perhaps the key to getting back into my own mind this evening is…

… writing? is it writing?!

i am such a hermit as of late; it’s almost ridiculous. perhaps it is the weather or the cold or something more… it is probably all of the above. i feel that i may be a little bit like the crab right now, cancer-y, just swallowed up in the creature comforts of myself? feeling weird extending outside of that to go places, talk to people, whatever. certainly were it not for social responsibilities and relationships, i would probably be sitting in my home, as i am doing now, watching movies on hulu, as i just did (finally watched doubt after way too long; shit is amazing).

i have marveled at this before but it is funny how the relationship to social activity has changed since moving to portland. i guess in times like this i am reminded hilariously that i once was perfectly okay with pretty much never going out save for the occasional show (pretty much still the case; there just hasn’t been any show, really, that i’ve wanted to see lately). in seattle, it was much easier to not do anything because my friends there weren’t really up to all that much, or something. but now, i’m kind of always having to do things, or wanting to do things, but on a very fundamental level i am still not wanting to do anything. i forget that i feel this way; i would have forgotten completely had it not been for the fact that my book documented it last year. never really remember these unremarkable feelings because they feel silly to wallow in, yet they are just so necessary for my overall well-being, like a temporary sponge to soak the negative into until i am able to bounce back to normal people land and be somewhat outwards-facing and be able to deal with that outwards-facing-ness. how people who are social all the time are social all the time i really cannot understand, and will probably never be able to. it is annoying, though, that i am at such mercy to my moods, and that when i’m on, i’m super on — social butterfly, mega comfortable — and when i’m off, i’m a bumbling and awkard. so it goes! so last night was the bumbling and awkward! oh well!

funny thing, though — went early to holocene to watch a show and not many people were there. was sitting on an l-shaped couch that had two additional chairs pulled up to it. people sat down next to me on one side of the l-shaped couch while their friends sat in the two additional chairs. eventually a fifth friend came; they called him over and, as i was still in the corner of the l-shaped couch, he sat to my side, effectively closing me off in this circle of strangers. he was none the wiser, thinking i was a part of them, but that certainly began my night of “i feel awkward,” as i not-so-quietly vacated the circle by saying, “i’m going to get out of your circle now,” and slithered away into the corner near the water cooler where i continued to sit by myself and waited for others to appear. i am not necessarily the type who always needs to check text messages and phone messages while alone in a circumstance such as this — but i do default to that sometimes, and did so this particular evening — but i wonder what people used to do while waiting? i can’t quite remember. i’d certainly prefer to write or draw or read a book over looking at text messages and pretending that i am writing things or checking messages when in fact i am not writing anything and have nothing to write and don’t have any new messages to read and really am only looking at the clock’s time over and over again, wondering why only 5 minutes have passed when it has felt like an eternity and wondering still how much longer i have to run through the social charades before i can vacate the premises and return to the confines of my not cold, yes, warm and blankety, home, or even my partner’s. comfort. what the fuck! this constant desire for comforts feels weird, and i hope to god that summer or spring arrives soon and i will get out of this freaking weathery leathery rut of butts.

perhaps.

currently on my way up to seattle. the internet is crawling at a snail’s pace. i am listening to junior boys, though tired of music. i had thought for certain that i would be ready for the heat, and at the light of the morning today i sat in the window of sound grounds ready to soak in the sun’s rays. but no sooner had i sat down that i began to think about the computer overheating, and soon thereafter, my phone began to grow warm and its screen began to fade, as they become do sometimes when the heat melts them. counter-intuitive. i wish i had brought a movie, but i’ll sit nauseously typing instead. it smells of corn nuts. i am slightly jealous. dinner for me consisted of a pre-emptive strike of gluten-free vegetable noodle soup and some crackers and a fruit salad. i might grow hungry later but whatever, or i might not; i never know what to eat to actually stay full and healthy. it’s a strange thing, this eating thing. it’s always an enigma. i think i ate too much fruit, though; the sugars and the nausea work together to be completely non-friendly. this is usually the case.

there’s a magazine within my vision called artslandia. the cover looks fairly neat.

i have been reading the book henry and june. another henry miller book, indeed. it’s actually interesting because it is just anais nin’s journals, but in it she copies out a lot of the letters she writes to henry miller, and a lot of the things he writes to hers. last week, i had gotten through half of another book which was a compilation of their letters to one another. it is interesting to read these two books side by side, because in the compilation of letters, there are periods where there is a lull in communication, and you wonder what anais nin is doing in the meantime, and why, a lot of the time, she is fucking around (she was married, too, and also seeing her cousin). it’s hard to tell what henry’s view of that was, but endlessly interesting to me that he was the one that was more madly in love, that he was the one waiting for her to come around and get married to him.

i am to work tomorrow, but i have not even been told where i am to go, or at what time… i hope i have not taken this trip for merely nothing. the idea of coming up here periodically is simultaneously alluring and obnoxious; but i suppose i need the money. and truly, the only thing that holds me back from really wanting to dive into doing it is the parting. so temporary it is, yet so long it feels each time!

i gave a speech at research club yesterday. i felt good after doing that, and i think i projected a confidence that was better than what i had initially felt. i left out a couple of concepts, but nothing significant, and didn’t once have to look at my notes, and only read through it once (granted there were pdf cues to help). no one asked me questions afterwards, though, which is a shame! i want someone to tell me how to make money! haha! (it was about redefine.)

this week in seattle should be fun. catching up with people and things, and robby may be coming up. i am trying to get him a job at my company to do iphone and ipad design, and i hope that works out… even though i don’t know where i am going tomorrow, save for a vague destination of “capitol hill”….

but yeah, before the speech yesterday, i was a wreck for a couple days, primarily because of the non-listening disingenuity of some people. these things become obvious through cues, through contradictions of speech and behavior, and they are disappointing, primarily when the people are your good friends. and i was left hanging in the wings, simultaneously hating the situation of isolation and simultaneously hating myself for feeling the way i felt. my critical nature is one that perhaps makes me great and effective and discerning and simultaneously obnoxious to myself at times. i am very good at letting things go in some situations… but find it hard to let dishonesty go, and find it hard to let go of my own criticisms of flaws in others which are also flaws in myself. so it goes, though… many of us hate the aspects of ourselves we can see so clearly as negative in other people but are powerless to stop in ourselves. and i ramble.

but i feel alright, now… it comes and it goes. it’s up and it’s down if you feel a lot!

i’m already halfway through henry and june! such a brisk read, and exciting that i can finish it this week in seattle — if not before then — and move on, quickly, rather than lag in half-read purgatory of purgatories as i have been doing with literature as of late. i will also be excited next week to go home for a day, though unfortunately troy will probably not be able to come with me, for my parents denied their band the permission to stay at our gigantic, barely inhabited home. but this is the way of selfishness, and as i told troy recently, i wonder time and time again how i spawned from these people, these people who will argue with a child who wants to sit with her mom on a plane — and so it is. you either become them or you become vastly different from them. the latter, i choose. forever, the latter. ever i should be a parent, i will be one that is not governed by the false face of fear, which shades all things good and mutates them into monsters. it is the worst thing. the worst thing.

