No, I'm not going out tonight. February has hit campus hard and everywhere the sidewalks lump up into ugly frozen scar tissue. I went to two parties last night and at the second one, around quarter to three, I realized I was crouching on the floor nursing a badly mixed rum and Coke, trading too-loud and undercooked witticisms with James Ngembe, a massive-in-every-sense 32-bit dork who will take you to school on any Nintendo game produced before 1998. I saw this from somewhere higher, which happens sometimes and let's not make a big thing out of it. From about eight or ten feet up I could see myself and James, and the other limp and lapsed people sprawled around the small anteroom into which we'd all separately crawled to get away from the endless, maddening buzz of the main party, and I knew, dropping the awareness onto my own head, that I had circled back around to five years ago and was exactly where I didn't want to be. I took my leave a little after that. I don't mean to sound too good for anyone here, or like I hadn't been having a beery, blurry version of fun up to that point; it's just that I come from a place, and I don't especially want or need to return to that place. People ask sometimes if I was given a lot of shit growing up, and the answer is yes, although you will not find me going into details unless we know each other extremely well or are unlikely to ever meet again. Everyone's got a terrible childhood stashed away somewhere. To take it out and dress up in it again is something in which I see no percentage.
It's been a weird weekend in most regards; the party was probably the most conventional aspect, with the familiar ruined table full of toppled Ciroc bottles and ashtrayed Dixie cups. Lately that spread, reproduced in dorm rooms and studio apartments across the world, puts me in mind of nothing so much as a bombed city. It's the kind of thing I might try to photograph now, since lately I seem to be drawn exclusively to stupid, self-destructive endeavors. I mentioned February's quiet bitchslap of Baltimore? There are about three dozen breath-stealingly beautiful varieties of ice currently in operation, from the captured-water tableau atop the biology lab to the muscular plugs lurking beneath drainpipes and freestanding on concrete to the hundreds of tiny fingers newly arriven on every tree. The main green froze over a couple of days ago and kids were playing hockey on it. The whole campus is locked up, but in the sudden immutable rigidity we have found entirely new ways to move. (For the curious: Yes, I can flip some badass moves on the shoe. Find me Wednesday mornings on my way to the Amplos building.) My point here is that Lohan, and the greater Atwell area, has been wrapped in unexpected and probably undeserved beauty that will almost certainly be given back to the air in a few days, and have I collected any of it with my finger? I have not. Instead I am chasing down muddy streaks on vestibule floors and the caked black snow hiding in the upper molding of the north dining hall. My hands are full of this stuff, the dirt comes out of the water in the hot red light.
It's supremely dumb but it is all of a piece with what I guess is the usual sophomore identity crisis, the point where questions jump on you at nonsensical moments. People you never thought of as particularly interrogative, suddenly their every statement seems pointed at you, a challenge, a thump of the chest. A lot of my friends are either CS or politcal science majors, both of which are eminently useful fields, and it comes up, you know, never in anything more than the most good-natured and frivolous way, but everyone sort of knows that while I will do huge amounts of work for a photography (i.e. visual arts) degree, it won't be the same kind of work that most people do. It's a shaping. Nobody talks about it but nobody is ignorant. It's not even a question of putting in different amounts of effort because I don't think anyone is really dumb enough to believe that Lohan allows even a single person to graduate without subjecting them to a rigorous program of own-ass-kicking. It's just the black box on the flowchart, the thing you can't answer because who would ever ask: why do you care about this stuff so much? What makes you think you should be running your life this way? Who entitled you, out of all the people who want to pin their hours to something that contributes in only the most flickering and ephemeral way? And you can't tell them that it is a way of holding down and holding up. You are ashamed and disgusted that it should be something so crude and obvious as that. To look at the same few inches of color and shadow and turn to the person next to you and say there, are we finally seeing the same thing? Are we level now? You write other reasons around it. You cover it up with text and none of it is false, but that first command is still there. It can't be helped.
