everyone · all · of · the · time · forever

I wrote some years
ago a digitized hide

an invisible canvas
of minds extended
out of my closest field of apprehension

onto which
perhaps I could gain a component
of friendship so to gather

up often and in parts
what used to be a human
present.

It is colder than a man
but wider too
and stretches over me

a web to lie beneath
breathing light across
a body difficult to name

in between a place
of wanting to move
and not moving

of not doing what one wants.
Am I just pretending to not know
or is it true

that I cannot sense this thing
that knows the difference
between what I want.

Evil

I am without a plan,
stranded like a fool on an
island of indeterminates.

Good

But a plan seems the most
terrible of possibilities
right now, the situation
at home and abroad
indicating a significant
necessary caution pertaining
to anything risky, or quick,
or entrepreneurial will be
most definitely required.

Evil

I am with no settling,
no sense of things and how
they are to be arranged.
There is a soft fear
inside my conscience.

Good
But I am equipped with
things. An education, a
sense of wonder and ambition.
There are courses set ahead
that are not easy, but wanted.

Evil

I am repelled by anything
I have tried or succeeded in.
Not a single activity or product
of my labor has given me
satisfaction.

Good

But I am told, through words
and circumstance, that I
am of worth and loved. These
graces don't deserve to be
received with such dispondency.

Evil

I am not ready to die.

Good

I'm not about to.

This Grizzly Bear song has blown my mind.

I am sittinng outside on Daniele's porch. it is attached to a huge pink and black house in Strangologalli, a small town one hour outside both Rome and Naples. The sun was behind big, gray clouds when I woke up at three in the afternoon, but now it is out and makes the pool look like a blue mirror, the opposite of those blue-killing Ambervues Kevin sold me out the trunk of his car last week in Wayne, NJ. If I put them on here, the water turns green and if it weren't for the shadows between the leaves, the reflections of the eight foot bushes lining this porch would disappear.
Strangologalli can be loosely translated to "choke the chicken" which doesn't exactly sound like a great name for a small town. Apparently the story goes like this: French barbarians swore to attack the town as soon as the cock crowed in the morning. In order to protect themselves and their village, the people of Strangologalli choked all their chickens before the sun rose. Clever Italians. They probably ate well that night.
I must write my paper tomorrow. It is on Intelligent Design and it was due three weeks ago. On Tuesday I am meeting with my professor, Mario de Caro, and this will mark the end of any Junior year obligations. Which sort of makes me a senior in college, which sounds worse than it feels. Then, in one week from today, I will be on a plane bound for London. I have a job there, and a place, and no one. All this moving around is like a thick dream.

I hope I get to see Laura and Dan on their trip across Southern Europe. I hope I get to take my brother to France to visit Xavier in Lyon. I hope I make it to Amsterdam to taste the legal shrooms before they go away in August. I hope I do not leave Rome forever.
Life is accumulating swiftly and condensed. The deep kind of love is missing somewhere on the water in between New Jersey and New York, but the kind that smells and tastes and shines off hills and strangers comes in droves. Maybe they are the same and my inside antenna is just a bit rusted.
This dog has been licking my feet the whole time.

The kind of drunk that comes before leaving for Berlin - leaving not in a day or a week, but in stuffed hours - is a pleasant sort of drunk. There is nothing packed, few things to be, and the weather is shut away behind roman shades but was wet and trying at around 22:30. The weather in Rome during the month of March is like a good hard teacher, frustrating in what he asks of you but right. In Amsterdam there are rumors of snow. It feels like it could happen anywhere this spring break.

Where will I go and what will I miss. I am young and feel it. Need to exercise maybe. Need to run.

Need to not die soon. Need to take pictures with patterns. Need to write more. Need to figure between love. Need to want some terrible things. Need to play more. Need to learn more things to cook. Need to be better at something that feels worthwhile. Need to do prison style pushups.

Three hundred and
Eighty five times
Twenty one is

Just around the corner,

I feel good and old. This year has no possibility of being bad. at. all.

