one thing i've learned is that if i swear loudly while sprinting to the shower, it actually makes me move faster. it is like shouting when you kick something, breathing out in little tssts that accompany and so magnify each punch. i am clamoring with a violent lateness through the early morning and my roommate says, "did you hear our neighbors working on their stomp rendition until 4am?"

did i, jesus. my actual reply is something more along the lines of "fuckity fuck fuck." the period is the bathroom door slamming. i've overslept by about a million miles.

ten minutes later i'm at the bus stop. my hair is flopped heavy like soggy jungle vines but clean. i dont know what the neighbors were doing, but in my half-dream state i understood it as a fugue. they were playing a fugue for the apocalypse on the apartment complex as though it was some tremendous multiple-percussion set up. when the deadbolt came undone and and somebody walked into the kitchen, i resigned myself to the fact that they'd come to kill me. and then i realized that people dont often make toast prior to partaking in a giant fugal butchery. and now! a coda by toast! to-a-to-a-to-to-ast! the small ding saved my life. like a lighthouse on the shores of consciousness.

i want to ask them what they were on, man. but, hell.

the problem with being in a relationship with your work is that you can't have much of a dialogue. i can't say to my work, "yo, work! i need you to say something kind to me every now and again." then my work tells me i'm pretty at least once a day so's we're assured to cuddle up real sweet and wake up real gentle.

it is just a series of observed successes and failures that have nothing to do with how you actually live your life.

i want to curl up in my bed and translate beowulf from old english to contemporary english and then back to middle. sounds like heaven.

and a photograph.

note to self:
frozen spinach is not such a bad comfort food.

i hate reading poems about buses, seeing plays about buses, being prompted to examine myself as if i am a bus. who are the different people in your bus? who is driving this bus? this is the bus of you.

but fuck if i haven't been harping on them, lately. these little pods of people. they're especially compelling before the sun has completely risen. fucking huge fireflies that open their misted abdomen to you like some sacred mother machine.

last night i was riding the bus home and the driver and i were the only people in the universe. it was so cold you could smell fingerprints on the windows. the driver was a talking loudly talking man. i sat on a cold plastic seat at the far end and didnt say a damn thing and he kept on talking loudly talking. he told me at great volume about how his friend charlie had a bus, this bus his friend charlie had, a 30 footer, that charlie, he'd furnished it and he was selling it, his friend charlie was, it was a nice bus, a 30 footer, that charlie had.

if you stare at fingerprints long enough, pictures show up like on a cottage cheese ceiling.

"80 grand, though, i dont got that." he bellowed like train stack. "but i dont want to buy a house, neither."

his voice was a large flapping bird shooting from the windshield at which he was shouting down the tunnel of the bus. it then bounced off the back and scatted into a thousand simultaneous and disoriented trajectories, in the same way that the lights of passing cars would refract and flicker through the windows and the fingerprints in a thousand simultaneous, disorienting geometries. his friend charlie had a bus.

this morning at the bus stop a drunk transient was trying to help a chinese girl on exchange figure out the schedule. it was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated. the glowing mother machine arrived and she and i both got on. from the ground he made me promise to look after her. one of his eyes didnt open all the way. i promised. the doors flapped closed. we were back in the womb.

she and i never made eye contact.

he was on another bus this afternoon and lost track of his leg compared to the exit door. and then he realized it wasn't the right stop anyway.

mardi therefore gras, bitches.

we are the animals

i always feel

like black and

white are

unnecessarily pretentious

all i want to do these days is write. after two full years i'm back in an english classroom and both new and familiar doors are opening again in my brain. some traveling operatic types came through our little town last night and it was hard not to grab the sign-me-up-for-church pencil and paper from the pew back and start scribbling that the pianist looks like a tugboat docked between transport ships!

on the subject of northern california in the year 2009

from my bedroom window i can see the highway that runs the length of california. a man is trying to get onto the highway in somebody else's car, but he doesn't have anybody else or their car yet.

several months ago i tried to write at the same time at the same time as i was driving south: "this steady state of migration to the outside of ourselves/ highways are a fascinating endless". the words scatter across the page like a topographic map.

i am obsessed with the idea of a road that can take you for 1540 miles with countless installations of buck-fifty units of gas station coffee that always taste like coming home. i am obsessed with the idea that you are at home even if you have no idea where you are except that you are in california.

this man has a garbage bag thrown over his shoulder and a stick that measures the distance between the palm of his hand and the ground. the ground is covered in that short hopeful grass that only grows on the side of highways in california.

"motherfucking californians!" he shouts.

and then he shouts some more. the cars move blindly past him and muffle his words like a flock of pigeons all rising at once. a simultaneous departure from the cool city square of his eagerness.

every day there is somebody else who wants to slide down the chute of california. some have colorful handkerchiefs, or dogs, or parts of bicycles, or parts of dogs, or pieces of cardboard with bent corners. sometimes i think about taking off my clothes and standing at the window just to see what happens.

sometimes a cop car will sidle up real gently like, as if it is going to ask them to the prom.

"free -- fucking get out -- goddamned future -- every californian's future --"

there seem to be equal instances of the words "fucking" and "california."

"you fucking hate niggers!" he continues shouting.

and this is where he is wrong!
dear sir, they're not picking you up not because you're black, but because you look like a crazy screaming homeless guy. you look like a wild screaming bird with cold marble eyes frenzied and trapped in the subway.

visually curious cross sections.

my family had dinner at a friend's house for christmas eve. i was helping her with something in the kitchen and i apologized for being clumsy with my words.

"you're spending all your time in the right side of your brain," she said. i dont know how much truth that holds, though it is probably surprisingly little.

these last several days have found me practicing into a state of euphoria. i do not suddenly become technically more able (though relaxing is certainly part of it, which can only help the sound), or more accurate in my playing. it is an intense musical clarity and totally focused thought, so it is the quality of sound and control of musicality rather than "hitting notes" that improve. the great majority of previous euphoric episodes have correlated with complete or nearly complete run-throughs of pieces, and not slice-and-dice passage work. musicians experience this frequently; it is the drug of practicing, the days when you can see god. regardless of the arrival method, there is no doubt that it is a fundamentally alerted state of mind. something changes in the brain. it would make sense that the longer and more frequently one spends in a musically euphoric state the more effect it has on one's brain. the realization that i was spending time there without any concept of the physiological consequences ... was bothersome. and so i did some research.

there is either very little understanding of what exactly happens while one is playing music, or i am just not good enough with my doctor-lingo to effectively navigate their seas of knowledge. in a brute overview, performers often get hit by a truckload of dopamine, which explains the performance/competition addiction. however, performing is not playing. there is a certain honesty in playing for oneself that is very difficult --at least for me-- to take onstage, and the high seems to have a more religious tone when in isolation. (again, i only speak for myself. if you are a musician with things to say in this regard, i'm all ears.)

on the other hand, there have been a lot of studies of people listening to music, probably because it is easier to do MRI's of a person lying still than of a person sawing at the violin. according to this layman-unfriendly article, when a listener gets chills, the same centers of reward and emotion that correspond with sex and chocolate light up (which any musician could have told you):



which is a really totally useless graphic unless you are familiar with the brain. but it looks good on the page. visually curious cross sections.

anyway, i feel like i have a lot of work to do.

musicians, i'd like to hear your thoughts.

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.