and then there's this.

i wrote this letter to my friend paige. i figured it had general interest, and so i post it here. i may start putting more things I've written up here and not just tell stories and talk about things that have actually happened to me.

whats up you wanted stories of the city of angels. 3 months ago. but it takes a while to get enough good ones for a letter. i haven't yet, but I'll write one anyway. sorry the friction funding didn't come through. the day will come, though, and we'll be ready. you should definitely do the nyc/publishing house thing. you haven't ever lived in a big/really big city, have you? i've been here a year and a half now, and I feel like a battery is charging up even though it's exhausting to live here. like when i get out of here in however many years and go somewhere more stable like you were talking about, I'll be able to get a lot done in whichever direction I'm headed (writing/movies/music/etc.).
la is crazy. I've been working steadily for the first time in a while, starting in late april. much needed stability. lots of crazy stories, but most are best told in person with gestures and silly walks to illustrate. writing some. we got a writers group together among my friends once a week for a while there and that helped a lot just to get my head in the right place to start writing again. I just got a typewriter...well not just, but i only recently started using it.....and i get good vibes out of it when i'm writing on it so i'm going to keep using it. it's nice to know that someone else, or a bunch of other people, used it before. i wrote this on it yesterday:


i have visions of other worlds
red worlds
with people-creatures
with vague and undefined
features climbing out of the
shadows that cloud this other world or my
visions of it.
blue worlds that rest like an hour before
dawn on a sunday. orange worlds.


they creep through my mind when i
try to sleep off the week.
i think they want me to send them something
but i don't have their address and it will
likely be years before i can find what
they need.
they must understand my situation
i mean, a man has to make a living these
days and, in the wake of the tragic events
of september 11, which have shattered
our nerves but deepened our resolve, i must
churn out product for the war machine.


this is not a time to cavort with aliens.


i just don't have the time to
let their signals wash across my thoughts
and don't know if i shoul--


write in the morning. squeeze the dreams
out then, when they are juicy and just then
retreating. pound through their door then,
catch them before they have woken enough to know to run.
they will pay for leaving their window open. every man
has his place in the war machine. i will accept their calling.
the fall, the boyant cry of the hunted that has just escaped from the slaughter:


why is there blood on my pantleg.
why did i pick this revolution
did i think it would succeed?
you must release me some time, if
only to oblivion. you cannot hold
my soul forever. take what you need
now, and quickly, and let me moan
away to memories of the end of
august and quiet summer nights in the
north country where the soft breath
of winter remains in the air even then.
where the streets are empty and
the quiet rhythm of the sea echoes
off the rocks of the inlet. i've reached
the end of my line.
---



not particularly coherent or polished but it's more interesting that anything I've written in a while so I figure it must be the ghosts in the typewriter. tell me more about school and such and what's up in your life.

i was off coffee, off caffine for good. i had beaten the monster. and now i'm back on the stuff. the sad failures of continued addiction will likely define my short jolted life. i wish no one ever put ice in coffee. cause regular coffee, with ice, is just too good.

Arts and Letters Daily has a pretty interesting articly about halfway down the page attempting to synthesize huntington and fukayama's theses of current events and the near future in light of our current moment in history. pretty interesting, and included not because i really think you care, but just so you know that i still understand big words.

why you gwan try an test de champion?

i leave my mind open for a second and the monsters come in. fuck. it's like with vampires. you invite them in, even offhandedly, and they are allowed free reign by the rules of the spirit plane. i f'n hate the rules of the spirit plane. so last night i invite them in, say i'll write a bit every morning while the dream-creatures are not yet fully awake either and i can trap them, squeeze them out, but instead they just trample me this morning and i don't wake up till 11 am and work starts at 10:30 and I'm a half hour away.

fuck.

