its funny in a very sick way how things can turn out so awefully from such good intention. even minor cases. its bad on the psyche. i made time for myself tonight. after reading the requisite work i made a point of being able to think again. satisfied, i cut all the lights and lowered the televisions volume and made a spot for myself on the couch. i collected the cd player, put on the music i was (and still am) looking forward to and tried to relax. it was good for a while, wonderful even because for a short bit i responded the way i had hoped... feeling the music, thoughts cleansed to the point where mutinous ones (consciously attempting to ruin the moment) were rare. i really did it for a while but other things still stood in the way of my meditation. among the random other things lay the reason for the nights impending horror.

you see, as is well understood, when one sense is taken away, your other few are strengthened. while all this took place i was happily blind (unless the tv blinked ferverently) to enjoy the music more but instead of just my hearing being sharpened so was my touch. taste and smell i tactfully ignored. an acute sense of touch is a good thing if... say... you are in the business of colonoscopies but during musical meditation it tends to get in the way. it is cool to a certain extent when you can feel your heart beat through your entire body not because of intense workout but because each beat courses through the couch to reach every nerve exposed to it. this also works with whatever else might stir the air or ground, expressively, people walking. you dont realize until you are in this position that people dont just walk, they lumber. the way us fat americans move is seemingly the anti-grace that elephants and other large warm blooded animals long ago mastered. through the beautiful music i was supposed to be focusing on i could trace each step based on the couch and, somehow, through every cling and shake of the room's furniture which, obvious to me, maliciously hated whoever was doing the strolling. every squeak of the hardwood somehow made it through to my consciousness. another thing contributing to this little game is that i am a dreamer. always have been and hopefully always will be. easily sucked into daydreams and uncommonly weird nocturnal ones, i was sucked into a few here. and through this peaceful and ultimately content music i somehow come to three very violent strings of thought.

i am never sure why i come to think of what i do but it somehow never ceases to make things worse than they were. as i listened to a particularly uplifting and yet subversively maddening song i started thinking. these thoughts, much to my unconscious dismay, started to take over my visions of music and habit of fingering songs i know how to play. three of them, which i really dont feel like going into deeper because my mental state is a bit on the low side tonight, came to me. first string: a robber waits on my deck, slips in the door, slits my father's throat (he makes a gurgling sound and his face...), slips into the hall, similarly kills my mother, i see and awake from my meditation, somehow tear off the leg of the table next to me, bash him until he is dead and continue in a dazed shock until his head is nothing but pulp on the floor. the cops would find me sitting between them in a corner with the table leg crying to myself... second string: i wake from my meditation and hear my mother screaming from behind the couch, i jump up and see the man raping her so i jump on his back, grab his chin and head and break his neck. i can see myself in court trying to evade murder charges for saving my mother... breaking down. third string: i wake and hear my mother screaming from the kitchen where i see her struggling with the man, i grab three knives out of the block on the right and stab him in the back with one, he turns around and looks at me with this bewildered face then comes at me, i slash him, stab him, tear him apart (i can feel my muscles twitch through all of this, disturbing really) and he is finally dead. i cant take any of this and stare at a ceiling fan until the song is over and put it all away. i wish these things wouldnt happen anymore.

hey guys, this is the funniest thing ive seen on the internet in a looooong time. dont worry if it doesnt load because the server is full, you will get it eventually. its worth it.
this land parody

