My Matutinal Nightcap

In a sudden wave of conformity (i r s0 indi3, n00b), I will post a spam email that I found especially amusing. It’s a distinctive phenomenon: funny spam, because it’s both esoteric and easily relatable, since everybody gets spam by its own nature.

From: "Daisy Howard" gcbxaqkl@gwdg.de
Date: 2005/04/24 Sun AM 03:58:49 EDT
To: cjaykill@cox.net
Subject: Make your peace

Before its too late make peace with GOD,
and make sure the ones you love do also.

Its the greatest pleasure you can ever have and it lasts foever.



Accept him.

Repent.

Get baptized.

See you in heaven.






In confocal we can marine as always aplomb bring theirfore
magna is medicine and disposable.

      I think the last part is quite possibly the best string of words placed together in mock formation of a sentence ever constructed. “Yea, in confocal, we can marine as always—aplomb!—bring, therefore, magna is medicine and disposable. Amen.”
      The more banal observations to be made, of course, go along the lines of, “For what is this even an advertisement,” “Why is this spam threatening me,” and “Why is it completely unsurprising to find the mention of baptism in this, hinting at a Baptist origin.” I know the Baptists are, for one thing, fucking insane, and, for another, prone to use that on-the-spot, insta-conversion prayer, but is there now a formulaic conversion email? “And, yea, unto his followers God did say that thou shalt spread forth like a good plague amongst the sinners My Holy Word via the Net.”
      Heh, eConversion: Everywhere God Wants You To Be. Sell your soul on eChurch. Egads, it’s eGod. Today, the new ePope was made an oper in channel #Catholics4evr. *** ePopeJ0hnP4u1 has kicked 666s4t4npwnz0r(devil@666-66-66-6.cable.home.eHell.net) from #GodsHouse. Welcome to eHeaven, would you like a free 10-day trial of AOL Broadband?

I’m stopping before it's too late . . . Oops.

O.Y.E.

Ten Things I Hate About You . . . Is A Piece of Shit Movie

In the spirit of self-deprecating humour that’s not particularly funny, here is a list of ten reasons why you probably don’t want to date me, women of the world, in no intentional order:

1. I have a sword collection. Some would say that is “telling” about me; I am here to assure you it is completely telling. However, I will not tell where the bodies are.
2. I have a beard, and I’m fat. There’s no real way to spin that, in writing, to be funny, but, in real-life, it’s fucking comedy gold. Especially since people can look right at me, and think, “Hey, he is fat and does have a beard, right there, on his face. Wow.”
3. Above my head are a collection of roleplaying sourcebooks, to the my left is a collection of anime DVDs, and in front of me is a computer that I built myself, on my right is an assortment of hats I take special pleasure in having. Do you know what that means? While running a roleplaying game, for which I generated my own character sheets and for which I pirated some music, I wear an atypical hat and draw inspiration, sometimes, from anime.
4. I never finish anything.

The Gradual Enervation of My Moral Obligations: To Look Is To See What It Means

I would like to assert my opinion, because that is what I do here.

     Are you Pro-Life? Fine. I do not discredit your stance on the abortion issue, due to the fact that I, for one, am not concretely seated on either side of the spectrum of that debate. See this particular entry for an explicit set of sentences that run together to form the bulk of my opinion on the issue. I'm not going to paraphrase myself, in this instance. My apologies to those who find constant reiteration to be their favourite vice (this may, or may not, include myself, but I'm pleading the Fifth, Goddamnit).
     I do, however, have something to say which very may well tie into a hypothetical entry entitled "What are my views on the death penalty?" This one goes out to all those Pro-Lifers who use a particular form of justication for their viewpoint.

     If you have ever uttered—and believed—the following argument: "I do not support Pro-Choice because I believe that every life is precious," and have also said, with conviction, "I believe firmly in the death penalty as right and just," then I have a gift for you; hint: it's wrapped in hatred, contempt and disgust and even has a fucking bow on top. Furthermore, inside this gift could be something that rhymes with 'Mom' and is spelled a lot like 'Comb,' even though their pronunciations do not share many common traits. Don't get it, yet, ass-ram? Fine, let me clarify:

I would like to bomb you to death.

