And there's nothing she doesn't see // She knows where I'd like to be // But it doesn't matter

A little while ago, angry for a moment at my disillusionment with "gender roles in relationships" (see: here), someone asked me to make a list of all the things that I would want a woman to do for me. Like the female version of "throw his coat over a puddle, take me out on our anniversary, propose etc" I'm on like day 5 of thinking about this list in my head. I don't have a single one.

I mean I thought of like one or two after a while, but it was like the ends not justifying the means. Like it would be nice to get a call very late/early out of nowhere, it would make me feel needed, but only for a terrible moment before feeling guilty for wishing for some sort of trouble to fall upon someone so that they might call. Another one was maybe having someone hold me and stare into my eyes and say "I love you." and mean it. But now I think about that and it seems kind of desperate, like I somehow don't believe in myself being worth another woman's time and that there was some sort of grave mistake she was making by standing beside me.

So I don't have any. I was afraid that it might be some sort of inner resignation at work, but I am more hopeful that it might be closer to a first step in totally dissolving my concerns over 'relationship roles' and just letting it all off. I mean really why waste any time on 'this isn't fair' all day, I mean I'm only going to be alive for what...another 50 years or so maybe? Not enough time to worry about it, I don't even have time to think of those I love! I'm just gonna put my eyes back into the stars and keep trying to find her. And if I end up having to ask for her phone number and not the other way around, I think I'll live.

(btw PBS is running 'No Direction Home', which is Martin Scorsese's doc. on Bob Dylan and it is just great. I've been up the last two night watching it. What a true journeyman and storyteller. And then they interview Scorsese about it all which is cool even though of all his celebrated films I think I've seen maybe 2. Then again I do have his stern/so true 5 min 'Why widescreen is the only way to go': showing perfectly how without widescreen you literally lose the picture: an all too predictable example. Har har.)

I want to defy // The logic of all sex laws

So I presented myself with two distinct choices for my Thursday:

1. Sit down, pour a beverage, sharpen the pencils, open the books and catch up on all the reading that had fallen victim to my recent/usual bout of procrastination, or

2. Pick up my board and surf around the net for Beck tickets for a special 'sold out 10 minutes before tickets went on sale' show in the D.

So after I won the tix on ebay and got em in the mail I had to somehow put together an excuse for cutting out of my Thursday night class early. Of course, in the true spirit of the week I procrastinated on this as well, opting instead for getting the next homework assignment from an anon classmate and mumbling to the teacher "airport.....Grandma...." as I slithered away. Scooped up Isaacs and we blew through the raindrops into the big city. It was a very good show. Like a Greatest Hits spectacular or something. We swore that they paid the guy in the brown flight suit to just dance like a madcat on stage all the while. And he played an acoustic 'Do You Realize??'! And the band brought in a table and had tea on stage during his acoustic medley, adding unbelievable percussion to the last song. Honestly I'm not much into the 'Top 5 ___ ever" stuff anymore, but is there a better solo artist ever than Beck that doesn't have the word 'Dylan', 'Elvis', 'Sinatra' or (technically) 'Hendrix' in their name? The answer my friend is no.

& just when you thought I might again catch up on that homework (+the new chapter that I got just before "airport....Grandma..." Thur.) I was asked to join Higgins, his g/f Misty, his parents and Shannon (his sister...my God not that Shannon) for the wedding reception of a pair of their old chums. Even with the possible "uncomfortable, I'm-only-here-to-make-for-even-boy/girl-ratio" outcome, it was a complete blast. I couldn't decide if Higgins' suit made him look like a sleuth or Al Capone, I got all dolled up and we got to basically get drunk and dance like a couple of assholes (Higgs and I that is). Higgins' Ma took me under her wing in teaching me the steps to the Polka, which was made more difficult because I actually had dress shoes on that I could probably wear as basketball shoes as far as how frictious (made up word) they were. But I did get to borrow Higgy's size 12's if only for a "Dance-off" between myself and the younger girl in the red dress that was basically Baryshnikov with a dash of Madonna (thus hitting my quota for 'Madonna' drops for the calendar year 2005). My one minute freak out during ACDC 'All Night Long' was enough to crown me the champ. I took pictures, some of them came out a little more surreal than was originally planned (still trying to figure out all the bells + whistles):

Obligatory prom-style group shot in Higgo's backyard

Obligatory drunken chicken dance impression with ambient camera effects.

my favourite couple of all time.

Seriously I am all about dancing now for real. It is moving up my top 10 all-time fun boy/girl activities list like a rocketship. And on that 'Ink is not yet dry before I say something hypocritical' statement, good night.

