Something new, eh? I like it when I go somewhere and someone comes up to me and says "Oh, you're in for a treat" and they're right! Went out and pogoed to The Ex and a bunch of people collectively lost it and danced, bleeding on stage, hornrimmed glasses and beer and Dutch people everywhere. Got so many crushes on people.









There's so much to do.

I don't know why I can't let things go. Keeps me going I guess. I can't spin it any other way -- can you? Yeah, I'm locked in the grooves. Time to get out and bust a move, make music out of tape loops, start something bigger. Small steps, small steps.


"That way, or nothing at all." Exactly!

I had a dream that I couldn't move my middle two fingers for some reason. It was really annoying and I could actually feel it. I usually don't feel things physically when I dream. I looked in a mirror and my nose was crooked. I couldn't figure out how the hell my nose had gotten broken but my fingers were more of a concern as it made it harder to do stuff.


(I was making a stupid face like that, too.)

I pried my fingers apart from the half-assed metal sign they had formed and got back to work. I was part of the cast of a tv sitcom about a misfit family, a sort of post-Brady Bunch rip off I guess. It was set in the late 1970s and I had this janky as hell wardrobe of polyester coordinates. It was funny in an ironic way but not at all my style. It was ostensibly being filmed in this combination my house/tv show set/bookstore/spa place in a rambling old house. The building really made absolutely no sense like a Victorian house designed by a five year old with ADD or something. The other people on the show were my old housemates from college and I was stuck with the annoying girl who I and everyone else hated but just wouldn't move out for some reason. She was her usual completely socially retarded and arrogant self. She was eating unnaturally blue colored crackers loudly. I abhor that sort of shitty food and hate television even more, especially sitcoms. What a waste of life. This one I was on was particularly stupid and I wanted out. A gang of old, bizarrely dressed Swedish bikers with long beards and aviator sunglasses invaded the set. Great! My chance to get out. There was a younger guy with them and he was crying. He couldn't deal with life or something. I told him it was ok, speaking from experience. "Even though I play a 15 or 17 year old girl on this show, I am actually 23". That seemed to make him feel better. I was kind of annoyed by it though and a bit embarrassed, like, I really don't want to be dealing with this. Then annoying girl from my house rushed into the conversation in the useless way she used to and started giving useless advice and I got disgusted and left.

I think my subconscious is telling me to bust a move, get outta here, get metal as fuck, and do something dangerous.

Last night I was going through some old emails from the summer. The end of this summer really bummed me out. Like some kinds of animals do before natural disasters happen, I had sensed it was coming in this weird, primal, all-consuming terror way. I was dreading another New England winter and plotting my escape but all of the alternatives I came up with kind of sucked (Texas???) and what I actually ended up doing sucked beyond belief.

I said this before, and I'll copy and paste it and say it again:

31 August 2010
Changing is hard though. Sometimes it’s like one step forward, two steps back. But I don’t regret it so much though now, all that time being miserable and hoping it would get better. As if I could find the exact point where it started to go wrong and go back and change it. (In technical terms, this is called “magical thinking”). For all that, I came to the conclusion that: Some people need to go through their own hell and journey to their outer limits (mentally, spiritually, physically, geographically) in order to come out on the other side. I’m like that.

I said this before and I guess I've already said what I meant to say long ago. I guess that was my dramatic send off of sorts. A pretty good one. Romantic, almost. You'd be surprised how boys are into that, really. It's kinda gross.

I also said this before the hell that was... Jeez. Ok, I've sat here for a few minutes now and weeks longer than that and you know what? There's really no fantastic, magical, nice way to spin it. At least I've already accomplished several major New Years goals but I wish I hadn't gone about it so...hard I guess. I'm doing a hell of a lot better now that I don't feel like the David After Dentist kid all the time anymore -- "Is this real life??? Is this gonna be forever??????" Imagine, working like that. It was absurd really. And kind of a funny distraction because I knew I was going to quit anyway. I liked it when the bartender I worked with most nights would remind me to keep a 'positive mental attitude' and I was thinking to myself 'I literally am not capable of that right now, but I'll keep it in mind.' Difference is this time I didn't resist it and just sort of nodded my head and went along with it.





