Recent days have borne out that the combined forces of lack of sleep and loads of caffeine create this swirling, roiling perfect storm of emotionality in which I'm liable able to get worked up over just about anything at the drop of hat. All I have to do is dwell on a picture, a thought, a piece of music, and everything just begins to melt - the flood of chills washes over me, or tears well up, or my fists clench involuntarily. It feels gorgeous, like a warm silken rain. The other day at Bongo Java I stumbled across a passage in "A Prayer for Owen Meany" that somehow sparked my memory of my friend Blake, for whom I had found myself unable to grieve for months (http://www.houstontx.gov/police/nr/2009/aug/nr081709-9.htm). All the depth and pain for him that was there had been stuffed down and tightly wrapped in this sausage casing of my own bullshit. It's impossible to feel for anyone or anything else when you have your head so far up your ass you can't the one from the other. That's a really crude way of putting it, but honest. Anyway, I found myself becoming choked up in the middle of a goddamn coffee shop, and out of nowhere this poem for him just oozed forth onto the page before I had time to even realize it. It flowed out absolutely void of the usual filters and screens and garish kaleidoscopic lenses of self-criticism that usually coat my artistic endeavors like slime on the walls of dank cavern. For hours afterward, every idea or perception or attraction or repulsion all led back to the same thought - that he will never, ever be able to experience these things, good, bad, neutral. He will never get addicted to cigarettes. He will never try to make eye contact with a pretty girl, or take a runny shit, or eat pumpkin soup. He will never gain thirty pounds in two months, or lose something precious, or find faith, read another word, hear another note. Never think of baby names or get into yoga or pick his nose. Nothing in my life has ever made me feel more gratitude for everything that I've experienced, and at the same time brought into perspective just how petty and meaningless those things are in comparison to the bigger picture of life and death. In a strange way I almost feel this weight of obligation to live for him, to be aware of and accumulate and store away and cherish every single moment of my life in dedication to his memory. It's eerie, like walking around with a translucent layer of someone else's skin sheathing your body like a smooth glove. He shed like a snake and passed me the filmy residue to do with what I may.

Yesterday at Cafe Coco I met a hemp artist named Crash who's traveling the country with his guitar and some friends in an old diesel ice cream truck. I went on a hemp-gathering mission for him and in exchange he made me a lighter-holder necklace in a weave he learned from a Romanian gypsy woman. He told me about the time he was sailing in the Bahamas in a little dinghy he had paid for in hemp and was boarded by pirates wielding AK-47s. He diffused the situation by making them all rum and cokes and smoking them out, and in the end they left having graciously declined to plunder anything but his vast stores of hard liquor. After shooting the shit with him about how Obama is a nothing but a puppet of the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, I invited him to come cook dinner at our house tomorrow. I'm sure auntie will be thrilled about that.

Went to Portland Brew to act as boredom police for Abby, who had been there since 2. She was working on my mix tape, which she promises will be devastatingly educational. She kept tossing out names of artists to which I could respond with no more than a sheepish shake of the head - "John Mellencamp? Van Morrison? Oh my GAWD you poor child." After that we headed to 3 Crow Bar where YOU CAN SMOKE INSIDE OH MY GOD DRIVE THIS STAKE THROUGH MY HEART RIGHT NOW I LOVE TENNESSEE. It was nice to find out that I can still put down three or four brews like a champ. Then it was on to the only decent late-night establishment nearby, this dingy, fluorescent-lit diner called "The Hermitage," where we proceeded to groove on French toast and ham and good tunes. Today, if everything goes right, will be a near-replica of yesterday. A scale model of sorts. What have you. I hate no one. Try it sometime.

its just the anesthetic given to the amputee
cut off parts and cut up pieces
lord i know you're looking down wont you give me the strength
pull that trigger, put that bullet through my brain

GO GO GO GO GO GO GO

For the glorious extension of the Schriver lineage:

Boy- Emile

Girl- Fifel (yes, as in that Fifel)

