Nonsense

“I’m sure you’re talking nonsense in calling this inn a castle.” / “Sé que decís disparates en llamar castillo a esta venta.”

Write what you mean, not what you want to sound like

When I read pre-structured, soulless academic writing, I can’t help but lament the gigantic waste of time and talent that such a vapid task surely cost.
A colossal waste of time.
Pages and pages of sugar-free information.
Inane diagrams, vida infras, and see appendixes. Stretching on for literary miles.
I don’t know why exactly but I see the written word as a medium for the conveyance of emotion; not rote, basic communication. Don’t get me wrong – when you’re writing an email or a text message to simply convey rote, basic information, then it is appropriate to write accordingly. But I cannot fathom spending hours and hours of my time writing to simply convey rote statistics and figures. That’s not even what I think of when I think of “writing”. It’s more like mechanized reporting; a form of soul-sapped, automated stenography.
Perhaps it proves difficult for many people or maybe it’s just against the “rules” of academia (or maybe I’m just getting used to the devil’s side of the whole “advocacy” thing) but I think that when you’re writing, you should always say what you feel. You should let a little bit of that soul - that ever-evasive “self” - shine through. Everyone out there has something to say more than they have something to convey. Some of the most powerful and profound academic work I have ever seen belies a little sadness, gives you a little wink, lets you see the obvious anger permeating every account of injustice or maltreatment or asinine historical misconception.
I want a nudge, I want a nod, I want encouragement. I don’t want simple percentages and pre-authorized transitions and standardized paragraph structure and data reports.
No one wants to read that shit. Not even other academics. It’s all just an arcane set of Ivory Tower writing regulations that are essentially intended to keep John Q. Public from cutting into the “experts’” monopoly on information. They make it so no one has the ability to read it without the proper academic credentials. But hey, what’s the point of going to years and years of school except to make your theories sound more professional? By making it only intelligible (or halfway interesting) to other academics and “experts”, they can pour more cement into the foundation of their intellectual stockade, the garrison that separates them from the people without as many degrees.
This is most remiss for sociologists, social psychologists, and other humanities experts. It is our job to explore and expose the machinations of this social world, not to further shroud them in secrecy and unintelligible academic buzzwords. It is not our job to be uppity elitists and study mysterious “theories” encrypted with pseudo-Greek and Latin academic gibberish* about the way our society works. It is not our job to write really smart-sounding academic papers with impressive vocabulary and sentence structure. It is our job to debunk, to demystify, to instill hope, to figure out. It is our job to provoke change, and no one ever achieved that by inventing esoteric six-syllable quasi-Latin words to describe simple, everyday occurrences. You talk of “phenomenology” and “philology” and “pedagogy”. Why not “how stuff happens” and “how people say stuff” and “the way people teach”? Is all of this coding really necessary? Don’t you want to make a change in this world? Don’t you want people to understand you?
There are things that are broken in society, things that need to be fixed. Writing about the ontology of semi-urban disenfranchisement in divested zones of transition is not going to help any poor folks in the inner suburbs get more rights.
I think we need to re-examine the way we write to exact change. Everyone knows we’re smart already. Let’s try to help. Let’s try to share some real emotion and stop being such unsure-of-ourselves, insecure, namby-pambies. Let’s bleed and be pissed off together.
It’s not a fucking “-ology”. It’s life.

*I realize the irony of saying something is “pseudo-Greek”. Go fuck yourself.

OK, now that that’s all said, I think I have officially justified not doing my reading for the evening. Good night!

Jackson Pollock

I wear a badge on my sleeve
I've got a fucking chip on my chest
You've got some egg on your face
Might as well live with it
It's better than a little bit of blood

I'm caught in the throes of a forced word vomit
Spray my brain on the wall like paint
And we can make a mural

Gutted on all fronts by hungry ghosts
Not sure I'll be able to ignore their sighs
Drown in a bottle like a famous painter
Move to Idaho like a bunch of White Elephants

I wear a badge on my sleeve
Better than a little bit of blood

Caught in the throes of a forced word vomit
Paint my brain on the page like I mean it
And we can write a song.