lenny’s dad asked him to go to cambodia with him. dude is old — older than my dad. i don’t know if my goading was vital in convincing lenny to go, but he’s going! and i am quite excited! it should be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and cambodia is just the biggest shit (the good kind). i wish that i could go back there again, but so many places, so many places to go!

we went to dj prashant’s bollywood dance night the other night at holocene (a temporary one-off venue). it was amazing, and there was a time for bollywood dance lessons which ruled. it just so happened that i have been watching just about nothing but bollywood movies lately, and i am absolutely in love with this movie that was posted here. tees maar khan (तीस मार ख़ान)) just has the most awesome theme songs — one of which, “my name is sheila,” was played at bollywood dance night — and it was soooo hilarious it makes me wanna watch the director farah khan’s entire discography… it got a 2.7 on imdb though! wht a buncha shit! fools!! i think perhaps americans just don’t understand this genius in humor. or maybe just the whole world doesn’t, save for me!!!!!!!!!!!! but really, i’m not familiar with this subgenre of bollywood movies so maybe i fail to win at life. in any case, i like it. though admittedly, i did fall asleep at the end.

this internet is so slow… i must quit. stupid train internet! i bought you because i thought your internet was tolerable! it won’t even allow me to access facebook!

this is actually yesterday.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<< written yesterday (though edited today to some degree)

I decided earlier today to walk from Capitol Hill to University District – a three-and-a-half-mile escapade I have done a few times before, though never on the particular route I took today and never when I actually lived here. Peter spent the previous weekend in Portland, so I hitched a ride back up to Seattle with him on Super Bowl Sunday. It amuses me immensely that Super Bowl now creeps up so suddenly; I find out about its existence a few days before, and it always comes as a complete shock. Not that I was ever extremely gung-ho about it, but I can appreciate most sports – baseball being the only real exception – and do find it interesting to miss out on such a huge part of American culture now, when I had at least some sense of it before (that sense shaped as person who was throwing a Super Bowl party or even more than a handful of people attending a Super Bowl party). Now, I don’t even have a party to attend even if I wanted to (and I would rather want to) unless I went up to Seattle and asked my Seattle friends if they knew of one I could attend, I guess! Perhaps even more interesting than that, though, may be going to a bar and watching it, given the recent hobby of visiting the most random bars ever and the fact that I’ve never done that before but nacho-eating huddled around a television is probably more or less the same no matter where you are or who you’re with…

As I was saying, I walked to U-District and was certainly more or less over the walk by the time I got there. It was nice to retrace my steps to my old workplace at the Experimental Education Unit, though; over the course of one summer I walked to and from work daily and lost an exorbitant amount of weight doing so. I would be so sweaty by the time I got to work that it was the kind of sweat that soaked through parts of your shirt you didn’t want it to soak through.

Losing weight is no longer such an easy feat, even if I do walk for miles at a time. I know this because I do that. I am curious what the difference is; is it really as simple as metabolism and growing older? It may also be the fact that I eat way more now… pretty sure that is a truth. It’s a mystery.

I walked through the University of Washington campus to the University District post office, making a couple of pit stops along the way. The first was stopping near the fountain by the Architecture building. The last time I was in Seattle, Troy and I happened to be in the Suzzalo Library – a true beauty, with one hell of an amazing reading room I had never taken the liberty of using when I went to school there – when I ran into Tammy and we came across a series of posters describing a Cultural Fair they used to have on campus. The heart of it was around the Architecture building, and it looked fucking incredible. While doing research to find photos of this, I also just came across this awesome blog of University of Washington’s historical photos. This article tells more about it as well (written in 2009, it celebrates the 100-year anniversary of the event). Am I getting school-sick? Seattle-sick? It seems that I am, big time, and I guess it’s pretty appropriately timed considering some things I will mention later on in this post.

Back to where I was. Walking through the UW campus, there was just one lovely stone bench that wanted so badly to be sat upon, the sun just slightly having been introduced to a corner of it. I granted it my ass! And faced slightly east and sat cross-legged upon it, welcoming in the morning sun with eyes closed, long my favorite way to meditate. Something about the rays upon your eyelids and turning everything an equalizing red, while highlighting patterns of eye dust, really just feels cathartic and radiant. (I also vaguely remember someone telling me once that looking into the sun in that way gets rid of some cells you no longer need and ultimately makes your eyesight or something better. Who told me that, and is it true? Who knows.)

I distinctly remember one meditation session in the backyard of the 716 house in Greenlake when I still lived there. It dawns upon me now that I may not even have purposely been meditating, as I’m not sure it was a practice I did then; it was just an appealing thing to do. I remember opening my eyes for the first time after an extended session adoring the sun in that way, and the world was not the world as I had seen it before; it was tinted blue, or green, but all things were visualized as they were in comparison to the sun’s strength and color. This tinting gradually subsided, but it was powerful to me then, a type of inducement of hallucinogenic states through doing nearly nothing at all. Today, meditating in front of the fountain, I expected difficulty; I expected that those passing by would distract me, that I would get lost in their footsteps and chattering and not be able to focus, similar to what had happened to me the other night with the Shamanic Mysteries. For the most part, though, I meditated for perhaps twenty minutes and many passed by, but none were chattering, save for a man who burped right towards the end of my session. And because I was out in the open, for all to see, I figured that some were looking at me while passing and wondering what I was doing, while others were perhaps not at all curious. As distracting as those iterations on human reaction could have been, they were a minor aside, small notes considering what I was actually thinking. The meditation thoughts were more worthy, rising to the top while the other portions sank down. I was proud to have been influenced so little by the thoughts of them, more interested by the thoughts of them inside me. It was a self-back-patting moment, the non-barrier to meditative entry always a graceful and satisfying moment.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<< written today

I have been reading much of Henry Miller’s Tropic Of Capricorn, and quite pleased to say that after putting it down for months I am now nearing the end of it (note: my copy does not nearly look this awesome). This book was purchased by he, one named The Unmentionable Other, back in January 2011, and it was gifted to me by Rose when she headed off to the East Coast. He had left it at her house, and she knew not who better to give it to than me. But of course, the book’s existence was of eerie timing, similar to how Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea had been, and I can’t help but think that the silly Unmentionable has some sort of magical ability, akin to what I have developed, to manifest wishes desired into reality. But the difference seems to be that he wishes to manifest tragedy, imposed tragedy, inexplicable tragedy, where I desire for more peaceful, soulful, constructive things. I suppose our romance never would have worked. I suppose the place we are now is the perfect place – and I do not doubt this, have not doubted this, but it is always popping again as the type of reminder that might never die or dispose of itself, that pigeon-pecks seeds of reality. But more fitting, though, is that one sir Mr. Henry Miller writes like me, or more I write like him, though if you take the logic that he subscribes to of there being no time but only present – we both write like each other, quite mutually. But not always. The writing is mutual when I am feeling poetic and down in the dumps, when my internal monologue is strong and rambling and stream-of-consciousness rather than analytical and exacting. The writing is mutual when my roots are, as Miller says, rooted in the ground rather than in the brain – when the brain is in the heart rather than in the head. Of course, unlike Miller, I think I find value in both, whereas he seems to find value only in the one, in the heart-in-brain…

