Bibliography

Oh, and I almost forgot to nod to my sources. Courtesy of a Moleskine notebook of many years past, the original lists:

list

-today we will begin our prepwork for the coming day of enlightenment

1 tranquilizer gun for large animals and/or ty
laffy taffy
exciting water device
baloons (baloon juice not included)
chewing gum
bubbles
fizzy lifting drinks
munchies kidz mix
salt and vinegar chips
my watch
flashlight batteries
muzak
orange juice
boats
elton john
random silly things
ice cream
jello

activities

croquet
foxtail
bike rides
sprinkler
wiffle bat time
lego time
diablo 2
hackey
frazbee
kites
sit on asses, look at shit
walkie talkie games
lotr
corn starch
sex with women
jello
cut green island in half with metal heavier
expose ourselves to multimedia
masks
painting/art
whooping
fire
build fort/create society

kits and general attire stipulations

shoes, socks discouraged
short pants
sunglasses
writing/recording utensils
hats/headwear
uniform emblem/icon for purposes of continuity
quantities of liquid, cigs, gum, and tool
shirt
jacket *a must*

I don't know what it is, just look at it

As promised, a recollection submitted to the collective memory, albeit with some cringe-worthy sentimental BS abruptly edited out (and a little abruptly left in). Petros and I were just discussing the lawn mowing in the dark, but I did not remember it being on this day. Is this true, or have I completely conflated several different occasions? You know I rely on you guys to keep my past and childhood in order, so I will defer to the rest of the Triad on this point. Regardless, I give you a mostly accurate and true except for where I probably made shit up if I felt like it account of the trip heard round Leland:


