matter what else happened to us now, at least we maintained our dignity.

Benin Urban Groove Compilation

2008-06-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

I was wrong about the Stern Grove show, delightfully wrong. I took my time in getting over there, taking the 6 Bus into the clouds and getting off at the same stop as a young woman who seemed convinced that my intention was to rape her. She was not entirely wrong, and I followed her up some stairs which had been given a street sign, and then reassuringly turned in the opposite direction once we got to the top.

There was a park with North Face wearing people and their dogs. I walked past them, past a playground that wasn't loaded with signs saying Kids Only and Don't Come Round Here After Dark and into a collection of bay trees and old cypress. The trees held a strange fruit, computer chairs (because the dot coms burst) and muni benches (because I just got off the 6) held together and to the tree by nailed planks at random angles. I bent my way into the Muni Bench, saturating my ass with Eucalyptus oil and fog residue, and I sparked a bowl. It was then I noticed there was trash everywhere.

The tree with the chairs faces out on the Sunset, in one of the hills near Noriega street where the elder Bush kicked some ass and there are also pastel colored houses. I took a bus down the hill, got on the 28 route and immediately studied my busmates to see which of them was going to this music scene. There were a lot of likely contenders, but then I also felt that way about the 6. I can convince myself that you are not who you say you are through your clothes and mannerisms. There is very little about my reality that I would say is objectively true.

The walk down to the grove was lined with opportunistic kids, legally hustling donuts and vitamin water. Fucking kill me now if I'm ever buying vitamin water, unless the proceeds go to a young hustler's ego. The rhythms were familiar and slow and Afro centric, the angle of the walkway steep. It's a free concert in the park, but many people are working there with stickers and barriers and other civilizing elements, so that we don't ever think we're just dancing in the streets. Seu Jorge either has some crazy Archestra of voodoo accomplices, or I am seeing one of the sons of Fela Kuti.

And indeed I am. Although the father may have complained about Nepotism as being a problem in his Nigeria, apparently when it comes to music the concept is not so bad. He plays Suffering and Smiling, and the injured rasta in front of me raises his staff and drinks from a conspicuously empty clear water bottle. It is, as James Baldwin says, the very cup of trembling. Where Fela would have been backed by maybe a dozen background singer wives, the son was more modest and had only two or three. I heard a group of hipsters behind me, one of them saying unconvincingly that "his father is... One of my favorites", as if to dismiss what we were being a part of today. And maybe a year ago I would have agreed with that sentiment.

But this music is not western music, and the emphasis is not on the songwriting prowess or encrypted symbolism. The emphasis is on the event, the captivating rhythm, the audience's participation, and the dancing. Mr Kuti is just a small fraction of what is going on, and that he is not original when he covers his fathers songs is irrelevant, nothing in our lives will be original and we're always just coming back to the same themes of life, triumph, and death, because that is all we have. I dance like I don't have a messenger bag on, swinging my hair like it had it's own percussion, and fade into a mass greater than myself.

I left Stern Grove feeling healthy like I didn't need food to live, only sincerity. The boys hustling the donuts still had dozens left, apparently they misread the crowd, but people don't buy a dozen protein bars at a time. I made my way to 24th street and struggled to finish a burrito. The 33 took me home, and I read the Richard Brautigan short story anthology "Revenge of the Lawn", laughing a lot and attracting some book reading young woman to sit next to me and decidedly look in all but my direction. I tried to prop the pages so she could see, read the fictionalized accounts of diffused casual sex between San Francisco strangers, but it was not enough, and she got off the bus near her house.

As usual, I was the last person off of the 33, and walking through Laurel Heights I heard a fence straddling semi-hipster describe to his decidedly non-hipster walking companion about a video he saw where it started with a pond, zoomed out to focus on our galaxy, and then it zoomed in all the way on a single cell, and we notice that it too looks like a galaxy. I am familiar with this footage, computer generated as it is. The pond always seemed lovely, I think it was in the Netherlands.

Linger on

2008-06-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

On Mission Street, cooking fats could be smelled everywhere after sundown, and the dirt puff sleeping bag brown crowd was replaced with drunken car owners. I wasn't carded anywhere, and as I result I do not remember the phone call I read this morning that I had made between 11:30 and midnight.

I get drunk and the street is the encrypted side of a key. I look into the contorts while pacing past, and if one is dark and wide enough, I pee. Haight and Masonic, a store selling sixties counterculture to tourists has printed signs aimed at our empathy, asking if we would like a free public toilet outside of our home or place of buisness. Tonight, I would like that.

Three times smoking, high ranking skanking, and visiting friends. Dolores park was full, a bicycle powered music festival was MC'd by a guy who proudly told the crowd he was living on a friend's roof in an 8x9 tent on Florida street. The band who lived below him, he said, were a real neighborhood gem. The garage from which they practice is a little hole of curious neighbors and post-work beercans.

Working class affectations are in style. PBR advertisements feature loving remditions of the can as made by young artists. A beardo talks about how cool is friend is for cultivating a tan specifically on his left arm. Cigarettes are getting cheaper and more chemically. We are in opposition to the older, more established whites, in our wild and liberated consumption habits.

I stayed hot the whole day. Lots of parties, early June, warm San Francisco nights. I saw Italian esoterica this morning, I guess because of the euro cup. Harpers was finally available in the library when I wanted to read it.

I got home and at some point around the phone call I don't remember making I put on a DVD of Sonic Youth videos. I remember Kool Thing and Dirty Boots and Tunic. I turned it off when my stomach gold turned to yellow. A gallery of local artists had a series of cocks in landscape, cocks in watercolor, cocks in cocks. The gallery was located at the end of the credits in Superbad as well as on Valencia street. They kept the cocks with other queer art in a space they called the back room. Outsider identity is the only identity.

I'm spending money too fast, but my brain feels a cool looseness like a windshield defrosting when hit with warm water. Cracked out. I got a ride back through the city just as the fog slipped over the Eucalyptus topped dog shit factories.

Today, free show at Stern Grove, which I'd rather call Rock Creek Park, with the guy made famous in this country by his association with Wes Anderson and David Bowie and blackness and Brazil.

Also Aimee Mann, but I don't have the patience or the curiousity to find out what that name means or how many of each letter to use when writing it.

I also want to check out the hippy hang out in Golden Gate Park, when I'm dressed appropriately. Earning less than the 8,000 dollars necessary to warrent taxation seems like the only morally responsible way to live when ones society only pays for death.

Skirmish in a Babylon

2008-06-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

Seriously, Babylon is just fun to write.

I got on the 71 just as a fight was breaking out in back. Apparently some kids who had BART'd in from the East Bay were thinking that a card game with oppurtunistic hustlers on the MUNI was a good way to make some money. The kid was duped out of fifty dollars and started reachign through the hustler's pockets and found himself held back by a couple of the hustler's friends. The busdriver waited until it was over, and then phoned in to MUNI headquarters to tell them that there was a fight going on at 8th and Market. I got to the back of the bus to hear the kids complain about those shifty card players. It's not like the card players have jobs, and it's not like if they didn't have friends they could've gotten away with that shit, they thought. Some white girl next to them agreed that the whole situation was hella wrong, and I drummed like a motherfucker on my knees.

It's hot today, I think that's why everybody is going apeshit. I would really like to buy some pot. People roll blunts on busses, in this day and age. I was even offered one at the price of 15 dollars, something I at the time considered exorbitant, but would now totally go for. I'm writing now not from the main library but the Presidio branch, which Richard Brautigan described in the mid sixties, the only difference being his library was open 24 hours a day and housed unpublished manuscripts.