COME ROME COME GERMANY COME GOOOOODLY

and i will be drunk for some of the time and out of my mind for all of it. this is a
grand adventure

my tounge has the taste of basil and
will get better

the excitement, really
the excitement is OVER-
WHELMING

my mother is not with me for the first time. and
there is a bottle of champagne waiting in the fride,
scratch that -
a bottle of Prosecco and a taste of new homes.

this world is a plane of color and i am reminding myself that things are in three dimensions. there is much faith in this: thinking not about what could be, but flowing without worrying whether being is a dream or a flash or something that could even end.

i wonder if i have ever made a decision about my life: no. i have decided to make decisions made for me to be as comfortable as i can make them. that would seem like a decision itself, but i would argue that no decision about anything undecided is purely satisfying. and what does not purely satisfy its promise is a lie, another thing which satisfies the condition of being not what it declares itself to be. what have i done then? it is a sort of lie, this place in time.

this place in this time is the active thing i know. this is so different from all other things and i really am so much believing in you. i will never know you, but you know this place and this time because i am writing it. and you might as well be sitting here, all of you, in a big circle, so we can see what is going on instead of assume inside some subconcious space that comes to surface, slyly and with something in the throat, to tell you that I too had a place and a time where i was doing the thing you were doing at your place and your time that is now reminding the both of us together. you read and I read and now those place-time objects have met and sexed and are a new place-time object at the same place and time for both of us.

i am deliberate, here we are.

what shape is our monstrous field of vision?

there is no more camera.

my third eye drowned in beer and is no more. not taking pictures is like, well, it's like being home, where i am right now. not what i am supposed to be doing at all.

hayley told dooblysticks the other night that all the little coincidences are signs that she's doing the right thing at the right time. i believe that is how that works. for me, there are no coincidences now. there are little mishaps and tight knots in my throat. brain-splits, lies. this summer is compulsory and floats like a sail boat with no wind.

i am glad i have the people i do.

harry potter was awesome. she pretty much stuck to everyone's expectations concerning the plot, but i felt it was really nicely paced and exceptionally exciting. i don't know how i feel about the epilogue, but i'm glad i have some concrete idea of what happens in the future instead of none at all. the scene at gringotts was probably one of the best scenes out of all the books, cept maybe the first time i read priori incantatem. it's just sad to see the series end when i've stuck with it so long. i remember when i started reading them and realized that i would be twenty when it ended, how weird and far away that seemed, and now i'm here, the same boy, and it can't be all that strange.

i'm sick of telling people i'm thinking about law school. even though i am, i know the main reason i say it is so they'll get off my back about being a philosophy major. i wish i didn't always feel like i need to defend a part of myself from this place, but i do.

without class, the summer sits like a fat log of crap outside my front door. it is my job to take this log of crap and to cut it into daily portions, which i am then forced (willingly) to consume. it is difficult to come up with things to do each day without losing every good mood.
i would like to update every day, but i never feel like it. i know i would be happier and better if i did, so maybe what i will do is take a random picture and post it and talk about it. i think i will do that.

this is a picture of my cousin Timmy. It was taken the day after my grandmother died, in the backyard of her house. i do not take a lot of black and white pictures, but i thought the ivy would make a good black. i love that backyard, and that garage wall, and the ivy, and Timmy. this picture is filled with things i love.
in that backyard, i see soft ghost replays of my brother and my cousins and I always. sometimes they are sitting on a bench that is not there, deciding who will be which Little Ninja. I will always remember being the chubby one who ate jellybeans even though i can't remember his name. i think we had bracelets, maybe. now we don't even have the one person who can claim us all as hers.
i like this picture because i know my grandmother has seen these things, and i know they looked almost exactly liked they did in this very picture. everything may be a couple weeks older, but it's close enough. that ivy is still growing, even though my Uncle Alex (the Colombian, and they do not let him forget it) has tried to tear it down and caused a ruckus that even reached the kitchen where my grandma stayed. that time he got support only from my Aunt Diane's boyfriend John, who is now dead also. but you knew that.
he said that if we let it go, that it would creep under the roof. over time, the panels would crack and lift, the garage would start to let it in like a new green lover, and the ivy would wrap around both walls until it hit the floor or the sun stopped shining.
i would rather see things go that way than have some other boy's ghosts where mine stay to play.

