It came from real life!

Just two little snippets of information, just to pretend that I still have a blog (and to encourage other people to start writing in their own blogs, grr argh!)

I trimmed my hair again the other day. My mother has always said that my hair is quite thick and tough, but I never really believed it was extraordinary. The other day's adventures proved otherwise. Midway through cutting my hair, the length extension snapped cleanly in two. It is no ordinary hair of this Earth that can defeat something specifically made to destroy it. I even took a picture of the corpse (with a shorter extension on the clipper).



The other thing I wanted to do was complain about grading papers. I'm sick of grading papers! Argh! Papers everywhere! I hate them! Hate them! My floor is just about tiled with them! In the middle of the night, one of them bit me on the toe! I have a strange rash on my back, and I think they're causing it! I took a picture of the mess across my apartment floor, but I decided not to post it for privacy reasons (student names are showing).

The Modern Man needs your help!

My poetry chapbook is due on Tuesday for class, and I'm still struggling with a few last poems. I'd like your input on this one:

Tomorrow’s Future

They pay a shilling to enter the Great Exhibition’s lower gallery.
Riding his father’s shoulders behind the top hat,
the boy’s eyes grow every time he turns his head.
More patient than Virgil, the man strokes his mustache
and waits for his son’s mind to drink down
the reaping machine from the endless fields of America,
the quickest steam gurney from the smooth raceways of Britain,
the big bore rifles from the towering foundries of Germany.
And most of all, the promises of Prince Albert’s new era
represented in the vastness of the exhibition’s scale:
the arched steel girders, entire ash trees beneath acres of glass,
goods from every corner of the Empire and the globe
brought by steamship to the queen’s home in London.
The boy’s imagination cannot be filled,
grown to a bucket as wide as the borders of empire.
Long after the sun has set and even electricity,
new marvel demonstrated by science magicians,
cannot replace it, they turn for home.
Pausing in the halo of a bulb as the lamplighter makes his rounds,
the man asks what the boy thinks of the World in Hyde Park.
“I wonder,” his son whispers, “what the boys will go to see
when they can speak to each other with the power of lightning.”

A little contentious today, aren't we?

I hate to swear. It's crass and ignorant. But sometimes I can't think of a better way to say it. So you have been warned

















*****


















Fuck the tea party. Our country keeps a torture facility open for years in Cuba, opens secret prisons across the world and makes people disappear without a trial, hands over prisoners to foreign countries because we can't torture them as much as we'd like but other countries can, and we, the people, do nothing. Then the government--rather than just curtailing our civil liberties, occupying foreign countries, and abusing our trust--imperils our MONEY, and we're up in arms.

Fuck that.

If you want to be angry, be angry about something that means more than your wallet.

Another Dream

Last night, I had another one of those dreams. Better than any video game. I was a drow assassin armed with a sword and a laser gun working for a group of rebel soldiers on a space station. It started with me sneaking onto the station, since it was being surrounded by deep space monsters (looking like giant space ticks crossed with dogs). Then I crept through the deserted, rusting under layers which were populated by scavenging punk gangs. Then I arrived in the main control room to be greeted by cheers and praise; apparently, I was quite the hero. I came not a moment too soon, because the walls shattered, and a platoon of battle droids entered. After dispatching them in fierce fighting, we started planning a counter-attack to break free, but then the dream ended. My colleagues were all very interesting characters; I wish I could remember more of them. One of them was Toshiro Mifune in a battle suit. Those battle droids never stood a chance.

Sometimes, I think being asleep is better than being awake.

On a more melancholy note, sometimes I spend a lot of time reflecting on the friends I have lost or drifted away from. This life is far too transitory. I can too easily count the friends I've had for longer than five years, and it seems like that number is steadily decreasing. Leaving friends, like any habit, becomes easier the more I do it. I wish it wouldn't. I wish I had the strength to cling to those friendships more tightly; then again, maybe there is wisdom in letting them go if they're not worth the both of us trying to hold on.

One of those days

I've been down all day, but that's okay. I got up early to join my family for Easter breakfast, then accompanied them to Church. It was a good sermon, and I even got a little teary at one point, but I didn't feel the presence of anyone or any greater thing but the crowd pressing in around. I couldn't help thinking how many of them, like me, wouldn't be there next week. I couldn't help wondering how many were there just in case. I wondered again, as I often have, whether religion is all one great act of collective wishful thinking.

But that's not what I set out to write about. I set out to write about my feelings. I have no immediate reason to feel the way I do, but that's not a sin. It's a beautiful day. Not a good day for melancholy. Maybe that's why I'm writing this, deep down: on a warm, sunny day, I feel as though it's my duty to the day to feel more cheerful.

But I don't feel in any hurry to cheer myself up. I don't mind feeling down. I put a melancholy song on, sit and think. Be glad I don't have anywhere to be this minute, no one to be with. Maybe there would be that rush to try to cheer me up, and I would have to put in that effort, as though making me feel better were another task on that daily list, and I could help them get there if I only smiled a little. And of course I'd try, because I don't want people to feel bad. The worst part about feeling bad is that trying to hide it, and I'm not a bad actor. But when I'm alone, I can kick back, grab a pillow, hum along with Billy Corgan. I'm not hurting anyone and no one is hurting me. Just time to breathe between heartbeats, let it go for a minute. Just be melancholy for a while, no rush to be anything else. At least not yet.

towards humility

How vast the cosmos, the inescapability of depth,
the scope by which galaxies are clouds
of dust. Consider the shapes of nebulae,
the deep breath of the eye that shapes them thus.
How meaningless the quarrels of humanity.
Expansive the star's bright cradle's comfort,
deep the hole of its dying despair.
Can you sing across the galaxies?
What black well shall your suffering make?
Never draw the lines of constellation
for fear of painting with dead stars;
you know no better, nor could you learn.

A "Review" of Street Fighter IV

My friends recently rented Street Fighter IV for the PS3, and since neither of them has a PS3, we've been playing it at my apartment, and they left it here for the weekend.

When I was a kid, I spent hours in front of this game. On the rare occasion I had quarters, I'd play, mashing buttons like a fiend and usually getting my ass not so much handed to me as shoved in my face by older kids who knew what the hell they were doing. More often than not, I watched those kids playing each other. I wanted to think that, one day, I, too, could make those cartoon characters beat the crap out of each other as well as they could.

It's past two o'clock in the morning. I've been trying to beat the final boss with Abel since 1:00. I finally did it. I've been swearing more than I probably have all year. I said things aloud to the screen that I never thought I'd say to anyone. I've railed, I've seethed, I've punched the air. I have Nintendo thumb so much my left thumb is literally purple.

But I finally beat that sonofabitch Seth. I unlocked the last character it's fairly(!) easy to unlock. I feel like I accomplished something epic. I feel like long poems will be written in heroic couplets about this day. The day Seth met Able, and, after a grueling war that lasted long into the night, stood victorious.

And unlocked some sad dumbass Bruce Lee wannabe I will never bother playing as.

Dream

I had a dream. I got up in the morning, walked around, started getting ready for going to the presentation today. Then I noticed that there were things in my apartment I haven't had for a while; to check to see if I was in a dream, I pinched my cheek. I didn't feel a thing; I panicked, expecting to get attacked by some horrible nightmare monstrosity in a moment. Instead, the floor opened into blackness, and I fell through.

I fell down toward the Earth from high above. I almost collided with the street, but wound up hovering over it. I was in China outside some official function. A shouting policewoman was pushing people onto a rickety bus to go to the event, screaming at the top of her voice. When she saw me, she started screaming at me to get on the bus. I told her I wasn't from around there, I was just a dream manifestation, and I didn't have to do anything she said. She just screamed louder that everyone has to get on the bus, dream or not. I didn't get on the bus. She kept screaming. I woke up and went to the presentation.

I'll leave it up to you to interpret, readers.

Not an April 1st Blog

One thing wrong with April 1st is that you can't do anything serious without people wondering if you're just pulling their leg. I'm not. I just wanted to clarify that right off. If necessary, I will repost this tomorrow.

It's a sad thing to realize that I don't know people as well as I sometimes think. Even upon casual meetings, people start to tell me that something is "like me" or "unlike me," they start to tell me what films would "suit me" or make suggestions about ways to accomplish "my goals." I put all these in heavy, heavy quotes because the first thought that always comes to mind in these conversations is that they don't know me as well as they think they do. How would they know what books I'll like? Have they seen me cry? Do they know what moves me? How do they know what secret fire burns in my soul?

Before this turns into a bad song, let me pan back a second and finish my thought. As sad as it is to realize I don't know people as well as I thought, or that others don't know me as well as they think, it's even sadder to think about whether I know myself as well as I think.

What do I really want? What moves me? What is that fire thing? When the remnants of my fleshy brain finally starts shorting out in my robo-body a thousand years from now, will I look back and be glad of this or that? Or will I long for something else, something I never had even in that long life?

Who am I really? What do I stand for? What do I want to do with my life? And no thanks, poetry teacher, for bringing up these unanswerable cosmic questions I've spent long hours in front of glowing screens trying to push down.