     Oh? Okay, so you believe that "only God" has the right to take life, so nobody should get abortions? You think that only our Holy Sovereign and Divine Being can truly and rightfully select those who shall die and those who shall live? Life is in God's hands, huh? Fine, fine, I really don't intend to argue that. Or, hell, maybe you're more the secular type and you're just going with a more generic, less deity-related approach to the "Life is Precious" argument? That's cool, too; let it be known that I may refer to you, at some unspecified point in the future, as a "hippy" or "bleeding-heart," but that's because I'm prone to petty slander (and libel!) at the drop of a hat, if it feels funny. Welcome to the generation that brought you South Park: making irrelevant and nonsensical Jew and/or Canadian jokes a revived hobby.
     So, you're going to wave that mighty "nobody's life is your's to take" flag, then you decide to take the soap box out the laundryroom and hoist up a second flag: "Capital Punishment Forever!" Wait, what? What? What? I could re-type "What," with varying typefaces all day and night long, but I'm still fucking confused.

In a word: bullshit.
     In a paragraph: The fuck kind of logic is this, folks? Every, single life on this planet, even that of an undeveloped fetus, is worthy of God's blessing and is not in the hands of Man to destroy, but, hey, let's electrocute people until their brains leak out their ears? Oh! I get it, this is one of those games where no two issues are actually adjacent to one another and, thus, comparisons can't be made—right, fuck you in a particularly unpleasant area of your body, or somesuch expletive.
     Would I be writing this if I didn't see a proliferation of this kind of practice? Possibly. But, I have been noticing a lot of this logic floating around in the great seas of cheese, and I'm taking a passive, insignificant stand right here and now, brotherfuckers. Don't give me this fucking shit, don't shovel me a load full of your homemade, corn-speckled shit and expect me to quietly and politely, with an inexplicable British accent, ask, please sir, for more.
     What this means, and what it comes down to, is that people are either: (a) dirty liars, (b) raging hypocrites, or (c) unable to connect distinct and visible dots between their beliefs. If the only reason you don't support abortions is because taking life is wrong, don't come back a few hours, days, weeks later spouting off about how people need to be brought to true justice and life-imprisonment isn't enough, how we should go back to hanging people in the town squares or whatever. Why, no, I would not like a heaping plateful of your brand of idiotic logic, I'm pretty sure the icing is your ejaculate, sir. (A fourth option, of course, would be: (d) all of the above, by the by.)

     Okay, so, you don't like abortion but it's for more than just the reason that you're not comfortable with lives being taken, even at an embryonic stage? This isn't about you, then, and you're probably just throwing in that little piece of the "every life is lovely" platitude so you can coat over your true, less swallowable beliefs with sugary sweetness. I can deal with this, because I'm used to people being unable to fucking make their minds up about how they Goddamn feel. On the other hand, who wants to argue with even an idiot that babies sure are garsh darn cu-ute, hyuck. Right, ignoring the social and medical implications of the entire situation, if you want to boil it down to that God, or the giant head made of Tofu that lives in your backyard, or Vishnu, Krishna, or Harry Carey's ghost says life is beautiful, then I am not going to argue nor complain about you.

