What Have I Done

Tonight I made the terrible mistake of playing on my guitar:

• Every Neutral Milk Hotel song I know;
• U2's "One";
• Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"
• and Jeff Mangum's cover of "I Love How You Love Me"

and now it's dark and I'm in deeper emotional waters than I meant to get into and I think I need a hug.

Communiqué

Last night in my dream I was talking to a pair of gangster types, who informed that if you're planning on hitting someone with a baseball bat, you really wanna choke up on it as much as you can. Holding it too near the knob slows down your swing (because you have to take a bigger windup), meaning you're not going to be as efficient, plus the weight imbalance will create "wrist drag", which means the bat puts stress on your wrists in a downward direction, which leads to joint problems later on in life. So if you're planning on hitting anyone with a bat, maybe try this out and let me know if they were right.

We also agreed that the worst thing was when you found the toilet unexpectedly backing up on you while you were at a friend's house, or at a party.

What I Did Last Night

It's kind of like hypnotizing chickens...

Last night I dreamed about a gang war erupting at a school. Kids were getting shook down in the principal's office for any weapons they might have had on them, and things were pretty fraught to begin with, but then this one kid whipped out an Uzi or some shit, and things got real quiet real fast. He said he'd only give it up to the administration if they reimbursed him the $7000 and change it cost him in the first place, and it looked like one of the counselors was totting up some numbers on a calculator in a serious attempt to maybe do just that, but just then a group of kids from a rival gang burst in, so the kid snatched his Uzi back and some serious fucking bullets started flying after that, boy.

Then I dreamt about a woman in a fugue state in solitary confinement who, while deliriously singing to herself, managed to steal keys from a guard and instigate a prison-wide revolt, and the prisoners then took over the compound and rather than escaping to the four points of the compass, decided to fortify the prison itself, and they started holding brawls in the courtyard, for entertainment, and there were fires in oil barrels, and one of the prisoners attacked another one with a huge iron spike on the end of a chain.

And then I dreamed I was the Incredible Hulk being chased around by Gen. "Thunderbolt" Ross and having "gamma grenades" thrown at me, but it turned out that the reason Gen. Ross had such a personal vendetta against the Hulk was that (get this) Ross was actually harboring latent homosexual tendencies, and the grotesquely-masculine figure of the Hulk was causing these latent feelings to manifest themselves in ways too obvious for even the general to ignore, so rather than deal with these feelings in any kind of integrative way he decided the best thing to do was destroy the figure that was causing him all this distress. Plus the fact that Bruce Banner, the Hulk's alter ego, was going to marry his daughter Betty, was just another layer of frustration and annoyance and too-close-to-home-ness which caused Ross to (in my dream) mutate himself into a weird three-legged creature (like it was just three legs and pretty much nothing else) in an attempt to destroy the Hulk once and for all. (In other words if he couldn't be "Mrs. Banner" then not only could no one else, but there wasn't going to be any Banner at all).

Then I dreamed I was some young governmental agent in some lady's apartment reading about the events of the aforementioned dream-segments in the newspaper. The lady herself looked like Meg Ryan, but was not specifically Meg Ryan, just Meg Ryan-esque. We talked a bit about Gen. Ross' avowed intention to destroy the Hulk using nuclear weaponry, and I expressed shock and dismay and mentioned the huge amounts of collateral damage that would surely result from such a tactic. The apartment was small and cozy, and apparently we must have had some sort of intimate relationship because I realized I had her in a clinch and the dream shifted over to a sexual sphere, which I'll spare you the details 'cause modesty.

After that I woke up.

OH GOD FUCKING DAMMIT WHY AM I READING A FUCKING ECLIPSE REVIEW, LIKE I FUCKING NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS SHIT. HERE LET ME SUM IT UP FOR YOU: YOUNG PASTY BORING UNREMARKABLE UNATTRACTIVE GIRL CAUSES ANCIENT POWERFUL BEINGS TO FIGHT FOR HER LOVE, NOT ONLY THAT SHE'S SO CAPTIVATING SHE CAUSES THESE ANTEDILUVIAN INHUMANLY GORGEOUS KILLING MACHINE CLANS TO PUT ASIDE THEIR DIFFERENCES TO DEFEND HER ROBOTIC MILQUETOAST SOMEHOW-IRRESISTIBLE ASS, AND GEE WHIZ AS IF THAT WEREN'T ENOUGH, GRADUATION FROM HIGH SCHOOL IS COMING UP WHOOPS!! LIFE SURE IS TOUGH!! I CAN'T EVEN BEGIN TO FUCKING IMAGINE WHY THIS SERIES HAS CAUGHT ON LIKE GANGBUSTERS, CAN YOU?