I am here, right now, in Albina Press in South Portland. I am playing catch-up on yesterday’s activities, as they are more of note than today’s. Yesterday, I was in Seattle, and after my morning meditation which I previously described, I happened by the set of lecture halls I previously had known so well – the ones which seated hundreds of people for General Ed courses, the ones which I fell asleep in innumerous times…

I passed by at 10:15am or so, and classes were just letting out. It had crossed my mind many times to visit one of these halls again, to barge in on a random class and let fate decide what I would learn that day as though I were some Freshman or Sophomore once again. But every time I return to Seattle, I never follow through with this plan because to actually plan the plan takes away from the magic of the plan. This particular morning, however, was ripe for my education! In I walked, decision made in a matter of seconds – straight into Kane 130, site of where I failed the hardest in college (Linguistics, Dinosaurs 101… I’m serious…)

I sat down, the same college awkwardness I had once known so well once again rearing its ugly head. Am I sitting in the right place? What if I’ve taken someone’s seat? What if I end up making conversation with a college student? Wait, what the hell! I’m almost 30! Shouldn’t I be over this shit?!!! But it seems not, as in this case, I am worried I might somehow be caught and that my imposter, education-gold-digging ways might be discovered, leading to ostracization – or probably not ostracization because I don’t think anyone would have that extreme an opinion – but misunderstanding, yes. Definitely misunderstanding.

To my chagrin, the class was a Communications class. I suppose in some way a Communications class should be something I’m interested in, considering I run a music and arts publication… but by god, there’s a reason I didn’t do Communications in Undergrad; it’s just not interesting to me in the same way that Sociology was! It’s similar to the lack of magic in planning on going to a random lecture class versus the magic of stumbling into one on a whim; deconstructing Communications not my jam. Making communications more my jam. And anyway, the concept we were initially presented with in this lecture – media bias and objectivity – were ones I learned about in high school Journalism class ad nauseum. Not to say that the information wasn’t valuable, but I was seriously hoping for some information about Linguistics or Dinosaurs (maybe to make up for my previous failures) or at least something I’m a little less knowledgeable in. C’est la vie, though, and the class was interesting in very particular ways, as it was a meta-commentary upon itself (which I will get into in a little bit here).

Some things have changed since I went to school at UW. For starters, laptops are now allowed, though only in the last five rows in this particular class! I suppose this comes as no surprise, but they were never commonplace when I went to University. But I just remember someone telling me recently that students don’t write real words anymore in class, and this is clearly a lie, I’ve now discovered through first-hand knowledge (though perhaps with younger generations this is indeed true).

At one point, the teacher, Randy Beam, put up one PowerPoint slide that asked the students whether M.I.A.’s flipping off people during the Super Bowl (see below) would “fall under the FCC’s definition of indecent content?” along with a multiple choice poll where 1 meant “Probably” and 2 meant “Probably Not”. All the students immediately reached into their backpack – a point of great confusion – and retrieved teeny tiny remote controls with which they punched in their answers! What! My mind was blown! What is this madness! Technology! Interaction! Teachers who actually employ participatory tactics in a class with hundreds of people and succeed?! This is remarkable!

In fact, the teacher did much back-and-forth with the large class, and students were surprisingly responsive. No question was met with complete silence, though I will say that most opinionated students were actually rather lacking in backbone. At one point, a series of cases were presented, and students were asked to decide whether they considered the cases to be news or not news. There were some quibbles amongst the class, wherein some considered The Daily Show news and some did not; some considered an opinion piece about supermarket purchases news, and some did not. A discussion ensued. Beam asked students how they arrived at the decisions that they did, and it was altogether too easy to back those students into corners! Come on, kids! If the professor saying something like, “Why isn’t [The Daily Show] news to you? Isn’t it from the World News Headquarters in New York?” – a clear joke – is enough to notably rattle your foundations, you’ve really got to think through your answers a little more! He in fact played Devil’s Advocate a lot, and almost every time the students gave up their original opinions and some even became confused about what their original opinions were. But I suppose they are still youth and the growth of backbone and well-thought-out opinions will come in time. Or not…!

My favorite response came from the individual who decided that celebrity gossip news (about the custody battle over Anna Nicole’s baby boy – or whatever, who cares) is news, despite the fact that it may not be particularly interesting to everyone. He said, “Just because news is esoteric doesn’t mean it’s not news. Some people wouldn’t consider sports news news.” This was perhaps the most profound and well-thought-out argument in the class. Kudos!

Though I left half-way through the lecture, during the conveniently-timed break (I really needed to leave then, and it would have been awkward if I had to leave mid-lecture!), the teacher hinted at what he would go on to discuss in the second half: how certain stories are picked over others, and why.

“It’s kind of chance [and idiosyncratic] what gets to be news,” he said, “because there is no standard definition of what is news and what is not.”

But the point of mega-meta-hilarity came from Beam’s earlier question. “Why isn’t anyone going to cover Com 201, unless I am doing something illegal?” he’d asked.

Exploding silent giggles to self! I was planning to cover Com 201 the whole time! And he wasn’t doing something illegal! But is this news? What is news? Is a blog post news? Is this too esoteric to be news? Is my opinion news? God, I don’t know anymore! I am reporting facts but my opinion is all over this thing! But isn’t that all news? Isn’t that the Daily Show? Isn’t that NBC and Fox News? Help me, Mr. Beam! What is news!!!!!!!!!?

EDIT >>>

Of course, I wrote the professor. His response: “This is a hoot — the irony of you “covering” a class about news when I was suggesting no one would ever consider it news. I just gotta talk about this tomorrow. Thanks for sending, Vivian. –RB”

These things are fun.

blargh blargh blargh blargh blargh blargh blargh blargh blah blah blah bah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
everyone makes a big deal out of ex-girlfriend things which makes me think that i should make a bigger deal out of it, but i know that i shouldn’t… it’s all just very silly.

the other night, troy and i went to jeff’s art opening; after we left, we decided to go to this random place near the gallery that looks interesting; it’s called funhouse. anyway, we really didn’t know what to expect — i seriously thought it was even a strip club or something — and it turned out to have this crazy freaking thing going on (see poster above… seriously. now imagine that on stage… which equals a lot of… costumes… and silly accents… including one guy who had a particularly maybe slightly offensive native american character with a really bad beard or something? super confusing.) anyway, the shit was totally awesome because it was free but it definitely blew my mind that: a) it cost $18 usually; b) the room was seriously full; c) the thing was probably sold out; d) it usually cost $18. where the heck did these people come from? i’m so confused. that being said the whole idea is arts-centric programming, which i can get behind… i just don’t get the humor or interest (especially not $18-worth of interest) of that type. but you know, whatever makes people happy? more power to them? congratulations?