None of this is productive, and hopefully I will be made to put it on hold soon. I mentioned there's a girl thing on the horizon? It's closer now and better defined. To shorten history somewhat, I met this chick at a Fourth of July party last summer when I was up in Maine with my grandfather. She's from Oregon and is now going to school in Florida, a freshman, but she's heading up to the DC area for a few days and I told her she could crash. So we'll see. It will be nice to have someone around, anyway, who can take me away from my head for a while.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Radiocination
Well, the trash is still glowing. Raquel Calgieri across the hall had this massive lightstick party over the weekend, with about six hundred little three-inch snappers in seven different colors and various other luminate paraphernalia -- nunchucks, cat's-eye glasses, I don't know what all. There was more alcohol than anyone could even process, and a pretty exemplary lineup of house artists on the shelf speakers, and most of the furniture had been backed up and was hugging the walls like schoolkids in an air raid. I won't claim to remember most of the night; I ended up drinking way too much, trying to match pace at least with Ellen Power, who is four foot eleven and one-sixteenth Cherokee or something. You know, I can't believe it took me this long to figure out, but I really pass through my comfort zone quickly with respect to alcohol. Somewhere over the course of Saturday night I was in the right place, quick with jokes, tossing out bold claims, able even to work a little pop-and-lock routine with my arms (yeah, when I was twelve everything was Kool Herc and Afrika, what were you doing). But then I reach the tipping point without even knowing it, and suddenly it's Sunday and I'm waking up to a carpet full of ground-in peanuts and eight text messages from people asking whether I got lost on the way across the courtyard. It's not all that bad really, it's not like I get belligerent or maudlin when I'm drunk, but I would like to retain a little grace. That's all. I would like to minimize the number of remembered stumbles across the room that pounce on me in Economic History and cause me to ground a fist into one eye.
Anyway, Raquel I guess ordered her party supplies from some aggressive upstart retailer in New York, and they were pretty much nuclear the night of. I know this because at some point the party spilled over into two nearby rooms, including mine, leaving behind clumps of trash to sweep up and tweeze out from divisions in the carpet. That was my afternoon. That evening, though, I dressed down and killed the lights for a quick Wire episode (that show is kind of comical sometimes, but there's usually at least one scene per hour when they get Baltimore absolutely right), and the garbage lit up like aliens at Chernobyl. I tied the bag shut, but the light kept pulsing out; I had to double-hood it and sit with my back completely to the can. What the hell is in those sticks? At least they're easy to find with the lights off. I didn't realize how many I'd missed, and a few were in places that made absolutely no sense. Someone -- I know it wasn't me -- had laid one across the sprinkler head in my ceiling, which would have been fun had it triggered. I had to knock that off with the skylight pole while exhaling about four molecules of carbon dioxide per minute. I am definitely calling it earlier on the drinks next time.
There is some business with a girl I could report here, but it seems too early to say anything. I'm not sure why I'm even bringing it up. Maybe it's the song. "Ellen and Ben," Dismemberment Plan, man. What would it have even been to see them in a club around here. Oh well -- tomorrow looks good. I have to check out a few Richard Avedon volumes for this class but that's totally not work I mind doing. That one Sly and the Family album is all you need, I think, to be reminded that the world is a pretty cool place.
Anyway, Raquel I guess ordered her party supplies from some aggressive upstart retailer in New York, and they were pretty much nuclear the night of. I know this because at some point the party spilled over into two nearby rooms, including mine, leaving behind clumps of trash to sweep up and tweeze out from divisions in the carpet. That was my afternoon. That evening, though, I dressed down and killed the lights for a quick Wire episode (that show is kind of comical sometimes, but there's usually at least one scene per hour when they get Baltimore absolutely right), and the garbage lit up like aliens at Chernobyl. I tied the bag shut, but the light kept pulsing out; I had to double-hood it and sit with my back completely to the can. What the hell is in those sticks? At least they're easy to find with the lights off. I didn't realize how many I'd missed, and a few were in places that made absolutely no sense. Someone -- I know it wasn't me -- had laid one across the sprinkler head in my ceiling, which would have been fun had it triggered. I had to knock that off with the skylight pole while exhaling about four molecules of carbon dioxide per minute. I am definitely calling it earlier on the drinks next time.
There is some business with a girl I could report here, but it seems too early to say anything. I'm not sure why I'm even bringing it up. Maybe it's the song. "Ellen and Ben," Dismemberment Plan, man. What would it have even been to see them in a club around here. Oh well -- tomorrow looks good. I have to check out a few Richard Avedon volumes for this class but that's totally not work I mind doing. That one Sly and the Family album is all you need, I think, to be reminded that the world is a pretty cool place.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Slick on slick
Well, that was disgusting. I was just up on Sohn Avenue trying to find some cantaloupe that didn't completely look like it had been kicked here from California, and as I was coming out I got a glimpse of some really stark black-on-white graffiti framed against the grocery store's roof. There's a two- or maybe three-story building next door (it's hard to tell from the ground), like an Italian cafe thing below a head shop and maybe some apartments, and someone had obviously gone out on the fire escape and tagged the shit out of the Guadalupana, probably with a Bela Fleck banjo line still tick-strumming in their mind's ear. Graffiti shots have really kind of been done to death, for the most part, but I thought I saw something interesting there. From the right angle, you know, with pedestrians down in the lower left frame, hats and haircuts trafficking past, and maybe a measure of sky in the top right for symmetry. Anyway, I can't know until I get up there. I went around to the back of the cafe to check out the accessibility situation; it was not what you'd call enviable. I guess that's where they dump all the grease, because there was this unpleasant patch of Crisco-looking shine about the size of a parking space radiating outward from the back door. Scraping that shit off the shoe was not fun. It was all over my knuckles, too; I kept having to stop on the way home and wipe my hands on people's lawns. Gloves next time, and I'll probably bring the board as well. I guess I could just ring the bell on the head shop and ask to use their fire escape -- I have no doubt that they'd let me -- but I feel like I should pick up some skills in terms of infiltration and quick getaway. I can't be going to war zones and asking the murahaleen for permission to get a couple quick rolls of broken children corpses.
