Sometime in 2007

I love to take long walks, by myself, after midnight. There is nothing as serene as a lifeless suburban neighborhood in the dead of night. I'll stop, sometimes, at Terra Linda Elementary School for a cigarette or a brief ride on the swings. I force myself to focus on the present, on the stillness of every sound and the gentle, chilly wind against my skin, or on the smoke contrails from my cigarette, illuminated by the streetlight. The twisting, flowing patterns of smoke, in the right light, in the right frame of mind, are unique and beautiful, a natural chemical reaction moving with balletic grace. The smoke can look exactly like a Van Gogh painting, if you let it.

I'll walk into the adjacent neighborhood though the overgrown switchgrass that frames Saltzman. I'll stand far away from the passing cars and close my eyes, until I hear ocean waves crashing ashore. The timed indoor lights click off in many houses at the exact moment I pass. *click. click. I can pretend to conduct the lighting, waving my arms in a silly fashion, hoping that no one sees me. Just live in the present, I tell myself.

I haven't gone camping or hiking or mountain biking in some time. I regret that. But the natural world is alien to me, in some ways. This place, with its' soulless homes and inefficient use of land, is what I've acclimated myself to. This is my outdoors, my nature . This is home.

The Netherlands feels like home to me, too. So does Ashland, despite the short amount of time I spent there. Now, I'm going to have to find home among my extended family, in the California desert, while my mother's mother slowly starves herself. It has only been a year since the man she married, the man she lived with for over 50 years, passed away, and I can only guess what a terrible hole that must leave in anyone's heart. Given my maternal relatives' well documented struggles with... melancholy, we'll call it, it is no surprise that she's clinically depressed.

Why, I am but one in a long tradition of half-mad and mad people. I love the story of my great-great grandfather, who was once extraordinarily wealthy, owning much of the land and timber rights in Washington State. Then, out of nowhere, he decided he wanted to be a dairy farmer. He gave most of his assets away and moved to some ass-backwards place near Spokane, dragging his whole family with him. Soon thereafter, his beloved wife died, and in his grief he decided to sell the dairy farm and live as a transient, as penance for his sins. That was when my great-grandmother got married to the first person she could find, at age 14. Her husband was something like 27 years her senior.

I feel incredibly lucky I have no land rights to give away, actually. That is the sort of thing I can see myself doing.

I escape all my baggage with my solitary night-walks, and I hope I can continue this tradition in the high desert. I know this move is the right thing to do, unequivocally so. After my grandfather died last May, I was shocked by his accomplishments in his life. I never knew him as an adult, as someone more than the guy who would always buy me candy whenever I saw him, the old man absolutely fascinated by my Playstation even though he never quite figured out how to work it (he could never remember to press the 'accelerate' button whenever we played racing games together)... even though I had the opportunity, I squandered it. Now, I have the training another opportunity to learn who my family is, with another grandparent, and like hell I'm letting this slip though my fingers.

I'm getting scared that I will never finish college, with all these breaks and diversions and transfers. I take some solace knowing that I almost certainly would have flunked out by now were I to have attended school like a normal person. I got fired from "Bed Bath & Beyond," for Christ's sake. That is somewhat difficult to manage. You really got work at it to get fired there. But the 'traditional' approach hasn't worked too well either. Last year, I was miserable. I tried to hide away in my apartment, doing my best to ensure I made no friends in Eugene. It got to the point that I was stockpiling lithium and seroquel, "just in case" I felt the need to off myself. Fate intervened, my family didn't have enough money to pay for two kids in school at the same time, and it was too late to apply for a loan, and I came back home. Most likely saved me some serious trouble and medical costs.

I want to delete the above passage, but I shouldn't. I have to keep myself honest by presenting it as it was to a select few. I would be surprised if there were any men less stoic than I am.

After I got back from my walk last night, I fell asleep, exhausted. This was around 1:45 AM. The cat got into my room at about 4:15 AM.

Maybe the reason I stopped blogging, quit the music-review circuit, started posting less on message boards, all that -- maybe I stopped because I came to the realization that I'm not the writer I think I should be. No, that's not extreme enough, and it is also misleading.

I'm getting pretty emo here, but that is what this forum is for: expressing really emo stuff. Bear with me (although the only person who has to carry this burden is... me, isn't it? Well, good. And bad.)

I read articles by professional journalists, writers, &c. written in a clumsier syntax than my own. There was a pretty interesting discussion on Insult Swordfighting regarding Hilary Goldstein's review of Bionic Commando Rearmed; we all agreed the article was poor, but we couldn't agree entirely why the thing was so awful.

This is the sentence he excerpted, which I will also excerpt, for my own archival purposes:

Capcom is finally revisiting the classic with an updated version that takes everything that was good from the past, modernizes it, and then adds new layers of awesome.

I'm with Mitch Krpata: "adds new layers of awesome," is grammatical nonsense. It's

and then "adds new layers of awesome"
"verb adjective noun [of] noun?"

Can we use this form to make a coherent sentence?

Bubbles "was completely of monkey."

Nonsense. The only exception I can think of is along these lines:

"Jesus socked stoic Franklin of Bethlehem"

Okay. That's dumb, but...


Some argue that "awesome" is a colloquialism and therefore permissible. Considering how often I pepper my writing with slangy, purposefully jarring bits of prose, I shouldn't complain.

that's the trouble, though; I have yet to develop a complete, complex, internally consistent voice in my writing. I need to prove mastery of the conventional, Stucker/White school of composition before exploring the limits of my command.

The only way to create a voice like that is to discover it, though composition. I know this, but my prose is so far from what it could be -- hell, from what it used to be, 3 years ago -- that I figure, hell, why not give up?

Well, because I'm compelled to write, and I'm obsessive about writing. I might not understand why I want to disseminate my thoughts expressed though my language on the internet, but I feel awful if I go too long without doing so. But I'm too much like a high school cheerleader gripped with a need to wash her hair 24 times a day or a homeless man stepping on each brick in Pioneer Courthouse Square 5 times before moving forward; these are not a compulsions with any tangible benefits.

It's gotten so bad right now that I cannot bear to read the things I write. I get sick looking at them: I see nothing but flaws, hundreds of sometimes groin-grabbingly obvious flaws, typos, &c. I freak out. I can't take it. I can't go on.

I'll go on.

SUMMER OF EMO continues:

I've really noticed, in the last four weeks, how contemptibly out of shape I've let my self become. I'm not corpulent or anything, but I'm doughtier than ever -- which, while perhaps not the greatest thing in the world, to be 10 lbs overweight or thereabouts.... it's not so repugnant I can't stand to see myself naked.

But it is a definite sign that I cannot eat whatever I want, in whatever quantities I want, any longer. I had an "a-ha" moment like this in high school, as well -- dropping from 180 to 140 lbs starting the beginning of junior year and going 'till the end of senior year -- but I'm pretty sure I developed some minor eating disorder-like behavior in that timeframe, too. I also know that I have become less moderate in the past 7 years or whatever, prone to eating huge amounts of food without thinking, prone to running and running and running until I absolutely "hit the wall," and collapse like a adipose sack of medical waste, prone to drinking until I can no longer drink, prone to staying up all night, prone to sleeping for days...

Getting fired makes one pretty down on oneself. I hope that's it.