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April 4th, 2008
11:17 am - "Once you have given up the ghost. . ."
 That's my old userpic, right there. When I first started journaling, I used three covers from Atari 7800 games--Xenophobe, Dig Dug, and Kareteka. This was back in 2002. I kept those until 2004, when I photographed the cover to Tropic of Capricorn, touched it up, shrank it, and pasted it down on another 7800 box scan. Hoopity fucking doo! I was exceedingly proud of myself, at the time. I deleted the other three userpics.
"So what's the point of the game?" someone asked. "You gotta fuck some chick?"
That really irritated me.
As I put that little graphic together, the game I was imagining was a little different. Basically, you play Henry Miller. You've got a suit and tie on, a little fedora. Gray. Your character sprite is gray. And he's wearing roller skates, too. In the main stage of the game, you rollerskate through various rooms of the Cosmodemonic Telephraph Company's headquarters in New York City. You skate around collecting spare change and abandoned bottles of bathtub gin. You need to avoid colliding with desks, secretaries and intoxicated homeless men of all ages, colors and creeds. Also, your boss is on your case, so need to avoid him. Hitting a chair, for instance, will slow you down--maybe even enough to allow your supervisor to lay his hands on you and drag you back to your desk. Provided you manage to waste enough of your workday, you get to go on to a bonus stage. The bonus stage takes place outside the Cosmodemonic building. It involves drinking all of the contraband liquor and then pitching the empties through the windows of assorted banks, federal buildings, and police stations. Should you get more work than skating, done, you're forced to go back home, to your wife and kid.
I still think that's the best game I've never played.
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April 23rd, 2007
06:21 pm - The Dharma Bums
I meant to read Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums this past fall. For ten years, or so, it'd been kind of a tradition to read that book every summer. Some years I'd read the whole book, others I'd just read a chapter.
Last August, I was packing up The Dharma Bums along with the rest of the R.J. Hudson Eastern Wing Library. I flipped through it, came to the part where Gary Snyder is dogging poor old Jack Kerouac about his alcoholism. "Dogging," is possibly off the mark. You can read the whole book as a tale of a monk (Snyder), trying to save a wayward soul (Kerouac). Their relationship seems to start on their appreciation of booze, but as the plot thickens, you quickly understand that Kerouac doesn't have his shit together. That is, his drinking isn't under control.
Kerouac had the idea of taking all of his work, standardizing all of the names, and then publishing it as The Duluoz Legend. Or something like that. If you read The Dharma Bums in the context of that sprawling mess, it's the sad tale of a monk losing a soul.
The book is also about one man's relationship to the void and Christ, and Buddha, and Han Shan. . . Jack Kerouac: Between Nothingness and the Mystics. How he toes the line—living with the knowledge that ALL IS ILLUSION must be hard work for most, and Kerouac wasn't too likely an exception. How did he manage? (Barely.) How did he sustain relationships with his family? (Tenuously.) How did he fare in society? (Competently.) Did he form lasting friendships? (Occasionally.) Much luck with the ladies? (Possibly.) Did he turn to drink? (Assuredly.)
And Kerouac was certainly aware of his faults and part of the pleasure of reading him is that awareness' presence in the story. You could say he's writing from a religious perspective on the topic of a man admiring things from an aesthetic perspective. Sad as Kerouac's life played out, within the confines of The Dharma Bums, we're given a happy end. . . as that aesthetic man transforms into a religious man. At the end, his failings in the world are shed. Unfortunately, he accomplishes this feat by becoming a recluse.
I don't have any biographical material on Kerouac handy. I don't recall when, precisely, he wrote The Dharma Bums. Seems like he'd sat on On the Road for a considerable period of time, got it published, and then followed up with something he'd put together a bit more recently—The Dharma Bums. On the Road and The Dharma Bums are as different from one another as Visions of Cody is from Visions of Gerard.
This cover to The Dharma Bums is from a Signet Paperback from 1967. It is the third printing. The back cover reads:
"The book that turned on the hippies. . . THE DHARMA BUMS. . . Jack Kerouac's barrier-smashing novel about two rebels on a wild march for Experience from Frisco's swinging bars to the top of the snow-capped Sierras. . . Here are the orgiastic sexual sprees, the cool jazz bouts, the poetry Love-ins, and the marathon binges of the kids who are hooked on Sensation an looking for the high. . . THE DHARMA BUMS.”