Speaking of photography (and when am I ever not), holy good God, there are some beautiful girls in my Italian class. Some people are just good-looking past the point where they'd ever need an education. Like, you can get any job you want. You look like Anne Hathaway, or that girl from the Weezer video. What are you doing here? You will never get fired from anything ever. I'm guessing the ridiculously beautiful girls must perceive the world very differently from everyone else -- I'm thinking their major idioms of social interaction are aggressive friendliness and hostile resentment, with some bitter competition thrown in for variety. Actually, I probably wouldn't want to be transcendently good-looking and female. I'm glad they exist, though, because wow is the camera friendly to them. Often it feels like kind of a crutch, you know, like it doesn't matter what else is in the frame as long as I capture Kyra von Heijne in midstride, with her hair in any condition at all. Automatically people are going to call that a good picture, and really all I have to do there is hold down a finger. Plus it seems faintly icky to just take pictures of hot girls and be like "no, it's cool, this is my major," and then have all these contact sheets of goddesses saved in plastic sheeting with the rest of my negs. I kind of feel like I should be modding a They Might Be Giants wiki and memorizing a Playboy Advisor about chiantis when I do that. But damn, man. Okay, I'm imposing a limit: For every picture I take of a beautiful girl (or a beautiful guy -- I'm not going to pretend like I don't know what constitutes a good-looking man), I will take four pictures of landscapes, or trash, or fat children, and make them just as pleasing to the eye. Yes. I will do this. Shortcuts are no way to get better at anything.
Speaking of shortcuts (I like the segues tonight! I will try to do more of this in the future), my friend Harry Stroud picked up something called the Elizabeth Rathbone Miracle Ball. Have you seen this? It's like a soft plastic-ish sphere, about the size of a grapefruit, that you can use for apparently a thousand and one limited-space exercises, on a plane, at your desk, wherever. Harry hasn't put this thing down for three days. She's got it between her shoulderblades, under her neck, she's bowling it lightly down the street and running circles around it as we walk. There's an aperture to poke a straw through and do breathing exercises. Nothing Harry has actually done with the ball has required any greather physical exertion than the contraction of an elbow, but she's convinced that she's on the fast track to the Iditarod. Should I say something? She is kind of entertaining with the ball. It's like having a cat. I'll let her flex those thumb muscles a little while longer. Everyone should be able to play with a ball now and then.
Speaking of photography (and when am I ever not), holy good God, there are some beautiful girls in my Italian class. Some people are just good-looking past the point where they'd ever need an education. Like, you can get any job you want. You look like Anne Hathaway, or that girl from the Weezer video. What are you doing here? You will never get fired from anything ever. I'm guessing the ridiculously beautiful girls must perceive the world very differently from everyone else -- I'm thinking their major idioms of social interaction are aggressive friendliness and hostile resentment, with some bitter competition thrown in for variety. Actually, I probably wouldn't want to be transcendently good-looking and female. I'm glad they exist, though, because wow is the camera friendly to them. Often it feels like kind of a crutch, you know, like it doesn't matter what else is in the frame as long as I capture Kyra von Heijne in midstride, with her hair in any condition at all. Automatically people are going to call that a good picture, and really all I have to do there is hold down a finger. Plus it seems faintly icky to just take pictures of hot girls and be like "no, it's cool, this is my major," and then have all these contact sheets of goddesses saved in plastic sheeting with the rest of my negs. I kind of feel like I should be modding a They Might Be Giants wiki and memorizing a Playboy Advisor about chiantis when I do that. But damn, man. Okay, I'm imposing a limit: For every picture I take of a beautiful girl (or a beautiful guy -- I'm not going to pretend like I don't know what constitutes a good-looking man), I will take four pictures of landscapes, or trash, or fat children, and make them just as pleasing to the eye. Yes. I will do this. Shortcuts are no way to get better at anything.
