FINE

I'LL FUCKING MOVE TO TUMBLR.

GARSH.

well. she's right.

R.I.P. TEENA MARIE

1)wake up 2)speak up

I've lived a lucky life thus far in the way that I've never faced any obvious sexism or rampant gender prejudices. But every now and then I hit a wall and I'm like..."Wait a second...this is happening because I'm a girl and no other reason."

I should learn to extract myself from the vices of my gender. Like using my boobs to get what I want. Or playing dumb. Or playing weak. Or flirting. Effective, but a short term victory. Talking my way out of parking tickets and letting my male friends be right all the time so that they'll grant me something later or continue being my friend might feel like I've won something, but it is more detrimental in the long run.

Ladies.

I'll stop if you will. Just go ahead and open up that pickle jar on your own. Change that tire. Kill that spider. He can live without that ego boost. If not..well..find a better man. There are men out there that don't need to put you down to raise their own egos.

I get to a point where my male friends treat me like a child, they babysit me, they work on films without me, they confer with each other first and then pick someone to address me, and it angers me in a small way, but then I realize- Oh. I've trained them to treat me this way for a long time. I've acted the part. They aren't doing anything wrong. It's my fault. Oh dear, is that my instinctive guilt coming out? Women blame themselves a lot. Ugh, I can't tell anymore.

There is no feminism-fast track to acceptance. I'm not sure how to handle this. Other than, 1) Wake Up, and 2) Speak up. Um. I might need a new tattoo for the latter. That's the harder one.

I like being passive. I find peace in being non-confrontational. Gotta rewire the brain. I'm in the wrong industry for pacifism.


BE aggressive, BE, BE aggressive!!!!

Because we are taught not to be that way from a very young age.

The Wolf & I

I'm working on a film. It's called "Patience." It was my idea. It's all happening.

All y'all new visitors creeping up on my google analytics, I see you. I hear ya baby. If you want a voice in this town, and you got big ideas, let me know. I do too. It's gonna be okay.

Anger, all the time!

I can't help but feeling like we are a nation of enraged souls sometimes. Yes, you can argue that the zombie zeitgeist fad is just representative of our passive consumerism, but sometimes I feel like we are born to rage! Rage against the dying of the light, against the machine, we fight and fight and fight until our dying day, just to be heard. Clawing our way upwards out of obscurity. At least I think that's the path for artists. It's an uphill battle.

But if one's born into battle, and doesn't know any other kind of life, then how could the battle seem so bad? It's all you've known, and all you've had. (Thanks, Nicole Atkins.)

The waves fight the shore timelessly, infinitely, and crash on the rocks over and over again and the undertow will fight to pull you under and the dawn fights at the day fights at the light fading fights at the night. I don't see ecosystems anymore. I see great big bursts of chaos and confusion that inexplicably form patterns. We call it the circle of life.

Some mornings I wake up feelin' like an untapped resource. Sometimes my dreams eclipse reality.

white sea

well there's that

Someday I'm going to write something and it's going to scare people and they're going to trace it back to my life, like, "Where did that come from?" And I'll just tell them that my writing is generally a spillway for coasting through internal haze. And that the internal haze rarely translates into action.

Sometimes I merge lanes on the highway without checking any of my mirrors. I just brace for impact. It never comes.Painted the fuck out of my room

i wish i were you

Im'ma radio. You're a radio. I think we are all radios, just mechanized bits of meat and desire who are equipped to send out frequencies. Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. Ground Control to Major Tom- can you hear me?

When people pray to an unseen/unheard god they are on a ham radio, searching, scanning, looking for someone on the same frequency. Someone to hear our broadcast. People praying are broadcasting hope. Someone listen.

When I sleep in the same house as my mother we sometimes have similar dreams. We're on the same wavelength.

Over and out.

ideas

A friend just told me to write down my ideas. Sometime I'm good about that, mostly I'm not. My thoughts live and die in conversations with loved ones for the most part. I save my thoughts to say to you because I love you.

1) I've been watching a lot of 80's films because I'm drawn to the pre-internet and pre-cell phone communication styles. The film "The Warriors," which is incredible, could not be made today as it is. It's based on a mistranslated act of violence, and today, which all the flipcams and iphones and bullshit we have to record history as it occurs, the premise of the film is an obsolete threat.

2)I like 80's films because they do not have to accommodate technology the way contemporary films do. There isn't a third party technology interface involved to communicate things through characters. It's all done through human interaction, without being enslaved to media devices. I like it. It's refreshing.

