The Matrix

It’s what keeps me up some nights and lulls me to sleep others. It’s the never-ending struggle to be number one and never come out on top. It’s the battles we fought and the blood we spilled, the limbs we lost and the hearts we kept. It’s giving a damn and not giving a fuck. The highs and the lows and wides and the narrows. It’s that stupid pop song we listen to all summer and the bottles of booze we drank all winter. It’s when Andrew died and Scott’s daughter was born. It’s looking for number 10 while you’re still on number 9. It’s loving the self that you love to hate. It’s that dirty red hat you’ve had for five years and never washed. It’s a bicycle ride into the sunset accented by synth-pop from way back then…yeah. It’s that first concert you got lost in the mosh-pit, and you finally figured out what that “funny” smell was. It’s remembering that smiling baby girl on the bus in Lima. It’s the time before visiting Grandma’s house was so damn depressing. It was baking cookies and growing like a flower. It’s when you wake up in May and the sun is shining and you drink your coffee outside. It was the first time you heard Brahms Tragic Overture driving in the dark down that long dusty road – you told Grant you were in love with Eleanor. It’s the first time you hiked the ridge…remember that perfect blue sky? It’s all those times we drank way too much and the times we didn’t drink nearly enough. It was listening to techno late at night in the car after dropping off Diana – she leaned over and whispered, “I love you,” speeding away watching the hospital lights grow so tall. It’s KGLT and public radio. At one time it was beer, but now it’s water. It was never death metal, but it still is Max. It’s Romeo and Juliet being knocked out by Othello. It’s B vitamin complex and urine like a yellow highlighter. It’s getting paid not to shower. It’s breaking the habit…and then starting again. It’s American Studies and how little you know. It’s the way Del just knows how to flow. It’s black and white photographs and words on a page. It’s a t-shirt stained with wine from all the dinner parties no one can remember – we talked all night but what did we say? It’s knowing a whole album by heart. It’s that weird satisfaction of not being like most. It’s that burning desire to kick in your own teeth for acting like an egotistical prick. It’s not having a hangover in class. It’s having a hangover at home. It was Paris – walking that boulevard where the women inspired Lautrec. It’s crying like a baby for no reason. It’s Lorazepam when you just can’t stop. It’s all the unread books on the shelves that keep calling your name. Never again will it be cocaine – no more numb teeth or bloody noses. It has to be the first kiss, right? But it’s not – maybe the second. It was that unmistakable feeling you had when you thought your life secreted good art. It was shaking up, waking up and knowing the truth – but never growing up. It’s the smell of your pee after eating asparagus. It’s Céline – that dirty old man! It’s leaving the country and pretending you’ll never come back – do you do that too? It’s that painting by Bouguereau that almost looks like my mother when she was a teen dream. It’s old man Bob and how I wish he was still alive raising hell – he had the best advice. It’s pretending to agree with people’s political espousals. It’s being a Republican – no a Democrat, or wait was it a Libertine? Oh forget it, they’re all the same – bunch of crooks! It’s an unhealthy addiction to collecting books and music. It’s running until you can’t stand up. It’s shaving you head or getting punched in the lip. It’s learning a new word and forgetting what it means. It’s all those silly romantic notions you know wont come true. It’s John Lennon singing, Happy Xmas (war is over) – all those dead children that make you cry. It’s still having terrible grammar. It’s learning to shrug the little stuff and laugh. It was the first time you read, The Education – oh those cynically delightful prose. It’s learning to appreciate all those things you can’t seem to let go, that help you grow, fall – that pick you up. It’s an environment of ever bending, flexing, collapsing conscious illusions and exploding synapses – the oscillation between the serotonin levels and learning to love every moment in-between – high or low. It is the ever-present swirling reality –stranding at the apex of the maelstrom – understanding everything that is your cause and effect – transforming you into your ever-present anamorphic self.

The Unreadable

So Let’s take note, or a list if you will: refrigerators, handbags, monstrous DVD collections, Bedrooms, content of backpacks, the alphabet, Cinema ticket Stubbs, ipod artists, things we see upon waking, items in front of us, landmarks, dogs... All these topics have been covered in the great quest to create the most boring and unreadable blog. I guess I’ll add my own list to the list . . .

