seize my slaves, mistreat them, kill them

( How I met my wife Elly )

Some photos from Australia, finally. All by the lovely Shannon, and all of the lovely people I met and the lovely places I went, although I wasn't necessarily present when the pictures were taken. (Warning: big spiders.)

( red and green )

Friends only.
Comment to be added.

I should be off to a going-away function, but first:

Item the First: Be still my sweater-loving heart

goldworm

Item the Second: Let's go dancing

like it would fit

Item the Third: Fondue party

not fast enough

Item the Fourth: Soda shop

full swing

Item the Fifth: I feel an almost sexual longing for this particular item*

i would SELL MY SOUL for you

No, seriously, it could be friends with my other lizard purse!


||||||

* My priorities are forever screwed. Uh, skewed. SKEWED goddammit.

Someone someone someone take me with you and receive my everlasting love.



(I'm such an everlastinglovewhore, I offer it up daily, BUT THIS TIME I MEAN IT!)

SERIOUSLY GUYS GIVE YOURSELVES A TREAT AND READ THIS BOOK.

There are passages of my book I know by heart.

By heart, this is not an expression I use lightly.

My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I'm at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells shit? -- small daily humiliations -- these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. Other damages I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that's been lost. It's true there's so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it's over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: KISHKES. I don't mean to make it sound like I've made a science of it. It's not that well thought out. I take it where it comes. It's just that I notice certain pattens. When the clocks are turned forward and the dark falls before I'm ready, this, for reasons I can't explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible. (We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood: to me that is the sound of childhood, heavy breathing and shoes scraping the hard earth.) Stiffness of the fingers is the dream of childhood as it's been returned to me at the end of my life. I have to run them under the hot water, steam clouding the mirror, outside the rustle of pigeons. Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don't know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in a world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big production just to bend them. To everything a season, to every time I've woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

Every morning, a little more.

--Nicole Krauss (The History of Love, pp10-11)

I have becomes disturbingly single-minded of late. Yesterday I misread "potato fields" in a Harriet the Spy sequel as "porno flicks". Oh sex, you're not the only thing in life.

Has anyone else ever had a dream about livejournal?

You know that fine line between Low Maintenance and Slob?
I think I'm perilously close to crossing it.
If I haven't already.

Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It's long since filled up the plain, and now it's creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it has already become out of date. It's a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel. In smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don't have the space, not unless you're a company president, a gangster, a politician, or the emperor. You're pressed against people body to body in the metro, several hands gripping each strap on the trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows.

No, in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head.

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise, and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it's not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren't born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who to laugh at.

Takeshi's place is the nightlife. Clubs, and bars, and the women who live there.

There are many other places. There's an invisible Tokyo built of them, existing in the minds of us, its citizens. Internet, manga, Hollywood, doomsday cults, they are all places where you go and where you matter as an individual. Some people will tell you about their places straight off, and won't shut up about it all night. Other keep it hidden like a garden in a mountain forest.

People with no place are those who end up throwing themselves onto the tracks.

My place comes into existence through jazz. Jazz makes a fine place. The colors and feelings there come not from the eye but from sounds. It's like being blind but seeing more. This is why I work here in Takeshi's shop. Not that I could ever put that into words.

-- David Mitchell (Ghostwritten, p 38-39)

***Y'all should check out his most recent novel, Cloud Atlas.***

Look what I found!

I want to wrap thick black cloth around my hands, make protected fists and use them to punch through things: glass, plaster, people, concepts. Mirrors most especially, I want to punch through mirrors, break through, see how the other half of me lives.

I want windows and eyes lined with something flash and reflective, tin foil maybe, something that will catch the light just right and bounce it back, sparkle prettily and hatefully. I want not to squint and grimace oh so unattractively in the middaylight.

I want more walks like this one, more days like today, more weird renaissance fairs in school parks, more sillyserious men with medieval clothes and weapons fashioned from modern materials. I want to add spare change to the lighter-and-plastic-bag bulges in my pockets, enough petty cash to buy green ceramic birds sitting forlornly among less attractive bric-a-brac, crocheted toilet paper holders, at weekend garage sales.

I want to live next to people in a wood-panelled house with a wood-panelled garage and a wood-panelled shed, with a tall wooden fence and a large wooden porch and (who knows, maybe) a wood-panelled toilet, wooden people with a save the trees no flyers please sticker on their mailbox.

I want wants that don't feel like needs. I want to write things that are true and undramaticized, to keep the ordinary ordinary, to not need dressings and trimmings and beautifications. I want real words to match the things I want to say.

I want to not feel like "aw fuck it" most of the time.

I want to know the gentleman in my userpic.

Hooter locked up his brakes and screeched to a gravel-spraying, fish-tailing stop along the shoulder. He snatched the cell phone from its cradle and threw it as high and far as he could into the pasture beside the road. Then he lifted his 30-30 from the rack, slipped between the wires of the fence, found the loathsome electronic gadget looking no worse for the wear and proceeded to blast away, like some prairie ninja, shredding the remains of remains. After each pull of the trigger he screamed, “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now you Japanese tin can, can you hear me now you &*%#@%!”

-- Cattle Today

"You Are Beautiful is a simple, powerful statement which is incorporated into the over absorption of mass media and lifestyles that are wrapped in consumer culture.

"This statement and the context in which someone finds it gives meaning to its message and purpose to this project. The intention behind this project is to reach beyond ourselves as individuals to make a difference by creating moments of positive self realization in those who happen across the statement: You Are Beautiful.

"Intention is the most important aspect of the You Are Beautiful project in its idea of purity. Graffiti and street art are an act not a style, but stylistically large corporations have been copying and using the 'urban decay' look to sell products.

"It all comes down to intention. Nothing is sacred. Everything that has a perceived value becomes commodified. Companies hire out teenagers to slap up stickers and posters, and pay their fines when they are caught by the police. This is not street art, but a marketing campaign.

"The reasons why street artists are doing what they are doing, in the way that they are doing, is not simply to question their surroundings; but to provide alternative perspectives, meanings, or values to those of consumerism.

"Advertising elicits a response to buy, where this project elicits a response to do something. The attempt with You Are Beautiful is to create activism instead of consumerism.

"You Are Beautiful uses the medium of advertising and commercialization to spread a positive message. Projects like these make a difference in the world by catching us in the midst of daily life and creating moments of positive self realization."

-- you are beautiful

for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul
for, oh, my soul

Three teenagers, two girls and a boy, run past the cosmetics counters at a major department store whisper-yelling, "Olfactory assault! Olfactory assault!"