Sunday, June 25, 2006

"Headphones" Bjork

If I could be the drug on your tongue, if I could swim in your blood.
If these accidental collisions grew patterns of intent.
If somebody lifted these gauzy rain clouds, several months late. They had no business here.
If we were blind and mute.
If it were as simple as the confluence of tributaries, identified by a new whole.
If I could leave these things behind and scale these walls.

These names follow me around. These disparate events are growing arms to reach each other and are aligning themselves under new definitions. I am cheap and jealous. I am plummeting into the negative half of my mind's amplitude. Where is the smell of Dharamsala? Where are these secret weapons I've been collecting?

How can we be judged on our successes, when they do not speak of the chaos that surrounds every event, and are influenced by those whose intent nor means we can control?

We do the best we can and I hope that somebody is keeping track.

Friday, June 23, 2006

"Olsen Olsen" Sigur Ros

I woke up at 4 this morning.

I was sleepy so this guy goes, here, take this. Hydroxycut. I said, fine, and besides, who doesn't want to burn a little extra sumpin' sumpin' around their waist right? What guy doesn't want the coveted V separation between the upper thighs and the lower obliques? I ain't too proud to tell you the truth. Shit.

So I've been running around unnecessarily around the office, like I'm cocained. And paranoid that people sense this frenetic energy coming out of my fingertips. Imagine my hands like the spiky outside of jackfruit and yellow lighting bolts coming out. And the sound of bees all around.

I want to vomit.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

"Changes Are No Good" The Stills

I stopped working overtime for my job. I'm happy about that. I'm now rededicating myself to getting some other chapters published. Detached for months from this project has given me a bit of insight: Some of this shit sucked. The grammar is impeccable, of course, and the phrasing is precise and sometimes clever. But I was so concerned with length that some of these chapters lack the necessary focus to make it a compelling read. I'm working on a section now whose core element is a run-in with Osama Bin Laden. But I managed to talk about Disneyland, American commercials, the business casual beach attire of Muslims, a fist fight outside a restaurant, how many bottles of water I've drank, a fantasy scene with me and the president and another fight. Hmm, you know how sometimes nervous people talk too much as a means to conceal their ignorance or lacking confidence? This is what's going on here. Come on, boy, chin up.

Something else: This heat inspires both activity and lethargy. I woke up at 7 this morning after 4.5 hours of sleep, got dressed to play tennis, and went back to sleep until 11:30.

Monday, June 12, 2006

"Hide and Seek" Imogen Heap

"I know, but who was here first?"

Silly, really, for him to assume schoolyard ethics should have a place here. Of course this--the expectation that his rules would travel with him and instantly resonate with those he just met--was a mistake he'd made in the past, and one he continued to make on a perennial basis.

"Wait your fucking turn," he said. And to her, across the table, he mouthed, "Idiot."

Her delicate face, carefully embellished with the colors of moth and butterfly wings, falsely advertised a history and complexity in character that were largely absent. Surrounded by two men who were three choice words shy of a butter knife duel, she smiled. Perfectly still, vapid as ever.

His breaths had grown shallower over these last years. Despite irrefutable scientific evidence supporting deep, diaphragmatic breathing which he accidentally found on medical websites--he regularly browsed for pathologies for which he could qualify--he breathed like a very old man with a very large thing stuck in his throat.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

"How I Made My Millions" Radiohead

It's like holding my breath and closing up my eyelids until they hurt and freezing the image in my head and zooming in and out, rotating it, trying to make indellible the nuances of its dimensions. And saying, "You're here, right here, inside, inside. Forever." But how can I make permanent that which was born from circumstance? A new smell, a distinct new blue in the sky, the lovely settling of food in my belly, a song, this one--an intermingling of forces cosmic in aggregation, chaotic in origin, never to happen again. How can something so pure and strong come from things so easily dismissed as the haphazard occurences of every day? I wish I could remember you, that easy smile, the way you treated others, a self-acceptance so vital it made others believe they too were deserving of love.

I was one of them. I was inside your orbit. And the faculties that held me up so well--analysis, skepticism, truth-finding--you suspended in your anti-gravity. But I have changed. I am smiling now, the kind whose gentle curve upward tries to conceal what the eyes cannot deny. I have the symptoms of a beautiful life, but I am sick of everything. And people know it from my eyes. Sick of what's around me, sick of the disease that's eating everybody around me, some know it and are struggling amid others who are unwittingly promoting its advance.

You said once you'd never leave, that you had moved inside me. And you said not to worry, you said, "You don't need to move to the mountains to be a Buddhist. It's up here." You pointed to my head. "And here." My chest.