no matter what, though, the place itself was totally amazing and they had one room that was full of clown paintings — a couple velvet ones, a couple intensely creepy ones including one that was slightly looking over his shoulder at you, and he was right next to the tv so you always saw him a little bit out of the corner of your eye, and one that was! the! best! thing! ever! and kind of reminds me of this dan lydersen painting with the flying ronald mcdonald… only it was way more epic and was a clown descending out of a sky like jesus. it was so sos oso sosos os oas o soso amazing. (a quick search for a jesus clown is both a good and a band idea…)

anywhooooooooooooot. yeah, they had a wii in that room and the owner or something of the place told us to play super mario forever, which is basically the hacked version of mario that i’ve embedded below. i mean that exact level. we got as far as 9 seconds in (robby got the furthest; he showed up just as the weird theatre piece was ending) and then gave up because it was too hard then moved onto mario 3, and in general, i was just stoked because i had been thinking — i think literally the day before — that i really wanted to play video games. wooooooooooo. we were definitely there for a couple hours. totally ruled, playing video games, in a bar, in a weird room adorned with all things clown…

anyway, blah blah blah. time to go be mihae’s paper editing slave part like five in the past two days! (but i forgot to call her on her birthday so this is kinda my self-imposed help and punishment cycle…)

other than that, though, she got gifted this shit for her birthday so one of my lucky friends coming up is definitely getting one of these…………………! had some of the whiskey rum and the askinosie dark milk chocolate and goat cheese with cognac figs. so fucking good, all of them, but the dark chocolate one wins, of course (it had tiny pieces, like mint chocolate chip, but finer, and pretty much all i need in life is chocolate). definitely learned recently that 90% chocolate is like, seriously, the only chocolate i can eat that i will be satisfied eating just a little bit of. with even like 86% i just keep eating it, waiting for it to get satisfying or something, and it just never does!! i dunno! it’s weird!

i’m fat, though. diet time, soooooooooooon. but first, cupcake royale tiramisu cupcakes tomorrow, since i’m in seattle, and like i said before, i’m totally obsessed with them :/

i am on a fence.

i’m listening to… radiohead.

went up to seattle this past weekend and had a really good time. it felt so good to be up there, though i can’t remember the last time i was up there. this entire year has felt like an eternity, and while i think i definitely have been back there sometime within the past six months, it feels like a foreign entity now… and i suppose it rather makes me sad.

when i first went up, i checked my long overdue po box and it was majorly filled. beginning to feel bad about even having one and doing so minimally with it, but whatever…

i’m in a weird mental state today, as it goes. having some relationship weirdness that is partially me, partially him, partially difficult surrounding circumstances. no fun………………..

i rideshared up to seattle on thursday with some random lady offa craigslist. she was really into astrology, which i found surprising because it seemed that she was [possibly] easily weirded out / bummed out on people. she had said that she picked me because i seemed the least creepy and said that some people who wrote back seemed creepy just because they would give one line emails or something. maybe i just have a high creepster tolerance. i dunno. found it was interesting that she worked in non-profit mental health-related stuff and was weirded out, though, cause i seem to feel like that kinda employment is kinda built for a “anything goes” mentality, but perhaps not. oh yeah, she was a sagittarius, too, and was basically using me as relationship counselor… which is totally fine… she is just basically in the midst of a break-up with her boyfriend of eight months or something, and, well, yeahhhhhhh. we kept starting to talk about other subjects and then she would bring it back to relationship stuff, so i just kinda figured that she really -neeeeeeeeeeeeded- to talk about the crap. so it goeth.

met up that night with rachel and ryan for dinner at purple dot, and it’s just funny because they hang out a lot now. went to ryan’s afterwards and did i can’t remember what whatsoever cause it wasn’t particularly interesting… neighbor boys came over to shoot the shit and then eventually the nurses boys showed up after driving two straight days from minnesota or something. was nice to hang, and james, john, and i slept in the living room. sleepovers are the best thing… .. . oh but yeah they got their shit confirmed on some stupid t.v. show and were bummed because aaron’s family had told him that it wasn’t in the show. we watched the show the next day, and it turned out it actually was… it was just during some party scene and so quiet that it was barely even audible, and we knew what the song sounded like, too! ridiculous. and they made tonsa money offa it. ridiculous how much budget those people have. and the tv show was super dumb, about vampires and ghosts and dead ghosts kissing girls’ boyfriends. seriously. puuuuuuuke.

went to lunch with lenny in the afternoon and it was pretty great catching up. he has just recently come back from singapore and had $100-a-day budgets to spend on food. so jeally. went to an ethiopian restaurant called zobel and i actually thought i had already used my restaurant.com voucher but evidently not. it’s funny, i had purchased tons of their vouchers previously… one of the participating restaurants that had decided to no longer participate and i got a voucher in exchange. to redeem the voucher you needed to click on some link that said, “redeem voucher,” and i did that, but opened it in a new window. i exchange it without a problem. then i realized i didn’t close the o.g. voucher and clicked on it and opened it in a new window again… and it worked…! i could have done that probably an infinite amount (but i didn’t). funny, though. i still have tons of them. i’ll use them all sometime… maybe… still got like 14 more… went crazy one day…

the nurses show at the sunset was really fucking amazing. second to last show of their tour and they totally killed it so hard. best i’ve ever seen them. and seattlites were dancing and singing like mad!!!!!!! the show was really good. a lot of fun. and these two dudes on either side of me were giving each other really intense stares and i happened to be in the middle and was amused by them, and eventually, late on in the night, when the show was over, they were playing oldies music and the dudes made me do like ballroom dancing crap with them and were spinning me around and stuff and i have no idea how to do any of that stuff, so that was fun/weird… and they were like fighting and trading me off, jokingly, and it was pretty amusing for sure… what a fun time… i was in the most social mood ever that night and freaking was talking to tons of strangers and asking questions in the way i do when i’m feeling social. it’s weird how when i’m extroverted i am SUPER extroverted and don’t give a shit, and when i’m introverted i’m SUPER introverted and can’t talk to anyone (which was how i was last night at matt’s party at the church in portland… so did not want to be there and so did not want to talk to ANYONE… blargh… though there were compounding factors, in this situation…).

oh right, and i talked to the wife of the dude who mixed the nurses record and just randomly decided to ask her is she knew of anyone who did past life regressions (because she had slipped in a small comment about how there were faeries everywhere around us)… and she told me that she didn’t, but that she really wanted to do one, because she has had really vivid memories of past lives ever since she was younger… she said that in one of her lives she remembers it was 1290 or something, and that she was inside a stone house and she could look outside the front and the back, and some guy came and brought her furs in exchange for sex. in another one of her lives, she was like an 18-year-old in world war ii or something, and she said, “i wasn’t a hero or anything” — he had just gone to the front lines and gotten shot immediately and was dying. she said that the last thought in his mind was that he had a betrothed waiting for him at home, and that he felt horrible because she thought he was coming home but he would never be. fascinating.