You whisper half thoughts to me

Architecture in Helsinki...a dash of Cardigans 'cheerful/bright/thinly veiled melancholy' and a tablespoon of 'ADD indie pop symphony adventure ' This is their G0-Go's song I've come to think. I'm driving down to Chicago see them next Friday as the closing ceremony to my proposed proposition. If I don't come off as about 120% more excited it might only be because I'm waiting for the trap door to pull open. Totally glass 1/2 empty I know. Hopefully the excitement of the day drawing nearer will make the glass all full (and not 'awful').

I have always been a secret fan of the 'bathroom stall poetry'. The childish 'for a good time call 248-830-0022' is always worth a grin, but also slogans, political statements that are amended and altered by other artists, doodlings and witicisms alike bring me cheer. A canvas at O.C.C. displays:

I don't know whether it is the memory of the boys of 4th grade being called into the bathroom by the Principal in regards to 'the b-word' being scraped into the wall (which suddenly opens up the long lost memory/legend of flushing the toilets and saying 'Bloody Mary' 3 times, Beetlejuice style, and the supposed, maybe even witnessed, blood scrawled 'Bloody Mary' on the mirror.....), or maybe a sense of connection between the artist here and the photo repair man from Amelie; both reaching out anon, trying desperately to create, trying to be remembered.

I rescued this from the sidewalk at work not long ago. A 5th grader that sat at 'Table B' painted it. She got a B on it but I'd surely take out my red pen and convert that into a 'A' and add the '+' if I were in charge. I hold this painting and it makes me smile and think of this glorious summer. Even the paper feels like those days that I already miss and warmly recall:

I hope that you had the most wonderful summer. Here's to an apple cider toast together in the fall.

(Don't you ever) Tell me love isn't true // It's just something that we do

"aspects of life can make you feel like a pencil sharpened too often in a pencil sharpener."

So I answered to a mock myspace-esque (facebook won't let me in, "University students only") survey I placed into the email of a friend. I sit here in my pajamas re-thinking the original context of that answer to the bright turquoise question 'why has/hasn't your major changed', it is worryingly copying and pasting itself as a motto for many other directions my life is winding through.

Politics: I was very bright eyed and fascinated with politics once. Theodore Roosevelt, whom after being shot just below the heart during a campaign stop in Milwaukee, was only able to deliver a fiery one hour speech before seeking medical attention. Nixon/JFK and how history viewed one greater and the court of popular opinion the other. The old gent I met during Isaacs' successful Precinct Delegate run, who recalled campaigning for Hoover in Boston amid showers of eggs and rocks. Then the last two Presidential elections happened, the trenches were dug, anyone in the middle got cut down by the "with us or against us" hatred. Two times over I've watched my friends do anything they can to blast each other to the ground in some sort of fucking "I'm a better person than you" contest. I still think it is beyond important to vote, that is a right that is a/the cornerstone to our/any free society, something that many have given their lives to preserve. My salvation from it all are the issues; an influenced (but non self-serving), informed (but unbiased) and open-minded (not written in stone) opinion.

love: so I say that feeling love (with the lowercase " l ", I can't speak for (mutual) capital "L") is like a fantastical, magic adventure; like watching fireworks under the ocean or dancing in the stars. It's not that I believe that when you meet someone you will fly on a magic carpet out of your window or something, it's just that I have felt that way before, like I seriously found my way to the end of the rainbow and she was standing there grinning. The more I talk to others who have actually been in relationships, the more it seems like a "last person left standing" battle. Like the only goal of a relationship is to find that place within someone, that sensitive, pure and innocent place, and destroy it with sex and jealousy and fear and games so that that person won't leave you heartbroken & that if the relationship ends, then it will be because you sent them to the curb. It seems backwards, almost like "I'll do all these things to prevent myself from getting hurt" by doing things so as to make a relationship almost impossible.

I mean what is the point if the only way is to pretend like you don't care about someone, almost to the point of driving them into submission as part of some mad game, complete with rules apparently left around from the days of separate beds and boys don't cry. Occasionally I wonder if I hang on to what I believe in because it is what's in my heart or because I'm afraid I'm bound to some Freudian destiny to become my Father.

Life in general: Outside these sort of metaphysical paranoias, I am becoming concerned with their effects with my body and mind in objective terms. I'm too much of a coward to say "no" when it comes to picking up shifts at work, which has created this 'workaholic' habit of pushing myself to pointless limits. I've eaten 2 meals a day for the last 2 years I bet. I have to leave the shampoo bottle and face soap bottles open before I use them because if I don't, I forget if I already used one, the other or both during the course of a 10 minute shower. I'm getting worse at my job rather than better. I have to drag myself kicking and screaming every time school is involved. Shouldn't I be interested in what I'm doing academically at some point? Nobody wants to hear this, women, nobody. I don't want to say them. I don't enjoy comparing scars. Do I?

