This is me.

Wearing too-expensive jeans torn from a dogbite to the leg; a green t-shirt with a breast pocket, tucked in to the aforementioned jeans as to not be walked upon. Cuffs to which are rolled up for the same reason. Nice tight socks.

This is me as a stylistic exercise. Me trying to be cool.

I exercise to the sound of Liars. Wanting not just to be thin, because I am thin, but I want to be post-punk. I want to be bones and connective muscle tissue. Lithe. I want to seem brittle.

Everything is a pose because we can't express the sum total of human experience all at once. This is the pose I want, one of a man skinny and tightly wound, all thoughts like 4 AM thoughts anti-social and brilliant and no not fucking pretentious, there is no artifice, this is your brain on nosleep and movies and books and music I've seen too much I've read too much I've seen too much. (you haven't seen enough) NO ONE'S AROUND.

Wrote a little song lyric this afternoon:
Like an episode of the Twilight Zone where everyone you know is dead, but they're just avoiding you.

Wrote a line of dialogue earlier in the evening: “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Well, no, that’s not true. But the things I was more sure about in the past? Yeah, they were right. Other things I was slightly less sure about? Also right. I am right about this too, you can trust me.”

This is your brain on BEINGFUCKINGWEIRD.

This is me as a stylistic exercise. tryingtoohardmaybe?

Shut the fuck up. (oh here's a thought I had a ways ago: Remember in elementary school when we were told not to say shut up, that "Be quiet" would suffice? And we disagreed, because "be quiet" did not seem harsh enough to get the point across and we continued to say "shut up." And now look where we are, unable even to say shut up, we need to throw "The fuck" in there, just so you know, oh dude I am not fucking around I want you to be quiet. BE QUIET. Harsh like a scream but quiet like a whisper. I want to bring back Be Quiet and I want it to mean something. I can't make it mean something because yeah, look at me. I can't make anything mean anything. It's all bullshit. I can't pull off harsh like razorblades. I am more like a bunny rabbit. No, seriously, I am, I am a bunny rabbit dipped in lemon juice. Acid on my hairs, it's just citric acid but whatever I guess that can burn some people. Of course it's on me all the goddamn time, it's not meant to hurt you, but think about it, hurts me more, I've got citric acid in my fucking eyes and it burns it burns and it's funny when it hurts other people, but it shouldn't hurt them that bad, it's only lemon juice after all, and sure it might seem like it comes from me but I don't want to hurt you. It's in my eyes, I'm saturated in it I am soft on the inside but everything is going to hurt because that's the way the world fucking works)

You want me to write more and I'm giving you what you wanted. Liars on a loop now.

DUDE.

tryingtoohardmaybe?

Oh, God yes.

This is me?

Um, what?

Style over substance because I've got nothing to say. Kill Bill was cool so maybe all will be forgiven.

Of course, Kill Bill was very wisely split up into two halves because there's only so much bullshit you can take right? That's the reasoning. I guess its a certain mood you have to be in but its a mood I'm always in.

This mood, I guess its a rarity. Or is it? Is this my brain on nosleep or my brain unfiltered?

Think about that next time you talk to me and I'm trying too hard to make jokes that no one laughs at.

Daily Show, I'm disappointed in you.

There was an interview with Howard Dean, conducted by Jon Stewart. Not one of the in-the-studio interviews. Jon Stewart went to wherever Howard Dean was. They overdubbed unfunny voiceovers afterwards, and then did some editing. It was fucking horrible. Very far from the land of funny. And far from the land of insight. Yeah, just bad.

This is me posting for the sake of posting. It's about TV. I swear I am not lying when I say I have nothing to say.

So, yesterday that Neutral Milk Hotel t-shirt came in.
Also, yesterday, Evie said I should update this more.

I'm tempted to just post stuff that no one wants to read whenever someone makes such a request. Sure, it's borderline complimentary, but you know me, I'm pretty punk rock. Want to defy expectations and alienate my audience. If I had a digital camera, I could start documenting each time I take a crap. But I don't have a digital camera. But, along the lines of posting stuff that no one wants to think about: I have no sex drive at all. Rather than have the sex-drive of a college student, I have the sex drive of a corpse. And not the kind of corpse that died with an erection and this has gone unrelieved. No. Normal corpse.

