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hoo boy...I'm glad the dumb kid is our president...

I don't get political, but here I go anyway. Favorite parts of Bush's speech -

1) the "not it" clause in terms of the declaration of war. "It's up to Saddam." Brilliant. As Dennis Hopper says in Speed about himself, Bush left it up to the "whim of a madman." Dumbass.
2) his repetitive use of the technical term "neighborhood." re how Saddam endangers Iraq as a nation, and in his neighborhood. Bla bla bla neighborhood. Neighborhood neighborhood neighborhood. I wish he would have just said, "Dude, he's endangering tha 'hood yo!" and I would like him so much more. That or he is in denial about the death of Mr. Rogers.
3) his statement that he likes the UN, he wants the UN to agree with him, but if they don't fuck 'em, we're still going forward. It isn't disobeying the UN, it's defending our own nation. Brilliant.
4) pretty much everything else.

I need to register to vote so that I can vote against him in the next election, because I am losing my mind.

 
Before We Forgot to Leave for the Cities

III.

the images from a screen
without sound pound my
retinas oo-hindi
and pull the trigger until
it goes click!

i sit on the kitchen countertop
constantly hiding his olive oil
maybe he never knew

the number five glistens
on a locked door
that once i enter
is home again

quotables i don't know who
took home a shuttle
schedule in secret code
and a fucked up Tricky poster
round out the vista
as i stroll in to look
over a computered shoulder

 
So I was just watching Conan O'Brien, and saw a comedian named Demetri on who is definitely the surfer / Yale law drop out / son of a Greek diner owner who I met two summers ago when I went to see Dido and Travis in New Jersey. Fucking small world. I guess he was on Letterman last year sometime, but Tricia neglected to let me know what was going on. And I was just flipping around and poof! There was Demetri. He's funny + was on tv. Woo. If you saw it, you know what I"m talkin bout!

 
Sorry PhiLL...

This is sort of a draft of a poemy thing I am working on...it's rare that I work on work on a poem, but this is my experiment in poeticizing my experience rather than trying to have my experience be poetry in and of itself in the flo of the moment. Help! All comments welcomed.

DRAFT # 2

He didn't drink coffee
I should have known then
that in an uncaffeinated unhaze it would end
when in a fermented caress it all began
which was the more telling?

it was tenderly sinister
distorted images of a situation
even while it was happening
my eyes too bleared to see it then
my eyes too dark to want to see it now

my vertigo grabbed up tired feet
spun them out in a fishtail from beneath me
and onto a barely clad air mattress

he was to be my sweet departure
/even honey doesn't help to sugar me anymore
but newness lacks the guarantee of goodness

I'd go to service, holding his Republican hand
if he asked
but Christianity is never sweet and hopeful
(sorry Lord) / it's built on fear and trembling
on crucifixion and sacrifice and pain
how was this immature man of no call backs and guarded words to be my hope?

no, it wasn't all his fault
i was a hopeful Nietzschean on my own
so where does that leave me now?
unhinged sun and taken to the ships -- unmoored
as 'better as friends'
seeing a flood of Olsmobiles in deserted streets
even in the same sick metallic green as his
everywhere I go
tho they've stopped making them
complete with the dent he acquired in my parking lot

leaves me thinking
coffee was telling
and i pretended not to see
tried like hagel to believe in happy-go-lucky
when no such thing exists.

 
Justin Timberlake: Wannabe or N*SYNC with the cultural musical wants of the "people"?

Like I say, I couldn't really identify it at first. There were a lot of hip hop beats that weren't half bad, but weren't super duper either. I think he had Nelly or somebody do the beats for his album. This girl I saw was teenie bop, but I can't really explain the other kids in the Colgate bookstore who aren't who were dying for JT to be in there stereos on repeat. It wasn't your garden variety boy band fare, but all the same, I'm not running to buy it. My boy band days were over with the death of New Kids on the Block, when my brother took my NKOTB tapes out back and smashed them with a sledgehammer. It was no lookin back after that. What I really truly, and honestly think of Justin Timberlake is that he wants to be Michael Jackson, the young version, when he could sing and dance, and if you don't mind my saying, was still black and had a semi-original nose. What this college set is missing is Thriller<i> -- otherwise they would take it for the sham it is. That's what I think anyway.

