Ode to Ted

I am lounging on Andy's unmade twin size bed.
Some girl I have never met sitting beside me, staring into space.
My violin, a Christmas present from my parents, is resting under Andy's unshaven chin.
He is sqeeking an impression of twinkle twinkle little star.
Justin is lost in scales of music.

There is Ted the farret, struggling with a paper cup, trying to hide it...the theif that he is.

I make a movie about Ted in my head. The music being played is the sound track.

Revenge of the Nerds

I had to read a short story of mine in class today which was really cool because I have never read any of my stuff to anyone, ever. It was a story about three college kids on a road trip to Vegas. Loosely based on a trip I took to Vegas last year. The dialogue was basically directly quoted from my friends. For example: "Lewis what is our ETA in Vegas?" and "According to the GPS we should be there any second now", and so on. The professor and and my peers were baffled. "What is GPS? ETA?". Believe it or not that is how we actually communicate.

I got home and heard Andy talking, I figured we had a guest. Nope. He was talking into the video game headset and playing Halo online. Then it hit me. I am a nerd. My friends are nerds. My family is nerdy. I have no idea how to be cool or write cool.

"What is GPS?" come on...Don't you go on a road trip with a satellite dish on your roof wired to a lap top computer in the cab?

Shakespeare

A-L-L-T-H-E-W-O-R-L-D'-S-A-S-T-A-G-E

Pressure On My Pectorals/I must Release

Yesterday on my break at work I turned on C-SPAN, the only channel worth watching, and caught an arts program. There was a solo violinist playing his guts out in a symphony hall. The expressions he wore on his face while playing were so different than the expressions on my face while working. There is something horribly wrong with guest comment cards placed in rooms, with taking away employee's holiday pay and continental breakfast privileges in order to save the upper management and owner money. The expression on that man's face, his body movements, he was on a different level. One in which I am sad to say, I have never felt, except maybe once while painting.

Yesterday at work, on that same break I turned off the TV and looked out the third story window. A flock of seagulls was gathered in the parking lot. A guest had left a bag of bread rolls, so I opened the window and fed the birds for the rest of my lunch break. I noticed something similar in those birds that I observe in my own community, nothing that hasn't already been written about but interesting to me none the less. The loud fat birds were in the front row bullying the bread away from the smaller birds. Wanting to be fair, I threw the bread at the smaller birds in the back. Poor quite birds. They don't even try to eat the bread thrown their way, they just wait with growling stomachs, while the big birds fly in and eat up their meal. Class systems amongst birds. Pecking orders.

I wonder am I one of the birds in the back? Am I one of the fat, white, well fed, birds in the front? I am not really sure. I guess I am one of the ones on the side, not wanting to eat the bread crumbs thrown out of a third story window. Not wanting money, and marriage, and picket fences, and vacations to Europe. There has to be something more to life than working our way up the pecking order. I want something more than bread crumbs, I want people to be as moved by life as that violinist was by his music.

Chicken noodle Soup

Rain. I hate it. It is trapping me inside, not only the house, but my own head. The scary thing is, the 10 day forecast shows no relief in site. I need a UV light, or a extra an large pizza, no, better yet...drugs. I have to go to work now, all I really want to do is get back in bed with some chicken noodle soup and a good radio program.

White Picket Fence

Before bed last night I put a movie on. Andy was on the couch watching it with me. I think that the way logos are animated now is really cool. No longer confined by paper or stone tablets, businesses can make their logos come to life. The Dreamworks studio has an awesome film short displaying thier logo. The one with the little angel guy fishing from a quarter moon. He casts his line creating ripples in the water and then out of the dream like clouds the Dreamworks logo is unveiled. I have always wanted to live in that logo and go fishing with that boy, taking a nap in the clouds when we are done. Andy must have the same fantasy but his was on a different level then mine and I thought it was really cool because I have never really thought that way before. The Dreamworks short started to play and Andy says to me "don't you want to live in that guitar intro"..... Wow.... Yes I do want to live in the music of that guitar. And that is what kept me up last night... Imagining what it would be like to live in pure music.

