Day Six: Rubberneck

A mist of rain descended in the night. Had some disturbing dream about indestructible aliens.

Drove. Drove drove drove drove. Trying to find the past. Traveled 130 miles, took 118 pictures. I am a horrible driver mostly because I rubberneck all the time. I just love exploring, it's what I'm used to. Kept looking for decaying barns and road fauna. I think I got some good shots, especially the one of the dead porcupine. Yech.

Bottle neck: Found someone's collection in the basement. Just a shoebox full of really old Coca-Cola memorabilia. Not sure any of it is worth money. More than anything, it scares me. What kind of person finds fascination in coupons and advertisements for Coke? Worship of this kind is disturbing.

I find collections like this all the time. I pick and choose what I like. Everything I own is a collaboration of a million collections I've found in dumpsters, thrift stores, the street. Of Coke guy's stuff I kept the baseball cards and the advertisements which I will scan and use for my artistic devices. Then I'll probably burn it.

I also found a bunch of postcards covered in "modern art" (circa 1970). They are beautiful and poignant. I want to write nasty messages on them and mail them to politicians. And also keep them. And also leave the here. Deliver me from clever art. Found some books on art galleries too.

Watched Bravehart. What a ridiculous film. It was good, but I could never take it seriously. My mind was elsewhere, couldn't escape from some harrowing thought. Damn that dream.

Day Five: Copy/Paste

Something is living in my attic, I swear.

I went to work for my uncle, who owns Financial Resources National, inc. He's got a lot of money because of this and while he may never admit he is rich, he is. Nothing is difficult for him.

He told me, that to work for him, this is a business atmosphere and I need to dress appropriately. I didn't pack any khakis, so I'm wearing jeans. I'm wearing a business shirt so old it has stains from when I worked at Safeway. My Radiohead t-shirt is underneath, and sometimes you can see the skull and crossbones. My hair is flopping like Dilbert's tie. I haven't shaved since spring break.

My uncle gives me the once over, a sneer really and shows me the terminal I'm going to use. I chose the word terminal for a reason. Some office women teach me how to transfer from one database to the new one. Basically, a copy/paste job. A monkey could do it. Which makes me that monkey. I'm dressed up like one. The same as everyone else, waiting for lunch and to go home. To watch TV and work harder for things that won't make them happy.

Deliver me from clever art and Swedish furniture.

All this information, thousands of names and numbers for clients for my uncle. Basically, a strange geography lesson. Most of these businesses were mortgage companies, all of them the same boring names. NATIONAL AMERICAN PREMIUM MORTGAGE BROKERS OF GEORGIA. Sadly, the only original titles were when managers decided to use their last name. Found a Michael Hughes, a Clayton Human and a Carl Hurlbut. Names that made me smile.

I was thinking of how if I destroyed any of this information so much money would be lost. I could cause several businesses to go under, especially my uncle's. Just copy/paste/delete. The economy is swaying, I could cause it to collapse. Domino effect.

I went through all the G's, the H's, and the I's in seven hours. It was so boring but the trouble was it required just enough thought and motor skill that I couldn't think of anything else, but just the minimum to torture me. I'm not meant to be this unproductive. And I mean that nothing I did matters. If I died in that office, no one would even smell me.

But at least I get my own office. It used to belong to someone named Michelle or Melissa or Lindsay. She quit the other day, and so I'm a temp, just filling in. I'm Ryan from the Office, only I don't see why he wants to move up in the business world. Sick, horrid place.

Anyway, Lindsay or whoever left behind a lot of crap and I dug through the trash and took it. Some cough medicine, which I tasted. Lots of pens. A disaster DVD. A few giftcards, I'm not sure they're good.

I had gurgled down a No Fear energy drink, and I was shaking all day. I coughed up some bile into a Santa vase that I found. I did some voodoo to a poor little bear. I stapled tape. Sure, laziness is a sin, but I think so is boredom. Man, was I bored. When I finally left at five, this numbing feeling released me. Had I really done all that much typing? Was it all just some torturous nightmare?