sunday morning held sunday school. wonder how they came up with that one. our teacher was the youth director. odd... i speculated on what happened to our usual teacher. maybe he severely sunburned his tragically exposed scalp after leaving his hat at the lake last weekend. possibly... anyway, i walked in a bit late as always and was greeted by one of my sister's friends (my sister, thankfully, was in another younger class at the time) and i joked for a second about not knowing nor caring where she was at the time. younger sisters... arg. by unfortunate circumstance i was the oldest student in the room (of six or so people) by about three years. so, as history dictates, i went and sat down and didnt say anything for a very long time. in this time bible verses were read, mostly about god's forgiveness and subsequent unforgiveness (of certain types) and what we should do to assure ourselves a seat on the good flight to heaven... come the day. then our makeshift teacher read a little bit from a little teaching lesson manual she had about how god can forgive us for sins we dont realize we commit... like white lies, failing to stop at lights etc. actually not stopping at stoplights was the only one i remember. this shook something in me. despite my silent treatment of the room i couldnt help myself. i blessed her with a question. i asked, "so, in god's eyes... is not stopping at a stoplight worse than not stopping at a stop sign?" because, you know, theres a difference. failing to stop at a stoplight is one thing but if you are out at a stopsign and nobodys coming id just as soon go. so in response she giggled, as did a good bit of the class (though i managed to keep a straight face), and after consulting her inner god, concluded that... perhaps... stop signs inflected more of a 'yield'. yeah, thats what i thought.

bible verse of the day: Matthew 12:29
"Or else how can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house."

so remember, if you want to rob somebody, make sure to tie them up first to prevent complications later. the bible says so. goodnight.

couple atypical summer days since i last posted. i meant to write some last night about the optometrist but never got around to it. basically only two interesting things happened. once, a smelly guy sat down next to me and tried to talk to me while i was listening to beautiful music and trying to read for school. i cant help but wonder why people do that... and he smelled horrible. eventually he got up and walked away... and i could still smell him. odd i thought, i can see him over there but if i close my eyes he is sitting next to me all over again. how pleasant. but more importantly, there was a little girl there. it was odd to me, the way she moved. must have been a dancer or something. she would stand up on her toes and just balance there, then sprint off somewhere all on her tip-toes. you may think hey, thats no great feat. but she did it so effortlessly and with such grace... it was like she was supposed to do that. later i saw her with cheap flower foam flip-flops, maybe an inch and a half tall, you know the ones. she was walking around in those tip-toe. strange, i thought. later on she was leaning up against a counter and rolled her toes under her feet sortof like she was about to pop them like i do sometimes but she stood up. stood on her toes rolled under her feet like it was the most natural thing in the world for her to be doing. and again, with such grace. just thought i would relate that to all of you. cant ever tell what you will notice in people.

and today i had the good fortune to make it to winston-salem and visit dear old wake forest. ill probably end up living there next year. well... not to jynx it. and i loved it and it was gorgeous. so many awesome things. i can imagine myself out in the middle of davis field on a 'mood' swing writing to all of you on my new thinkpad completely wired. yeah and at basketball games for free. love it.

and all the people i really care about are at shows or out having lives tonight while i sit and type but hell, thats the way things go sometimes. maybe soon ill meet them for the first time all over again. never can tell though can you? never can tell...

take two: post power surge... how many topics have i exhausted so far? it feels too difficult to think of something to write. tonight im going to lay off bashing those i love, speculating about god, stars, dreams and damn i know theres more. all ive got tonight is beautiful music. the kind that makes you want to cry the first time you hear it. music and the softer glow of the monitor erratically backlit by the lightning bolt flashbulbs through the sun/moon roofs of the room. and the rain is being almost... indecisive. continually readjusting from deluge to respite, steady rain to hard drops in no sequence at all... enough to drown out the music and the glow and my thoughts all at once. and now seems to have withdrawn into itself... back up in the sky. so ill think about something else for a little while.

ive been a good person lately. im almost proud of that. even though i was fired by my manager last monday for being a couple minutes late... eh, doesnt bother me anymore. company didnt agree. i could have thought well... to hell with mowing my grandmothers grass but nah, theres no need for that. guess i still have to go pick up that last paycheck. treated my father to a movie and drinks at the rialto saturday night which, aside from the people sitting behind us, was enjoyable. also enjoyable, treating my mother to pizza at lily's for lunch today. best pizza ive had in my short life. so it all comes back to you because we went out for ice-cream at cold stone tonight... dads treat. id feel better about all this if i didnt have to be charitable all the time. but enough.