YMCA

Andy and I bought a membership to the YMCA yesterday. I am very out of shape--skinny and yet flabby. Not since high school have I really had to be in a gym locker room. The one thing that puzzles me about a gym locker rooms is that men go to extraordinary lengths to walk around naked. When I first walked in the locker room I was greeted by a man walking from the shower holding a towel. It isn't that difficult to hold a towel in such away that it covers the groin. This guy was putting a lot of effort into making sure that the towel did not cover his groin. His hands were above his head and the towel was covering the back of his neck. I walked on and turned a corner. There I was confronted with a fat naked man bending over doing the touch the toes stretch. His sweaty red ass was blocking my way. I have nothing against nudity. I am not uncomfortable with nudity. The body is the body. But displaying your balls and your sweaty ass as some sort of statement of manhood is just silly. Taking a shower is one thing. Walking to your locker in your birthday suit is fine. But holding a towel over your thigh while your junk is airing in the wind seems like a design tactic.

Fill Station

I have been reading some pretty dense sh--beep now for the last 6 hours. At the moment i am eating a huge meal--Chicken strips, potatoe salad, mac and cheese, and a dinner roll-- fueling up before i start writing this huge paper. I am not sure if the body burns calories while reading and writing, but for some reason it always makes me hungry.

Small Talk

The room they were in was messy, not just because there were junkfood wrappers and bread bag twisties littering the floor, but because it was filled with a deep sort of messiness, where old computer key boards lay perfectly still, grinding against scuffed wooden floorboards, and the smell of old cassette tapes brought down from the attic permeated the air.

"You shot yourself in the hand with a BB gun?"
"Naw, I just put my hand in the bag of bullets too fast."

Living in a Snow Globe

I am going to affirm it right here right now. I am going to start my day off positively. Writing this paper is going to be a blast and I am going to do a good job. Now all I have to do is let time wash over me and the paper will write itself. I will procrastinate by writing on my blog.

It is raining outside. Last night I had a desire that I never thought I would have. I was sitting in my kitchen, wearing a wool coat and hat, while shivering. And then suddenly I had this longing for the sound of rain on the roof. Big, warm, tropical raindrops. I want to shed the layers of clothing and go back to the days of bare feet and t-shirts. I am happy to say that this morning, the snow is gone. But instead of satisfaction, I feel claustrophobic. Get me out of this northwest winter! I want to see the sun again.

The other night it was snowing for the third time in two weeks and the new snow was covering the brown snow. All the nieghbors were outside smoking excessively and drinking hot spiced apple cider. The great thing about falling snow is the acustics. Everything is so silent--so fizzy.

Doug and I were in middle of the street taking core samples from the inch of soldid ice accumulated on the road after the snow turned to freezing rain, when Monica appeared in her Honda, telling us to get in. She was working. She delivers Chinese food. So Doug and I got in the car and off we went. Monica had Pink Floyd blasting on the radio, the second track from the Darkside of the Moon, it fit the schizophrenic situation we were in perfectly. This was the situation: Monica risking her life, and now ours, to deliver dorm kids Chinese food in the middle of an ice storm, for minimum wage. It goes many levels beyond that but I will keep this story out of the realm of theory. I have a deep sense of awe for delivery drivers. They are professional drivers. The amateur drivers are all of us who are not professionals; the people swaying back and forth while singing Jewel's greatest hits, as if that metal box rolling down the highway at 70 miles an hour is as benign as the comfy couch in the living room.

We get up to the dorms. I have never been to a dorm. They are very strange. I realized what the dorms are and this realization made me shudder. Remember in High School the cool people had those binders with the clear plastic cover so that they could showcase how popular they were with pictures of their friends under the plastic. Well living in the dorm is a lot like living under that sheet of plastic on the front a notebook. All the kids had their windows decorated with pictures and political slogans. It was a bumper sticker convention. I hate bumper stickers.
Monica delivered the Chinese food to three hungry girls who invited us in, even Doug and me. They were watching a make over show. There were three of them in a living space the size of my computer table. What a cruel experiment these kids unwittingly participating in.

After the noodle drop, Monica dropped us off back home, in the now lethally icy street. As Doug and I were walking up to the neighbors house, we both noticed that Brent, an acquaintance with a heroin problem, was guiltily walking out of my house. We went to investigate. Brent was hiding behind a bush exhibiting the tendencies of man that stretch all the way back to Adam and Eve--guilt and shame. In his hands Brent was holding my painted Styrofoam mannequin art piece, and a couch pillow fresh off my couch. Calmly, "Brent what are you doing with my stuff?". He put the the mannequin head in the snow and the pillow on top of it. "I needed to take a piss Matt, and I couldn't make it to your bathroom so uh I was going to piss on the pillow." Poor Brent there is only one brain cell left in his head and it is being squeezed from all sides by junk. I took the pillow and mannequin and put it back. At work, cleaning hotel rooms I can always tell those people that are on hard drugs, their rooms are always rearranged in the most irrational ways. I recognized Brent's bathroom strategy as a hyper symptom of the same phenomena.