troy and his band had gotten one a while ago from one of their friends, and i guess what the lady had told them was that the four of his band members had been together through many lives and always traveled together, but that he was not really a human? and that he was an akasic record keeper? but that he decided to be human because he found it more interesting, or something. fascinating. here is a summary of what an akashic record is, from wikipedia…

The akashic records (akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning “sky”, “space” or “aether”) is a term used in theosophy (and Anthroposophy) to describe a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence. These records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are metaphorically described as a library; other analogies commonly found in discourse on the subject include a “universal supercomputer” and the “Mind of God”. People who describe the records assert that they are constantly updated automatically and that they can be accessed through astral projection[1] or when someone is placed under deep hypnosis. The concept was popularized in the theosophical movements of the 19th century and is derived from Hindu philosophy of Samkhya. It is promulgated in the Samkhya philosophy that the Akashic records are automatically recorded in the elements of akasha one of the five types of elements visualized as existing in the elemental theory of Ancient India, called Mahabhuta. In Buddhism it is taught one reason that people knew Gautama Buddha had attained enlightenment as a Buddha was because he was able to remember all of the details of all of his past lives by accessing them on the akashic records. The term akashic records is frequently used in New Age discourse.

i suspect that i definitely had some middle eastern associations personally. or egyptian or something. i wonder if/when i finally get one, they will tell me that. i just posted this question on facebook: “‎… suppose you were to hypothetically remember one (or more, if you please) of your past lives. What would you think you were?” — i wonder seriously if anyone will respond, haha.

anyway, after the nurses show… the lead singer of stupid really horrible band they were touring with (d_m_n_nt l___) came over to our place with some groupie and there was some canoodling in the freaking nasty ass bathroom — and ryan seriously has the most nasty bathroom. ughhhhhhh so gross. and it was like 4:30am and they were still there and we were all like wtfffffffff go awayyyyyyyyyy. and that groupie friend had another friend with her who was biting the bullet so her friend could be nasty and was definitely totally bummed, for good reason, of course…

anywayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. had a really long walk and talk with aaron and that was fun. we talked a lot about the subconscious being outside of time… he basically had a dream that turned lucid… and generally, when you’re lucid in dreams, everyone else is still kinda a dream person. in this particular dream, he passed a dream character and started a conversation with that dream character. he asked the dream character if they were bothered by his manipulating the dream environment, and i guess the dream character said something like, “honestly, yeah.” and aaron asked him what he was and how many of him there were and the dude said five billion or something. interesting. aaron’s conclusion is that dream life to him is almost just as important as waking life… cause the amount that you can bring conscious life into dream life (lucid dreaming) and dream life into waking life (just remembering it, in general) is almost about the same, and not one is more real than the other, really… it’s fascinating…………………….

anyway, i don’t know what it all means, but i feel great about my good friends and how everyone i am associating with is rather mystical these days. i don’t know, i don’t know, i don’t know, but i think that it’s a generally good thing.

take this aldous huxley intro quote i just lifted from the perennial philosophy which i just picked up again:

“What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves. ‘Practice,’ in the words of William James, ‘may change our theoretical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead into new worlds and secure new powers. Knowledge we could never attain, remaining what we are, may be attainable in consequences of higher powers and a higher life, which we may morally achieve.’ To put the matter more succinctly, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ And the same idea has been expressed by the Sufi poet, Jalal-uddin Rumi, in terms of a scientific metaphor: ‘The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.’…

The self-validating certainty of direct awareness cannot in the very nature of things be achieved except by those equipped with the moral ‘astrolabe of God’s mysteries.’ If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do, in the field of metaphysics, is to study the works of those who were, and who, because they had modified their merely human mode of being were capable of a more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge.”

— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

is it strange or egotistical to believe that spirituality only shows itself if one is a “good” person? perhaps… but from the people i know who seem to be privy to that knowledge, it certainly seems to be a true thing…? or maybe it’s just because those are qualities that come with a general openness. unclear. unclear.

oh also, last note. totally had the best fucking cupcake ever at cupcake royale. i always love cupcake royale but this was next level, even for them. a super light angel food cake-type cupcake with a whipped tiramisu cupcake (called the
“stumptown tiramisu cupcake” — this one is soaked in coffee, too…). i mean, seriously, like, the best cupcake i’ve ever had in my life. it’s so ridiculous. i mean, it’s so good i’m going to post pictures of it. i don’t do that shit, man. i don’t do that shit. SO GOOD. I AM GOING TO EAT IT FOREVER (the seasonal pumpkin cardamom one was OKAYYYYYYYYY).

huxley.

ejected from my brain this morning in the twenty or so minutes after i woke up. i woke up before any alarm went off today, these words streaming in my mind. it was as though i could not NOT put them down, and for the next half hour of alarm clock-snoozing and cuddling, i was pretty much trying to NOT think about that but failed greatly, instead drafting out the outline of it mid-sleep, subconscious functions a-tickin’. last night gina gave a lecture at praxis talking about how friedrich neitzsche and michael jackson are similar (hehehehehe), and she had previously suggested that i give a praxis lecture about aldous huxley — my main squeeze and ram jam as of late. perhaps not a bad idea, perhaps. in any case, this is the beginning of -something- whether it be the talk i potentially wanna give at research club, the change to redefine’s new mission statement after the website goes up, or perhaps a praxis lecture! it remains to be seen but this is a draft and i’m not even gonna re-read it again right now because i’m on my way up to seattle. so that’s that. also, over the course of the next couple weeks, i have to write up some art installation proposals and pitch them to gabe because i have sooooooooo many art show / installation ideas — they’re pretty much never-ending — and i just need an excuse to do them all. i actually usually write them down in a flash (thanks subconscious), just like the essay below, and pretty much never think about them again until i have reason to. man, i totally live in my subconscious… no wonder i can’t remember jack shit in waking life…

anyway, here goes. hopefully this crap makes sense.

oh yeah, and i am also reading cosmic trigger that troy gave me finally. robert anton wilson’s book. it definitely makes me want to finish mine (which is almost done — just going through my second round of personal proofing). but yeah. it’s funny how books show up in your life when you want them to, if you’re looking for the signs. last night i was talking to paul, and he’d mentioned that he had just finished some book about a priest whose daughter died and as a result started becoming super interested in the occult… and he went to the library later on and just randomly saw a book which really caught his eye — about bringing dream life into waking life — and that the dream book turned out to be written by the wife of the priest dude. crazy, right? crazy. anyway, since i just realized that this post went into the “subconscious” category i created recently, i also just created a “synchronicities” category! wOo! i am wholly frOo-frOo!

and oh yeah, my interview with gardens & villa totally rules…

>>>

When you work in the web industry, you sometimes take for granted the web’s ability to bridge gaps. I don’t think anyone can argue that the benefits of the internet for everyone in the world are many, but it is my opinion that, more than anything, the main benefits lies in these personal links. These links provide, on a basic level, comfort for anyone with leanings toward the esoteric, as they begin to feel that they are not alone in their rare preferences. In fact, in some cases, the presence of the internet may even make one begin to lose sight of the fact that their rare niche interests are, in fact, extremely niche, simply because one can find such a solid community in it. On a more profound level, though, the internet inspires collaboration between like-minded and not-like-minded individuals. The collaborative potential in this is immense, and although it seems maybe obvious when one says it aloud, it is, in fact, in practice, not particularly practiced at all.
These ideas come to mind through a series of events, and upon that series of events have arisen points I would like to focus on. The first begins with my music and art publication, called REDEFINE. I began it seven years ago in Seattle. It was a printed quarterly rag initially, with the goal of promoting talented independent bands that other publications weren’t covering. At the time, that was an important thing because major labels were still of humongous influence and importance. From the very beginning, an extremely juvenile worldview that because what I was doing was so unique – and it quite was at the time – that I did not need to collaborate that much with my peers; they were my competition, not my friends.

