It's Just a Matter of Time Before I End up Making out with a Man

Catch phrases work to hook in people. Remind them you exist and make them laugh at the same time as they now relish in your rediscovered presence. Sometimes people just need to hear someone suggest body shots or strip Brass (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28720/brass). Even more interesting is not necessarily even when these events happen, but the realization that it's not really a big deal. Making concepts such as nudity and simulated sex, even if lewd and entirely inappropriate in a traditional sense, help fortify self confidence as well.

Here is a tentative and incomplete schedule of a typically week.
Tuesday: Dave Gets Drunk at Jameson's (bar in downtown Eugene)
Friday: The District (dance club grooving with the possibility of body shots)
Saturday: Ninkasi Saturday's (local brewery)
Sunday: Mimosa Brunch

Additionally I would at a 20-50 mile ride around Eugene on Sunday mornings and a strip board game night. Midweek looks a little bleak, although the weekend would also include intramural sports practice and games once the season begins.

Something like body shots should be a tradition along with copious amounts of Shirley Temples and Roy Rodgers', mix tapes and ridiculous self expression.

That last time I bought groceries was not as well planned as I had assumed. I ran out of fruits really quickly and was down to Matzos, peanut butter and bananas within a few days. Now I live a frustrating distance from a good grocery store, so I'll have to piggy back off of other people's runs. Maybe I can work my way into one of those really obvious give and take relationships meaning the gain is inherently obvious.

I also bought a bike, and I have to secretly admit that I really like hipster girls (or at least hipster looking, which is entirely subjective) with hands dirty from bike maintenance, construction and repair. I'm too lazy to go into too much detail because I've grown lazy in documentation. The last month or so has been pretty busy moving into my new place downtown, just a handful of blocks south of the Whiteaker. I can really only be myself and I haven't been able to really force a self image of myself onto others, but it's been a fresh start in a way that people aren't tired of my act yet. I like to think my style has changed and matured over the last four years especially.

I'm feeling pretty ambitious with respect to getting out a bit more, exercising a bit and losing my fear of failure. Who cares what happens? No one, really. People just respect you less if all you do is lay in wait like a constant sleep. My ideas haven't been so creative lately, but there are still a few things I need for my new place. Those fancy things like a shower to hold shampoo, soap and a beer or whiskey neat.

I have seen a lot of movies lately, and maybe I'll feel like talking about those soon including a David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman series along with a few classics like Sunset Boulevard, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Funny Face (definitely a change of pace). 

Groceries are all that but a bag of chips

A structural/organizational note: This entry will be labeled as IMPORTANT in its suggestion of a new formatting technique, although not explicit with regards to the layout. There will be three distinct categories to distinguish some facets of discussion. The label "Books" will emphasize literary discussion. "Movies" will, in turn, accentuate analysis or thoughts on moving pictures. Finally, "Music" will include descriptions and opinions of current music flavors currently splayed across my ear tongue. Additionally, typical every day topics and self-revelry (bascially less voluminous topics) will be left to the powerful, yet dangerously flexible "Misc" label. As I am also in general lazy, I predict I will fail to update past posts for a while, but that's only 13 posts so far (which will be labeled "Pilot").

I do want to discuss groceries though. I've been on a pretty steady ~$45 (USD) a week diet, not including a once a week treat to a restaurant presented to the graduate physics student email list. There is no sales tax in Eugene, but the services that those pay for don't seem affect me in my youth. Either way, I just spent 37.86 and I want to document how long this lasts and how happy I will be with the result. The last week was kind of a wash. Twice I spent ~$23, the first time on all junk, and the second time on soups, Matzos, Chips, Salsa, Clif bars and the like. But all the same, these stashes kept me going for 8 days. Tonight I went back a couple weeks to the staples I have built my Eugene diet on thus far including Bing cherries (on sale for 3.49 a lb), Matzos, peanut butter, red grades, and bananas. I also have been buying a bunch of Clif Bars, but they're good for the quick snack with a bunch of protein and a decent amount of fat, even if a big loaded with sugar. The carbohydrates are kind of the kick starter. And of course raisins and salsa, even though I left out the chips, which I may purchase to supplement the salsa either for this week or the next.

