Even Dante Hicks gets a proper story arch

Even though ten minutes ago I was bopping around to “What a wookie”, I have only just realized that I haven't any plot to speak of whatsoever.
I consume the plots of others. Of fictional characters, of friends, of family. I even try to influence the plots to see them all turn out right. This is all to mask the fact that my plot has simply stopped. Ended. With no true ending either, the author kinda sucks.
And “What a wookie” represents the intersection of two separate fictional plots, which only intersect at various places along my intellectual timeline. My intellectual timeline, however, doesn't actually influence the plot at all. It merely influences the themes, mood, motifs, and messages of the overarching plot. But there IS NO plot to create theme with, so there's … just... nothing.
Like that pure moods cd, where there's no mood to speak of whatsoever. It's just... washed out. Like an eight year old with watercolors. The blues the purples the yellows all look great, until you dip your brush again and they all get washed out.
My plotline is like that. Like someone dipped the brush into the water again and brought it back to the page suddenly erasing all pigment and purpose. Everything that makes a person a person and not a hard shell of overly intellectual escapism surrounding a vast void. God, does this remind anyone else of the Neverending Story 2? It's just me? Oh well. Kinda proves my point, doesn't it?
I do my best writing in the shower.

Reverberation.

I have always found that music that gets me in some way, will get me in a  certain place in my body.

Tool often gets me right in the gut, like someone's punched me really hard right where everything twists and writhes and churns. Makes me want to punch back, to destroy with the beautiful simplicity of the hydrochloric acid that fills us. A letting go, the urge like Fight Club, that is released when i hear "aenima", "H", or even "46and2". There is joy in that clenching pain. In that knock-the-air-out-of-you punch of the rhythm.

A Perfect Circle will get me in the heart. Where things bleed and mourn and die. Makes me cry for the love and hate and beauty and all the admittedly cerebral concepts that reverberate in the central muscle. Empathy overflows and the warring concept of man's inhumanity to man and "what a piece of work is man" bleeds out leaving a mono no aware shell. "3 Libras", "the Hollow" and even "Blue"

Some bands, however, depending on the song or the mood or whatever whim strikes them, (Admittedly often one such band is Puscifer...) , will go straight to the groin. The groin that fucks, that desires, that destroys. Makes me want to go mad in some ecstatic bacchanal. Like those ridiculous dionysian ideals i clung to in the ninth grade - well before i ever tried to understand any of it (not that anyone fully could). "Rev. 22:20" by Puscifer, also "God is in the Radio" by Queens of the Stone Age, and "Stinkfist" by Tool. Mmm.

Few bands that i love are a cerebral joy. Perhaps because there are no nerve endings in my brain. Mostly they include those whose lyrics are particularly witty and since we all know Lester Bangs' quote about rock'n'roll lyrics, i can't say that i find that very often.

Some bands will get me in my feet, too. "Pass that Dutch" by Missy Elliot, i can't help dancing.

I don't know if anyone else experiences this or if I'm over-dramatizing, but that's why i love this stuff. Likes waves in a pond expanding out to hit distant rocks or reeds and then bounce off, the notes reverberate inside me and out again filtered through my anatomy, changed and yet the same.

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like a tame cat trying so hard to be as wild as her tiger friends

Some undergrad inexplicably made me think of Ian H in high school. The kid probably walked a certain way or maybe it was a white tshirt and black floppy bookbag, but clear as day i was back in the CAHS cafeteria with him eating some disgustingly greasy substance and questioning whether it was truly dead. I remembered what he meant to me then. A walking symbol of where I'd come from and the utopia I'd arrived in.

I remember him in middle school but always apart, only because of the way it was there. People were separate. The stifling pressure of conformity. He was older, but always nice. Never gave in to the conformity or the separation. I looked up to him even then. He damned the man, and never said sorry.

When he transferred with Moni and me, i had no idea that would solidify our friendship in the way it did. He reminded me of my cousin and all the girls thought he was the cutest, which got weird a couple times. But having him around always reminded me of how far i'd come in my journey. I'd come to a haven of creativity and support and considering the desolation i had come from, i couldnt help ride the wave of elation.