GO GO GO GO GO GO GO

Not a day passed in my middle school Spanish class during which my mustachioed, thick-spectacled teacher, Senior Jorge Luis Buitrago, would not invoke either God or Albert Einstein. The sole decoration on the tin walls of an otherwise barren temporary-building classroom was a gigantic framed poster of the great thinker playfully sticking out his tongue, with the mysteriously incongruous caption E = MC2. This was back in the days when I had even less of a notion of what that formula could possibly mean than I do today, which is vague enough. At that time it was as elusive and foreboding as a snippet of Latin scripture, an esoteric incense-laden fragment to mull over in awe and wonder without the foggiest idea as to what was actually being said. Somehow Senior Jorge would always find a way to relate conjugations and grammatical constructs to "the Big Guy in the Sky," to whom he would pay cheery homage by bumping his chest with a closed fist and pointing to the roof. In Caracas he had been a physics professor at a prominent university, and though he did his absolute best to bring the same caliber of pedagogic focus to bear on our pack of spoiled, resolutely uncooperative rich kids, it was not altogether difficult to discern a scrap of resentment in the mortal blow he had delivered to his own pride. Our school was a repository of sorts for the children who had the money to pay for the more academically-respected institution down the street but happened to lack the requisite smarts. The resultant cesspool of over-privilege, smug entitlement, and chronic disinterest in all things scholastic tended to hang even the most idealistic and gung-ho instructors out to dry. For my part, I did not happen to count myself among the affluent rank and file. After spending years as a door-to-door saleswoman for encyclopedias and children's books, my mother found a job at this school as an assistant librarian, and we were offered a half-off discount in tuition for my attendance. The first traumatic memory I hold related to being ripped away from the comfortable womb of my old elementary school involved a requisite physical exam, during which an attractive female doctor asked me to pull down my pants, turn my head to the side and cough. The glut of confusion and embarrassment that inflamed my face as she apologetically intoned, "No, your underwear too, please" haunts me to this day as the apex of unfathomable humiliation. I felt close at that moment to the Jewish people who were stripped naked as they descended from cattle cars to be sorted into the columns of life and death - some terrible mortal judgment weighed upon us that could only be calculated when we were stripped of earthly accouterments, bare and helpless as we had been born. It was an augur of things to come, a portent of sly taunting and hours spent alternating between bawling into my pillow and laying into it with hot fist-firm bursts of unmitigated contempt for all living creatures.

There's probably plenty more where that came from, but for the moment I'd rather share some quotes from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I finished today at Portland Brew, that I found particularly relevant to my own life and situation. I hope, gentle reader, that you may glean a foam of poetic insight from these lines as I have.

-"His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease, plunging ever deeper in its dull fear into a sombre threatening dusk, while the body that was his stood, listless and dishonoured, gazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed and human for a bovine god to stare upon."

-"How they will rage and fume to think that they have lost the bliss of heaven for the dross of earth, for a few pieces of metal, for vain honours, for bodily comforts, for a tingling of the nerves.:

-"He could not weep... He felt only an ache of soul and body, his whole being, memory, will, understanding, flesh, benumbed and weary."

-"Well then let her go and be damned to her! She could love some clean athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black hair on his chest. Let her."

-"And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his anger was also a form of homage."

-"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world, a mother's love is not."

-"...that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it."

Last few days have been utterly fabulous. Meeting friends, curtailing shitty habits, smoking lots of cigarettes, attending secret house shows where the saw player from Neutral Milk Hotel culled Christmas carols from his decidedly idiosyncratic instrument. Abby from Portland Brew has promised to fashion me a mix tape, which is apparently her creative endeavor of choice. I have rarely been as stoked for a gift in my life. Also, thanks to Joyce, I've decided to ask for a sweet walking cane for Christmas, which I plan to shamelessly integrate into my burgeoning new persona. Watch out world, he takes jiu-jitsu and wields a big stick. Take that however you'd like. Mel was right when she said months ago that you literally wake up one day and shit is just better than it has been in so long. Like a snap of the fingers, trip of the tongue, hop, skip and a jump. Comme la vie est belle, mes amis.

I've already begun a new read, but I'm curious (tip my hat to C. Poff for the idea) as to what everyone is reading/watching/listening to these days.

I feel I owe my vast readership a heartfelt apology for that last entry. Every now and again these days I find myself beset with a terrible urge to post, and lo and behold, find I have absolutely nothing in the tank. Hopefully I can atone for my crimes against the blogging world with this and subsequent entries.

