Testing?
Would you believe that for once it wasn’t blogger that fucked up my site?
Archives for November 2001
There is a tiny spice cookie echo at the back of my mouth, and a similarly worn in feeling of comfort in my too blue attire — locked in from hours just spent on Lindsay’s floor. My birthstone is sapphire, and blue is my comfort color; today i am all in it, with just the tiny red racing stripe of interruption down each side of my jeans.
Today was Accomplishment Day, with my brain like a slot machine that just lined up three perfect cherry red pairs of cherries, and all of my accomplishments were quarters sliding shiny out of my mouth. To wit, in Critical Reasoning we talked about the gambler’s fallacy, which would seem to indicate that just because i had a successful day today doesn’t mean i should anticipate having another one tomorrow. Of course, my brain is not quite the polished chrome model of a casino machine or the red-black-red of a roulette wheel, even if sometimes it’s wrinkles and turns would have me believe that it was as random as all of that. There is a bias towards winning in this system, because every time i do something right i am more convinced that i can do it again. Two weeks ago i got one quiz back marked with a fat red A, today i got three; i am a man convinced.
Like dawn welling up over New Jersey in the early morning sky, today in Communication Theory i realized that all of these numbers and letters on my papers won’t mean anything when i’m thirty, unless i’m still in school then. Drunken scholar Kenneth Burke informed me that it’s all about my inherent guilt-redemption cycle at nine o’clock in the evening. It felt like someone had hit the pause button on my academic life in the middle of a press screening to wonder aloud at how the writer/producer/director had just made his first (fatal) flaw. I was standing outside of myself watching my accumulate checkmarks and superlatives; i was my refrigerator door, magnets gleaming as they lay in wait for another tidy 10/10 quiz to get tacked on.
At nine thirty someone brushed up against the play button by accident, and a scant score of frames later i pirouetted down the divide between our campus and Penn’s singing at the top of my lungs: the cumulative total of red letters and accounted-for numbers and solid notes and actually getting something done, just this once. For once my day made a dent.
(Bang!)
Hey, i’m just reminding myself to go to Amazon to order the script of House of Yes and to read the enlightening Kenten’s Journal some more later … i had no idea that comics like Spawn had dropped so far in circulation. Does that mean back issues of comics from four years ago are more expensive than ones from ten years?
Okay, now i must write for real.
My room whooshes something awful, like an incoming thunderstorm bantering about up against the clouds. It’s the fault of the heater; our heat lives housed in Lindsay’s closet, and one of its ugly grated maws lies not a yard from the head of my bed. The mighty bellows of heat’s tin home are our shared burden here on the backside of the apartment, and each gust of preserving wind is accompanied without fail by a similar rushing and clattering of air on metal on metal on air.
It is not quite the same as the way my room breathes through the back window, that’s for certain. This is like life on a ventilator… same stale air brushing in to inflate and out to deflate, leaving me lukewarm and half alive in the meantime. That’s about right, though, because today i have only used up half of a life, as if i am carefully rationing the discarded halves and thirds into my empty bottom dresser drawer so that one day i can be larger than life itself. Half a life like clams on a half shell, and i greedily suck it down and toss it away.
Nights have all been the same lately… sick with two different kinds of pressure welling up behind my jaw and in my stomach, and then curled tight around a sheaf of pages, and then restlessly nudging my head over the top of my mattress so i can see out of my window as i fall asleep — nothing as romantic as stars or any of that, but to spy on my across that back neighbor. I would think he could catch on by now, my prying eyes digesting his slim back and swirling tattoo like prime-time teevee, but he would appear to be none the wiser; still sleeping with the light on despite shades being drawn. I can see through to his slim circumstance as long as there’s some light to guide me. Anyhow, his dog has got me made … he knows the game. I stare at the owner as he sits and listens to whatever it is whose echoes i can hear across the alley, and in exchange i sit framed by my half-sized back window in just my underwear and thrash like mad as those beady canine eyes follow the supple muscle of my right arm up down up down. We have traded… my posed voyeurism in measured doses for glances into his owner’s life, undisguised … and unrealized, as of now.
I’m not sure exactly what i’m looking for, or at; the lithe nude that hides inside those baggy pants and shabby blinds is seemly to-be-sure, but not worth the effort i put forth to capture it backwards and upside-down inside the workings of my squinting eyes. I suspect that i am looking for something other than what i have: a life on the half-shell, waiting to slither down another gaping maw. And, it does, night after night — all the life i left unused mingles with the sweaty breathing of the heater just a few scant feet from my head to leave my room a sort of dewy warm in the morning when my alarm first rings at 5:27. Heat and life, to wake me. Of course, it isn’t really 5:27 because time is my false illusion — a special effect that is all too real. But, i have disguised it, and it gets me to and from my nest of decades old blankets that obscure the sheets on my bed at least three times before i’m up and about on any given morning. Four this morning past. I don’t mind it really, because i’m up in time to pick up a piece or two of my decrepit morning routine, and the once-every-fifty-minutes blare of my alarm slices my dreams into acidic little orangey wedges that i can devour one by one, only to leave behind dreamy sucked-out citrus smiles in my wake.
I dream the same old thing every night, and i don’t know why i bother to savour it anymore. I suppose it’s just part of that latherrinserepeat of my daily half-life, my waiting to see how long it takes whatever’s at my core to degrade down to just a phosphorescent echo of the radiant glow it once put out. Lather in the day, rinse out anything i was beginning to care about in the evening, and at night sleep and repeat.
It is time, my friends, to sleep and repeat.
Okay, so, you can call it the after-effects of the spectacular Buffy Musical from this weekend which swept Garbage, Erin McKeown, DeathCab for Cutie, Rufus Wainwright, and Leona Naess right out of my musical rotation as soon as i finished downloading it … but i want to write a musical.
Hey, stop laughing. Just stick with me for a minute.
For my Creative Writing class i wrote this awfully belabored story, and i could have passed it off as excellent work to any other teacher, but my instructor leveled her gaze right at me and said “you didn’t like that assignment too much, huh?” So, after much negotiation we decided that i would write another short story and hand in a cd of a few songs to make up for some of my least favourite poetry assignments, and that my grade would somehow be triangulated from the both of them. Mind you, i’m getting an A in the class either way, but both of us agreed i should at least try to get some criticism out of the class for my effort, and i can’t really do that with a story i’m not feeling at all. So, once more with feeling…
Meanwhile, we have the new songs. Some of them are quite nice and i like them, but this year i’ve found a lot of them work just as much as stories as they do pop songs. For example, there’s the inverted pair of “Over You” and “Excuse,” the latter of which details a sexual escapade that might not have been the best idea in the world and the former pretty much saying that the narrator can’t get said escapade out of his head. While working out the puzzle of what songs are heading for my next demo earlier i found myself with a heap of these narrative songs, with an entire handful of them that are as good as those two but that i wouldn’t leave standing alone in the middle of an album.
And that’s when it hit me… i should turn in a one act musical to my Creative Writing class… or, at the very least, a story with narration via song. Yes, it sounds insane, especially since i typically hate musicals and writing drama, but it makes some sort of crazy sense in this post-Buffy world. So… we’ll see. (Nevermind that i just wrote the synopsis and the main character’s theme, we’ll see. Honestly. I’m not going to spend all night doing this instead of studying to retain my perfect score in communications).