Speaking of shortcuts (I like the segues tonight! I will try to do more of this in the future), my friend Harry Stroud picked up something called the Elizabeth Rathbone Miracle Ball. Have you seen this? It's like a soft plastic-ish sphere, about the size of a grapefruit, that you can use for apparently a thousand and one limited-space exercises, on a plane, at your desk, wherever. Harry hasn't put this thing down for three days. She's got it between her shoulderblades, under her neck, she's bowling it lightly down the street and running circles around it as we walk. There's an aperture to poke a straw through and do breathing exercises. Nothing Harry has actually done with the ball has required any greather physical exertion than the contraction of an elbow, but she's convinced that she's on the fast track to the Iditarod. Should I say something? She is kind of entertaining with the ball. It's like having a cat. I'll let her flex those thumb muscles a little while longer. Everyone should be able to play with a ball now and then.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Le Big Mac
I had a bad moment today where I was boarding through the parking lot behind the biology labs and saw a chick talking on her cell phone. Her head was encased in some kind of unfortunate orange cloth helmet (it's been mild here but wet, the kind of suspended-moisture situation that clams to your skin and drops the body temperature in a really unfair way), but, you know, her ass was decent and I was enjoying the view as I rowed past. Getting closer, though, I heard her voice and realized it was actually a guy. The egg-shaped head covering thing had completely neutralized any cues. Fortunately I don't think anyone else was close enough to notice me checking him out, so I just jagged right the first chance I got and found an area with some actual females. Simon Federales: stopping mistakes before they happen.
I was hoping to avoid it this year, but today I set my alarm for six. January is a great and terrible time to take pictures: at certain hours the sky provides the kind of flat, unaffective light that people spend days trying to recreate in a studio setting. If you're lucky, of course, that light has a lifespan about the same length as a tampon's. My class schedule hits the clock in such a way as to almost completely lock up my usual shooting hours, so it looks like another winter of early mornings and early retirement. I need the weekends for homework and shit, plus the refinement of existing shots, and the occasional trip out to wherever. A couple of my friends have been leaning on me to get back into snowboarding as well. Oh, about that: I almost wish I hadn't mused my way backwards into this idea that most of my friends are consumed in some way or another by their own egos. Now that I've picked it out, I can't stop noticing it. The guys I used to board with, Trese and Ian, are perfect examples of this. (I'm only exploring this subject right now because it's more likely that I will run to the top of a mountain and eat a dinner of microwaved dung than that either of them will ever read a paragraph on the Internet containing as many words as this.) They are both great, fun guys, both of them working hard to earn degrees in fields that will ultimately allow them to do much good for others, but they are both so full of themselves that they need bags to carry around the surplus. I don't know. Do some people just not know what doubt is? The full-speed-ahead mentality, I understand it but I don't know what the appeal is. I'd rather get to the right place than get to the wrong place fast. But yeah, they've been talking about boarding over at the Swan resort and I probably won't have the heart to defer much longer. It's been awhile -- maybe it will feel good to get the snow back into my lungs.
I was at a party a couple nights ago where somebody had the idea to throw on Pulp Fiction and play probably the most basic drinking game known to man -- just sip every time there is profanity or drug use, basically every time the R rating is earned. I usually crap out of drinking games way ahead of everyone else, and as I think I mentioned my tolerance has been way down lately, so after a while I was just watching the movie. What a good movie. I mean, the dialogue is as bad as anything Tarantino has ever written, but visually, kinetically -- the guy knows how to run film. I actually slowed out of the rounds a little sooner than my body chemistry would have demanded, and I noticed that most people were pretty much doing the same; by the time Mia was getting around to explaining Raven McCoy, almost everyone else was just watching the movie, you know, and enjoying it. I guess one of the other guys, this Canadian kid named Will who is shaped like a gumdrop and has one of those bowl cuts that don't look good on anyone past the third grade, noticed it too, because at around that point he started announcing the drinking cues in his terrible systems-analyst voice. "Coke is fucking dead as dead." "DRINK!" "I don't want to hear about no motherfuckin' ifs." "DRINK!" Then there were the debates about whether "nigger" is a curse, and whether it was actually "nigga" when Jules said it. Jesus, Will. If everyone wanted to drink, that would be one thing, but I think most people were just going along with it because Will basically has no other friends. I hate when someone can't catch the vibe of a room, though. Mainly I just feel bad for the guy, but regardless I don't think I'll be visiting that hall for a while.