I got a letter today from Anna Hazel, who's working on a dude ranch out in Arizona. She included a picture of an orange and white stray cat she came across during her biking adventure in Alaska, which has found a place on my shelf and in my heart. Everyone needs a power-animal. Amanda and I decided that mine is the owl.

I'm finally able to make myself laugh again with the absurd curve-ball observations my mind chucks up at all hours of the day and night. For so long they bubbled up only to pop on the surface, hoisted skyward just to come crashing down like a grand piano with the cables cut from twelves stories up, exploding into a cacophony of black-varnished mahogany splinters and snapping wires, lacerating the hot asphalt. It feels good, like speaking to an old friend you had given up for dead.

Speaking of friends, I've been putting out my feelers of acquaintance left and right over the past couple of weeks, reconnecting with dozens of people whose very existence rang hollow for me only a month ago or so. Hearing what others are up to has almost become a fixation, the centrifugal force that holds me together in the same way that running or yoga did for so long. It's also just starting to hit me how blessed I am to have such a tight-knit, supportive family unit. I can't even imagine what it has to be like to not feel like you can share everything you're going through with your mom and dad and in my case sister. There's a good reason my iPod is inscribed with "i love my parents."

The barista from my official new coffee-shop haunt and I struck up a healthy conversation today with the end result of my being invited out to unwind over a few beers tomorrow with her and some friends. Everything that's happening right now is just confirming my need to be here and nowhere else. It feels like casting seeds into dusty soil and keeping your fingers crossed that something will spring out of the weed-choked earth - parable of the sower in action.

In other news, I got scammed for $400 by a guy named Curtis selling junk stereo equipment out of the back of a van. My naivety never ceases to amaze me. So yes, everything is obviously uniformly splendid right now, in case you were wondering.

i am ftypinvg thjis entry with b ig old fucvkin migfgfdns ion my hands juST BEC ASUDDE I WAZNNA, WSORD. gtfodays big accomplishmentf = drawing up battlesplsnsd weith my sister;s hlp for snagging the cuted cshidfrf gifl at the locsl natural foods store. wish me luck .

medic atikon is funnmy stuff. it dxoes imndeec rfender onme less prfonme to worfrfisomd fruminastiomns , yet you c ant hedlkp but feel ass ghouvh hyour mkissing out on somkething somdhow. the ligtle awful nuancesa thsgt compose the fije muslce tissue of our ijnmdividual existence., just wrote sa haikua:

i am corporesl
fleshj and substance, meat and bones
sausage on a stick

time to curl u[p imn ,my freseh downyu shjeets. more pewsse ssand lovd for all you fine folks so sdo soon.

Ah, nature; The dewy peach mist of a frigid morning dissolving into cloudless azure, irascible squawking and squabbling of finches and sparrows in the barren treescapes overhead, mournful jazz-chord horn blasts of a freight train as it clatters and squeals over the old wrought iron bridge through the park, the steady stream of jet planes roaring overhead, heartwarming echo of gunshots from the tenement buildings a few blocks away. Life as it should be lived.

Past few days have been exceedingly positive and eventful and supremely American. Randomly road tripped to D.C., where cousin Jake and I played a game every morning called "classify the people we're jogging past as senators, diplomats, or office lackeys." I fancy myself a fairly solid judge of stateliness by this point. Did the whole tourist shtick - asking assault-rifle-wielding guards at the Capitol if we could take their picture ("No."), standing at the spot where MLK delivered his oratory (tingles-inspiring), tastelessly posing for pictures in which I offered Honest Abe my cup of coffee.

On Sunday I took holy communion for the first time in probably eight years or so. Like a spiritual sauna, emerged feeling crisp and fresh under the pink babyskin exposed by steamheat tender flagellation. "The body of Christ, given for you." As though this were not enough of a throwback, later that night the fam and I attended my inaugural pro football game, an epic showdown between the reviled Ravens and our beloved Pittsburg Steelers, who fought valiantly but were in the end vanquished by a fucking field goal kick.

At the Vietnam memorial, somehow found myself in the midst of a sprawling clan of Russians. Understood enough to catch this little golden snitch of conversation:

"Artyum, the sign at the front says 'No Smoking'"

"It's okay, I'll just tell them I don't speak English."

