Kooy to the World

fArt Show

2011-10-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

This weekend marks the end of the month wherein sculptures and things I have made have been on display at Sue's Java Cafe. I was offered this opportunity about four months ago but I didn't really tell anybody until I had put stuff on the walls as I am a professional self-saboteur. I spent two months halfassedly working on some sculptures and then a month hoping that the owner had forgotten her promise and had already given the area to somebody else. I then spent five days working eighteen hours a day in an attempt to finish enough stuff to fill Sue's. I found this hilarious because this time occurred shortly after my one year anniversary of being fired, and one of my eighteen hour days was Labor Day.

Each time I've gone into Sue's I've been told that many patrons have commented fondly regarding my sculptures, which makes me feel pretty good. Also, I've sold more than $50 in small sculptures and have received three requests for commissioned pieces.

That's me in the picture. I'm the one sitting next to the cardboard box. I've been making those trees for a while now. They are my take on the Celtic Tree of Life and I started making them because I've always like the symbol and I saw at least three really crappy examples of Tree of Life sculptures within the same week and decided to attempt a decent one. I also enjoy the challenge of manipulating metal wire to mimic an organic form.

I don't feel I can call this type of thing a sculpture (Hell, I don't feel like I should call anything I do a sculpture, or art for that matter. Take a wild guess at how many times I use the word "art" in this post?). I usually call it a 2-D wire sketch.

I'm pretty sure that normal people would be able to easily draw something as simple as this. While I am incapable of drawing any part of this, it turns out I can bend wire to make a picture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza if I so desire.

This is Daphne (see Greek mythology). While I cannot sketch any of my sculpture plans, I usually have a very clear picture of how I want something to look and am pleasantly surprised that the wire ends up looking like my brain picture. I was not pleasantly surprised with Daphne. I've been wanting to make a Daphne sculpture for a while and this is not what I have in mind. Jen likes it though, so I framed it and put it behind glass so it seems extra fancy.

While I am terrible at drawing, I was once a student and thus have many pages of notes that are filled with doodles. These are some of my favorite bits from all of my doodles (the ones that would be acceptable on a coffee shop wall, at least). The bird usually looks a lot more like a deranged flying dolphin in my doodles, but I am certain that I have increased awareness about how awesome it would be to carry around a bunch of bees tied to strings.

This is the part that I am most proud of. Sue's has zero shelf space. This is a problem for someone who wants to include a ceramic bust and metal stand that weighs about thirty pounds. I had to come up with some sort of shelving apparatus that could hold the weight, but did not attach to, damage, or mark up the wall. I feel I overcame that challenge with much aplomb. Also, better than a third of the stuff on this shelf has sold as of last week.

All of this comes down Sunday night, or Monday, or whenever Sara forces me to take it down. This will be loads of fun as I recently rode my body down a spot of rapids, dislocating my left knee and turning my right leg into a bruise from knee to ankle and giving myself a lovely bruise on my spine that stretches from four inches above my buttcrack down three inches inside my buttcrack. I didn't even know that was possible. I'll spare you the pictures.

Don't Write Like This

2011-08-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

A Taste of Redding: Part 3

If I see somebody reading in public, I always try to catch the title so that I can pass judgment on them and their reading habits. I assume all people do this, so I am wary about the books I choose to read in public. When I am reading an impressive book I proudly hold it out in front of me, careful not to cover up too much of the title, so that people can view my erudite sophistication. I often read what I call escapist fiction, though. I disappear when I read these stories, able to forget that I have a paper due or an upcoming assessment at work or that the girl who competed with me and lost to be the top student in AP English in high school is about to start her residency and I am just getting around to finishing my undergraduate work. I hunch over these books, reading from my lap, because, more often than not, escapist fiction is my euphemism for a Star Wars novel.

I was in the midst of finals week and needed to escape from campus and reality, so I sat on a couch at Starbucks hiding my novel.

“Star Wars, eh?” said the man seated on the couch across from me.

I had lost myself in the book for the last hour and forgot to cover the title. I hadn’t even seen the man sit down.

“I’ve always liked the idea of Jedi,” he continued. “You know, some people like the philosophy so much that there is an actual Jedi religion.”

“I’ve heard that,” I replied as I studied this enigma I was conversing with.

He was a black man in his mid-thirties. I judged him to be about three hundred pounds and I estimated that when he stood up he would be a couple inches taller than me. He was wearing a sports coat with a sweater and tie and had a large, round, bald head and bookish glasses. I discovered that his name was Cornelius and was shocked at the depth of his knowledge surrounding the Star Wars universe.

I tend to keep this passion secret because even people who love the movies and take the time to know all the details surrounding them, call me a nerd when I open up my library of Star Wars knowledge. Once, when I was taking some science credits at a community college, I was forced to reveal my nerdy nature.

It was an astronomy course and I was sure I had everyone fooled that I was actually a cool guy. At the time, I had dreadlocks and a pierced nose and ears. I always asked good questions and had interesting things to say. The professor, however, decided to utilize the last half hour of one of her classes to air her frustration with how Hollywood constantly gets science wrong. Her ultimate complaint was Han Solo’s boast that he had made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

“Parsecs are a measurement of distance,” she railed. “That’s like saying ‘I made it from Portland to Seattle in one hundred and fifty miles.’ It makes no sense. I just wish Hollywood writers would have five minute conversations with a scientist or anybody who has the even the smallest grasp of scientific terms so they wouldn’t make these kind of mistakes.”

She was in error. Her righteous anger was uninformed by truth. My hand was raised and I was speaking before I had time to think.

“Actually, a measurement of distance is both accurate and intentional in Han’s boast about the Kessel Run. Kessel is a planet on which the illegal drug, gliterstim spice, is mined. This planet is surrounded by the ‘Maw’ which is a vast series of black holes that protects the planet from blockades by the Imperial fleet but also makes the journey extremely challenging to the smugglers who ship the spice. Though speed does play a part in it, Han Solo’s boast truly is about distance. The Millennium Falcon has upgraded engines that allow it to fly at a velocity that is fifty percent greater than average hyperdrive engines. This allowed Han to navigate a course much closer to the black holes than anyone had previously attempted, shortening the distance and possibly even bending space due to his proximity to multiple event horizons, causing the regularly eighteen parsec Kessel Run to be completed in less than twelve.”

I had revealed my nature and the class stared at me as the odd beast I truly am. I gathered my bag and sheepishly admitted to the silent class, “Sorry, I’m a huge nerd,” as I slunk out the door.

I didn’t have to hide any of this as I geeked out over Star Wars with Cornelius. We were speaking about more than lightsabers and spaceships, though; we discussed the philosophy behind the fictional universe with both its literary and philosophical implications.

“Recently, a lot of the books in the Expanded Universe have spent a significant amount of time on the subject of philosophy,” I continued. “They’ve introduced a new enemy race who worships pain and death which is inimical to most philosophies held by the inhabitants of the Star Wars universe.”

“Really?” he replied with honest enthusiasm.

“Yeah, and they do it in a manner that never seams preachy or loses the story like the Dune series did.”

We managed to continue on like this for quite some time—making it the longest serious conversation I expect to have about Star Wars—until Cornelius interjected with a seeming non-sequitur.

“Have you ever heard of the Baha’i faith?”

“Never,” I admitted.

“It’s a belief system that credits all faiths as steps towards truth and human enlightenment.”

“Oh, an ‘all truth is God’s truth’ sort of thing,” I respond.

“Exactly,” he said excitedly. “Each religion speaks to the truth of God and it is only by studying all beliefs that we can find enlightenment and unify humanity as a whole.”

I hadn’t expected this well dressed stranger to proselytize, and I had never imagined that any conversation about Star Wars could segue into a religious debate, but I enjoyed the discussion’s odd unfolding.

“But most religions claim that they possess the only means to heaven. How can both Christianity and Islam be correct when they each blatantly state that the other is wrong?”

“Well that’s a matter of human misinterpretation,” he responded quickly. “Moses, Mohamed, Jesus, even the fictional character of Obi-Wan Kenobi are great prophets that all preach peace, unity, and enlightenment. It was their followers who twisted the messages into exclusive religions. That’s why I subscribe to the Baha’i faith; it seeks to unify rather than exclude.”

If this conversation had occurred a couple years previously, I would have been offended by the casual comparison of the Son of God to a fictional Jedi. Before I could respond, though, we were interrupted.

An unkempt young man about my age entered, shrugged off his backpack, and flopped bonelessly on the couch next to Cornelius before exchanging an intricate handshake that included slaps and fist bumps that bespoke of familiarity.

“Yeah,” slurred the stranger, “the world would be better if people were more together, you know? More unity.”

I assumed that this guy was the reason Cornelius was waiting in the coffee shop but he continued to look at me expectantly so I replied, “Unity is good and all, but it sounds to me like Baha’i strips the interesting mystery from religion and simply brings it to the level of philosophy. How is there room for God or faith when humans hold the key to their own salvation?”

“That’s just it,” he replied. “Religions have to lie that we need God, because that lie is what gives them power. Humans only use something like ten percent of their brain. Just imagine what we could do if we used our minds to their full potential.”

“Yeah,” interrupted the stranger, “this guy knows some stuff. I just met him but he’s the shit. And you,” he pointed at me nearly falling off the couch, “you’re a fuckerhead.”

“Buddy,” Cornelius said holding out a hand to stop the newcomer or perhaps to keep him from falling to the floor, “I don’t know you but we were having a nice conversation before you arrived, so please stop interrupting.”

“I’m Hamilton,” the young man stated.

“That’s a name I don’t hear too often,” I offered, in a friendly attempt to overcome his obvious animosity.

“Named after the president, fuckerhead” he responded proudly.

“You mean the Secretary of State,” Cornelius corrected.

“No, I’m on the ten, see,” Hamilton replied as he patted his pockets looking for his wallet briefly before giving up. “Think I forgot my wallet.”

“Listen kid,” Cornelius said, raising his voice, “you’re obviously high on something, your pupils are saucers, so sit quietly and calm down while we continue our discussion.”

I noticed for the first time that his eyes were all pupil. I admired Cornelius for his observation and worldly wisdom and was glad that he considered me a worthy conversationalist.

“Where were we?” Cornelius considered.

“I’m twenty-two,” Hamilton spurted, a step behind, “and I just had a drink or two this morning.”

“Whatever you say,” Cornelius responded dubiously.

“You’re gonna give me a ride home,” Hamilton demanded.

“No, I’m going to pick up my kids from school. In fact, I better get going,” Cornelius said to me as he got up to leave.

“Pick em up on the way,” Hamilton stated as he retrieved his backpack.

“I don’t want you anywhere near me,” he responded with disgust. “What makes you think I would allow you to be near my kids?” To me he said, “It was nice meeting you, Andrew.”

“Thanks for the conversation, Cornelius,” I responded and shook his hand.

Hamilton was getting worked up and I thought I’d save the Starbucks employees the hassle of dealing with him. I had five inches and about a hundred pounds on him and I figured that if he got too out of hand I could always sit on him so I said, “I can give you a ride.”

“Fine,” he replied and stomped out the door.

“My car is the white one over there,” I pointed, directing Hamilton through the patio where people sat enjoying the afternoon sun.

An older man sat at a table along our route. He was reading the paper and smoking a cigar. One of the chairs at his table obstructed our path slightly and Hamilton stopped to push it out of the way. His actions were slow and normal at first, but then it was if he had a muscle spasm and flung the chair the last few inches. The table rocked and the man’s drink fell on the ground. His hands began shaking the paper with surprise or rage and the cigar fell from his mouth as he slowly repeated “What? What?”

Hamilton continued walking to my car as if nothing had happened.

“Uh, I’m really sorry sir,” I stammered. “I just met this guy and I think he’s sick or something so I am taking him home so he doesn’t cause a scene here. I’m sure if you explain what happened to the baristas inside they’ll give you another drink.”

“What? What?” was all I heard as I quickly followed Hamilton.

“Aw man, did you just apologize for me? I don’t need you apologizing for me” he shouted angrily. “Did I spill that Grandpa’s drink?” he reversed abruptly. “I should go back and apologize.”

The older man was no longer on the patio. I assumed he had gone inside to clean up and call the police. Hamilton may have been an idiot but I didn’t think he was a criminal, so I hurried him into my car and said, “Don’t worry, I explained everything to him. We need to go.”

“So, where do you live?” I asked as we pulled onto the street.

“Let’s go to the mall!” Hamilton exclaimed.

“No, we can’t go to the mall. You don’t have your wallet and I don’t have any money.”

“Why don’t you have any money?”

“I’m a poor college student.”

“Oh, you go to Simpson? I live right by there.”

I was glad to have a direction, but was a little concerned that someone who was on potentially dangerous drugs lived close to the conservative Christian campus.

“Hey, drive up next to that car,” he said pointing to a small yellow truck. “I know those fuckers.”

I obliged him as he rolled down the window. As we drew alongside the truck he leaned out the window, waving both arms and flipping off the truck as he laughed and yelled senselessly. The elderly couple looked shocked and took the first available right turn.

“Oh shit! I didn’t know them, but they sure got a kick out of me,” he shouted as he continued to flip off the roadway.

“Mind if I smoke?”

“Knock yourself out,” I responded.

I was beginning to question the wisdom of giving Hamilton a ride home, but I figured that even if he got us pulled over, the truth would get me out of it and my passenger would sober up in a jail cell.

“You do drugs?” he asked abruptly.

“No, I’m clean.”

“Good, good . . . ever do meth?”

This question seemed unnecessary in light of my previous response but I clarified anyway, “No way, meth is a seriously bad drug.”

“Good, if you liked meth I woulda been pissed. I woulda, I woulda beat you up if you liked meth. Meth is bad, it’ll fuck you up. It’s bad, but sometimes . . . sometimes it’s so good,” he concluded in an enraptured sigh.

“Ah,” I thought sanguinely, never truly realizing the implication of this revelation, “he must be high on meth.”

“I had this roommate once, found out he was making meth in his room. I beat the shit outa him before kicking him out but . . . but man we did have some good parties back then.”

He swung his face next to mine and blurted, “You know, I’m about five seconds away from ripping that nose ring outa your face.”

I had lied to him before. I had done plenty of drugs in the past and felt like I could understand the fluid reality of his thoughts. I hoped that if I confidently put forth the reality that what he said was a joke, he would believe that he had been joking, so I chuckled and said, “Gee, I sure hope you don’t do that.”

He continued to stare at my nose as he growled “No seriously, man.”

I finally began to admit to myself that giving this guy a ride had been a bad idea.

“Don’t worry,” I continued with a nervous chuckle. I reached up a quickly flipped my crescent septum ring up into my nose. “See, it’s gone, no problem.”

He was quiet and motionless for the first time since he had stumbled into my life. This lasted for about twenty seconds before he erupted. “You better tell me where the fuck that thing went before I go looking for it.”

I realized that my size advantage meant very little in the confines of my car. “It folds up into my nose, see,” I stammered as I revealed my nose ring. “Out, in, out, in. Not everyone wants to see my nose ring so sometimes I hide it.” I left the nose ring hidden hoping he would forget about it.

“Here’s the school, so where do you live?” I asked to distract him.

“Right there,” he said as he pointed to a shack on the edge of campus.

I pulled into the driveway and he got out. Holding the door open he turned and said, “When I first met you, I thought you were a fuckerhead. That black guy, he was cool, but you gave me a ride and you know what? You’re still a fuckerhead, but thanks for the ride.”

Something is better than nothing, right?

