I have lit upon the Anthropomorphic Ruins on spindle legs

The dark angel he is shuffling in/watching over them with his black feather wings unfurled/dream brother with your tears scattered round the world/don't be like the one who made me so old...

Alright, blogging for fun before my class starts. i haven't been home all day and i forgot my cell. sucks. means i'll have a few folks to call back at the end of the day here. it's alright. mostly i wanted to talk to sara. i miss her. a lot. i'm glad this is the last time. i'm glad that this is the only time i'll really remember for any time. i really want to go to boulder, utah and hike the slot canyons and escalante. really really. i have the spring fever in a bad way now. but i am really happy with how i buckled down and did my latest project. i used Dali, van Gogh, da Vinci, Goya and Picasso to show how huge the influence of Paolo Uccello was. he's the most important figure in art you've never heard of. seriously. look at that list. and all of them were influenced by his work. Monet, too, and Manet, Matisse, everyone. Even Polluck picked up a form of Uccello's influence in his eccentricities. as he said in response to being asked how he knew when he was done with a painting, "how do you know when you're done making love?" I love that quote now. it's great. but for all of you who haven't met the master of perspective, go check him out now!

Ok, let me just say that in a lot of ways i have to agree with Cameron, some women can't drive to save their lives. like his example, "[t]oday for example, i was driving through a parking lot, and this dumb bitch pulls out of the parking spot like fucking dale earnheart without looking. And almost runs into me and then starts bitching at me saying it was my fault." I had that happen today. and the lady flipped me off!!! who does that?!? what the fuck? if you drive like an idiot don't go flipping me off because i'm driving like a sane individual for once. i'm not a great driver, but i look before i floor it out of a spot. And i have to say that i think amy is great. she posted a very personal poem, and i can tell it's the first time she's done so. all i have to say to amy is this, you are humble but you shouldn't be and you are far more normal than you realize. i know that i almost ended my own life in a deep bout of depression. seeing your poem made me remember how powerful those emotions are. and you did an amazing job of conveying the confusion, stress, sadness and loneliness that i remember. And i think i can at least identify someone i know or myself who fits every single one of Anjy's blog on "you know you're from colorado if..." that makes me want to go home. because i am such a coloradan that it's just fucking scary.

And so it is, just like you said it would be...

There is a mischevious ghost about today. and he likes wind. a lot. so i've decided to retreat inside and write on my blog before class rather than lying in the sun and enjoying what is otherwise a very pleasant day. i've now officially lost all desire to do any schoolwork. i'll be back on the boat after the break but right now even philosophy doesn't sound as good as cleaning my car. or my room. or anything else sara is likely to see. i actually dusted, really dusted, my room. usually i just kinda get a rag and go around pretending to do it. and i'm caught up on laundry, my room is clean, i have a fresh 6 pack in my window well. everything is ready. everything is perfect. well, not quite perfect but certainly ready. and so it is that i come to the point where i'm so excited i can hardly speak, hardly move anything. i feel a tightness just behind my heart and just above it, even though it remains beating between the two. 6:15, Frontier, happiness

This was different from the Bach that i listen to on a regular basis. It was harpsichord and strings where i'm used to big, overpowering organ. i love the organ pieces, the tocatta and fugue in D minor are some of my favorite classical pieces out there, right up there with smetana and beethoven's 7th. but at any rate, it was a different experience and i don't know that i liked it very well. seems to me that the organ pieces are more complex and awe inspiring, which are more baroque principles, as we've seen in the art. Things need to be grandiose and overdone. and a little dark. these pieces didn't feel like they were that.