I've been trying to live without the use of the refrigerator simply to avoid my roommates. Not that they're bad people, but I still have this haunting social anxiety and avoid dealing with them even though they probably think I'm some uptight douche who has a problem with them. This also has driven me to apples and peanut butter (although I left out the apples this time, maybe a bad call and why my bill is usually a few dollars higher). On the other hand, I spoiled myself with a small stash of Rainier Cherries at the passive suggestion of a lab mate. So I'm looking to compare those if nothing else. Additionally I eat a lot of peanut and banana sandwiches, or open faced spreads of banana and peanut butter on top of a Matzo with raisins (which I forgot to mention, but are excellent as well).

One thing I've noticed about the fruit here is that none of it is bad or rotten. I don't know if I'm lucky, or it's the season, or the fact I've been shopping at a Safeway, but not one cherry was rotton nor was any apple or banana old or covered in mold. The worst piece of fruit was a Red Delicious apple (my choice to have with creamy peanut butter) which had rotted a little at the bottom near the core, but the rest of it was in form and tasted no different than the others (even if the texture seemed a bit gritty). Every cherry was plump, firm, and that deep dark red-purple/mahogany of a delicious and just ripe Bing cherry. I have less experience with the Rainier cherries, but of course they are a mix of red and yellow, so I have less experience with their color. Bananas are more robust and the raisins of course are probably quality controlled in the Sun Maid production facilities. Oh, and I almost forgot, organic strawberries from California. Even from a grocery store chain like Safeway were perfect and sweet in just the right way. I haven't even tried locally grown from some of the farms around here, so I don't even know how to think about how those might taste.

I also learned that Blackberries around here grow like a weed. Apparently many people live in or near blackberry infested lots all over town. I'll have to roam around and see if there are any for the picking at some time before the season ends.

As I grow older I have learned of excitement over ripe fruits and finding that second sock of a pair thought incomplete. 

Matzos and Raisins (Throwing Test)

When I hear music in my head, what am I listening to? 

Last night provided difficult situations of unprecedented horror only furthering the triumph of this morning. I went to the rainy Eugene Saturday market to scope out some preliminary fruits, crafts, and drug paraphernalia. I shuffled my feet from booth to booth watching the naked dancers gracefully fall to the muted and superimposed musical styling of bands and street performers (and perlatters) looking for any unbeknownst treasures about. I came upon this booth that sold local organic honey and decided to strike up a conversation with the cute women behind the stand who looked to be about my age. I told her the little I knew about the honey process and she mostly corrected me with various degrees of thinly veiled laughter (not for lack of trying). I must have looked pretty pathetic as this other guy came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go check something out, as if I knew him. So I started walking with him...

The key lies in describable details, interesting in review. 

I give nothing so when people stumble into an empty room, feel a breeze on their skin, or gaze upon a blank page, they think of me.  

There are three things I realized I will have to starting avoiding, domesticated animals, pizza submerged in red pepper flakes, and caffeinated coffee. Cats and Dogs especially will bother me for about 6 hours after I leave for every hour spent with the animals. It's probably not a linear relationship, but I'll take this data point. It's also hard for me to truly grasp the long term aspect of relationships when getting to know people. The first time I spend time with somebody new, every development seems so important at the time, but most people probably realize that one night playing Ms. Splosion Man doesn't really mean anything significant. Friendships aren't really these long planned out ventures to spend time with somebody, they're a a slow building favoritism and loyalty built from years of nights of games, eating, and just spending time together. I guess there are probably just more important things to worry about; almost as if social interaction is supposed to be instinctual. On the other hand, that's probably how it feels being the odd man out. Only two of the accepted first year students (including myself) came early to do research. 

I just wish I could make some tea and not see another human being. It would only take a few minutes. That's all I would need. 

Before I Discovered Motion and Limbs, I was a Mannequin

There are some basic goals I would like to keep in mind around my daily schedule, whatever that may end up being from day to day.

