The premise for dystopia

Whats between the inside and the outside becomes immaculate.

But all that crap has to go

somewhere...

right?

2/16/07

Where do you come from? When I look for you you're gone, but there's always some reason why you're not here. When you're here I'm happy, but I have no control... or so I believe. Lets walk upon the proverbial beach: There are your footsteps, they swing in and out of line with mine in sharp curves of urgency, though I have trouble following the lines off to wherever they may go.

I wonder sometimes: Am I a bad host? Our conversations seem so forced these days... more so because I want you back. Is it ever as easy as saying "I want you back. What can I do to convince you to stay?" Or is it as I feel: that it requires more finesse? I'm not asking you back, I'm speaking in hypotheticals. Please: I made this coffee for us, lets enjoy its earthtone ritual.

I used to look at the stars a lot more when I was a kid. I'd wait in my driveway for my friends to come and I'd look up at that vast spread of nothing and so much of everything. The tangible sigh: these things will never be for me except as images behind glass. I'm born too early. My mind stretched to contain it all- a token to be put under my pillow. A dream to come back to again and again.

You were with me then. You were born out of the swelling of my heart- my heart, pregnant with you, and I speculate that you were born with my heart's first breaking. The dreams that come and go, but so often are forgotten at the table when the glut comes upon me.

I don't want no more of this rotten food. I want to push aside the plates and have a long hard talk with you. I want to pass the night into morning discussing what is to be done. The candles burn down into scabs. I'm talking too directly again. I will change the subject.

Where were you when you went on vacation? I know I've asked you this before. I know you've answered me as well... as best you can as is your fashion. Lets stare up at the sky and think of music... think of places we want to go to. I've never been to the Amazon. You know they call it the green hell? I want to smell the dirt after a storm, have the rain drip onto me, into me- become a plant, listen to the sussurus of a jungles mad logic- the jungle is talking to itself again... trying to remember where it put the car keys... if it had car keys at all.

"Perhaps its under my wallet... now where is my wallet? My wallet, if I had one, would contain my driver's license as well, provided that I drive... but how else did I get here. Hush now! There's a panther coming, black as my eyes! I am surely lost, though I'm everywhere. I must find my keys and go at once. The Panther! The panther..."

There's a click of stones and the game is moved forward a step. I am one.

Shameless Promotion (panhandling)

I've been fiddling around with web design all summer. If you (as a reader, friend, or both) have been wondering where I've been, its been right here in front of the computer, but mentally distant from my phone, email, blog, etc.

I have a professional(ish) home page up now (it still looks like shit in I.E. but all other browsers support my (web standard) code) and you can reach it by using

{MyfirstName}.{MyLastName}.name

Anyways, I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with the graphics for the site and ended up learning quite a bit about Seashore, a free drawing program for Macs... and now I'm kinda hooked on using it.

...and I can never find a shirt design that I like...

...and I've been wanting to make some beer money...

So I created my first design last night (rather than study Heat Transfer). I've put it up on CafePress.com, and now I'm sharing it with all of you. My way of rattling some coins in a coffee cup...

My store is here.

...and the weird thing is that I'm not even a trekkie. If you look closely, the camo consists of an SS Enterprise, a Vulcan hand sign and the Enterprise logo.

...Wwwhooops! I first posted this on Friday night, its now (very) early Monday morning... and I've been shut down by Roddenberry.com . I guess I'm infringing on a copyright or two. So, like, don't go reaching for your piggybanks yet. I'll have to see if the Roddenberrys sell stuff on commission... and/or make up a new design.

A bit about Ben

...when I think of Ben now, the term 'natural scholar' comes to mind. He was, and is, just endlessly curious. Whereas I might be satisfied with whatever conclusion I come to regarding a particular subject, for him theres always another question that follows each answer. Sometimes it makes me tired, but generally I've always enjoyed our protracted discussions regarding life's minutiae. This general affinity of his for entertaining even the craziest of ideas down to the last detail, always meant that I, with my own natural attraction for the ridiculous, had at least one person that I could share my own absurd thoughts with and not have to suffer blank looks and uncomfortable smiles.

For example; one summer after a lot of serious discussion, we hatched a plan to sneak into an all day Reggae festival that was to be held at the Greek Theater. We were going to find a place to hide inside the venue the night before and wait there 'till the music started the next day. Without any more preamble, we spent several hours poking around the darkened amphitheater looking for a suitable spot to hide... maybe in a clump of bushes, or in a bathroom... hiding for ten hours in any spot that we found didn't seem to justify the rewards, so we called it a night and went home.

