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[Jul. 18th, 2009|06:12 pm] |
I awoke to first light, unwillingly watching the colors swell and fade as the sun rose. The act was reminiscent of a driving fast on a black road with a full moon, catching your eyes wander away from the white reflectors to the only other source of light, trying to balance the rest of your life with the joy of that sight. (I'm a firm believer in the Lunatic.) Three and a half hours of sleep left me talkative and woozy, nursing a headache whose source I couldn't place. When I laid down in my bed I tossed and turned, thinking about breakfast and golf, when I heard a roommate come home. I listened to their actions, considering abandoning my attempts at rest, when the sounds coming from their breakfast intrigued me. It was like ripping a banana from a bunch, over and over and over again, a firm crunchy sandy noise. So when I put on my basketball shorts (I have basketball shorts?) and stepped out, there was Angela on the back porch at 8:30 in the morning with a giant container of crab legs and claws. Her face reminded me of the dog who's been caught gnawing something he oughtn't, but without any repentance or shame. I'll make it for you, if you like. There's a noise that accompanies it.
So my day began for the second time with a giant crab breakfast. Primal. Not that I've ever seen a crab that size in the wild. Maybe not so primal.
I love where I am and who I am. I love my bouts of depression where I know I have no friends. I love my best friend who knows my silences better than I do. I love my new roommate and my new house and my new neighborhood. Bless the useless tall bikes and the drunky riders of tall bikes who live next door. Bless the known gang member on the other side, and his crass and truly joyful and positive friends using our sidewalk for a hangout space till late. Bless 'em all.
I'm writing again. Prose, for without reading or watching plays my dramatic bones have leached their goodstuffs. Into someone else, I'd hope. But god dammit I am writing and things make more sense that way. And I played my recorder. I have a recorder, guys. Deal.
He said aggressively, though none had raised their eyebrows at him. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 18th, 2009|11:07 pm] |
When I left work the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The rain of late spring, begrudgingly shedding fat, lumpy drops, falling haphazardly on its constituents. Yesterday we broke a dry spell of twenty-seven days, or twenty-eight. Our parched earth, accustomed to reliable and constant wetting, offered up its thanks. They manifest in this city as a smell of rot and dust. When one combines water, rot, and dust, one usually can make mud pies. Those on foot are grateful for the grace the city shows, merely hinting at these hidden traps, eager to be tracked all over the carpet. We receive only the reminder. But then, few of us seek out mud pies.
The people who know weather know about high and low pressure systems, and colliding pressure systems, and rain-shadows, or mountain-shadows, or what it is that makes east dry and west damp. I do not know weather, but I know topography, and can say that up the hill is higher than down the hill, so when I smell the brine of Puget Sound, it is more likely to be a low pressure system on the sound, supporting the salt-cracked breeze up a hill. Or perhaps the high pressure pushes down on the ocean, and given no safe haven, the particles of kelp and dead fish flee—out to the wild ocean, up the cement hill, even back into the sound to be reabsorbed and consumed by the zoo- and phyto- and the other planktons too. But being on the hill, I can’t speak much to the plankton. I can speak to a confusion of senses, when I smell saltwater and the field of vision turns blue and the air thickens.
There are memories we are born with, those that haunt our nightmares. Which, given the lack of real experience to bastardize, seem to grant them a shade more validity than whatever fondnesses we carry. The falling one, and the drowning one, these I know; I have faith there are others I haven’t remembered yet. Woe to those who die in a city! Nothing to be done, no good to come from that potential energy. A waste of space or a puff of pollution—-and these appeal? If I die before I wake, I pray my lord my soul to take. And that’s it. Keep your laws off my body. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 31st, 2009|06:38 pm] |
I was told that my unstoppable desire to go fast was a boy thing. Being a boy, I didn't know how to argue with that, but seriously, some of my best friends are girls who like to go really fast, down hills, across the plains, on two wheels or four or on the balls of their feet, transferring through the bone and skin into damp socks and rubber soles. My best scar (now faded) was the inherently boy-like scar of running too fast down an eastern washington hill. There's that breaking-free point when you take off and all your energy keeps going, up or down or speeding across the plains, and at some point you land. On the concrete, again, on the other wrist or the first one. It's a good cost. If we could harvest that flight time, grant all the dead drivers and the broken cyclists and moaning, knee-grabbing, ground-rolling skaters just half a second extra flight time, set aside the briefest of moments to realize that you've done it, you've taken off, and the flight to the sun was always, 100% forever, always going to be worth it.