2011-08-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

I recommend Jodorowski films to most people with the knowledge that they will be disturbed and possibly hate me forever for the recommendation. He is a Polish Mexican filmmaker who cannot be easily described and must be experienced. I first discovered Jodowroski through Holy Mountain, a conceptual kaleidoscope that symbolgasmically inseminated my dreams with more wonder and confusion than a thousand bastard brain babies. El Topo, the second Jodowroski film I watched, is a bit harder to describe. I watched Santa Sangre while writing up a plot synopsis and would like to share it with the internet. Whereas, with most films, a plot synopsis would be a severe spoiler and discourage later viewings, I posit that any person should be able to read this plot synopsis, immediately watch Santa Sangre, and be constantly surprised.

Santa Sangre

A man is insane and thinks he is an eagle.

Enter Circo Del Gringo. A boy magician, whose best friend is a midget touted as the worlds smallest elephant trainer, falls in love with the mute girl who walks a flaiming tight rope. His father (the ringleader who looks like a wicked overweight Brett Micheals) is a drunk who killed a woman in America and cannot return, but falls in love with the tattooed lady.

Some nuns are rioting because their church (Santa Sangre) is going to get bulldozed. Just when it looks like they will defeat the bulldozers through the power of music the Monseignor arives to hear the history of the church: Their patron saint and martyr, Lidio, was a little girl who was attacked by some street thugs who cut off her arms then raped her and left her to die in a pool of blood which miraculously still exists in the foyer of the church. The Monseignor says she is no saint and that the pool of blood is actually a pool of paint. He rejects the head nun as a heretic and encourages the bulldozers to tear it down. The head nun is the magician boy's mother, but luckily, some clowns are there to chear him up.

The tatooed lady is very flexible. Head nun does not approve. But she is powerless when confronted with the Ringleader's spandexed body. Scary sex scene culminates with an elephant spewing blood from his trunk. Clown band plays it out. Huge coffin goes over the cliff while the mudmen pay tribute. . . and then eat it. Everyone dances.

Ringleader gives (forces upon) Magician boy his first tattoo, and passes him his mantel. Mute girl doesn't know the sign for eagle so does the sign for dove instead.

Clown show. Magic show.

Ex-head nun burns off Ringleader's genitals with acid so he cuts her arms off then slits his own throat. Mute girl watches in horror then gets kidnapped by the tattooed lady while the boy magician watches impotently from his trailer.

Hey, guess what? The crazy guy from the beginning is the boy magician all grown up. His doctors try a revolutionary new therapy that consists of hugging kids with down syndrome while circus music plays and then eating a lot of fruit.

Crazy eagle guy and the downies are sent to the movies while doctor and nurse make out in the car, but instead of seeing a movie, some guy gives them cocaine, takes them out dancing with transvestite hookers, then gets them all a deal on cheap blowies. Crazy eagle guy wanders off and finds the Tatooed lady. . . flash forward to the next morning and mommy-no-arms gets magician manboy to jailbreak himself by utilizing her crazy crazy eyes. . . Tatooed lady is hooking the mute girl to a mute, giant, Mexican Lenny but she escapes via Transvestite-hooker-conga line, though she narowly escapes a creepy dude who tries to feed her his ear.

Tattooed lady gets hacked to bits by a mysterious stranger with a dagger.

Crazy man/magician boy reunites with his midget friend and then acts as his Mother's hands while she gives a creation and fall sermon with mariachi accompaniment followed by cancan girls and striptease.
Magician Manboy in ringleader costume meets with stripper but his mom takes control of his arms and throws a knife into her and she dies. They hide her in a donkey costume and bury her in their backyard after painting her white. She turns into a goose and flies away.

(At this time I wandered outside and discovered a phospho-luminescent worm crawling around my backyard. I watched it for nearly twenty minutes wondering if I was sane or not and then trapped it in a matchbox. The matchbox was empty when I checked it in the morning.)

Magician Manboy is his mom's hands for breakfast and then she uses him to practice the piano. Chickens and Jesus figure.

Magician Manboy fantasizes about being the invisible man and a mad scientist but is disappointed about his obvious lack of invisibility, anyway, his mom needs his hands to finish knitting stockings. He goes to the apothecary and pulls a giant python out of his pants. . . but only in his mind.

Luchador fight with the world's strongest woman, nobody can overcome her. (shower scene with world's strongest woman and magician manboy that I would like to forget forever) Magician manboy seduces world's strongest woman in an attempt to find a woman who can overpower his mom's control over his arms, but mom is far too strong and has a samurai sword at her disposal.

Magician Manboy's victims' become bridal looking zombies and rise from their graves. . . don't worry, I'm sure it's just a metaphor.

Mute girl and Magician are reunited at last! They may or may not have floated when they kissed. But Mom enters and commands her son's hands to cut off mute girl's arms. EPIC STRUGGLE! He defeats his mom and she becomes a ghost of some sort, and the clowns are now back to comfort him.

Pigeons, puppets, more clowns, a musical number, a fire hazard, some mannequin violence, a burning in effigy, a midget kiss, and then everyone goes to jail.

The End.

17 was bad, but 27 was far worse.

2011-07-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

I have discovered that I am under a 10 year curse that requires every year that ends with a 7 to be absolutely miserable. I don't exactly remember what 7 was like but I know that if I reach 38, I will either be invincible or brain-dead.

17 may have marked the first time I got to spend an entire year in a state of near debilitating depression, but 27 included getting fired, ~~redacted~~ , being rejected by grad schools 6 times (7 if you count the letter I got from Louisiana last week that informed me of "recent changes to my enrollment status" only to be told that I was still rejected), and a few bouts of depression that were about as bad as I can imagine ever surviving. Luckily, I'm good at multitasking* so I made sure that 3 or 4 of these things would occur at the same time throughout the year.

28 hasn't been much better than a punch in the crotch: The morning of my birthday found me in the woods, waking up to discover that all our food, beverages, and many other supplies had been stolen. Later that day, one of the guys in our group almost drove off the mountain and another car was attacked by deer. A couple days later a highly inebriated bum named Floyd stumbled into our camp at three in the morning demanding beer and pork or he was going to rape and kill us all. It was probably the second best birthday I have survived yet.

I've known for the last few months that I have failed at all of the most important of my year's goals. Sure I read 28 books by June and shat from the branches of a few trees, but all the biking, grad school, and leaving Redding business is out for 2011. So fuck my previous list and fuck all new year's resolutions that coincide with the calendar year.

Andrew's List 28

Read 52 books
Write up book reviews for them all
Quit smoking
Fix both mopeds
Learn Tai Chi
Learn to play 'Happy Birthday' on the banjo
Learn to solve a Rubik's cube
Learn to love Redding/burn Redding to the ground
Apply to Grad School
Get within spitting distance of 200 lbs
Learn to spit farther

*no I am not.

A study of the effects of reading a book a day for a full week.

2011-04-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

It was raining heavily on Sunday but my house had been invaded by teenage girls, so I slogged out to the leaky shed in the far corner of my backyard with a water bottle, some cigarettes, a martini, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Sirens of Titan. I planned to spend an hour reading in the relative peace of a thunderstorm and remained four hours til I was finished with my book. My butt was sore from sitting on a milk crate and my feet were wet from the two-inch puddle that had accumulated while I sat, but I was quite pleased with my afternoon. Vonnegut always gives me a feeling of mildly pleasant insanity. It had been some years since I had read an entire book in one day; I was happy to find that a great story can still force me to consume it in one sitting.

Monday was sunny and warm so I hung up my hammock and grabbed The Sun Also Rises. I do not recommend following Vonnegut with Hemingway because the colorful absurdity of the former makes the terse style of the latter feel soulless. I was almost two thirds of the way through the book before I realized that I was enjoying the story, but it is a quick read anyway, so you never feel as if you are burdened with getting through the slow parts to get to the exciting part of the story.

On Tuesday I decided to pick up another short book to see if I wanted to continue this pattern of literary consumption. I want to say that I've always loved Steinbeck but that is a stupid thing to say. Several years ago, I had never read Steinbeck and a few years before that, I couldn't even read. I do believe I might safely posit that I've always enjoyed playing in mud and boobs but that is about as far as I am willing to go right now with my hyperbolic statements. Cannery Row was fantastic and I couldn't help but decimate it in one sitting. I started to feel literarily gluttonous and a bit ridiculous, but it wasn't as if I had anything else going on.

After reading three very different authors, each with a unique style, I decided to go in a strange direction and read a book on style. Strunk and White's Elements of Style is a great little handbook for anybody who desires to communicate with the written word in the English language. Nevertheless, reading the whole book is a silly endeavor on any given Wednesday.

One might consider Thursday's read as being a cheat on the formula of starting and finishing a book in a day, but I don't know if it is possible to read Moby Dick that quickly. I had been reading Moby Dick off and on for about a month and decided it was time to be done with the last third of the book. This was an easy task because this is a wonderful book. I felt like it ended a bit too abruptly, but I'm sure many others complain that it drags on far too long.

I debated what to pick up on Friday, and after staring at my shelves of unread books for several minutes, settled on Douglas Coupland's Polaroids from the Dead. Coupland always puts me in a reflective mood that forces me to write, so when I finished the book, I was forced to sit down and write up reviews for the books I had read so far that week.

On Saturday, I woke up from a nightmare into which parts from each book I've read were integrated. The part that was inspired by Moby Dick was the most disturbing and vivid. In my dream, a twelve-year-old boy tied up his six-year-old brother, made an incision from armpit to wrist, and then used a water pick to peal the skin back and see what was inside (This reflects the story told by the captain of the Rachel of how he lost his arm the only time he met the white whale.). The dream was absurd because there were all sorts of organs inside the arm as if the boy had cut open his brother's torso. The dream was frightening because the older brother was calm and unemotional while the little brother never cried but never ceased screaming in pain. The EMT s decided not to untie the child even though he was pleading to be released because they were afraid he'd hurt himself.

I decided to pick up The Crying of Lot 49, a strange book by Thomas Pynchon I had once read twenty pages of and then gave up out of confusion, for my Saturday read. It wasn't nearly as confusing as I had remembered it.

I hadn't left the house all week and I felt ridiculous and self-destructive. One of my friends was in town for a visit and called to invite me to a free beer tasting he said he could get me into. I debated whether or not to go, which is silly because both free beer and friends are rareities in Redding. I had an absurd goal to complete though, didn't I? I decided to stay home and finish my book and then reversed my decision, drank free beer, and hung out with friends, leaving my book unfinished until the following day because reading a book a day for a week is a bad idea.

The best ideas come after midnight.

2011-03-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

Buzz Kill

An original Screenplay Concept by Andrew Kooy

Spring break turns deadly when part-time bee keeper, full time madman, Belvidere Bosmoton (played by Crispin Glover) swears deadly vengeance against local marine biologist, Henry Gills (played by Scott Baio) after his daughter, Nancy (played by Miley Cirus) is stung to death by jelly fish and then eaten by sharks. The pristine hamlet of Townville is brought to the brink of destruction when Belvidere discovers that he can control local bees by playing ancient, apiary hymns on the church’s pipe organ and Henry gives his fish a taste for human blood. The town’s only hope lies in Mary Stockworth (played by Megan Fox wearing glasses), social outcast and three year debate team champion, but she is deathly allergic to bee stings and doesn’t know how to swim.

Rated NC-17 for graphic bee violence and anthropomorphic rape

If I don't get into Grad school, I'm blaming it on brain damage.

2011-02-28T12:25:00.000-08:00

I have always been a huge nerd. Being known as a nerd is popular these days and my nerdiness still seems a bit odd, so it might be better to call me a dweeb.

I loved school. I suppose I took to heart the public service announcements that "knowledge is power" and figured that school may turn me into a superhero. In high school, I felt lucky that I was allowed my education for free and attempted to take every advantage of it. Through AP courses and extracurricular activities, I only had four classes I needed to take my senior year, yet I filled my schedule with electives like botany and advanced Spanish grammar. Expensive college was around the corner but high school would teach me these things absolutely free. Perhaps I was simply thrifty.

Illness was a nuisance I ignored as much as possible. If my brain was at least somewhat functional and I wasn't throwing up, I would drag myself to school. This would often result in my sickness escalating into some sort of super bug and once, nearly killed me.

I went to school for nearly a week with a pretty severe case of strep throat. I couldn't talk and I felt like crap, but I was taking notes! Eventually the strep throat turned into something much worse (I remember the Doctor saying it turned into a type of scarlet fever but I was hallucinating by then so who could say?).

I was pretty sure I wouldn't be making it to school the next day when it took me three hours to crawl up stairs to the bathroom to take out my contacts. I didn't even make it to the bathroom. My sister noticed me when I finally reached the top step and after I pointed to my eyes she brought me my contact case. She even offered me a thermometer, but I was cognizant enough to know that the only thermometer we had in the house was a rectal one; I was far too fascinated with mercury during my childhood for thermometers to survive long. Descending the stairs didn't take much time, gravity did most of the work.

My brother alerted my parents to the fact that I was having a seizure in the middle of the night. I was hallucinating (more on that later) and woke him up by shouting that I had hit my head and my brains were leaking out. Dad came down and pinned me to the bed so I wouldn't damage myself or my room while Mom called the hospital to let them know I'd be coming in.

Dad dragged me to the front door and went to his room to put some clothes on. Everything was far too hot, so I crawled outside and laid down in a snowdrift in my underwear. When my parents were finally ready, they chided me for going outside. I think they were upset that I had left the door open. Mom wanted me to put clothes on to go to the hospital, but the snow had eased the heat in my brain enough to allow me to threaten that I would vomit all over her if she tried to put clothes on me. Even though I insisted that that was where the heat lived, she forced me to at least wear a hat which I threw under the car before we left.

It is a fifteen minute drive to the hospital from my house, and I decided that the trip would be best spent with my head outside the window. My parents didn't enjoy the refreshing winter breeze like I did, so they forced my window shut. The car was stifling, so I opened my door to get at the breeze until they allowed me to roll my window down again.

Even though I had spent some minutes in a snowbank and fifteen more with my head lolling in the ten degree winter air of a sixty miles-per-hour car ride, my temperature was 103.9 at the hospital. Looking back, I wish I had taken the offered thermometer when I had the chance, for the sake of science.

I find my hallucination fascinating because, though my shouting that I had hit my head and my brains were leaking out implies that it was violent or frightening, the hallucination was, in fact, quite peaceful.

I dreamed I was riding a bicycle along a winding, hilly, tree-shrouded road (I encountered this road again later in a nightmare where I watched my dream son get hit by a car and twitch and jump in paroxysms of death, reminding me of the time I was following Dad home from church and he hit two of Aunt Sherri's cats. That frighteningly violent death-dance illuminated by my headlights is still easy to recall. I would find this road in the waking world too, as that which runs by the Morris' driveway in Maple Valley, WA.). In the reality of this dream, human life had been seeded on earth by aliens and they had secreted some of their alien genes into human DNA. Only recently had these genes made themselves known and then, only in a small percentage of people. If a person had the alien gene, when they hit puberty, they would undergo a change wherein they would develop spots on their neck and the sides of their face and their brain would advance beyond that of a normal human. In my dream, puberty was right around the corner and I hoped that I would end up having the alien gene even though many people hated and feared the part alien people.

I was riding down a very steep hill when puberty hit. I started to spasm because my body was transforming into a partial alien and I crashed my bike. I continued to tumble down the hill with no control over my body, entwined with my bicycle as it jabbed and bruised and bent about my body as I fell. Parts were very hard and painful while others were warm and soft and then the light came on in my room.

