evidence of maturity in this growing increasingly complex world.

grandmother installation no2

a dialogue with my grandmother.

she says, "i look like an old geek."
i say, "it could be worse."
"how?"
"could be invalid."
"that's true."

the last day of finals week

libraries are like churches; they're supposed to be there for people in times of need. but churches close their doors and libraries kick you out. one by one our sacred institutions fail.

i made two very conscious decisions tonight. the first was that it was more important for me to spend time connecting with somebody than it was for me to be studying. the second was to see how long i could balance a container of coffee grounds on the top of my head while standing in line at safeway a little after midnight. it lasted as long as it took for the man in front of me to turn around and laugh and then become embarrassed for laughing so openly at a stranger.

there are three thousand words to go in the next twenty four hours, and then three hundred miles. and then quiet.

the weekend

it is not yet noon on this saturday in december and they are already talking about death in the taco shop at the north end of our exhausted little town. a fly retires to the counter top and washes its face. my heart is breaking.

a man has shaved the lower part of his head. the material coming out of the top of his scalp resembles palm fronds. "i want my ashes to be cut into coke and then my friends'd snort me," he says.

the girl behind the counter shoves a spoon into a pot of beans. "i'd totally blow you -- in that circumstance." she has the eternal serpent tattooed hungrily on her back. "we'd have to go to bolivia or something. do this shit right, you know."

the fly, all the facets of its eyeballs now sparkling, returns to work.

"that's a lot of coke," she says as an afterthought.

while there is a definite monetary limit to how many tofu-burritos-with-death-paste-no-cheese-black-beans-thanks that can fit in my life, i have yet to find evidence of a physical one. however, if habaneros and death metal are the je ne sais quoi for my sense of regulation fortitude, then that's all right with me.

and now, for a little more of the collegiate experience:


tune in next week for: emily farts garlic in a small practice room.