A viable defense, Arytum, except for the big internationally-recognized diagram of a cigarette bisected by a foreboding red X. Typical Slavs. On the subject of smoking, I've found in recent days that sporting a fag in one's mouth is a surefire way to make friends of all walks of life, from stocking-capped homeless figures with faces like prunes sprawled across the concrete to half-drunk, jaded 40-something ex-regional-beauty queens who call you "honey" and could give a flying fuck about the score of the game. This is of course provided that you have a smoke to share, which, if you happen to be in the throes of perpetually trying to quit, you will.

Began volunteering last week at workshop that builds desks 'n shit for impoverished schools. So far my accomplishments include planing, sanding, and LAYING FUCKING CONCRETE LIKE A MAN. Also, turns out I totally do get to play the mirthless character who stands outside of malls jingling my little bell for your pocket-change. I've been working on my disaffected, couldn't-actually-give-a-fuck face for the past week or so. Must. Authenticate. Experience. ALSO also, I have a job again, revolving around punk-ass fifth graders asking me in an IM box what the difference between a noun and verb is.

My aunt rescued me from the clutches of a 24-hour cafe last night around 4:00 A.M., just as I was fixing to copy down that soliloquy in my "real" journal (yes, that would make this the fake journal. You have been warned). There are probably both more productive and more thrillingly maladaptive uses of my free time than committing lines of Shakespeare to memory, but Lord knows it'll make for a neat party trick some sunny day. Said episode resulted in a wholesale reduction of my driving privileges, probably for the best. When we got back to the house she offered me a handful of animal crackers with my tea which I was instructed to feed to the "good wolf" as opposed to the "bad wolf" inside. Nothing more comforting than having your issues boiled down to facile analogies designed for schoolchildren.

Life here consists of a steady stream of heart-to-heart conversations with my adoptive parental units, countered by epic stretches of idleness. Occasionally the pattern is punctuated by a mildly entertaining interlude, such as a jiu-jitsiu class or accidentally going for a seven-mile run or picking up a drunken truck driver who introduces himself as Douglass Crabtree, Jr. on the side of the road and giving him a lift to the closest gas station. He had been wandering the cold, unfriendly streets for God knows how long after a drunken brawl with his best friend. He kept slurring about how he had no idea "where the fuck he was at" and trying to show me his trucker's license as if it were somehow proof that he wasn't planning on shanking me.

I'm seriously considering (meaning it's happening tomorrow) getting a tattoo of a multicolored cartoon zebra riding a snowboard on my left hand. I should probably be either more excited about this or more apprehensive, but it's conveniently fallen under the category of "something that's just gotta happen" in my brain. It will serve the dual purpose of covering up some nasty scar tissue and effectively ruining my chances of future gainful employment.

My caffeine intake today boggles the mind. I started the morning with two cups of coffee, each spiked with two shots of espresso. At the infamous Cafe Coco, proceeded to indulge in an "Adrenaline Rush," or vanilla latte with four shots, and later warded off an impending crash with a double espresso at Bongo Java. Piece de la resistance = coffee with three shots at Portland Brew around 6:00 P.M., just prior to faxing in my application on an online tutoring company. I should for all intensive purposes be dead right now. Eyelids are indeed on the puffy side, yet I keep getting zapped with inexplicable periodic surges in energy. Blame the drugs. Modern science up to it's no-good devilish tricks again.

Wandered up and down the glittering gallery of neon known as Broadway for a spell this evening, surveying the countless honky-tonk dives and passing buskers who all seemed to be playing the same three Johnny Cash songs. One of those "Gee, wasn't that swell, let's never do it again" moments, although any street that features an average of three cowboy boot stores per block merits some respect.

Uncle J had his Star Trek-themed retirement party at the YMCA yesterday. They outfitted him like Kirk and plopped him in a "Captain's chair" that looked to be made out of old car upholstery and oversize rolls of toilet paper. Some asshole dressed like Spock read from a cheesy script about reporting to the bridge and living long and prosperous and all that good shit. Only upbeat moment during the whole affair for me was snapping a photo of a disgruntled old black guy sporting a purple checked jacket and plaid beret and a paino-key necktie. Obviously that made the entire thing totally worth it.