James Brown's In A Jungle Groove is one of the CDs they have here, the other one being Live at the Apollo. Good choices both on a day like today. An old woman is talking to herself,sitting in the line. She asked me earlier if she could use the computer after me. I said yes, so long as she sits in the line, and nobody else sits in the line before her. She got sad. I got kinda sad too.

Other old woman is confused about the way the library computers work on an hourly refresh. Lots of looking at clocks. Holy shit, am I addicted to the internet. Talk to yourself in this chair, I insist.

Babylon Children

2008-06-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

Little Tiny Little kid. His T-shirt was bright red with a blue pill in the middle that had the words "LA LIFE" written inside of it. He was shaved bald, had an ipod in the ears, and reminded me of a bloodsucker. He had a skateboard.

Bland posturing preteens. Get off or get on at Fillmore street, home to about six thousand blacks as recently as the 1960s, now home to less than a thousand. But the neighborhood banners still feature a black jazz musician against a deep blue background. Sophistication.

That kid was seriously half the size of a normal person. He just stood there in the middle of the aisle, barely able to see over his proped skateboard, well groomed and with pinchable cheecks, standing on the verge of getting it on.

He scared me, I guess. Badditude of money as a petulant little white thing. I worry that I was him. Am him. War in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war on being able to retain my stash. Library is kicking me off now.

2008-06-19T09:30:00.000-07:00

The English paper was unacceptable, I redid it, and am reconsidering the implication that I would post future essays on here. School is a lot less consuming than I thought it would be.

I don't smoke tobacco and will stop pretending, even if that means my inability to participate in a UCSF study which offered thirty dollars in cash for an hour of survey. I tried smoking a cigarette while waiting for the bus on an empty stomach, and ten minutes later had to request a stop before Forest Hill station, so I could hurl in a stranger's lawn. I sat next to the mucus and tar spotted stomach water, feeling better and naked, until the next bus came.

Forever, and ever, you'll be in my heart and I will love you. Together, forever, we'll never will part oh how I love you. There's a scene in Monterey Pop where John Phillips is talking with Dionne Warwick's handlers on the phone, saying he wishes to speak to Dionne. I say a Little Prayer was one of the top billboard hits in 1967, and therefore the itunes album cover art is some shitty .gif in florescent reds and blues that says Age of Aquarius Top 100, or something like that. I guess at the time fame was a cabal of love and hair that grew flowers, with even the cultivated purity of Warwick and the cultivated counterculture of the Mamas and the Papas on a first name basis.

Smoke was rising from an orange orb above a scattering of single unit California rancho style houses, and we are in the police car, moving through the streets angling and weaving towards it's epicenter. The car stops, the camera looks over the roof and the glow is real.
"POLICE, Your house is on fire!" He knocks on the door and then looks towards a divided window. "Sometimes we just have to kick it in" he explains to the camera, "-POLICE, your house is on fire!" He kicks in one of the windows. "Police", his breath not allowing for all caps, "your house is on fire, get out". The baton hits and breaks each piece of glass, presumably so that the occupants of the house can hear his voice? Maybe there isn't anybody home? "POLICE YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE GET OUT NOW!"

An old black woman in a natal nightie comes down the hallway and opens the door. She is mostly deaf. The policeman reiterates. She rationalizes the situation, and says she must put some more clothes on. The officer searches the house asks her questions to determine if she is the sole occupant, and she answers while putting her clothes on from the other room. They rush out the door, and wait for a second squad car to arrive. Once outside, it becomes clear that this lady's house was not on fire, that the fire was coming to a neighbors house. The young officer, smile not obscured by his prickly mustache, apologizes and promises to replace the windows, free of charge.

In another episode, the Dallas policemen are free of calls, and so they decide to go to a neighborhood where there "is known to be drug trafficking," hoping to pick somebody up. We roll up next to some dilapidated Victorian with a dozen black people hanging about. They pick out a bigger guy with an Afro style haircut, some overly dark patterned golf shirt that I imagine could not have been made outside of the first Bush era, and nondescript khakis. He's standing to be frisked, the camera records the nervous analysis of the officers and, at half volume, the outraged heckling of the neighborhood. Suddenly the dude bolts by the side of the house and the guns are out. He rushes into a chicken coop, in the process getting rid of whatever it was he had on him, and the suspect is apprehended.

Like always, the officers dissect the situation before the video fades and we see the COPS logo and go to commercial. Like always, they mention how some people just choose not to work for a living, and some people have to feed their families. In the America of COPS, we are still a frontier, agrarian nation. Willie Loman is a righteous homesteader. The darkies have nothing to protect and nothing of value, and only exist outside of the borders, to steal and scalp out of disrespect.

Fascist overtones aside, it is a great show. Or at least, one that I can't help but watch anytime I'm home and it's on. Dallas cops get a call about a man selling flowers on the street. The officers explain how little they care for these calls, and we cut to the actual encounter. The man selling roses at the intersection is terrified, it is raining, and the sirening cowboys have arrived. They motion to him and he approaches forcing himself into a minstrel smile that could fit a melon half, saying he's just there to sell some roses. The cops ask him if he feels safe doing so in the rain. The cops ask him if he feels he is blocking traffic. The smile only breaks when he cognitively hears these accusations, and even then it's only for a second. He bows a lot and explains that no, he's just selling his flowers, and we're holding back tears. The cops ask that he continue to feel safe and not block traffic, and then drive away.

I'm in an awful place, like Another Saturday Night, except I wouldn't have a girl under each arm if I were back in my home city, either. I am reminded of my inability to talk to people when I find on the bathroom floor a bookmark I had been using. On it was written my phone number and a brief explanation of the fairly universal circumstances which I felt required I give a stranger my number. I remembered writing it after an orange haired girl sat next to me on the bus, reading the guardian and taking interest in my buttons. It was a long ride on a very full 38, but as the bus cleared she got up and sat next to some dude in a VANS tank-top who seemed like he felt he had no choice but to move to California since he was the weirdest dude in his South Carolina town. I folded the note then and there, placed it where I had been reading, and got off to gorge myself on Indian food.

It's brighter today than it has been in a while, fogless and warm when I left the house at 6:30, but somebody is turning the lights out on me. My class is held in a room without windows, and the power inexplicably turned off for a full 20 seconds, exciting the kids into outburst, A Russian accent said "How Romantic" and Linda fanned the excitement off of herself. In the darkness, I stretched my legs and looked for deliberate symbolic meaning in this action. I threw away about 30 Hot Dogs this morning, and the guy I'm renting from never came home last night. The last I heard from him was this email:

Edwin,
I don't want to have to tell you this all the time because we are
grown men. Stop with the toilet seat. Its loud and annoying. Everyone
else hears it and they don't like it either. Stop dropping the toilet
seats, Edwin. I don't how it is where you come from but we don't do
that kind of shit around here. I find it disrespectful because I
already addressed this to you and you are still doing it. Its getting
on my nerves and its getting on everyone else's nerves. We don't like
it Edwin. You do it early in the morning and late at night. I was
respectful enough to ask you like a man to not do that this morning.
Email this time. Don't let us hear that crap anymore, its selfish and
disrespectful.

Sonny

I'm worried he's drunken himself dead in a ditch somewhere, only because his already psychologically destroyed children would then have to fend for themselves on the streets of San Francisco. I fucking wish I got KMEL on my ipod. fuck mp3s. Secession. Radio es la futura.