running into people over the summer is difficult for me. if i mean to see someone i get nervous because it would be odd to assume i would be seeing them if i didnt have special appreciation for them. otherwise, seeing people randomely tends to scare the shit out of me. drove into circuit city crabtree today and saw a car i recognized. moments dull debate before deciding to go into the store. im so bad at faking normal behavior. when i know someones around i tend to stand with my head down behind things so as to... blend in maybe. looking out for myself in case i must (dear god) converse or interact with anyone. especially someone nice. luckily for me i didnt see anyone i recognized and made it out (running for the car before my mom had finished paying) unscathed. check that, im embarresed for me. odd thing is i ended up driving back out to her house to make an unscheduled delivery tonight. go me... and yeah i managed not to see anyone again. i love tempting fate. late tonight, after cold stone, we were all standing in line at michaels to get some random things. my mother asks my sister if she recognizes the girl in the orange and white striped shirt paying up in the line. i got a look at her face and realized she went to middle school with me. we were on the yearbook staff together. hello meagan. of course i didnt say anything, bowed my head, and looked at other things... im pretty sure she saw me though. always glad to leave a good impression, thats me. so to past acquaintances i must appear to have gone through some traumatic accident. i clearly appear incapable of handling social situations. this isnt aided by the fact that when i do intentionally meet people i give the illusion of being sweaty from anxioty... which is only partially true. my anxioty had nothing to do with the sweat which is what happens when you ride around in a black leather hotbox with no working a/c. its hell on wheels, baby.

said i wasnt going to bash anybody i loved but hell, i might as well... where are you? the reason i handle my life with so little grace cant show up to discuss herself. i have a feeling this is it. this is big. you know what i mean. and to the rest of you... where are you? the one night i thought i could feel safe for having things to say to four different people and all of you remain conspicuously absent. this isnt working. this isnt working at all.

slow, slow summer slump. no enthusiasm, no willpower or i would have written more recently. i write things in my head but they never make it to the screen. this is my half-assed apology. well, formalities aside, im forcing myself to sit here and write tonight for my own mental health's sake. i would be just fine otherwise, rotting or lolling or... i dont know, sleeping. maybe playing guitar... productive? maybe. they say musical people tend to score higher on standardized tests... id believe it. ive played today already enough though. i dont feel like going off on anybody (although i have good reason to) or writing scathing movie reviews (although i have good reason to)... maybe something philosophical.

maybe the stars... they are gorgeous tonight. or the sudden prolific appearance of satellites. they used to mean something to me. maybe not so much anymore. at one point i even considered one a sign from god, a prayer answered. eh, not anymore. looking back it seems like just another happy coincidence that made me happy for a night and ended up causing more pain than it was worth in the end. happens a lot with me. i sat outside on the back deck with my dad independance night and watched the fireworks from the next neighborhood over and the satellites up above. i counted six that night, they were everywhere. just two nights ago i looked up and saw a plane... then a bright satellite traveling the same speed. i thought they might collide but they didnt and i realized then that they really dont mean much anymore. used to be so symbolic... death of an icon i suppose. just a small event in a series of unfortunate tick exterminations that aid in the decline of my psychological dependance on someone. not too important at all...

but stars... i have a feeling they will feel special for a long time. i guess stars have meant one thing or another to just about every civilization in humanity's short history. our levels of understanding have slowly expanded until we have concluded that they are nothing more than fiery gas-balls in space. probably moving rapidly away from wherever that supposed big bang occured. imagine your body moving in a plot of infinite space. moving around normally, rotating around earth daily, simultaneously circumnavigating the sun, going around the galaxy, moving at incomprehensible speeds through the universe. its enough to make you dizzy. im willing to argue that there is no speed in space. speed is, after all, relative to a single location. any single location, as you will now realize, is impossible to maintain given the entire universe's lack of stability. heel, universe, heel. any speed here on earth is no cosmic speed at all because of all the funky movement our world does. if space travel is going to be successful to any extent we are going to have to stop using miniscule miles per hour or tiny machs or whatever else. light years maybe. it is a moot point anyway because i doubt we will find any form of information transmission or sheer power in the near future able to propel humans outside this solar system. the only theory ive heard is hibernation. somehow... isolate the gene that allows bears and other woodland furries to sleep so long and get humans to do it. that or something above light speed. and god only knows what happens then.