Anyway, I get the impression that most people aren't psyched when I talk about music, as no one cares what I think. But there's been a few songs I've been digging that are actually really bad, and I feel they should be mentioned, along with why I like them.

First off- Atom And His Package's Philadelphia. Crap song, not big on the whole style- Goofy synth fun for the hardcore kids or whatever. But- this song is about Philadelphia, and it has this enthusiasm for the city that I share, and this makes it endearing. It's a happy song, a sing-along. "Philadelphia is a place where the mummers are weird" well said, my friend. Ween's Freedom Of '76 is cooler, but really, that song's cooler than a lot of things.

Next- The Faint's Casual Sex. I like the long noisey bit before it becomes just some kind of shitty new-wave revival. And there's the borderline stream-of-consciousness bit "I think it's time we figured out why each time I fall asleep it's nightime in a dream there's a dolphin" so it seems to exist in some kind of genius-retard netherworld.

Halo Benders' Your Asterisk. I like this band because of Doug Martsch. He is so very much where the talent lies. The record I have, God Don't Make No Junk, is too minimal K Records pop. The Rebel's Not In, found on iTunes has a bit more of Built To Spill influence on songs like Virginia Reel Around The Fountain. But this song- goddammit, it's all Calvin Johnson. His time to shine. He has a vocal melody. On all the other songs on the album, he's annoying as hell, but here, he works. The song also has Doug Martsch saying "yeah" which I am never not a fan of.

And breaking from the tradition, I'll mention a genuinely good song- Silver Jews' Random Rules. It's a good song, but it has a definite high-point. That being the second chorus- which isn't really a chorus. Anyway, the point where the trumpet (?) comes in and the drum beats away. The "yeah, you look like someone..." bit. It's a moment that shames the rest of the album, which is really good, but that one moment is so much more immediate. It's like how Dry The Rain is the high point of The Three EPs, and the best part of that song is very much the part in High Fidelity.

Also- got a letter back from these people who were doing a study on drinking habits amongst college students. I think the computer fucked up, in that I gave them the impression that I only drink on Sundays, and on Sundays, I drink 15 drinks. So, apparently, I am in the 91st percentile of college drinkers, in that I drink more or equal to 91 percent of college students. This is not true.

If I could close this with a picture of one of my turds in a toilet, I would.

Me and Alex discuss "Float On"

AndrewWKIsntGood: so whatchya think of the new modest mouse song?
waffle4223: haven't listened to it yet
AndrewWKIsntGood: really?
waffle4223: nope
AndrewWKIsntGood: should check it out
waffle4223: i'm doing it now
AndrewWKIsntGood: it seems like it could be a radio single
AndrewWKIsntGood: imo
waffle4223: it's short enough
AndrewWKIsntGood: just everything about it
waffle4223: yeah
AndrewWKIsntGood: and i mean that in the best way possible
waffle4223: huh
AndrewWKIsntGood: well i mean its not like them doing commercial radio bullshit
waffle4223: yeah
waffle4223: dude for a second his vocal reminded me of hot hot heat
AndrewWKIsntGood: its just a modest mouse that people in general would probably enjoy
waffle4223: the vocals aren't that high in the mix
AndrewWKIsntGood: hmm well theres always a chance hot hot heat just got a lot better
waffle4223: it's just the vocals that sound like hot hot heat in places
AndrewWKIsntGood: havent listened to em much.. wasnt interested enough in em
waffle4223: and the guitar kinda' sounded like hot hot heat just then
AndrewWKIsntGood: hmm
waffle4223: i don't think it could be a single
AndrewWKIsntGood: really?
waffle4223: it sounds like modest mouse but LESS
AndrewWKIsntGood: yeah
waffle4223: like with all the edges off.
AndrewWKIsntGood: exactly
AndrewWKIsntGood: edges cut
AndrewWKIsntGood: and people dont like being cut
waffle4223: like lonesome crowded west trimmed to a pop song
waffle4223: and the abrasiveness kept in check
AndrewWKIsntGood: yeah
AndrewWKIsntGood: thats a single
waffle4223: no because there's not a hook
AndrewWKIsntGood: hmmm
AndrewWKIsntGood: true