It's happening though. It's gone slowly though, much slower than I thought it would.

And ok, from here on out, here's a new resolution: less negativity, more positive vibes.

Hope for the future, May 28th, 2010:
“we are excited about life every day and actively defeating boredom
like how it should be
shimmering bliss”

More notes from May 28th, 2010:
I got a sunburn on my neck from laying outside and drinking g&t's all afternoon.

I tried to write my overdue senior reflection essay and got two paragraphs into my revised draft before deciding I was too high to do anything except lay on the floor and listen to Fugazi, which I am pretty sure is the opposite of what you are supposed to do and listen to Fugazi. My moral sense seems to have been shaped by their music more than anything else. A good one, I think, instilled into me at an impressionable age when I was flirting with a fake nostalgia for communism and mass-produced and sold anarchism. (Also kind of music more sophisticated than say, the more youthful efforts of Minor Threat. Punk rock for kids and grown ups.)

I don’t even know what I like anymore really. I see the same people all day every day and pretty soon I won’t anymore. Ok, a list of turn ons: guys in glasses, guys with beards/interesting facial hair (especially if bald), guys who read books for fun, guys who can admit to having feelings and it's fine but they’re not wieners about it, guys who are responsible, guys who know how to have fun, guys who like spontaneous trips to wherever, guys who are honest, guys who are at least somewhat reliable, guys who don’t smoke weed. Ultimately I am just kind of lazy when it comes to relationships and would rather couple up sooner than later but avoid the (inevitable, I'm told, but don't believe) communication issues regarding what 'commitment' means to whom and whatever, it's just boring.

I started writing a letter that went unsent to this guy I don’t even know (a recurring trope in my life I guess) but really it was just a monologue to intended for an audience of myself only: “I'm about to graduate college now and it's freaking me out a bit. Weird in the worst unknowable way. There's no way my senior project can be complete, as even at 50 pages, a book was just released two weeks ago (after 700 years of virtually nothing, at least the information age has improved some things in some respects) 350 pages in length...in Dutch...which I don't understand very well yet. Oh well. I suppose I'm cutting edge. The other final project I'm doing is on meditation.” I stopped writing because, oh hell, I don’t even care anymore.

* Walking down unknown roads into new towns. I like going and getting lost and disoriented and a bit scared but mostly excited and totally aware of my surroundings and then working my way back.
* Now my best friend Jared has a friend from Arcata visiting who at 21 has also just flown on an airplane for the first time in his life to the east coast. It's a nice exchange. We make plans for the future that probably will not pan out. He's a cool guy and is also unashamedly into booty jams.
*Anton putting a tattoo on Jared
*I think about how I know all these people.
*Jordan, a friend of mine who I went to Montreal (accidentally illegally) with for Spring Break '09 woooo did a performance on intimacy and experiences of such that was so brave and true. I wished I felt that strongly about anything ever.
*Talking about pop punk with my friend Peter. He rules. He's a bit drunk and a bit more forward than usual and hugs both me and Jared and tells us both how much he'll miss us both. I promise I'll come back and visit.
*Campfire songs over fireworks. People start inexplicably getting patriotic, chanting USA, USA drunkenly over our illegal fireworks purchased and transported across several state lines from South Carolina for 5 dollars or less at 2am. Time to go.

- - - - -

Notes from May 30th, 2010:

I don't know what I'm doing now. It's late. And I'm paraphrasing a Stanislaw poem, and I don't even really get poetry, and I'm also playing "Beast of Burden" as loud as possible at 4:27am on a Sunday.
What is my life,.
- Jaimi


- - - - -

Notes from June 1st, 2010:

A clear and dusty day in June
My stoned mind just spilled that line
Describing...what's it like, describing?
Believing that the sum is "yes."

