Asleep in Green Country

Red Fox Grey Fox - Wait for Me, Abbey Bernstein, cover of a song originally by Small Towns Burn A Little Slower.

I don't really have much to say, nothing has really changed.

Reading Palms

Finally, I've been able to get sleep after weeks of trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing. I know why I can almost never sleep at night but I don't have to like it do I.

I woke up really early though, at like 3:52 A.M. if I remember correctly.

The moment I was fully awake, I slipped into some khakis, an old Anti-Flag shirt that I try not to wear but the material always smells of incense from that store that I purchased it from, and my favorite sweater that Courtney bought me a long while back, then I planted my wallet and cigarettes in my pocket and went for a long walk.

I explored many parts of town, places I had been with my friends before, places I have fond memories of. Like the church with the nice hidden hill that Robby, Jenna, and I used to sit on at night, smoking and looking down at the traffic, all the while listening to country music and talking about the future... and where I had that nub fight with Joseph and Robby in which we all got slammed into the concrete of the parking lot a little to hard.

There was also the old wall in the shopping district that we'd all sprayed our codenames on. There were also all the outlets that Robbz had placed on many of the surfaces around the town.
The road that Holly and I drove up and down till two in the morning on a day that I had to be at school early, yelling at passing people, and trying to figure out if her neighbors were going to tell her parents that they'd seen us acting like trapped animals.

Then there was probably my favorite place, the stoop in front of a small clothing store where Molly, Jared, and I used to sit at till we got tired, which usually took until about 5 in the morning. The place where we used to talk about all the things that had happened to us at school, the place where we'd tell each other wild sex stories, our hidden secrets... the things that we only tell the people closest to us.

Reliving moments of the past... Hopefully, I'll be somewhere different soon, to start this whole thing over again.

Names and Faces

It feels really weird when you know you know someone, and that you've known them forever, but besides that you can't remember who they are. You remember there name, your remember that you were connected in some way, but you don't know if you were friends or foes, if you hated them or absolutely loved them. You only know that they existed somewhere in your life and that they were there for long enough for there name to be remembered.

I've been having this happen all night, people will ask me about someone and I'll remember that I had a connection to them, but I pop up my memory file and it just says "You knew them for a couple years. You may have had 8th grade math with them." It's all very stressful.

Hmmm... Maybe I'll hunt these names down and find out exactly how I know them, and if I knew them well I'll find out if they have a husband or wife, if they have any kids, how they like there sandwiches, things that need to be known.

I don't really have a clever nonsequiter, so in other news... My little sister has a job now, I'm waiting for a call from my prospective employer which could be at anytime in the next two days, and I think I may becoming a stranger in this city. I think it might be time to actually leave, and stop just talking about it.

Passage from Time Quake by Kurt Vonnegut

At ten o'clock the old, long out-of-print science fiction writer announced it was his bedtime. There was one last thing he wanted to say to us, to his family. Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said. I held up my hand. "Me, please, me," i said.

The crowd fell quiet as i took my place to his right.

"The universe has expanded so enormously," he said, "with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history like the Pony Express.

"I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesnt matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they dont twinkle they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites."

I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was. For all i knew, it was Puke, Trout's star the size of a BB.

"Do they twinkle?" he said.
"Yes they do," i said.
"Promise?" he said.
"Cross my heart," i said.

"Excellent!" he said. "Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarified that for light to go from one to the other would take thousand or millions of years. But i now ask you to look precisely at one, then precisely at the other."

"OK," i said. "I did it."
"It took a second, do you think?" he said.
"No more," i said.

"Even if you had taken an hour," he said, "something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light."

"What was it?" i said.

"Your awareness," he said. "That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness."

Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip as he sad his last words to us that enchanted evening.

All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: "I have thought of a better word than awareness," he said. "Let us call it soul."

(Nothing to say really, job interview in an hour.)

By request of the old man that his body never lay out of ear shot of the town's bells.

It's been a rather exciting past two days. I've got a lot of things done, filled out some paper work. I'm waiting for a call from a prospective employer, which hopefully comes soon. Then I need to go sign some papers for this beautifully house that I found that hasn't been occupied for a very long time, I hope it's a murder house.

I watched the Fountain today, such a great movie. I like the interweaving of different philosophies and religious beliefs.

I think I might watch the Seventh Seal later.

Also, I need to get out of this house and go somewhere, spend some time with someone else, besides just Billy.

José Saramago...

At first I was really not excited about the film adaptation of Nobel Prize winning novel Blindness by José Saramago. Almost everytime a book is picked up by a movie studio it is inevitably ruined in some way, but after reading a little more about it I'm losing some of my gaurd towards it.

The first thing that made me drop some of my gaurd is the fact that the movie was directed by Fernando Meirelles, director of the amazing film adaptation of City of God by Paulo Lins and also the adaptation of John le Carré's (David John Moore Cornwell) The Constant Gardener. So that's got me letting up abit on my fear towards letting this film be directed.

Also, the film will not have the characters named, just like the book. I love that they kept that in because it forces you to actually watch the movie, and learn about each of these characters so that you can have a way to describe them. It might be hard for some people to watch, but oh well.

The producer and screenwriter also went to Saramago and spoke to him personally to get that rights to making the film and let him have his demands about what had to be in the film, which should help the movie stay faithful.

There have been some critics who don't care for the film, but most of their articles make it seem like the haven't even read the novel.

(Oh yeah, I read all the books that this author has directed film adaptations for last year in my reading for personal pleasure class... I wonder if he'll think about doing an adaptation of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.)

Classifieds.

I'm beginning to scare myself, not in the good ways like thoughts about maiming your enemies with a hockey stick covered in bent nails but in the awkward what-the-hell-am-I-becoming sort of way.

Firstly, I've become unnaturally obsessed with the V-neck shirts from American Apparel, which may not sound weird, but anyone who knows me knows why that's a scary thing.

Secondly, I've begun to actually be able to go to sleep normally at night, which shouldn't be a bad thing, but I actually do have literal insomnia, so it's really awkward to wake up at 8:00 in the morning like some people.

Lastly, and the major one, is that I'm beginning to develop an interest in a really good friend of mine. Until recently I've viewed this person as nothing more than a really good friend and someone who's fun to hang out with when I get the chance. But now, I've begun to notice that there is a really subtle sexiness and confidence to him that really isn't common to most people, like he's really comfortable in his own skin, it's a really attractive quality.

The bad thing is I'm don't think he's gay, even though we do flirt and play around there's never been anything sexual or romantic about it, it's just two friends teasing each other, but everyone else I talk to are pretty sure that he is a queer. I don't know what to do, I hope to be able to talk to him about it one day like I've done with other friends that I've had an attraction to.

Oh well, I'm being melodramatic.

I'm going to go buy a canteen, because I want one.

ALSO, I have to remember to tell Shawnte that she is marrying a douche bag.