I am sitting in work. I just left the men's bathroom, the one on the fourth floor of Low Library with a twenty foot hallway or so before it that leaves most females working on the fourth floor of Low Library with a shorter average delay between first urge and relief. these are the things i envy.

i was trying to not pee fast, to not push and instead to flow, as i am feeling these days that if you're gonna do things a certain way, you better just try something to keep it going, whether it's trying to be a little more relaxed while peeing, or just clicking on an email instead of just reading the subject line and lingering. someone told me in my writing class last week that I like really big things and really small things and i said yes.

so this summer i'm working in midtown at a videogame public relations firm. there, i will cover videogame coverage, specifically of the products we represent and their competitors, stalk blogs to make sure people are saying good and correct things about our games, and getting to play all of them in the gaming room convienently located in office. it was originally unpaid, but then three days after i got the job i recieved this email:

Hi Jeff,

Good news! We just received confirmation from our headquarters in San
Francisco that your internship will actually be paid - $12/hour. I'd
also like to confirm your start date of Friday, May 4 at 12pm. Let me
know if you have any other questions, otherwise we will be in touch
again closer to your start date. Have a great weekend!

Best,
Audra

and this, another proof of the niceties of dealing with things, even emails, as they come.

i appreciate the irony of breakfast blend at 5:35 PM. i need it to keep my eyes open during writing class at 7. leather, burning, sour, why did i want this as a child? now, i get it: coffee. alcohol. xxx hot sauce. a little bit of pain as i sit at this plastic rectangle place. everything around me screams dead trees. what isn't wretched?

Rolling Stone had an article on the cognitive origins of our appreciation of music the other month. It was an interview with this professor at McGill, if I remember correctly. He stated a theory that music might have proceeded language as a form of communication. This made me think of dolphins. It also made me think of the world tens of thousands of years ago with all these hairy naked people banging things and crooning into a bigger sky. Yale's wind ensemble performed this piece about a world of people in caves beneath Kansas or Illinois or someplace that only communicated through music. when i hear a certain song i think of you, and sometimes, if it's true enough, i'm encouraged by the thought that at the same sound your mind turns to me as well. it is a scent between us - sweet and yes, forever.

this wonderful red-headed thirty-five year-old woman named Mary just walked in and told me about how her ex-boyfriend used to have a prince albert and how she just had to make him take it out sometimes, you know with all that drawin blood n shit. she plays in rock bands and was close friends with Joey Ramone. she is a bird clipped like most everyone, but she knows it too and so we laugh easy. i will take this as the cue to hush and let this evening tingle me. goodnight!

: ]

i think this is going to be my first friends-only banner on account of a second person has stolen my internet stuff in the past week. i never wanted to do it, but people suck.

Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play!
Step 2: Pick your favorite lines from the first 25 songs that play!
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what BAND and SONG the lines come from!
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly!

I will screen the comments so everyone has a chance.

NO CHEATING (that means no googling) and

( the songs )

i think it's christmas eve. happy that.

i really love winter break becuase it is usually the only break that actually feels like a break. i feel like i lieave school behind and just live for a week and a half. it's nice.

yesterday was fun. school was pointless, as it usually is the day before any break. my last band jeopardy was interesting and a question about my p33n slipped in there, whcih was the best part. there was some issues in english and in health we watched a really cool video on sex in the cinema, but i bet i was the only person paying attention. after school was the JSA christmas party. we discussed santa and ate food. there was a monsoon outside, but the nice kind and if it wasn't for laura's lack of adequete clothing, i could have played in it for a very long time and still have come out smiling. i shopped for dave's jewmas/bright eyes payment gift with anthony and it was cool. fye is the worst store in the world for music though. i got home, and my brother and I picked up Alissa to go to the mall and find some presents for my mom and dad. we walked around for a really long time, ran into some cousins (of course) but we had no present luck. i did find a nice christmas sweater for 60 bucks that was originally 135 so the night wasnt a total waste. after we went to best buy where we bought my dad a:

and we decided to install my mother a cd player in her car. im getting my brother some illegal ps2 stuff. dropped off alissa and went home, watched some buffy, and waited for lisa and ashley to come over. we all went out and did some stuff which was really fun. really fun. we ended up at the diner (as usual) and then a final buffy episode to put us to sleep. i woke up today and dropped off my mom's car at circuit city to get ghettoed. now i'm home and waiting for this night to begin.

this wonderful, wonderful night.

( yay senior breakfast )

in addition, my brother's graduation occured. it was a great time. i'm very proud of him and his B.S. in Economics with a Concentration in Public Economics. the ride west to happy valley was full of my little cousin dean and nintendo DS. o now i have to go. present emergency ill post more pics later.

HAPPY EVE MY INTERNET!!!!