So on my way to dinner, I ran into some people who were planning a trip to the Capital Theater in downtown Olympia. It's a little film society- they show movies usually like two weeks before they come out on DVD. The movies they're showing right now- Shattered Glass and All The Real Girls. We would make it a double feature.

I go, and, because of the whole "them-being-retarded" bit, we go after All The Real Girls showed. So we watched Shattered Glass. Jason recommended it, but my expectations were still pretty low.

Didn't like it. Bad acting. A lot of it, like the ANNOYINGASFUCK framing sequence, is intentional, and some other scenes it's intentional too. Acting within acting, it's about artifice, etc. But there are other scenes, like some big scenes, where the acting seemed weak, like something was being held back. My brother's really big on the acting-within-acting- he cites Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys, but I'm not sure that's an example of it. I got the phrase "acting-within-acting" from him, too, but I think it's a pretty self-explanatory concept. Bad acting, no real visual style besides just generic slickness. And a terrible title. The thing is, it starts off with large amounts of the bad acting, intentionally so, maybe. But because of that, I spent most of the movie going "oh dude, fuck this movie" so maybe it was better, I was just aggressively disliking it for a while there, because the, let's say the first twenty minutes, sucked. Cheesy as hell. And the director's name was Billy Ray! I giggled.

I was kind of wanting to see All The Real Girls. It got pretty mixed reviews, but it got a pretty positive one from a relatively reliable source that I saw today.

See, there used to be this internet column, called Title Bout, by one Abhay Khosla. It had a little framework of going over comics that got released each week, but that was just a vehicle for crazy stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Jokes were funny, and when they weren't, it was acknowledged they didn't work, because of the stream-of-consciousness nature, and the fact that funny people are really hard on themselves when they don't think a joke worked. So I liked that aspect- Kind of influential, especially on this post here. But another reason I liked the column was because I agreed with many of the opinions about pop culture stuff expressed therein. It's gone now, ran for a year. So my life was lacking the Abhay hilarity. But then I found out that the dude still posts on some shitty pop culture message board. So I, being a nerd, did a search, and found some nice longish rambly posts. Like stream-of-consciousness as-he's-watching-the-show reviews of The OC, and reviews of various other stuff. Anyway, he wrote up a Best-of-2003 movie list. The list was lacking the hilarity, but had an abundance of opinions I agreed with. Well, actually, it had some stuff I agreed with and stuff I would probably agree with if I had seen the movies in question. Number one on the list was Kill Bill, number two was Bad Santa, which I can get behind, because my movie memory is shoddy. Number five on his list was All The Real Girls. The list seems to fall apart after that- most top any kind of list falls apart at some point. Like Pitchfork is doing Top 50 of the year lists, which is retarded, due to scale, but results in a relatively solid top ten. Other people do top ten lists, which are just inconsistent, but Pitchfork's process resulted in a very solid top ten. But I'm getting off-topic, that topic being- I don't know what. I guess it's "Abhay's cool."

He also had a list of movies that were crap but he liked parts of, which I like. It allows people to give shout-outs to absolute crap that's entertaining at a lizard-brain level. I suppose that you could say that's what Kill Bill was, but it was that way all the way through, as opposed to say, Pirates Of The Caribbean. He pointed out that Pirates is pretty shitty but you forget about it when Johnny Depp's onscreen. When he's on the screen, you're like "Ghost pirates, that's pretty fucking cool" when, in execution, ghost pirates=retarded. Actually, he just wrote off the ghost pirate thing as bullshit altogether, but my brother was really feeling the whole ghost-pirate idea, so I feel like I should reconcile both ideas. I'm not sure my ghost-pirate stance. Sounds brilliant in theory, cheesy when actually on celluloid.