But I'm a boy so I don't know.
Wear a helmet though |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 31st, 2008|12:44 am] |
The federal courthouse in downtown Seattle is one of my favorite buildings in Seattle. It has a balcony on the 19th story, where I could go and induce vertigo. The wind is different at 19 stories. It flows like water. There are no street-layout-induced corridors of wind that stop and start at random, it's just free. Like not being in a city. Like, well, being above the city. I went there today. Guess what? You are now required to have a pass to go out there. But it's not locked, it just is equipped with an alarm. It's an emergency exit. In case you're having. any emergencies. and need to exit.
Granted, that's just what the signs on the (tauntingly) glass double doors said. I wasn't having a spiritual emergency and didn't want armed guards interrupting my reverie.
Winter is coming. Time to hide myself in novels. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|12:48 am] |
This paper I am working on is getting overwhelming. It's that I'm not used to really being attached so strongly to such a project. When something isn't for school, wow. There's no excuse for it not being good, because you don't have to do it in the first place, you know? I dream of Hamletmachine. Last night it was my teacher who's helping with me on it as well as a fellow student who wants to direct it for her senior project. (That is quite the fucking project.) Night before was muddy snowy streets (presumably northern europe) and cement and harsh metallic music and a naked man raping someone with his eyes. EGADS! I see Hamlet everywhere I go. I am excited and I just want to stay up every night and keep writing.
The essay is getting bloated; I can't stop including things I've found. It's that point in a collage when you stop adding things for aesthetic value and you just obsessively glue everything within reach.
With the exception of Steve Reich everything I read or listen to these days somehow, totally accidentally, has to do with Germany. Huh? Oh yeah, and his last name is Reich. Good God.
No, really, this is GOOD TIMES. This is me having way too much bleary-eyed sore-necked un-showered fun. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 15th, 2008|09:48 pm] |
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I fell asleep on the couch earlier this evening. I dreamt of walking down a road very similar to the one out my window. My cat was on the street, her thin, emaciated form shivering and wobbling helplessly. With astonishing strength and agility she leapt up into my arms. I was so overjoyed I had to wake up to see if she was really there. But she was still gone. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 22nd, 2008|03:12 am] |
Swimming in the ocean in my skivvies with close friends. Laughing at the swelling, the churning brown waves high up caused by the low riptides hitting the heavier crashers, the bewildering diagonal pulling coming from a seemingly perpendicular ocean . As I stood in the receding tide, the current flowing back sucking away the sand from under my feet, I felt like some uprooted mandrake. Every pile of heavy pitted rocks I constructed would disintregate; if I were lucky I could watch the flat stones rolling like a square wheel. I thought, as I guffawed in the face of brine and seaweed, that perhaps my feet would start melting away like all silicon beneath my heels. I couldn't stop laughing. I would talk back to her, goad her, thank the cormorants & the pelicans & the swells for pulling me in, tempting me to go out, let the moon hook my navel and take me somewhere new.