1st English homework

2008-06-16T13:41:00.000-07:00

Michael Paradis
Homeira Foth
English 1B
Response #1
In 1981's Eat Y'self Fitter, bandleader and sonic cosmonaut Mark E.
Smith does what the militaristically tight drumbeat everlastingly
refuses to do and breaks down, muttering scared over the duration of
the track and at one point claiming to have seen the Holy Ghost in the
screen of a computer. That he could find a third of Jesus in the white
space between the words and his cursor comes as no surprise to those
familiar with the drug fueled balls on the wall ethos of self
aggrandizing self destruction that defines Mark E. Smith. But what is
surprising is the Zen-like implication that it would be in the small
things, the mundane things, the ins and outs of a sewing needle, where
Smith has claimed to find his maker.
After all, for a man who seems to have spent his life trying to
replace the Church of England with the cult of Dionysus, one would
expect a little less respect for the everyday tit for tat, or maybe a
suggestion that god was in the music. In James Joyce's Sonny's Blues,
the point is driven home that within music is the human experience,
"…the tale of how we suffer, how we are delighted, and how we may
triumph". Personally, I am torn between the Zen position as expressed
by Smith and the ideas expressed by Joyce.
This is because I have had it both ways. Dub reggae and Ethiopian
jazz, American soul music and deconstructionist European punk rock
have taken me into Sonny's playing. I have no ability to manipulate a
piano, but I take my iPod with me to use as a PowerPoint in impromptu
lectures I give those I would be unable to reach otherwise about that
music, and therefore about me. I have taken the hard drugs,
disassociated myself from the known to know anything. The Holy Ghost
is there, human history and the essence of life springs from the tunes
like I need to tell Ponce De Lyon, but there is still something to be
said for the simple things.
And that is because to accept life in this society is to bring on a
shit parade of the simple things. Brick and mortar, bread and butter,
they are what happens between waking up and going to sleep. The music,
the ceremony, can only compress and reintroduce that, because in the
end it's all we really know and our art is based on what we know. To
live for anything other than the moment, as one convinced that god was
in the music would necessarily do the moment the music stopped, is to
lose sight of life. Sometimes, the bravest thing we can do is accept
what is in front of us.
Reconciling these two positions is a constant process, and one I do
not think I will likely accomplish anytime soon. When I'm
self-reflective, I am Sonny's brother. When I'm happy, I am Sonny.
When I'm dead, I will be my soundwaves, making their way out through
space for god only knows to hear. Everything sounds spiritual to me

ROOTS TRAIN #1

2008-06-16T09:37:00.000-07:00

Mr Me Too is cool in the face of danger. Steam whizzing from the ceiling, flashing cyclical red sirens, coughing, choking, sleeping. This is no shower! Hand claps and we're in it to win it, shades down swooping, exhale only.

If my ass is not planted squarely on Muni, pea of the pod, I am walking with Mr Me Too. Dart the city block, suspect the corner, I am the unwilling prop in the photographs of tourists.

We keep the public housing because the iconic neighborhoods would otherwise disappear under a new regime of middle class expectations. Chinatown exists because of rent controlled public housing of a specific racial composition. The Fillmore almost doesn't exist, the spillover from the elevated street of the same name saturating the underbelly with money. But the city pays, after a third of their income, for the rest of the rent of people whose faces make jazz venues and soul food restaurants appear legitimate.

Zoo metaphors abound in traditional descriptions of mass housing, the emphasis being on the animalistic sociology of the place, the impossible task of bringing civilization to creatures unable to assume human form. But a zoo metaphor is appropriate here only from the view of the patron, who for the price of rent and taxation is able to live amongst the wild creatures of the urban jungle, kept there to keep things interesting.

On the trains, the people are there to be read. Girls try to assume the form of poetry, combining rags and feathers from salvation army counters, boots wit' da fur. There are so many symbols in the cultural lexicon hitting one in the face at any given moment one's natural response is just to get stone emotion and into some correct lean. At that point, you are writing.

Problem is, willpower doesn't keep people on trains, telepathy isn't the next step after the shifty eyes. I read her iconography, and it suggested compatibility, but she is available only through online community.

Class divides mean more than ever when one of them has become bionic.

I need to get up and pee. Public computing is cutty like that.

GOOD MORNIGN!

2008-05-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/fofdez

THE GOOD BOOMERS

2008-05-30T00:24:00.000-07:00

It's easy to forget amongst all of the self congratulatory 60's retrospectives and reductionist nostalgic crap that's floating in our flickering medias that some of the Boomers were in fact, serious fucks.

Easy Rider features a lot of real serious fucks, but a lot of them are fictional. I think anyone who sees this movie will no longer be under the impression I know I had growing up in the Clinton era about hippydom: dated, and gross at it's most sinister, but usually just gray long hair on a dude, some tie dye, a black vest, maybe even the 70's have a nice day smiley. And a disco ball. With a tie dye background. Austin Powers did not help things. But, really, who can blame us for our vapid revisionism when the styles are recycled so many times over by now, the 60th annual cycle of totally renewed lines of consumer products and lifestyles to associate with them?

No, Hollywood serious fucks are revered by the same who program XL radio stations in places where old men drop benjis. Beach Boys, Doors I can understand, but the fucking Velvets, man? I like to think the man checking my stereo in to get repaired at Magnolia Hi-Fi just doesn't think about the music. If he did, it might occur to him that pushing expensive black boxes of nostalgic dream recreation would be a totally valid job description to put down on his resume. Maybe that's how people actually score jobs at head shops and pot clubs.

The serious fucks I'm talking about are all beginning to die. The dude who I would most want to talk to about all of this is already dead, he croaked at the Hospital down the street from my house when I was seven. In the TC Boyle book Drop City he is introduced as old. Thirty, maybe even late thirties. He was a professor in musicology, jazzy Beardo, musician poet, modern utopian, and legal visionary. This was before reggae music, by the way.

Like most Americans, I first discovered Morning Star, off of Coleman Valley Road near Occidental, in the Time Magazine article about the hippies from 1967. Unlike most Americans, this was on the internet three months ago, and I have been living within twenty miles of Coleman Valley Road my whole life. I asked my dad if he had any memories of the era, my parents having moved to Sebastopol in the early 1970s. He mentioned he was friends with a man who wanted to be a writer, whose mom had died in the Spanish civil war. Thanks to the internet, I now know this man to be this man. I should remember to tell my dad that he is a published writer. More importantly, I should write this guy and talk to him, I mean he's clearly a serious fuck.

Hippy aesthetics were sort of the easiest thing to take down when Reagan directed the Right at their culture war zenith, dopiness does not get money. Looking through the First Edition copy of the Morning Star scrapbook that my mom told me to look for in the house, they do seem awful naked. I'm hearing the Royal Trux song On My Mind were Neil Hagerty finally gives up, "Yeah We're a bunch of long hairs, what about it? What'da I care? What do I care?" and Jennifer Herrema is black and asks if we can feel it. The bubble gum pops, and it's the roller skate girl with the orange afro in NASHVILLE from Los Angeles who done the poppin'.

But the values were in the right place. I can't help but think of Alan Watts when I read the religious chants, the interpretations of Eastern theology so focused on the idea of expansive openness and intangible warmth and blue love. They sat next to doodles of naked men and women, their eyes closed, taken out of the comics of the New Yorker and finding themselves totally at peace in their voluntarily primitive surroundings.

One of them tells you how to shit. The description for preparing the earth is one part soil as vaginae metaphor, one part very funny to somebody who just read about the Korean war and all the human shit Americans encountered in that totally unfinished international dispute. But then that was the talk they talked in these yellowing pages my parents had kept for all these years between some book on The Sacred Pipe and another on California's Wild Coast.

Morning Star outside of the meatless freezer section

2008-05-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

Deeding land to God is the juridical pre-requisite for building peacefully the society of the future -- a society born of an economy of abundance in which everyone eats and only those who enjoy working may work.