     If I find you holding the "No Abortions, Love Life" trumpet in the "Kill The Bastards" parade, though, I believe I will ram that instrument of political hypocrisy so far into your ear that I can play it out the other side. I will gladly fucking play a little ditty entitled, "Keep Yourself Straight, Make Goddamn Sense." Are they contradicting ideas? Yes, period.
     Given the idea that an unformed, undeveloped, sometimes unsexed blob of proto-person can be accepted as a real, valid person, then why am I supposed to bend over and accept that someone who has committed a heinous crime is no longer worthy of being considered viable? Both ideas are reaching way into the realm of abstraction here, and I don't think anyone can present me with a good argument that two ideas dealing with the philosophical point of the beginning and end of life can be weighed against one another and prove anything. Sure, I will gladly debate the points until I die of an asthma attack, but I'm not even referring to my own, personal views in this instance. I am not going to retardedly plop myself definitively on either side of a fence that is constructed entirely out of fluffy, happy, imaginary, hypothetical clouds of morality.
     What I will gladly do, though, is state that there's no fucking chance you can validate the mutual existence of two viewpoints so fucking paradoxical as "Don't abort 'cause it's life" and "Kill the living 'cause they're ungood, doubleplus even!" It doesn't take a lot of literal dissection to discover how throbbing the wound is on that argument.

     You know what, you masturbatory, moral-majority circle-jerkers? Kiss my fucking ass, because I do support the exhuming of the guilty in the public, and I am partially against frivolous abortions, but does that mean I will lay down such a thick line as "Nobody should take any life, ever, 'cause that's God's job/'cause it's icky." Fuck, no. I would never leave myself so Goddamn open to attack from anyone with common sense.
     How many times have I heard this argument, that it's wrong to take the life of unborn children and it's fine to take the life of convicted felons, immediately before some form of support for war? Do I think war is right? No. Never. War has never been—will never be—right; "necessary," though, is a different subject to be explored. It has come to my attention that the survival of the species does necessitate some revocation of morals at certain times. Maybe you skipped that day in Life Class (God, that is the lamest analogy I've ever made, but it's not a food-related one, at least), but I noticed a long fucking time ago that some shit that gets shit done ain't so shit-hot. In other not-so-vulgar words, people are not always reasonable, and that is the primary and number-one cause of the need to shirk morals in the face of overwhelming, evil-minded opposition.
     What I'm trying to say—or type, or what-have-you—is that your unreasonable and unjustified beliefs share a direct proportionality with the need to lose morality to be productive as a race. That's correct, you heard—read?—me right, I'm saying that your so-called moral stance on these two issues, when held hand -in-hand, are not nearly as "moral" as you may have been lead to believe by your local Baptist priest, and that you, yourself, are contributing to a deterioration of morality in this country, in this world. Everytime someone has to be sat down to paint the picture that one can not say, "Life is precious," then turn around and exclaim, "Hang 'em!" means that another fucking fluffy, cute kitten died, you bastard son of Conservatives and Hypocrisy. If that doesn't make you frown, then, instead, it means another tax loophole that deducts hundreds of thousands from the taxes you owe America is patched—there's an upset, huh, shit-for-fists? (Shit-for-fists . . . Think on that image, momentarily.)

     Can one legitimately defend the death penalty, in my eyes? Certainly, but it involves the acceptance of an idea of the ability to devalue human life based upon an arbitrary, albeit moral, foundation of crime and punishment. And once you have adjusted to that idea, then the defense of Pro-Life based on the selective and unprovable definition of how one can qualify life is out the door. Are unborn children innocent? Technically speaking, sure. So, the leap being made here, which I fervently disagree with, is the correlation of guilt and innocence to "false" and "real" life. The less innocent one is, then the more right we, as a society, have to end their life?
     Morality, too often, is used as a dynamic and manipulative means to a selfish end. "Oh, um, we think it's wrong to kill innocents, but it's cool wit' us if we have to bomb a few children on the way to Saddam's hizzy, fo' shizzy, mah nizzy. Dat's jus' hows we roll, dawg." The justification of taking lives based on innocence makes no sense in the context of war, so it's just fucking ludicrous to not only oppose abortion based on the immorality of taking innocent lives, support the taking of lives based on the justice of punishing the guilty, but also promote the practice of forcibly, violently invading a country because of a potential threat from people entirely unassociated with the impoverished, underprivileged citizens we're going to be shoving missiles down via their throats and, occasionally, anuses. Did I support the Iraqi War? In a way, so I don't want to hear that I'm just a peace-loving hippy. See above statement regarding the need for war, at times.
     My personal views, however, will never serve to undermine the objective and logical stance that Pro-Life, Pro-Capital Punishment, and Pro-War don't mix well. If you can't see what I'm saying, then I'm not certain how exactly you made it this far into this impromptu essay of mine.

