So, I haven't whored for McSweeney's for awhile. But recently, on the "McSweeney's recommends" section of their site, they recommended not moving. Which... um, yeah. Pain in the ass. Besides the whole packing things up thing, living in two different places and moving twice in a short span of time ends up in me missing many many shows.

Anyway, yeah, back to the whole talking about movies thing.

Watched Almodovar's Live Flesh. When it was over, I realized the thematic similarity/repetition at the heart of the oeuvre that I hadn't picked up from the other three movies I saw. This one put it over the top. I don't know if it's a bad movie, but in a way it's one I wish I hadn't seen because it tarnishes his other work. I imagine that if I'd been following Almodovar all this time, Talk To Her may not have kicked my ass like I did.

Also watched Tom Tykwer's Heaven. Apparently, when someone I knew saw it in the theater, much of the audience was pissed at the ending. Endings that piss people off tend to make me happy, unless it pisses people off by just being aggressively shitty. (like A.I.) This ending made me happy. Most of the movie... The first two-thirds (excepting the very opening scene) seem vaguely thrillerish. Not so much in execution. It's not much of a nail-biter... A lot of people call the movie hypnotic. But it's compelling, plotwise. The final third takes on a more languid tone, vaguely pastoral. (This opinion is shaped mainly by a few shots very close to the end.) The plot stops developing, basically. And then it ends on rather daring note, the kind of thing that I want to call "magic realism" as someone who has heard the term before but hasn't read Marquez and really has no fucking clue what I'm talking about when I say that. Think the ending to Barton Fink, if everybody took my advice and watched Barton Fink. Or that one scene in Magnolia everyone talks about. Basically movies embracing the fact that they are not real life and doing stuff which might not work according to its own logic, but rather, does something that DEFINES the movie's logic as being much larger than the strict realism-with-some-oddity it seemed to be embracing. Realism with some small oddities, but then one GIANT fucking oddity. I love that shit. Eat it up with a spoon.

Um, my brother bought a copy of Drugstore Cowboy so I watched that. Fun sidenote is that one of the movie's screenwriters is named Daniel Yost. I know a guy with that name. I also liked the moments with flying hats. That movie is just okay, nothing great. The kind of thing where you can imagine the director falling off sharply and creating pieces of shit like Elephant, Finding Forrester, and a Psycho remake, but this was made while they were young and hungry. Like, when you're done watching it, you wouldn't call Gus Van Sant a genius, and you wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt ever, but you can concede that it's an alright movie. And, even though it's just alright, he never made anything that good again. So you accept it as a fluke, and chalk the quality up to Daniel Yost and William S. Burroughs, and then you go on living your life. (The moments with the floating hats are pretty fucking cool though.)

I saw Melvin Goes To Dinner. Which it turns out is not a comedy. Some of the cameos in there are rather surprising. I recommend it to fans of Richard Linklater. It's based on a play. One of the special features on the DVD is a scene from the play, which really brought home how I don't like plays as an artistic medium. Ugh. Seriously, why make a play when you could make a movie? Fuck plays.

I also saw Blood Simple, which was okay. Coen brothers doing something not a comedy. Which means... it's okay. I borrowed Miller's Crossing from work and will watch it tomorrow, along with Amores Perros. Apparently it's way better.

I also started watching Spartacus on DVD from work but the DVD crapped out. I liked it though. My brother mocked me for getting it, due to the gayness of gladiators.

There are some people I would like to contact but I'm not sure if the information I would use to contact these people is out of date or not. One of these people is Diana Fanelli. She used to read this, but I don't know if she still does, as a) it's rarely updated and it seems like most people should have stopped reading it, and b) I have no way to get in contact with her so I haven't communicated with her since the posting became erratic. Anyway, if you, the person reading this, are Diana Fanelli, contact me while I'm still in Philadelphia.

Which, for those of you keeping track, means sometime in the next two weeks. If I were in Olympia over the next two weeks, I could see Deerhoof.

So, on reading and writing: I finished Gravity's Rainbow. Yay me. I can't recommend it to anyone though, even though it had its moments. I started Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but yeah I don't know if I really have the drive to read through it, at least in order to finish it before school starts. My brother's been getting David Sedaris books from the library, and my mom's been buying books that aren't crap. (I told her to pick up 100 Years Of Solitude, and she's also bought a handful of ex-hip book-club-style books from Borders' Buy 3, get 1 free table, so she's got the first Augusten Burroughs book, Life of Pi, and some other stuff.) My brother also has some books that he owns and I sometimes think about reading, like William S. Burroughs' The Wild Boys. All of these ae lighter quicker reads than the actually pretty enjoyable and compelling Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And after Gravity's Rainbow, my brain is going to have to decompress on the light quick reads before reading another ungodly long novel. Oh and yesterday I got a handful of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, (best comic ever) rounding it out, so maybe someday soon I'll be able to spend an afternoon reading that whole run front to back. That would be a fucking great afternoon.

Did I ever write about how my mom has some girl from church living in my room? Okay, technically, it's not my room, it's a guest room, with a lot of my shit there. (i.e. comics, making the room important for my Best Afternoon Ever plan) But anyway, yeah, that's happening, which kind of sucks.

Oh and I told my mom I was stopping going to her church (you know, the one I grew up in) because it was too conservative and I felt consistently more and more alienated from the proceedings. I've had differences in terms of interpretation with the church leadership for fucking forever, but now, you know, I gots me a job, so it's one more reason to stop going. These two things combine so I won't be seeing my mom as much as I have been. Which I'm pretty cool with, except for the kinks in the Best Afternoon Ever plan. That's really all I care about.

