went to my mom’s house to retrieve (amongst other things) my cowboy hat, which i am wearing right now. if past experiences are any sort of indication (kant states that they are the only indication) when i put on the hat i turn into a jerk. but what does it mean “to be a jerk” anyway? (nb: i am currently wearing the hat as i write this– indicators: refering to kant, using the construction “but what does [x] really mean, anyway?”). other things previously referred to include the concrete wave skate video where mike leslie skates to a cat and bird hospital song, my daffy duck videos, and a whole mess of toy keyboards (for a mike-t.-prompted sesh (don’t worry mike i have no intention of blowing up your spot)).
another personal aside- matt carroll get off my bra strap- “cosmos” is already on my reading list you maniac.
charles schubert (who enjoys as much as i do discussing the lives of mathemeticians) says that the followers of pythagorus (pythagoreans) are vegetarians, but also, they don’t eat beans. something having to do with thier belief on the transmigration of souls, that eventually they come to rest in bean plants. this leads me to wonder, why didn’t* they try at every oppurtunity to stop others from planting / eating beans? i mean, if that’s where people’s souls are, and you care enough to not eat them yourself, why not do all that you can?
on a related (barely (by a gossamer thread)) topic, nearly everyone i
talked to today saw andrew w.k. on sunday at the palladium and rather than
rehash what they said i found this old
href="http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3817/avfeature_3817.html">interview
from the onion a.v. club that sums up quite nicely what a nice, sincere,
life-affirming person he is. it’s too bad my mom isn’t allowed to use the
internet at work anymore, because i know she likes clicking on things
and reading funny articles and people being positive.
oh yeah, please note that i have once again changed my email it is now, and presumably will be for a long time, jacob at fujichia dot com (written in a such a way as to hopefully fool those sneaky web spiders).
sunday we tore up the carpet in my living room, and seeing as it will
probably be weeks until we put down some decent flooring, i blasted
“1983: a merman i shall be” and laid down a psychedelic paint job over the
particle board in lavender, navy blue, maroon, white, and pale green. i messed around some on music then read my book and ate raspberries until nearly sun-up. just as it was getting light i went into the woods across the street from my house and got lost until 9:00. some items of note:
i’m (still) reading “rememberance of things past” and i’m still into it. i like to read it at night by candlelight in my special study area, which is an abandoned, semi-detatched outhouse (not the pit kind, the bucket kind). it’s really nice– i have a little desk, and it’s a two seater so i have plenty of room. what’s more it’s hidden- i left all the rusty junk outside the door, and all the cobwebs too, so no one will know i’m in there. as for the book itself, it is delectable. here is a frivolous passage (the only sort i feel right in transcribing, although the book is far more than just an overabundance of ripe tidbits):
“…what more enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stipled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet–still stained a little by the soil of their garden bed–with an iridescence that was not of this world. i felt that these celestial hues indicated the prescence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which i should recognize again when, all night long after a dinner at which i had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeares’s Dream) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.”
bear in mind this fecund prose is the tip of the iceberg so you can see
why i don’t lose sleep over losing sleep over this book.
getting lost in the woods is something i’ve found i’m quite adept at. the trouble comes when the deer path you’ve taken on a whim dissolves into just another mess of ferns and ivies and you decide that you’re bound to come across another trail sooner or later. i guess the thing to bear in mind is that when it comes to that old “two roads diverged in a wood and i” routine, the effect is not neccessarily cumulative.
on the way back from the woods (the path eventually dumped me out in paxton, maybe a mile or two from home) a cluster of grade school kids made disparaging remarks upon my person (probably) but i’m pretty sure one of them was andy “” fallon, who tugged america’s heartstrings a month ago in the little league semifinals.
in other news ersatz “back to the future” expert matt carroll lazy genius
puts at 2% the chances my theory is right that doc brown’s explanation of
how he came up with the flux capacitor (it came to him after he fell while
standing on a toilet seat) is a veiled drug reference (via “confucious say
man who stand on toilet is high on pot”). maybe we’ll see when the bttf
dvd comes out at the end of the year– i think this is a pretty reasonable
notion.
speaking of leonardr, i recorded a crummy crappy version of his fine song “alien nature documentary” for the call in line. when i first heard it the song i thought he was making fun of me but now i realize he’s making fun of the jacob berendes in all of us. wait, that’s no good.
today i sat down and worked on music for the first time in a long time and it felt great. in the time since ordem i’ve made a lot of little pieces of things, now i’m about ready to put them all together. today i worked on a song about the alphabet. that’s right,
the alphabet
.
last night melissa #1 came over and we listened to the flaming lips “zaireeka” album, which requires you listen to it’s 4 discs at the same time on four stereos. it was really great. the songs are awesome and it’s great to sit around with people and really intently listen to an album. also it’s kind of awesome to own an album that it’s actually hard to listen to (for logistics reasons).
