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Sunday, August 17th, 2003
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12:34 am - Passage
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A migration is commencing, the way rain hits a leaf, huddles into a drop, and scatters amongst the veins. Hitting the road with thirty-three psi Radials with two centuries of space displacing a metaphoric future, people just my age are flocking to new freedoms. I don't know if I want to be in those backseats, though. Texas seems like a virus. I want to drive somewhere... else. With a someone. Just one someone.
John Waters' house is pink. That fucking kicks ass.
There was a ripe dead cat in our backyard this morning. Eight pounds and dropping of rotting feline posthumous scream. Mouth open, tongue out, eyes weak- it looked like old age. It found a place next to Oscar, Little Boy, and, for all I know, Jimmy Hoffa. Our backyard is really the pride and joy of many laborious hours sweated out by my parents. Whoa, I just had a disturbing thought.
The Houston Astros are driving me insane.
In an average fourteen-hour working day, my computer receives approximately five hundred pop-up ads. That's sick.
New glasses. I cried when I saw how much stronger the prescription had gotten.
I love Lindsey so so so much. I wish that did us both more good than it does.
Will and I planted ourselves in his plastic-covered dining chairs and spewed bad jokes into a Dell and called it thirty minutes of a movie. Three characters so far. A cynical jock who gets benched and breaks his foot as a result of kicking a locker-room wall out of anger. He winds up becoming enamoured with Harry Potter. A poor kid whose mother wins a scratch-off lottery and winds up buying up useless items so fast that they slip back into being paupers in no time. An atheist girl with a Catholic mom and a compassionate older brother who dies from eating toxic casserole. Can't wait to do the funeral scene. There will be confetti. Literally.
current mood: worthless
current music: The Cure
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9 songs | sing it to me
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| Monday, August 11th, 2003
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12:06 pm - Sap
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"We live in a nation whose government approves sodomy but not same-sex marriage."
"Why are those two things even issues?"
"Because America voted for Bush and Dick. Supposedly."
If there's someplace I want to be, some place where the trees hug you and the sky feels as close as it is far, then I want to make distance of my driveway. If the winter can make August a 31 flavor tan and September a rise of fall, then I want my house to be a speck on my roadmap. If we can be overlooking a pool of still water that whispers to the sky, if she can finally feel the romance that I feel, then I want to make Texas feel smaller than it's ever been.
I'm not going anywhere for college. Two years and so much support that tuition is near 750 dollars per semester. I want to meet people there, people who aren't just another band of white-washed Clear Lake Christians who think that Bush is exponentially better than Clinton. But, then again, a lot of people have issues with the place in which they were raised.
Our IFC, our little high school one, has the looks to be prolific. A footbagger named Will and I are planning to slip into chaos and hack out a good chunk of script on Thursday. A scene will be done where there is a confetti storm on a funeral. Pastel raindrops everywhere in the midst of sadness. We're making a very dry movie.
My Aunt cheered when her two doggies made slobber of her cheeks. This is someone who loves dogs so much that her kitchen, wardrobe, Christmas tree, stationary, classroom, and living room are fully decorated with Scottish Terrier designs and... whatever the name for the Royal Dog of Madagascar is. Madagascar just doesn't strike me as an island that needs a royal dog, much less a tiny, fluffy one that makes a sport out of diving at your face to give you a series of kisses.
"You know, Chris, a dog's mouth is cleaner than a human's."
"Shut up, I still can't believe she enjoys it."
current mood: travel-hungry...
current music: The Sea and Cake
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4 songs | sing it to me
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| Sunday, August 3rd, 2003
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4:43 pm - In Flight
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So much of experience is intangible. I can use any word I want to, make any sound, but there is no guarantee you'll actually understand a word of it. The projected text will suck itself into your eyes, your brain will buzz with activity, and you will process everything according to knowledge already in your brain. If I say "pain," you'll remember the pain you've seen and felt in your life, but you're not me. You could see things as being worse or better off than I do.
So experience is relative.
August has landed on the doorstep once again. This time last year, I was squirming on hardwood in a hollow home in Austin, groaning about how the marijuana I had just let fly in my blood was failing to do little more than make me dizzy. This time I'm crunching numbers in a boring experiment that I hope will answer the question of which is the most important element to a baseball team.
It was a few days ago that we found Oscar playing dead weight at the bottom of his tank. The sun had set on his scales, the lava-lamp tones burned to brown, and his fins could no longer keep him afloat. We buried him in the back yard. There's a pet cemetary back there by now. A day later, our answering machine died. I think my mom considers that loss to be a greater one.
