I have a song in my head that I want to play, and I don't know what it is. And I'm distracted by the idea that my forgetting might be a metaphor for life. Like playing the song is the goal, maybe success or self-actualization. And the reason we can't get there is that even though we can sort of play the song in our head we can't conjur the essential elements with which to effect the actual song. I don't know.

Anyway, I have been dating a guy named Brad. I don't know what to think of him. He is nice/cute but not exceptionally interesting, and I feel like this summer I just want to be around people that completely blow my mind. That's asking too much. But maybe. I am meeting and hanging out with a lot of new people, while trying to maintain my friendships from the [ast year. I am pretty successful so far but it means I haven't been able to do the truly meaningful things like apply for scholarships and read, which is making me sort of depressed.

I got a 4 on the Art History :(

Take me to college!

Today I am sitting at my computer. Pretty high. I am texting a 24-year-old who I met at a club, and we make arrangements to "hang out" in his new appartment after my 12-hour-shift at work tomorrow (I get off at 11:00). I pull out a pamphlet to look up my account at Carnegie Mellon and establish my password so I can select a meal plan. I have a job interview on Monday, flying out to Wisonsin on Wednesday right before a summer of (maybe) a full and a half-time job. And I feel like an adult or like I am becoming one. In kind of a scary way...

feeling authentic
facebook not working
had fun. lost ipod. wrote a poem
poem is called feeling authentic

Feeling authentic

The things that were my life went away
And I realized I am nothing
That I can forget every capacity I had
Every thing that gave me worth
Can't imagine not being here
Can't decide if I need sleep

Date:	2009-03-22 13:16
Subject:	Time
Security:	Public
Mood:	contemplative
Music:	Ashley- the Dodos

I was up until 6 last morning. With some girls. We called ourselves a big pile of rejectection. Decided we were society's garbage. Didn't really have anything to look forward to. Hallucinating in the kitchen, she performed self-portrait as a fountain without even knowing it. We coined several phrases and nicknames. I had several:

1) Garrett the Grape- my face was small and purple in many pictures we took
2) Rudy- I am a gross old man
3) Steroids boy- no idea on this one. But she was hitting on me all funny. Interesting quotes, unthinkable sober. "When I get near you, I want to touch myself"
4) Gorilla- "Go back to the zoo!"

Emily was:

1) Queen of the Bed- she was like all big and nasty like funamentally attatched to her bed. When we got in with her, we were her "guests" and needed to be "invited"
2) The Thing- When the Queen gets nastty
3) AZN- as always

Sarah was just

1) A beast or
2) Gung-ho Sarah- to capture her sarcasm
3) The reject of the rejects- at least in the pictures
4) There was an exhibit for her boob at the zoo?

Major events were
1) The crossing paths of Meghan and Potato Head
2) The presence of "The Beth"
3) The Entrance of Sarah
4) "The Embrace"- Sarah and I were both being as schitzophrenic as possible and she made me hug her. Her face was so demonic. It was not actually awkward because the ceiling was moving, but definitely raw in a way I can't describe.
5) "Our Friend"- stolen lawn ornament of a snowman

And as usual, I left feeling absolutely and fundamentally rejected. We all did. We decided it was not "The human condition", but that there was some underlying fear of it at the base of friendship and many selfish human interactions. I was feeling pretty "Eastern philosophy"--pretty "accept and grow" from insufficiencies and the reality that if I am ever "happy" it won't be soon. I need a dermatologist, now.

Date:	2009-03-16 22:06
Subject:	Cuticles
Security:	Public
Mood:	depressed

Cuticles

No wonder they said if Trouble laid his hand across you
So it was meant to be. And no wonder they defined two poles
One evil one good, for acceptance and rejection, for how
Else can we evaluate ourselves? And no wonder the objections
erupted as from a geyser: life is fluid! happiness is fluid!
Or does it catch hold of notches, shoot up and down in set
Intervals? Or does it find its way to destiny like the edge
of the sea finds its way exactly to the inch where my toes
can curl into the rough earth without wondering where else
the sea could be? And if asked to control the hand of Trouble
Would I find myself in a state of sacrifice or self-affirmation?
Would I close my fragile fingers and take notice of the webs
between them and the almost imperceptible yet persistant itch
Of my cuticles, to which, maybe, all of my self-control
can be attributed? Would I find similarities between my hand
and his? No wonder they said we are created in his image.

