one of my writer just wrote me the most fucking offensive email ever.

lines:
“Redefine is a marketing project. Publicists send us shit and we kiss there asses to get on their good side? Am I right? It’s what we’re trying to accomplish, to move up in the world. The only reason I’m writing an interview with ***** is because she’s a “name” and it raises both your and my profile to have that on our resumes. Yours for the site, mine for my writing. It’s basic ass kissing 101. I’m fine with it, you’ve got to play the game and all.”

fucking hell fuck.

“It was watching interviews of [Bill Hicks] talking about how he tried to fit into normal comedy for his entire career but wasn’t really successful until he stopped giving a shit about industry restraints and just did what he wanted. That’s when he really took off in Europe. I’d recommend you do the same thing with Redefine. There are a million marketing sites. You’re trying to do something different. Do it. Only play within the lines so much. Sometimes I look at the site and I think we’re basically a slightly more sophisticated Pitchfork clone. You need to give people something they can’t get anywhere else.”

my response was somewhat manic, along the lines of:
“Doing an article about ***** is not to kiss ass. I like her record; you like her record. It makes sense to me that we cover her because she is liked. I don’t think it’s about kissing anyone’s ass at all; in fact, I don’t post a single thing that I don’t believe in. This is a personal rule. I don’t do it for the resume; are you joking me? You have no idea how much time I spend on this shit… it is because I believe in it wholeheartedly not for any kind of marketing shit and definitely not for any fucking money. I kind of find it offensive that you do think I am playing some sort of bullshit game because I work very hard to make that not be the case and I could be doing a lot of things and posting about a lot of motherfuckers that I don’t believe in at all just to get more traffic. Man. I AM A FAN OF EVERY FUCKING BAND I POST ABOUT. I DON’T MAKE SHIT FOR MONEY. Redefine DOESN’T EVEN PAY FOR ITS OWN WEB HOSTING. I pay for it. I have fucking $8 in the bank right now. That’s all there is to it. What fucking game? !!OI!!OI!II If I wanted to play a game I would do simple Q&A’s with every band I interview rather than pouring my heart and soul into shit that takes me fucking hours and hours and hours. I WISH I knew how to paly the fucking game more…

Anyway, again, I’m pretty fucking offended you think it is some kind of marketing project. WHAT THE FUCK. Who the fuck is making money or marketing any kind of fucking shit. I am doing this purely because I believe in every fucking second of it and if you think it is a marketing ploy then FUCK we are clearly not on the same page at all. Are you joking me? Like… the whole point of it is to offer journalism that other people can’t find elsewhere. DO you know how many bands have come and talked to me personally about the articles I do to say that it is their favorite interview they’ve ever done? Or told me that their mothers had called them about articles I had done? That’s not bullshit journalism and that’s not marketing I work very hard to keep this thing honest and pure.”

FUCK MY FACE I AM SO FUCKING PISSED
(fucking my face is probably not a good thing)

ugh.

i am like some forlorn creature, tethered to myself but half floating from afar, frustrated by my own complexities, familiar only with my own inability to clarify the reasons for the distance.

above, a sense of failure in navigating, as though an excited collection of fingers touching down upon grace, and things made of dream fodder, are not enough, will never be enough.

within, a sense of failure in understanding, as though a lack for attention spans and simple underlying sympathies point towards root tendencies towards selfishness.

so inconsolable, so treacherous, though without intention. thus wearing emotions upon one’s sleeve marks one as honest but presents a constant worry and manifests exhaustion in the he, muted or not.

are we acting out scripts? filling in roles? inadvertently dodging faces? purposely giving in automated excess?

—

Edit > 10:48pm
It is most interesting that I have just been reading Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse all evening, and similar words and emotions have been expressed, as I have been feeling, acknowledge ridiculously to be feeling, but want desperately not to feel… My sentiments are not callous to such a degree, not so overwhelmingly filled with distaste or so unloving — but there is a degree of this, which outwardly, manifests similarly. (Hopefully I don’t go sticking my head into the oven in the future, or go burning beautiful things to the ground by sheer idiocy.)