Looking around at all my comrades
My police-state mind just spilled that line
I want to give names to our bonds
I need names to play the game

But what makes my heart run?
Why the thunder in my thighs?
My body
My mind
The idea of my life
Seems like a symbol

Everyone loves dead actors and film stills and French New Wave and the film Breathless, myself included. Jean-Paul Belmondo is still alive though, I just looked it up. He was way too handsome in his hey day, with a rakish, reckless charm. 50 years later, girls still can't get enough. This guy came into my work once. I couldn’t believe it – he looked exactly like a young Belmondo except that his eyes were blue and he was preternaturally ruined by life. His face was leathery and his teeth were horrible and mostly missing. I wondered how the hell that happened. Where'd all his teeth go? What ugliness seeped into his life and ruined everything? Probably meth. Avoid that one, kiddos.

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."
- Hunter S. Thompson

At work, I get so bored sometimes that I imagine weird groups of people who don't know each other but know me showing up for dinner reservations. Friends from different places, professors, ex-boyfriends, store clerks, musicians. They'd be meeting each other there for the first time maybe, most of them anyway. and then eating dinner together. What would they order? What would they talk about? Who would get the most shitfaced and who would sit there in uncomfortable silence, unsure what to do? What hilarious hijinks would ensue? Etc. That reminds me: I wanna have a potluck dinner with a bunch of unlikely people. The last time I tried that, with a group of likely people, three out of six people brought some sort of bread.

Notes to self.

“For Kierkegaard, resolution and transformation come ultimately when despair in all stages is overcome through a leap of faith. In this leap one accepts at the same time one’s weakness and one’s strength, the intermixture of the finite and infinite realms in being human, and the realization that human beings must move between the opposites rather than identifying with an absolute.”

“What is really required to relate to one’s mystery is to discriminate objectively what one’s own potentialities and limitations really are and to actualize their synthesis. “

I am kind of embarrassed to say what book this is from because the title is just so...but whatever, it's called The Wounded Woman by Linda Schierse Leonard and it's all about female issues from a Jungian perspective. I don't really know all that much about Jung, having been indoctrinated in Freud and all. While I'm still pretty much a Freudian, Jungians use some good metaphors and have super fun online personality tests (I'm an INFP, the Architect). Anyway, that passage is pretty good, eh? Not only does it offer a snappy review of some stuff I forgot from Intro to Philosophy six years ago -- shit, how'd that happen? all that time just going by like that -- but I believe it. I've been trying to figure out a whole mess of things for a long time and have sought a variety of outside sources for help/advice/direction/etc. You could say it's more of a crisis of philosophy rather than a defect of anxiety. And sure, a lot of things out there are horrible, but there's a way to make it better and not live in thrall to the things you hate. While nothing will ever all fit neatly in a little philosophical handbasket, I think ol' Soren was right.


"You're getting old like you've lived."

That's a probably inaccurate quote from Jan Wolkers, poorly translated from the original Dutch and thus likely skewering the original meaning, so I suppose you could attribute it to me. Jan Wolkers was a really cool guy and I found out about him by chance after seeing one of his book covers and wondering what it said and what it was all about. The title in English is Spun Sugar. I can't find a copy of the book but someday I will (maybe even this week) and I'll struggle through reading it and tell you what it's all about.

Anyway, something to think about, "you're getting old like you've lived". It has a nice, bizarre sort of feel to it with the odd syntax of someone whose first language isn't English. I think there's truth to it. How do you live? We've gotta think about that from time to time, as sentient beings, with vastly more options than eating bugs and evading predators, though we do that as well sometimes. There's more to it than eat-fight-fuck-die (though reality television viewing may lead one to believe otherwise). But we've still got lizard brains, instinct. What's your instinct? What drives you, from the murky depths of your subconscious? What conflicts do you struggle with? What sucks about your life and how much of that is you not knowing any better and you knowing better but letting it suck? What do you want? It's hard to get what you want when you don't know what that is. It's hard to know what you want when you're too scared. But if you live scared and worried about things you can't control and allow yourself to be willfully blinded to the options, you'll get old that way pretty fast. Of course, it's hardly easy to come to that conclusion, and much more difficult to believe it.

