you know, for all the scorn i heaped on my sister years ago when she decided to name our cat "bubbles," the name was quite appropriate. bubbles is absolute evil, and sources of absolute evil are still almost loveable when they are cutely named. there's a lot of that effect going on in cat ownership.

my grandmother called earlier today and mentioned that her neighbour has a new cat that is named "velcro." velcro. velcro the cat. my next few minutes were dedicated to coming up with other, comparable names: clearly, such a cat needs a pet companion. my suggestion? i'd sure like to see a children's cartoon one of these days-- the adventures of velcro the cat and double-sided adhesive strip the dog. the name is cumbersome, but it'll stick one way or the other.

i wish i'd been born a few years earlier so that i'd have been old enough to appreciate and have a taste for good music in the mid-90's instead of much later, and that i'd watched mtv late at night at around that time, because then i'd have music video memories like this and this and this.

the trees are dying early this year: the rotted, decaying leaves have fallen in yards all over the neighbourhood and patty wants to know why. the heat? global warming? i don't know, nothing seems to be capable of making much sense anymore.

i don't necessarily pride myself for it, but for the past couple of years i've been known for my hyper-awareness of political doings and world events, categories which have been completely fucked even more than usual lately. there's never solace there so much as there is a rage that kills and fuels hope at the same time, but now the rage manages to block out hope entirely.

i mean, what the fuck is wrong with people?

so i guess there's a level of apathy in me now for it all. climate destruction, heat waves, trees around here: maybe the israelis did it!, that kid who fought off the gator down south somewhere: it's all blending together into a hostile outer world, pushing me more and more within and forcing me to see how little is actually there. so i keep thinking, reading but not writing, because the words won't come when it's summer or when i am alone. now both of those conditions are in full effect.

so what happens next? i wait a month or so and then everything starts making some sense. during the interim, hey, maybe i'll see another movie or two, next sunday sounds like it'll be fun, other times maybe i'll drive around to the usual expected destinations and waypoints listening to whatever music suits me at the moment. it's just that it's all been done before and i was looking for something different. i suppose i'll have to wait for that, as i've always waited. maybe nothing is actually different, it may all be shades of the same thing, whatever life is, some shades more pleasant than others, but essentially similar-- close enough that sometimes the good and bad can reach out and feel each other's dimensions, like that stab of "this must pass" you sometimes feel during one of life's better moments.

currents and moments of being, sweet and bitter, timeless and transitory: fading memories of what just happened, vivid recollections of the distant past. a room full of people for just one night talking about how much better they used to have it, how life's splendour came and went and they're not at all resentful because they had their moment and perhaps another will come before long, unbidden, because wonderful things rarely come strolling down the walkway when we keep close watch with high-strung anticipation. memories of the good times as what they were when they were happening instead of what they represent now, fading relics of "those were the days," a sense of blessedness for knowing that at one point something went right instead of a dark room in extreme stages of hot or cold where you stare at a wall and will your very skin to again feel the now-diluted sensation of the last time you were touched.

i don't know what i'm saying or how to end this, but actually, on second thought some things, most things, are pretty okay. perspective, sometimes a heartless individualism to maintain sanity, like we talked about the other day. only for a moment, while you need it. it only gets better from here.

a webcomic interlude following up on this post from back in may:


via xkcd.

i normally but a pretty high level of trust in my memory, but in all the surrealism of a day like today i'm mystified at my lack of ability to identify certain people after only a few years of non-contact. hell, i only say a few years, it's more like two. if that. there's no excuse. but no matter how many times i looked across the not-so-crowded movie theatre during the lit up portion of the moviegoing evening, no matter how many angles of their faces i picked up or tones of laughing voices i managed to attempt matching to remembered sonic vibrations in my mind, something was entirely right and wrong at the same time. they're doppelgangers, or my first impression was correct: "hey, i think i know them."

just to be safe, going through the motions of avoidance, leave on the other side at the end, wait till they go first. just to be safe. wouldn't know what to say, what do you say after so long?

and that surrealism of the day anyway: driving patty's car and having no sense of scale or proportion, humid warmth, rain, music perfectly suited to the outside weather conditions. and my existential theories on clerks II, if such things are possible.

i need a break from thinking-- this week introduced a lot of it, probably too much. i'm going to go to bed early and get up late, then spend whatever's left of tomorrow reading and/or listening to everything but the girl and/or doing nothing at all.