 
Probably the worst thing I have seen in a long time...

Ok, so I was out at this coffee shop that's sorta trendy, but having sworn off trendy coffee beverages for Lent or my own agnostic equivalent, I don't feel bad about it being a trendy hang out spot for people with great haircuts and snazzy threads. I was just drinking coffee and reading Alexis de Tocqueville. Things were fine, dandy, and peachy, until I heard some different music heading out of the speakers. Oasis was on before and something else recognizable and not in a bad way. But this was different. There was sort of a hip-hop overlay to it, and unrecognizable vocals. I saw this girl with Princess Leia buns get all excited and dance around, gesturing wildly. She obviously thought it was good. To my horror, I realized, only moments later what it was...THE NEW JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE ALBUM! That's right kiddies...the horror, the horror. But even with this realization in tow, I didn't leave. It wasn't as obnoxious as regular boy band stuff, and wasn't loud enough to really bother me. Then it happened - the table of sorta teeny bop girls burst into song along to "Cry Me A River" in a fashion that would even curl the toes of Simon on American Idol. It was like a bad or worse outtake from the worst of the worst American Idol auditions...some Asian chicks singing, "Tell me you want me / Tell me you need me / oooh / Cry me a River" with absolutely no concern for tone, key, or anything. The words tone deaf acquired new meaning for me tonight. And then I left.

Afterwards, I went in my car and flipped on my tape deck to a mix tape that Doug made for me a while back. It was some indie pop song that I know but can't remember the name of or of the band itself...but it made me jump around in my car to the beat with a huge stupid grin on my face. Those are the moments that make Nashvegas not so bad.

 
Part Deux: A Letter to PhiLL

Thanks for the response, compadre. What you say makes sense, but moreover, I'm glad that it is coming from you, for what it's worth. I guess I have just felt like life has been spinning my wheels lately instead of the other way around. Today might be different, so I tell myself. Maybe that is my version of keep on trucking. Unless it is "keep on keepin on," which I definitely say to myself as well. I don't know. For me, Nashville is one of the loneliest cities I have ever been in. I don't feel like this in New York. Maybe that's because I am a New Yorker and I can walk around in those streets anonymously and in the cold air and feel at home. I don't really feel at home down here, although Nashvegas is probably a friendlier city than NYC. I feel more like I Northeasterner / New Yorker here than ever before...and allegedly I am going to be down here for five to six years. Feels like a prison sentence. But I guess I should be getting busy living, regardless of my locale. I don't know what else to say at the moment, other than thanks for the support. Word up to PhiLL.