So, yeah, writing. I am a slow writer. Here's the latest news. The book I had entitled Get Broken has transmogrified and now is being called Powers Of Observation. I'm pretty excited about it, although I should probably do more research before I write any more. The story I called Shoppe is now called Drawing In Frosting, but isn't quite done. There's a part of me hoping I can finish it by the time school's out.

I have two more short stories that I've written and finished since taking up the short story form in earnest following being kicked out of my dorm room last November. One's called Of Mice And Men, which I submitted in the McSweeney's August Van Zorn contest and a few people have read. The other's called Companion, which no one has read and I might submit for publication after I'm back at Evergreen. I finished writing Companion before the school year ended. But yeah, still haven't finished Drawing In Frosting, which I think I began writing around the same time as Companion. Actually, probably before.

I'm a slow writer. Don't know what I'm going to do when I'm in a writing class, where presumably I'll have to write fiction. Essays and autobio I can pretty much crap out. Maybe other people are faster at writing fiction because they just write thinly-veiled autobiography, or maybe I just suck. I mean, it's not like I'm slow because I'm meticulously crafting sentences, I'm slow because I have to wait for more insights to write down and pace out the thing. Drawing in Frosting had like a three-paragraph meditation on the nature of marriage. And the rest of the story is all about the interaction between a husband and wife. The husband doesn't quite understand the wife, which needs to be made clear, but it's being written from the husband's perspective, so I can't just declare it. So... that's going to be tricky.

So, computer froze at the tail-end of a long post. Here I go, retyping it.

After my last post, I decided not to write about every movie I see as I rarely have anything to say about said movies.

That said: Gus Van Sant's Elephant is a cinematic abortion, as boring as Lost In Translation and for many of the same reasons. It aims to capture alienation and loneliness, and decides to go about doing so in the same fashion. It's even more bullshit about high school than it was about foreign lands. The other points, when the movie makes the killers players of violent computer games and gay lovers, are even more bullshit. Do not see Elephant. If the point it was trying to make was that high school violence is OK because everyone in high school is a lame-ass with no personality, it succeeded. Holy fuck did this movie have no characterization. I didn't give a shit what happened to anyone. Everyone in the movie could've died and I would've met those deaths with apathy.

That was rented by my brother, along with a copy of the as-yet-unwatched Predator 2. My brother also made me watch Spaceballs. He kept on telling me to keep watching as really funny parts were right around the corner. I left in the middle, feeling sleepy, and mentally added Mel Brooks to my list of dudes that aren't funny at all.

Peter Sellers is still on that list, even though The Party sucked. It was Sellers in slapstick mode. I really don't get the comedy in people falling in water. When Sellers spoke to make jokes, I laughed. But that only happened once.

I borrowed Man Bites Dog and Sunset Boulevard from work. Sunset Boulevard's cool, except for a few elements that I excuse due to when the movie was made. (Melodramatic at parts and the insertion of the score at big moments) Man Bites Dog was good, although I don't like the whole making points about media violence by making a violent movie thing. Yes, I'm sure they were aware of it, and it's a good movie regardless, way better than Natural Born Killers, but... It's really more just an issue of my own idea of what film should be. If I ever make a movie, I'm not going to indict myself and make myself part of the problem. I don't know. If I hadn't seen Natural Born Killers, I probably wouldn't bitch about that element of Man Bites Dog. And again, Natural Born Killers had a lot more wrong with it than just being a part of the problem it railed against.

And I saw Sonic Youth last night. Not as good a show as the one last year. Afterwards I really ironed out the kinks in my whole "hating everything but still I guess loving people" bit. I guess all cultures/subcultures are shit. The only way you can be cool is to pretty much reject all of them, but this doesn't mean rejecting everything, as there are many many people who don't fit into one cliche or scene.

But yeah, try to think of a good culture, because maybe I'm wrong.

So basically, I work, I steal CDs from work, I borrow DVDs from work.

I also read Gravity's Rainbow, which I'm close to finishing. It's not great. It's decent, and I will be filled with a feeling of satisfaction when the book is complete. Even though it's not going to satisfy my desire for books that just break my mind and flip my shit, I'll just be proud of myself.

So, um, movies.

First off, Natural Born Killers is a total piece of shit. Fuck that movie. Tries too hard, not funny, cliche-ridden.

Flirting With Disaster is smile-funny, not laugh-out-loud funny, and cute but nothing more.

Dog Day Afternoon is pretty damn good. Sidney Lumet knows how to do drama.

Alphaville is better than Weekend, but that says very little. Enjoyable, but I'm not going to recommend it.

Vertigo may or may not make sense, or come together. It's also very slow-paced until shit starts happening. The twist was one I didn't see coming. Has anyone discussed Mulholland Drive (or maybe Lost Highway) in the context of Vertigo? Obviously Vertigo's not as over-the-top, but it does have a long segment where you ask yourself "what the fuck is going on here."

Barton Fink is underrated. What a great movie, which I wasn't quite expecting because no one talks about how awesome it is. I liked it more than Fargo, easily. It's not that funny, but it's damn compelling and kind of entertaining.

Killer's Kiss made my mind wander. I guess the shots looked cool, because it's Kubrick, but slow-paced. Everyone likes Kubrick, but who's seen all of his movies? Fucking no one. People just tend to go based on other stuff about the movie they find interesting, which in itself is kind of fascinating. It's weird how most Stanley Kubrick collection sets don't include all of his work. He wasn't that prolific, he made 10 features, not counting Killer's Kiss and the one, shorter movie he made before that. Killer's Kiss has the great line "you're an old man, and you smell" said by a woman to the gangster who... loves her, I guess. My mind wandered. But that's a great, quotable line.