Also buried in the back yard is the tip of a spade shovel. Legend (if that's what it can be called) has it that a real asshole roamed this house before we did. His kids wanted a swimming pool, so he steamed down to the hardware store and came back with a shovel. He took the kids into the backyard and stabbed the earth with brute force and told his offspring that if they wanted a pool, they would dig it themselves. The shovel sat there until the tip rusted off. We found the tip, left it there, laughed more than those two kids ever did.
Tomorrow I officially get the job I've been promised. I'll be teaching clarinet lessons for middle-schoolers at the grand little facility I used to go to. "You have to sign a form saying you saw the harassment video; I'll hold it up, you sign the paper." Forty bucks an hour. Even after taxes, I'm making good fucking money at the age of 18. I'm lucky, I'm extremely lucky.
There isn't much I can complain about, not really. I've had bad run-ins with other people, fights, been treated like shit, but that's just drama, fluffy drama that's almost the least a person will get in life. Everything else bad that's come along, I say, has been more deserved by me than most people. The paranoia that people get when a string of good events happens is not warranted- there is no balance between good and bad on this earth.
I know a girl that I will care about more than anyone even if I'm not at the top of her list, and that's fine with me. No matter how much bad will come out of it, I'll be happy, because I'm so connected to her that I would lose more than just her if I were to let go: I'd lose a big part of myself. She's human, she's beautiful, she's a mix of amazing and bitter and sensitive and sarcastic and everything that makes a person interesting. That's more than I could ask for, not just appropriately, but possibly.
current mood: flowing
current music: The Matrix Score
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4 songs | sing it to me
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| Friday, July 25th, 2003
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2:31 pm - Out Where the Lights
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"Norman sat at his desk while he contimplated his existence." That's the first sentence of the book I've begun writing.
Hot and sticky, a band of mourners crowded on concrete and grass. Those that spoke amongst each other stayed back from the crowd, those that prayed curled around a circle of candlelight, a picture of Marcus clutched in shaking hands. The street was lined with cars, shackled with newsvans sprouting metal antennae. I stood, arms crossed, listening to hymns being sung by those who could fight off tears enough to silk notes through the night. Cameras with logos slapped on the side fired beams of magnesium-white light, mourners went from looking sad to looking drunk, stumbling about to get away from the media and squinting until they found candlelight again. A woman gussied up in a starched suit set up by the tree and a full set of photons fired upon the mass. Silently, we all hissed. Loudly, we all wept. That was Monday night.
Thursday morning was the most incredible display of human emotion I have ever witnessed, and I don't mean that in a good way. The funeral home was packed so abundantly that half the attending bodies had to stand on the sides and in the foyer. A construction-sheet project of photos and white happy teeth showed visitors that Tiffany had joy, something we all lack, or were lacking that day. Kirsten was choked up enough to scream "MEAN IT" when she told us to love each other. Marcus' mother wore thick sunglasses and couldn't walk without help. My sister thought the woman was blind. Metaphorically, I'd say yes. Her muscles were busy squeezing tears out of her eyes and Chester couldn't sit still, hopping in his seat every time he tried to breathe through his tight throat. A girl dropped to the ground helplessly when she tried to walk away from the casket. A line several yards long strung out, made of people offering arms to wrap around the father Rowell. "You have to keep me going, Chris." I told him I would. A crowd migrated to the flowered gravesite of Marcus and continued crying.
There was screaming, collapsing, anger, fighting, pleading, crying, music. It was the first funeral I'd been to that saw someone younger than me sink below the soil.
Rain need not fall in a cemetary- tears provide floods of nutrition.
current mood: worst ever
current music: Iguazu
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2 songs | sing it to me
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| Saturday, July 19th, 2003
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11:56 pm - Circuit
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Flashback. Me, shorter, dusty hair, naive, holding to principles that had yet to seriously be bashed into my personality. Chester Rowell, more rosey, getting back into teaching, a black-and-white picture of he and his wife cheek-to-cheek previous to her dying of cancer on the table next to where we played duets. Day after day, me walking though the front door and settling in the living room. They had parakeets, then rabbits later on. I bought them a candle and fancy iron holder for it from Pier 1 for Christmas. When I saw it out on the coffee table, I smiled. But that was two years ago, at least. Likely, now, the holder has a smear of blood on it. The coffee table isn't far from where Tiffany and her boyfriend were shot.
"Four people were found..." It was eight-thirty AM this morning when disgruntled mother woke me. It had taken me an hour of tossing and turning to fall asleep the previous night. All day long, my mind has drifted to news, television, somebody tell me what I already know. Tiffany and her boyfriend, friendly people, shot along with two others in our neighborhood.