I've been revisiting some memories I had of this place when I was 13. The people around me, every face familiar, are putting the pieces back together. I revisited the house I lived in when I was three. The backstory is: I was born in Phoenix, but my dad kidnapped me and took me to his parents. So my mom just followed him and we lived here for two years, in a tiny blue duplex. It's painted green now.

But seeing that house brought back memories that I never knew existed. They popped into place, just like like a jigsaw puzzle. Copy/paste. I went to an arcade hall. Same feeling. It was so overwhelming I wanted to crumble into a million pieces. Cry or scream or something. Break the madness.

I earlier said that I was terrified of driving here at night, but I've gotten used to it and it's really beautiful. I cruised slowly up a hill, lights turned off, just breathing in the eerie darkness. A chorus of voices in the woods. Then silence.

Day Four: Conspiracy Theories

The phone rings in a dream.

Drove with my grandparents to Manchester. 45 minute drive. My grandma took a plane to North Carolina to witness my cousin's graduation. I haven't seen him since I was eight. Guess it's staying that way.

We took the Prius and the truck so that we could fill them up with donated food from the Manchester food bank. I was allowed to grab a handful of stuff for my own devices. I mostly got old, expired 35mm film which I hear is a godsend to develop for experimental photographers (read: me).

I also got a disposable camera, some weird dyes, mints that taste like chlorine, rechargable batteries, shoe polish. A CD by the band Seven Mary Three, that reached their peak in 1996. Their new CD sucks. In fact, I bet they all do.

An entire case of weird energy pills I will be experimenting with.

I got a bit more than a $150 worth of stuff. My grandpa got about $1977 estimated worth of food and toiletries, but he had to pay $232. The money was tithe money tho, because the church funds the pantry.

My uncle employees a man named Miro, a dude from Bulgaria who taught me how to wait tables. Just going over the basics. A crash course. He was really thorough and realistic, teaching me how to raise the check.

As I waited in Scott's office, I noticed his tropical fish. Sad little things. Slaves with low levels of consciousness. No emotions. Swim. These are animals as wallpaper. As nothing more than decoration. Because how much affection can you afford to a mindless animal like that? Not that you should set them free, not that I care. It makes no difference. The point is, they exist for the purpose of observation. Just an observation.

Tried some schizophotography. Nothing I really loved.

I like my flickr pro account so much. Totally worth the $25 I paid for it. I see it as more of a photo diary than a collection. Each picture is worth more than a 1000 words to me. You'd probably get a better idea of what was happening to me in New England if you followed the uploads, which you can, here. You may already know that.

The security here is very lax. No one locks anything up. Not even their front door. My grandpa leaves his keys in the car. It would be incredibly easy to commit a crime here. It might be possible to get away with it, I don't know. People here notice things more and they are more likely to tattle.

If five others and I went around burgling people, in broad daylight, we'd create a strange wave of paranoia that would turn this town completely upside down. Once they lock those doors up, once they fear, this town will never be safe again.

One day it will happen. I'm just wondering when.

Perhaps the people here are too trusting. In other areas of living, a little cynicism could go a long way.

I went to a boring little awards ceremony and drew sketches with my cousins. My cousins got many achievements in school, but I was just happy with what I drew. Spent the rest of the evening playing video games with Matthew.

Drove home in the darkness and spoke softly with it. I'm here again, in this sunless abyss and this time I'm not to blame.

Day Three: Opium Eater

I've discovered quite a lot in that basement. I found Do-It-Yourself Strip Tease. I wonder if they have strip teases where you don't do it alone. I found an old Bible. Provocative Piano by Dick Hyman. No better name for that album. A collection of Gregorian chants.

A bunch of short stories, including Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey. It is such a dark, beautiful memoir. It is exactly how I want to write A Link to the Past, a short story I'm kicking around.

I want to read and and do nothing but educate myself. In college, I was too busy to learn. I researched Agent Orange. The pictures are horrifying but they fascinate me.

