Electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze
I've not written anything in weeks, either in here or elsewhere. Finally, last night, I went to JavaHutt and wrote
The four billionth Man to call your name
Wafts his song from the rafters above
Uniform and utterly lacking in substance
Fresh with you and stale on ingenuity
Desperate to set your veins aflame with base love jargon
Kneeling to sleep cross-eyed before his concrete deity
Worshipping the crusty traditional romance
He imagines your dreams contain
I roll down impractical from the bleached edge of the West
Spitting pie-in-the-sky through my teeth
And grabbing wildly for your waiting hand
He howls as you catapult his priests to the curb:
His screeching red block digits and proper name envelopes
He grovels and sneers and burns and weeps and settles
As we skip rocket-speed for our golden coast
Free from the moment we choose to be.
. It's nothing spectacular, but at least I'm writing something.
For those who are unaware, I have a girlfriend now. So if it seems to you that I have dropped out of life the last few weeks, this is why. But please don't be angry. Her name is Rosie and she is lovely and sweet and wonderful and I very much enjoy her company. All you LA kids can meet her in a couple months when she comes back to California with me. But just hold your horses; she's not living with me. A few hours before meeting me, Rosie declared that she was going to go be homeless in Santa Monica/Hollywood this winter. (Apparently this is a tradition among a lot of the Detroit kids and she's been wanting to do it for several years.) Then we met and I offered her a ride there in August, so Rosie and her pet rat Aratron will be joining Paul and me in our trek back across the country. I will then deposit her at the homeless location of her choosing and begin the interesting process of dating a homeless girl. Obviously, there are more details than all of that, but that's the abbreviated version. If you're confused or intrigued, ask me about it. But bottom line: I'm a very lucky kid.
Shawn and I will hopefully be leaving Monday for our East Coast trip. We're just going to Boston and NYC, we've decided. But we have a slight dilemma at the moment. We'd planned to stay with my friend Kerry in Brooklyn for the second half of the trip, but her folks are renovating her house, so we can't stay there. With hostels in Boston and NYC costing $25-$40 a night (each), this is getting very pricy very fast. I really don't have $200 to spend on lodging alone, with food, gas, and entertainment still to be paid for on top of that. Thoughts?
So it turns out that I can't always tell when people are just jokingly pretending to be angry with me. I used to be clear on that, but then I hung out with Cassandra too much, and when she said something mean, she actually intended it to be mean. So now I have the unfortunate tendency to believe that other people's mean/angry comments are meant in earnest, when they are very often just playing around. So, if you wouldn't mind, to avoid confusion, if I appear to be inordinately offended/hurt by some playful jab you make at me, spell out for me the fact that you're joking. I know that's kind of pathetic, but until I straighten this out in my mind, that's the best way to avert potential disaster to our friendship.
Ooo ooo! On Sunday, Rosie planned a surprise for me. I love to swing dance and so does she, but neither of us knew of any opportunities to do any real swing dancing in Michigan. She searched online and discovered the Michigan Swing Dance Association, which hosts a swing dance once a month in Warren. So Rosie took me down there and it was lots of fun. It was mostly middle-aged/old people, but they were very impressive dancers, and a lot of them got really into it and were consequently extremely cute. For our part, we didn't know all of their fancy sassy moves, but we were the only ones who were doing flips and such. (Rosie is about 5'10", so she's big enough to flip me and throw me around... Yes, we do look a little odd together, as I'm still only 5'2".) All in all, it was very exciting and an excellent surprise. And when we get back to LA, we're definitely going to have to go to the swing clubs there, too.
I'm sleepy and must take my mom to the airport tomorrow (she and my dad are going to be in Phoenix for the weekend and my brother's in Ann Arbor for debate camp, which leaves me with.... an empty house for the first time in my whole life!) so I am off to bed. I leave all my adoring readers with a few interesting bits to read:
"Richard, how can you hope to impress the world when everybody else works for their living and you run around all irresponsible from day to day in your crazy biplane selling passenger rides?" He was testing me again. "There's a question you gonna get more than once."
"Well, Donald, Part One: I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy."
"OK. Part Two?"
"Part Two: Everybody else is free to do whatever they feel 1ike doing, for a living. Part Three: Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is...?"
"...ourselves," Don said, replying for the imaginary crowd of seekers sitting around.
"We don't even have to answer to ourselves, if we don't feel like it... there's nothing wrong with being irresponsible. But most of us find it more interesting to know why we act as we do, why we make our choices just so - whether we choose to watch a bird or step on an ant or work for money at something we'd rather not be doing."
I don't think I've posted this before. It's the December 28, 2003 "Pearls Before Swine" comic by Stephen Pastis. Ask me if you want to see the actual comic.
A TV set does all the talking:
Leading off the news tonight, six Israeli children died early today when the bus they were riding in exploded in downtown Jerusalem.
They were little kids......with backpacks filled with sandwiches and juice and gym shoes and math books.
They had bedrooms with posters of race cars and soccer players, and they had unmade beds with Spiderman sheets.
They had little sisters and dentist appointments and cats and jeans with holes in the knee.
They took piano lessons on Tuesday and spent Sunday afternoons with their dads, who made them hold hands whenever they crossed a street.
And on the wall of the hall to their bedroom was a long line of photos with each of their annual school pictures placed chronologically...
...by a mom...
...who kissed her son goodbye that morning and watched him board the bus...
...that exploded in downtown Jerusalem.
The four billionth Man to call your name
Wafts his song from the rafters above
Uniform and utterly lacking in substance
Fresh with you and stale on ingenuity
Desperate to set your veins aflame with base love jargon
Kneeling to sleep cross-eyed before his concrete deity
Worshipping the crusty traditional romance
He imagines your dreams contain
I roll down impractical from the bleached edge of the West
Spitting pie-in-the-sky through my teeth
And grabbing wildly for your waiting hand
He howls as you catapult his priests to the curb:
His screeching red block digits and proper name envelopes
He grovels and sneers and burns and weeps and settles
As we skip rocket-speed for our golden coast
Free from the moment we choose to be.
. It's nothing spectacular, but at least I'm writing something.
For those who are unaware, I have a girlfriend now. So if it seems to you that I have dropped out of life the last few weeks, this is why. But please don't be angry. Her name is Rosie and she is lovely and sweet and wonderful and I very much enjoy her company. All you LA kids can meet her in a couple months when she comes back to California with me. But just hold your horses; she's not living with me. A few hours before meeting me, Rosie declared that she was going to go be homeless in Santa Monica/Hollywood this winter. (Apparently this is a tradition among a lot of the Detroit kids and she's been wanting to do it for several years.) Then we met and I offered her a ride there in August, so Rosie and her pet rat Aratron will be joining Paul and me in our trek back across the country. I will then deposit her at the homeless location of her choosing and begin the interesting process of dating a homeless girl. Obviously, there are more details than all of that, but that's the abbreviated version. If you're confused or intrigued, ask me about it. But bottom line: I'm a very lucky kid.
Shawn and I will hopefully be leaving Monday for our East Coast trip. We're just going to Boston and NYC, we've decided. But we have a slight dilemma at the moment. We'd planned to stay with my friend Kerry in Brooklyn for the second half of the trip, but her folks are renovating her house, so we can't stay there. With hostels in Boston and NYC costing $25-$40 a night (each), this is getting very pricy very fast. I really don't have $200 to spend on lodging alone, with food, gas, and entertainment still to be paid for on top of that. Thoughts?
So it turns out that I can't always tell when people are just jokingly pretending to be angry with me. I used to be clear on that, but then I hung out with Cassandra too much, and when she said something mean, she actually intended it to be mean. So now I have the unfortunate tendency to believe that other people's mean/angry comments are meant in earnest, when they are very often just playing around. So, if you wouldn't mind, to avoid confusion, if I appear to be inordinately offended/hurt by some playful jab you make at me, spell out for me the fact that you're joking. I know that's kind of pathetic, but until I straighten this out in my mind, that's the best way to avert potential disaster to our friendship.
Ooo ooo! On Sunday, Rosie planned a surprise for me. I love to swing dance and so does she, but neither of us knew of any opportunities to do any real swing dancing in Michigan. She searched online and discovered the Michigan Swing Dance Association, which hosts a swing dance once a month in Warren. So Rosie took me down there and it was lots of fun. It was mostly middle-aged/old people, but they were very impressive dancers, and a lot of them got really into it and were consequently extremely cute. For our part, we didn't know all of their fancy sassy moves, but we were the only ones who were doing flips and such. (Rosie is about 5'10", so she's big enough to flip me and throw me around... Yes, we do look a little odd together, as I'm still only 5'2".) All in all, it was very exciting and an excellent surprise. And when we get back to LA, we're definitely going to have to go to the swing clubs there, too.
I'm sleepy and must take my mom to the airport tomorrow (she and my dad are going to be in Phoenix for the weekend and my brother's in Ann Arbor for debate camp, which leaves me with.... an empty house for the first time in my whole life!) so I am off to bed. I leave all my adoring readers with a few interesting bits to read:
"Richard, how can you hope to impress the world when everybody else works for their living and you run around all irresponsible from day to day in your crazy biplane selling passenger rides?" He was testing me again. "There's a question you gonna get more than once."
"Well, Donald, Part One: I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy."
"OK. Part Two?"
"Part Two: Everybody else is free to do whatever they feel 1ike doing, for a living. Part Three: Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is...?"
"...ourselves," Don said, replying for the imaginary crowd of seekers sitting around.
"We don't even have to answer to ourselves, if we don't feel like it... there's nothing wrong with being irresponsible. But most of us find it more interesting to know why we act as we do, why we make our choices just so - whether we choose to watch a bird or step on an ant or work for money at something we'd rather not be doing."
I don't think I've posted this before. It's the December 28, 2003 "Pearls Before Swine" comic by Stephen Pastis. Ask me if you want to see the actual comic.
A TV set does all the talking:
Leading off the news tonight, six Israeli children died early today when the bus they were riding in exploded in downtown Jerusalem.
They were little kids......with backpacks filled with sandwiches and juice and gym shoes and math books.
They had bedrooms with posters of race cars and soccer players, and they had unmade beds with Spiderman sheets.
They had little sisters and dentist appointments and cats and jeans with holes in the knee.
They took piano lessons on Tuesday and spent Sunday afternoons with their dads, who made them hold hands whenever they crossed a street.
And on the wall of the hall to their bedroom was a long line of photos with each of their annual school pictures placed chronologically...
...by a mom...
...who kissed her son goodbye that morning and watched him board the bus...
...that exploded in downtown Jerusalem.