Zoom to Kansas, Mr. Rowell on a phone, driving on a road, losing the rosey in his cheeks. Blood had found its way into his skin recently- remarried, daughter graduating, moving in to new house. He left the house for his daughter to live in while she went to college.
Flash to pages of an annual projecting onto a tube. "HOLY SHIT!" Those are faces I remember from school, only now those faces are full of gunshot entrances.
My shriveling thoughts can't conduct what nightmare this is for Mr. Rowell. One of the most important people in my life, bound to a dead wife and murdered daughter. No suspects, no motives. Two crushed skulls and multiple gunshots.
Rest in peace, Tiffany Nichole Rowell, Rachael Ann Koloroutis, Marcus Ray Precella, and Adelbert Nicholas Sanchez. Live in peace, Chester Rowell.
current mood: dreaming, hopefully
current music: Possibility (Pay it Forward theme)
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8 songs | sing it to me
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| Wednesday, July 16th, 2003
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9:07 pm - Blossom
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I wanted to shock the world when I was a little kid. Not so much as in the sense of me wanting to make a name for myself. I just wanted to have something demented to say to people who asked about me. I wanted to be a coroner, I wanted to hunt down viruses with tears and science. Before that, I was the more appropriate homosexual version of myself. I wanted to be a marine biologist, a dolphin trainer, something like that. After visiting many a water theme park and aquarium, I decided that the only dolphins I wanted to see were in the ocean. I sponsored a dolphin when I was a kid, this little "Save the Dolphins" thing. They had pitches for other animals, but I was a dolphin-lover. Anyway, after some ink on a page and a slip of electronic hard-earned salary by my parents, a Bottlenosed Dolphin was born, the development of a flash on film sent to me, and I have no idea what happened after that. To this day, I stubbornly kick myself for not choosing to sponsor a Pacific White-sided Dolphin. I wanted, when I was a kid, to be able to go to Galveston Island and imagine that every dolphin I saw was the one I sponsored. I liked to dream. I spent all my time alone, so dreaming was all I ever did.
Now I'm a borderline insomniac. Six AM this morning is when I finally passed out in bed. I woke three hours later to take my sister to school. It's not uncommon to find me tossing on my high-up queen-sized with Oreo chasing headlights that would race across the wall everytime someone took a left at that stop sign in font of our house. An expressionless dolphin is caught on my wall in mid-surf with speckles of paint as the wake. My uncle trapped it there, made it forever an icon of my room. Oreo slaps it when a motorist sails photons across its body. I used to keep Oreo out of the room, leave her to banging on my door and bellowing, leave her to prowling for socks in the laundry room and roaches in who-knows-where. Now she's been on my bed long enough to be camouflaged with the sheets. The last thing to slit my irises before I dream is the first hiss of the sunlight.
And now I want to run away to the Pacific coast to find that dolphin I never sponsored, to live in autumn forever kicking sand and stone in San Francisco and Seattle. And I don't want anyone to come with me or follow me.
current mood: spaced
current music: the songs playlisted for a CD I made for Anna
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10 songs | sing it to me
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| Saturday, July 12th, 2003
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2:29 am - Auron's Glasses
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A nine day stretch where there is no greater happiness than in the bed of the Desert has kicked itself off. If you take away the time it takes to get through Code Orange insanity at the airport, I guess it's really only eight days. But I'll say that it's nine, because my body chemistry inclines itself to a lack of wishful thinking.
The gray in the sky has been sweating across the whole county with plenty of sunny breaks to breathe life into the ground. Gnats have taken after something in our kitchen and the grass is growing faster than we can mow it. Twenty-five empty Vanilla Coke cans line my desks. The name of the tropical storm is Claudette. "It came from Miami, didn't it?" That's a quip that, really, almost none of you would get unless I tell you a very long story. And I just know I'd try to nutshell it and fuck up and leave out the most interesting details. The bottom line is, it's raining whole clam of a lot. That's an inside joke, too, just with a much shorter explanation.
Today we slid ourselves down to Ichiban to pay seventy-five dollars for sushi. I want to meet someone who is able to do something like that for lunch all of the time. It was genuinely divine, though. Avacado slithering around succulent eel and seaweed makes my tongue do something I'd probably tend to describe erotically. So I won't. Not now.
We don't have a swimming pool, my mom just pretends that we do. A pair of twins is coming over to wade. If you can swim in that rubbery shell by our bottlebrush, you've got to be a fucking tadpole.