Aside from Manhattan's ominous, glowing towers of boxes which give me major creeps on some visceral level, like 'how could one live this way', New York's alright. I held it in contempt for awhile, though not out of some misplaced love for Boston nor that delusional, rabid fanaticism that comes with affiliation for organized sports teams. I walked up to Herald Square in a sort of daze, exhausted as I can hardly sleep before I go traveling somewhere. It was just so funny to me, this oddly placid island of relative calm amidst the rush. I sat at this little table and just sort of spaced out, looking around at all the buildings and the world gliding by and started to understand a little bit of what people might love so fiercely about this place until I was interrupted by one of those palm reader hacks with some wack ass Eastern European accent. I have trouble getting those sort of people shilling bullshit away from me. Fortunately Kim called at that point which afforded me an escape.

I didn't really get anything done but that's the point of a vacation, I suppose. Though most of what I've been doing the past few months has been "not doing" so uh, I don't know, but that's the past now. I saw people who I haven't seen in awhile which was great. Positive vibes and good dreams.

If you want comfort you should give up learning;
If you desire to acquire learning you should abandon comfort.
How can a person who wants comfort acquire learning?
And how can a person who wants to learn enjoy comfort?
- Sanskrit proverb

Another day of hustling out applications. Real cool times.

I interviewed for a generic office position in this labyrinthine office park complex this morning. It went well but I'm not going to get that particular position. And really, nor do I particularly want to mold myself into the sort of person who would be the right fit for that. Can't jam a tetrahydral peg into a pinhole, I suppose.

So the search for a job that doesn't make me want to jump off the Tobin yet also affords me enough money to move out and not starve remains ongoing. All sorts of things are up for consideration. So, I spend hours staring at my laptop screen, my eyes disintegrating from the light as well as the content. Man, I can't even believe how much horrible shit is out there and that people spend their lives doing it. Are they really that boring that they don't mind living and working in the equivalent of an ant maze doing a job that will be outsourced to either the third world or a "friendly" robot within the next few years? Why there is so much completely unfulfilling and ultimately pointless bullshit out there is something too frustrating to ponder further. The vast majority of what society has constructed to maintain an artificial consumer class is fucking horrible. I'm making myself sick here. Well, I suppose once saddled with dependents and a mortgage and things of that ilk, one's concerns tend to shift away from "intellectual stimulation" and "personal growth" and "fulfilling life experience" and "doing something awesome that is actually enjoyable rather than a suicidal gesture" towards the more banal but still important "being responsible and shit", etc. Rather than continue to contemplate that vicious infinite regress of that particular hell and ponder ways to join its discontents, I'm also considering more bohemian ventures that would allow me to be less tied down to any particular position such as nude modeling. I reckon that perhaps it will help me overcome my various and sundry vagina monologues-quality body image issues. Contradicting myself, I also just applied to a finance job. Which, for females, may as well be nude modeling. I feel as though I should have some sort of ideological opposition to that industry as a whole, but at least some of those guys don't even pretend that they're just shuffling around made up things. Trading "futures" up in the shiny glass box tower somewhere in the financial district is merely few steps in prestige and degree attainment above rolling dice in the alley below. I have a feeling that whatever I just applied for is not actually a job but the equivalent of a fishing lure -- one of those too weird and too good to be true jobs made up by staffing agencies in the financial district to actually attract folks like me in for soul pulverizing temp positions doing the most inane tasks in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire for barely above minimum wage. Fuuuuuck that. I bet they won't even call back!

How's that for a positive mental attitude? Eh, I've been trying to work on it.



This is from 2005 I'm fairly sure. I was looking at it last night and thinking "Man, how could you have ever thought you sucked?"

I retrieved my Richard Brautigan books from storage in the garage and got another one, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings. Three in a row from when he was 21:

nothing new

There
is
nothing new
under the sun
except
you and me.



the eternal she

I gave
a girl my soul.

She looked at it.

Smiled faintly.

And dropped
it into the gutter.

Casually.