By the end of the week I want to have a bike, as I plan to being a bit of distance training this weekend. The greater Eugene area riders map their rides, so I figured I could start off with a couple 20 to 30 mile rides to see how I weathered. Depending how I preform, I would love to start riding with GEARs members on their longer rides which range anywhere from 30 to 100 miles. So in short, this is a hobby I would really like to get off the ground, metaphorically of course. My only experience in long distance, if we can even call it that, comes from a 30 mile round trip to Homer lake and back when I lived in central Illinois, which was last summer, although with an undesirable bike that applied the brake constantly on a contorted back rim. So my navigation and endurance are large question makes in the list of my capabilities. 

I need to start working out a bit too. When I live on my own apparently, I mostly consume fruits like bananas, apples, and oranges coupled with copious amounts of Bread or Matzos and peanut butter, chips and salsa, with raisins and cottage cheese on the side with seasonal organic strawberries. Although I can't fail to neglect the Spinach and cheese turnover or the wild berry bunch I had at the Oregon Country Fair and the occasional outing. So far I've only had Pegasus Pizza, where we ate during the grad school visit in April. I actually posted an ad on Craigslist to see if anyone wants to explore downtown Eugene with me, but I am as of yet, comically afraid to answer replies. I should probably make an effort to make friends. I have come across to many opportunities, but I need to shed my proposed guilt. 

For example, the first weekend I was in Eugene I went to the David Minor Theater. Aside from this theater being awesome and offering a service where you can text for food and drink (including beer mind you) while in a screening room. Of course as you may have guessed this place is small, with 2 screening rooms sitting about 50 and 15 people and they show recent movies that pretty much just stopped playing at theaters within the last few months or so with the occasional flashback or classic like Back to the Future, etc. Anyway, they have couches in front of the larger theater (I think in the small theater they have nothing but couches, love seats, and reclining chairs, they call it the 'living room') and I figured I would take a seat on the couch. Well, I showed up about 10 min before the movie started and ended up watching the DVD menu from True Grit (remake with Jeff Bridges from the Coen Brothers) about 23 times, but this girl sat down on the couch adjacent to mine and even commented on how to get the couches, you had to show up early. I could have easily segued this into the casual conversation of who we were, why we were there and if the conversation failed to arouse our intellectual curiosity we could have stopped talking. I think that is how everybody else ends a fruitless conversation. 

Of course this is not to mention the OCF (fair I mentioned earlier) where I could have walked around in my underwear high as a hippy at 4:20 or danced like maniac flailing my painted limbs, face and torso with a crazy hat that said 'Viva la Pasta.' I will definitely have to become more involved with the people that put together the fair at the events they put together during the rest of the year. 

The next thing on my mind is housing. I am so anxious to find housing. My dream single I can really begin to explore who I am. I can start with silverware, posters, a turntable, set up an area where I paint, an area where I read or whatever and no one can see what I have done to judge me. I can let people in selectively as I wish.  

I also saw how much I owe in student loans, and these are just the loans I took out, not including the loans my Dad took out, which actually are probably a little more than the sum total I owe, which is 24,000 fucking dollars. And I only make regular dollars. I know I am probably lucky to only owe that much, which coming from the University of Illinois (started in 2007 and had a fixed tuition) amounts to roughly the total cost of a year of classes and housing. I started to daydream about paying off these loans and the thought of completing payment on this debt almost sexually excited me, because that is something I am not ready to admit to.  

Wrist Bands and Well-Laid Plans

I am uncomfortable with my sexual appetite. I associate nudity with sex. I was taught, or I learned about sex before I was taught about the human body and before I saw a naked body aside from my own, which was covered up except during bathing. 

This coupled with other social issues including the sale of audiovisual sexual services and the acts themselves destroys the concept of love making. I can understand that masturbation comes from curiosity and later, if not concurrently, an individual learns of sexual pleasure and that people in fact pleasure each other sexually as well. Unfortunately during this time, society feels the need to hide nudity at the cost of destroying some sort of innocence. Naturists don't walk around with erections having sex with anything that moves. Clothes are a man made cover of something that is not man made. 