“Naaawat?” Tyler asked, as a stream of saliva overflowed his bottom lip.
“Kee ih on yo tongue,” Peter said. The three of us were sitting in Peter’s living room, relaxing with our feet up in reclining chairs as if we were enjoying an ABC family movie, rather than holding small squares of paper on our tongues, trying to make sure we absorbed all the acid from them before swallowing.
Several factors had contributed to us finding ourselves in this situation. One was that Peter lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest neighbors being miles away. Another was that my parents and Peter’s parents had driven to Wisconsin for the weekend to watch Shakespearean plays. We had been invited to go along, but the third factor was that we had reasoned that, while Shakespeare was great, we could watch plays when we were 92, while taking acid and running around in cornfields was an activity that would get less feasible with each passing year.
And so began what our “hallucinogenic farm party.” We were dressed for the occasion. Tyler wore tight blue jeans, brown cowboy boots, and a child’s sized tie-dyed t-shirt. Peter was dressed in a pink button-up shirt and gray Goodwill sports jacket, ripped jeans, and a cowboy hat pushed down over his long blond hair. I wore shorts and a used youth soccer jersey with the words, “I’m the space invader, I’ll be a rock n’ rollin’ bitch for you,” stenciled on with black paint. I had a a plaid Scottish cap with a fuzzy blue ball on top, and aviators as accessories.
We swallowed the squares of paper and decided to have art time while we waited for something to happen. We sat around the dining room table and scribbled with colorful ink pens on a huge roll of white butcher paper, something I hadn’t done since elementary school. I began doodling and drawing terrible stick figures, which was all that my artistic ability generally allowed for. The three of us drew uneventfully for 15 minutes or so, until I suddenly started grasping at the pens frantically.
I knew exactly what I had to draw and I started sketching in quick, purposeful strokes. I drew an elaborate blue and orange monster with swirly eyes and a square face in the upper right hand corner. Next I drew a series of very simple, yet elegant, triangular trees, and finally a small purple bird on one of the branches. I drew a caption bubble for my bird, and began writing him some dialog. Finally, I looked up and found Peter and Tyler staring at me with their jaws hanging open. They looked like wooden puppets, and I could almost see the metal hinges at the corners of their mouths.
“I think it might have started,” Tyler said.
“Why?” I asked. Peter pulled my edge of the paper towards him and studied it.
“You, my friend,” he said, “are officially tripping balls.” He grinned like a Disney character, reached across the table and shook my hand, while tipping his hat to me.
“What is the bird saying?” Tyler asked. Peter picked up my drawing and cleared his throat dramatically, then began reading from my caption bubble.
“I have lived in many places,” he said, “but never in a shoe.”
We walked back to the living room to begin our adventure. We gathered around the table where we had assembled our supplies, and tried to decide what to do next. The table was covered in a ridiculous assortment of items. We had made several lists the day before, in preparation for this event, one of them being a shopping list.
It had been nice to pick up our shopping list and find, instead of things like eggs and milk, items such as silly string, Laffy Taffy, and small American flags (for burning). Our shopping expedition had taken us back to our youth, when our mothers would take us to the store and we would toss Oreos into the cart whenever we thought she wasn’t looking, only to have her discover them and put them back on the shelf. This time we were three orphan children, tossing in anything and everything that caught our eye, with nobody there to veto it.
The result was that we now had balloons and Munchies Kids Mix and assorted party favors at our disposal. I ripped open the Laffy Taffy and stuffed as many pieces into my pockets as I could. I picked one up and read the joke. It was embarrassingly awful. We decided that it might be more fun to read the punch lines and try to guess what the jokes were supposed to be.
“Beef jerky,” I said.
“Umm, what do you call a cow that masturbates a lot,” Tyler blurted out.
“He didn’t say beef jerkoff, dumbass,” Peter pointed out.
“It’s ‘what do you call a twitchy cow,’” I explained. “What should we do now?”
“Let’s consult the list,” Peter said. He opened his little notebook and looked at the list of activities we had compiled. “We could play croquet,” he said. “Or cut green island in half with a metal heavier, or set things on fire, or sit on our asses/look at shit.”
We walked outside for the first time, and it became immediately apparent that we hadn’t needed to make a list. We would clearly be spending most of our trip sitting on our asses and looking at shit. Outside was incredible. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard explores the phenomenon of seeing. She describes the documented experiences of the only generation of blind people to be given sight for the first time after cataract surgery was invented by Western surgeons, and I imagine what I saw must have been a little like that—like suddenly having sight after years of relying solely on your other senses.
There were colors I’d never seen before, and everything seemed to be shining brilliantly, so that the whole world was full of glint and glare. I lost my sense of depth, so that all was two dimensions, like very detailed and beautiful cardboard cutouts. Peter walked in front of me and he looked like a paper doll, sliding fast past a flat backdrop attached to a popsicle stick.
I flopped down onto the ground out of confusion and exhaustion, and pressed my left cheek into the grass and dirt. I felt as if I stayed there for several hours, but I had lost all grasp of time by then, so there was no real way to know. The world started peeling away, layer by layer. I saw everything in my field of vision, and I watched it all intently—the base of a nearby tree, the grass, dandelions, a few fallen leaves and twigs. Then suddenly all I could see were a few blades of grass, as if there had been a zoom. They loomed up in my vision and I saw the tiny wedges where they had been nibbled, the different shades of green and yellow, and the individual grains. And then I was looking beyond the grass, and I saw an ant walking along the dirt beneath, navigating between the obstacles in his path. He began climbing up one blade, then paused halfway and seemed to think better of it, turning himself around and heading back to where he’d come from. I watched him, and wondered if he would turn into a man-eating sloth-toed cheetah, or grow spines, or turn yellow, but he just stayed an ant, walking around on grass. It was fucking fascinating.
When I eventually remembered that I wasn’t alone, I sat up to look around and my face was numb from the hard ground. I saw that my friends had been occupied the same way I had. Tyler was petting a tree branch and Peter was investigating a dandelion. We gathered our wits about us, grabbed a pair of binoculars and set off into the woods. I brought the binoculars up to my eyes as we walked, and let out a yelp.
“Look at that!” I shouted.
“What is it?” Tyler asked.
“I don’t know what the hell it is, just look at it!”
After looking through the binoculars they understood my comment. You couldn’t always tell what you were seeing, but anything you pointed the binoculars at was amazing. It became a kind of mantra for us over the course of the rest of the day. It never really mattered what the hell it was, as long as we always looked at it.
We spent the rest of the day checking a variety of things off the activity list we had made—we rode bikes around the yard, sprinted down the gravel lane, watched Fantasia, climbed into an old deer stand to watch cars pass by on the highway, and made jello. At about 10:00 that night, Peter suddenly remembered that he was supposed to mow the lawn before his parents returned. We quickly realized that the only solution was to mow the lawn. In the dark. On acid. We set up some small floodlights, which barely lit even a portion of the yard, and prepared for our most challenging adventure yet.
Peter gave me his Ipod and clamped his noise canceling headphones around my head. Some kind of dramatic, classical march to hell seeped into my ear canal and rampaged around inside my skull. There was thundering percussion and the brass sounded as if it was trying to win an argument with someone. It was the kind of music that you would hear at the opening of an epic battle scene in a movie like “Braveheart” or “The Lord of the Rings.”
My task was to use the little push mower to do some of the smaller areas, and Peter began to give me instructions as to where exactly I should mow, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. I could see his lips moving, and the music in my head made it seem like he should be explaining the importance of the upcoming battle—a fearless leader motivating his troops to victory—but instead he was grinning and making gestures that were supposed to indicate the act of pushing a mower. When I finally stopped laughing long enough to realize that I’d be able to hear him if I removed the headphones, I caught the tail end of his last sentence.
“. . . and try not to mow over those fucking flowers over there, or the extension cord for these lights, or your foot, or those cats,” he said. It was less inspiring than I’d hoped, but I nodded solemnly, slipped the headphones back on, and we walked out onto the porch to a soundtrack of war songs, as I glanced left, right, and left again, on the lookout for Orcs or Scottish warriors.
We accomplished the task without injury or property damage, although in the light of the next morning we would see that the yard looked as if drunken toddlers had romped through it with machetes, and we would have to do the entire job over again. But for then we were proud and satisfied, and we retreated to the basement to watch television and fall asleep as the effects of the acid wore off.
The next morning we engaged on a massive cleanup mission. We discovered Laffy Taffy wrappers everywhere we went. I had apparently left a trail—most every room in the house, the fields, the lawn, the woods, in the trees. We picked everything up, stashed the leftover supplies in Tyler’s car and plopped down in the recliners where it had all started a day before.
I remembered the sunset of the day before, and I thought about how we’d watched the clouds and talked for over an hour.
The three of us had laid down like parallel lines in an open field, flat on our backs. The clouds moved horizontally across the sky faster than planes, and it looked like time-lapse photography. But we tracked them as they moved, and found faces and mythical animals and construction equipment in them.
“That one looks like a really old woman eating a cupcake,” Peter said, tracing the outline of her cheekbone with his index finger.
“I can’t even believe that I could agree with you,” I said, “but it kind of does.”
“I haven’t seen images in the clouds since I was in elementary school,” Tyler said. “Do you think we’re hallucinating these things, or are we just remembering how to be creative, and reverting back to a younger age?”
“I kind of think that everything we’ve seen today was real,” I said. “Like it’s always there, and we just never look. Old women and cupcakes must always be in the clouds. Maybe we can do this whenever we want, without drugs.”
“Dude,” Peter said, “if you can ever manage to catch a frisbee one-handed while riding a bike and looking through binoculars again without drugs, I will be impressed, but predominantly frightened.”
“We should not do this often,” Tyler said.
“But we should do this again,” Peter said.
The front door opened, snapping me out of my daydream, and bringing me back to my position in the recliner. Peter’s parents were home. They told us that the lawn looked nice, and all about Shakespeare, and that we really should have come with.
“You have to come next year,” they said.
“Maybe when I’m older,” Peter told them.

Gentlemen: The Future

First:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070521175721AAsT339

Poop My Dad Utters

Today, on a visit to the office to inspect my progress in walling-up a basement door, my dad offered me the tasty option of a lunch at SUBWAY. Being both cheap (like my father, thanks dad) and hard-up for social interaction, I initially forgot about and afterward worked to ignore the fact that I looked like a very muddy, unkempt person, and walked with my dad toward the green and yellow glow.

The room was full of Forest Citizens, and I immediately felt highly self-conscious about my dirty clothes and lack of a smart phone to stare at. The people at Subway in Forest City are a peculiar bunch, and I always think about the politics of lunch here. The Subwayers, as opposed to the Hardeeans, the Sum Hingers and the mad one percent of the town who eat lunch at Shooters or Bills or Pizza Hut or even Taco Jerry's (A&W is still closed for the season), are a mixture of the wannabe health-fashionable consumers of GMO compost and the obedient, fetishist, accountants/mystics of calories and nutrients. While there might be laudable ideas here and there in the mixture, the overall act of eating at Subway pretty much always feels like an act of bad faith on my part.

I was thinking about my Subway angst as I watched one of the women preparing what seemed like a very tiny sandwich. Why was this sandwich so tiny? I looked down and saw the corresponding child dawdling while her mother attempted to interview her with respect to the design of the sandwich in progress. And then it dawned on me: in this bizarro future there was no longer a deli roll sandwich, just a three inch. By the time I'd made it past this heavy paradigm shift, it was time to order. My dad requisitioned a tuna melt, speaking to the robotic, forest-green, assembler women in curt bursts that anticipated the scripted back and forth that would have otherwise played out. This drove me nuts, first, because it made my dad seem like some kind of brusque robot himself and then more-so because the women at Subway were nowhere near tuned-in enough to the process of sandwiching to parse dad's uninterrupted string of commands, and everything had to be repeated, slowly.

We got the sandwiches, paid, sat, chewed for two or three minutes. Somehow we happened onto a fragment of conversation about British squatting laws and the fact that the police in the UK treat such disputes as civil matters, that is to say they ignore them. Then my dad pipes up with "I have this recurring dream..." [nom nom nom tuna nom]. I stopped chewing and began laughing rather uneasily through my most recent hunk of bready, compost with assorted cured meats so homogeneous as to be quite sinister. My dad leaned back from the very end of his sandwich and looked up, scratching his chin, exceedingly obviously preparing some recollection to share with me. I guess I felt ready, but somehow not expecting this sort of lunchtime revelation from my father.

"I have this dream where I realize that I own this building that I totally forgot about... in Mason City"

At this point my eyes are completely bugged out and I have no idea anymore how to deal with what he's explaining. I know that he's brought this up because we were talking about squatters and property, does he dream about having to deal with squatters? Regularly??

"Dad, wait, you're saying that you have a dream about discovering you own additional property that you dream over and over?"

"Yep. I think it started around five or six years ago." I mentally subtract; this date would place the headwaters of this dream right around my father's 50th birthday.

"Have you ever like researched this at all? Googled it?"

"No."

"Dad, this is the whitest guy dream, let alone recurring dream I've ever heard of." He lauged at that. I directed the conversation back at the dream. I wanted to compare it to the sorts of formal similarities that I've noticed in my comparison of my own dreams. I've never really had a dream that I remember repeat more than once, though my dreams often contained warped elements of each other, like a communal bunch of props and sets.

"Woah, okay, so how do you actually perceive this? What're the shots and the stage directions of the dream?"

"Well, I don't really remember that too well..."

"I mean, where does it happen? How does your realization occur?"

"Well, I'm just doing stuff and all of a sudden I remember that I've got this property in Mason Cit-"

"Doing stuff? Doing what stuff? Like anything specific?"

"No, not that I remember. Just anything. But then as soon as I realize that I've got this building, I'm really stressed out, cause how do you forget about a building? And then I go to Mason City and it's always a huge hassle..." He trails off, presumably picturing the squatters or the meth cooks or the stray animals or the neighborhood gang of kids or any manner of interlopers who might upset his building. Now I am doing the laughing.

"Dad, you're telling me this is a nightmare, or like a stress dream, about property about very specific pain of dealing with the bureaucratic hassle of removing people from your fallow property?"

"Yeah, it's always something. The building is usually different, but it's kinda industrial, maybe a warehouse or somethin'."

"Is it always in Mason City?"

"Yeah."

"Like, where in Mason City? Do you have to actually travel there once you've had your epiphany?

He thinks about this for a minute. "I don't know. I think it's usually like I realize and then the dream changes and I'm standing in front of the building, whatever it looks like, and I just know it's Mason City."

"Wow," I say. "That has got to be one of the strangest dream descriptions I have ever heard." Dad seems pleased with this and smiles.

At this point in the conversation I tried to explain the one form of dream that I have experienced occasionally for years that is (usually, with rare exceptions in which it seems downright prophetic) tantamount to his dream's opposite.

First, let's review briefly. In dad's dream, he discovers something he'd forgotten and is overwhelmed by the impenetrable mystery of its omission from his memory. When my dad wakes up, he feels better, though with perhaps a little more paranoia that he might be buying and forgetting giant objects in the world (something that it is just inherently weird for people to be able to do in this crowded a world).

My dream, on the other hand, occurs when I've actually lost something in the real world, something that I seldom do, and therefore obsess about when it occurs. Again the issue is memory error, but this time I go through the triumphant experience of seeking out and actually finding the object that I've lost, only to awake disappointed, frustrated, enraged at still having a lost whatever.