I also borrowed The Party but will watch that tomorrow.

Oh and I bought and read Caricature by Daniel Clowes. For those not in the know: Daniel Clowes is a cartoonist, does a comic called Eightball, which is mainly an anthology of just his work. It was in this that the comic Ghost World was serialized, which sucked as a comic, but he helped adapt into the movie, which was rather good. The new issue of Eightball's pretty damn good, and it's fascinating to me to read the online discussion because of the ambiguities of it, and people having their own ideas of what it's about. It brings to mind discussions of short stories in English class, only everyone involved in the discussion is smart and it's not being moderated by a complete dumbass. Caricature is a collection of short stories, in the Raymond Carver mold, but funnier. I liked it okay.

Someday soon I'm going to need to buy clothes.

Only music I've purchased is Streethawk: A Seduction by Destroyer, and a copy of Black Eyes' Cough on vinyl for Alez. I want to listen to the Black Eyes more, and I want Pitchfork to review it. It's a fucking crazy record. I've stolen a lot of music, very little of it notable. I now have a copy of Gentlemen by the Afghan Whigs, which makes me a minority for my age bracket. They're a nineties indie rock band, but not one the very good ones, and they've fallen out of fashion. Archers Of Loaf are way better.

Like many of my blog entries, this one ends when my urge to shit becomes to much to take. That is to say, now.

Keeping in touch sucks. I suppose it's a necessary evil, but I do not enjoy it very much at all. Today I called up Evie Nelson, talked to her on the phone. Evie will be reading this, and I don't want her to get confused: she is one of my favorite people. Many of the people reading this are some of my favorite people. People I want to keep in touch with, in a certain way. I want to know what they're up to, where their head is at.

But, more than that, I wish I was with them. Right now, I am living my life in limbo. In a perfect world, that is not the case. I am with these people who I sincerely enjoy, and we are doing things and having adventures, having shared stimuli to talk about. Without the constant stream of shared stimuli, conversations become dull and vague, trading in Jungian universal experiences and pronouns. (or movies and tv and news and music and shit... fun but feels shallow) Right now, I wish I was traipsing around California, living some kind of greatest hits reel of someone else's life, talking with her old friends and ex-friends, arbitrarily deciding that some of them suck and telling them so, because these aren't people I'll see again. I'll get yelled at later for it, but what the fuck, fun times, these are the memories that we share.

Or instead of California, it's Portland, or Alaska, or... Not Chichester, obviously, but I suppose I could hang out on other people's college campuses for short bursts of time when the school year starts. In theory. This is not actually going to happen.

Of course, if some one visited me in Olympia I might feel awkward about the convergence of lives new and old. I'm aware that this is true for other people's lives as well, so maybe adventures in someone else's life that is seperate from my own is not what I want. Maybe the different circles of friends should stay home and only the geography would remain. I'd show kids from Olympia around Philadelphia, showing them places to eat and how cheap CDs are if you know the right places. If kids from high school went to Olympia, I would obviously have nothing to show them. But still...

I lamented yesterday that it's fucked up that work is pretty much all I have in the way of a social life. But, in a way, going to work/school, or living near people just might be the ideal in terms of interaction. Something constant. Trading off reading material, knowing the same people and having inside jokes, because you sure as hell can't make new inside jokes over phone lines. Friendship over phone lines, or via the postal service, feels like homework. It's rewarding homework, but still, homework.

Also: thinking about the people I know, and am friends with... The more shared experiences I have with them, the bigger the space they occupy in my brain. The easier my thoughts run in their directions. Complex neuropathway maps of associations. There are people who I think about when I think of high school, when I think of college, when I listen to music, when I think about movies. Keeping in touch segments them off into little compartments, file cabinets full of information about people, "where are they now?" pieces of trivia.

And even if I met up with these people, shared a lunch or something and a conversation, even that isn't optimal because the conversation is about "keeping in touch," the telling of old stories (not of shared nostalgia, although sometimes that occurs as well) rather than the creation of new events.

Basically, I crave adventure, and it's easiest to get excited about people I'll be spending time with in the future. (Alex and Loren: I've got an idea for a movie! Maybe you don't want to be involved, which is cool. But you'll be around when I try to get other people involved! It'll be sweet! Also, maybe adventures in rockbanding? Loren on bass, Alex on laptop, fun times playing shows in downtown Olympia? Goddamn, that'd be rad! Let's fucking rock that action!) Which sucks, as there are many people who I won't be spending time with in the future who I would love to be excited about because they're fucking cool, and I care about them.

So I've been thinking about my recent past in the vague terms of "growing up," looking at myself from not-that-long-ago (high school years) and just wondering about the general what-the-fuckness of it all. I'm not even particularly immature, but just looking at the people that surrounded me and the contradictions makes me wonder. It's hard to articulate.

Basically, I look at myself from not that long ago... let's say when I was in ninth grade... Four to five years ago. In many ways, I'm a different person. In many ways, I'm innately the same person. Which is an interesting contradiction, but not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is how, when viewed as a narrative, I don't quite know how I got from point A to point B.

The thing is that I viewed myself as having my shit together at that time. But I've viewed myself in such a fashion for a while... Probably since I was eight. This is pretty much how everyone operates, I figure. But, in high school, also thrown into the equation is this feeling of "it's all downhill from here." Not in terms of "these-are-the-greatest-years-of-my-life"... From that perspective, nowhere to go but up. But in terms of having a fear of the loss of ideals, that people associate with maturity.