A few months later, I was riding a bus down Haight St. in San Francisco when I overheard a conversation that set quite a few gears spinning in my young mind: some hipster was telling his friends about how he knew these people that rode freight trains. He planned on making a how-to video on the ins and outs of train hopping.
Wow! Riding trains! I'd tackled hitch-hiking with moderate success, and now here was a whole new world of adventures waiting to be had. So of course, the next time I saw Ben I told him all about what I'd heard. He seemed game to give it a try and we started making plans to hit the rails.

I went out and bought my first French army backpack, it had the name 'Conrad' stenciled on it. I believe we were planning on only making a long weekend out of the adventure, so there wasn't much need to pack a lot. I carried a sleeping bag, some canteens and four or five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I might have packed some additional socks. One of us had the foresight to carry a flashlight.

I'd seen some train tracks in Marin. I don't know why we decided to go to Marin; there were plenty of train tracks running through Oakland and Berkeley... maybe Marin seemed like a nice place to ride a train. We started our train hopping adventure by boarding the BART. From San Francisco we took a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Rafael.

Theres a refreshing naiveté to first attempts at the illegal, dangerous or taboo. Nobody talks about these things, so the best way to learn is to just go out there and attempt to do it in the simplest way possible. Sometimes you're surprised by your successes, but more often than not, you learn volumes from your mistakes.
Jack Kerouac started walking along the highway in cheap sandals with his thumb out. Ishmael booked passage on a whaling boat. Ben and I got off the bus and walked in the direction of the train tracks.

It was, as I recall, a crystal clear night in Marin. My memory, in its rosy sentimentality, even gives it a full moon. The tracks caught the moonlight and shone like silver ribbons disappearing off into the hills. We trudged, laden down with our packs, from tie to tie. We didn't have any type of train schedule, so we didn't know when to expect our ride. Then again, we didn't really know what we'd do if a train did come thundering by. The whole scene reminded us of Stand By Me- we may have even tried the trick where we walked on the rails holding a stick between us for balance... and if we did that, then there's no doubt that we would have crooned the song of the same name out into the darkness for a laugh.

An hour or two into our journey, we came upon a tunnel...that was boarded up. Later investigation confirmed what we then surmised: this train was no longer in service. We turned around and headed back the way we came.
We arrived back at the bus depot long after San Rafael had shut down for the evening. The next bus back to S.F. wasn't going to run for at least six hours. The security guard at the depot wouldn't let us sleep in the station, so we ended up sleeping under the 101 'till dawn.

After a somewhat disappointing homecoming, we decided that second attempt was in order, and we surmised that the best plan of action would be to try to catch one of the trains that ran along the shore of the East Bay. We consulted maps and saw that there seemed to be a small rail yard in Richmond, so the next Friday we made several more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and took the BART north four stops.
Richmond was a bit of a dodgy neighborhood for two white kids to be wandering around in at night. We didn't let this deter us though, and made a brisk walk over to where we'd seen the tracks. We snuck in through a fence and found what looked to be more promising prospects. We were in some kind of rail yard, where the tracks curved gently from the south to the northeast. We found a spot where it looked like we would be able to run along side the train and hoist ourselves up onto one of the cars. Satisfied that we were in better hunting grounds, we took off our packs, unwrapped a couple of PB&Js and waited.

It didn't take long for a train to come rumbling through. We watched from the bushes as the engine glided by; then we threw on our packs, ran up the embankment and... were confronted by this massive rolling steel behemoth of industry. We made a few attempts to run along side it and grab one of the ladders... but maybe it was moving too fast... or maybe we were just cowed by the dangerous and imposing reality of what had been 'till then an abstraction... we ended up standing there on the embankment watching the creaking rumbling monster lumber on by.

"HEY YOU KIDS!"

We jumped to see who had caught us, and then we heard a cackle- it was coming from the train. A gutter punk was hanging off of one of the cars. "Ha ha! See ya in Roseville, suckers!"

This required more thought. Feeling somewhat defeated, we walked back to the BART. Just before we hit the turnstiles a group of black kids pushed past us going the other way. After they passed, one tapped Ben on the back and sucker-punched him when he turned around.

Christ. Ben was down. The puncher had taken his one shot and ran back to his friends. I was convinced that Ben couldn't possibly be hurt because I hadn't heard a smack when the kids fist made contact with Ben's eye. I think I was expecting a sound more in line with what I'd heard in movies and television all those years prior. I wanted to just get up to the train platform and call it a night. Ben, on the other hand, was hurt, pissed off and tired. He wanted to take a cab home. After some bickering, we pooled our money and asked a cabbie if he could get us back to Berkeley for eight bucks.