Deeding land to God counteracts that obsolete animal instinct which was been named "the territorial imperative" by removing "No Trespassing" signs from the land and from the human heart. The earth is the mother of us all; and to pay rent will be one day understood as turning mother into a prostitute and hiring her services.

Deeding land to God opens land-access-to-which-is-denied-no-one; land whereon permission to live is not required; land from which no one may be ordered to depart; land from which God is the Casting Director assembling, juxtaposing, and re-tribalizing those human forms he has chosen to help free Mother Earth from the ecologically lethal grasp of exclusive ownership; land on which life becomes an ongoing encounter for the mutual benefit of the participants who are abandoning materialistic goals and incentives.

Deeding land to God establishes laboratories for the definition, defense, and demonstration of alternative life-style consonant with human dignity for the time in the not-too-distant future when leisure will be compulsory due to the inevitable take-over of repetitive labor by our "happy slave" - cybernated industry; laboratories for expanding the bliss tolerance of human beings.

Deeding land to God is an idea which challenges imagination all over the world, because it provides an opportunity to participate actively in the solution of many contemporary problems, ecological, sociological, psychological, international, and theological.

Deeding land to God can prepare refuge for the survivors should respiratory catastrophe strike an urban center. If one day a thousand people die of asphyxiation in a smog filled city, a contingency which is not remote at all, many of the remaining city dwellers will not feel safe anywhere but on Gods land.

Deeding land to God is for the defendant appellant a ritualistic offering to the Divine, at once the pinnacle of deeply held religious convictions and the synthesis of privative, medieval, and contemporary devotional practice, fully protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from legislative and judicial infringement.

But: Deeding land to God is superfluous, is it not? Since God created the universe He certainly "owns" His creations and does not require a grant deed to prove that ownership. I know that. You know that. Everybody knows that. Only the Superior Court of the State of California in and for the County of Sonoma, Departments 1, 3, and 4 does not know that. This court found, held, and reiterated that God, the creator of the universe, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, does not measure up to certain common-law requirements for a legal grantee. It is from the judicial effects of this absurdity that relief is being sought in this action.

- Sept 9, 1971

Screen Actors Guild (SAG)

2008-05-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/3lyrkc
http://www.sendspace.com/file/lxd4gl
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qxp2xp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ym664b
http://www.sendspace.com/file/h8zhec
http://www.sendspace.com/file/hczfie
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3pr0xm
http://www.sendspace.com/file/u98pbv
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9keyz5

Traditionally prepared of spinach.

out the door

2008-05-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/e1hp0c

Drippy Dick Swagger

2008-05-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/cwcoz7

Saturday Morning Experience Show

2008-05-10T11:07:00.001-07:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/j4pkgi
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ubb7vr
http://www.sendspace.com/file/kxb69k
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4lbcox
http://www.sendspace.com/file/al7cyd
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3ki5jf

Chris Donahue's birthday party in the third grade, his dad took us all out to the new Petaluma Century Westgate theater. Half of us went to see Space Jam, and the other half Star Trek: First Contact. I regret that I was in the latter group, even though I had already seen First Contact at least once by this time. I would see it four times. Titanic had come out that year and seeing movies multiple times as affirmation was in the in thing, so as I could tell. To this day I do not know what happened in Space Jam, only that cartoon space aliens and Bill Murray collide over a jam of hoop in da space. I am curious.

I think I also saw The Net there before the theater closed down, as a result of the shitty quality common to all the movies released theatrically during the late 1990s. I think I also saw the cartoon about the space ship and the space apocalypse there as well, but as I can't remember the title, only the vague notion that Drew Barrymore was in it, but I think I may have dreamed this movie.

The lot where the theater used to be is now a KOHL's. It's remarkable in that it's the only place in Sonoma County where even in the wettest parts of January the grass around it is still dead and yellow.

I miss sitting outside of my house sharing cigarettes with my downstairs neighbor, trying to convince her to sleep with me because I was crazy and insightful by talking weightfully in between shorter and more complete puffs. It was the greatest courtship game for me, as my peacock feathers were all degenerate tangents meant to shock her, and if she looked bored it'd be all the more violent.

I'm rarely that comfortable being a top. Something about her being so much older and in such an obvious position of power made me excited and vulnerable. I think sexuality is not warm or comfortable, but strained pop philosophy on a Mission district sloop over cigarettes with phone sexing tooth chipped degenerates. That's why I'm such an easy sell, I guess.

SPACE JAM

2008-05-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Week-end in Fécamp, France. I'm French

2008-05-07T21:04:00.000-07:00

I drove the Skyhawk Mountain road today. I hydroplaned on pollen and oak leaves into a parking lot carved out of a Duplo update of the old Lego stripmall. On time!

The job interview for the barista position at the Filipino boba tea and free trade coffeehouse to be went well. While buying drugs, another customer maybe twenty pounds my junior with dreadlocks composing the nemes to his fitted trucker hat double crown showed up, and he talked really fast without pausing between ideas or sentences. He wore a Crystal Castles shirt, checked van slip ons, tattered jean shorts, and really wanted me to like him, to the effect of telling me my shirt was a name I didn't recognize.

I felt smarter than other people. That said, earlier I ate a once frozen New Zealand leg of lamb for dinner, tummy bummers.

Selfish always seemed as appropriate next to me as it was next to the word shellfish. I'm hot when I don't take off my coat. The wind was picking up as I was walking to my car, remembering my biggest fear is to be cold. It's just dreadful. I also hate whenever my body is an instrument of unpleasant realities. All encompassing bummers.

Jumping dubplate masters serenade down from Minarets. The Mayans killed themselves through massive deforestation hundreds of years ago. Apparently there was A disconnect; their thinkers were in tune with the riddim of the earth enough to make a precise calendar, not enough to understand their inability to transcend their environment. There is no metaphor in their writing, just tree stumps and lime powder.

Crescent City, CA.

2008-05-02T17:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/details/Derrick_Jensen_Vancouver_April_18_2007
he's all about the thresholds.

Hard Times

2008-05-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

My mind receives the data. A pattern is recognized, through the tubes electric signals fired. "I've heard this one before, it's, uh,"--

Not important.

They say that a recession is either on it's way, or that we're already in one. A recession is defined as the process by which a market adjusts itself to take into account the fact that much of what was reported as earnings doesn't actually exist.

It's not that we're making less than we were before the recession, it's not that less work is being done, it's that the rest of the world no longer believes the values we assign to ourselves on paper, or to our paper.

it's dangerous to not tie the worth of your currency to anything real, to give most of it away for cheap plastics and a war or two. The privatization of all aspects of American life are beginning to mean what privatization traditionally means in the third world, foreign ownership of national infrastructure and shrinking access to society for the lower classes.

The Chinese and the Arabs aren't even interested in profitability at this point. Owning America is just a burden assigned to them by virtue of all of the increasingly useless dollars we've stuffed them with for the past thirty years. They inherited a country without a functioning infrastructure or clear role to play in the world economy, now that simply being consumer #1 is no longer a viable economic model. The previous owners were more than happy to give it to them, convinced as they were that nothing good could ever come of the place anyway.

Imperialism required a historical narrative in which this country had achieved perfection, and was therefore left with nothing to do but spread said perfection like a cool margarine all over the globe. That historical narrative rings true to many a fucker, and it's for that reason the language of black dissent as expressed by Jeremiah Wright might seem threatening or hostile. It is a narrative that we must do everything in our power to destroy as it is the main obstacle to progress.

It allows the status quo to paint reformers as trying to subvert something worth saving and emulating. The expression of grievances and the articulation of wrongs is the first step in their correction. It should not require overcoming personal pride, getting people to express disappointment in America as it exists vs America as they understand it to promise.

