In the mornings I wake to a clumsily crafted life,
a wrinkled blanket that has taken some time to weave
and in the crispness of the day I wonder where it was I lost you.
Did you drop out from inside me as I rose from my bed,
or was it in the shower as I washed away the previous night?
Could it have been in my recurring dream
in that nameless hallway where you slipped away into some room,
one whose door was locked and all my keys don't fit?
I hold my breath thinking that will keep you in,
for with each exhalation one or another kiss floats away
and outside in the misty summer you hang in the humid haze.
There are many things that I may call my own
but you are no longer one of them,
I don't think you ever were.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
hypervoyeurism
When we know people are watching we act differently, speak differently, position our bodies in a manner that (we think) flatters our form. The head is tilted a little higher, the outfit may be slightly more brazen. Our laugh is distinctly heard across the room. The moment your presence enters a room it is tried to be made known. Voices lift and carry themselves at a higher volume. The truth of the matter is that people do not notice us more, they notice a change in behavior that is instantly tagged as abnormal. We must blog as if no one is reading.
Friday, June 27, 2008
oh where is your inflammatory writ?
sweat
I feel the space between us
as it presses itself into my thighs.
It is hot and full of emptiness.
Where our mouths once met,
leaving us wide-eyed and hungry,
there is nothing but a ghostly imprint.
I lay wrapped in a mess of tangled sheets
with a heart that beats much for nothing,
licking my lips hoping to taste you there.
What I remember of your face
is embossed somewhere between my eyes,
it fades as though left bathing in sunlight.
My insides once churned and boiled
as if I sat upon a molten surface
but I seem to be dormant as of late.
Like the smoke in my eyes,
you're a painful reminder
of the vices I find myself running to.
I want to know what it is to burn,
to glow at the center where my ribs meet,
and to fizzle and die into the night.
I feel the space between us
as it presses itself into my thighs.
It is hot and full of emptiness.
Where our mouths once met,
leaving us wide-eyed and hungry,
there is nothing but a ghostly imprint.
I lay wrapped in a mess of tangled sheets
with a heart that beats much for nothing,
licking my lips hoping to taste you there.
What I remember of your face
is embossed somewhere between my eyes,
it fades as though left bathing in sunlight.
My insides once churned and boiled
as if I sat upon a molten surface
but I seem to be dormant as of late.
Like the smoke in my eyes,
you're a painful reminder
of the vices I find myself running to.
I want to know what it is to burn,
to glow at the center where my ribs meet,
and to fizzle and die into the night.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
chaw chee chaw chee chaw
While watching Current TV this evening -- in between the pods about rising gas prices and a sunken ship in the Philippines -- I found out that Jason Bateman, the actor who plays Michael Bluthe on the old TV series Arrested Development, has confirmed that there will in fact be a full length movie! I don't know when it's going to be released, but I'm super excited!
If you like Arrested Development, don't own DVDs, and want to watch it somehow you can do so here.
Monday, June 23, 2008
I'm ready
to move
to start working
to make money
to build my life
to meet new people
to meet old people
to use my mind
to use my education
to stop being stagnant
I'm ready to start living.
to start working
to make money
to build my life
to meet new people
to meet old people
to use my mind
to use my education
to stop being stagnant
I'm ready to start living.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
baby, all I need is a shot in the arm
I could either count the moments of my life in cigarette butts or the piles of ashes I allow to grow in the tray that stands vigil atop my nightstand. I'm not as messy as my room likes to say I am. Day to day I enclose myself within these four walls and upon these walls I'm surrounded by what are now familiar words, phrases, faces. Of all the shit I have, I recently wondered: at what point had I made the conscious decisions of what is wall worthy and what is not? Often I imagine what these things would say about me, about my daily habits, about the many conversations that have happened right here where I sit. Do they like the music I play? The shows I watch? The rapid sound of my typing as I spit my brain out onto this digital page, does it annoy them?