I think I know why I am so reckless and stupid and get into so much trouble. I am happy at exactly the times I should be horribly depressed and vice versa. Except right now, I feel pretty bad and I should be feeling pretty bad, which is throwing me off. What happened to anger-induced adrenaline being the high that kept filling in as my raison d'etre until I get into college?

Basically, I am wondering if everyone is so self-obsessed. Narcissism sucks for everyone. But not self-love... I guess self-love is fine. The type of narcissism I experience is when you almost vomit all over every mirror you look into.

Going to Harvard this weekend, which I hope will be fun--would be better if I had any spending money at all--and if I wasn't thinking about returning to my life here the whole time--oh yeah, and if I wasn't debating. But I guess it is a small price to pay. The guy from the Brown interview e-mailed me: "You have a lot of things on the ball"

I am almost tempted to respond: "Actually, most of my things are scattered around under the ball and some of them have even found their way onto cones and such."

I will let you

Even now it is winning or losing.
There is no construction- only argument,
No social harmony- only social hierarchy.
People either hate you or love you in a
Bipolar world of paradox.
Even now it is consolation.
It is going to your family and friends
And providing the much better argument.
Sure.
Okay.
You win.
What now?
There is nothing I’d rather do than answer
A rhetorical question like,
“You DON’T pay attention, do you?”
or “Your memory IS terrible, isn’t it?”
Nothing I’d rather do than tell you the
Only appropriate answer: Yeah, I suck.
Now, a rhetorical question for you:
What if I refuse to hate you?
It vexes you, doesn’t it?
I only wish you wouldn’t need
To be right before answering.
I’m over it. I’m not mad.
I swear.
But if you aren’t then I will let you
Worry about it.

Dreams

I dreamt
I was a nitrate
Undergoing the frustrating struggle to hold myself in,
Being lifted into a thousand molecular helicopters
Damning solubility. I dreamt
I was a Tane Muhata
Son of sky and Earth, possibly knowing
What love feels like, but more likely just the high-up
Feeling of falling or lashing out in knotty ascent. I dreamt
I was the vapor trail looming above Albuquerque
From the low Sandias, following
The majestic curve of human consumption like the curve
Of God's voice whining. I dreamt
I was a golem
Coughing up filth, flexing joints which are peacock copper
Or oil shale distilling into strange voices
whispering "fags" in a restaurant. I dreamt
I was Sisyphus walking away,
Realizing if truth was not the meaning
Then love surely cannot be either: The meaning is
A stomach churning.

Selina

I cannot concentrate
on Selina, her father's glasses
with yellow lenses

two pinkies, head back and
legs that are shaking out of control:
unsolved rubix cube

mention glasses party
mention of how to make the first move
spandex: Selina

Can't interpret the mean-
ing of a nose, Heather Wilson and
youth governership

Purple Halo

A song called "holy dances"
Rubbing my callused heal against the ball of my foot
Laying on the foam hot tub cover
A mask on the wall, staring
Lower back pain

I remembered sending an e-mail
To a woman, Ms. Taxy
And wondering how to finish it
"Best" or "Thanks" or in some silly way
That exemplifies my inner Dada
Like "not a starfish"

Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock:
Difficulty of translating poetry
Into French

A circular fixture like the sun
On the Stele of Naram-sin
Rubbing my callused heal against the ball of my foot
Thinking of the time I called myself
A "mal enfant", but meaning to say
"Enfant terrible"

Finally, the sensual, the religious
Appreciating my foot, finally
Back and forth to the beat
The round purple mask
A song called "holy dances"

Hass speaks of hedgehogs

A zit is a stopgap measure
Your face takes to construct
a patch of veins hardly visible
But as red as
Boiled tomato skin.
My chin recedes and it
looks as dirty as
The dark bruises under my eyes
"Morning eyes" she says, drugged

The sky is feeling particularly social
So it descends upon me,
in an attempt to become as obtrusive
as possible.
Unfortunately for the sky,
I am not easily disturbed.
A life lesson:
It should have paid closer attention
To the eyelids

The atmosphere is evolving towards
my face, penetrating:
A bed of light,
a snake pit.
I think maybe Genesis is
all true
I certainly feel as if
I am made of dirt.
Especially my face.