I was hoping to avoid it this year, but today I set my alarm for six. January is a great and terrible time to take pictures: at certain hours the sky provides the kind of flat, unaffective light that people spend days trying to recreate in a studio setting. If you're lucky, of course, that light has a lifespan about the same length as a tampon's. My class schedule hits the clock in such a way as to almost completely lock up my usual shooting hours, so it looks like another winter of early mornings and early retirement. I need the weekends for homework and shit, plus the refinement of existing shots, and the occasional trip out to wherever. A couple of my friends have been leaning on me to get back into snowboarding as well. Oh, about that: I almost wish I hadn't mused my way backwards into this idea that most of my friends are consumed in some way or another by their own egos. Now that I've picked it out, I can't stop noticing it. The guys I used to board with, Trese and Ian, are perfect examples of this. (I'm only exploring this subject right now because it's more likely that I will run to the top of a mountain and eat a dinner of microwaved dung than that either of them will ever read a paragraph on the Internet containing as many words as this.) They are both great, fun guys, both of them working hard to earn degrees in fields that will ultimately allow them to do much good for others, but they are both so full of themselves that they need bags to carry around the surplus. I don't know. Do some people just not know what doubt is? The full-speed-ahead mentality, I understand it but I don't know what the appeal is. I'd rather get to the right place than get to the wrong place fast. But yeah, they've been talking about boarding over at the Swan resort and I probably won't have the heart to defer much longer. It's been awhile -- maybe it will feel good to get the snow back into my lungs.
I was at a party a couple nights ago where somebody had the idea to throw on Pulp Fiction and play probably the most basic drinking game known to man -- just sip every time there is profanity or drug use, basically every time the R rating is earned. I usually crap out of drinking games way ahead of everyone else, and as I think I mentioned my tolerance has been way down lately, so after a while I was just watching the movie. What a good movie. I mean, the dialogue is as bad as anything Tarantino has ever written, but visually, kinetically -- the guy knows how to run film. I actually slowed out of the rounds a little sooner than my body chemistry would have demanded, and I noticed that most people were pretty much doing the same; by the time Mia was getting around to explaining Raven McCoy, almost everyone else was just watching the movie, you know, and enjoying it. I guess one of the other guys, this Canadian kid named Will who is shaped like a gumdrop and has one of those bowl cuts that don't look good on anyone past the third grade, noticed it too, because at around that point he started announcing the drinking cues in his terrible systems-analyst voice. "Coke is fucking dead as dead." "DRINK!" "I don't want to hear about no motherfuckin' ifs." "DRINK!" Then there were the debates about whether "nigger" is a curse, and whether it was actually "nigga" when Jules said it. Jesus, Will. If everyone wanted to drink, that would be one thing, but I think most people were just going along with it because Will basically has no other friends. I hate when someone can't catch the vibe of a room, though. Mainly I just feel bad for the guy, but regardless I don't think I'll be visiting that hall for a while.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
The persistence of grappa
Alright, I'm back. I know I haven't updated for a bit, but I was busy shuttling my entire life down to Baltimore and reconnecting with my people here. It occurred to me over break that my friends at Lohan tend to be either monumentally self-absorbed and -promoting or quiet and inwardly focused to the point of actually deflecting light. My two tightest guys here are probably Granver Elios, who you couldn't pull out of the library with an air raid siren, and Dave Del Mar, whose whereabouts on campus are known at all times, since his every line of conversation is delivered in a shout -- not in an angry way, and oddly not in a manner that becomes annoying; the guy is just so happy to be alive, and pitches his voice accordingly. This is one of those things where I don't know and can't ever find out whether things would be different if I hadn't been born with pieces missing. Between Dave and Granver there is almost no overlap, except that both are absorbed to a huge extent by their own agendas. Is it possible that I can only become good friends with people who are so self-preoccupied that they don't bat an eye when I swing myself onto a couch or hit the dance floor on my fists? Not that I have encountered anything like hostility or even hesitation here at school -- everyone is friendly, if momentarily awkward on first introduction, which I can forgive. Still, I don't know. This is one of those life issues Dr. Seakins recommended I spend a quiet hour thinking about, when there's any number of things I'd rather be doing.
Classes begin Monday, so it has mostly been a weekend of heroic stupidity, early breakfasts paid for with fistfuls of dimes, and way, way too much alcohol. I guess in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I have been sucking on a bottle of Svedka this evening. It's been a few months since I got properly toasted -- the semester took an early dive in November, and I ended up having to hold myself to a schedule of something like twenty-one shots a day in the run-up to finals week, so I was too cashed to drink in any event. Then I was in Sweden and then home, both of which experiences were disorienting enough without the aid of distillates. All of which is to say that my tolerance seems to have dropped significantly. It was never that high to begin with, for obvious reasons, and I have evidently lost about half the ground gained in the first three semesters of college. This was to be expected. What I didn't foresee was that I have pretty much lost most of the desire to be drunk -- it's just not doing it for me lately. Having your brain revolve like a phonograph record on that needle called equilibrium, seeing each motion in ghostly advance before executing it blurrily -- I don't know. I kind of like having a clear head. This whole last paragraph I have been working on a half liter of Poland Spring, the sobering powers of which are supposedly a myth but usually hold in my case. It is nice to be back at school, nice in a lot of little ways. For right now I feel good just keeping the Vaseline off my vision and appreciating what is there. I'm sure I'll be back into the cocktails by President's Day. (Interestingly, Lincoln's birthstone is the amethyst, which was thought in Greco times to be a powerful ward against the effects of intoxicants. Oh well.)