Tilting at Windmills

Tilting at Windmills

No amo mi patria – su fulgor abstracto es inasible.
-Jose Emilio Pacheco

I think helping your fellow human being is a value that has fallen by the wayside in this day and age we live in. Smothering us from every angle are the Snookis, the Rush Limbaughs, the homophobes, the Fred Phelps’, the SATs, the GREs, the layoffs, the Bernie Madoffs of the world. We live in an age of rat-races; of apathy, ambivalence, dispiritedness; of sheepishness. We’re fitting the mold like cliff-bound lemmings.
We live in a land of competition and cut throats; cutthroats and identity thefts, of banana clips and stray .50 caliber bullets; of Zoloft, Ambien, Lamictal, Ativan, and a million other kinds of chalky, adult Pez to make the problems into fog.
Every single day, a broken-down school in a broken down neighborhood is visited by a team of military recruiters who promise college and self-sufficiency and golden dreams in exchange for avoiding bullets in arid climates. They promise exultance and Horatio Alger fantasies to go lie in a culvert in Fallujah or bleed in the poppy fields of the Swat Valley. They promise it to them with a straight face; the young men in uniform making the promises might really believe it, too. This would never happen in the overpriviledged, platinum spoon-fed suburban theme park I grew up in. I feel like I just drew the lucky straw.
We worry about our grades; about how our beer belly looks in this shirt; our witty comments, our rapport with the people. We worry about our glances sitting right, our smirks not seeming unsolicited, our stride striking the ground firmly, and our half-windsors not creasing out too crooked. We worry about run-on sentences and artistic merit; of truth and relative justice; of righteous indignation and judgmental backroom whispers. We worry about egg on our faces; of seeming cliché, of in vogue ridicule and dismissal.
I fear being alone (which is a different thing than being lonely and I have learned that it is valid to fear fear itself, despite all the admonitions to the contrary. I also fear being surrounded, medicated, jaded, conflated, and juxtaposed. I am afraid of having nothing to say; of nothing anyone wants to hear; of nothing that I want to hear.
But I don’t feel cold cylindrical steel on the back of my head and I don’t feel the creeping death dagger in the small of my back, so I don’t really have the time to be preoccupied for any of the right reasons. I don’t have time to write between my crossed eyes, but maybe my glasses are dirty.
I don’t love my fatherland because it’s abstract luster is inaccessible. It’s in a museum somewhere, behind plates of glass and laser tripwires and banana clips and well-intentioned .50 caliber bullets and angry eyes and shouted judgments and closed oak-paneled doors.
No amo mi patria.

Trapped in the amber of this moment

"Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim," said the loudspeaker. "Any questions?"
Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"
"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"
"Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.
"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Invernal

Éste ha sido uno de los más largos inviernos
Que puedo recordar

Pero éste será el más largo verano
En muchos siglos

Te prometo, Arcángel

Podemos volar

Acá estamos

Sic Semper

Some say with great haste
"Thus always are tyrants defaced"
But manifest our reflection:
A cruel dictator's face.
I'm doling ire to others
You'll be slow to discover
That we're part of no race
No last, no first place

So give alms to your sisters
Lend a hand to your brothers
Because if we don't we'll discover
That though one despot's displaced
There'll soon be another.

So let's obviate our disgrace
And eliminate this chase
So that all of us, our friends,
Cand come up from the under.

And we'll be a patchwork of people gazing
Into the sunset of a better tomorrow.

Hubris and Reconnect

I am invincible
They cannot hurt me
This is more than just my head
This is reality.

No dreams of fame
Fortune escapes me
I am an enemy of death
This is reality.

I know not why

I have become a true enemy of death
I know not for why I have thought otherwise

Ya soy enemigo verdadero de la muerte
No sé por qué pensaba otra cosa

Unsolicited

DEATH has found ME again
BUT I can't be made to raise a hand
Wish it weren't so with all my soul
But on this grass I stand.

Wicker Wire

I can't take the straps off this wire wicker casket where I live
No love forever, you know, I'm not who I want I wish I could be
Suspicious whispers asphyxiate the careful hissing, Missy
I left my fucking sense by the wayside

No my car did not get repossessed, not yet, quite yet
But I'm fighting them off with tin foil and silver blanks
I feel that when they find out the coordinates of my location
I'll have given up my fortress, buttressed by ten levels of deceit

We gave our brains to the park, to the needles, to the never-ending dark
I can't remember where I put my life and now for that I'll have to answer once again
That I can't break even one link in this goddamn chain does not portend well for my friends
For my friends whose names I've forgotten once again
For my friends whose names I've forgotten once again

The American Dream in Padlocks
A wicker wire casket once again

And they will come in from the hills
Descending upon the town, the townsfolk
The will o' the wisp
The golden bouncing light
And the heat of the sun will never move
Will not extinguish
And a few clouds will echo the will o' the wisp
And we will have nothing but the swamps and the sadness
And they will come up from the valleys
And they will cover us with their blankets of stars
From Oklahoma to Needles
From Fairfax to Monterrey
And they will cover us with stars.