The Names of the Kingdom

I can never place the name with the face/Don't touch me! Don't touch me, again/Hats off to the...city fathers, they're no longer a hundred feet tall/ and we're no longer a hundred feet stronger/ so give us the keys, now!!

the end of another week and i couldn't be any happier. i'm starting to really, really need spring break in a bad way. i need to have my girl and i need to have time off and i need to have her gift in my hands. i can't wait! it's somewhat awkward to have a gf in seattle. i'll be the first to admit that that's most of the distance problem. you may think it's great, i could get away with being a total man-whore here and she need never know. but then i'm too decent a person for that. it did happen once, during a different time, i felt so horrible that the first think i said after 'hello' and 'how are you?' was 'i have to tell you something...' it's taxing, it's tough and generally i hate it. it is about the worst thing that's ever happened to me. but then she's the best. i think that the best way to think about it if you aren't in a distance relationship is classical: imagine you are Atlas and that the world keeps just slightly shifting on your shoulders, moving just a little bit but enough that you always have to readjust to the new reality of things; now imagine how that weight would slowly wear away at you, would wear down to your very soul with its weight, a weight that is no unbearable by any means but also a burden that is never far from the front of your mind. now you might have an idea of what it's like. this is why many people can't do it. and yet i am happy to bear this burden, even when sara and i fight over menial things like the length of my hair or who calls whom or when they call. it's actually kind of funny now how banal and yet fulfilling this is. i am doing what few can do and so is she. together we have already beaten a lot of odds and come out with a strong relationship. i am happy even as i am sad. +/-. vale

I never meant to become a grandfather. I never meant to grow past my youth and into this decrepid state. Maybe, I thought to myself, that is why i can hardly bear this. I was constantly reminded of the smell in the bathroom of the old-folks home, or my grandmother's house, a mixture of Ivory soap, orthodic insoles and sweat slowly leaking from old pores. An intense claustrophobia struck me, etched its way down my spine as small mounds of tense flesh. I had to get away, I had to escape into some vague vortex to my own childhood. It was far too late for me to return to my life outside, a fact my old bones drove into my mind with aches like I had been struck with a railroad tie recently, and so my mind clung to that scent, no that stench that now gripped me.
I had never much liked the langorous car trips and lazy days that marked trips to my grandparents' house. The smell of dust, the old courderoy of the worn couches, the smell of dumplings in the steamer, the perception of slight decay; the monotone discussions of family, religion and life which had never struck my fancy, mostly because they always fell well short of meaning and squarely into the banality that characterized our lives.
And so, as a child I always retreated into the musty basement with the old Christmas tree that never seemed to come down. There my brother and I played at boredom and Tiddly-Winks, padding over the harsh outdoor carpeting that looked somewhat well placed against the faux wood paneling and water-stained acoustical tiling. There we played at hide-and-seek among pastel leisure suits, philosophy tracts and old sermons; it was there I remember the small shell nightlights that etched frightening lines of armoires, easy-chairs and beds into the walls. These were my nightmares in the ancient house, they were the ghouls that kept me from a sense of ease, a sense of comfort.
And yet, there was a deceptive warmth in this home. From the white lace curtains on the front door that my grandmother had sowed in her childhood to the way those worn couches broke around you like a swell of the ocean, comfortable in a way few things can ever be. It was the sort of warmth that slipped out of memory quickly as the impression of it faded and only the idea remained. I always reveled in that glow when I found it and likewise always forgot it by the next morning, only the etching of the smells and the drone of voices remaining firmly in my mind. Now I saw so many things I never had, ironic that this wisdom only comes when there is no way to use it. Nothing can be changed now, I will die alone here while my daughters and sons laugh at their dinner parties in houses with fine crystal chandelliers. There they forget about my very existence, the wrinkled fey who was never as warm as they'd like and was always a stern man. As fine wines slide down the long course of their throats they make sure to forget again, until the bill comes like it has every month for years. There is a certain despair in what I have said, I know that. But after years of sleeping on hard beds with hospital corners and seeing my friends die one by one I simply have given up on all hope of a better life.
There was a time a while back when i tried to be a happier man, when i tried to make myself see the best. I played poker, throwine small chips into a large pot, but as this was never what i really cared for in my youth so it was never quite what i expected then. When all of my friends were sitting around an Americana style table with blue and red plaid table-cloth and a Tabasco bottle dressed up in a knit sombero enjoying intently focused on each other and the cards in the flop i would sit and drink orange juice. I would be bored. I would wish my girlfriends would get out of work and call me. In short, even though they were some of my best friends, I wanted more and different experiences. What were those experiences, though? She was in Washington at school. Even if it cost fifty-thousand dollars a year she needed to connections to the families, needed to know the children of the political glitterati. She would always tell me that things would work out, that this was only temporary and she was lying through her teeth. We both knew that she would remain there and that the only way for me to be with her was to move. In the hours spent on the phone, the rampant text messaging and the over-arching loneliness we slowly grew apart. That winter she suggested we take a break to make sure we'd remain strong. I didn't hear from her again until five years later. She ended up dating a man she'd met there in the months preceding the break and they'd ended up really enjoying each other while i sat on the other end as the unwitting third wheel to our demise. I've never forgiven her, not really, and i will never again date someone i cannot run down the street to see. It was as though she had driven a single eyelash through my chest, it hurt so much worse than anything i'd ever known but i couldn't see any wound that would cause my internal atrophy.