I went with my grandpa to take food to an invalid woman. Weird how all the invalids I've known smell the same. I like working with them tho.

Ate Syrian food. It's where I'm from and my grandparents cook it a lot. It was good.

They don't refrigerate their butter. Their jams are the best. Learned how to cook bacon.

Fell asleep in the car. Me and my apneas.

Got a callback from someone. We'll see if I get the job.

Met a woman named Rhonda. The first thing she said to me, "Do people often tell you you look like your father?"
"Anyone who knows us."
"Cuz you do." She chuckled. "Your father used to yell at me for not singing into the microphone."

She invited me to lead a Bible study with her next, for the youth. The kids are about my age. We're reading a book that questions how anyone knows God exists. I like it, but it's pretty elementary.

I would take more leadership opportunities, but no one offers them to me. I have a heart for service, but I won't pursue it. It's not laziness; it's fear. Who cares? It's probably for the best.

There are spiders in my house. They watch me shower and defecate. I won't kill them because they get the skeeters. They are my friends.

I went to a greenhouse to buy flowers. I found it really pretty.

This could be my diary. My personal journal has been neglected since I landed. I could write about my life like this all the time.

But I won't.

Day Two: Stranger in a Strange Land

I've been rocking out to Bing Crosby, driving that little Prius everywhere. The car of the future. But it won't stop global warming any. Tear.

I listened to some French radio station. Rudy Cayn sung a song about Guantanamo Bay. That's social commentary for you. Then some Mars Volta on full blast. Love driving that Prius.

The street signs are sporadic here. Can barely ever find the speed limit. I was confusing the route number with it and driving 25 down a 55 two-lane road. Pissed off a lot of drivers. Ha.

I usually keep the speed limit, but no one else does. Once I discovered that there are never any cops around, I began to really enjoy myself. Driving at night here is terrifying tho. No streetlights except on major roads. (There are no major roads).

The signs are also weird and unprofessional, compared to the authority of Phoenix. Blind Person. Beware! Pedestrians.

One of those tube-like ashtrays caught on fire. Some church employee tried extinguishing it with Lemon Flavored Fruit2O.

My grandpa had a meeting so he threw me the keys to his blue Chevy truck. It's Center Harbor. I have no place to go, not much money to spend. So I drove to a train station. For no reason other than unadulterated adventure.

I applied for a job working for this dismal little restaurant called Hart's. I hope I can find a better place to slave away.

I met Steve, a really overweight guy my dad has been friends with when he lived here. I think a lot of people have resentment or adoration for me just because of how well they knew my father. My father the Anarchist. The Smoker. The Rebel. It's interesting. It'll be more intense on Sunday, I'm sure.

My grandfather owns the church and he has a cellar filled with donated goods. There's a food bank and clothes, furniture, books and random bits of everything. It goes back out to the community. That includes me. Someone donated their collection of LP records. Most are boring classical music or gospel hymns, but I've found a few gems. Like Bing Crosby.

Someone donated an entire encyclopedia volume. Will people publish these in the future, with Wikipedia and About and the rest of the Internet? Wikipedia is just proving that knowledge is infinite, so I guess not. No point.

I flipped to the P's. Learned about the history of Mannerism painting. I've been reading up on the Siege of Sarajevo. Roses. Things I never learned about in school. Things I want to know.

I found a dream house. I didn't have one before. I'm not sure I'm serious about here. But this is a small town that isn't sucking me dry because it's not centered around trains or indoctrination. It's just nothing. I could live here and get things done. But I'm hesitant.

I don't fit in here at all. Not wearing my indie clothes, my fedora. My crooked haircut. Not my unfundemental anarchist value system. They give me stares. Some judgemental. Some vaguely familiar. Everyone knows me somewhere, somehow. Small town thing.

I haven't been this happy in a while. Probably since November. December. Most of January. Some Thing.

Nothing's superficial. Nothing really matters. Dreams and dreams and more dreams.

