Making the scene...I often have this scorn for the need others have for acknowledgement from their peers. When I was having dinner at S's I saw all the mid-thirties Ivy League professor boys showing each other their digital cameras, making academic jokes, reaffirming their boy love for each other...I am never sure if they love what they do or whether they just want others to love what they do.

It is hard because of my previous experience with scenes. Now that I am in academics it seems like just another scene. I've seen too many of these (ha ha) to be at all captivated or try to be a scenester extraordinaire. When it looks like a scene I just refuse to try but at the same time currently trying is a key to a future livelihood. This was not true of the punk scene (the first time I DID try...I must confess. The three previous scenes (I exclude mini-scenes) were: (1) The punk scene (2) The club scene (3) The Grateful Dead scene...In the punk scene I was what? 14 years old. So OK, I did try...I failed miserably but I tried...for a little while. I even remember when Jeff was in love with me cruelly cutting his hair with nail scissors at the Flipper show so that he would be more punk. His beautiful curly hair.

The club scene. Well, this is when the horrible truth began to hit me. I was of course magnificent at times and beautiful. I did not expect much attention. My one friend was a groupy who got someone from Alice In Chains to sleep with her, the other was an actual Playboy centerfold. But at the same time I noticed no one really paying attention to anyone...really. And I thought: This is interesting...Why? It suddenly dawned on me: They are looking to be looked AT. It was a sad example in utter self-defeat. EVERYONE was looking at everyone to see if they were looking at them. There were no potential admirers...only those hoping to be admired. I'll never forget sitting with Playboy centerfold for hours talking to the porn star's boyfriend. For some reason, Centerfold loved the porn stars' (plural) boyfriends. Yet, they were terribly boring. Then, when angling for a date with Axl Rose I told Centerfold how boring and dumb Axl Rose really must be. That sort of killed our friendship.

There was of course one exception--this was the case where one could be acknowledged by someone who everyone could not help looking at--e.g., a rock star, a celebrity. If such a person acknowledged you by speaking to you, having sex with you, etc. then this would break the cycle of self-defeat.

(3) Final scene: The Grateful Dead. Sadly, there was really nothing to talk about in this scene except...The Grateful Dead. Somehow...someway...people found infinite numbers of conversations that could center around such a singular subject. What was forbidden however was the 'meta-conversation.' Such as: What sort of social function does this fill? Unfortunately, I would engage in these sorts of conversations. I was truly hopeless in this scene. Yet, because of my ability to befriend stunning women (I'm not quite sure why) I was allowed entrance into certain levels of the hierarchy. These were the middling levels.

My one interesting conversation took place in a parking lot (lots of time was spent in parking lots in this scene) with an African immigrant. He told me that the Grateful Dead was, in his opinion, an escape valve for the meaninglessness grind of a capitalist society. Good answer.

There was the strange time I saw my best friend Julie C. from high school at the show. She told me she had stood behind me crying for an hour--but did not speak to me. She had hooked up and was traveling the country with a man who, although kind, had very few teeth left. I often wondered what happened to her after this. One thing I know: My other friend Julie told me that once she had asked to park their van in front of Julie's house. When Julie gave a party the other Julie--Julie C--had come in and dumped the entire bowl of rice pudding on her head and told her Grateful Dead boyfriend to lick off the rice pudding. Essentially, Julie C needed this guy to take care of her. I hope he still is...Julie C was relatively sane until her parents institutionalized her. After that, it all went downhill.

But I digress...Back to academia. My problem in academia is that I cannot engage fully, wholeheartedly and without reservation. I cannot make the scene in other words. I continue to think thoughts about the absurdity of the scene and although I am careful not to express them, somehow...I think people can tell...Again, it is easy for me to make friends with the women at the top somehow. So I see, but from the outside.

Now...I would like to reveal my own hypocrisy...In fact, I was planning on keeping this short and making a brief observation of this nature but needed to set up just how lengthy said hypocrisy has been...

