Minor Triad -- High Contrast

I did not know these pictures existed, but I just found them in negative form. See if you can reach deep into your brains and remember some day where we walked around by the school and the track and rebecca took pictures. I think we may have even run races, and we had a boom box and hackey sack with us... fun day, some cool photos...


photos to follow:












There are more on the ol' flickr

Traveling!

After driving back to Chicago for the best decision I've ever made, we've made our way through Iowa and all of it's delicious entrails, Nebraska in a flash, and very public Colorado. Santa Fe, NM for now and from here, who knows? I promise to try to let any of you know if we're coming at least a day if not a couple days ahead of time...or maybe we'll just show up on your doorstep. I feel like the luckiest man alive that I'm able to take this trip...and especially that she came with me for it. If I haven't seen you already, I'll see you soon! If not...give a year or two...or fucking come visit, asshole...

7-13-09

Got in at 5:30 after flying in what I have come to believe was in fact a subsection of coach referred to as the nursery.
Tonight: a family barbecue, a little fishing in the pond with my cousins and then off to the fire.

planes are ridiculous

Thank universe for PDX free wifi! I've managed to download some fresh tv for the trip in the time its taken to sit here and wait for the plane to board. I am about to take the midnight plane to iowa. All indications are that this will be a special trip if ever one was to be had. Tyler, call me when you hit town!

Postponement...

As it is now two weeks after I was supposed to be arriving in Iowa, I suppose I should explain. The bit of machinery that I was planning on ordering to haul the motorcycle turned out not to work with my Cherokee. So, I found another bit of machinery that would accomplish the same goal in a different way and ordered one of those. However, that particular bit of machinery turned out to be on back order and they didn't tell me until five days after I ordered it, so, I was forced to cancel that order and find another establishment to order one from, and I did. This most recent bit of machinery is what is currently keeping me in Chicago, for I have to wait for it to be delivered. The upside is that in all of my extra time here, I have had the best of company and the most spontaneous of adventures. As of this moment, my bit of machinery should arrive on Tuesday the 14th and I will be driving to Iowa the following day. I will make more words if things change yet again...

Change of plans...

I will be leaving Chicago in time to be home for the Fourth of July. After some time there, I will be heading down to Iowa City for an indeterminate amount of time, but will be back in Forest City by the fourteenth. I won't be heading west from Forest City until at least the 19th. Hopefully, I will see my friend Dandroid in Denver amidst camping in the Rockies. I don't know yet when I'll arrive on the west coast, but will try to be in Seattle in time for the Capitol Hill Block Party with (at the very least) Eric! After that...who knows! I hope this covers all the bases...

Wants become blurry...

Home again from drinking, I find wonder! The Triad is, indeed, turned back on! Passing the time has become so troublesome, so I'll just have to settle for the little teasers that this fine blog offers me. You as well, I think. I don't, necessarily, want to write about it, but what's on my mind tonight is the aforementioned wonderful little Estonian girl. Under different circumstances, I would be crazy about her, and as such, I've had to work fairly hard to stifle that. However, her company on nights such as tonight is preferable to that of anyone else in this metropolis and keeping my mind platonic is a small price to pay for it. Whew, with that said, I can think again. Anyway...I have a tentative itinerary of where I'm going to be and when (subject to change at my whim, within reason) during the entire month of July, so I should work that into a postable form and publish it here, for all to see. I may also be taking volunteers along on parts of my journey, if anyone is so inclined, so once I get the schedule posted, let me know where you want to get on and off of this scrambler machine!

Oh, yeah, and the snowcave is back up, as well...

The Ghost of Ben Kenobi Weighs In

Tyler,
Never before have I been so morose/elated as when I found your three most recent posts and realized I'd missed their arrival. We've got to tell everyone that the triad is turned back on. I'm really excited for all of the potential this summer has for reuniting our disparate members. Your posts have thrown gasoline on this fire. This also came down the facepipe recently:

Remember when...
Between You and šunkový Chlebíček

šunkový Chlebíček
May 17 at 8:10am
...there used to be Sockey? Apparently other humans have also been practicing strange forms of large ball-n-sticks sports games. The New York Times wrote about it, so I guess that means it's officially part of our history.

