make friends with your feelings

the holy hour[s]

2012-02-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

Wayne Memmer of Vacation put together another tasty tribute compilation through Universal Electricity, THE HOLY HOUR, a tribute to the Cure. He was kind enough to include my cover of 'A Night Like This,' which you can listen to below.

The whole compilation can be listened to here and//or downloaded here for free.

You can also hear other things that I make on bandcamp and soundcloud. There will undoubtedly be more to come, as I'm recording a new album now, and as sad love songs are sometimes the only way to make sense of winter months.

Okay that's it.

I hope your windshields and hearts are all frost-free.

SUNDAY TAROT // free shit edition

2012-01-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, and you've constructed all sorts of intricate interior channels through which to protect yourself against personal failures and (even worse) minor* triumphs, you spend a considerable amount of time chalking up the more significant events // epiphanies // shortcomings of your life to external processes, astrological patterns, and other standard-grade bullshit. This can take many forms, all of which ultimately boil down to the relinquishing of control and accountability for your actions to metaterrestrial patterns like weather, moons, God?, or your period. A pretty handy habit! especially if your life is prone to disaster and sadness.

Since I'm pretty deeply invested as of late in Universal Semiotics™ I essentially exist in a constant state of palms open, eyes peeled, and transference engaged; and luckily for all of us, this edition of SUNDAY TAROT is soaked with meaning, inspired quite literally by a cardboard box of 'FREE' VHS tapes my neighbor put on his front steps. I think you will join me in concluding that this collection of garbage (listed completely below) couldn't possibly be anything other than a direct message to yours truly, because as we will presently unpack, there is always plenty of meaning amongst the piles of stained, unwanted, culturally obsolete shit.

ALIEN TRILOGY BOX SET (INCLUDING BOX)
As you may well be aware, most free sidewalk shit is quite literally not worth taking home, considering taking home, or even touching. So finding a considerately maintained package of three arguably totally-fucking-badass movies is already a good sign. However, it must be said that the films were arranged in the box 'out of order' from left to right -- this could be symbolic of the true chaotic nature of the universe, the inherent danger in simplifying multi-faceted things with dualistic characteristics, or the gorgeous imperfection of human beings. Also, when we consider that the box set -- comprised of Ridley Scott's Alien, James Cameron's Aliens, and David Fincher's Alien 3 -- is an outstanding example of artistic collaboration, creative variation on a single unified theme, and ultimately an attempt to analyze a culturally significant fascination by incorporating and respecting differing, high-grossing points-of-view, we can conclude that we are working with multiple symbolic layers with respect to this meaning-laden yet discarded item.

Extracted personal reading: The Universe clearly wants to reward you in some form or another; it isn't every day that you happen upon such a blockbusting treasure, out-of-date format or no. Receive your gifts with an open heart and mind, knowing that everything carries its own set of flaws and limitations (after all, you don't even know if this is a solid copy or if the tracking is gonna be all fucked up, remember that?). Also, re-connect with the idea of artistic collaboration amongst your friends and lovers. Also also, maybe examine why you felt an undeniable need to re-arrange the VHS titles 'in order' -- perfect doesn't exist, idiot, are you a human being or what?

BLADE
If you haven't seen this movie, I'll spare you being all "OMG WTFFFF" because if you weren't kinda into it when you were 12 then you missed your window and it doesn't even matter anymore so forget it. Wesley Snipes is a vampire killer or something with a leather duster and Steven Dorff is involved and so is techno music in a serious way. Point being: sometimes the astral-etherians send you reminders of your past so you can gauge your personal growth and truly accept your history as a vital piece of yourself and your unique path. When I saw this I was reminded of the borderline-white-trash childhood my brother and I shared, and was forced to acknowledge the fact that deep down, and non-ironically, I think this movie is pretty fucking sweet. And in the face of any personal tragedies or temporary karmic comas, being reminded of how there are other humans in the world who know how you spent money renting this video and then watched it while shit-faced on Surge and candy bars and then kinda wanted to learn how to do cool ninja tricks because of it and who still love you anyway, well, it's just about the most beautiful reminder of trans-human interconnectivity and training your heart to be an unconditional organ of acceptance there is.

Extracted personal reading: Complete and compassionate acceptance of your own spotty past is essential to human evolution, emotional health and personal development & enlightenment, plus it makes you a more interesting person! Existential optimism will allow you to cast a more positive light on your experiences, even if they are mistakes, and to extract lessons from events that could otherwise be considered complete failures. Be gracious in love and energy to the siblings and family members who helped raise you despite the 90s being a never-ending media garbage dump of Bad Decisions You Got Caught Up In (excluding Tommy Boy and Billy Madison). Above all, as you accept your own imperfections, work to cultivate your ability to forgive others for their mistakes as well, i.e., forgiving Wesley Snipes for participating in something that he must consider to be sort of a stain upon his career, even though he did make leather dusters cool before The Matrix even came out.

BLADE II
Totally different story. I never saw it because I kinda have this thing against sequels? And also way back in 2002 I sort of knew that vampires were over. However, there was something mystifying about the inclusion of the (much less popular) sequel in the free box as well -- maybe symbolic of the need for acknowledgement or pride in the entirety of your existence // creative output (or, in this case, film franchise) despite negative reviews. I left this in the box for someone else, which is in itself a me-created fortune about free will, a refusal to acquiesce to metaphysical victimhood, and the need to comb through and select inputs to your life like you select avocados at the grocery store (CAREFULLY).

Extracted personal reading: You have the power to pick and choose the people, events, and objects with which to populate your existential landscape, so choose well. You don't have to, and really shouldn't, shoulder the burden of keeping Blade II in your video collection if you aren't that psyched about it in the first place (neither was Stephen Dorff, apparently). However, be careful to curb your judgement regarding things you know nothing about: like maybe the sequel is super rad, plus I'm pretty sure that's how wars and stuff get started.

THE EYES OF THE DRAGON by Stephen King (Hardcover novel)
Forget all that shit I just said about judgment and acceptance. Sometimes the Universe puts garbage in your way, just to test you. Sure, maybe you could take the high road here and give it a shot, but you should also be wary of mass market bullshit that will probably make you dumber in the process of its consumption. Sometimes social alienation feels yucky, but sometimes it's to your benefit that you can't relate to anyone w/r/t their personal relationship with (you assume) not-so-great paperback novels.

Extracted personal reading: It's lonely at the top.

WILLOW
Here we go. Seeing this as an offering in the upturned palm of the universal currents is a true sign that you are, in fact, currently and totally scoring. If you've seen the film (starring a phenomenally babely late-80s Val Kilmer and a bunch of lil' p30ple) you know that it has the very and truly magical qualities of something like Labyrinth, because in contemporary Hollywood it would absolutely never get made and also because after a certain age it's impossible to watch it without thinking, "seriously, what the fuck is this?" It's very presence in a cardboard box, just half a block away from where you sometimes sleep, is like a compendium of all the nostalgic self-consciousness that afore-said vampire hunting movies tend to induce, plus an extra gift of knowing that the astrological forces of this plane sometimes just want to make you plainly and blissfully happy. But have you watched it past the age of 14? Because if you haven't, and you retain memories of it being totally awesome from your childhood, consider just leaving it in its untouched time capsule of adolescent magic ('cause, like Labyrinth, it's better in theory than practice).

Extracted personal reading: Learning to recognize incredible opportunities is almost as crucial as acting on them; be willing and able to act quickly when offered something mindblowing (like Willow on VHS), and keep yourself continuously available to receiving and accepting these gifts. The Universe is completely enraptured with your existence and current life path, otherwise you never would have received such a blessing. However, it's up to you whether or not to re-watch the film or to simply keep it on your shelf for nostalgic purposes. Either way, you learn crucial lessons about the importance of era-specific emotion and memory, and what happens when you disrupt or reconsider these emotions. Still, this is the best kind of cairn, especially because you can conceivably masturbate to it [The Universe thinks masturbation is totally acceptable].

THE GRADUATE (NO BOX)
Why, I could ask, was this VHS tape, arguably the most artistic or 'film'-y of anything else found in the FREE box, included in a collection that would otherwise be pretty solidly labeled as pertaining to a mainstream action // sci-fi esthetic? Why was it the only item to be visibly stained, and incomplete in its lack of jacket? Why, also, upon a second inspection of the FREE box this morning, was it the only item remaining, occupying a lonely corner space in the cardboard porch box, waiting for someone to take it home and enjoy it? Is this a recognition of a commonly-held belief that most people in Eureka are tasteless pieces of shit that wouldn't recognize art unless it was something you could smoke in a glass pipe? Is it a meditation on the relationship between media and audience? Is it destiny that it should remain, pathetic and forlorn, until I should personally liberate it and take it home and watch it and take from it a very specific and personalized meaning as to the nature of my current and unique existence and life path and emotional state? The answers are, undeniably, yes and no.

Extracted personal reading: You probably need to get the fuck out of this shit-hole, because no one here cares about cinema or art or anything really, besides weed. However, the Universe understands your current plight, which is not at all unlike Dustin Hoffman's; so figure it out in whichever way you can, which is likely to be messy, but that's okay. Sometimes things happen that offer you no answers but only an obscene amount of questions, many of which can never be answered. Let these questions inspire you to growth and imagination, but do not let them consume you, and do not take the not-knowing seriously. Consider the signs carefully, but with a light heart. After all, you really don't know shit. Also, you should really consider buying a VHS player. That copy of BLADE ain't gonna watch itself.

*see?

GEMS & DIVINATIONS at mud luscious online

2011-12-31T10:51:00.000-08:00

J.A. Tyler's amazing baby, Mud Luscious Press, has graciously published my work in Issue #18 of their online magazine.

Palmed hands at heart, in concentrated laser form, to every beautiful person at MLP.

You can read "Raw Amethyst, Rose Quartz, Bismuth" and check out other lovely prose-treasures here.

They are meditations on love, travel, the silt of heart and language. I don't know what they are.

Allen Ginsberg, sobbing, says everything is holy.

Scraping the surfaces of big things with the almost-right words.

DIG

2011-12-31T10:24:00.000-08:00

This morning the sun makes glitter out of everything that's been left out to freeze overnight.

I microwave yesterday's coffee and sit on the cold porch and watch my breath bloom out as proof.

This day is something constructed to make me excavate memories.

It's like going through a wet garbage pile.

Or maybe, my lungs will fit my chest again,

Maybe everyone is doing the best they can.

GIFTS

2011-12-23T19:12:00.000-08:00

+ Trying to locate yourself in the month of December is like putting a stethoscope up against a moving freight train to find out if anyone inside is still alive.

+ I haven't learned anything new in a long time, and most everything just reinforces old beliefs, like:

+ Everything seems dumber than it should be, and:

+ Someone has to be holding back truly great technological innovation (economically accessible laser guns, etc)

+ I got really stoned and thought about guns and shooting guns and freaked out. If a dude shot someone in my defense though -- BONER.

+ Being home is hard because my parents still believe in things like Social Security, and anyone on TV telling you anything solely for your own benefit. They believe these things outloud.

+ I don't have enough energy to tell old people how crazy their beliefs are anymore.

+ Is it possible to maintain steady love velocity? (V = ma)

+DUH.

+ Someone has also got to be holding back huge department stores from replacing ~75% of their employees with self-check-out kiosks and robots.

+ I need to do a better job pre-gaming for existence.

+ Life is never an actual struggle unless you don't realize that the struggle is the only fun part of life.

+ I miss basketball.

+ I miss drug use, or figuring things out, or people with different thought patterns, I dunno.

+ There have to be more options beyond fear and love.

+ I don't know if I know anything for sure, but I'm not sure, I'm just loud.

THE DAY THE INTERNET DIED

2011-10-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

For the past two months I've been living and working in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees and stars and quiet, with no internet connection and rarely any cell reception (sorry, (former?) friends). My man and I have our own cabin we go back to every night to do sun salutations and read before falling asleep to the sound of a diesel generator outside. It's admittedly extreme-dreamy status, and despite the exhausting tendency of the dormant, under-used, and non-stimulated mind to wear footpaths into every dark corner of your psyche (seriously, STOP MAKING ME CONSIDER MY PERSONAL SHORTCOMINGS), the work and life out in the mountains is a welcome respite from the gigantic pitch-black prostitution marketing feel-bad corporate pyramid scheme that Los Angeles can sometimes be (no offense).

However, I do, at times, find myself really missing the internet. Not because of Facebook (two years of sobriety yaaalllzzz), or tumblr (seriously, can we abolish all 15-year-old humans?), or all the super 'clever' graphic designers that constantly use their powers for 'meh' by preemptively designing Mad Men promotional posters or something, but because I think of it as a source of collective experience and knowledge, and more basically a link to the outside world --- for example, I only read about the Occupy Wall Street protests after all major media outlets had made up their minds about it being stupid, pointless, and justifiably punishable by law. For two months I looked forward to poring over everything in my Reader and, goddess help me, reading something interesting about our increasingly zany world. But when I finally re-connected with the webz at long last, you know what I found out? We're all still talking about, looking at, and contributing to the same boring-ass heap of cultural lameness, and I think everybody should just stop it right now. In short: The Internet Is Over. For why?

CONTINUED DISCUSSION OF " "HIPSTERS" "

It's been analyzed, re-analyzed, and re-re-analyzed by everyone from your best friend with an intentional haircut to your dumb mom, and every time I hear someone's theory on the demographic I feel like, "wait, who are you talking about?"A whole bunch of idiots have built popular single-topic blogs around them, one huge idiot has built a clothing empire perpetuating their myth, and in general most people seem to have something negative to say about their existence, despite the fact that the definition of a 'hipster' is loose at best. And after the whole Adbusters business, I felt like we could finally close that whole boring book. But apparently, nothing shrieks "buzzworthy" (read: Mainstream-appealing) like some infographic touting them as silly-looking consumer whores. Even Radiohead's performance on The Colbert Report was tainted by a 3-year-late cultural critique of the Hipster as sickly, sardonic, and TCFS. WHO FUCKING CARES. We live in a police state and your grandchildren will be born into indentured servitude; let's talk about something else.

BACON

I'm not denying that bacon isn't totally yums, but I am saying that this shit is over-er than Red Velvet cupcakes and The xx COMBINED. I'm not sure who even decided that this was like a geeky internet thing in the first place, but I'm pretty sure it should have been eliminated from internet meme-ry after that Denny's Baconalia!™fiasco (and.. what?) and the creation of the 235346345134566th bacon-themed foodtruck in the contiguous United States. We all eat it and love it and we'll all die from heart attacks caused by it so just stop making wacky appetizers with it so you can be on Geekologie, plz. It's done. Although making stove-top popcorn in bacon grease instead of oil is srsly so delicious you guys OK THAT'S IT IT'S OVER.

ANGRY BIRDS

Just.. never.

STAR WARS

I get the feeling that Star Wars is the glue holding the internet together in more ways than one -- mainly, that to see the movies (the ORIGINALS, lames, I have no interest in NatPo + shitty computer graphics, that was just a bad call) is to love and//or appreciate them, so I guess it's cool that we can all come together to geek out in a positive manner. Additionally though, I can't spend fifteen minutes dickin' around on the nets without running into some SW-themed design project // object to purchase // comic // memorabilia // cake decoration. It's cool I guess, but at a certain point I have to resent people still feeding this fire, if only because I'm bored of looking at all of it, but also because I feel like the easiest way for a design firm to get 'exposure' involves putting some vintage font over a re-imagined war-era Boba Fett drawing. Boring. Plus nothing will ever surpass the greatness of Harrison Ford in his 30s anyway.

FACEBOOK PRIVACY RANTS

I actually like seeing more and more attention given to rumors about who owns what information and where it's being sent to and the generation of stress regarding all those pictures you (shouldn't have) posted and how Mark Zuckerberg owns them and maybe it's a CIA database and blah blah blah. CAUSE IT'S ALL TRUE. What sucks about them is that everybody who whines about how scary and terrible Facebook is still has one. Quitting that shit is like dropping fifteen pounds of pure time-wasting and bad awkward feelings, plus then you can read blog posts about how icky the new format updates are and think, "Holy shit, I am superior to everyone else on the planet."

CELEBRITY GOSSIP

I don't want to live on this planet anymore // we've become our bored, exhausted parents. This is what the chewing gum area of the grocery store is for, and why would you fuck with 2,000 years of tradition? On the flip side though, unwarranted attention is the only thing keeping Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashian family alive at this point, so I guess vote with your dollars.

IPHONE ANYTHING, EVER

I have a MacBook and I like it. It's a computer and it does computer-y things and maybe there's subconsciously some sort of upper-class stigmatic pride attached to it in my brainhole but I don't really think so (yeah right). Most things about Apple are weird, like the rabid frenzy that attends their product unveilings, or how they made it popular for consumers to go into debt over personal electronics they can't actually afford. The popularity of iPhones blows my mind because I feel like paying $120+/month to have Yelp and Twitter in my pocket seems kinda ridiculous. And why the presumption that I have one via updates on apps, accessories, and Angry Birds? (see above). And why do we have to perpetuate an exclusive environment that makes buying an iPhone a rite of passage // social necessity // existential justification // invitation to participate in the discussion? And why do people need a really expensive glorified GameBoy in their purse all the time? And seriously, over 200 million pounds of e-waste every year, America? Just download a bacon app or whatever and stop clogging my internet sites with how the release of the 4S instead of the 5 personally affected and//or surprised you.

IPAD ANYTHING, EVER

Dumb.

SOMETHING ARTSY SPONSORED BY COCA-COLA // CONOCOPHILLIPS // THE US ARMY

Who let them in here?!?!?

ADVERTISEMENTS, ESP TAILORED TO MY DEMOGRAPHIC (?)

I remember giggling with my friends about the Google ads that popped up in the sidebar each time we sent each other e-correspondence back in the day -- like, it was a super good email if I was being pitched to by sites for tantric philosophy, at-home beer-making, and suicide prevention. Now, of course, Google has stockpiled enough personal info of mine to keep it simple and tell me where I can meditate // booze. But I keep feeling like as I round the corner on the second half of my twenties, I'm running into all this propaganda about having babies and finding foreclosure deals and just generally buying a bunch of shit that will somehow represent my still-totally-individual but 'maturing' self. This can be seen most obviously as the insertion of pseudo-indie, pseudo-hippie types into car and insurance and McDonald's commercials. Also there is a special circle in non-Hell designated for people who make you watch 30-second commercials before a 4-minute music video.

CHARLIE SHEEN

Just kidding! Nobody cares about that guy anymore.

BFF SERIES, vol. 1

2011-07-31T17:28:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of my friend Kelly, taken in Detroit last fall, about 48 hours after she was involved in an alcohol-related bike accident. Our birthdays are 15 days apart and we will soon have matching constellation tattoos. Once, she let me sleep on her couch for like two months and we ate avocado sandwiches and smoked weed and painted pictures of dinosaurs with watercolors. She was the manager of my high school folk "band" and my family still refers to her as 'that really drunk girl' they met at the river one time. She is one of the most gorgeous humans I know, and now that she lives in Mexico City I miss her terribly like alllll the time. As such, I made her a mix to show the depth of my love, and decided to start a BFF MIXTAPE SERIES for everyone else to enjoy too [even though you could never love her as much as I do, ever].

Track listing below, and download the whole thing for free here.

1. Los Angeles - Gene Clark
2. Weeds - The New Mary Jane
3. Glitter - No Age
4. Harvest Moon - Teen Daze
5. Hello Sunshine - Damien Jurado & Richard Swift
6. Crushin' (feat. Cherub) - Police Academy 6
7. Magic vs. The Machine - The Next Door Neighbors
8. Maple Leaves - Jens Lekman
9. Horses - High Highs
10. I Wanna Be Yr Boyfriend - Woven Bones
11. Blackberry Song - Kurt Vile
12. Sunlight - Swimsuit
13. Rory Rides Me Raw (Live on KEXP) - The Vaselines
14. Wires - The Moles
15. Somehow To Keep it Going - Cotton Jones
16. He Would Have Laughed - Deerhunter

GOOD JOB EXISTING! Stay tuned for other digital collections celebrating ballin' humans who for some reason like to hang out with me.

<3

LA HAIKU

2011-07-27T19:09:00.001-07:00

a movie, and then

something else [better], and then

i can move back home.

i want to give up,

but then i think of my dog

and my car payment.

i'm just trying to

find work, stay busy, network,

figure some things out.

someone on craigslist

is gonna do my website

for free! [an "intern"]

it's just amazing,

the parallels between

acting and pilates.

i don't recycle.

there are too many homeless

people who need jobs.

my band will open

for any band, any night

(we play rock and roll)

i can't even stand

coke anymore, but it's a

great networking tool

floating on a sea

of money in my big-ass

corporate-sponsored boat

please just stop talking

about how hard you're working

on your web series

without your twitter

you are nothing. without your

facebook, you are free.

saturday, los angeles california

2011-07-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

the woman on the second floor called down

about a sink leak, and something else entirely.

that number five was keeping her up, she said,

the increased need for solitude as one ages.

at the kitchen table i ate grapes and read on.

the danger, she was able to determine,

is in your frequent disappointment,

your knowledge of the divine interior.

i followed the stained carpet back home.

everything was asleep.

i kept on waiting.

SPIRIT//MATERIAL

2011-06-08T16:55:00.000-07:00

national holidays are for lovers [and ass-shakin]

2011-05-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

Happy Memorial Day Lovelies! Although I think most of us will only recognize this day as an extra day to drink beer during the daytime, I guess it's worth remembering that regardless of what or why or where the fight is, many people still have to fight it. Specifically, Mercury's retrograde and the transition of springtime have really done a number on the psyches of several close bros and broads. So even if it's a fight to maintain your individual wilderness, your long-distance friendships, your creative fertility, or, you know, the ability to drink beer during the daytime, we could all stand to remember that the fight is continuous and difficult and well worth it. And who better to remind us of the Supreme Divinity and Ballin'-ness of Our Selves than maybe the most kickass pop-siren of our time?