Speaking of which, sort of, Oscar is nearing his death. That's the theory. Not that there isn't a living organism that isn't. I accidently typed "orgasm" on the first try in the previous sentence. Anyway, poor Oscar has to take his food to the bottom of the tank to suck it into his tiny sunset body. Mitzi is like that. She can't hear and you could draw a pretty accurate feline skeleton by just glancing at her. That's sad, to me, really, and I cuddle Mitzi up to my sympathies every chance I get. She camps out by the main bathroom toilet. Oscar looks sappily on. My mother talks about how nice it will be to not have to listen to the pump and clean out the tank anymore. But I was the only one who dealt with the pump and the tank-cleaning, anyway. Poor Oscar. Poor Mitzi.
Our house is beginning to smell like the back of your eyelids when you stop to think for a while.
current mood: removed
current music: St. Germain
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4 songs | sing it to me
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| Thursday, July 10th, 2003
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9:30 pm - Droplet
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It's the middle of the night in the central time zone. A muscle bit of machine flies across Neptune at over one hundred miles per hour.
Pause.
A boy is staring through a ceiling, counting stars, counting possibilites, day-dreaming at night of a drive. His cat has cornered a roach and is a mere dive away from making a crunch of its life.
A girl is enjoying the back of her station wagon with her one-and-only, a guy who is so good at sucking on her clit that her bottom lip has a cut on it from her teeth biting down so hard. Her climax is within sight, though her eyes are closed tightly.
Another girl is in the middle of a sigh with her eyes locked on scattered dirty laundry. She needs a clean house for a guest that has given and taken away the most sacred things of the human body.
Play.
The car curves to the stop sign and tests the limit of the anti-lock brake system. Successful yet again, this sort of thing happens two or three times a night. The community added a pair of stop signs to the lane, unsuccessfully, and failed to rid the "SLOW" painted where the stop lines belong.
The boy smiles, bites his lip, and turns over. July could turn out to be pretty wonderful. Less than 20 hours later, however, news would be set that July is going to be as lonely as ever. His cat hunts down the roach and earns dry, falsetto-fish tarter control cat treats.
The girl comes hard into her man's face; she tries not to have a similar explosion come out of her mouth and winds up with a bleeding lip from her efforts.
The other girl lets out her lungs, picks up what's in and around her bed, and calls it a day, dreaming about the next ten days and how much love could be brought on a single flight.
Scattered showers head towards the AM of Thursday.
current mood: empty
current music: Jung at Heart (from the VW commercial)
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4 songs | sing it to me
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| Tuesday, July 8th, 2003
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2:46 pm - Domain
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Gosh, I should shave. Oh, well.
Last summer I met a girl. Yeah, last summer, and nobody has come along since. Burden to me now, fresh lungs in August. You can't breathe in August in this state, in this Lone Star that we take too seriously. How creative is our flag? We were trying to draw the American flag, but we gave up after a star and two stripes. We're those people who are proud of being idiots, but we change the wording and say we're proud of being great. Even a conservative court did away with our anti-sodomy laws. Are we that far to the right?
Yeah, probably.
Anyway, back to August, a year ago. August was the slide part of the slide on the playground, you know? The previous two months were spent climbing up steps, the fun part was feeling the wind against you as you slid back down to earth. Around nine in the morning on weekdays I would find myself in a parking lot with a bunch of woodwind players. Something about that seems like a dream now. The sky was too bright and people were too friendly. Or maybe it's because sweating doesn't seem real. I was part of a lethargic crew to teach or re-teach people how to march, only what I really cared about was telling people how much band sucked. Band was one of those things that you hated but just did anyway.
"Why is he in band if he hates it?"
"Because he really, really loves music."
Yeah, I'll just keep telling myself that Natasha was right. She was, seriously, she knew me better than a lot of people did, and that meant something to me. One night I took an hour longer than planned driving her home. A wrong turn on some highway. Twice. We wound up at the abandoned entrance to a chemical plant in Pasadena. It was late at night and I was running out of gas. In Pasedena. In Pasadena, it does no good to stop and ask for directions unless you know Spanish and speak it fluently.
And life was good. Natasha was liberal, marching band was a nostalgic trip through time, and I was in love with someone who loved me back just as much if not more. June and July sucked, truly, as I had an encounter with a romantic escapade that involved a kiss in an arcade and August (or July, whichever is a better pseudonym for her) wound up in the backseat of a car less than a month later unzipping someone's pants. It was depricating for both of us, and I knew that the pain eminating from it was not just from infatuation. I've lost tons of people in my life, but only the threat of losing this one was truly impossible to face. So things haven't been good since September. Three dear people have died, a slew of the first thirteen years of my life has slipped down a grated drain, and now I cry everytime I think about August- the month, I mean. That was the best time of my life. Saying "I love you" never felt so good. When you cry just from telling someone that, that's powerful.
current mood: lost
current music: Forest Temple music... again
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3 songs | sing it to me
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| Saturday, July 5th, 2003
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4:12 pm - Kokiri
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It isn't long before it's hard to live with siblings. My mother's self-righteousness has rubbed off so heavily upon my sister that I fear my mom has successfully duplicated herself. In the mind of my mom, if there's one thing she's not, it's wrong.
