best to fear the educated youths

following the images of a family in tajikistan, salt miners in mali, and a west african boy on the beach, the next slide he clicked on was of a dog sledding team. in front of a class of nearly two hundred, he gestured with his laser pointer to the team driver. "this is sarah palin," he said. "she's on her way to city hall. in the sled, here, are --"

"five kids!" somebody in the classroom shouts.

"five kids, yes," he says. "and the dogs have been fed on homosexuals."

we all laugh. two hundred of us in a giant lecture hall.

we have nothing to talk about except our work. i am exhausted during the day. i leaned over and whispered to him, when she called i explained to her, i want to wave my arms in the air and scream pathetically to the man who is the sane-conscience in my head, "i am surrounded by creatures that seem to be freshly beamed down from outer space! what do they eat? why are they here?" he looks at me and laughs and i realize the violence of the outburst was all i needed to find firm ground again.

the weather is just that sort of dreary where it has spent all day threatening to uncover the sun, but never managed to follow through. in the evening, my roommate sits on the balcony and plays some blues on his guitar, a cigarette dangling from his lips. i am drinking licorice tea and memorizing violin parts. our brains are heavy. i feel like i'm pushing through the thick, rubbery foliage of a primitivism painting. i'm all out of green vegetables.

keep trucking, keep trucking, all night long.

two portraits of a friend.

from three weeks ago or so.

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.