Anyway, All The Real Girls will probably be out on DVD shortly, if not already. I'm thinking that's a movie I'd watch.

Haven't updated this for awhile. No one's complained.

My life desperately needs to become more interesting. For a while, I would use this to avoid repeating myself in conversation after conversation. Now, there's nothing to type, and nothing to say.

Something has to happen.

Hey everybody, time for a gender studies class. Today, or I suppose more accurately yesterday, I was talking about my belief that women drawing mustaches on themselves a feminist statement was fucking retarded and made no sense.

Evie postulated that it's based from some kind of "sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears" kind of thing. Which I'm going on record as saying as bullshit, and articulated to myself before going to sleep, before saying "fuck going to sleep, let's see if I can articulate this in text."

First off, unless sex is being used to refer to the act, sex and gender are motherfucking synonyms. The difference between men and women is one of penises and vaginas, and then how society reacts to whether or not one has a penis or a vagina. The "sex is between your legs..." slogan assumes a homogenity in thought amongst gender lines that doesn't exist. Yeah, there are thoughts that women have that men never will, and vice versa. For example: Women have more of a fear of being raped than men do, which makes perfect sense. However, some girl who thinks of herself as a dude isn't going to walk through a dark alley any less afraid because she thinks of herself as a dude. She's going to have the same fear, because she has reason to have that fear, because she has a vagina.

My point, in conclusion, is that your sexual orientation and your "gender identity" are two very different things. The main difference being that gender identity is, for the most part, and in every sense that doesn't come directly down to penises vs. vaginas, is total bullshit.

Am I being dismissive and overly simplifying the issue? Yeah to the first and no to the second.

In other news, I finished Lolita and it's much much better than Pale Fire. I should read more Nabokov, although I've read the two classics. With records by bands, I feel that all you really need are a band's classic albums- I have Minutemen's Double Nickels On Dime and don't intend to buy any more- but with the great writers I think you need to get more of the context provided by their larger body of work, as opposed to the culmination of what they do and them at the peak of their powers. With mediocre writers you just need to see them at their best, but with ones that can be described as genius, they're more likely to fuck around and experiment with different types of work, and those works need to be investigated.

So, now that I'm back in my room, I've resumed reading Lolita. I was flipping through it's pages when I came across a sheet of paper. I bought the book used, so this might've been left by the previous owner. On one side we have white text on a black background, but it's not entirely black. It was cut out from something, and it's apparent that not all it was cut out from was black, just this portion of text had a black background, for emphasis. Anyway, it reads, in all capitals "WE WERE JUST CONCERNED WITH FUCKING AROUND" on the back of the slice of paper is normal printed writing, with the white-on-black design technnique for the page number, thirty. Anyway, two lines of print can be read.

toon types of stoner metalhead kids that you could imagine," Kurt recalls. "They were so hilarious-zits, no teeth, reeking of pot."

So yeah, it's probably about Nirvana. It's just odd I came across it now. It would be better if I had discovered once I got to the page it was on, but whatever.

Let's continue on the path of me writing about things that no one else cares about. My AIM's all fucked up.

I'm thinking about buying a Neutral Milk Hotel t-shirt. I was at the Orange Twin website. This one. The text in the boxes reads "Somewhere soft and warm and without maggots" with one word per box. Awesome, but the art's kind of craptacular. But I do love me some Neutral Milk Hotel. I'm thinking it evens out.

What else- making mix CDs. One project that had been on my mind for a while was a dance mix filled with music that doesn't suck ass. I'm going to keep on throwing songs onto the iTunes tracklist until there's enough to fill a CD- more than 70 minutes. I'm following the mix rule of not repeating artists, because I'm a huge fucking dork. Then, tonight, I was thinking that this one Unicorns song would be a good opener, as it starts off with a piccolo. There was also a Magnetic Fields song I thought was particularly good, but neither were especially danceable, so I just started another mix, that will be half-assed and consist of songs I already have on iTunes. And I'm not repeating songs from the other mixes on this one. This one probably will never be finished, I just didn't want to delete the tracklist (now up to four songs) once I started it. I just have this terrible music-geek drive to make them. It's a similar compulsion to that which makes me write in this blog. Anyway, if anybody wants this mix once I finish it, you know, probably before I die, say something. You can act like I made it because I really care about you, and am a good friend. I will allow you that self-delusion as it creates a scenario where I am not insane.

