tuesday touchdowns

tomorrow will be better,

like a diamond pattern sweater

keep looking out,

if your pop gotta lotta clout,

slide presentations,

from your own slack creations,

fuck the dash,

make off without alotta cash,

slip past armed guards,

wide-eyed holdin bad cards,

just don't get robbed,

by some fatass slob named rob,

control tower, so sour,

your own personal power hour,

five times a day,

lumpy like a piece of untouched clay

how i feel

If there is one image that could describe how I feel about my life right now, this is it:

iTunes

Sometimes, I open iTunes and move my cursor up to the browse box and type in something lewd, like "pee pee" or "labia" or "ballsack."  Then I wait to see what appears, and if I like the music, I make it a playlist and I listen to it.

bathrooms

I'll continue with the bathroom theme.

I cleaned the bathroom today.  It was annoying.  I cleaned brown spots off the toilet that came from people's butts and also from people's mouths.  It actually wasn't so bad.  I ended up thinking about whether I was doing a good enough job or not, which I tend to think about in almost every situation.  Should I scrub harder?  Could someone really strong get that weird maroon stain off the porcelain?  Maybe I should work out more so that I can clean better?  No.  Don't think that, that's a terrible display of reasoning.  Ok, so then, do a lot of people even clean their bathrooms?  I feel like there's a large percentage of the population that just doesn't clean their bathrooms period, they allow hairs and soap to combine until they have become fixtures of the sink and toilet, because it's a bathroom and dirty business happens in there anyway.  The other portion of the population has lots of money, so they pay someone to clean the bathroom for them, thus relieving themselves of such a remedial and mundane task.  These people often have their little worlds exploded when they visit someone's house where cleaning the bathroom is a self relegated task.  They can't understand why there are little water drop ghosts on the mirror, or why the bath mat is slightly damp and not completely yellow.  It's hard for me to imagine, this surprise and disgust, and harder for them to take, an awkward pause and slight upturning of the nose.  We are all so different, it makes me want to organize a group of people and take them to a public bathroom, that we can clean it together, promote unity and solidarity across myriad social and racial demographics.  Maybe this is why I feel an urge to perform public service every few weeks.  Usually, the thought passes and I end up feeling good about refilling plastic Vitamin Water bottles with tap water that I've run through a Brita filter.  

what love is like

She tried to explain her love to him one day.  She said her love for him was like peeing in a public  bathroom that is completely dark, and he is in the stall with her except they can't see each other at all, just faint auras of color moving somewhere before their eyes.  They could feel each other breathing, smell arm hairs brushing against bent knees, hear the moment before the pee collided with the toilet bowl water, a slight hissing sound and then the payoff.  She thought she would feel embarrassed at first, but then she started to embrace surrounding darkness and threw her arms up in the air triumphantly as she peed, victorious in being comfortable with him there in the public darkness of their love.

what?

oh...ok.

In a hundred years

In a hundred years, there'll be fifteen thousand million people in the world.  Where will they all live?  Our towns will be too small for everyone.  So people will live under the sea, or in the air in enormous balloons.  The "houses" will be smaller than ours.  And they probably won't have any windows, because there'll be nothing to see outside!  Where will everyone work?  There'll be alot of factories, but they'll be full of machines.  What will our food be like?  What will people eat and drink?  We can't be sure.  The world will certainly need a lot more food, and it probably won't taste as good as food today.  Perhaps things will be better in a hundred years.  But we'll never know.  We won't be here.

- excerpt from a French textbook on the English language

done trying

today, i decided to stop trying.  so...yea.  i'm not going to try anymore.  mostly, i'll just do whatever i want, which is to chill around my place and make silly things.  deal.

sweat

today i sweat alot.  also, i got a bloody nose.  i haven't had one in a while.  i also listened to this song and then sang it to my self for most of the day.  enjoy.  

http://youtube.com/watch?v=z5kHF4lKgWU

What am I listening to?