war and tragedy and and reconnecting with old friends and deception and things i can't talk about here and everything else:

from the bouts of serendipity back in plattsburgh to the apparent mimicry of things we said in private on the much larger stage of world affairs, it seems like the turmoil in the personal lives of those i know is somehow connected to a larger, almost apocalyptic disorder in things. that build-up of energy before something happens, where you can just feel it, like over the weekend, like the week before, like we all should know what's coming. it's impossible to even talk about it, the whole thing seeming almost silly when vocalised or written down, but simple coincidence seems to have taken a holiday. each of our words carries the possibility of sinister goings-on in the near future.

christine and i were trying to talk about this yesterday, and it's more of a general consensus along the lines of "whoa, someone we know was talking about [x] last week and [something the same or similar to x] happened?" with just a sort of nod. and "whoa," sufficiently awed like a drugged-out teenager thinking about plastic forks. or just the thought of something seeming, disturbingly, to cause it in actuality. maybe i'm too open to the echoes of superstitious i-am-the-center-of-the-world assumptions as i lick my proverbial wounds, but what makes sense these days? any world we fashion may make more sense than reality. i'd rather just sleep.

"and if you kiss somebody, then both of you'll get practice..."

- regina spektor

so this is breakup stage me, definitely a difference from yesterday, my mind having been kept running over the weekend by a thought economy equal parts lust and medieval studies, and also a steady market streak of willful ignorance. i knew it was coming. it made sense that it was coming. then, today, there it was. and it's not so bad, not like last time.

funny that this morning i had a sudden surge of what i guess you could call nostalgia for late last summer. and the fall thereafter. and even what came after that. that ended up being more like scorched earth, not like what this will be. it would be senseless to regret anything that took place over the last couple of months. better to sit back and let those experiences weave themselves into memory and out of active service. preserve your memories, they're all that's left you-- but i think i'll cry if i let myself listen to that song again at this temporal proximity. or "america." or...--actually, fuck it, anything simon & garfunkel is out for a while. collateral damage, a shrapnel ricochet into my music library.

and so we move on.

i agonised to a point over what to put in the text of my high school yearbook entry. there ended up being a terrible picture of me, almost accompanied by some lyrics from the sleep station song "hang in there charlie" (which i had even counted the characters of to ensure that they would fit) before succumbing to a bit of a chaucer mood and putting in a short canterbury tales excerpt instead. i suppose one has to really love reading and medievalism to have a "chaucer mood," but that was me. and still is: in the spirit of accuracy, it's actually nevill coghill's modernised version. it goes like this:

A straw for all your dreamings and your scares.
Dreams are just empty nonsense, merest japes
Why, people dream all day of owls and apes,
All sorts of trash that can't be understood,
Things that have never happened and never could.

it fit for me alongside everyone else's fond memories and wishes for the future. made sense. oh, he'd do that.

anyway, the yearbook having been issued, we graduated and went our separate ways-- but not before grad night. the next morning, my family decided it was a good time to have my family-centric grad party. me, on only a few hours sleep. i remember this, specifically:

my aunt donna, who teaches small children, has an unfortunate tendency to speak to everyone as though she thinks they are straining to understand her every word. she bought me a fancy "plugs right into the wall" surge protector that was later condemned by a salem state residence hall safety inquisition as a dangerously subversive "octopus plug." she also insisted upon seeing my yearbook, paying special attention to what i'd chosen as a textual representation of myself. i also immortalised the "SLARY A" joke from 10th grade with the remaining space, but she was more interested in the "oh, chaucer" aspect.

oooooooooooh.

brian and donna's house, things i remember: hearing they were very devout christians who sang happy birthday to jesus complete with cake on christmas morning. paul, the oldest son, going through varied stages of obsession in which he gathered everything related to whatever the focal point was at the time-- two such obsessions included elvis and star trek: the next generation. one time i was there for his birthday and he got this x-men action figure, wolverine more orange than yellow. i played that game that's sort of like pool except with bumpers on the table with some old guy there one time. and there was this girl, this black-haired girl i may or may not be related to, who was there in the distant reaches of my childhood memory. mystic figure.

i come back to that because i think i saw her, indeed, that i was in a class with her, in that last year of high school. when the whole of our creative writing class was instructed to bring in a fairy tale of one type or another to read aloud to the class, either of our own composition or from a favourite source for the writing of others, she brought in an old book with a long story about a tin soldier and his courageously longing exploits, all cool metallic yearning and implausible journeying. her voice was sweet with just a hint of soft sharpness, a certainty in the words evident if not a powerful drive behind the voice itself. everyone thanked her because her selection was so long and headed off the efforts of michael edmonds several seats down in line, who was doubtless intending to read another of his obsessive, egomaniacal creations to a captive audience. but her reading was good too, it shouldn't be forgotten:

whoa. good fairy tale.