Shoin: "What do guys think they get from fucking as many girls as possible? Like it's a game? Do you win something?" Thinking about this, we say people are losers in this sort of abstract subjective game Living in which the object is merely to discover the rules, and the rules are so complex and always-changing that they evade ever being learned. Living is a game of learning and the crowd is the teacher. See a rule that seems to work? Play by it. See someone who seems happy, and, maybe, in making yourself a reflection of them you might be happy also. But happiness has been filtered into sex and money and the illusion that these are the only paths to happiness is pervasive in school, popular music, general media. "How you should live," according to the self-help section has become this sort of plastic political restraint that only offends the id. And yet winning offends the superego so that the people who have won seem to die losers and Truth seems ever more distant with each brainwashed generation desperately seeking but failing to procure a plastic political future, a theraparchy demobilizing future Hitlers with "Be yourself," and, "That's totally normal." The irony! Following advice to be independant.

I lie in a bed, stomache wriggling and walls shifting and transforming into roundabout textural migrations. The girl next to me will drop out of high school next week. Don't know about the other one, Sarah. They insult eachother and then forget what they said just a second before. We recall the time she needed to call her mom from my house so I called her cell phone with my cell phone and her mom with my home phone, both on speaker. I put the two phones together. Her mom: "You sound so far away". Nerves complain all over. "You are on speaker, mom." Actually, she is about to fuck Wade McCollough who has a zia tattoo on his chest. Now, I'm in bed, Alice in Wonderland on TV, insults, and I feel like a loser.

Lol My ridiculous Common App Essay.

Running Clinic
There is this woman from Russia. You can tell because her thick accent stands out from the buzz of the air conditioner, distinctly above the other voices, as she outlines her workout plans to the speaker at the workshop. He, clearly uninterested, is shmearing his bagel and going over his slides in his head. There I am, the only person under thirty, sitting next to a man in a fluorescent lightweight jacket with many apparently unnecessary zippers. I do not know that I am about to realize why I love running. We embark on eight sedentary hours in the “VO2 MAX: Distance Running Clinic.”
Within thirty minutes, Mr. Karp, the speaker, who appropriately resembles a fish, realizes that keeping runners in chairs for even half that time will be a challenge. He tries to keep it interesting by modulating his voice and gesticulating dramatically as he explains why “lactate threshold is the best physiological predictor of distance running performance.” 8:00 am becomes 10:00 am, and no one has gotten up and left. Success! Fluorescent jacket man, Robert Robergs, chassés out of his chair to advertise his electrolyte drink—for an hour. Now the distance runners become restless, so I raise my hand and ask about some statistic I’ve read about Gatorade. As he answers, he walks over to me to slip me a business card, which accents his ridiculous name; I will tack it to my bedroom wall the next day. My question gets Russia started about Gatorade and Americans, and about how we’re always drinking soda, and how we use too much ice.
Several more hours of this. A Kenyan, who goes to the podium and acts bewildered about the source of his incredible talent, informs us that he ran fifteen miles to school. A remarkably unscientific graph which plots “fitness” versus “fatigue” in a Microsoft Paint wave pattern appears behind Mr. Karp. Finally, since we need a break, toothpicked turkey sandwiches and potato salad are served. I am a vegan, so I abstain, but lunch is an opportunity to meet a runner, eating bits of bread she picks off the top of her sandwich, who gets up at three in the morning to run with a headlamp.
I sneak away from my conversation for another electrolyte drink; this whole thing is too much. Runners are crazy, but that’s why I fit in. I am as offbeat as the erratically clapping worshipper in a Baptist church service. I am a get-up-at-three-with-my- headlamp type of guy, and that’s why I love running. Running does not require anything but a will and a voice in your head that will not leave you alone. “You are your own person!” Of the groups of which I consider myself a part, running is the only one that can pull me out of bed on winter break and dictate that I hold nothing back.
It is also a component of my sanity. The walls in my room, which are painted white to accommodate my artwork (sketches in Sharpie) and clippings of anything I find interesting, might resemble the thoughts in my head. Running is the focus that can neatly organize any complicated matter into a goal and starting place, that can navigate through my eclectic collection of ideas. The phrase “clear your head” seemed somewhat daunting, a bit like “brainwash yourself”, before I experienced it. Now I realize that sometimes the only thing missing in my head is a bit of empty space.
So, as the piles of essays, with titles like “The Uncanonical Dante”, accumulate on my desk, I am eager to find a stopping point at which I can push in a pair of earbuds, crank up the freak folk, snap on a pair of trainers, and celebrate running.