Our bodies tore off swimming suits // and all the old notions // the cold ocean far away

Yea wow and her new album is the bee's knees all the way. And she played basically every track from it live the other day. AND she is wearing those shoes in a picture in the liner notes. My cardiac muscle is full of joy. The album cover somehow reminds me of another album I have by a group called Camera Obscura. What do you think?:



So a quick thought about something that should not even be bothering me in the least (this is saying something as I am admittedly and quite renowned the world over for my neurosis), but consider this: At the end of Forrest Gump we see how Forrest is united with Jenny (go go gadget resiliency!), but also we find out that the night Forrest and Jenny "had it", little Forrest Jr. was conceived. However we also see that Jenny has contracted HIV/AIDS at some point and actually is fading away just as their Love was realized. Seeing the last moments of the film on teevee not long ago made me think of an exchange I had with a friend just as we had been watching that same part a couple of years ago. I had said something about the child, that he totally looked like Forrest Gump or something silly, to which my friend leveled me by saying, in a rather "as a matter of fact" tone: "Yea, it's weird that you find out that Forrest and his kid have AIDS at the end".

What!!? It was something altogether different from any difference of opinion I think I've ever had about a film/movie. Something that I had subconsciously ruled out as an impossibility mixed together with something that is so radical in thinking/belief that it could not ever be considered as completely improbable. Only more people agree! I threw the matter onto myspace; Raj voiced his dissenting opinion:

"The movie never explicitly explains that Jenny did anymore fuckin after the magical night With Forrest, but anyone using more than 1% of their brain can safely assume that she did not take a vow of abstenance after that. Lastly as for Forrest and Forrest Jr. having the HIV, get that shit out of my face. A movie about a mentally slow man succeeding in this topsy turvy world will NOT portray his demise as a result of banging without a rubber."

John Harris introduced another possible direction altogether:

"you are totally right about forest 1 not having it but i think forest 2 might have it forest 2 isn't forest 1 child jenny only told him that so that he would take care of him forest only had sex with jenny once while in the late 60s she got aids in the early eighties the kid was still young in the 90s theres no way it was he kid! that was one long ass sentence. rock on brother!"

while Nick Higgins offered:

"Forest Gump is extreemly overated - so who cares?"

Now even as someone opposed to the infected Forrest I & II theory, I must concede it's existence as a viable opinion. There is nothing in the film to prove that Jenny and Forrest "made whoopie" pre- or post- infection, so there can be no objective conclusion as I understand. My only candle I carry into the night is this: how does giving Forrest Gump and "I see dead people" jr. AIDS not completely crush the spirit of the move entire?

Do-Re-Mi, innocent!

...as in innocent of not stealing this song from the O.C. soundtrack. I actually was bopping my head to it in between sets at the Laura Viers/Sufjan Stevens show I went to tonight. All the kids were singin along, it was definitely the "wow I am either a.) too old for everything or 2.) I need to watch a tv program regularly so I can be on 'the in' for this kind of stuff" moment. I am seriously a nudge or two away from getting into this 'Desperate Housewives' thing. Scarrrrrieeee! But I keep catching the last 15 minutes of episodes and it is really coming off to me as dark/melancholy dramedy. And we all know Justin's 2nd favourite emotion of melancholy....

So tell me, on a kindness scale 1-10 (1 being kind as a fieldmouse and 10 being toe fungus) about where you would place my behaviour tonight: Doors open for the show at 8:00 P.M., so I get down to Detroit about 20 after. I go to park in the usual reserved Wayne State student parking area behind the theatre, only the wooden gates are down. I have a fiendish thought. I exit my car to try, as onlookers pass by, to try and pry the gate upward as to squeeze my automo under the gate. So when this act fails like everything I try, I atempt to go around and over the curb, also a rousing failure. So I bite the bullet and park at the nearby hospital, only in all this time before and after the parking fiasco, a line, literally 3 blocks in length down Woodward Ave, has begun at the entrance to the theatre. It is only about 20 feet between the door and the side street intersecting Woodward, splitting the line. I have a fiendish thought. I go down the side street 30 paces, double back and in a single graceful maneuver, blend into the cluster of people on the theatre side of the street, thus scoring the front edge of the stage as an armrest. In my defense, your Honor, it is general admission, and everybody in that line got inside, one day or the other.

Laura Viers is awesome btw. She had the coolest shoes just about ever; I kept trying to scope them out to see some sort of name brand or something but alas. She sounded like the Summer clashing into the Autumn and the Autumn winning out, which is either very apt or I missed something. And she had a song called 'Spelunking' where they turned the lights all off and she + 3 bandmates put on cave head flashligts and she played acoustic guitar. It was wonderful. After the show I totally walked over to where she was standing by the merch table to tell her her she had cool kicks, but I totally got too nervous. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

There was this soft grassy knoll going up to where I parked; I wanted to crawl to the top and roll all the way down to the bottom and laugh with the girl I was with and lie with her under the stars and traffic hum lullaby together. But then I remember I wasn't with anybody.