I couldn't move or feel but watched as my leg went up and kicked the shelf above my bed. Several books were dislodged and I saw my hand rise and smack them across the room as they fell. My dad ran in and sat on my chest and pinned my arms down. I still couldn't feel anything except a slight pressure on my chest that made it hard to breathe. My head turned toward the hallway and I saw my mom (though she was, in fact, still upstairs) wringing her hands, a perfect caricature of worry. Next to her stood a giant, muscular angel in a white robe. The angel started counting down from five, and when he reached one, my seizure stopped.

I will always hate you.

2011-02-14T02:58:00.000-08:00

Enough time has passed to allow me to believe I can talk about this. It started out so well before turning to shit. That is the nature of things though, if they started poorly to begin with, you wouldn't invest your dreams in them enough to taste the blatant nuances of the shit they inevitably turn into. Nevertheless, if I ever see that thundercunt of a year again, I am going to stab her in the face. Yes, I believe that 2010 was a woman and no, I did not enjoy her.

I have always noted my seventeenth year of life as one of the worst I have yet survived. It was my last year in high school and my first year of real depression. I can't name anything specific that happened anymore, but everything was tinged with awfulness. This year was somewhat similar with fantastic bouts of depression punctuated by the stress of things like getting fired and applying to Graduate programs. Now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn't blame 2010 but 27 for this crap. Perhaps I have entered a ten year cycle of notably shitty years, perhaps my depression is triggered by the apprehension of transitions. Remind me of this theory in ten years and I'll let you know.

I'm going to leave the blame on 2010 for now seeing as this is my year-end recap because that would make more sense. I made a list last year. I forgot to do a bunch of it and some things I did accidentally. Anyway, here it is:

Finish Don Quixote sculpture
Finish Baby Chandalier
make at least 10 trees
do some other sculptures like the picture colage idea or give the sexiest lamp ever a lamp
Do 100 consecutive pushups
do 100 consecutive situps
Get to 1000 miles before lauren has her baby
ride to Jen's parent's house for easter
ride a century
(STP?)
lose 50 pounds
Give up smoking, drinking, and meat for lent
fix at least one moped
get rid of crap car
have a kick-ass garden
read your height in books
read a large portion of my to-read books (currently a little more than two shelves=60 books)
read through the bible again
Make whiskey
Make Gin
Brew 5 beers
finish "taste of redding" stories
finish the ballad of Taylor and Quiznos
learn to play the banjo
save $10k
gorilla suit (life goal)
apply to grad school

I did a good job with the sculpture goals, though I did not make the baby chandelier because I have nowhere to put it now that my sister has moved to a small apartment. And it's a good thing I didn't put a lamp on the sexiest lamp ever because I now use her for my "making friends" project. I completed all of my bicycling goals and ended up riding five centuries and succeeded at Lent but I did not do the sit-ups and push-ups. I lost about 40 pounds but ended up finding them again. No moped runs, but I ended up actually getting money for Obi-wan Carnobi and my garden was awesome. I did not keep good track of my reading habits after the first three months of the year, but the stack of books I can remember only measures about 32 inches and at least 10 of those inches were classics so I feel okay about that, though I neglected to read through the Bible again. I met all my brewing goals, and even though two of my beers were cosmic abortions, I feel that I made up for it by brewing about 5 batches of cider and a couple of gallons of honey mead.

I finished more of the Taste of Redding stories but I've come to the conclusion that I will not be able to be completely done with them until I have quit the town completely (Just the other day a man came up to me in a thrift store and quickly explained how he had mated with a praying mantis and begged her to abort the monstrosity their coupling would create but she refused, gave birth, and then ate the child. One of the employees came up at that time and asked if he was bothering me. "No" he replied "We are all just looking for Gameboy cartridges," he stated before running from the store. . . I don't think this is a Taste of Redding story though, this could have happened anywhere). I did not even remember that I was supposed to write the Ballad of Taylor and Quiznos until I looked at this list. I am sad because I don't know if I remember enough to tell the tale and of all my notes I could only find these two paragraphs:

"You are fucking retarded. You know, all I want is for you to apologize and admit that you are the biggest asshole I have ever known." It wasn't the first thing she shouted, but stories must begin somewhere, and it is nice to know the terms of surrender at the beginning of a conflict. If I was to start at the beginning it would have to be before I ever even saw her.

He was the setter of the scene like the director of a Shakespeare play placing Juliet on the balcony just so and ordering a pillar or a bush or something to be placed on the stage so that Romeo will have something to stand by as he confesses his love. Our director introduced the scene by stumbling out of the back door and, with a flourish and a bow, vomited in a wide arc. The contents of his stomach hit the ground in wet plops that were not unlike the smattering of awkward applause from an audience who isn't sure what it is they are watching or when to clap, so a few individuals have decided to clap at various points in the play because it is important to show support for the arts. He sipped his miraculously unspilt drink as he stumbled back inside, secure in the knowledge that he had fulfilled his duty by directing our attentions to the stage upon which drama was about to unfold.

I'm pretty sure I was reading Terry Pratchet when I wrote that. The rest of the list are all successes though, except the banjo, that is moving to my 2011 list. Speaking of which, here it is:

Learn to play the banjo
Loose 50 pounds
Read a fuckload of books
Learn to meditate
Get a Moped running
Fix up the bikes
Make Daphne
Sell some sculptures
Attempt to practice normal people hygiene
Get to 1000 miles sooner than last year
Bike to Paradise for Easter, Chico century, Redding century, STP
Get into Grad School
Leave Redding forever
Climb a tree and shit from the branches (at least 3x)

I've started on some of these, others are out of my hands completely, and at least one of these is nearly impossible. 2011 may still turn out to be a shit year, but I figure any year that trades the traditional kiss and champagne toasts for a slap and violently painful flu has some promise. At the very least, it's all uphill from there. Right?

A title? Whatever, nevermind.

2010-12-28T01:12:00.000-08:00

According to my nephew's chalkboard and my math, between the three times I've taken the GRE and the 6 schools I applied to I've spent $992 applying to Graduate school. Couple that with the four months I've spent unemployed and this may very well be the single greatest monetary mistake I've made to date. Everything is in the mail or already received so it is all out of my hands.

I discovered a few things about myself in this process, the foremost thing being that I hate my wife's laptop (every time I go to hit backspace I get backslash and I keep moving everything thanks to the touchpad mouse). I learned that I don't get writer's block. I have plenty of things to write about and I am only stymied when I try to write in a manner that is untrue to my voice. I think there were a couple of other things but I forgot them so the other thing I learned is that applying to graduate school is the worst experience ever. It is very slightly similar to any job application but all your dreams about the future are tied up in the process. Very few of the schools do anything to help because they make their websites so poorly organized that it is much easier to make a mistake than apply correctly and they give you three different ways in which you are required to submit your materials. I'm sorry but I haven't yet sired any children so I don't have the blood of my innocent progeny to sign my name with (sure it dangles but that's how I likez my participles).

While I edited and re-read all my writing samples several dozen or thousand times, I have lost all confidence in my submissions. I have to fend off panick attacks twenty to fifty times a day as I rethink every word. I am not allowing myself to read any of the stories I submitted but luckily I have up to five months to wait to hear back about my dreams.

I think I had a point to all this but I guess I just better get back to learning the banjo so my street performance career can take off.

One week remains: A countdown to destiny

2010-12-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

In the backyard for my morning piss and the urine shoots out in two distinct streams like my dick is a little girl running around the trailer park after her drunken stepmom has tied her golden hair into cockeyed pigtails and I think "Yeah, I could be a fucking writer."

"I AM NOT A NUMBER, I AM A FREE MAN!"

2010-12-02T12:13:00.000-08:00

I don’t know what I am doing. I woke up this morning wearing a shirt when I went to sleep naked. Stranger still, it is an old high school football shirt I didn’t even know I still had. Was I dreaming about high school? Did I do anything football related? Did I wander outside? The shirt is not backwards or inside out but the correct application of shirt on body is a one in four chance and I had to have dug into the boxes in the back of my closet for this relic so far that I have no idea what the statistical probability is that I ended up dressed as I am. Sometimes I love the mystery of my nocturnal peregrinations.

Sleepwalking aside, I still don’t know what I’m doing. I write a bit here and there and end up with absurdist bullshit about prank calls and dreams. I’m working on short story samples for my applications to MFA programs in creative writing and this is all I am able to slur out? I want to be a better writer, I want to help other people become better writers too, but you have to be a pretty damn good writer already to get into a program and I don’t think an honest desire for betterment will supersede shitty writing samples.

When I scored in the ninety-seventh percentile for the GRE verbal section I was invincible. Well, 97% invincible. I called everybody to brag about my quantified brain skills and was sure that I had guaranteed my place in graduate school; my score would give me confidence to polish my writing samples and would easily land me an assistantship to boot. And then I received my essay scores. I did not improve at all and my previous score that put me in the sixty-seventh percentile would have to stand as my best effort.

Who has two thumbs and appears to be a bit of an idiot savant in that he knows tedious words to a fairly impressive extent but can’t seem to string together enough words to form a cogent pair of essays? This guy.

And so I doubt and delay, never quite finishing a story, opening three documents at once about obsessive counting, a petty creator of imagined universes, and a smoky conversation about pain. That is, when I am actually working. Most mornings I distract myself with the internet while I wake up, checking email, discovering the best sales on items I can’t purchase, watching videos of people hurting themselves. I then make myself some coffee or tea or whatever caffeinated beverage catches my fancy and sit in my backyard reading.

Today I read a whole book from start to finish. This is ridiculous excess. I glut myself every morning on caffeine, nicotine, and literature. As the chemicals seep in and the literature draws me out I am thankful that nobody sees me laugh maniacally (the GRE word for this is cachinnate) and dry sob from sentence to sentence till I can’t stand it anymore and have to go inside to write. By then my hands are too cold to type correctly so I check my email again.

I don’t know what I am doing. I write to exorcise the constant internal narration, writing because I want to (need to?), hoping that someday somebody will read and say “I’m glad he wrote that.” I feel like a polished writing sample is just my current excuse because I need some sort of goal when what I really need is a reason for why I’m writing.

I don’t know what I am doing but I seem to be doing something, and just like my nocturnal adventures in fashion, I hope it means something interesting and mysterious and is not simply the restless wanderings of an overactive subconscious.

Wake up dickhead, your phone's broken.

2010-10-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve been busy in my sleep of late. Dreams and dreams and dreams. I’m often pursued or pursuing. Nothing ever comes of this.

There are snakes, always snakes. Red and copper fanged adders that threaten but never strike. Frightening me into stillness when I know I must be moving on.
I’m peeing on a hollowed stump. A monstrous viper is perturbed by my micturition. I jump back and turn to grab a stick to kill it. When I turn back around it has vanished. This might be a problem. . .
I am an officer walking the lines during a campaign of some sort of trench warfare. Or maybe I am a camp counselor walking between a dry ditch and a creek, I’m not sure. “Check this out. There’s snakes down here.”
“I know there are snakes down there, that’s why I’m not in the ditch. Don’t lean over it, can’t you see it’s poisonous? ‘Red to yellow, kill a fellow’ and all that.”
“Oh, it can’t strike us, it has to coil in on itself to be able to strike. Plus it’s too cold for it to be active.”
Somehow I find myself sitting right next to the snake. It is frightened by my presences and winds in on itself to be able to strike. It won’t strike, though; my body heat is all that is keeping it alive. If I attempt to leave it will bite me. I’m afraid of being bitten, but am sure that it will never strike if I stay still. I know that more snakes will be drawn to my body heat throughout the night and I will be surrounded when dawn comes. I’m not as scared as I should be, mostly annoyed because there was someplace I was supposed to be. . .

I watched an oafish man visit prison hoping to be raped. The clown smearing shit on the walls, the sheets, the hands of those he lied to. “See! I was raped. He forced me and I couldn’t escape.” The warden, his wife, nobody believed him; everyone leaving, shaking their heads at this man’s foolishness. The inmate rejecting this idiot’s pawing, wanting only to shower and be left alone. That moron made everyone feel dirty.

Immigrant workers rolled out paths of AstroTurf in my backyard. My neighbors were claiming it as their own. I was angry about this, but not the AstroTurf. That seemed like a good idea.

There was a young boy always looking to me for comfort. A man would hold him back until I approached within a couple of paces. The child would be released and he would jump into my embrace. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I would repeat and after a time the tears or his fearful quaking would cease. He never explained, but would eventually begin laughing and run off to play. By morning he had grown heavy enough to necessitate my sitting while I comforted him.

Prank phone calls are simply opportunities to make new friends.

2010-09-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

“Dayman, aaaaahhaaaaahaaaa fighter of the Nightman. . .”

Watching Dr. Who on the back patio at midnight when the wife is away for the weekend is a perfect idea. I recommend it to anybody.

A Seattle number eh? I get wrong numbers from time to time. Living in Redding and having a Seattle area number invites that sort of thing. I tend to assume that these mistaken calls will be more interesting than anything intentional so I pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

I hear a man’s voice. It sounds like he’s at a party.

“Hello, can I help you?” expounding on my initial contact.

Click.

Normally I would continue with my episode and ignore what has happened but today I am an asshole. Today I dial the number.

“Hello” I hear.

“Yeah, you just called me?” I respond.

Click.

Who was that? Why did he call me? It is officially the AM so I assume it is some sort of booty call or prank. I’ve got nothing better to do so I dial again.

The number rings, several times, but then is picked up and hung up within a second. I like to think I am fomenting paranoia.

I dial again. This time it only rings twice before it is hung up. I’ve got all the time in the world. Something about oysters or opportunity or something like that.

I could dial again but I don’t. Perhaps I will wait until I inevitably wake up in four hours’ time and leave a message then. I would hear his voice. I assume that by the message I would at least know his name. Nevertheless I create one for him. Jared David Burrows. Yeah, that sounds like the name of somebody who would call me at this time.

Hello Jared, I’m sorry I couldn’t get a hold of you last night. I look forward to speaking with you soon. I have lots of time on my hands these days. . . you know what I mean. I’m sure I’ll speak with you soon.

Yeah, that would be a perfect message. I would blow his mind. Confuse the shit out of some stranger and get him to start checking his shadow. I like the idea of forcibly entering one’s dreams, strangers don’t ask my permission so why should I?

Then again, I tend to shy from adversity. Sure I still wake before seven, the stranger’s number stored in my phone. I am sure he is asleep now. Even if he is not, he probably lives at least seven hundred miles away and who gives a fuck what he imagines he might be able to do to me, I’m the one with nothing to lose here.

Even though it is getting light, I roll over and fall back asleep. We all have regrets: opportunities missed, chances neglected, might have beens that never will be. I guess this is simply mine for this week. We all have crosses we must bear.

Welcome to the Life Major. You may call me Professor Kooy.

2010-07-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

Hey buddy we need to talk about something. Make sure to take good notes, this is important.

You're pretty much a person now and it's time you've mastered a couple of skills, namely: being still and being quiet. You might think that I want you to learn these things for selfish reasons and, while I am excited about the day I can put you in the corner of the grocery store, between the radishes and lunch meat while, I go shopping and get a couple of rounds of free samples in peace, I also know that these are life skills that will aid you in many of the challenges ahead of you. You never know what life is going to throw at you. Just imagine if you were in a "Most Dangerous Game" situation; the ability to be still and quiet is more valuable than any type of woodcraft or self defensed you can think of. If you knew who Anne Frank was I would tell you that she is a pretty good example of what I am teaching you but. . .Actually, no more "Dirtiest Little Puppy" we are starting The Diary of Anne Frank at the next night night. And you better pay attention because I want you to be able to tell me what her greatest errors were by the end.