No Atoms

I was all a biplane whose vapor burbon monoxide intoxicated the sky
Four seasons and a worn out sun gets closer to spitting
The space back out, with no atoms to fill it
Carried an inoculation loop everywhere, just in case
A light bulb and a magnifying glass to corner the sun
Why not some spent uranium while I'm at it?
Laughing at the heirloom tomatoes and durum wheat
That's not technology! That's therapy.
No. I'm talking about the Bunsen burner
The Capillary tube, Spetrophotometers, systems to make
A gas chromatograph. To think, someone out there
is frying sopapillas, scooping cool eggplant innards.
Someone is the assistant prop manager of a movie that
will get bad reviews. I have with me an electrical
engineer and a rocket scientist an erlenmeyer flask
full of triple sec. Progress is the name. Progress.

Burrito

When I attended Del Norte High for a semester, I felt pretentious among the girls who would come to school in faded pajama bottoms, and the boys who security guards would escort to class from fights. My attendance was, somehow, a mistake; I had been flung into a culture as exotic as the ones I read about in sub-Saharan Africa, and I felt myself quickly developing into an anthropologist. Even some of the teachers were objects of my scholarly espial, like my English teacher who regularly compromised grammar in a show of Ebonics.
Cross country was no exception. The Albuquerque Academy has a nationally competitive cross country team with over forty members; At Del Norte, I joined a troop of eleven. I joined with my best friend, who incurred a stress fracture in the second week, and still cannot run significant distances, two years later. So, as one often finds himself when he least wants to, I was alone. Yet, loneliness and fresh beginnings imparted the taste of opportunity.
At one practice, the team went to the “dump hills” to run. I drove there in the car of my newfound friend, who we called Tubby. Only in New Mexico could you find a landscape so absurd; We parked by an abandoned mattress in the midst of giant sand dunes in the shapes of clouds and wild organic funnels. My surroundings, as surreal as death, reminded me that I was supposed to have consumed a concoction of alcohol and sleeping pills, and that gossamer threads of happiness can be torn apart repeatedly, but bodies will keep on functioning just as mercilessly. Each new experience brings the promise of revival, and the dust and sweat that enveloped me were as effective as responsibility and love of life as elements of my sanity.
After practice, we drove to Taco Bell for burritos under-a-dollar and soda, a crime on most cross country teams. Eating in Tubby’s car with Hot Hot Heat blasting on the radio, I realized that I had never felt belonging. I had been part of many teams and classes and groups, but I was always looking in as if reading a book, and now I forgot that I was an observer; I forgot that I was a hopeless jumble of cognitive processes, desperately trying to come to conclusions; I forgot I was an awkward fag with a bad personality; I forgot self-loathing and unending regret and the pimple on my chin and my obnoxious gasping laugh that echoes in my head for hours after it has escaped my mouth. I wish I could have died then, sweaty and exhausted, eating a burrito.

Poem With a Swollen Face

I thought about the political process,
But just thinking of it made me feel small.
My swollen face throbbing. Applesauce politics.
How are there terrorists: I can barely swallow
solid foods.
What does a politician think when he sees...
"No War" or "Flower Power" in a window?
Advil, Advil, come to my rescue!
Maybe if they started "Peace School",
an international treaty, which
beholds an applesauce curriculum.
ICBM stands for
If Cake Baked Me.
Brainwash waves rupture power hierarchies.
Throw the old TV out:
You'll do better with
some paint and some acid.
Yeah, that'll show today school
PBS and bulletpoint school
"Peace School" doesn't give a shit about
Character Counts, no all the students know:
"Character is a construct."
This is real, hallucinogen balloon
and whhooop! Electric drugs for
size! You are not small anymore,
You are able!
You and your swollen face.

It is one in the morning. I want to feel horrible pain. I want to break everything. I want to vomit everywhere and scream and cry and cut open a few throats. Instead, I finished a college essay I have been working on for months. I don't like it, but I don't think I will write one I like in the next 24 hours (my time limit on this)