My sister turned twenty-nine yesterday. I got her the first two seasons of Family Guy on DVD, Office Space on DVD, and the first season of Strangers With Candy on DVD. The card I made her this year featured hand-drawn Strong Bad and a slew of inside jokes. Retreated to the forests yesterday, under rain and family tidings. Everyone wearing French colors ten days early. But I won't pick on my grandfather for that, he tightened bolts on airplanes in England during the golden ages. The good ol' days. When America was actually the ender of wars instead of the starter of them.
The family, short of my uncle and I, played dominos for three and a half hours. My uncle and I watched Family Guy and laughed our asses off. I also introduced him to HomestarRunner.com. Good times.
My sleeping schedule is such that, if I did have a life, it would be the night life. I go to bed at five in the morning and wake up at one in the afternoon.
A few people have tried getting back in touch with me, a few people that I never really want to speak to again. Last August I tried the keep-in-touch thing and instead got someone pretending that they'd never heard of the person I was calling, though they had their cell phone and one of the fakest voices I've ever heard. The last straw was a half-dozen e-mails that really haven't ever been answered. My fingers were on their wrist, my eyes on the second hand. "Either this person's dead or my watch has stopped." Maybe I just take a shitty pulse.
Six Feet Under was trying to groove into its third season when a two-hour fight broke out between me and a medicine-popping, cocaine-addicted, casual-sexing teenager who decided I was a little kid compared to their maturity. One of the best friends I've ever had did their thesis on the overmedication of physiologically undeveloped persons. This is a good example of what happens when the pills are pushed. Getting addicted to crack and turning to Prozac when your supplier runs out of fairy dust are two mistakes in a row.
And then I'll never forget the "I don't want to live, get away from me, you have to help me, fuck you" routine that started in September of last year and goes on today. But it's my fault for getting attached. Not that there isn't love there.
And the server that hosts my background picture is down, in case anyone is wondering.
current mood: sweating
current music: Forest Temple theme
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4 songs | sing it to me
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| Tuesday, July 1st, 2003
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3:37 pm - Whip
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I haven't been too good about anything lately. A week of making things worse can pile up months of repair work. I should probably equate building up happiness with building a house of cards. My hands are shakey enough that I barely lay down the foundation before a finger slips into a load-bearing two of hearts, and, whiff, it's a game of pick-up.
My therapist asked me the other day about any female role-models I had growing up. The scene when I was most impressionable was this: My mother, finding a man who she believed would love her at any weight, was on the couch with food, testing her theory. My sisters, popular in their teenage years, snuck out of the house at night to do drugs and have parties. It wasn't uncommon to see my mom screaming at them and their mid-thirties averages on their report cards. The only cousin near to my age turned a snob when her mother found a rich man. She wrote "fuck you" cards to family members at her mother's encouragement and split. Our theory is that she is in Idaho now, or at least her mom is. My grandmother, at the youngest I would ever know her, bled racism. The nicest thing she ever said was along the lines of "that boy was a nigger, but at least he was nice."
"I think we know why you get involved with girls that seem to border on personality disorders."
"Why?"
"Who, out of all of those, did you look up to?"
"My social sisters."
"And how social are you now?"
"I'm not."
"Ah-ha."
The funny thing is that I know I've been leading a good life, it's just that, because of that, I have a weak stomach. The worst, physically, that ever happened to me was a Day Care center where, on more than one occasion, a pair of boys a few years older than me locked me in the bathroom and beat me with a plunger. That was probably because they saw me making out with a young black boy. But at least he was nice, my grandmother would say now.
My mother always told me that it was okay if I was gay. Never did she say it was okay if I was straight. The irony is, I've probably been gay my whole life, mother or not.
But I still feel heartbroken when girls I'm crazy about have sex with someone they've fallen in love with.
current mood: depressed
current music: Super Castlevania IV
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6 songs | sing it to me
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| Friday, June 27th, 2003
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5:44 pm - Scripting
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This is life, a montage of a movie, the love of the film, the bridge of the plot.
This week I've been exercising and reading Chuck Palahniuk like there's no tomorrow.