Looking at his hand he thought that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time… how trifling it all is, how boring it all is, he thought, compared with the other thing — work. Here he sat drumming his fingers on the table-cloth when he might have been–he took a flashing bird’s-eye view of his work. What a waste of time it all was to be sure! Yet, he thought, she is one of my oldest friends. I am by way of being devoted to her. Yet now, at this moment her presence meant absolutely nothing to him: her beauty meant nothing to him; her sitting with her little boy at the window–nothing, nothing. He wished only to be alone and to take up that book. He felt uncomfortable; he felt treacherous, that he could sit by her side and feel nothing for her… He reproached himself again. He was sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay and he had nothing in the world to say to her…

He felt rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that have been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them. Yet he must force his feet into them. He must make himself talk. Unless he were very careful, she would find out this treachery of his; that he did not care a straw for her, and that would not be at all pleasant, he thought. So he bent his head courteously in her direction.

barfing on my own face.

Today! Today, today, today, at 6:30am on February 9th, 2012, marks the date that I have finished Henry Miller’s The Tropic Of Capricorn. Never would I have believed upon being initially gifted this book that it would become notable enough to celebrate its completion! In it, I not only have found the perfect opening quote for my novel, but now I realize, the perfect closing one as well. And how symmetrical, that these chosen verses fall within the opening ten and closing ten pages of Miller’s book, just as they fall within the five opening and closing of mine.

It begins like this:

Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of a contradiction.
Until the one for whom this is written came along I imagined that somewhere outside,
in life, as they say, lay the solution to all things. I thought, when I came upon her, that
I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead
I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to — and
I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left
high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for — myself.
I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live — if what others are doing
is called living — but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest
in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of
it at the same time, and beyond it.

And it ends like this:

It seems to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been asleep in the black womb of sex. It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365 years too many. But at my any rate I am now in the right house, among the sixes, and what lies behind me is well and what lies ahead is well. You come to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it. My whole life is in the balance; I will enjoy the luxury of this for one day. Tomorrow I shall tip the scales. Tomorrow the equilibrium will be finished; if I ever find it again it will be in the blood and not in the stars.

I, too, have begun and ended like this, though in reverse to this process. Henry Miller and I’s parallel romantic experiences are twain mirrors of our separated lives. But sandwiched between bookends of our shared experiences – symbolized by death and then birth, birth and then death – everything else in-between is variable, different, made similar only by our each writing a book and finding ourselves because of pain. Both hint towards the future, though seventy years of question marks divide them, his having completed The Tropic Of Capricorn in 1938 (appropriately, in Paris).

I suppose, contextually, for one to understand what I mean really is to capture this exact passage from The Tropic Of Capricorn – this passage that will begin my second book, the continuation of the first, the hello to the one for whom that is written, my star-aligned Aries, my age-old familiarity, for which this verse rings true:

“One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this.
The woman whom you never hoped to meet now sits before you,
and she talks and looks exactly like the person you dreamed about.
But strangest of all is that you never realized before that you had dreamed about her.
Your whole past is like a long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no dream.
And the dream too might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life: REALITY.”

Up until this moment, I knew not where to begin with the continuation; I knew only that my work must be continued. But here, before me, with its red jacket sleeve and 95 cent price point, lies the answer, the door-opening key spun from paper and memory and imagination, brought to me in the present by one Henry Miller, whose history and astrology I shall wander to research in the immediate future. Henry Miller, who his hive-minded, zombie-brained contemporaries foolishly sought to banish due to their lack of understanding his genius. Henry Miller, who similarly finds as much weight in astrology as do I; for no other reason would he write two books in homage of Cancer and Capricorn, for no other reason would he have said that he is “now in the right house, among the sixes…” upon finding his ultimate second love…

EDIT

I did find out that the book is not purely fiction or non-fiction, that the truths and non-truths are one and the same, indistinguishable. I wonder if his description of this love is about his wife, June? Or Anais Nin? Or none of the above? Purely fiction? Regardless, I did find this book, to the right, which has a synopsis like this (it is exactly what I aim to do with my own book, coincidentally) according to this lovely post on Psychicchic’s Paranormal Curtain:

“This book, Henry Miller: His World of Urania, was written by the late Hollywood astrologer, Sidney Omarr in 1960. The book analyzes the effect the planets had on Miller and his many works, including Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring and even Sour Orange Juice… I have yet to come across a book like this one – a book that dissects a life history in an attempt to examine the impact of any cosmic thinking.”

>>>

Now to get barfy. Forgive me.