cosmic speed only matters (far as i can tell) when you are approaching the speed of light. as far as my thinking has carried me weird things happen around that point in time. here on earth light travels in pretty much real time. when light reaches here from the sun or whatever source, it bounces off you and goes into your eye. lets say you are in your spaceship going a marginal bit below light speed. so maybe light only travels, for the sake of conversation, fifteen miles per hour (i know, cosmic speed... shut up). so looking behind you at say... earth (with a big big telescope); earth activities would appear in slow motion. the light reflected into your eyes is getting there slower because you are traveling away from it. now, the light from the stars you are passing (which i can imagine would appear as lines in the sky...) reflects off your spacesuit and into your eyes. do you appear in real time or do you appear in slow motion as well? and unless your conscious mind slowed down (i dont know why it would but maybe) you would be moving in real time but seeing yourself in slow motion. scratch that... scratch all that. no slow motion. slow motion if you were accelerating away. rather, you see in real time on a delay. light still reaches your eyes at a constant speed, thus, constand vision. it just doesnt reach it in the time it normally would have, thus, delay. but... you reach light speed. this is a tough one. im wondering... since light isnt getting to your eyes anymore, rather frozen at the same speed you are going... would it all appear to freeze-frame from the moment you reached that exact speed? at that exact speed the only light you would have processed is the light that is there when you acheived light-speed. now, you could picture it as a video tape, forward, pause, and rewind but it wouldnt work that way. it is real life motion we are talking. lets say pause would be light-speed. by slowing down you start to see things again... in delay. but what would it look like as you are slowing down from light-speed? consider that no light has reflected off anything in your ship since you reached that speed. you have most certainly moved or done something since then. so when light finally starts reaching you, you would see... all the light that was in between your eyes and whatever else in there going to you and then light that started after whatever movement occured during light-speed time. some odd shift of vision going on. now, going faster than light is something far stranger. you would not see things in reverse looking back but rather forward... seeing all the light from behind you that passed you come back to you again. light from behind you wouldnt reach you so looking backwards would be complete black. looking into oncoming light would be a fast forward. remember... on earth light speed is real time. so that is cosmic speed for you... i think.

time. time is skewed as you can see by how fast you are going. dependent on light... possibly. but is there any such thing as real time? maybe one all consuming time but as for consciousness there isnt one. flies process information much quicker than humans so they basically see us in slow motion... hence their uncanny ability to avoid human swats. to them, time is much different. if you try and compare it, a human second isnt like a fly second. in reality though, it is still the same second for both of them. if the earth froze in space our time measuring systems would be fucked but i suppose digital devices would continue to keep stop-watch type time for us. going light speed maybe you slow down. maybe you stop altogether. maybe time isnt an issue for you anymore. when you see the sky it is a mosaic of time. the stars in any constellation may or may not still exist. they could have burned out millenia ago and we wouldnt know until the light reaches us. picture a constellation and figure the logistics. it is light colliding with earth. ok. so five hundred years ago this star releases light in a direction in space. maybe earth was... over there. well over time earth has moved here (remember all the moving we go) and that light has hit us. the star next to it is closer. its light was released three hundred fifty years ago towards the exact point the earth is now. repeat for other stars. the constellation we see is a picture of individual stars taken at different times at different places edited together to make a pattern. none of the stars are still there. star A is dead, has been for two hundred years. star B is much bigger now. we wont know until all that light reaches us. wherever we are. so time doesnt really mean much after all. it is just a semi-rational creation we use to make things easier to figure. it just confuses things after a while. yeah... i could still outrun light and with a large scope watch myself being born. time is worthless. this doesnt at all explain how i lost the last two years of my life. im still working on that one.

i cant stand thinking any more tonight. take it all with whatever pills you are on. ease the pain. its ok.