Now don't start thinking that these skills are only good when your life is at stake. If you are able to be still and quiet, untold fun awaits you. I've seen you play hide-and-go-seek and sometimes, I am ashamed to call you son. It's obvious that you put a lot of effort into hiding. You take your time and choose creative hiding places while half of your idiot friends try to crawl under the couch cushions. It's just that once you are safely in your hiding spot, you are so proud of your sneakiness that you start giggling and getting careless. That, son, is hubris, and hubris is unacceptable. If you master the ability to be perfectly still and quiet, you could stand in a a slight shadow and disappear. Just picture all the kids looking for you and getting worried because they can't find you. You let them get almost to the point of being frantic before you step out from right behind them and quietly say "I'm right here." They will shit their pants, and trust me, though that may seem normal now, eventually, you will be able to hold that over their heads and it will be awesome. Couple these skills with silent movement and you will be a ninja.

Don't tell mommy about this, ok. Sure she would be pissed at Daddy and say that I was filling your head with craziness and trying to make you weird or something, but if she knew about your lessons, she wouldn't be as easy to trick, and you've got to practice on somebody, right? Oh, and don't practice this on mommy when daddy and she are together, I'm not supposed to give you that talk for a couple more years yet.

Let me see your notes. . . Well, I guess this is my fault. The first lesson really should have been on note taking. Time to get your jammies on kiddo. Sure it's still light out but it's never too early to develop a nice healthy fear of Nazis.

Bikes: A fucked up love letter.

2010-06-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of days after my most recent century I took the car out to get some groceries and I decided that a gas pedal, though very useful, is far from the most satisfactory means of acceleration. On a bike it is very rewarding when you've gotten yourself up to twenty or thirty miles an hour, in a car it's just what happens when you put forth the most minimal of efforts.

I felt really enlightened at that moment, like I was about to turn into a cycling enthusiast and I was going to start getting emotional boners (henceforth to be referred to as "heart-ons") over cycling, preaching about the evils of fossil fuel and danger of cars and bringing up my bicycle every time I open my mouth because I love it so much and how the only thing that gets me through each day of dream crushing work (yes I feel like my job is crushing my soul's dreams but crushing dreams is actually 65% of what I do at my job) is knowing I am going to hop on that bike and pedal, pedal, pedal.

The next morning, my enthusiasm was squashed more thoroughly than Lenny's puppies as shortly after Jen left for work I discovered that I had two flat tires. I carried my bike two miles to the nearest bike shop where I was informed that they were out of inner tubes (fucking silly) but was allowed to borrow a bike to go to the next nearest bike shop to buy some tubes. I hate bikes.

Anyway, the Redding century was the most enjoyable bike ride I've ever been on. I never once thought about the futility of riding in a big circle for no reason beyond bragging rights. In fact, I even enjoyed the scenery. I came very close to appreciating Redding. . .ewww.

Including rest stops and a flat tire, I finished in exactly eight hours. I figure that means I had about seven hours pedal time which, according to math, means I averaged over fourteen miles per hour. They gave me food at the end of the race and I felt pretty good and decided that it hadn't been absurd enough, so instead of calling Jen to pick me up, I decided to ride home with "Boombox" on repeat. I know I said that there are only two options when attempting a century: finishing it or not finishing it. I'm going to have to add a third and that is "fucking a century in the ass". Yeah, it sounds dirty. Yeah, I'm okay with it (ooh, I'm going to add a fourth category "being hit by a car" because it is better to have a category and not need it than need a category and not have it).

For years, heavy physical activity for the sake of exercise has brought forth interestingly twisted yet wonderfully cathartic thoughts to my brain: I would spend the entire time envisioning painful ways to die. Maybe a mugger would jump out of the bushes and stab me repeatedly in the gut. Perhaps I'd get hit by a car, the impact crushing my torso in a way that would allow me to feel my intestines being squeezed out of my body through my groin. Possibly I would trip on the sidewalk, hit my head on a parked car in a very specific manner that would cause me to be paralyzed but still able to feel my body. I would, of course, soil myself because I'm sure that is the natural reaction to this type of injury, which would anger a herd of feral cats who would begin to devour my incapacitated (but still feeling) body with their small mouths of very sharp teeth and I would not be found until the next morning when somebody would come out to get their paper and see my bloody mess of a body which will send them into a catatonic state of shock as they notice one of the sated beasts curled up and sleeping in what was once my ample belly as I mouth the words "Please kill me."

It would be easy to say that these fantasies are a coping mechanism as running any distance carrying two hundred and seventy pounds on bad knees is awful, but doesn't seem all that bad when compared to ridiculous evisceration. One could even argue that this is a very clever trick that my mind plays which forces adrenaline into my bloodstream allowing me to run faster. I think, however, that it would be somewhat more accurate to describe these thoughts as a sort of mental sweat, a sloughing off of ephemeral toxins, exorcising while exercising. I have forced myself to do physical exercise without allowing my mind to dwell on thoughts of a tortured death but I never feel as refreshed or euphoric when I am done. I never feel as clean. Something magic happens when I sweat death that allows me to end up feeling carefree and simply happy.

During the Redding century, I never thought about my own death, I thought about my wife's. I imagined that I would come home after triumphantly finishing my century only to find her brutally murdered. Around mile ninety-two I habitually smelled the air and checked for smoke as I was within a half mile of my house and kept thinking it was burning down as I rode. I don't know how similar sadness is to fear, but it seems to me that both can be pretty cathartic. The tricky brain/adrenaline theory may be appropriate here as I was able to average better than twenty miles an hour for seven of the last ten miles but I like to think of that ride's daydreams as more of a sign of maturity. Apparently personal torture no longer involves harm to my physical body, my inner demons no longer base my affliction on insularity but on a relational nature, and when my mind naturally envisions that which would cause me the most pain, it doesn't even involve myself anymore but my wife Jen. I don't care how much this disturbs most of you, but this gives me a bit of a heart-on.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus = Mega Fun and Giant er. . .Fun!

2010-06-05T00:46:00.000-07:00

You know a movie is going to be a special gem when an explicit message to the audience is given within the first twenty minutes when one of the characters (I have to assume it was a cameo by the director) says "Just don't take all this too seriously and we'll all be fine." Sure it was hidden amidst an explanation that stated that Japanese oil rig workers like to pee on dolphins due to some sort of ancient superstition but I saw right through that shit. I'm like the MacGyver of knowing shit and the internet is my paperclip.

I love shitty movies. I'm not talking about Ryan Reynolds romantic comedies, Twilight films, or Nicholas Sparks adaptations. I love campy, ridiculous, stupid, gory films that push the boundaries of the absurd. There will always be a special place in my heart's soul for the hundreds of truly silly horror films I've watched and the thousands that have yet to be seen. VAGINA DENTATA!!!

MS v GO is awesome because it isn't even trying. Sure they bust out some poorly stated political commentary but I'll take a comparison of prehistoric aquatic behemoths to hurricane Katrina over pictures of oil covered birds any day.

As I watched MS v GO while drinking large gin and tonics (see I totally could have written "mammoth" instead of "large" right there but I didn't because I have integrity. . .no, it was probably so that I could have the opportunity to write this explanation. THIS IS A BANK ROBBERY!) I felt that it was important to jot down a few notes that I would now like to share with you.

Why you got to bring Tokyo into this? Seriously, a giant, prehistoric creature coming from the ocean to attack Japan. Now that's some fresh shit.

I love the science in this movie. It consists completely of mixing various colored fluids in various sized test tubes. Let's mix this here red liquid with that blue fluid and. . . AW SHIT PURPLE?!? FUCK!!! Well how about we take this green vial and add a couple of drops of light blue and GODDAMMIT STILL GREEN!?! What the fuck are we doing wrong? (tortured dream sequence) How about we use a big ass needle to inject glow stick fluid into a bucket of more glow stick fluid but this time call it pheromones. . . MOTHER FUCKING BINGO!!!

It seems logical for ancient sea creatures to envy the technological advancements in flight, but killing two planes does seem a bit excessive.

Do we really need a love story plot arc in here? Oh yeah, awkward scientist sex is probably the only way they could have brought pheromones into this story.

NO SHARK! NOT THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE!!! No wait, I'm totally fine with that one.

Why are there some Mexicans in the Japanese navy?

"Only a hate stronger than their combined survival instincts could force these results." And for some reason, two lines later they imply, nay demand that physics proves that success of this plan is inevitable. Now this really bothers me. WHAT THE FUCK DO PHYSICS HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHI no wait I'm just out of G&T.

Oh Shit! Shakespeare Quote!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

INTENSE SUB DRIVER FACE! Apparently subs have emergency turbos. Who knew?

Of course the pilot freaks out and pulls his gun on the captain forcing the Irish marine biology professor who happens to have once been a nuclear submarine operator to take the helm to keep the submarine from crashing into the ice shelf. I'm just surprised the heroine didn't get shot in the ensuing struggle to increase the scene's dramatic impetus.

Wait just a minute. Are they really going to end the movie that way!?! They totally forgot their blanket on the beach. This movie makes no sense at all.

Autocorrect says "donut" is wrong but is fine with "donuts". Okay, how does it feel about doughnuts. . .oh, it's fine with it. Fuck it, I'm sticking with donut.

2010-05-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

One of the few perks of my job is going to other offices and stealing their coffee and eating their donuts or cookies or whatnot for the small price of idle banter. This morning I used the phrase "I'll just take a donut for the road" (which is a very lame, banter-y thing to say and I felt a little embarrassed about how naturally it came from my mouth words) and unwittingly called up one of my pleasant childhood memories: the road donut.

I spent summers almost exactly like I spent the rest of the year when I was little because I was "home-schooled". In the summertime, however, Saturday mornings were often spent going yard-saling with Grandma Kooy and the cousins.

Driving back to Kooy's Irrigation, Grandma pulled over because she saw something lying on the shoulder of the highway that looked edible. I just want to pause for a second to allow everyone to ponder that last sentence while I point out that this actually happened and that not only was this not weird when we were kids, I still only think of this as weird when viewing it from a non-Kooy perspective. I was the nearest child to an accessible door so I was sent out to run back down the highway to find out what it was. Non-Kooy perspectives are weird because I am suddenly questioning the sanity and safety of my childhood as six kids under ten in a pickup with two seat belts doesn't seem too safe, not to mention having a five year old run down the side of a highway to pick up discarded donut for a snack. . . aw dammit, now I'm starting to think that eating things found on the side of freeways sounds like a bad idea too (especially when stated so direct like that). Damn you common sense, you are no longer allowed near my childhood.

Anyway, what I found was a giant donut. In my memory it is much larger than my head, maybe the size of my torso. It was mostly encased in saran wrap, sitting on a Styrofoam tray similar to the ones that I only ever see holding meat these days. The tear in its covering caused a couple of inches of donut to be soiled with road debris but Grandma cut that part out. And, since it was open to the elements it was a little stale, but Grandma had a solution to this as well: ten seconds in the microwave.

Grandma was able to cut the road donut up into enough pieces so that all of the cousins and all of the uncles who were working at the shop that day could partake in our fortuitous discovery. One of the older girls thought it was gross so I got two pieces. That was a good day.

Not all titles make sense, but the one referring to Radiohead and bicycles totally did, I just never got around to that part.

2010-05-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

There were a couple of things I neglected to do to prepare myself for my second century: eat right during the race, wear sunblock, and train properly in the three weeks before the race. I wouldn't call this a recipe for success. In fact, I would call it the opposite of that. . .what was the word for that again? Oh yeah, it's called "Andrew's half-assed long distance bike ride training regimen". I'm going to start selling DVDs this summer!

The course for the Chico Wildflower was designed by an asshole. There is over 4,000 feet of altitude gain on the course, which wouldn't be too horrible except this elevation is exclusively located in the climbing of two mountains. The first mountain comes before mile thirty and is the longer of the two climbs. It is a seemingly infinite series of switchbacks which turned my legs into a lactic acid factory. As I neared each blind turn I pleaded that the summit would be revealed, but I think that I started hoping that in the middle of the climb so I had a lot of disappointment ahead of me. I guess whoever designed this course isn't too bad because they could have put this climb at mile ninety.

The second mountain is situated around mile fifty which occurred, for me, around one in the afternoon on the first quite warm day of the year. On paper, the second climb is easier as it is about three hundred feet less of elevation but in reality it is far worse because I had already climbed a mountain and though this one was shorter, it was still a nearly half mile of vertical gain within a three mile span of road. I nearly passed out, so I walked the last 1/4 mile up the mountain. I felt quite sick at the top of Table Mountain but pushed on thinking/hoping it would pass.

When I got to the mile 65 lunch stop I had reached a special level of exhaustion. It reminded me of the upsetting senselessness of being tired as a small child. My body was extremely sore and I was so fatigued that I felt like crying. I remember thinking that I felt like a 3 year old who had just gotten kicked down a flight of stairs at 3 a.m. The sound that came out of me as that thought went through my brain was a depressing chuckle-sob which inspired me to turn up my mp3 player as I forced down my sandwich.

The rest of the ride was fairly bland. There were no huge climbs and there was also absolutely no shade. Before I get to the eventual failure, however, I must go back to the mountains.

Downhills are pretty crazy for a fat guy. I have always biked alone so when I take on a sweet downhill on which I will meet or exceed the speed limit, I generally just take over the lane. I love it when drivers get pissed because you are on a bike, in their lane, going their speed. They usually want to pass me or attempt to make it look like I am inconveniencing them in some way. By the time I get to the bottom of the hill, however, they are 300 yards back and generally continue to give me a fair amount of space. Do they think I'm crazy for going so fast or have they just realized the size of a dent my extra large helmet would put in their car? When there are bikes as well as traffic, the descent becomes a bit trickier.

After the first mountain, I was excited for a long downhill run. After the second mountain, I hit every down-slope by saying "Fuck this pedaling shit. You owe me this one, gravity." I let my speed get a little out of hand on the first hill, however. I can feel fairly comfortable in the low 40s, but that is when I am the only biker on the road. About three quarters of the way down the hill I was flying by other riders and swerving into the turn lanes hoping to miss the cars driving up the hill as well. Luckily, my odometer stores my fastest time. I was going 48.9 miles an hour. I'd like to try for 50 at some point in time, but not any time soon.

I felt steadily sicker as I rode, and at mile 75 I started experiencing very painful back spasms. I now think that this was probably not a muscle issue as I drank my camelback dry twice (it holds 100 oz) and about 100 oz more of sports drinks at the various stops as well as another 150 oz of water at dinner afterwords and I didn't pee once all day until 7 at night. I'm thinking that back pain might have been my kidneys screaming for help. After dinner, I got the special opportunity to experience the literal reality of a cliched phrase as insult was added to injury and I was completely debilitated for an hour and a half writhing in horrible pain with the hiccups.

Since the ride looped back on itself, I could have cut off the last ten to fifteen miles and go straight to the finish. But, despite feeling ill and being in pain, I had to keep trying to do the full 100. I didn't allow myself to stop and rest in a spot of shade for a moment until mile 93. I figured this was safe because I ride seven miles every day to and from work. I stood straddling my bike with my head resting on the handlebars. After a couple of minutes I realized that I would not be moving from this spot and at that moment one of the ride volunteers drove up and offered to give me a ride back to the finish line.

Just about everybody had already finished as evidenced by the two remaining cars in the parking lot. I thanked him for the ride as I dropped my bike in the grass and called Jen to come pick me up. As I lay on the grass in the shade of some rose bushes, I remembered that I had put my headphones in my pocket without turning off my mp3 player when I hopped into the car. I slipped them back into my ears and heard:

"You do it to yourself, you do
and that's what really hurts
You do it to yourself, just you
you and no-one else
You do it to yourself
You do it to yourself"

Luckily I had turned the music up, because I'm pretty sure the laugh/sob/whimper of pain probably sounded pretty depressing.

