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.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
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:
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.
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.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
From May, 2006
Not everyone can feel deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotions when they listen to pop music. Actually, I'm pretty sure most people hate it when they have to deal with the histrionics, the florid prose, or the unendurable superciliousness of passionate fanatics who have felt deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion when listening to pop music. They can't relate, after all.
I'm using ""pop"" in the most general way, here: ""pop"" music, as I see it, is just about the broadest term that can be applied to music. It's almost a redundant statement. The very fringes of the avant-garde, even, are usually inspired by the whirling cacophony of sounds, melodies, rhythms, clangs, and vibrations that bombard all of us. The world is not a silent, ordered place; pop music seeks to humanize and order the chaos of our natural environments - or it seeks to personify the metronymic order present in the mechanical - before it seeks anything else. The key word is ""humanize."" Mozart is pop music, and Lou Reed's ""Metal Machine Music,"" is pop music - both Mozart and ""MMM"" are many other, more descriptive things, but they're pop before they are anything else. I'm not just talking about the Beatles and Madonna alone, here.
I feel a mixture of sadness and envy when I think of people who don't feel deep, inarticulable truth when they listen to their favorite bands. My favorite bands create a sort of connectedness to the universal commonalities of human life, and an empathy for the particularities of the musicians contributing to the unconscious stream of universal commonalities I perceive in the music. I'm sad that there are people on this earth who don't feel the awe and revelation I do - sad that people can't access all the wonderful, empyreal feelings that I can. And I'm envious because it feels a bit silly, sometimes, to feel such overpowering emotions at the sound of guitar strums and Wuhrlizter wheezes. I'm envious of the people who never have to deal with any sadness or pain when they play their favorite records, of people who don't have to change the radio station when ""Wild Horses,"" by the Rolling Stones, comes on the radio, of people without raw, exposed nerve endings.
Will Robinson Sheff, raised in the northeastern United States but currently residing in Austin, TX, is the sort of guy who can feel deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion when he listens to pop music, and he's the sort of guy who writes and sings songs about deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion. Sheff never doubts the validity of those inarticulable emotions, and unlike me, he doesn't envy the people who don't feel this way.
Okkervil River is his band. He's something of a heroic Everyman to a small cult of blogging admirers, especially after Okkervil River's third record, Black Sheep Boy, was released nearly a year ago (Okkervil River is Sheff's primary musical project; he also plays and writes songs with Shearwater, as well as performing frequent solo concerts). Maybe that makes Sheff, and Okkervil River, sound a bit like Dashboard Confessional, if Chris Carraraba wasn't a inconceivably moronic person. Hopefully, it doesn't; Okkervil River (I'll abbreviate it OKR) isn't in the classic ""emo band"" template, anyway. Some people just call them ""alt.country"" because that's a close enough categorization for OKR's sound: lots of acoustic guitars, rudimentary folk chord progressions, some sporadic use of pedal steel and mandolin, and a bit of similarity in the vocal style Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) employes. The observant indie-kid might hear Bright Eyes, Neutral Milk Hotel, Wilco, and maybe Ryan Adams in OKR's sound, and he'd be mostly right.
Okkervil River, and to a lesser extent Shearwater, are (to me) something greater than the sum of their influences, though; trying to shoehorn a genre on such individual creations is something of a futile act. Okkervil River and Shearwater have their own individual idiosyncrasies in their instrumental arrangements, and those idiosyncrasies are so lovable that each would still be pretty great even without Sheff's lyrics or vocal delivery. On the most recent Shearwater record, Palo Santo, I can even test this hypothesis, because it is the first Shearwater release without a song written and performed by Sheff - and I like Palo Santo quite a bit.
Sheff, however, is what I tune in for. His lyrics cackle with energy, and his performance is something otherworldly. He's got a bit of Leonard Cohen in him, a bit of Skip James, a bit of Jeff Mangum, but he's his own man. A screaming, spittle-dripping, maniac of a man, sometimes, but his own man nonetheless.
I first heard Okkervil River way back in 2002. Sheff used to write record reviews and other articles for Audiogalaxy, a peer-2-peer service that eventually morphed into Rhapsody. As far as I can tell, I was the only person who actually read those articles, before searching for Zeppelin songs. Why, it was Sheff's writing that introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel.