Dada Poetry!

One of my favorite things about Youtube is their wildly inaccurate closed captioning system. I once turned it on while watching a rambling, not-very-tightly-wound guy do a video about Stevia, MMA fighting, giving women orgasms and who knows what else, and then decided to transcribe what popped up on the screen, word for word.

The video is me reading that transcription. This is an experimental video, so feel free to tell me what you like or don't like.


They Will Well/It Can't Happen

Music is 1) Piano Concerto No. 5 in E Flat by Beethoven, and 2) "Lichen" by Aphex Twin from "Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2".

Thank God for the Internet

Oh my flogging gourd, ignore all the other pompous crap on this page and check out this video:

Look at my Horse, my Horse is Amazing

Scorpio Tactics

There's something rewarding about being perceived as some kind of a threat. I had a conversation with a friend about a third party, someone I have an ever-so-faintly acrimonious relationship with. My friend said, "If you wanted to, you could make them your friend."

I thought about it, and realized: that's absolutely true. But I also realized: I don't want to.

Whether it speaks to some flaw in my character, I don't know. But there's something I find very pleasing about having enemies. It made me stop and think when I realized this about myself, because I spout a lot of hoo-ha at this point in my life about love and spiritual growth and so on. "Am I some kind of hypocrite?" I asked myself. But my tentative conclusion is no-- there's just some part of me that needs someone to growl at. I admire my friend's crystalline spirit greatly-- I believe she is someone who would make friends with every single person on the planet, if she could. But I am not of a similar function.

Think about music. Whenever you put two notes together, there's a quality to their interaction. If the notes are in unison, major thirds, perfect fifths, or octaves, then they are "consonant". Anything else, and they're "dissonant". Now, try and imagine how utterly boring and restrictive music would be if you could only ever use consonance. No dissonance, no tension, and nothing moves.

Trying to be friends with everybody, to me, is like trying to write music with no minor chords, no dissonance, and no dynamism whatsoever. Going back to one of my original posts, what if the entire universe were crammed full of stars, no blackness between them? It wouldn't work.

That being said, I think it's crucial to respect one's enemies, or at least the role they are playing. We enjoy being with people we like, because in some way, that We Are. We dislike some people, because that We Are Not. (Or so we think). Everything knows intuitively what its antithesis is. Everything knows, on some level, what could destroy it, given intensity enough and time. So what you hate and fear, the things that can destroy you, are your flip side. And I'm not really talking about sharks or axe murders or falling off a building or whatever. I'm talking about the things that would eat you up from the taproot. (There always are such things-- there have to be).

I've strayed somewhat from my original point, but it's taken me to the other thing that's been on my mind: seduction. I was thinking: imagine some sort of mansion, where every room was crammed to the rafters with some delight. Rooms full of chocolates, cocaine, naked women, bottles of wine, books, jewelry, incense, everything from the gross to the subtle. Now, turn anyone loose inside this mansion, and there will be something they'll choose first of all. It doesn't matter what it is. (Some people experience transports of bliss playing with a yo-yo, I'm sure of it). Even if you sit down and try to choose nothing. Whatever takes your fancy first of all, that thing is imbued with a quality of seduction. And I think-- I could be wrong-- that whatever seduces you is the very thing that can harm you. If you desire it a lot, it can destroy you a lot. If you want it a little, it can destroy you a little. But you only want it because it's a part of you.

And now we're veering perilously close to Livejournal territory (LOVE = PAIN, fuck you mom and dad, you won't let me go see Rise Against this Saturday)-- so I'll knock it off with the hyperbole. But that's what I've been thinking about.