Incredible text message from Hugh

Hey faggnut cheerios u best be ready to pull out your dick at practice today and whip up a face melting bass facial

Algunas veces

Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's great, sometimes you love, and sometimes you hate. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry, sometimes you live, and sometimes you die. Here I stand and here I lie, I am me and me am I

Banality

One of the things that causes the deepest depression is a lack of curiosity about oneself. Personally, I am a constant student - I am curious to understand how everything works; the machinations and intrigue of everything that exists fascinate me to no end. And of course, that "End of the Line" marker where one needs to know to stop delving. Beyond that barricade, there are things we just cannot understand.
However, I make the critical error quite frequently of thinking that I have myself figured out. I make the crucial mistake of thinking that I too am something beyond curiosity, beyond intrigue, beyond enigma. I think I have myself figured out, that I am not interesting.
But if I know that there are so many things out there I cannot understand - the stuff of gods, the stuff of extraterrestrials, the dark matter of the universe, the inner workings of the effervescent human soul - then how can I possibly misguidedly believe that I know myself?
The point is, I must continue to be curious about myself. I must continue to be intrigued by what I think I understand about myself. Because I am not a banal person, I am a complex - unfathomably complex - human being, just like everyone else is. We are too complicated for axioms. The point is to stand at a distance and marvel - to gaze and awe and be amazed, but to sit in a comfortable position doing so. And you must know when to pump the brakes and not fight it, to hit that road block.

Nuestra falibilidad

Creo que lo que me da miedo es simplemente ser humano.
Creo que la sensación de ser falible, de ser imperfecto o - de alguna manera - ser decepcionado, deprimido son los que me dan miedo.

Quizá no sea perfecto mi español pero ya sabes lo que te intento de decir.

Sin embargo, yo sé que no es realista desear ser perfecto, pero para mí es difícil cambiar mi punto de vista.

No obstante, sé que cosas así les cuestan trabajo a toda la gente del mundo, ¿no?


LA PALABRA ESCRITE ES INHERENTEMENTE FALIBLE, DEPRESIONANTE, DECEPCIONANTE.

Pero no me voy a fallar.

Vivimos

No te ilusiones.

Vivimos en el ocaso
Y el amanecer
Los dos se unen y están juntos.

Explorador.

Exploration is one of the hallmarks of expanding your line of sight. Whether it's staying up late to watch pandering commercials or hanging out in a place you don't belong, nothing shows you things like exploring. This means taking risks, putting yourself out there; it's all about trying to see the best you can what might be and/or what is out there. You need to try and figure it out the best you can even though completion is impossible. All the good and all the bad.

(3:15 AM)

al Ghoul

al Ghoul

Somos nosotros
Y no somos nada.

I won't be afraid of their eyes any longer
And they won't be afraid of mine

The Tyrrany of Bootstraps

Self-reliance is a myth. It was a fabrication concocted to serve the interests of the self-made-man fable. We are nothing without the millions of efforts exerted by millions of others every day. I couldn't be here at PDX if someone hadn't built it; I couldn't read this book if someone hadn't written it. I couldn't return a favor if someone hadn't given it to me first; I couldn't return a kiss without someone giving it to me first.

[The tyrannical myth of self reliance
keeps us in a cage
[We are nothing without our community
[I am nothing without my friends
[In a way we are all related.

[I won't be afraid of their eyes any longer
[And they won't be afraid of mine

Our thoughts are always in flux
The myth of stability makes us stagnant
The myth of function keeps us numb

WE ARE RIVERS NOT STATUES
WE ARE RIVERS NOT STATUES
WE ARE RIVERS NOT STATUES
AND THE MYTH OF EFFORT STRAINS US
AND THE MYTH OF SELF RELIANCE STRANGLES US

[And I won't be afraid of their eyes any longer
[And they won't be afraid of mine


(6 / 18 / 10 --- 9:47 AM)

Moons

|||Waxing||
I care not about acceptance
She'll keep bowin' her neck
These ghosts are testing their limits
Of my already hoarse voice
They're gonna find me out by the dumpster
With orange caps at my feet like a bunch of confetti
And broken doors with death scrawl pleas
Submerged in the silence of twenty-two stifled screams
With the virus in my blood, I wane.

(This is about one of my friends' neighbors. He was an intravenous crystal meth addict who was dying of AIDS. One day, after defaulting on his rent payments to the point of warranting a dereliction notice from the City of Eugene, he left his apartment in the middle of the night to avoid being served with a subpoena. Before he left, he wrote some insane shit all over the walls: threats, pleas for help, other errata. I think it might have been written in blood. A lost soul if ever one existed.)

