Well, kiddies, you've all been great (some more than others) and whereas I can't say that I loved all of you, I loved as many of you as I could (wink wink).
I wish I coulda done better for y'all. Written more things for yous to read. Maybe I coulda joined a gym and worked on my abs more. But I am as I am--crazy.
Goodbye.
PS- Remember me as Vincent Van Gogh.
The Futurists across the street have stopped working their jackhammers into the asphalt.
There is only night outside.
The plastic tarp on the elephant skeleton across the street is sticking out at a ninety-degree-angle
with the wing blowing
a constant sheet of uncooked short-grain rice at my bedroom window.
Denis Johnson plays guitar on the corner for the paparazzi.
I sit at the Ming dynasty palace I have constructed out of the loose papers on my desk.
My cat leaps up to the looseleaf north tower
and looks outside at nothing.
I feel the party went decently well. (Although I never did get that lap dance from Dominik.) I haven't had Swedish Fish in forever! (Weeeeeeee!)
Oh, and I feel the draft of my short story was well received. My group members pointed out some flaws that can be fixed by the time it's due. All is groovy.
Now give me back my tricycle!
Never Let Me Go is highly impressive with its levels of intentionality involved in the method of narration--("Kathy is telling us about when she was thirteen and remembered a time when she was ten when Tommy told her something that reminded of herself at eight--all the while being aware of the outcome and the mindsets of other people, through her experiences as a carer")--but this is the most boring Sci-fi novel ever. (Yes, I'm aware this is not a work of science fiction, but stick with me here, I'm trying to make a point.)
Science fiction, in theory, is orchestrated around our present concerns using thrills to achieve a catharsis from its audience. Never Let Me Go is concerned with current class-relation issues but fails to make me feel anything. Kazuo Ishiguru builds these beautifully constructed works of art--cathedrals to architecture, but they lack the power of religion. (Whatever you happen to worship. I won't judge you. My religion involves watching episodes of M*A*S*H repeatedly.) That's where Ishiguro fails, in my mind. He makes these very nice, intellectual books, but when I put them down I just think they're nice.
(I think Tougaw hates when I refer to Ishiguro as Sulu, which is what makes it so much fun.)
Okay, so I started off with a short story I've been working on--real surreal stuff--but then I decided to make a sculpture, but it kept looking at me funny, then an octopus attached itself to my face and I fell out the window while struggling to get it off my face, and I landed in the back of a hay truck, where a pig stamped my ticket (twice, by accident) and pushed me out of the truck when we took a turn by a cliff--I flew fifty miles up in the air, banged up against the Fox News satellite and plummeted, and instead of dying, landed on top of a cop car--and it died, and I rolled over, shook hands with the octopus (commending it for a fight well fought) and we both went our separate ways--him back to Russia and me back to my surrealist short story.
(I meant that in earnest... Sorry if it sounded sarcastic.) Really what I'm working on now is my preface. I'm treating it as a process paper with a works cited page.
Tougaw had a bad idea. He sent me after books about surrealism. Naughty, naughty Tougaw. (Go to your room.) I went to the library and I felt like a fried egg with a paper cocktail umbrella sticking into it at a forty-three degree angle in a walrus theme park. Now I have twenty books at home that make me giggle whenever I look at them. Thanks a lot, Felix.
I like to sit in the library at school in those little wooden booth-desks they have lining the walls. Real hermit-style. (In fact I wrote a poem about it once--which uses the phrase I've included in the title, so don't any of you writer-types think about stealing it.) And without fail, there's always something written or scratched into the walls of those cubicles.
I've gotten to sit at many of those seats throughout the library. And I've seen quite a few things decreed there. (And, judging by this, there's quite a few incredibly dumb, racist students attending this university.) What makes a person vandalize something? Do they think they're enacting wide-scale social change by doing this? I hate to break this to you all but the Kennedy family does not visit the Queens College library, there has not been one Rockefeller in the bathroom stall of the second-floor men's room of Hunter College, North Building, and W. H. Auden does not rise from his grave at night to wander into the bathroom of King Hall to see you misquote him on that tile right above the third urinal (on the right).
So I thought, as a community service, I would take the time to respond to some of the queries that have been left for more important folks.
How do you tell someone you can't stand that you don't love them?
I'd think this one would be pretty easy. Try running them over with a car. If they don't get the hint by then, back up.
Kill all Niggers and Jews
Apparently the most ethnically diverse borough still needs more humanities classes. (Or a man with a shotgun. I haven't decided which.)
I Wiz Here
Thank you. You're delightful...
I fucked Pamela. Pamela fucked me. 9.6.06
Good for you. I'm glad charity is still alive and kicking today.
Yea, I fucked her too. She's got big titties and no ass.
Well, we can pretend, can't we?
Shut the fuck up
Make me.
Remember all those times when you tried to clear your head to meditate or free-write and you just couldn't do it? Well, I've come up with the solution. Introducing The Zen Waiting Room.