When the film Waking Life came out, a lot of people seemingly dismissed it and the ideas put forth as being sophomoric. A lot of things are dismissed as sophomoric... i.e. dick jokes. Waking Life was being trashed for having an idealism about it's ideas and being in love with philosophical discussion in a way that people felt like they had outgrown when they left their dorms. Which kind of proves my point as mentioned above. I mention Waking Life also because these are ideas that are kind of touched upon in one scene. But yeah, sophomoricism, I guess, encompasses both philosophical discussion and being a fan of dick jokes. (What's sad is the low level of discussion I've encountered even at my hippie college... It rarely goes on as is, if this is the high point, no one on Earth has any reason to exist.) Usually it's because being a sophomore (I was always unclear as to whether or not this referred to college or high school) is often synonymous with getting high. (Which I guess could account for the low quality of the discussion, but the implication seems to be that if people didn't get high, they wouldn't think about anything larger than themselves ever.) Anyway, as anyone reading this knows, I am a fan of both the philosophical discussion and the dick jokes. These things seem pretty goddamn innate. (Seriously, if it's not my sense of humor and the thinking of deep thoughts, what the fuck are the defining elements of my personaity? Bad social skills? Fuck, I thought that was something I was getting over...) I don't think I'll outgrow them, and at this point in my life, I don't want to. But the idea of personal growth looms on the horizon like grim death.

There is of course the possibility that my life isn't going to make sense as a narrative until I am very old, which I don't want to consider because it goes against my belief that I am on top of my shit right now, at age nineteen, and as self-aware as I ever will be. (It is the self-aware writer part of me that laments the use of parentheses in this and the previous paragraph.)

Oh, more movies I had rented, but had forgotten to discuss.

El Topo: I had an even more lukewarm to this than I did to Santa Sangre, as this is more rambling and not as tight in terms of narrative. So it produced moments of "what the fuck" in that way, not the good way.

Dead Man: This was cool.

Last Temptation of Christ: I guess I'm just not feeling the Schrader/Scorsese team. Which is disappointing.

Um, I also watched my brother's copy of Fistful Of Dollars. I was often confused by what was going on. I'm thinking that the western, even the cool kind of western, not the John Wayne killing people who are darker-skinned than he, is not my genre, no matter how much I would want it to be.

It would seem that my coworkers are the closest thing I have to friends right now, in that going to work is all I have in the way of social interaction. And it's not like I even like all of my coworkers. And I doubt any of them consider me anything more than a weird dude.

So, that's a sad state of affairs.

In the absence of real events we talk about movies, and in absence of criticism, we just throw some shit out there: I saw 2LDK, Lady Snowblood, and Human Nature. 2LDK was good, I wish I had fast-forwarded through Lady Snowblood. (there was a bit in Coupland's Microserfs about everyone being so busy at work that they couldn't watch tv, so instead they would record it with subtitles on, then play it the next day, fast-forwarded while they ate lunch, and the idea of doing that with foreign films has stuck with me. Not the artsy kind, but martial arts movies with long periods of tedium, like Lady Snowblood kind of was) Human Nature was underrated, and I enjoyed it a good deal.

I would like to apologize to anyone reading this for having wasted their time so thoroughly. I wish that instead of these journal entries you could just see footage of me working at work, edited in such a way so all you get is my non-stop cleverness.

I could write a whole letter to Alex just about music and pitchfork and shit. In brief: David Bowie's Low is not that good, neither are the Fiery Furnaces. Funkadelic's Maggot Brain is pretty damn great though, not funky/danceable at all really... I've heard some of their other stuff that is more in that vein and I'm not feeling it as much, but Maggot Brain is pretty solid. Also: Some crackhead came into the store yesterday selling stolen CDs. She had good shit, but sometimes the good shit was just the packaging and different things were contained therein, like a copy of the first Godspeed record in the case for Spiderland. What sucked is I thought she had a copy of a Destroyer record, but when I looked at the CD, which had very little information on it, just a map of constellations, what I took to be the label and the CD number corresponded to something completely different, what it was I don't know. Also: A copy of Fennesz's Venice, which I kind of wanted to see if I could buy on the cheap then send your way. Oh dude, and the good record store in Philly actually sells a copy of Girl Talk's Unstoppable. And there's this band that played in Philly called Growing that are from Olympia, but are apparently signed to Kranky, they're like harsh drone stuff, ex-hardcore kids or something like that.

This computer... the keys don't give as quickly as I would like them to.

My doppelganger from college came into my store not that long ago, which was kind of weird. A group of people from high school stumbled in as well, that same night. That was a crazy night, in a way, but disappointing... these were not people I was friends with. this was an altogether different clique. I've seen other people, on South Street, who I didn't hang out with either.

So yeah, I might've said this before, but I'll say it again, because it seems appropriate for me not to know whether or not I've actually said it before: I am living in limbo.

At some point, I stopped looking like a clean-cut nerdy kid. This is if experiences with people where I work are anything to go by. Like when drunk girls ask me if I'm tripping, and it amuses me to say yes. They then ask what I'm on, and if I can get some. They later compliment my shoes.

Or today, when I left work at 2:15 and ran into a customer and his wife on the street. The customer in question frequents the store, asking for help to locate several CDs, then buying maybe one. In the past he's tried to pay in cigarettes, but today he apparently tried to pay using a piece of paper with a girl's phone number. Anyway, I run into this dude who asks me if I have any rolling papers on me to roll a joint. I say no, I don't smoke out. The wife inquires as to the phrase "smoke out" and why I say it. I admit that just heard it somewhere and thought it sounded cool. Anyway, yeah, they proceed to ask me if I smoke weed. I say no. They ask if I do shrooms, then they ask if I do hash. I say no to all these things. Then the wife asks if i'm working tommorrow, and if she can borrow a dollar until then. I tell her no, because I swear to God, I don't have anything but pennies in my pocket. She shakes my hand, which the husband had already done. I think she told me I was hardcore, but that might just be something I really wanted to imagine I heard.

