Category: Uncategorized

i wrote blue lava in the receptacles of giants this morning around 3 and just posted it. sometimes i write the title to the story first. not often, but i do. that’s what happened with this one. i drew this picture:

and came up with the title after looking at it. i made it my msn screen name for a while. i didn’t know that it was because i was planning on writing a story with that title, but in hindsight i guess it was. i’ve had the name since the end of march.

we saw Troy the other day. i liked it. in the fight scenes things actually looked real. i don’t know how they did it. the sword thrusting into the guy’s shoulder actually looks like a sword thrusting into the guy’s shoulder. the spear going through the guy’s neck, the half decapitation(s). ahh, beautiful. but what i liked best was there wasn’t a definite evil side and a definite good side, so you weren’t really sure when you were happy and when you were sad.

i wanted a sprite during the movie but all they had was sierra mist. so i got it. if the correct measurement for soda pop is one part soda syrup one part carbonated water, my sierra mist was at about 10 parts soda syrup one part carbonated water. perverse sweetness mixed with popcorn topped with delicious yellow chemical sludge is not a good mix.

Laura said she doesn’t like going to movies with old people (of which there were a lot at Troy). they often get their wife or husband to repeat lines in the movie because they can’t hear, and they don’t attempt to whisper at all. i don’t mind so much, but that’s just because i’m looking forward to being old and doing this very same thing at movie theatres and annoying younger people like me. i also want to carry around mace and spray them for fun

[i was going to put the mace quote from Kill Bill Volume II here but i couldn’t find it and i didn’t remember it.]

i wrote and posted wax traps this morning at about…one or two i think. it’s the first sort of free consciousness writing i’ve done in quite a while. i think it turned out very well.

i was watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on tv when i wrote it. in my opinion the movie is not as good when dr. gonzo is dubbed over saying “i’m gonna goldurn kill you you crap face [mouth moving no words coming out].” but at least they didn’t edit the interesting stuff. like raoul’s little gems: “a drug person can learn to handle such things as seeing their dead grandmother crawling up their leg with a knife in her teeth. but no one should be asked to deal with this trip.” i read the book before i saw the movie…i think they did a fantastic job. and i’m glad i read the book first. someone needs to by the dvd for me…

i believe the movie influenced wax traps…at least at first. a little. maybe not at all. wax traps is a little more coherent than the movie…

i highly recommend “Brushing Brushing” on cora’s (drivelautumn) blog. it’s the may 16 post. she’s stealing my ideas before i even get them! she also found an interesting site, engine heart. the author has more poems than me, and writes good short stories. it needs to be viewed, even if you hate reading. the site layout is worth it.

i just put the drawing of the ram up on my site. i think it looks good. i didn’t know this until now, but i’ve always wanted to have a drawing of a ram on my site.

i went to a site, PEDA, people for the eating of delicious animals. it’s making fun of PETA, people for the ethical treatment of animals. some of it’s funny, and i know the guy, so i sent him a sarcastic e-mail. here’s what it said:

hey matt. this is chris. chris hopf. got your blog address from
cora. i laughed my ass off just at the name peda. but i wanted to retort:

death of an animal is a horrible horrible thing. want proof? peta
happily distributes a free video of slaughterhouse conditions. watch it. they promiseit will “change your life.” it sure changed mine. when you’re done watching it come back and finish this email.

your life is changed isn’t it? after seeing it, i turned off the video and watched some tv. i came to a horrible realization.

my tv was on the discovery channel, and what gruesomeness did i
witness? there was a cheetah MAULING a zebra. it was devouring its flesh like the horrible beast that i once was before i saw the peta video. i was apalled. but there is something we can do, fellow peta brother.

it’s not just cheetahs. birds kill worms, ants kill grasshoppers,
snakes eat rats! they obviously have not been taught the true virtues of life. there is an easy solution.

in a clockwork orange, they strapped the guy down and forced his eyes open so that he’ll watch violent films so it makes him sick and he will no longer commit such violence. this is all we have to do to get these animals to see that what they’re doing is wrong. strap the animals down, force their eyes open, and make them first watch a young zebra prancing around with his friends. then cut to the next scene, a DYING zebra, presumably the same one, with its guts hanging out of its belly, trying to crawl to his mom. but where is mom? SHE’S IN THE STOMACHS OF THE OTHER CHEETAHS. as he comes to
this realization a cheetah bites into his neck and causes blood to spray forth like a geyser. the animal being forced to watch will realize that he’s made one bad mistake after another, and will leave the building a new animal.

i know that you must agree that this the only solution to such a
horrid problem, because you too saw the terrible treatment of animals in the peta video. i’ve tried to contact peta about conducting “Operation Animalsave,” but i have yet to hear back from them. i’ll keep you posted.

chris.

i thought it was a vaguely funny e-mail. i don’t really put much thought in peta, or really in peda for that matter, and i’d rather think about other things. but matt didn’t get the joke, and i suppose he takes peda very seriously. he replied saying that peta is stupid, don’t call me a peta brother, etc. for a while, i thought he was playing along, because i couldn’t really see how someone could take my email seriously. but, he didn’t, and he said he’d post my hatemail on his site.

well, it wasn’t hatemail, and it wasn’t posted, because he got the joke after i told him it was a joke. so i posted it so others may join me in Operation Animalsave. come on now. Operation Animalsave??? who could take that seriously?

ecstatic. this is me. for a few reasons.

1. i wrote and posted a new story, germaine’s poor. this is always exciting for me…filling up my site with stories makes me feel like i have worth; that i’m accomplishing something. writing something also gets that special something out of me that keeps me sane. for some reason i see this story as more of an experiment for me…i think i tried to write it a bit more consciously than other stories, and i think it worked out well for once. i wrote it in about fifteen or twenty minutes while my mom was listening to African acapella in the kitchen.

2. before giving the next piece of information, to fully appreciate it some background information must be given.

2.a. my freshman year in college i made two Ds, four Cs, two Bs, and one A. basically you can throw the A out, because virtually anyone who takes that course (a “welcome to college” six week course that everyone must take) is guaranteed an A, even if said person is comatose or partly comatose. so after leaving my freshman year, my gpa was at 2.08. i think we get put on some kind of academic probabtion if we go below 2.00. (this wasn’t a big threat…my neighbor had a gpa of .50. i’m not exaggerating. she had been enrolled in college for three years (couldn’t enroll for one semester i think) and was still considered a freshman. she dropped out and got pregnant. so “probabtion” is just a made up word trying to sound scary. but still…i didn’t want my grade to be so crappy.

2.b. the first semester of my sophomore year had me in better spirits. i made four Bs and one A, making my gpa 2.50. there was much rejoicing.

3. now we come to the new news. i just checked my grades: two Bs and three As (i dropped one class, computer science, and dropped that major because i’m not a computer scientist. i’m a writer. so now i’m just an english/creative writing major). i’ve checked several times to make sure i’m logging in correctly, if maybe someone has taken the exact same courses as me and i’m just looking at their grades. but i’m not. and it’s mine. all mine. my gpa now stands at 2.75. i’m not just here to burn money anymore!!

4. i used to think that only extremely inteligent people, or people willing to trade sex acts for grades, or people with enough money, or people who had no life outside of studying, or people who belonged to the mexican mafia could possibly make so many As. now i realize that any underachiever who often believes they have better things to do than to study can make such grades. this is possibly the best and most rewarding news i’ve learned all day.

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.