I remember reading in McNally's biography that Kerouac had a difficult time handling his success as a writer throughout his entire career. And after he struggled for decades to gain some recognition, he was disgusted with the following he had once he finally acquired one. He spent his later years avoiding the media, losing entry-level professorships, drinking in his home town, and generally doing everything but writing.
Chances are pretty good that he saw this paperback cover, and he was no doubt repulsed by it.
A few months ago, someone pointed out to me that a great deal of the “action” in this novel takes place in Berkeley. Apparently, he lived in a small cottage behind a house on 1624 Milvia Street.
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January 5th, 2007
01:46 am - You should read Misery, if you haven't already
 I know I've said before that Stephen Kind was kind of my stepping stone from The Uncanny X-Men to Kurt Vonnegut. I've been giving genre authors some time, lately. I select an author known for contributions to one particular genre, and then track down something the author wrote outside of that genre. *Hearts in Atlantis* is basically two novellas and a few short stories, all inter-related.
Seven hundred pages, it took me less than a week to read. The only line that's stayed with me is "If you touch her again, I'll kill you. If you touch me again, I'll burn your house down."
"Chaos is a word we've invented for an order that remains to be understood."
I'd like to say the above is a Henry Miller quote, verbatim, but I can't and looking it up would kind of be like cheating. But that's a line I think I remember out of Tropic of Capricorn. It makes a bit sad, knowing I can quote Stephen King, but not Miller.
What makes me even sadder is the movie adaptation of Hearts in Atlantis. Here's the story to both the book and the movie: Some dadless kid gets a psychic dad. The psychic dad gets hauled away by thugs. At this point, the two forms of the story diverge. In the book, the kid turns into a strutting badass. He stalks down an enemy and beats him the fuck down with a baseball bat. At which point, he says "If you touch her again, I'll kill you. If you touch me again, I'll burn your house down."
Which wasn't in the movie.
Damn them.
They killed ANY merit that story had.
Current Music: Trans Am--Red Lines
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December 4th, 2006
11:06 pm - A Book That Kicked My Ass
Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch was published in 1983 in Italy. The English translation hit the Kelknap imprint of Harvard University Press in 1994.
The book is written in an aphoristic style, although the aphorisms therein aren't that short, and sometimes aren't that memorable. I'd guess the book is usually stocked in the history sections of bookstores, but it could it easily turn up in philosophy, literature or anthropology. The prose, in English, is some of the smoothest and meatiest I've come across in awhile. Here's a typical passage from the book, this one concerns Louis XV:
"We shall never with certainty know much about his licentiousness, just as we shall never with certainty know much about his childish games. But one account tells us that, when he was seven, his courtiers entertained him by filling a vast hall with sparrows and then suddenly releasing some hawks, which mutilated the little birds with their sharp beaks. According to another account, 'The king had a white fawn that, since he had fed her and raised her himself, would only eat from his hand and loved him very much. He had her taken to La Muette and said he wanted to kill her. He chased her off, fired at her, and wounded her. The fawn dragged herself toward him and nuzzled him. He again had her placed at a distance, shot at her a second time, and killed her. The act seemed very cruel.'"
And here's another:
"Within Chinese society, within all societies, the park of the Son of Heaven once epitomized all nature in miniature. Now all nature is our park, and we do not know what it epitomizes."
The book contains over forty chapters, varying in length from just a few to a few dozen pages. These chapters are full of anecdotes, journal entries, all manner of philosophizing, anthropological and economic inquiries, and good old fashioned story telling. It would seem that Calasso disregards a hard and fast distinction between "History" and "Literature." And he doesn't see much of a point abiding by any chronology or linearity. Someone asked me to sum the book up in ten words or less and I said: "The origins of Modernism from the French Revolution."
But that doesn't really do the book justice.
It basically starts out as a biography of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, a French diplomat who worked alongside Napoleon Bonaparte. Calasso regards Talleyrand as being very in touch with the times, very much with the zeitgeist. He and chalks up Talleyrand's success to his ability to negotiate without ever standing on one firm principle. His outstanding achievement was holding no scruples.
The life of Talleyrand isn't told in typical biographical fashion, and is intercut with first hand descriptions of the places Talleyrand frequented, and anecdotes relating to the times from the likes of Goethe. From Talleyrand, Calasso moves on to the books namesake, the legend of the ruin of Kasch. It's a damn good story, and I'm not about to do it the disservice of relating it here, but let's just leave it at it being a proto-Sheherazade tale with a larger scope and nastier implications. Afterwards, there's a good deal of writing about sacrifice, and its development along with society from the most distant, to the most recent. The last third of the book seems to examine the advent of bureaucracy, capitalism, tyranny and psychosis. Worldwide, culminating in an Indochine Hell on Earth.