I actually went out with someone on Wednesday. I haven't spent time with someone before that in... I can't remember. I picked her up from work, took her to dinner, then drove her home. It was so nice just to talk to someone and be within five feet of a living, thriving body full of its own thoughts and feelings. Plus, the neighborhood she lives in kicks ass. Something about a sylvan alcove of hidden houses makes me feel cozy and magical. There's a road, unpopulated by cars, long and straight, that takes a driver from Clear Lake Forest to Bay Area Boulevard. Hit it during the right time of day, and you'll feel like you're out in the middle of nowhere, with the sky and the world to marvel at, happy as can be that you have your eyesight.
This is a bit of script I wrote in the middle of the night to kick things off for the CLHS IFC's movie for the 2003-2004 school year.
(credits show unless otherwise noted in parentheses)
NARRATOR (VO)
There are four seasons in a year, with approximately 91 days per season.
(Montage
--a field of flowers
--afternoon sun going across the sky
--a leaf falling onto a leaf-ridden lawn
-- a snowflake landing on someone's mitten)
There are 365 days in a year, except for leap-years, which have 366. The truth is that, mathematically, there are 365 and 1/4 days in a year, and we just take off the quarter-days until they add up to a full extra day. I read that in a magazine somewhere.
This is about a girl and three of those seasons, but you honestly wouldn't know the seasons by the weather.
(Visual
--A map of Texas, Houston marked with a red dot and the name to the side. The words "Annual average temperature 76 Degrees Farenheit" appear on the other side of the dot.)
Guys in the twenty-first century often express their interest in girls in terms of curves and skin. We talk, all the time, about contours and nuances of feminine bodies. Truly, though, we get pretty used to what girls look like. All sorts of girls.
(Montage
--A girl in a tank top and skimpy skirt walks down the hallway, brushing her long blonde hair out of her face.
--A girl with baggy pants, a tight t-shirt, and short, slicked-back hair eyes people suspiciously as she walks about
--A girl in a fancy dress with a cellphone to her ear is screaming dramatically into the receiver)
The truth is that pheromones, these sensors in our noses that don't really tell us smell in a way that that we'd notice, attract us to people. One girl can be, by twenty-first century male terms, hotter than the next girl, but the next girl might drive us twice as wild because our body chemistry is somehow more compatible.
(black screen)
I read that in a magazine somewhere.
current mood: serene
current music: American Beauty score
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5 songs | sing it to me
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| Monday, June 23rd, 2003
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12:24 pm - Jet Pass
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This is me, grinded into the hide of a dead cow after it's been cleaned and stretched over a climate-controlled frame commonly referred to as a passenger seat of a Volkswagen Passat. This is Dan, mid-fifties, could get along with college kids no problem. He tailgates and flies through traffic at ninety miles per hour. Christina in the backseat, appropriately an older and more depressed version of me. Rounder, more well-read, smokes. Still wears jeans all of the time. My sister, half-asleep and half-related, nodding over a textbook. The Police are playing so far off in the background that I wonder why I even slid the CD in. I've just spent less than a day in Austin, primarily hoping to see Mitch with his purple sunglasses make me laugh a few pounds off my ass. The sun is pressing sweat out of my back and I don't want to go home.
Rewind to two hours earlier, when Toby was making dead baby jokes and I didn't want to go home. If not for the deathly scent of cigarette and the sweat-inducing in-house temperature, I'd want to stay there. The room at the Doubletree wasn't so bad. TV was fucked up, but, then again, I shouldn't be watching it, anyway. "How about Tree? Nope? Doubletree? Okay, good. I had my heart set on Tripletree. We almost made it."
Somewhere, six years ago, I discovered the internet and had what seemed like meaningful conversations with people who were, let's face it, complete strangers. Slowly, I moved into shadows at school and huddled with my monitor at home while I proclaimed to love and care about these people I'd known for a week. That went on for six years. Well, it's still going on. Only now "people" is barely the number detail of the word.
I've been drinking enough Vanilla Coke to begin a decent windchime hanging from an unused coat hanger. Probably will quit after four or five rows of five cans each. And I thought we'd never use up that ribbon left over from Christmas.
My sister's birthday is soon, it's the same birthday as this nation. This nation that's giving its tax refund right back to a man named George so that he can fund a campaign that'll receive more money in a few months than most families see in a year. Oh, but he cares about us, don't worry. We're safe from those citizens of Iraq who have every right to kick us out of the country we're still occupying. Sovereign, not anymore, but United States it sure doesn't look like. There's a welcome mat at my house and a spare bedroom, come on over.