I present my bookshelf. I will list them in the haphazard order in which they have been arranged . . . this will be much more entertaining for me than the reader . . . if you do read this . . .enjoy.

Walden – HDT
The Contrast – Royall Tyler
Advanced Racquetball – Strandemo and Baum
The Constitution of the United States (2 copies)
Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas
Blindness -José Saramargo
Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck
The Prince – Machiavelli
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
Cannery Row – Steinbeck
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday – James W. Baker
The Heath Anthology of Literature: Volume A
Outer Dark – Cormac McCarthy
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Lost Victories: The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson – Bevin Alexander
For Whom The Bell Tolls – Hemingway
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Fredrick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln – John Stauffer
Candide – Voltaire
America and Americans – Steinbeck
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Metamorphoses – Ovid
Moby Dick – Melville
Romantic Art – William Vaughan
A Clockwork Orange – William Burgess
Ishmael – Daniel Quinn
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
A Sand County Almanac – Aldo Leopold
The Rules Of Attraction – Bret Easton Ellis
A Confederacy Of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Farewell To Arms – Hemingway
Burmese Days – George Orwell
1984 – George Orwell
The Red and The Black – Stendhal
Island – Aldous Huxley
Off To The Side – Jim Harrison
Farmer – Jim Harrison
Warlock – Jim Harrison
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Lullaby – Chuck Palahniuk
Haunted – Chuck Palahniuk
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
Winter In The Blood – James Welch
Travels With Charlie - Steinbeck
Travels With Charlie – Steinbeck (yeah, it’s there twice)
The Pearl – Steinbeck
East of Eden – Steinbeck
The Short Reign of Pippin the IV – Steinbeck
Once There Was A War – Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck
Hot Water Music – Charles Bukowski
The Reader – Bernard Schlink
Ask The Dust – John Fante
Invisible Monsters – Chuck Palahniuk
Growth Of The Soil – Knut Hamsun
One The Road – Jack Kerouac
The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac
Cry, The Beloved Country – Alan Paton
No Longer At Ease – Chinua Achebe
My Century – Günter Grass
Survivor – Chuck Palahniuk
The Harper Collins Study Bible
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
The Histories – Herodotus
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
The Theban Plays –Sophocles
The Iliad – Homer
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
1919 – John Dos Passos
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
The Following Story – Cees Nooteboom
The Skin of Our Teeth – Thornton Wilder
America – Johan Huizinga
The Waning of the Middle Ages – Johan Huizinga
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig
Ordeal By Fire – McPherson
Black Elk Speaks – John Neihardt
Holidays On Display – William Bird
The Death of Superman – DC Comics
Rupay: historias graficas de la violencia en el Perú 1980 – 1984 – Luis Rossell, Alfredo Villar, Jesus Cossio
Batman: Year One – Frank Miller
Pride of Baghdad – Brian K. Vaughan
Watchmen – Alan Moore
Japan: A Cultural, Social, and Political History – Anne Walthall
The Black Cat – Edgar Allan Poe
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Leaves of Grass (First 1855 Edition) – Walt Whitman
Bob Dylan Chronicles – Bob Dylan
Cities of the Planes – Cormac McCarthy
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (again)
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Absolute Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie
Fools Crow – James Welch
The Golden Fleece
The Burial At Thebes – Seamus Heaney
The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus
Cupid and Psyche – Apuleius
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
The Rum Diary – Hunter S. Thompson
The Motel Life – Willy Vlautin
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Black Boy – Richard Wright
All The World’s a Fair – Robert W. Rydell
White Guard – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCrathy
São Tomé – Paul Cohn
Personal History – Katharine Graham
Letters on Life – Rainer Maria Rilke
Fencing the Sky – James Galvin
The General In His Labyrinth – Gabriel García Márquez
Popism: The Warhol Sixties – Andy Warhol
Party Monster – James st. James
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Beautiful and the Damned – Fitzgerald
OK, I’ve made it about a third of the way through, if I continue I’m going to fail a test tomorrow. Maybe I’ll continue someday…