--and i had that feeling: knew that i knew her from somewhere. that realisation that it was donna's house so long ago didn't hit me until later and how would you approach someone with that anyway? the awkwardness of starting a conversation in the manner that would have been required would have dashed through the faint link of this mystery possible-cousin across the room, our empathetic glances during long objectionable sharing sessions by classmates and the murmur of recognition that may have just been visible in my eyes.

the band sleep station was supposed to come out with a new album called monica around spring 2005. i was really looking forward to it, they even had some tracks completed, including "someone like you," which i listened to on their myspace page over and over again, imagining it as a potential summer theme song of sorts. then the album didn't come out. that particular incarnation of the shifting lineup of sleep station started calling itself new london fire and set several release dates for the album, now called i sing the body holographic, that never came to be. i think everyone was pretty sure that it'd be coming out in february. i was even briefly in touch with brad paxton (now of starboard green), who, among other things, arranged the four-part acoustic guitar section at the end of "goodnight to the moon" on sleep station's after the war. he said this:

"New London Fire's album will definitely be coming out Feb. 7th - their label decided to push it back so they could spend more time hyping it with tours, interviews and the like. Personally, I think it's going to do very well."

now it's coming out august 8th, and it's available to listen to online right now. i was worried that re-recordings or other tinkering would alter "someone like you" for the worse, but even though the record is coming out so much later than anticipated, it's the same version i'd listened to before, the same awesome little duet with the "let's all sing along with david debiak's oohs" chorus: closure to a minor music saga in my life.

i'm back from plattsburgh and a weekend of living but i'm not going to write about it. actually, i mean i'm not going to write about it here. i wrote about it there in the moleskine i brought with me, the words now seeming connected too closely to the actual moments so as to be incomprehensible to anyone else at any other time, and barely comprehensible to me at any time later. a sort of emotional shorthand with ups and downs, inside jokes and quotes, a coded version of my social security number, lyrical references, and a list of juices and teas.

anyway, i met some interesting people and got to spend time with interesting people i already knew. now, back to the life from before, but not exactly as it was.

i find that the audience at any given fireworks display spends most of their time wondering if the current salvo is "the one"-- the finale, the big moment everyone expects. then they're usually disappointed, as we were tonight. these are more from the early part of the show, and are not particularly good pictures:






there was this pretty sweet fireworks setup in pelham that they used to have back when i was younger. there was a playground near this open field where all of the children would play together until it got dark, then we'd join our families on that big open field, the sky soon to be full of coloured fantastical lights. everyone brought blankets, just lying down, no obstructions to block it out. they had a bonfire afterwards, and one year they were giving away several nintendo 64 systems. i filled out the little card with all that confidence of a child, the self-centerdness, sure i'd win like there was no chance of anyone else taking that from me: it was already mine, don't you understand? there was a big white house off to the edge of the field-- we used to watch the reflections of the bonfire in the windows of that house, thought we saw the face of satan, wavelike, dancing like the tongues of flame. never won anything, never really believed that's what we were seeing.

for a few days last week i thought i'd be spending the night that is today known as last night in a tent somewhere as part of a hastily-planned camping adventure far to the north. i didn't, and it's a shame, isn't it?


ever have a certain bit of information you wish you didn't have in your memory tied to a piece of information you need, and when you think of one you invariably come across the other? it's sort of annoying.


part of me yearns for the early days of television: a guy could stand inside a castle near the window in a storm and say something like "what is contained in that room is...the devil himself!" (with the accompanying sudden flash of flashy lightning and thunderclap) with no sense of banality, because the medium hadn't been around long enough for conventions to develop. actually, this whole idea is something of a temporally misplaced illusion, but twilight zone marathons are still pretty awesome.


what in the fucking fuck?


what do you mail someone? what?


actual quote from the superfluous cute pet pictures section in today's paper, "ready pet go!"

[picture of a dog]

"This is Lady at about one year old. She is a miniature Yorkshire terrier and weighs a whopping 4 pounds. My dad says she looks like Chewbacca from Star Wars." (emphasis in original)

oh, that chewbacca, the one from star wars. seriously, as opposed to what? chewbacca, the distinguished six-term congressman (congresswookiee?) from arkansas? thanks, i think we know who chewbacca is.


but you promised.