2001, 2002, 2003, 2004. Liberals, democrats, were right about things because their solutions would be better in the context of the war on terror. Smug, don't they know killing one only makes more terrorists, we are the ones who talk, etc.

We lost because we bought into their toxic bullshit about America being totally perfect and only able to feel external harms placed upon her by our dark skinned adversaries.

Culture and history are things dissected ten years after the fact by B-list celebrities and their punchlines on VH1...

Not to be made, certainly not a conduit for social justice and progress, culture and history are passively observed on the TV.

The disengaged, those whose escalating opportunisms have left us here, all personally blameless. But collectively we are not worth the biological mass we have been given. At least the nazis ended with fourteen year olds fighting the red army with rifles in the destroyed capitol. In our opium dens of electronics and diminished imagination, we laugh at the concept of prisoner rape like we're in any way detached from responsibility. We're the fucking champs.

I believe you, Mr Obama. I believe you will do everything a President can do to activate a culture of civic engagement and responsibility. I just don't know that even the highest office in this country has the power or authority to undue the toxicity of our arrogant laziness.

I believe also that you will get the shit thrown your way, that the Barnum and Bailey economy is pulling one last elaborate deception to keep this zombie nominally alive until Bush leaves, but at that point the men in the ties will flip the switch, and they will say Carter. The reporting of the constant death in Iraq will once again take precedent over entertainment news and your policies will be blamed. Forty years of regress since 1968 have left us here, but 9 out of ten still think history only makes things better.

Even the presence of saints isn't enough to avert a Dark Age. The language of integration and progress and hope is the new Latin, and the monks are retreating into the monasteries.

But it's not a country for people like me. I'm glad I'm not a Kennedy.

Indoor weekending

2008-04-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-04-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

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!!!

2008-04-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-04-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

New week's resolution: take care of myself.

hibernated nazi

2008-04-11T17:59:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T06:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T10:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Flexipop

2008-03-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

I mean, with the two week upload expiration date. I just hope they don't come down on the kids who share the mp3s with the law. Because this is a lot of fun, and I feel like for the middle class kids with broadband at least, the only limit is one's own desire to consume. I hope that doesn't just lead to the kind of personal session from society on my part that I so often j'accuse! America of hiding as a guiding principal.

I need to go to some library and do my math report or whatever bullshit today. I knew Friday not doing it meant investing only in increased anxiety. And here I am, hummingbird heart thinking about how to get out of here and somehow failing to come up with an answer. I have no interest in school and am taking the schedule of an invalid, but somehow I've done that long enough that the end of it is on the horizon. Maybe that belief is as self sabotaging as everything else. Only way out is the math homework.

fixed first link. In that copy and paste that shit.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4y2ayj
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qmuzhb
http://www.sendspace.com/file/uh5utu
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qtrhj8

J.G. Ballard

2008-03-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

I got halfway through High Rise today while sitting in the town square, removing and re-applying my sunglasses like an ostentatious and unsuccessful secret agent, leaving when it got cold. It's great, less thick than I thought it would be after reading The Atrocity Exhibition, but great.

The younger kids all appear a shade or two more hip than they actually are. The arc of stylistic justice is long, but it bends towards hipness. Case in point, last night dark British indie cocktail dress attire girls claimed to love Madonna when Bizzare Love Triangle started playing. I am the old fart at the party, a dance floor Richard Simmons moving myself in easily replicated self esteem boosting bursts of the 1970s that young women with body issues are looking towards. Somewhere upstairs white lines are cut, and the stew of bawdy communication downstairs is thinned. I am unable to get in on that train, and remember my place.

One of the girls had orange hair and a green dress and was named Allison. She made me feel like Elvis Costello, but it didn't work because I made her feel stupid and judged. I am radiant, bounding through infinite faceless baseball cap and jean wearing proletariat, looking at the women like another close study of outfit will give me a better idea if she ever thought about the meaning of being free.

I didn't sleep, resisting a fadeout with the idea of a warm bed and bong would be my reward for soldiering down more cola and cigarettes as the women began to leave the party. Somebody pulled a knife, but from my perch on the white picket fence it just looked like the guy who pulled the steel was fighting off giving adoring fans his autograph. Nobody is stabbed, but the party's epitaph is written when one of the coked out birthday girls laments how this all happened because nobody was listening to her instructions. I just have to leave.

And leave I do. My reality incriminating, I will start my own tribe. I will be king, And we'll drink all the time, I think that's what that song is about.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/62g9vp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/haxsi2
http://www.sendspace.com/file/aqjuaz
http://www.sendspace.com/file/p811ks
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ovqml9
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vnyza7

Weekending Again

2008-03-14T06:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5ntoo8
http://www.sendspace.com/file/35mbal
http://www.sendspace.com/file/m7vlcd
http://www.sendspace.com/file/kv3kba
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ytlvt7
http://www.sendspace.com/file/5gon4t
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ygzgfo
http://www.sendspace.com/file/abfvxu
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6bwzm8
http://www.sendspace.com/file/32o9ww
http://www.sendspace.com/file/poxqmg
http://www.sendspace.com/file/odo9ec

Sucker Free City

2008-03-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/rw0jrj
http://www.sendspace.com/file/txge80
http://www.sendspace.com/file/pbjycf
http://www.sendspace.com/file/hso8zs
http://www.sendspace.com/file/5bumfe
http://www.sendspace.com/file/nielxh

Underground hip hop equals no women.
- Pigeon John

Rockers is an amazing movie

2008-03-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

So, I am signing up for an Art History class, doing English in the summer with a different professor in Petaluma, and then hopefully leaving to London 6 days later.

Now my schedule is only two days. Now surely I will be employed.

I have a lot of gray hairs for a dude my age.

2008-03-08T19:23:00.001-08:00

I was in Richard Speakes' class on the waiting list for two class periods before he dramatically announced that those so categorized must, and he emphasized saying this next part was the least fun part of this job, immediately and forever go.

Tearjerker, but I took with me his first observation, "Yeah, I've seen that look for a while. That cool like. Y'know, it's always, I'm blacker than you." Gasps, amusement, disbelief. "The 60's? Youth listening to black leaders, that's what that was about."

I really regret not being able to stay in his class. I'm not actually technically enrolled in my English class now, though.. I'm wondering if I can get at least 8 units some other way, to qualify for the BUNAC, and then do it over the summer... With Speakes? Maybe add some courses that would qualify me as an African American studies major. San Francisco state apparently invented the concept.

Either way, please employ me, somebody. Or, somebody please just drink with me in the park like it's post communist Bulgaria. Give it a few years.

Yambol is a really nice town
Whoever doesn't like it is an idiot
Drajeto is trying to make money
The other towns are just playing video games
I don't have anything against video games
But I prefer driving a Mercedes

http://www.sendspace.com/file/k5d0q1

San Francisco's Doomed

2008-03-08T08:58:00.001-08:00

This is a matter of SAFETY

SAFETY for ourselves

and

SAFETY for our families

There is no time to waste with further academic debates about social and political issues.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/j3ie5q

http://www.sendspace.com/file/bub5q2

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ze3d41

http://www.sendspace.com/file/bgig2m

http://www.removephprojects.org/

http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/moh/SFHOPEReport.pdf

The kids on the street they'll never give in

2008-03-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

I am going to San Francisco today to return something to the library. Protecting women from darkies is civilization, I am willing to kill for a couple of old fashioned style donuts at this very moment. Trans-fats are merely the imperial acquisition of feminine fats by masculine fats. It is only odd because it is compressed into one fat, and therefore too much for the heart to take.

There is a "happening" tonight at a dive bar in Chinatown. Dada beatnik revisionist whiteness I wish I could witness, cliquing doesn't stop at 20. Or thirty. I don't belong either.

