....elaborating that it was also both "bogus" and "retarded"

Such a fun headline

excerpt

from the book Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, which I bought today with part of a generous gift card from a generous uncle. I am typing it out for you because I am so deeply tangled in a lonely, oddly panicky boredom, uh, twine, that this really is a relief for me, to painstakingly type out pages for you. Arrested Development will be on soon though. Soon.
Anyway, I highly recommend this book. Am halfway through already.

Tonight I took a walk down Venus Drive, cut through the woods to the Pitch-n-Putt parking lot. The stars were out, what stars we get in our dirty sky. Some old golf carts stood near the field house, more for after-hours ball retrieval than for play. Nearmont has an eighteen-hole course and a state-of-the-art driving range. The easter Valley Pitch-n-Putt, with its culverts of broken glass and unmowed greens, must have been designed expressly for trespassing, teen sex, vandalism.
Gary and I used to come here to drink beer and smoke bones and talk about the future, when we'd drink beer and smoke bones with girls. Gary was going to be a rock star, or a rock journalist, maybe both.
"I don't want to be a superstar," he said. "Just a star. I want to have influence. I want to be the visionary all the hacks steal from."
"Why would you want to be that?" I said.
"It's cooler," said Gary. "Maybe I won't even start a band until I'm twenty. You shouldn't even attempt to rock until you've run the gamut of human experience. All of my records will include essays I've written about why the record rocks."
"I don't know if that's such a good idea."
......
Sometimes others came to park and smoke with us. Randy Pittman would drive up in his Pittman Liquors family liquor van, offer us in-state vodka, bitch about his vicious father. He had a plan to run off with his sousaphone, join the navy marching band.
"I need the discipline," he said.
One night he came by with a bottle of apricot schnapps and we got sick on the stuff while he told us how his father really wasn't all that mean, just a little tweaked from his tour on a patrol boat in Vietnam. Old Man Pittman was only a cherry when another piece of new meat caught a bad case of nerves. Everybody got scared Charlie would hear the sobs, the whimpers. A corporal named Van Wort slit the kid's throat, dumped him into the Mekong. Randy's father made Randy swear to keep the whole thing secret, but Randy figured he could trust us. We didn't know anyody in the navy, and who'd believe us, anyway, a couple of ass clowns from East Valley?
"What a load," said Gary.
"True fucking story," said Randy.
"Well, the patrol boat's a nice touch, but really, I doubt your dad told you all of that. For one thing, guys who were actually in the shit talk squat about it. That's just how it is."
"I'm his son."
"He still wouldn't tell you."
"You can't speak for everybody."
"No, I can't, dude, and neither can you."
"What the hell does that mean?"
We never really got to hear what that meant because suddenly there was a loud crack from out past the woodline.
"Shit," said Randy Pittman.
The kid was bleeding from all these tiny shallow holes in his chest.
We drove him to the East Valley clinic in my father's Dart. Randy bled all over the seats, but they were vinyl and I didn't mind. He wasn't dying and this was a nice vacation from our usual Pitch-n-Putt bone routine.
The way the doctor figured it, or whoever the guy in the white coat who tweezed out the buckshot was, somebody had fired on us from far off. The pellets had petered out right as they hit Randy. The police never found the shooter, though they did undertake a token manhunt, once through the trees with a flashlight. They also issued a sketch of the suspect, a suave-looking black man with slicked-back hair. We had no idea where they came up with that one. It looked copied from an old Duke Ellington album sleeve.
Later we figured it was Georgie Mays who'd fired on us, this nutjob from Nearmont who'd been bragging all week about his new shotgun. He'd never be brought to justice, though. Georgie's family went back to Revolutionary War times, descended from the guy on the Nearmont town seal, Matheson Mays, who either spied on the British or spied for them, scholars have never decided. Matheson Mays was hanged before he could clear up the debate.
It didn't matter now. The man was on the town seal and the Mays name was under municipal protection. Besides, everyone was too riled up about the gangs of dead black jazz geniuses, apparently roving our district with heavy armaments, to give the Mays connection much thought. You may recall Glen Menninger's editorials in the school paper about the need to balance tolerance with safety, arguing we should err on the side of safety. I wrote a short rebuttal, which he tried to pull, big surprise.
But most of our times out here were not so eventful. It was usually just me and Gary and maybe Randy Pittman or Dean Longo. We'd sit around and talk about the unrelenting boredom of our town. The unrelenting ferocity of the world was a different problem. Only Dean Longo found a permanent solution, a bag of dope that, according to the coroner, would have killed a rhino. I think about Dean sometimes, not that I ever knew him so well, because we all dabbled in rhino death, and Gary did more than that, got himself a habit that was scary and embarrassing at the same time. We were all so grim and invincible then. I guess we figured we were trying so hard, there was no way we could die. But you can always die.

nothing to do with anything

This song is GREAT. It is not mopey. Try it.
I used to think a lot about making t-shirts--never did--but for some reason it was in my head when I first heard this song tonight, and I started thinking what a beautiful thing it would be to make a t-shirt about a song. Not promoting a band; not even an album; no, one particular song, that you are such a freak about that you have made a shirt honoring it.
Not that one can go around with "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More" emblazoned across the chest.

Optimism

Someday, I will learn how to not sabotage friendships.

Someday, I will have a lover who's not a lameass.

Yes.



Here is a picture of a moth,

in the classroom I went back to today (first grade). I am sorry I could not do better by the moth; it is a gorgeous moth. The top is off its tank but there's a warm light shining on it, thus it does not fly away, only stays there in furry creamy mothly beauty.


I have a lot to do tonight, but I feel in my bones that I will fall down on the jobs. I think I will, instead of doing things, decide to go to sleep. But then who is to say.
It will all turn out alright. (I almost forgot the title of my post.)

*

I am liking this song a lot.

I am fighting moroseness...morosity...morosification
and some stupid vague anxiety, and the feeling that I will cry if I pay any attention to anything having to do with christmas, and I'm not sure why that is. In past years I have become more and more iffy about Christmas, just not all that excited, not feeling the same of course as I did as a kid. But this year those iffy feelings have changed to something less indifferent. I now do not like it. It feels like a dangerous time, when many people are pushed to feel more on the margins. Plus, I don't believe in god, so christianity kind of scares me. I don't like that, but considering U.S. culture at this time, it's not an entirely indefensible intolerance, if that's even what it can be said to be.

The thing is, it's so pretty, a lot of the "holiday season," I do see that. In so many ways that I cannot begin to describe now. This prettiness, alongside the loneliness/alienation, makes something I don't know how to think about yet. It feels like something to be weathered, cautiously. There are good parts, but all in all I do not like it.


So I've been thinking about this today, probably because I downloaded stupid Sufjan Stevens' christmas songs. Tinkley little devil.
Also today I've been liking the song I just gave you.
Also today I have a lot of work to do and it has been so cold the frost on the ground mainly stayed through the afternoon.
Also today I am getting a sneezing runny-nose kind of vague cold.
Also today I got my work sample back and have an A on it.
Also today I am getting used to the idea of not knowing someone I thought I would know for longer, trying to feel it's not my fault. Some day or moment soon I hope I can feel better about myself than I do at this time. Probably I can.
Also today I might have a bubble bath, if I decide I can risk it.
I am not doing my work quickly enough, it's just that I can't take it seriously.

red is pretty

Today my first work sample was due, which is a kind of big deal, and whoooeee. I had the hugest block against doing anything on it, I ...

I was about to go into more detail and then realized there is no reason you should care. Anyway, that got turned in this afternoon, and then after that was a mandatory "celebration" for the program, with activities and very tiny kind of weirdly preservativey brownies. Some people said they were good.