I want to be worshipped. I don't just want to be loved, but adored and adored by all. At the same time when I observe others in their (often fairly successful) attempts for social group membership and acknowledgement I find myself unable to anything except thwart and destroy any attempts at such acknowledgement on my own part. I avoid at all costs the behavior that might make me OK with those who can (a) help my career (b) be my career pals (c) allow me to be a part of things.

I cannot claim that I don't share their desires. I am not above it all. But the pursuit of 'honor' as the ancient Greeks would call it somehow seems to me like a kind of slavery to the whims of others...an abasement to my (very successfully concealed) pride. Thus, I remain an adolescent at heart.

Somehow I thought I would be funny here explaining just how hypocritical I really am! It all seems so funny to me...but I believe this blog's template somehow thwarts any attempts I make at humor. It is probably just as well.

some examples of the sexy girls sites with good graphics to the side but not the best

Unacceptable to me...lack of amazingness in my art here. Love so much the slutty girls and their good graphics. Must become one of these slutty/good graphics girls soon...

Drunk...sleepy

Pastrami. How can people continue to be atheists when there is pastrami of the kind I ate tonight? Yes, I once used a burrito as evidence in my argument for the existence of God.

JUST THAT ONE ASSHOLE...

The world might be a paradise where all that lives could flourish
Except for that one asshole

And we would have been happy back then
when we were young and free
Except for that one asshole

The sick feeling in the stomach on awaking
Would not be there
But for that one asshole

I believe that here in this abundant and hopeful place
We might all get along
There might be enough prestige, enough status
To go around
If only we could get rid of that one asshole

------
Not the best written blog but oh so true. If I just hadn't had to deal with that one asshole and don't have to deal with that one asshole tomorrow. Damn. Please God--let me defeat and triumph over this one asshole that is messin' my life! Let me triumph over the all the assholes...

In fact...a little respectable vengance and calling on the ALMIGHTY, ALL POWERFUL LORD TO SMITE MY ENEMIES...MAKE ME TRIUMPH AND PULL ME FROM THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND...

O God whom I praise, do not be silent
for wicked and trecherous mouths attack me.
They speak against me with lying tongues;
with hateful words they surround me,
attacking me without cause.
In return for my love they slander me,
even though I prayed for them.
They repay me evil for good,
hatred for my love.

My enemies say of me:
Find a lying witness
an accuser to stand by his right hand,
That he may be judged and found guilt,
that his plea may be in vain...
May their guilt be always bfore th eLoORD
till their memory is banished from the earth,
For he did not remember to show kindness,
but hounded the wretched poor
and brought death to the broken-hearted.
He loved cursing; may it come upon him;
he hated blessing; may none come to him.
May cursing clothe him like a robe;
may it enter his belly like water,
seep into his bones like oil.
May it be near as the clothes he wears,
as the belt always around him....

Help me LORD my God;
save me in your kindness...
Clothe my accusers with disgrace;
make them wear shame like a mantle.
I will give fervent thanks to the LORD...

Well, that is incomplete...

But this one is apropos:

Psalm 69

Save me, God
for the waters have reached my neck.
I have sunk into the mire of the deep,
where there is no foothold.
I have gone down to the watery depths;
the flood overwhelms me.
I am weary with crying out.
my throat is parched
My eyes have failed,
looking fo rmy God.
More numerous than the hairs of my head
are those who hate me without cause.
Too many for my strength
are my trecherous enemies
Must I now restore
what I did not steal?
God you know my folly;
my faults are not hidden from you.
Let those who wait for you, Lord of hosts,
not be shamed through me.
Let those who seek you, God of Israel,
not be disgraced through me
for your sake I bear insult
shame covers my face.
I have become an outcast to my kin,
a stranger to my mother's children...

They who sit at the gate gossip about me;
drunkards make me the butt of their songs.

God in your great kindness answer me
with your constant help.
Rescue me from the mire,
do not let me sink.
Rescue me from my enemies
and from the watery depths.
Do not let the floodwaters overwhelm me,
nor the deep swollow me,
nor the mouth of the pit close over me...
-----

I love the idea of crying on God to smite my enemies even in the most trivial situations. But if God can't help you when you have the niggling jerks surrounding you--if the LORD can't smite those schmucks--then who can?