Also yesterday, I sent Jamie from Xiu Xiu an email asking whether he ever encountered the phenomenon of writer's block, and if so, what steps he took to alleviate his condition/stimulate the creative juices. His timely response was as follows:

oh holy fuck i have it all the time
for me the only thing to do is just keep working even if it is crap
if i stop working then it only takes me longer to get going again but everyone is different
read a book, watch 10 amazing movies, go for a walk and listen to an entire record
get really drunk and go to the movies with a note book and a little flash light and write down good lines from the flick

Fairly certain I've given all of those save for the last one a try at some point. Have to investigate the results of drunken cinema scribbling sooner or later. Finally know where he gets all those insane lyrics.

Start volunteering at the Salvation Army next week, promises to be a wholly rewarding and enriching and ethically edifying experience. I hope I get to be the guy who stands outside Kroger's in an ill-fitting Santa suit, ringing the little bell and spiritlessly "ho-ho-ho"ing for hours on end. Would seem to be appropriate somehow.

Secondary symptoms of acute sleep deprivation beginning to set in, including rapid disintegration of descriptive prowess, and J's going to be rolling my sorry stinking keyster out of bed at the butt-crack of noon tomorrow to hit up the track, so it's time to reel this puppy in. Irks me on the most fundamental level of my wanna-be grammar-nazi soul to have ended that sentence in a preposition. FYI.

We are all so very very proud. Pleased as punch.

Sentiments, paraphrased:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

corpulent.

belly swirling and gurgling with three cups of ice-cold black coffee. frigid, uncooperative fingers want to double every letter i type. measuring the minutes in cigarettes. frostbitten sky with leprous patches of blue, naked branches thrusting upward, skeletal.

i had a dream the other night that i was surrounded by a hoard of dusty, starving, naked african children, all swollen tummies and washboard ribcages. i smiled and patted one on the head. he turned to me with jaundiced and bloodshot eyeballs, blank as a computer readout. i looked down and saw that his stomach was split open vertically, a slit incision with gray-yellow organs the consistency of clay or dried shit peeking out from behind the flaps of skin. I spun away with equal parts revulsion and sad, profound understanding, began to retch up some phosphorescent yellow gruel that plopped into puddles on the sidewalk next to flowering trees.

9/25, 5:00 P.M. Avant la deuxieme chute.

Remember the banging, sucking, machine-gun pulse of the MRI, muffling headphones pressed firm and hot around the ears, deep, chest-shaking electric speech. The sound of science talking to itself. Technology's inner monologue. Remember the flush of the CT scan solution coursing through your eager veins, the half-formed question bubbling up: Shouldn't this feel good? Because it doesn't, really. Like dipping your feet into a baby pool, warm with the diffused piss of a hundred shrieking toddlers, slimy film of near-toxic chlorine levels, your eyeballs would dissolve if you ever reached the apex of insanity and dared to open them below the surface. The mural above the machine, some sort of white budding tree, crape myrtle? You have no idea, only remember the thought - this thing is coming disconcertingly close to fooling me into imagining real silken white blossoms, set against an actual bright, spacious, grainy blue sky. The not-quite-affectless automated voice emanating from the ring: "Breathe in. Hold your breath." The LED display ticks down from ten. "Breathe." Something off about a machine commanding a human being to breathe, upon reflection - funny, you didn't question it at the time. Even if you had, you would have complied regardless, the fact would remain what it is now, just a curiosity, a blip on the radar, maybe even a contrived one. Yes, definitely contrived - nothing more than smug musing on man's relation to his creations.

probably my most fruitful entry from "the inside." havent quite felt up to snuff since that day.

just back from some serious bonding with my uncle in the basement over a beer, history channel, japanese world war II death rays and medieval kite bombs. going along with his endless sports analogies about my life, delivered in curling bostonite drawl - "you're big ben, stepping back on fourth and long, and you're seeing the blitz coming on the outside, and you're rolling to the left, trying to find your man heinz ward down field, 'cause you know if you can just create some movement, get a drive going, get outta this hole, you can start to put some serious points up on the board." today he actually busted out with a comparison between my situation and that of ulysses s. grant after the first day of the battle of shiloh. im thrilled with the diversification. apparently, in the words of the master tactician himself to general william tecumseh sherman upon being pushed back to the river - "we'll lick 'em tomorrow." there's your mantra right there. actually, what we'll do tomorrow is go down to the track at vanderbilt and measure my times on the 200, 400, and 800 meters. today i ran up and down a hill three times.

