Nothing you can say can't be done.

My sister is in England, I am at home. And I am jealous. Of course I am. The only time I've ever been out of the ountry was when we trekked from Seattle up to Vancouver once when I was a freshman in High School. At the same time, I don't know if world travel affects me very much. I don't know if I really want to travel the world, if I really want to see it. I do but I don't for some reason. Maybe it's because I have a slight fear of flight.

I'm writing this without my glasses on, the screen is about three feet away, and I can't see a word of what I'm typing. I'm glad I learned how to instinct-type because otherwise, I wouldn't be able to write in this situation. It kind of sucks hwo bad my eyes are. Especially when I take my glsses off. It's so hard to find them again when everything blends together. I can't discern between colors at times, I can't see smaller objects within larger ones, so if my glasses were on a black shirt, I'd have a hard time seeing them. Everything kind of bleeds together. It's not the best.

I want to become something more. I want to be transformed. I was watching John Safran vs. God today and he, as a Jewish man, tried to join the KKK. That wasn't the interesting part, for me, though it was rather interesting how militant the group is. The interesting part to me was that, when they showed their altar, it had a bible open to Romans 12, a sword and an American Flag draped over it. Romans 12 is the chapter I memorized one summer during a summer camp. Funny how normal Christians and KKK Christians are under the same rules for living. Somehow, for some reason, I don't think they're following those rules very well. I mean, c'mon, they're a paramilitary racist group. And I'm just a dude, trying to offer my body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.

find yourself.

--

So I just recently watched the movie I Heart Huckbees, a movie about existential detectives and Jude Law being an all around dick. I must say, it wasn't very good. It was billed as a comedy, and it had its moments, but it really wasn't very funny. At points, it seemed like it was trying to hard to be quirky what with all the choppy editing and funky pieces of screen floating around. Overall, though, it was just faux philosophical and didn't answer any questions the movie proposed. I don't know, maybe I'm jaded towards the whole idea of philosophy ever since the major didn't work out.

Under the gun gun gun

I think it's getting better, but it has a cycle. I've been able to fall asleep at 11 or 12 the past few nights. The problem is that I tend to wake up again at about 215-245, struggling with two things: a deep hunger and a full bladder. I know that if I don't move, I could probably fall back asleep. However, I also know that I just may wet the bed. Totally not cool since I'm 19 (for the record, I haven't wet the bed since the fifth grade when I went through a rash of it that I thought were wet dreams.) and that's something for kids.

And I've never been able to sleep on an empty stomach. So I get up and I pee off my patio in the backyard since it's closer than the bathroom, and then I eat something. And then, oh shit, it's my morning ritual at 230 in the morning. I'm wide awake. I don't know what to do. I turn on the TV and try and sink way deep into the couch, letting whatever's on sooth me to sleep. But I just ate something. And it's digesting. So I can't sleep for at least twenty minutes. And after 20 minutes, I'm suddenly engaged with what's on the TV. Dammit.

I turn the TV off and go up to bed, by this time, 330, my dad's awake and is getting ready for work. We say a few words, so I really get into bed at around 345. I read a little bit from whatever book I'm trying to read but will probably never finish, then turn off the light and stare at the ceiling until about 5, at which point I'm fed up with the whole bloated concept of mystic war puppets (something I'm apt to think about), or worrying about my friends or worrying about meeting people.

I'll get over it. I'm gonna go back to staring at the ceiling.

--

Wild and virulent like the children of two manic children. The tome of a thousand aged caveats, all ignored, and now given merit vis-a-vis their proven rightness. Oh tired divinity, giveth me thy cross. Let me walk. Let me churn. It's always midnight in the Ozarks. If only time could stop for me. For only a moment. So I could gather myself, know your name, and press on towards you as my goal against whim and will and way.

Perhaps. But maybe not. I can't offer any certainty save that which has tightened my chest. I will pray for you often and think of you always.