Later....As the traffic slowed to a crawl in front of our houses, Doug and Mike threw snow balls at the passing cars. All fun and games. A couple times the occupants vacated their vehicles in the middle of the road and returned fire, laughing and making merry. The rest of us laughed and pointed from the porch. But this story doesn't end as a Thomas Kincaid painting, no, it ends in a case of road rage and a theory about penis size.

A gigantic Ford, F-80 trillion, truck drove by which promted ALL of us to unleash a fury of snow balls at it, mainly because the truck was so huge and unnecessary. We didn't get the same jolly reaction that the others had given us, the driver of the metal beast, a young guy, pulled over and got out of his truck and threw his hands up in the air. "Which one of you mother fuckers threw that snow ball?" Was this guy really this angry, really this lame? We all looked at each other with surprise and the beginning of smiles at the corners of our lips. Mike told him that we had all thrown snow balls. The guy looked closer through the snow and darkness and saw five above average size men standing in their own yard, so he backed down but went strait to his truck and grabbed his cell phone. I am not usually a hateful guy. But in that moment I felt a hatred for that kind of guy. Hate is a strong word, maybe pity is a better word, a completely different word. the guy left but came back a moment later and hucked two cans of coke at us, yelling obscenities and insisting that he had fucked our mothers. How embarrassing.

Diana says that the bigger the truck the smaller the penis. I disagree, but after watching this guy throw cans of coke, or corprate bullets, at a crowd of happy civilians, I think she may be on to something.

So yes, I think we are all ready for summer to come.

Age of Aquarius

Crimson and Clover over and over... And over and over and over into the new age. The new age is near. The main focus of the news media is crime and disaster, while pop culture is obsessed with crudeness and celebrity worship. Academia seems to be stuck in a feed back loop of Freud and Marx. The consensus in the church is that we are living in the last days, and that we should look to the sky and await the rapture. No matter who you are or what you believe, there is this feeling that we, as a people in the 21st century, are on the cusp of something big. The pessimist will say that we are on the brink of world war III. That with the exhaustion of resources and the rise of industrialism and population in the third world, we are all going to die. I on the other hand, feel optimistic. Maybe it is because I heard Michio Kaku speak on the radio the other night about a satellite that is going to be launched this summer. This satellite will have three stations forming a giant triangle in space. Lasers will be used like a huge butterfly net to detect gravity waves. These gravity waves, if they exist, will go a long way in verifying string theory, which opens up a whole new frontier of dimensional physics. Think about that. We are close to probing the "spirit world"! The implications of this will drastically change every facet of our lives. Free energy. Worm holes. My god we can't even fathom what lays ahead of us. It is truly a remarkable time, one that can lead to the death of our species or something greater--the transcendence of our species into the realm of immortality.

Ticket to Paradise

Nights spent drinking were always followed by mornings at the Giddy Up Café. I didn’t even have to order, just sit down and wait for the waitress to bring me a mug of strong black coffee. And pull tabs. A mountain of them, cascading down in an avalanche of lost hope. I remember that morning as a chilly one in December. The windows were decorated for Christmas with a painting of Rudolf sneaking a bite of Santa’s syrup smothered flapjacks. I sat in my usual booth, drinking and smoking and gambling and winking at the waitress with the ferocious head of permed hair until gradually the fog of morning burned away and the bill was settled with a crumpled dollar and a handful of coins. Bells on the front door jingled and jangled as I pushed through it out onto the cold street. I paused in front of the diner, brushing dry bread crumbs off my collar while thinking--a man can only get so far on a winter’s day, after eating cigarette smoke for breakfast and then stepping outside for a breath of fresh scrambled eggs. I was poor, alone, and terrified that I might have caught a venereal disease the night before. But that was all about to change as the bells on the door behind me chimed again. Turning, I saw a cream colored hand near my shoulder. It belonged to the waitress and in it she held a solitary virgin pull tab. “You forgot this Chuck.” I plucked it from her fingers and thanked her warmly and then she was gone. Alone again in the cold I was, but now with a hope--a fiery hope that this was my ticket to paradise. There was no hesitation, I yanked it quick, like a Band-Aid ripped off of a hairy wound. Only two words appeared under that tab and this what they were: Big Winner. I pissed my pants in the street that morning. I pissed my pants for the last time outside of the Giddy Up Café that chilly December Morning, and I didn’t care a bit.