I also lended my stool to the very young daughter of a woman with a giant yellow mohawk in the store, despite my sleepiness. This has nothing to do with people thinking I'm a drug dealer, but everything to do with me thinking I'm a bad-ass.

I was quite tired tonight.

Latest coworker is a thirty-two-year-old, which is odd because she's someone who I feel I could list a few personality traits and come up with a stereotype, based on people at Evergreen. The stereotype: Vegetarian lesbian ex-goth who smokes American Spirits. Do you know what that means, or do I just create stereotypes because I am filled with hate? Anyway, doesn't respond to my deadpan humor... Although I'm not sure any of my coworkers do with any regularity... she wore a Liars t-shirt her first day and a Sonic Youth t-shirt today, so I guess that's someone I can be cool with. Today people were listening to Big L and I was wondering if she was offended, because hot damn, Big L is some hateful shit. She was in fact offended. I agreed that it was offesive, but then she said some rant about people just saying offensive things to be considered "cutting edge" and asking what illiterates could listen to something like this, and I explained that I was dead inside, no longer offended. She said something about "when did it become cool not to be offended" or something along those lines, and I just told her I disagreed and refused to have such thoughts because they seem very "old dude way of thinking." Weirdly enough, when I said this I wasn't thinking of the age difference. I wasn't viewing her as being 32, I was just viewing her like those kind of people at Evergreen who are offended by things.

I am rambling, but that is because I desperately need sleep.

Been meaning to write something in this, open letters to a few people. Blogging really isn't that easy when you don't have a computer with a cable connection. I might just try to contact people individually.

Anyway, the latest. My dad had a heart attack, but didn't die. He'll have to eat healthier now, although I don't know if he will. I wonder if he's done coke. Which is a weird thing to wonder about your dad. Most people know if their parents have done coke, or have no reason to suspect. My dad hangs out with strippers, so I'm thinking he's been around coke. Can't really ask him about it, though. My mom got fired from the inner-city Christian school she worked at, essentially because she doesn't understand black people. She might put it differently, but I mean, holy shit, she really doesn't understand even the barest bones of the culture, I think. I want to ask her if she knows how important Malcolm X is to most black families... He's known for being militant and muslim, so I'm sure my mom dismisses him. She says dumb shit. Moving on.

Saw two movies in theaters, both sequels to films I haven't seen. Spider-Man 2 and Before Sunset. Both are good if you like that kind of thing. I like the Before Sunset kind of thing more... Richard Linklater's great. I've wanted to see Before Sunrise for ages. It seems like it would be Lost In Translation done right. Before Sunset is a very talky movie, but in a way closer to everyday speech than most talky movies, in that much of the conversation comes across as fairly banal. None of the high-minded discussion of Waking Life finds it's way into the movie. And yet, it's still good. A few scenes are great, like the fact that the movie ends the way it does. It seems kind of defiant.

Before leaving Olympia, some people wanted to know my e-mail address. I told them not to bother, because I wouldn't be getting online that much. Even when I said this, it was partly a lie, partly wishful thinking. But no, I'm online a bunch. My e-mail address is embarrassing, created as it was when I was in sixth grade, a reference to an obscure comic book I loved then. But here I am, in Philadelphia, on my brother's computer, which resides in the room I sleep in. It's his studio. I sleep on the floor. My stuff is crammed into one small corner when I am not asleep. When I am asleep, I spread sheets across the open part of the floor. Looked at people's Livejournals. Thor met Stephen Malkmus and saw Need New Body. Need New Body live in Philadelphia and I've yet to see them. I have no real reason to meet Stephen Malkmus, but I'm sure that if I did, it would be the high point of the month.

I have a part-time job working in a really shitty record store. It's owned by a fat dude. He buys things cheap from flea markets and stuff then marks them up. It's really terrible. I get paid... I guess six bucks an hour? And it's part-time... For two days work, Saturday and Sunday, I got fifty bucks. This would suck, except: Because I am sleeping on a floor in my brother's studio, I'm only paying $100 a month for rent. I also have to help him keep shit clean, but that's a good deal. Oh, and there's soon going to be a second store, so I can work full-time. It's seriously absurd that he can open a second store. His is the worst record store on South Street, and there's a lot of competition for that title. It's open late. That seems to be the only thing it has going for it. It has diversity, but mainly because the owner's retarded. Still. I'm getting paid, and it's a reference to put down. Is it weird that they don't call themselves a record store, they call themselves a CD store? Even other places that sell nothing but CDs seem to call themselves record stores if they market themselves to a very music-savvy demographic. (i.e. Tower Records) This place doesn't. It's a store for retards. Someone asked me where the oldies section was. I told them we didn't have an oldies section, but if she told me what she wanted, I could find it in the existing sections. What she meant by oldies: "like the old Biggie and Tupac." No one I tell that story to laughs at it. It's fucking hilarious. Biggie and Tupac aren't even old-school hip-hop. Ready To Die came out in 1994. But, hey, they hired me. I didn't have to fill out a job application, either. Just walked in, gave my name, phone number, and told them I was eighteen.

Every time I walk home I want to drink milk as soon as I get back. The Freudian interpretation of this is that, when I work, I feel like an adult and want to drink milk to bring me back to childhood. A more practical explanation is that I have a very poor diet, lacking in calcium, and after I do work, I need calcium. Before I got the job, my roommate said to me "Nothing like a cold one after a day at work," and I just kind of agreed in a vague sense. You know, how I do.