All right, on a trip to the bathroom I am basically fluid without possessing false knowledge. Bless you, bottled water, and call on me if you ever need a character witness. Also, if anyone is reading this and feels like reminding me tomorrow to for God's sake go get a Dustbuster, I'd be greatly indebted. The hall here is still three steps down from horrific in terms of cleanliness. It's not the maintenance staff's fault; they can't keep up with Heusinger freshmen, and the sophomores are not much better. I hate to be that guy out moving past your room in a Dopplering whoop of whining suction, but on the other hand, I really don't mind so much at all. Empires could be built from the dirt ground into that carpet. Actually, if you are going to be reminding me of things I need to do, be a mensch and add something about getting my bus pass refilled. I need to carve out some new loops of territory in the city's junk orbit. Lohan is a beautiful campus, looking every day like the catalogue, but it has been snapped to death, cut into a billion squares and proudly hung on clothespins. Time to forge new ground. Way past time.
Classes begin Monday, so it has mostly been a weekend of heroic stupidity, early breakfasts paid for with fistfuls of dimes, and way, way too much alcohol. I guess in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I have been sucking on a bottle of Svedka this evening. It's been a few months since I got properly toasted -- the semester took an early dive in November, and I ended up having to hold myself to a schedule of something like twenty-one shots a day in the run-up to finals week, so I was too cashed to drink in any event. Then I was in Sweden and then home, both of which experiences were disorienting enough without the aid of distillates. All of which is to say that my tolerance seems to have dropped significantly. It was never that high to begin with, for obvious reasons, and I have evidently lost about half the ground gained in the first three semesters of college. This was to be expected. What I didn't foresee was that I have pretty much lost most of the desire to be drunk -- it's just not doing it for me lately. Having your brain revolve like a phonograph record on that needle called equilibrium, seeing each motion in ghostly advance before executing it blurrily -- I don't know. I kind of like having a clear head. This whole last paragraph I have been working on a half liter of Poland Spring, the sobering powers of which are supposedly a myth but usually hold in my case. It is nice to be back at school, nice in a lot of little ways. For right now I feel good just keeping the Vaseline off my vision and appreciating what is there. I'm sure I'll be back into the cocktails by President's Day. (Interestingly, Lincoln's birthstone is the amethyst, which was thought in Greco times to be a powerful ward against the effects of intoxicants. Oh well.)
All right, on a trip to the bathroom I am basically fluid without possessing false knowledge. Bless you, bottled water, and call on me if you ever need a character witness. Also, if anyone is reading this and feels like reminding me tomorrow to for God's sake go get a Dustbuster, I'd be greatly indebted. The hall here is still three steps down from horrific in terms of cleanliness. It's not the maintenance staff's fault; they can't keep up with Heusinger freshmen, and the sophomores are not much better. I hate to be that guy out moving past your room in a Dopplering whoop of whining suction, but on the other hand, I really don't mind so much at all. Empires could be built from the dirt ground into that carpet. Actually, if you are going to be reminding me of things I need to do, be a mensch and add something about getting my bus pass refilled. I need to carve out some new loops of territory in the city's junk orbit. Lohan is a beautiful campus, looking every day like the catalogue, but it has been snapped to death, cut into a billion squares and proudly hung on clothespins. Time to forge new ground. Way past time.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Neutropenicism
So it turns out that my grandfather is back in the hospital. Dad and I went to see him on Sunday. Strange day all around -- the room itself with its unstabbed fruit cups and craning, inquisitive flatscreen TV was the least unearthly passage. We drove to Washington Heights through a thick haze of fog; the hospital is ten blocks from the bridge, but we could see no trace of it from the visitors' area. It's been a while since I was in the city, and I felt it as soon as we parked on Riverside: this is really where I belong. Baltimore is great, but it's no place to stay. Things come from the earth here, wet and yellow, new and receptive to the air. It is a city where things begin. We humped it up the hill, past the Marta Velasquez memorial playground, slicked over with wet leaves that in any other year would have been snow. Dad was muttering things about the Dominicans the whole time, but I think that was just to keep his mind and his mouth moving.
