June 2002 Archives

"Hey Drew, could you misdirect your anger at someone else for awhile."

-a lesson in humility from an unexpected source

ME:Man, I was a screwed up little kid.

And that is different from now how?:E

ME:...well...at least I no longer think Alf is real.

Weren't you like eleven or twelve when that show came out?:E

ME:(much sadness).....yeah.....

Your pain brings me joy.:E

some pictures

(click to enlarge)

I swear to Christ that I only meant to put some pictures up, and go to bed. I swear that I should have been asleep hours ago. I swear that I don't get as scared during a full moon. I swear that this dark room is not too quiet. I swear too much.

"By its very presence, the time stamp connotes the sense of timely content; the implicit value of time to the weblog itself is apparent because the time is overtly stated on each post. Without the time stamp, the reader is unable to discern the author's update pattern, or experience a moment of shared experience. But if I visit your site at 4:02 p.m. and see you just updated at 3:55 p.m., it's as if our packets crossed in the ether. You, the author, and I, the reader, were "there" at the same time -- and this can create a powerful connection between us. Moments of shared experience can be powerful connectors. They happen in the offline world when two strangers on the subway chuckle at the same funny billboard, and make eye contact as they do so."

This was taken from an article I found. The notion that colliding packets being a powerful connection seemed a little creepy at first. I do have to admit the first time I used AIM or those moments when one can send and receive 'instant' e-mails from ones friend halfway across the globe are sort of thrilling, in that I know exactly what you are doing right now thrilling way. But I don't know what your office looks like, what you have on your desk, or even how your voice changes in response to things. I could just be greedy when I try to communicate, but I want these things. I have a friend who hates to speak on the phone because she feels it not worth her time to only get that one part of a person. Have we now stripped away even that? I guess what I mean is that colliding packets are not really a connection, more of a tag at a bus stop. The artist painting "I was here" the receiver thinking "and now I am." Where I feel that a connection demands something more. To use the language of a blogger- a post and a comment followed by a response and another post. Strangers on a subway say so much more with their eye contact than I could even with a million words.

The doctor's office was on an out parcel of a medium sized hospital. It seem at times that St. Louis has a few too many hospitals for comfort, either they are a little too needed, or someone is deliberately trying to confuse you. But this office was on an out parcel, in the middle of a huge asphalt parking lot. In the suburbs, as in no sidewalk type suburbs, so while the lot could never be full (are they ever?) it contains a fair amount. The sun seeming to reflect off all of their metal bits, the mirrors, windows, etc, burning your cornea washing out all color in a blinding white. Hot. That air that Midwesterners know, the kind that has not touched an ocean in days, picking up the sweat from cattle and other Midwesterners, the dirty air that will trickle down your throat a few seconds after you breathe it in. I stood there amidst this sea of cars and tried to imagine the passage of time in that place. The unobserved minutes and hours that pass in that parking lot. The noise of the traffic ebbing and flowing, the smell of the fast food restaurant across the street wafting (which could never be the right word for a scent that moves in a less air-y and more steamroller-y fashion) and growing as the afternoon wears on. The pure machine sounds that come from the air conditioners in the building, the engines of a thousand cars, squeals of breaks, an occasional honk. Sounds human made, but completely inhuman. Small strips of grass that line the road, and runty trees that will never be allowed to grow. The overpowering light as the cloudless sky seems to drop blue-ness onto you. These are the spaces that make our lives function but seem almost without function. They are the support spaces. The maintenance drawer writ large. I wish I could say that I stopped, that I noticed more-saw some sort of beauty in it, but it was really fucking hot.

I haven't had long hair since high school...
Maybe it will lay down..
The curls could get better...
If only I thinned it some...
It doesn't look too bad right?
Right?

These things I think. Like the beard experiment of earlier this year, me thinks this tragedy has finally run it's course. Tomorrow it will all go. I don't think I will be sad, save next time, ten years from now, when I think, "I haven't had long hair in a long time..."

Of course that doesn't mean I can't still play with this guy.

There is a certain thickness to chemical food that I am hard pressed to find anywhere in nature. Eating lunch in a hungarian church buffet, I encountered gravy that had the consistancy of jello, that globular feel that makes one think of marrow. I remember it from the scientific meals in Kirksville, the parade of cafeteria's whose foodstuffs could, raw or cooked, outlast anything on God's Earth. I guess there was a point where food stopped being grown and started being 'designed', as in more foods are being designed for women. Hmmm. I can't keep track.

New haircuts always make me feel like Hasselhoff.

I never really talked about my trip to Vegas. I talked around it, the things I did there, a smattering of what I saw, but I never wrote about it. Codified the experience, trapped the swirling memories down into words. I took pictures and thought it would make sense, a visual representation. But it failed, fell apart bits lots and rearranged, unreadable a few hours before completion. Now even I don't understand, the memories change falling away into the place where all memories go I guess, the mud of the past, something that I think happened to me somewhere else. I can still talk about, but the one talking is not the one who was there. I was never there. I have never been . A month has passed and I am already gone. Different, changed.

The way that space works there, differently. The inhospitable desert has not been changed, save at the golf course where some of the scarcest grass in the world grows. But the town looks and feels wind swept. The lack of humidity bakes your lips and leaves you scratching your face, and the paint has begun to fade even on the most recent hotels, from the baking sun and the constant friction from the sand. Things seem close from the air, from the pictures you see displayed in gift shops, from your hotel room, but the scale screws your eyes, crosses the wires between walking across the room and walking to the next city. They say there is a strip, but the influence of the hotel owners changed it so, the streets outside the casinos seem almost to be apart of the maze that exists on the inside.

I have some things left. The source files, the pictures, I only lost the glue. Sick fucking metaphor. Losing the plot, the glue, that ultimate fear of falling away into disparate parts. A flash of memory here, a skill there, an opinion, a habit. No timeline, just the portions of a life strewn about the landscape. Is that why I worry so much about identity? Of course if I listen to Karista, I am just wrong, that I do move along, collecting bits, that everyone can see but rearranging them in order to keep myself entertained.

I have a terrible habit of reformatting my computer. I want to start again, pure and fresh, trying to find the best way to get work done. INstead of doing work on the machine, I constantly prepare it for the possibility of work. Like someday there is going to be a project that will make all of this worth it. Maybe that it why I want to do theater. Because it is constant preparation for a role that may never come. The rest of the world do