Here's a real-life testimonial from some strange man I found off the street.
I was waiting for my friend Joel to get out of rehearsal. And I'm in the atrium of The Goldstein Theatre. So I says to myself, alright, John, time to entertain yourself to pass the time. Let's use that brain to think of something. And I just couldn't do it. Nothing was in my head--now that I needed there to be. Ain't that a kick in the teeth?
Now that I've discovered the secret to true inner peace and quiet I'm going to pass on this service to you. For one payment of $250 I will make you wait for me in a cold, dark room by yourself for an hour--so you can truly focus. What's $250 (plus delivery fees) when compared with clarity of consciousness? Call now! Operators are standing by!
Every freakin' holiday I have to go into the attic closet and drag out the appropriate boxes and bags corresponding to the time of year, drag them down the stairs, and put them up--with little or no assistance. (Perhaps this would go faster if some helped... or if they didn't send their asthmatic son into the dusty closet so his allergies can flare up.)
The closet's tiny--(yes, there's a room in the house smaller than the space I share with my brother)--and against the side of the house, so the roof is severely slanted on one side. So instead of conserving space we continue to get new crap without getting rid of anything that hasn't disintegrated into particles. (And then we try to glue the dust back together before we get rid of it.) Freakin' pack rats of sentimentality. (I get that way with my things too, but I have limits--I can throw things out... Of course my parents, on one of their whims, made me throw out things last summer--but the closet must stay!) I'm waiting for the time when everyone celebrates Festivus and I can just bring a metal pole out of the closet. (I'm still constructing a plan to have one set of universal wreaths for outside the house.)
But that's not what I came here to talk about. (I didn't want the title to mislead y'all if I stopped here.) Christmas is the worst time of year for closet activities (Dominik) because that holiday has the most crap. And because of the shape of the closet, everything has to be taken out to retrieve Christmas from the seventh circle. I call this The Shift. Everything gets carried down the stairs to the living room and most of it goes back up. My brother used to help me with this stuff, but he has a job now, so he works until evening hits then he drinks until morning.
So I'm doing it myself this year. (Again.) It'd be nice if I didn't have to put up the majority of the stuff that I take down. (Especially because I don't care.) My mother takes on little pet projects, like putting out a snow globe on the coffee table, but in the end it's still me climbing ladders to put up garland and lights on the roof. (And I really don't like heights.)
So you can imagine my shock and alarm when my sister, who was sitting on the couch not helping me bring boxes out of the closet, states that it is actually her who decorates the house, not me. Gee, I don't remember seeing you on the roof last year. (I would have considered pushing you off.) She's so busy with her Full-Time Job (for which she earns constant praise) and her boyfriend that I only see her a few hours a week. (Which is probably the nicest part of this blog entry.)
Point is, we don't have the same schedules like we used to when we were kids--my parents included. The past few years I've just been leaving the boxes out in the living room and we decorate the tree in shifts. (We're getting a punch card system this year.) Why bother?
I ate too much. (Although, it is Thanksgiving, so it might be redundant to say that.) It's that time of year my sister does the one thing she's good at (aside from complaining, being bitchy, and knowing everything) which is making turkey. A twenty-pound bird- stuffed, rubbed with butter, marinated a champagne (although I think my sister gets more of the wine than the bird does) and wrapped in bacon before being roasted golden brown. (Man, that reads even better than it eats.)
But the sides are becoming very pedestrian to me. Same stuff every year. Bland mashed potatoes. Greasy stuffing. The affluent concept of shrimp cocktail. I tire of holidays and their "traditions". I say if the routine bores me I should do something else. I should do something else. Move out of my parents house and live like a bohemian, where I won't be forced to uphold any traditions. But I'll just roll over in my over-sized holiday sweater (engineered entirely to stop food from landing on my pants) in this coma. I don't even like turkey. Why did I eat so much?
Hiya conscious peoples!
I just wanted to put my project proposal down in a hard blog entry for y'all to read. (And what better place than right here?) Basically I'm going to be executing the idea I was talking about last class. I'm going to be writing a surreal short piece of fiction from the first-person perspective of a strange man as he goes through a crisis.
Basically I'm interested in different perception. The strange mind. How does that surreal brain perceive things differently? As we learned earlier in the semester, people impose their ideas when perceiving an object, so how different will the qualia be in the unique, surreal brain?
I'm hoping that I can make clear what's going on--because I can't come out and tell the reader what's "really" happening. No one's consciousness has cliffnotes that explain to you why things are coming out different than you expect it. I feel this story will be a lot like Lauren Slater's Lying--and surrealism is like autobiographical lies--in the way that you know that both have a falseness about them. However, I feel they both capture the true nature of what's going on with the experience.
Surrealism is a figurative method. You can't point at something and say that didn't happen because it'd be useless to do so. That world is what it is, but you can still get the idea of what's going on. Basically I hope I entertain y'all with this.