Mission Dolores park is the background for a lot of photographs of plaid shirts, oversized sunglasses, futuristic sneakers, and the people who rock them. People walk their dogs, bring their microbrews, and pray to the sun.

Insufferable ideas right now. Small people.

Neighborhood pathological study reveals self identification as Wes Anderson characters, sense of cool and class based entitlement as cause of current terminal status.

These songs aren't quite as fun as the ones from yesterday, but then I'm less familiar with the contemporary sounds of urban America than I am with kitchen sink post punk stuff from ten years before I was born. Go figure.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vko7op
http://www.sendspace.com/file/648bqi
http://www.sendspace.com/file/caiutz
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vpc5yx
http://www.sendspace.com/file/nnaj1k
http://www.sendspace.com/file/x05lp9

Weekending Again

2008-03-06T14:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1ojpkr
http://www.sendspace.com/file/dx6b65
http://www.sendspace.com/file/owbb0d
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0w8ztg
http://www.sendspace.com/file/k9lt4p
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1aetkr

Closure

2008-03-04T20:46:00.000-08:00

I called her at four. Her message machine spoke in the voice of somebody impersonating static where a name should be, and then said leave a message.

I think about everything I did trying to remember moments of self sabotage.

I think it may have been a ruse.

I am convinced she has friends, and the next time I ask a stranger if they'll hang out with me, they'll place me into their friend's story.

Oh, you were the guy who left the message on her phone.

Yes mam, but I am no longer that guy.

My new name is Anxious Instability. I am here to scare you.

Actionable intellegence

2008-03-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

Womens history month opening ceremony.

Highlights include the hip hop dance class shaking it to the ground with Amerie, and every time the word vagina was mentioned.

I thought a taller girl in a pink top with art supplies was staring at me, so I told her how it was going to go down.

She said she got off at four, and I'm going to call her.

Dare, double dare.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/avtj11

http://www.sendspace.com/file/9ffjs7

http://www.sendspace.com/file/duzs6j

I'm in heaven
I'll show you heaven
So much heaven

http://www.sendspace.com/file/xtaxr8

Solitary Orgasm

2008-03-04T11:27:00.000-08:00

Where are you?

I'm here.

Where are you?

I'm here.

Where are you?

I'm here.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/05lnvo

Martin Luther King Jr. had planned to visit Richmond just prior to his assassination

2008-03-04T08:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/pb8cs7

http://www.sendspace.com/file/9zpvb1

http://www.sendspace.com/file/g1dsl7

http://www.sendspace.com/file/mum6tk

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1ekvfw

Feeling really lonely the past couple of days. Renewed efforts to drop coffee. Thinking it's about time I drop denim and start dressing in slacks and buttoned shirts, like a man dude.

Free your mind and your ass will follow, I am interested in crotches. Very interested. Girls stare me down and dig it, and my eyes return the favor so much it's rude, but that's as far as it goes, the sexual revolution having had it's leaders round up and shot by AIDS sometime around 1982.

The last time I was so defiant was a Tuesday, and we had met online. I drove to San Francisco and didn't know how to act naturally until the bottle was gone. Sleepiness and shame made it surreal and sublime. Sobriety came too soon, and I drove back home before sunrise, feeling like I knew something the commuters didn't.

Offline, the world is less accessible. I am not driving so much as looking at the honeys through the windshields. I don't go to school so much as wander around campus looking for the peaches. Conversation isn't the end goal so much as fantasy. Fiction romantics seem to gush at the idea that their fantastic fulfillment of it all is just one "Excuse me sir" away from them. Snatches and dick smell dripping from the ceiling, I sometimes find it hard to breath.

I should just start asking people if they like to fuck. Maybe even hang posters around the school saying "FUCKINZ OKAY, A'IGHT?" Number and picture underneath, of course, as I am true to my word.

If you have a significant other, make out in public. If you don't, do so with strangers. Youth and love need to reclaim public space, if those ideas are to take hold.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/10156809/detail.html

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_8404856

http://www.topix.com/city/richmond-ca/2007/11/eight-shot-in-north-richmond

Countrypolitan

2008-03-02T22:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/km2219

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wlg6dx

Carquinez Heights

2008-03-02T16:09:00.001-08:00

I didn't really move much on Saturday. My mind felt guilty of assholism and my joints weren't doing anything for me. My mom called every half hour, starting around ten, often with messages, about eating or something tomorrow, and just to check in. Each time she called I let it ring and we both got irascible in our convictions.

But today I went to Vallejo. It's gorgeous during the day now and suddenly I'm burning gasoline like my children aren't going to call me an irresponsible fuck for the self satisfaction I get from doing it. I'm being tailgated by somebody applying makeup to their cadaverously wealthy selves and I don't mind. It's fucking gorgeous.

Poverty is pretty easy to find in America. The edge of a new city is built to be read at 85 miles an hour. A connect four slot filled with brand iconography promise familiar consumption and brand name comfort. From the west at least, Vallejo reads differently. Vallejo is one of those places that used to make shit, build shit. The sleeping dragon that woke up after Pearl Harbor was once again sound asleep on the shores of the San Pablo Bay, a rusty petrification settled over it's once powerful body.

Poverty is only allowed so long as we allow ourselves to fall victim to a historical narrative in which it is justified.

Everything anyone in this country has had they have had because history has given it to them.

Prior exclusion from the pie, from the table, from success, is no justification for future exclusion.

Poverty is sustained by affluence; the rich have defined themselves as entirely antithetical to the poor and require that elevation to themselves maintain power.

It is for the sake of the construction of a narrative in which there is some worth assigned to wealth.

Wealth is granted to you by prenatal historical circumstance. It has no worth.

You're wrong if you think otherwise.

The Japanese are a homogeneous people. At some point 200 years ago, a certain village was shamed because their village burnt down or some shit, and they became an underclass. No genetic distinction exists, it's just history. They consistantly score lower on test scores, and are of a lower standing economically than their Japanese peers.

The rich require the poor because the poor construct the proof for their entire belief system. The rich strive to separate themselves from the poor in every aspect of their lives and in the physical construction of our society and have for generations.

Whole Foods is for motherfuckers.

And your daughters won't put out.

Poverty is easy to find in America because we have it caged. It is as easy as looking to the intersections of major infrastructure: highways, rails, refineries, power stations, airports, docks, factories- anywhere where society is pushing the costs of it's actions into the earth for free, the poor will absorb them because our system requires an underclass.

I drove around Vallejo spewing gas and staring wide eyed at a Sunday morning, and that's as close as I can get to my brothers.

And we're just getting more estranged.

Rich people are crazy and destroying the planet with their secessionist bullshit. Find your brothers and sisters and learn about our family. Grow your own food and learn valuable skills. Most importantly, place yourself in history (not his story) and take that shit to heart.

Lonesome Countrypolitan

2008-03-02T00:35:00.000-08:00

Stevie Wonder for Minister of Culture

2008-02-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

Cut off in wishing us displeasure

2008-02-28T22:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/zpnrdm

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5pmy9o

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ubmn0w

http://www.sendspace.com/file/42ofc4

http://www.sendspace.com/file/8jcem1

http://www.sendspace.com/file/rircov

If they're boys

2008-02-28T15:37:00.000-08:00

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

Meatyard

2008-02-28T11:10:00.000-08:00

School essay minus proofreading

2008-02-28T09:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-27T20:24:00.000-08:00

Laconic Bionic

2008-02-26T21:12:00.000-08:00

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.

oggle

2008-02-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

Obsession

And

Fantasy

The Best of Blog House

2008-02-26T08:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Frederick Douglass

2008-02-14T06:04:00.000-08:00

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

Dancehall Stylee

2008-02-07T20:03:00.000-08:00

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

Expatriation is the answer

2008-02-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

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

School Library Posting (I found a chair)

2008-01-29T06:43:00.000-08:00

I didn't manage to catch the SOTUS last night. I was Too busy stealing bad political acronyms to listen to a tired old man remind me that we are awesome. I tried parking in the new garage this morning at the Junior College, and if cars were honey, that was some richly flavored baklava, thick full. Maybe if we built some goddamn infrastructure instead of just incrementally accommodating for more cars, because the economics of it dictate that by doing so more cars is just what we're going to get. I want an Obama administration to build us some fuckin' rails and shit.