Snow Day

If you have ever made up adventure stories about going on quests over snowy landscapes while staring intently into an ice box in need of a good defrosting, then you understand the joy I felt when I threw open my curtins this morning and found the real world looking just like the inside of a freezer.

Territorial Markers

It snowed today! Huge light flakes, bigger than I have ever seen. It was such a beautiful walk home from school. The world is absolutely fascinating when fresh snow is falling and everything is white. White really is the color of innocence. But... It can bring out another side that is fascinating in its own right.

Every neighbor hood in this college community had its own snow man. Like monuments to a great kingdom, it didn't fail, every street corner was marked by a snow man. One had ears and it looked just like the rabbit from Donnie Darko. Another one had roman candles for arms and sparks for fingers. The best was a ten foot abominable snow man with a torch coming out of his head. And then we come to my street. My friends. They made a seven foot tall penis and balls, with branches for pubic hair. That makes me laugh.

My brother was the redeeming factor in our one day snow gang. Being the artist that he is, he carved a 4 foot snow skull which comes from months of drawing the human body. We put candles in the eyes and candles in the mouth to make it look even more spectacular.

Invasion Force: Armageddon Alpha One

Dreams are very strange things. Especially strange because a third of our life is spent dreaming, and yet people mostly dismiss dreams as left over junk that slips into their sleeping state. I choose to believe that dreams say something about reality. Which makes last nights dream all the more scary.

Last night, I had a vivid dream that really shock me up. I was in a rocket ship pushing up through the atmosphere. I was pushed back in my seat by the G force and my head felt light and dizzy. And then there was a moment when we escaped the atmosphere and started a weightless orbit high above the earth. I looked out the window and there below me was a deep turquoise blue earth, rotating. The United States turned past us, and later, Asia and Europe. Awe and wonder were my only feelings until I heard one of my comrades gasp, "look at that man on the moon!" She was confused and excited but mostly terrified which got me and everyone else terrified. "the Man on the moon, the man on the moon!" "where is he?" I asked in a panic. "right here!" she yelled and reached her arm out of the space ship and touched the surface of the moon. I looked closer and there, near the dark side of the moon, was an ancient city carved in rocky cliffs. The buildings were twisted and dark, and with age, turning to dust. Then I saw him. A Devil with his arms raised holding a staff in one hand. I had a feeling that this lord of the moon had a great army hiding in the shadows and the crevices but soon the whole scene disappeared into the sunlight as we swung around into the day side of earth.

What a creepy thought though. A Dark Lord on the Darkside of the moon! yikes. I have never before left Earth in a dream. This could be really fun, flying through space at night.

There is a blizzard outside my window. Right now.

America... Fuck Yeah, Part 2

How does the law define harm I wonder? If I punch someone they probably deserve it and maybe I deserve to go to jail for the bodily harm to that individual. What if I punch myself? Does Emotional harm count?

I heard this news story on the radio. It went like this: A man was picked up at the border with a car full of racist monopoly games. Instead of Boardwalk and Park Place there was Ghetto St. And Barrio Ave. I'm sure the N word even appeared on one of those community chest cards. The Milton Bradly company is suing the man and he is going to go to prison, where I am sure he will get his salad tossed by one of the "ethnic" inmates.

Ok here is my opinion, and my opinion counts because I am a blogger and we won the people of the year, this man committed no crime! Is the guy a scum bag, probably, but he is also just trying to make a living. Why can't he put his game on the free market. If people want to buy a racist game with their hard earned cash, then more power to them. When did it become illegal to offend somebody? I saw a toy this Christmas that was a fake McDonald cash register. I was offended and appalled that toy makers are conditioning young children to work and eat at Mickey D's, but hey I don't have the right to tell someone what they can and can't play with. Oh America, your so confused, like a group of unpopular girls arguing about what to wear to the popular girls sleep over.

Narnia

I just found out that The Chronicles of Narnia are being turned into a series of live action movies. Hurray for that! Sometimes I find myself day dreaming about Narnia, about voyaging to the edge of the world and fishing off of Ramadu's Island in the company of merry Mermaids. Then I snap out of it, staring blankly at my dinner companion, a green bean dangling from my mouth. I improvise by nodding my head and throwing in a, "mmhmm, yeah."