So God, thanks. Do your worst. And save me from the depths...smite away...clothe my accusers with disgrace, etc., etc. I'm sure they deserve it. And please do something about George Bush and his administration if that isn't too much.

And whether you choose to smite them in all their wicked trecherousness or not I continue to be grateful for everything else.

I think the imagined audience inspires many a web logger to flights of fancy. It is good not to remember that you are keeping this just for yourself. Except even in diaries people lie--even when they *know* people cannot find the diary...I believe every diarist always imagines discovery and prunes accordingly. There is always the car crash and post-mortum discovery or the nosy mom/dad/husband/wife/sister/brother/roomate. On the other hand, in spite of their seemingly public content the web log does not raise that problem. If I die tomorrow my web log will just vanish...it will be deleted and no one will ever know.

I'm keeping a meta web log it seems. I hate the meta level, but oh well.

This was all just a prologue to say: I've been looking at porn. I'm writing what I might hesitate perhaps to write in my diary cloaked both by anonymity and the assumption that blogger has 750,000 weblogs so no one will be reading mine. I went to site called (I think) www.conservativessuck.blogspot.com. And well...there were these links to pornography of nude females. Seemed like a good a reason as any. It said 'gotta love...' I wanted to know why I had to love them. And how rarely do I find the opportunity (which is apparently always present but yet does not present itself to me on a regular basis) to look at porn. But it was hardly porn. There were these nice tasteful shots of very nice attractive women and their very lovely bodies. I didn't find it sexually exciting. But it was exciting to realize that my breasts are nearly as good as theirs. On a good day. Ah, the girl's approach to porn. It is not that it doesn't give one pleasure to see human beauty in all its forms. But it doesn't matter to me if their clothes are on or off and when it gets raunchy then it is no longer pleasurable. They are being sprayed with water on (what I hope were) warm summer days and who doesn't like being sprayed with water on a warm summer day? Somehow water just tastes better when it enters your mouth from a hose on a hot day. They just looked happy and like they were having a whole lot of fun. I was more putting myself in their shoes and thinking how enjoyable it is to eat ice cream slowly in the heat...although I tend not to like my shorts to be so tight, but...It is fun to be naked and stand under waterfalls. Identifying with the moment while looking at the women and their enjoyable venues--Sort of like the wedding photos I like.

But gee that Monica Belluci sure is hot.

So that is the girl's approach to porn, I guess.

Proustian purses...When I used to have lots of purses they would get full of things and these things would recollect to me times past. They were Proustian purses. Especially when I used to pick up just about every object that might fit in a purse and stick in and then when the purse was full, put it in the bottom of my closet for a year or two.

Just in case anyone is interested, the url www.proust.com is for sale.

When I would go back to the purse the things that I would find in it would do as Proust described...They were like vessels that contained past moments. Full of letters (no one writes letters anymore), ticket stubs, pieces of glass, bazooka joe gum (my favorite), rocks, church bulletins, religious pamphlets, shells, sometimes even wrapped up bits of food that probably seemed transportable at the time. The makeup was always the most evocative of the past moment. Lipsticks I'd worn at different moments in their life had a small and a slight taste much like the madeline did for Proust. My coat pockets sometimes served the same function. My freshman roomate remembers taking psychadelics, wearing my trench coat and then being amazed at the many things in the pockets: packets of swiss miss hot chocolate powder, 10 flyers for the ice capades (the Smurf ice capades...I think I was planning on making a collage), $5, a xerox of some poem, etc.

I think I started somewhere in my '20's to drown in stuff. I am of course still mildly drowning in stuff. But I learned to throw things away...sort of. I am less nostalgic than I was also, I think.

But I still like the idea of an object as a vessel containing a past moment.

I'm pretty sure I didn't get that poem right. It wasn't that great to begin with but I recall it as better in its original form...