Or maybe not. Calasso leaves it to you to connect the dots, and I'm never quite sure where he's really laying his emphasis. In one section, we're told about an episode involving Goethe, ending with him saying "Damn, I got drunk for nothing!"
Whenever I read a book, my mind usually splits into three different parts. . . or, better, it adapts itself into a mode wherein it takes on three different tasks. The second task is the actual reading of the book, essay, poem, etc.. The second task has my mind adding what is being read to what has been read. The third would be the situating of a space for the end of the book, a space that excludes some possibilities and allows for others. . . a sense of where it all is going.
The Ruin of Kasch completely confounded this three-fold task that I call reading. I hadn't had such trouble reading through a piece since I tried reading On the Genealogy of Morals stoned, about ten years ago. I plan on re-reading it in February, and seeing what I'm able to take away from it.
When's the last time a book's kicked your ass?
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November 23rd, 2006
05:28 pm - One Dirty Buzz
I've never liked Bradbury, but I figured I'd give *Dandelion Wine* a chance because it wasn't a genre piece. Neither sci fi, nor fantasy. Two types of storytelling I dislike immensely. My logic, as usual, is simple: Why fuck around with Martians when you can read about real life?
The whole damn book reads like it was written to sell to a mass market. The copyrights go back to 1947 and this is way bad news of the house-on-fire variety. Bits of it were published in Charm, McCall's and Everywoman's Family Circle. Time, according to the back cover, had this to say: "Dandelion Wine is fine and new and rare. . . A giddy leap into nostalgia."
In the summer of 1974, Bradbury wrote an introduction for the book, from which I now quote.
"The wine still stands in the cellars below. My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark. The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer. Why and how? Because I say it is so."
We are able to forever keep the joys of the past present in our minds, through memory. Bradbury never doubts memory's infallibility. The idea that memory can keep us rooted to our pasts comes up quite a bit, in the novel. The wine referred to in the title serves as a metaphor, throughout the stories, for this very idea.
The plot is (barely) held together by the protagonist discovering he's alive and that he must also, one day, die. That's an outstanding premise, but it is all so poorly executed that I'm still aching from some passages. Not that any one, in and of itself, is ever that bad; but the way they stack up on each other, revealing a crude nostalgia for a cast of family members and townsfolk that interact with one another with all the depth and feeling of sock puppets gets grating, after awhile.
The sentimentality of this novel, and it gets pretty damn thick, is almost as bad as the wooden, Jerry-Mathers-chatting-it-up-with-Hugh-Beaumont dialogue. The ridiculous situations (two brothers rescue a fortune telling mannequin), flat characters (the preachy grandfather was particularly unbelievable, only because Bradbury depicts other characters actually listening to the old fart), out-of-place props (The Happiness Machine), and general lack of focus make this a testament to bad American storytelling.
I put the book down with the impression that Bradbury's memories were turned sour by bad child actors (from both radio and television) and the desire to market short stories and radio dramas.
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October 20th, 2006
12:58 am - This came as news to me
In April (1934), when Nin was in London trying to hunt up a publisher for Tropic of Cancer, Miller wrote her that he had been revising the manuscript again and now liked it better. It gave the impression, he wrote, of having been written at twenty-five different addresses—which it had been. When Nin returned with no offers, Miller began to despair. Kahane was claiming to be nearly bankrupt, and Miller had broken with Bradley, denouncing him as an old man who got sadistic pleasure out of critiquing younger men. Then, in June, Kahane agreed to publish the book if Nin would pay printing costs; she agreed to advance him 5,000 francs (about $300).
By July, Miller and Nin were reading proofs. The book needed a preface Kahane thought, because the material was so inflammatory. He offered to provide one, but Miller declined. Instead, he wrote the essay himself and had Nin sign it (she no doubt had something to do with its composition as well). It was a rare opportunity; he could "explain" the book, and point out its importance—under someone else's name. Kahane accepted it, and publication was scheduled for September.
--Mary V. Dearborn
*The Happiest Man Alive: a biography of Henry Miller*
( Tropic of Cancer's Preface )
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October 17th, 2006
12:50 am - Tripping Into Christ
 Think about the word![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dayonfire, for a second.