3) People losing each other in films is a problem. Like in The Warriors, or The Pick Up Artist (Molly Ringwald, Robert Downey Jr, 1989). Without cell phones, if you lose someone in New York City you will lose them. I like the justification of chasing down your target and the threat of a city swallowing up someone. You can't find them on facebook. You can't google them. They are gone.

fuzzy memories

sad songs and chardonnay

story of my fucking life.

I GOT SOMETHIN' TO SAY

Sorry, folks- I've been watching Strangers with Candy on netflix. So good. Watch it.

Anyway, I saw something TERRIFYING today

I went to the "Novel Cafe" in Santa Monica, which is right next to where I work, so that I could pick up a grilled cheese sammich for lunch. As I had forgotten my phone at work, which I would normally fiddle with while waiting for my food order to be ready, I seized the opportunity to window-watch the people passing by. Normal, right? Skinny kid smoking. Surfer mom and her blonde gap toothed kids. Meathead boyfriend in a green day shirt and his skinny little girlfriend holding hands.

The passersby hit a lull and I stopped backtracking their life stories, so I turned around to face the inside of the restaurant.

SO DIFFERENT Y'ALL

There are these little tulip shaped lights that I had never paid attention to before, and today I realised that they aren't lights at all- but hanging outlets for phones and laptop chargers, above each and every table. Convenient, right?

Everyone in the restaurant was plugged in and talking on their cell phones, or clicking away at a laptop. No one was talking to each other. It was scary to look at because people were quite literally plugged in- a woman was shouting, indifferent and oozing self-importance, while her blackberry was plugged in above her. She was skinny and standing, tethered to the tulip. She had fake breasts. Another man was pacing, while attached to his charger, talking to Gotham Records (the label sticker on his Mac laptop, I'm assuming it's his workplace) about signing somebody or something.

I hated. I'm never fiddling with my phone in public again.

We use technology as a communicative crutch. It's easier to push the buttons on a keyboard to broadcast meaning than to speak the words. I'm doing it right now. I've done it before. I love you. I miss you. See? I just did it again.

Someone apologized to me via facebook for breaking my heart three years ago. Wish he would have said it three years ago, when it hurt the most.

I'm lookin' for truth, here, people. Something real. Something not presented to me through a technological buffering interface to diffuse the pain or discomfort. Don't tell me I'm in the wrong city for that- I know it's here somewhere, hiding.

New York was gritty, sharp, real- it was video. Los Angeles is grainy, fuzzy, soft, smeared, faraway, smoothed over with smoggy skylines. The whole goddamn city looks like a faded photograph. There's truth somewhere here too. There's real people.

So long, summer. It's been real.

I meeeeeeeeannnnn...damn.

I was stuck in traffic today and I saw New Jersey license plates. I just about cried. New Jersey is a wasteland, yeah, but really it was seeing someone that was so far from home, too. It was seeing something so familiar in a place that really isn't. I really miss New York. I miss you. (yes, you)

It's going to be easier once the boys get here. They begin their road trip tomorrow morning in the AM- two weeks of driving cross country to make it to mecca, where I already am. (waiting)

When I look back on this time I'm going to remember the music I was listening to mostly. I'm feelin' music like never before, like, it's breaking my heart and waking me up and stopping the gap- I heard Jose Gonzales' "Heartbeats" recently, and oh, hell, it just took my breath away. I had to turn the damn song off to catch my breath! Hearing that song felt like a pain in my chest.

That's the most defining part of my new life. Music. I feel like the people that are coming in and out of my life right now are static. And I feel that way because you spoiled me.

I got so used to being myself, unfiltered and uncensored, that I forgot what it was like outside our little Brooklyn bubble. I can't do that here. I can't say what's on my mind because I get blank looks. I can't say how I feel (or voice the lack) because people are scared of how I live. Meeting tons of new people, building up that rolodex, yeah, but it's like flipping through a deck of cards to figure out how to present myself. I'm good at being charming. I'm not good at being myself. How long did it take with you? Awhile. And we lived together.

So many new people. But I don't know them and they don't know me. I can't wait until the boys are here. I feel like my anchors are road trippin'. My kite strings are coming! I need reminders of who I am. I don't want this place to change me. I'd rather evolve, first. Let the city morph to fit my needs. So far, so good, but I'm feelin' that strain of survival adaptation, that pull of self-preservation. I keep having to remind myself of who I am because I get lost in the shattered parts of who I think people want me to be. Remember who you are.

This is a love letter.