Purple?!? No, I would call this shirt lavendar.

2010-05-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

As I walked into Winco yesterday I had a thought that I thought was quite funny but was erased from my brain because the following happened:

Immediately after having my interesting thought, I noticed a truck driving towards me and the guy driving and his passanger were looking at me with cartoonish sneers. As he passed me, the woman sitting next to him shouted “I hate your stupid fucking face, asshole.” I assumed she was shouting at me.
I watched a crow fight off a flock of pigeons and fly off with a whole piece of pizza.
I saw a woman with an ICP tattoo in Winco and was a little bit shocked to see a possible juggette in Redding but then I remembered that I’m in Redding and this kind of seems like ideal juggallo country.

I think I just remembered my amusing thought and it was “I think the greatest hurdle for a chubby guy wearing purple is to not look like Grimace.”

Sad-sack sorry gamblers and their drunken ramblings.

2010-05-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

I played black jack for a couple of hours last night. I didn't win but when I average this trip with the other time I've gone this year, I still come out a few hundred dollars ahead. Aside from not winning money, this excursion was not all that interesting. The casino was strangely free of weirdos. Last time I went there was a guy who kept demanding high fives and a drunk lady who decided that I was the one who should be told how her friend just puked all over the inside of her car but that it was okay because she had one of those new cars that could be hosed out if it got dirty, though she was concerned that her hair still smelled of vomit.

When I got home early this morning I remembered that I had written something down about my first trip and found a piece of paper with "sad-sack sorry gamblers and their drunken ramblings" written on it, and I remembered how much I love words. One of the things I find most personally rewarding about writing is a perfect sentence, a fantastic turn of phrase, or a beautiful pairing of words. I have written papers around single instances of words I really enjoyed. I doubt this is a very good writing technique, but I'm not going to change because I see no reason to stop loving the lyric beauty of a thoughtfully crafted phrase.

I can understand why somebody would turn off half the lights in the bathroom and sit in the darkened stall the day after Cinco de Mayo, but this has been going on for a very long time.

2010-05-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

I appreciate a clean and comfortable bathroom at work. I like having the option of going to a place where I don't have to do any work and I can sit around without pants on irregardless of my intestinal directives.

In my previous job there was a point where I considered the bathroom to be the only safe haven from the all women, post-menopausal work environment. This was taken away when one of my bosses started using the men's restroom for her foul death shits. I never found out which one was destroying the last thing I enjoyed at work but I suspected all three of my bosses thought they were very clever in hiding their digestive problems from other ladies in the office. Either that or a single culprit had a very interesting diet as the tone of the air quality shifted from horror to horror throughout the day.

My current workplace commode is quite nice. In fact, when I was a student here I would relieve myself in this same bathroom, if given the choice, as it is generally cleaner and better air conditioned than many others on campus. As this restroom has become the sole fecal repository I frequent, I have observed the habits of some of my coworkers and what started out as an odd mystery probably should have remained a mystery but I figured it all out nonetheless.

About half the time I enter this bathroom, the light is off. This does not cast the entire bathroom into darkness but leaves no light in the entrance and leaves the handicapped stall quite unlit. I usually accepted this as a power saving effort by somebody on staff until one day as I was sitting on the toilet the lights were extinguished by an incoming waste management patron. With the lights off, the unknown man slipped into the far and newly darkened stall and I left the bathroom (after I washed my hands of course). This started happening on a regular basis. Sometimes I would be in one of the stalls when the lights went out and other times I would walk into the bathroom and the lights would already be out and somebody would already be in the stall. This became an odd mystery because I could never quite catch sight of whoever was doing this but I started referring to him as the Midnight Pooper. I would write 80's hair metal ballads about the Midnight Pooper, fraught with shredding guitar solos and would always turn the light back on when I left because that's kind of weird.

After a couple of months I realized that many times when the Midnight Pooper is doing his business, you can hear the clicking of cell phone buttons. Texting? Surfing the Internet? Who can really tell? I know I'm not going to ask them because there are too many awkward possibilities and I would rather continue my crusade for well-lit toilets with my current motivation.

This isn't the end of the mystery, however. One day as I washed my hands I was plunged into semi-darkness as the head of the counseling services walks in and enters the darkest stall. This was when I realized there are multiple Midnight Poopers and began to wonder what the reasoning was behind obscured defecation that was not due to an attachment to technology. My current theory is that the counselor has phobia about seeing his own feces. Maybe his dad was a plumber and died in a horrible septic tank accident and was raised by his puritanical mom who refused to be in the same room to potty train him and would shout through the door "You better clean up all your filth you dirty little sinner." And at some point he asked her what poop was and she shouted at him "It's your dirty sin you beast." and then she locked him in the pantry for three days and beat him severely for soiling his trousers.

It's a theory. No matter the reason, I hope I freak every Midnight Pooper out each time I turn the light on and disrupt whatever it was he was doing.

"Just" is my favorite Radiohead song. You got a problem with that? Are you challenging me to a duel? Fine then, I get to choose the weapons. I choose bicycles. A slow, painful, endurance race to the death is the only thing I can prove my point with now.

2010-04-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

Riding a century is a pretty awesome feat. They could have called it a 100 mile bike ride and it would still be bad ass, but calling it a century adds an epicness to it. Sort of as if you are transcending space and time, or making the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.

I completed my first century at the beginning of the month. I rode from my house in Redding to my in-law's house in Paradise. It was raining the entire time and there was a headwind of ten miles per hour that increased to about forty miles an hour. The last five miles of the ride gained nearly half a mile of altitude. If it had been a ten mile bike ride it would have sucked. This ride was straight stupid.

Don Quixote helped me keep going. I listened to the king's portion of the book on that ride. It is wonderfully cyclical to be listening to the exploits of a crazy person doing absurd things while attempting to complete an absurd task yourself.

Lauren also helped me keep pedaling. In January I was speaking with my sister about some of the feats and challenges I was to attempt and she added another: she challenged me to ride one thousand miles on my bicycle before she gave birth to her baby. I had a little over three months to complete this challenge and in that time I started training to ride a century, eventually coming up with a plan to have the completion of my first century coincide with my thousand mile challenge.

I believe, however, that the main thing that kept me from stopping is my amazing stubbornness. I used to think that I was a pretty patient guy. It has taken me a long time to realize that biding one's time may look very much like waiting patiently though in reality it is an entirely different sort of beast. You may have faith that moves mountains but I have the stubbornness to wait for the rocks to melt and the dust to drift away on the breeze.

It may have taken me almost thirteen hours but I completed my first century, and in doing so, reached one thousand miles. I was surprised at how sore one's entire body can feel after a bike ride of this nature. Football never made me feel this sore, and I sucked at football so I got smashed around a lot. I felt the way Bruce Willis looks by the end of every Die Hard movie. But I didn't fight terrorist or avert any disasters; I defeated my unborn nephew. That little sucker was so embarrassed, he didn't even show his face for another couple of weeks. You may call him Titus Ransom Soini, but I will always refer to him as that kid I already beat. Not that I beat kids on a regular basis, but I probably could if I wanted to. It would be totally easy actually: They are small and lazy and I'm pretty sure they're illegal immigrants because most of them can't even speak English.

Anyway, this weekend's century was a little bit different. This is already kind of long so I will start out by telling you the ending: I only rode ninety-three miles. And by start I mean end. . . for now. My drink wants ice and my brain wants drink. Three more days till my third century: one success, one failure there's no third option so it's all repeats from here on out.

"Memory and Realization" or "Bad Poetry, Oh Noetry!*"

2010-03-17T17:10:00.000-07:00

It was in seventh grade that I learned that I am horrible at poetry. There was an assignment which required me to write two poems: one had to be about the Bible and I believe the other was a personal poem. I put a lot of effort into my poems and was very proud of the results. My content was superb and my rhyming skills most excellent.

We all had to read our poems in class, and after hearing several of my classmates’ work, I knew my poems would be the best. When it was my turn I proudly stood, ready to bare my soul as I shared the poem that had come directly from my heart. A very strange thing happened as I recited my poems; every couple of lines one or several of my classmates would laugh. “What are they doing?” I thought, “This is serious stuff.” I began to blush and would chuckle nervously with the other students in an effort to fit in with the group. As I read the lines “John the Baptist lost his head / Jesus died but didn’t stay dead” I came to the realization that what I had written was patently absurd and in a moment of brilliantly quick thinking that spanned the intake of breath from one line to the next, I made a decision that I now believe shaped much of my adolescence: I owned it. Because all of my classmates thought it was funny and they liked it because it was funny, I decided that it was funny and that that had been my intention all along.

I believe that may very well be the moment I decided that I must be the funny guy, a class clown. Being hilarious was my invincibility because even if you put your heart and soul into a project, if the final product was stupid or a total failure, you could always laugh it off. Comedy is the invisibility cloak of baring your soul gone awry. I held onto this identity until my senior year in high school.

It is amazing how thoroughly a person can trick one’s self. Somehow, at the time, I never felt disappointed or embarrassed by that terrible poem. It took me a while to remember that I had written those poems in all seriousness but I think of it every time I consider writing poetry, or reading poetry, or when things rhyme.

I have almost never attempted poetry since junior high. In fact, I have hated and avoided poetry for most of my life, and it was only in the last few years that I came to appreciate or understand poetry at all (this is hard for an English major to admit) and this was mostly due to a love for Aesop Rock (I have no problem admitting this).

I am currently going insane. Working in finance is antithetical to everything I want to do in my life and I have been forced to put a shit-ton of energy into work lately by working the odd ten hour day and some Saturdays (I typed "work" so many times in that sentence that I nearly gouged my eyes out with highlighters). I have had almost no time to sculpt or write and the little bit I have written of late has been steaming piles of shit. This has brought me to a decision: I have decided to own it. I am going to take my horrible scribblings and poorly worded rants and make them worse by turning them into poetry.

I am pretty sure my brain isn’t working very well right now because this seems like a good idea.

Am I reaping the results of a youthful indiscretion or am I simply growing older?
I pierced my nose seven years ago.
Ever since then
My nose hair has grown wild.
It may very well be the natural course of things
Growing hair in odd places
Losing hair in others,
But I like my explanation better.

From time to time
I have to pull my nose hairs out.
If I do not do this,
My nose gets irritated
And I sneeze a lot.
And my sneezes are pretty violent.
People at work,
Two walls separating my office from theirs,
Will call to say “Bless you.”
I no longer pick up the phone when it rings after I sneeze.

I did not sneeze very much today;
I plucked nose hairs before showering.
The pleasant pain conjuring nascent tears
Was better than a pot of coffee to wake me up.
And when I looked down
The sink looked as if I’d shaved off an eyebrow.

*The magical wordsmith behind Toothpaste for Dinner, Drew, is responsible for this excellent phrase. If I was a doppelganger, I would definitely eat his soul and assume his identity.

Whitfield's Big Mistake

2010-01-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

“Where did you go last night? I thought your host family lived near mine.”

We had only been in Mexico for a couple of weeks before Tequila Nights became a midweek staple. I am not sure about the logic of prefunking for $2, face-sized margaritas at Mama Mia but no one ever said that the world of drinking made sense. We would eventually come to be familiar enough with the cobblestone streets of San Miguel de Allende that we would make our separate ways to our host homes, but we started out the tradition with the home-bound mindset of strength in numbers, which was why it was weird when just as we left the bar, Antonio said, “I’m gonna take a short cut this way. See you at school tomorrow.”

It wasn’t until I had walked halfway to La Academia with Antonio the next morning that I thought to question his directional sense, “I wanted to swing by El Lounge,” he replied.

“Is there really a place called ‘El Lounge’ here?” I scoffed.

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s the only bar open till daylight.”

I would later come to find out that this statement was not completely factual. There was another bar that was open nearly every hour of the day called La Cucaracha, which, aside from being named “the Cockroach”, I did not want to drink there because women were not allowed entrance and the patronage of gringos of any kind was strongly discouraged, usually through violence (I have always thought of as the Cantina and since I have neither the Force nor a fully functional light-saber, I wisely stayed away). So, while Antonio’s statement wasn’t technically true in an absolute sense, it was true in enough senses that made El Lounge the only after-hours bar I would enter during my time in Mexico.

“You seem awake enough. How late did you stay there?”

“Uhh, I didn’t actually go in.”

“Why, what did you do?”

“Well, I got to the door and just as I was going in, this chick walks out and asks me if I want to go home with her.”

“That’s ridiculous.” I said to the five foot four, pudgy, sun-burnt, Texan “There is no way that happened.”

“I have been here for four months and I can assure you that that does indeed happen, and quite often I might add.” He continued his story while I made numerous mental notes reminding myself to not shake his hand or share a drink with him for the remainder of our acquaintance. “So, this chick invites me to her place and I think ‘why not?’ so I go to her place. Now later, I’m on her roof and I say to myself ‘Whitfield, you’re gonna need to smash this window’. . .”

“Whoa! Hold on a sec there. It seems to me that a large and possibly important part of your narrative has been misplaced. How did you come to find yourself on this roof and was I correct in hearing that when you speak to yourself you call yourself Whitfield?”

“Well, Whitfield is my actual name. I started going by Antonio because that’s where I’m from and no one here in Mexico can seem to pronounce Whitfield.” This being a suitable explanation I was able to move on and with the aid of the crowd that had now gathered,I was able to urge Whitfield to fill in the gaps of his story. It was revealed that the diminutive Texan had indeed engaged in sexual relations with a stranger who had passed out promptly after their coupling. Whitfield let himself out only to find that he was trapped in the courtyard which was hemmed in by a large wall topped with broken glass and jagged metal. The door to the house was locked and his lover could not be roused by any conventional means, leading him to climb upon the roof so that he could break a window, climb inside, and rouse the stranger long enough to gain access to a key that would allow him to make it beyond the courtyard and into the street.

Though this story was odd and entertaining, it seemed like Whitfield was still keeping something from us and, after further probing, it was discovered that the amorous activity was anal in nature, he had not used a condom, and that Whitfield had been so drunk that he could not recall if he had ever glimpsed the front of the stranger leading him to grudgingly question the sex of his partner. Luckily, one of the twins soon began dating a horse-faced local girl whom even the instructors at La Academia referred to as “Cabesona” who had been outside El Lounge on that fateful night and was able to clear up our mystery.

Have you ever accidentally used Holy Water to make your coffee. . .

2010-01-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

. . . resulting in sharp pains in your stomach due to some sort of internal cosmic warfare in which the power of Christ compels the demons of feculence to be exorcised into the abyss?