Of course this is all confusing during adolescence and the discovery of sexual pleasure and organs and during this time of uncertainty even young people are known to don clothing during this period of their lives. 

Basically I feel that I'm sexually confused. There is emphasis on taboo in society and the real focus is sexual orientation and stereotypes like genres of pornography. I don't care about my orientation, but I have a problem with these sales of artificial audiovisual pleasure. Even years of avoiding pornography has recently sent me crawling back and I have began a phone sex escapade I desperately seek to escape. I'm just further burying myself in a social context. I should be outside, fearless of my body and other people's opinions (as if anyone really cares anyway). I should be exploring myself during these times of independence and yet I sit and squander my time looking for cheap thrills and ways to avoid dealing with reality. 

Moving out to Oregon should be a great opportunity to express who I think I am and learn who I really am, but all I feel is the anxiety of inadequacy every where I go. I'm not clean enough, tough enough, smart enough, free enough, happy enough, sad enough, depressed enough, motivated, premeditated, over-medicated enough. Everywhere I go I am the short end of everything, and what I really realized yesterday, and what I really believe is that I will always feel this way living the way I do. Even if I worked out and gained lots of muscles and lost a bunch of fat I would still feel inferior. I have made no progress, and what's difficult is the ability to understand and accept that I have made no real progress. Of everything I learn about myself, I have to step back and realize what I'm really doing. I'm avoiding exploration of hobbies and skills and events just to avoid dealing with who I am, afraid of what I really might be. 

Unfortunately, it appears there is a rock bottom, or at least a breaking point where we just snap out of these ruts. The hard part is waiting, but the problem is I can't just sit here and wait. I have to take this time and appreciate living. I have to allow myself to be ripped off, take risks, be made fun of, ridiculed, abandoned, loved. If to love myself is to permit a respectable and prideful life, I have to start. 

Basically it has to start here. I have to take what I see as a social deformity as merely a difference. And if I don't like my expectations I have to change them, but the only way to change them is to become acquainted with these different outlooks I respect and expose myself to the other side. Maybe it's ironic I sit here typing this to nobody (you'll notice most of these will be emotional, so please disregard inconsistencies, I am as a human being, inconsistent), but I need to declare these things for myself. This information is on the internet for anybody to see, and some of the information here I'm afraid for people to know about. 

I went to the Oregon Country fair yesterday and I'm about to go again today out in Veneta. It was therapeutic to leave Eugene as well, since I felt like I was exploring a bit. The mentality there made me feel like I grew up in the wrong region of the United States. It's not like a topless women with hands and trees painted on her breasts or a man with a masquerade mask and a green dress is going to call me a faggot for wearing yellow pants or a Cat in the Hat hat. I think I'm a coward because I'm spineless, but it has to be worse if you're afraid of admitting you're spineless. I'm not an overly rude person, I just seem snobby because I'm so uncomfortable with myself I assume other people taking with me have some sort of hostile agenda, or will become extremely displeased at interacting with me. 

Today I'm going to wear shorts and and T-shirt. I'm sick of this long pants and sleeves charade. Who cares if my forearms are ill-developed or if my calves are fat and hairless or even that my skin may be too light? In fact, how would someone with white and pasty skin get a tan? They have to first get into the sun and deal with any criticism or observation. I've spent so much of my life trying to not be observed, but it's impossible and just breeds anxiety. No one cares that I'm fat or have blemishes, and in fact the only way I'll loose weight is if I go out and exercise where somebody might see me. Who cares if I'm listening to music or carrying a camera? I'm respectful enough would be polite if confronted. Why feel guilty if I don't even have intent to do anything to feel guilty about?

I feel stupid. 

..........................................................

White Collard Greens

A marketing moment, a sale of the past winding in the tides of a tawdry and deriding shoreline. The surmounting presence of a moment surpasses the control over the immediate future. Where is my moon?