Day One: Jet Lag

There's graffiti here.
TSA crushed my identity and I'm someone else now.
Chewing Winterfresh. Cruising in a Prius, a car so electronic just press a button to park.

It's the little things that make this trip what it is. I'm amazed at the kinds of unique culture a state can have. It's incredibly structured here.

First thing I notice is how my cousin has changed. He's wearing American Eagle and flip flops. He highlighted his hair. Never thought he would care about those things three years ago, when I last saw him.

We drive off, my grandfather and uncle in the front. We get lost a few times and my cousin wishes he had brought Nicole. He named his GPS system.

We're going to visit a dying person. But when we show up, she's just very sick. Her name is Irene, and I meet her husband Takie. They are both Greek immigrants who escaped a depression in Greece in the '80s. A trip that should've lasted six months, stretched into 16 years. Now they live here, more fluent in Greek than English.

I have never been exposed to this specific kind of culture before and I decide that Greek is one of the most beautiful languages human beings are capable of. It's almost as if I can understand what they're saying, but not quite. Tone and body language are the same. The words the same color and shape.

I met a nice woman who was born Greek and raised in London. She gushed about it. My family talked about plans to visit Greece and Africa and I felt grounded again. By which I mean, I'll never be able to travel enough. I never want to stay in the same place for long.

We give this sick woman flowers and pray over her. If it wasn't for a car accident that blocked the highway for an hour, my family would never have brought me along. Blessing in disguise? Or is that really sick?

I passed out once or twice. Lost myself in another dream of Art One. If you want something and you dream of something, does that make it special?

Baby stories. I like them because they are a relic of the past that no one but the parents, relatives, chaperones can remember. I certainly don't.

The smell of the kitchen. The way the ice tastes. The smell of the lake. The creaks in the floor. I've been here a million times in expanded memory. In a dream. Does that make it special?

Met a woman named Saka from Bosnia who gave us a type of cake I've never had before. It was incredible. I don't know the name.

My grandparents own a cottage next to their house that they rent out to tourists. Until June 28th, I get this beautiful house all to myself. I feel like I'm on a writer's retreat.

My grandma really is trying to hook me up with a nice Bosnian girl. She's not terribly attractive, according to my grandma but she's moderately attractive. I laugh and my gaze goes out the window. She's smart though and you should move here and go to college here and. . .

But I'm going to pass out again.

Pictures.

7MIN

This should take you seven minutes or less to read.

I went to churchy church today. I've been going to services and sermons and stuff for months, but it's been a while since I went to main service at North Hills. I don't think I've ever listened to Tom as closely as I did today. I have almost no idea what he was talking about, except he said we should be making an impact in the world, as Christians. Did he say how? No. He babbled about some holiday that is tomorrow.

So I thought about it for two seconds. How can I impact the world? Well, Galations 5:22 came to mind:

22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

That'll make you stand out as a human being, let alone a Christian. Practice ONE, just ONE of these things and people will start to notice you live a lifestyle of love, whether you say it or not. Easy.

Also, it's not against the law. Brownie points for not being illegal to be nice.

Another effective way to impact the world is to pray. It doesn't have to be a prayer more than five minutes, and it doesn't have to be about anything important. The key is communication with the Almighty.

There. Now, you don't have to pull out any change from your linty pockets or listen to me talk about tomorrow. The rest is up to you.

Hope you learned something.

The Last King

If you like long, boring historical dramas like I do, you may want to skip the Last King of Scotland. Its forced dialogue and weak plot failed and made a tragic historical event humorous instead. Which I did not appreciate in the long-run. Forest Whitaker did an excellent portrayal of a paranoid, insane dictator but that didn't save this mediocre film. I don't know how you can screw up a historical event; it's right there in front of you.

It didn't help that the main character was an asshole. He only cared about himself and his sex drive and did a lot of foolish things that killed a few people. While the dictator Idi Amid killed 300,000 people under his regime, Nicholas killed about five people, albeit indirectly. He ran one over and caused about three to be gruesomely executed by his insane boss. The fifth is in there somewhere.