Have you ever Google search your name to see if someone out there is living a life parallel and identical to your very own? The only proof that I have ever lived lies in pictures that maintain a small percentage of the allotted internet bandwidth and those captured instances may not even be solely mine. Whether or not I leave my room today, the world will go on with or without me. So what are you doing with your time?
I'll leave you with this:
"Doubt is uncomfortable. Certainty is ridiculous."-Voltaire
Have you ever Google search your name to see if someone out there is living a life parallel and identical to your very own? The only proof that I have ever lived lies in pictures that maintain a small percentage of the allotted internet bandwidth and those captured instances may not even be solely mine. Whether or not I leave my room today, the world will go on with or without me. So what are you doing with your time?
I'll leave you with this:
"Doubt is uncomfortable. Certainty is ridiculous."-Voltaire
Saturday, June 21, 2008
for michael
"Farts are the only valid blog topic left," Peter told me, "to do anything else is to sell out of the blogosphere." Wise, wise words my friend. In homage to my two most favorite roommates Mike and Pete, I'm sharing some recently found fart-related pictures. Don't try most of this at home.
toot toot, yeeeah, beep beep.
toot toot, yeeeah, beep beep.
toto, we're not in honfleur anymore
I don't think that anyone could have represented the carelessness of a summer day better than Georges Seurat. In numerous works of bathers and beaches, he broke down the many stimuli of the outside world using the pointillist method in order to present a visual representation of one cohesive world. Here we are standing on the edge of summer, and all the things that stay on my mind ("tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," as Macbeth once said after his wife's death) dissipate and I too find myself careless, pleasantly drunk, and happy. Spending the day poolside and slowly sipping Midori coladas with my bests was the only way that I could have pictured any day such as this. We shed our skin and let the sun sink in, shower away the day and run ourselves into night. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm happily on my way.
take only what you need from it.
Friday, June 20, 2008
don't take acid and get shot
I've recently become obsessive about two movies: Hairspray and Bobby. For those who know me this behavior is not the same as my avid fan-ship toward the Golden Girls or even cheesy dance movies like Stomp the Yard. This behavior has something to do with my desire to go back in time and feel as though I'm fighting for some real change, and not Obama "change." Despite the fact that I am going to vote for Barack Obama, when he talks about "change" I'm not sure in this day and age what that is. However, in the 1960's and 70's I knew what that word would have meant, and did mean. Last night my friend Mark recorded me saying that I swear if Obama is elected president I will rock a serious afro, but only if Hillary is NOT his running mate. Now I'd like to share a quote with you from Bobby (which is just a voice over of RFK speaking played over the scene when he and others get shot including Shia LaBeouf and the other kid he turns on with).
"This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours. Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded. "Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs." Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire. Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul. For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again." -Robert F. Kennedy
After being shot numerous times in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 Los Angeles, RFK's last words were "Is everyone alright?"
I like to pose conspiracy theories towards politics related deaths. I found a website that listed several abnormalities regarding the RFK assassination.
"This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives. It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours. Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded. "Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs." Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire. Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul. For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again." -Robert F. Kennedy
After being shot numerous times in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 Los Angeles, RFK's last words were "Is everyone alright?"
I like to pose conspiracy theories towards politics related deaths. I found a website that listed several abnormalities regarding the RFK assassination.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
this is not a pipe
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was the one to propose the idea of meaningful coincidences, or synchronicity (NOT the police album!). I'm sure this exists much like the feeling of déjà vu, but personally I've never been able to pinpoint when these occurrences take place. More than anything I would love to experience synaesthesia: blurring of the senses. One could hear colors, see sounds, taste feelings. I'm digressing. What I was trying to get at is the importance of repeated themes or images. When an artist has a number of paintings that may or may not be a part of a series, what is it that they're trying to examine? Are these reoccurring visual patterns more significant than we think they are?