 
No Exciting Lights, No Exciting Life

I don't know what I am writing or how this will turn out, but here goes. I feel paralyzed by trying to blog this. I feel paralyzed by communication in general as of late, I suppose. I feel a lack of closeness with pretty much the world...and that wears me thin as of late. I used to be so jazzed about my department, and about what I am trying to do with my life, but lately things are just kinda blech and I don't necessarily know that I am heading down the right path. I guess I brought this up in my "I've been passed over" thing from the other day. Partially I feel that I have been passed over, but mostly it is my department fucking a whole bunch of us kids all at once, and me taking it personally...and having it make me question my own abilities as a philosopher and whether or not this is really what I am supposed to be doing with my life. My roommate said that people from 19-99 question this in themselves and most people don't come up with an answer / don't really figure out what they should be doing. But somehow, as an aspiring pseudo-philosopher, I feel like it is my job to figure out what I am really supposed to be doing, what I should really care about, and what the good life really consists in. I dunno. Sometimes I feel like I can hack it all and can make it through, but then I feel the rug pulled out from underneath me in that I am probably not going to be able to teach next year. A lot of what I am interested in in trying to get a PhD in philosophy is the teaching and writing aspect. I have wanted to teach at least since I was in high school, although the subject has ranged from chemistry to English to philosophy. I think that philosophy is what challenges me the most to think differently and approach texts and the world with new eyes. It lets my mind play in ways that English or something so hardcore analytic like chem doesn't let me do. I just feel like even if my dept doesn't have the money / is restructuring, if they thought I was a good philosopher / promising philosopher, they could find me the bling and pay me. It's just sort of frustrating to bust your ass and not have it come through in the end. As Christian told me once, "Sometimes the harder you try, the harder it is," and I believe him. I am at an empasse in my life. I feel like this is a midlife crisis, and I am all of 22 years old. I don't really want to give up philosophy, nor do I really believe that I will give up on it as my pursuit, but all the same I feel bogged down in it right now. The pursuit of wisdom is a difficult pursuit if only because one can never truly be wise. I was talking all this out with Rachel tonight, among other things. She is, as you will remember (perhaps) from posts past the girl in my department who dicked me over for a guy...we haven't really hung out since, but I have classes with her and am friendly with her, I suppose. My roommates hate her to such an extent that it is almost unbelievable. It is a true showing of loyalty, but all the same, it's almost as if they are taking it more personally than I am. Fuck, that was in December, it's March now. We're all adults (at least some of us try to be) and I feel like it may be time to bury the hatchet. Maybe. See, I was thinking that it might be that time, regardless of what whoever so and so thinks it isn't time to do...but then tonight, while talking about another friend of mine (Caleb) who she doesn't really get along with, she was like, "well, as an undergrad, it seemed like he was either drunk or stoned all the time when I ran into him, and he would forget that he kept trying to hit on me..." etc and so on. Mind you, she has sort of beat me out in terms of two romantic interests thus far in my V career. To me it's like, now turn the knife counterclockwise. It's sort of fucked up, what girls do to each other. God, I am candid, but at least I am not catty. I don't know that she was trying to be catty, but all the same it's just messed up. This other time we were talking, and she was saying how her friend John came to Nash for the weekend, and that she, John (old college love interest of hers), Eric (the guy she dicked me over for), and CJ (her ex boyfriend) were all in the same room together and it was AWKWARD...as if I really cared that it was awkward for her - it translated to me as "All these guys who like / liked me were in the same room and..." etc. That pissed me off as well. But back to tonight. She was bitching about how she's got this weird jealousy thing with Katie (another girl in our dept) and how it related to insecurities while she was dating CJ / how CJ said that Katie was hot or something like that...but then she sort of turns around and does the same thing to me. I don't know, it's tough to explain in person, let alone to an impersonal computer screen. What can I tell you? Either way, I am sort of torn, and not in the Natalie Imbruglia way (be impressed that I can actually spell her name properly). I want to be friends with her, but she is sort of abrasive towards me at the same time. Am I a glutton for punishment? Am I stoopid? What the fuck am I doing? I don't really know anymore. This all probably sounds like a Real World confessional, but my life is always uberdramatic, so fuckall, that is what I say. I feel isolated from most people in my department, and even the people who's company I enjoy don't hang out with me all that often. It makes me nostalgic for Colgate days and Colgate ways, but I don't even really talk to all that many people from Colgate. I only really talk to about 3 people from my high school total - Barbara (known her since I was only 3 years old, if not earlier), Josh / DIVA! (known him since preschool), and Tricia (graduated a year before me). I used to be in contact with Vinny, but he is bad about keeping in touch, and Ryan and I fell outta contact sometime last year. I think he might be in Japan, but I don't really know. That's about it. From Colgate, the person I talk to the most / am in contact with the most is Larry Berkowitz. Props to him! Much love. And then there's Flynn and Marty, but mostly in the form of blog - and the occasional contact with Schiffer. That's about it. What does it say about college or grad school or life or anything? We all have good intentions, but it is rare to see it follow through. I don't know where I am going with this anymore. I thought I did at one point, but what can one do? I guess it's just because I keep trying to let people into my world, and then they don't really follow through on it, even though they have the potential to be good or even great friends. That's probably what the most difficult thing about meeting new people is at my age / our age / any age out of high school. Most people get complacent with the friends they have, the people they know, and don't want to open up their world to anyone else. Not in a negative way, but just timewise and energy wise, I suppose. This was even true by the end of Colgate. It's just strange. Well, comment away on my drivelling ramblings. I am curious as to what anyone can make of this mish mosh of criznip. On life, on friends, on philosophy -- whatever. Let me know that I am not blogging out into oblivion, aight?