Chelsea lost her sunglasses; the two plaques I hoped would contain local history were memorials. The sea keeps what it takes. |
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| Brokenhearted |
[Jul. 19th, 2008|04:23 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Don't stop living in the red | ] |
August 8th, 2008
Gathering Of The Juggalos
Cave-In-Rock
Cave-In-Rock, IL, USA, 62919
Andrew is proud to be performing a solo show at Insane Clown Posse's music festival, "The Gathering Of The Juggalos". Andrew will play at 9pm on August 8th. Other acts this year include, Ice-T, Three Six Mafia, Afroman, and of course, I.C.P.! Tickets are $150 and get you in for all 4 days of the festival.
http://www.andrewwk.com/
EDIT: I decided this rules. |
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| Back. |
[Jun. 22nd, 2008|04:08 pm] |
This morning I woke up and glanced at my bedside table. When I first moved in I started collecting little organic things, clover flowers and a clump of moss and soft smooth rocks and leaves whose smells warmed me. I'd place these on my bedside table in front of my record player and arrange them like a little sandless rock garden of sorts, complemented by Jonny's moving-in present, a beautiful book of sonnets by Emerson designed to look like curling birch bark. So I woke up this morning and glanced at my bedside table, and realized all these items had been scrunched to the back half, all haphazard and lifeless. The front half was occupied by CDs, a glass of water, someone else's necklace & hairtie and a few scraps of trash. I took the time to move all these visitors into the top drawer of the bedstand, dusted the area with a dirty sock and carefully placed everything back in some semblance of what felt right.
It's just, I can't remember their origin. Everything there was picked up for a reason. That perfect rhodedendron leaf was a bookmark in a forgotten book, picked up in a forgotten locale, and carried a perfume that just lingers on the verge of memory. The rest are just relics. All I can rightly place in time and space is the moss. This was a day trip my mom and I went on to Mount Rainier national park, a mutual need to leave the city and remember something. That was the first and only time I've ever smoked in front of my mom. I don't know why I did; I hate smoking in wooded areas. The rich, heady air makes me gag on the smoke. But by that trailhead, where I lit up as we looked down upon a waterfall, I walked over to a tree and picked up a fallen swatch of moss. It was meant to be a gift for someone, but it never got there.
I have a collection of no less than twelve unsent letters and at least three wrapped gifts with no recipient.
I have no idea where I'm heading. I'm trying to step forth into the fun-lost from the scary-lost; I don't intend to fault myself if I fail.
A friend called me a scribe in passing last night as I wrote down the name of a book. It made me feel strangely uncomfortable before I realized that I felt a little giddy by that notion. I blushed a little, but it was dark so I wasn't embarassed by it.
I feel burdened by the obligation to have Big or Good Ideas. I used to have too many. I feel like my brain is shrinking into a crinkly but thorough mass. It could be my imagination but it seems to coincide with drinking and smoking pot more frequently.
I've been spending more time with large groups of people/friends lately. It makes me paranoid. I fare better with a handful of close friends. I'm getting close to giving up on who used to be my absolute best friend, despite the fact that he's facing what will be the biggest challenge he's faced in life. I'm disgusted by myself and taking it out on him, except it's all just happening in my mind.
Someone I was friends/friendly with was murdered on Wednesday. I have not been grieving but rather have felt totally disconnected from everything. I assume I'm overreacting, because I tend to hold the belief that I don't deserve to feel emotion. It's weird.
A long-dormant passion for 1950s scifi/horror movies has reawoken and I'm catching up on all the ones I never saw way back when. It's nice. You should come over and we'll rewatch Forbidden Planet or Them!. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 23rd, 2008|05:19 pm] |
I went do do laundry this morning. I got downstairs and had all my clothes & sheets in the washers when I remembered that I'd used the last of the detergent the week before. So I go across the street to Benson's and find their small detergent section, hoping against hope they might have something unscented. I've got a choice of Regular or Mountain Spring--no luck. Oh well, I buy the smallest container I can find.
So I took a shower, retrieved my clothes from the driers and went to work. I turn my head now in my freshly laundered t-shirt, and I smell someone else. I don't know who, I don't rightly care, but it isn't me. This isn't me. Garth smells like sweat and coffee and cigarettes and sometimes the faint smell of cooking, which is odd given that neither Jonny nor I do as much cooking as we'd like or should. So, I smell like Regular. What? |
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