I awoke this morning, as if from plague, afflicted, tumbling from me waters like catharsis – only waters poisoned. I have been bed-ridden since late last evening, feeling like complete pale-faced horror, eating rice and carbs in an attempt to create solid ground inside me, but there is none. It’s horrible. I need to work but I have no internet in my home, and I must make the decision of going out and risking disaster or staying here to do nothing except for occasionally write when the appropriate words come to mind. But aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, I feel as though I am dying, though I am not, I hope; I am not often sick in this way, and it is the worst kind. At the same time, I am growing a pimple, I am sweating, oh, it’s horrible. Bathe me royally, is there anywhere for bandages to stop these ridiculous horrors?!! DEATTTTTTTTTTTH.

I’ve ventured out am in public. I’ve scarcely been here half an hour. I need to go home. I need to go home. I need to queue up some bookmark links about Henry Miller — no internet at home — and I need to go home. Over this for the time being. Why did I think I wanted to face the world? Oh, right, responsibility. Getting in the way of my comforts. Sick.

shamanic mysteries of egypt, part two.

OHHHHHHKAY. So part two of my crazy Egyptian meditation visionary book is about connecting with Nekhbet Mother Mut (pictured right), what they describe as the “Alchemist,” the deity that comes before the rest, the mother of all, and supposedly my “main guide” in my vision quest. In my book about Egyptian deities (the best intro book, seriously), she is a vulture, usually shown from side view, often shown in combination with or in relation to a snake.

I decided to edit the meditation this time to cut out unnecessary words and basically get to the meat of the thing, after learning that last time I got way too much caught up (concentration-wise) in the extra descriptive words I was saying that were in the original texts. This time, I also paired it all to Barn Owl’s Lost In The Glare record – at least, its first three songs. It matched up ridiculously well with the arc of the entire meditation, though I did not intend for that to happen whatsoever (with the exception of the last song, because I put that on there in its entirety as an entire song’s-length worth of meditation with no additional verbal guidance). Anyway. The arc:

Track one of the record, “Pale Star,” is super mellow and fit in perfectly with the introduction of the meditative session, which basically just called for you to breathe deeply and to get into the zone, and to focus on Anubis standing on the side of a cliff. You were to join him in watching a sunset. I decided to hold his hand in my vision haha. Not sure if he liked that or not, and I was wondering the whole time what kind of hands Anubis would have – would they be more jackal-like or more human-like? – so soon, I just grabbed onto his bicep instead. Which is kinda weird, too… and then I wondered about the bottom half of his outfit, which was some sort of golden skirt-type thing… was getting all pervy on Anubis, sorry!

At that point the meditation told you to let go of what you were thinking of and start preparing yourself to enter the actual meat of the meditation. It told you to step off of the cliff and then transform into a dove, which would enter a vortex…

Almost exactly timed with my entering the vortex came track two, “Turiya.” It was actually fun to glide through the vortex initially with this song playing because it becomes fairly intense, and I imagined myself as a dove, flying very confidently through this vortex, constantly arcing towards the right… but then the song got mega intense, and it got to a point where I felt like seriously my forehead or something was going to explode… everything just became super hard to control and I had to remind myself to breathe deeply to like, maintain control of my body or something. I don’t know how to explain it really; I have never felt anything like that that intensely. I mean, during the previous meditation session for this I had mentioned that it felt like it was hard for me to get back into my body at the end; in this case it was similar to that, only it felt just like my mind was going somewhere else and that if I wasn’t careful, it’d go off without my body following it or something. Anyway, the deep breaths helped, and what’s even better is the timing of the next track and next happening…

The next track, “Devotion I” is a super calm I guess salutary track to someone or something, and it felt so so so appropriate as this was when the journey through the vortex ended and I came face-to-face with Nekhbet Mother Mut and offered her an olive branch of peace, which she was to accept. She then talked to me (this is all in the dialogue from the book) about basically what she was there to do and that I was courageous for attempting this in the first place, and that I had the heart like that of the Fool in the tarot. Then there was a space left for “getting a message” from her, which in my mind, started off as basically her reassuring me that things would be fine, followed by me asking a LOT of ridiculous questions such as: “Is the serpent we’re going to ride on really white?” even though it was originally listed as silver. These are just the type of questions that sprung to mind, though – nothing profound whatsoever, and so I just kept apologizing for asking the dumbest shit, to which the answer seemed like a kind of maternal, “It’s fine,” plus a type of shrugging off, though not mean in any way, just the kind of shrugging off you would give a little kid who might be talking too much about things you’re bored by.