Brand New Waves of Sordid Oncology

It's 330. I just cleaned up dog shit in my dining room. This is probably the best time to do it, because you're only downstairs for a bowl of cereal when, bam!, you're shocked into having a ZipLoc baggy inside out on your hand while you hold stinky, warm, clay-paste. Then, next thing you know, you're grabbing your dog by the collar and stickin' her face in it. They know they've done something wrong and you have to shove them an inch from their sin. Next thing you know, your hands are clean, your happily stuffed full of mini wheats, and your dog loves you like you're a God again.

It's amazing how similar this situation is to how God is with our sin. Our conscience, AKA the holy spirit, shoves our nose in our dirty deeds (not done dirt cheap, ACDC), and tells us to not do it again, sternly, even though my conscience and I both know that it's a pit we fall into when we have no other options. And then we're both back to happily loving each. A dog can't hold its crap for 43 hours straight, we can't go 24 hours without doing something crappy. A dog's gotta deuce, we've gotta sin. We're inherently evil creatures.

And I think that's how God atones our sins: with an inside-out ZipLoc baggy that he tosses into the toilet, never to be seen again. And the cycle starts over. Luckily, there's no human pound where gods take their followers when they've been consistently bad and they just can't keep them in their temple. That would suck.

[A refrain from quoting Edie and the New Bohemians]

At some points, threre will always be doubt. At others, there will always be malice. I am awake, my feet are cold.

there seems to be some sort of erhereal disconnect between me and my inspiration. See, I know life is more well than unwell because i feel no underlying sense of worry or spite or unrequited love sick blues to drive these musings. All I've got is this:

I'm so insanely content with life right now I almost want to laugh in its face!

Except for the fact that the Dodgers aren't going to make the playoffs, but who didn't see that one coming?

Rain like Crickets, make the noise.

Complacency.

I feel stricken by the ghosts of seven different past lives, streaking across the sky until tomorrow's dawn. Having had written correspondence with Jesus Christ to boost my faith, I know this is true. I know you are true. I know that I need to read more than the occassional sports article and short story if I want to become a serious fiction writer. Maybe I'm not meant for fiction, I've hypothesized that before. I know: I was meant for the stage. That's the title of a Decemberists' song I don't ever remember hearing.

Contrition. Contention.

Deep down, glottal feelings in my throat. Real ugly nasty. Things will be okay. One can only hope for the best between two or more souls. We are one within the shells of many. That's what unity is.

We move out, we move upward. I am gone away from here, forewarned and unrequited. Take care of my sisters old boys.

My ears aren't ringing. You aren't thinking about me.

My last quarter at CSUSB has started. I feel no sense of sadness, no sense of "maybe I shouldn't be leaving," not a bit of a doubt. I just feel ready for this quarter to be over so I can go up to NorCal and freeze my ass off on the beautiful Redwood Coast.

Give me sanctity, give me peace.

Those are my feet. Like Quentin Tarantino, but less into them, I like feet for some reason. I think for me, the attraction is within how ugly they are and how much people hate them even though they're in our top 10 necessary body parts (top four limbs, for sure.).

Anyway, I just wanted to play with uploading a picture. However, this post does differ from others in two ways: 1) I'm not laying in my bed, doing this from my laptop, falling asleep and letting the folly of thought overtake me; and 2) look at what time I posted this. Now, look at the times for the other posts. See something? This is the earliest one of the last ten or so. I start school tomorrow, I gotta get my whore ass ready to go to bed before 5AM. Don't call it insomnia, don't call it a worry, it's just me being me.

I burned my thumb on the iron the other day. It's a rough spot that's healing. If I had a picture of that, I'd post it too.

The Dodgers' playoff hopes are officially moot. Grady Little even said so himself, and that's just not allowed. You don't write off your own team until you've officially been knocked out. That's just not logical. That's just not nice to your players making a combined 100 million dollars. Give them some hope for their money.

I actually had a moment tonight where I had to tell myself that baseball is just a game. It was when Broxton, for the second night in a row, gave up a homerun to Matt Holliday, who, actually, is a great young player and I'm afraid of the Rockies in the years to come.

I switched my bio class with a photography class. Gonna take it easy this last quarter before I get my ass kicked in the cold. Go Lumberjacks!

I never loved nobody fully.

As I sit here, listening to my dog bark downstairs, waking up my sister, I can't help but reflect upon this great big collapse that I'm busy recovering from that happened throughout the last three years.

I think it started the moment Alycia broke up with me. I took it as if she had left me at the altar even though we had only been dating for two weeks. She left me in disarray for no apparent reason other than I was way too creepily into her and I couldn't understand that it was just plain weird for that to be.

That year, 2004, was a downward spiral. I was transmuting all of my feelings onto another girl, Katelyn Duffy, who I don't think I ever really liked. But, she was blonde and she was christian and I was crazy--she was my surrogate. And I could never understand why she didn't want to date me. Until the other day when the "Holy Shit, I never realized this even though it's so goddam obvious that I should have realized this" moment happened: what kind of girl would want to date a guy who's madly in love with another girl, of which she knows the ENTIRE situation and how crazy I am about her and about everything else. I am stupid. Or at least was. Hindsight is 20\20, right?

Anyway, by the end of 2004, I was diagnosed bi-polar.

(( and I know that all of this is shit you don't care to hear about, but whatever. I was on meds, finally, and was ready for my senior year. ))

My senior year was basically a plateau for this whole collapse. I had a girlfriend, so shit couldn't be too bad for me. But it was, all the same, because of my feelings for this girl in marching band. Because of Kailee, I couldn't ever fully commit to Kaitlyn. She's why I broke up with a girl who was mad about me on the day of prom (yea, I know, dick move on my part). I thought that I could regain some sort of relationship like Kailee and I had had near the end of 2004, right before I was diagnosed and medicated. The funny thing, here, too, is that, since I could never actually talk to Kailee (don't ask why, I had some sort of ultra-broke-down-sad-ass notion that she was way up in the echelon of sacred-goddesses, and thus could not be spoken to about anything. I think I just wanted to revere her), I always ended up transmuting those feelings onto her best friend, Christina, who I don't know if I ever really liked, but at least she was more human in my mind and thus easier to talk to. So the only girl I had actually expressed my feelings rightly to, and had success with it, was Kaitlyn.

And, by September 2006, I was using Kaitlyn for my own lust and private adoration. Trying to get my fill. I think that, when I realized this and broke up with her for the final time, was the edge and bottom of the collapse. Of my collapse.

And for about a year I floundered at the bottom, not doing much, not surrendering much, just kind of... at the bottom of this big cavernous valley which I had unwillingly, but divinely and unavoidably, climbed down into. And now I'm on the opposite side of this big great valley, having meandered across the bottom of it, climbing out the other end toward normality. I'm ready for it, I've seen the greatest of the lowest, and I'm working on getting my God and my sanity back.

The day I got my letter of acceptance from Humboldt was the first day I started up the opposite side of the valley, when things started looking up for me, y'know? I'm so tired of everyone knowing me. I've had my years of thick-headed, shit-for-brains, dense-ass, stupidity, and now I'm ready for my less-naive self to takehold of my feelings for one girl and actually use them on that same girl, and not on some other surrogate that's never quite the same because no two people are the same (we're like snowflakes, really. We all seem the same at the beginning, until you survey us under a microscope and we're really not all the same because I have a crevice and a turn where you have a dash and a point. Then you look a little deeper, and see atoms, and realize that we're really all the same, no matter where God folded me and cut me with scissors and paper [a vaguely worded allusion the those snowflakes we'd made as kids around Christmas time to decorate the classroom with]). We are all beautiful, we are all serial killers. Moby thinks we are all made of stars.

So, I'm climbing out, I guess. I know now that the stories I wrote in 2004 are shitty. I know now that I put Katelyn and David and everyone else who was ever close to me in 2004-early 2005 through way too much shit to even be apologized for, though I would in a heartbeat if I felt it were something that could actually be forgiven. It can't be forgiven. I can't be forgiven for what I've done to you. I can't be forgiven by you. It's too big for mortals to actually let go of all that crap. It's only for me and Jesus to sort out. And we've got a shit-ton to sort out, it seems. But we also have a lot of time to sort it out as He and I have this big long hike in front of us. I'm glad he can make rocks give us water because damn am I thirsty. But, yea, he's like the accountant that has to sort through a closet-full of unorganized paperwork to figure out why I got a $100,000 tax return even though I haven't paid my taxes in 6 years and 7 moons. Once again, another convoluted analogy.

Anyway, God is love and I am at Peace.

Eyes were made to cry during her birthing a child.

I feel sick. My stomach feels "wrapped in bailing wire." I'm sick of my soul being sodomized by cynicism and irony. I want my G-D back. I believe in him yet he feels so far away... Like a deity that left and can't be grasped onto.

I'm sick of loneliness. With G-d and JP so far away, I feel like parts of my soul have up and gone away for the winter months amongst the southern flightless birds. It's not queer to miss my best friends. I still have Jasmine, and I love you to death, but I'm so scared of G-d or JP never coming back the same. Being different. Changing the good parts, the warm parts, the sacred parts. I know all of G-d is sacred.

Must I, really, be brave in these the waning months of autumnal change and discomfort?

Jesus is my G-d is my Holy Ghost that haunts the weeds behind my house to scare me awake amongst the night and to keep me safe.

I feel the anguished Autumnal blues coming on--and the season hasn't even started yet.

A Juggernaut heart. And a Japanese car.

This is something that I struggle with concerning Christianity: everything on Earth, all matter, never breaks down. It simply reappears in a new form, molds and becomes something else. Gets new life breathed into it. I was talking to someone about this once and they mentioned that any one of a trillion people could have a part of Abraham Lincoln in them. All matter is eternal. Is our eternal life to be recycled among the Earth going to from sand to sea to rock to ridge? If that is the case, then isn't this simply an Eastern thought of cyclical still-life reviving itself? How does that fit into the "one life to live?" Is it that our metaphysical, our souls, are singular and made of something other than matter? Or do our souls simply not exist? Is the soul simply a manifestation to give us hope that there's something not so evil inside of us? I don't know, that's why I'm asking you. If parts of me, one day, will be soaking in the dirt, becoming new parts of newer things--if my atoms and my electrons are constantly shifting--then how can I affirm that this is my one life, how can I affirm that I go to heaven and not simply begin sifting back through the dirt until I manifest again?

I've brought this up before, the lessons that God could teach a soul through reincarnation. For example, if a soul (not a person: a person is the soul's shell. Think of us as horseshoe crabs, I guess. We shed our shells and find a bigger one.) has problems with patience, wouldn't it be a great big beautiful exercise in patience if God made the soul come back as a Redwood tree, one that lives for a thousand years and is stagnant, unmoving, and simply reaching higher and higher? Or what if he wanted to teach vain souls a lesson by making them come back as pigs?

Are our souls eternal? If they are not, then how is there a heaven? If they are, then how is there a heaven beyond the eternal that is already on this Earth? Even when the Earth disintegrates, or gets consumed by the sun, or gets blown to bits by our own hands, the matter will still exist, and we will float all over space.

Oh my God, how can one life of a billion heartbeats be all there is?! I just don't understand!

I went to bed. Read Matthew 11. Jumped ahead to 14. Started reading 6 parables starting with "The Kingdom of Heaven is like..." I caught a second wind. I made a new logo for this site, deciding that two logos both utilizing a sketch or painting by Salvador Dali were indicative of a bygone fetish. Reload enough and you'll see the new one. It was going to have a superimposed image of Charles Bukowski's ugly ass face. But I'm so goddam rusty at photoshopping that I couldn't get it right. I got frustrated. I made this one. I like it. It's got John Fahey driving a car towards hell. And the Daniel Johnston frog on his roof. And a lyric from a song that you should know. If you don't, ask me. Or type it into google. School has yet to start. I miss my friend Kelley. I haven't seen her in two weeks. I don't really miss JP yet. I should consider starting. I won't see him for at least a month or more. For the first time in two years. I applied for housing, I think I want to live in the Academic Area. In Cypress. They have some badass dorm setups, it seems. I'm gonna live in a suite, sharing a common area with 7-10 people, and a room with 1 person. That should be bitchin'. I want to be an underscore.

Fine purveyors of:

___________
(noun)

Transcendental, Mudslung, Heroless Blues.

Notes:

Listening to John Fahey makes you want to add the word blues to the end of every thing you write blues.

I got accepted as a transfer student to Humboldt for the Spring 2008 Semester. Instruction begins January 22nd. I'm excited.

Meat:

I watched the first Michel Gondry\Charlie Kaufman vehicle last night (The second being the epiphanical Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) entitled Human Nature. In typical Kaufman style, it's a fucked up script about a woman with a hormone problem that causes her to have hair all over her body like a man which causes her to shun society and live among the wilderness naked for many years. There, she becomes a nature writer and ascertains enough money to get her hair electrically removed by Tina from Do the Right Thing (Thank God for the left nipple...). Through her, she meets a man who's legally blind with a small penis who she falls in love with despite his severe OCD. They both just want love. Meanwhile, they go for a nature hike and discover a man who was raised by an ape who the man, played by Tim Robbins, insists on turning into an ultra-civilized being (he's always trying to train mice to have table manners, a funny aside to the story). During these trials, Robbins' character falls for his French Secretary, and the ape-man, named Puff, sees their first sexual encounter. Immediately he's fucked up. This is subsequently followed by a falling out between the hairy woman (played by Patricia Arquette) and Robbins' character and Puff. Success and wilderness abound.

Apparently, this movie was supposed to raise philosophical questions about nurture versus nature, but, to me, it was just a typical love quadrangle story that just happened to involved some ultra-quirky characters (much like all of Kaufman's works) and it seems to fall short. His writing and scripting is definitely exonerated when you put Gondry's magical touch on it all. That man has an eye and a knack for making things look downright-fucking-pretty in the most cartoonish, arealistic-but-really-hyper-realistic sense. I can't recommend the movie though, because it dragged on for far too long, and definitely sagged under its supposed weight.

I have seen three (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Human Nature) of Charlie Kaufman's five (Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) movies, and I have to say that he is an auteur for the weird shit. I don't think anyone can consistently devise strange-ass characters as well as he can and then consistently get directors that can fully realize the quirks he wants conveyed. Gondry definitely has Kaufman's number since Gondry, as evidenced in his writing-debut The Science of Sleep, is also into creating weird-as-shit characters.

"Stephane, what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know, maybe play with my hair for a little bit."

Potatoes:

I hate potatoes.

You're so money.

I finally got around to watching two movies that've been on my to-watch list tonight: The Outlaw Josey Wales and Swingers.

Josey Wales is a western with Clint Eastwood where he gets betrayed multiple times and then becomes an outlaw, leaving a trail of bodies everywhere he goes. He was an ultimate badass. Gets his house burned down and cries vengeance on the Union--who then force the rest of his gang to surrender. The story's steeped in mutiny, and he takes care of it the only way Western Clint Eastwood can: with more bullets than words. Everyone wants him dead, and he's having none of it. Ultimate badass, I'm telling you.

Odd though, the problem that I had with this movie was the score. It felt way too melodramatic, as if it were for a good vs. evil western and not a vengeance western. It also sounded like the skeleton of all action-film-scores to come after it. Minor trifles. Clint Eastwood fucking rules.

--

Swingers is the story about a guy getting over a girl who he was with for 6 years. She broke up with him, he moved to LA to become a comic even though his character's not very funny. This movie made me want to live in Los Angeles for the rest of my life in hopes of meeting a Heather-Graham-type-girl from across the bar who suffers from all the same woes. It was a great portrait of a guy who's absolutely crushed by a girl and coming to terms with the fact that she's never going to call and that he just needs to get over her. He tries and tries and tries. It's sad at points watching him struggle with the awkward moments of trying to meet a girl while still acting like he's talking to his ex-girlfriend as if he's trying to, through his words, transmute his ex into the girl at the bar. It's relatively sad and deprecated, but still a good movie. Ends well enough to make you leave feeling well.

TCSM, bitches!

I'm probably going to spoil the whole fucking movie for you if you haven't seen it already. Just putting it out there.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from 1974 has been on my mind all day and night since watching it last night on Netflix' Watch Now feature--something that was much more convenient and of much higher quality than I expected. I was expecting something much more similar to its 2003 remake starring Jessica Biel et al, yet what I encountered was something much more organic and true to form as a horror film.