ok so i think now that i have a job and some money i'm going to try and put out a 7" record by the recoys, the now defuct, pre-walkmen band that isn't jonathan fire*eater. I 'll put it out on a subsidiary of I Think Records, the st-louis-originated hip-hop label that i started w/ A-Double and DJ B-Money. but this subsidiary needs a name. any ideas?

thanks to liz for promising to provide the official walkmen west coast tour wedding dress pillow. check her blog if you're thouroughly confused right now.

those fucking brits.

will we all die in nuclear armageddon?

i heard on public radio that colonizing cultures' music empasizes the upbeat (marching shit like house and rock and waltz and hip-hop), colonized cultures' the downbeat (reggae/ska, go-go, etc..), as a rule.

reading Island by huxley right now. pretty cool. dense. bought the wind up bird chronicle by murakami today and can't wait to read it because

it's 4 am on a sunday morning and im exhausted but i love you, so:

just dropped a friend off. on the way we got stuck behind the new york times delivery people so we stole the sunday times from someone's driveway. east cost people: cherish your daily printed media. the LA times fucking sucks. i'm not doing anything tomorrow but reading the paper. cover to cover.

which reminds me. fuck all those new york bands. fuck my friends bands. flogging molly rules. they're my new favorite band for right now cause they're the pogues but punker.

which reminds me. I'm the "tour manager" for my friends the walkmen when they do their west coast tour at the end of this month. baiscally it's a free rock and roll vacation with my friends up to vancouver and i can't fucking wait.

been reading a lot lately. huxley, anais nin, murakami, borges. which reminds me. richard brautigan fucking rules in the same way that tom waits and leonard cohen rule.

i said "rules" and "fucking" a lot. fuck you.

sleep.

so i went to see dj z-trip at root down last night. it was the first time i'd seen him since he blew the fuck up (i.e., cochella, linkin park, etc.). it was also the first time i'd been to root down in months. i used to go all the time. good music, good crowd, and i knew one of the djs (egon) from doing hip hop college radio back in the day. then, after it was rated the best dance club in the city by citysearch, the crowd started to get a bit less fun(ky) (fewer breakers, etc.), and i had heard everything the 3-4 regular djs play too many times. the one really great night near the end of when i was going to root down all the time was when z-trip showed up unanounced and rocked the fuck out of the place. that was probably the most fun I've had at a club in la. everyone was dancing and going crazy with every mix. z-trip had just moved to la from phoenix. this was a few weeks before he got his residency at vermont on wednesdays. so...i was pretty excited to go see him rock the same spot.
it kinda sucked.
we (max, matt, and i) got there a bit before 10 so we could get in for less, and there was a line down to the end of the block. and a vibe right out of heavy metal parking lot. weird. overheard people talking about how they were uncomfortable at gabah because it was too ghetto. weird. some guy kept talking to me about this mix z-trip was going to do with some tool song that would blow my mind. weird. jump to when z-trip gets on the wheels. the place is packed, more like a rock club than a dance club. i've been dancing for a while and am smushed up against the stage . he starts playing and i turn around away from the tables to dance with people and not just stare at the dj. i'm staring at like 100+ people, no one dancing, everyone staring at the stage. ok, fine, z-trip's a rock star now. i get it. that's cool. i turn around, look at the tables like everyone else, and prepare to be rocked. it never really came. there were a couple cool mixes that got everyone excited ("jane says" + "h to the izzo", for example) but there were too many dips in the energy level. z-trip also gets the bozak for using pre-mixed cd's and those fun, but cheating, cd-tables to make up for the fact that he didn't have such and such on wax, or couldn't mix this or that live.
you need different sets to rock a stadium and a club. z-trip tried to rock the e-z stadium mix at root down, and it didn't work.

a few quick notes:

-i cant believe it's actually thursday already. that rocks, especially because of the three day weekend and the official start of summer. i wish everyone barbeques and the beach this weekend. let the summer begin.

-i just heard from Abigail for the first time in years. awesome. she is my favorite librarian ever. my decimals get all dewey whenever i think of her.