children of the spring grow faster than the fall

right now i want to help brendan out with his work on intravenous melodies because damn do i want the acerbic, acrid lyrics and the twin guitars of cursive battling it out for supremacy in my veins, it'd be such a high. nothing can compare to the way music can make you the most chilled out, zen master driver or the most violent, pissed off fuck on the road. seriously, i was a bastard this morning. windows down, hair going crazy as i took my car up the 5k RPMs every shift and made the steering wheel rattle with my pounding out the beats. and i totally smoked some "hip-hop" chick in her damned cherokee twice. it was hilarious, i think she may be driving an automatic...that or she wasn't trying. because honestly those usually smoke my ass so bad it makes me laugh at my own little girl for being down at 90-some-odd horses. it's alright, she moves well when i want her to and i am the king of driving curves. something about steering with the left hand and shifting with the right while you lean the car through a perfect angle and blast out at warp speed makes it my kind of driving. i was made for the mountains.

ten reasons you're wrong (an introspection)

i have the type of mind with which i have an on again off again relationship. like today, i did great with reading and horrible with the lecture (this never happens in the mentally stimulating philosophy course but has today...) and i'm not sure why. i think it's time for spring break. and maybe a shave...maybe the length of my facial hair is directly proportional to my desire to go live like a mountain man... i've also concluded that humans as a species are perhaps the oddest creatures i know of. with all of our searching and science and reason and rationality we're still managing to hurt ourselves and kill everything way more efficiently than anyone, even in the early Neolithic, could have expected. and we're all sorts of out of balance. you can prove that just by looking at a few things: what we eat(total crap that makes us feel horrible, including wheat, a grain that 80% of my herbology class is allergic to), what we do(look at all the people doing crash dieting, yoga, exercising, praying, philosophizing), and what we do to each other(divorce rates, rampant adultery, cheating in general, unchecked hedonism, alcoholism, drug abuse, excesses, power plays). we are truly the shit race. it seems like no matter what you do someone is out there with a scientific study or a holy book telling you you are wrong. and not only that, they say you're totally fucked when your time comes or that you're accelerating your own demise...sometimes i hate being a human. i just want the simple life:food, sleep and sex; or at least a definitive answer about what i should be doing.

yet again, here we are posting an assignment...go figure. this movie reminded me of the other plays i've seen and read by Shakespeare. he is kind of a one trick pony type of guy to me. throw in some differences in plotlines but they focus a lot on jealousy, trust, power, race and blood. and usually a large number of the cast dies. like in Macbeth. i can't say it's a bad way of going about things, it is effective because those are some of the most fundamental issues with being a human being. i really just can't get over the fact that no matter what i read of his, i keep thinking that if two people would actually communicate and be good human beings that the whole thing would be solved and 16 people, 4 dogs, 9 tilapia and a few plebians wouldn't need to die for the protagonist to see the light. Luckily, this isn't that sort of play.But anyway...i will say that Al is the man for making me hate him so much in this movie. But i will say that he can't expect anyone to treat him like a human when he's a total asshole to everyone else and treats them like crap because they're not Jews. It's as the pacifists say, violence begets violence and that is an appropriate observation here. But it just pisses me off that they force Shylock to convert. No one should have to do that to save their property and life. Its like every time he starts to make his way up the social ladder he gets bitch slapped back down to below a dog again. So in the end i just ended up feeling like he did get the shafting of a lifetime every time. i suppose that's maybe the point...