tickle me pink, you naked swedes, er, danes

"The core of Løber Nøgen - Danish for 'running naked' - consists of six individual, working photographers hailing from France, Norway and Denmark. Personal styles and boundaries are annulled and vanity is left behind in a childlike attempt to lose ones self."


that is all for now.

last night, i had a dream that i found the perfect day planner. maybe it means: get cracking.

"its kind of pathetic," i tell my roommate.

"yeah," he says. he bends a blues note on his guitar. "a little vanilla."

i hope they see me.

it is one of those days, you know, where you wake up and come down from mount olympus with the calm inspriation of exactly-that-shirt, today, and of course it smells like a hippie and half an hour of an uninspired archaeological seminar with yourself about the components of your wardrobe yields an increasingly poor morale and exactly what you wore yesterday. you know who'd feel chagrin for that but it sure as hell aint you.

and the day proceeds bit-by-slowly-bit one foot in front of the other.

and ever onward, 'cause, see, you randomly hooked up with this person and maybe it meant something and maybe it didn't but the point is that there they are at the gym and jesus, i hope they don't see me and if they do i hope i dont look like a fat idiot and fucking christ! observe this sweetly urbane musculature of my arms and regret! how uselessly subversive!

you can always tell when i've had insomnia because my bedroom smells like paint!

by Chang W. Lee at The New York Times.

"ploitering." my mentor laughs. (i wrote that before. he laughs a lot; being in the shop is good for the soul.) "we do a lot of that here," he says.

i am in the front, cleaning and re-assembling casters from the shitty upright from the theatre department. "ploitering - i forgot that one?"

"to work to little purpose."
"ah."

i laugh.

chris and i are tooling our psyche of the bourgeois with the most expensive coffee in town and i am trying to explain to him how important a building can be. when one spends kindergarten through eighth grade in the same place, particularly the kind of intimate place that demands greeting the grandparents and neighbors of your classmates when you run into them at the grocery store, it means something. it adds up. he's used to my talking stupid wordy shit at him so he's getting very good at listening noncommittally .

"it represents the duality of man," he suggests.
"fuck you." we laugh. he finishes off his fancypants latte. i am caffeinated out of my brain.

the state of california is broke and that particular school district is even broker, so three years ago they shut the place down after assessing that the funding needed to keep the plumbing operable was out of the question. killing time back in the hometown last week, i noticed a gate was unlocked and so let myself in.

one could write: "everything was so much smaller" or "i suddenly was very aware of how much larger i had become" and of course that was the case but this was my School and my Childhood all rolled into one and completely abandoned. i kept meaning to go back with a camera and photograph the splashes of broken glass across the dusty classroom carpets, or the way the grass broke through the still-familiar expanse of blacktop. (the empty case of natty ice in the shared space between the back entrance to the stage and the front entrance to the kinder classroom. the abandoned spinet where i was in 6th grade.)

so of course i didn't.

however, last night was the first night since then that i haven't dreamed about going back and taking pictures. sometimes i'm by myself, or there is a drunkard roaming the hallways, or i bring a friend, or an italian model for a high-fashion shoot.

"huh," says chris.
useless fucktard.

i stop indulging myself and we shift the conversation to this year's concerto competition.

hypergelast: a person who won't stop laughing

a man takes a year to read the OED and lives to write about it. and so i am inspired. my mother is folding laundry when i decide to pop the question.

"would you support me if i decided to take off a year and read the oxford english dictionary?"

"no," she says. she starts a second pile for pants. "you would make it through about ten words and then give up."

"but what if i kept reading? we could do it on a day-by-day basis."
"no."
"why not?"
"because its stupid."

end scene. cut to:

int. car. (yester)day.
clocked in 409.5 miles, with the windows rolled down for the first 287. driving by yourself through california is the spiritual equivalent of one of those long nights you spend Talking with Somebody New and Lovely. at first it is the semi-drunk fierce arm-waving excitement, and then as morning grows closer, it becomes a slow, almost exhausting, desperate necessity. we cant stop now. we're falling in love.

farts are always funny

one cellist each from turkey and germany, one violinist each from latvia and bosnia, one violist from canada, and two pianists from california are all sitting in a dorm room in california and it is another midnight in california, and how are we make for the passing of time? the somber cross-cultural bonding ritual manifests itself in the form of a fart-sound contest, interrupted by the occasional spanish violist who parades in for the brief demand of "party! some party we have here!"

the latvian violinist declines to participate, so the canadian violist offers to help by making a fart sound on her arm. he elucidates, "it is how my people keep each other warm in the winter."

she laughs, throwing her yellow hair forward in front of her face. "no, no! i am the judge of this contest!"

the hungarian teacher totally gutted my keyboard technique today. it will be for the better, i know, but simple five-finger patterns haven't been this hard in a very long time.

i haven't been this happy in a very long time.
this is what it means to be blessed.

champaign-urbana tastes like a hot dog wrapped in tin foil.

my father started the song by lyle lovett over again. "god, that's such a great line. honey, put down that fly swatter, get me a glass of ice water. i have no idea what the rest of the song is about, but it just puts you somewhere. it is hot and there are bugs." every word in the last sentence is pronounced, like seven tiny ball bearings.

we were just south of rockford, and the rain was coming down like nobody's business. i put my bare feet up on the dash of the rental car and its just me and my dad and mr. lovett and sometimes mick jagger or dvorak's dumky again, which is kicking my ass. dad is reading the new translation of don quixote and i'm reading the fountainhead. we're looking at grad schools. per usual, a portion of me wants to pop out like the seed from an avocado and move to iceland where i'll set trails for the rest of my life, or something equally non-scholastic.

this entry comes to you from madison, wisconsin. to a girl who has lived most of her life in california, the taste of the word is a strange one. "wisconsin? you're in wisconsin?" said my best friend today, when i called her, sitting on a long grassy rise in the middle of campus. "what's in wisconsin?" as if, "what is that child eating?" the word itself is a statement of disbelief. a long, dubious chewing of cud.

this, our daily bread

the fourth of july found my catholic grandmother making faces most of the family had never seen before. "wouldn't it be wonderful to be an actress?" she said to me through the lens of my father's camera. "i've always wanted to be on stage. i think i'd be very good at it. don't you think i'd be good at it?"

"you should definitely do something with that," i said.

off stage right, one of my aunts shook her head. "just when you thought you knew somebody."




and since we're on the subject of strong familial ties -- female suicide bombers whose vests are detonated by remote. hooray the nytimes.