Fall is here, hear the yell // back to school, ring the bell // brand new shoes, walking blues

Weeee school! (2 shots of sarcasm, 1 shot of... well.. sarcasm) You can't believe how 'un-excited' (I've decided also that I am official self-righteous enough to construct new words. I mean really, what governing body decides what is and isn't a word?) I am for coming out of a wonderful summer into fall and school. I don't know, it seems like almost everyone I know is all about Autumn as their favourite season. I'm okay with it I think (certainly the colors, anything in relation to the pumpkin {pumpkin pies, jack-o-lanterns [and the pumpkin guts that always make me feel like a surgeon when I yank them out... scalpel!], salted pumpkin seeds... really when you think about it, the pumpkin might be the most celebrated veggie, at least that I can think of. Which of course reminds me of how I've wanted for the last few months now to get into The Smashing Pumpkins but haven't found the in yet... I'd go on, but I think I should wrap it up with this parenthesis stuff}), diving into piles of leaves and many more. I'm way more the Spring fella; brightness, warmth, love is in the air...don't bother commenting about it, because I know it already, I'm hopeless.

I think a lot of the appeal around it has to be the attraction to switching into 'The Fall outfits', sporting the new longsleeves and the in-then-not-in-and-now-in-again-to-my-knowledge 'Sunday jeans' (Sunday...your 'holey' jeans...yukyukyuk). Really I stopped with the school shopping for clothes sometime at the end of my casual/lazy preppy phase probably circa 11th grade (which of course soon evolved into my post-slacker turn soon thereafter, currently resting in my 'I don't give much a fuck/Great G-pa's {R.I.P.} & Great Uncle's closet wear/anything that still fits that is still lying about phase)

Only this year I did something quite unexpected: I dropped a good $100 on clothing! Which is pretty astronomical for the likes of me. I think credit for this has to go to an inadvertant discovering a place called Kohl's. Not only was I able to hook it up with a pair of grey pants that don't have the cell phone antenna hole in the pocket (I don't think they were buying that chic 'holey' pants argument) and some slick, almost oversized, black pants (putting any 'might Justin start wearing blue jeans agaig?' rumours to rest) and my green soccer jacket, but I also stumbled into the shirt I had almost literally been seeing in my dreams. The mythical longsleeve grey argyle sweater! Literally I was heading towards the register and then it just pounced on me like a raptor basically. Throw my overpriced Coldplay t-shirt in there with a new favourite Great Uncle shirt and it goes a little something like this:

I might have to bookmark this Kohl's place for the future, they had a clearance rack that I literally had to tell myself out loud not to go to because I knew I'd end up hemorrhaging more cash. This place also helped me to confirm one other theory of mine: 'Napoleon Dynamite' is officially everywhere. Between the 'Vote For Pedro' notebooks at my work to the entire shirt rack they had there...it is just everywhere. They even got this song! I still say this about the movie though: It's like a great cover song... good until you think of what it is trying to be (*cough, 'Rushmore', cough*).

Tonight, the moon's drawn its curtains // It's a Private show // No one else gonna know // I'm wanting

I'm telling the truth. It is like one of those things where music (even of the more "disposable" persuasion) and you and her and the release just melt together. Just the lights and the freedom and the touch and the smiles... and you just let it all fall to/on the floor, cut through all the fucking chains. And it is amazing what things fly about, the friends and all the passion and flames that are lit and that burn out, suddenly it's 2:00 Am and you are about an hour away from realizing that your body cashed in its chips 3 hours ago. You know what I mean.

Lately (I use "lately" pretty loosely, maybe the year 2005 entire) I've been in this place where it really seems the/my key(s) don't fit in the doors. Instead of holding on tight and racing through the flame I hide under my bed and brush everything under the rug while I'm down there. Doing just enough to fail with honor. Standing on the ship until it has disappeared into the deep blue, though a noble feat many times, it is made ignoble when the life preserver is at arms reach. I need to reach out to them more often instead of pushing them away from "the destined meltdown" aka stop behaving like a fucking asshole and going cold and numb because of it.

It really felt like the 'bell jar' crashed apart last night; a realization that I'd accidentally been holding my breath for a year, maybe longer. I'm stepping out of this "road to hell is paved with good intentions" garbage and start thinking outside of my own mind/heart like I should. I donate a lot, but not enough. I gave a $20 bill towards hurricane relief, but I have been far too blessed to have that single bill appease my conscious. Just like that Cousteau quote scribbled in the library book from 'Rushmore', "When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself." And that is exactly what you and I have in common right off. I just need to try. Go in like I believe in myself for a change and just go for it. Carpe Diem you know. Because now I know how all the pain of small failures melt away under the night lights and a smile returned.

Dancing with someone is just about as close as two people can come to becoming one. That's my $0.02