Groundhogblog

Since I haven’t done this for a while I guess I’ll start from a place I’ve been before. The dentist’s chair. That is where I found myself on Groundhog Day 2010. And perhaps there is more truth to those opening lines than their obvious inadequacies as gripping turns of literature. It doesn’t really pull you in does it? Regardless it’s the truth, and the truth can be boring…get used to it. Maybe if I twist it a bit, give it a ferocious turn or a mighty stretch, gripping and interesting would be the adjectives that float to the surface of your thoughts in describing a routine as humdrum as teeth cleaning. Is this all sinking in? So, I was in the dentist’s chair. Drooling between monosyllables as I attempt to answer to the dental hygienists trivial questions. The same questions, reformatted every six months. My son did this; my son did that… blah…blah…blah. I hate to fain interest during polite formalities, such as the conversation I’m describing. I usually prefer no refrain from all forms of communication during moments of relaxation. And having my teeth cleaned is certainly one of those moments. Oh how I enjoy those biannual cleanings. I have heard there are those of you who fear, dread, loose sleep over those preventive upkeeps, and I will say now that I do not understand you. We are incompatible. How can that be? You obviously do not frequent the same Zen-garden/dentists office I do. I’m not joking. The chair in which I find myself twice a year is front row seating to a visual feast for the meditatively inclined mind. Six very large windows on the north and east walls make privy an enchanting view of a dense thicket, back dropped by celestial reaching mountains. So it is here that I purposely schedule my cleanings, always in the mornings when I am still tired, this is very important so as to allow for the ideal state of relaxation. I sometimes think about grapes. Grapes large and small. Red and green, dark and pale. I like grapes. They make a delicious snack or juice. And treated just the right way they can make a wonderful muse. Would I make this up? Other times I find myself thinking of nothing at all. I really strive to think of nothing. Zip. A blank Canvas. A dumb horse’s mouth. Mouth…mouth teeth…teeth chatter…chatterbox? No. Teeth? Yes, teeth…talk…talk, too much…much too much…yes! The dentist talked too much I mentioned earlier, and it still holds true. But now I realize that I’m talking too much. I’m being way too long-winded, but perhaps I’ve lost my way. Or is my way sound and the path is where the fault lies? We are constantly concerned with moving forward in a linear fashion, we sometimes miss the turns and folds in the labyrinth. But not that morning, no that morning I was tuned in; I didn’t miss a beat. Literally not a beat, because, as it were music clued me in, it was the device that exposed the glitch. So there I was in the dentists chair when the landscape fell flat and I could see forward and back, side-to-side, up and down. The Sound of Silence was deafening. Or rather not, it was adjusted to a reasonable volume but the effect was sublime. That overplayed classic by Simon and Garfunkel could be heard softly, accenting the sterile quite of that office. And I realized that I had been there before. But of course that is obvious, I go there twice a year. But no, this feeling was different. I knew that exact moment had been mine once before, I had played that game previous, I knew my lines well, I was my own understudy. Everything became clear. So there I was. My moment of Déjà vu struck me in the dentist’s chair. I was tense as hell, anything but relaxed – having my teeth cleaned is like a death march through the mud – all I wanted was a bit of small talk to ease my mind.

Master of Water Genie Speach

Bedcrooming Intoune Bemeing

There was a map of the world –
Its spread of countries, blood-spattered red.
There were prints by French Impressionists on the walls and
The bookshelf held novels from the same era.
Cloths from the upper Andes of Perú were draped over the window.
There were black and white photographs
Crystallizing images from all corners of Earth.

The lack of light and a presence of life without color,
Sets the tone of the piece about man – absent of mirth.
Empty bottles that once held red wine, now held candles –
Flames flickering and fine.
The bookshelves were cluttered and spilled onto the floor,
What would not fit there were stacked against the wall.
Their pages were watermarked and worn
Tattered and stained burgundy.
They held secrets to life and an escape from that room,
Which felt like it was stuck in time –
Over a hole.

Existence should bounce forward and back;
Each action should leave tracers for the eye.
The closet doors were ajar and spotted shirts and pants
Spued onto the floor like sullied souls climbing
Pathetically out of the dark.

The foot of the bed slept a small black cat.
The duvets were disheveled
From the previous night’s sleep.
Pools of cooled wax clung hard to the shelf,
Encompassing the clock and time itself.