Drawn In

A cyclone of purple smudges, the faintest yellow undertone almost entirely obscured, and I hope to arrive at a face. The mirror is a thousand fluid forms, and no identities. A line of high contrast, elevations and depressions, or the brilliance of colors mixing take the place of “me”. There is some unavoidable authenticity; the lure of art is its exotic nature and simultaneous familiarity.
This combination in art—familiarity and foreignness—draws me to it like a reptile is drawn to sunlight. Jean-Paul Sartre explained, “The goal of art is to recover this world by giving it to be seen not as it is, but as if it had its source in human freedom.” He captures the idea that art is an experience instead of a product, like a crunchy leaf begging you to step on it, the thing itself is not the appeal so much as your own actions on it. But deeper than that, Sartre incorporates human freedom, an innate truth, which may be what feels so familiar to me; You cannot extricate art from life or instinct. I learned this from my cousin Amelia, 7. I was teaching her to draw faces. To her, as to any professional artist, there was a point in her work that felt “right”, after which she did not need to make any changes; she captured the universe within her own perception. When I asked her if she thought her (drawn) face looked like a photograph, she said it didn’t. This suggested an early recognition of existence before essence; she thought she had gotten at what something was but realized she did not capture what it seemed like. I could imagine the words of Hamlet escaping her second-grade lips: “I know not seems”. I could imagine the burgeoning freedom, so like home, in a creature wholly dependant upon others.
To ignore the enigmatic beast Art who disappears into a mist before you can make out its shape and size is to see it incompletely. Art requires more then a step from the comfort zone; it requires a dive away from acceptability. The first thing to be learned from art classes? Shed preconception. You don’t know what stuff looks like. So stare up at your subject instead of down at your paper. More comprehensively, see something each time as though you have never seen it before. The subject of your drawing is as unique and unknown as an ancient artifact. The comfortable emotional outburst in art accompanies a foreign rethinking, not only of what something looks like, but what it acts like, what it could become. “There are no edges”. Observation insinuates existence, but only if an artist can make his subject foreign.
Familiarity and foreignness. Investigating why I love art has been one of the most significant academic experiences for me; It has become a motivation for my future. Art feels natural, and it also feels like a stretch. In art, I know what is right only by questioning what I know already.

I feel my neck jerk suddenly away because I can not look them in the eyes. The thing is eyes are so easily misunderstood, not that I would actually mind it. The statements that are rehearsed come out like ghosts and shadows. They are obscured and repressed by context. They are arrows pointed just wide of the eyes of my listener. Luck makes the ones that are unrehearsed incomplete or entirely inaccurate sometimes. "Yes," I would respond, without first listening to the question. "I mean no. Totally lied." Thinking seems to get in the way of functioning whenever it can. Mostly sentences begin with "I don't understand..." and end, "I don't know." The reception is obviously more positive to the ones that are decisive, but then I become overconfidant, and luck melts away the conversation like cars melt away chocolate. Forgotten and disgusting... ill-formed. Compliments: I cringe at them, while simultaneously being brightened. "Thanks" is always so awkward and it is too likely that a quacking noise will take its place. Questions: I want to spend etrnity answering. If I could only recieve without giving. Plato would hate it, but if only eyes were more lucid.

First was the turkey. Turkey is always the first.
Chained man in lederhosen wishing me a happy thanksgiving indeed
But when he wished it, there were so many birds fluttering around us.
He had no money, and I had no heart.
Second was the stuffing.
Suffer fluffy bunnies
Black People! the sirens screamed angrily
Cardboard boxes stacked high on the roadside
Third was a smile.
Endless eye spirals
Which cannot even see satire
The candyman has diabetes

Date:	2008-11-20 23:27
Subject:	Sean
Security:	Public
Mood:	dorky
Music:	Easy to be Around- Diane Cluck

Sean

I've started to name security cameras.
I named my first one Sean.
I drive blithely to the intersection
Neitzche called the moment;
Suddenly a burgeoning optimism
Runs up my arms and to my forehead
Where it can modify my dreams.

What am I talking about? Pomegranites?
Or hope for an auspicous beginning?
Or a stinging mishap as I reach
awkwardly outward? Or mac and cheese
entering my body, making me warm?
--So much like looking up from under
a sunset willow tree, writhing

Anchor Blue jeans that graced
my car seat are my fervent wish
to break from this carapace
which has grown too like home.
I wonder why "I don't know" has
nested at the end of my thoughts
and why I laugh too much, too loud.

Someone accused me of being jealous.
I thought I didn't know jealousy,
But they were right, I was.
Now, it's a funny thing, before
I had felt it, I thought jealousy
was probably always bad.
Not quite.

I realized it is an emotion
for children, wanting to grow.
I realized I was in the garden of
Eden, jealous of the snake, because
for all I had, it had wisdom.
I realized the image I saw in the
mirror was less complex than the one
they saw. And I just want to see it
clearly!

Green is the color of money, yes.
But not the color of jealousy.
In fact, jealousy is the color of
grey matter.

I manumit my eyes, my fingers, my ears
Also my tongue and mouth, my nostrils.
All I want is my mind to be a slave
to me.

All I want is to see intricate patterns
On my inner eyelid, in which
everything I know is a line
And the other lines are everything I don't,
So I can traverse them, like a
weary camel, on the worn path of
wisdom.