Anyway, that's my review. I've been trying to experiment with some new forms of writing, including writing accurate (decent) movie reviews. It takes practice and so far these leave much to be desired, especially with my random tangents (like this one). However, I am mostly analyzing this film for the objects used in it.

I've been reading Chuck Palahniuk's writing tip essays on his site. They come out once a month and you have to pay to read them, but every time a new one comes out you can read them for free, once you register. They're important to me so I wait and read them.

This month's was on objects used in fiction. It describes how personal effects in a story can have personality and change meaning and progress action. For example, the ring in the Hobbit is a nice, magical trinket but by the Return of the King it is a device of complete wretched evil. I want to start doing this in my fiction, making items a part of the story but it takes practice. Noticing the items in movies is a good way to start.

In the Last King, there is a medicine bottle with poisoned pills instead of aspirin and a bag with the ingredients for an abortion. These items are used to build tension that Nicholas may be caught and executed by the raving dictator he works for.But that's all I can think of.

I can apply this to my day-to-day as well. A couple of days ago I bought a silicon head from a thrift store. It is incredibly creepy, it has real human hair and you can remove the face. I have no idea what it's used for. I named the head Cirby. I wish I could show you pictures, but my camera mysteriously broke. I've been using this cheap, crap one my mother owns.

I went to the zoo today with Dave and brought the head. I took pictures of myself next to random animals, posing with this creepy head. It freaked an antelope out and it grunted at me and lowered its head, about to charge. Several monkeys were so interested they stuck their grubby hands through the wire and groped the head. I whispered to the monkeys, "Yes, yes, yes! Touch it my precious!" I got plenty of weird stares from single mothers pushing strollers and trying to avoid having their kids ever run into people like me.

The peacocks were especially not amused by my antics with the head. They were running around in the mud and squaking at me. I found two eggs sitting by a fence, which I assumed were peahen eggs. I put them in my backpack and have them now. I plan on eating them later. I also found a fake ID.

The pictures we took were amazing. However, I somehow accidentally deleted all the pictures on the camera. It made me very frustrated but not frustrated enough. With this and my camera breaking I should be really angry at the universe. Yeah yeah yeah. But somehow I'm not.

I think the lesson I learned is that art is about living. It's about doing. It's not about showing off. That's the best compensation I can come up with. You don't need to see those pictures and I don't need to show them to you, no matter how amazing they are.

Now I just look at the head as a new opportunity. I have to top whatever I just did. And I will.

How was that for implementing objects into my writing?

Need for Speed. . . and Reality

The Wachowski Brothers have made some interesting accomplishments in film, and now they've taken on a different kind of challenge: working with animals and children. Ironically, the film is not bad, even if it is for kids.

I think there's a reason they call it "Speed" Racer. It is clearly a drug film. Like "The Matrix" and "V for Vendetta", Speed is full of flashy visuals that could give you seizures. On acid, the schizophrenic color wheel wielded by the Wachowskis would be amazing.

The Brothers do an excellent job of making the film still look like a cartoon while still maintaining some credibility. That means, they don't become retarded or sloppy. In fact, they take the show to a new level.

The story was pretty bad, but forgivable. In fact, the thing this reminds me of the most is all the podracing in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Speaking of which, there is a new Star Wars coming out, based on the Clone Wars, that is completely CGI. It seems that Star Wars gets progressively more fake, but all films seem that way now.

It was Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park that brought CGI to the big screen. Things haven't been the same since then. Now we have Beowulf and Transformers and 300, some of the worst movies I have ever seen. But other than that, I don't know why I complain about the integrity of CGI films. I don't think there has ever been integrity in Hollywood. In fact, everyone moved there a long time ago to evade the patent laws that Thomas Edison implemented. The whole city has been a group of thieves from the beginning. Film itself is made out of dead horses.

But anyway, Speed Racer was quite good.

Precious Man