So I downloaded the J Dilla discography about two years too late, but anyway, there's this album of remixes on there called A.K.A. J. Yancey.  I can't tell if that's the actual album name, no result on Google, but here's the album art:

I'm guessing it was just a collection of remixes that was put out, maybe as a mixtape?  The album year is supposedly 2003, but who knows.  Anyway, I'm in love with the production on these tracks.  Dilla loves the old school deep beats and reverberation on his tracks, and I must admit, with certain artists who nod their heads to the past generations hip hop and r&b and especially soul, his production is a perfect suitor.  Some other artists can be interesting, but a little disjointed, for example, Dillagence, the mixtape that was put out by Busta Rhymes after Dilla died includes a number of unreleased beats with Busta rapping over them.  His style is a bit more abrasive and raw, but it makes for an interesting listen.  I'll be listening to J Dilla alot in the next few months, that's for sure.

wedge-head

For as long as he could remember, there had been a small wooden shim wedged in the back of his head, just below the bony bump, puncturing the taut trampoline of his brain stem and the skin above.  It was a nice piece of wood, with a small dark knot that looked like a stopwatch at the end farthest from his head.  It usually wasn't painful, in fact, he mostly forgot it was even there, except when he tried to wear hats or get his height measured against a white wall.  As he grew older, certain activities became more difficult, such as driving, or enjoying carnival rides; it was difficult to make friends when you didn't attend carnivals, and even more difficult when you couldn't give prospective friends a ride to said carnivals.  

The only pain that he experienced from the slice of wood came at night, when he would lay down on his back to sleep.  He would close his eyes, head resting in a pillow with the shim digging deep into the duck down.  He would remember things from his childhood, small red ducks, a bright green portable toilet in the shape of a turtle that his family would bring on long car rides, throwing rocks at tadpoles at a gray pond on Long Island.  Most memories were about water, or animals that lived in the water, but some memories were painful.  These painful memories came in floods, waves of desperation, like some tidal force was rushing up from his stomach into his lungs, splashing against his windpipe and frothing up to touch top of his mouth.  The time when his father bit his tongue in anger after he had found his son burning books in the parched woods with the matchbook collection that his father had collected from trips to hotels all over the world.  Or when his younger brother had screamed in fury, and everything turned into a tunnel, all that could be seen was his brother's face and all of the pain that he knew were held inside those eyes, and he realized that his brother was different from him, that they would never be close to each other, an ironic sort of relationship based on bagels and poking fun at religious fanatics.  When these memories came back in the moments before sleep, he felt the shim in the back of his head force it's way further into his brain, he felt the blunt pressure on his cortex, not sharp enough to cut, but sharp enough to break blood vessels on the soft gray-pink surface of his brain, small sharp splinters lodging themselves in the deep ridges and peaks that littered his control panel.  It was at these times that he felt true pain, pain as it was always intended, the pain that people felt when they attempted to embrace God on their deathbeds, a hurt that navigated his entire body like some lost army, poking and jabbing the inside of his body to see if anything was living or edible, or both.  The wood would flex and crack quietly, almost satisfied with it's niche, but not satisfied enough, always moving forward in the small increments, and he would hear inside of his own head the dry crackling sound of splintering wood, some kid with a shitty summer job splitting logs, nothing turns out even, and there are scraps of wood everywhere, littering the vast dry lake of his own head.  Eventually, he would start to think irrationally, imagined people  running very fast with small metal cars for feet, crunching metal and heavy breathing in a red room with black stripes on the floor.  These visions would take him away from the grain of the wood, and he would soon begin to sleep, to drift slowly towards complete blankness, nervous and confused, into the void of what he could never really begin to imagine, with a thin umbilical cord of spider's silk attached to his lower back, his life-line to life.  Then, everything was fine for a little while.

He one day decided to cut a hole in his mattress, so that there was a place for the squared-off end of the wood shim to rest when he rested.  It worked for a few hours, but then he rolled over, woke up, and without thinking, allowed his neck to go limp, head diving back towards the spring-loaded bed.  He thought about the wedge splitting his head in half, from back to front like a watermelon, and the wedge drove further than ever.

Family of Toothbrushes

When I was younger, I always thought that families came in groups of four.  This was because I had only ever seen toothbrush holders with four holes.  I had met large families before, but I didn't believe that they could all use the same bathroom with.  Only groups of four.  If you shared a bathroom with three other people, then you were automatically a family.