im out to prove that you can take up smoking and strenuous exercise at the same time. i live to contradict your preconditioned notions of identity. or better yet, im pitting the two passtimes against one another in the ring, a back alley-broken-glass-bottle-clipped-ear-dogfight, battle royale to the death, see which one prevails. i figure ill have to give up one at the behest of the other eventually. for now, ill just see the increased huffing and wheezing as character-building. the most interesting choice, if you will. and you will.

i keep catching myself making unnecessarily prolonged eye contact with a series of cute, short-haired baristas, who seem to be in healthy supply around these parts. expression of some animal instinct trying to tear its way through the android sheath, no doubt. actually succeeded in engaging one in conversation about kerouac and the virtues of moleskine journals (aesthetic, practical, historical). nice to feel like a totally predictable coffee-shop junkie again.

speaking of innocent flirtations, im toying with the notion of revisiting my judeo-christian roots basically for the hell of it. ive spoken to god for the past four days in a row. read the first seven books of john today. harmless experiment, right? i feel as though this would be the most alarming news possible to anyone in austin concerned with my fate. e.g., "hows gavin doing?" "not so well man, he's started going to church." thats some worrisome shit right there.

whatever. i dabble. its kinda my thing, okay? i heard "the new year" at the cafe today, reminded me of the new years eve party at zach duran's house where everyone attended in his or her sunday's best and my hair was long and gross and gibson hall existed and we all moshed to slipknot. which in turn led me to remember the time that same year we spent the night at zach's to go surfing ass-early the next morning and gibson woke up with a spider bite on his cheek the size of half a baseball. half-assed surf attempts devovling into epic sand-clod battles in the piercing rain. stripping butt-nekkeid outside walmart to change, warming up over a breakfast of taco cabana velveeta-quality queso and hot tortillas. going back to zach's house and watching all the stuff we had just recorded. living for posterity runs deep.

im pretty self-conscious about the last paragraph. just fyi.

hoepfully ill be able to churn out another compelling installment sometime in the near-ish future.

cause that might explain a lot for me.

titles currently gracing my spacious slab of caramel-stained oak (read: desk):
- man's search for meaning
-journey to freedom: your start to a lifetime of hope, health and happiness
- life without ed: how one woman declared independence from her eating disorder and how you can too

my uncle and i have agreed to kick-start my life using the second of those texts as a scaffolding of sorts. mixed metaphors are the spice of life. its like a 12-step program for your SOUL. which, incidentally, is the target of most 12-step programs if im not mistaken, and im not, because i seem to find myself circulating wholeheartedly amongst recovering addicts of all sorts these days. of my own volition, make no mistake. at the clinic where i spent five weeks, all the kids in the addictions program, ranging from methheads to those poor individuals who were a little too honest about just how much dank chronic they imbibed on a weekly basis, were required to attend a set number of AA meetings every week. however, the counselor for the program also happened to be the most badass man on "the ward," as we affectionately referred to it, so before every meeting he would take the whole crew out to starbucks in a 15-passenger van. he allowed those who were eligible (the patients were divided into various strata of privilege, or "levels of responsibility")to tag along. in due time this became my only way of escaping the stifling monotony of on-campus day-to-day routine, which by the end of my stint consisted of eating, pacing, and sleeping. in that order. all the guys would order ridiculous drinks like venti white chocolate mochas with five extra shots and be hyped out of their minds for the duration of the meeting.

in case you're unable to infer from how that entire paragraph shaped up, ive been a journaling fool over the past several months. i filled a whole goddamn one of those fuckers in like two milliseconds. i gush. i spurt. i spew. i dribble. sometimes its as though reading past entries is the only thing that makes my life seem worthwhile. i mean, if someone ever dared to type those bad boys out, no mean task seeing as to how my handwriting veers between vaguely legible and chicken scratch, you'd get a whale of a neurotic tale. the moby dick of post-adolescent crisis, frenzied shifts in tone and stultifying tangents included. and adjectives. gobs and gobs and heaping heaps of adjectives. some tiny slice of me is obnoxiously proud about that. these days ive basically been reduced to doing things so i can write about them, e.g. nighttime scaling of bridges in freezing weather (sir edmond hilary, the first man to climb everest, on why he did it: "because it was there"), chain smoking on the front porch where i remember shooting off bottle rockets on the fourth of the july as a kid, catching snippets of family lore to jot down in my itty-bitty notebook. existing for posterity/retrospection. reliving the past when its still warm as fresh dogshit. livejournal spell check disagrees with dogshit being one word. but it also disagrees with livejournal being one word, so its obviously got some bigger identity crisis issues to sort out.