So I was going to talk to you about the last activity, blocking the rest from my brain best I can--in that one, we had to, in our guide groups, write nice things about each person in one other guide group, and then we ALL WENT AROUND THE CONFERENCE ROOM READING THE CERTIFICATES WITH THE NICE THINGS OUT LOUD for like eons. It was so ineffably MAT, on this day when all of us are drained and stressed about the work samples, at the end of a full week, with another busy week ahead of us, and then the damn holidays, and they decide to make us spend over an hour in the late afternoon doing frivolous bullshit.

Ok, but what I really came here to talk about was the nice stuff my certificate said. I wasn't sure what to expect, because some people might know me a little, I talk somewhat here, but then again I might still come off quiet and "nice" or something, so I was not sure what would go on with mine, and was at peace with the "kind," "intelligent" or whatever, just please people read faster, we have been here so long already. But then I got my certificate, and it says it is presented to me for "bringing in new perspectives" and "standing up for what you believe in". I spent a good 5 minutes really touched and in love with this version of myself. Then I felt silly, because whatever, why should I care one way or the other about things said about me by people who don't even know me well? And then
ha
this is the best thing
then I started to think, you know, this sounds kind of like a self-righteous, humorless pest.
Maybe I'm totally an annoying crank.
I BET I AM.
Probably more accurately I am both annoying crank and, uh, the nice way of saying crank, but wow, what a weird activity. You try it, get even people who know you to try to compliment you, and see how weird compliments can be.
So, to review this week's lessons:
Never compliment me.
Wearing a Kermit head is the surest way to my heart.

I don't know why I'm sitting at the computer, after my damn work sample. I must be lonely.

here

have this

tale of bathtub woe here, if you haven't seen it.


I went to a play with the practicum class this morning--Sleeping Beauty. Kismet! Not really, because nothing interesting came of it. It was at the high school across the way, and grades k-3 all went together. It was cute how some of the jokes in the play relied on the written word (signs put up by characters) and only some of the third graders could read them, really, so you could tell the ones who could, because there'd be these little weird hah!s scattered around, kids all surprised and excited that they actually get those jokes.
I wish I had had the guts to take a picture of the frogs who played the music. At the back of the stage there was a girl playing the piano, with a parrot on her head, and that wasn't too exciting, but THE FROGS, oh my gosh. Two people, one on a drum kit, one with a tambourine, both wearing green sweats and Kermitesque frog heads, with the kermit notch eyes even, and some strange thing like a hat, a hat made of streamers, on the tops of their heads, their real heads peeking out of the gaping frog mouths...they accompanied the pianist, in this bizarre Shaggs-like way. Man. I can't even express it to you. I could not get over how funny they were, how funny they kept being any time I looked at them. One of the frogs, the tambourine frog, started looking back at me. I couldn't help it, I was in love with those frogs.
So now you know: you ever want my undivided attention, wear something like this on your head.

Wash out your fat with liquor, then rinse out your liquor with coffee.

i am a nerd

I am watching Vertigo now
I have no willpower
and, here's what I want to share with you: a major epiphany:
DISNEY'S SLEEPING BEAUTY
are you ready?
TOTALLY STOLE THE CREEPY PART OF THEIR SCORE FROM VERTIGO
!
Where Aurora is walking toward the spindle, yeah, I tell you, they would not have that sequence if it weren't for Vertigo. Not just the music, but the greeniness, and the glow.
And then check the dates: Sleeping Beauty, 1959.
Vertigo, 1958!
Why do I feel such triumph
maybe as a means of countering my growing realization that I don't really understand my work sample.
Anyway!

I'm back, kittens

..due to my strong desire to salute Donald Barthelme, the man responsible for forever linking in my mind zombies and cafe au lait. He wrote several other very good stories, that I read yesterday. I debated withholding this find until my next lit mix, but what the hey, here are two of my favorites: Rebecca
The School

Enjoy! Maybe tell me what you think, too. I bet you, the more interaction I get from the blog, the less likely I will be to leave it again. What? Threat? Passive-aggression? Oh, no no. Just an idea, is all.
Anyway, I am off to finish laundry and edit/add to my stupid work sample. Well. Also I am watching Adam's Rib on tv. But I will get the work done. Oh yes.