i don’t know why this never occured to me– having a desert plate that is like a dinner plate, diverging from the standard sundae format in that the items aren’t stacked, they are ordered in little coplanar piles (the standard thanksgiving food arrangement). tonight at nick’s house i had two kinds of ice cream (coffee fudge and cookies & creme), some angel food cake, and some cold cranberries, and if it were all mashed together in a sundae it would’ve been gross, but on a plate i could choose exactly what i wanted to put with what and when, and so it was a complete success. ideally i’d have chocolate gravy and a side of whipped cream but i guess that’s all pretty obvious. i don’t know– is part of the thrill of desert that it’s all mixed up in a bucket?
me and jer made cheeseless, sauceless pizzas* in the bread oven
outside. the bread oven is made of cob, a hippy building material that’s
just straw and mud more or less. you make a huge fire inside, let it burn
out, scoop out the ashes and put the pie inside and the structure stays
way hot for way long. what sucks is you always knock into the side of the
thing when you’re taking it out and you get dirt in your business. but
having been heated and reheated, the dirt is (to quote george john ringo
etc.) very clean. cold weather breeds fine dreams– elaborate and
subtle.
oh yeah, me and matt coe were talking about having a lecture series, starting in a month or so. so far it’s just me and him dedicated, which is fine for now, but anyone else in the area want to research and deliver a lecture on any topic contact me and i’ll put together a calendar. i don’t know what mine’s gonna be about– i gave a brief lecture to my housemates about idealism and confusion (in other words, weird records) some weeks ago, but i was also thinking about esperanto, or maybe time. there will be no question and answer period. period. matt coe’s will probably be about the french national character, or bruce springsteen, or nose picking. matt coe i’m just kidding.
*hey mike, great minds and bargain hunters, right?
i was watching the tail end of king kong at nick’s house and i realized
that i didn’t want to go out exploring the city with holmes tonight (the
first cold night in a while)– i wanted to come home and write in my
journal. instead i get sucked into the arduous process of copying old mail
out of my web mail program and pasting it into a word file to save it, and
all the while steve is watching simpson’s reruns i’ve seen a million
times,
in the same 6 x 10 foot room as me. my every option melancholic and what
else did i do today? i spent some hours tying a tarp down on the roof in
readiness for a rainstorm, and i lied on nick’s trampoline watching the thick grey cloud cover creep high above, and we fired up his old computer and played old computer games, and we ate pasta and popcorn and fudgesicles and root beer. last winter i remember me and tim used to go to the chef of india lunch buffet and talk about how great it’s gonna be when summer rolls around, the idea being that the weather would change and with it us. i know this is stupid but now that it’s getting colder i feel a kind of idiot pride for staying more or less in winter mode the whole time.
yesterday (tuesday) me and jess and little andrew and charles schubert saw
the microphones and calvin johnson at some intimate theatre at brown
university. needless to say it was a really good show and when i get this
mighty retirement check i’m waiting on (this is an actual event due in the
next two weeks) i’m going to get a mess of microphones albums. no longer
will my exposure be limited to mix tapes and intimate theatre settings
(although truly what theatre is more intimate than a pair of
consumer-grade headphones?). other check purchases already scheduled are
the new sonic youth album (or possibly a thousand leaves), the new flaming
lips album (or possibly the one just before it), an esquerita best-of, the
henry cowell piano works cd,
and lest we forget our stars: a bag of
english muffins (should i
be unable to score some from the tj’s dumpster) and a tub of that
frou-frou non gmo margerine spread and a liter bottle of moxie.
what would happen to me if i lived in an less tempestuous climate?
hey gang, how is everyone? i’ve been taking a nice sabbatical but for no
definite reason i’m back to writing regularly so hooray and with a
colorful redesign to boot. comments are welcome in the guestbook, but
please just email the bugs to me and i’ll fix them– quite clearly, this
all still needs a bit of work. i added a bunch of zines to the catalog and
will add some silly button designs soon. i terminated the long neglected
(by me) essays section and replaced it with the easier to update but not
unneglectable articles section, featuring selections
from said expanded zine section. also, i had to temporarily disable the
cat and bird hospital albums as i don’t have the money to keep printing
them. right now i don’t have two bills of any denomination to rub
together, but don’t worry– i’m waiting on a check from my quinsig
retirement fund and when that comes boy howdy– so long debt and hello
ability to follow through on obligations (and hello record buying
spree). yes, i’m still funemployed, but i should get a job soon, like in
the next two months. what have i been doing all summer? really, not a
lot. my horoscope today said that “being down all the time will not lead
to popularity” but whatever– the truth is when i look back at this summer
i will think “that was the summer i mostly stayed in bed.”. but new leaves
abound: only today i got up at 8 and made pear pancakes (vegan, and fluffy
even!). more things i am/have been pumped for: chopping wood (so
satisfying to smash stuff so meticulously!), film nights with secretly
jess (we already watched the seventh seal, and times square), building an
awesome fort in my backyard (with stone floors!), going to the da
lat with my mom (and talking about quilts), fixing the roof of the
100+ year old farmhouse i live in (we’re resposible!), and slowly meeting new people (although in all honesty “slowly” should be stressed). only a great fool would tell you that there are never those haunting moments of abonimable transparency but as for now my belly is full of pancakes and only yesterday i saw four white-tailed deer scampering through my yard and this morning four turkeys gobble gobbling. hi everybody i missed you.