I wrote this song for you: (not really)

villianess

c'mon now

Would someone like to inform me of the exact percentage that my adult life will be spent sifting and sorting through disappointment? I would like to schedule around it. Thank you.

Parents- stop teaching us that if we work for anything, we will get it. Stop teaching us this. Stop coddling us. You baby-boomers, man. You brought us up softened and sorted into neat piles of self-esteem and self-worth so we enter out into the work force thinking we are necessary for something (see HERE. and you know that shit is legit because it's the mathafucking ny times.) and that we might even be overqualified for whatever it is we are approaching. It sucks. We're stunted.

Not that I dislike work. I love work. Working. Having a job to exhaust me. I think its marvelous. Being employed out of college is just splendid.

I dislike the ebb and flow of false hope. This, I find, is supplementary to pretending to be grown up. The parking garage that is $60 a month and a 10 minute walk away. The coffee that I spill in my car. The DIMINUITIVE paychecks. The friend who is angry with me. The boy that didn't call. The Ikea bed that did not come with all its parts. The cockroaches. The mac'n cheese nights. The clothing on the floor.

I'm requesting a time table, plz. I would like very much to know when I can expect the pieces of my life to fit together nicely, like they are supposed to. Like I was taught they would. When everything will fall into place, because I was told that they would. Well, I'm working, world. Hard. Exhaustively.

ATTN KARMA: cut me a deal.

I don't fear that things won't get better, because things always do, eventually. I fear that they might get worse before this happens though.

I'm feelin' like an unencumbered embittered heathen these days. Dazed like an antebellum dream. Sleepin' like a creepy mummy.

I got a tattoo months ago that says "Wake Up." Apparently this permanent reminder is not enough.

spaceman, oh, spaceman, come rescue me

I got somethin' to say. I've got a theory I've been working on that has been pinging around unsaid in my skull for awhile.

You can pitch in if you've got some more fact or fiction to contribute.

I'm religiously untethered. (That's a nice way of calling myself a heathen, y'all.) I tend to see a lot of physical prospect out there, in this whole great big universe, that when I confront it, I back down a little. The world is so big, and we are just the gum on a planet's shoe.

I think not being religious can lead to a certain sense of impending doom. Atheists must live life as a means to an end, right? This is it. This is all we've got. It's hard to keep yer face up and smile into the sun with that kind of attitude, I'll bet. Not having a God up there can make you feel so small and insubstantial.

I used to sit in church when I was a little girl and feel like such an impostor. It all seemed so silly to me. I got baptized and cried, not because I felt the touch of Jesus or I felt connected to God, but because I looked up into the pastor's sweet face and thought "This is a ridiculous show," and I cried for lying.

I believe in art. I seek refuge in music, film, literature, and I think museums are my temples where I go to worship. That's where I experience enlightenment.

There's something else, too. I think science-fiction is the rational mind's answer to religion. I mean, think about it. Futurism and the obsession with the superiority of man-made technology seems like a hopeful prayer for longevity. For something more. For a goddamn eternity.

When I look at sci-fi nerds (like myself) and what we're drawn to, this is what we're praying for. Not a dystopian downfall, necessarily, but the idea that We. Are. Not. Alone. And I don't mean that we believe in little green men and probes and whatnot, that's reserved for the Roswell conspirators. We aren't consciously hoping for E.T. to come be our best franz plz, but just by being drawn to science fiction we are displaying an acceptance of the subject matter which implicates at least some sort of belief in it.

So I've been hoarding science fiction music to aid and abet my obsession. And I'm choosing to write about it now because I think science fiction film and literature is a more obvious choice. I'm more interested in the deviations and where the edges fray, and where sci-fi meets normal. Science Fiction music in my mind is divided into two categories:

1)"Subject" Science Fiction : Music that clearly states science fiction subject matter within the lyrics or title. Includes space, time, stars, aliens, etc.