     Everything you believe, think, propagate, understand and hold dear and true should cooperate together, work in cahoots, and not be able to be sliced apart by simple, logical analysis. I strive to ensure that my philosophies, principles, and morals don't blaringly clash with one another to form a steaming pile of fucking hypocrisy. Sure, they change, because we change as a race—as a whole, even. Get over it, that doesn't justify outdated beliefs that are past-due for extermination. "Old dogs don't learn new tricks?" Vets practice euthanasia, last I checked . . . Oh, oh, so every life is precious, beautiful, wonderful and lovely, right? Another clause, though, is that the life has to be intelligent (fetuses don't have minds, man)—No, I meant sentience, obviously. Pardon my backtracking and reverse-engineering. You fucking roach-faced maggot-suckers, I ought to pump your ears so full of crickets and locusts that it's like a biblical plague right in your Goddamned face.

I've either made my point, or unmade yours, by now, I hope. Conclusion: bomb Baghdad babies.

Adios

“There’s a legend, they say, about the priest’s house.”

       The scarecrow man stood alone, against the brick wall of the funeral home—not alone, no, for the black kitten laid contentedly on the edge, by his head. Ivy sprouted from the base of the wall and spindled its way along it, in columns of green leaves that looped around each other in a circular fashion. The man leant his head forward, tipping his broad-brimmed, frayed, black hat forward; in his left hand, he held his corn-cob pipe that smoked silently.

“There’s a legend that his brother died, one day, by suicide. Yes, they say that he shot himself in the head with a shotgun, twelve years ago, at the age of eleven. Their parents—both the priest’s and his brother’s, of course—were in the middle of a separation, at the time. They say his brother was quite upset about it; he was older than the priest.”

       The slow breathing of the kitten escaped from his pink nose in tiny sighs, then it grew louder so Frost, the cat, stretched his legs out and turned over. His fur was matted with dirt and grim from the wall’s concrete edge. The speaker paused, tapped his pipe to dump the ashes, put it in his mouth and sucked twice, letting the smoke leak out of the corners of his tight-lipped mouth and from out of his hairy nostrils. Not far in the distance, Juan was hefting a plastic trash-bag toward the dumpster behind the house of the dead.

“They say, and I don’t know how true this part is, that the very owner of this here place of business was sleeping over on the night it happened. They were friends, then, from school or something or another. On a cold, foggy morning the entire priest’s house was woken up by his screams, as he discovered that the brother had shot himself, first. He was sleeping in the same room, but didn’t wake up from the actual shots, they say.”

       The sky was littered with looming, puff-ball, cumulus clouds that were dark on the bottom with potential rain, sleet, or snow; the sun was dimmer than usual, a dull orange ball in the sky. A few stars and the brighter planets—Mars, Venus—were already visible. A breeze was picking up, bending the scarecrow man’s hat somewhat and tumbling dead leaves across the cemetery. Little Jack Frost, the cat by his full name, rolled over again and opened one eye to stare at the strange, talking man; for his part, he blew out his breath—along with a ring of smoke—and chuckled hoarsely.

“Nobody woke up from the blast, apparently—it had happened, forensics suggested, two or three hours earlier than when the proprietor of this here funeral home, as a twelve-year-old boy, had woken up. It was his father’s shotgun, that he had gotten out the shed at some point. This is what they say, how the legend goes, that his young friend, our boss, opened his eyes one morning and was coated in his dead friend’s blood.”