[Fuck you. I know it's a tenuous connection but dammit, you should really watch these vids.]

Here we go. This is a great place to start. Not only does this shit actually suggest that inside every black-and-white-colored professional-type lady there's a bubbly neon vixen just screaming to get out, but MYGOD, that bubbly neon vixen is almost inspirationally hot. Even though her lyrical dissertation is something kinda like "I Kinda Wish I Had A Dude," she somehow manages to keep a smile on her face and an array of sweet-ass accessories all over her bod. Other inspiring things about this video include, but are not limited to: spandex jumpsuits, caribbean-deco earrings, leopard-print hair scarves, and confetti.

This song was #1 on the charts on the day I was born, NO BIG DEAL. [Spoiler alert: you'll never know, Whit, you'll never really know]. Now that you're riding the high of how fucking awesome this woman is, let's take a moment to not only appreciate her amazing Minnie-Mouse hair bow, but the high-concept radness of this video in general. Don't you kinda miss the days when divas could bounce their hair around a weird circus-y funhouse with a bunch of theatre people performing their little dancing hearts out all over the damn place and it would be considered a mainstream masterpiece? And holy shit, that bride//groom suit? Are we commenting on the ambiguity of gender & relationships, Whitney Houston? Or were the producers of this thing just as coked out as everybody else in 1986?

Let's bring it down a notch, because high-octane candy-colored pop gems can only take you so far in life. Human beans are emotional lil' creatures, that's for sure, and it's okay to embrace your feelings, especially if those feelings are directed toward Kevin Costner and if said display of feelings can and will pay your bar tab for the rest of your fucking life. That being said, listen to the words! :'(! Apparently most critics pee their pants over the fact that she has a 45-second solo vocal intro, which is whatevs. All I know is, if this doesn't elicit a thought of a potential shedding of a tiny tear from you, you're probably also the type of person who pokes small animals with sticks.

Yeah, fuck off, you haters. IT'S FRIGGING MEMORIAL DAY. After performing this at Super Bowl XXV in 1991 (while America was in the middle of the Gulf War), it became so ridiculously popular that the single reached the Top 20 on the charts, and girlfriend donated all the proceeds to the Red Cross. If you're not into national-pride-related nostalgia, however, you can settle for simply a deep appreciation of her jumpsuit.

And although her personal life kinda fell into turmoil down the line, I think it makes it even more bittersweet and bodacious to watch her completely own America in her day. So savor your youth, my sweeties, remember the neon-colored vixen inside each and every one of you, and just dance it out. Dance. It. Out.

i feel like this too, sometimes

2011-05-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

[mY cAt RuLeZ]

may.

2011-05-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

Like when the sun bottoms out over the valley and the air turns cold, drops thirty degrees within the span of an hour, no water or heaviness to the sky. I remember that I live in the desert, and it makes me feel better about being here somehow. I and the succulents, storing water and hunkering down. The cacti spin themselves spines and shells, grow where they can, bloom when they have anything else left to give.

tuesday, los angeles california

2011-04-19T23:14:00.000-07:00

I. [clock-in]

The McCafé helicopter

is being broadcast in blips.

It sings to us.

We warm our hands

upon it.

II.

Good Morning! This is KTLA,

[and I am implicated somehow]

III.

There's a truck and it's ours,

wrapped in an advertisement

for bottled water, and here

at our morning show slot

we are not saved.

IV.

We're gonna need

an iTouch, an iPad

or two.

[This ain't my first time

in LA]

There are several pictures of actual people pretending to be different people in the water bottle advertisement that I drive around the city. They are mostly twenty-somethings, just like me. There is one man who is older, though, and kind of grizzled. He has a blue handkerchief tied around his wrist, and I think about Crips v. Bloods, 'Democrats' v. 'Republicans,' Biggie v. Tupac. Primary colors. The graying older man looks friendly to me. He's clean-shaven. He seems vaguely homosexual in a San Francisco-kind of way. Like an emotionally stable motorcyclist.

VI.

Kevin Nealon holds the hand

of his young son or grandson

And also a cup of coffee.

His forehead is wrinkled a little,

like: who is this girl on the steps.

Has 'security' 'cleared this.'

His young son or grandson

doesn't yet know

he is Kevin Nealon.

VII.

Thought: Maybe Starbucks exists

for this demographic alone --

[I need something

warm and sugary

to cling to]

VIII.

Celebrities

are fuckin

stupid.

IX.

"TV PERSONALITY"

Say something about Twitter.

Quickly.

ROLLING.

XI.

I think: every mile I drive is furthering this cause.

I think: I am a body-shaped shovel, carrying coal to the furnace.

I think: the shame we bear, to afford our coffee and beer and magazines.

Maybe I'm being melodramatic.

Nobody else seems to mind.

XII.

Let's just get through one meal

without discussing

the Kardashians.

XIII.

At the Coca-Cola bottling HQ downtown our freebies are being doled out in the parking lot. I am sandwiched between a concrete wall and a gigantic plaster Coke bottle, being eyed by a scatter of bored security guards across the street. They smooch me, sixty feet away. I wonder how many sodas they get, say, if they wanted to take a break.

The reps are complaining that people are just taking the shirts because they're free [...not the demographic that's gonna buy our water at the grocery store...]. On the phone I am talking Hideous Men and the fate of humankind with my heart, 2000 miles away. Dimitri is around the corner holding the boom, waiting to tell me more about how hard it is to make it in this city, especially being just another good-looking Russian-born actor-slash-bassist.

The security guards palm fives with a couple newcomers in street clothes. I can hear their handshakes, and the laughs they give one another, even over the collective lament of the marketing team. Buscamos trabajo. Those in uniform gesture past me, toward a closed door.

XIX.

[the vision is attended to]

XX. [clock-out]

Single-serving plastic bottles,

half-finished,

constellate the ground.

I am falling asleep

on the bus ride home.

Understand me.

What that takes.

grown ocean, growing, oceans

2011-03-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

Fleet Foxes - Grown Ocean from Fleet Foxes on Vimeo.

To most people I feel like Fleet Foxes have become a bit lost and irrelevant what with the current surge of noisy experimental tape music that most 19-year-olds are peddling these days, but I still feel grateful that Robin Pecknold et al managed to make folky sincerity cool again, and will always get excited when FF throw down some new media. This is a beautiful vid and I can't wait for the album.

Related: in my early 20's, metaphorically, I was destitute and had wheels.

This morning I sold my schoolbus to a beautiful hippie family from Ojai who I'm pretty sure I've met before.

Not sure how to feel. Meditating on freedoms, the length of life, my proximity to the Pacific Ocean.

Most dreams are kinda forever, dampened only temporarily with the loss of their physical manifestation // the signing of official documents for the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I AM BECOMING AN ALL-AROUND ASSHOLE

2011-03-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

Driving a cupcake truck around LA is a pretty solid way to 'make ends meet' (err, keep the Bulleit stocked) for many reasons. Chiefly and most importantly, though: I can wear all the douchey muscle tees I want, I have complete control of the stereo, and constantly guzzling espresso is in the Top 2 of my on-the-job managerial duties. Plus, being strong-armed into navigating the city's shitstorm of freeways has gotten me comfortable with driving in a furious and entitled manner, just like everyone else here! And occasionally I'm reminded that the job constantly takes me to new and exciting places, to meet lovely and interesting people, and that I'm all the better for it.

Yesterday -- a day from which I'm still suffering an unrelenting hangover, via Cheesy Tots and multiple buckets of caffeine -- was no exception. I drove out to Pasadena to sling 'cakes with some other food trucks at some 'Walk for _____' event that I assumed would be benefiting a civilized organization//society. As it turns out, 'Walk for LIFE' no longer means that any walking will be done to benefit worldkind, or disease prevention, or existential fulfillment. It just means that in Pasadena, there are a whole lot of people who think your reproductive rights are undeserved, and they've got the picket signs to prove it.

Imagine my horror at watching the scene unfold before me as I load bakery trays full of cookies that will undoubtedly be consumed by people who think I am an asshole! Knowing that as I brew ten gajillion vats of medium roast on a drizzly day in Southern California, that the conservative hordes will be lining up by the dozens to get a hot drink and treat me like shit! Well, what actually transpired was nothing short of, yes, the horrible amalgamation of all previous concerns, but being on the other side of it now, let's just be adults about this shall we? Putting all my personal politico-moral beliefs to one side (of course), I've compiled a completely unbiased and not-mean report based on some incredibly fascinating observations and general 'notable shit' about the consumption patterns of pro-lifers I gleaned from this experience, which was worth it all in the end, which has undoubtedly made me stronger in character, which I wouldn't trade for the world, etc etc etc. Therefore, in no particular order: a list of the top-selling items of the day.

1. HOT CHOCOLATE. Wow! As a barista I can assure you, there's NOTHING I'd like more than to continuously pump out the weakest-ass drink imaginable, especially the part where I take all that extra time to stir the chocolate syrup into the hot milk so I don't see your ass back here in five minutes complaining that all the chocolate is on the bottom of the cup. For some reason (obvious), I jump to very startling and scathing conclusions about people who order hot chocolate, mostly because I feel like they could have stayed home with their Snuggies and hospital dramas and left me out of it. And what is it with hot chocolates that make people order them 7 at a time? With two that are not so hot, and three with non-fat milk? It's weird that this was by far the most popular drink of the day, but then again it's the exact beverage equivalent of the average person in that demographic -- FUCKING LAME.

2. CARAMEL MACCHIATO (...?): Here's the thing. Starbucks pulled this really huge dick-move (class action lawsuit pending by yours truly) where they took a regular ol' caramel latte and started calling it something that is traditionally served in a 3oz. brownware cup. Now, when people order a macchiato, I have to have a >30 second conversation with them to ascertain what it is they actually want to dump down their Planned-Parenthood-defunding gullets. Usually it involves a whole lot of syrup, prolific usage of words like 'grande' (shudder), and a lot of me being genuinely unable to disguise the hatred I feel for them in my voice.

3. CUPCAKES!!!!!!!1111!!!!: Remember that whole Bush//Kerry fiasco in '04, when you were like so totally convinced that there was no way that doucher could be re-elected, and then he was, and you realized how out of touch with America's Wants And Desires you actually were? Exactly. So when I say the cupcake fad has peaked, what I really mean is that the best cafes in OAK//PDX//SEA have pioneered new territory (see: tarts), but that all the middle-aged Grey's Anatomy fanatics in the Los Angeles suburbs are just now wrapping their manicured tentacles around that shit. Red Velvet cupcakes are so tracked out I'm starting to ride rocks, yallz.

4. SUGAR-FREE SYRUPS: Interesting that you would be so against the 'murdering of fetuses' when you ingest cancerous toxins on a thrice-daily basis!

5. NON-FAT MILK: As you might have guessed, my hands-down favorite part of working in coffee shops is harshly judging customers based on the drinks they order. It makes the whole prostitution of customer service a little easier to swallow, and simply can't be helped most of the time. I like to have a little private giggle, for instance, when people order something and preface it with 'skinny,' especially when that something is a 'skinny caramel mocha with whipped cream.' No offense, but YOUR'E FAT. And the 100 calories you saved could be better skimped without the four brownies you just chowed. But again, who am I to judge? For those humans whose life views collide so violently with my own, I like to slip them full-fat and just hope cholesterol takes care of the rest.

OMG, whatevs, etc. [March Edition]

2011-03-24T12:43:00.000-07:00

Springtime is upon us, and throats and roots and belts are loosening themselves all around me in what sounds like a thunderous oncoming if you're listening for those sorts of things, which I am. Even if you don't have an immediate personal history of nearly 24 months of meta//physical wintertime blahhs (Humboldt County apparently being a Bermuda Triangle of general happiness), I think we can all hold hands around the campfire of generally agreeing that this is a good time of year to feel alive. And seeing as how I currently share space with an immodest army of some startlingly vacuous and yucky people, I will take the goodthings as they come, of which there are actually plenty (contrary to popular belief)(hint: they're buried under and amongst the freeways).

I moved to Los Angeles in a shortbus purchased with highly-illicit funds, so needless to say I hadn't planned on taking the area very seriously, beyond it being an ideal place to be warm in the wintertime and to be anonymous as a homeless person. And it was! December and January were largely spent enjoying 75-degree afternoons on the west side, with minimal interference from any law enforcement; we were one of hundreds, thousands of people who were living in vehicles in Los Angeles, and since Naet and I were both young and white and able-bodied and good-looking, we were given every benefit of every doubt. We showered at an unmanned gym bathroom in our neighborhood and lazed about the city until we finally got sick of lazing about.

Which we did. Craigslist blessed us with a job where we worked together and were paid cash under the table. Our bosses were chill, didn't question the exact deets of our personal histories or where we laid our heads at night. Eventually a late-night 'what-the-hell' job application turned into an interview to manage an apartment building, which we sure-why-notted into a comped room in a totally sweet yuppie neighborhood. I started a yoga teacher training course and money came in and went out, mostly to restaurants and bars and cigarettes.

This is my point: Los Angeles is a microcosm of the Universe, in that everyone here is so fascinated with their own personal journey within it that it's relatively easy to slip through the cracks of any watchful gaze and exist completely unfettered. There is an enormous ocean of money here, generated by the omnipresent and Jurassically shitty entertainment industry (or The Industry, as everyone here refers to it), which permeates almost every aspect of life and feeds the vast majority of people in the city. I've found that people are so worried about Bigger Things (i.e., their production stake in Sony's newest shitty movie, or paying their exorbitant rent) that they don't give a shit about a couple of kids who just want enough cash to survive, and maybe go to a show every now and then.

I spent a lot of time bewildered that we could so easily set ourselves up in about six weeks of arriving, being reluctant to attach myself to anything that I'd spent the majority of my years railing against. But the fact remains that my existence could be likened to a heavily buttered slip-n'-slide on which I am a willful and awed passenger. And so, despite my previous hesitations, I am now welcoming springtime with a sangria and a pair of shorts (they wear those here), trying only to keep my eyes and heart open for what else is on its way.

And yes, scandalous celebrity sightings have been fastidiously documented and are OH SO FORTHCOMING! Come for the cellulite rumors, stay for the expanded theses on America's self-deprecation via its fame complex.

Hearts and shit.

monday, los angeles california

2011-03-21T19:04:00.000-07:00

please understand: it's been so long
since i could consider a handout
a compliment.

[but cannonball into my pool nonetheless]

that thinking, speaking, wanting
feeling? it's here to stay.

your arm around me in the dark,
which in the desert is darker
and colder.

[would feel _______________, but i don't know]

crunch.

2011-01-26T14:01:00.000-08:00

Barry Graham is a nice person. He is including 'August' in the 2011 DOGZPLOT Flash Fiction Anthology, about which I am humbled and excited. Lots of talented writers are featured and I'm happy to be wedged between them somewhere.

I started writing music reviews for Sick of the Radio, which means I get to use the word FUCK and be building a published online portfolio at the same time. Cool beans, man.

I've reached a breaking point in my relationship with Los Angeles maybe, as in it's still warm here, and plus I discovered where all the kids with dirty hair and neck tatts are hiding.

My yoga teacher says it's totally cool to flip people off if they are truly assholes.

Just tryna keep my bodily pathways of energy open for further self-realization and shit.

I hope your respective lives are fruit-bearing, pacific, orange-hued things.

LETS GET THIS OVER WITH

2011-01-05T20:19:00.000-08:00

+ Not that I believe in time, or human measurements of it, or 'newness' really, but the relief I feel at 2010 being over with could be likened to someone taking a soft-bristle toothbrush to the layer of residual bacon fat surrounding my heart and doing a pretty good job at it too

+ Cities are 360-degree projections of The Dream that people can hold onto in increasing numbers when the shit hits the fan, featuring the soundtrack of diesel trucks and other men and women talking loudly and beginning all their sentences with "I"

+ I's are towers to climb over in the mind, on paper too

+ I mean, things are awesome & fun & stuff, for sure

+ Being like the desert and holding onto nothing for very long, becoming the temperature around you as the night cools or the sun rises, growing a little, destroying a lot, keeping secret treasures a big secret

+ TRON is even more delicious than I hoped it would be (feat. Headband, Maker's Mark)

+ Sometimes it's more obvious to me that I live in a place where all I need to do is say something outloud until it becomes the thing itself, or I start living in a new place where I have to yell over a lot of other shit

+ The place you live is a 360-degree projection of where you think you're at in life, so I tend to notice things like espresso machines & old dresses & places where EBT is accepted

+ COOL HUH

+ On January 1st, 2011 the first thing I did was to follow a well-spoken Italian boy back to his housesitting-house so he could give us whiskey and show us his airstream and I thought something like, 2011 is being born into something comfortably surreal, and then through the window we heard those girls in the dresses say something about cocks in their mouths, so we took our booze away in a plastic cup and walked back home to be by ourselves

+ I will hold my own hand and I will be fulfilled then

+ I'm pretty sure there's some kind of homeless bro Turf War going down at the Santa Monica Public Library, which is understandable, since it's generally nice and warm in there, and there are only so many tables where you can play loud computer games and eat an old sandwich at the same time

+ Maybe being propagandized is affecting my ability to be patient

+ I must be the only white girl in the whole wide world without a smart phone :'(

+ There's nothing wrong with referring to other people as 'beings'

+ The Dream must be redefined, or remeasured, or revised, or reworked, or re-envisioned as something intrinsically beneficial, revisiting what benefits actually are (which I'm pretty sure have something to do with strong hugs, the amount of food being grown in your front yard)

+ I think people born in the wintertime are just gentle

+ 2011 is going to put brand new things into my brain & heart & body, maybe, but it might be too early to tell

LA KILLS

2010-12-29T22:56:00.000-08:00

While the details of my whereabouts and general life motives are still forthcoming, I just wanted to shout it to the blogosphere that I have washed up in Los Angeles without sustaining any major injuries (incl. head trauma//heartbreak) and you can consider me your liaison to the innerworkings of one of the grossest, most fucked-up beehives of human activity this tender planet has seen yet. I say this with all due respect, considering that wherever I happen to be is within walking distance of "like, the best fucking taco truck I've ever been to," and also that I spent Christmas Eve shuffling my sandal'd feet around the strand at Venice Beach in 70-degree weather, having to turn down more than one 14-year-old boy selling cheap weed on his BMX bike. All in all, I can never really complain, and there are definitely things here that could make me change my mind about how Southern California is one sprawling, gigantic shithole of development (see aforementioned availability of Mexican food and pot). But yeah, I guess without wanting to jump to conclusions, it's a pretty weird place. Hush now my darlings, while I tell you strange and wonderful tales.

1. LA is BIG. And not like that gosh-wow, kinda-magical, gasping sense of BIG you get when you go to New York City for the first time and stand on the sidewalks craning your neck upward and spinning around in circles watching all the big buildings shine and maybe waiting for them to turn into Transformers (fuck you, I grew up in Eureka). I mean BIG like sprawling, like it takes 30 minutes to drive 1/4 of the way across the city, like we climbed to the top of a big hill and saw that it was 360 degrees of concrete, that the horizon faded before the billboards did. Despite living next to the ocean again, that amazing geographical reference, I find myself being turned around, lost, and confused nearly all the time. Although that could also be attributed to the constant barrage of marketing images and billboards (srsly) and the invisible flow of radio waves through my sweet spongy brain (prtty sure). Which brings me to my next point:

2. LA is FAKE. And I don't mean that the bajillion fucking WINDOW TINTING!!! businesses here are all cardboard-built Blazing Saddles-style. I mean that many people here seem to be obsessed with appearance, which is apparent in the Kardashian lookalikes juggling shopping bags down the Promenade and the fact that roughly half of every Craigslist job posting asks you to submit a photo "and/or" a resume when applying. From what I can gather, good-looking people get face-time here, and everybody else has to work for Target (but there are like 36537546 of those so it's cool). I guess I shouldn't look into any deeper meanings about how our society is organized based on this fact -- it is, after all, a city propped up almost solely by the entertainment industry, which gives THISMUCH of a fuck about your soul or marginal talent, and more about how much money your face can generate. Cynical? Yeah, you're right. Which brings me to my next point:

3. LA is MONEY. There's a lot of it here, even if you believe Hollywood is dead. I still hold out hope that I will dig so deep into the classifieds that I will find some organization who is willing to pay me for being intelligent, gentle, and "into" growing chard and journaling. But the sad reality is that most of the jobs down here revolve around sales. Marketing, real estate, PR, modeling, tele-fundraising -- everyone is selling something, or rather, forced to if they want to pay their rent. It seems like a dog chasing its tail to me, but then again I haven't the faintest idea how money works. I'm just looking to pour some coffee or maybe answer phones while I finish my yoga training, and hopefully in the meantime I can afford breakfast every so often. And since I'm not paying rent, and since I'm not looking to make a life here, and since I'd rather end on a glass-half-full kinda note, this brings me to my next point:

4. LA is BEAUTIFUL. Seriously. For Christmas I wore a sundress and my shoulders grew a couple more freckles walking barefoot down on the beach. At night the ferris wheel on the boardwalk lights up and there are children playing tag and the boys pedal up and down the strand selling baggies and there are palm trees everywhere and the kids are young and beautiful and one night feeling particularly sad and lost on the Eastbound 733, a girl got off a few stops ahead of us, ran to the side of the bus, and drew a heart into the raindrops with her fingertip, waving goodbye. I put that poem-moment in my pocket and will take it out again and again to remember that buried in the shit there must be some good, that even in a seeming wasteland, Capitalism's favorite nephew, there must still be people who want to experience something real and good. Here's hoping I can find some of them on this go-round, or at least eat my weight in tacos in the process.

thursday, northern california

2010-12-02T00:32:00.000-08:00

everyone is playing

call of duty or whatever

i want to say something

to the effect of the war machine

is reaching its fingers into my drinking hour,

but there is a too-long list of things

i can ruin my mood over

already.