I had never truly let myself believe that it would end. The freedom, the confidence that came with that freedom. We were all big fish in small ponds there. And therein lies the beauty of that place. We had the headroom to soar above the mundane ;)

I guess in a way Ian always represented that to me. The example of what one could become when one is freed from social prison and asked to BE. Perhaps i put too much on an adolescent boy, but people never know the effect they have on others. Just by being himself he helped teach me not just to trust myself, but the CAHS world too. A sempai, a mentor, a zen master. Hope he's doing well. :)  

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Why are thoughts only worth two cents?

Here's my thing about Thanksgiving:

Yeah, it's built upon a complete and total lie. There was no happy harmony between new settlers and indigenous people. There was only slaughter and smallpox.
This is not something to forget. I am not trying to forget anything about that. I think it was nasty for historians to TRY to forget that. To gloss over all the death and teach children some fantastical lie about turkey and corn. While slaughter and smallpox is a little heavy for young minds, I think it's inappropriate to lie to children. Doesn't help anyone.

However, I do not think that celebrating Thanksgiving as it exists today has anything to do with those stories. None. There's no connection between modern Thanksgiving rituals and that lie you tell second graders to pretend our ancestors didn't slaughter whole societies of people.

Celebrating Thanksgiving, as it exists today, is not about some ancient fluffy lie. It's about family and friendship. It's about sitting down and enjoying some food and company and taking a minute to feel thankful for what you have. Even if you don't have much, it's worth taking a minute to be glad. It's about a feast before a long, hard winter. It's about the harvest. It's about enjoying what you have while you have it.

Thusly, I haven't any qualms about celebrating Thanksgiving despite the horrific atrocities my ancestors committed against a full country of people.
We cannot forget the past, but we also cannot forget that things change. In time, meanings change and societies change and a lot happens in two hundred years.

In conclusion, a quote from a Thanksgiving special.
"A bear! You made a bear!"
"I didn't mean to."
"Undo it! Undo it!"

hounddogs

Makes me want my duct tape covered notebook and some black coffee. And chocolate cake, on some summer afternoon after the 11th grade. I do so love it here sometimes.

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A Memo to Men

You know how people always look at you just a teensy bit nicer when you're dressed up? When you clean up nice and wear a button-down Oxford shirt and nice, well-tailored slacks? People may compliment you and point out, with a note of surprise, that you look good when you don't look like hell all the time?

Let me impart some wisdom:
All men look good in an Oxford shirt. All of them. At formal occasions, when fully buttoned with a tie, men will look good. In informal occasions, with sleeves rolled up and the collar unbuttoned, men will look good.

The Oxford shirt is specifically designed to flatter a man's distinct lack of curves. It shows off the angular shoulders and straight hips with ease and elegance. I am convinced that that shirt is one of the greatest product designs of all time. Whoever designed it is some sort of Grecian sculptor reborn, etching the post-war man from blocks of marble in a Platonic Ideal ecstasy.

This is not to say that it doesn't look excellent on women, too. The angular tailoring of the Oxford shirt emphasizes the places where a woman's curves distort the angles and all my CAHS education is screaming at me to giggle "curvilinear lines!!" Thanks, Mr. Feeser.

My point is simply to clarify what perhaps you were never told before:
Wearing an Oxford shirt makes you look your best. When you flatter your shapes with the eloquent confidence of the greatest innovation in men's fashion, those who are turned on by the shape of men will act like total and complete idiots in your wake. It can only improve your hopes of a best-case scenario on a Saturday night, whatever that outcome may be. Waffle house? Yes, please.

When I talk to myself, I speak in thinly-veiled metaphor.

This is a flashback. Sometimes I've already said what I wanted to say. Sometimes, I said it years ago, in another time in another place, responding to the same question. This time, however, I'm really just talking to myself.

I was going to post Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "What Could She Say to the Fantastic Foolybear?", but it's obviously not mine, and this is my blog. Think of his work as the question, posed, not by anyone but myself. Below is my response to the question, written in 2001. Please remember that I was seventeen when I wrote this response. Despite it's faults, the poem is as true now as it was then.

----

Usagi's Lingerie

i haven't changed
in the least
i haven't though I have
everyone's different now
they all feel betrayed
and alone
i did not leave them alone
i left myself
for myself
i left my fears
and my excuses
for myself
i haven't changed
have i?
i'm still the me
you love
i'm still the me
with the mismatched
socks and the
pigtails
i'm still me
just a part of me
you didn't know
came out for all to see
and it scandalized the masses
i didn't betray you
you just didn't know me
as well as you thought you did