Continuing to make my car into the car I want it to be (as without it I am not an American), I finally replaced the wiper blades, in a twenty minutes circus of error for the neighbors with windows. Riding that pride I went in also for the headlight, but was unable to get the fucker out. My dad saw that my hood was open, and came out to ask what was up and get something from his car. I told him without looking directly at him, and he said that it was a good thing to learn how to do. I looked at the Accura manual one last time, it was as useless as he had been in teaching me to do anything with that car. My dad went back inside, and I tried a variety of tools in a variety of places to unlock the light bulb.The painter guy saw what I was doing, came out, and wrestled loose some wires and bits with his giant, Big Mac growth hormone enhanced hands. I guess my dad never had that kind of dad either. I emptied my car of everything but the leaves and dusts too small for me to feel accomplishment as I scoop up and out. It is now 100% legal to ride, and is flying the Obama flag from the right rear window.

The school library is full of people deliberately not noticing as I stretch my neck to look frightened at them. They're sitting in various stages of wetness, headphones and pencils allowing their sensory addicted minds the ability to sit and do for a second. Keyboards be tappin' and pant legs are rubbing up against one another as the books remain on the shelves and kids keep to themselves. I'm sure they're all passively looking for sex, maybe half of them know it. There's a horse head at the end of the computer terminal, Terra cotta like Sun Tzu, but less interested in staying relevant. It's balanced in such a way that it's chin sticks out towards the window, mouth agape like it's mid-charge. I don't think horse people would like this horse. But then, i don't know horse people.

I bought some cannabis yesterday, planning on making it the last time in a while, not sure how that's going to work out. I feel like I'm buried in layers of foreign chemical influence at this point, probably because self-medication is in a sense burying things. I mean I like the view from here, I like the tints and the skews all of it brings to my outlook, like some astronomical phenomena turning a still sky rippled. I just feel no sense of urgency, and I wonder how to connect with people who see the same sky as blue. My sister says I just gotta get up and do, and that it will all go from there. Most of the time I wake up cold and wet, and I undo. I feel a deep sense of shame for not wanting what she wants from me badly enough to to be that person. I believe, and she says (that sentence originally read she says and I believe) that I've been too coddled growing up, but I think that knowledge isn't helpful. Romulus also had original sin, and his mom was a bitch.

This writing is all public because it's easier than apologizing to everybody individually. I feel like expectations own my life and that the second I tell anybody I have interest in doing something is the second I die and am replaced by a mission statement. AM I CRAZY OR JUST A TEENAGER???

I uploaded these puppies before leaving the house at like 7 this morning. I forget what the one that isn't Abba or the Abba cover is, but quality noise right here.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/tup1v6

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vz0a8t

http://www.sendspace.com/file/88y3pp

Weekending Again

2008-01-27T15:10:00.000-08:00

It's a different moral universe. Things unacceptable during the week are the routine of the weekend. Hence, my current situation, watching the ants dart across my desk and alternating between a sleeping foot and a foot with adequate blood flow like I were Hapi, periodically flooding and draining the Nile so that some kind of order may prevail. It's dull, timelessly dull.

I went on a drive with my mom up the coast to eat Indian food. It was clear at the beach, but my stomach was still empty and we were listening to Closer, so even as it was beautiful I just sat silently, looking at Macclesfield. The restaurant was cold inside, like they hadn't reached the necessary number of customers to decide it was economically reasonable to turn on the heat. Everyone who worked there was in fleece and a face of petrified indifference. I ate, and it was better.

That was also more or less the theme of Saturday, when I had the hang over gang over, and the first half of which was devoted to sleeping. Barack's speech made me cry (I was also on the pot), while Hillary's speech implored a fluctuation in volume that by the third time she did it, made me turn her off out of discomfort. Such contrasts I try not to think about it, in case she ends up the nominee. Friday had two completely unrelated halves, both of which began by talking with Isaac Boyd on the phone. To begin with, the guy is in the neighborhood. We get danishes, and I drive him home. The Danish a distant memory, he calls back at maybe nine, and tells me that he's planning on going to the city with some kids I knew from high school. I agree to join them, and down enough coffee to feel the need to talk about it. I hop in the backseat of a large late 90's Ford SUV, sitting next to an old skater kick box and 15 cans of Budweiser.

These kids drive like they have never been pulled over. I mean, I suppose it was only one person driving, but I picked up no terror but my own as we tailgated all motherfucker despite downpour status. The 101 was closed, and we inched our way around everyone else's unthinkably long workday for the purposes of thankless leisure. We stayed most of the night at our point of arrival, waiting to go to the party until the shame of diluting such an event with 12 boys was effectively drunk out of our concerns. Getting there we fit all the boys in, blasted the rap as though our car wasn't now filled with illegal passengers, booze, pot, and being driven by an underage person on the drink. I was in no position to do anything if a cop pulled up behind us but stare helplessly at them out from between my legs, my face inches from the trunk windshield. My ass wasn't on the line, but I did have front row seats for any potential spanking.

Once there, we stole Sparks and I remembered the extremes young adults have to go through in terms of image cultivation to survive in their world. Plenty of the White out. I danced after a couple because I remembered that dancing was something I loved doing (oh, shit, yeah!) but it wasn't the greatest. Three other people on the dance floor all of us playing the I'm blacker than you game, two of them with black skin. The women who show up see my spastic flailing and decide to slowly grove with one another. I get self conscious, (did they just call me Hitler?) and go drink this wallflower into a blossom.

Then it's time for the obligatory run down the street and message to my ex-neighbor to see if she's awake and has my shoe, complications- The dudes I'm with have been drinking sparks and enthusiastically say that they want to go too, not knowing the destination. Isaac comes with, the other dude gets a burrito, she's not home, and we're back to Sebastopol. Only the 101 is closed as far North as Novato, so we go back to San Rafael and through the West. At this point our driver is going well under the speed limit and ignoring dividers. We stop for Gatorade. It's restorative properties apparently do the trick because when I wake up again we're back home.

I'm pretty much caught up with life shit, like renewing my license and attending traffic school. Staying on top of homework would mean I might one day soon be free of all this weight. Real vernal renewal motherfucker type stuff. Springtime for the cynicism machine.

Could employment be so far away? (Yes.)

Stay tuned. (who?)

I know nothing about these people. Aren't parties nice?

How about you? How about your crew?

http://www.sendspace.com/file/cxb4y6

http://www.sendspace.com/file/t3f4q7

http://www.sendspace.com/file/hlfayr

Kirkland Signature Orange Soda

2008-01-25T18:15:00.000-08:00

Is the peak of the excitement of the now. So many interesting questions are raised. Where did it come from? Why are there only four of them of a six pack in my refrigerator? What would it taste like, were I to drink one? What would I taste like after having done so? Irreparably different?