FOUR JPG POEMS FOR KANYE WEST

2010-12-01T23:32:00.000-08:00

II.a

II.b

III.

IV.

LUST

2010-11-15T10:58:00.000-08:00

Got myself an audio converter, so the tiny lil' EP I've been working on lives here now.

Enjoy loves!

WARM GUNZ

2010-11-15T01:10:00.000-08:00

Hello again O beauteous lovers of similarly-shaded spirits and hearts. It is November once more, the most gracious of all winter-ish months, if only because its primary focus seems to be keeping its participants mildly wasted and uncomfortably full, & in the arms of other warm bodies no less. Say what you will about pagan holidays or the NFL -- this month, in my mind, is all about embracing the oncoming stretch of hibernation and//or gnar-shreddage with soft dignity and a full liquor cabinet.

e.g., fifths of Jim Beam are on sale for $16.99 at CVS righ' now!!!

I'm happy to report from the dark and melancholy netherspaces of Humboldt County that my exodus from this shithole is nearly upon us all! EXCITEMENT. It's uncomfortable to hold any physical//metaphysical space when said space makes you wish you could sleep the rest of your near future away, but my persistent existence should be a testament to all you bitches that it can in fact be done, and not only that, but it can actually look fucking good.

e.g., I live in a shortbus, collect food stamps, and maybe we are going to India (?!)

It's pretty cool that human beings are capable of things like reinvention, self-rescue, bravery, and love. After being surrounded by ultra-conservative out-of-touch Boomers for nearly a year, I was almost conditioned to thinking that life was about resigning yourself to being unhappy, convincing yourself that you want what everyone else wants, and 'getting into politics.' Thankfully, the mysterious eddies of the Universe have landed me in a delicious whirlpool of illicit activity, endless daydreams, and a sense of Feeling On Top Of The World.

e.g., my family now consists of a man in wool overalls and the kitten we have yet to purchase.

Pictures and love letters to come.

I hope you can see the moon from wherever you are.

hello again october

2010-10-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

Dispatches from Humboldt County are fog-shaped, fill my chest with negative space. The letters I send presumably skirt the cloud-cover, en route to places with warmer bodies of water. October has taken its time, slow and easy and inevitable: the bottoms are roiling with banks of freeze, cows huddle together to keep warm (I like to think). We are trying to unlearn the lessons of our younger years spent in cold places. We are sick and unhappy and there was never any summer.

I am hiding in a bunker that is fog-shaped and most things are telling me come out come out come out.

At night we go to sleep inside our beautiful bus and pull the covers over our heads when we think the cops have come to talk to us again. In the morning I hold on to sleep like a lover, imagining how the light coming through the windows could be warm if it wanted to be. The three of us wonder how we could still be tethered here & we still are.

In the United States of America, it is illegal to live in anything except a building you paid for.

This time of year means that every parking lot & freeway on-ramp stays full of day laborers. The grocery store reeks of weed. You can make a lot of money if you are willing to sit for hours on end at a table somewhere, trimming rough buds into shapes that people are more inclined to purchase. We are all willing because we are all very poor.

Roughly seven days a week I hang out with a pregnant 20-year-old who likes CMT but doesn't really like me. Her boyfriend talks to us about the trucks he wants to buy. The things that are lovely exist in my imagination only. I have no idea how the world works.

Being bone-cold and heartbroken is all geography. There is only will be and am going to and as soon as.

Eternal damage control for events I had no hand in whatsoever.

HIGH//DESERT

2010-09-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

FURR

2010-09-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

BANDCAMP // ARTSHARE

2010-08-03T23:43:00.000-07:00

I just moved all my recordings here, y'all. I think this will be a better space for people to listen to & download my shit for free, without being manhandled by penis-enlargement advertisements and/or loaded offers to "cartoon yourself!!!*", whatever the hell that means.

Thank you to the beautiful souls who actually listen to these. It blows my mind that anyone is into hearing me sing about the various things I'm enamored with, and secretly makes me feel like a hot air balloon made of watermelon Bubblicious™ gum. I've made a few new recordings and am planning on posting a new mini-EP (3-5 songs) on this site in the next few weeks.

AND.

I had this idea to make the release a kind of art-share thing, where if You (The Listener) design an album cover for my forthcoming as-yet-untitled EP (or for the good green leaves EP) and get it to me (via the USPS or the INTERNETS), I will mail you a CD of the new EP and//or good green leaves in their own hand-decorated and numbered sleeves, plus love notes maybe.

[!!!!!]

If 2D isn't your bag, I will also gladly accept anything you've made that falls under the category of ART, including [but not limited to] musicks of your own, videos, poems, sculptures, zines, puppet shows, DJ sets, dance parties, photographs, great sex, feather earrings (ahem), and//or municipal vandalism.

EVERYTHING I receive will be gathered together and made to stand around on the internets in a digital gallery to be enjoyed by all. Open to every human being in the world ever, plus animals & stuff, more details to come, etc.

Entries accepted until one of us dies.

<3 <3 <3

i think the best thing about you is the velocity you lend my heart

2010-07-24T20:28:00.000-07:00

um, it's tuesday

2010-07-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

Mornings here are cold and gray. The air trickles in like water, is water, through the open window. It's maybe 50 degrees. Mid-July is sweatshirt weather before 2 in the afternoon, when the small sun breaks the high clouds apart and there is blue tissue paper where the hard white used to be. There are no dimensions to the high hard clouds, hard to tell the feel and distance and taste. You are covering one eye with your palm sometimes without you knowing it and looking upward.

The mountains hold the high clouds over our heads so when we cross them on Sundays after I get off work and head toward the river the sky splits open and it's 100 degrees and the trees are green and not brown. The water is green and not gray. We can show our limbs and warm them, our hearts warming on each other's, beating in such close proximity.

There are no patterns in the weather but we look for them, always. Each morning our eyes are palms and are held up and open, just receiving. On the bike ride into town you will feel wind, warm or cold. Everyone you see or talk to over the phone will introduce themselves with it and you will understand. Maybe when the sun is out everything will come together. Maybe I will wear sweatpants forever & ever and feel sexy because I smell the same as I did yesterday and maybe more so.

When you don't know what to say you will talk about it. It's so easy. Will you be hurtling toward a place where you can rest your sun-browning arms & legs this weekend, and what will you read or drink? Are you also having trouble feeling like you want to wake up and come to life in the cloud-cover of weed smoke in the dairy lands we all live in together? What do you make of yesterday? What are you praying you will wake up to tomorrow? Me too. I feel the same.

Sometimes in the house you rent, there gather souls who are a different color of alive, and no weather matters, or no weather exists that prevents the consumption of whiskey and the habits of pen to paper. Then you do not mention it. Then the weather is for your mothers and fathers only, the same as it has been always. Disregard the high clouds or the hot sun. Do not disregard the shapes the clouds make against the blue. Do not disregard the way seeing a cumulo-T. Rex makes your heart feel. It will feel that way again.

Sometimes we are drinking in the fog at night or in the daytime and we are high, and the sun and moon are far from us, and we are looking at each other. You can tell the truth then, and people will listen. It will not be about things beyond your control, or maybe. The haze will dissolve and you will go for a walk under the stars and look at the ones that are tattooed on the sides of you and sigh and the sigh will make it all the way up, unhindered. You will know when you are too close by the sounds the others make, how the next day sobered they will tell you they haven't talked like that since college, and you will wonder what that means, and nod & look upward & form thoughts, like how the sky is your mood, and what does it mean that things are leaking from it.

LIVE BLOGGING THE NATHAN'S FAMOUS HOT DOG EATING CHAMPIONSHIP 2K10

2010-07-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Happy 4th of July, motherfuckers!

[Potential future employers, it's just the coffee talking! I am a being of pure light and love, capable of performing endless administrative tasks with efficiency and professionalism. Pinky swear.]

I actually really like this holiday because it combines good weather, shitty beer, and mad sweet pyrotechnixxx. And nothing says mega-proud laissez-faire rugged individualism or whatever it is we're exporting these days like a tasteful combination of the above three AMIRIGHT.

Hilariously & awesomely, ESPN is broadcasting the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Championship 2010 this morning, and seeing as how I have two hours before I need to go to work, it looks like I'm going to sit around in my undies getting over-caffeinated (for something new and different) and continue to rant about things that are completely beyond my understanding.

e.g.,

"I have a large esophagus." -- 2010 Champion Joey Chestnut, on his goddess-given ability to cram a shitton of wieners down his throat.

BIG NEWS in the world of competitive eating is that 6-time champ Takeru "I'm Too Much Of A Fucking Pussy To Show Up To A Contest That Only Survives Because Of Me" Kobayashi bowed out of this year's hot dog eating competition due to some contract red-tape bullshit between him and the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE). First of all, about 7 things I just said should make you uncomfortable. I can only hope that the "sport" gets overrun by New Jersey meatheads, assuming that's a demographic in the first place.

Pepto-Bismol is a sponsor of this year's championship LOLZ11111?

Anyways I'd love to stay but I'm already bored with this post, and television changes so fast it's hard to keep up YAKNOW??? Miss u, Founding Fathers. Wish y'all were here.

Happy Birthday, America. Take some Advil, wear a lifejacket, and use a condom.

goodthings

2010-06-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I accidentally worked, and put some money into my pocket that was empty, and made us two mimosas in compostable to-go cups, and went easy on the OJ, and drove home in the sun to play with a cat, and you were in the sun too and said, "no thanks," so I drank everything very quickly, and you were still there, which made me feel like stretching my legs, & then I was all-powerful, a self-contained explosion, and went to sleep in our weed haze dreaming about MarioKart and making everybody a really good dinner.

FATHERS DAY MEDITATION ON SPORTS DEATH & MONEY

2010-06-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

Now that America & I have had a little time to come down from the recent media frenzy that was the 2010 NBA Championship, we can finally take all those recently-emptied Coors Light cans down to the recycling center and look back on the whole incident with a little clarity & perspective. For the past several weeks, I (and countless other souls, I'm sure) have surrendered my evening social calendar and sex life to the whims of Kobe Bryant, Inc., meanwhile incorporating all sorts of interesting lessons about what I perceive to be the male psyche into the body of Things I'm Pretty Sure Are True. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy professional basketball (see [non-ironic] previous post) but then again, I've been living in a city with little to no cultural element for about six months now, and occupying a headspace in which everything my father thinks is the truth for even longer than that. And not to take the fun out of Mainstream America's favorite pastime (or whatever), but isn't that sort of what I do? Yeah-huh. It is.

1. I know everyone talks about this and I know I've been a human being on this planet for 24 years but I guess I still get my mind blown just thinking about the sheer number of dollars that are tied up in a media event like this via advertising. My perpetual lack of dollars probably lends itself to my morbid obsession with capitalism, but yeah, when T-Mobile is all like, "hey since you're here enjoying yourself, maybe you could buy one of our phones?" it kinda touches me in the wrong places. I'm sure psychologists have words for this, and when I have a 50-year-old existence of my very own I'll most likely revert to buying all the shit I couldn't buy when I was younger as some sort of feel-better mechanism, but until then I'd like to steer clear of feeling pandered to by people more powerful than I am. Most people have this uncanny ability to watch commercials that are clearly aimed at our demographic without feeling much in the way of rage or hurt feelings, which makes watching TV with me reeeaaaally awkward. Unless you want to hang out with someone who will point out when and where the military is making a shit ton of money in between quarters. SWEET.

2. Ron Artest is a lunatic with a forthcoming reality TV show and a rap album, which makes sense, cause if you're already a celebrity in the sports world why not let it all hang out in a couple of the only other ways that a regular person can become a bajillionaire. A lot of people think he's a scumbag until he sinks game-winning threes, and until they find out that he chose jersey #37 as a tribute to the number of weeks that Thriller consecutively held the No. 1 spot on the charts.

3. HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS: People enjoy watching sports because of the personal development of individual players' careers and their interactions with other players, which is to say they enjoy watching the ups and downs of certain players' professional careers until they retire, which is like, a symbol of their death or something, so really the span of a sports career mirrors a lifespan in which other people are free to scrutinize, support, and live vicariously through any individual player. It's as if these players have to put on a good show to make the masses feel like it's possible for any life to be lived successfully. It's as if sports fans, constantly watching players retire, be bought & be sold, are all-too-aware of mortality and individual powerlessness to the machine, and will welcome Luxury Watch Collection commercials if it makes them feel like they will live longer than Kobe Bryant (which they won't).

4. Seriously, if I could just sit courtside with Jack Nicholson for one game. You hear me, Make A Wish?!?

5. Why is that movie GROWN-UPS being prostituted up and down ESPN? Is it because the faces of Adam Sandler & David Spade are some of the only comforting images our brains can recall from the ludicrous haze of boy-bands and Japanese fad technology that was the 1990's? I kinda feel like movies have to be stacked with "celebrities" or else they won't make any money at all now. Also, if you didn't wear out your VHS watching Billy Madison when you were 12, I'm not sure we have that much in common after all. *sigh*

6. My brother fucking hates Paul Pierce with a passion, which I find hilarious because of the constant running commentary he provides about wanting to kick him repeatedly in the balls, and because broseph has admitted that it's based solely on the fact that he looks "like a fuckin gangbanger." It got me thinking about how the uniform kinda takes away the ability to tell what kind of person you're dealing with in real life. Paul Pierce isn't the douche he appears to be on TV, maybe, or maybe he's even more of a douche. There's just no way of knowing, y'all. Kinda like how at work I'm required to look like a narc in a collared shirt, but if I could get away with wearing neon muscle tees at my place of employment then the world would truly know how much cooler I think I am than the majority of the population.

7. Is everyone here because at one point their dad hinted that it might be cool?

8. Team allegiances are kinda weird. Maybe you root for Boston because you lived there when you were a kid, or because you saw that movie "Celtic Pride" where Dan Aykroyd kidnaps Damon Wayans and thought "Yeah, okay, I can get behind this." Or maybe you pick based on color scheme. Or maybe you not-so-secretly would totally make out with Sasha Vujacic. You can probably guess which category I fall into. Damon Wayans is FUCKING HILARIOUS.

9. So right after the Lakers win Game 7, the NBA runs this commercial where the whole team is like, caressing their championship trophy and all wearing hats that say NBA Championship 2010. I wonder if they filmed the same commercial for the Celtics, and if so, how can the losing team look back on the sweet minutes of the production of that commercial when the NBA let them touch that trophy as CHAMPIONS and not feel a little dead inside? Does that mean that somewhere in America's junk drawer there now exists a couple thousand boxes of Championship hats with the Celtics logo on them? I can only hope those get shipped off to those in need somewhere; the clean-up crew down in the Gulf could probably use a little sun protection these days.

10. Seriously, what the fuck is a "smart phone"?

11. I'm really glad I'm not a boy sometimes. Women aren't expected to know the names of players, or their stats, or to recall any pertinent sports-related trivia, or to live up to the expectations of their fathers. SWEET DEAL.

12. The age-old belief in athletics as a unifier sometimes holds up, especially when you can now bridge the communication gap between yourself and 80% of the world's males via discussing sports. Now call your dad, you scumbag: it's Father's Day and he should know you love him. And as an added bonus, you and your mom can now discuss how hot Kobe toooootally is.

GARBAGE

2010-06-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

the most broken thing //
is the most open thing

Further consideration re-reveals that there are infinite ways to go about existing on this earth. Sometimes there are things that need to get done & other times you can drink beer and go to the beach & I think everyone seems to be okay with that.

I've been thinking about articulation as a tool to wield skillfully and intentionally in allowing ourselves to understand and be understood by others. Communication is a tricky thing in general because it all comes full circle back to the Only Ultimate Truth which is that sometimes I might know what you are thinking but I will never ever know what you are truly thinking etc. I feel like articulation is just one part of presenting your insides to other humans in ways that will let everyone in on your intentions and actions via self-contextualization & stuff.

Does anyone else think about this shit or do I just get my feelings hurt too easily?

Once long ago I used to chug whiskey and rip bongs like a 17-year-old, and then I came up with this sweet theory about how our individual existences are like colors in a necessarily infinite spectrum and how you could alter your color and have it altered for you through these various individual experiences so that at any given point in your life you are a different shade than you were a week before but that your initial LIFE experience had started you in a certain palette (or whatever) and that life was all about surrounding yourself with individuals who were complementary to your color, which obviously is constantly changing, which obviously is an indicator that YES! YOU ARE ALIVE!

I wonder how drunk Noam Chomsky gets before he writes a new book. WASTED.

I also like that we like art that echoes the truths closest to our own hearts.

[Which is why I don't feel bad judging you based on your bookshelf // music library]

[duh]

I think if I summed up my current mental state on a t-shirt it would say

I DONT KNOW WHAT TO THINK

or maybe

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

or maybe

FUCK SHIT UP

But yeah. The infinite! I feel like the sickest thing about occupying a reality in which your wildest dreams are but an intentional manifestation away is that you can really appreciate when some humans are taking the reins and going balls-out with their particular idea of What The Fuck Is Going On Here. Like for me, I can pretty much get behind anyone who seems like they are mafuckin' tantric in their tackling of living out their lives the way they want. Which, ultimately, is why I will never jump ship from Team Kanye, no matter how many teen girls' dreams he may shatter [Taylor Swift is a hologram, I think, anyways].

In the same vein, if this commercial doesn't make you feel the outline of your own heart, I'm not sure if we can be internet friends anymore:

life is great and i hope yours is too.

guh huh.

2010-06-02T22:08:00.000-07:00

and then you left for thailand and it seemed silly
that i was returning only now to describe
the feeling in my chest driving a car across
the broadway bridge without you, with ghosts
of everything we were throwing themselves
against the frames of this body i have
and carry with me, which is hollow now,
and why is it already then, and is there room for me
anywhere -- or did i leave a half sink of dishes
on purpose, home forever, your heart heavy?

IT'S MAY & I'M 24 & EMPLOYED

2010-05-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

in sunshine there is not much to make others feel bad.

i have made little inside altars so intricate i've forgotten to let others put flowers there.

now you know.

look at everything in my pocket and remember you are alive at the same time i am alive.

everybody likes the feeling of bare sand under bare feet.

everybody uses a boarding pass as a bookmark.

for the record

2010-05-02T14:55:00.000-07:00

Richard Manuel isn't really my spirit animal. He was a lonely alcoholic who killed himself the year I was born. I'm not even convinced that's a meaningful statistic, either. Whiskey is great, duh, but being alive is pretty fucking rad. Robbie Robertson wrote some song for him at some point, it was important to me for a sec, I don't know, I can't remember, &c. He did have a voice made of maple syrup and woodsmoke, though.

Underneath every human is a really beautiful human.

You know?

Today is Game 2 of the 2010 Humboldt Whiffle Season so I'm gonna go dump some Natty Light down my gullet and sunburn myself.

Yesterday I played beer pong in my parents' attic with some friends from Colorado and was drunk by 6pm and had some thoughts like, "jesus christ, what are we doin" etc and then had some thoughts like "fuckin a, I am the coolest motherfucker ALIVE" and then lost two games of beer pong and ate a hot dog really fast.

"Too wonderful to be an individual human body weighing just enough to never unfasten from the ground" -- Sam Pink

OK I have to go play outside now.

i will never destroy you i promise

2010-04-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

# Psychedelic cartoons : my brain :: danky peanut sauce : every food ever

# Wake up all you sleepy lil half-alive things buried in cold dirt! now there are trickles of water and little leaf shoots to keep you alive until things can explode into tomato vines and vitamin D (the check's in the mail, sleepy lil half-alive things). Until then, ride the big waves of spring thunderstorm runoff through every gopher hole in every field until the waves die. [Yep. That's pretty much how it all works.]

# Is anybody really into destruction?

# It's pretty sweet that there are wells of everything inside us and we can have as much as we want all the time.

# Totes buying overalls.

# The other day I was painting a flyer for a friend's show at an ice cream shop (duh) when a group of four tweens asked me if I was in a band (nope) and then sat down with me to talk about what they should name their band. They were 14 and had little gypsy hats and suspenders and things, and kept saying "code words" like ZIGGY STARDUST that were supposed to let me know they were chill. I couldn't decide whether I should be like, "Wow! these lil tweens are on their way to becoming Cool" or if being into Jefferson Airplane (jesus) at that age bumped you into a higher tax bracket of alt-existence and therefore should make me judge you more harshly based on the fact that, dude, your elbows are totally bumping the table, effectively throwing off my ability to watercolor within the lines. Then they left to go see a matinee or eat a donut or whatever.

# Personal happiness level = how okay you are with the thoughts in your own head

maybe

# I really love you in embarrassing quantities.

some things last a long time

2010-03-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

The Devil and Daniel Johnston makes me feel like everyone is a faker and like i want to buy markers.

Brains are really fucking interesting. Most people spend a lot of time trying to articulate the shit that's bouncing around in theirs via language and instruments and art supplies, and hopefully maybe you don't get batshit crazy // famous.

Daffodils decide to bloom in February. Isn't that nice?

I wonder what the psychology behind the timing of tax season is all about.

(Good work surviving that winter, shh shh shhh, here's some money go buy a soda)

Some people are poor forever and somehow that makes me feel great.

Maybe I'm moving to Michigan.

I am a fucking sweatshop of arts 'n crafts. Probably 'cause, like many other developing countries, I "have no other option" (according to mainstr3am3rs)

Some nice boy bought me a typewriter.

(Cupping my silliest desires in his hands, blowing gently on the flame, feeding them pine needles)

It's still sunny.

I'll just continue to dirty my workpants playing with baby goatlings,

weeding beds of garlic.

I'm writing lots of new songs and soon you will hear them maybe.