I spent six hours from midnight to dawn contemplating my life. Then my sister told me I had to drive her to school. Where does the time go?
current mood: tired
current music: The Police
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2 songs | sing it to me
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| Friday, June 20th, 2003
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10:37 pm - Beats Faster
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A transitive verb, beating on an object. They say "taking on" in school, but, really, that verb is thrashing the shit out of some poor noun. Billy shot Susie. The dog ate the ball. Video killed the radio star. That's my random thought about language for the day.
"My apartment is infested with koala bears. It is the cutest infestation ever." Tomorrow night I'll be in Austin, cracking up to just about every word that comes out of Mitch Hedberg's mouth. Almost every word.
We don't really have a swimming pool, but I suppose we should. Cement pond is the phrase, actually, used down here. If I'm right. Down here. Gosh, that sounds so stupid. I would never surrender the array of plants thriving in our backyard to plunge tons of tile and grout into our below-sea-level backyard. We do, however, have a discount store giant inflatable wading pool. It does three things, really- kills the grass it's on, waters the grass it's next to, and spawns thousands of mosquitos because we obviously don't know (and I don't care to know) anything about pool maintenance. I did drain it, though, and was proud of myself for having the strength to do so after having staved off ten hours of boredom by throwing darts. Nonstop. I was not as excited when I saw a bunch of mosquito larvae crawling all over my body. Maybe I should have been proud of myself for not letting my sushi buffet cuisine loose all over the lawn.
My mother and sister have lost a combined 140-ish pounds. Thank gosh I haven't found any of them. I've been staring out a venetian-blinded window while chucking along my heels to the pedals of an exercycle. And throwing darts. But I really get into it, I swear.
My parents are off at the beach, celebrating twenty years of that matrimony thing where you keep the same pole plugged in the same hole. I didn't say it like that, I swear. My mom's a self-righteous crazy person and my dad's a sensitive and brilliant sweetheart. Lucky for her she found him. Or, he found her. His eyes slid onto her tall, skinny blonde girl body when he was cleaning out his apartment some 22 years ago. He spent the next hour rounding up trash to carry out of his apartment and to the dumpster as an excuse to keep seeing her and talking to her while she cleaned out her car. A shitty blue Malibu, a valedictorian, and a salutatorian. Oh, and fresh-out-of-college boy trash. But it was love.
current mood: peaceful
current music: Nick Drake
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8 songs | sing it to me
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| Tuesday, June 17th, 2003
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11:41 pm - Never Light
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Do you think vegans breast-feed?
For six dollars you can get a decent amount of decent food at Minute Maid Park. There's something about baseball games. My sternum can rock at the bends of something that really doesn't matter too much in the long run in life. Oh, and thirty thousand people can go nuts when I sit back and mellow out. I think my nerves work harder when it comes to fear than to joy. They have a half-inning break where they turn on "Kiss-Cam," where couples at the ballpark get put up on the big screen so that the horny romantics that we are get to cheer them on to kiss. "Don't put me up there- I'm at the game with my sister!" Yeah, a date to the ballgame would be pretty wonderful. Evening on the town, night under the covers. Amongst other items.
Bush has kicked off his re-election campaign. The economy's sucking ass, but he's reeling in money like he's made some cure-all pill. A poll from who-knows-where shows that people would sooner elect Clinton than any democrat who can actually run for the office. Holy good gravy, are both major parties that full of losers? I did hear a good joke the other day- "we should re-elect Gore."
I realized today that a crazy guy with a gun assassinated JFK (er, barring no government conspiracy...), and, forty years of technology later, the entire US Army and government can't assassinate Saddam. They have to choose to invade the country.
Sudden downpours are amazing. When clear rain makes the air so thick with rain that you can't see...
Talking about the weather again. Gosh fucking damn.
current mood: stuck
current music: Strong Bad Techno Theme
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7 songs | sing it to me
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| Monday, June 16th, 2003
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7:07 pm - Riptide
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We never finish growing up. Then again, we DO have adults designing the Toys 'R' Us store. Even the CEO of a toy company stares in the mirror now and then and has to wonder how he could let himself be who he is. Paperwork, staples, board meetings, stock, business. You're designing entertainment for fucking toddlers.
I sat by a baby at lunch today. She kept playing peek-a-boo with me and tossing her carrots around. I think my favorite thing about babies is how they can look so spaced out, but when you look at them and they look at you, they smile and blush. I probably haven't smiled and blushed from the way someone looked at me since I was three.