       Frost mewed softly, stood up, and began licking the scarecrow man’s face; with his right hand, he scratched the tiny kitten’s head. Juan, by this time, had dropped the trash off in the dumpster and come over to stand by the legend’s teller; he had both hands in his pocket and shivered from the cold wind that was increasing in velocity, gradually. The clouds were not moving very fast, heavy with their dense moisture, casting shadows over the funeral home and its graveyard. The scarecrow man tapped the ashes out of his pipe, again, and took two more puffs; shifting his eyes skyward, he blinked slowly three times as he let his vision unfocused then refocus. Smiling crookedly, he exhaled three concentric smoke-rings and tilted the pipe at Juan.
       “Have ya evah heard the legend o’ the ghost that ‘aunts the holy home of our beloved Father Briars, amigo? On a cloudy night like last night, ya can see his blue, deathly face in the window o’ one bedroom, disembodied and cryin’—the vision of a li’l child. Is a creepy tale, eh?”
       “Yea, jefe, yea. Real creepfsy. What you need me to do, now?”

Onward, My Cavalcade of Accolades

So, apparently, I'm part of the "Who's Who" of International Poetry, or somesuch. Strange, considering this will be my third publication. I'd assume there'd be more going on the world of poetry. I must be wrong.

That Is All; Adios

Fine, Fickle, Fertile Fettle (Doot)

He dreamt of sex.

"Always in the middle of a kiss
Came the profane stimulus to cough;
Always from the pulpit during service
Leaned the devil prompting you to laugh."

     He dreamt of the raunchiest, lewdest things—fantasies of taboos and twists of pain—inflicted upon woman after woman. He dominated, deflowered, desecrated, devastated supermodels, virgin schoolgirls, Asian women with cat-ears, Victorian visages of dour nobles . .. His lusts were boundless, when he slept.

"Behind mock-cermony of your grief
Lurked the burlesque instinct of the ham;
You never altered your amused belief
That life was a mere monumental sham."

     Once, in the midst of a wet dream, his mother appeared in his mind and screamed in his mental ear: "Get off her! Get off her! Get off her!" That ended the dream rather abruptly and unpleasantly, then, in his next set of dreams, there was no sex. Instead, he was a medieval knight in platemail, wielding a great, holy sword and leading an army against the walls of some foreign, rival kingdom. No princesses awaited at home, either, to be taken.

"From the comic accident of birth
To the final grotesque joke of death
Your malady of sacrilegious mirth
Spread gay contagion with each clever breath"

     There was an English teacher featured in one of his sex-dreams, a teacher for which he harboured faint feelings of attraction. Halfway through the act, she aged into an elderly woman, opened her mouth, and died—little rivulets of blood streaming out of her mouth. He never really felt any stirrings in his stomach when he saw her, henceforth, and his grandmother died the next week. He dreamt of sex, because his worst fear was powerlessness.

"Now you must play the straight man for a term
And tolerate the humor of the worm."

To Be Extant, Postpositive

If you give a fuck, go visit the newly-opened Official U.R.M. Companion.
       I'm thinking the purpose for this journal will be an excuse for me to revise old entries (again)—or, at least, one purpose for it. Do something along the lines of revise and update old entries in the Journal, creating a new version explicitly for the Companion, then link those in the old entries, themselves. It's an idea, I don't know; sounds good, but that doesn't mandate I follow through with it.
       The first entry is a little diatribe on Livejournals—very little, honestly. Nothing special, but I will append, here, that I really dislike the aesthetic of Livejournal a whole fucking lot. I think the part that primarily irks me is the switching between the Journal and the Entry/Comments page, where they feel it's necessary to switch everything to an ugly black-on-white, generic format. I've never seen a Livejournal that didn't do that, so I'm assuming not even paid members can fix that. "Blech," I say to that.
       On a side note: hey, is that my hideous mug? Yes, yes it is; in the Blogspot profile and on the Companion are pictures of me, in person, in my full glory. I've been feeling lately that a slight bit of identity construction would be a boon to this Blog, so I decided to attach a face to the words—not an impressive face, by any means, but a face.
       The pictures were extracted from a video project a friend did for her editting class, starring myself and my old roommate; it's a pretty amusing stint, an absurd exaggeration of the potential harm of the Patriot Act. There's a thirty second spiel of me doing nothing but making expressions of confusion, because she was never satisfied with any one of them and kept making me do more—eventually, she gave up, and just included a clip of four or five out of probably eleven or twelve. Picky director.
       Anyway, this entry is pretty mundane. It's supposed to be. The Official U.R.M. Companion is open, and that's about all I meant to say.