Springtime, in my brain, is getting up and walking into another room and then forgetting why you're there. And then feeling lightheaded. And then noticing an open door and going, "huh" and walking out of it.

things i can't prove

2010-02-18T16:57:00.000-08:00

+ you are just a tangible projection of my subconscious desires, maybe

+ your existence, in theory, should teach me a lesson

+ airplane seats keep getting smaller

+ LOVE is something

+ my house is haunted, which is why my cat acts so weird

+ every human being on earth tries hard to make every other human happy as much as they possibly can, as long as it doesn't compromise their own ability to be happy as well

+ there is something special going on in here, i think!

+ my heart is purplish

+ you are doing the best you can

detroit

2010-02-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

plastic bags in the treelimbs:

birds / ghosts of them; white flags;

a dealer's house.

let's get drunk and throw frisbees

2010-02-07T18:05:00.000-08:00

taking myself down a notch
feels good, like how
a pocket-sized ruler
is easier to carry than
a yard-stick.

the sun broke the clouds apart
like tissues in water
today, to keep everybody thinking
maybe maybe maybe.

there is no you
or me, get it?

i found a library

folded into the back pockets
of clean pants, unbroken into
by late winter's mudpuddles

/ your fingertips.

the sky breaking apart
seems okay today

like weeding a garden

or breathing.

Featured Baller: Emily May

2010-02-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

Happy February, darling readers! If there's anything that the apex of the winter months makes me feel grateful for, it's the presence in my life of wonderful, talented, and inspiring friends that keep my heart and hands warm with their very existence. As such, I'd like to take this opportunity to inaugurate a new tradition in which I highlight various humans I think are deserving of baller status and/or are making the world a better place simply by living/creating/working/breathing in it (according to me (duh)).

It should come as no surprise that my first Featured Baller is none other than Emily May of Astral Weeks, Please and Tiger Mountain. Not only do I appreciate the higher metaphor in her continuous practice of making gorgeous crafted goods out of beer cans and old newspapers; I'm pretty sure she's the only hair rock fan on the path to enlightenment in the world and her spirit animal could be likened to a grizzly bear that gives great hugs when intoxicated. Like Astral Weeks itself, her art reflects the constant human struggle between zen contentment and various pits of despair, and to me articulates the rage and bliss (and not a whole lot in between) resulting from the live-giving yet devastating forces of free market capitalism. As an added bonus, she makes really good cookies. Here's what she has to say about Amerika, cool dead people, and Sarah Palin:

One of the things I like best about your work is that, to me, it has a very consistent thesis. What would you say defines your aesthetic? (You can disagree with me if you want)

In all the art that I like, there's some blood left on the page, or the canvas. There's something less, or more, than just "pretty" there, and something that makes it more interesting and more true. Pretty is easy and boring.
As far as any aesthetic of my own is concerned, it's sort of un-articulated and mostly due to the fact that I don't have much practiced technical skill. I have very little "formal training" in painting so I do what I can. Kind of like a dolphin paints with his mouth. David Byrne said something like "unlimited freedom limits your creativity" and I have a very specific, limited set of skills to use, so an aesthetic grows out of that. A lot of paintings are "very good" in their representation of an object, but they all look the same. I had one teacher who was a photographer, and he taught us that paintings shouldn't strive to show what's there because that's what photographs are for.
But as far as an aesthetic goes, I've been accused of being unable to feel anything other than rage or euphoria, and not too much in between. Maybe that's what you see.

What sorts of factors, internal and external, influence your creative process?

Hmmm. It sure seems like there are some people hell-bent on destroying the world and everything good in it, and these people are very efficient at doing that. There seems to be an increasing uniformity of what's expected of our lives, and there are people that have established that order. It doesn't include art. So every act of making art is an act of rebellion against the attack on being a human. It's an antidote to big-box stores and all the shelves of plastic shit made by humans from far away. Art is made by one person, or a few people, because they wanted to make it, for no reason at all that related to the global economy or money or the system that valorizes them. I guess that's an internal influence too.

Astral Weeks is, like, the most beautiful album ever made. How does Van play into your overall creative message?

Van is a Romantic visionary but is percieved as a cranky old guy, probably cause he's been screwed by the industry at one point or another. He's always done exactly what he's wanted to do and doesn't take any shit from anyone.

Portland in 2009 is over-saturated with intelligent, progressive, and creative twenty-somethings (EPCTs). What's up with that? How do you fit into that demographic? Does your art reflect this in any way?

Put my impoverished and idealistic face on a poster for that demographic. Or absolutely anyone else I've met here. I'd say what I've made here is a direct reflection of that energy; Portland is definitely a muse. Luckily, people have been receptive and supportive to it.

Portland has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and yet the EPCTs continue to move there in droves. Is there something special happening here? Or is it just what the hip kids are doing?

Depends on what "hip" is. It's now often used as a dismissive term, but "hip" is traditionally associated with deviating from the norm toward progress. So, I think both. It's cheap here, and there is a definite appreciation for local art and music. This city is a refugee camp for young "progressives" who come from lame places. I think it's something valid. People are able to live here in a way of their choosing. It's a departure from the mass-produced culture we grew up in.

As you may or may not remember, we met while doing a semester abroad program in environmental science and sustainable development in Central America. How does environmental sustainability influence your life and your art, if at all?

I think I remember that. Ah I love this question. I think it's kind of sad that "sustainability" is still a buzzword; that modern Western culture is just now coming around to the idea that maybe we need to actually DO certain things to healthily co-exist with the environment that we live in/on/around. Obviously effective "environmentalism" is a complete overhaul of everything that's traditional practice in our culture. That having been said, I'm wracked with guilt if I buy anything other than food or beer. Environmental sustainability is cultural and economic sustainability too. Hypercapitalism is not sustainable.

Write me a haiku about America in 2k9.

Let's stop the army,
kill the neo-nazis and
go out for coffee.

It's no secret that I think you might be the most bangin' female of our generation, namely because you don't shy away from taking names and dropping f bombs. What's it like to be such an outspoken woman in the creative scene?

First of all, you stop it. heh.
Answer: I read way too many teen magazines when I was like 11 and I've been pissed about gender normy bullshit ever since I realized it was all patriarchically-propogated mind control. Gender determines a large part of our identities and the experiences that form our lives. I think females are able to be more conscious of these differences because they more obviously and more often screwed by them. My parents taught me to be an independent, free-thinking broad, so I've never really had a sense of what I couldn't do as a woman. But, women will always be women first and people second, and I am definitely aware of that when putting my stuff out there, and worry that because I'm a woman and my art isn't glorifying the miliarty or whatever that it will be dismissed as "feminine" which is code for "lesser-than" or not "real" or "valid." But I've gotten to a point at which I'm proud of any "feminine" characteristics may be evident in what I make. The things we make are informed by our gender (and lots of other factors) because our perspective is. I used to believe that all our notions of "gender" were just culturally constructed and that a "genderless" society would allow us to get past all the harmful stereotyping and the personal freedoms that it prevents. Of course I still believe that, but for us to really move into a more enlightened future, intelligent women need to own those differences and be proud of what they are, not cast it off in favor of a more moderate femininity to "get ahead in the world." We need to respect femininity as much as we respect masculinity. We don't. But if women are going to be exploited, I'm going to exploit that and use my wiles/boobs to get what I want. I don't think I answered the question. Joni Mitchell. An outrageous talent, and very much a woman. She never hid behind any men in order to blend in. She is a fully realized human. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of "indie rock" bands today are mostly guys, and have one female member who plays some random instrument. She's always good looking and wearing some demurely cute outfit, and is always unable to move on stage. She is afraid of being watched, of being an object of desire, and that's what she is, and she knows it. How is that still possible today? I think things are getting better, but they move at a glacial place.

What direction would you like to see your art go? Who do you want it to reach?

I'd like to help other people find value in what their hearts and minds look like on the page or canvas. I'd like to continue making things and feel that I'm making progress and liking the results. That's it, really. If anyone else enjoys it as well, that would be nice too.

The thing I like most about your art, as evidenced particularly your magnets, is that they demand an intelligent/self-conscious audience. Is this important to you? Do you think this excludes some people from 'getting' your stuff?

Any exclusion isn't intentional. I like reading and being aware of the rest of the world, and I like other people that do as well. I think what I put on magnets is what a lot of people are thinking, I just happen to have the time to type it out. The things that are the most interesting are multi-layered, and some people respond to that, which is a lot of fun to see and how I get my kicks.

How do you feel about letting your art to pay your water bill?

Oh man. I was just thinking about this this morning. With the more crafty stuff, magnets, cards, etc, hell yeah. That's what it's for. I'm happy to sell those and have people enjoy them so I can buy some beer. However, my paintings are my babies. I am completely, almost irrationally, uncomfortable with selling those for money. There's a New York graffiti artist named Revs who said "once money changes hands for art, it becomes a fraudulent activity." Money is a commodity. Everything is a commodity. There needs to be a space in the world that is untouched by commodification, and the "means to an end" mentality, that has kind of hid in the shadows from the teeth of the beast. Almost everything that exists in the world has been defined to death. Art should be a little magic, and completely independent of "use." When art is sold, it becomes a commodity and therefore useful. I don't like it. But I'm mostly unable to feed myself and have recently started receiving bills from collection agencies, so maybe I'm being weeded out by Darwinist capitalism or something.

What things keep you up at night?

Exponential population growth, mostly. The fact that there are so many humans and that we're all so unable to do a good or even decent job at co-exisiting. Iran keeps me up at night-- their nukes and their war against women. Sarah Palin's coterie of vacant followers. "America"-- that we can and will give a brain-dead reckless warmonger a large amount of control over our lives and the rest of the world. That Vermont will have the climate of Virginia in a generation, etc. The World Bank and it's choke hold on "developing nations,"-- that we as a culture haven't begun evaluating the validity of development theory. Should I get married/have kids or not give a fuck? Has "the media" succeeding in fetishizing us all out of subjectivity and into objects? Will I ever be able to pay off my student loans? What happens when the world ends? Is there just blackness forever, or another world waiting to start? Am "I" really just a brain in a vat, hooked up to an experience machine? Just the stuff that the average seven year old worries about.

What dead (physically, morally, or professionally) people inspire you the most?

James Agee, Lester Bangs and DFW. All incredibly brilliant, and all dead too soon. Agee and Wallace felt the weight of the world on their shoulders, which ended up killing them, and Lester felt a little bit of that, maybe, but he mostly just really enjoyed the hell out of life and his partying killed him. Agee killed himself inadvertently, and DFW very intentionally. They all lived by the truths they believed and inaccomplished more in their pretty abbreviated lifespans than most of us do. They were all incredibly driven and only got thrown off course by their early deaths. Frida Kahlo lived in the same way. She was guided completely by her own vision. She was very politically active and very intelligent, and recognized the disparity between the "first" and "third" worlds and wove her protest of that into her art. She seemed to live the hell out of her life. There are some similarities between her and the three male writers, in their singularity of vision, and the very clear voices that resulted from that. Same with Forough Farrokhzad, a female Iranian poet of the early 20th century who was persecuted and reviled for her subject matter of sex and other evil things, like being a woman. She didn't care and kept writing because she had to. Ginsberg too. He remained true to what he found inside himself for his entire life, which happened to be incredibly unique and also pertinent to so many people. He never wavered from that. I'd also throw HST in here, as well as some people who are still alive, like Joan Didion and Dave Eggers (whose haters are just jealous. Check out this interview if you don't believe me.)

What subculture would you like to infiltrate the most?

Ha. I'd like to start one. But other than that, probably Sarah Palin's fans. I'd like to project a more sane agenda into their empty skulls. It would be so easy. I'd like to infiltrate a subculture of anarchists who actually accomplish things. Or a subculture of sensitive bearded men.

What do you think is gonna happen in 2012??????

Sarah Palin will get elected and the world be one step closer to ending. We'll all get nuked. Or, it there will a enormous, all-encompassing shift in consciousness and humans will cease being myopic idiots, and everything that's broken will begin to get fixed.

If you were a performer in The Last Waltz, who would you be and why?

Hmmm. On my best of days, Robbie, because he's a bit of a pretentious bore, on my worst, Van, because his presence and outfit are slightly offensive, and on a day I hope will occur in the future, Joni, because she steals the whole show and remains entirely gracious.

Emily May blogs at Remix Mountain and displays a selection of her artistic endeavours at Astral Weeks, Please.

self-topography, &c.

2010-02-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

+ Watching The Corporation so close to bedtime was a mmiissttaakkee.

+ Pride has gotten us into a lot of trouble. I bet if everyone spent a short stint living with their mom, working for below-poverty-line wages, and having to drive to the nearest darkened grocery store parking lot to smoke pot by themselves at 9pm on a Tuesday, we could nip all that hubris in the bud. I mean, so far so good.

+ "Life is too short for us to be deprived of any one of its joys by the sad, sick androids who control laws and economics." ---Tom Robbins

+ My Pandora station played Dr. Dog all by itself today and I felt like I had taught my cat how to fetch me cold beer from the fridge.

+ Reasons I can think of to wear underwear < Reasons I can think of to not wear underwear.

+ "Countries" are just representations of the general projected mindset of the majority of the country's citizens. Kinda sucks to live in a country that's like a bro who is too much of an egotistical asshole to say he's sorry after trashing your house during a particularly out-of-control dance party.

+ I wish there was an email listserv for well-intentioned people who genuinely just wanted to exist on the earth peacefully and better themselves and love others, so when we get bombed for being douchers everyone on that listserv would get a heads-up email 24 hours or so in advance, giving us plenty of time to hide in Canada until every angry sad violent person//Burger King franchise was melted away.

+ Pretty soon there will be no one else who feels skeptical about the internet.

+ I have to sleep with clothes on now.

+ Making art is kind of like passing notes in class about how much of a lame-ass the teacher is. (Some are sneakier than others.)

+ Making out is kind of like passing notes in class, only these notes are really nice and say stuff like "I like you more than a friend."

+ Winter is happening in other places.

+ Attempting to contextualize the existences of others can be a solid means of accepting/respecting their beliefs and decisions, especially if they differ from your own. Sometimes though, it's like when someone puts their hazard lights on and thinks they can park in the bike lane for four damn hours and you're like, "maybe their wife is having a baby or something," but really they're just an asshole.

+ I feel like current world economic conditions discriminate against moralistic pseudoanarchist young lovers.

+ What I'm trying to say is, we are all very lonely so let's agree to be nice.

+ One time I went over to America's house and he was playing XBOX with a couple other dudes and they were all drinking Mountain Dew and eating Doritos Nacho Cheese chips and they wouldn't let me have a turn. For every chip they ate, they chewed up 3 and spit them on the ground so there were piles of orange chewed-up spitty chips all over the place. I said, you guys are fucking sick, don't fucking do that. America was like, if you don't like it go to somebody else's house, this is what we're doing here. And I couldn't think of anyone else's house I wanted to go to right then so I just kinda stuck around acting pissed.

+ Forgive everyone for everything.

+ I wish I had money so I could produce a musick vid for M.I.A.'s "Bird Flu" involving blowdart guns, neon feather explosions, and little kids in headdresses tearing ass through the jungle. Like a cross between that trippy-ass tribal chanting scene from Baraka and some Lisa Frank shit.

Can you see it? No?

THEN HIT IT AGAIN.

KNOW WHAT I MEAN DUDES

2010-01-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

+ Divorcing yourself from your perception of who you think you want to be based on a mainstream understanding of what you should be is, like, the most important thing in the world you can do.

+ Re-reading Still Life With Woodpecker for the first time since I was a semi-sentient human makes me feel like Tom Robbins is grabbing the mic so hard and going, "GET IT?" to a crowd who really is just here to get drunk and laid.

+ Today I was eating lunch with my grandma and it suddenly hit me that a New American Revolution is impossible because most people still think there will be consequences for their actions. WEIRD.

+ I get embarrassed when people talk about celebrities in public.

+ Dear God: What the fuck should I do?

+ We must surround ourselves with people who make us want to bearhug everyone in the world at the same time including ourselves. Otherwise you hang out with sub-par normals and have to constantly second-guess your unwillingness to even ironically watch shit on MTV2.

+ We must shine lights into the dark shit world of MTV2.

+ Pffffffffftt.

+ You know that awful video for "Faithfully" where Steve Perry is like shaving in the mirror while singing waaaaay too emotionally about The Road, and you can't watch it and not think about how ridiculous and bad it is but you know that Steve Perry took one look at the rough cut and did a double fist pump and was like, "YES, dude. HELL yes." That's how I want to live my life.

+ I think the Twilight Snuggie (copyright ME/forthcoming) could be the biggest fucking thing this planet has seen since the Plague. Probably more destructive, too. Defz propagated by vermin // angsty tweens from Nowhere.

+ Existential environmentalists have the least fun out of everyone in the world.

+ I need to borrow someone's notes because I feel like I either fell asleep in class or was absent on the day They shared the secrets to "Maxxin' and Relaxxin' in the 21st Century."

+ I want to love everyone unconditionally and never feel judgment toward anyone or anything ever again.

+ I wonder if people who voted for Obama ever feel as embarrassed as people who invested > $100 on Beanie Babies.

+ Most people are happy if you aren't mean to them.

the Splinters in YETI EIGHT

2010-01-13T22:35:00.000-08:00

YETI is so damn cool. I highly recommend it if you are looking to read up on the connections between Satanism, folk tunes, highly technical metal, and fairy tales; or if you are just looking to impress your friends with a sweet sweet mix of obscure 1930s Georgian recordings and live tracks by zany bands like Deerhoof and that skinny bro from Atlas Sound. Hell, sometimes I flip through it in Powell's just to bait any heady alt-bros who might be cruising the aisles looking for girls to make out with. My point is, it's a fucking great publication. And EIGHT's mix features a track by the Splinters, a bunch of hot drunk chicks I went to college with. I was so proud I actually bought a copy instead of just stealing the CD out' the back. Congrats, loves!

Slingshot Says:

2010-01-11T15:14:00.000-08:00

A key to figuring out how to resist capitalism, earth-destroying mega-technology, and velveeta culture is learning how to re-define our values based on what it means to be fully human, awake, and free. All of us who've grown up within this system internalize its values in subtle as well as more obvious ways. In other words, perhaps without even realizing it we start to define what we like and don't like, what we are willing to strive for and what we dismiss, what we see, and what fades into the background based on a value system defined by an economic, technological, and cultural environment structured by capitalism.

The capitalist economic system requires all participants to simplify their thinking and behavior to pursue narrow goals: the most efficient, quick, cheap method, technology, or form of organization. It is important to understand that although these goals are easy to understand, they don't really mean anything -- they are means to an end, but the end itself (more stuff, more growth at the lowest cost) doesn't really have any ultimate meaning. Capitalism has no internal way to determine whether anything -- including, in particular, constant growth and cheapness -- is actually good. In fact, on an ecologically finite planet, limitless growth is not good. Capitalist growth may kill us all if we can't somehow stop it soon. Just having more stuff does not make human beings happy or make their lives meaningful.

Because capitalism is designed around constant competition, the pressure to pursue its very narrow goals is almost irresistible for companies, communities, and individual people. If any element of the system rejects the pursuit of efficiency, others who are more efficient will out-compete the resister, who will be forced out.

Human beings are not machines. We are not merely cogs in an economic machine. It makes no sense that psychologically, culturally, and in our day-to-day decision making we should primarily pursue efficiency, the lowest costs, and other valueless means-to-an-end forms of thinking.

The most fundamental aspect of being human is our ability to experience raw emotion, wonder, love, freedom, pleasure, and sensation. These are experiences totally outside the awareness of economics, corporations, or computers, but each of us knows they are what make life meaningful on a deep level. When your face is stained with tears -- of happiness or sadness, but in either case of being-ness -- those are the moments you know you're really alive.

Humans seek freedom, self-determination, adventure, and challenges, whereas corporations, hierarchical authority structures, and machines seek control, order, routine, and the easiest, quickest, and most boring solution to problems. Humans seek to express their humanity -- we sing, write, draw, dance, and rebel. Only living creatures can love, which is an irrational emotion that is also essential and even magical. It is the glue that makes society possible, makes our lives worth living, and can give us the strength and courage to organize, resist the capitalist destruction of the world, and survive. Yet love is totally invisible to capitalism -- computers and corporations can't love. These structures can't comprehend solidarity which is based on love and that doesn't depend on trading something for something else.

To create a new society, we have to figure out ways to resist the social structures and institutions that oppress people and are destroying the earth. We have to create alternative institutions that can meet people's needs based on cooperation, sharing, free will, beauty, pleasure, and ecological sustainability. Doing these things means we are re-organizing our priorities away from mainstream goals such as achieving success and getting material possessions.

We can decrease burnout by increasing our sense of meaningfulness. We won't be seeking one path in our politics while self-judging our lives based on internalized values from the system. The part of our mind structured by the system is filled with a lot of "shoulds" that upon closer inspection may not make a lot of sense. It can be easy for our "reasonable" system-mind to doubt our human impulses for adventure, freedom, and ill-advised love that can leave us dangling out on a limb.

Taking a different path or doing it yourself for your own reasons will be slower, more difficult, and often very confusing and messy. Resisting the global machine means you'll miss out on the treats it has to offer, and it may roll over and crush you if you don't step out of the way at the right moment. The funny thing is that a lot of times, enjoying easy treats makes you feel empty, while seeking complex, tough pleasures makes you feel alive and engaged. Taking the human and therefore sometimes irrational and inconvenient path seriously, and following it with all your heart is what the world needs most right now. We've gone as far as we can with making things fast and cheap -- now it's time to build something meaningful and human.

-- Slingshot Collective

unsolicited ruminations on astral weeks // HOT TUNES 4 CHEAP

2010-01-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

Like you need me to tell you one more time how boss I think AW is. You get it, I know. But I'm only relentless because the album is truly magical and makes me feel like being a human is okay and actually pretty awesome even if it's fucked up and scary too. Plus, if you stay to the end, there will be surprises!

Lester Bangs (thanks, Em) does a pretty bang-up job of reviewing the record, mostly 'cause I feel like he's just as obsessed with it as I am. I've always felt like the whole thing was so haunting because I can never tell if it's a record of songs about love or songs about heartbreak, and mostly it's both. Hope and hopelessness, imperfection and absolute truth. For those who have ever considered the beautiful and terrible capabilities of humanity or pondered what LOVE actually means... push play, friends. This, via LB:

"What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. Transfixed between pure rapture and anguish. Wondering if they may not be the same thing..."

Love it. This album continues to inspire me and uplift me and make me believe in good things.

I highly recommend listening to the real thing, but in a pinch I've re-recorded my own version here.

My lil' pre-EP/collection of songs is also up and free for you to eat here.

Eat. Enjoy. Try not to think about the fact that Van was 22 when he did this.

today is the first day of the rest of your "life"

2010-01-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

Did you guys know, even though time is relative or whatevs, that it is a brand new year now? With no mistakes, that means. And although calendars are subjective, I like a blank slate as much as the next guy. Girl.

There is general happiness shared over the fact that the Nightmare Decade is over. Cool name, I think. Very apt, too. And maybe I'm prescribing my own meds to everybody else because I (for one) feel a little shell-shocked and a lot scared and sometimes (yes, sometimes) even pretty fucking hopeless. But I am looking forward to the possibility that everyone is gonna try and be nicer to everyone else from now on. The Sincerity Decade is upon us, yallz! And we have only to come out of our hiding places and give each other bearhugs and dance on top of the charred garbage that is The Real World. Cause there's a lot of garbage.

BUT.

Did you guys know, that for all the silly stupid wasteful shit that gets highlighted, that there exists like 40 million times more things in the universe that are absolutely amazingly beautiful?

AND!

If we didn't have all that garbage, we wouldn't have a sick dance floor for all of us to bearhug upon.

So I am unpacking every little thing inside myself, considering it, and placing it back inside me under watchful gaze for safekeeping.

So I will slowly turn the intensity of my forcefield down so it doesn't bump against anybody else's forcefield and possibly hurt one or both of us too much.

So I will remind myself over and over that we can be angry grizzly bears that roar flowers and hearts.

So I will start over and be satisfied with everything jagged and off-center and incomplete because that's all there is and that's all we have in common.

So I will set a good example for the self I want to become, and give all the love I have away because no one can afford to buy that kind of thing these days.

Big hugs and open mouth kisses and handmade letters to you.

Sincerely.

friday, northern california.

2009-12-25T20:30:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas and junk!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks, Universe, for letting me drive across the US while Road Conditions were PRTTY GOOD.

The mid-Atlantic shits snow for a living.

I think I might be unprepared in every way. In general.

I miss living in Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania didn't give a fuck about what I was "going to do next."

I'm not moving to the Sierras anymore and so I am only Here and maybe I will never move anywhere again. Maybe I will leave for Oakland tomorrow. Seattle. Denver. The Pacific Ocean. Just for a swim, and then come back and microwave some dank xmas leftovers for lunch.

I don't want to spend money for the rest of my life.

If I refused to do anything that would cost me money for the rest of my life I probably would have a completely uneventful life.

How does everybody else feel about that?

Living is kind of difficult when you want to do it in a relatively specific way.

Today I watched a romantic comedy with my mom.

My cat is underrated. I can kinda manhandle her around and she doesn't make a big deal out of it.

I will purchase the necessary items to make lemongrass soup and imagine making it for people who can talk about things unrelated to Health Care Reform or Their Kids or HGTV.

HGTV shits on the feelings of baby boomers for a living.

This blog is DDDEEEAAADDD. /kool!!!

I want to climb into a cave and fall asleep with all the stars out and spinning around me.

Like they are making me a cocoon.

give me your hand, i'll show you.

2009-12-10T18:56:00.000-08:00

Really it's like being let down soft by the gentlest gravity with only the blood in your ears and the bong rips in your blood. The sky will be high and hard white or an easter egg blue that will come into your open mouth like a leaf. Low viz days you will struggle with your peripheries and breathe only to carry the calcium to your bones should you wreck yourself against a snowbank or catch your edge in the trees and flatten your lungs. But mostly you palm your wax and point it straight downhill, think of airplanes descending and what to do with your arms. Like the first time you took off your shirt in zero-degree weather for a boy with chapped lips who caught snowflakes in his beard.

<3

2009-12-04T06:25:00.000-08:00

Robin Pecknold chats with Pitchfork about what he wants in a new album:

"I want it to be really fast. I want to do all the vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. [Van Morrison's] Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds totally like there was only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling."

HERE COMES THE FUTURE

2009-11-29T17:56:00.000-08:00

i'm always hiding in my treehouse
every chance i get. my mom says
to come down, but i tell her to fuck off.
if she hadn't been born inside one
she'd want to climb up here with me
and look at faraway things too.

First Aid Kit // BLOGOTHEQUE Take-Away Show

2009-11-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

Pretty obsessed with these ladies as of late. This video is amazing. Not to mention those bangs.

First Aid Kit - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Happy Buy Nothing Day.

Familia! Pavo! Genocidio!

2009-11-26T20:10:00.000-08:00

Wishing everyone a full heart and belly on this día de gracias! This is the only Thanksgiving in my life I plan on totally wasting due to an ill-planned detox/empty bank account, but even so I have plenty to be thankful for. Namely, a lovely community of friends and family, a near-perfect rack, and the guarantee that I will be out this b*tch in about two weeks. See below for an extended list, even though I'm pretty sure I hit the three main points just there.

1. The Band/The Last Waltz. Watched this for the 897th time today and it will never get old. If you aren't into Martin Scorsese, Canadians, or folk monsters of the 1970s enough to rent it (your loss), here's a choice nugget for you. Goes well with whole-berry cran and Maker's neat.

2. Matt Maiellero. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is a pretty killer way to waste an evening if you're into absurdist animation, duh. Every time I load my brain with Adult Swim I'm overwhelmed by how creative and weird all the storylines are and just think "DAMN" a lot. MM is a pretty sick artist. Then I read this interview with him and it totally blew my mind. When asked how he came up with the concept and characters for a new animation series called 12 oz. Mouse, this is what he had to say:

It’s like, there’s this Mouse and he’s in this world. I don’t know what’s going on yet because he doesn’t. Since he’s a mouse, let’s make the other characters non-mouse-like. Let’s make them all interesting and unique. Instead of creating ha-ha jokey-jokes like everything else, let’s build something slowly that takes on more form. Something more concrete. Something’s that real. Let’s let the humor arrive naturally through well-developed characters and let’s let them say what needs to be said. Is it weird that the town is cardboard? Sure. But only to us - people who don’t live in cardboard towns. The environments these characters interact in are real. Everything is tangible and has been so since it’s been so, and so is real. So again, here we are. One mouse - this world. Where does it go? Lead us there. Take us into the dark and show us its secrets, because that’s what smart America wants. They want to fill in pieces, figure out things, and get attached to complex characters that are simple to visualize. Especially characters that represent true life. Start a story. Let’s take the pilot: A drunk mouse robs a bank - seemingly simple. If that’s all he does, it becomes one-dimensional and instantly boring. Take it further. Un-shadow the shadows. Mix a bunch of stuff together. Finance, debauchery, human organs, fish, umbrellas, music, archerists and monsters that even today would not exist. Write it down, figure it out, and have a blast making it.

Yes, yes, and yes. I want to crawl inside his brain and eat mushrooms and then take pictures.

3. The UC Fee Hike Protests. These have been getting a lot of media attention, specifically because of instances of police brutality and the fact that many UC campuses participated in the strikes. RAD. California is totally effed as far as budgeting goes, this is true; there was even talk about cutting all financial aid across the state this year just to bring us closer to balancing. This didn't happen, for obvious reasons of riot-avoidance. But I'm glad that this issue is gaining traction, simply so that the UC Regents get a little heat from their Business As Usual actions that shift responsibility to the student body (via a 32% fee increase) while preserving their own six-figure salaries. There has long been a lot of shadiness going on at Berkeley regarding the privatization of a public campus through corporate grants and donations, and a tuition hike like this would totally disable a vast population of UC students (many of them on state financial aid) from completing their studies. I'll admit, the cost of a Berkeley education is incredibly cheap compared to a private school, and increased tuition fees would still amount to a fraction of the cost of an Ivy League. However, if the money were actually going toward things like preserving languages, increasing student services, and re-invigorating departments that haven't proven to be exactly fundamental to greasing the wheels of The Machine (art / environment / humanities), I don't think it would be as much of an issue. The sad fact of the matter, though, is that most languages are getting cut next year and that even two years ago, the College of Natural Resources was a pretty pathetic shell of its formerly bangin' progressive self. I can't imagine Novartis dollars are going toward hiring professors who teach anything other than "GM Crops Feed The World!!!™" But I guess that's what happens when you let Big Oil and Biotech take over your public liberal arts institution.

4. Daytrotter Sessions. These are SO good and SO free. Lately I've been consuming Horse Feathers, Bon Iver, Local Natives, and Bowerbirds like it's a mixture of lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper and tap water. DANK.

5. Bill Murray. If you haven't watched Space Jam since you were 11, do yourself a favor and rent it. It made me so excited to watch it, mostly because it is like watching the formation of an unstoppable two-headed monster of on-screen AWESOME that breathes golden fire and cartoon catch-phrases and slam-dunks. Bill Murray, who for some reason had something to do with this movie, totally and obviously steals the show. It should be noted that this also prompted me to watch Ghostbusters at least three times last week.

6. And lastly, I'm grateful that my season here is winding down and that I'll be heading back West to reconnect with my beauteous families very soon. I have very little idea of what I'll be doing in January but being on the Left Coast will be like a bearhug for my insides, and I know an opportunity will present itself because it hasn't failed to yet. Two more weeks of culturing hippie propaganda in the tender minds of America's Redneck Youth and then packing my life into my car once again for the sweetest exodus of my life yet. Huzzah!

7. Seriously, though. What's it like for people who don't have great tits?

is this it

2009-11-24T21:06:00.000-08:00

Read Emily May's contribution to The Nation's Recession Stories here!

"I'm currently living on $800 a month, working part-time in a glorified data-entry gig. I'm completely uninsured and unable to pay back any of my $20,000 in loans. Even if I could get a job at an "evil corporation" that might pay my bills, I still wouldn't be able to force myself to take it, as clinging to my principles is the only thing I can do to stay a little sane. I think more than anything else, I've completely lost faith in the capitalist system as well as the government that enables it."

This is the state of everyone I know. This country is so fucked.

Meanwhile, a lot of jackasses are super pumped for Sarah Palin's book. Awesome.

Solution #1: this, via Sam Pink.

Solution #2: Raise chickens, keep stealing. Ears to the ground. Write each other songs. Come over to my mom's garage and I'll make you an omelette for breakfast.

mind explosion. dot connecting.

2009-11-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

Sam Grello is moving to New York to finance a one-way ticket back to his girlfriend Julieta in Guadalajara. After driving for three days straight across the Shit 'n Korn Belt of the United States, he washed up unwashed in Sandy Lake to spend the weekend with yours truly. Considering that the majority of our shared memories together are hazy at best and usually involve shady characters, misdemeanors, and/or blacking out at frat parties (I'm thinking of a Venn Diagram now), it blew my mind to have this person inserted into my current 74-year-old-lady-type of existence. Nonetheless, it was a perfect weekend. Planets get aligned because Sam Grello causes their alignment. This weekend the planets really straightened up and flew right.

+ I bought the sexiest brown road bike I've ever seen for $9.99 at a Salvation Army. ULTRA LEGIT. If "getting laid" was the number 7 and "successfully re-relocating to a mega-tight west coast city" was the color black, I would throw at least fifteen bucks down on that particular square of that Big Roulette Wheel of Heady Str8-Ballerness in the sky. I don't know anything about gambling, though, really.

+ Light Up Night in Franklin, PA, made me wonder if things like Tradition and Religion and Nostalgia would ever become obsolete or vestigial in a highly modernized world. I took a lot of pictures of the Chamber of Commerce truck parades, JV Cheerling squads, and Evangelical organizations with homemade banners wanting to KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS, and then I thought, "Am I an asshole?" I didn't want to be the snarky godless douche in a vintage coat pffft-ing at the fact that they cranked Smash Mouth for the fireworks show, but I was anyway. We are products of the water we bathe in, and my particular bathwater is suspicious of American Tradition. Which brings me to my next point:

+ West Coasters have no respect for anything. Which is also why I love it there. And also:

+ That song All Star BLOWS. And also:

+ Fireworks are so amazing, no matter what. This fireworks show was choreographed to music and was starlingly low to the ground and close to a bunch of trees. It would have started a fucking forest fire had it been in California / never allowed to happen in the first place. They had flamethrowing cannons and stuff! Like, they had really invested in putting together this super-awesome foreworks show that prolly cost a ton of dollars so that everyone could come out to the street and be together and go "whoooaaaaaa" at all the really big loud ones. I started thinking about how cool that was and how I felt like people everywhere are really just trying to look out for each other and do things to make other people feel happy and good the ways they know how, and all these fireworks were going off and I had no more film in my camera so I just watched it and things made sense and were nice.

+ Dear small towns: I feel like you probably won't survive. It'll be like Children of Men where everyone is kind of forced to move to the city cause Wal-Mart can feed everyone more efficiently than you can. I'm sorry about that, small towns, it keeps me up at night. Maybe if you took care to stock the brand of tempeh I wanted though small towns, you'd last a little longer? Yeah, I know though, pizza burgers are cool too, I know, do whatever you want. It's your life, small towns, you know? Dance like nobody's watching. If you're not livin' on the edge, you're takin' up too much space.

+ It really tripped me out to have an older friend insert himself into my current existence. I definitely feel like I subconsciously-intentionally buried myself in rural PA, like I have been in hibernation mode since August without any social inputs or distractions. Meditation Abstinence Cleanliness Productivity Etc. It's been real good. But honestly, I was kind of feeling like this place was just a hallucinated projection of some set of desires inside my brain and that maybe I was just asleep somewhere playing it out. (TOOOOOOOTALLY)

+ Adult Swim is the greatest kind of art.

+ I saw a Back to the Future kind of couple at Light Up Night. He was wearing a leather jacket and sneakers. She had her hair in a ponytail. They were standing close to each other looking at everyone else. Their babies would be blonde and feel safe. I felt weird like we were being filmed. Then I thought, they probably have boring sex. Then I dropped my piece of pizza face-down in the gutter but picked it up and ate it anyway.

+ Bill Murray is Bob Dylan is America is Performance Art.

+ Hard pretzels = overrated. Giant hard pretzels + crunchy peanut butter = dude, I can't believe you've never tried that before, it's so awesome.

tuesday, western pennsylvania

2009-11-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

through cigarette bluffs i am noticing
that my fingers halt just at the edge
between your shoulder and its background.

pool cues not yet forearm-splintering
in a gun rack line the wall as arteries,
drain sharp beer into shit mouths.

the whiskers collecting around the mouths
are shifting to say what is this one
a fuckin dyke? are thrusting filmy bills

into the palms of other hollow-eyed,
sailing brown bottles across the counter.
later in the car there were no words

against the bass. passing the white bones
of a playground, you are a wolverine
in a gunny sack, back and forth, saying

seriously, seriously---i fucking hate dudes--
driving with your kneetops
while your cold hands pack the bowl.

make friends with your failings

2009-11-14T06:34:00.000-08:00

This week I'm thinking my life is equal parts shit and equal parts YES, which is kind of like everybody else's life (presumably). I got a short thinger published on DOGZPLOT and you can read it here. I started making some pretty sweet Christmas presents for everybody with dated paper products, cardboard, and duct-tape (less tasteful than it sounds). Will is visiting (!) and I feel like I have friends again and that makes me happy. Last night we bought IPA from the Stoneboro Beer Center, which is a big-ass drive-thru refrigerator that sells only cases and employs portly mustachioed men who load said case of beer post-credit-card-transaction into the backseat of your car while your engine idles. It is a perfect easter-morning-type November day and we shall picnic in the woods and pronounce our respective crises through mouthfuls of peanut butter sandwiches. Four more weeks left here and I'm ecstatic to get moving. I do love the steady routine of a 58-year-old divorcee but I am missing all things West Coast and feeling antsy for community and movement and NEW. I will wear my heart thin for new. It is somebody's leftover mayonnaise-based BBQ salad in the fridge that I keep sneaking guilty spoonfuls of, thinking one day this will be gone, though.

OMGZ BROZ

2009-11-11T15:31:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite jamz on Veckatimest got a badass vid to go along with it. Yowza. It's equal parts creepy, beautiful, and psychedelic. 'Scuse me while I load my bong.

Point: Good art is always conducive to pleasing stoners.
Reference (1): The movie Speed Racer
Reference (2): THIS

Reference (3): THIS

K, that's it. Go get yourself a Yoohoo after all that visual stimulation. It'll make your mouth excited.

DETROIT NEVER // MOTORS PSYCHOS NIGHTMARES

2009-11-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

At the Luxury Apartment Complex of 1 Lafayette Plaisance Street in downtown Detroit, a sixth-floor one-bedroom costs the same as half a closet in Santa Cruz. We collected the crumbs with our fingertips and looked out over the city's brick ruins while we smoked, all easter egg blue mornings through the pollution. Clark had dumpstered everything there or else found it in the middle of some street, so the creaks of vintage armchairs exhaled cigarette smoke into our hair. In the corner he had an end table with a built-in 8-track, completely covered in white faux-fur, absolutely non-functional, also dumpstered, that displayed some salvaged Pistons figurines in various states of ballin', none of which matched. We flicked lighters and watched the sun get higher and I thought about how a once-white faux-fur 8-track end table was just about the fucking most badass portrait of what things here might have been like once, and how now it was such a sad and heroic piece of shit furniture, and therefore a pathetic and lovely little poem in itself.

Before visiting, I felt the same things about Detroit that many creative-progressive poverty-stricken douchers may have felt about it; namely, that I could pay somewhere between $0-100/month for a pretty bangin' place to pursue my various crafty endeavours, slip right into some community development work, and generally live the urban pirate lifestyle with a clear conscience. Post-visit, I'm not saying that's not true, and I'm sure many people who are much bigger badasses than I (see: my esteemed colleague) could make it work. But I can say with a pretty fair amount of certainty that Detroit is a depressing fucking place. It's a broken, empty city. Downtown high-rises are growing trees from the rooftops, whole neighborhood blocks are burned down or boarded up or crumbling piles of brick. It's a city full of contemporary ruins. Fucking wild. Most businesses are closed-down, most houses abandoned, most cars broken into. It is beautiful in its own right, and walking around in it kind of reminded me of Yellow Submarine, how every frame is a perfect piece of art. There is no traffic.

The most fucked up and amazing thing about Detroit is that it is a no-longer-living testament to the violence and the failures of free-market Capitalism and overproduction. It was built up based on the beliefs that materials and profits were infinite, and after throwing its weight entirely behind the mass-manufacturing of shitty inefficient vehicles, Detroit got to watch itself slowly die as these beliefs started to tank. I think it's pretty beautiful that corporations everywhere might suffer the same agonizing death, but it's fucking unfair that they get to take whole populations and urban areas with them and then offer no assistance to those things that they exploited for so long. It seems like most people who can afford it have left the city and the only ones left are the ones who can't afford to go anywhere else. So what the fuck happens to them? Will we just have an entire city of refugees with nowhere to go? Will they get funneled into another unskilled labor industry so we can go about Business As Usual? Are people going to die of starvation or gangs or police brutality or health problems because GM's executives couldn't manage their funds? Are we ever going to talk about this on cable television?

It makes me think things are kinda fucked, friends, at least in places that are completely dependent on corporate dollars and intensive production. The fact remains that Capitalism is not sustainable, and I feel like younger generations give enough of a fuck about that to ensure its demise. The kind of excessive material wealth of Detroit's golden age now seems tacky and stupid and careless to us, unless it's ironically placed in our living room. This is ultimately good: less silly shit = less waste. Great. Unfortunately we were all born into a nation that has cared more about the acquisition of wealth and material goods than about the well-being of other humans/the environment for some time now, which will leave us a pretty sizeable mess to clean up when it all falls apart, considering that our ability to stay alive is dependent upon money which is dependent upon corporate America's ability to stay alive. Now that the money/people's faith in money (same thing)(whoooaaa super heady brahhh) is running out, it seems like we're all sort of screwed. I kinda feel like punching someone in the face for thinking this was all a good idea.

On the way home (admittedly, high) I was also thinking a) holy shit, that Chairlift song "Planet Health" is really fucking amazing and b) that the existential crisis ~95% of all sentient humans I know are currently experiencing is probably in many ways a side-effect of the financial withdrawals that the world and we are now going through. There are a ton of studies showing that money is as addictive of a substance as drugs or alcohol, and presumably having to get used to going without it would cause the same kinds of withdrawal symptoms that other addicts go through when they quit using their drug of choice. Money is the only way most people are able to justify their existence or even exist at all, so having no money literally makes you feel like you aren't Experiencing Life the way it should be experienced. Not acquiring it makes you feel like you aren't "on the right track." And knowing that older generations enjoyed unprecedented, guilt-free, un-self-conscious material comfort that you will never enjoy adds to the shittiness as well.

Material wealth + recession --> less wealth --> poverty --> loss of connectivity with marketplace/others --> inability to fulfill own desires (which are based on advertisements) --> loss of identity (based on products) --> loss of purpose --> EXISTENTIALISM

(Again. Very high.)

