Author: chris

i had a dream last night. it happened right before i woke up.

laura and i were in her house talking in her bed. i went down to leave, and then someone announced that an ex boyfriend…or maybe it was just someone who liked her (laura has no ex boyfriends except myself)…of laura’s was about to come in the door. so i ran back upstairs and started making out with her to make him jealous.

he came in the front door enraged, and knew my tongue was in her teeth. i ran down her spiral staircase and he was standing in front of the door, heaving in anger. or maybe he had diahrrea. he came at me and i kicked him, hard, in the kneecap. he fell down screaming and grabbed my leg and pulled me down so my head hit the hard tile floor and started bleeding. we were right next to the table so i grabbed a chair and hit him over the head with it. he fell onto his back and tried to get up but i mashed one of the cross beams connecting the legs of the chair into his throat and had laura’s brother stand on it with me (he had been standing there in his doorway watching it all, i guess).

“aren’t we going to kill him?” he asked.

“no, he’s going to pass out.”

he stopped flopping and we stayed there for a few more seconds.

“i think he’s dead,” luke said.

we took his pulse.

“you’re right,” i said. then i went back up stairs and made out with laura some more. then i woke up.

the reason, i believe, for such a violent dream is, i’m sure, because i was listening to smog right before i went to bed. his slow, soothing strumming must have enraged me.

as promised, here is a drawing of a ram. it’s the first drawing in my new journal. i was afraid to draw it on the first page because i haven’t drawn in months and i didn’t know if it would come back to me very well. having a poor drawing on the first page of a journal is not a very good omen, i would think. i think the drawing is okay though. it’s a sign on a dentist’s office that i saw as i sat in the parking lot of a grocery store. i was reading How to Be Good (so far, an excellently depressing book about a crappy marriage…not as boring as it sounds) when i saw it. it looked like it needed to be drawn, so i drove over to their parking lot and drew it. they were closed at the time.

Nick Hornby wrote the book i was reading (incidentally i only wanted to read a chapter of it because i had some time to kill. i’m actually reading the next book in the series that Ender’s Game started.). I’ve read two of his other books, About a Boy and High Fidelity, both after seeing the movies. i usually hate reading books after i’ve seen their movies, but this time it wasn’t so bad. i guess because the movies didn’t really do a good job of copying the characters in the book so they just seemed like new characters to me.

i just posted coping with life mundane. i didn’t just write it though. i wrote it a few years ago, and it was even on my site at one point. i have no idea why it wasn’t still there (there wasn’t even a link to it) and i found it in Laura’s room. she had printed out most of my stories from the site and as i rummaged through them i didn’t remember this one at all. i checked and it wasn’t posted–sin of sins!–so i scanned it in and posted it. i think it’s a great example of how i wrote in that time of my life, and it’s one of the better ones.

my girlfriend, laura, says i’m on a Bob Dylan kick. she didn’t mean it in a bad way or anything. i kind of am on a Bob Dylan kick. for the last few months i’ve been acquiring his cds in order of their release. recently i’ve been paying special attention to his live bootleg series. i just got the newest one, number six, the other day. it’s excellent, and Bob is often hilarious–a side i’d never heard before on anything else he’s done (not in his songs…in his audience banter). but is this a kick in the sense of someday i’ll quit buying Bob Dylan’s music? of course i’ll never stop being a fan of his…i think he’s one of the greatest musicians ever conceived. but as for accumulating his music, i think i’ll probably stop as soon as i get to Love and Theft. i guess then i’ll get them all in vinyl…

hopefully, i’m going to post a drawing of a ram tomorrow.

i just wrote and posted copy. copy. copy. tote. i think i’m happy with it. i like how it’s dark, but then you wonder why it’s so dark. maybe i’m full of crap.

it took me two years, almost to the day (about a week and a half from being to the day), to finish filling up my black journal. i wrote my last entry last night. it’s held together very well, i’m very happy with it. so i got another one just like it from BookPeople Bookstore. there were about seven on the shelf in the size that i wanted (8.5 x 11). i looked over them and ran my fingers over them, then picked the second one from the left. it felt good. and it smelled right. so i bought it.

as for my old journal, i’ve learned a lot from it. don’t put two pictures face to face on opposite pages so that they touch–it makes them scratchy. it gets much heavier as you pour ink and tape pages and pictures into it. it holds up really, really well. it is not good for watercolor, and i am not good with watercolor. drawings plus writings is much more interesting than just writings. i’ll thumb through it a lot, so it may start getting old to me–expecially the first few pages. it now has an interesting smell.

both journals are made by Cachet (i would have put a link but i can’t find their official site. oh well.) and are hardback, sewn binding, unlined journals. i highly recommend them.

i also bought the book published by Found Magazine. i’ve been a fan of theirs for a while and i was very happy to find that they’ve published a best of Found. they collect notes and photos and things found by people all over and then publish them. i wish i had thought of it first.

my journal entry on may 3, 2003, exactly a year ago today. my best friend, juan, was getting back from Japan after being there for almost a year.

it’s 4:54 and i’m waiting at the airport for juan. his plane is scheduled to land at 5:06. i have a feeling these next few minutes will be some of the longest in my life.

my mom said laura’s going to be mad that i didn’t bring her to pick him up. i don’t think so. i mean, i hope not. and we’ve been planning it just like this for months….i still have a feeling that something’s going to fuck up and he won’t be on this plane. it’s just because it feels so unreal, i think.

i wonder if we’ve changed at all. i kind of hope so. people change, right?