Moving on, this was when I intentionally placed the fourth track, “The Darkest Night Since 1683,” into the pre-recorded meditation reading. It was during this part where I was supposed to look into myself and Egypt and find a lost memory. A ton of random shit came to mind but the strongest things that reoccurred were: lion-headed god (female), Sphinx, Horus – in that order. I knew that Horus was a bird-headed god, but really didn’t know much more than that, other than whatever tangential information I had learned from reading about other gods. Then I was left with the idea of: Eye of Horus (which, in my head, after it came to mind, I mistook for the Eye of Ra / Re) and also, an Eye on the Sphinx??? I also got confused during this time because I had read that Thoth was born from Seth’s eyeball and though that maybe THAT was the Eye of Horus? (When really that has nothing to do with anything, I see now.) Also the line, “So many centuries” – or something similar – kept repeating again and again and again. And I got the very clear sense that a Sphinx – the Great Sphinx?? – is located atop some kind of giant slab of hieroglyphs extend like a vertical column, similar to an obelisk? Similar to the Easter Island “heads” and how they have bodies?? I remember thinking during the meditation that, what the fuck, this was surely an impossibility considering the amount of research that has probably gone into the Sphinx??? ANYWAY.

When I came to and finished this meditation, I was basically like, what the fuck, and went to the book that I had borrowed from the library. It yielded some information about what I had seen:

1) eye of the moon [found coincidentally after I was attempting to look up anything related to “eyes”… “eye of Horus” was not a real thing]
“[Horus as a] Sky God: This is the original form of Horus as ‘lord of the sky’ which preceded all others. The Eyptian word her from which the god’s name is derived means ‘the one on high’ or ‘the distant one’ in reference to the soaring flight of the hunting falcon (if not a reference to the solar aspect of the god). Mythologically, the god was imagined as a celestial falcon whose right eye was the sun and whose left eye the moon. The speckled feathers of his breast were probably the stars and his wings the sky – with their downsweep producing the winds. It was in this form that Horus was apparently worshipped at some of Egypt’s earliest sites such as Hierakonpolis and in which Horus assimilated a number of other local falcon gods.”

2) lion-headed deity (female): [found listed under seven or eight Sphinx-related pages in the index]
“The lion-headed goddess personifies the most common type of ‘hybrid’ or bimorphic deity in which the head of the animal is fused with an anthropomorphic body.” + “A lion-headed goddess is a lion-goddess in human form, while a royal sphinx, conversely, is a man who has assumed the form of a lion.”

3) Horus and The Great Sphinx [found as the last entry related to ‘sphinx’ – I was definitely beginning to think that there was no connection between Horus and sphinxes]
“[Horus as a] Sun god: As a natural outgrowth of his role as cosmic sky god Horus was also venerated more specifically as a solar god… The Pyramid Texts specifically refer to Horus in solar terms as ‘god of the east’ and he appeared in at least three forms in this guise. As Horakhty or ‘Horus of the two horizons’ Horus was the god of the rising and setting sun, but more particularly the god of the east and the sunrise, and in the Pyramid Texts the deceased king is said to be reborn in the eastern sky as Horakhty. Eventually, Horakhtys drawn into the sun cult of Heliopolis and fused with its solar god as Re-Horakhty. As behde or ‘he of [the] behdet’, Horus was the hawk-winged sun disk which seems to incorporate the idea of the passage of the sun through the sky. As Hor-em-akhet (Harmachis) or ‘Horus in the horizon’, Horus was visualized as a sun god in falcon or leonine form. By New Kingdom times, he Great Sphinx of Giza – originally a representation of the 4th-dynasty king Khafre – was interpreted as an image of Hor-em-akhet.

There is nothing else in this text related to Horus being a lion-related god at all. Totally fucking weird…

Maybe a point to note that I’m finding now after reading more about Horus:

Chapter 112 of the Book of the Dead tells how the Delta city of Pe (the historical Buto) was given to Horus as compensation for his eye which was injured by Seth, thus explaining this important centre of the god…

Well, since I’m already here, let’s look up the terms Book of the Dead (to see if there’s more about Chapter 112) , Pe, and Buto… noting that I don’t have internet at home right now, so I actually have to rely only on *gasp* this book that is right in front of me! (God I am glad I actually wasn’t lazy and picked this up from the library today…)

1) Book of the Dead [a shit ton of entries]
… too many entries for me to give a shit right now at 12:30am…

2) Buto [3 entries]
Nothing of particular interest.