When I go to sleep, I dream that I'm still at Evergreen. None of my friends are in Olympia, though.

Philadelphia isn't living up to its history of being awesome. I wish there were shows to see. I wish there were independent films to see. I need to eat more food. I've been eating at Lorenzo's a lot, which I missed, but it's not the full experience. I've also had water ice once or twice. Also: the comic shop on South Street is fucking weird, too. It caters to a bizarre demographic. I believe the term is "buppies." Only they're not that young. I mean black people that seem stereotypically white. I did overhear a comment about the racial politics of an issue of G.I. Joe, but... it's just weird. It's like dads. It's probably the only shop, comic or otherwise, I've been at the same time as a uniformed cop. Oh, and their selection is pretty crappy as well. It's really generic superhero centric. If you're a black cop in your thirties/forties who really digs The Flash, it's the fucking store for you.

On the good side: TLA Video has copies of El Topo and The Holy Mountain, as well as Eraserhead on DVD. I need to see those. TLA Video is something I missed about Philadelphia. I also got to see Pedro The Lion doing a little acoustic set behind Spaceboy. I missed Spaceboy, but I haven't bought anything from there yet.

So, where is the grass greenest? I want everybody to take a picture of some grass in their area. I mean "grass" in the literal sense, and you are not clever if you photograph marijuana instead. I want those photos of grass to also include that which is awesome about the area in which they're at. This idea just came to me, and I don't think anyone's actually going to do it. I don't even know if anyone else would find it at all amusing to do. I'm just typing crazy type.

So, my thoughts over the past few hours have concerned themselves with the question of whether I should go to sleep or not. I'm going to be hitting the road at 5:30 AM. I figured I'd fit in some sleep. So I packed up the computer and hit the sheets. Sleep didn't come. I thought about my diet, of eating one hearty meal per day then coasting by on simple sugars for the rest of the day. The sugars shouldn't be found in beverages, and only water should be consumed. I call this the cheap bastard diet. It works for me, but it's probably really unhealthy. What sucks is it's not going to work for me tomorrow, due to lack of availability of both hearty meals and simple sugars. Damn you airplanes. Also thought about how I'm going to spending six hours in Chicago. If only I knew people in Chicago. I also came up with the idea that there should be bus services that run, constantly, from airports to the downtown area for people with long stop-over flights, and people who needed to get from downtown to the airport for one reason or another. I think this idea would work perfectly, and make a shitload of money for both the bus and the downtown area. For all I know, there's a bus set-up like this in Chicago, and I'll end up doing shit in Chicago. Here's hoping. Anyway, with all of my thinking, sleep didn't come, and then my upstairs neighbor turned on music. Which made me think "fuck sleep." So I got up, stripped my bed, pulled out the laptop and the ethernet cable. Of course, almost as soon as I got out of bed, the music stopped. Hence keeping up my tradition of not being a person who does smart things. And, really, this isn't facetious self-deprecation. I might be known for being a fairly intelligent person, but I'm also kind of known to do the dumbshit.

God, I hate my hair right now. I liked it nonexistent, and I liked it shaggy as fuck. But right now, the length it's at, combined with my general style of dress of wearing white t-shirts, I look very... manual labor. If I wear a button-down shirt, I look prep school as all hell. Mainly I don't concern myself with my appearance that much, but that's because I generally don't look like anything, really.

I really don't like the current airport setup that stops people from waiting at the terminal. I hate getting off a plane and just walking to the baggage claim, and just thinking "at some point I'll run into the people who are looking for me." What the fuck is with that? Oh, and having people wait with you to board a plane is nice too, as opposed to the whole set-up of just dropping you off and saying your goodbyes then.

Don't know what I'm going to read on the plane/in the airport. The food issue is a bigger one, though.

Hm. I'm thinking now that I'm going to turn off the computer, put it back in my bookbag, and start reading Invisible Man. Maybe I'll end up finishing it in 24 hours. Maybe I'll just do some writing. Maybe I'll end up falling asleep in spite of my saying "fuck sleep."

I probably won't be able to post for awhile after today/early tomorrow, but right now my mind is in that manic state it sometimes gets, so maybe there'll be enough of my witticisms posted to tide you over.

When I was looking at colleges and expressed an interest in going to Reed, I would get all kinds of shit from them. Some of the things I would receive would be little more than postcards or flyers that did little more than kill the earth. I got one of these that had a Dorothy Parker quote on it. You know, amp up the kid's excitement with a little Dorothy Parker, so they'll be more willing to give this college their money should they be accepted. I wasn't a fan of the practice, nor of the sentiment expressed in the quote. The quote was "The only cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

That's the quote I'm talking about when I think about wanting my epitaph to read "Fuck You Dorothy Parker."

A thought occurred to me last time I was flying over Pennsylvania, down to the Philadelphia airport. The cabin pressure would naturally build on the plane's decline, so there were adjustments made within the cabin. I'm not sure what exactly caused the feeling in the air. At the same time, I was leaving college, and going back home. My feelings regarding that situation were confused as well. Somewhere around 24 hours from now, this situation will be relived. And I share with you the thought I thought better than to share with my neighbor on the plane this past December:

Is this a release or a buildup of pressure?

Thought I was done my packing, everything could either now be put in luggage or thrown away. Then I remembered some other stuff, on top of my dresser. Two small speakers which are essentially dead to me, unusable, and I need to see if I can give away. Also, detergent and fabric softener, which I can pack but that might be kind of retarded. Also, now that I think about it, cleaning supplies under the sink. My hippie neighbor's listening to a mix that's surprisingly listenable. I paid attention during Beulah, opened all doors. Then Reasons by Built to Spill came on, then something that sounded like Neil Young maybe then something that sounded like Jimmy Eat World maybe. Now, Dramamine by Modest Mouse. Yeah.