[[[[Waning]]]
Brackets, bracelets
My legs are braced
There'll be not another word
I left myself death alone on the tarmac
In Minneapolis
The skyline burns into orange and sinks
Behind the trees
We melt into the scorched earth
We wax.

(Sick on the runway in Minnesota.)

(6/17/10 - xx:xx??)

[\Alleys\]

I am a haemmorrhage
I am an astral plane
I am conviction
I am the driving rain
I am an eyelid
I am a new form of pain
I am confusion
I am untrained
I am despondent
I am the same
I am the driving rain

I am nothing if not the driving rain.

(6/17/10 - ??:??)

(Views)

I'll use this paper to wipe the dirt off my brain
I'll use this paper to make these crazy fucking walls sane
I'll use this paper to exorcise and excoriate all who have invited our ire
I'll use this paper before we change our minds and toss it into the fire
I'll use this paper to silence that buzzing hum of bugs
I'll use this paper to extirpate that florescent metal hum.
And then mind, we'll have some silent time.
One on one.
Hand is dead.

(6/17/10 - 12:30 PM - on a nauseous airplane)

States (a): Minnesota Nice

Grow tired of our airplane fame
A state of moral bankruptcy, foreclose the same
What happened to old fashioned politeness, good ol' boy?
You bring your state ill fame
You done brought your state ignominy

And I thought you guys were supposed to be nice
Motherfucking banality

Sad tattered old man, heart on sleeve
Don't like what you see?
Don't like what I say?
Then feel free to take up the issue
With me
Self-righteous goddamn Golden Rat proclaim

What's this I heard about acting nice?
Fuck your state, and I thought you are supposed to be nice?

Hey listen hear Abel and Cain
Hey listen here, Golden Rat proclaim
I hope you sink a hundred thousand times
In your bullshit ten thousand lakes
I hope you sink a hundred thousand times
In your goddamned ten thousand lakes.

(This is a fast, angry punk song I wrote after this sad, old man cursed me out on a plane landing in Minneapolis's airport. Fuck that sad ol' cocksucker. 6/17/10 - 6:15 PM, CST)

States: Carolina

It worries me
I see every little ache and pain
As burdened proof of epic failure

Unite
Encouraging
I feel every delighted slight
As unencumbered news of surefire success

Bleeding
I missed my stop this time
And now the ferry's sailed
Across the marsh; not returning

So I've built a fire
And next to the dark I lie
Trembling
This is the state I'm in
This is the state I'll be
Carolina burning

Sink in the marsh off Gold Bug avenue


(7/13/10 - 3:51 PM)

The Owner Men

The bank is something more than men
I tell you
It's the monster
Men made it
But they can't control it.

Yet there is neither darkness or light;
Just an unbroken dance of shadows.

The bank is something more I tell you
It's the monster, men make it,
But they can't control it.

(Interpretation of a passage from "The Grapes of Wrath", 1939, by John Steinbeck)

(6/22/10 - 11:11 AM)

A Drop in The Ocean

That is true. I am a drop in the ocean, but I'm also the ocean. I'm a drop in America, but I'm also America. Every pain, every confusion, every good and every bad and every ugly of America is in me. And as I'm able to transform myself and heal myself and take care of myself, I'm very conscious that I'm healing and transforming and taking care of America. Particularly I'm saying this for American cynics, but this is also true globally. And so as we're able, however small, however slowly, it's for real.
-Larry Ward

Digital Feelings and Phones

I can’t wait until we digitize feelings
In this giant sea of brakelights
We think that time exists
But it’s only clocks
We’re stuck in our light world.

There are some things that make it worth it
The things that make it concrete.
The foundation.
Foundation.

And the thought of bullets has been giving me chills.
And there is something out there that doesn’t make sense.
Trees turned to leaves, greens to brown.
And it looks so eerie, it looks so bled.
But to us it was something.

Mendacious

Precipices and chasms
The poverty of words belies the poverty of philosophy
A calligraphy of lies weaves a beautiful cacophony

Vuvuzela

I can't make it
These starving ghosts, no I can't shake it
They hound me
Knees breaking
Cardboard pill cups and plexiglass havens
Linoleum floors and flourescent hum of locusts
Names years ago scratched into days-old paint
A stale draft silencing any whispers of reproach
The muting din
The deafening silence
Dominion

Ad astra

Sometimes boy you've got to rise from the wreckage
I know that I'm cliche I know that I'm shit
But sometimes you can deal with the upper lip quiver
We're all traitors to our nature.