I have recently finished an experiment which lasted the whole of 2009. I committed myself to a reading list, but one that was descriptive rather than prescriptive in that I only added books to the list once I had completed them. I have never had too much of an urge to create a reading list to follow for any period of time but I have toyed with ideas of recording my reading habits, and must thank Evan for suggesting this wonderfully simple one that I overlooked. Below is a the list, broken down by month, of what I read in 2009:

January:

Twilight Watch, Starship Troopers, Care of the Soul, The Reason For God

February:

House of Leaves, Preacher TPBs 1-9, A Game of Thrones

March:

A Clash of Kings, Bird by Bird, Y the Last Man TPBs 1-10, A Storm of Swords, A Feast of Crows, On Bullshit, Fables and Fairytales

April:

American Gods, Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin

May:

Assassin’s Quest

June:

The Bible, War and Peace

July:

Dead Until Dark

August:

Hood, Living Dead in Dallas

September:

Club Dead, Dead to the World, Dead as a Doornail, Definitely Dead, All Together Dead

October:

Les Miserables, When You Are Engulfed In Flames, Luck in the Shadows

November:

The Name of the Wind, Foreskin’s Lament, Player Piano, Last Watch

December:

Fahrenheit 451

First of all, I am a little bit ashamed that I only completed 36 books in 2009. True, The Bible, Les Miserables, and War and Peace are all beasts that are several times longer than the average novel, but I still feel like I should have been able to complete more books in a year's time. One may look at this list and say "Shit Andrew, you sure have a lot of goddamn silly books on that there list." To which I would reply "That is true" as I fire my automatic shotgun into the advancing zombie horde (because obviously this question was asked by a well read yokel during a zombie apocalypse in which we are fighting our way to freedom through a bayou. I think that it is important to talk about things like reading, self reflection, as well as future goals during the realization of any type of apocalypse, because, aside from basic survival, there are many good reasons to clear the land of the violent undead. Not the least of which being that as one of the sole survivors (due mostly to my excellent shotgun skills) I would be in an excellent position to reshape society into one that once again prizes books above other forms of entertainment).

I have read a lot of fluff in the last year, and I hope to change that somewhat, but the fact remains that reading, for me, is definitely a form of entertainment. I love the books that require a bit of brain sweat, but I also like the books that allow me to turn off the unending self-reflection, social commentary, insane ideas, and inane chatter that is my cerebrum. Also, I feel I can defend almost every book on this list (except for Luck in the Shadows, fuck you Powells for suggesting this book as an acceptable place holder for George R. R. Martin's tardy novels. Fuck your stupid face and this awful waste of paper.). Even the Sookie Stackhouse series contains some very interesting complexities and social commentary. Plus, I read that series via audio book (if you want to argue with me about the validity of "reading" audio books, go right ahead but I cannot think of a safer way to read a book while driving or riding a bike.) and I am falling in love with the accessibility of audio books and find that I would rather listen to a book for a half hour than watch just about any show on television.

For the next year, I plan on continuing my reading list, but I hope to post it each month with a short defense of each book I read. I say defense because I don't want to do a full fledged book review, and I know that I will continue to read many fun books but feel that I ought to try and keep myself accountable that the books I read are also reasonably worthwhile. I also hope to read a lot more books this year, and, as I have already finished three books this year and in the midst of two more, I believe I can reach this goal.

This is but one of several challenges I have set for myself in the next year, and, like this reading list, I believe that I will only post them once I have successfully completed them. That way, if I fail miserably, no one will ever know. But if I don't post any completed challenges, feel free to assume I have died or my life has fallen apart completely and I have moved into my parents basement/tool shed where I chain smoke in between shots of some horrific grain alcohol as I play World of Warcraft and masturbate furiously in my specially reinforced chair that is necessitated by my corpulence.

Halden: "This is, to date the most scientifically accurate summary of the nature of our blog. For the record."

2009-12-23T14:56:00.000-08:00

I have started an experiment with me most excellent freind, Halden. We have decided to combine our culinary skills and editorialize them on the vast series of tubes you see before you. They will reside in a magical mansion who’s front door is a perfectly smoked slab of baby back ribs. . .where taps are never for water. . .where beautiful mermaids serve you buffalo wings of mind blowing deliciousness on a platter of magic bacon cooked by a unicorn’s laser vision. The drinks are always cold (unless they are supposed to be hot, in that case they will be hot. . .but not so hot you would scald your tongue because that would just ruin the whole experience), the food is probably bad for you (but always worth it), and, depending on how much we have consumed of either of those two, the posts are interesting.

We invite you to enter into the world of two minds in perpetual synergy. Our dreams will thrust themselves upon reality, pleasuring her with our wonderful meat and most excellent alcohol. You are welcome internet.

mightyvaldenkor.wordpress.com

Take a look, it's in a book. . .

2009-10-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

I found out today that I am now older than Reading Rainbow. Reading Rainbow first aired on June 6, 1983 and continued airing new episodes until November 10, 2006. Reruns were aired until August 28, 2009 when PBS pulled the plug on Reading Rainbow completely. This means that as of September 8, 2009 I have actively existed for longer than Reading Rainbow (I was born ten days after the first show aired).

Initially I was surprised to find out that Reading Rainbow had continued to exist long after my childhood, but then I became nostalgic. I remember watching Reading Rainbow quite often. I am not completely sure why I watched this show; in fact, I am pretty sure I never read a single book LeVar Burton talked about. We didn’t have cable and my parents could plop us kids in front of the television with this on, secure that there would be no boobs or cussing (most people would add violence to that list but as most of my childhood games were competitions/battles with my brother involving fire, falling or pushing each other from heights, burying one another, or other forms of violence and we would only get in trouble if one of us had to go to the hospital or damaged somebody’s property, I figure that my parents weren’t all too worried about exposing us to violence as we were pretty good at being creatively violent all on our own).

I also remember watching it often on my own, even before I learned to read at age seven (Yeah I started late, I blame my mother who “home-schooled” me until 2nd grade which allowed me to discover fire and all the aforementioned games, but never allowed me to learn to read). I had the theme song memorized and anticipated the ironic one liner that ended each book review because I definitely did trust Mr. Burton’s word but if he insisted, I guess I could try to force myself to doubt him. How could you not trust the helmsman of the star ship Enterprise? If the operator of a fucking spaceship tells you that a book is good, you better believe him. And if said operator is Geordi La Forge, a blind guy who can see with the aid of a kick ass mechanical visor, pretty much making him a cyborg, and this guy shows up and tells you that reading is cool, then you know without a doubt that reading is totally fucking awesome.

Whew, got carried away for a second there, but Reading Rainbow is a great show. Several tattoo shops I know of have a couple of free tattoos they are willing to give people. Usually it is a crappy drawing of a stinky beaver or some such nonsense but I have always dreamed of finding a tattoo shop that has the Reading Rainbow logo as a free tattoo. I would take that deal in a heartbeat.

I am currently reading the unabridged version of Les Miserables; a monstrous tome and a fantastic literary work. I feel that I have come a long way since I learned how to read as I am pretty sure that I just remembered the first book I ever bought (I have absolutely no idea what the first book I ever read was). It was a school book order and since I attended a Christian school we had to order from some shitty Christian publishing company. The first book I ever bought was the initial installment in the nearly unremembered, Christian, science fiction series, Zaanan. I remember thinking that these books were cool because instead of being rectangle they were square. That seemed totally futuristic to me for some strange reason. I believe that Zaanan was some sort of galactic police officer or detective or something like that because I remember mysteries being solved. The best thing about Zaanan, however, was that he got to wear these bad ass bracers that could shoot laser beams. I throw around words like “best thing” and “bad ass” but really, the only good thing about these books was the idea of these books. I am pretty sure that even in second grade I realize that the Zaanan series was pretty lame. . . But don’t take my word for it.

Found Poetry: A recorded testimony of drunken brotherly love transcribed for your reading pleasure.

2009-08-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

I woke up in the middle of the night and listened to the first message for some unknown reason and, as I was mostly asleep at the time, the message integrated itself into my dreams and I had drunken, poetic conversations with Jordan all night. I did not recall this until I received the second message which allowed me to discover the first message as well as the text. The process of writing these messages down was necessary for both posterity and comprehension. If you would like a dramatic reading, feel free to give me a call.

7/26 6:00am (text)

Everythinh’r good,

nothing’s great,

things are stuff, yet all is well.

Love jordan. L & s…

Good morning butthorn.

Sometime while I was asleep on 7/27

Huurrr Ho ho ho ho ho

Here’s a uh, little message

from Jordan,

your brother

uumm

Clap clap clap

ahhh sometimes we wish

sometimes we piss

sometimes we wander

other times we Saunter

aaaaand other times we falter

and the other day I met a guy named Walter

Sometimes there’s splash

Sometimes you just go and pass

And then there are other times when we see a light

Aaaaaand there are other times when we see a fright. . . movie.

But in the end,

sometimes we just send…BAD phone call messages

Great!!

Ate, sate, bate, crate, late…as always

Click…

lick, slick, tick…

The end. . ..dick

7/28 4:28am

What!?!…

what what what, is that soot

on my foot.

My foot, my shoe, don’t you?

Did not do those things that we did

and was done back when we had fun

now how did we… wow!

Those great crops

and give me props for not selling,

reeling those silly feelings that I was selling…

But please, don’t be a tease,

I say excuse you

when I sneeze.

Aaaaaaaaaand take cord when you snore and ignore…

myyyyy upbringing?

I see a stop sign

and I did not see Coralline

cause the movie looks like a little bit of a sloosey

and stuff

Safeway is the wrong way

I much prefer danger way.

If you remember that September or October and November

where we painted and instigated

much paintings,

many feastings…

Rooftops are great by the way,

I’m feel okay

It’s not all it’s up to beeeeeee…

and we see which is me Jorban,

Lorban, Jobs, Cobs, not Nobs

Okay…

I get punched in the face in the end

so send me a message and we may uh, chrisbinosomebitch…

woops, now I’m just making up words.

were nerds,

butter turds…

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrllllllhrhghgsge sue poo you crew too

The end.

Holler back… girl.

Huh, jen, dun, du du duuu uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Boop!

Epic Goals

2009-05-21T16:39:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I said "I am not going read anything or start a project until I finish reading the Bible and War and Peace." I immediately realized the absurdly epic nature of my vow and was even more pleased to realize that I was completely serious.

I plan on finishing before my birthday, a mere 26 days hence.

That is all.

Semantic vortices, musings, and doppelgangers

2008-10-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written for a while. My reading has slowed down too but that is because I am reading meatier texts. I should be reminded that writing is far more stimulating than not writing more often.

When I first started sitting in on a literary theory class taught by Professor Philippian, he explained that theory must be thought of as tools with which we can understand the text. Each of these tools, used correctly, will bring out a different understanding of the text. A reader could use the same tool to search every text just as a can opener or a chainsaw could be used to open a can it is just that some theories are better suited for a text than others. At the same time I see the problem of the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail because it seems to me that literary theories are mostly a way to state your foremost bias as a reader.

From the beginning I wanted there to be a sort of swiss army tool; a literary theory that doesn’t set one bias over another in the reading and understanding of a text but exposes all biases and can thus search for understanding in a more holistic manner. The problem with this is that not all people contain all biases so there will automatically be preferential treatment toward one or another venue of comprehension and no one person can possibly grasp all of his own biases. And if, in some amazing happening, a reader could look at a text from every possible angle with every possible bias, writing or speaking of that understanding would last forever. And if it was trimmed down to a digestible size it would just as absurd as attempting to say every word I am going to say today in one second; the result would be an incomprehensible yalp. The impossibility of a functioning swiss army tool doesn’t detract from my desire for one but requires me to search all the harder for this fantastic absurdity.

When we came to Deconstructuralism (also called poststructuralism), I was at first quite put off by the school of thought. Deridda starts his essay with “Perhaps” and constantly speaks in such ephemeral doublespeak that there is no possible way to find any definitive meaning in the essay. I don’t know why I didn’t like the essay at first; I guess I momentarily forgot how much I love absurdity.

I have been thinking more and more about Deconstructuralism and have come to realize that it is a sort of swiss army tool. Deconstructuralism takes a reading of the text down to the meaning of words but says that words only have meaning in relationship or context to other words. When meaning is broken down this far the author, the reader, history, belief, and language all have a say in what the inherent meaning of a text is and are all fallible because communication is inherently flawed. Deconstructuralism is a great humbler of critics because it will always call foul on any critic who claims authority over knowledge. Not because it claims to be right (which would, of course, be a paradox) but because everyone is wrong in that we can never be totally right. Deconstructuralists are kind of kooky because they can never say anything definitive beyond you are wrong because you are only partially right.

This seems to be a rejection of any metanarrative and revulsion to absolute truth but I disagree. Deconstructualists are driven to a constant rejection and embrace of ideas because partial truth is never sufficient. They are driven by a search for absolute truth even though the fallibility of language renders all efforts to quantify Truth incomplete thus allowing them to question critics while accepting their ideas.

Maybe I simply like Deconstructuralist criticism because it can agree with my own feelings that absolute truth exists but at the same time is unquantifiable in human language thus making it incomprehensible and untenable in the current human reality of a finite realm, and since it can not be grasped because it is beyond human ability of conception, in the same way, it does not exist in a human language defined world. Or maybe I just like it because I love semantic vortexes and infinite play of language in interpretation (here I am not talking only about texts but about all communication everywhere).

Now that I have got my absurdity out for the day let’s turn to a more serious matter. I googled myself the other day. Simply typing “kooy” into the search engine did not render the results I had hoped for though I did find out that there was a musician named Peter Kooy who is apparently popular in some circle or another and that my last name was originally spelled Kooij (Grandpa always said that there was once a j in our name).

What I was really searching for was an answer to the question of how important was my blog in the realm of my self as defined by a Google search. When I typed in my full name I got better results though not quite as good as I hoped for. The first result was a hit from classmates.com. The second was Andrew Kooy on facebook. The third was my myspace page. Finally, in the fourth place I found Kooy to the World.

My first reaction was: “Fucking myspace. Sure that profile has existed longer but my blog is far more interesting than myspace.” My second reaction was: “Wait! Facebook? I don’t use facebook. Did somebody set up a facebook page on my behalf?” And in an attempt to catch the lousy bastard I clicked on the link to see what “my” facebook had to say about me. I wish that someone had simply set up a false account for me but the truth is far more insidious. I have a doppelganger.

The doppelganger Andrew Kooy currently resides in Toronto, Ontario and has many Dutch friends, lots of Vander-something names. As doppelgangers originate in Germany I am sure that he followed a linguistic route to track me down. Dutch is an offshoot of German so of course he went to the Netherlands, fell in love with the myth of Kooy, and immigrated (just like my ancestors) to Canada. There I am sure he is honing his skills of subterfuge so that he may destroy me, feast on my soul, and take my place in society when he finally confronts me. Luckily I know that I am my doppelganger’s goppeldanger and have skills I too must hone if I am to prevail. Fear and tremble Andrew Kooy. I, your nemesis, know of your existence and will not stop until I taste of your destruction.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!

A Taste of Redding: Part 3

2008-10-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

My first experience of “pint night” at Carnegie’s is one I hope to never forget (I would say that I will never forget it but there is always the possibilty of senility or brain damage). My friends had spoken of the wonders of pint night for some time. I always wanted to go, but it occurs on Wednesday nights and my friends were usually busy. Finally, some time in the fall a couple of years ago, my friend Scott gave me a call and we journeyed together to Carnegie’s.

The pub was crowded. The line for beer ended at the front door and there were no tables open when we entered. We waited in line, figuring that by the time we got our beer, a spot would open up for us.

Pint night, in my opinion, is a very good idea. It goes like this: To enter into pint night you first buy a pint glass tattooed with the decal of a brewery of your choice (that is, if the brewery of your choice is on tap and they have not run out of glasses from said brewery). The cost of the pint glass is six dollars which includes your first pint. Each pint after this is only two dollars so if you drink four pints you will only be paying three dollars per pint and you have a glass to keep. Carnegie’s only has about a half dozen beers on tap but they are good beer and you can change your preference each time you fill up so I deem pint night to be a good, economic choice for midweek beer enjoyment.

While we stood in line we didn’t speak much. As I said before, the pub was crowded and I don’t like having conversations publicly. Usually I try to move away from everyone if I am even to answer my cell phone. I wanted to wait until we were seated, just another part of the crowd. Waiting in line always makes me feel as if I am on stage, as if everyone is watching me, waiting to see if I will remain patient or become exasperated. Overhearing conversations while in line or in close proximity to a line is not a deviation from the norm by being nosy or “listening in” on another’s conversation; it is a right of the bored.