How does this relate to the theme of my blog? The TIME AND CHANCE theme? All too obvious my friends: memory. The way we track it all. Faultily and with great lack of veracity, I'm afraid. But it's all we've got. Unless we are careful to document and document well. The creation of a personal archive is not a bad idea for those afraid to lose track of the past (as long as you can remember where the archive is). I believe most people would rather forget, though. That's the only way to explain how lax they are at memoribilia preservation.

Reading Luis Urrea's (dare I call it a blog?) site inspired me to try to reconstruct a poem I wrote in college. Can't remember it exactly. I went through a phase where I needed to destroy everything of my past and alas that meant all my writing. Which means that if I can't remember it, it is gone.

Anyway...here was the poem. Remember! I was a freshman! 18 years old and not too smart!

Not A Universal Feeling

The flesh on my bones is the same as
Mashed potatoes
And car exhaust the same as the smell of God
No one thinks this

Sometimes A Universal Feeling

No one knows I killed that hamster
But that is why I broke my leg
Adultery makes the car break down.

A Universal Feeling

Why can't everyone love me?
I just wish everyone/someone would come along
And love me.

Gee, it's kinda sad. The stuff I'm writing here is the first stuff I've written in over a decade. I wonder what happened.

Check it out...to the side. Luis Urrea. Yo, the man himself. Powered by blogger. He even has a guest book. I wish Chekov weren't dead...I wish I could sign Chekov's guestbook. But I'm beside myself with joy to sign Urrea's.

God, just wrote to this nice couple that I read their blog...I feel so...strange about all this blogging thing. It's kind of voyeurism on a different level. You look but it is OK because they wouldn't put it there if they didn't want you to look. Why do I care? Why do they want me to know? Why do they want anyone to know? Why does anyone want anyone to know? Why do you want people to tell you that they know? What do I want?

Gotta run and eat my lean cusine. Stuffed cabbage!

Had many nightmares that my husband was unfaithful. Then I got to have sex with Paul Newman. That was OK. The house I was living in with Paul was really cool. Painted many different nifty colors. I'm glad my horrible dreams still bother to have good aesthetics.

The night before my nightmares were about blogging. I keep thinking in blogs with dark blue background. I was half awake and half asleep. I don't want the internet to irrevocably change the shape of my consciousness or anything. Yikes.

Sleep...Why can I never sleep? I guess I mean like a normal person because I slept for 12 hours today. I slept for 2 hours the night before last and then I went to see a Kurosawa movies. Roshomon and High and Low-- High and Low was so amazing. After the movie was over I bummed a cigarette off a guy outside the movie theater. (So many people smoking in the movie. The killer always had a cigarette in his mouth). I asked the guy I bummed a cig off if he thought it was a great movie. He just was like 'yea, it was OK.' Maybe he was scared that I was trying to pick him up?

Some people fail to appreciate life. He thinks that movies like that come around every day perhaps? There never will be a director like that ever again. The folly of youth.


My God--the scenes in the Tokyo hipster joint..alas I was born too late. I want to be a hipster but especially I want to smoke cigarettes with impunity. Without fear, guilt. In public. Without paying taxes on them.

I want to claim that Godard was copying Kurosawa since Kurosawa's movies are better in my opinion but alas Breathless (1959) is before High and Low (1963). Still Akira does it better...much better than Paul.


In the movie...whose title I forgot for the moment there are these incredible, incredible shots. There is one of the killer going through this patch of gladiolas with mirrored sunglasses...you just see his head from the sunglasses on up. In another, the killer talks to the victim in the last scene. Whenver the camera is on the killers face you see the reflection of the victim and vice versa reflected in the glass vaguely. So you can see the person speaking and the reaction of their nemesis at the same time.