No quarters to do laundry. Dirty clothes on the floor, to be thrown into luggage. Big money in my wallet, enough hopefully to cover one month's rent.

Summer reading list, growing. I've kind of given up on the Paul Auster. Invisible Man still looks likely to read. After that, I'm thinking Gravity's Rainbow. Also: Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Something Happened by Joseph Heller. I saw that for like a quarter at a bookstore downtown, but declined to buy it thinking that it might've been the sequel to Catch-22, and fuck that action. But apparently, Something Happened is fucking brilliant, so I should check that out. I've also been meaning to read Ficciones by Borges. Also, in the realm of poetry, still want to read David Berman's Actual Air, and Maldoror, eighteenth century surrealist poem about nature of evil or somesuch thing. I think my uncle owns a copy and has read it. That one's kind of a low priority.

Have I ever declared my goal of wanting to read Ulysses before I turn 21? If not, I'll do so now. That won't happen this summer though. But it will happen eventually. I'll probably start next summer. I wonder if I'll give up and say "fuck it" fifty pages in.

Pyramid Song's playing now. I've got more cleaning to do.

So, most things are boxed up and in storage now. Everybody's gone. This is nice, in a way, because it makes it easier for me to reconcile my present status with my near-future status. When all my friends were here, it made the summmer hard to imagine. Now, it looms larger, and is easier to conceive, if not necessarily to look forward to.

I'm listening to Ted Leo and the Pharmacists right now. And you know, experimental record and a punk background aside, this dude is really fucking classic rock. Sure, there's the politics, and the literature references, but I just can't get into it that much. I can get into it easier than I can get into, say, actual classic rock, and I might still want to see him live, but my actual response to the records is one of almost ambivalence. There are some enjoyable moments, but mainly, it just doesn't speak to me.

It seems like I should be able to tie those things together, and yet I can't. I am tired, tomorrow looks to be a fairly busy day, I am anxious about the future and annoyed with music. There's a Brainiac song that's been running through my head as of late, and it sums everything up: Nothing Ever Changes.

Today, I told my friend Loren the only thing that would make me stay in Olympia, so I will now tell you all. The only reason I would stay in Olympia post-graduation would be if I opened a record store. Now, owning a record store isn't a dream of mine. It's just something I think I could do well, and much better than the two other stores that currently exist in this town. I am pretty sure I could kick their asses and run them out of business.

Oh, didn't there used to be a thing being passed around blogs about putting itunes or an ipod on random and then listing the first twenty songs that came up? Because I did that this Friday, didn't ever list the songs. I started off with the first song, then put it on shuffle, it ended up much better than I expected, being listenable all the way through.
McLusky- There Ain't No Fool In Ferguson
The Kinks- Sitting By The Riverside
Parliament- Tear The Roof Off The Sucker
Sleater-Kinney- Things You Say
Wilco- I'm A Wheel
Yo La Tengo- The Sea Horse
Ween- Sarah
The Kinks- Animal Farm
Jim O'Rourke- Get A Room
Nathaniel Merriweather/Lovage- Anger Management
Beck- Side Of The Road
Mirah- Advisory Committee
Husker Du- Dreams Reoccuring
Fugazi- Latin Roots
The Books- All Bad Ends All
David Bowie- Warszawa
Fennesz- Rivers Of Sand
Prefuse 73- Coming Into Something Better
Quasi- Repetition
Sufjan Stevens- A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Today I saw two movies at the Capital Theatre- Secret Things and Spartan. Secret Things... Not sure it had a point/went anywhere interesting. Not sure the relationship between the two main characters was that realistic. A little over-the-top. Well-photographed. Fairly pornographic, I guess, but somehow avoids male frontal nudity (even when there's an orgy scene). Basically as mediocre as any number of movies I've watched on my own, but with more nudity to make it more enjoyable, and more over-the-top than the average mediocre indie film. (could be because it's French) When I talk about it being over-the-top, I'm mainly talking about the end. After the antagonist dies (who's Very Very Evil, and in an incestuous relationship with his sister) an eagle picks at his flesh. And, like, the eagle belonged to this woman whose silhouette showed up at certain points in the movie? Was that the deal? I don't even know what that was, really. I really thought the silhouette thing would end up being awesome, but I guess it was just a woman with a bird. The thought now occurs to me it could've been symbolic, but of what, I have no idea.

Spartan was surprisingly good. Almost wanted to leave early on, then got interested. Val Kilmer is a huge fucking asshole, and sometimes says some very action-movie type shit. Still, good, with lots of twists. Some people apparently talk about how political it is in that it condemns the person in the White House. Which, on one hand, is total bullshit, in that, with the exception of a reference to terror and the prescence of some muslims, there really isn't the slightest connection between our current real president and the fictional one. Wag The Dog, also by David Mamet, is way more fucking political and related to things that were occurring in the White House at the time of its release. Although, Wag The Dog serves as an interesting parallel if Spartan is viewed as being political. Wag The Dog was much more political, but it was also a satire, which seemed to fit with the time of the late '90s. Spartan's a thriller with lots of shooting, which seems to fit the modern zeitgeist. It's an interesting note, but if Spartan really did nail the zeitgeist, I think more people would've seen it. Who the fuck saw Spartan? Jason did, because Jason cares about David Mamet. Unlike Wag the Dog, I don't think anyone saw Spartan based on the press it received. Which is weird, as it really is a fairly effective thriller. Maybe reviewers were bothered by how big an asshole Val Kilmer plays. Or, more likely, people heard the retarded premise (President's daughter's kidnapped! Hey, I saw that episode of The West Wing, and it seemed cliched then, as well.) and wrote it off. But it ends up having more twists and being much smarter than that premise.