Less than five years after I started the publication, it became obvious that the whole industry had changed immensely. While major labels still wield power over certain genres of music, their slice of the pie has gotten much smaller; the amount of music disseminated by independent labels is much, much more prevalent, and particularly prevalent in the styles of music I am interested in. The esoteric is no longer as esoteric as it once was. As a result, many a music magazine and music blog cropped up, and what had previously been REDEFINE’s tagline – “Fighting The Independent Fight” – was no longer as convincing of a tagline, except to those who were still hideously stuck in the past and feeling pity for themselves – because just about everyone was now fighting the independent fight.

This led me to re-assess my publication’s entire mission, as difficult as self-criticism is – particularly for a project that lies near and dear to your heart, which you have been working on for nearly a decade. But it is when I decided to open up my eyes to the collaborative potential offered by the internet that, firstly, I learned to become more satisfied with my product, and secondly, learned to further that project. While some amount of healthy competition is nice, it is also not the only thing that is valuable; cross-promotion between like-minded individuals and non-like-minded individuals is vital to an organization’s growth in this day and age. Particularly because there are so many individuals pursuing interesting ideas and it has become difficult to push your innovative idea into the forefront, if you are a content creator.

Now onto my second point. A couple months ago, I was reading “Ends And Means” by Aldous Huxley. His book “The Doors Of Perception” had originally changed my life and opened up my eyes to a whole subculture of individuals, but it was really when I read “Ends And Means” that Huxley became solidified as one of my heroes, and perhaps my number one hero. “Ends And Means” Is a sociopolitical book in which Huxley details his solution for world peace. Huxley, part-spiritual and part-logical, describes himself as a “rational idealist” – which, as far as I can tell, is a term he coined – and means an individual who is excessively positive and believes in hope for mankind as a whole, yet understands that it must be achieved through small steps and extremely rational means. It’s that simple. “Ends And Means” is a book that changed my life, yet I realized one day when another individual on Tumblr messaged me exclusively because I was reading that particular book, that it is a book that is, firstly, out-of-print, and secondly, hardly read by anyone at all. It’s shocking to me, really, considering the solutions that are laid out in that book. I could write an entire curriculum on that book alone – and, in fact, the only other person on Tumblr reading the book, a third individual, has had the similar idea himself – but there is one central idea I have taken away from “Ends And Means” that has since changed my worldview which I would like to share. That idea is this: “Our discussion of the nature of explanation brings us to the conclusion that causation in human affairs is multiple — in other words, that any given event has many causes. Hence it follows that there can be no single sovereign cure for the diseases of the body politic. The remedy for social disorder must be sought simultaneously in many different fields.”

As obvious as all enlightening points seem when stated aloud, they are not always put into practice. I believe this point is not put into practice enough, and furthermore, is not acknowledged enough. The Occupy Wall St. movement has certainly made that obvious. Everyone is complaining that there is no one central goal, that there is no one central solution – and that is because there isn’t. Causation in human affairs is multiple. There are a myriad of reasons people are currently dissatisfied, and, as a result, a myriad of solutions. The remedy for social order indeed must be sought simultaneously in many different fields. But if that is the case, why is everyone looking for answers in the same place? Why is everyone looking for other people to save them when they could each be pitching in to save us all from ourselves? What little things can we do in our lives to save us from the problems we see in society?

This is where cross-disciplinary collaboration becomes an important thing. Another quote I stumbled upon earlier this year which also changed my life was one from Benoit Mandlebrot, the discoverer of the fractal. He said, “The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.” And maybe it is a bit vain that, indeed, he was talking about himself – as he was a mathematician who discovered something that affected the fields of biology, physics, and ecology – but I think there is great weight in what he has said. This importance has been heavily obvious in the realm of translation, or perhaps in comparative religion, but there is not enough of this work being done in other fields. I have taken it upon myself to disseminate to others what I think is extremely important knowledge in the 21st century, and I would like to list a number of individuals who are “nomads-by-choice” who have profoundly altered fields of study they are involved with.

Some include:
[Physics dude who linked wave and particle]

In my own personal life, I have eternally been trying to balance the two main parts of me – the Sociologist and the Music Editor. It is with this new attitude of cross-disciplinary collaboration that it really dawned on me that having a music magazine, especially in this day and age, does not at all discount the possibility of stroking the back of me, the Sociologist. And while since 2005 I had always leaned towards doing articles with a social bent – such as features on a tour called the Take Action Tour which gives all proceeds to suicide prevention hotlines – it was a feature that had since fallen by the wayside and been replaced with more traditional music coverage. Now, thanks to Huxley and Mandlebrot, I’ve come to realize that not only can I work with other music blogs to help prop one another up, so to speak – but I can make positive social change through the outlet of a music publication. And it is perhaps here that the most change can be sought, because there is such a low barrier to entry, and many people approach music appreciation in such a visceral way. For most, it is only later that the intellectual components come into play.

blarbargh blarghath neglecting myself.

in honor of having a real relationship, i have been neglecting myself. i feel good about it, mostly, but for the past couple days i have felt less good about it! i have goals! and it’s easy to get distracted. luckily, my schedule has been more free than usual as of late — primarily due to no longer feeling the burden of heavy social responsibility with regards to many interactions — so it has generally worked out. but i’m getting back to me, at least for this evening, because i’ve realized that i only have two weeks before rose and i embark on this:

this, this, this! what is this? a road trip plan! a plan for a road trip! and it is coming, sooooooooooooooooo ridiculously soon. currently in the process of attempting to find someone to sublet my apartment and/or trade me for two weeks. ideally someone in new york so i would have a place to stay in new york. man, would that be amazing…

the temporary plan is this… (copy and pasted from an email from rose…)

Oregon >
13th – 7.5 Boise, ID *
14th – 5.5 Idaho, SLC
15th/16 – 8.3 Denver, CO *
17- 7.5 Lincoln
18 – 1 – Omaha, NE
19 – 4.5 – Cedar Rapids
20- 4 Chicago, IL – **
21st – 4.5 Ann Arbor, MI
22nd – 1 detriot + 4 Hamilton, Canada
23rd – 4 Niagra / Border Patrol / Syracuse, NY
24th – 5 NY NY NY NY NY NY!!!