wenjing, if youre out there, i totally had a dream about you the other night. i also dreamed of my/your/colton's old room. it was weird.

whence this impulse to share in a public setting? god knows. ive grown really accustomed over the past several months to diffusing my innermost being, spreading myself across other people like a single square of butter (always use margarine) over a loafs-worth of hot toast. a supernova or some shit, a sudden beautiful blast of light and heat signifying the death of something that once served a practical purpose. or signifying nothing. tale told by an idiot. i can relate. drifting apart into pale pink ribbons of cosmic dust. something pretty to look at. do you still have my mom's scarf from paris, france. the end.

Flash forward two months, give or take a handful of idiotic, nervous days in a greyscale purgatory. Said 20-something-year old has managed to binge eat his way into and out of a world-class psychiatric institute, gaining a truly prodigious amount of weight in the process. It would not be stretching the truth to say that he awoke one morning to discover his entire frame, until recently a spare network of taut lines and veins, sheathed in flab. The surrealistically overnight quality of this transformation had the neat effect of leaving him unable to process that it has even occurred. As he stands in the mirror, jiggling a newborn gut, he cannot shake the feeling that all this has somehow happened, is somehow happening to someone else; it is not his gut that he jiggles, not his breasts that bounce with each step. And so, fueled by this tidal wave of a defense mechanism, the cycles of stuffing his maw with bagels smeared in cream cheese and pilfered slices of cold pizza and handfuls of granola bars smuggled in his sweater pocket until he winds up writhing on the floor, clutching at his bowels and begging the nurses for Malox, continue indefinitely. There is nothing to hold him back, no itch of consequence, no bayonet to pierce the belly of his heat-swollen carcass and release the foul gas. Instead, there is only the opiate of optimism that fills him in a hot flush as he talks himself to sleep every night - "at least it can't get any worse than this."

During these weeks he had flung open his soul to all manner and dosages of medication without the slightest smacking of hesitancy or consideration, like a man who, after squirming in a self-imposed straight jacket for years, finally rips through his bonds, or rather slips from them with disappointing ease, to let his arms hang apart like Jesus on the cross, ready to embrace anything in the spirit of martyrdom. Every chalky pill he greedily tosses back is another blow to the heads of the rusted spikes that nail his hands into the beam.

Now he finds himself convalescing in the heart of industrial Appalachia, a rolling landscape of wrought iron bridges and fields of skeletal trees that have already shed their leaves of cinnamon and pear, leaving a crisp brown carpet underfoot. The naked maples and birches remind him of the pitchfork from American Gothic, as close to emaciated as any inanimate form has ever come.

more soon about falling asleep at seven pm without brushing his teeth, still tonging peanut butter from his molars,or maybe about the epic stretches of not showering and the flaking scalp, and the smell of personal stink that wafts up when he pulls down his underwear to collapse feebly on the toilet seat, and washing down xanax bars with coffee and beer.

Today I got an email from the fine folks at Democracy for America that offered the following advice:

1) Don't get sick
2) If you do, die quickly

Food for thought. Lol.

start from scratch.

22 years of age.

i am man. hear me roar.

(shameless solicitation for best wishes)

in other news, i live in nashville now. hard at work slaying some inner demons.
soul search. find yourself. whats up.

hope everyone out there is doing terrific.

for lack of facebook i may end up hitting the lj a little harder these days. just be forewarned, hardcore ramblings could be imminent.

or not. who knows.

this is what happens when i try to be terse. i just end up tapping out shit like im sending telegrams. mother died. sincerest regrets. stop.

i'll start with something i wrote yesterday and posted privately but that i feel like sharing, so i will. may be the nexus from which some appropriately grotesque and self-abasing artistic endeavor emerges. one can only hope.