So, long story short, I think my own personal E.C. would be better suited to the youthful artistic poverty of Any Other West Coast City as opposed to the old-industrial, in-your-face, We-Are-Fucking-Everything kind of doomsday scenario that presented itself to me this past weekend. And granted, Detroit is an extreme example of a failed city on behalf of Capitalism. Other long story short, feeling shitty about poverty is probably good because maybe it means that humans will be forced to evolve into caring about other things over dollar billz y'all. I really think self-sufficiency and community sustainability should be on the list of shit to shoot for in a nesting place. Or maybe I'm just a lunatic who needs to chill the beat, yo. The conclusion I keep coming to is that these bridges will be crossed sometime in the future whether we like it or not, that we should all love everybody as much as we love our 8-track-playing faux-fur end tables (ohmygod SO MUCH), and that the Mayans totally called that shit in 2012. In any case I bid your tender minds a hopeful Sunday eve. 35mm postcards of contemporary war-zones forthcoming.

YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH

2009-11-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

Today a bunch of first graders came to the center and I was supposed to teach them about things like habitats and communities, but most humans who are 6 years old have attention spans of maybe ten seconds and need to use the bathroom four times an hour. So instead I told them to 'knock it off' when they threw sticks at each other and sent them on a scavenger hunt for flowers, which was a total Noah Vanderhoff move since all the flowers in the woods now are dead. They just kept pumpin' in quarters, ya know? SUCKAZZZ.

I probably shouldn't be working with children. It's just embarrassing to me that they can't form whole sentences or walk through the woods without catching their lil' froggy boots on a log or something. Really am gonna write an essay about how children maintain and perpetuate the Capitalist agenda and the overproduction/consumption of 'worthless shit.' I just think adults could maintain a totally sustainable society and make responsible consumer decisions that would kill Wal-Mart forever, but then babies come along and need to shit in big wads of virgin materials and/or own some noisy plastic bullshit, and we are so emotionally overwhelmed by their demands that we cave to it.

Like, the phrase "Live and Learn and then get Luvs" just popped into my head, which is fucked up for myriad reasons.

Speaking of economics manipulating real human emotion, I just bullied my car insurance posse into lowering my bill and then paid it in full, which effectively drained my bank account, but also made me feel like I could climb a mountain and then punch someone out. It's kind of crazy how knocking out stupid real life bullshit like that makes you feel like Michael Jordan.

Then I talked to my parents on the phone and they told me a lot of uplifting cliches that for some reason sounded awesome, like "everything in moderation" and "money isn't everything" and "you live, you learn."

I completed an errand that involved the USPS.

Seriously, I could wrestle a bear right now.

No work tomorrow.

HOLY SHIT I AM ON FUCKING FIRE.

Detroit this weekend with Kelly Noodles, because I haven't yet learned that driving places takes money that I don't have. I'm stoked to suss out the potential for future squats but in my happiest states I am only ever thinking of forcefully aligning the planets and returning to Portland. It feels possible. It is. I shall sling coffee in the trenches for you, darling cesspool of hot young drunks. We will hold hands and grow our vegetables. Come January our soymilks will kiss in the refrigerator. Come January I will be stuffed with hope and goodthings like an easter basket.

monday, western pennsylvania

2009-11-02T20:51:00.000-08:00

after nine weeks of starving, i ate. i smeared it all over the walls and devoured it. shook off my dustrag bones, went to filling myself with meat. all of it on display. i am a terrible friend, the worst kind, absent; it is cold and i am lonely still; there are too many newspapers to not write letters on; this is where you are from, remember? my swollen face on the day you drove away and built something between us. we are past the time when, a year ago, the leaves would have looked like this. we were trying to build a nest in them i thought. i put things in my mouth that shouldn't go in people's mouths, picked the crumbs from my suitcases, sucked my teeth. i cried and felt ugly and remembered how hopeful everything was, is, how surrounded we are with each other all the time in the all-hours. you have lived through snow; i don't care what you have lived through; you are not allowed to walk away from this. i licked plates transparent, carved your address on an envelope.

fall back.

2009-11-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

It's November. I am happy about this.

When I was little I would wake up to take a shower before school and my mom would come in and be putting on makeup while I was showering and on the first day of a new month she would say, "It's the first day of __________! What's the first thing you said this morning?" as if that would be setting the tone for my entire new month. And I would think about it and it was usually something dumb like "Unnhhhhh" and then I would feel like dammit. Now I am older and more careful. This November, I am going to choose my word carefully.

Did you know you can rent-to-own a 4-bedroom house in Detroit for $1000 a month?

I didn't either. Think I'm gonna move there in the spring. Squat in the bomb-outs, shit out some public art. Reclaim the parking lots for community gardens. Yes yes yes.

November's first word is YES.

ehhhhhhhhhhh, you don't care

2009-10-31T07:27:00.000-07:00

"No one wants to hear what you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them. Don't let that stop you. Tell them anyway." --Doug Martsch

For some reason last night, sleep and I fought like two raccoons over the same really ideal raccoon den location. Twice I woke myself up from laughing so hard. This is the coolest dream I've had in a while:

I was at some public movie-showing event in a drugstore/pharmacy in Pennsylvania. We were all sitting quietly with the lights off at makeshift tables between the greeting card racks, watching something like Blazing Saddles. While the movie was playing I kept getting ideas for my collage project, which involved the use of clear packing tape and scissors, so I would pick it up and start working on it there until this woman near me took it away from me and said, "He's trying to enjoy this," gesturing to the man between us. This man had a hippie ponytail and looked young-ish and we started whisper-chatting. He said, "No way, you're from Eureka? I'm a grad student at HSU!" and he got really excited. I was about to ask what he studied and then he said, "No way, I'm from Kensington!" and I got really excited for some reason, even though Kensington and Eureka aren't close, and even though I had never mentioned that I used to live in the Bay Area. The woman leaned over to us and said, "you guys need to shut up. Did you call Sal? I thought that was the whole reason we came out here and now I'm starting to think it isn't." And she folded her arms and turned away. Ponytail got all serious and straightened up and turned very close to her. "Sal," he said very seriously, "is my son. Of course I want to call him." And right there he picked up his cellphone and walked around the pharmacy making a call to his son while the rest of us were trying to watch Blazing Saddles. It occurred to me right then that this man was very high. He listened to it ring and walked back and forth, sometimes in front of the screen. Everybody there went insane grumbling and complaining pretty loudly and saying things like, "what the hell is he doing?" and "where is he going?" really angry and confused-like, outloud. It was warranted at first but became way too much of a riot, so I tried to yell "you guys are making way more noise than he ever could by talking, just shut up" but just after I said 'more' the crowd noise abruptly stopped and a tape recorded voice said: THIS IS AN AUDIO RECORDING OF PEOPLE'S LIVE REACTIONS TO THE BALLOON BOY INCIDENT IN 2009. And then it shut off. I didn't know who I should be pissed at. The ponytail man was gone. I got excited. "What the fuck?!" I was so excited. I was laughing really hard. I kept turning around in circles. "Play it again. Play it again!"

I woke up.

friday, western pennsylvania.

2009-10-30T16:28:00.000-07:00

yeah, i know what you mean. i mean,
it's not like i'm that fuckin into christmas
or anything, and if i have to go back
to working at the meatpackers
i could do that. take a break
or something. let the dust
settle. but yeah yeah, i know
what you mean. movement.
movement is important.

running/returning

2009-10-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

Sunday night sees me back safe in the sticks. My room is the same but with fewer things in it. All the oranges and yellows and reds made little bundles in the hills as I drove past and tried not to hit a mailbox. Crossing the state line, deer begin bounding across the highways and the sun sets things on fire. I was only thinking of the sounds our voices made mouthing goodbyes against wind and how nothing can ever stay the way you want it. Every quiet bundle is a violent fire. Sandy Lake has gone on existing without me in it.

This week was overwhelming gorgeous exhausting. Reconnecting with some other lovely souls made me feel more focused and more lost as to the construction of this whole Life Thesis thingy I've been working on. I feel like every day was a concentrated universe of Something To Think About, which is how it should be, I guess. Many things added to the list, many things crossed off. I was thinking how everyone everywhere is just confused and kinda scared, and trying to make sense of things the best way they can, and trying to do something with their time that they can feel okay about, and maybe trying to find a body or several bodies to sleep alongside, which yields some pretty diverse results. I really miss having bodies to sleep alongside. It made me think that constantly uprooting myself in the name of Experience and Exploration was kind of whittling away at my sacred organs. I also just don't know how important it is to have a "meaningful job" when it pulls you 3,000 miles away from the people you love the most. And Fuck You World for making me feel like I have to choose. Wish I could just turn off the part of my brain that would make me feel like a huge sellout if I became a corporate desk pilot to afford my water billz/bar tab. Wish I could decide whether or not becoming said corporate desk pilot to afford said water billz/bar tab would be worth it if the alternative is being paid slave wages to feel like you're Not Contributing To The Problem and/or living somewhere you don't necessarily want to live. Ho hum. Everyone is heading home and I haven't yet decided where mine is.

(Plz see Robbie Robertson for elaboration)

I just want what is falling asleep in Burlington--- the rain without/the warm within, whiskey cider on the stove, shared dinners and the hands that made them, people who care about one another taking turns paying for pitchers. Special thanks to the beautiful and inspiring [Elsa and Meres] for reminding me how important hugs are. Flowers and bloody marys to you.

In other news!

+ GGL future side project to include impeccable harmonies/getting indie folk-nasty with softspoken gingers. To Be Continued, assuming Rochester remains nearby.

+ Even if you're not that excited about Bon Iver, this is still fucking beautiful.

+ Even if you're not obsessed with RP/the flannel aesthetic, this is still fucking beautiful.

+ Even if you can't grow one, now you actually can!

+ My new housemates listen to STS9, which is great news, 'cause I really miss Colorado Bro Culture (CBC) and being a snarky jerk.

+ Speaking of musics, this is amazing. The Flaming Lips' compilation will BLOW YR MIND.

+ We're all moving to Michigan! I just decided. Thoughts?

+ I love you all. Probably in unhealthy quantities.

six words for errbody vol. 1

2009-10-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

portland: i miss you. take me back?
powell's: need a cashier? i'm ~~smart~~ hot!!!!
k. sampsell: (see above)(i also make coffee)
veganism: cheese omelettes are just so good.
brooklyn: i'm not convinced. say again. over.
juno: finally saw it. yep. it's good.
WWOOF: planets are aligning. maybe puget sound?
cupcakes: nom nom nom nom nom nom
robin pecknold: you dream of me. for real.
fleet foxes: NEW ALBUM, PLZ. (miss u, sensitivity)
manhattan: sneakers are, like, popular or something.
beach house: i have unrealistic expectations now, thanks.
work: most people have no better ideas.
waffle house: cheesy eggs > god. don't judge, h8rz.
kleptomania: he said stop. now i will.
burlington: leaves and things tomorrow. can't wait.

alcohol poisoning is cool again.

2009-10-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

bartenders love tits.
that's how it always starts. add
dollar shots, and then

you're splitting smokes with
the bouncer out front, saying
"i'm gonna move here;

i'm gonna move here."
(not ever.) it gets you more beer though;
stars blur and spin.

fresh prince over the
pool table. you are pissing
in the dark. and then

(i don't really
remember-- i had been drinking
a lot of whiskey)

and then. you're awake
and oh god-ing. showers don't
help. neither does bread.

sunday, winchester virginia

2009-10-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

Slowjams in the coffeeshop are refusing to give my caffeine jitters an outlet. In a few minutes I will google directions to Brooklyn and then drive there through the rain. I'm nervous about driving into NYC. If Die Hard With A Vengeance painted an accurate picture of traffic there I might be eaten alive by machines. That yogurt parfait made my stomach hurt. I'm thinking about how scary it is to wrap your bare arm around somebody's bare chest in the morning, when you really care about what they're thinking and can't ask. The Soundtrack to Every 8th-Grade Dance Ever is playing, loudly.

I just thought about how rad a shirt that said "Auto-tune is for Lovers" would be. COPYRIGHT ME 2009.

Yesterday we saw Where The Wild Things Are and think it might be one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Like one huge visual poem that reminds you how silly and scared and lovely human beings are. Makes you crawl inside a child's head and heart and feel the oppressive weight of small things. I can't wait to see how the Jonze'ster explodes faces with Light Boxes. Wild Things reminded me a lot of it actually; the combination of raw nature and violence and magical monstrous creatures and blatant things like LOVE and LONELINESS. Yowza. Go forth to drop yr $10 on this goodness.

More importantly, the Art Film Of My Dreams has apparently already been made. Wes Anderson has made an incredible-looking stop-animation version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox, and I pretty much wanted to cry just watching the preview. Roald Dahl is one of my favorite authors of all time, and this looks magical and lovely. I like where big-budget movies are going nowadays.

The after-church crowd just walked in wearing pea coats for waves of hot chocolate and I am wearing a clever t-shirt and feel like an asshole. Outside there are a lot of people talking to themselves under porches in the rain. Sometimes when my phone rings I get really excited and think the conversation is gonna go one way and then it doesn't go that way at all. So, I need to go pick up the pillow I forgot.

@weekoff: ur hot!

2009-10-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

Emily May, 9:24pm PDX: Holy fuck. Grizz bros. Yeah.

Emily May, 9:26pm PDX: @ show. Omg.

Emily May, 9:50pm PDX: Actually this is so gay.

LOLLZ!!!

Happy Friday, PlanetEarthBros! Usually this phrase should be reserved for coffee mugs and Kids in the Hall skits but I'm stoked, cause starting now I have nine wondrous days of unfiltered freedom before I have to re-strap the ol' ball/chain of "earning a living" (also, wtf english language?) on my tender legs again. Weeeee! Despite the fact that I woke up this morning to two inches of snow on the ground, my irresponsibly bald tires and I are still gonna make a run for it and try to cram as much east coast loungin' into the next week-ish as we can. Remember me by this blog post, if I should be found dead in a twisted smoking wreck of crumpled steel of Japanese origin.

Excited to take a break from children and/or drink alcohol for the first time in two months. My tolerance is going to be embarrassingly low, about which I'm embarrassed. But I'm also quietly less than $100 away from utter destitution, so it should all even out.

ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY WIN.

Should be a lovely time. Can't wait to be snuggling in the beds of warm loved ones and pronouncing existential crises over espresso. Bad weather be damned. Our arms will make good windshield wipers.

larger things

2009-10-13T14:36:00.001-07:00

collage and french films, because they belong to him. electric lips he softly sends to the soft jawline, hinge nearing earlobe. no address specified. there are leaves crunching the gutters now, no long-distance longer. larger things at stake here, she breathes into the junkmail. her parents are the savings bond type, would never watch her throw those years into treehouses, folding her heart into newspaper letters, yielding no return.

sunday whistles

2009-10-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

Snagged un año on Crispin Best's For Every Year, which you can read here. I have a total crush on this bro because he also has his own slanguage, can do everything better than I can, and taught me how to make snappy crabs and piles of poo on gchat. He also has some sicky Ninja Turtle fiction, which I'm pretty sure is its own genre.

Finished New York Tyrant 2/2 and it was like listening to an awesome mixtape from your best friend you live really far away from now. I feel like I'm starting to "get" that short stories can be good and not always bad. Plus it has funny/great cover art involving men and bears.

One more week and then ten days of coasting the east shall commence! EXCITEMENT. Gonna work on staying off the internets until then. Also gonna do a rain dance except for money.

It's windy here today. Richard Manuel has secrets in his beard.

timing, everything, lovelyday

2009-10-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

Today was a lovely day. The sun was shining and I went for a drive and took pictures of the red hills. Emily is healthy and hopeful. I went running and it was cold and I felt like my lungs were collapsing and then I got warmer. I was thinking about movement and routine and priorities and creation and family. I felt everything in my day become a colorful and productive object piled upon other colorful and productive objects. On the way back I checked the mailbox and there were two (2) letters from two (2) wonderful ladies, both of which contained multiple power quotes of Universal implication. I read them while walking back down the hill to my house, hoping I wouldn't step in any puddles.

Mostly everything seems like it happens when it needs to. Today I felt like I found two (2) cairns on The Trail, courtesy of the USPS. Everyone is struggling everywhere, but we are together in the shit, or could be. I have settled into a nice solitary routine of stretching and collage and meditation. Now French films are making me nostalgic and maybe I could even move to Oakland or SE PDX, find a house with garden space, settle down for a spell in a nest of arms of friends, build my coffee mug collection back up to what it once was.

consuming perishables = feeling a lil' like a raccoon trapped under a house

2009-10-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

This morning my mom sent me a text that said "HAPPY FRIDAY!!!" among other things. I kinda felt pumped up then, like how before a big basketball game you used to do layups to Ludacris, thinking oh fuck yeah. By 4pm I was feelin' pretty on top of my game, having already a) fulfilled my responsibilities entitling me to a monthly paycheck, b) devoted an entire roll of film to the zillion bodacious varieties of fungus and mushrooms in my backyard, c) gone for a run and showered, and d) established total solitary domination of the house for the duration of the weekend. For something new and different, and because the feeling of being untouchable probably always leads to some sort of rampant consumption (Adbusters essay forthcoming), I decided against stealing my lamer roommates' Pop-Tarts for sustenance, opting instead to steal them from the friendly geriatrics staffing my neighborhood 24-Hour WalMart SuperCenter.

Greenville is 18 miles away but totally worth the drive if you are at all into "watching your budget" and/or shoving everything you sort of want deep into your ironic messenger bag and walking out with a clear conscience. Sometimes I crave theft like 2am drunks crave burritos, which I am not willing to discuss any further. Spending any length of time in a place like this majorly fucks with my brain, and this time was no different. Heady epiphanies, commence!

1) Stealing from the biggest corporation on the planet makes me feel 0% bad, this is true. BUT. While selecting which bag of ground medium roast was gonna sleep in the bottom of my purse until I got back to my car, I ran into a serious dilemma. NO DUH @ if you're gonna buy shit, you better buy Organic/Fair Trade/Non-GMO/&c. But what if you have no intention of paying for it at all? I still don't want conventional garbage in my bloodstream, but I feel sorta bad stealing a more responsibly-manufactured product. Should I take Fair Trade and hope that WalMart's check to Mr. Starving African Farmer has already been cashed? Should I take organic and feel okay about the fact that Big Organics are still kinda effing the world over? Or should I take conventional to get it off the shelf so some other Pennsylvania doucher caffeine-hog will have no choice but to support responsible consumption via throwing dollars Its way? Then I saw there was a whole Starbucks brand section I'd neglected. A wave of helplessness started to pass over me until I thought fuck it and just grabbed the most expensive one. Living beyond my means is sort of what I do best.

2) Amish people as a marketed-to demographic blows my fucking mind. This place stocks really simple black canvas shoes by the hundreds. Bros with bowl haircuts and creepy beards push around shopping carts full of toilet paper and eggs. WalMart Brand Amish Potato Salad. Who the hell are these people? Is their potato salad really superior? Are you gonna chop my head open with a hatchet? Cause that's how I feel. When I left I noticed a horse-and-buggy in the parking lot. The world seems like a nonsensical amusement park sometimes.

3) $5 DVDs don't even seem economically feasible. Like $5 Footlongs at Subway. IMPOSSIBLE.

4) Consumer economics is a crisis of choice, price matrixes are built into our gray matter, etc etc. I bring this up because I was faced with the impossible choice between a 23-hour-long collection of stockpiled documentary footage on the Vietnam War for five bucks or a package of the first three Die Hard movies for $13. Decided to take the high road of self-education and thriftiness. Not that dollars really entered into it, but if a Security Guard clotheslined me at the door and they searched my bag, which would I rather go down in flames for having stolen? I think you can see my point here. Now that I've watched two hours of US Air Force propaganda though, I'm sort of wishing I'd settled for a sooty Bruce Willis killing a lot of people in a wifebeater.

4b) Considering that I probably overdrew my damn bank account to buy some kale, even considering the above choice makes me think I still don't know how "money" works.

5) 70% Cacao or 85% Cacao? 70% Cacao. No wait. Yeah. 70% Cacao.

6) Seriously though, who the fuck is Miley Cyrus? She has her own edgy tween clothing line here, and apparently WalMart has some sort of exclusive rights to her albums/soul. Like everything else in this store, it makes me feel weird. Somehow in my mind she is some vague representation of the terrible cluelessness of Middle America and maybe also everything that Philip K. Dick warned us about. I hope I never truly and wholly accept the fact that she indeed exists and that she, indeed, will make more money this year than I'll ever make in my life. Miley Cyrus is a robot hologram.

7) Dan Brown is #1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

8) JESUS CHRIST MY BOOBS. I kind of decided since there was no one staffing the dressing room that I should grab a bra. The undies section made me feel weird. I wondered what it would be like to go to WalMart looking for something to "spice up" your failing marriage. I wondered what it would be like to be cripplingly self-conscious about the fact that you have no tits but you still have to change for P.E. in front of everyone in the girls' locker room. I wondered how many people this month had bought lacy underwear for a specific boy to see them in. I wondered if there were girls that had squished those push-up bras with 2 full inches of foam and went "oh hell yeah." I wondered if Amish people had sex with each other or what is the deal with that. I put a black bra in my bag and went away from there.

9) Are Budweiser boxers ironic, post-ironic, or a waste of child labor and virgin materials?

10) The poster rack, a haiku:

Twilight bro is pale--
like, unhealthy. Still don't "get"
the Jonas Brothers.

11) If you ever get the pre-Walk-Out jitters, or get paranoid that 80+ year old checkout clerks are "watching you," or if over the loudspeakers you start to imagine that "1080 to Manager? 1080 to Manager?" is code for "yeah, just go ahead and head off that sketchy-looking alt-broad at the door with the ol' Baton To The Knees," just do what I do and loiter. Suspiciously. Sweat a little bit. Pace, even. And then buy something, just as a peace offering. But make it convincing that you could have come to WalMart for just that one thing. Like, don't make it a nectarine, or anything at the front counter. Buy a pair of underwear for a specific boy to see you in. The woman who is ringing you up will have totally been there before.

in on the weekend

2009-10-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

miss u pdx/meat

2009-10-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

I stop eating meat for a few years and this fucking happens.