honestly, it is all a bit short for my liking and i’d rather just get to new york by the 28th… buuut whatever. it’s kinda crazy that sometime during the past week there was a hurricane warning that turned new york into a potential “state of emergency” and i had heard nothing about it whatsoever! luckily troy actually gives a shit about the news and can tell me things, but as this girl who works at palace — nicole — and i were discussing, it’s very simple to stay in a bubble in portland. neither of us had any clue… it’s so easy to get lost in the micro here, in the everyday routine…

anyway, back to the road trip.

will be staying with brian baker in boise, will be staying with ed and kathy in denver. met a few people this past sunday from ann arbor who might be able to take us around, so that’s potentially exciting — though i think we might be getting in after the guy leaves, which is too bad. but we’ll see! but there seem to be a lot of randoid connections since nim is actually originally from ann arbor.

tonight troy and i watched this movie at grindhouse in hollywood theatre… it was pretty amazing, i must tell you. it’s like a bunch of extremely proper british hippies turned into bike zombies. not even joking. minor touchings-upons on the occult and other ridiculousness. at some point, main character dude was wearing really tight leather pants (of the type i used to have) and a white turtleneck tucked into his tight leather pants. like… really? this is what you’re wearing?

speaking of such… 1) i hope to actually be able to make all freakin’ night in olympia this year after skipping it for the past two years (though i can’t seem to find any information about this year’s online); 2) forget… haha.

other than that… i had my show last thursday.

after all was said and done, it was like ~150 people plus performers, but it felt very full and the vibe was appropriately amazing. i’m so stoked to be in this weird position where i can throw psychedelic shows like this.

the write-up from portland mercury’s up & coming:

INTUITIVE NAVIGATION: GOLDEN RETRIEVER, SWAHILI, MIDDAY VEIL, BILLIONS AND BILLIONS, BLACK SCIENCE
(Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison) Holocene gets dressed up as an empyrean dream world tonight for Redefine magazine’s Intuitive Navigation, a cross-disciplinary indulgence of film, music, dance, wearable sculpture, and art installation. Intended to facilitate a self-reflective state of meditation for the attendee, expect ritualistic performance art and hypnotic stimuli galore. The event will be soundtracked by some of the Northwest’s most prismatic artists, who will perform in costume along with visual artists and dancers to enhance the immersive experience. Take special note of the evening’s headliner, Portland’s best bet for trance-induction: the soporifically zonked Golden Retriever. CHRIS CANTINO

the write-up from willamette week:

[INDISCIPLINARY ART EXPERIENCE] A spinoff of a similar event that happened at Holocene in December 2010, Intuitive Navigation gathers a handful of psych, drone and experimental bands and pairs each one up with a dancer, filmmaker or artist to play with and off one another. Considering the tone of many of the acts—the spacious dreamscapes of Midday Veil, Golden Retriever’s glorious tonal smears and the sharp metallic edges wielded by Black Science—this isn’t a night to be taken lightly or without a little chemical boost to help let the music and visuals take you to a higher plane.

i’m super stoked to be able to throw trippy-ass events. more. to. come. i. hope. i like the schedule right now… every three or so months a new event? sounds good to me, anyway… that’s actually quite a bit! and sure, some are more successful than others, but it’s all in the wrists, kids!

i’m presently watching a documentary of people’s confessions in church… it’s alright. it’s just strange because the people are confessing but looking at the camera, eyes open, while they’re doing it. doesn’t feel like they are talking to a priest, and therefore feels less real. but maybe it is real. it is visually quite appealing, though, in the way that i like to take photography. it’s sad, though, at this point. i don’t really care about photography like, at all. it seems like a dumb thing that anyone can do. its appeal is lost to me, for the mooooooooooost part.

i wanna share some pics from intuitive navigation… but sometime soon. later.

am i thinking critically these days? i am. but every day is no longer a huge revelation.

a couple weekends ago we went to helsing junction, on the farm. it was pretty amazing, but it was also an amount of shroomery of which i have not experienced before. was crippling at some junctures, actually. i think i said to troy a few times, “it’s hard to be much more than a lump,” because that is essentially how i felt. also, bagged pita bread tasted like the grossest thing ever; i could taste the plastic. fresh fruit was not as bad, but i had no appetite, pretty much. was interesting.

at some point, troy and i had been rolling around on gina’s air mattress (hilarious thing to bring) and finally decided to get up and go towards where the people were in the main area. and like five minutes after we got out there, everyone had decided to take a group photograph at the top of this haystack period. it was such good timing, especially since the timing felt arbitrary as fuck. like… there was no reason for that picture to have been happening at that time, really.

we also spent a fair amount of time wading around in the river, which was fun. floating down that river was pretty wonderful, indeeeeeeeeeeeed. what we barely ended up doing — despite the fact that it was a concert — was seeing music. we saw some, for sure. shoulda saw more. or not. but yeah. oh yeah. rose’s sister kathy was in town… and she was really, really awesome. instantly likable. and very mom like. and at some point we were in apple orchards, starting at one and then retreating inwards from the field to escape the sun… just taking over aisle after aisle, like locusts! and luckily kathy was around to clean up our mess a few times, as we blocked off the locations to other people’s tents and stuff. honestly, it was a bit rude, but i was out of it, so.

it dawned on me while i was there that i needed to write back to my prison penpals really soon. it’s been really quite a long time. i need to do that.

i am wanting to go up to seattle this weekend so i can give lenny some money i owe him and also take him to sushi because i had bought him this meal to red fin (expensive and good, supposedly) and it expires next month. sherry just got to singapore. lenny is going later in september. it’s crazy that two of my best friends are going to be in singapore at that time and i can’t even be there. aghhhh! because i need to go on this road trip!!! arggghhhh! this is fine and good, of course, but at the same time, SUCKKKKKKKKKKKKS. but this is what happens. we can’t get everything we want all the time, although i come close! so fine. i can’t complain…

also, today… i won a $50 gift certificate to a restaurant that’s really close by! YEAHHHH! also, tomorrow, we’re going to eat ethiopian food… yeaaaaaaaah! also, tomorrow, we’re going to aquarian, this weird psychic church thing. more on that later.

also, really romped through a whole bunch of korean music videos the other night. some memories, man. here are the songs i dug up this particular time, many of which were like, HOLY SHITTTT…

young turks – ta een (sigh, one of my favorites back then)

lee junghyun – bakwuh

j – like yesterday

sechskies – pomsaeng pomsah

solid – eebameh keuteul japgo (completely forgot about this one)

s#arp – tell me

s#arp – lying

shinhwa – chun il yoo hon

yoo seungjun – gawee

turbo – december (definitely an og favorite, too)

dj doc – l.i.e. (from an album i rocked so hard later on in my kpop phase)

dj doc – bi ae (same as above… gahhh, so good!)