The line moved slowly. Not many people filed in behind us and by the time we had halved the distance to the bar there were only four people trailing us, first two women, and then two young men. As we neared the bar I noticed that the four middle aged customers sitting directly at the bar were not partaking in pint night but were imbibing wine. I scowled internally as they flaunted their excess by circumventing the excellent deal of bargain beer. I filed them away as philistine lushes due to the caliber of wine they were drinking as well as the slurred timber and public volume of their conversation.

As we edged ever closer to the front of the queue, one of the men at the bar turned around and attempted to focus with the particular effort forced by inebriation on the words printed on the sweatshirt of the young man behind us in line.

“You ever been there,” the older man said.

“What? You mean here?” the younger man replied, pointing at the words on his sweatshirt that advertised some casino in Ferndale, California. “Yea, that’s where I bought the sweatshirt.”

“Oh,” said the old man, seeming to deflate for a moment before expanding with joyous confession, “I fucked a sheep there once!”

I turned away from the man and looked at Scott with wide eyes in an attempt to ask “Is this really happening?” without uttering a word.

“Yea, me and four of my buddies went down there and fucked a sheep, but I went first; no sloppy seconds for me!”

“Uh, okay” the young man replied. How do you respond to such an oddly exuberant confession of bestiality?

I attempted to contain my shocked laughter. The older man turned around, paid his bill, and left with his friends before we got our first beer.

“Did he just say that he ‘fucked a sheep there once’?” I asked without attempting to hide the incredulity in my voice.

“I think so” the young man spouted in the midst of his own unbelieving laughter.

“Who does that?” I asked Scott as we stepped up to begin pint night.

As he took out his wallet to show is ID to the barkeep he clapped me on the shoulder and said without reserve or need to contain the laughter in his voice, “Welcome to Redding, man.”

Guess who's employed. . .

2008-10-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

Yea, that's right. I got a job.

I am writing articles for a magazine. . . Some of my stories were bought by a publishing company and I have recieved an advance to write "A Dirt Kid's Cookbook: You don't have to eat shit just because you aren't getting paid shit". . . I am delusional and sometimes talk to my cat about philisophical matters. . . I have sold out and am a loan advisor for Simpson University's adult education programs. . . I am an ass.

My job is in the afternoon and evenings which is nice because I tend to do most of my writing between seven in the morning and noon. I am excited because there is no possible way for my new job atmosphere to be as dysfunctional as my last job. Plus I get paid more.

I bought a pink tie which I will wear to my first day of work. I will ride my bike to work even when it is raining and cold because I like the rain and cold and because my car has a gasoline leak (as well as an oil leak, a transmission fluid leak, and a water leak not to mention the bad breaks and leaky tire).

Since I have too much time, I have become a horrible steward of it. I hope that I will become a bit more focused.

I don't know why I am writing in short sentences, a stuccotto voice of direct ideas. It makes me feel like I am writing on a typewriter for some reason.

Also, I am going to insert one of my past writings into this post because it is short and though I wrote it over a month ago, it reminds me of my current thoughts.

Day Screw You: September 3, 2008

What? I skipped from day three to screw you? Yea, that’s because I didn’t write for a few days except to write up some book summaries (I hope to eventually review all of the books I own, but that sounds too noble I HAVE NO EXCUSE). I am a lazy piece of shit, not working so I could write but then not writing because I got lazy. What the fuck is wrong with me, sabotaging my weird ideal. Maybe I will have to start posting these as blogs, then paying people to read them and harangue me when I get lazy.

Anyway, the plans. I am not writing any stories. I have various stories I tell but have never written down, many are of my childhood but these things get collected as you go. I kind of want to start with some of the more recent stories, ones I might call “A Taste of Redding.” These are weird happenings that I feel truly typify the Redding experience. Maybe if I got those out I could start clearing out all the other junk stories I have stored in my mind and someday build a figurative colossal story machine robot (sorry, sometimes the coffee hits me weirdly about now and my mind is a bit of jumbly jittery nonsense).

Also, I am going to start posting the "Taste of Redding" stories. I only have a couple of them written thus far but I find them funny and interesting. They are numbered with the most recent one as first but shouldn't be read by their numerical order. I hope that you find them at least somewhat interesting, funny, and offensive.

An observational story about birds that ends in a fantasy

2008-10-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Day 3: August 27, 2008
I flew a homing pigeon out hell’s kitchen window
Left an SOS infested bottled nestled in his grip. . .
. . . I observed him fly ten feet then drop the bottle to the devils

It is strange the things that make you write or not write. I am committed to seeing this experiment through and continue writing every day but I was considering putting off my morning writing to see how evening writing suited me. I, however, lost the desire to continue reading and the pigeons got me thinking.

I am not all that interested in birds or the idea of flying, which I feel might be some of the reason why various people find birds so intriguing. Growing up in a fairly agrarian society I was raised with a familiarity of wild animals and, in my youth, could tell you the type of a bird (local ones mostly) from sight or sound and was capable of finding the nest of many of the most cunning camouflage artists.

My family used to raise pheasants. There were stacked round incubators that were the size and shape of the dryers people use to make homemade beef jerky or fruit leather only more industrial looking as they were made of unadorned metal. Farmers would bring us eggs that they collected as they harvested fields, upsetting the pheasant’s natural nests. We would place them in the incubator, rotating the eggs so they all got sufficient heat. I was very young at this time and loved watching the eggs hatch. It amazed me how a being could remain in such a compact space for so long before deciding to peck its way out, stretch out its neck, feet, and wing stubs, and wobble around its brethren who decided to remain indoors for the day. I was told that these little birds needed to get themselves out of their shells. The struggle was necessary for some reason; maybe it was to make them grateful for their freedom. But I am not that interested in birds, how would I know? I was impatient, though, and sometimes I would help them.

After they hatched, we would transfer the chicks to a low profile metal apparatus that included a trough for feed and a removable bottom tray so we could empty out the poop. These rectangle mini coops seemed to be able to hold about 100 chicks, and I always kind of wanted to let all the chicks roam free in my little room. My mom would come to get me up after a nap and I would be sitting on the floor and chicks would cover every surface. I would be playing chicks and blocks, chicks and Johnny Appleseed Ball (the tintinabulous bobbling orb of my childhood), chicks and that weird homemade bunny rabbit game I never knew the rules to or purpose of. But I was too young and did not yet have the strength or dexterity to open the cages.

When the pheasants grew too large for our little coops, a man would come, pick them up, and take them to open air pens I could see from the road every time we went into town. These pens were long and domed by netting, surrounded by chain linked fence so they coyotes would not eat them. The pheasants would remain here until they grew to adulthood and were released just in time for hunting season. Coasties and local hunters would come for a pancake breakfast that was held in the community hall across the street the morning of hunting season. I always hated getting up at four to help cook.

I never thought any of this was weird. That we would spend time preserving wildlife so that it could get shot was something I never questioned. Maybe this nurturing of the species so that its death could function as sport fomented my adolescent pastime of tormenting the pheasant’s varied winged cousins.

We stopped raising pheasants when I was still young. I am not sure why, we still had incubators in the garage when I was in high school, but I think we stopped raising the little buggers when I was about eight (I just called my mother and found out that the reason we stopped raising pheasants was because nearly all the pheasants were eaten by coyotes as soon as they were released into the wild and apparently that meant that our efforts were meaningless so we ceased them).

Though we had no more pheasants, I remained interested in eggs and their transformation into birds, and my love of climbing trees allowed me continuing opportunities of observation. I would collect baby birds that had fallen from their nests not yet ready to achieve flight. They would hop and flap and offer a diverting challenge to capture but I usually prevailed before the cats would and I would make toilet paper nests and feed them mushed up worm in an attempt to nurture them until they were ready to fly ( I even saved a baby duck we later named Bilbo from our cat, Solomon. We kept that duck for quite a while but it fell off of the deck and was eaten by cats in the end). My mom was always telling me that I would get ticks or fleas or something (bird flu didn’t exist back then) but she would usually allow my doomed attempts. Doomed because every single one of the birds died. All, that is, except one. The last bird I tried to save stayed alive for four days before I tried to see if it could fly. It was a little windy and I figured that a breeze would help the little orphan so I tossed it into the air. It took off, flew across the yard, and landed in our pine tree. I was very pleased with my success and excited that my foster bird had decided to live so close to me. I hoped that it would remember and trust me, that I could go outside with some bird seed whenever I pleased and it would fly over and land on my hand. Other birds would learn from that one and soon I would be the bird master and eventually beast master; able to call all sorts of animals forth with my inescapable will and animal magnetism.

Looking back, this idea is utterly ridiculous for more than the obvious reasons. You see, I killed the bird’s mother. My friends and I were often killing birds with rocks, BB guns, or sling shots. I remember shooting birds once on my friend’s farm. I hit a big fat robin in the neck with a BB. It plummeted from the tree and flopped around, spraying us with what little blood it had in its body. I began to feel slightly bad, not because I had hit my intended target, but because of the spectacle of its suffering. So I stomped on it. Not at first due to its erratic flopping, but I got it eventually.

This bird’s mother, however, I ended using my slingshot. I did not raise the birdling because I felt bad for killing its mother because, actually, I knew that the bird had a chick in her nest, and I had not attempted to raise a bird for a while, and I was bored. I suppose that this makes me sound like a sick child, a serial killer in training. But we all play god as children, I guess it’s just lucky for us all that I stopped after my first success.

My family more readily remembers the tortures I inflicted on my sister’s parakeets. There was one named Sergeant Sprite, or Captain Sprite, or some martial rank Sprite, or was it Plasmodesmodda, I can’t remember exactly anymore. And I didn’t really torture them, I think harass is a more appropriate word. Anyway I took that parakeet out of the cage and placed him on my snare drum; I wanted to see how he would react. I banged on the drum and he took off. It was pretty much the reaction I expected. I didn’t, however, expect him to fly out of the open window to disappear forever. I got into a lot of trouble for that. I bet if I brought this story up to my sister she would remember the name as well as yell at me for losing her bird.

Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the reason I started writing: the pigeons around my apartment and how they reminded me about the fantasies I would have on the walk to work of killing geese.

I never knew that there were pigeons in Redding until I moved to my new apartment. It still seems a bit preposterous to me that they are able to survive here; I wouldn’t have thought they could live in this climate. As the scorched bones of summer’s greedy maw envelope northern California and the air feels so hot that my lungs seem thoroughly bronzed and ready for a swimsuit contest, it seems to me that fluffy sky rats would be prime candidates for spontaneous combustion. Not only do they live here but it is evidenced by the peck holes and feathers in my screen as well as the frantic cell phone message I received from my wife last week about pigeons attacking our apartment, that these birds have some sort of vendetta against our bedroom window.

Aside from that, I do not believe that these birds are quite right (mentally, that is). Every morning as I sit on my deck reading or writing, all of the pigeons will leap from the rooftop, fly about a hundred yards away over the next building, then fly back and re-perch on my apartment’s roof. They do this every twenty minutes all morning. Nor do the coo beatifically as recorded in poetry or remembered from past experiences. The feral gurgles they emit put me in mind of the insane mutterings of a gang of escaped mental patients. That and their banal peregrinations reek of an institutionalized exercise routine. I imagine them all repeating the call of their warden, mimicking his tone and mannerisms, “Okay boys, once around the yard. That’s enough lollygagging, again you lazy bums.” I suppose that the ruined screen on our window would be proof enough for most people that these birds are crazy but I like to have my theories validated by multiple sources.

Another thing that strikes me is that whenever these birds take flight and are just about to turn back, two or three of the birds continue flying past the next apartment complex and further until they are barely visible to me. It’s as if these few pigeons remember that they are birds and their domain is the sky. For a moment they remember freedom and adventure before they falter and panic because they also remember that they are part of a flock. They wing back in a frightened flurry, consoling themselves in community. Unable to convey their epiphany for fear that in exercising this one freedom they will shatter the flock, destroying what means to be what they are.

Oh yea, and the geese. Every morning on my way to work I would walk by a whole bunch of geese. There were always two groups of them, and they were always in the same general area each morning.

The first group consisted of about fifteen to thirty adult geese. They located themselves on or around a dock in the river. Sometimes they were on the sidewalk. Sometimes they were in the water. Generally they projected an air of apathy toward my morning constitutional.

The second group had only five to seven adult geese and at least fifteen young geese ranging in age from new-hatched to adolescent. The young geese would shuffle with panic and leap into the river as I walked by while the adults hissed and postured making me feel penitent for interrupting their morning routine. This group I called “the kiddie swim class” and the first I called “the adult swim class.”

This job I was walking to everyday, as I have said before, I hated with about as much passion as I could muster for any other thing in life. And, after a time, my mind began chronicling a more interesting reality to cope with the soul crushing boredom of actual reality.

I imagined spending my hard earned money on memorabilia purchased from eBay: perhaps the katana from Kill Bill or maybe a replica elfin blade from Lord of the Rings. As I neared the dock of the adult swim class I would drop my bag, draw my sword, and rush into the water. My face a mask of berserker rage, I so wildly abandoning my humanity that even the geese, grown fat and docile, accustomed to the leavened sacrifices of normal people, would not be able to react to the unholy chaos of a man breaking free from the nine to fiver’s hell. Cleaving left, then right I would become drenched in the shower of blood and turmoil of flapping headless geese. But then again, those blades are never sharp. None the less, my wild flailing would be rewarded with the satisfying thwack as I connect with their expressive necks, mocking flight as their boneless trajectory lands them on the sidewalk, the dock. The only blood being the small pools that will collect by their beaks after I am gone. I will leap as Grendal among Beowulf’s clansmen, ending their civilization, ruining hearth and home in my unabashed lust for destruction. They will have no hero. Their panicked attempts at flight will only give me a better angle

The kayaker about to launch his boat will have been the first to notice. The cyclist will stop and stare. The elderly couple will be unable to look away. Not even when his wife faints will the man turn from the ruin, his hand still holding onto hers, no longer forming a v, but a straight line pointing toward the goose corpse that has cushioned her fall.

I will step from the water, pick up my bag, and walk to work. I will, once again disturb the kiddie swim class. I will be chided for this but I will be merciful. Besides, I am well sated and have, for now, exorcised that demon. And I must hurry, lest they miss me back in data entry hell.

The police will question the witnesses. One will say that I leapt from the bushes shouting imprecations and brandishing a stick. Another will swear I came up from the water and used my bare hands. Yet another won’t be able to control their sobs long enough for a statement. Everyone will ask why a person would do such a thing. No one will have seen where I went. When faced with actions that completely reject that which is normally recognized as human, their minds will reject the possibility of my humanity and thus they will be incapable of recalling my face.

I will be safe. The police will question our office since we are so close to the river trail. My coworkers will mention that I take that way to work every morning and I will honestly say that I saw nothing. It was a different man who incited such rebellion against humanity’s norms. It was no human but a demon of unactualized potential that completed that avian holocaust. But there will be that unnoticed sword I will not be able to account to myself for. I will write it off as a particular of the peculiar amnesia that comes with the mind numbing work of a soul crushing job and I will be safe. I will be sane enough to survive work another day, and crazy enough to punch the clock again tomorrow.