Today I thought about Portland a lot because I drove out to Franklin and let my vices get the better of me via stealing a lot of shit from thrift store chains. It's kind of unbelievable that the Armies of Salvation out in the middle of nowhere are a gazillion times better than the ones in the middle of somewhere. I'm not gonna feel any highs or lows about it. The only real crime here is that I have no hip barista gig to wear my new purple windbreaker to.

Sometimes I miss living in a city where it seems like shit is always happening, although I'm pretty sure the only way I could afford it would be to get a benefactor. What's the deal with those? Really all I want is a soft-hearted old person to pay off my BFF's college loans so we can hitch-hike to Devendra's house and start tryna experience something real. Like dropping acid and making out with heady earnest bros.

I sort of feel like maybe it's a human rights violation that we are restricted by 'economics' in attempting to live full and happy and meaningful lives, but maybe I used to live in Berkeley. Sometimes I wish America would be like those really cool parents who emancipate their 16-year-olds but still let them live in their house. It's not like I want to move to Nicaragua, I just want to be absolved of all my financial and legal debts for the rest of my life. No big deal.

Business as usual in PA this weekend. Aqua Teen, theft, and too much coffee have lent themselves to rabid collage-making and waves of nostalgia. You are so totally getting letters in the mail soon.

california, elimae

2009-10-02T04:32:00.000-07:00

There's a reeeeaaaaally short poem of mine up on elimae; you can find it here. It's small but makes me pretty happy. And I feel like the last song on a mix CD or something. It's pouring down rain here today. Fridays are very nice.

PREDATORY BIRD WIN

2009-09-23T15:04:00.000-07:00

Rural PA never fails to entertain. Last night as a special addition to our regularly scheduled Earthkeepers program, we were informed that some bro named Earl Shriver (alias The Birdman) would be doing a live demonstration with his van full of predatory birds. My boss took great pains to let us know that the material might be 'disturbing' and that one regularly-visiting elementary school had actually banned Earl from their programs after he upset a bunch of lady teachers by feeding dead day-old chicks to his Peregrines. The only other bit of information I heard re: Earl was that he was a 'rough-around-the-edges' retired steel worker who apparently didn't give a shit what you thought about his routine. I am a huge fan of larger-than-life characters, especially when they involve shady retirees toeing the white trash line and/or keeping fascinating extracurriculars like fucking falconing. So naturally I stuck around to check it out.

Earl is a man with a gut; that is to say, Earl is an instantly respectable 78-year-old male, and shows up wearing one of those 'make-yr-own!' tees that reps a 4x6 of one of his hawks. He has a badass leather falconers glove that sorta gives me this sensation like, "wow I bet this guy gets Cold Steel catalogs in the mail." Five enormous taloned birds perch behind him, preening. The whole 'demonstration' pretty much involved Earl lining the auditorium stage with clear plastic tarp and then mumbling for 45 minutes about the sport/art of hunting with birds, the overabundance of housecats in Pennsylvania (which naturally dove right back into the subject of hunting with birds), and habitat protection (I guess), with a few wife jokes and bad puns involving words like foul peppered in there for good measure. It's a well-played routine, and I am shoveling it into my mouth like fucking Gushers.

Finally he sort of gets quiet, digs into the pockets of his jeans and pulls out two baby chicks. Like he's shrugging them out of his pants, mehhh whatever. Fifty 5th-graders did that thing where you half-gasp-half-yell, then get really quiet for two seconds, then lose your shit screaming your head off. After making some comment about how there was no difference between a falcon ripping apart a rabbit and one of us eating a chicken nugget ("I'm a killer, you're a killer, she's a killer; welcome to the Real World"), he hands them over to the ladies and they commence ripping the chicks to pieces, complete with little chick-sized blood fountains to spew all over the plastic tarp and then lay there in pale pink pools for the whole school to look at. The principal rolled his eyes, the kiddos went nuts. And at the end, he even let them come up and take pictures, as long as they maintained five feet of distance from the birds at all times.

Yep, Tuesday night. I just love it when characters like this exist in real life, especially when they infiltrate my otherwise typical schedule of shoving a lot of hippie propaganda down some Philly kids' throats to no avail. I will leave you with this magical video, per the suggestion of Earl himself, because I think all of us could stand to learn a little more about predatory bird hunting via the Mongolians.

nate

2009-09-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

i am waiting for you with a cup of tea
which seems the most appropriate.
cutouts of flowers on my hands.
pretty soon it will be then; the shuffling sounds
your feet will make walking toward me–
strong like the stench of rosemary, echoes of when
the push of a button made a large sound,
pulled people through the windows of their homes.

no child left to its own devices

2009-09-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

Working with kids is awesome and weird. Awesome because the whole cliche about seeing magical shit through a child’s eyes sometimes pans out, like when you show them some cool fungus or let them catch crawfish and they’re so fuckin stoked they give you snotty high-fives and BFF bracelets made from pipe-cleaners. Weird because I feel like kids are mostly just non-sentient human-looking blobs that chew food and breathe air and fall asleep and take shits and fight with sticks and things. It’s pretty annoying to think that I went to college just to get a B.S. in Feeling Panicky About My Existence and that 5th-graders are far more interested in who that was that farted during lunchtime than how to start a compost bin. Kinda makes me sad/feel like the future is doomed. Kinda also makes me think about how having kids means something totally different to everyone. Seems to me like it isn’t really worth the trouble to “wait it out” til your kid is fucking 27 and finally “gets it” that they cost you a lot of time and money and sleep and heartbreak, not to mention the “best years of your life” or something (i.e., your ass and tits and sex drive) (let’s be real). I can’t tell if it’s selfless or self-serving to raise a kid. I feel like I either want to have an army of beautiful children to release upon the earth who will know how to be intentional and careful and loving with everything they encounter, or else say fuck it and scooch away from The Table and play with my brother’s kids and die happy knowing that I spent my years/dollars/firm breasts on something other than bringing another human into existence. Like what if your kid likes McDonald’s and Twilight? Or is really really painfully pathetically obnoxious, or has a lazy eye, or a skin problem. What if your kid has acne and votes Republican? Or cares more about farting than soil cycles? THEN WHAT???

Actually that penultimate sentence is pretty funny.

guhhhhhhhhhh

2009-09-12T21:27:00.001-07:00

I just Pressed an entire French of coffee for no good reason. Prolly ’cause today was supposed to be very productive and it ended up being a throwaway Saturday, meaning instead of driving into Pittsburgh to successfully toss my dollars at the Goodwill and go see Andy Warhol things, I drove into Pittsburgh and over-self-caffeinated and then walked around lost for a really long time. There are like sixty fucking bridge/river combinations in Pittsburgh to get confused about! Feel like crucial buildings are hiding in the trees and/or down nonexistent streets. Dumb. Pittsburgh. And for some reason, just as the realization was blossoming in my mind that I would not be looking at art or buying ironic work t-shirts at all today, I went into a Target and stole a bunch of crap that Malaysian babies had probably died over, just because I felt like it would salvage the afternoon in some way. And, sadly, it probably did. How many Shaun White little boys’ shirts do you own?

Exactly.

On a related note, urbanity (?) is totally overwhelming after even two weeks of living in the sticks. Messes me up. I had almost nearly wrapped my tender mind around the notion of spending zero dollars, having zero social distractions, and generally undergoing a mental/literal detox this fall. I’ve been going for runs through the forest, saving acorns on my windowsill. Meditation and Shit-Getting-Together would be happening, I thought, in a vacuum of green leaves and no inputs whatsoever. After ten minutes in the city I’m feeling like I should get a tattoo and move immediately back to Portland, or at least to a place with good coffee, or at least to a place with any coffee and more to write home about than a 24-hour-WalMart and a Subway/gas-station combo (that, by the way, I still have to drive 20 minutes to reach) (I wish I was joking).

But. With all that madness now behind me and the spoils of klepto-victory tucked triumphantly into my dresser drawer, it feels nice to be back in the woods. The crickets are yelling outside. Today just feels like it shouldn’t count or something. I should probably stay out of my car for the next month.

wednesday, western pennsylvania

2009-09-11T21:26:00.000-07:00

we’re sort of just playing the waiting game
you know, derek wants to open his own gun shop
in indiana, but it’s hard when i’m out here
and he’s out there and it’s just crazy.
but the wedding is set for some time next summer;
when i was a little girl i always imagined getting married
in the sunshine, wearing my grandmom’s dress.

Open Letter to

2009-09-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I started Brief Interviews With Hideous Men as a way to minimize the existential pain of having to spend the entire day in various shitty airports across the United States. Arcata, California: gurgling babies in tiny baby crocs, 5am stoners sipping weak coffee. I am unfolding your neuroses and spreading them out on the table and it looks pretty good from here. I started thinking about how you think and it made me anxious. All the human secrets I unlock wide-eyed post-bong rip swim around in your head for keeps all the time. LAX: Laura Bush was on CNN saying that American politics were ‘divisive’, GW is working on his memoirs, and everyone is angry about their stimulating packages. Or something. My head is shaking. You know a lot of names of prescription drugs. I kinda just feel like you get it, D, more than anybody else. How tragic human interactions are, how potentially salvageable and Good. Your stories are like snakes eating themselves letting me eat them. Airports always give me that sense of mild lunacy; stale skin and no healthy food. I found a pressed flower in between the pages. Like you are letting me watch. Atlanta, Georgia: I killed an iced soy latte in three minutes but at least my hair isn’t that big. And can I at any fucking cost get some non-overpackaged food? Christ! Dave, I just have this feeling that you were way too correct for your own good. Our brains are doing all that work and then they just get sick, no fault of their own. What does it mean for the rest of us, clutching at your sentences, that you opted out? Cigarette vending machines in the breezeway. I wish you hadn’t of. Apparently, Former Vice-President Dick Cheney and Former President George W. Bush are still in contact with one another, from time to time. While reading your stories, I imagined us lying together under a bedsheet fort, talking about our feelings. Pittsburgh: swampy wind tunnels. My headphones only come off to ask for directions to my car. I will marry the first man I see with a copy of Oblivion dangling from his messenger bag.

1928-2009

2009-09-03T21:24:00.000-07:00

once when he was very young, his grandfather had taken him on a trip, some large national park that (he was embarrassed to admit) he couldn’t remember the name of. his older sister had sat in the front seat next to his grandfather because she was older, and good at conversing, and a girl. their curls bounced in tandem, riding over potholes. he sat in the back and watched the trees go by silently, hands folded across himself. every so often he peeled the bottoms of his thighs from the hot leather with a thwick. he watched the trees and looked for people. after a long time they stopped.

his grandfather carried him on his shoulders until they were into the forest, where the spindly tree branches scratched his cheeks. then he set him down. there you go. they walked into the woods, along a dirt path, looking up into the trees. he watched their green mosaic against the sky. everything was dank and rotting; everything was being eaten by something else. every so often his grandfather would slow and point to a bird or something and say look and he would look so hard he would trip and fall. his knees smelled like wet bark. his grandfather touched trees gently as they walked along; he pulled leaves off of them and smelled them and made a sound like everything around them was filling his lungs. after a long time they stopped.

there, his grandfather said. that looks like a good one. he sat down. he and his sister found flat little rocks between their legs, practiced skipping them across the green river. his grandfather cut rough chunks of orange cheese and dry salami with a pocketknife, toward his thumb, passing them little pieces. his sister squealed as her rock skittered the surface toward the bank on the other side, died in a swirl of white riffle. the sun shone. he watched his grandfather make his methodical cuts. he remembered feeling some dull ache inside him, like he wanted to wrap that moment in smooth and beautiful paper, kiss its ribbon, give it to somebody. he would dream about that slow afternoon for years after, dreams where he was hungry and carried a big knife. dreams where he would lie on his back in the wet dirt and cover himself in treebark and breathe soil into his lungs, watching the sky change behind those tissue-papered leaves.

after a long time they stopped.

july.

2009-07-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

Seams and tags scratch at sunpinked patches of skin. Matted curls greased and frizzed to foreheads and backs of necks. We wandered into the cool marble lobby, our stained sea-salted clothes on their third day, falling loosely from newly freckled shoulders. It was not how I would have wanted it, and I shuffled through the lobby wearing a chopped t-shirt around my torso (”The sleeves look like pockets, sort of. Very European-y”), wondering what other people might have been wondering, gingerly smoothing my clothes and hair.

This is being back after three days sleeping in the sun, languid and outstretched on the decks of gentle boatdocks and in the backyard lawnchairs of friends’ parents’ houses, where all the noises cocooning us were of rustling pines and the lapping of water on barnacled rock, keeping the anemones, the blood-purple starfish, as wet and alive as tongues. We were fed there by someone else’s mother, by the soft lushness of quiet island forest that suggested only four colors, and the distant pops of fireworks as they whistled and screamed, somehow also softly, all along its shoreline. And we could only think of Portland then, and our cluttered little house on a noisy street, how we would return to her the day after with renewed sense of purpose and renewed sense of loss, to the scattered existence of Being 23 Years Old, when nothing is as you want it and the road toward it looks long and tedious. Our mothers are not there and no mothering will be done, and the excitement of scraping by and feeling alive is equally weighed with the overwhelming sense that you are absolutely fucking exhausted.

But. We have hitched up our dirty skirts around us and carried the remains of our case of beer onto the ferry, where for fifteen minutes the rush of wind from the salt waters and the distant city and the forests beyond sweeps our hair from our faces and shushes us from thinking of anything but this. Carried swiftly across smooth bodies of water, under the matte blue sky of the wooded Pacific Northwest, where egrets may or may not flourish on diets of healthy fishlings and everything seems to be whispering its lullabies and condolences, we are willing to believe it.

And now I am moving slowly through the cool galleries, looking for something. I may have found it in a letter someone wrote to Picasso, that happy desperation that comes with knowing you are Doing Things Right no matter what anyone says. Yoko Ono’s installation involved a strung-up hammer and a box of nails on a wall, inviting the rest of us to take part. There are receipts and scraps of paper, the dregs of purses, shit you dig out of the bottom of your backpack all pencil-stained. I hold the cold nail in my mouth, position my contribution, hammer it in as confidently as possible, then shyly shuffle backwards to look. There. A 4×6 index of my recently developed Colorado film, 26 thumbnails of drunk friends and green valleys and the sunrise over the Moab plateaus. I think about writing something there that would encompass how I now feel, strangely fulfilled, most definitely exhausted, having tacked a personal universe into a dizzying array of hundreds of others. But, assuming someone would even read it, it would have been barely glanced over, misunderstood completely; it would have been a watered-down t-shirt slogan at best, not really saying anything interesting at all, a bone casually picked over by others even hungrier than I am, finding nothing substantial. And so I turned and walked away without scrawling, under the watchful gaze of a dozen-or-so other compatriots, the only phrase that was coming to mind, the only thing I really wanted to read, and wondered how true it was that the terrified populace still found nothing Artistic about knowing absolutely: everything is beautiful and everything will be alright.

you haven't heard from me in a while.

2009-04-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

And it’s for a good reason, I promise. Global economic crises and consistent snowfall have gotten me all existential, and I may or may not have spent the winter wondering whether or not it was “worth it” to do many things at all, be it waking up to “shred” the “gnar” or applying for jobs elsewhere, and especially regarding being another internet soapbox whistler. But snow melts and seasons change and headlines get more positive, and when I think about the fact that I’m the only one who gets to hear the voice in my head, well it just makes me feel sorry for the rest of you. Is this thing on, etc.

Not to mention, Telluride had made me lazy. I feel like a bear just waking up from hibernation, all lean and half-crazed and ready to fatten myself on the World again. Or maybe like I downed a bottle of NyQuil and a pint of Jager and am waking up in a stranger’s room, reaching for my knife and wondering if we used a condom. It took me sitting in a bus station in Mexico City realizing that I had no guidebook and no map and no fucking idea where I was headed in a country where I have a half-grasp of the language to understand how Unawake I’ve been this winter. But waking up is nice. I’ve had a nice week of stretching and slowly getting out of bed. Now maybe I’ll take a piss and get some coffee.

Yesterday afternoon I was welcomed back into the arms of America by a couple of no-nonsense Homeland Security personnel and a raging snowstorm. Having spent the previous three nights sleeping on various Mexican bus station floors and airport lobbies, dwindling my already-dwindled bank account pre-magical-roadtrip, and being fully equipped with lady parts, I essentially crumpled into tears upon realizing that our ride had ditched us and that no shuttles were braving the snowy passes at all that night. But after some yerba mate and a chat with my personal shaman, I realized that a night at the Ramada Inn of Golden, Colorado wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. Did you know that Domino’s fucking delivers to the place? They do. In fact, after getting my mochilera on for ten days across the dirt hills and scrubgrass of Mexico, I was surprised at how overwhelmingly grateful I was for the opportunity to brush my teeth and scrub the layers of sewage and dog shit off of my feet. And last night, as I fell asleep showered and shaved and naked and satisfied, having made all the important home-safe phone calls and masturbated in a bed that my mother would probably reimburse me for, I thought “God DAMN do I have this living thing figured out.”

So there you have it. It does me good to bow to the elements every once in a while. With any luck we’ll be over the icy passes this afternoon, and I’ll be sipping whiskey and watching Futurama with some loves-of-life in no time at all. More epiphanies on art, travel, self-manifestation, and just-how-fucking-cool-I-am to follow shortly, barring any more Nietzschean meltdowns.

And for the record, the Coors Brewery is not offering tours today; I already checked.

first five days in one of those middle states

2008-11-26T21:16:00.000-08:00

Bearing in mind that I started this ill-considered journey to the mountains at a time when I had no money, no plans, and essentially dragged myself kicking and screaming from Portland “Chillville” Oregon, where the indie rock shows flow like microbrews which flow like wine, I’m trying to keep all initial judgments regarding Colorado to myself, at least until I get acclimated to living above 10,000 feet and accept the fact that snow is indeed real.

Last weekend in Boulder was a shitshow; after hearing its name tossed around for so long in the company of Seattle, Missoula, and PDX itself, I almost feel guilty that my memories of the place will from now on only involve debilitating hangovers courtesy of Canadian Hunter, chowdering a barely-acquaintance’s front porch with Canadian Hunter, and watching Will Murray nearly kill himself in a giant-trampoline-related stunt while riding the emotional high of conquering the backflip and also slightly hungover on Canadian Hunter. For the first time since leaving Oregon it was nice to be in the company of other beautiful humans who, for some reason or another, understand and share the unspoken desire we all have to keep moving and experiencing and delaying our plunge to the un-magical world of adulthood, even if it means working shitty part-time jobs or living temporarily in abject poverty. It was lovely and validating and just plain fuckin’ fun.

So getting on the Amtrak Sunday morning I felt again that too-familiar sense of being pulled prematurely away from something meaningful and good. Six hours winding slow along the mountainsides in a big iron snake, I watch the icy rivers and the birds who forage near them and listen to everything because I forgot my headphones. I am seated next to two middle-aged women reading US Weekly who discuss their post-Thanksgiving shopping plans and ask me what California is like. Suddenly the world feels big and impersonal and I am lost in it again. I fall asleep and wake up and read and fall asleep again and then I am in Grand Junction and my little brother meets me at the station with a Yoohoo and a packed bowl and I can feel my heart turn a more healthy shade of pink. We share stories and smoke and laugh, we roll the windows down and then up. We go careening into WalMart for toilet paper and eggs and things are still funny until the size and sterility of the place makes me call Emily for consolation, and I dodge whole families hefting bricks of processed cheese into their babies’ laps, wondering where we will move to bury ourselves away from the marketplace.

One hour and $97 later, I am broke and exhausted and we lug our shit to the truck to head home. Halfway there our engine is steaming and the heater reeks of burnt anti-freeze. Fuck you, you motherfucking coolant pump! We are freezing and swearing on the side of the road weighing our options, considering melting the engine to get home tonight. In a single moment of clarity, realizing that it would just like totally suck to burn up and die in a piece of shit Ford half-ton, we make some phone calls and get picked up by some curly white-haired old man who sort of resembles Jerry Garcia if Jerry Garcia was more clownish and talked a lot about Tom Cruise. We get in just before midnight, enough time for me to drop my bags on the ground and pass out in the sparse one-bedroom i now call home.

The next morning I have orientation for the Guest Services Department which promises to be informative, for despite the huge amount of bullshitting I’ve done with my parents and other authority figures, I have little to no idea what the hell I will even be doing in Telluride for the next few months. I spend about twenty minutes deciding what I should wear, because dressing for thirty-degree weather is a skill that has completely evaded me and because, derr, I should obviously attempt to present myself as the biggest baller in the room. I eventually settle on Johnny Cash for obvious reasons, assuming that anybody of worth would give me the enthusiastic thumbs up. I plop down at a table of ladies who look about my age and do the handshake/introductions thing, but soon end up zoning out of their conversation as soon as I realize that I have virtually nothing to contribute to a discussion about Juicy Couture bracelets in Platinum. By 11am I had “agreed to disagree” with one of my new co-workers about how babely the Backstreet Boys are and how Bon Jovi is, like, seriously a good songwriter. We ride the gondola into town, which is cradled in the valley of the biggest mountains I’ve ever seen, and head to the bar where no one makes us pay for our drinks. Around 9pm we barrel back to Mountain Village where there are brah-brahs leaking from every room in the building, belligerent and beer-bellied and yelling about Turok 2, and after a few shots with the new neighbors I head back to my empty room to collect myself and wonder where the fuck I am.