We found Abuelo on the sixth floor. That hospital is really inescapably a box; you can't stand anywhere without being aware of your own small size in the greater spatial arrangement. From the window of his room you could see a jackstraw ruin of a construction site, collapsed or halfway to ascent. He was not in bad spirits but seemed incredibly enervated. I spent last summer with him up in Maine, where he and Herminia now spend most of their time. He's been undergoing rounds of this experimental chemo treatment, and I guess it hasn't been kind to him. Dad's sister showed up with my cousin Jaime, who is an advertising major at Boston University. Herminia was also there, completely responding to Abuelo before he spoke, anticipating what the rest of us could not really guess at. He was exhausted and dehydrated. Herminia had brought him in after he'd lain there in bed for thirty-six hours, barely moving or talking to anyone. Dad told him what the Steelers had been up to and Abuelo told us about when he'd overseen the law students in their offices on 136th Street, how in the spring they would fill paper bags with water and drop them from the windows in an early-May courtship ritual.
On the way back we listened to Steely Dan, Dad fast-forwarding through the tracks that didn't have Fagen singing. Later that night we went out to dinner with a couple my parents are friends with and they asked if I was still taking pictures. Cally and I screwed around for most of the meal and I taught her how to send text messages. I'm not sure what an advertising major does -- it seems that most advertising is designed to strike at the lonely and the vulnerable. I wonder what my cousin is learning up there.
Thick, sandy fog, as I mentioned, so this weekend was pretty much a wash for outdoor shots. I did get a nice piece of someone's fence over which the vines had completely crept in a pubic snarl, at once immaculately arranged and unmistakably wild. There was a moment when I was heading up Cassidy Street to buy some fruit and had my camera out to get a shot of the asphalt slicked with rain, and realized that I am completely sick of taking shots of streets and sidewalks. It's actually sort of nice to access that disgust all at once. My father and I passed by the ruined construction site on our way out. It was an awesome tumbledown catastrophe, impressively mountainous from the mouth at the bottom, through a broken and stained fence tagged with the calligraphy of the local lords -- MOOKIE RAM, SKONK, STELLA 95 -- but man, I am tired of shots that put you into a small feeling. I am ready to get some height. The gray dishcloth light was draining away as we left. My grandfather did not have the light on in his room and as we swept over the wet January leaves back to the car, I knew what it was to be in that bed, alone, a dent in the gathering dark, the hall beeping in a symphony of interrogation.
We found Abuelo on the sixth floor. That hospital is really inescapably a box; you can't stand anywhere without being aware of your own small size in the greater spatial arrangement. From the window of his room you could see a jackstraw ruin of a construction site, collapsed or halfway to ascent. He was not in bad spirits but seemed incredibly enervated. I spent last summer with him up in Maine, where he and Herminia now spend most of their time. He's been undergoing rounds of this experimental chemo treatment, and I guess it hasn't been kind to him. Dad's sister showed up with my cousin Jaime, who is an advertising major at Boston University. Herminia was also there, completely responding to Abuelo before he spoke, anticipating what the rest of us could not really guess at. He was exhausted and dehydrated. Herminia had brought him in after he'd lain there in bed for thirty-six hours, barely moving or talking to anyone. Dad told him what the Steelers had been up to and Abuelo told us about when he'd overseen the law students in their offices on 136th Street, how in the spring they would fill paper bags with water and drop them from the windows in an early-May courtship ritual.
On the way back we listened to Steely Dan, Dad fast-forwarding through the tracks that didn't have Fagen singing. Later that night we went out to dinner with a couple my parents are friends with and they asked if I was still taking pictures. Cally and I screwed around for most of the meal and I taught her how to send text messages. I'm not sure what an advertising major does -- it seems that most advertising is designed to strike at the lonely and the vulnerable. I wonder what my cousin is learning up there.
Thick, sandy fog, as I mentioned, so this weekend was pretty much a wash for outdoor shots. I did get a nice piece of someone's fence over which the vines had completely crept in a pubic snarl, at once immaculately arranged and unmistakably wild. There was a moment when I was heading up Cassidy Street to buy some fruit and had my camera out to get a shot of the asphalt slicked with rain, and realized that I am completely sick of taking shots of streets and sidewalks. It's actually sort of nice to access that disgust all at once. My father and I passed by the ruined construction site on our way out. It was an awesome tumbledown catastrophe, impressively mountainous from the mouth at the bottom, through a broken and stained fence tagged with the calligraphy of the local lords -- MOOKIE RAM, SKONK, STELLA 95 -- but man, I am tired of shots that put you into a small feeling. I am ready to get some height. The gray dishcloth light was draining away as we left. My grandfather did not have the light on in his room and as we swept over the wet January leaves back to the car, I knew what it was to be in that bed, alone, a dent in the gathering dark, the hall beeping in a symphony of interrogation.