oh yeah, yesterday maddy cut my hair! yay! it’s now really short on one side and i still have what they call “the tusk” on the other side. it’s really long. and then paul read maddy’s tarot at a bar (dig a pony… it’s new and super nice). maddy is leaving soon to move back to minnesota, which is really sad, but it really seems like a good move for her. it seems very positive, and it seems like she knows what she is doing.

sigggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.i wanna travel really bad. and i guess i am, but i mean… internationally.

this movie has really nice symmetries, many of which are images from churches. it’s called “jesus, you know”.

also, the zombie biker movie, “psychomania,” puts this song in my head. (i’ve embedded this video before; this person sucks at spelling and lyrics.)

this is the end of this post. i will stop editing it ad nauseum!

dude i lied, this lady on this film just got real and was like, “he distracts me from my life. he ruins my prayers. help me to forget him. it’s all so difficult. so tremendously difficult. i must make an effort not to kill him. because i have poison. i have poison. i have access. but i don’t want to kill myself either. i am not allowed to. but in the night when i cannot sleep, i imagine how it would be if i were dead. if it would grieve him, if he would be sorry. but thank god the night comes to an end. and when the sun comes up and i leave the house, then thank god, these thoughts fade away.”

cray-crayyyyyyyyyyzy. but interesting. this is the advise she is beseeching jesus for. help her out, brah. guess what’s going on is that her husband is doing the hanky-panky with another lady. a married one! tsk-tsk!

i feel like i am writing the craziest shit.

my latest show reviews being a great example of “the craziest shit”…

such as:

With their brand of heavy psych-dance rock, I gained from My Disco a hyper-awareness of my body. Eyes closed, I visualized alternate versions of me stacked atop present me, layering like transparencies. These alternate versions of me were animated. They lived in momentary bliss. They danced without inhibition, heavy with stomping and jerky, elbow-flailing movements. By contrast, present me began to notice the strain in my body, as evidenced by my arms being crossed tensely across my chest. And though my feet were tapping and my head was nodding, that limited movement was the upper end of what I could allow myself to do in a public setting. Somewhere in my mind’s eye, alternate “me”‘s were having a more honest and open time…

As My Disco’s set continued, their deep drum rhythms conjured movement in more concertgoers, but participation was slow-building and self-conscious. This group lethargy led me to yearn for the past, or a hypothetical future, or another locale in current time, where people are not so limited by fear. Perhaps someday, conventions will no longer dictate that we, your average showgoers, will stand around relatively unaffected by rhythms which should make our bodies freak out in unison with our minds. Perhaps someday, we’ll embrace the primal desire to seize life and feel music with more impetus.

young widows + my disco show review at rotture

+

lightning bolt at healthy times fun club

ahhhhhhhh man.

funny, life, funny.
this past weekend in seattle =
siff opening
james blake
clay’s bed
samurai noodle
yunnie’s
daniel li (random!!!)
alki beach
pepper (most amazing fucking clothing shop ever)
alice in wonderland clothing
chupacabra
cactus
funny hell
hattie’s hat
laying around at peter’s (for fucking ever)
another earth film

yesterday was the longest day on the planet, post-cactus… seriously. longest day. it also happened to be may 21st, 2011, aka judgment day, which naturally sparked many a joke about us being in purgatory that day and that being why everything was so godamn fucking slow to the ends of the universe… .. . .. …!!! seriously drove from ballard to capitol hill and ended up stopping at -every-single-traffic-light-on-the-planet. it was insanity!

cactus was funny. involuntarily became third wheel (ick, but hilarious… like, really hilarious). all of my ‘stuff’ like my ipod and sketchbook were in the car and the room where it would have been difficult for me to grab stuff (respectively). anyway, so i was in this weird horrible purgatory where the magnetic fields were playing uber romantic music and it was driving me fucking CRAZY but i couldn’t turn it off and i couldn’t get my ipod to drown it out… yet with the cactus it’s kind of like this funny reverse on horrible situations, where it’s like, “well, that sucks so bad… but it’s so hilarious in its triviality.”

anyway, drove back after the long day and got back to our place at like, 1:15am. ahhhhhhhhhh man.

as for today… the universe and/or circumstances sure have a helluva sense of humor. i don’t even quite know what to do with myself right now; some things certainly feel blissed out… .. . i feel how one feels when experiencing young love, but it won’t last; in fact, i know that it more than won’t last because time is limited… .. . and distance is going to grow… .. . and all the more miserable that i am gone so frequently within the upcoming month. ahh… not sure how to feel. i thought the unmentionable other made me feel real — but this is the next level of that. i feel completely like a wacky inflatable arm man! i am totally learning about temporariness, but not about fate or destiny! i am learning about decisions and sacrifices, but not about patience! i am learning about letting go and full-blooded diving in head-first, but not about thoughts in the mind of others.

l’amour fou, l’amour fou!!!!!!!!

who the hell is reading my bloody shit!

i wish i knew! there’s people searching for my name, and like 30-50 people a day reading posts on this thing, but i have no idea who they are or where they came from.

anyway.

i’m at rachel [brown]‘s, after a night at first thursday art walk in seattle with her and jason [connell], who i actually met 10,000 years ago on the streets of berkeley (actually, almost exactly four years ago, and i wrote about it here). it was funny. he just emailed me yesterday morning for the first time since november 2008, and i was like, “dude, i’m going to be in seattle tomorrow!” and so we hung out! weird!!!! life is the biggest weirdo!!!!

anyway — it was super nice to hit up the 619 building again after such a long time. before, when i had come every month or whatever, it was not particularly awesome because it wouldn’t really change all that much from month-to-month. but now that it’s been a couple years or whatever, the change is quite dramatic, which is great. same artists, but with completely different works. leveled up, if you will. saw chris sheridan and lucien knuteson, both of whom i interviewed way back when. and both of them are still as fucking amazing as ever. good job, humans. redd, i believe her name is, who makes pixie, hyper-colored anime-inspired illustrations… also has quite an amazing new body of work. seattle is doing a pretty good job, and the vibe in the 619 building tonight was unlike any i have seen. i guess the fact that the artists in that building are being kicked out because of the viaduct thing has kind of revitalized the scene, in a way… whereas a lot of stuff would close down by 9pm before, there were TONS of people tonight, and stuff was going well past 10:30pm… with live music and everything. good times.

especially since on the way up, the greyhound took forever to arrive (and i actually missed lars’ show that i had wanted to go to because of it… boo, hiss!), and i seriously got nauseous while on the greyhound. this is the second time this has happened when i’ve come up to seattle in the past couple months, but basically, i would take off my headphones and start listening to conversations around me… the first time was during a rideshare, and two or three other people were having a discussion but it was just super ego-ridden, where everyone was just basically waiting for their own time to talk about their own ego-ego-ego-driven things. and tonight was the same thing between two older seattle folk, and it seriously made me ILL. physically. it was pretty bizarre and i can’t quite get a grasp on why it even happens, but it does. weird weird weird weird weird weird weird.

you _ are _ me _ are _ you