The great thing about this place is that literally everyone here is having the time of their life, so if I can suck it up and stomach three months of dorm-style blackouts, politely bowing out of beerbong competitions (yeah, right), and coming to terms with the fact that I might not engage in any intellectually stimulating conversation on the weekly, I should be fine. From what I can tell, most people are massive stoners here to escape the suckiness of the “real world” by getting shitfaced every night and playing in the snow, which is fine by me. I think I’ll just set a few personal goals for the winter, including (but not limited to) reading the Harry Potter series in entirety, writing a catalog of beautiful songs, and avoiding liver failure. Promise you’ll pull the plug though if I make it out of here genuinely liking Tim McGraw.

november is for nomads

2008-11-26T21:14:00.000-08:00

Leaving portland is like going into freefall, an acceleration toward some unknown hard surface, where for two weeks I go shouldering my heavy backpack on a goodbye-for-the-winter tour down the California coast, paying visits to the places that used to be my home but never were. Absently I continue my slow crawl south along the foggy beaches, shuffling rocks in the drizzly fern canyons, settling like a cloud shy and slow over the low cold dairy lands. Six days in Eureka makes me simultaneously incredibly nostalgic and tooth-and-nail anxious to fight my way out all over again. Walking in the eerie twilight of the bottoms, the flat and swamp of the earth, in the bone-cold, where the first few stars are clean bright pinpricks in the shallowing blue night. It makes me feel sixteen and heartbroken, like I’m stuck in the current under the crashing waves, always looking up. Just as my bones start to hurt and my throat gets thick and there are tears behind everything I say, I scatter out of Humboldt county like autumn leaves for the sunshine and oak trees and piss-stained neon glass buildings of Berkeley. There is warmth there, and movement; all the young hipsters and frat brahs and timid med-school hopefuls in mobs leaking out over the sidewalks and cluttering up the pharmacies and coffee shops. There is green grass and the shade of tree leaves; there are more dive bars than I remember. My small pile of belongings goes floating around from living room to bedroom to car, spreading and contracting like a tidepool on the wood floors of those who love me the most. I can’t keep track of my instruments, my coats with bills in the pockets. I am spending my found wrinkled dollars on cheap pints and I don’t want to think.

(One night leaving the Hotsy Totsy at 2:30am when even the neon lights of the Albany Bowl are fluttering and settling into dark, we are three and breathing and belligerent and the buses aren’t running and the hot vapor of our whiskey sodas go billowing out of our red mouths and into the cold black night in blooms. Our thumbs go out haphazard, unsure, and we flail after the taillights of a white minivan apparition, where the quiet middle-aged driver speaks flat like the whistle of a tea-kettle and drops us at our corner and disappears. We throw flowers at his altar for not slitting our young throats. I sleep on a friend’s friend’s pullout couch, a half finished glass of red wine and Walker Texas Ranger blurring me softly to sleep.)

There is no feeling like being terrified and drifting and free, waking up and getting out and consolidating your shit and walking toward a maybe warm place. My Berkeley darlings, now exhaled to the outskirts of Oakland, have steady paychecks and unfulfilling hobbies and we look at each other from either side of the divide. I am bartering for dinner or a ride into the city with a brown grocery bag of my dad’s trim. I am speaking loudly about love and the universe and they are nodding, absent. I am a wild and interesting animal with tangled hair, blooming out of the woody pacific northwest, locating myself in the fabric of space and time. I am reeling and true, I am capable and conscious. I am in love with myself and everyone and specifically two. I am drunk and broke. I am tired of being the person who is asking to crash on your futon. I don’t know where i’m going and I don’t want to feel the need to question it, and these weeks in the sunshine and fog i go lurching back and forth, over and over, all over again, between knowing absolutely why I carry my things on my back and wondering if I’ll ever find a suitable room where I can unpack them.

crocodile dundee on silent at 3am

2008-11-07T21:13:00.000-08:00

muted paul hogan extends oak burl fingertips
to the smooth pious forehead of a marble-eyed ox,
bare chested, the color of his peel-crusty leather vest,
his waxy man’s face a callous. i wonder what the fuck

could paul hogan know of this animal, his eyes
strained and lean. what cheap silent chivalry?
what soundtrack could be conveying what sentiment?
some sad orchestral drawl maybe, how they share

those tenuous moments near transcendance,
four or five forced seconds, paul and ox
fumbling and self-conscious, and then
a slow inward nod to the tragedy of artifice, the pain

of no shared language, ancient and wild
sadness, the kind that makes you 4am desperate
to know someone knows exactly how you feel.
now he is stoic, his hat rimmed with bullets

and teeth cocked over his rough sleeping mouth,
or else stabbing into soft reptilian flesh, haphazard,
and then pan away to a cheap blond actress,
and then there are more small tragedies.

momentum

2008-11-02T21:10:00.000-08:00

I have three more days to tie up my loose ends in Portland before two weeks of being homeless again and then five months in the mountains. thinking of your life in blocks of time is exhausting, makes you feel like you’re on autopilot, but keeps decision-making at bay. This is crucial. This is in fact all that matters.

I’m not ready to leave this city. Now all the fall leaves are dropped off and littering the sidewalks with oranges and yellows and reds and they swirl around in the rainwater and clog gutters and driveways and front lawns, mulch up under your car tires and on your steamy windows, and the wind blows and the clouds are cold and hard and distant and things are wet and gray. Candles and incense go burning their low lights in your bedroom to keep your fingers and feelings warm. Inside houses all your beautiful rosy-cheeked friends gather together on found couches and cook shared vegan meals and drink shitty beer and tell you they love you in the ways they know how. Outside anonymous people go bicycling past your windows and the bars stay open late and play old movies and everyone buttons up their used coats and scarves, freezing and smiling, and you collect on your porch or a nearby porch to play instruments and sip whiskey and ponder Capitalism and wonder aloud what the fuck you’re doing with your life. There is some vague important current here, the same words just about to leave everyone’s mouth, and everyone is hungover and wondering how we all ended up here, and then you understand that it has something to do with the leaf rivers and the big gray green Willamette and the cold wind, and Sunday brunches across town and the romance of crossing bridges at night when the city lights are like candles glowing in the trees.

I don’t want to lose momentum, don’t want to lose the ability to live from backpacks for months on end. I don’t want to get so attached to my beautiful green room and its tapestries and tea lights and weed smoke that I forget how big the country and world and Universe is and lose myself in making soup and collages and lovely friends. I’m terrified of settling down, of returning to this place to find something different. It’s hard remembering how beautiful the vastness of things is, and how important our adventures and experiences, when everything you want is asleep in the bedroom next to you, dripping down the roof to the browning flowerpots on the front porch, in the pale winter sunbeams shining weakly through the thunderclouds above to warm your freezing toes.

PDX

2008-10-02T00:32:00.000-07:00

I am in a city of tattooed 26-year-olds
and I still have my baby fat. I have been here
for three weeks and still don’t have a good fit
-ting pair of jeans, do not have many facial piercings
or an art show coming up, or a show show coming up
at the doug fir, I did not make flyers on the copier at work
for my show out of gum wrappers and the classifieds
and my Polaroid camera: here you go. I do not want to get a job
I hate to support my nicotine addiction. I want to grow up. I do not
want to get a job.

I am in a city of weirdos and I have one pair of shoes.
If I had my bicycle it wouldn’t be so hot at night, and cheap beer
would spill over on my fingertips as, pulling a pint toward me,
I spilled it onto them, drunk. Did I vote? I don’t know
any people to buy weed from, although I wish I did;
then I could stop trying to make new friends
by being nice and funny and willing
to go to the bar. I don’t like having to make friends

but we need friends to buy weed from, so we wander down side streets
on a humid Thursday night, hitching our soft skirts up
for the concrete, advertising. A bunch of trainhopper
eco-punk anarchists walk by, those types, grease-dark, yelling
that they have mushrooms and do we want any. We do not
have any money but I have my cell phone, I say
what is your name I’ll call you for mushrooms later and he says
something and I put MUSHROOMS. His fingertips
taste like cheap beer. Everyone is everywhere
here, everyone is new.

lesbro

2008-09-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

There aren't many pitfalls I've encountered in having a heady BFF for a constant travel companion and general hetero lifemate. In fact, ever since Emily moved out here things have been pretty outstanding; besides becoming obnoxious giggle-faces every fifteen minutes and starting our drunker sentences with "Our fucking generation..." just before we chowder our barstools with Maker's Mark and last night's hummus, it's amazing to have a friend on the same page as you. But we have encountered a few minor setbacks; actually really just one. We've left behind a slime trail of super hot dudes, family members, and general cool folks who for some reason or another assume we're going home every night together.

You know. To put on our Lilith Fair '97 concert tapes and cry together. To jam on the Indigo Girls. To talk about adopting a baby together from Korea. To wear flannel, drink dark beer, pierce our noses, and bitch about the subjugation of women. And while only about 15% of that is false (Sarah MacLachlan is fuckin' boring. There. I said it), I'm getting pretty damn tired of every broseph on the West Coast assuming that any pair of chicks with a denim vest and a nose ring between 'em are going down on each other.

Not that there's anything wrong with it, and God knows that if I ever took the plunge to the other side Ms. May's would be the first door I'd knock on. But dude. I have to wonder why the world can't handle the existence of two lady friends who spend every waking moment together in a platonic relationship. Maybe it's the fact that we're headier than most (Did I mention Emily has a denim vest?), or that we show up everywhere together without any visible male escorts. My mom says dressing from a thrift-store rack is the main issue, and that "letting your girl out" should entail showing a little tit, painting your nails, and not letting a man know that you have a warmer-than-luke opinion on most everything in the world. Maybe we should invest in some more sweatpants with PINK on the ass, or start carrying around gaudy designer handbags full of Sara Bareilles CDs and condoms. I mean, what the hell does it take to convince the world that you're a heterosexual woman? I already have thirty damn handbags worth of condoms in my car!

I could complain that my sex life is suffering over here for wearing a Transformers t-shirt to a show, while meanwhile half the damn dudes in the room are sporting white skinny jeans and an eating disorder and they practically have to scrape the ex-sorority chicks off their crotches. I guess androgyny only goes one way. Or maybe if I acted like a more timid and vulnerable human than more guys would feel more comfortable considering my (hand)job application. It seems a little lopsided... but maybe I'm reading too much into it. I suppose I have no real gripes other than being paranoid about sending mixed signals to Mr. Babely Bearded Mountain Man in the corner, or the fact that my Catholic grandmother is probably subtracting $100 of my will money for each day that I don't have a boyfriend who used to play football.

I guess in the end it's pretty comical and only slightly inconvenient. And you know Society, while I'm waiting for you to update your collective Jurassic worldviews, I'll put up with your damn assumptions. At least I can still use lesbianism as an easy escape from any middle-aged sleaze-balls offering up drinks at the bar.

intentionality

2008-08-12T03:27:00.000-07:00

It's the current theme of my life. Or at least the general, honest-to-god aim. The world is full of a lot of things that are too big/terrifying/profound/beautiful to ever fully understand, and it's okay that we don't have any answers for certain right now, as long as we can say that everything we do and everything we've ever done has been done honestly, thoughtfully, and intentionally.

My brother says he looks at life like a block of marble, and every experience he has chips away at the block. Chisels can be tricky to control; you have to be careful if you don't want your finished statue looking like shit.

I think being intentional first requires being grounded in yourself. It's like informed consent clauses or something. It's like locking your standing knee before extending your other leg. Or putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others with theirs. Growing the tree before you can give away the apples. And stuff.

I want to be mindful of my words and feelings. I want to say sorry to everyone I've hurt. I want everyone I love to know exactly how much I love them. What else is there?

Highly Suspicious - My Morning Jacket

2008-07-03T15:43:00.000-07:00

check it out. shit sounds like disco porkchops with beef gravy.

thoughts from 7 plaza sarmiento

2008-06-12T15:12:00.000-07:00

Our generation is growing up in a period where everything is available to us-- more young Americans are traveling than ever before because it's at all of our fingertips. There are nonstop daily flights from SFO to Beijing EVERY FUCKING DAY! For Christ's sake, how much more connected can we be? The crazy part is, I think we're about to enter into a new period of reclusiveness... in fact it's probably already started. Globalization has reached it's peak-- whatever information or location or culture isn't immediately accessible to us in person can be easily reached by internet, plane, or chemical substance in a matter of hours. If I wanted to, I could hop a plane to Africa tomorrow morning. And with more rich Yankees trotting the globe, we are for the first time coming face to face with our own image as seen through the eyes of every other person on the planet. You can hardly walk down the metaphorical international street anymore without having to defend yourself against all that is Bush and explain your reasoning in voting for Obama over Clinton. We're realizing just how much we've pissed everyone off. Even Lonely Planet is starting to feel the heat (advice: "avoid wearing clothing with American flag logos if you wish to avoid unwanted attention"). And although I honestly hope that we take advantage of the realization that we are TOTALLY the spoiled douchebags of the global lunchroom, I'm hedging my bets that although our generation may be jaded and pissed off from growing up during the GW Regime (the man has been president since I was 14 years old for fuck's sake), we are also so self-conscious and terrified of our global image that we may just opt to keep to ourselves for the next century or so. I imagine it like a bell curve sort of, where maybe 9/11 is sitting right at the top and now we're just riding the fallout wave to tightened international boundaries. It'll be interesting to see how following generations play out, be it scared and reclusive or inspired to help fix our image in the world. All in all I guess the best thing we can do is to keep our hands to ourselves.

OMGZ argentina

2008-05-25T15:24:00.000-07:00

Against all odds, I am alive and semi-well in the real city that doesn't sleep. My initial experiences in Buenos Aires have been tinged with drug-induced paranoia, a general sense of confusion, and the fact that i haven't properly slept in the last few days. To start off, moving out of my house was a shitshow that ended in me being so stoked about actually moving all my shit into storage and painting my room on time that I figured I could go out and get plastered and wake up early the next morning to pack my remaining shit into my backpack and leave by 9am for my flight. What actually happened was, I stumbled home drunk at 3am and forgot to set my alarm; then when Kelly and John came to pick me up to take me to the airport at 9 they found me passed out on the futon with all my unpacked crap still sprawled everywhere. So, still wasted, I scrambled around the house for an hour throwing things into garbage bags and knowing that my housemates, who already hate my guts for reasons that I shall not discuss here (but which in my mind could be summed up by the phrase "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!" where the heat is my rampant alcoholism and general coolness), were going to want to kick my ass for leaving garbage, unwanted socks, and the random dregs of shit that collect in corners when you live somewhere for an exteded period of time all over the place. But it couldn't be helped. Needless to say, I missed my flight to Dulles but luckily got a standby for a later one, which amounted to me signing my life away for 16 hours of airplane travel while nursing a terrible hangover and wondering how many necessary things I had forgotten to pack. Luckily, God invented Vicodin, and so I was able to milk six or seven hours of peaceful chemical-induced sleep from the otherwise hellish experience.

Fast forward to 9:20am on Saturday, when I touch down in Argentina and the fun begins. First, the hostel I was recommended by my Spanish school here is totally full (seriously, fuck you) so they suggest the hostel just down the street. There is plenty of space here... in fact, there seem to be only a handful of clients at all. The room I'm assigned to has eight bunk beds but there is only one dude in there, one of those world traveler hippie types, I think from Germany, who has crazy dreds and his beads and shit scattered all over the one table in the room. He sleeps all day long and doesn't talk to anyone and it looks like he's been there for about a month. I'm fucking exhausted so I take a nap for a couple hours before meeting up with Nicale, a friend who's been living down here since February, to go to a capoeira showcase (so fucking cool) and eat some veggie Chinese food. He's a cool cat and so we played catch-up for a while and walked around the city. He tells me I am living in the fucking ghetto, whereas he is living in the posh urbanite section of BA, Palermo, where people are wearing leather boots and scarves and eating ice cream and stuff. It's kind of like Europe. I haven't decided whether I like it better or worse than where I live now.

Around midnight I take the subte back to my barrio and start walking back to my hostel. The one thing I'm noticing is that everyone is out eating dinner right now, even though it's after12. I walk past a bajillion pizzerias where whole families are getting food... apparently this is normal. But at least it's safe to walk back to my place so late with everyone still out. I get to my hostel and walk up the two flights of stairs to the main level where eight or nine dudes are all sitting around a table chain smoking and drinking beer and it's creepy because a) the fuckin place looks like a Stanley Kubrick set and b) I am the only chick in the hostel and they're all just staring at me while I try to get into my room and get my shit straight. So I decide I'm gonna make a sociopathic beeline for the bathroom to brush my teeth and on the way back one of them yells out HEY ARE YOU FROM AMERICA? and in this way I'm introduced to Will, some goofy Canadian from Ontario who has been in Argentina for eight months and has lots of stories involving drugs and public transportation. While exchanging pleasantries I say I'm from California, which automatically means that I smoke weed and hate Bush. So I get invited upstairs to where this Argentine dude known as Profe is celebrating his 55th birthday by rolling a bunch of joints and the three of us go at it. At this point I reveal that I have successfully smuggled in a sizeable bag of Weed Krispie Treats and we each eat half of one and wait.

Profe is a recovering cocaine addict who has been living at the hostel for two years, smoking weed every day and teaching Tango lessons to travelers who pass through. On his bedside table is a small clock radio, a painting of him having sex with a blonde mermaid (from an artist friend), assorted crumbs of marijuana, and a journal. Will is in his twenties, from what I can gather, and really likes gesticulating while telling crazy stories. He's Canadian and his favorite band is System of a Down, and right away he starts telling me about how much he loves boobs. It goes without saying that all of these things make me distrust him slightly. Maybe this is how Canadians pick up on girls? No wonder they are referred to as America Light (if only by myself). But he turns out to be pretty good people albeit for the fact that he is staring at my tits for our whole convo, and gigantic stoners always win my affection eventually. The only awkward moment turned out to be after the three of us have been talking and sharing stories in two languages for a couple hours when Profe leaves momentarily to take a piss:

Will: You're cool. I'm really getting along with you.
Kelly: Uhhh, yeah. You too?
Will: Just be careful around Profe, he might try to rape you.
Kelly: Haha... ha... wait, what?
Will: Yeah, one time I brought a friend over here and he tried to rape her so we left. Then I went to Córdoba for a month, we don't really talk about it.

I'm not sure what sort of recovering you can do after a statement like that so I kinda was just like... haha cool yeah whatever, what is rape I don't even care. Plus we were all tripping out on the treats so I couldn't tell if he was serious or what. Canadians are shifty with lots of things.. maybe joking about getting raped by a 55-year-old on his birthday is just a cultural norm. But around 3 I decided not to gamble on it and went to bed while I was still unviolated by either one of them and had my wits about me. We made some half-assed plans to eat some more weed food the next day and go to the zoo, and then I bid them good evening to go pass out with the world traveler in our big ass empty room.

Today I woke up at 2:30 in the afternoon to a cold and foggy day. I had originally resolved to go look for new hostels in the Palermo area but spent the few daylight hours left cruising around the city instead where nothing was open because it was a Sunday. Now I'm going back to my hostel to hole up and read some Kesey and maybe smoke more weed with the crazy hostel folk. Good GOD. Spanish school starts tomorrow and I'm looking forward to having something to do during the day that doesn't include drugs and wandering aimlessly. My brain feels like a big bowl of pulpy orange juice. I feel like I have had absolutely no downtime since the damn semester started and now I'm in this big ass foreign city and have no fuckin clue where to go. It's a bit overwhelming and I would have given a lot to have a couple extra days in the yay saying goodbye to people who I may not see in another month. Ah well. Así es la vida. Hopefully this week will bring some interesting times. Stay tuned dear readers for more random updates on la vida argentina.

fuck yeah 21st century

2008-05-15T23:21:00.000-07:00

I just got back from seeing Speed Racer, which is quite possibly the coolest fucking movie I've ever seen in my life. Seriously, everyone needs to go out and watch this movie. I'm going to unabashedly say that it is THE most baller thing I've spent ten bucks on in quite some time, and may or may not remind you of that one time you played Rainbow Road on MarioKart64 twenty times in a row while on mushrooms, except this time there's way cooler music, a chimp wearing overalls, and you actually feel like you're the one driving the car through neon explosions and trippy ice caves at 200mph (well... actually, yeah, MarioKart on mushrooms does sorta feel like that).

I wonder if they've always made movies that are visually appealing to cater to demographics of... uhh... stoners. I mean there are a shit ton of movies coming out right now that seem to throw open their doors to throngs of kids sneaking in ICEEs and visine. Maybe with the advent of computer graphics, movies have become the visual equivalent of electronic music... manipulating technology to maximize sensory pleasure, with extra special care given to the inebriated assholes in the back row. Am I being overwhelmed and pacified by an excess of visual and auditory stimulae? Sure. Are the neurons in my brain tissue getting the equivalent of a shoddy fingerbang by CGI? Maybe. Do I fucking care? NO. Because for two magical hours tonight I completely forgot that I have final exams to study for and a 15-page English paper to finish. Please, O God of visual effects, keep the stimulus coming. And seriously, put in a phone call to your drug dealer first.

hot chip/whoaaa

2008-04-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

Weed treats and Hot Chip at the Fillmore. I now feel like nothing short of a social theorist taking notes on the writhing, angry, self-conscious masses. And good GOD does my neck hurt. Lessons learned:

1. "Hipsters" (or whatever) are totally just grown-up nerds. You can't tell me this shit didn't spawn from Nintendo sounds and all your geeky 4th-grade dreams about robots. Urban Outfitters is three seconds away from selling pocket protectors. I'm calling that shit in '08.

2. Electro-dance is folk music with a bassline. Let's start jazzing up all those Leadbelly originals with some dirrrrty drum 'n bass. There's nothing sacred anymore anyways.

3. Being super fucked up at a show is a detriment to yourself and society. I'm all for chemically enhancing your experiences, but if you can't handle your freakout you better keep it off of my dance floor. I watched two chicks on ecstasy first attempt to slow dance/make out with everyone in their immediate vicinity just before sinking into bad trip status, complete with hysterical crying and attempts to punch their caretakers (slightly less drunk friends) in the mouth before being collectively shoved out of the way by the Mob. It was like when I was on a bus in Guatemala and they started playing dubbed Rob Schneider movies, and even though I would have cut my own hand off to just watch the scenery outside, I couldn't tear my eyes away from "The Hot Chick" in Spanish. And I'm still pissed about that.