Brain in a Box: The Wavy Davy Story (Part I)

Edit: Let's call this Part I: An Introduction to Intent and Circumstance through a brief description of a few weeks in the Afterlife

Edit Two: Grammar, Clarity and Flow of Third Paragraph, Acknowledgement of Choppiness from Paragraph to Paragraph

In contemplating termination of my previous years of consciousness, I curiously explored the second-person knowledge of my day to day activities of my peers and colleagues. Even living with some immediate family my encrypted calls for attention stem from an inwardly pointing inquisitive nature and often lie outside the perception range of the blood-relative housemates making the effect implicit. Wild Tom Waits impersonations, showers submerged in Julianna Barwick or a newfounded William Basinski, reminiscent attempts to cover nostalgic Bright Eyes songs, hours buried in reddit articles or conversations with myself all describe recent realizations.

It's been about 5 minutes over a week since I moved to Eugene, Oregon and I want to take my time usually spent wallowing in social anxiety to reflect over the last few weeks in Illinois, and extend gently into the last four years. I used to blag (superposed blog+blah) in high school, but until tonight the motivation escaped me. My motivation became diluted with this inflamed sense of self-importance believing I really had something amazing to say, but now, as then, I really just wanted to talk about me. The truth is (after every sentence you may parenthetically add, "I assume.") after a while I began to generalize, and I failed to understand the entanglements between my motivation (a fuel) and the generalization (the motion generated from fuel combustion). After a while I strived to travel without fuel, which only lead to frustration, failure, and the employment of activities used to numb rather than stimulate the brain. In other words, I wanted to blind myself from the fact I wasn't traveling. Years were filled with tricks and shortcuts to make me throw up important words, but that's just like covering up body odor with more deodorant instead of showering.

My last few weeks in Villa Park were spent mostly inside. I love the idea of my presence having no effect on human lives, of not existing to other human beings. If I had my way, my movements would fail to perturb air  streams and I would need no external sustenance. My perception would no longer necessitate the intake of molecules nor the absorption of photons, and physical contact with my body would violate Newton's action-reaction law. The physical reality prohibits any human from actually achieving ideal isolation, but of course at the same time, nobody could handle such isolation. I probably crave attention to an extent that lies within the statistical variance of the mean intensity of such a desire. The apparent dissonance here arises from the lacking standard of human behavior. Humans keep each other grounded simply because when we interact, we behave more like each other. Either there is an instinctive want to belong, or humans fear ridicule (majority of my motivation to remain undiscovered). Let's say one person first learned to walk on his or her hands and then sees everybody walking on feet. This person may try walking on feet and realize the ease in which one may walk.

In my dawdling the Reddit seed planted however long ago blossomed and I started an account. I had just created a Grooveshark account during my last few weeks in Urbana and so used the same username that rose from a recent exploration involving MF Doom, which, in turn, came about from a history with a friend who obtained their discography and the installing of a Linux platform on my computer. The articles of reddit range from the quick laugh (like /r/Pics) to the insightful jest of a fundamental question (/r/AskReddit) or a huge IAmA post containing a whirlwind of questions and fascinating experiences.

The branching possibilities here are now overwhelming. I don't really want to go into a list of Reddit articles I read, but have I really said enough to move on? Sure.

There were days I didn't escape the pull of Reddit, but I also found myself once again trying to cover Bright Eyes songs. I was a bit more successful this time using my brothers headset, my Dad's Gibson acoustic guitar, and a new found appreciation of free audio processing software. I recorded stuff with audacity, layered vocals, and even experimented with a free 10 day trial of auto tuning software. I ended up with finished, although not too polished versions of "I've Been Eating (for You)" and "Tereza and Tomas." "Make War," "You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will." and "Laura Laruent" among a few others were less successful along with a few original chord progressions spiced with experimental vocals including the aforementioned Tom Waits impression.

Along with this came a couple of June blag posts where I tried to reconnect with my yearning to tell stories and put in meaningful, cryptic messages hidden in anagrams or their use. I began to read a bit, although this habit died quickly and was only revived to a comatose state while I finished "The Swimmer" through "The Open Boat" in the Seagull Reader I failed to return to Eric (former roommate). Still I was happy to be reading at all, even if a majority of what I read were Reddit articles.

While alone in the house I liked to sing in the shower and put in a lot of effort, taking in all the air I could and using it to hit notes, sound full and booming. Sometimes I would try to alter my voice and try to eradicate the characteristic overtones that associate with the unique system of my vocal chords and surroundings. I would pretend to be crazy and preform dynamic chants that evolved over time from what I was saying to what else I could be saying that sounded nearly the same sometimes truncating a vowel or even replacing words with synonyms (although a bit more cerebral than I wanted to be during a chant).

I finished up Oz during the first week or so and completed the entire Mr. Show series along with modern stand up performances by Janeane Garofalo and David Cross, which left me craving some older material of the two. A Nick Swardson performance make me laugh, but I felt ashamed relating to drug humor and chuckling at sex, alcohol, and video game related stories. It was a performance I felt aimed at my age demographic, of which I'm ashamed of I suppose.

Towards the end I began to look for new music and having completed LA Noire in a few days, I rekindled my affair with the music of the early-mid twentieth century including Nina Simone, the Andrews Sisters, and a couple others I can't remember. I don't have the music with me anyhow.

I suppose this is a decent stopping point. I've gotten a few things out in the air. I've kept things reasonably detailed, but I'm writing this as if someone will read it. I remember someone asking in a movie, or some medium, their friend why he or she wrote their diary like someone was going to read it. If a diary is a personal description of innermost thoughts and feelings why should someone hold back? I agree, but anything documented, paper, orally, digitally, etc. creates a trail. Whether stumbled upon or deliberately sought out, there is a chance the material may be uncovered, hence diaries written and censored for a general audience. In my case, I'll be very forward and actually explicitly state, in fact, I intend people to read this some day.

I write this with a target audience in mind including people that know who I am, have vague ideas of my notions, convictions, and intentions, family immediate and unknown to me, friends I loved, people I were acquainted with, etc. Basically anyone that may have a slight interest in who I was and what I had done during my life is the target audience. I'm being an egoist and I want to take this time I'm alive to express my essence and declare information, motivations, etc.

I can't promise my style will improve, become less juvenile, but with performance will come discovery and with discovery, changes and with changes, maybe some improvements to what ever deficiencies exist. My thoughts are typically organized in reverse chronological order and with decreasing importance prioritized by extent of self-discovery. The ninth letter of the alphabet called me up and apologetically explained the death threat written in blood left on the inside of my pants suit, so we're back on speaking terms. 

Lithiated Lemon

Reality twists and turns to appease fears and discomforts, perhaps physical death represents the mental ability to overcome such solace. Overcome with metal lapse, Ira emptied hys glass into a container never before filled with the partially consumed substance. The overtly literal meaning of looking to the left escaped the ability of electrical impulses once ignorant of sully and overuse. The glance drained Ira's hand much as he drained the vessel. Both compartments had shattered and the contents mixed sluggishly with entire regard for the clandestine constraints of mental capacity.

"Are you going to clean that up?" Stolhm inquired.

Ira replied in terror, "Aeronautical egg putty? Oh no!"

A Well-upholstered Lady Knows Where the Bowl of Cherries Belongs

A dizzying ring around a fortuitous display of constitution sprouts from an decommissioned attempt of abeyance. As the mind replays a card game of spirits, juggling periodically copious employment of apprehension and anxiety with regards to the stakes of oscillating value, the environment speaks a common language, influenced and influencing like vessels of experience. A timid parley and languid expressions sweep across the room following the ebb of air currents and emotional jet streams. The atmosphere lies in a constant plod of a submerged, yet necessary rhythm. 

Colourless Green

A proper description captures a part of whole with arranged letters as opposed to a summation, which may grow larger than the collection of individual parts. The apparent creation of "matter" if you will arises from creative perception. The sudden growth of meaning or subtext implied by consideration.

Of all I don't know, let the truth stray the most from my grasp. I can find the properties of a carrot in a tomato. All within the third person narrative.