Sometimes, less than four people share a bathroom.  In that case, someone usually has an extra toothbrush filling the empty slot, because they were at the store and impulsively bought a new toothbrush because the colors were bright or there was come cool-looking rubber shit on the head that made it look like the teeth-brushing process would transpire much more efficiently and with great ease.  

Sometimes it's fun to sit in the bathroom and look at the toothbrushes in their holes, leaning in all different directions.  Some toothbrushes look stoic and proud, because their base is too large to fit into the hole of the holder, so one must jam the base in until it sort of fits, and then the top is sticking out way too much, so the patriarchal toothbrush towers over the other teethbrushes, imparting his fatherly knowledge about what it's like to have been dropped on the floor, or to have been used accidentally to clean a toilet bowl, or to have a piece of hair stuck in his bristles for three weeks.  

Some toothbrushes look tired and forlorn, like a mother of five who husband left her.  She doesn't wear makeup and her bristles are frayed and sloppy.  My own toothbrush looks like Lazer from the American Gladiators show.  He has a big steroid head and is abnormally shaped for a toothbrush, as if I should be wrapping both hands around the curves and really go at it.  He is also red, white, and blue and has alot of unnecessary padding.   I guess the padding makes him more like the challenger in the show, because Lazer doesn't wear pads really at all; he's already huge.  

A day at the Ohm Home

This is a dream-

At the Ohm house, playing games and having fun as normal.  Someone gets hurt, Timmy, I think, and all of the sudden, John's friends start pouring onto the property from Lima Estates, the retirement home next to their house.  Down the steep hill and onto the front yard, everyone is yelling, battle cries.  It felt like a scene out of Braveheart, and I felt a little scared, since I knew they were all drunk.  I remember thinking that it was all of the kids in John's grade plus the other kids in the school who would attend a huge party, so it must have been something like 400 people descending simultaneously.  We sat in the grass and watched, accepting that fact that we were about to host an impromptu blowout party.  No one questioned it; the number of people was too great, and a riot would have been incited had anyone dared to tell these high school kids to go home.  Suddenly, everyone went silent, and it was a big awkward moment with a few hundred people.  I said something stupid, and a few people laughed.

At some point Timmy had gotten a GIANT gash in his calf.  There was a hole just below the back of his knee the size of a baseball, and he was reaching inside with a paper towel or something and sopping up the blood.  I remember thinking that he must have lost alot of muscle tissue.  I got hurt too, a small scratch, and Tom was asking me if I was ok, while Timmy sat there, probably bleeding out.  He complained about how he was the one with a cut.  

Someone set up an obstacle course, except it was all hanging from trees in the woods right next to the front porch.  You basically had to make it from one end to the other, using almost entirely your upper body.  There were padded pendulums and medicine balls on ropes to knock you off the course.  Timmy was still completing the course despite his gnarled leg.  I couldn't do it and felt ashamed.  

how to be more honest

1. Eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches without drinking milk.  Drink water instead.

2. Inhale deeply your own farts.

3. When driving on the highway late at night in low traffic, accelerate until the car starts to shake.

4. Stand in a room, staring at a light for 5 minutes, and then quickly run outside into the woods (if you live near a forest) when it is nighttime and very dark.  Try to make yourself think about monsters and bugs without getting scared.

5. Hand-write a letter to a friend you haven't spoken with in a while, but still think about fairly often.  Tell him/her exactly what you think of them, and then burn the letter and use the ashes to make a charcoal drawing of what you think their face would look like now.  

6. Don't let ice cream melt, ever.

7. Practice solitary, erratic errands.

8. Dive under water and hold your breath for as long as you think you can hold it, and then stay under for an extra 15 seconds. 

9. Watch Maury on UPN 57 every day for a week, and see if you have a dream about the show.  If you do, call Maury and tell him about your dream and see if he invites you onto the show.  If not, throw toilet paper on his house.  