I can only assume that the driver had seen Ben get socked; and saw two kids, out of their element and more than ready to make a bee-line back to the comforts of their own environment. He said he reckoned eight dollars would get us back to our Co-op and drove us back home, off the meter.

That pretty much did it for Ben: way too much bullshit for an idea that didn't look like it would see any fruition. I kept at it, but all that is fodder for another story...

Summer viewed from the opposite end of the elipse

Poor poor neglected blog...

I feel like explanations are in order, details to be dumped here by the truckload and turned over and over in inquisitive hands...

...but between work and school and a mystifying bout of some kind of low grade but nagging depression, I haven't had time to really sit down and dump out the contents of my humid interior. I feel like I'm getting somewhere with something though... there may be a write-a-thon on the horizon...

Anyways, I was just cleaning up my flash drive in anticipation of a new semester and I found this slice of pre-fiction lying next to a half-eaten bag of virtual potato chips. I started a second chapter off of it, but I rapidly found myself losing inspiration.

It starts with a rant, then falls into a rhythm.

*** BUILDING NOTES ***

When I die, let it not be said that the blaze of glory that I went out 'in' was by shooting the loudspeakers off of ice cream trucks. Please God, though I fervently entertain this fantasy with the advent of every new summer, let it not be the way I choose to make my exit:

“Man Shoots Several Ice Cream Trucks, Self.”

Its a hot day. A muggy day. I'm sitting at my desk entertaining the idea of being someone else. I start out with what comes to mind first, an opposite... in this case, a woman.

I wake up in a bed with way too many pillows, but being who I am (in this case, a woman who buys a lot of pillows) I don't notice the excess. My sheets are appropriate for the weather... light cotton for summer. A light duvet sits in a pile besides me- cast off while the day was starting to gather heat around my sleeping self.

The predominant color of the room is off white - subtle tones shade my surroundings. The furniture is pine, the curtains have a bluish tint to them, the walls a very diminished hint of salmon. My flesh, 'white' as well almost blends in with everything else. I view the world through sleep renewed sight- I see my world with a soft focus. I turn onto my back and stare at the ceiling, sighing. I lift my head just a bit to look at my toes and wiggle them.

I am reborn and I am a woman... though I take both things for granted because I am and always have been me. I am not an outsider pretending.

I live in an... apartment complex- the eighth floor of a fairly old building built after the tenements, but well before the ephemeral complexes now known as 'condos' or lofts. I live in a building that retains a sense of timelessness, though one day its time will come too... as will my own. I am a mortal female... though perhaps through a trick of imagination I can reinvent myself into longer or younger lives...

I become the building. I contain several lives. Thousands of dramas contained in my existence.

Within me a woman named Anne is waking up, going though her morning ritual of contemplating the journey between bed and shower. Despite the simplicity of the task, there are a million permutations that have been considered at one time or another. The complexity of her life bleeding back in from the void of sleep. In the end, she'll walk the twenty steps to the bathroom and turn on the shower, but not before wondering if she should call this person first, maybe start the coffee pot before she turns on the water, maybe make the bed, maybe stare out the window...

In another apartment a man is sitting back in an old desk chair with his feet propped up on his desk. He's trying to imagine himself out of a life overtaken by monotony and boredom. He's going about this task in a way thats most creatively designed to thwart any real changes to the afore mentioned monotony and boredom... he's imagining himself as a completely different person instead of imagining himself as a completely different self. In a few minutes he'll put on his shoes and make his way to work and nothing at all will have changed.

I feel myself stretch in the gathering heat. The sunlight hits my eastern side and as this sun exposed side expands ever so slightly, I lean almost imperceptibly to the west. My interior creaks, the wood and pipes shifting with my movements. The lives inside me start to gather the momentum to spread out across the metropolis we're in.

We're all in a dynamic system, we move and change. We're all in a linear system... I see my beginning and my end, and I have also seen many ends and beginnings come to pass within me. We're all in a circular system: energy comes and goes, the cold and the heat comes and goes and comes again, the days pass over and over and over...

My birthday invite:

Of course, you're all invited...



I'm actually posting this on my blog so that, through some convoluted process that I have yet to actually understand, I'll be able to send the graphics inline in a message sent from my Gmail account.

Of course, if you're halfway around the world and I haven't sent you the invite via e-mail, its because I figure you probably won't be able to make it. If, however, you find yourself in NYC this weekend, stop by!

For your consideration:

The scales are exactly the same:


If the similarity is at all meaningful, then perhaps I've only really moved as far as Gardena...