3) Pe [0 entries]

Mystery ended adequately, at least for now. Not 100% pleased about not checking out all of the Book of the Dead stuff, but fuggiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Sleep tym.

Anyway, glad I wrote this. Felt so fucking weird right after doing it. felt craaaaaaaaaazyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Still feel a little crazy but it’s fine.

ADDENDUM… 01/31… @ 4:00pm
This morning, when I woke up, I was thinking about how “Horus on the horizon” and thinking that the sphinx is somehow associated with the sun. I don’t know if this is actually true. If this is actually true, it would make sense to think there’s another sphinx? Dedicated to the sun?

Anyway, some quick Googling about sphinxes and Horus… found some sort of articles:
- Was There a Second Great Sphinx at Giza?
- The Riddle Of The Second Sphinx

God this shit is weird. I honestly don’t know what to make of it, AT ALL. Is it my mind actually tapping into something? Is it just my mind? I mean I seriously don’t know that much about Egyptian mythology at all, or Egyptology… so some of the things that have been coming up are pretty bizarre.

Also, there are apparently (maybe?) passages under the Sphinx, which makes it possible? That there might be more carvings in the sides of the walls where the passageways are, no?
- The Saga Of The Sphinx
- The Egyptologist, The Sphinx, and the Cover-Up
- Robert M. Schoch’s Research On The Great Sphinx
- Known Sphinx Passages
- Uncovering Secrets of the Sphinx (a Smithsonian article worth taking a look at, and pretty recent, from February 2010)

Lehner spotted something perhaps even more remarkable. If you stand in the eastern niche during sunset at the March or September equinoxes, you see a dramatic astronomical event: the sun appears to sink into the shoulder of the Sphinx and, beyond that, into the south side of the Pyramid of Khafre on the horizon. “At the very same moment,” Lehner says, “the shadow of the Sphinx and the shadow of the pyramid, both symbols of the king, become merged silhouettes. The Sphinx itself, it seems, symbolized the pharaoh presenting offerings to the sun god in the court of the temple.” Hawass concurs, saying the Sphinx represents Khafre as Horus, the Egyptians’ revered royal falcon god, “who is giving offerings with his two paws to his father, Khufu, incarnated as the sun god, Ra, who rises and sets in that temple.”

Equally intriguing, Lehner discovered that when one stands near the Sphinx during the summer solstice, the sun appears to set midway between the silhouettes of the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu. The scene resembles the hieroglyph akhet, which can be translated as “horizon” but also symbolized the cycle of life and rebirth. “Even if coincidental, it is hard to imagine the Egyptians not seeing this ideogram,” Lehner wrote in the Archive of Oriental Research. “If somehow intentional, it ranks as an example of architectural illusionism on a grand, maybe the grandest, scale.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Uncovering-Secrets-of-the-Sphinx.html#ixzz1l5Mg9PDm

“According to the legend engraved on a pink granite slab between the Sphinx’s paws, the Egyptian prince Thutmose went hunting in the desert, grew tired and lay down in the shade of the Sphinx. In a dream, the statue, calling itself Horemakhet—or Horus-in-the-Horizon, the earliest known Egyptian name for the statue—addressed him. It complained about its ruined body and the encroaching sand. Horemakhet then offered Thutmose the throne in exchange for help.

Whether or not the prince actually had this dream is unknown. But when he became Pharaoh Thutmose IV, he helped introduce a Sphinx-worshiping cult to the New Kingdom (1550-1070 B.C.). Across Egypt, sphinxes appeared everywhere in sculptures, reliefs and paintings, often depicted as a potent symbol of royalty and the sacred power of the sun.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Uncovering-Secrets-of-the-Sphinx.html#ixzz1l5N1tjdu

I DON’T KNOWWWWW can’t really think about this.

No results for a third eye related to the Sphinx.

so, this is the new year.

saying i am confounded would be an understatement. the confusion runs so deep it kills a part of me that i love. it bludgeons core foundations while trying to bully me into admitting that my judgment of characters is absolute crap, that my idealism is not realism, that my world and my worldview are naive, naive, naive! this is heartbreak, which forces one to question one’s entire being, pressures one to unwillingly count the minutes that pass, and persists without reason or answer, indefinitely, unless hope is explicitly crushed or revived…

my mind and heart would be wrestling, but as nostalgia pushes against heartache, the two can barely distinguish their legs from one another’s. in their tangles, neither can win. nostalgia desires to grasp onto the novel feelings which may never be felt again; heartache desires nothing more than to let it all go, to diminish itself out of existence.

what i am writing, however scornful, is at least diminutive. should the unmentionable other never speak to me again, written accounts will be, perhaps altogether too appropriately, all that remain. the moments will slide further away, ejected into space without recourse, specks in endlessness. every passing moment will emerge so much less precious, so much more categorized by pain, that at some point the desire to revisit even the most beautiful aspects of our interactions will wane. the memories will transmute into a blur of pain, to be boxed and shelved away, labeled as trauma and not as longing — and hardly even as friendship.

with no tangible material to celebrate our memories, save for a book, a dearth of letters and poems, and snippets of shared music, any lack of desire on his part to revisit our mutual understanding will reduce everything we’ve shared to nothingness. visual cues not being enough to solidify the moments, they will be left to the mercy of memory, ever-shifting.

(written on the plane from the bay area to seattle + the light rail from the airport to downtown seattle)

today was a bit balls.

this morning, i woke up @ 7:30 to get ready to go to san francisco to help tinwin take some photographs for her wedding. i feel rather ambivalent about it, in retrospect. it is like, 5 pm. stuff kicks off at 6. i have been stranded in and around wedding activities for what feels like a million pointless years. so extremely pointless. i have just been drawing by myself for the past couple hours. it is pointless because everyone else is a bridesmaid or a groomsman and i am just a human, here by myself. they seriously asked me to carry a cellular telephone while they were doing a photo shoot, and it felt kind of insulting, almost! slavery! i know it is “help” but i’ve already helped so much, and especially considering i am not great friends with the bride… it feels unfair anyway, and i know one is not to be expecting of things reciprocated for good deeds but right now that sounds nice. and i feel like an alien; these people are so different from i, talking about their favorite tv shows, what latest crap they bought online… and it all leaves me with a sick taste in my mouth and an even deeper dislike and boredom for weddings, in general. such excess and waste, and it pains me, yet i know i am being a total pompous judgmental ass in saying so.

the other day sherry was brainstorming for an hp project in which they had collected demographics of music lovers and realized they are mostly my age or my peers’. the studies they found also showed that this (our) generation is particularly nostalgic and resonates w/ music from the ’60s. this i know to be true from personal exp. in the music industry. this they know not for they (hp) are disconnected. the goal, then, is to brainstorm ideas w/ which they can find an “in” to this demographic. and though that is, innately, what advertising is, it sickened me to no end. and i said this. and sherry said, “thanks for making me hate my job,” and i realized i was being an ass, yet i am so strongly disdainful of the particular brand of consumerism most americans subscribe to that, seriously, it disgusts all fibers of my being. and while i like to look nice, i realize that people didn’t grow up like me and don’t feel this way because they don’t have the same experiences i do. it is one thing to realize this but separating it enough so that i am not thoroughly disgusted by it all is damn near impossible. my interests occupy an extremely esoteric niche and so i look down upon those who run the hamster wheel… but it is just… so judgmental. and i hate the concept of hating upon others for that, but it cannot be helped.

2:47am
… or, at least, it is difficult to help. i am to help it.

this all compounded by more feelings of inadequacies, from: a) people asking me questions about me — in a very nice way, with nothing but positive curiosities in mind — which make me “unique” but also point to how much i don’t exactly fit in; b) purgatory; c) my realizations that i am kind of an ass in an unintentional sense; and today was just an overall bad day. like, a really bad day. blazing realizations of the fourth kind. discomforting blurry haze. inwards braindead daydreams. friend disconnection resulting in them asking me what was wrong — something which used to happen consistently all the time, and hasn’t really happened in a long time. these days are dark.

i was kinda pissed…

… so i went for a jog. dude, fruitful. i haven’t gone for a jog for ages… well, probably like a month and a half, but before that, ages. and that was like, “i wanna get home faster!” this is the first deliberate jog i’ve gone on in… well, as long as i can remember. felt pretty good though my leg cramped up a little. might do it more, but only at late night intervals such as this. i should go snowboarding sometime soon… i haven’t been in ages… it’s like a foreign thing at this rate. i gotta go at least once this season…

anyway, i truly hope to have a longer actual post one of these days… when i’m not feeling like a complete and utter insane person. this week has been like, 10+ hour workdays, everyday. i’m certainly making money, but it’s rough. can’t wait til tomorrow’s over so i can rest slightly easy…

just created a new category for “fuck”. haha…

(oh right, and i was pissed because there’s this huge deadline tomorrow and the ladies i’m doing for sprung it on me and gave me two days to do all this shit and were really slow about communicating changes to me, and didn’t give them to me for forever, and then finally, after i was like, “okay, i’m leaving the coffee shop to go home for dinner!” they fucking sent me a bombload of changes, many of which i could have done much easier earlier on. fucking ridiculous.)