There was the mask in the corner he wore when he went outside . . .
There was the mask on the floor broken;
The one he wore to hide.
There was the drunken monkey he could never fully abide
And the elephant in the closet people never saw outside.

The chest of drawers hung
Wide-open, clothes belching forth.
He looked about and saw everything that was without . . .
Without care, without neglect . . .
Without despair, without respect.

His cuticles were bleeding but he picked them still.

His mind was sad but he tortured it yet –
He knew it still moved and he longed for results.
If he found any in the theater of his mind,
He yearned to share them with others.
Though a part of him knew
It would come of no good . . .

He dreamed of the day he would pick himself up off the floor –
When everything would be new and nothing a bore.
When he would walk through doors and
On the other side find each scene different.
Ennui is crippling and leaves too much time to think.
The individual is a lonely hunter
Who only stalks the self.
Once something is built to satisfy others
The artist tears it down and runs for cover.

He dreamed of coming home from college for the holidays by train.
He wondered what it would be like to be sturdy and sound,
To be built solid,
Pound per pound.

Of desire he pleaded for a life more romantic,
To know true love – if such a thing existed.
Birth, death, sex,
He knew were the fundamental realities,
He never took the human connection for granted.

He wanted to brush skin with
Beautiful women he respected.
He wanted to be a writer and
Hoped it would work out.

He would leave his home and never look back
Were it not for the few loved ones he did not lack.
He wanted to quit the life he had forged for himself,
He wanted to stand on mountains and navigate vast valleys.
Oh to be deep inside the recesses of your lover,
To hit the heart and have ecstasy
Explode from the stars in your eyes.

A passionate scream jutting out from the dark is
Ground enough for a man to stand.

He was learning how to play the game,
Where to push and where to pull.
He had butted his head into many a wall,
He had tripped and stumbled,
Bruised from the fall.

Over and over –

The man picked himself up and stretched his neck in
The direction that resembled forward.
Way out in the distance,
Where the earth curved away from the sky,
There was a new glow of light,
A fire to fuel the inside.

He was a runner in the night
Always in search of the unknown.
So, he pushed the big white elephant into the shadows
And stepped forward with sharp eyes.

All the dirty shirts in the world
Could not stop him now,
Nor the empty wine bottles –
He would break them.

The horizon,
For all its murkiness,
Was a beautiful place to be . . .

Spinnegan Mememormee

The Section of Finnegans Wake I will memorize can be found on page 229, beginning of the second full paragraph. “Maleesh! He would bare to untired world of Leimuncononnulstria (and what a strip poker blobbtrottel they pairs would looks!) how wholefallows, his guffer, the sabbatarian (might faction split his beard!) I liked the words: Maleesh, bobbtrottel, wholefallows, and sabbatarian.

The Iffian Entanglement

So I’m writing a paragraph modeled after, imitating, burlesquing this over-articulate incessantly repetitive Water Genie. Seriously, He says the same goddamn thing over and over again. The identical idea . . . twin thought . . . double-speak, but not doublespeak like Orwell – then it would be Orwellian and not Rushdian. All the same, the words are different, but the meaning remains. It’s kind of like life. Every week, school . . . work . . . school . . . work ¬– it never changes. How cliché! Give me some variation, some variety, some hurdles, throw some boulders! But isn’t that what this is – something new? A blog? What the hell is that? Never heard of it. Nope not me, I’m a Luddite! Or am I? Oh I forgot, who the hell cares anyway? So here we are, another semester, more classes, and new knowledge - or is it old knowledge? Depends on whom you ask. Back in the labyrinth that is Wilson – have we been here before? There’s no place like home. Where are my Rudy Slippers? After Finnegans Wake I’ll surely need them. Wow! What a mountain, talk about throwing boulders. But in any case it’s something new, exciting, unfamiliar, novel, a new frontier; one that comes after the west but before Mars. Who will we find and what will we incorporate? Here we are at a new beginning ready to jump, leap . . . fall – head over heels, in love out of love again, armed to the teeth and bursting with questions. Scared shitless and loving it. So that’s it, the paragraph is over and I’m ready to begin. End, prost, chau, good night, Salud, cheers, fin!