Black Sheep Boy, along with the Black Sheep Boy Appendix EP, is the first record to challenge Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over The Sea importance in my life. Not enough time as passed, I suppose, to definitively state that ""Black Sheep Boy"" will not lose it's luster as time passes, like Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights has (at least, in my estimation). But now it has been over a year since I first procured an early leak of the record over the internet, and exactly a year since I saw OKR open for the Decembrists, and 8 months or so since I saw OKR at the Doug Fir in their first national tour as headliners, and 6 months since the Appendix was released - and I'm still listening to the damn thing every day.
_____________________________________________
Man, I used to be able to write. Sigh.
I'm using ""pop"" in the most general way, here: ""pop"" music, as I see it, is just about the broadest term that can be applied to music. It's almost a redundant statement. The very fringes of the avant-garde, even, are usually inspired by the whirling cacophony of sounds, melodies, rhythms, clangs, and vibrations that bombard all of us. The world is not a silent, ordered place; pop music seeks to humanize and order the chaos of our natural environments - or it seeks to personify the metronymic order present in the mechanical - before it seeks anything else. The key word is ""humanize."" Mozart is pop music, and Lou Reed's ""Metal Machine Music,"" is pop music - both Mozart and ""MMM"" are many other, more descriptive things, but they're pop before they are anything else. I'm not just talking about the Beatles and Madonna alone, here.
I feel a mixture of sadness and envy when I think of people who don't feel deep, inarticulable truth when they listen to their favorite bands. My favorite bands create a sort of connectedness to the universal commonalities of human life, and an empathy for the particularities of the musicians contributing to the unconscious stream of universal commonalities I perceive in the music. I'm sad that there are people on this earth who don't feel the awe and revelation I do - sad that people can't access all the wonderful, empyreal feelings that I can. And I'm envious because it feels a bit silly, sometimes, to feel such overpowering emotions at the sound of guitar strums and Wuhrlizter wheezes. I'm envious of the people who never have to deal with any sadness or pain when they play their favorite records, of people who don't have to change the radio station when ""Wild Horses,"" by the Rolling Stones, comes on the radio, of people without raw, exposed nerve endings.
Will Robinson Sheff, raised in the northeastern United States but currently residing in Austin, TX, is the sort of guy who can feel deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion when he listens to pop music, and he's the sort of guy who writes and sings songs about deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion. Sheff never doubts the validity of those inarticulable emotions, and unlike me, he doesn't envy the people who don't feel this way.
Okkervil River is his band. He's something of a heroic Everyman to a small cult of blogging admirers, especially after Okkervil River's third record, Black Sheep Boy, was released nearly a year ago (Okkervil River is Sheff's primary musical project; he also plays and writes songs with Shearwater, as well as performing frequent solo concerts). Maybe that makes Sheff, and Okkervil River, sound a bit like Dashboard Confessional, if Chris Carraraba wasn't a inconceivably moronic person. Hopefully, it doesn't; Okkervil River (I'll abbreviate it OKR) isn't in the classic ""emo band"" template, anyway. Some people just call them ""alt.country"" because that's a close enough categorization for OKR's sound: lots of acoustic guitars, rudimentary folk chord progressions, some sporadic use of pedal steel and mandolin, and a bit of similarity in the vocal style Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) employes. The observant indie-kid might hear Bright Eyes, Neutral Milk Hotel, Wilco, and maybe Ryan Adams in OKR's sound, and he'd be mostly right.
Okkervil River, and to a lesser extent Shearwater, are (to me) something greater than the sum of their influences, though; trying to shoehorn a genre on such individual creations is something of a futile act. Okkervil River and Shearwater have their own individual idiosyncrasies in their instrumental arrangements, and those idiosyncrasies are so lovable that each would still be pretty great even without Sheff's lyrics or vocal delivery. On the most recent Shearwater record, Palo Santo, I can even test this hypothesis, because it is the first Shearwater release without a song written and performed by Sheff - and I like Palo Santo quite a bit.