on top of that, i’m also working on this other website project which is also ridiculous because the dude doesn’t know what he wants at all, or what he’s doing, and it’s a bit of a fucking nightmare. fuck. time to dance in my room for a song or two and then get back at working.

1:00am.

(i also have this fucked up foot problem… where my feet are really fucking itchy and swollen during the wintertime. i don’t think it’s athlete’s foot. it fucking sucks. i have the weirdest health problems, when i have health problems, always. never get regularly sick but my body is always doing weird ass fucking shit. fuck.)

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2:26am.
addendum.
i’m listening to… el boy die’s black hawk ladies & tambourins album, which rules… dude, there’s so much good music it’s fucking stupid.

anyway, i neglected to mention that when i came back, i felt really awake (the goal of the jog), and it was awesome. now i’m kinda in the work zone, which is excellent, considering it’s so late/early in the morning! that also allowed me time to calm down and not put together a totally bratty email cause whatever.

also when i came back, i laid down on the floor for a while, listening to emil & friends, and doing some exercises and just generally zoning the hell out to the music. uhhhhhh that run pretty much made me feel like i was hallucinating. natural high, i guess, but in this weird way… like being on a hallucinogen or something… i began to notice the strokes in which the painters painted popcorn on my ceiling, and how those strokes seemed to create a spiral around the light fixture in the center of the room, and how the light radiated outwards and cast shadows upon the paint strokes in a circular, hurricane-like way… it was as if i was hyper-focused and hyper-clear for a second, and i think it’s because of all the deep breaths i took on my jog. crispy deep breaths! when i was coming back and ran out of breath (i can’t jog worth shit), i just closed my eyes, took deep breaths, and focused on the music. when i came to, i: a) could jog again without problem; b) was surprised at where i was. it was like that hallucinogenic ceiling thing again, only i was outside…

that reminds me, though… this morning i woke up and laid in bed forever because i couldn’t get up, and my head was just spinning, spinning, spinning, and i felt barely able to pull myself into consciousness… hmm, that sounds kind of bad…

oh right, and today i started my first day of volunteering. what i am doing is basically going to low-income subsidized housing and participating in giving residents coffee and making conversation with them. i had a long conversation with this guy named sasa who was from tehran and had been in the states for ten years; he used to run his own company in iran but now is in the states, battling depression, and talking daily with his case worker. he says he wants to work but he cannot because his health is not good — health meaning mental health. he was formerly a political science professor at a university in tehran, he said, and had converted to christianity since coming to the united states. he talked about how everyone in the united states has so much CHOICE, basically, and can anything they want, unlike other countries. he says he gives thanks daily…

also had a brief conversation with this dude from new orleans about making gumbo, and how he makes awesome gumbo…

also had a really long conversation with this super albino hypoglycemic kid who loves to bbq but can’t cook and can’t really eat vegetables because they make him sick because he has a protein deficiency. he was suuuuuper pale. but anyway. he said he bbq’d 24 packages of baby back ribs for his family for his birthday this past year, and that he marinated the meat for like, five days straight. hardc0re. he told me that if he eats starchy vegetables, like potatoes, he has diarrhea for a week. such hardcore food problems… dang.

there was also a filipino guy who made everyone lumpia. and he was talking with such pride about making lumpia and adobo, but no one there would really eat it because no one ate meat. his talking about it and kind of feeling like we were crazy for not making meat made me think twice about the realities of being vegetarian. and i think i decided today that i don’t really care enough to actually make the stretch. not that i’m ever going to really BUY meat and cook it, BUT… it’s such a thing of privilege — which we have, yes — to decline meat when it is such a cultural necessity in so many other places. i don’t know. in any case, it’s whatever. i’ll probably continue eating as i do, but i think… it’s whatever. i don’t care. i’ll eat it.

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2:39am.
hey, look at that… this is damn near a real entry!