Also, yesterday I finished writing this short story, Companion, that I'd been at for awhile. I added very little to what was already there, but the little I added constituted an ending. The day before that, I began writing Get Broken.

I also started reading Paul Auster's In The Country Of Last Things, which I'm not sure I'll finish. I thought that would be my summer reading, and after that I'd start reading Invisible Man but this book isn't that great, and the tone is depressing. If a book's going to be depressing, it had better be fucking brilliant. I really don't think this is. So I might just go right to Invisible Man. I'm also thinking that after that, I'll give Gravity's Rainbow a go.

I have a bowl that I stole from the school cafeteria. I planned on returning it, but the cafeteria's not going to be open this week. I guess that means I keep it forever. C'est la vie.

So, I've been viewing things in terms of a one-week threshold. Like, a week from yesterday, I'll be on a plane headed home. A week from today, I'll be worrying my ass off in regards to finding a place to work. Holy shit.

I'm not done my packing yet.

I woke up this morning with The Blow's cover-with-new-lyrics of Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic stuck in my head. It hasn't left. It's really good. The only thing better than women singing about fucking is women singing about fucking with sapphic overtones, I reckon. Song's not on any records, she just did two versions of it live on Monday night. So, it sticks.

I have all my CDs packed. I also had my last class today, a party at the beach followed. I packed while listening to Deerhoof's Milk Man, and the urge to jump up and down and dance and spaz out came.

Watched Rushmore again last night. I had forgotten how it ended, which is a common occurence, but I'd forgotten a lot of the film. Wes Anderson movies get better the more you watch them, funnier. I really need to watch Bottle Rocket again, as that's another one I've mostly forgotten. Ah, Rushmore. I just watched it thinking "This is such a great movie" and laughing at things I didn't laugh at the first time.

Also, if I ever get a book published, I expect everyone reading this to steal a copy. I would give out comp copies, but no, I recommend stealing.

Things are coming to an end. I had my last seminar this afternoon, finished reading White Noise, found a box large enough to hold most of my books and packed it and sealed it with duct tape.

More importantly, I found out that a really good friend, my first at Evergreen, is leaving. It was up in the air for a while there, but now it's sealed. Not only is she leaving, but two of the dudes in my class I got along with (probably the best) are leaving as well. What sucks is that this really isn't surprising: At this college, the people I befriend are the ones who are most likely to dislike it. Because, you know, there's a lot of bullshit at this college, and the people who don't see it as bullshit I want nothing to do with. I see the bullshit, but... There's a lot to like about this school as well. There's also a part of me not sure how I'd fare at a regular college anymore.

Some people I'm friends with are staying. My two best male friends at Evergreen will end up being my roommates come fall. Still, I'm going to have to make a lot more friends, and am going to have to work my ass off to find people that awesome. And they'll probably leave as well, once the horror strikes in. Fuck, I had a good program, and I had it all year. There's the possibility that I won't be as happy this time next year and will be fed the fuck up. I really don't know how the program I'm enrolled in is going to work out. Granted, I didn't know how Looking Backward was going to work out, and that ended up working out quite nicely. I blunder my way through life.

Loren and I watched The Dirty Dozen. He got it from Netflix thinking western, ends up being a World War II movie. Either way, Loren and I watched it, as ambassadors from Man Country to this here hippie college. A problem I have with World War II movies, or any war movie, is their glorification of the military, and by extension the whole "fall in line" mentality. Fuck the military. Some of you are now going "haha, you go to a hippie college and you fit in there, jackass" but: While I was bored/annoyed for most of the movie, when the Germans got fucked up and shit went BOOM the movie became all worthwhile.

During it, my mind turned to something weird to me that probably shouldn't be. That being: I'm pretty much done with my program. I have to do the whole self-evaluation bit, but that is it. The rest is packing and preparing to go back to Philadelphia. The weird thing is this: I'm coming back. Not in terms of the whole friends thing, although that probably adds to it in that it gives me less to return to, but in terms of... I'm going across the country. To the east coast. Then, come September, I'm back here. Not the same thing as last fall, where it was a big momentous move. It was an event.

All I feel now is a vague disconnect basically. Rather than taking the form of alienation from those around me, as it has in the past, it's more of a feeling of confusion as to my future. Way more than last year, when I knew where I was going. I didn't know what it would be like, but my life had a feeling of purpose and direction. It seems like a second year of college will just feel like limbo. Or at least that's how it's looking to me right now. It makes me regret how little writing I got done this year.

A life in limbo. High school felt like that too, I guess, but then I had a lot of friends, and a lot of enemies, and just basically knew where I stood. Those friends... I rarely talk to them. And I'm in a different place than they are, nowadays. Literally and figuratively.

And this summer I'll be living with my brother, probably seeing none of those friends, and probably not making any new ones either as I will not have that opportunity as I'll be living life through the filter of my brother. And most of my books and all my records will be in storage in Olympia. I'll have the laptop I'm typing this on, and a shortbox with some comics, maybe a few novels, and a notebook and a pen to call my own. I might not even have a bed. My only insistence is that I don't have the same job as last year, working with my dad. I expected the Summer to be spent in limbo, in isolation. That the fall will be much the same way is kind of a bizarre thought.

Yes: I know this is how life works. I have free will too, and that's kind of a bitch in a lot of ways.