"Rocket Man" by Elton John
"Spaceman" by Bif Naked
"Robocop" by Kanye West
"Remains of the Sun" by Leitvox
"Sad Robot" or "Space Invaders" by Pornophonique
"Starshine" by Gorillaz
"Conquer" by ABK, Esham, & Violent J
"The Stars Are Projectors" by Modest Mouse
"When They Came For Us" and "We Are Pilots" by Shiny Toy Guns
"Extraterrestrial" by Outkast
"Starstruck" by Santogold
"We Are All Made of Stars" by Moby
"Space Mountain" by Fuck Buttons
"One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21" by The Flaming Lips
"I Want to be a Machine" by Pornophonique
"Slipstream" by the Crystal Method
"Space Oddity" and "Life On Mars?" by David Bowie (DUH)
"Phone Home" by 'Lil Wayne
"From Stardust to Sentience" by High Places
"I'm So Tall" by Chester French
"Paranoid Android" by Radiohead
"Technologic" and "Robot Rock" by Daft Punk

OR

2) "Prospect" Science Fiction: Music that utilizes typically science fiction "noises" like electronic beeps or sonar noises, without necessarily singing about science fiction. Not just electronica music. More like electronic, technological echoes that you would typically hear in a science fiction film score.

"Flashing Lights", "Stronger" and "Coldest Winter" by Kanye West
"Look Back In" by Moby
"Purr" by Tides From Nebula
"Rome" by Yeasayer
"Lullatwerp" by Disastertron
"Chromakey Dreamcoat" or "Satellite Anthem Icarus" by Boards of Canada
"What I Have Left" by Alexis Taylor
"Nights of the Week" by Apes and Androids
"We're Looking for a lot of Love" by Hot Chip
"Coconut" and "When I Grow Up" by Fever Ray
"Flying" by Secret Machines
"DEA" by The American Dollar
"Alice" by Pogo
"Sexy Saturn" by Bix
"Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit
And pretty much everything by this guy.
Or this girl.

It seems that the sci-fi is either implicit or explicit within each category. Some bands, like Daft Punk or Pornophonique pretty much exclusively write songs heralding technology or space. There's even a subdivision of my subject sci-fi just for sci-fi rap. Think Kid Cudi, some Kanye songs, 'Lil Wayne's "Phone Home" or ABK's "Conquer. It seems to me that a lot of sci-fi rap involves a conquering theme, which is congruent to the mainstream aim of most hip hop and also seems to be the mission statement of science fiction. A lot of those songs, no matter what the genre or target demographic, will employ those fuzzy radio voices calling out to you through some staticky nowhere. Hope from beyond.

And all these different songs- this is just what I cound find in my 7500+ Itunes. So that's got to just be a sampling.

Furthermore, I noticed that when I was searching for links to the implicit prospect sci-fi music, a lot of the "fan made" videos depicted space scenes, orbits, galaxies...just images of space they lifted and set to the music, even though the songs never discussed space explicitly. Like Fever Ray's "Coconut" and Alexis Taylor's "What I Have Left." Both show space pictures. Both not about space. People know. They feel the same way.

Isn't this amazing, how this subject seeps into music from so many different genres?

And then I realized.

It's our gospel music.

When we sing out to the stars, we are throwing out our hope for a forever out there, not at the hands of some unnamed, unknown deity, but placing our faith in mankind to rekindle our futures and that there is more out there. Cloning? It's reincarnation.

I guess I am religious. I just think my religion is art. It's what I believe in.

We may not have a God, but we have hope. Hope in ourselves and the intelligence of humanity to perpetuate the species so we can seek out an eventual eternity. We don't sublimate ourselves with a hankering for heaven and dreams of the pearly gates. We evolve.








Here are the related links I could find on science fiction music videos and music. Here and here.

see? homegirl gets it.

ATTN: 18-25 demographic, all races

I gotta bone ta pick with our parents. The baby boomers. Not YOU, Mom and Dad, because you're both ideal grown-ups, but the vast generations of adults who are fucking up all over the place. This is why.


That's a seagull. Or, it was, before the gulf oil spill. Critter's still alive, but he's not going to last long. When they get coated in oil like that, they can't fly. Which means they can't get food. They die. They're immobilized by the oil. So they're all dying.

They dive into the water because they don't know. They just see their dinner swimmin' around, because the fish that are still alive in the gulf coast swim beneath the tar bubbles, and the birds dive down through it, not realizing what they're kamikaze-ing into. They float up paralyzed and blinded.

I'm so infuriated. Like, frustration-tears-furious about this situation because I DID NOT ASK FOR ANY OF THIS. Thinking about and watching the talking heads babble baffling arguments back and forth on the television makes me want to pick up and leave. It was just released that the head of BP is handing off responsibility to this Dudley guy, an American (BP is a british company, I learned that today), so that blame can start getting shuffled around. They spent $3 million on that ad that's been running on tv, but they are slow to reimburse crippled businesses along the gulf who rely on the shore for fishing income. They're also only reporting the minimum gallon amount gushing into our waters to lowball the cost of the $4,300 per gallon they have to pay. It's much worse than we know.