Game shows. Gosh. "Some people will take the trip to France, but most will take the washer-dryer pair." How true. I want to throw cards off the Space Needle and somehow change a thousand people's lives for the better. Trotting very quiet steps by the boulevard, a man in jeans bears language trying to remind motorists that there only is this moment. Cardboard signs with pleas that never fade when rained on. "This was the wall of the house I slept in last night, give me a fucking brake." Play on words. Or bad spelling. Who knows. I certainly don't. Twice I've sat down with a homeless person on the streets and started a conversation. Those were pleasant, mostly about the weather. People who have nothing to talk about tend to talk about the weather. Everyone's a person.
The six-foot-four frame I walk around in doesn't seem intimidating. Broad, but soft, couldn't mangle a flower with golf shoes.
Flash floods are an amazing thing to watch. Had some today. Oh, shit, talking about the weather.
current mood: content
current music: Comptine d'Un Autre Ete
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3 songs | sing it to me
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| Sunday, June 15th, 2003
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1:59 am - The Buds of the Tongue
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Endless self-administered mind-screwing. Like the fading part of a long song, over and over again, plucking at some set of neurons in my head. I find myself asking intimate questions and forcing myself to feel worse, to know about the joy the few I talk to have found. What's the point of making lonliness feel any worse? I guess that makes my day pretty pointless.
Going to Crosy tomorrow to swim and smell the nostalgic smell of the interior of my aunt's house. Father's Day thing. I miss my father. Haven't seen him in a week or so. I feel so close to him, and I don't know why. I don't feel close at all to anyone else in the family, not even my sister in Austin, the sister that I actually thought I had stuff in common with. Instead, she's popular and wild and married and I'm... well, the complete opposite. It's strange, because there was a point once where I decided that people inevitably take on a trait or two from people they live with long enough. Meh.
Strange luck is that my summer trip happened right before a trio of summer trips by people around here I actually talk to. That's bad strange luck.
The soft hum, skat, whatever of this voice in the song I'm listening to is so hypnotic. Every now and then songs make me feel like I'm in the music video for them and that the world is as beautiful as it looks when arranged on streaming video where the colors are all off but still look natural.
current mood: nauseated
current music: the conclusion of the main musical sentence in Oscar (Tosca)
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3 songs | sing it to me
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| Saturday, June 14th, 2003
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4:02 pm - Voicemail
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I think I'm in the midst of some emotional breakdown. Maybe it's the yet-to-be-balanced chemicals in my body, maybe I'm seeing things in some insane fashion, maybe I'm finally seeing things as they really are.
I did go to Austin, a decent drive other than the pits of hell known as Houston area traffic. I was planning on dragging crates of crap from my sister's house to storage, but she and her husband have been doing... nothing. Each other, probably. They wake up around one in the afternoon nowadays. I drove them around town to bars, they got drunk and high with friends. It was depressing from the standpoint of being sober in a room full of party-crazy people twice my age.
Home now, where something crashed down, lashed out, I don't know. The only entertaining thing I find is listening to the second CD of Dehli9 by Tosca, which is predominantly cold, soft piano vibes.
Adding the tenor saxophone, finally. I wonder when I'll be able to afford one. Until then, the college has given me one to screw around with. Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, and Tenor Saxophone. I wonder, in the long run, if those will really get me close to a life I want to live. Not to be taken cynically, just wondering. Somehow, somewhere, I'm going to wind up liking something enough to walk into the lifestyle brought with it.
current mood: depressed
current music: Dehli9
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3 songs | sing it to me
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| Sunday, June 8th, 2003
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11:33 am - Fine
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When enough sand and wind mixes with my hair, my sunglasses get caught in the mess. When enough hours have transpired, my muscles tie themselves in knots like a prank I would've pulled on someone's shoes, provided I was seven years old and an asshole. One out of two ain't bad?
Ten feet of sand fell over, but I didn't feel so bad. It was fun counting the cracks in the side of the cooling tower before the meltdown. A girl with red hair found it hard to believe that I didn't like the movie Spider-Man. That was a good day.
Two weeks removed from a blue down and a tassel and- here I am!- in front of a computer, two days from driving to Austin only to move to Mexico. Juxtapose the two places and look at the rent for apartments. Yikes. Heaven in San Miguel? I'm looking into apartments in Chicago. I want winter, even if over a hundred days a year of it.
current mood: sore...ing.
current music: The Cure
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1 song | sing it to me
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| Saturday, June 7th, 2003
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10:00 pm - Bowing
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Certain nation bows to the young.
Nothing's wicked, everything's fun!
Because of Malynne- the goddess of LJ!
current mood: crackling
current music: Official Malynne Worship Song
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2 songs | sing it to me
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