But the odd thing was that, by about 45 minutes in, I hadn't had one scare, I hadn't seen Leatherface, I just knew that something was ultra-fucking-wrong with ultra-fucking-everything. This vibe was especially rampant when they pick up the crazy-fucking-hitchhiker who takes the invalid's knife and cuts his hand open, has a conversation about bashing cow skulls at the slaughterhouse, and making head cheese by using the boiled flesh of a cow's head. That's not scary, that's just fucked up. And it adds something. We now know the locals are fucking crazy.

Because of all of this, we can tell that this movie is seriously based in ambience and atmosphere, that this is all to enhance the scares, the jolts and the terror to come. The opening credit roll is shown over what looks like Corona blasts from the sun that are discolored, precluded by a short narration about the events which unfold, making this opening narration akin to a Greek Chorus telling you what's going to happen and basically saying, "These people you will hang out with for the next hour and a half are completely, and utterly, fucked. Have fun!" During that opening credits roll, there's a typical news report speaking of a Cholera outbreak and oil fires and sweltering heat and shit shit shit. It all adds up to an experience.

So we had tension, but no scares. And by the poster featuring Leatherface wielding a chainsaw over his head, I wanted scares. And at about 45 minutes I was ready to turn this movie off and go to bed--and then it happened. We see one of the kids go over to the house with his girlfriend after the creek bed is all dried up to ask for gasoline since they're going to be needing some to get their asses home. He knocks and no one answers. He knocks again, nothing. He must have knocked on that screen door about five times, figuring that backwoods hicks have got nothing better to do than sit around at home or run around in the scary ass woods around the house. With this in mind, he opens the screen door to knock on the front door, which opens up when he hits it. Oh goody. With the door open, he peeks inside and sees a drab, desolate house with tons of bones everywhere, and one wall behind a door jamb painted blood red, with cow skulls and other bones on it. He calls to his lady to check this out, and he, now thinking no one is home, ventures into the house while she stays on the bench.

The moment he crosses the door jamb towards the red wall and skulls, he is fucking NAILED over the head with a hammer. After 45 minutes of slow, angering explication--tense-ass fucking atmosphere--we are hit over the head by a sledge hammer and catapulted into an insane second half of people getting knocked and maimed and chased down.

But here's the thing. Holy shit: there's very little blood, and very little gore. Unlike today's horror films that try to make us squeam as well as scream, we are treated to a horror film that has some of its most graphic moments (aside from someone getting pancaked by a semi) obstructed by other objects. In the 2003 remake, we saw people get hung on meat hooks at least twice, and, this time, the one time it happens, it's obstructed by the table where the guy who got his head bashed is laying, about to be chopped to bits.

By the time there's only one person left, we learn some things: the crazy-ass hitchhiker is Leatherface's brother; the owner of the gas station is their father; and they have a grandpa who used to be the best killer around, according to them (we see him in his flaccid phase, can't hold a hammer); and the barbecue at the father's gas station is probably cannibal-cue.

This movie is fucking crazy. The 70's were fucking crazy. The girl who plays the character Laurie got her hand cut open because they couldn't get the blood bag to work. The actor who played the hitchhiker said that filming this was worse than being in Vietnam. I'm serious.

I never want to go to Texas again.

Cock-eyed Vindication?

I think I have writers' ADD. I can't seem to completely round things out, as in create something with some sort of legitimacy. I try, but I always fear that things go on too long. You know how it is. And I'm not good at coming up with titles. That's another problem. Oh, and writing about random shit like this for all of your life will get you nowhere.

I've reading this guy's movie reviews lately, and they make me want three things: to not have writers' ADD, to be ultra-vulgar, and to see 10,000 fucking movies and all their terrible-ass sequels. Jesus. What a man.

3:10 to Yuma comes out this weekend. I'm excited. I fucking love Westerns, where moral ambiguity is as rampant as the dust storms. And yet I haven't seen Once Upon a Time in the West, or the Outlaw Josey Wales. I hate myself.

One of my biggest fears in life: being convoluted. Seriously, it scares me more than spiders or death.