My ears are ringing and my knees are creaking

Al volar

Todos somos capaces de belleza
Eso te juro
Y de esto estoy seguro
Lo que ya tienes
Es todo lo que necesitas

Vuela.

Run to the Battle

We are all magicians / We are all fertile ground / We grow with what we say / We grow with what we are
We are who we think / We are nothing like we are / We are everything we believe / We are who we are

Besmirched

What you say could be construed as abstract vandalism
Creating conspiracies against my good name
Well I’ll tell you a little secret for your spider web theories
That I’m not as easy as you think to classify.
You speak against my good name
You wonder you wonder you
You speak against my good name
You wonder you wonder you
But I’m the worst jury that money can by
You’ll see that soon you will you.

Enterrados Vivos

No soy ciego
Sino un tuerto
Y es el tercer ojo
Que aún lo tengo.
No hay anhelo libre
No hay voluntad
La que sólo quiero
Es la sinceridad.
En mi mente, al fondo
Al cielo yo iba
Pero en la vieja Corea
Ya perdí mi vida
En un mar de minas
Y mi pobre familia
Está desaparecida
Y por el Gran Señor
Vierto la’ lágrimas.

"Narcotic evil"

"The true nature of the narcotic evil becomes visible when someone who has been using an opiate for some time attempts to give up its use. Suddenly his eyes are opened to his folly and he realizes the startling fact that he is in the coils of a serpent as merciless as the boa-constrictor and as relentless as fate. With a firm determination to free himself, he discontinues its use. Now his sufferings begin and steadily increase until they become unbearable. The tortures of Dives are his; but unlike that miser, he has only to stretch forth his hand to find oceans with which to satisfy his thirst. That human nature is not often equal to so extraordinary self-denial affords little cause for astonishment...Again and again he essays release from a bondage so humiliating, but meets with failure only, and at last submits to his fate as a confirmed opium-eater."

On Challenges

A challenge is an open invitation to improvement.

You can relax while you face your fears too.

Untighten the coil

Smile and say "Thank you".

And see their smile too. How happy you make them.

4:54

Do you remember how good it felt that one night
Where nothing mattered and we were best of friends
And we found out things about ourselves
About each other
But we could still be next to one another.
I won’t forget that.
As I lie here bathed in dim light.

Do you think that’s possible again
I just need to give you time and not force it
We need to grow again.
We need time to grow again
And it’s hard man
As I lie here bathed in dim light


I know we need to grow again
And it's hard man
I feel the pangs of fear creeping in
As my room turns so gray again
My world's corners are pulling in

I will End this, I will end this Escape.

I will end this escape
This dreamland of No's and Don'ts
I will leave the swamp soon
We will be one again

And I'll smile on your day
I won't have on my everyday frown

I won't be afraid to say it
There's always a half-full
There's always a second view

Anome on 13th and Harcaid

A flourish in every word

Smack your gum with a swagger
John Q. Meatskull
Go backwards on your fixed gear bike
And continue to wax your irony
More conspicuous sloth than an Amazon exhibit
More beer logos than the Daytona 500

But I guess my observatory of concrete
Is in no way a loftier position
And me writing this makes me just as bad

"Look at that asshole watching all of us
And scribbling in his bitch-ass notepad
What a stuck-up hipster
And I bet he thinks his tats are badass"

I guess the thing is that we're all the same
Let us posture and pose
It keeps us sane sometimes

So smack your gum
And back up your bike
Wear your Ninkasi shirt
And I'll sit here and write.

I Am the Bayou, I am Not the Same

A life been lost
I am a wasteland
I am deplete
I am replete with desire
I embody defeat
I sit here in judgment
I sit in the street
Watching shadows go past
I am defeat

I succumb to the forces
I finally give up
Take my hands and my eyes
I am just me
I'm just going to be

I am a wasteland
I am deplete
I am replete with desire
I embody defeat
I sit here in judgment
I sit in the street
Watching shadows go past
I am defeat

A life's been lost

The Fecundity and Desertion

Alive, Son of Awake - Fecundity and Desertion
Em D G A

I am the wasteland
I am nothing left
I am the wax and wane
I am bereft

There was once so much here
There was once a hope and promise
And now we have a desert
Empty but for longing

I am the oasis
I am the desert's song
I am the greenest grass
I am nothing wrong

There was once so much here
There was once a hope and promise
And now we have a desert
That's permanently haunted

There's still a shred of hope
There's still a shadow of a doubt
As hope must diminish
And our eyes cast downward
Shame again
Gray again
Gray day again