Where to begin. This story starts months ago and has at its high-water mark the image of a slightly haggard yet robotically self-composed 20-something white male crouching on the ground outside a drive-up Church's Chicken off 7th street, mechanically tearing through a drumstick and zigzag-cut french fries and industrial-quality mashed potatoes and a flavorless cardboard biscuit, all on a stomach already overbursting with piles of mindlessly devoured complementary minimuffins and gallons of soft-serve from his friendly neighborhood Jason's Deli. He squats under the awning around the corner from the pair of service windows, one for placing your order and the other for picking it up, as a steady drizzle sifts down from above. After licking the dabs of ketchup from grease-coated fingertips, he heads through the rain to the back corner of the parking lot to piss among the tangle of disintegrating chain link fence and weedy urban underbrush, the stream of apple-juice-dark urine splattering on crushed cans of Redbull and 32-ounce Big Gulp styrofoam cups. Running through his mind is this single thought: at least you can't get any lower than this. He is wrong, of course, but the idea provides at least a passing semblance of cold comfort.

friends

page

sure

does

look

lonely

without you.

the end.

if i get hit by a car

it will hurt

a tummy ache is still a tummy ache

taste is taste

so i finally feel sorta on top of my school shit for once this shemester, which is great and probably deceptive (i think its just cause i dont have any papers due for the next two weeks). MANsion is going okay, we have our bumps but who doesnt. i am not being totally confidential in that statement but whatever.i have gotten really into danzig over the past couple of weeks, just the first cd but thats enough. oh yea + freakout about what im going to do with myself after gradjeation is imminent. TWO MONTHS. FACH.

other nerws? i have a professor who calls me gav, and another one against whom the class openly rebelled for being a dick. also my milton professor rulez, even though its really easy to get behind on reading. UGGHHHHHHH LJ FB MURDOCH-SPACE WHATEVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.


i am going to stretch my love like a sheath of skin over all of you. that is meant affectionately.

hi everyone.

im writing this from the garden district coffee house, which is a pretty neat lil nook across from stedwards. came up to austin on tuesday to record with zach, which was moderately successful, considering he had an eastern sea show to practice for and that he just left for houston two seconds ago so i had to mix everything as much as i could last night. anyway, his and sam and ryan's duplex is internet-less right now, so ive been coming here every morning for brunch and surfin. nice foods, nice ppl. i think the recording came out nicely for doing it in 3 hours after not having played the song in about 4 months and recording with one microphone, but its only real purpose is to get someone to play bass for us. it was good to see sam and to have ryan greet me every morning with a genuine "whatup homie" or variants thereof. but the duplex is sorta roach infested, which is weird, cause lack of bugs is generally one of my fave parts about austin as compared to houston. whatever, the couch is comfy. think im stayin here through saturday to see mammoth grinder, crashing/hanging out at the coop with the other zack. then if all goes well i'll be starting work at salento in the village when i get back, which is nice cause i'll finally be a certified baristaman instead of just a tea lackey. salento is also just a cooler place than te in general. nobody let that comment come back and bite me in the ass please (i.e. dont tell yvette).

summer has been pretty okay to me so far. my routine up until this point has been: wake up at 11 or so, eat, have foy call me and yell at me to come work out at the Y with him, pump iron, come home, shower, lounge, eat, do something in the evening. insert playing guitar at free periods therein. all this will probably change cause of the jaerb.

hope everyone is doing wonderful. try to be back in austin to record another song later in these summer months.



PAX.

i need to get back in touch with my cynical side. i need to get pissed. like fucking honest-to-shit punk rock pissed. i feel like a huge fucking glob right now, and all i want to do is relearn how to be brutally, unflinchingly sarcastic and jaded and mad about stuff, and act on that.

back in houston for the summer, disappointment number 2397423643whatever of the past week. looking for a job, which will hopefully get me motivated about being pissed. i really just want to play loud music that doesnt suck with people, and even that seems like some impossible dream, just with how i am and how other people are. if you take the bell jar as gospel, it was exactly when she came home from college when she was 20 that sylvia path starting going nurts. the past couple of days have not been a good omen as far as all thats concerned. this is probably the bleakest start to a summer ive ever experienced.


not to get anybody down, just venting. i hope all your summers are as fruitful in friendship and memorable times as i think theyll be.

"hey i'm sorry if i freaked you out a little last night, i was on mushrooms and i thought i had found god playing the organ"

-jeff hooten, 4/28/08