I wish I could say that I had looked up this dream and had a snappy wrap-up to this anecdote. I do not. However, I can say that I really like chatting with my dad when things go well. His banter is WEIRD, no doubt, and not just because I'm talking to the previous version of my brain.

Thunk!

Woah!

It was the Lest of Times, it was the Wurst of Times.

Tonight, I realized that I'd been living in a pile. I started making smaller piles. This process was undeniably stupid, but I felt, once I had all the wee piles, that there was no stopping until I had resolved the situation. I started examining bits and pieces that had been squirreled at one point or another. I made tea out of the decade preceding this one. The tea was a little stale and also contained a few pre-millenial bits. I dredged up a bunch of flavors that tickled and were generally so dusty that I sneezed, violently. But somewhere between when the steeping took place and the point at which the tea reached the temperature of erstwhile bathwater, I encountered two leaves, actual printed hojas from the past. I swirled my cup around, gazed in, focused my attention, then turned it over on my saucer. Having waited a couple of minutes, I lifted my glass again and began to puzzle over what was left beneath. Unlike future tea, this tea-stalgia is detailed in the extreme, and despite its surreal form and content, yields a definite emotional response. Here's what we printed:





I like these lists. They're chock full of mildly disturbing crap, and you can see us pushing one anothers' buttons, alternating entries. There is something to be said for that level of creative comfort and rapport. Our patience with one another and our shared frustrations get to play out, not simply in silent gazes or utterances bandied lazily. For some reason we formalized, we collaborated zealously, playing on the contrast between the generic simplicity of the list and the vast, fluid scope of our aspirations. What came out was rough, of course, but a fantastic artifact nonetheless, and a great indicator of the depth and breadth of boredom and desire. That's pretty much all for the moment. Hope you guys are swell.

P.S. Hey Ty, while I can imagine that this isn't high on your list of personal priorities, please make sure your state legalizes it on the second. It would be so excellent.

Rock and Roll Weather:

Sometimes when I'm summering, I can't wrap my head around my own music library. I feel like a temperamental pregnant woman with visceral, irrational cravings which make weird and unpredictable the various aesthetic qualities of the songs I've collected. Songs that I poured over my brain innumerable times with no diminution of emotional response, suddenly feel lapsed, dull, and unmistakably obtuse. Additionally, I find myself stuck on new music. Sometimes it's really legitimate, and I can see how it fits in with all the old canon, where the sound comes from, where it's going. Often though, I don't care and I tolerate listening to things whose parameters clearly exceed my normal thresholds of listenability. Examples of this: soundtracks, music with lyrics I will never learn, noise, ____ metal, bluegrass, instrumental psych, Crawling With Tarts, and many others. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but I don't think it used to happen quite like this.

I hate this feeling of obsolescence when I encounter it, and I take care to prevent myself from experiencing this wrong-place, wrong-time, aural toothache sensation by only bringing out these pillars of the sacrosanct temple of rock and roll when I know they'll ring true to willing ears: in the car with eric/tyler/jon/gina/a few others. Social environs would seem to trump, but when I want to really get down with the division of my music to which I was first drawn as a collector and an investigator of tunes, I wait for the magic that arrives following labor day weekend.

A week ago, I took [sic] elesdee with David on a day sandwiched between early morning trips to MSP. At some point in the middle of the afternoon, standing the between the fire and the pond and holding a stick that flamed great red-blue-orange feathers and crackled loudly, I suddenly felt like I was hearing power chords, strumming loudly and building in the distance to the South. Was someone playing music somewhere? I tried to get my ears wrapped around the sound, but it was still very faint, and there were a lot of available sounds for my brain to play with and collage, which it did. The sound built to somewhere between "Back in the USSR" and a Led Zeppelin riff, energetic, regular, rolling, pounding. I burst out with "Sounds like Rock'n'Roll, man!" before I could think about whether I had actually figured out what I was listening to. David looked at me and listened. The sound was a jet engine, and he took my statement not so much as complete misrecognition, but more as a kind of cheesy joke. It didn't matter, I had already felt something shift back into place. Electric guitars made sense in my brain again, and they sounded sublime.

Now, the weather has changed. The sky has darkened, the clouds pack low, slate-colored down comforter. The wind below them moves with the kind of urgency that one sees in migrating geese this time of year, and is not so much warm or cold, dry or wet, but a pure electric mercuriality. I am drenched in a kind dim longing for an identity so long amputated as to feel phantom. I look out the window as I drive and I want to hop atop motor vehicles, to get thrown out of a shitty restaurant, to hoist someone into a tree or a second story window. I have been cast back to a time so dark and deep, that when I first left home I had almost forgotten what it meant. This is where Rock and Roll gets me today. Our saturating communality still comes back, fills the chords, and reconciles my human-centipede of minds when the memories of our times of institutional parkour re-appear and rush by in every direction. The sets are still up, more or less, and sometimes I think I see us, flitting ganglyly out of the lit portions of the street as my car passes in the middle of the night. I can go out and put on Thru the Eyes of Ruby, and it makes my spine tingle and my feet feel light.

I've got more thinking to do on these topics, but for now I just wanted to bring the post count for this year up to one. I've got a total friend crush on you guys; write something sometime. Tyler, you are officially excused on account of you having an actual dependent to feed, and I hope she's doing really well.

Love from the museum,
Petros

Stolen Facebook Flotsa

9:17pmPeter

whoop whoop!

9:17pmTyler

yo...

what's goin'?

9:18pmPeter

oh, you know, just warwhoopin...

how's the yay area?

9:18pmTyler

like...our old high school newspaper?

it's good...

9:18pmPeter

yeah, I never could give it up

9:19pmTyler

I forgot it existed until you used the term just now...still a little surprised I remembered...

9:21pmPeter

i was not surprised, it's deeply ingrained in the more annoyed parts of my consciousness

9:22pmTyler

understandable...

9:24pmTyler

speaking of annoyance...I've become inextricably fixated on finding a small linux distro that'll boot from a cd on powerpc machines...and I can't explain why...I don't need it...I mean, anything I want to do from the command line in Linux, I can do from the command line in OSX...it's the same fucking command line...but for some reason, I just can't stop myself...

9:26pmPeter

woah... that is a weird goal... you've come to one of the chosen few that could even hope to empathize with that... yeah, in fact, I have a machine for which I could use such a disc at this very minute... but I'm going to try just sell it for parts...

I got the too many old computers blues...

9:29pmTyler

that's probably a better plan...it's becoming apparent that if you want a lightweight ppc machine, you're going to have to build the thing yourself...though, I hear Debian still runs decently on some old ppc machinery...

9:30pmPeter

yeah... dinosaur footsteps in the distance...

9:31pmTyler

so, what's new with you, abe?

9:32pmPeter

oh, not too much, officially homeless as of one week ago... couch surfing and grad app writing for another week or so, and then driving midwesterly....

9:32pmTyler

sounds like a time...

9:32pmPeter

it certainly is...

I'm feeling alright about it though... some kind of adventure is better than none at all... especially at the ripe old age of 24...

9:34pmTyler

indeed...adventure is in the air lately...the apes are getting restless...

9:35pmPeter

I'll raise a rock and drink to that...!

and you sir? what strange new frontiers are you probing?

9:38pmTyler

I've been spending whatever time that isn't used up on job hunting and domesticity learning Python...

9:38pmPeter

RAD!

9:39pmTyler

hence the origin of my burning need for a barebones linux machine...but I've been realizing lately that the easiest solution is to just use the shit that comes with unix...

9:40pmPeter

i suppose that makes sense...

9:43pmTyler

I've also been looking for a decent homebrew curriculum for learning Russian...

9:45pmPeter

that also sounds like a serious task

9:45pmTyler

indeed...luckily, I have a built in language tutor!

9:45pmPeter

I was going to say

9:46pmTyler

I figured that if I didn't get here in time to enroll in classes, I'll just be homeschooled for this semester...

9:47pmPeter

well, sounds like a good t-term syllabus

9:49pmTyler

it's serving me a hell of a lot better than World of Warcraft did last October...

9:49pmPeter

eeeeeewwwwww really?

i'm currently living with a member of the hive... it's debilitating

i keep pressing his talk button and screaming insanities into the retardverse

9:50pmTyler

good...

they all deserve it...

9:50pmPeter

"fire magic pretzel juice!!!!"

9:51pmTyler

I've seen past the dark veil...it's hideous...

9:51pmPeter

"please let me be your mage! Please Please, my DPS IS LEGENDARY"

9:55pmTyler

I retained one shred of human pride throughout the experience by never using a fucking microphone to actually talk to people who aren't in the room with me...

9:56pmPeter

bless you... others are not so strong

well, must dash...! adios compadre

9:56pmTyler

later...

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.