-liz is coming out to LA in mid june to play. that rules. there will constant visitors and new arrivals this whole summer. the air will be thick with blood and whiskey. in a good, secret agent way, not a oh shit my drunk friend is in a puddle of blood and whiskey sort of way.

-the library of congress just gave the bozak to the riaa, which means web radio, like KWUR can keep making our lives better. this, along with the aforementioned abigail, is why i like librarians.

-there's a place called record surplus douwn the road. im going during lunch...

so alissa (a-money) just left town, it was good to see her, although I wish I could have shown her a little bit more of la than destro's basement. oh well, she'll be back.

my dad's in town, so that means that I get to eat well for a few days. we went to the sushi bar at matsuhisa last night, the place that zagat rates highest in the whole town for food. all i have to say: holy fucking shit. i've been to that place before, but each time i eat there it blows my mind and I just want to roll around naked in raw fish. sorry for the mental image, everyone.

also feel free to e-mail me if you want to, especially if you know why hunter s. thompson is in beruit. i'm assuming that this means that he's at least attempting a return to somewhat serious journalism after the last decade or so of his lunatic drivel for espn.com and others. i subscribe to the school of thought that his last really readable and insightful work was fear and loathing on the campaing trail '72 and that everything past that was either a) him too fried in the noggin to really say much or b) him calling it in for a paycheck, just tossing together some rambling about booze, peacocks, and paranoia and sending it through the mojo machine to people always willing to gobble it up (myself often included). anyway, let me know, if you know.

i did go to the beach during my lunch break. maybe its just because i havent been to the beach yet this year, but it blew me away. clean, clear air and heavy winds, clouds exploding everywhere in the sky, sand and sun, so sensual, with my feet in the sand and the waves. i'm sold on this place again, i just kept reminding myself "this is my lunch break" and after 25 minutes walked away recharged, drove back to work with my shoes off.

so tired. but its so nice out. morning rains cleared the crap out of the LA air and it's beautiful. i might go to the beach on my lunch break.

shit. i just wrote like a page and a half and it dissapears into the ether. it was funny too. i'm still at work at 11. im getting tired and now im frustrated.here's the gist of what i wrote, im not going to write the whole thing again:

i shouldn't be at work on god's day, but i'm getting mad overtime and getting paid for watching tv and fucking around on the internet. cool with me. 13 hours + at time and a half.

i'm a dork/simcity 3000 is ruining my life.

it kept me from checking my cell phone messages last night and finding aout about a house party that the lords of altamont were playing. they rule and it would have been more fun than what i did last night, im sure.

it made me go back home at 2 or 3 am and keep playing the game and when my friend matt came over he tried, first mentally and they physically to get me to stop playing and interact socially and instead i ended up stabbing him a couple times with a corkscrew to keep him from getting between me and my gaming.

simcity 3000 unlimited is the opposite of sex. when that movie came out my now roommate max and i argued about what the opposite of sex really was. he maintains to this day that it's marijuana. i think it's this game, cause you can interact with people while smoking weed and can have sex while you're stoned, but you cant do either of those things when you're in the evil grip of this game.

inspired by sixo and liz, and being bored at work on a sunday, im going to start one of these. if you don't know me here's my life and this should get you caught up to the present day. i was born 2/22/78 in baltimore, then shipped to dc and lived on capitol hill for two years until my folks got scared and moved to the suburbs outside of dc. i went to high school in dc, and led a bit of a rock and roll existance there, then went to college in st. louis, led a bit of a hip-hop existance there, then graduated and moved back into my parents attic in dc. after 6 months of that i was going crazy and neeeded to get out and come out to los angeles. so i did. that was a year ago. i lived in west hollywood for 9 months or so. i moved out to silverlake, a less glitzy, more rockin neighborhood just a bit northeast of downtown in january. and now i'm bored at work on a sunday and so here's a blog. i'm going to go play with it now that you have the basic gist of my life down.