I see myself waking up to find every last *thing* observable to the eye holding an undevouring flame. The flames are hot enough, but they don't necessarily *burn,* they don't consume. There's no smoke. I look down and see my hands, arms, and body engulfed in this fire that is. . . uncomfortable, but nonconsuming. Even the dog is ablaze, but he's been up for an hour or so. He's almost used to it, just looks a little nervous. I get out of bed and put on my burning clothes and I go downstairs, not being afraid to set my hand down on the lit-up railing. I slip into burning shoes, twist the flickering knob and open the door, to see everything under the sun on fire. The world has stopped, for all intents and purposes. People aren't going to their jobs. No one's driving any cars. Everyone, engulfed in flames, wandering throughout the streets. And the day goes on. Everyone gets used to the heat, though they still look a little shook up no one's worried about being burned to death. The sky is cloudless, the trees are hard to look at, way too bright. Every last thing observable to the eye burns on and on for a solid day. The world is suspended, at the very edge before apocalypse for twenty four hours. At sunset, you're surrounded by orange. By midnight, you're yawning beneath a red sky. Just like God said after the flood, it's the fire this time.
Walking the fine line between life and loss.
dayonfire, aka Michael K. Gause, writes poetry and an ongoing narrative he calls *The Ramble Noose.* He's just published a chapbook by Little Poem Press, and you can order it right here. It's called *I want to look like Henry Bataille*
I've been reading Gause's work for awhile, now. He seems to have been stingy with his poetry, as of late, but here is one example of what I think you'll find in this new chapbook of his. At the very least, I think it jibes with whatever went on above.
 From what I've read of *The Ramble Noose,* and the assorted poems to be found here and there, he's able to maintain a consistent voice and use it to present subject matter ranging from the commonplace to the convoluted along with stark imagery and endearing observations.
At the very least, you should give his journal the once over and leave him some nice mail.
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October 4th, 2006
11:23 pm - For A Broke Motherfucker
 Robert Anton Wilson can't make rent. Apparently, he's really sick, too. His website(replete with Midwestern Chinawoman Minivan Music), states that he's suffering from Post-Polio Syndrome and is need of constant care. A friend and collaborator of his has also taken to begging for the man. It seems legit. You can click on Wilson's or his pal's links to find out how you can send a few bucks his way.
I'm not promoting this call for an assist out of any love for Robert Anton Wilson. I've read a few of his books. If I had to pick one out as a favorite, I'd probably go with Cosmic Trigger. I liked the layout. In point of fact, it was the first book I'd ever read with such a layout.
I think I probably came to Wilson's work too late for it to have much of an effect on me. I think that, at the time I was exposed to his works, I had been as sufficiently "altered" by books as I'll ever be. On the other hand, I came across Tago Mago, last spring, and that record pretty much blew my mind. Same goes for Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O.. And I'd thought my mind had been sufficiently "altered" by music. Anyway, Wilson didn't exactly turn my world inside out, but I appreciated what I took to be his commitment to "Art For Life's Sake," nonetheless.
(Upon further reflection, Wilson *did* introduce me to the concept E-Prime, which has proven helpful, over the years, in a lot of ways.)
Anyway, there are probably people closer to you that could use the money. I don't really have any to speak of, right now. Even if I did, I can think of at least two people who probably need it more than Wilson. Still, I feel obligated to bring it to your attention. The man has made a deep impact on our. . . society. Not deep enough, in my opinion, but he did, I think, help quite a few people out, got quite a few people thinking, got quite a few people reading books in a way they never did before. That's an accomplishment. He deserves our respect, I believe. Help out, if you can, but at least acknowledge what he's done for the reading public.
In closing, I'd like to say that it pisses me off (royally) that Jim Carrey is starring in a motion picture titled The Number Twenty Three and Wilson's friends need to beg so that he doesn't have to die in some nursing home. That seems fucked up.
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September 27th, 2006
01:00 am - Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller
 In 1966, Henry Miller was calling The Pacific Palisades home. On Wednesday nights, he'd go into Beverly Hills to visit his doctor and friend, Lee Siegel. He never brought along any "intellectuals," as he was "sick of hearing people discuss art and literature in [his] home;" it was a chance for him to have some fun.
On one of these nights, in Beverly Hills, Miller met a new love. Her name was Hoki Tokuda, and she was in the United States working at the—now extinct--Imperial Gardens. She was, by all accounts, an accomplished jazz singer and pianist. She was on a work visa. She'd also been in two films, by then. Japanese films, they were titled Nippon Paradise(1964) and Chinkoro Amakko (1965). (Those are IMDb links you're looking at, incidentally, and neither offers much to look at.)
She was twenty-seven years old.
Dated February 22nd, this is the first note from Miller to his newfound love in the collection of their correspondence, edited by Joyce Howard:
Dear Hoki
I hope to see you one evening this week at the Imperial Gardens. Maybe I will bring my friend Joe Gray along. He wants to meet nice Japanese girl.
Henry Miller
( And embarrassment ensued. )
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June 9th, 2006
02:48 am - Some Thoughts On William S. Burroughs
The first Burroughs novel I read was Interzone, At the time, I was still not familiar with Kerouac and the rest of the beats and, most importantly, Henry Miller (who kind "put American Literature together" for me, if you follow). I was about sixteen years old, had only just begun to sense the movements beneath the surface of some works which simply weren't present in other works. Not to sound cryptic, I'm saying I was only just then learning to distinguish between prose and writing. . . Get me? Anyway, I was comically under-equipped to approach these works.
Interzone was the first. The copy I got was prepared by Penguin. I had to special-order it from the closest bookstore. . . a place twenty-five minutes away that pandered to middle-aged housewives with no taste in literature. Romances. It was called The Little Professor Book Store. The next tier of clientele down would have been Stephen King and Dean Koontz fans (a crowd just as lowly, only smaller). . . That's where I'd been, more or less. Interzone may very well have been the first book I ever ordered.
( I had no idea what I was getting myself into. )
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November 10th, 2005
03:43 am - More About Comics
 Dan Truman fought in World War Two. He had come back from Europe and tried school but didn't care for it. He had a sweetheart who became his wife and together they had two daughters. Sometime in the eighties, whenever it became profitable to trade in baseball cards, he opened a baseball card shop and stocked the extra space with comic books, "vintage" skin mags and sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks.
Over time, his customers clued him in that the better name for his place was Truman's Comics. After a few nights of deliberation, he changed the name of his store to Truman's Comics from Truman's Baseball Cards, Comics, and Your Dad's Old Playboys.
He had his own store. I don't know how business went for him. I really only remember bits and pieces. . . snippets of conversation between him and my mother and father. I reckon the early nineties were good to him, business-wise. But he died in '92.
( Excelsior! )
Current Music: Doc Butcher and the Cardiac Arrest
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October 31st, 2005
02:20 am - Recycled
 These people have written books that I like alot. They are: Charles Bukowski, Plato, Elaine Pagels, Albert Camus, D.H. Lawrence, Noam Chomsky, Haruki Murakami, William S. Burroughs, Flannery O'Connor, Henry Miller, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Albert Camus, Paul Tillich, Anais Nin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kenzaburo Oe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Somehow, Jack Kerouac didn't get thrown into this, but that's okay. . . nineteen portraits wouldn't have worked as well.
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October 23rd, 2005
11:55 pm - Marvel Comics And Where I Was Going
Dig it--on June 23rd, 1986, around five o'clock in the afternoon, I bought my first comic book. G.I. Joe, issue number 39. It was published by Marvel Comics, the story inside bore the title, "Walk Through The Jungle." It cost seventy-five cents. . . which was ten cents less than a school lunch.
I was with my uncle, we were in the Ren Cen in Detroit. That was my first time in Detroit. It was my first time in a large city. . . I know I'd been to Pontiac before then, but I hadn't walked around much. I was nine years old. It was the first time I'd been in a large city. . . We were there for the fourth Detroit Grand Prix.
We'd taken a shuttle bus from Pontiac to Detroit because. . . well, there was a national F-1 race going on, downtown, and the organizers were trying to dissuade people from bringing even more cars into the city.
I read the comic on our way home, on the bus. . . the second "real" bus (as opposed to a school bus) ride I'd ever been on. I can't say it was a very absorbing read. I thought the artwork was a little spotty, the inking sucked, and the dialog, to my young ear, sounded really stiff.
( But I reread it, all the same. It was all I had. )
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October 9th, 2005
October 6th, 2005
01:23 am - Five Years Ahead Of Its Time: A Lost Classic Resurfaces
 Just recently, aum posted what I believed was a long-lost collaboration between the two of us from May of 1995.
Sad, but true, actually more than two people contributed to this. . . I believe the original roster was only four people long. Ideas had been tossed around, a premise was developed, and a loose storyline sketched out. It was left to Seth to type the play itself out.
This play was intended for an in-class performance in Mrs. Segowski's Creative Writing.
I'm not sure exactly how I became involved with this project. I believe Seth and I had decided we were going to drive off somewhere. Pontiac, most likely. Before we could do that, there was the matter of this play that needed to be written. At first we were just filling in the blanks and getting the skeletal outline of the play on to the computer. At some point or another, KMFDM was put on the stereo and we began trying to make each other laugh.
I'm not sure I remember either of us saying, at any time, that we were going too far. To this day, I don't think we went far enough.
The next morning, we went into the classroom with two copies of the play. Lines were not to be memorized but, instead, read from the actual script which was to be passed back and forth between the actors. I must stress that the troupe was composed entirely of young men. One of which, if memory serves, was painted up to look like a woman.
Two of the original conceivers of this outing were in love with the script. Another one wasn't so hot on the idea. He insisted on playing the part of Beefcake.
The end result was a call home for me. I managed to get in trouble in a class I wasn't even enrolled in. In point of fact, this is the only trouble I ever got into while in school. The phone call home resulted in my room being raided by my mother, and the script, as well as some other writings, being confiscated and, presumeably, destroyed.
I remember Seth having some particularly harsh words for Segowski.
Below is the Beefcake Fiasco. I have made a brief note at the point in the play in which Segowski put a halt to the production. Everything else is as it was back on the morning that I was supposed to be in Physics.
( THE BEEFCAKE FIASCO )
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October 2nd, 2005
11:04 pm - 2nd Hand Jack Kerouac
Jay Pendergast, a doctoral candidate in Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin: "What was the influence of Joyce on your work?"
Jack Kerouac: "Go fuck yourself!"
Desolate Angel is full of moments like this. Some aren't quite so triumphant. Here's another one from Kerouac, in his forties, talking to Allen Ginsberg:
"I'm old, ugly, red faced. . . I'm beer-bellied and a drunk and nobody loves me anymore. I can't get girls, come on and give me a blow job."
( Yeah, as you might have guessed, the ending to this biography is a real downer. )
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September 12th, 2005
03:00 am - Within Without Who
According to the first page, I purchased my first copy of The Bhagavadgita in July of 1994. Since then, it has been lost, then found, blessed by one of India's more popular gurus, caught in a flood, rescued from a dead man's apartment, and carried around the world wrapped in the crime blotter of the Spinal Column. Books made in India have a very distinct smell to them. It's the paper they use, I guess. This one still has that smell.
If I had to tell you why I'm at all interested in religion and philosophy, I'd have to refer to this and the writings of Paul Tillich in testimony. I've taken to reading it again. I used to read it twice daily.
( That was back when I was into practicing breathing. )
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August 6th, 2005
01:34 pm - Art and Beauty and The Sheer Pointlessness Of It All
 In the summer of 1998 I had a job at Bob Evens. I was bussing tables for minimum wage. I wanted to go home every summer, back then. I didn't want to stay in Ann Arbor. Picking up a summer job was tough, back then. No one really wanted to hire you. Not if you were up front about the fact that you just wanted to work there two weeks. Occasionally, some kind-hearted soul--such as my boss at Bob Evens--would offer me job and I'd take it. Short-term employment.
I wanted to go home where my friends were, that and the lake at my parents house. I wanted that, too. I was still paying rent on the place back in Ann Arbor, for Christ's sake. Part of the reason I even had a job (at all) was because I had to pay for a room in a crackhouse I wasn't even staying at.
( Jesus. It was a haunted crackhouse, too. )
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August 1st, 2005
01:30 am - Now I'm Still Here
I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is. Yet I confess too that I do know that I am saying this in time, that I have been talking about time for a long time, and that this long time would not be a long time if it were not for the fact that time has been passing all the while. How can I know this, when I do not know what time is? Is it that I do know what time is, but do not know how to put what I know into words? I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know!
Augustine of Hippo
*COnfessions*
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July 20th, 2005
11:40 pm - The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter: A Winner (or, No One Will Ever Read This Book Again)
 This is a longstanding feud between aum and I. He's always contended that The Education of Little Tree would have been better titled (you need to shout this, sounding just like the Elephant Man) "I AM NOT AN INDIAN!"
I would like to argue the position that the superior title of the book is neither The Education of Little Tree nor I AM NOT AN INDIAN, but ( Kiss My Ass, Suckers! )
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