This is not the America I asked for.

Older generations, I'm going to helpfully and politely point out your discrepancies.

You tell us to dream big and shoot for the stars, and that anything is possible if we work hard enough, but you make education so impossibly expensive and unobtainable that only certain classes can afford to "dream big."

You tell us that we're all created equal, but some of us can't marry each other if we want. What's that? Oh, sorry, I can't hear you. It's gotta be this glass ceiling above me.

You tell us to slow down and not grow up so fast, but you put Human Growth Hormone in the food that we eat, so that our bodies develop faster and we physically become adults before we're supposed to.

You tell us to eat right, but you put high fructose corn syrup and monosodium glutamate in all our food so that we get addicted and obese.

You tell us that our body is a temple and should be treated as such, but you are the ones that set the impossible standard of beauty in advertising and media that taught me to hate my body with such enthusiasm starting when I was a little girl. I can show you the scars.

You are the ones who just want us to be mentally sound so we can be productive members of society, but what that entails is that you first discover symptoms, attribute them to a new disease, and then prescribe us the medication to quell this sickness you fabricated so you can profit from our purchase of the pills.

You are the ones that started the war, and asked us to die for it. You also asked us to kill for you.

Capitalism doesn't work because it is constant warfare within one society. It is marred by free-enterprising battles, the terrain pockmarked with self-indulgent battle scars left behind in the wake of destructive corporate tankers, and since YOUR parents worked their asses off so you could go to college, you have put your education to work by looking out for yourself and proliferating your finite fucking nest egg.

My inheritance from you is a war, its debt, a crumbling economy, dismal job market, and a destroyed coast. Fuck you.

I have lost my faith in you. You have ruined this country. My hope remains with my generation. We are the activists. We are the ones who turned up in droves to vote for Obama- highest young percentage of votes ever. You're welcome. And for those of you who doubt my dear president, here's a list of achievements thus far. I like that list. It includes Bo.

To my peers, if you're out there and sentient, I'm going to ask something of you. Put down the xanax and the adderall. I know we're Generation Medication, and that fake prescription is our birthright, but just stay with me for a second. You don't have to be dependent. You don't need any of our forefather's bullshit. We have the right to take this country back and start repairing the damages. We just have to get angry first. Please. Get mad. Get fucking infuriated and do something. It's what we're really known for. It's what we're best at.

Activism.

it is so hot

thank you.

"The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving inexorably towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.

Do not try to \"find yourself\", you must make yourself. Choose what you want to find meaningful and live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it. Do not let your life and your values and you actions slip easily into any mold, other that that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, \"This is who I make myself\".

Do not give in to hope. Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake. When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, \"Fuck You!\". Remember that to fight meaninglessness is futile, but fight anyway, in spite of and because of its futility.

The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own. Live deliberately. You are free."

found here.

quick little math lesson

When I graduated college, I learned about subtraction. When we're in first grade or so we learn the arithmetic action of subtraction, the mathematical component and motions, but it's the anthropological, psychological concept of subtraction that doesn't really kick in until much later. About what you have left in your life when everything else is removed.

I've been formulating this theory because today I came home and my roommate had unexpectedly moved out. I dimly knew she'd be headin' out soon, but I've been too wrapped up in my last film project here for it to kick in that this weekend she'd be gone. So I came home, and saw the unexpected physical manifestation of what my life was like once she was subtracted from it.

All the shit I've accumulated in my years on this coast is pushed into corners, and this is the difference that is left in our lives once she is subtracted. My sneezes echo.

Seeing this math problem led me to think about subtraction and the parts of my life that have been shed now that we are scattering. I'm all that's left in this apartment. I'm looking at my life now that the social construct is taken away, the roommate removed, the college subtracted, and the film shoots are at an indefinite hiatus now that the necessary academic requirements are no longer relevant/impending/impeding. So...what's left are the parts of my life I haven't looked at very often. The lesser parts. Like why I pick at my cuticles. Or fixate on the things(people) I shouldn't.

This is a pessimistic way of looking at things. Wise man say you have education, relations, riches, and LOVE. Which I'm truly, painfully, aware of. But right now, I can only hear my typing clattering noises clicking weakly in the empty apartment and my social calendar is empty. Shit. I'm a negative number.

H.A.G.S.

There's always these little chillen's being carted around Hofstra's campus, trotted out from some nearby daycare center when the weather warms up a bit, and sometimes I want to run up and smack the smiles off their faces and yell I KNOW YOU'RE THREE. BUT PREPARE FOR WHEN YOU GET TARNISHED AND IT'S NOT FUN ANYMORE.