Then I came home. To fall asleep I tried to read a book. Unfortunately, it was an incredibly good book. Thus I stayed up until 3:30 a.m. to finish it: Nobody's Son...by Luis Alberto Urrea

Quote:

Right at the end, after all the many mourners had passed by, after my father had gone out to hide in his car, right before they closed the box forever and carried it to the hearse, Abelino stepped up to her. He didn't weep. He stood silently, gazing down at his one love, the companion for more than a lifetime, and he studied her face. Then, with no emotion showing on his fae, he reached into the coffin and put his palm against her cheek. His big, iron, calloused worker's hand. It trembled slightly, and it landed on her flesh as delicately as one of her butterflies. Just a second, no more. But all the love in the world was there, in his palm. All the love in the universe, and all the tenderness and all the grief and all the beauty collected there in his hand and lay against her lovely cheek.

Urrea, Nobody's Son, University of Arizona Press, p. 151.

Saving the thrown out and the rotten. It is my need to rescue the abandoned objects of the world. To rehabilitate them from their disutility. It is a very bad thing that I now live in a town where people put out boxes saying 'free.' Yes, I have a great deal of useful furniture that was free. And some of it is even fashionable. My rehabilitation of thrown away ice boxes from pre-refrigerator days has been a big hit. At the same time I also have a collection of ceramic memorabilia that was apparently given to some Portuguese person every time she went to a baby shower or wedding. I fear moving but I think that moving is the only thing that will save me now.

Something strange has happened to my blog. I made some sort of template mistake. It has all gone awry. I like it this way. Topsy turvy upside down. As usual, I must react to every environment. My reaction to the blogging world is to be annoyed with the emphasis on visuals, the genre identification, the teenage appeal for attention. I'm sure it will pass. I am nothing but a reaction to what everyone else cares about. When people care about what they serve at dinner parties (like my former roomate) then it becomes necessary for me to throw dinner parties where I serve frozen food. I live to react to the foibles of everyone else. What's my problem? Am I trying to be above it all? Does it all go back to the trauma of high school. Going from the poor inner city public school to the wealthy Catholic school. The girls wore izods. I wore Le Tigre. They had Bass boat shoes. What did I have? Can't quite recall. Some kind of K-Mart sneakers I believe. And because of these girls and their impeccable grooming I did not shave my legs for 10 years. Then, upon entering a feminist environment I began to bikini wax. Well, I suppose something must shape our choices. Much of what we pursue is chosen for arbitrary reasons..mere chance...preference simply is a matter of chance. I could either like it because everyone else does or because it makes everyone else slightly uncomfortable. The rejection of others to a particular preference for some reason makes the thing rejected appear in an attractive light to me.

There are times when this tendency has its drawbacks. For example...when I sabotage my own career in subtle ways by going to the amazon or staying up all night to watch Children of the Corn III instead of working like I should. Just because I am not supposed to.

Now there's a little psychoanalysis for you! Hey! That is the reason I do it? Maybe I'm getting to the bottom of things quicker than I thought. I've always wondered: If it says 'wet paint' why do I always touch it. If it says 'no parking' why must I park there?

Because when you do what you are not supposed to you become more aware of your own freedom? Maybe it is all because I am not supposed to? But who is in charge here really?

Don't ever go to www.whyme.com. Don't!

I don't want to ever complain. It sounds like on 10/20/2002 at 12:41:20 AM I WAS complaining...No that was not complaints that was documentation of my whiny-ness. It was meta-complaining. There is a difference. So to head off the charge that I ever complain I will say: The world is wonderful. It amazes me to go to the grocery store and have my groceries bagged by a Tibetan refugee. Everything can be a surprise. I thought of how someone could be born in a small hut with no electricity, running water and then 40 years later end up bagging groceries, surrounded by computer technology. Can't quite explain why that is so wonderful right now. Gotta run...if I have the strength to leave here. It is always so difficult.

It's important to state for the record that it is 3:45 a.m. and I have done no work yet and this is the reason my life is falling apart. My life is falling apart more than it ever has been. I am screwing up worse THAN I EVER HAVE...well, almost ever. It's not a bad thing to remember this. Now, what to do about it? If I get up at 9:45 I will have gotten 6 hours of sleep. That's OK. Can I work all day tomorrow. I can but will I? I'm sure a therapist (those idiots! don't tell me I'm starting to need one!) would tell me not to say DON'T BET ON IT...