I wanna know who the heck claims to be a "foot reflexologist" and posts comments in broken English about sour feet on entries over 1 year ago.
The late afternoon sun today was a glowering dull yellow evil eye peering out of ragged shreds of torn hair clouds. Walking into the grocery store I looked up at a giant American flag flapping in the wind, and stopped, because its flapping seemed to go into slow motion, then the curling edges would speed up again, like my Time was a tired organ-grinder who couldn't keep a steady beat anymore.
Two nights ago I dreamt my reality was at the end of a long, dark, cork tube. The light at the end was about the size of a quarter. I could barely make out a smiling female face and blonde hair, and as I watched I started to move closer to the end of the tube. But when I made it to the end I saw that the face was really laughing demonically with sharp pointed teeth.
Concocted a little story today as I biked to campus that had me chuckling to myself. It's about the convex mirror that presides over the gated exit to some marginalized administration building's parking lot. You see, as everyone in the department knew, this entrance was always particularly dangerous. But nothing was done about it until the day Belinda S. Crane, a woman with a chronic disorder in her neck vertebrae that prevented her from looking too far to the left or right, got her flashy little sports car run over by a cement truck. To those that still honor her memory, the mirror erected subsequently is known as the "Belinda S. Crane Memorial Convex Mirror."
Chekhov about himself: "Write a story, do, about a young man, the son of a serf, a former grocery boy, a choir singer, a high school pupil and university student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss the hands of priests, to truckle to the ideas of others--a young man who expressed thanks for every piece of bread, who was whipped many times, who went without galoshes to do his tutoring, who used his fists, tortured animals, was fond of dining with rich relatives, was a hypocrite in his dealings with God and man, needlessly, solely out of a realization of his own insignificance--write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how, on awaking one fine morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a slave but that of a real human being."
A crazy time with Jake last night. Jake was my roommate from freshman year and is the closest thing I have to Sal Paradise's Dean Moriarty. We went to bars and ended up at the Spigot, where I started talking to this very cute blonde girl named Emily, the cutest girl in the bar and there alone (amazing). She turned out to be real cool & listened to the same kind of music I do i.e. metal & alternative. She's in security at the Lincoln Airport, and told us some funny stories about the kind of things she's found in people's suitcases, and how embarassed they somtimes get. According to her businesswomen carried the worst stuff.
She was stranded so Jake & I gave her a ride home in the vanagon. Jake started freestyle walking on the way to the parking garage, and then suddenly he was doing stuntman somersaults into the shrubbery. This stopped when he somersaulted into a rose bush.
Well anyway on the way back Emily saw her ex of about 2 weeks, and he passed by without hardly saying anything, so she was all upset & pissed at the male race. Jake, who broke up with his serious girlfriend about a month ago, was pissed at the female race. So the net result was that they started beating the crap out of each other brother-and-sister-like, and kept this up the entire ride back to her apartment, ricocheting around the back of the van and rocking the thing. I saw her punch him in the face a couple times and there was nothing friendly about it.
We said goodbye to Emily and moved on. We went to his sister's apt., but didn't know the number. Standing outside Jake told me about a police scene that was all over the local news that happened right on that very spot, they captured an escapee from the pen who was dumb enough to try to buy a gun off two dudes, and tell them he was the guy who had just escaped from prison. When he walked to the gas station to get a copy of yesterday's paper with his picture all over it, to prove it, they called the cops. How dumb can you be good grief.
Ended up at Claremont apts. where we searched for apt. 6 but ended up walking into another party. Bunch of dudes and a couple girls sitting around listening to Frank Sinatra. Ten posters in the living room, all black-and-white. Some drunk guy with a John Deere hat. Kind of a fratmosphere minus the frat. When we tried to leave this belligerent dude yelled at us that we had to stay. Jake walked up to him, shook his hand and said "that's the best haircut I've ever seen man," and with that we left.
We returned to another party we had passed earlier. Jake and I got into a big discussion that ultimately turned religious, so there we were at 5 am in the morning groping with big unsolvable questions on these people's porch.
Jake was practically falling asleep standing up when we got into the van and I drove him home. I kept having to shake him awake to get directions out of him, which were some of them complete dream state nonsense. But we got there okay, and then he had to smuggle me into his house so I could relieve myself, careful not to be seen by his (understandably) cranky mother who had to let him in the front door. I got home at 6 am as Drew & the Minnesota mountain bike team were rousing themselves from the floor for today's bike race.
Well I had one of the most disgusting experiences ever this morning. So I'll tell you about it. I woke up and had an English paper due in 2 hrs; no prob, only 1 page single-spaced and I'd already thought about what I wanted to say. Then the toilet downstairs decides to overflow. And it wasn't just toiletwater. So here I am literally screaming in disgust trying to figure out what to do, thinking towels? do we have any old towels? no, no old towels, no paper towels, i'm not gonna get this paper done in time, ah! So I drive like a maniac down to Walgreen's, buy 6 rolls of paper towels, rush back and get the problem under control. Then I'm supposed to sit down and write a nice paper about a Flannery O'Connor story.
Well sure enough I wrote a paper it but I was 15 min. late to class. After class I apologized to my prof. He said it was okay. By way of excuse I told him it had something to do with a "bad toilet situation."
"Please," he says, "don't tell me about it."
So I decided to tell you about it. Okay?
You know you're absent-minded when...you almost walk out the door on the night of Sept. 11th with a hammer and sickle t-shirt, red on a black background, accidentally. I may not be Captain America but I know when I've gone too far.
Sunday went and watched Drew as he raced 94 miles in 4 hrs, a total of 8 times around Branched Oak lake. Up until lap 6 or so he was in the lead group of 4 dudes way off the front. But the other 3 dudes were teammates and he had to fight off constant attacks from them. Eventually his legs cramped up so bad that he couldn't move them, and fell off the back, but still placed well in the end. When he got off his bike he was just about delirious: covered with salt from 4 hrs of sweating, could hardly walk, unable to control emotions. But he came to and I could tell he felt an immense sense of accomplishment after racing his hardest and longest race yet. In a way I was jealous.
I just hung out all day in the sun, which was about all I could manage after pulling an all-nighter. Oh and I helped the Jaimster (Andrew's gf) make little colored contact-papered cards for a game (she's a teacher). All were food pictures until I decided to throw a random smirking dude with sideburns in there--he ended up looking like a stoner. "These are nachos, kids, help the stoner eat nachos."
I sat through a presentation on critical thinking the other day. It boiled down to making rational arguments, and then I started to wonder, how do you argue that making rational arguments is a good thing? Which was essentially what this speaker was trying to do--but you can't use a logical argument to justify the use of logic, so how the heck do you go about this? How do you convince people to be rational?
It's little things like this that feed my slow-growing conviction that science, at its core, is a sort of religion too. There are always things that you are going to be asked to believe "on faith," even with science. These things that you believe "on faith"--whatever they are--are the important part. The rest is pretty much irrelevant.
The Drew & I were at Pipe Dreams--a head shop--last night looking for house decs etc. A biker dude in leather and bandanna was in there with his biker chick, also in a leather. He bought some smoking accessory or another & asked the owner if they could go out back and "do what they came to do," only the owner misunderstood you see, there being an adult novelty store somewhere in the back of the store also. So the owner says "Yeah, pretty much anything goes, except there are some rules of decorum round here..."
Anyway we saw these two later in the parking lot. The biker dude was all friendly and curious at this point, since we had inquired inside about getting a real Middle-Eastern hookah and sheeshah to smoke. He wanted to know what "sheeshah" was. We explained that it just made you more alert, kinda like drinking a coupla cups of coffee, since it was just flavored tobacco. "Aw, that wouldn't wake me up man," says the biker dude, "when I wanna do that I jest get in a fast car."
Well he has a point here. When I get up and exercise I don't need coffee in the morning, coffee's kind of the sedentary man's form of alertness, but really not a very good substitute at that. Endorphines man--the natural stimulants are definitely the best ones.