I had no idea that I would become this jaded. There wasn't an inciting event that lured me away from enthused orgiastic acceptance of unfortunate life circumstances, or any riotous fight with a loved one that made me the way I am, but here I am. Anesthetized. Overlooked. Unconscious.

When I'm stuck in traffic now, in the summer, on the Belt Parkway, people roll down their windows and just stew in the muggy heat out there on the asphalt. Lots of old people clutching the wheel and waiting for their exit to crawl by since I live in a "NORC" (naturally-occurring retirement community). We start out sprinting, just kind of racing for an inevitable flag to fly by like a graduation or a marriage, getting there as fast as we can until at some point we see the definitive light at the end of the tunnel and we slow down. We age and we move slowly and we stutter and we forget and we lose ourselves in the marathon. We put up a fight.

It's raining now. Rain always smells like pennies. I walk outside and can smell weird minerals.

I'm transitory. I am aware that we are always transitory, that because we are aging and moving and talking and changing at all times, that we are permanently transitioning from one moment into the next so that we may string together a personal, linear, sequence of events and scrapbook it and call it a life, but I feel especially transitory. Aleatory. Moving without purpose. This part of my life will go undocumented in my scrapbook.

In my french literature class this past semester, these two kids gave a presentation and asked everyone in the class to write out on a notecard what we want to be when we grow up. Yes, phrased like that, in a college course. I instinctively wrote "happy" (which has been my every shooting star/birthday candle/fountain coin/eyelash wish since I was a kid, but don't tell anyone that or it won't come true) and then the people giving the presentation asked who wrote happy. Of course my hand shot up, because I assumed that many people would have answered similarly. They didn't. They were astronauts, forensic anthropologists, dance studio owners, exotic trade derivatives. I was the outlier for just wanting to be happy.

I say things, a lot, I talk real big when it comes to my future, but I gotta say folks, when it comes to graduating college and staring down my identity for the first time, I actually feel like I've just been flung out of slingshot blindfolded and I can't even feel the trajectory. It's scary. It's normal, and expected. Right? We base our entire beings around the confines of some sort of synthesized academic personality and we identify with the people who have chosen the same interests so we conform to create a group, and find our role within this group, which is easier than tackling a larger percentage of the population. It's simple. We categorize. We eke out our identities and build ourselves up within these little microcosms, which just seems like exercises in futility once we have finished school and all of our anthropological attempts at existence return, sunburned, to their separate suburban homes with bidings of a good summer and see you soon. I'm going to miss my friends.

I can't remember everything about college. I mean, I remember these little moments and these big walls, and those people who maybe saw me when most didn't, but mostly I remember the spaces that contained me. That dorm, that bedroom, this one. I remember you and I remember the smiles that glowed in the dark and I remember the bone-crushing exhaustion and I remember pushing through that and I remember momentary connections and that's why I can't stay in New York. Nobody settles down here. No one grows up. Manhattan is a playground. Some people fall in love. I just shatter. At this point, my heart just wants to know it exists.

So, I watch the rain and I bleat out insipid refrains online into nowhere and hope to reach some sort of semi-enlightened catharsis. I mostly feel like an untethered kite. And I'm sorry for that. I'm mostly really sorry for the things I never said. Like thanks. I love you. It's been the best four years of my life.

Here's an irrelevant but currently-listening-to-song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAPzYJprS8

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzbuzzzzzzzzzbuzzzz

Okay. Breathe, breathe, breathe. I am standing on the shore facing a tidal wave.

Or, even better, I am a rubberband that is stretched much too tautly. Little plinks pull me down and I vibrate, but eventually I am just going to snap and strike out in futility.

The past three years have been a practice run. A drill. Simulated combat under controlled circumstances.

This is not a drill. This is the war.

This is the year of the tiger? I heard that weird things happen during that. I'm looking for full moons and swinging tides to explain the chaos, because shouldering it and not asking questions is not enough any more. I'd rather find an external source, some smoldering mysticism to blame. Until then I have to content myself with placating internalized falsehoods and picking my cuticles.

This is war, right? We fight. We fight. We fight.

We arm ourselves, kick and scream at the wicked things, and hope for the best.

i feel ya buddy

remind me

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3. Mic check.

You ever hear a song that makes you feel like a damn hand puppet? Just like someone shoved their hand up your ass to make ya sit up straight real fast?

I heard her and sat up straight: