after the city fell
2014-04-26 - 9:42 p.m.
activity::
20apr: resolved to die alone.
24apr: drank the last can of Coca-Cola. i gave it up because my entire life revolved around caffeine. with any luck, i will have traded sleeplessness for the ability to relax.
28apr: realized that i can run 2 miles on foot faster than i can ride 2 miles on a bicycle. accidently broke bicycle while trying to fix the gearing mechanism.
30apr: learned to play "twinkle twinkle little star" on the piano. 72...
30apr: learned to play "lightly row" on the piano. 79...
05may: learned to play "long long ago" on the piano. 65...
05may: learned to play "on top of old smokey" on the piano. 60...
08may: went shoe shopping and saw ed izzard with juni at the wang theatre. experimented with mascara/eyeliner.
11may: went hiking with juni and ate diner with ray (ruby died).
12may: abducted by flying saucer.
14may: very proudly shut the back hatch of my car, with a full-sized couch inside.
15may: learned to play "sakura, sakura" on the piano. 69...
16may: before dancing at the club and before the search for the elusive cake, but only slightly before convincing the hostess to let me bring wine into the restaurant, i met a man named wilson, and we agreed that we both looked very familiar, but neither could say wherefore, nor from whence.
18may: helped shalhavit with her bike.
19may: broke down and drank some coke.
20may: learned to play "when the saints go marching in" on the piano. 65...
23may: watched "the other woman" with juni.
26may: watched "x-men: back to the future" with juni.
14jun: dropped juni off at the airport.
30may-14jun: paid vacation.
15jun: learned to play "amazing grace" on the piano. (626767-71676971-716967-64-62-626767-71676971-69-71-74-717474-71676971-716967-646262-626767-71696771-69_67_)
17jun: dancing with emma. quick quick slow.
19jun: failed to keep a straight face while ordering "thunder doodles" with krystal and olivia.
23jun: abducted by flying saucer.
28jun: stood up by catie and grace.
28jun: saw into the woods (starring Erica Spyres) with mitch.
30may: got my motorcycle permit.
28jul: abducted by flying saucer.
30may: resolved to die alone.
6jul: basic motorcycle safety class with deb and wor.
11jul: spent too much money on melons, and not enough on water.
18jul: tiki bar with mitch, kiara, and nicole. and tequila.
19jul: 24k car maintenance.
20jul: picked up juni at the airport.
25jul: twixt at mitch's turned into walk around Salem.
26jul: BBQ with matilda, enna and isaac.
27jul: boston seafood festival with juni, rained out.
28jul: abducted by flying saucer.
03aug: tupelo and ice cream with G (adorable dark blue polka-dot dress). her voice is positively magical.
04aug: abducted by flying saucer.
05aug: dinner and a movie (at the same time!) with G (attractive white dress). movie was �Boyhood�.
07aug: ice cream in the park with G (adorable pink dress).
08aug: US airstrikes on ISIS.
08aug: ebola outbreak in Africa declared an international emergency by the WHO. patient zero is thought to have died on 6dec2013. the current count is nearly 2000 dead, and several (non-Africans) that were treated with an experimental drug have scandalously survived.
08aug: dinner and dancing with G (fashionable red dress, brahmin).
13aug: watched "before sunrise" by myself.
15aug: rocco's (starring Susie) and tamboo with mitch, kiki, nicole, susie, and katya.
16aug: samba with nicole, nicole's sister, and katya.
19aug: watched "before sunset" by myself.
20aug: katya came over to my apartment (frozen pizza).
22aug: katya came over to my apartment (hong kong, How I Met Your Mother).
23aug: board game day with mitch, mike, and katya (cielito lindo, Firefly, orange chicken).
26aug: went over to katya's apartment (panko steak).
30aug: dinner at katya's turned into dancing in haymarket with nicole, angel, lauren, jodi, jill, and katya.
31aug: ate dicks with mitch and kiki (and cute puppies!) in quincy market.
1sep: pastries in the park with G (pink nailpolish with silver tips, sea-green tubetop and kickass jeans).
2sep: resolved to die.
10sep: saw "before midnight" by myself. more ideas than "before sunset" but the best part of the film is 19:30 to 21:17. there are no groundbreaking thoughts, most of the dialogue isn't even in a language i understand. but i re-watched these 107 seconds over and over, as if it was a movie all to itself. (i found out later in the commentary, the original design for the movie was 90minutes of scenes like this...i would have loved to see that.)
thoughts::
dream: pirate theatre (graphic, 1950s).
fact: you can write shakespeare with crayons on post-it notes. i am constantly bewildered when my day-to-day interactionaries see only crayon scratchings. this is the defining characteristic of people that are worthy of love: curious enough to consider the content through the medium, and intelligent enough to understand the significance.
i keep thinking about hyperbole and a half, and wondering if all humans go through this phase, at some point in their life.
Sir#1: cool... so, how far did you get?
Sir#2: let's see, i'm past the part where the city raises out of the desert and the lasers shoot down from the sky, the mer-people already evolved into crab people that evolved into turtlethings that evolved back into mer-people... and i solved the Gauss riddle and Pascal's puzzle, and reforged the sword-of-many-names, and this one time, i decoded the long-lost negative-state relief model from ancient hieroglyphs and mixed it with the loyalty-distilled empathic conern arguement in the alchemy chamber to make the Grenade Launcher of Helpfulness, which of course i gave to some n00b. so far, i've logged 923 hours on the game forums, and have over 8K posts -
Sir#1: ...
Sir#2: i'm hardcore into the 'merch too! i have three t-shirts, the special edition Latter Day Saint underwear pack, a giant foam sword signed by the mexican guy at Disney that wears the suit of the main character like it's his job, the bobble-headed sippy cup and the scruple-shaped sugarbowl, and a full set of the figurines, except "Juan Escudero Villanueva Veni Natavi Veni", which was recalled for -
Sir#1: *rubbing eyes* so, when you got to the castle, did you choose euclidean, chebyshev, manhattan? i wanted to go with that weird step-function convention used in D&D, where one diagonal equals one but two diagonals equals three, and i haven't unlocked geodesic yet, obviously -
Sir#2: whoa!? there's a castle?
Sir#1: it's at the end of level 1.
Sir#2: but that means...
Sir#1: yea, you haven't beat level 1 yet.
Sir#2: but the mer-people...
Sir#1: intro video.
Sir#2: and the silly n00b?
Sir#1: tutorial. it's not even an online game. you didn't, fall in love, with an NPC, did you?
Sir#2: *cries*
"...but superman, he carried on, forgot krypton, and kept goin'..." -Crash Test Dummies
There was this brilliant moment sitting outside at the CBC, having a deep conversation about the movie, when she took out a clip and used it to secure her hair in the "up" position, and my heart just stopped. Everything stopped. It was like seeing what happiness could be, if you could distill and concentrate it with a set of beakers and flasks. It was like seeing the sun rise and set, all at once. That is what I think love is: brilliant.
Sir#1: i think i'm gonna come up with a sexual position that is commonly abbreviated to FDA, in order to throw off the google searches.
Sir#2: lol, not a bad idea. it could be in a foreign language too, so it sounds more exotic.
Sir#1: Fellacio Del Agua?
Sir#2: i think we've discovered a new marketing angle for mouthwash.
the earth is too small, our time on it is too short, and miracles are too plentiful, for us to have any excuse for not falling in love, each and every day. thus, love is not a question of frequency, but one of depth.
"if it's conditional, it�s not love." -Anon
before sunrise:: if you take out all the music, silence, explosions, and logistics, this movie is full of interesting concepts. her: couples get hearing loss. him: poetry of day-to-day life. her: ambitions into ventures. him: grandmother rainbow. her: fear of death. him: dating losers = time travel. her: mark flurry was so hot. him: love is more complicated than attraction. her: i hate being told to make others happy. her: i hate that no one cares that there's a war going on. her: i hate the medias. her: i hate people thinking im soo cute. him: fractional souls. her: cemetary of the no-name. her: the new rebellion. him: shit happens. her: is any relationship happy? fortune-teller: find inner peace. fortune-teller: you are stardust. her: people are more transitory than evironments. her: pain and happiness of churches. her: i feel too old. him: i fell too young. her: does that make me a pedophile? him: quaker weddings. him: tormenting bums. her: strangers are more amicable. him: women want an excuse to be mean. her: men are immature. her: conflict can be good. him: our culture is too competetive. poet: delusion angel. him: saved time is never used well. her: i write about girls killing boys. him: people don't respect people. her: you should focus on bright colors. him: monkeys like sex. her: fear that feminism helps men. him: 1 man & 99 women. her: men die easily. him: women can kill men. her: men can kill women. her: everyone should dance. him: are men useless? her: yes. (joking). her: everything we do is to be loved. him: i'd rather be successful than loved. her: money doesn't lead to happiness. her: god exists in the space in-between. her: trying to understand is magical. her: the answer must be in the attempt*. her: do you think i'm manipulative? him: no, you're an angel. her: i wanted you to say that. him: this might be a dream world. him: everyone dies. him: we think relationships last forever. him: let's focus on these moments. bartender: for the greatest night of you life. her: i like sharing this with you. him: people are sick of sharing with themselves. him: people like to get away from themselves. him: back in reality. him: snapshot. him: dylan thomas. her: i only really love someone when i really know them**. him: we neglected the cow***. her: let's meet here in 5 years. him: let's meet here 6 months from yesterday.
* this is the best line of the film.
** this is a reference to what he said 8 minutes prior, which, in a movie, is like forever. and may be related to her pre-poet concept.
*** this is a reference to a scene 74 minutes prior, which, in a movie, is a ludicrous eternity (i spent the Entire movie worrying about the cow).
Been thinking a lot about the difference between 'nice' and 'good'. Loyalty is becoming increasingly more important than selfless service; it's a big shift for me.
{ }: it's the difference between one person clapping, and twenty people clapping. it's the difference between waking up alone in a room, and being awake in a room with a dozen sleeping people. it's the difference between watching a scary movie at home, and watching a scary movie in the theatre. if there's a word for it in English, i'm not aware of it, so feel free to email me your best guesses. a potentially poetic riddle.
"Seek first to understand." -Nemo
I met Lindsay on a bus on 9sep2002. I instantly fell in love with the way she curled up into a ball on the bus seat, and how intelligent she was in conversation. I felt like she was the first person I had met, in my whole life, that understood the lens through which I see the world. To the best of my memory, we rode the bus together on three separate occasions, emailing occasionally. In August 2003, we were both in NY state, and I wanted to see �The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King� or some other movie with her, but she dropped off the planet instead. At the time, I thought her �style� was mostly gothic. We met again on 24nov2009, at the Armory in Portland (I think in part due to step-sister). In my memory, she was wearing the sexiest purple dress ever, but in reality it was the sexiest purple shirt ever, and a pair of tight jeans. I don�t remember her ever wearing that shirt on another occasion, though I commented on her hotness in it several times. We had a happy and meaningful long-distance relationship from then until 20may2012. I moved in with her on 1jun2012, and I sat around without a job for a month. She dropped me off at the airport for military training on 6jul2012. In mid-sep2012 it was clear that something wasn�t working. She met me at the airport in late sep2012. Around 20nov2012, I started working at the lab. Toward the end of dec2012, we were in the process of breaking up, but I was still completely in love with her, cooking her meals when she allowed for it, and trying very hard to give her space and time to herself. On 1jan2013, Sister (not little sister or step-sister, but The Sister) called, and I talked to her on the phone instead of partaking in the annual obligatory oral orgy tradition. Although no one in my family had heard from Sister in six months, we hadn�t given up hope on the possibility that she was still alive. It�s hard for me to express the importance of that phone call, but given the choice now, I probably would text Sister back �glad to know you�re alive� and return to my arm-candy duties as quickly as possible. Then there was the plane flight� I offered several times to pick her up from the airport, and she insisted that I not do so, because it would have infringed on her independence. So when she got off the plane and wasn�t feeling well, she was furious that I wasn�t there because I had translated �no means no� to �no�, instead of the obvious translation. I lived in a separate room for a while, populated mostly by unwanted furniture, and moved out of the slums of Cambridge on 1apr2013, immediately after my parked car was hit by a pizza delivery service. The timeline is important. The overall trend was thus: she was supportive of me, I was attracted to her. I shared with her the things that she refused to share with me, and vice versa. We didn�t do much for valentines or anniversaries, mostly because I was still in my anti-consumer phase. There�s a line in �Boyhood� where the father says that he eventually grew into the supportive man that the mother had wanted him to be, but by that time it was too late. Given the situation, it was impossible for her to wait for him to change.
I had really given up hope on falling in love with anyone else, until now. Enter G.
"all i know of love... i'm just a wolf, howling at the moon" - Unknown