10. Try to imagine how painful it would be to slice the webbing between your toes. 

Stephen Hawking

He recalled a time when things were simpler, a small goldfish in a clear plastic bag as opposed to the exotic coral piranha playground that served as his world now. Forcibly reckoning with his own failures was a small part of the learning curve for John, or was it a learning circle? The rest of his daily checklist included pumping up his chest for photos and/or lofty new goals, flexing his wrists in hopes of finding someone who would appreciate his right hand besides himself, and doing back bends to try to work out the kinks that kept him from attempting anything new or risky in life. He knew that, in his life, there was a ubiquitous synergy of fear and confusion that made mundane daily tasks somehow pleasurable, where as a person like say, Stephen Hawking would find these same tasks mundane and most likely, physically impossible.

bring nelly back

how much did nike pay nelly to do this video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxGavd199X8&feature=related

bike accident

Droning horn noises and then, on cue, a dark-haired girl slowly but painfully falls off her bike onto the hot hexagon sidewalk.  A guy with spiky hair smoking a slow-burn cigarette looks on in amusement.

I think about Teletubbies.  That's the type of weather this is, Teletubby weather, always 78 degrees and sunny with a light breeze coming from the direction of the 27 rainbows in the south.  

I want to marry her because she fell off her bike.  Tell her that I saw it happen, passively wondering if I could dress her inevitable knee scrape with a smooth antibiotic gel and an uncomfortable plastic band-aid.  I would try to open the band-aid professionally, with the skill and speed of a school nurse, but it would end up getting stuck to my index finger and would end up in a bunched messed on her left knee-cap.  She would call of the wedding and move to North Dakota to head up a failing CD packaging company.  So it goes.

all i can see is people jumping really high to pull off the tops ones, sidewalk trampolines

crowbar wars

last night, i was a little drunk and looking out my window.  i saw some guy who was either really drunk or on a lot of drugs.  he was pulling handles on car doors on the guilford street bridge, trying to get into one.  so naturally, i grabbed my crowbar and ran outside.  i walked on the sidewalk glass carefully so as not to attract any unwanted attention, although in retrospect, a shirtless white kid walking down the guilford street bridge at 4:30 am with a crowbar is going to attract some attention either way.  i approached the guy, who by this time had called a friend who arrived just ahead of me on a bike.  decision time.  one guy is not so bad, two guys could be a problem.  thats when macho stuff happens.  the dude was rifling through the care pretty openly, so i walked up with the crowbar and asked, "hey is that your car?"  he replied, "is it yours?" i said, "no but i think it belongs to a friend of mine." i tried to have a slight smile and all-knowing eyes, but i probably came off as a smug idiot with a metal weapon.  the other guy didn't speak, but the one talking was clearly fucked up.  i sized up my options and he said, "ok well if it isn't your car, then what the fuck are you doing?" i replied, "good point, i'll go get my friend then and he'll come out here."  i turned around and walked dejectedly back to my building.  for some reason i didn't think that they might have had a gun, and they probably didnt, so theres always that.  what was i going to do anyway? hit someone with a crowbar?  what a terrible idea.  

anyway, i got back inside and called the police even though the guys were gone. i just wanted to see what would happen.  almost immediately, an undercover in a toyota truck pulled up, searched the open car and left.  then three marked cop cars came up and about 25 old cops tumbled out of those three cars, flashlights blazing.  they searched the car for about a half hour (literally) and the street as well.  it was an entertaining end to my night.

What is Patriotism?

I woke up this morning and read Time magazine.  Everything about this morning was pretty routine, but as I read the headlining article, I suddenly got this sinking feeling that Barack Obama was going to lose the presidential race.  My heart dropped when I read this quote he made in regards to the lapel pin that was absent from his chest: 

"I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said in the fall of 2007.  "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism."  

As always, I feel the need to explain my gut feeling of pessimism after Obama's party has come so far.  My fear is that the majority of our country simply isn't ready to take a risk.  If I were a conservative, I would have ripped apart the aforementioned statement.  Try to tell?  We don't try, this is America, we do!  What you believe will make this country great? Who says it wasn't great already and if our country isn't great by your standards, why the hell have you been living here for so long?  And finally, to borrow a line from Obama himself, having the audacity to say hopefully as a potential presidential nominee (he hadn't won yet) is suicide by conservative standards.  The man is not cocky, he is realistic, he is not blind, he is hopeful, but he is not SURE.  To be the president, you have to be sure.  John McCain is sure of something, even if he can't quite explain why he differs on immigration policy from so many other conservatives, even if he has no fact-based logic behind his support of offshore drilling.  

John McCain wears the pin, and he wears it well.  If I'm a swing voter who doesn't follow the minutia of these two campaigns, but I am informed enough to argue at a bar when there's nothing better to do than talk about politics, I would vote for John McCain.  He at least seems sure of himself, and isn't that what Americans want?  But I'm not a swing voter, and I'd like to think that I absorb a good amount of the information that's disseminated by our trusty and prudent news outlets.  I understand that Barack Obama is attempting something that has never been attempted before in the political realm (except for JFK, maybe): he is not sure of anything.  He harps on progress, but where is this master plan?  It doesn't exist of course, we must have faith in Obama's own critical introspection.  We have to believe that he will not be the figurehead for a party, that he will always be looking forward, will not allow our country to revel in any past glory or to celebrate that we've made it this far.  We have to believe that he will make the choices that will ultimately make our country a better place, not only for those privileged enough to live here, but to make our country a better place in the global community.  

It's a scary idea, I know, giving your vote to a man who does not have a plan.  I am scared sometimes, as I mentioned before.  This morning I was scared.  I was asking questions, questions like, am I buying into this hope thing too much, am I blind to reality in any way?  Has the Obama approach become a hallmark of the Democratic campaign, and if so, have I been swayed into thinking that I'm being completely objective about all of this?  Is Obama's patriotism indicative of how the majority of Americans feel, or is McCain's message of loyalty to our fathers, the celebration of our country's struggles, faith in a military tradition, is this message striking the hearts and minds of our popular vote?  

McCain makes a fairly out of character statement in his piece for Time.  He says: "The good citizen and patriot know that happiness is greater than comfort, more sublime than pleasure.  The cynical and indifferent know not what they miss.  For their mistake is an impediment not only to our progress as a civilization but to their happiness as individuals."  Really, John?  You wrote that? That sounds almost like something Obama would say.  The only problem I can see here, is that you, Mr. McCain, have a significantly larger voter base who give you their vote without ever reading what you just wrote, without caring about what you have to say about progress and ambivalence and patriotism.  They only care that when they turn on the television, they'll see your muscular head and misshapen jaw, with your chest puffed up like a pigeon, and right there on the left side of your jacket, a shiny red, white, and blue reminder of why they like you as a candidate.

Pretzel shake

I've been thinking about this for a while:  creating a smoothie-like drink using only water and pretzels.  I very much enjoy eating pretzels, and I also enjoy drinking water while I eat pretzels.  This act makes me feel sort of healthy and also someone told me that it's good to eat snacks.  The only problem is that I have sensitive teeth.  My molars have been frightened of crunchy foods for the last 5 years of my life, or roughly equivalent to the number of years it's been since I actually ate a piece of candy with any gusto.  To put it simply, I like the texture of my food to be a pushover, within reason of course.  For example, I find grits to be great.  Corn chips are definitely delicious, but they hurt my brain when I eat them.  I am finding myself more and more interested in blending crunchy foods until they are in some sort of powder-like form.  Then, one of two things might happen: I could either a) pour this delicious powder into my mouth and then pour some water in as well, and let the magic happen, or b) I could just add the water into the blending process and really create something weird. 

 I often feel as if I'm not eating efficiently enough, and while some people probably enjoy the action of grinding hard objects between their teeth like some horrible mortar and pestle, I'm mostly just trying to get this food into my stomach with the least painful method possible.  Call me crazy, but I think it'll catch on.  Plus there are tons of interesting variables that can be introduced. For one thing, you could use milk instead of water in the mixture, and then add some of that powdered cheese stuff that they include in the Kraft Mac and Cheese boxes.  Voila!  Pretzel and cheese shake!  Or take it even further, and blend corn chips, salsa, the aforementioned cheese powder, and sour cream.  Now you have all the flavors of an authentic Mexican style dinner with none of the mess or dishes.  Who cares if the mixture is some nasty looking pink color with little chunks floating in it?  What's important is that you made things much easier on your digestive system, so that next time, when it really needs to work on some tough piece of steak,  or an incredibly raw banana, it'll have all that unused shake energy to exert.  This logic is flawless.