Friday, January 12, 2007
If you strike me down
Today had all the start-and-stop charm of a YouTube video over a 6.0 Mbps wireless connection. I've been working on different applications for this summer, mostly magazines in New York, although I have a couple of contacts in local studios that also look promising. The city would be ideal, though -- I have nothing bad to say about Baltimore, but there are downtowns and then there are downtowns. The bulk of today was taken up with this Harper's app, where you basically get to create half an issue of the magazine, on spec, for no pay, in the hopes of moving up to the Broadway offices and working there, also for no pay. I know that's what an internship is, but you would think Harper's would be a little more sympathetic to the starving idealist. I'm not even half done with this qualifying literature and I'm pretty sure I've already worked harder than I would if I were actually on the staff. It's very much designed to weed out the people who don't know the magazine all that well. I'm personally going off the three issues I could find in the house, none of which is more recent than 2004 and two of which are actually from the Clinton administration, so it's all a lot more frustrating than it really needs to be. On the other hand, a big part of what I've been doing all day is combing through pre-refinery news sites for items of interest, which is how I learned that the Indian village of Lakhanow recently pledged to give the name "Saddam Hussein" to all of its newborn males. They already have about twenty Saddams -- the oldest is about eleven; the trend dates back to the first Gulf War -- and I guess they just decided to make it a town policy. It's things like this that make you feel good to be American.
Picked up the car from Joel's today. As far as I can tell it no longer makes that Tuvan-throat siren song; now it sounds more like a jet is about to land on the hood. I tried to case some parts of town where the tracks edge close to the street, but for some reason there were cops out in record numbers. Tagaste has been really territorial about its train system the last couple of years since this kid just ahead of us in the high school got killed out on the tracks one night, and civilians get chased away if they're spotted. I would go out at night to get some shots, but broad daylight is pretty much the only option with this camera. Maybe I could talk to someone on the force and get a pass or something. On second thought, fuck it; I'm only in town another five days. If someone really wants to give me a problem I'll just take. It's sad but most cops seem really disinclined to chase a half-person if the terrain is rough.
My father seemed pretty distracted today, maybe because Mom hasn't been up from her office in a while. He fried up these sausages which I don't know the Spanish for, but they're complete Quiebra Hacha comfort food, and just wandered off to his library halfway through dinner. Cally sort of picked at hers, so later on, while I was trying to track down the primary document on this bulletin circulated by the Church of Scientology to the Berlin municipal government (this is still for Harper's, which again, I read maybe twice a year), I invited her in and just motioned discreetly to the jar of pretzels I got for Christmas. (My parents didn't really know what to get me this year, so it was just a lot of food and iTunes cards, which is actually kind of ideal.) She stayed around for a while and we ended up daring each other to eat these Muhammad Ali protein bars called "Who's The Mango." Do you remember Floam? That Nickelodeon sickly-pink moldable squishy stuff that came packaged in what looked like a brain? Who's The Mango bars taste a lot like that. I can't see Ali stretching out at the end of the day with one of these. I wonder, between him and Foreman (speaking of identical names in freakish multiplicity), how many products have their signatures slapped all over them, and what percentage of those products they might actually use. Maybe there is a Harper's piece in this somewhere.
Picked up the car from Joel's today. As far as I can tell it no longer makes that Tuvan-throat siren song; now it sounds more like a jet is about to land on the hood. I tried to case some parts of town where the tracks edge close to the street, but for some reason there were cops out in record numbers. Tagaste has been really territorial about its train system the last couple of years since this kid just ahead of us in the high school got killed out on the tracks one night, and civilians get chased away if they're spotted. I would go out at night to get some shots, but broad daylight is pretty much the only option with this camera. Maybe I could talk to someone on the force and get a pass or something. On second thought, fuck it; I'm only in town another five days. If someone really wants to give me a problem I'll just take. It's sad but most cops seem really disinclined to chase a half-person if the terrain is rough.
My father seemed pretty distracted today, maybe because Mom hasn't been up from her office in a while. He fried up these sausages which I don't know the Spanish for, but they're complete Quiebra Hacha comfort food, and just wandered off to his library halfway through dinner. Cally sort of picked at hers, so later on, while I was trying to track down the primary document on this bulletin circulated by the Church of Scientology to the Berlin municipal government (this is still for Harper's, which again, I read maybe twice a year), I invited her in and just motioned discreetly to the jar of pretzels I got for Christmas. (My parents didn't really know what to get me this year, so it was just a lot of food and iTunes cards, which is actually kind of ideal.) She stayed around for a while and we ended up daring each other to eat these Muhammad Ali protein bars called "Who's The Mango." Do you remember Floam? That Nickelodeon sickly-pink moldable squishy stuff that came packaged in what looked like a brain? Who's The Mango bars taste a lot like that. I can't see Ali stretching out at the end of the day with one of these. I wonder, between him and Foreman (speaking of identical names in freakish multiplicity), how many products have their signatures slapped all over them, and what percentage of those products they might actually use. Maybe there is a Harper's piece in this somewhere.
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