French Surrealist Rene Magritte has a tendency to do this, not to say that it hasn't happened before. Fellow contemporary, Salvador Dali, does this as well. Each painter's work is equally as powerful, I just like to point out Magritte because his repetitiveness is more apparent where Dali makes you work for it. I feel you're closer to understanding a piece in its entirety with Rene.
check out the son of man, le pretre marié, and the listening room. there are apples in all of these, but he's got recurring bird shapes, sky patterns, eyes, etc. my favorite series is the lovers.
what are we trying to get at anyways? the impurity of the human condition? the idea that we're all the same on the inside, corrupted by our outside world? or is it simply nothing?
the truth of the matter is that no one will ever be sure of an artist's goals but the artist, and so we move on.
French Surrealist Rene Magritte has a tendency to do this, not to say that it hasn't happened before. Fellow contemporary, Salvador Dali, does this as well. Each painter's work is equally as powerful, I just like to point out Magritte because his repetitiveness is more apparent where Dali makes you work for it. I feel you're closer to understanding a piece in its entirety with Rene.
check out the son of man, le pretre marié, and the listening room. there are apples in all of these, but he's got recurring bird shapes, sky patterns, eyes, etc. my favorite series is the lovers.
what are we trying to get at anyways? the impurity of the human condition? the idea that we're all the same on the inside, corrupted by our outside world? or is it simply nothing?
the truth of the matter is that no one will ever be sure of an artist's goals but the artist, and so we move on.
weekend warriors
We live in a world of access and excess. It is difficult these days to draw some sort of line between what is enough and too much. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain and so we consume. My generation is pregnant with self-indulgence and self-doubt. I'm one step away from a paradoxical miscarriage.
I've declared this the summer of many things: fitness, understanding, growth, et cetera. While I ponder these things each day I'm bombarded by things that break my focus. In an almost obsessive rage I collect music and I have decided that my summer's anthem is Time to Pretend by MGMT, the Wellesley College originated Brooklyn based band that has been described as "crazy kids who like to take acid." Whether that's true or not there is some profound depth to their sound. Take away the cocaine and intravenous drug laced lyrics and break it down to its skeleton: fun is our fate, no matter how we choose to pursue it. Take a glance and listen and see if you feel the same (click that link above!).
A more pessimistic anthem lies in Kids:
Needless to say they're happily trapped in a state of what Of Montreal would refer to as lysergic bliss. More power to 'em.
GIVE US MORE! IT'S NOT ENOUGH!
I've declared this the summer of many things: fitness, understanding, growth, et cetera. While I ponder these things each day I'm bombarded by things that break my focus. In an almost obsessive rage I collect music and I have decided that my summer's anthem is Time to Pretend by MGMT, the Wellesley College originated Brooklyn based band that has been described as "crazy kids who like to take acid." Whether that's true or not there is some profound depth to their sound. Take away the cocaine and intravenous drug laced lyrics and break it down to its skeleton: fun is our fate, no matter how we choose to pursue it. Take a glance and listen and see if you feel the same (click that link above!).
A more pessimistic anthem lies in Kids:
Needless to say they're happily trapped in a state of what Of Montreal would refer to as lysergic bliss. More power to 'em.
GIVE US MORE! IT'S NOT ENOUGH!
Monday, June 16, 2008
lacking profundity
There isn't really anything that I have been doing from day to day that has brought me any closer to figuring out what I'm "supposed" to be doing. I can barely form a coherent sentence. The mouth of my mind opens to purge one particular thought, and halfway through I've forgotten what it was that I wanted to say in the first place.
Here is where each day presents itself as a gift with the most elegant of wrapping. Without hesitation we rip into it like five year olds on Christmas morning. For me I'm always disappointed, as if my days are all sets of Ginzu knives when all I truly wanted was an Easy Bake Oven. I have never wanted an Easy Bake Oven, but some days I would kill for one.