Sheff, however, is what I tune in for. His lyrics cackle with energy, and his performance is something otherworldly. He's got a bit of Leonard Cohen in him, a bit of Skip James, a bit of Jeff Mangum, but he's his own man. A screaming, spittle-dripping, maniac of a man, sometimes, but his own man nonetheless.
I first heard Okkervil River way back in 2002. Sheff used to write record reviews and other articles for Audiogalaxy, a peer-2-peer service that eventually morphed into Rhapsody. As far as I can tell, I was the only person who actually read those articles, before searching for Zeppelin songs. Why, it was Sheff's writing that introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel.
Black Sheep Boy, along with the Black Sheep Boy Appendix EP, is the first record to challenge Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over The Sea importance in my life. Not enough time as passed, I suppose, to definitively state that ""Black Sheep Boy"" will not lose it's luster as time passes, like Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights has (at least, in my estimation). But now it has been over a year since I first procured an early leak of the record over the internet, and exactly a year since I saw OKR open for the Decembrists, and 8 months or so since I saw OKR at the Doug Fir in their first national tour as headliners, and 6 months since the Appendix was released - and I'm still listening to the damn thing every day.
_____________________________________________
Man, I used to be able to write. Sigh.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
After a series of unexpected setbacks, man, the slightest little thing can send me straight back to insane country.
For instance: a clerical error for which I am completely blameless has retarded any attempt to enroll in summer classes; I just got the "screw up again and your fired" treatment at work; I'm having serious, serious social anxiety issues and I'm getting kinda lonely in the existential sense.
However, I knew that, on Monday June 17th I would finally have me some current-gen videogame experiences, namely: Metal Gear Solid 4
After a series of unexpected setbacks, man, the slightest little thing can send me straight back to insane country.
For instance: a clerical error for which I am completely blameless has retarded any attempt to enroll in summer classes; I just got the "screw up again and your fired" treatment at work; I'm having serious, serious social anxiety issues and I'm getting kinda lonely in the existential sense.
However, I knew that, on Monday June 17th I would finally have me some current-gen videogame experiences, namely: Metal Gear Solid 4
I got home, tore into the packaging, hooked the system up and... nothing. Didn't work.
After nearly 4 hours on the phone with SCE tech support, it was decided that my PS3 was damaged in shipping (they dared not to utter what I suspect to be the real cause of my electronic problems: a faulty system snuck though Q&A and I was the lucky dude who got it). Luckily I can just swap the faulty unit at my place of employment for a new one... except OH WAIT WE ARE OUT OF PS3 MGS BUNDLES.
Sigh.
For instance: a clerical error for which I am completely blameless has retarded any attempt to enroll in summer classes; I just got the "screw up again and your fired" treatment at work; I'm having serious, serious social anxiety issues and I'm getting kinda lonely in the existential sense.
However, I knew that, on Monday June 17th I would finally have me some current-gen videogame experiences, namely: Metal Gear Solid 4
After a series of unexpected setbacks, man, the slightest little thing can send me straight back to insane country.
For instance: a clerical error for which I am completely blameless has retarded any attempt to enroll in summer classes; I just got the "screw up again and your fired" treatment at work; I'm having serious, serious social anxiety issues and I'm getting kinda lonely in the existential sense.
However, I knew that, on Monday June 17th I would finally have me some current-gen videogame experiences, namely: Metal Gear Solid 4
I got home, tore into the packaging, hooked the system up and... nothing. Didn't work.
After nearly 4 hours on the phone with SCE tech support, it was decided that my PS3 was damaged in shipping (they dared not to utter what I suspect to be the real cause of my electronic problems: a faulty system snuck though Q&A and I was the lucky dude who got it). Luckily I can just swap the faulty unit at my place of employment for a new one... except OH WAIT WE ARE OUT OF PS3 MGS BUNDLES.
Sigh.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Here I am. Rock you like... nevermind.
I've gotten sick of not blogging, so I'm going to start again.
Right here.
Of course, I doubt many people will read it, but whatever. I'm gonna emo-kid this shit right up.
Right here.
Of course, I doubt many people will read it, but whatever. I'm gonna emo-kid this shit right up.
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