Adios.

Mijmeren, Vágyálom, Søvn, Quiesco, Kieuseru

  Break, break the glass, inside,
Inside, we are all so soft, make,
Make, a sky so crimson, watch,
Watch, the bodies adrift on the waters.

  The land is fallin’, faster and
faster, there on the pilaster, written
in blood: a prophecy of religious mud.

  Rake, rake, surrender to the breeze, warn,
Warn, this is the Ides of March, waive,
Waive, this is the newborn Caesar, wake,
Wake, the dreams are teeming with death.

  The water’s a’risin’, don’t be surpris’d,
Fortuna, thine name art mine, Goddess
of Luck—smilin’ like a dusty rock.

  Take, take, borrow the sun, weave,
Weave, her’s is the pricked fingers, wind,
Wind, her’s is the busy needle, tell,
Tell, can you hear the loom spinning?

  The tomb’s awaitin’ in Knossos, your
Highness, under the Tympanum is
where the ivy leaves whisper, “Soon, soon.”

  Forsaken generation, lost in contemplation,
Are we yet finished with the wheel?
Children of Socrates, Worshipers of Persephone,
Did you yet find the joy in your own eyes?

  An Age of Sparta, the Rebirth of Rome,
Float the Styx, two coins with Charon,
Eyes of Tiresis, Vision at Delphi,
Weighing the dead souls—
         Anubis, is it feather-light?

The Hagiography of Overaged Marining

Validation of the Nintendo Generation, one absurd creation after another . . .

Fuck. Yes.

Whoo-hoo!

Complementing Compliments of a Previous Life (Doot)

         The farmer looked up a me and smiled in a quite strange way: he was missing teeth, the left incisor and a couple of molars, which gave his looks the semblance of a jack o' lantern with a straw hat shoved on top of a skinny body clad in denim overalls. In his left hand, he held a pitchfork like in the Grant Wood painting, and I couldn't help but think of Deliverance, although he didn't have a banjo; in his right hand, he had an unfiltered cigarette with a long ash teetering on the fate of all things and gravity.

"The roads are jam-packed, this morning, and it looks like if you want to get anywhere, you better not take the Interstate . . . "

         On his shoulder, a black bird—a crow or raven, an ornithologist I am not—perched and opened and closed its beak every once in awhile like it was yawning in boredom; his feathers were a bit ragged, I could only guess it fought with other birds or cats or something (like I said, not an ornithologist). Its black beads for eyes darted around and rested on my own eyes a few times, and it sent a chill down my spine. Wait, what spine?

" . . . I wanted freedom,
bound and restricted,
I tried to give you up,
but I'm addicted . . . "

         A pig sat on its haunches at the farmer's side, snorting noisily—honestly, I don't recall ever seeing a pig quite sit like that, like a dog would. It was slathered in mud, as the sun burnt rings in the lavender sky (no ornithologist, but it's kind of common knowledge that pigs waller in mud to keep cool, I think). Lavender? In the background, a low farmhouse sagged in old age, although it had a fresh white coat of paint and a new-looking porch; a grain silo was behind it, along with a tiny, whimsical (in my opinion) windmill. American Gothic, indeed.