Last night I was kept awake by the memory of a person once close to me, so for the first time in years I successfully wrote about it. I wrote about him, and the dissatisfaction of the majority of what is around me.
clusterfuck
I lie on the four corners of my own earth,
sheets tossed to this and that corner of a mattress
sunken in the center where i have allowed myself to collapse,
worn in by endless love or whatever its called these days.
It cricks and it creaks in a lofty booming voice
that's grown raspy from the rush and push of things,
it envelopes me after one or another has come and gone,
and judges not my stark, sad nakedness.
In hot days I let myself seep down beneath the surface,
speaking only with my window and a ceiling fan,
my index finger chasing it in quick circles.
The neighbors are familiar with this sight.
At night in silence I am ravaged here,
my toes curling inward in crackling ecstasy.
I pop and snap like a thousand golden embers
and release you in a sweet, symphonic drone.
Alone with the hum of nothing
I let a dusty smoke hover over me.
Perpetually unsatisfied with this nightly ritual,
I crawl to the floor and stay there 'til morning.
Now and Before
I long for your sticky skin,
your humid breath, the weight of your many bones
upon me.
In darkness, in a bed too small, in a room in a house I hate
I leave myself on tattered sheets, struggling to find
your smell
your hair
it's there and is as soon gone.
In silence I dress myself, covering the places you have been,
inside where you once glued yourself to me,
outside where the ghosts of all your hot fingertips have waltzed.
I am my heart, pounding, pumping hard
with each step you move away
You are my stranger,
now and before,
never anything more.
I am currently watching Running With Scissors. I'm convinced my mother too, is crazy.
Here is where each day presents itself as a gift with the most elegant of wrapping. Without hesitation we rip into it like five year olds on Christmas morning. For me I'm always disappointed, as if my days are all sets of Ginzu knives when all I truly wanted was an Easy Bake Oven. I have never wanted an Easy Bake Oven, but some days I would kill for one.
Last night I was kept awake by the memory of a person once close to me, so for the first time in years I successfully wrote about it. I wrote about him, and the dissatisfaction of the majority of what is around me.
clusterfuck
I lie on the four corners of my own earth,
sheets tossed to this and that corner of a mattress
sunken in the center where i have allowed myself to collapse,
worn in by endless love or whatever its called these days.
It cricks and it creaks in a lofty booming voice
that's grown raspy from the rush and push of things,
it envelopes me after one or another has come and gone,
and judges not my stark, sad nakedness.
In hot days I let myself seep down beneath the surface,
speaking only with my window and a ceiling fan,
my index finger chasing it in quick circles.
The neighbors are familiar with this sight.
At night in silence I am ravaged here,
my toes curling inward in crackling ecstasy.
I pop and snap like a thousand golden embers
and release you in a sweet, symphonic drone.
Alone with the hum of nothing
I let a dusty smoke hover over me.
Perpetually unsatisfied with this nightly ritual,
I crawl to the floor and stay there 'til morning.
Now and Before
I long for your sticky skin,
your humid breath, the weight of your many bones
upon me.
In darkness, in a bed too small, in a room in a house I hate
I leave myself on tattered sheets, struggling to find
your smell
your hair
it's there and is as soon gone.
In silence I dress myself, covering the places you have been,
inside where you once glued yourself to me,
outside where the ghosts of all your hot fingertips have waltzed.
I am my heart, pounding, pumping hard
with each step you move away
You are my stranger,
now and before,
never anything more.
I am currently watching Running With Scissors. I'm convinced my mother too, is crazy.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
le premier
For four years I was consumed by academia. I have recently been thrown into post-grad limbo. Now more than ever has the importance of time management made itself so apparent. With a newly limited social life, lack of employment, and the face of the real real world hovering above me each morning,
I'm sharing all of this with whomever is reading, if they so choose.
Until then, I'm going to chain smoke and be hypercritical of the world around me.
Welcome back to South Jersey.
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