Alex: My sister got me The Hipster Handbook for Christmas. And you know what the number one hipster college is?
Me: Reed?
Alex: No, it's Evergreen.
Me: What? Does hipster just mean ugly people now?

I made it back to Olympia, via Chicago. Weird feeling which it turns out I shared with just about everybody: A feeling of homecoming on both my leaving Olympia and my return.

So I'm back in my old room, sans roommate and a bed. My books/CDs were in disarray, and I spent some time putting it all back in order in true neurotic geekboy fashion. I think I used to have a copy of The Stranger, but maybe not. And I thought that I had Jeff Mangum's Live At Jittery Joe's returned to me, but again I'm unsure.

Threw MyTunes on my laptop. It's a great program, it allows you to download stuff off the network you get on iTunes onto your computer, where you can do with it what you will. I got Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2, Exile In Guyville, the Menomena record, The Unicorns album, some Sufjan Stevens outtakes, the last Cat Power record, Shrink by The Notwist, the Wrens' Secaucus, and some other stuff. I don't want to catalog every piece of new music that comes into my possession, but I mention all this just to prove that this is a fucking amazing application. It allows for music to spread like a virus. It's like an STD that gets spread amongst straight dudes, singles and the sexless- the demographic that seems to care about music more than anyone else, or at least the obscure electronic indie bands that I favor.

I brought back two things I had mentioned to people as something I should show them- my children's book done for my creative writing class and my Chlamydia comic thing I did for kicks. It doesn't hold up in a context of preservation, I'm thinking. They worked as things I crapped out, but me bringing them to the attention of people after the fact seems to imply some quality that they don't possess. Either that or I've changed since high school. I don't know.

Speaking of my writing not holding up- There's this short story I started writing after I got kicked out. Progress has gone slowly. The problem that I've created for myself is this- I'm telling the story in the present tense, stream-of-consciousness, but the story's ending takes place three days from the story's beginning. This fucks up the pacing royally. Even though I am not one for descriptions, keep in mind that this is something which would need a lot of time spent on unimportant things for the whole stream-of-consciousness/present-tense thing to work. The last sentence I wrote in the story is either brilliant or a cop-out, I don't even know yet. This thing's choking itself. It seems like the next scene for me to write involves drinking heavily, not sure how I'm going to work that out with the narration. A Burroughs style drug-state depiction using cut-up of the sentences wouldn't work, due to the nature of alcohol. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. It's a pretty good story almost. I don't know what I'll think of it a year from now. I'll probably still be trying to finish it. What a fucking terrifying thought.

Here's the thought which almost gives me hope- maybe I'm looking at my older work with such disgust because I'm a better writer now than I was then? Is that more or less believable than the idea that everything I write fucking sucks ass and I just like the new stuff because it's new, and it has that feeling of freshness?

My favorite graffiti is gone. It used to rest at the corner of Second and Washington, the unpunctuated sentence "I can't sleep at night." I discovered this Tuesday night, around 1 AM, as I went out of my way to see it on the way to a convenience store after I watched Raging Bull. It bummed me out.

It's funny, in Olympia I like to claim a kinship to Philadelphia, which is kind of real and kind of bullshit, in that I lived there for all of three months this past summer. I felt the city. I know it's mood but not it's geography. But that graffiti is gone now. It's mood was not the mood of the city but was one of my moods, written in the city, actually giving me something to claim a kinship with. I could also relate to that feeling of kind of thinking I'm shitty, as opposed to New York's massive "New York is the greatest city" vibe. Philly's got this combination of pride and knowing that most people think we suck ass (especially New York, they're oh so cool) and not quite believing we suck ass, but knowing we're not as "cool" as NY, and thinking we're better for it, because fuck the hipsters man with their coke problems and their Vice magazines and their Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

I've been spending this break as a transient, needing to move on constantly. Spent a night at my dad's house, then I spent the day after Christmas with my old friends. We had lunch. Diana remarked that I should write more of my character assassination, and I'm not sure if she meant this blog in general or just the IFuckingSuck entries.

