Confession

I wrote this using an on-line program called wordperhect that is basically stupid and unnecessary, but is pretty neat overall, like the coolest stuff on the internet. Check it out if you like, I recommend it.

But anyway I landed on the site and this little bit of prose-like mess sprung to mind. People forcing my to be arty makes me get a little arty.

Translation is as follows:
I'm not sure what it is but every time I see you it makes me crazy. I don't shake or anything, I just lose all the parts of me that make any sense and end up blathering like an idiot at the circus. I don't know what it is about you that makes me react this way or -------As if I can't tell you exactly what I want to say exactly the way I want to say it. My toungue does weird stuff and my mouth gets dry and I think of all these clever things to say that aren't clever at all and so it makes me want to not even try anymore. I don't think about it anymore: I just run away and hide so you can't see me.

Cool photos

I know no one reads this blog, and that's fine. But if someone out there eventually does, check these out, they are neato.

They are color photographs from the 30's and 40's (mostly taken in the midwest United States). That may sound boring to you, but every time I've viewed photos from the 40's they were in black and white (and usually very good, too, Dorothea Lange, anyone?). But these are interesting just because they're just barely color photos: everything has just enough color saturation to make it noticeable; in other words, there's no high-def color blasting going on, they're just simply pictures taken simply for documentation, and mostly depict daily life in small farming towns and ranches.

Unfortunately, some (read: most) are riddled with Flickr tags because some people just can't see something on the internet and imagine that that something couldn't be better with them interacting with it. Honestly, where on the internet can a person just fucking look at a photo and not have some moron writing "LOL This silo looks lk a dildo!!!!!!111!!"?

ANYWAY, I thought these were pretty neat, as far as color photos of stuff we normally see in black and white go. While browsing them I couldn't help but think of Ted Turner and how he wanted to colorize all the old-school movies from the fifties, and this was back when the colorization process usually ended up making the actors turn red and purple on the screen. What Turner wanted to do was make the movies look like these photos, but he was a moron and decided to try to fuck with classics like Casablanca and The Petrified Forest. Wrong Teddy boy. Leave the colorization process to the movies who use film that can actually reflect colored light, as opposed to making all the movies fit your version of shitty colorization.

ANYWAY, check these photos out. They're cool.

What To Do, what to do

I am different from everyone.

I know everybody is different from everybody else and that somehow we are all the same decomposing material and noxious waste. I know how we're all human and alike, but really unique in our own special way, and all we have to do is find our niche.

However, I am slowly coming to the idea that I have no niche, I have no specificity, I am not obsessed over anything, and this just may be my downfall. Especially if I want to be a writer.

Let me explain. I love music. Music is great. Music is something that can get inside your brain and twist it into bows or knots, fold it into an oragami swan or crumple it into a wet ball and toss it in the wastebasket. Music is the one thing that I'd have to say 90% of the world at least can handle on some kind of level. Some people love punk rock, blues, metal, emo, hip-hop, r&b (do they even call it that anymore?), soul, "classic" rock, 80's hair metal, pop, grunge, country, bluegrass, &cetera &cetera &cetera I could go on for fucking days. Some people like one kind of music and THAT'S IT. SOme people have a mixed bag. But me (and a lot of people I know) like ALL KINDS OF MUSIC. And that's where I sit. Somewhere on the gray line between all genres. I like almost everything. Our mixed bags are bigger than most (like those who just like blues, jazz, and swing and big band and...oh sorry), but that doesn't make us any better than those who like trance, house, techno and industrial. We're just different, and I get that.

But here's my problem: can I write about just music? Fuck no. I see what that does to people. Before you know it, I'll hate music. I'll hate the morons who don't listen to the music I've had on heavy rotation the last four months. I'll start looking down my nose at musicians who didn't affect me with their songs when I can't even play a fucking instrument (no hand-eye coordination, and I'm REALLY fucking lazy) .Look at Rollingstone's David Fricke. That guy fucking sucks. There are people out there (me included) who don't believe he EVEN LISTENS TO THE MUSIC HE REVIEWS. I mean, the guy rates an album like Nevermind three stars when it comes out and then retro marks it with five ten years later because he's afraid to look like he didn't know what he was talking about. Of course anyone worth his salt isn't going to Rollingstone's Music-Industry-Spoonfed-Music-"Reviews" anyway, but that 's beside the point. That can't be me. I can't be that egotistical (he said, writing an article about how different he was from everyone). I can't take a job that demands I focus and analyze music as if it was a frog on a rubber plate, it'll kill the whole reason I listen to music: to get away from analysis and get to where I feel good again.

Not only that but I don't know enough. I don't know when Nevermind was released unless I look it up. I don't know how many albums Tool has, I don't know how many bands Jack White is in (3?4?). I don't know my stuff. I can't convince you I know what I'm talking about unless I have that knowledge, and I'm certainly not going to fake it, because then I'm a fraud and have no value whatsoever.

Same thing with movies. I can't review movies, because I have little to no interest in telling people about a movie before they go see it. A preview is enough, but personally I think I'd be a much better person if I didn't even watch them before I walk into a movie. Previews ruin things, they ruin the magic before the movie--they build expectation (which can lead to disappointment) and kill the idea of honest intake. How many times have you watched a preview or read a review that a) gave away key plot points that would have been better left out or b) looked so stupid that you would never see it in a million years or c) got you chomping at the bits to go see that movie only to have you walk out of the theater twenty minutes into the film?

