the world has turned and left me here

retreat

Since about a week ago my left eyelid has had a muscle twitch. Starts in about every minute or so. Why?

Finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, now on to Exterminator! by Burroughs. Still on a Beat kick. I can't shake the feeling that things were getting better back then, that we were progressing in some way towards something and that it originated with these guys and others like them. Then I look at where we're at today. Somebody must have yelled "retreat!" because the tide is out again. To be fair I should say I'm probably borrowing this idea from Hunter S. Thompson...you know that scene in Fear and Loathing where Johnny Depp is looking out the window and thinking that he could almost see the high water mark?

frightened out of my natural ecstasy

I was in a good mood this morning until I picked up a newspaper. "Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!"

electrocuted squirrel

I don't know why this is so funny, but it is. Poor little guy.

straights and stiffs

Sometimes I wonder if there's going to be any place for me in this world of straights and stiffs. Walking around Lincoln I get the impression that there won't be. People, you are oh so normal, oh so unbearably normal, can't you see it and don't you bore yourselves out of your own skulls? I've gotta get outta here.

slightly mind-blowing

What a week and what a way to end it. So much to do and then I got sick on top of it all. I told my Quantum Computing prof I would have a proof of this one problem ready for Friday, and I had so much else to do that I didn't get to it until Thursday midnight. The crucial insight finally came to me at 5:30 in the morning. By 8:30 I had the solution written up, just in time to go to my first class. Here's the writeup.

So I didn't sleep for about 36 hours, when I went over to Drew's for a beer and Ocean's Eleven. Of course I fell asleep immediately and feel a little bad about this. As Erika said the other day, "My mind was slightly blown."

But hey it's Spring Break now. It is a beautiful day out there, like 70 degrees, and there's some camping in the works at least for the first part of the week. After that I'm not sure what's gonna happen--I was so busy up until now that I didn't even really have time to plan my fun.

gangrene

I have a scrape on my elbow from playing frisbee, and I put a bandaid on it too soon. As a result it smells funny even though the bandaid is gone. Funny and gangrenous that is.

shaking with terror

Bad dream which I awake from, shaking with terror like an electroshock patient on the table, at the sight of my Shine poster looming on the wall above me.

disturbed

Just got back from the Disturbed concert. In all likelihood, I will not be able to lift my head off my pillow tomorrow morning.

Un Loco was the first band and there's not much to say there. Then Chevelle came on, and they rocked although their set was too long; they have about four good songs and they played about seven. In the interludes between acts the crowd amused itself by putting girls up on shoulders, and yelling at them until they obliged by showing us their breasts. One girl had a piercing in each one and that was kind of interesting to look at. Then these two fourteen year-old girls (I'm guessing) who claimed to be a lesbian couple (and I'm guessing weren't) were persuaded to let themselves be hoisted up, bare-chested, while they made out. This was at the insistence of a high school football player type. There was a big group of these guys, some of them approaching 300 pounds, who ran a tight ship in the mosh pits, effectively making them off limits for the rest of us who could only stand compressed together, packed like sardines in a tin can. No one could dance and you had to constantly be on your guard against nearby moshers and crowd surfers getting dropped on you from behind. So basically your typical concert situation.

Well after Chevelle I had had about enough of this. And besides, Taproot was coming up, and I had to flee from their suckage, so I went to the back and put in my earplugs. Taproot did not fail to disappoint me--they sucked severely. Although the lead singer did run around the edge of the entire auditorium on one song, all the way to the back, shaking hands and stuff, and this was kinda cool.

Watching the pretty lights from the back with my earplugs in I experienced some moments of clarity. I have been living from day to day with hardly any plans for the next one, much less an idea of what I'm going to do with my life in the long-term. There was a time when I deliberately set out to do this; I even called what I was striving for the happiness vector. Anyway it suddenly occurred to me that while I take pains to make sure every assignment is on time, I'm putting off the real assignment of figuring out what I'm doing here, what the big picture is, until the last moment. Schoolwork and programming are just convenient ways to distract me from making the most important decisions anyone can ever make.

So back to the concert. Disturbed finally came on with "Awaken" (which was my follow-up to Rage's "Wake Up" for alarm music earlier this semester). The lead singer was so incredibly flat that I almost wanted to walk out, I thought for a while he was one of those dudes who can't sing worth a damn live. I don't know what the deal was but by the third song he had it figured out. Then after that they rocked out and it was awesome. By the end of the thing I was close to being insane and was floundering around in a mosh pit with a bunch of big guys, all shirtless and muscled-up.

I gotta say though there is something wrong with these people. I wanted to say, look guys, this is not what it's about, it's about dancing to the music and enjoying it and not kicking each other's asses because you're taking steroids or something. It was definitely the opposite of the Weezer concert I went to in Lincoln, where things were tight and hot and suffocating but we all were singing at the top of our lungs, totally happy because that's the effect Weezer has on people, and you kind of felt this connection with everyone else. From the outset at the Disturbed concert, however, everyone just had hostility towards each other, and I felt no connection.

It's not the kind of music that's responsible for this. At the Keller I always felt a connection with other people--they were people really into the same kind of music I was, and there wasn't ever that feeling of unbridled hostility. It was all dancing and it was about the music. The crowd at Disturbed hardly danced at all, they just stood there as if under the mistaken impression that you can only dance to rap or hip-hop, and that with metal your options are head-banging, jumping in place, or getting aggro on each other in a mosh pit.

I just wished I could show them how wrong they were, that dancing is fun and you're not limited to moshing, head-banging, and jumping just because you listen to hard music. But that just wouldn't work...I guess they need to visit the Keller in Munich for themselves to find this out. ;)

that i exist

Sometimes I have gotten so far from reality and the conscious realization of my own existence that I am suddenly awestruck, glory-be, to find that there is a reality outside of me, or that there is a me. Now is one such insane moment. I am alive and I forgot this fact and I just now remembered...how amazing it is to exist! That I exist or that anything exists at all! It shouldn't be possible but it is.