As I left the scene of so much unexpected frivolity and imitation citrus, I saw the remainder of the Kirkland variety pack on the kitchen floor, sitting on top of a box of Duraflames. My dad now trusts Costco deeply enough to allow them monopoly in his non-caffeinated beverage and frozen lasagna purchases. I am perfectly willing to drink the grape and orange flavors, but lemon lime and root beer are empty of symbolic value for me, as they are not as embraced by the black community. I just have simultaneously higher expectations than my parents as well as lower chances of fulfilling them, starting with a soda that projects the identity I want. I feel this is reasonable.

Dinner came from the same refrigerator, down freezer town lane. I'd go out, but then I'd have to replace my front headlight, Muchachos. It's hard to not feel I'm channeling Jim Anchower with those types of excuses (or just the Muchachos bit), but there it is. I find the prolonged adolescence our culture encourages to be super. I observed eating ritual around tacquitos, avocados, and salsa. Two cans of orange drink to wash it down.

The rain is keeping up. Good day to stay inside said the Press Democrat. I take their reporting seriously, and did so. I also registered for Traffic School (next Saturday, Marin County) and dealt with outstanding landlord bullshit. All done with. Homework is tomorrow, and then maybe tell the lady who over the phone took a breath in as she said "The senator..." when referring to Obama why I haven't been returning her calls about the precinct data she acquired on my behalf. She is the worst person of all right now, according to the latest polls out of the Hillaryland of my liver. That is the place where one can rub me in incorrect ways.

I hate the rain. Makes me remember all the times I was a lover and crave cheese danishes. Reptilian mind on display right now. If the Lizard were king:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/9pwk5n
http://www.sendspace.com/file/tzo49k

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1vvl0b

CIA * MIA

2008-01-24T15:43:00.000-08:00

Odd vanity license plate, and yet there it was, driven by some (understandably) non-CIA looking middle aged lady, coming into Sebastopol from the East. Hah, the Spell Check suggests Sevastopol. I will consider that, Spell Check. Perhaps initiating some civic initiative towards that end. Real-estate agencies and civic institutions might then be able to market this place as the precarious outpost of high prices, retired people, and a civic government bent on petrifying expansion and pretending we are like Europe (we are not) by licensing wine bars and encouraging pedestrians. Other benefits to living in one of two cities in America with a Green Party majority on the city council include:

-the installation of multiple new pedestrian crossings with signals, sidewalks extended further into the street, blind people crossing awareness foot dealies, and a guaranteed sense of shame one feels when the cars stop just by virtue of your standing near the damn thing (this happens often).

-A police force that implores both hybrid cars in it's fleet and solar power in it's headquarters. Jerks can't buy my goodwill with carbon credits, but I'm assuming that's what's up here. They're still jerks, as of my finishing this sentence, though I am open to hear their side of things.. Any cops reading? Oh, right, cops don't read.

-I'm not really sure what to fill this third bracket with, I should pay more attention to where I'm living. Writing this has been an eye opener.

In other news, I am on my own for dinner. I am thinking drive through burrito. The volume on my computer keeps fluctuating, it's really unbearable, I'm having to listen to records. My default with this much rain and a shirt this dirty (I was unaware until after it was on) is to just put on The Idiot, and that's exactly what happened. Then I got mad rutty with the cheese the guy painting my dad's house gave me, and I thought I liked Tiny Girls a lot.

http://download.yousendit.com/EAB4E0DB7E524680

School was pretty Tokay (thanks for that suggestion too, Spell Check). Class consisted of the usual series of draining rhetorical questions that were at best silly and amusing, and at worst inscrutable. Afterwards, I stood for a minute to talk to somebody from high school. Then there was some girl in neon green stockings and a light blue dress talking to a guy with long hair and a dress shirt tucked into pretty tight jeans. Clearly evolving his style into something, but as it was it just all seemed more stuffy than any given classroom this time of year. I guess that's probably where they both came from or were going, but still. They clean interrupted the conversation, and when we returned it was necessarily about neon stockings. I then walked to my car wondering if what I was feeling at the bottom of my foot was coldness or wetness, I don't usually wear these shoes. This was in the CD player (finally working again) that I was thankful for. Burning CDs in the morning is the gift that keeps on giving.

Farolito Santa Rosa, I wish your chips weren't so salty, and I didn't occasionally find cartilage in your carnitas. Otherwise you are a rough provincial approximation of the mission burrito and therefore the only Mexican food worth eating in this county. And the drive through? Pure genius. Living in the future is living alone, preferably by vehicle... Unless it's just in constant search of water.

My shoes are still on, and the ambiguously wet or cold feeling is real, folks.

http://download.yousendit.com/9AF126D25E42AED6

http://download.yousendit.com/B7B4153B46705EE7

http://download.yousendit.com/3D0B7F300315DC9F

http://download.yousendit.com/EF66460A1A6E5DC9

That's the exit for burritos. It is also where I am certain I have seen battered poor people emerge from when riding my bike in that area. Invisible suburban poverty is sad when you think about it (yes it is). It is in no way connected with my acquiring a burrito by way of a twenty mile drive from my house. And besides, I saw some workers out there cutting all that excess grass by the side of highway 12 earlier this week. That has to be a good thing for those people, I'm sure.

Swastika eyes

2008-01-24T09:47:00.000-08:00

So! I haven't been watching this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, possibly because I don't actively assert myself in much of anything these days unless I'm absolutely certain to easily succeed, (I would lose at Curb?) but I've certainly enjoyed what I have seen of the show. Much then was my delight when this interest of mine overlapped with my interest in Baltimore club music. I'm not posting the Primal Scream song which shares the title of this post, but instead decided swastikas were sufficiently crazy to replace the word crazy. I just don't remember how it was actually spelled in the episode. Something about optometrists.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/jhclm4

Also, a big of bombastic mid-morning New Zealand audio-self doubt. And yet kinda uplifting. The nun keeps flying through time and space. Sonoma County so long as my eyes are open.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/t8z756

I should go to school now. Sandoval gonna be all vague and shit, but with the actual essay assignment. I will draw motherfuckers and think noise at him until kingdom come.

Hi I am Benny!

2008-01-24T08:30:00.000-08:00

SO, Hi. Big fan of the PBS show "Frontline". Last night I dutifully watched Tuesday's report, something about kids growing up online. Made me feel as though I wasn't doing enough of that. It also made me want desperately to visit New Jersey. The answer was obvious: though I could not immediately travel to New Jersey (school, no genuine desire to do so, despite prior claim), I could start an mp3 blog, and thus contribute publicly to this great cultural cross pollination the internet has fostered as of late.

I thought I'd initially just put up the two songs whose lyrics I blatantly stole from in the formation of this website, because what is the west if not the place of parroting heretics? I think you may have heard these, Target Audience:

Sonic Youth's Tuff Gnarl- I'm going to be able to put this on forty years from now and remember exactly how it felt to be twenty. I mean, I hope. Especially if I had kids or am a teacher or encounter young people regularly.

http://download.yousendit.com/800E6FED370ADDBF

The Fall's Your Heart Out- It's like meeting M.E.S. for the first time for a poetry reading, but more bouncy than New Puritan. Equally valid as a mission statement for the band as Printhead, from the same album, Dragnet!

http://download.yousendit.com/CB725EBA35EE209B

In other news, hoping South Carolina doesn't go disproportionately along racial lines, thus doing what Obama has managed so skillfully to avoid doing so far, being marginalized as the black candidate. I woke up all sweaty in thermals this morning. Some bullshit I must've been thinking last night, to set myself up for that misfortune. The resurrection involved too earnest karaoke renditions of Isolation and From Safety To Where, coffee, and leftover pizza.

You are reading about what it means to accept duty and responsibility. The tip of my wallet, where it is most worn, looks exactly like snake skin. Poisonous snakes keep our credit cards and stretch our butt pockets. We have all kinds of butt pockets in California.

-Michael Paradis,
1/24/08