Fresh out of Geppetto's Woodwork Asylum

2008-09-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

Day 2 August 26, 2008

Technology attempted to waylay my decision to write today, the computer restarted three times before it decided to stay on. My morning reading has focused my mind on writing and depression as well as how these two things are inseparable for me. My drive to understand my depression is a drive to understand my self. Thoughts are far too ephemeral and easily forgotten and thus do not suite me in this search. And so I must chronicle my strains so I may look back and say “so that is what I thought back then, does it still apply?” and “I touched on a truth their but now have a new understanding of it and can possibly verbalize it in a more meaningful way.”

Today I am a bit depressed. It is not the common “blue” feeling of life getting a little too overwhelming, nor is it the dank gray miasma of debilitating depression that saps my will to live and makes me lay down and think thoughts of melting into the floor and remaining motionless forever. Today I feel the smoldering embers of passion ready to burst into flame but afraid of what will be consumed. It is not the lack of emotion, which usually accompanies my depression, but the seething of all emotions which threatens to overwhelm me. I’ll see the ruined carcass of a raccoon in the road and start to cry. I’ll see a child spouting gibberish to his mother listening with half an ear and weep for the possibilities and hope. I imagine that I feel everything and want to tell everyone but know that I will be unable to speak. I will point and say “Look. See.” and you will say “yes, that is a dead raccoon” and “that child is annoying” and I will scream inside pleading with my mind to open up and communicate what I see. But the chemicals that interpret what I see do not know the chemicals that allow me to speak so I must observe in frustrated silence. I feel as if I am aware of all the possibilities. Possibilities and possibilities and possibilities. I have forgotten my skin at home and am bombarded by the fact that pain and beauty are intrinsically linked. Knowing that beauty has been refined by pain, tempered by sorrow, I can’t help but look at a gnarled tree, a transient wino, an immolated landscape and feel hatred, pity, and love. It’s a sort of jealousy, I suppose, as I attempt to absorb all the pain, seeking my own apocalypse so that I too may be refined, so that I too may be beautiful.

I believe that I have uncovered for you another of my flaws: a penchant for the dramatic bordering on melodrama. This insight, though, might also simply be a defensive mechanism allowing me to write off that which I feel so that I don’t truly have to engage in my emotions, which is probably just the part of me shaped by society to believe that men should do rather than feel.

Ah, but I started this out by stating that I wished to write about depression and writing. I guess this just goes to show that while these two things are linked within me, I can not always speak of them in the same breath.

I do not believe that it is possible to write an autobiography. I am not saying that it is impossible to write about one’s self, but as the self is always changing, when one recounts his own history, one is actually recounting the history of varying selves. I love telling stories of my experiences. I say “I did this”, “I said this”, or “I thought that” but it is not current Andrew that had any part but as observer and story teller. 17 year old Andrew looked at and felt things as a 17 year old. 25 year old Andrew is retelling the story with 8 years of details coloring the experience. He has forgotten some details, feels others are unimportant, and embellishes the story with details that may not have existed. There is as much fiction as non-fiction in my tales because the fallibility of the mind and the fact of growth emboss history with myth.

We all have albums of pictures of ourselves. We all look at old group photos and immediately seek ourselves out in the picture. This does not stem solely from narcissistic voyeurism: a desire to look at the past and lust after our younger bodies, fresher minds, and simpler dreams, or to take the opportunity to pat ourselves on the back saying “I was so young and stupid back then. Good job me for growing up.” I think that we are also often trying to prove our existence in this or that reality. I was a part of that team, I hiked this path when I was young, I drank that drink and hung out with those people. I digress from writing about writing to writing about pictures because in finishing “Life After God” I read of Coupland’s experience of taking a picture of and for a group of blind people who were out for a walk. His observations were of people who had faith in a sense that they did not take part in. I wonder what they will do with the photograph. They will never see it. They will never show their friends and say “There’s me. I can’t believe I thought that hairstyle was cool.” They will never sit alone and allow the photograph to conjure erstwhile sighs of the idyllic past. I imagine that when they show their friends the picture, inside they will be saying “Aha. See. I exist in your reality of a world with sight. I am in a world with vision even though I may never truly know what that means. The evidence is irrefutable (or so I am told), this picture validates my visible existence. I am an image even when you are not there to see me, even though I can never see myself.”

I also wonder at the action of taking a picture of blind people, for the blind people themselves. It seems a futile act, recording history for people in a medium they will never perceive. I do not want to become an author of illiteracy for the illiterate, speaking of and seeking out truth when all I have and will perceive are lies. I must try to write of my reality even though I am mired in it and can’t begin to actually perceive it because someday hindsight and retrospection might allow me to glimpse what I am seeking through writing. I have to believe that my awkward attempts to touch truth, to communicate will someday make sense to me, to others. In one sense I see myself as the photographer knowing that I must continue to take pictures of the blind, for the blind so that I, as a sighted observer, may remind the blind of a snapshot of their past so they may recount the experience (even if the sheen of details have been worn smooth by time). And as a blind man myself, I require that snapshot so that the sighted can glimpse my history in spite of my perceptions and so I may harbor hope that I may some day join those with vision and know what it meant to exist.

Side note: I write of writing here and I can’t help but wonder at the futility of the task. When will I cease to write of writing and simply write? Am I using my semantic meanderings as a stall tactic? If I talk of speaking but never open my mouth otherwise, have I really said anything?

Let's just pretend that the last week never happened.

2008-09-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

I was very sick this past week. It is not a good excuse but I did absolutely nothing last week because I was ill.

We got a kitten this weekend. He is a needy little bugger and makes it a bit difficult to type as he seems jealous of the keyboard's attention, attacking the keyboard and my hands equally in his search for attention. I have named him Rorschach, fulfilling my two requirements for the naming of pets: first, the name should be a real name and second, the name should have some sort of literary significance.

He is black and white spotted like the inkblots of the famed Hermann Rorschach (thus named after a real person), but I thought of the name in reference to the character from the graphic novel The Watchmen. In that novel, Rorschach has a mask that displays an ever changing inkblot (aiding him by possibly displaying the fears of the criminals he antagonizes as well as distorting the reader's perception of him as he is seen as an insane vagrant, vigilante, masked criminal, and possibly the only true hero in the novel (and, by the way The Watchmen is an amazing novel and I recommend it to all of you, especially those who would never deign to pick up a "comic book" because it is not serious or substantial reading. This is truly a very well written novel and should be studied if only for its destruction of the preconceived ideas about the form of the novel and its defiance of that which is appropriate for the "comic" genre). Also, this cat is thoroughly insane.

He reminds me of my nephew in his pre-language infancy. When petted, he flaps his front paws in wordless enjoyment just as Orion waved his hands about while perched in his high chair being fed.

I finally started reading East of Eden. I want to devour it but I am also afraid as if it is devouring me. It scares me because it is so far beyond anything I could ever write, it scares me because I can't absorb his passion and style like I usually do with everything I read. I love the dialogue partly because it is the most obvious fictional aspect of this book. The conversations are too honest, the brothers, Adam and Charles, are too true. They speak their naked observations with too much self actualization behind their words for the conversations to actually exist outside of fiction. This, however, is also one of the reasons why I think this book is so well acclaimed. We read the words of realization and probing dialogue and want to become the speaker. The characters are, at times, sick and neurotic, twisted and driven by wholly selfish impulses but we wish that in spite of our flaws we could speak with such clarity and confidently verbalize in the romantic garb of self actualization. But then again I am only about a sixth of the way into the book so I am sure that my opinions and observations will grow as I read on.

Finally, if I lapse again into silence feel free to harangue me in any way you choose.

The first of the past

2008-09-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

Day 1: August 25, 2008
Goodbye Blue Monday

Sometimes in the morning I feel as if I am still drunk. Not after a night of heavy drinking as the haze of inebriation clings and clouds, slowing movements and slurring thoughts. I had two beers last night without the driving force of slight intoxication as a goal, I was simply hot and I wanted to share. In the morning, without a schedule, I find myself forgetting who I am, where I am. Perhaps it is an early onset of senility but it lends itself to an odd introspection. I wonder who and why I am and there is an extended moment of disequilibrium as I worry that I am still asleep.

Today is my first day of unemployment. Self inflicted as I quit my job without another job lined up. I constantly wonder if I am an idiot but I would not have survived much longer at my old job. No English major who loves language and literature should ever attempt a career in data entry. It is interesting for a moment, communicating through numbers, income, expense. The only words written are names and businesses and sometimes a brief explanation to further clarity; communicating meaning using only numbers, organizing the chaos of facts. It was intriguing at first, as if I was learning and creating a new language, but the unbearable weight of an inactive mind begins to hurt after a time.

A mind-numbing office job will teach you that you have a soul.

Every day after work I was exhausted. It was not a physical fatigue as I had been sitting at a desk all day. I have spent most of my life doing physical labor and though I would end every day tired and sore, there was energy in the excitement of freedom and hope in the possibility of an evening full of actions of my own choosing. I may be over-exaggerating the pleasures of physical labor and waxing romantic as most are wont to do of the past, I think I usually just went home and had a couple of drinks while watching TV or playing video games or some such nonsense until I felt like falling asleep, but at least when you labor physically, you sleep well.

Neither was I mentally tired. I usually had one ear tuned to NPR while I woodenly entered datum, simply to maintain my sanity. The ladies at work always thought that I had music coming to me on my headphone and I was not about to disillusion them. They were very conservative republican types who view the type of informative world news I enjoy as liberal drivel and I would probably not have been allowed to listen if they had known what I was tuning in to.

Anyway, utter exhaustion without physical or mental fatigue proved to me that I had a soul, and that my job was killing it. Also, I knew that I had to quit when I realized that the greatest passion at that point in my life was the passionate hatred for my job (not to mention that they are currently getting severely audited by the federal government, and my moral opposition to some of the practices and procedures). I am not one to often be called emotionally healthy but even I could see that my situation must change.

And so today is the first day of my self inflicted exile from the working population. No more of the 9 to 5er’s anthemic woes. Fuck you Dolly Parton, earning fame through the catchy statement of fact as capitalism ossifies hopes and dreams in the stale necessity of monetary success. Sorry, it’s not your fault. I am full of bile.

My hope is to write, reversing the atrophy built up by my laziness and apathetic misuse of my own soul. I do not plan to start a blog, seeking validation in publication (also it must be noted that I am A: Chickenshit and B: Driven by a desire to reject that which is obviously popular, which is probably just an excuse based on a fear that my words will simply add to the sea of impotent vitriol and talentless passion. Also, I do not have internet). This is not to say that I will never post these. I believe that if the most beautiful poem ever created was destroyed unread, it would be devoid of all beauty and if the most insightful truth ever thought of went uncommunicated it would be utterly meaningless. Thus, writing to an audience of zero is as masturbatory as prolifically publishing incessant nonsense. Moreover, I am vain and believe that I am a fairly decent writer and my narcissism desires affirmation.

I do not want to state a goal for myself beyond writing, lest I open myself to the possibility of failure (or, to be honest, the even more terrifying possibility of success). I want to want to write. Perhaps for catharsis, perhaps because I believe that I glimpse a scintilla of Truth you can’t access and in exorcising my own reality I will be allowed to create and communicate that truth to you.

Thus I enter the wilderness, attempting to glut myself on the locusts and wild honey of the stories I have gathered often recited, never written, clothed in the skins of wild thoughts, living off the fat of my past.

The abrupt vista of possibilities threatens to send me into a catatonic rage, so to stave off hopelessness and depression, I will do my chores: Go to the DMV for new tabs and to register to vote, go to the post office to change our mailing address, go to Les Schwab and get my tire fixed, go to the old apartment to clean it so we can get our deposit back, and finally, look for a new job because I am too afraid to simply write.

Addendum of actual happenings Day 1:

Woke up around 7 am watched wife get ready for first day of class.

7:30 am made coffee set ottoman on deck, used empty cooler as desk. Wished I had a camera, beautiful picture: coffee, mug, press pot, book, cigarettes, etc.

7:45-8:30 am read half of “Life after God” excellent read, gave me the perfect balance of melancholic introspection to write (not too depressed, not too excited about life to hinder reflections)

8:30-10:45 am wrote though the last 45 minutes or so very little written: too much caffeine and not quite enough drive.

11:00-12:00 Fixed bike while heating up a burrito. Very difficult to fix bike as hands were shaking with far too much caffeine.

12:00-3:00 rode bike to post office then to DMV. Crashed on the way to DMV. Awkward crash, did a sort of belly flop over the handlebars. Managed to scrape both the palm of my left hand and road rash the back of my left forearm. Not sure how I managed that. Deep tissue bruise/ serious Charlie horse in left thigh. Leg very sore, feel a little gimpy but was mostly just embarrassed at my unskilled dismount. Picked up a new tire from bike shop and headed home.

3:41 Current time, had two messages from old job they can’t find anything, implied that I took some files with me. Called back and left message. Made myself a gorby, we didn’t have any cups so I used an old soda bottle from my car. Pleasant. Now must clean.

Now that I have joined the rest of society, I am sure that I will mearly discover that I exist.

2008-09-19T00:35:00.000-07:00

Oh shit. I've started a blog.

I am terrified. I guess I am a bit excited too. It is sort of like the feeling I would imagine accompanies picking a fight I am probably going to lose, but there is the slight chance that I might win, and getting the shit beat out of myself is an accomplishment of sorts. Also I am full of shit and getting some of it beat out of me sounds cathartic.

Three days less than one month ago I quit my job. "You quit your job with no other job lined up in an abysmal job market. That sounds like the very soul of stupidity." I agree. My intention was to read a lot and write every day. The reality is that though I did read voraciously, I barely wrote every other day. I did write something I truly appreciate and believe is fairly good but honestly, ONE WHOLE MONTH AND ONLY ONE THING WRITTEN THAT I CONSIDER GOOD. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING?

I know that I have been awarded a unique opportunity. My wife has a salaried job which earns more than double what we were making when she was student teaching and I was the sole earner. In fact, she was the one who suggested that I quit the job that was killing me (though my soul had been screaming for release for quite some time (I am continually surprised, though as she surprises me daily I should probably begin to expect it, at the amazing reality of healthy relationship. How was she able to verbalize and make possible that which I was completely unable to consciously grasp?).). I have an amazing amazing wife.

I have waited until now to start a blog because I did not want to have a reason behind my writing except to write. I did not want to become a slave to affirmation. I did not want an audience. I did not want to succeed (uh, i probably mean fail, but my pessimism can only accept success as delayed failure so it is really all the same to me). I have, however, become a mite delusional. I believe that it is a side affect of the lack of normal daily interaction known as "a job". Or maybe it is because my writing is so inherently masochistically narcissistic that I have found myself to have created an internal hell to replace the nine to five one I have so recently escaped (see, that right there is a product of this particular insanity. I have no idea what I meant by this paragraph.).

Anyway (oh and by the way I find that I often begin paragraphs with "anyway" I think that I am either attempting to convey my absent mindedness or am lazy and can think of no better transition than anyway), I decided, at the onset, to eventually post that which I have written. It turns out that "eventually" happens to fall on "right now" this year. Hopefully I will continue to write. I will intersperse the old with the new and since I have come to fear my written word I hope that I will succeed in the new category. Otherwise, this blog will be short lived (by the way keep your eyes out for day three; that is the thing I wrote which I actually love. If you don't like it, I will survive he said with an obvious need for affirmation. . .).

I would like to take a moment to briefly describe the situation I find myself in as I write this (not existentially or anything simply what I was doing before I started up the computer because it is odd enough to be notable). I am sitting in my garage drinking crappy beer alone (oh for the times of drinking great beer with friends) and working on some new sculptures. I am wrapping a baby cabbage patch doll with cellophane and subsequently with clear tape in order to create hundreds of ephemeral baby shells which I will then secrete (or maybe secret or maybe both) about the town in a blatant act of guerrilla art.