There's no way to solve this, really. Without promotion you can't have movies but that's why I can't review movies: I don't want to give away major plot points and I certainly don't want to take four thousand words and trash something I found no value in that you might really like. Everyone is different. Transformers 2 did really well at the box office, but the movie had no artistic or asthetic value. Yet it made billions (and I saw it in the theater, don't ask). But the key problme I have in reviewing movies is the same as music: I don't know my stuff. I like movies, but that doesn't give me the right to talk about them in anything but vague, compromised terms. I can talk about the thematic elements of The Dark Knight, but the only people who want to read that are decent film teachers and friends who don't mind listening to me ramble at length about morality plays when they really need to take a shit. I can't write a forty-thousand word review and submit that shit to the Times.

Many authors try to stick to one genre of writing: something that they're really good at or know a lot about; Stephen King is versatile, but he watched a ton of movies when he was a kid, mostly the badly made sci-fi/horror flicks made in the fifties and sixties. Dude obsessed over those, hitchhiking back and forth from a neigboring town to watch film versions of penny-dreadfuls. Crichton was a medical student obsessed with technology and the weird relationships of it's advancement and nature and how humans and technology really mean terrible things for each other. John Grisham worked in a law firm and knows his shit when it comes to law. He loves it, and he loves to show the morality between the decisions people make and the law that represents them. He's a beast. Clancy does military stories, Anne Rice does Vampires, Mark Twain did rural South in the 1800's, Fitzgerald did the rich youth of the twenties (well, the white ones anyway), and Steinbeck did the Depression-Era common man. These people all know their stuff and so their art drove them in that direction, they wrote what they knew and they knew what it was about their lives that was interesting.

My thing is, I don't know what I'm into. I know a lot of trivial information about books and movies and music. I don't have a career to use for material. Plus what I do know is boring: I know how to paint a garage and play video games and put off writing a paper. I know how to eat too much and play too hard and how to roll my ankle on a porch step and limp for a week. But is that enough to try and write and sell stories on? Is what I have that churns in me enough to live on so I don't have to worry about stupid shit anymore (something I know too much about)?

I guess I'll just have to do what I can with what I have and hope for the best. I suppose it's something I'll have to learn to do, just like everything else.

Hallowe'en

Home again Home again, jiggity jog
And I've noticed this morning that Halloween is little more than a reason to get annihilated on a college campus. I thought long and hard about ditching this particular event, just simply because it held so little for me: a bunch of random strangers drinking at my cousins across the street, swaying to bad music while I sat alone in a corner watching them, wishing that I had the stones to talk to that really cute girl in the fishnet stockings, the one with the really nice pair of legs that pounce upon the brain like kagaroos in a sick and twisted fervor, looking for blood.

But in the end it was a good scene, which, in college-townese means no cops, no fights, and maybe just enough cute tail to flirt with, but maybe not enough to take home, but that's fine with me. Can you imagine? The young, sweet smiles of Elise, Anna, and the girl dressed as Cleopatra whos name I forget, but she was so attractive I suddenly wished I was dressed as Marc Anthony, just to have more to discuss.

While the people downstairs danced to thick beats provided by whatever iPod was stuck into the amp, I hung upstairs and tried my best with a cute pirate from Wherever. It doesnt' matter. She took the last train out of my sight, gone to the wind and the dying leaves that flutter about her gold-embraced head and her swinging beads, but it was okay.

Maybe if I had talked just a little more, more about the fall of Rome or the encroaching barbarians, maybe a little smatter of speech about the Egyptian front, and I would have had her in the bag, her eyes fluttering up at me like sparkling stars, reflecting only the darkest space and the sharpest, brightest twinklings that we behold in the night sky. Maybe. But I digress. What do you want to hear about, dear sister, dear brother with your eager eyes and emblazoned shield stuck upon your chest like a knight who glued his best defense upon his chest?

PerhAps you want to hear about the couple (there's always one) that stayed on the ugly couch the fuck couch, the one that no one ever uses except to look at and wonder what the hell it's doing there, all night, only to neck and make out, only to suffer the indignity of my macking it to some poor girl dressed in gold and try my hardest not to fail.

Maybe the light is wrong, but methinks that maybe the real reason for tonight was to dress up and be someone else for a few hours, to pretend that the car, the house, the school work you left in your bag wasn't calling to you and begging to be done, maybe the night was to forget who you are for just those minutes, those fleeting seconds that tick off the clock and into the ether. Maybe the point of Halloween is to pretend that your problems are infinitesimal and ridiculous, stupid in the light of something new and golden and dressed like Cleopatra. Maybe Haloween is so popular because life is a set of token digits that mean nothing unless every now and again you can break free and visit someone else's life for awhile, just to get away. A four hour vacation from the worries of home and bills and school, from the evils of overdoing it and the bone-crushing loneliness you feel day per day. Maybe Halloween is for those who wish for something better and fantastic that you can never have.

All I know is that Cleopatra was cute, cuter than most/all, and I somehow missed my oppurtunity to let her know that. Maybe if I'd gotten a hold of her earlier or somehow better, I wouldn't be punching letters here alone and kind of drunk, trying to figure out why tonight was so great. Thank you cleopatra, Prisoner, Female Jason Vorhees and even that cutish girl in the living room who danced all night: you made my evening, despite not knowing enough about you to even recognize you in the light of day. Somehow you made it special. And that's exactly what I needed.