4:59

i hate the newsstands here…how you have to go through security and have a ticket to get them. i want to read something!

5:01

i’m going to the bathroom.

reading. lots of reading.

i can’t add two books that i’m reading in one post…or at least i can’t figure out how (not that i tried very hard). so i posted two times today, a sin i promised myself i would never commit.

i’m reading Robert Coover‘s book for my last assignment in creative writing (i have to write a “personal essay” on it). he’s a well known metafiction author. the book is a bunch of short stories, and they are so erratic and different from one another that they don’t sound like they’re from the same author, or the same time period, or the same country. this caused me much stress (i started eating the pages after the fourth story, downing them with glasses of water. i have paper cuts running down my throat now.).

so i started reading Ender’s Game to give myself a break between stories. it has read pretty fast and it’s interesting. i don’t think Orson Scott Card writes about kids very well. funny, because the only two books i’ve read of his, this one (thought i’m not done) and Lost Boys (one of his attempts at horror), have lots of stuff about kids. they always seem older than they actually are. but the writing is always fun to read.

if you don’t read and found the above information uninteresting, you should read, and find the above information interesting. but don’t read more than fifty pages into a book without being interested in it. there are other books to read.

i ate bad mexican food on friday night. following this was vomitting and a day and a half of nausea. not that bad, i know…but still. it was annoying.

i just posted this picture with my story, a rocking chair from germany. i drew it as a rough sketch for a big art project my freshman year in college. maybe i’ll post that sometime. it was kind of a collage ad for my site (back when it was parlor42.com–don’t go there! someone evil owns it now and you’ll be bombarded with popups.). i just drew a few pictures from my stories and pasted it to a board. the background was my favorite: i took a bunch of my stories and condensed them all into one huge paragraph so there weren’t any paragraph breaks. i think there were about 10 pages total. then i pasted them to the board and then pasted my pictures on top of that.

the story of the rocking chair came from a true story. my parents have an old rocking chair that actually did come over with my ancestors from Germany. it’s probably about a hundred years old and has held up really well. there are only a few scars from me carving on it with a kitchen knife and such when i was younger. i broke my little toe on it once while i was running to get the phone.

xanga cut off the end of the title of Elf Power‘s cd that i’m listening to. it’s called Vainly Clutching at Phantom Limbs. i bought it not just because i wanted something from Elf Power, but also because the title was so freaking cool. the link that i have for that album gives it two out of five stars. idiots. it’s not a fantastic album but it’s not horrible. it’s their first record and it shows: they are immature at times. i think it was recorded on a four track so it sounds like it was made in someone’s house. i love those kinds of records.

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon.  Complete silence–their speech centers are destroyed–except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine.  White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air.  A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs.  His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

–Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

why, i ask, is this book not taught in high school???  if you’ve ever wanted to try heroin, morphine, etc., read this book and you will want to vomit and go into convulsions each time you think about injecting anything into yourself. 

it’s an incredible book, if you haven’t read it before.  a favorite of most readers is the section on the talking asshole.  i think it’s hilarious, but there are so many pieces in the book that are so great that i don’t think i could pick one as my favorite. 

you don’t just learn about the nightmare it is to be a junkie.  you also learn interesting facts, such as the phenomena of bang-utot.  as reported in the Saturday Evening Post in the article “The Men With Deadly Dreams,” by Nils P. Larsen M.D., december 3, 1955, people have been found lying dead in their beds.  they were perfectly healthy and had no signs of murder, etc.  they believe they had a nightmare that was so terrifying and real that it physically killed them.

also, did you know that jungle rats are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hopeless situation?

During his first severe infection the boiling thermometer flashed a quicksilver bullet into the nurse’s brain and she fell dead with a mangled scream.

–Naked Lunch

i just typed and posted firecracker.  i wrote it at about 1:45 this morning.  i had been lying there trying to go to sleep when the story was going through my head.  i remembered i do this all the time (writing stories in my head right before i go to sleep) thinking i’ll remember it in the morning and write it down then.  of course, i never ever remember it, and then i’m angry.  so i got up and wrote it down in the faint light of my computer screen.

i believe it might be the first appearance of a pickaxe in a story of mine.  maybe not…i can’t remember all the stories i’ve written.  i will say that my weapon of choice in all my stories so far is a trumpet.

as for the music i’m listening to…

incidentally, the record i was listening to yesterday and the record i am listening to today both have band names beginning with Black, and they have a very sexy history.  on my last trip to Waterloo Records i was going to get The Black-Eyed Snakes‘ new cd.  (i got the first one a year ago or so at 33 Degrees (is it scary that i know where and when i got all of my cds?), because on the front it said “With Alan Sparhawk from Low.”  being a big fan of Low i bought the cd.  Low is slow, methodical music.  The Black-Eyed Snakes are hard blues; the music you’d get beaten up to during a drunken brawl in a seedy bar.  i was very, very surprised.) 

so i was combing the used cd section at Waterloo for The Black-Eyed Snakes’ newest cd when i found Black Twig Pickers‘ North Fork Flyer album.  it looked somewhat interesting, and i liked their name, so i listened to it.  they sound like they belong in the 20s or 30s playing and stomping old country blues on a porch as the sun goes down.  incidentally, i read that a lot of the songs were actually recorded outside on a porch.  i loved it, and i knew i would never remember their name, so i bought it.

and that is the long, sexy story of how i was looking for The Black-Eyed Snakes, and instead found Black Twig Pickers.