What's new?

No game trumps Sockey.

Sarah

Peter Johnson
Today at 10:07pm
Dear Sarah,
It is true, a great era of sockey has lapsed into inconsistency, intermittency... lameness. However, I maintain the hope that sockey will again be played in its true form, perhaps even this summer... sometime in july??
I was really pleased to receive your letter and it set me thinking anthropologically about sockey and what it means. Sockey is a game of wonderful contradictions and blatant oppositions: the gentile-sporting and the obscene; the furious and the lackadaisical; the individual and the group; rule governance/constancy and spontaneity/unpredictability/impermanence; the human body and the ridiculous equipment of sport. It is the revelation of these oppositions and their manifestations and relative intensities in practical instances of field sockey that we experience as a grandiose play of sensational tension, emotion, exertion, release, rage, and hopefully catharsis. Etc. Etc.
Things churn on in PDX; for how long, few can imagine. I hope you've very well and thanks for writing. Let me know if you're going to ioway in the summatime... we're well past due for a bonfire/acidtrip/mate/weed/games/music/chatter sesh
yours,
Peter


More to follow...

P.S. Because Eric does not care, we'll make him anakin. You, Tyler can be Yoda.

I'm on my way...

Things are more solid. Not concrete yet, but more solid. I poured the cement and I'm working on making it harden faster. I have the Jeep to drive me across the country and to all of your doorsteps. I also have the motorcycle to make myself grin. Now I just need to wait until the end of the month when I'll have enough money to get a hitch rack to put the motorcycle on the back of the Jeep. Time, I guess. The hardest part of concrete is the waiting...

On that note, I am looking forward to seeing you all again so much that the waiting has become unbearable. In your natural habitats no less! It's not a reunion back in Iowa around a camp fire in the Johnson's backyard, though that would also be awesome, and will also happen, though not all of you will be there. You will be in spirit. It'll be like Return of the Jedi where we're all partying and Peter, Eric and...Sarah, I guess...are standing in the background somewhere looking like holograms, smiling in their humble Jedi garb. It's been a long time since I've seen all of you and if you've changed nearly as much as I have since then, I'm especially excited to meet you all, all over again...

Lacks substance, but a placeholder is better than nothing...

I've reached one of those points in life where events happen fast enough to leave a sunburn but yet I feel like the lethargic, plodding steps of time are slowly bleaching my mind. Yesterday, I worked for several hours accidentally, bought a Jeep, was confronted with the fact that, for once in my life, the last thing I need right now is a wonderful little Estonian girl to kiss, and then went home and got ridiculously stoned for the first time in years (mostly because I wasn't entirely sure about that previous decision). This morning, while I was fashioning a new window for my Jeep out of plexiglass, I suddenly realized that it's only the twelfth of May. A month and a half. That's how much longer I have before I leave. A month and a half ago, Portia and I were still together and I had no inkling of any of this. Have you ever seen The Cell? You know that part where J.Lo is in Vincent DiNofrio's mind and she falls into that chasm where she is caught by water that isn't really there and her descent slows as she sinks in the water and then speeds up again when she reenters not-water? That would be a pretty good analogy. At least I exist in a time where I can carry absurd amounts of mood bending audio in my pocket. Reclaiming my Mac and thus rediscovering my music collection has been pure joy. The AKG studio headphones that I picked up from work have helped as well.

The format is there, but I just can't bring myself to write installment fiction...

All of the things that I spent so much time wanting to do once the weather allowed have apparently been erased from my mind. Now that I know I'm leaving, I simply can't remember them. I guess, really, I should compile a list of things I want to do before I leave the city and just make them happen. Oh, wait...those are the same things that I've been trying to remember since I decided to leave. Well, at least I'll leave the city with some regrets. I'd hate to believe I'd accomplished everything there was to accomplish in this giant fucking matrix of retards.

Apparently, I've rediscovered the proper level of discomfort for writing. As though the perfect combination of boredom, loneliness and intoxication are stimulating that certain part of my brain that makes the words flow. The main problem with this being that it results in something more likened to sticking my finger down my throat rather than the well thought out escapism that I so elaborately plan on writing. I started working on a project a few months ago that I hoped would eventually form itself into a novel, though now it's fins seem a bit lethargic and it's tank has a weird green film everywhere. It's the story of Jeremiah Kyzlasov's survival in a possible post-apocalyptic Chicago, subsequent realization that, although the landscape could sustain them, the still relatively high population density is too much of a threat to his small community and their eventual trek out of the city to open, fertile lands where they can thrive. Intertwined, of course, with detailed instructions and diagrams on how to recreate all of their solutions to living without reliance on the unseen trappings of society. Basically, a survival guide and an apocalypse novel all wrapped up into one. The Journals of Jeremiah Kyzlasov, at it's most successful, would make ordinary humans, still woven into the fabric of civilization, realize that there are better ways to accomplish everyday tasks in a new, more efficient way, rather than continue to rely on our shrouded caste system of proletariat morons and gluttonous profiteers. Oh, look, now I've begun to rant. The problem with all of this is that, although Jeremiah's exploits are still in the making, so are those of his uncle Travis. Perhaps they should combine forces...

It's not late enough and I'm not drunk enough for me to stop writing just yet. Though, not in this vein...

Contents Subject to Change, As Needed

It's time to end this drought. Therefor, I'm here to relax the muscles and wet the ground with a diarrhetic torrent of mental sewage.

Externally, I continue to thrive in Chicago at a price. Enjoying my ever-accelerating thrift store empire and the deluge of must-haves that wash ashore has grown old. You can only possess so many antique gas masks and sets of custom tailored prosthetic legs before you decide that the sight of one more copy of Iococca by Lee Iococca is going to set off a chain of events that you refuse to be responsible for. This is amplified by the process of shedding such priceless garbage. Getting rid of a home filling amount of other people's trash that you once imbued with monetary value really makes you think. All of the hours of my life spent on this bit of junk and that, for I prefer to convert straight from units of time to objects of detritus exchanged for such time. That movie cost me ten minutes of my life and then another ninety-eight because it sucked.

I had a dream some time ago where I was living in a Morton shed on a small plot of land surrounded by trees. In the rear section of the shed, I had erected a humble kitchen and living area topped with a sleeping loft. The rest of the space was taken up with tools and workspace where I welded sculpture, repaired machinery, spat in the face of science and whatever else a Mad Engineer would find himself up to. It was beautiful. I'm not entirely sure how much of this was the original dream and how much of it has been romanticized in the following weeks. Since the initial dream, I've really fleshed things out in my daydreams. Wind generators made from old steel barrels and the biggest electric motors I can find, rewound to accommodate the added magnetic poles. An enormous wood burning oven/kiln/furnace/forge made from clay bricks hand formed from the nearby creek bed, complete with spinning chimney cover to capture the escaping heat and return it back into the system in the form of just enough electricity to power a thermostat and an automatic flue. A small grove of bamboo out back as quickly replenishing fuel? Okay, so there are some things that I still have to work out. It's become my "five year plan". As a person who finds "five year plans" repulsive, I can now understand their purpose, I guess.

Internally, the city has become a wasteland. Where I saw potential and untapped resources only months earlier, I now see uselessness and worthless cretins. There are still gems among the wreckage, but only in the form of people. I am not a city boy by nature and I think I've leveled up in Urbanity significantly since I got here, but it's soon going to really detract from the rest of my experience points. However, quitting cold turkey is not an option either. Not because I find myself addicted to city life, but because the concept of land ownership has become such a perverted and protected notion in these fine United States.

All of this in mind, I have been confronted with a decision that I have to make. Not a simple this or that decision, mind you, but an open ended, nigh rhetorical self-imposed question as to just what in the hell I'm going to do about this. I pride myself as a decisive person, but this isn't the sort of thing you can just proclaim. So, I plan. A plan is really no more than a fluid decision and my fluid decision is to leave this city, diddle around the country side for a month and arrive in a different, smaller city. The former being Chicago, IL and the latter being Eugene, OR. If you're reading this, I hope I spend some time with you on my way.

2009?

So, I've been not blogging of late, but I think it's starting again. And whenever I feel the need to read/write internet content, one of the most joyful/sad places to check is, of course, this fine blog.
Looking back, I think it's fair to say that 2008 was at least a year of some fine content for we three, though not as much as any of us probably would have idealized. This year has begun as anything but ideal in terms of our collective internet output of gibberish, and so, I'll go ahead and at least stick in a placeholder three months after new years in the hopes that this space will again stalwartly serve contain those malefic products of the wildly occasional writer-lust that we each cast out into the web.

Actually, I've been two-timing this blog with a typewriter. What a glorious outrage!

In Which Eric Remembers People From Another World

Nick Craig just set off a very bizarre chain of events.

1. I was in the bathroom taking a shit when my phone rang. It said nickcraig on it so naturally I thought "what the shit?" and then picked up.

2. Proceeded to have a half hour conversation with said nickcraig, he drunk, I still on the toilet unbeknownst to him. Highlights included:a recap of 5 year runion including tales of a nearly consumated convservative christian bigot vs. lesbian smackdown featuring Tiffany Mickleson and Anne Peters, good old FC nostalgia, a brief treatise on segregation and race relations in Middle America and the broader global community, and the obligatory State of the Joel address.

3. Here being where it gets truly wierd, this unexpected contact ignites an ill-advised and unquenchable desire inside of me to contact someone else I haven't spoken to in years. I hatch a plan to organize my own sort of 5 year reunion, but excluding all the people I wouldn't want to see.

4. I call Anne Peters. I apparently still have her correct phone number, she apparently still has my number listed, and she actually answers. We talk for a half an hour and highlights include: finding out that Ashlea Twait is moving to Seattle in a few weeks, discussions of Mindy and Sam and Carla, and coming up with the idea that my quest should take the form of a drinking game in which I become successsively drunker between each call I make. I would need to make a list of people, and order them appropriately so that the last person on the list is the one that would demand complete shitfacedness to contact.

5. I call Carla. She also answers. I find it absurd that this is working. I tell her about my strange night and the drinking game and we brainstorm about my list. We agree that Joel should be last. Or maybe Sam, but that I'd have to be too drunk, and would pass out before she answered. Geoff Lindsay has contacted her, as Sam has contacted me. When informed that Carla teaches preschoolers Geoff told her he would never trust her with his child. Carla is thinking about becoming a hairdresser, despite the fact that she gave me the worst haircut of my life, which I pointed out.

6. I ran out of steam. Ty, you would have been next even though you weren't in my class, but I know you're rocking out at Lollapalooza right now and I couldn't really bear to call anyone other than you. And I didn't really feel up to getting as drunk as it would have required. Nonetheless, one of the most enjoyably weird nights in recent memory.

Ty, I'm calling your ass soon.

To all Major Fractions...

I submit this conversation as redundancy that our triumvirate submit to a census. Also, as a pleading beacon that we concentrate this solution...though one mole of us remains constant, it gets split up between beakers...

Ludovic
awake, super magic awesome man!

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
kablam!

Ludovic
I can only imagine what that resurrection sequence looked like...
what's the word, my friend?

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i just squeezed out a tastey blues jam...
if you haven't read it already, the mrs. and i will be heading your way in august

Ludovic
I have read it already and I am readily awaiting your arrival...are there any other guests travelling along?

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
maybe noah parks.. that would be it.. and i kind of doubt it
no, i do doubt it

Ludovic
not to discourage, but I would be especially pleased if a reconvening were undisturbed by lesser fractions...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
so delicately worded

Ludovic
I take pride in my art...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i hear you... this trip will be ideally filled with a lot of reconvening, as the lady will have been in europe for so freakishly long

Ludovic
oh yeah?

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
will you have to work a lot?
like, at night and stuff?

Ludovic
early august? I believe that I will be unable to take any time off...it's a black-out month...moving season...though, I'll be done at 6:30 every night...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
ah, good.. i don't want to use your place as a motel
meaning.. i sleep there without seeing your shining face

Ludovic
I truly enjoy that our conversation is following along in the same vernacular as the absurdly bourgeois period film that I'm watching...
and yes, I would like to spend time with you when you are not rocking and/or sleeping...or when you are...doing either, I suppose...
so, yeah, anyway, I'm glad you're coming, fuck face...and I'm glad you're bringing your lady friend...I'll be glad to meet her...I hope that you can meet some of the talented and wonderful humans that I've encountered thus far in my Chicago adventures...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
we'll be ready

Ludovic
glad to hear it...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i'm ready for an adventure.. it's hard to find a job when everyone else is loosing jobs because of a flood.. i have a lot of time to sit around and.. be ready for things

Ludovic
I know it gets old, having everyone try to convince you to be where they are, but I'm going to try...
Chicago is pretty rad...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i'll give you a fair shot.. for now, it's time for me to read the silmarillion until i fall asleep

Ludovic
sleep well, man of awesomeness...and keep the boss fruit growing, for it is our fate...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
word, son

I'm still curious about this anthology...

Could we have an anthology?

hey boys... 

So, I'm bachin' (pronounced "batchin'") it this summer, and It's making me crazy in a number of ways. However, as usual, these lapses in material "happiness, comfort and love"-making potential get me riled in a most introspective text-hemorrhaging manner. Anyway, last night/this morning I ejaculated the following collection of loose signifiers that I intend to make into fiction of some length:

Writing Project Brainstorm:

short story topics --> the gap;

 rurality and urbanity;

my generation;

- how fucked are we? why?  

technology;

society, political identity (vs. personality);

heterosexual-masculinity;

animality/primitivism;

drugs;

time/ambulation as a biological classificatory device/botany;

geomagnetic reversal;

 I realize that the gist of this brainstorm is heavily obtuse and science-fictive and, for me, it has already yielded three fairly concrete short story ideas that I intend to germinate in the coming days.  What I propose is FICTION most speculative! For, while our existential rants give us candid access to our shared and/or unshared emotional landscapes in light of our individuated urban experiments as they stand, I feel as though some of the greatest mojo that the triad has ever mustered came from our wildest and most fleeting hopes, our joking attempts to glimpse the future in all its probable absurdity. It's going in the movie. 

Anyway... my tripartite proposal/promise/dare is that fiction is coming to minortriad this summer and you two, or anyone else who reads this b-log should come along as well. The task I set is to extract the "rain" and the "torm" from a good heavy brainstorm and leave ourselves with some pure BS. 

Fattening the Brain Magic (a Tyler list...)

A) It took me quite a while to realize it, but apparently Janine Turner was a major sex symbol for me. I didn't know until just now when I saw an ad for some workout contraption featuring TA-DA!! Chuck Norris!...and a bunch of other random celebrities who don't have careers anymore...the last of which was TA-DA!! Janine Turner. At which point I thought...wow, she's...she looks familiar...she's...Maggie O'Connell?
3-I think I dated Jada Pinkett Smith...in high school...except she was white...and kind of a bitch. Yeah, tell me there's not a resemblance...
D. Getting really drunk makes me want to watch Waking Life. Inexplicably. I just want to ride in a boat car and listen to Speed Levitch pontificate on Golden Gate suicide until the Wiggins stop dreamin'...and I don't understand why...I think it's because I've never seen that movie sober...because it never seems like a good idea until I'm relieved of my judgement...
two!! putting relatively rare things online makes me happy, so, starting with the past, here comes Rock & Rule...the future holds KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park...hopefully followed by Andy Warhol's Frankenstein...

Thursday's Deep Thought Cache Dump... (a new list)

1. "Everybody Sees, and Everyone Agrees": The new Raconteurs album is certainly not bad, probably excellent, and definitely growing on me. It's so many shades of black.

2. Today I replaced my now former facebook photo with a photo of three of me on my living room couch engaged in some of the archetypical actions which comprise the living room and its identity. Upon looking at it again, I now notice that the picture is also chock-full of waldo-esque items. See if you can spot all of the weird bits in there!


3. Lyrics are fruity. These are some of the ones that David wrote yesterday and I'm recording in the hydra-facebook-photo I mentioned.

soft white hands lite pitchers of cream
fold napkins, polish silver, poach eggs, boil water and wait
Great lucifer's screams and oak tables ignite

at the awakening...
of the human skin dream
at the awakening...
of the human skin dream
pressing labor tired heaving beasts for meats
naked on pristine sheets of steam
her empty carapace ablaze and sips tea all night

at the dawning of the feast...
feast of the human skin dream
dawning of the feast...
feast of the human skin dream

4. Media from the Month gone by:

There will be Bud - a fine flv that should be googled, especially by anyone who has seen There Will be Blood, anyone who enjoys a good Daniel Day Lewis impression, and/or anyone who wears sweaters.

New Gnarls
{ What do you think?}
New We are Scientists

5. Okay, so I wrote this list on thursday, but it's now Sunday... Not as though anyone is actually checking the triad for updates urgently enough for this to fuck with anyone's day, but I thought I'd clarify things for those of you who enjoy thinking that time ought to make sense.

6. Doc Ellis is everyone's favorite baseball player. Or at least he should be.

7. For Tyler's Eyes Only: I can't upload albums to the ftp. Or at least, not the way I've been trying to do so; that is to say, in a folder and into the music folder.

#8. For Eric's Brain Only: Hannah Thompson

9. I've just been be-face-friended by Ryan Holtan. This is perhaps the most depressing profile page I have ever seen. I encourage you to be-face-friend him just to witness this trainwreck (like, the kind little kids have in their mouths) and then to have a good laugh/cry/sneeze-gasm along with me and our only current (herpetic) mutual friend katie dakken. :D

10. And Finally---> I would like to offer an apology (socratic style) which pertains to the month-or-so-long gap that preceded this post. I had been assured sometime, perhaps in february, that there would be an incoming eric post, which would shock and molest us just how we like it. I liked the idea of this post so much, in fact, that I nearly decided to simply wait forever until it came, so that I would not hold three posts row-wise. Apparently, I got over it. And I'm sure, given his current face-status, that eric will chime in with something insane here right quick.

"Ours go to" 11. I might get flown out to Ioway for the graduating of Siri. Wanna meet up??

A Scenario:

I want to know a girl who is attracted to me for a very businesslike reason. I want her to be mortally dependent upon receiving my warmth. Not to say that it's going to require anything particularly out of the ordinary, maybe a night spent accidentally locked in a workplace freezer/fridge. I guess, actually, I want a girl who has good reason to believe that she is mortally dependent upon receiving my warmth, but does not necessarily have to be. We'd be in this goddamn freezer (did I mention she has HUGE eyeballs) and she'd get real worried and right there at the top of the list of precautions to be taken immediately would be "Body-Heat-Preservation and Reinforcement". However this went down, it would involve one sitting very close to this freakishly beautiful girl and getting to notice all the finer movements of humans without having to look at oneself in a mirror. The curl of the lip, the twitch of the eye, the whizzing exhale of the nose.... okay, apparently I'm also feeling kind of lysergic in this scenario, but I swear i'm not actually tripping at the time. No, we'll say it's one of the really unfortunate aspects of the situation that my stash happens to be just outside the freezer in my backpack.

Oh, but the point being, that i have no idea how people get together without history (a long string of common prior events) or the shared delusion, what I'll call fantasy (inspired by intense coincidence/luck/physics?). I guess I thought the whole "need for warmth" concept would be a pretty indellible coincidence. This is certainly a weird time for history-building. Currently my most up to do date auto/biographical knowledge is contained in some late-night digital scribblings for those eyes which should fall upon this blog, and in the mind of an only child who has come to consider me something of a surrogate brother. All the female perspectives on Peter Johnson that I can imagine right now are pretty odd, pretty disjointed, and pretty vague. A good stiff coincidence could clear that right up... Vivan the shared delusion of significance and the willing mutual suspension of disbelief!

Get Ready For Super-Ultra-Gigantic Megapost!

So... I'm suddenly flush with goods fit for blogging, so rather than give you that unfortunate backward in time effect that blogs are so good at, I thought I'd just slam them all in one space. Thus this post will be list like, though ridiculous in this capacity, because the list contents will be no more than temporally and authorially related and all a great deal too long for the standard list format.

First: Required Viewing

First Book of Armaments 16:1 And then Peter took the holy disc from the great singularity and blessed it. First, he gave thanks to the singularity, appealing to its oneness and threeness alike, and he was filled with knowledge of the goodliness of his action. Then he spake unto his two companions, holding the great disc, a rarification of so much ephemeral and human, aloft and pleading: "Take this brothers, for these representations have resonance wherever we exist and are rightly a part of our canon. Play this in the rememberance of three. And be it a covenant in our life, everlasting, Amen". And so, the men partook in the sharing of this absurd delicacy... not so great within itself, but the key to much that memory and the spirit normally withhold. And they were quenched.

(I got kind of carried away with that... if you're able to pick it out from within that vaguely lutheran-flavored queef, one or both of you is smarter/crazier than I have yet imagined. The gist of it is that tonight I'm uploading the Darjeeling Limited to the FTP [it leaked yesterday, Fucking FINALLY], a movie whose numerology and Wes Anderson stamp make it an irresistible force for triumvirate nostalgia. It's taking me back to the life aquatic on a cold Edina night as I type.)

Second: Retarded Reading
This next one is a little more straightforward at first, and consists of only official act thus far as a technical Waldorf Alumnus: my pseudonymous submission to the lit-rag whose name has changed this year from the Muse to the Crusader, if my reports are correct. I'm not sure whether I like this one, but Laura told me that she did, and that it was compelling writing such that her co-editors might not get it... Hell, if she hadn't liked it I would have posted it on MinorTriad anyway.

Fear and Loathing in the Gap
by "Brad Rowncliffe" '07

Graduating from college is a whole new kind of death. For many it can be felt as a subtle end in the process of translation from the life of protected kinship to the life of the experimental, liberal individual.

I remember, vaguely, walking around in a robed horde of black-capped, beaming initiates. We were under fire; battery-fuel filled capacitors snapped, daze-inducing as we crept into the gigantic tent. I felt like an asshole. It isn't the kind of magic that people seem to like to invent when they talk about graduation, or when graduations are dramatized. There's an effervescence they try to depict, an idealized clicking and whirring of new social mechanisms set into motion by this event and a clear new momentum that thrusts these newly licensed thinkers out into the myriad tributaries feeding that bountiful current that is American Progress. But really, it isn't there.

All of those plastic smiling gazes and leaking tear ducts and bottles of champagne, what are they for? I don't think they're all that deep. They're the swiftest and surest sign of a dubious undercurrent that tugs at the Baby Boomers. For someone who has spent four years reorienting his or her thoughts around a framework of rational, self-referential, critique this kind of symbol floats in on a nauseating breeze and ruins the cake. There is hope strewn all over the place, but it is a stupid hope, a shored-up, bootstrapped vision of a future in which we apply ourselves wantonly to the task of Horatio Alger protagonism and everything comes out Hollywood.

So, what is the point of all this hoping, longing, planning for easy integration? Do our parents long for a world in which we assume all their baggage, their parents baggage? I suppose that would figure. A generation whose rebellion was easily as effective as the war in Vietnam, which it sought to quash, has been jaded into a more legalistic, cog-like lifestyle than even that of their depression-era parents. The "60's" is pure camp sold back to them and bought for their children, a goofy era that was the beginning and end of an ultimately silly counterculture. The world they live in is immovable and the idea that their children will bring or even witness great and radical change is both rhetorically powerful and safely laughable to them.

I think we are a generation divided. On the one side there are the privileged and the willing. Their parents have been carbon-copied, thus their "important" traditions carried on, albeit with an oblique artificiality that bespeaks this preservation, a new generation of brats is squeezed forth. I don't know what these people think of life on earth, life in the United States, but I hope they damn-well love it.

The other aisle is filled with catastrophists, catastrophists simply waiting for catastrophe. We live with a sincere wish for something authentically defining, an event which would stab into the softness of the ever-billowing boundaries that confine and proscribe our lives, which would lay bare the power relations that hobble our thinking and then violently explode them, leaving us with a clearer, messier, more visceral understanding of what the human animal needs and should value in life. We want something so inhumanely sublime in its scope, schedule and magnitude that there is simply no resisting the symbolic force of its many contexts. Something that mangles devastatingly and excretes communities whose task is to negotiate the form or to sputter and drown.

We understand, though perhaps we do not all think about it in these terms, that to be human, to be even an aborted fetus or retarded quadruple amputee, is to be among the luckiest and most improbably constituted matter in the universe. People are the side effects of raw atoms and energy and often they are way too worried about preserving that tiny, comprehensible slice of existence within which they can feel purposeful, meaningful and reasonable.

That's where I sit, right now. I do seemingly insane things every day in the service of systems that were broken before I was born. I am ultimately subjected to the whims of anyone who bears enough of the pure, rarified human agency of currency. I have no de facto recourse, even to reclaim the smallest bit of my biological habitat. I am a prosthetic beast whose ultimate happiness lies not in my ability to do good works or fulfill some other absurd criteria, but in my ability to somehow festoon all the aspects of my life, my body, my dare-I-say soul, so that I might incidentally feed my head with enough love, comfort, respect, excitement, suspense, ire... or some complex of emotions such that I continue respiration. I know there are better ways for me and for a whole lot of other people to get our biologically mandated jollies here on this planet. I am already way too lucky for this bullshit, and so are you.


Third: Zoom In
This is what happened when I ran out of Craigslisting for the day..... It kinda bugs me, but it's a little more personal than the other one, and it seems like stuff I'd joke about with you guys, or the conversation that I would manage to not have with my mother.

A Slice of Life:

I'm sitting here today with nothing to do but wait on answers which will likely never come. The arrival of any of these replies will signal that I have now progressed to any number of squares one, many of which are frankly quite exciting, but others of which lead down a path of belabored inquisition that ultimately terminates in an oddly arranged new schedule of drudgery. It is only via securing this sort of obligation that one of no means such as myself is able to remain free and alive.

For some reason, this experience also makes me want to write passages like the above.

I walk around, sometimes purposefully, in pursuit of one or more of these answers, other times just to get a new perspective on Portland. This was something I did during college, but not with any necessity and not often enough to scratch the surface of Portland's many views.

I haunt the Internet. Looking for anything that appears to have a job at the other end of it. I painstakingly craft Facebook status updates, they emerge in a range that should only be characterized as encompassing the involuntary utterances of the retarded - or perhaps autistic - to the mildly cannibalistic, schizophrenic. Recent entries have included my current address, which under the new Facebook status formatting conventions comes out to be something like "Peter apt. 8 4107 SE Gladstone St., Portland, OR, 97202."; entries which vaguely illuminate the nexus of my simultaneous longings for food and companionship, such as "Peter forages for interesting protein..."; and entries in which I make non-attempts at inside-humor with myself, like "Peter wishes he had more tea... ".

Specifically, I wanted some more of the shroom tea that I drank from a Nalgene bottle at a really fun party, and thought that the perfect way to assuage these feelings would be with a little foppish quip about me needing more tea displayed to the Faceworld. Beneath which, there would be me, the me that is hyper-present in the psilocybin-tickled brain, the me who feels no more at home than in an early fall garden: naked, hairy, panting, hair touching the back of my neck and shoulders, breath sharp and falling out in moist white tufts. I love being shocked at the number of fruits I can collect with two hands. My translucent skin, the flesh, bone and gristle beneath, suspend these juice filled bodies in a perfectly tight and delicate grip as I gallop around...

Anyway, today I need something for the status that makes it clear that while I am waiting for something, I'm not busy and I crave interruption. Not because I think anyone reads my Facebook status, but because I'm probably also going to vote in November, so I must believe in bullshit.