God! she had class.



a young man

Surely goodness
and mercy
shall follow me
all the days
of my life,
and I will dwell
in the house
of the Lord
forever, if the
rent isn't too high.

Mattieu Laurette

Sometimes I wonder (when contemplating life post-my shitty current job and post-student loans, that is):
Do I want to just earn a ton of money to be respectable? For power? "Money corrupts" -- why is that? Because you need to stoop to skeezy means in order to accumulate vast sums of it? And what's it all for anyway? What would I even do if I suddenly had a lot of it?

(Oh come on, that's easy, everyone knows I'd just buy a town in New Zealand and build some weird stuff in it)

Sure, you could play these all at once in order to compact the amount of time it takes to feel the posi vibes, but I wouldn't recommend it. Take your time, take your time, take your time. I'm taking mine and biding time.

There's something about New England that's just totally crushing. It's not so much the Puritanical mores, rabid love of boring sports (except hockey), or its generally aggressively unfriendly denizens that's got me down -- it's the fucking horrible weather. I've got this condition and I've got it bad. Of course there's a German word for it. Fernweh, literally "an ache for the distance". How great is that?

Even though a vast area of Australia is kind of totally fucked right now, Sydney looks like this!! I wish it were at least warm enough outside to wear that and jump around taking self-portraits. But nah, not in New England. All narrow, unplowed one-way streets and black ice and frozen slush filled sidewalks (if there are sidewalks at all) lined with Shaq-high snow banks around these parts. It's gonna be gross for at least the next two months. It's got me entertaining batshit-crazy thoughts like moving to Texas. Which uh, also has snow, but Jared tells me it was warm enough last week to wear shorts. See, I don't want for all that much. Just to walk around skimpily dressed and not die of hypothermia and to sit outside eating hemp milk ice cream. (Ew how precious does that sound, but for real it is so good).

But nah, unless I spontaneously come across a cash windfall, for now:

current interests:
Talking to Kim, pouting
I've certainly been better, though not recently.






this photo by Troy Stains


reading yr book












What is this bullshit? Am I in art school now or something?

"Somebody once said to me that cartoonists are people with a good creative gift that are scared of failure as painters, so they make it comedic." - John Lennon

lewd, crude, & rude dudes







Lauren (miss you to the max)

current interest: composing horrible stream-of-conscience poems (that's pronounced 'po-EMS' by the way)

driving home from work 1/29/2011
so it goes:
dirty talk
Jameson shots
bitches
30 stiches
and sore muscles
you gotta hustle
"you touched me"
oh honey
no
I have to go
speed by 1000 night clubs, dive bars
past potential futures
with unsuitable suitors
in fast cars
bad times
listening to Sublime
I was bullshitting
just kidding
it's not 1996
I'm in a fine fix
listening to some old mix
dragged down by old frustrations
lifted by new motivation
crooked teeth
crooked smile
"won't you stay awhile?"
check engine, check engine, check engine

observations:
Old hipsters! Falafel! Microbrews! Bald heads!
10:22pm Sun, Jan 16

Old punx! Sing alongs! & so much flannel! This is our future by the way! Not bad!
10:35pm Sun, Jan 16

Working blows and I am going to blow my pay cheque on shoes and Williamsburg. I've made bros with everyone at work except maybe the boss's best friend forever, but hell even he talked to me tonight, so who's to say. I really like everyone including the notoriously difficult head chef. We talk about books and Swedish language and travel and pickled papaya (holy shit, so good). I suppose it helps my cause that he is one of the co-owners of the place -- a major strategic ally.

My boss is really the only major issue. A perfectionist to a fault -- much like myself, but about 100 times more high strung -- with the tendency to take all of her anger out at whichever employee is closest by. Which has tended to be me. However, I found that she is significantly easier to deal with three margaritas deep. She tried to get me to go shot for shot with her, but I'm not a whiskey fan, nah, gin's my thing and gin only, and anyway I'd prefer to debate politics and talk about dumb guys which was what the other patrons wanted to do. As did she. She resoundedly dismissed my previous suitors as well as those of my friends, save the Canadian pizza chain heir. I wonder if I'll end up having that attitude at some point. Not jaded but wanting a provider. At this point I don't care too much. I was less afraid of her and more amused and intrigued by her in that state. Also she declared publically that she is a fan of Sarah Palin so I won't feel all that bad if I do get fired. I held my own in the debate, winning several shots which I passed onto my boss.