" . . . Did you hear what the President said this morning? Can you believe the abuse he gives the English language, Frank?
—Sure can't, Bob. Surely can not.
—I think he really ought to strategerise his speechs more, eh? Eh?
—Sure, Bob . . . "

         Why am I dreaming about a farm? The farmer didn't have a wife like in the painting, I noticed. He seemed happy enough, however. The crow—raven—black bird—cawed and stared intently at me. Because you're on the farm. Because you need to wake up. Because you've been dreaming this whole time, and it's time you came back to the farm. What?

"Jesus Christ, you're late! Wake up! Wake! Up!"

She Used To Say It As Her Shibboleth (Doot)

"Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
All dressed in black, black, black—"

       She dreamt of flowers, fields full of blooming flowers of every species known to man, of an endless expanse of innumerable colours meeting the sky at the horizon line in an indistinguishable haze of unearthly, incandescent light. In her dreams, the sun was a sunflower, ironically, and the moon, a white rose, hung on a stem of stars like daffodil seeds. A world of flowers, her dreams.

"With silver buttons, buttons, buttons,
All down her back, back, back—"

       Flowers, as she knew, were delicate, temporary things. If you trimmed them from their roots, they would soon die. Even if you kept them in water, even if you set them out in the sunlight, even if you loved them with all the ferocity of an English sonnet-writer, they would wilt, nonetheless. A flower is essentially dead the moment it becomes separated from its roots.

"They jumped so high, high, high,
They reached the sky, sky, sky—"

       People were, in her dreams, even constructed out of flowers. Her son was a daisy, albeit a bizarrely, literally personified daisy with his face surrounded by petals and arms and legs coming from his green stem. Every Sunday, she placed flowers on her first husband's grave, and, in her dreams, they all smiled back at her like he did, favouring the left side more than the right—a crooked smile for a crooked man, she used to joke. In her dreams, flowers wilted, too.

"And they didn't come back, back, back . . . "

The Amanuensis Is Out

     Yes, a new look, a new template: I’m not really original when it comes to web design, and I’m too lazy to try my hand at coding a fancy site or somesuch. I’m no webmaster, honestly; not sure what I am, but I have a long list of “Am Not”s.

     Looking at the archives, I’ve been at this Blogging thing for awhile, I think—then, I think of the stuff on my hard drive, on my laptop, on burnt CDs, and scrawled on pages in my drawers, and realise precisely how long I’ve been at this writing thing. And I think of the reams and reams of sketches, and the chalkboard in the attic, and the cardboard portfolio in my closet, and the napkins that used to hang on the wall at my local Pizza Hut, and I realise how much longer I’ve been at this whole Art thing. I turned twenty-two last month, on March 18th: that’s my birthday, the day after St. Patrick’s Day, or National Hangover Day as I affectionately call it.

     It’s been a long, short-lived life, thusfar. It all means something, I’m sure—what, though is a question to be pondered—perhaps, the question. It’s definitely the quintessential Philosopher’s Question, worthy even of unnecessary capitalisation.

     Been reading T.S. Eliot’s poems, again. Been listening to a lot of The Mars Volta, whom I am vastly more fond of than I ever was of At The Drive-In. Been doing a lot of classwork. One day, about a year and a half from now, I’ll have two degrees: a Bachelor’s of Art in Fine & Performing Arts with a Concentration in Fine Arts and a Minor in Literature, and a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Foundations with a Concentration in Computer Science and a Minor in Mathematics. That’s a lot of words to describe five and a half years of college education in, basically, random shit. Some people make decisions in college about life-goals or whatever, some people just get excessive amounts of degrees; one day, I hope to have two Master’s and two more Bachelor’s, maybe a Doctorate.

     This entry is brought to you by the word “contrived,” which someone who was once my friend and now I am no longer very fond of has told me is a word I use too much.

     Oh, you may or may not notice the link to the right labeled the "Official U.R.M. Companion." That is a link to a Livejournal I've opened, for a purpose as of yet undetermined. It's under construction, as they say, so if you follow the link and it's not much of anything to see, then . . . It's not been started.

Adios.