(If she likes the IFuckingSuck entries, there's a little bit of that here, I suppose. It moves on in the end, where I review movies and list CDs I bought, which is interesting to no one. And then it ends really half-assed, with a quote. Does this count as character assassination, this kind of almost-meta commenting on how shitty my blog entries are? Does anything I write about count as character assassination? And what was the fucking deal with the end of that second paragraph? Did anyone not me know what I was talking about?)

Spent the weekend at my dad's, then went over to my brother's for a couple of days, including New Year's Eve. I didn't do anything, as my brother and everyone else went to Tattooed Mom's, the punkrock bar place. Mike's roommate Cecilia left me with the remaining third of a bottle of wine to kill and so I rang in the new year, drinking but not the least bit drunk and watching South Park. Today I left my brother's, because even though I greatly prefer the company of my brother to that of my mom and stepdad, I'm just counting off the days to go back to Olympia, waitingwaitingwaiting.

My plans to see people didn't fall through, weirdly enough, but the plans to see movies and buy CDs kind of did. I went to TLA Video and instead of renting Talk To Her, which was out, I rented the first disc of The Ben Stiller Show DVD, which was pretty funny. My plans worked out for renting Raising Arizona and Raging Bull. The Raging Bull DVD was kind of fucked up with skips and stuff, and I was getting distracted thanks to being hungry and whatnot. I suppose it was OK. Raising Arizona I did indeed like quite a bit, ranking with The Big Lebowski in my mind in terms of top echelon Coen brothers movies that I've seen. I almost forgot, I also saw some movies that my brother rented before I arrived on the scene. Including Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (the director's cut). I would describe it as the worst thing that has ever lived, despite the fact that it's not actually alive, seeing as how it was a movie, and cancer cells could be aptly described as being alive. Apparently, the first one was watchable. But yeah, that sucked just as much ass as I expected. I also saw Stealing Harvard, which it turns out was directed by Bruce McCulloch. It's just as mediocre as you would expect.

When I was at my dad's, I also saw some movies. I rented The City Of Lost Children, which I didn't like as much as Delicatessen, as it's more of this French children's movie/fantasy type thing. It seemed the most Terry Gilliam influenced film in their oeuvre. Visually, it's Jeunet and Caro's best work, with tons of ideas like a brain in a fishtank. I wish I'd seen it in theaters. My dad rented Morvern Callar, which reminded me of Lost In Translation in terms of mood and being all indie-film and kind of boring. My dad also took me to see 21 Grams, which I wasn't feeling that much. It's very drama. It's cut-up and non-linear, it's about death, it's "intense," my dad described it as being "pretty damn good" and I felt like I'd seen it before, even though I hadn't. My dad also rented Secretary, which I've already seen but bring up because a) my dad rented it because he's a pervert (you don't need to be a pervert to like the movie, but that's why my dad rented it.) and b) because it's that same feeling of feeling like I've seen it before. I mean, I don't think that S&M lovestories have been done before, and if it has, I haven't seen it, but there's still that feeling I have of "I know about indie-film, and even though I haven't seen this before, it feels like I have, this doesn't seem fresh."

And when my dad took me to the record store, those CDs I mentioned in the last post weren't there. I picked up The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, The Beauty Pill's You Are Right To Be Afraid EP, and Ween's The Mollusk. Once I got to Philly I did the record store roaming thing, and found a copy of Silver Jews' American Water for 12 bucks (the cheapest I've ever seen it, hooray for AKA Music) and nothing else.

I also looked at reviews on Amazon for David Berman's book of poetry, Actual Air. One line struck me enough to remember it, and I'll leave you with it, although it's probably just a paraphrase: I refuse to be the middleman in a relationship between you and the florist.