It is nice when bosses finally reveal their "less professional" sides. You know that it's in them, somewhere, that they're not total robots. And it's easy to forget that bosses are human...sonewhere. Actually, no, it's more like that it's easier to forget that they tend to cover for that. If anything, at least being vaguely terrified but then remembering "Wait a minute, I don't even need anything remotely resemebling a college degree for this shit so who cares if I get fired?" is a different sort of feeling than "No one told me a frontal lobotomy was a recomended prerequsite for this position."

I drove home feeling weird and wishing I had more reliable source of disposable income. Ultimately, this must be a temporary position. At least half of my co-workers hold advanced degrees. Fuck, one of them was even a doctor in his home country. However, he seems content being head waiter and listening to Radiohead here in Boston. More motivation, if anything, for me. I shall not settle!

Kalindy Millions

I can relate.

It snowed all day. I did some things I've been putting off and listened to a lot of Neil Young. Got a lot to learn, love to burn... Keeping that in mind.

So many ups and downs lately. Oui, c'est la folie. I admit it! I don't wanna jinx anything, but I think shit's gonna start happening soon. And by "shit" I don't mean horrible things but good things. I'm cautious though, as ever, which doesn't serve me well. You know, these past few months, I've been playing it so safe I stopped playing entirely! Retired at 23! Well, fuck that. I mean, you know it's bad when your mother and your friend who works 60 hours a week both tell you to "live in the moment more".

So the thing to do is come up with absurd plans of action and extreme dreams. And then there's the hard part -- the action. Actually, no, that's wrong, that's what I used to think. The action component comes quite naturally as soon as the fear dissipates. Fear of what, you ask? You tell me. It's as irrational as anything: fear of failure, fear of ridicule, fear of rejection. Well, one simply cannot live ruled by negative potential outcomes. I'm not using a coherent metaphorical language to describe this, I know, it's past 4am after all and I'm past due for something to knock me out.

But I think it's time that we found out:


How is it that I can be nostalgic for a place that I've never been? And also this main fellow in this video, Matthew Bannister, is very good looking. I used to listen to Sneaky Feelings on the long drive back to Vermont and daydream of going to New Zealand. Studying at Otago, doing interesting and potentially even relevant academic research, living in a flat, going to rugby games, penguins on the beach, cute guys with strange accents, Tall Dwarfs, and walking up and down the steepest street in the world. Then the stock market tanked and my major wasn't approved and I quit my horrible job and I couldn't study abroad and ended up drunk in Montreal in the springtime instead of exuberant (and, yeah, drunk) in some quasi-exotic place on the other side of the world.

I'll admit it, I idealized the hell out of the place. Later on I would meet a New Zealander who would describe Dunedin as "the arsehole of the world". This sentiment was echoed recently by the Australian bartender who chatted me up while I filled out job application #313. "One for the bucket list, eh? Rubbish weather, full of whackas. Go to Sydney instead! Ahh you'll have a rip snorter in Sydney! Yep, just keep applying, she'll be right!"

Excerpts from my diary at ages 17 to 18:

A few things:
I don't dwell on the past. I don't plan ahead. I don't wear a watch that functions. I can totally relate to Smiths lyrics.

Read more »

Small town Vermont in the summertime: what else is there to do besides work at a gas station, meth, dirt biking in the woods (oft combined with meth), binge drinking, and "ugly chicks"? Making a gangsta rap side project, but of course. I enjoy their bargain bin Biggie Smalls-style and Adam's falsetto vocals.

I opened the champagne pre-emptively last night at 11:35pm. 2010 couldn't be over soon enough. Me, a master of my own reality.



p.s.: