California is for Superheroes

New Office

2010-04-08T02:36:00.000-07:00

Old office got too crowded, commercial real estate bust. Moving to different location.

vietwashere.tumblr.com

see ya on the other side, buds

2009-12-23T00:30:00.000-08:00

Feel fear. Feel it rising the hackles up inside your mind like an insidious worm wriggling away beneath the hairs of your skin. Fear moves you, like heat, fire, anger, passion, strife and despair.

I haven't felt love. I mean I have felt love, just not the intensity of love that comes from love being reciprocated, i guess. But what disturbs me a litle is how anger moves me to that happier place. Te anger does not cause the happiness, the emotion does. It lets me feel something strong, something intense, and myself being a stranger to the wide variety of hallucinogens, it's the best I can do. But what a rush man, good times. It's just sad this is all I got, sad isn't the right wod, it's just... empty, hollow, a statement. This is all I have, and I like it. So ultimately not so bad.

2009-12-23T00:25:00.001-08:00

Welcome to fantasy he heard, from a place far beyond what he could see.

He drifted, listlessly upon an ocean of his own thought, wandering the darkened echoing shadows of his mind until he entered wavering seas of open fields, flowers, petals alight in the gentle sunlight of morning. He was here, he was there, he was in a dream, long while the cold winter storm outside his window billowed and blew like the whispering rush of indifferent skies in the silent darkness above.

He was going to float here, in his mind, in his memory, in his thoughts in his feelings until the world around him swallowed whole, until life could begin to match the world he imagined in his own mind, r until something better could cocur. And until then he would be lost and alone in the confines of his skull, movement to movement, foot to foot, petal uon petal beneath a placid yellow sky.

2009-11-24T08:32:00.001-08:00

Okay so a girl has been appearing in my dreams that I do not know, have never seen before but is quite nice and kind of cool and in the dream she seems to be in one of my classes, but is clearly not in real life. Bizarre.

2009-11-23T19:00:00.001-08:00

What are you up to?
Cutting fingernails.

Mistakes hurt twice the second time around

2009-10-05T19:36:00.000-07:00

Far from sexy.

My thighs touch
My stomach hangs out like a belt distended and large
My chin does not exist.

This is who I am?
I am not ugly.
I am ugly.
I am not ugly.
But I am far from sexy.
So far from sexy
So far from being with someone without the titters of
Gasp, look
Look at that
Look at him.
What is that
So far from being with you, and not bringing you shame.

So not, so not something to be proud of .
So far from sexy.
I can live like this.
I can’t live with someone like this.
Too cruel, too sad, too humiliating
Seen with me.
Is that he, miserable ugly
Fat by beautiful.

I don’t want to be that person.

I hate myself.

2009-09-26T20:11:00.001-07:00

She came in through the door. Small, young, beautiful, elegant as any 20 year old could be. Pushed through the door, fell into his arms, her lips pressed against his, her dress floating away like wisps of smoke on the wind, she melted into him, loving him, desiring him, and hten as soon as she’d appeared she vanished, replaced only by the shallow grope of a hand against the nothingness of his apartment, chopsticks still clutched in his fingers. He opened his eyes again, disappointedly straightening up his position. This was all, he thought ruefully. But, in a small twinge of hopeful silliness, he put the chopsticks in the paper box of Chinese food and set it down on the table, his robe draping around his knees. He strode up to the door, his hand hovering over the doorknob, and then with a quick yank, pulled it open.

Of course, she was not there. Disappointed, he closed the door again. turning back to his kitchen table, he flipped through the newspaper, his eye pawing over where he’d cut out the coupon for Chinese food that he was now eating.

Pregnancy

2009-09-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

Pee.

Shake

Wait.

She counted out the seconds. Her periods had stopped, this much she knew. A month, and they had disappeared. Now the scattered husks of empty pregnancy test boxes laid scattered on her bed, pink and purple labels done up in elegant florid cursive with exclamation marks joyously enthusing ‘Pregnancy!’ all along the outside. They were the only place where joy was to be found in the room. The egg timer dinged, the small plastic dial clicking into place with the cheap plastic click of objects purchased under a median price range. She ran over to the sink and picked up the small plastic stick.

It wasn’t there yet. But slowly, surely, with the inevitable creeping of a glacier the pink dots slowly filled in. Dot, dot, dot, a dot off of the central minus sign, and then another, until finally the entire symbol was filled in: a plus. She turned the stick over in her hands, rotating the small cylinder with her thumb and forefingers. Her reflection looked up at her in the mirror, stared back with worried, sallow eyes, and then turned towards the door and moved back into her bedroom. She fell into the cold, stiff sheets of her comforter, the soft bounce of the mattress pushing her up a few inches before she finally settled down onto the bed. She stared blankly at the ceiling, thoughts swirling through her head. Over on the bedstand, her cellphone sounded out a small rattle as it vibrated on the table. She picked it up and took a look at what it said. “WELL?” it asked in large block letters. It was her sister. She flipped the phone open to the keypad, then flipped it close again, thumbing her fingers over the cold plasticine sheen of the touchscreen.

She let her arms fall to her sides and her phone dropped limply out of her hand, careening gently off the side of her bed and falling to the floor with a muted clatter. Well she thought. Her expression changed, and then she thought it again, a heavier tone in her mind, Well. She stared up at the blank whiteness of her ceiling, the faint up-side down mushroom shape of her ceiling lamp and lost herself into the emptiness, the cold muted pastels of the grey afternoon sky, the dank sodden rain that poured down around her as she imagined her room filling up with water until she swam around in the depths, swimming and drowning like a fish. She ran her fingers over her stomach, running her fingers underneath her shirt, feeling up and down along the contours of her navel. How odd, she thought to herself. She continued staring at the upside-down mushroom. It had as many answers as she did, she thought to herself ruefully. She didn’t want to get up. So for a few more minutes, she continued staring at the ceiling, the soft pastel greys of the overcast sky filtering softly through her window.

2009-09-22T08:25:00.001-07:00

A bullet ripped through another guard’s eye, impacting the cornea, popping it like a balloon, little flecks of eye fluid splashing out like a raindrop.

Suicide Fantasy

2009-09-19T17:25:00.001-07:00

She wiped her tears away, soft sleeves brushing roughly against the saline residue on her skin. A few gasps, deeper breathes, and her breathing calmed down. And then, silence, tear streaked eyes and reddened cheaks, tired and exausted she sat on the couch, a slump in her shoulders and a gun in her hand. She imagined it, the motion lancing through h her mind. The cool, comforting cold of the gun against her chin.

She pressed the gun into her chin.

The cool hard click of the hammer back against the chamber.

The hammer clicked back

And the final, quick burst of hot from the muzzle as the bullet rushed through her chin, exiting through her brain.

Her finger moved, hesistated, lingered upon the trigger, waiting it, willing it, hesitating upon the image.

The bullet entered through her chin, hot gases of the bullet gunpowder charring and burning her skin as the bullet passed through her skin. Small specks of burning bits of gunpowder impacted into the skin under her jaw, leaving small sizzling craters in her skin, singing hairs and moving outwards in small little waves as the gunpowder hit her skin like meteorites impacting the surface of the moon. The bullet traveled through the roof of her mouth, shattering the bone and sending it spinning out into a radial pattern, a pirouette of bone fragments as they spun with peculiar synchronicity through the air, bouncing off her tongue and finally embedding into her cheeks. The bullet passed through her nasal cavity, shattering the blood vessels inside and causing blood to stream from her nose as though she’d had the world’s worst case of nosebleeds that a person could ever see. It passed her eyes, impacting the nerve and sending a quick jolt of yellow to her vision, her last thought before she would die would be yellow: yellow: everything would be yellow. And then the bullet touched the brain.

It took addition first. One two three four five, add two numbers together to make another number. Cindy, what is the answer? She stared blankly at her teacher, she didn’t know. She couldn’t add. Three millimeters up. She was four, she was learning to ride a tricycle, she ran into a rock and fell over and skinned her knee. Her dad ran over and carried her back to the house, and then the house disappeared, and her dad disappeared, the wound disappeared, and then it was gone. Four millimeters up. Blood rushed into the cavity the bullet left in its wake, short circuiting the neurons left behind, killing them off in a wave of acidic blood. A wave of blood stormed in towards her brain cavities, and her brain sent off another neuron. 7th grade, the school fair. Little Jimmy Parkson was showing her how to shoot a gun. She paid 5 dollars, shot three times, and missed every time. He gave her his duck. She kept it until it fell apart, which was three months after that.

The bullet ripped through her brain, a trail of charred and blackened neurons, sparking in the air behind it. a millimeter before the skull it touched it, pushed through, and the last neuron made it way into her consciousness. It was three weeks ago, two weeks ago, a day. He had gone, in cruel and unhappy ways he had gone and left her alone. And there had been a gun, a bullet, the cool embrace of a stainless steel muzzle pressed up hard against here vein. And then there had been a release, a quick burst of gas, and then it had disappeared.

The bullet exited through her brain, a small star of bone erupting out around it as the bullet sailed away from the earthy confines of her hair, long lashes of black hair reaching up to the ongoing rocketship, flying up into the air upon the waves of dreams, emotions, the great tunneling rocket that had made its way through the earth and off into space. And behind it behind, it all there was she, she a girl, she a person, it a gun, and this a moment.

Bodyworks

2009-09-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

He was in love with her, the physical immediacy of her. How she felt, the soft plumbing curves of her body, her stomach, her breasts, the way his neck filmed up slightly when she breathed on him in the morning, the slight bitter tang of her breath when she didn’t brush. Eyebrows, plucked infrequently, odd and half-grown in, penciled infrequently still. Stray flakes of eyliner that flaked off onto the pale light of morning pillows. I was in love with her. I still was. I loved everything about her. Except for the things that I didn’t.

But girl, love, darling, madame, dear, she who I loved. Let it never be said that I did not love you completely, every aspect of who you were, every nook and cranny, fold and follicle, lash and lingering touch, let it never be said that I did not love it at all, all of you, and all of it. Never let it be said you are not beautiful.

now just to pin down this miserable voyeurism thing for the story.

Dogs

2009-09-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

We are old dogs, lost, forgotten, old wanderers who linger around old places we used to go to and dream about old girls who used to love us.

Old souls who wander around the old places of the world where once people, lovers, the young hung, hanged, lived, loved, lingered listlessly in the lilting light of lost sounds and moments hung on a string.

We forget everything we ever knew except for the people who used to know us or we dreamed we knew them.

We miss them.

Days like these

2009-09-10T22:17:00.001-07:00

Days like these you think about threading your fingers all the way through to the back of your skull, protruding out the base of your spine.

Community

2009-09-09T16:45:00.001-07:00

I aimagine a community. Small and disparate like the corners of the world, bundled together into a knotted seam. They played out like colors on a television sitcom, representations of the archetypes of jung all bundled up into a location. The thief, the sage, the girl, the boy, I was the boy, the girl was small, slender, parted bangs that split off to the left side of her cheek. I was in love with her.

We played archetypes and beehives, laughed at the stereotypical nature of our existence and then lost ourselves in living, laughing, and figuring out the basics of who we were, how we were constructed and how our arms came apart at the wrists, unspooling into gigantic reams of paper.

I loved her and then she left, floating off into the winds blowing away with the capricious spirit of my imagination leaving me only with the various scraps of paper that scattered around me like the autumn leaves. I missed her. and the sage, and the trickster and the archetypes that'd laughed and poked ironically at their stereotypicalness, then disappeared into the wind.

I miss her, the Girl.

We are too busy.

2009-09-05T12:49:00.001-07:00

On average the American worker works more hours than any other worker in a first-world nation. While there are many reasons for this, one of the major transformations of the social dynamic is that life has shifted from the family to the workplace, to life outside the workplace to entirely within the workplace.

You are your job, your job is you, and most likely you will find all your SOs at your job or related in some way to your job.

Now as for me that means that unemployed me who has been unemployed for almost ever, this means that well, things don't stay samelike.

Well I pulled this up because my friend works. A lot. She's constantly scheduled, poorly paid, but in this economy, it's a job. But, ionno. People are gone more. I stay home and write, but i'm mostly alone. Yes I'm a self-centered narcissistic little twat. But,

I forget people have lives outside reading and commenting on my story

Adventureland.

2009-09-02T01:00:00.000-07:00

I'm a very big fan of this movie. It's beautifully choreographed, it's sweet, sentimental, the main character could almost be my clone, and the performances are awesome.

Carnivals are some of the best places to photograph ever because you have multiple light sources and so much to do with wide angle lenses to achieve the movie soft lighting effect with blurred out lights.

With James and Em, you feel this performance. Kristen Stewart is a good actress given the right role, and this is her right role, among one of many should she choose wisely in the future.

Heady nuances in the movment of her hands, a distinctly jewish aspect to various elemnts of her character. Jesse eisenberg mixes it up too as someone who is simultaneously very intellectual and nerdy but comfortable in his own skin, a degree of jockish cocky bravado in his physical perforamnce. James is smart, but he's nowhere near as unrelastically cartoonishly awkward as is Michael Cera's usual demeanor which at this point has become almost unbearable to watch. Think of Michael Cera's character, except done well.

This is a movie about people who kow their lots in life, who act like adults and individuals who make decisions based on their personalities and not genre conventions or anything else. The performances by Eisenberg and Stewart in particular are so absorbing they might as well be a stylized documentary. Stewart's lines falter at times, but a compelling performance makes this as good as any movie ofits ilk can ever be.

It shares the spirits and hopes and dreams and demeanor of its main character, soft, sweet, intelligently crafted, and fableistic, but only in the best way possible.

This is the cheap and tawdry world of our memory, but how we rememeber it, how it was beautiful to us.

So yes, I'll have no shame in pulling up this movie to watch James and Em falling in love time and time over again. It might be wish fulfillment, but. I don't feel like i need to make an apology for that.

2009-09-01T22:06:00.001-07:00

I don't really want to know how many people read this blog, do I?

Prolly like talking to a mirror.

Ho-ly Shit (i.e. My current working story: aka My fanfiction: aka The Intrepid Adventures of Adenine and Kehanni (working title))

2009-08-31T22:00:00.001-07:00

The relevant facts begin with the lineage of Victor Leonin. Victor Leonin was one of the greatest paladins to ever serve in the Alliance military. He was well-known as an able warrior, a cunning general and a charismatic leader. But after his return to Stormwind from war, a few under his command began contemplating a split away from the Alliance military, forming their own organization away from the seedy politicking of Stormwind. To stave off this cleft, the Leonin Lions were formed, to appease the militant right wing of the Alliance military, the Lions were formed with the stated duty to protect and guard Jaina Theramore. But, since Jaina did not actually need protecting, this served as only a premise to excuse them from accountability to regular Alliance laws. Such it was that the Leonin Lions were formed.

From there, Victor had three sons: the eldest, Marcus; the middle child, Francis, and the youngest, Richard. The eldest, Marcus was born of Victor’s first wife. Absent of his mother’s traits, he grew up in the stead and shadow of his father’s accomplishments, eventually rising to establish his own name as a daring and stalwart warrior, a prescient leader of his own strictly devout military unit. The middle child, Francis was born of Victor’s second wife, a senator. She was originally assigned as the liason between the Leonin’s brigade and the Alliance senate, and it was ultimately she who was instrumental in garnering the necessary political impetus to facilitate the formation of the Leonin Lions. Left in Stormwind as his father fought off with his organization, Francis studied through the university system in Stormwind, gathering a sizeable presence and understanding of the politics of Stormwind’s governing Senate body. The last child, Richard, was born sometime after both Francis and Marcus. At the time of Richard’s birth, Marcus and Francis were already well into their respective careers as militant religious leader and politician respectively. Richard’s mother was quiet, soft spoken, and died in childbirth. Accordingly, of the three children Richard was the only one reared by his father, at this point a tired, old, beaten man whose views on his preceding exploits had withered into hollow warnings to keep away from the field of battle and an absolute faith in religion. This lasted until Richard was eight, when Victor had a stroke and was paralyzed from the waist down and was rendered unable to speak. In the year that his father hung onto life, Richard picked up on magic tricks to try and keep his father entertained. A year later Victor died and Richard was passed along from guardian to guardian within the Leonin Lion’s estates, his brothers effectively garnering custody over his rearing.

Several years later, at the age of 21, Richard storms out of the Leonin household. His brother Marcus controls every aspect of his life, forcing him to stay in the Leonin Lions, dictating who he can and cannot see, and constantly berating him with his responsibility to uphold the virtue of the Leonin Lions. The final straw comes when Marcus denigrates Richard’s magic abilities, the only thing over which he has ever had any control. In the passing years, Richard has bounced around the entirety of Stormwind, going wherever his handler says he should go. Be it school, military, trade occupations or other things, Richard has proven to be weak-spirited, mild-mannered, and timid to the point of milkishness. The only thing that he has pride in as his only hobby is an amateur capacity for card tricks. He kept up with his magic abilities since his childhood, learning more tricks and card illusions from the various orphans at the Stormwind orphanage most of whom were previous street urchins. He performs occasionally for them as he sees fit, and for few other people. His life is reclusive and small, but he identifies with his magic. Such that it is that when his brother insults that which should not be insulted, he storms out of the house and resolves to never again set foot in that house, walking off into the distance.

He initially intended to rush to Goldshire, find a whore, and have sex with her to defy his brother’s puritan sensibilities. Unfortunately he decided to walk from Stormwind, so this takes several hours. He heads to Stormwind where he meets Lily. Upon discovering that she is a thief, and she discovering he is a magician, they fall in love. This relationship continues for several months until his brother Marcus discovers what he has been up to, and yells the shit out of Richard.

ACTUAL BEGINNING OF STORY

The story begins with the Goldshire burning down into the ground. Locke – the goblin proprietor of the establishment, escapes with Flo – eldest whore and the rest of the girls into the woods. Marcus has sent men to burn down the Goldshire inn and everyone inside.

The morning after, Adenine and Kehanni are on their way to the Goldshire when they discover it has been burned down. They find and meet up with Locke and co, and converse on what happens, Locke sends them back to the Goldshire to pick up a few important missing things for him

Meanwhile, a rider informs Francis that Marcus’s brigade of men have failed at their task. Francis pulls out his pre-written order to get his own specialized brigade of men to go find them and sends it out.

Adenine and Kehanni are at the Goldshire when riders rush by, heading towards Locke and co. They run back to the rescue.

The riders round up all the girls and pick out the girl Lily in particular. She is handed off to specialized riders and the remaining riders then proceed to attempt to kill the girls. Adenine and Kehanni stave them off, killing a good number of the guards and saving the group. It is mentioned that Lily was taken off to Stormwind so Adenine and Kehanni head off to try and infiltrate Stormwind with Adenine’s disguise spell.

Upon infiltrating Stormwind, Adenine searches for information in a magic store, but only comes out with new spells instead. Kehanni interrogates a nearby guard after spying horses of a familiar insignia going into the stables. After he provides her the necessary information, she kills him. Adenine and Kehanni meet up again, but are accosted by local guards because Kehanni refuses to comply with an order to put away her Felhunter. When the guard attempts to arrest her, she stabs him through the head and blows their cover.

Adenine and Kehanni fight their way out of Stormwind, then decide that they should meet up with their respective contacts for information in Undercity.

As they are doing so, Lily has been shipped off to a prison ship, which is headed for Brigston prison, which is off the coast of Silverpine. On the trip there she reminisces about her relationship with Richard.

A day after Lily leaves, Richard finally speaks up and demands his brothers to let him go talk to Lily. Francis acquiesces and Richard is able to reach land the same night that Lily is transferred to the prison.

Adenine and Kehanni arrive in Undercity and contact their respective contacts. Adenine goes to Grimcow, an ex-boyfriend. Kehanni goes to Varelse, a drug addict pseudo-friend whose drug habit she is enabling. They stay the night in Grimcow’s room, and in the morning they are introduced to Simurgh and Georgiana, mercenaries that Grimcow found for them. They head off for Brigston prison to break Lily out of jail.

The night that Adenine, Kehanni and co. arrive at Brigston, Lily has been transferred there in the morning. Richard is riding to the prison, and Adenine Kehanni and co are transferring there as well. They are able to easily infiltrate the prison, reaching Lily just in time to listen in on her and Richard arguing over how he ruined her life. They attempt to break her out, but Simurgh blows their cover when he has a panic attack due to the summoned guard dogs. The group fights their way out of the prison building and Georgiana destroys the entire prison structure with goblin explosives and napalm as they exit.

They escape back to Goldshire, planning their next reconnaissance on the Leonin Lion building, to see if they can get any information that could get the heat off their trail. Adenine, Kehanni and Simurgh head to the Leonin house. As Adenine and Kehanni watch, Richard argues with Marcus. As they attempt to leave, Adenine blows their cover, and Marcus shatters the glass roof sending them crashing down below. The artery in Kehanni’s arm is gashed open by a large shard of glass. Adenine cauterizes it as Marcus busies himself putting on his armor. Kehanni sinks into the protection of her voidwalker and Adenine and Marcus fight. Adenine manages to wound Marcus but overestimates the gravity of the wound and is nearly killed when Kehanni transfers the voidwalker protection to her and lifetaps her own dead arm to regain lost energy, causing permanent tissue damage to her wounded arm. She and Marcus fight, Marcus overwhelms her abilities, and he is about to kill her when Simurgh stabs him in the back of the head, mistakenly assuming he was a guard as Adenine and Kehanni had instructed him to kill any guards that came nearby.

Adenine blacks out, we transfer back to the Goldshire. A large part is held to celebrate Adenine waking up. During the party Locke informs them that the Goldshire is being rebuilt at all because he made a deal with the steamwheedle cartel and francis that they would have to come and visit him in Stormwind.

The following morning they go back to Stormwind, expecting death. Francis sits them down and explains that he will lift the death threats against theirs and their friend’s heads because he could not kill his brother to assume power, but they have done him a favor by allowing him to do so. He lets them go, he calls Richard in, allows Richard to go free to do as he pleases.

Adenine and Kehanni exit from Goldshire. Richard comes back to the inn to apologize to Lily. End story.

Viet is not entirely drunk

2009-08-26T17:38:00.001-07:00

Today I awoke and discovered I was depressed. Here is how it happened. I woke up, as per usual and got out of bed. Checked how quickly my illegal download of Lost Planet: Colonies had progressed, then moved over into various other things. Games are a constant part of my world and I have an overabundance of games that I will never spend any full amount of time on. As soon as I wrote that I flipped over to a different pane and opened up my friend’s facebook, Lauren’s facebook. As I had a crush on Lauren that I’m sure she knew about but she’s how she is and we haven’t talked since she graduated last year. She is how she is means that she’s lovely and popular and I was an oddball run-in kid all.

Though good call on keeping your damn mouth shut for once, good call past Viet. Good decision for once. Good gut instinct.

Anyhow. Is this it? Sit around on a fat ass, house-delivered pizza and videogames and jack-all?

And Batman? While great, is this it?
‘
God I’m depressed. Bubbles.

Bottles of Bubbles, all to be sent to Talisa. Haven’t gotten it together. Her birthday was about a week ago now.

Hurm.

I don’t know where to go. Too unhappy with current situation but too scared to move.

Fuck all man.

On my relationship with the group dynamic.

2009-08-26T03:42:00.000-07:00

Spurred by Roger Ebert's post on matters Alcoholics Anonymous, I began to wonder about my own relationship with various provably addictive substances and why exactly it is that I've avoided them.

I've avoided them for any number of reasons: laziness, lack of commitment to actively taking something. Shame perhaps. When I speak of chemically addictive substances I mean substances that produce an active and irreversible (at least naturally) chemical addiction to a substance. This includes but is not limited to nicotene, cocaine, heroin. But, after all, Ebert was posting about alcohol, so let's start there.

It's worth mentioning I was almost absolutely certain that by the time I was 21 at least I'd be drinking myself into a miserable stupor on a regular basis. Nobody made this conclusion for me, I predicted such a future for myself. I am a notoriously poor judge of what positive outcomes will arise in my future and this was simply a manifestation of that, but, it was grounded in more factual grounds than other considerations of emotions and angst or otherwise. I was consistently depressed, I lost myself into obsessions, and I figured it was only a matter of time where once I got hooked into something, I wouldn't let go.

Few problems:

You do not think about your ADD when you have ADD but clearly I underestimated the effects of ADD on me (rhyming intentional). Even though I did lose myself into obsessive quandries over various escapist phenomena, I flipped. Constantly. Batted through channels, interest, videogames picked up and dropped in th eflick of the hat. Furthermore drugs and chemical addictions reeked of this miserable and awful thing that I did, and still do immensely despise: and that is obligation.

Nothing is fixed in the world, I prefer my world with as many possibilities and chances to adapt as possible. So anything that removes that choice, I dislike. I like being able to flip around.

But by the same token this affects my ability to work in a group dynamic. I do like people, I love people, the presence of people is a joy and their interactions form the greater human canvas by which I observe and inform everything I do with. That said, working with them can ve tiresome. After all, why do things to make everyone happy when you could just make it right? Ultimately it all comes down to a lack of respect for anyone' sopinion other than my own when it comes to matters i care about. I meana, wow I'm just making myself sound like an asshole.

Point is: I prefer working alone. More than any depression, angst or suicidal thoughts (and there have been more than one) I value agency. You have to keep your options open, it's the only way to be adaptable. By definition of course.

Well this was a fun meander. Let's do this again sometime.

-Viet

Beauty

2009-08-24T01:47:00.000-07:00

I forget what beauty is when I play videogames. Beuaty lies within the details, the small nuances and curls of a fig leaf as the light plays in soft lilting forms against the transparent green whispers of its fibers, tracing shadows soft and gentle on its form. Beauty lies within the details, be it objects, people, scenery.

Videogames, for all their artistry, so often amount to little more than a short jaunt through these universes. They are ultimately unconcerned with details, this is a world where life is concerned with the sword and fist.

2009-08-07T06:04:00.001-07:00

the souls of men are purchased in dollars

If I were the president

2009-07-31T00:44:00.000-07:00

President Kennedy famously said, in his inaugural address to the American public think not what your government can do for you but what you can do for your government. While it is true that he did not enforce the mechanisms that brought about the situation we are here, we can understand that it is this ethos that has brought us here today. So in this modern time, at this defining moment, I too return a question to you America: and that is, what can your government do for you? For too long have we sat by and watched our nation erode, the middle class disappear, the very cost of existence itself fly higher and higher and higher beyond any person’s dream of ever reaching the middle class. For too long have the wealthiest and most abhorrent Americans lorded above us all in palaces of gold and silver, lined with their ill-gotten opulence and greed. For too long have we worked, and worked, and worked all based on the faith – that simple faith – that we would all like to believe: that this is a free nation, that this is a just nation, that this is a nation where everyone who comes to these shores can achieve.

So then, we must understand that this statement too is true: freedom is not free. The freedom that we enjoy was fought for and purchased by the blood, sweat, and lives of our working men and women in the military and armed services. They share their kinship with every American soldier who has fought in every American war stretching back to the formation of our nation. But all too easily to those who have most commonly used this phrase over the past eight years, all too soon do they forget the other soldiers. The soldiers who fought against them, on American soil, to afford us all the liberties that we have today.

The soldiers by the name of Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King. By the names of Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X. Of Susan B Anthony and Gloria Steinem. Of Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, who struck down the monopolizing interests of big business so that we today might have a middle class. These are the soldiers who have fought, and bled, and worked, and died here in America to make the world that we know today. These are the soldiers who have fallen by the wayside in the past eight years, for good reason least of all, for they are on the right side of history. You will not hear these soldier’s names come from the lips of the conservative moment. You will not hear their names invoked in glorious adulation. Because when they see these names, when they hear these names the sound that they hear calling to their ears is the million-strong voices of history calling again and again: you are wrong.

And such it is that we come to healthcare America. This which not even the 20th century’s finest president could accomplish, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For forty years, we have felt the pinch of those who would purport to do us well. For forty years, we have felt the tightening purse strings of the moneylenders, schemers, and crooks at the heart of the insurance industry. For forty years, we have suffered under their tyrannical rule. So often do the Republicans incite the very spectre of our plan. It will ration healthcare they say, it will cause old people to die they say, it will result in care not getting to the most deserving people, at the most appropriate time.

To those who speak such words, and to those who agree with them, I will say this: Where do you live? Where do you live that this does not already occur? Where do you live where your fellow citizens are not routinely denied coverage, open to the fickle winds of bankruptcy the moment they lose their jobs. Where do you live where the majority of American’s primary health insurance is the local emergency room that will open them up to the exorbitant costs of the insurance industry? Where do you live, where the current system is fine with you? I understand why my compatriots on the right say the things they do. After all, they are in no position to suffer. They are already serviced by one of the best health insurance plans in the nation: the congressional public option. That of course, and 1.5 million dollars a day can make a man more certain to stand up for himself than stand up for his constituents. But these are the stakes America. These are the standards by which I will measure whether this succeeds or fails.

-A public option, at existing medicare reimbursement rates to drive costs down.

Sing

2009-07-30T23:46:00.001-07:00

We were poor, so poor, and no easy pablum or empty philosophy of “we were rich in music” would change it. We did play guitar, we played guitar more often than ever we did before and then we played songs that we’d heard, that we’d written, that we’d wish people would pay for but didn’t. We played everywhere. And as the hunger crept at our knotted fingers we cramped and played louder until only the vibrations of our strings kept the sallow pit of our stomachs from dropping out of our bodies.

We were so, so poor. The worst of all was that we weren’t even richer for the music. We’d written so many things, of so many broken hearts, of so many stories of love and life. But faced with the inevitable rumbling of our stomachs, they seemed sallow and empty: as significant as a steady bead of rainwater running across a drumskin. We were so, so hungry.

You wished, you so desperately wished that you could ignore yourself. You stared blankly at drugs, alcohol, sex and lies only to look away and remember all who fell before you. It wasn’t the way, but neither was this. We were drawn, almost inexplicably to the music. Or rather, I was. Joseph left. David went back to college. We were our band.

This in turn leaves only me, but. The mind moves.

I know some things: I know that this is all I own: my clothes, my guitar, a few sets of rusted-out fiddle strings, and a well-worn guitar case whose only familiarity is with coins and the faces of Washington and sometimes Lincoln. I should be gone, so long gone away from here. No broken family to head home to, no drugs to run away from. But…

Maybe just another song.

Coraline

2009-07-27T00:34:00.001-07:00

Je m'apelle Coraline.
C'est tout

Believe

2009-07-25T04:29:00.000-07:00

What do you believe in Lyra?
I believe in a lot of things: fairies, sunsets, fireballs, I believe in what I want to believe in
Do you believe what people tell you?
Generally, yes
Well it's good. But, be careful.
Why?
The older people get the more they have reason to lie.
I thought only bad people lied.
Well yes, but the world is not filled with good people.
People are good enough.
Good enough, yes, but it might not be enough for you.
Mr. Alexander you are always like this.
He gave off a small smile.
Yes, I am. It's one of the problems of being old. Eventually you are no longer young.
He paused slightly, then bent down, cupping her hands in his own and gave them a comforting pat.
If nothing else, remember this. Believe in yourself, that there are things beyond what you know and that you can find them and understand them. Sometimes it'll be all you have. Make sure it's enough.
Lyra peered curiously at him, her eyes drifting slowly up and down. And then she nodded.
Okay

Currently Playing

2009-07-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

A Love That Will Never Grow Old
Emmylou Harris - Brokeback Mountain OST

Something to Talk About
Badly Drawn Boy - About a Boy OST

Just a Thought
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere

Personal Fridays: We're back in a big way

2009-07-25T01:49:00.000-07:00

Yo yo yo yo.

honest to... blog (damn you Diablo Cody), I don't much like posting here. Personal things at least. But the situation warrants it so here goes.

WE ARE BACK, IN A BIG BIG WAY.

SO BIG THE SHIT WILL HIT THE SHIT WITH THE SHIT AND THE SHIT SAID ITWAS AWESOME!

Everyone graduated last june. I did not. Disappointed, but, i've been able to float since then.

Haven't moved from my room, much at all. It's okay though. I'm doing what I like:

-Writing
-Politicking
-PLaying guitar
-Stories, so many stories

this blog was never going to be well-maintained. I flitter and fleet, flutter on the wind from one obsession to the next. What's nice about this summer is that I've been able to do so, and realize at least: it's not so bad. I could be doing something I don't want to. Doing what you like for a while is nice, even if things don't quite work out the way you plan. What you can control is the now, and the now's okay. It's quite alright.

Ce qui serai, sera.

Au revoir pour le moment

(shit french, I'm aware)

-Viet

Joseph and the Maunch

2009-07-24T04:28:00.001-07:00

Joseph took pills that nobody saw and nobody knew about, that no one had prescribed to him, given to him, sold to him, bought for him, or even mentioned to him, but he took pills nonetheless. Every day he trudged the seventeen blocks it took him to walk the long poured concrete sidewalk from his apartment to his office, and every morning right before entering the office, as his hand brushed against the clamming cool of the wrought-aluminum door handle, he would quietly flip the pill into his mouth, and swallow.

He did this for a few reasons. One: because the pills were not paid for, they were not taken from his deductible, and if you had pills just lying around the house, eventually – if you lived your life as Joseph did – you got around to taking them. Two: because – unbeknowest to everyone – Joseph liked to be left alone. This is not to say that he did not enjoy the company of his coworkers: he did. However his interactions with them were small, he did not express any particular desire to engage in the usual office conversational pieces regarding reality shows and politics and other mish-mosh, but for the most part he did not find them altogether disturbing.

No, what the pills provided for Joseph was a reprieve from the maunches.

The maunches was the name he had given to the sound, given because when it had first started occurring it had been the copy machine: one day out of the blue the seams in the plastic had opened, a long gaping tear ripped apart the machine, and long jagged teeth had appeared from the gap, trimming the abyss with strange plasticine molars. He remembered backing away slowly, backing out of the room as the copier hummed along endlessly, the sterile musk of ozone in the air, and the large gaping mouth flapping in the wind, sounding *maunch*maunch*maunch*maunch*maunch*.

He scampered back to his desk, frightened, afraid, unsure of what he had seen, and absolutely certain that the machine was printing out far more than the twenty copies of page reports that he needed. His eyes darted around the room: everything there, everything normal, but still the persistent *maunch* floated to him on the air-conditioned breeze, a perpetual reminder of what was there, and how he would eventually have to go get the copies.

After several long minutes, and just as Joseph was about to will himself to brave the emanating *maunch* and go get his seventy copies like a man, the sound stopped; replaced only by the familiar hum of the copier, copying away just like any other day. This initiated yet another bout of petrified contemplation for Joseph: what was going on, why did the copier have teeth, what was he going to do with fifty extra copies of page reports, and most pressingly: was he gone? He stared at his monitor: cracked, he thought marking off a mental check. He opened the drawer, dirty, he noticed, and closed the drawer. He picked up a red stapler, stared at it intently, then placed it down marking it off mentally red. Red replied the stapler, and Joseph’s mental checklist scattered onto the floor.

My justification for beating you with a shaving pole

2009-07-24T03:36:00.001-07:00

"My biggest fear is that these terrorists would indoctrinate other prisoners... They would probably be quickly embraced by the various Muslim prison "gangs".

That's the last thing we need... Home grown terrorists are the one thing hardest to protect against."

Dear above dumbass poster from an IGN board detailing your reason as to why it is that you don't want Gitmo detainees transferred to US Superprisons.

Allow me to explain some very basic concepts to you.

1) the fleeting nature of information
There is only a certain time frime by which the information an individual holds is useful. How much useful information do you carry? Family memories are often not useful, and even in an ideal situation, the most you can remember back is a full year of participation in an organization, and only then if you were part of it for that period of time, in leadership, and that was all you did.

These detainees have been in there for SEVEN YEARS

2) You are confusing a good portion of those who convert to Islam in prisons as equivalent to those who commit terrorist acts. It is not a disease. It is not equivalent, this above fear exhibits nothing but your blanket, unforgivable idiocy with regards to how terrorism actually works.

3) THREE! *anger down* Terrorism evolves primarily out of local concerns. Al-Qaeda co-opts local issues and promises solutions through participation in their ludicrous global campaign to transform the world into an international caliphate. Case in point: the only thing these people could probably teach their fellow prisoners (if they even speak English, dumbass), is how much they wanted to get the security in their local village better. How exactly is that going to produce homegrown terrorists?

4) FOUR: WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?! TERRORISM ALREADY OCCURS IN THE UNITED STATES. IT IS A FUCKING TECHNIQUE, NOT A FUCKING IDEOLOGY. YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER.

5)Let's state finally, for all records that crime is not about ideology. It is about intent and purpose. Even if these terrorists, or alleged terrorists, are able to convince their fellow inmates, you are reliant on multiple, highly unlikely scenarios
a) They leave prisons. See: supermax
b) They actually get in contact with the main Al-Qaeda organisation. (Oh yes, this will happen. Because it's so easy Al-Qaeda has a phone line. 1-800 Al-Qaeda. Free Shipping and handling)
c) They actually get accepted in. (American? Sure! There's no way you could be a spy!)
d) they actually make it back and forth without being checked and scrutinized having both visited a middle eastern country AND been released from a supermax.
e) They actually evade police presence in order to
f) finally pull off a successful terroirst attack, in sufficient numbers.

So THAT is your great fear? Dumb fucking motherfucker.

6) As a final note, the greatest possible scenario of any real attack occuring lie this is organic. However, largely as a result of strong efforts on the part of the Muslim-American community domestically, there are no domestic terror cells anywhere in the US. They do not find havens within the larger Muslim-American communities. They are not welcome.

So at worst, what you have is the case of the Army post bomber, who operated independently. Was caught like a moron, and showed no possible sign of ever working with anyone else ever.

In short: a crazy.

So in conclusion.

This is why I'm going to impale you with a carrotstick

Note: apologies to readers for the violent, destructive tone of this post.

It comes with the territory (politics)

Jim

2009-07-19T18:53:00.001-07:00

Jim pawed nervously at the hem of his coat, fiddling around for the watch he’d misplaced the night before. Before him loomed the stretching form of The First Store, on first and 9th. He gulped quietly, shifted his cloak around him and walked in. A brief wash of cooled antiseptic air later and he was inside: marble veneer and yellow-orange lights everywhere washing over decapitated mannequins in awkward poses. One particularly awkward pose caught his attention halfway down the escalator. He twisted his neck trying to look at it too long. He arrived at Diamantine’s; his neck twisted and his mind still invested in the strange contortionist mannequin, he paused right outside the door.

The interior was rich, ornate: a thick velvety purple ran all along the walls and floors imbueing the space with a regal, romaneque quality providing a pleasant contrast with the waistcotted black-and-white workers who milled behind the glass cases, pointing out favorable ornaments to rich, luxuriant customers. Jim spyed a woman in what appeared to be a mink coat and adjusted the coat even tighter around him, concealing even further his T-shirt and jeans.

Writer's note -

I am making the horrible mistake of leaving story fragments in here.

Deepest apologies to all readers. Gots to suck.

Mr R. Burris will speak to you now.

2009-07-12T03:07:00.000-07:00

Editor’s note: The below text was fished out of the charred remnants of a diary lost in the wreckage of a downed Boeing 747 over Skokee, New York. The contents were transcribed into the official record in hopes of returning the diary to its owner. Richard Burris, the named party was never found.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror this morning. This if of course absurd in its entirety, the last mirror I owned was lost several months ago, but in the upside-down view of myself in the spoon I saw a suspended man with a gaunt face, what amicably might be described as a five-o-clock shadow but in all honesty has long advanced beyond five o clock. I am Richard Burris and I write my diary entries as though they will someday be published to the greater world with a significance imbued in them that they themselves do not actually have. And so unnamed reader let me inform you that I too can see your peering eyes, your veiled and judging gazes, let me tell you too that my life is not so much different from yours. I say this not out of presumption but out of fact: most people very regularly do not move out much beyond the medical normalities of their lives. You do not break your routine, it owns you, much as it owns mine, but we shall see if this sporadic breaking of routine shall not itself become routine and the upside-down man in my spoon may yet communicate something of worth to you, to me, to us; dearest, most beloved reader, let us see if any significance will be gleaned from my words.

SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE (scrawled in dark crayon, a title, the journal entry is still consistent with the preceding words)

Rich, the fucktwat bitch is about his regular routine, a shirt and tie, smooth, combed back hair. A dispassive smile, a nonthreatening glance towards (from here on out, the shortened words of girl… love… and despair… are only legible from the tangled mess of scrawling black lines).

I have lost something. Something I cannot describe but two weeks from this day prior, or two weeks ago, I swear I felt it disappear from my life, like the retreating of the tide from the shore I… I have quit my job, my clothes are unchanged, my legs are dry and uncomfortable with the chalked up residue of my own excrement and I am slowly wasting away in my spot without idea as to what it is that is missing.

Piece it together; find it, two weeks prior, two weeks prior, two weeks prior I was at work.

HEADER – AT WORK – INT. – DAY

TEXT – RICHARD

MAN: Could you state your name for the record please?
RICHARD: Richard Burris.
MAN: Mr. Burris I am sure you are aware of the company policy regarding tardiness
RICHARD: Yes sir, I am aware.
MAN: Well then good, I hope then that from this point on you will be more punctual to your assignments. As this was your first demerit in some years, we are prepared to let you off with… Mr. Burris?

RICHARD is no longer looking at the MAN but is instead staring intently at the disappearing figure of a shapely WOMAN IN RED.
MAN: Mr. Burris!
RICHARD shakes out of his reverie.
RICHARD: Oh, hmph! Sorry.
MAN: Now as I was saying, our company is prepared to let you off at this moment, but future tardiness will not be looked upon as kindly. Now are we clear Mr. Burris?
RICHARD peers at the man with a look that seems to say “why did you break me away from her?” but then answers slowly back.
RICHARD: Yes.
MAN: Very good, then let’s have a productive work session today yes?
RICHARD returns sullenly to his cubicle, the retreating form of the WOMAN IN RED in his mind: her hips gyrating, the subtle movement of her thighs against red satin. He sits down at his desk, puts on his headset, and presses a button.
RICHARD: Hi I’m calling to inform you of a momentous opportunity to purchase the Wonder-Vac 3000! Now…

I wait two days before I start searching for her. It’s difficult to truly find someone when all you have to work with are the color of their dress and the exquisite perfection of their ass. Try describing the above sentence to a compatriot and more than likely yours will be the name they’ll be suggesting at the week end “who’s a serial killer now?” office party. I learn small things first, her name is Julie, she works in accounting, she’s engaged to Fred, they met in the company. To the queries of who is asking I always answer “Richard Burris”. I am not Richard Burris. I am Richard Burris’s shadow, the very hollow frame of his existence, his hopes and desires, pent up masturbatory frustrations. I am Richard Burris the shell of Richard Burris fuck Richard Burris the fucker. I am a living cliché of a man entering the 32s of his life with a balding head of hair and no sex life. Too often I see myself on television and movie screens and shout – not honestly, only while drunk – at me to get off. Julie inexplicably agrees to meet with sweaty masturbator Richard Burris for a lunch meeting. I will see how this goes.

The last time I was truly Richard Burris, the true Richard Burris was when I imagined myself playing the guitar. In college, in the early morning hours, the air wet and heavy with dew chafing the raw confines of my caffeine-seared lungs I raised a vibrant and decadent air guitar up to the sky, imaginary pinstripes of purple-red flames streaming down the sides of its glistening V-form body. To the sky I would raise an undying toast, reciting anthems of Queen, Metallica, or an Aerosmith Revolution, though in all honesty it was only Queen, and only ever one song. I say the last only because it sounds nice to the ear, but in fact I played any number of songs, though most of them from Queen. But in a flurry of motion, the Richard Burris I was, the true Richard Burris: champion of the world and ruler of the mid morning dusk with his crown of sweat, fatigue-charred lungs and scepter of pin-striped flaming guitar glory, this Richard Burris would look to the glimmering wink of the horizon and call out the name of the sun, and like magic, the sun would arise from across the eastern lip of the earth to gaze upon the shuddering frame of the king Richard Burris: collapsed upon the front of his school.

I communicate none of this Richard Burris to Julie when I first meet her. She is tall, slender, attractive and sweet. This naturally makes me feel threatened, unsure of myself, and bald so the following transcribed dialogue should primarily be understood to have the intended delivery of Julie: warm and kind, Richard: sweaty, nervous, and bald.

INT – CORPORATE CAFÉ - DAY
JULIE: Hi, you must be…
RICHARD: Richard, you’re Julie, yes?
JULIE: Yes, that’s me. So what can I do for you Richard?
RICHARD: Um *beat*, okay so this is going to sound awkward but you know Ryan, 4th floor office manager? I was in there the other day and I saw you from behind and I lost my attention.
JULIE: Well, um, thank you, but …. I don’t know how to say this but… I’m kind of engaged.
RICHARD: I know
Julie looks alarmed
RICHARD: I mean, I know and I asked around and I … please don’t go, please, it’s crazy, I know I’m not going to kill you please don’t tell everyone I’m a serial killer.
Julie sits down from where she was about to leave.
RICHARD: I am turning 32, in four days
JULIE: (quietly) Congratulations
RICHARD: Thanks
*beat*
RICHARD (cont.): You seem happy.
JULIE: I am happy
RICHARD: I’m glad.
Julie gives him a look.
RICHARD (cont.): Please don’t, look Julie it’s not about you. It’s about this company, it’s about me, it’s all about me I don’t want to be me, I’d rather be you, I’d rather be Fred, your boyfriend – please don’t leave – I’d rather be anyone else other than me: about to turn 32 and going bald, and all I have is just you, as a reminder of what happy used to be.
*beat*
JULIE: I should get back to work.
RICHARD: Sorry for… this… I guess. It’s okay if you tell everyone I’m a serial killer, they probably all think it anyways
Julie walks to the elevator, presses the button, and waits for a moment as it ticks down. As the door opens, she turns to Richard.
JULIE: It was our anniversary
Richard looks up. Julie holds up two fingers.
JULIE (cont.): Two years.
RICHARD: Congratulations
JULIE: Thanks.
Elevator door closes. Richard shuffles quickly out of his seat, the cups still sitting on the table.

At this point it is a somewhat trifling point for me to make that none of this was true. Yes, there is a woman named Julie Siles, somewhere in my company. No, I do not know if she is engaged to Fred Weimar. Ryan Liu does exist, but he has pulled me into his office so many times now that our conversations take on the dull back-and-forth of a couple who has lived together for decades, arguments over tardiness and company policy imbued with the tone of participants who know both the beats and counts of the script by heart, fully knowing that the other participant will never do anything to change the conditions under which such a scenario can be enacted. But this much is true: in four days I will be 32. I am fat, I am balding, I cannot find reason to enjoy my work anymore, and the greatest and saddest fact is that even in my projected fantasies, Julie is already engaged, and I am doomed to failure. But hopefully, come four days from now when the wheels of my existence click past their thirty-second mark, I will remember what it was like as King Richard Burris, the man who might have began a sordid and adulterous affair with shapely Julie Siles, who conquered the morning dawn with his sword of Rock, Caffeine, and Queen. Perhaps in four days, I will be that Richard Burris again, but there are never any guarantees.

My name is Richard Burris and I lead an imaginary existence.

Succinct

2008-12-01T01:36:00.000-08:00

Viet:

Odd, shows signs of manic depressive disorder. Prone to substance abuse. Currently addicted to videogames. Funny. Pessimistic. Oft obsessive.

Diagnosis: crazy, but functional.

A need to explain myself: I am not crazy

2008-12-01T01:23:00.001-08:00

Well this is an explanation for exactly how it is that I am operating my life at the moment broken english horrible sentence omg what the fuck. The basics is this, and pay attention now because this is the first post in a while not facilitated by inebriation by anger.

I feel a need to fight every battle.

Every day is my last, every moment a passing breath, every second ostensibly the last second I will spend. But this is what motivates me. It's sad, but I move for conflict, I move for destruction, and it's possibly the hardest thing for me in the world to take a chance on doing something that might make me happy. I'm not going to reflect too much on my childhood, that's another post for another day, but for some reason when it comes down to the brass tacks of things I don't feel like I have a reason to live. Rather, I feel like I've been searching for an opportunity to die, or cause death.

Pessimism runs hard, you convince yourself early enough - to stave off the pain of disappointment - that the world is cruel and broken and it becomes a hard thing to shake off. I think I don't want to confront exactly how much that time period sucked, and for how long it sucked. But every fight I find, every battle I fight, I don't have an off switch. The only way I end fights is by walking away because there is no measure of escalation that I will not do, and I think... it's overcompensation for a childhood of trying to "not care" and "be yourself" when all yourself wanted to do was to hit back.

Also the news doesn't help because my pessimism is all too often reinforced. More often than not.

And Irvine.

I've spent a life I think in an area that's culled a sense of pessimism or maybe it's just me but... I don't know people, it's hard to see the light outside and it's hard to take a chance.

This much I am aware

2008-11-17T18:05:00.001-08:00

I really only post on this motherfucker for some kind of stress valve release for my extreme emotions but there is some

EXTREME STRESS going on right now. I need to finish this shit and I just really don't want to, but I must, so I shall but GOD I NEED A REASON TO LIVE I WANT TO DISAPPEAR FROM THIS PLACE

This place being Irvine. I really need to see... life.

Prop 8, Reap the wind

2008-11-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Get. Over. It.

Marriage is between a man and a woman. Get. Over. It.

Really? Anonymous commenter? Get over it? Get over the fact that the FUCKING STUPID DUMBASS FUCKFACES OF CALIFORNIA JUST DISENFRANCHISED AN ENTIRE GROUP OF PEOPLE

GET OVER YOUR SMUG FUCKING DUMBASS FUCKFACED GLEE

YOU WANT ME. TO GET OVER IT?!!?!!

I have dreams. I have dreams where I drag you behind my car and throw your miserable lifeless body into a ditch. I have dreams where your churches burn down and I smear your blood across my chest like a bath cleansing the world of all its sin.

I have a dream where the dogs of religion see their institution crumble before their eyes, where christianity falls into the sea and I NEVER EVER have to listen to you talk about how much better you are than me.

This is a BATTLE?!!

This is PERSONAL.

If you EVER say that to me in public to my FACE so help me god throw me in jail because I will kill you right on the spot. I don't want change I want war.

I want you destroyed. I want your belief system extinguished. I want the end of you.

And you know what, when this finally gets overturned?

I'm going to be right there to kick you in the balls. Screaming into your old decrepit face that this is now a godless nation of sodomites, whores, and sinners. And we are all going to hell, so fuck you.

And I hope it hurts. I hope it hurts as much as I am hurting now.

I'm moving conservatives. I'm moving to kill you.

2008-11-07T09:06:00.001-08:00

I am

going to hurt

"I do"

2008-11-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

Heart-breaking news this morning: a terribly close vote has stripped gay couples in California of their right to marry. The geographic balance shows that the inland parts of California voted for the Proposition and the coast and urban areas voted against it.

Yes, it is heart-breaking: it is always hard to be in a tiny minority whose rights and dignity are removed by a majority. It's a brutal rebuke to the state supreme court, and enshrinement in California's constitution that gay couples are now second-class citizens and second class human beings. Massively funded by the Mormon church, a religious majority finally managed to put gay people in the back of the bus in the biggest state of the union. The refusal of Schwarzenegger to really oppose the measure and Obama's luke-warm opposition didn't help. And cruelly, a very hefty black turnout, as feared, was one of the factors that defeated us, according to the exit poll. Today this is one of the solaces to a hard right and a Republican party that sees gay people as the least real of Americans.

But I realize I am not shattered. My own marriage exists and is real without the approval of others. One day soon, it will be accepted by a majority. And this initiative in California can and will be reversed, as California's initiatives are much more fluid than those in other states; and the younger generation is overwhelmingly - 2 to 1 - in our favor. The tide of history is behind us; but we will have to work harder to educate people about our lives and loves and humanity.

It cannot be denied that this feels like a punch in the gut. It is. I'm not going to pretend that the wound isn't deep and personal, like an attack on my own family. It was meant to be. Many Obama supporters voted against our rights, and Obama himself opposes our full civil equality. The religious folk who believe that Jesus stood for the marginalization of minorities, and who believe that my equality somehow threatens their children, will, I pray, see how misguided they have become. And make no mistake: they won this by playing on very deep fears of gay people around kids. They knew the levers to pull.

But some perspective from someone who has fought this fight as long and as personally as anyone in this country. Twenty years ago, equality of gay couples was a mere idea. Forty years ago, it was a pipe-dream.

In the long arc of inclusion, we will miss our goals along the way from time to time. Today, we have full marriage rights in two states, we have many civil marriages in California that will remain in place as examples of who gay people really are, we have civil unions in many more places, and marriage rights in other parts of the world, as beacons to America. And this is a civil rights movement. It goes forward and it is forced back. The battle to end miscegenation took centuries. These are the rhythms of progress. Sometimes losing, and being shown to lose, shifts something in the minds of those watching as a small group is punished for daring to dream of full civil equality. In this battle we have already had far more defeats than victories. But each time, we have come closer to our goal. And in the hearts and minds and souls of so many, we have changed consciousness for ever.

California has full civil equality in law for gay couples. In time, full civil marriage equality - the only real measure of equality - will follow. And it will spread, state by state, more slowly now, and perhaps more organically from legislatures, rather than courts, which would not be the worst idea. And observing this backlash against us will reveal to many the cruelty of allowing majorities to take the rights of tiny minorities away.

If we had won this, this civil rights battle would be all but over. Now, it isn't. So we get back to work, arguing, talking. speaking, debating, writing, blogging, and struggling to change more minds. The hope for equality can never be extinguished, however hard our opponents try. And in the unlikely history of America, there has never been anything false about hope.

-Andrew Sullivan
Originally posted at The Atlantic Online

Gabe Newsom is an Idiot

2008-11-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

And furthermore, so did the whiole No on 8 campaign.

You guys assumed too early you had this in the bag: you didn't

you faced off a multi-million dollar campaign and in a year where you could've tapped into Obama's message on change, you raised no money.

You guys fucking sucked, you played defense every way not once promoting the benefits of same sex marriage, how it's helped america, how it's helped bring in revenue how people should be able to love and marry who they choose.

No on 8 campaign, I could get no damn signs, irvine fuckign lit up yellow in the past week, nothing comparable.

You fucking blew it, okay, and Gabe Newsom did not help.

There was no ground game there was no movement tehre was no door to door.

you want to know why Barack Obama won? its because he had troops in the ground fighting for him.

You guys had none of that. LA county went Yes.

That is unacceptable. And Mayor Gabe Newsom, taht damn thing you said about Gay marraige is about one of the dumbest damn things i've ever heard from a politician in my life. There are so many ways you could've said it but you decided to go with the "I'm a dick" route.

That's something you say in private, not on a national stage.

Now look, California is a fucking joke. Big fucking awesome joke of a fuckign alful fuck fest.

Regardless of how this'll probably be eventually overturned, Californians, you fucking fail today

This is the first in a logn series of drunk blogs presumably

America...

2008-11-05T04:54:00.001-08:00

This is why I will never convert to Christianity.

Really? Ban on adoption for gay parents in Alabama?

Nice. Really fucking nice.

Evolution

2008-10-31T06:02:00.000-07:00

From R. Crutch:

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them breaks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one.

I don't want to work today

2008-10-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

... I just want to bang on my drum.

THE OFFICE

Holly cannot leave. She simply cannot. She makes Michael such a better person, makes him bearable, makes him AWESOME and they are FUCKING IN LOVE.

DO NOT MESS WITH ME I AM VERY COMMITTED TO THIS

CONSIDER

2008-10-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to consider the following.

MASTURBATE

That is all

I don't post enough

2008-10-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

I don't post enough in this and for that I apologize.

Also, when I DO post invariably it might lead some of you readers to expect that somehow, Viet has gone insane and is just going far off the deep end into Joker-esque mad runs of insanity.

While this is true, I would like to clarify.

Fact is, things have been busy, life has been busy, and if you've ever known a writer in your life you will know that ironically the one thing that writers hate most to do, is actually write. Writing seems to be a nice excuse to say "I would rather be doing something interesting, rather than doing what you would like me to do, but I will tell you an AWESOME story about it later if you let me do this awesome thing". This, and I imagine this is the case for a great many writers, is how I think and it is largely why I accomplish so very little in terms of actual work.

But I wanted to give an account of how things have ACTUALLY been going as opposed to whatever frighteningly mad thought that courses through my brain at that very moment when I would like to rhetorically burn an opponent into the ground on a forum that would most likely get me banned.

So, has anyone heard about warhammer?

First off, frigging awesome.
Second off, fucking nerf bright wizards already the bright wizard wall is so fucking powerful it's not even funny
Third off: Remake Wow, create a pvp focused game with a good idea for balance, and voila!

Somebody has angered Gork greatly

This is my most recent and beloved time sink. Though it is not very productive.

But I wanted to say reader that, frankly, I've not had a lot of time to like, talk or think, or even have time to get my thoughts together. My time is occupied.

By a lot of meaningless tripeshit, yes, but also by keeping myself informed and up to date on ye news events and the impending destruction of the world and Rachel Maddow (thank god in heaven). And between all these things I'm sorry reader, that I haven't been writing as often as I should. I still love you baby, I do! It's just hard, we don't have enough time to write anymore. Especially ever since you went to Lithuania.

Why baby, why did you leave me for that goat? He'll never love you like I did! ...sadly, ineffecably, in thirty seconds with a lot of crying afterwards.

Baby come back from Lithuania!

*wink*

(good lord I just pulled a Palin)

I will never sexually assault you again, reader, but suffice to say, things are alright.

Will be topic based later. This is my blog, I get to be as crazy as I want.

2008-10-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

I've been okay, This America Life is awesome. Really tired and procrastinating, Warhammer is good. Why is it I can't write properly?

The Tone and Tenor of Anger

2008-09-20T07:37:00.000-07:00

Reader, let us be candid. I do not find hope in the world.

I look at a governmental system that pursues deregulation of companies in pursuit of a disproven free market philosophy and yet bails out said companies with 1 TRILLION DOLLARS IN TWO WEEKS, when the earnings of their bad bets come to scuttle said companies.

We starve, wed die, Galveston has no electricity, people lose their houses, and high-risk empty companies is what we invest in. Our students fail, 7 years into war, every possible thing we know and do is being cut away, and this is what we spend on.

The world is built on a function of action and reaction, every action has a consequence. For too long has the consequence been disproportionately doled out on the side of the poor, while the rich have been serviced by the powerful in this country. For thirty years now, the stench, taint and broken philosophy of Reagan has poisoned this earth, spitting and demeaning and ravaging the backs and spines of programs the poor depend on to reach the middle class.

And now, even Obama's chief economic adviser was the one who masterminded the deregulation of the banking industry that led to this collapse.

We cannot take this. We shall not take this. Republicans want to say I'm inciting class warfare? Fuck yeah I am. They want to say I'm criminalizing the rich? Fuck yeah, I am.

Because you dogs, whores, and jackals ARE criminals. You are BEAST, DOGS, and BITCHES, and for too long class warfare in this country has only been waged from the top down, the rich taking from the poor and nobody stands up to the rich.

Well the time is now. We will take for us what is rightfully ours. We will mercilessly and gleefully murder any sycophantic dog that stands in our way, bathe the streets with their blood until we come pounding down the gates of the rich and burn their houses into the ground.

The only time trickle down economics ever works is when you split the throat of a rich man and he bleeds gold onto the masses of the poor.

You better run bitches, I'm raising the army.

Holy Shitballs

2008-09-12T15:11:00.001-07:00

Jerry Springer is damn good.

Holy crap.

Um, I need to go see one of his speeches.

Not the show, the show is bullshit.

Say Yes and...

2008-08-15T21:45:00.000-07:00

Am I ashamed of the life I am living right now?

Yes.

Today I saw people walking down the street. This bothered me. I was happy to see it but it bothered me in the sense that, wow, even here people live, and are happy, and are not living their lives as miserably as I do mine.

I had a week where my parents were completely gone. I did nothing. A week of complete isolation.

I didn't have friends over, I didn't do drugs, I didn't drink. I didn't do anything. I got asked to go to LA on a whim at a party a few months ago. I stammered out of it. I am missing opportunities in my life because I refuse to say "yes".

I feel a need in myself to disagree, for conflict, but, every now and then I wonder if really this town is the desolate morass of nothingness. Maybe I've just made it out to be that way. In the meantime, I am ashamed of the hermit-like shell that my life is.

And well, that's pretty much it.

Am I going to wake up one day at 72 and think to myself, "I've lived for nothing"?

It feels that way sometimes.

Reviews: Wall-E

2008-07-22T13:43:00.001-07:00

Robots are a tricky subject for many people. Especially in the context of our fiction they have been most commonly represented by violently murdering automatons that go about their business of edging out humanity.

Metaphorically then, they have come to represent the demonization of the working class, the rising up of the slaves and a continuation of the capitalist narrative: the revolt of the working class. Even more though is the idea that the capitalist machine will finally turn on its masters, that the replacement of labor will finally do as people would and revolt.

Far more revolutionary than this confrontational and tired narrative sits Wall-E, the stubby cube-shaped trash compactor that goes about his business as the last remaining robot on earth. By day he wanders endless heaps of trash left behind by a hyper consumerist culture that destroyed the earth and leaving it uninhabitable for human existence. By night, he retreats back to his humble abode in the shell of a larger version of himself where he stores a miniature menagerie of knick-nacks he salvages amongst the endless piles of junk he compacts into miniature squares.

The first 30 minutes of this film are the most profound, the most endearing, and the most revolutionary of any scene depicted in recent years. The stark and brutal depiction of a ruined manhattan, nouvelle skylines constructed out of towering piles of trash cubes, is gritty, fantastic, and utterly brutal in its silent condemnation of the humans of the past that brought about its genesis. On this palette the little robot Wall-E wanders with a sort of unaware bliss, scavenging parts for his own benefit from the shattered husks of his brethren. His introduction - humming in his own mechanical tunes the opening notes to "Put on your Sunday Clothes" from Hello Dolly - forms a humanistic contrast to the depressing starkness that informs his environment. Instantly he becomes our primary focus, our vehicle into this world, even as an inanimate object.

Later details reinforce this association, Wall-E rummages through infinite piles of garbage, picking out odd trinkets that catch his attention with the particularity of a human perusing the goodwill bins near his house. And when he returns to his humble abode, shelving his belongings and turning on a recording of Hello Dolly, we are all but committed to connecting emotionally with this robot.

This is revolutionary. A silent coup of epic scale if ever there was one. Through expressions, particularities of behavior and sparse sounds the animators at Pixar have undermined the very inherentness of humanity. The primary argumentative vehicle of those opposed to sentient robots is the innateness of humanity to humans. The primacy and uniqueness of compassion and empathy to the human experience. For the most part this is a narrative continued and reiterated by robot narratives. Wall-E spins this on its head.

* TO BE CONTINUED LATER *

MMOs: Empty Space

2008-06-29T10:03:00.001-07:00

How do we define a world? Do we define it in its spectacles? Its wonders? Its

- rest of entry truncated: we define the world in terms of the characters that inhabit it. And MMOs are devoid of characters that feel legitimately like they inhabit the spaces around them -

'Wanted' and 'Wall-E'

2008-06-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

How does one begin?

You begin with two movies that could not possibly be any more different, and you compare the difference between the two. That being said let's proceded procedurally and take this movies apart to their roots.

Wall-E: a film for the ages. Pixar's age-old time again and again mantra is that they are not creating anything new, they are simply reinventing the wheel. It's said that in the creation of Toy Story the Pixar animators had no real film training, no idea that they were not supposed to do it, no idea of the obstacles that faced them. And for that measure they simply did as they wanted, and were rewarded handsomely.

Since then they've mostly told simple stories, returning time again and again to the old movie tropes, never innovating, but breaking boundaries at every interval in terms of what an animated could be. Walt Disney once championed this standard, before his company caved into maintaining a conservative-friendly legacy and began opting for pablum over content. With that introduction, we have Wall-E, with Pixar once again drawing on the old cinematic standards, updating them and repurposing them for a modern audience.

RIP George Carliln

2008-06-23T06:06:00.000-07:00

World won't be the same without you you badass old motherfucker.

Here's to ya.

Marvel: Ultimate Power and the Uncanny Valley. OR. Cognitive Dissonance (Part 1)

2008-06-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

The Ultimates, and the Ultimate continuum as it exists in the modern Marvel continuity grew out of the immense and overwhelming success of the Ultimate Spider-man continuity. A stylized, teen-centric and visually slimmer version of Spider-man, Marvel soon attempted to replicate its success in its other properties, expanded the universe to encompass both the X-men, and a short-lived teenaged Iron Man. Out of this property came Marvel's Ultimate version of The Avengers: The Ultimates.

Featuring reinterpreted avengers characters, new nervous tics and character flaws, and a neo-realistic art style, The Ultimates was (at least in my view) an unqualified success. Modern, dark, and ripe with potential, I looked forward to a continuation of the series and waited anxiously for the next of the books.

Which brings us to Ultimate Power. Ultimate Power, a mash-up of sorts within the new Ultimate continuum, brings together all the superheroes of the world into a largely incoherent plot centered around Dr. Doom as an arch-villain again. While artwork is largely phenomenal, there is a problem that comes to light due in no small part to the realistic quality of the art and that is this: the women.

Perhaps due to the innate scarcity of women to be found in comic books to begin with, perhaps the first problem with this book is that there are just too many of them: they fill up the frame. Now before anyone starts launching the slings and arrows of misogyny my way, let me clarify: all female stories are fine, but not when they're all supermodels who appear to revel in ridiculously scanty clothing. It's not even that I object to it it's just that in these pseudo-realistic portrayals, with fairly anatomically correct male and female models, to depict exclusively slender, supermodel figures on ALL WOMEN seems immensely unreal.

Stylization allows you a great deal of freedom. In a stylized media sexualized portrayals of women gel easier: it's stylized, real women clearly aren't this sexy and real men clearly don't have several hundred tumors running all over their muscles. But in realistic portrayals like the Ultimates, this doesn't quite gel anymore. Most especially when the poses and the clothing these women strike hit closer to T&A portrayals than actually realistic poses. These aren't women, they're softcore models; but they exist alongside realistic portrayals of men so we are supposed to accept this standard of femininity as normative and in concert with the realistic portrayals of the male characters.

And this creates the cognitive dissonance

A Rejection of Centrism

2008-06-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

What is centrism? The ideological standpoint that dictates that the common neutral ground between two ideological extremes ought be the best of all possible outcomes. Centrism in the political United States has often been the greatest route to the greatest possible political recourse.

But let us give pause momentarily.

The recent FISA case as a model, centrism as it exists in the current United States has failed. After all, when the Democrats continue to appeal to the center and the Republicans appeal excluively to the insane fringe right, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a slow and steady trickle towards the mad imbecillic and utterly miserable proto-fascist regime that we've been living under for the past eight years. This was once a good place to live. FDR gave 3,000 dollars to every american citizen who went to college. In today's money I believe that's around 10,000 dollars. Once we valued education, standards, labor. Now what? What do we have in this enforced oligarchy consisting of corrupt businessmen and soulless merchants?

We have zero benefits. We have piddlings of social welfare systems, we have comparably immense disparities between rich and poor, and we have a governmental system that furthers and furthers this neo colonial global governing order called "globalization" a phenomena which no one is willing to concede, is completely artificial. Fareed Zakaria says globalization is inevitable, that it will be a boon to human society and raise the threshold of human existence globally and be condusive to a newer, better, more beautiful world. Yet what he fails to mention, conede, or note is that in the exportation fo capitalism and in the development of supposed interelated trade agreements, the disparity in power. We'll get back to that later but suffice to say: he is wrong. And were Barack Obama truly progressive he would be decrying this perverted international business entity that enforces the starvation of the masses for the benefit of the few.

But this is where we are. When the supposed "most liberal senator in Congress" toes the middle ground in between the true middle and the fascist wing of the American political system. We need a third party. Now more than ever. Even Israel which has appropriated the GOP for its own Likud has a tri party system spanning Labour, Centrist, and Likud. We need a third party, it's time for the liberals to get a say again.

John Irvine's Heaven

2008-06-21T00:01:00.000-07:00

They made this town in one man’s vision of heaven: John Irvine’s. John Irvine set foot on this earth ‘bout sixty years ago with nothing more than a horse and a rifle. He killed forty Indian men, women, and children before he planted his feet down on the ground and claimed this land belonged to him. From there he set about creating his heaven: he built forty acres of farm stretched out across the California countryside; ruled it tightly with a hoe in his left hand and a rifle in his right. So when the Mexicans came he gunned them down and he kept his paradise amongst the fields of tomato plants he seeded into the ground.

Forty years later those forty acres had turned to forty two thousand and in those forty two thousand John Irvine had his ashes scattered to the winds all across the land he’d made in his image. His family moved on, his son went north, his wife went south, and his daughter went east to Minnesota where she and her husband raised a family ‘till she died in ’92. But Irvine stayed put, his ashes kept their roots in the ground and the company he founded kept their hands on the reigns and moved John Irvine’s heaven closer and closer to his final vision.

They started building. Girders, concrete, and bolts spurted out from the ground where just forty years past John Irvine had spilled Indian blood making the land his own. Those houses were rough: islands in a sea of ripening tomatoes and the Mexicans that manned their rows. They weren’t through: those islands sprouted brothers. Like weeds the girders sprouted from the ground, cold, earthen, and industrial, pointing their dead, unfeeling fingers towards the sky where they grasped in fruitless agony at the heaven that John Irvine foresaw. The weeds they spread more widely, adapting and changing, eating away at the water’s edge where the tomatoes lapped against the shore. Where the first few weeds were weak, their borders tenuous, their construction outdated, their colors too varied, the newer weeds were stronger: uniform, defined, matching in design, construction, in color, and in their boundaries. Most important were their new boundaries for as the weeds grow their fences became their very definition: life in Irvine came to be the distance between fences that you occupied. And it was with that defining ideological characteristic that Irvine grew into what it is today, 60 years after John Irvine’s forty acres paid for in forty souls spilled on the soil he called his.

Hillary

2008-05-28T12:38:00.000-07:00

The failing of Hillary Clinton is that she has not been able to negotiate the tenuous distance between defining her strength as a woman and defining her strength as a man.

As much as many Hillary supporters might be loathe to admit to it, Hillary Clinton remains as much a slave to the same gender constructs she so passionately claims to be breaking. The creed of the second-wave feminists has been breaking the gender constructs. But what does it mean to be breaking gender constructs when you are defining yourself in 'male' characteristics?

As a recent article on Huffpost noted, Clinton is demonstrating her strength by engaging in a most bizarre performance, inhabiting the attributes and supposed 'strength' demanded of male nominees in an off-putting caricature of male showmanship.

Laying aside what this means for men in a moment, what does this mean to women?

She has abandoned the vestiges of whatever gender construct women have ascribed themselves to. As much as women look up to Hillary it still comes across that she is trying to break this gender barrier but in doing so she de-legitimizes the female experience in this country. What does it say to tell my daughter that her strength will only be recognized if she defines herself as a man? What makes Obama such a trans-ideological trans-racial candidate is that although he is black, he has not made it the focal point of his campaign. People are not voting for Obama because he is black, they are voting because of the content of his promises, his character, and whatever record he has.

Hillary has not done the same thing. She is not transcending the limitations society places on women but rather reinforcing them by proudly proclaiming through her actions that the only way a woman will get ahead in the world is by acting like a man.

This is not true. It is not right and it is not true. A woman's experience is no less inferior to a man's. A woman's gender performance is no less capable than a man's to lead a country. But rather than championing these empowering, new feminist virtues Hillary remains beholden to the central irony of the second wave feminists: that they continued to define strength in largely 'male' terms.

Eventually there will be a female candidate like Obama. Who speaks through her actions and words that a woman's perspective is no less legitimate than a man's. That the notion that just because women don't strong-arm, they are weak is foolish, and that the time of pandering to the symbolic American meta-narrative of the cowboy presidency is a time long since past. Hillary Clinton is not that woman. But I can tell you that when that woman comes along who insists - as Barack Obama has - that strength is not the exclusive property of the masculine gender, well that will be the day.

Why Is News So Negative These Days?

2008-04-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

By Thomas Patterson

In last week’s second installment of this five-part series, I discussed how changes in the nature of campaigning have contributed to the decline in voter involvement during the past four decades. That decline extends to voting in primary and general elections and to attention to televised debates and other forms of election communication.

In this installment, I describe how changes in news reporting, including the coverage of campaigns, have diminished the appeal of election politics. Evidence for this argument comes from the Vanishing Voter Project (www.vanishingvoter.org) that I co-directed at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy during the 2000 campaign. Through weekly national surveys, we interviewed nearly 100,000 Americans during the course of the campaign to discover why they are disengaging from elections.

The Bad News Chorus

On the network evening newscasts during the 2000 general election, George W. Bush’s coverage was 63 percent negative in tone and only 37 percent positive. Al Gore’s coverage was no better. A good deal of Bush’s coverage suggested that he was not very smart. There were nine such claims in the news for every contrary claim. Gore’s coverage was dotted with suggestions he was not all that truthful. Such claims outpaced rebuttals by seventeen to one.1 Although the press is often accused of having a liberal bias, its real bias is a preference for the negative. The news was not always so downbeat. When John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sought the presidency in 1960, 75 percent of their coverage was favorable in tone and only 25 percent was unfavorable. By the 1980s campaign, however, election news coverage had reached a point where more than half of it was negative. Since then, no major-party presidential nominee has received on balance more positive news than negative news over the course of the campaign.2 This change is attributable in part to the poisonous effect of Vietnam and Watergate on the relationship between the journalist and the politician. A larger influence, however, has been the emergence of an interpretive style of reporting. In the 1960s, this style began to supplant the older descriptive style where the journalist’s main goal was the straightforward reporting of the facts of events. Since the facts were often based on what newsmakers had said or done, they had considerable control over the coverage they received. Much of the “good press” that Kennedy and Nixon received in 1960 came from what they themselves said about their candidacies. On the other hand, interpretive journalism thrusts the reporter into the role of analyst and judge. The journalist gives meaning to a news event by supplying the analytical context. The journalist is thus positioned to give shape to the news in a way that the descriptive style did not allow. The power of the journalists to construct the news is apparent from the extent to which their voices now dominate the coverage. Whereas reporters were once the passive voice behind the news, they now get more time than the newsmakers they cover. On the nightly newscasts, the journalists covering Bush and Gore in 2000 spoke six minutes for every minute the candidates spoke.3 The shift in the style of reporting from a descriptive to an interpretive form began in the 1960s when the television networks launched their 30-minute evening newscasts and expanded their reporting staffs in order to deliver picture-based news. The networks quickly discovered that descriptive reporting was too flat for the television medium and that viewers did not have to be told things they could see with their own eyes. Gradually, the networks developed a narrative style of reporting built around interpretive themes that gave their news stories a clear beginning, middle, and an end. Several years later, the daily newspapers followed suit. To add value to stories that their readers had already heard on the newscasts, newspapers developed an analytical style of coverage that focused on the “why” as well as the “what” of news events. Interpretive reporting has unleashed the skepticism traditional in American journalism. This style requires reporters to give shape to the news, and they tend naturally to shape it around their perspective on politics. To the journalist, politics is not a struggle over policy issues. They see it largely as a competitive game waged between power-hungry leaders. Politicians’ failings and disputes are played up; their successes and overtures are played down. The 1996 Republican nominating race is a case in point. The media analyst Robert Lichter examined the GOP hopefuls’ television ads and stump speeches. Over half the ads (56 percent) were positive in tone and nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of the assertions in the candidates’ speeches were positive statements about what they hoped to accomplish if elected. These dimensions of the Republican campaign were seldom mentioned in news reports. The candidates’ negative ads and their attacks on opponents filled the news. “Forget about the issues,” ABC’s Peter Jennings said of the Republican race, “there is enough mud being tossed around . . . to keep a health spa supplied for a lifetime.”4
The tone of news coverage affects people’s opinions of candidates for public office. A study of the 1960-1992 campaigns found that negative impressions of presidential candidates increased step by step with the increase in negative coverage.5 Gallup polls provide another indicator of the effect of the increase in negative coverage. Between 1936 and 1968, Barry Goldwater was the only major-party presidential nominee who had a more negative than positive public image at the end of the campaign. Since 1968, in the era of interpretive journalism, a third of the presidential nominees have been perceived unfavorably and another third have had marginally favorable ratings. Negative news is not the only reason Americans are dissatisfied with politics and elections, but it is among those reasons and, as their dissatisfaction has risen, so has their inclination to stay home on Election Day.

1 See, Robert Lichter, “A Plague on Both Your Parties: Substance and Fairness in TV Election News,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6, no. 6 (Summer 2001): 16; Project for Excellence in Journalism data, web download, March 7, 2002.

2 Patterson, Out of Order, ch. 1.

3 Lichter, “Plague on Both Parties,” p. 17.

4 “The Bad News Campaign,” Media Monitor 10, no. 2 (March/April 1996): 3-6.

5 Patterson, Out of Order, ch. 1.

Holy fuck shit

2008-04-09T21:11:00.001-07:00

BBC News
San Francisco Takes Olympic Torch Off-Route
Washington Post, United States - 49 minutes ago
By Karl Vick Spooked by protests that overwhelmed the Olympic torch relays in Paris and London earlier in the week, city officials on Wednesday opted to ...
Thorpie To Run With The Torch Same Same
Olympic torch relay detoured in San Francisco USA Today
Globe and Mail - Salon - Salon - Guardian

Comment by Kai Chen, Former Player, Chinese National Basketball Team: A Sick Woman Denying China is Still Sick - 12 hours ago

This Christian Science Monitor article with my comments in it also quoted from another Chinese athlete, swimmer Lin Li who won the gold in 1992 Barcelona Olympics, saying that China is her pride for the Chinese are no longer "Sick Men of East Asia".

What a joke!! Lin Li was one of those miracle women swimmers under the East German coaches who were heavily involved in steroids and illegal drugs in order to earn gold medals for their beloved motherland. Their scheme was only discovered much later and the Chinese miracle swimmers suddenly disappeared from the international competitions for good. Yet this Chinese woman swimmer calls China no longer a Sick Man of East Asia. What a sick woman!! Now you know China is still sick as hell and here is a sick woman to prove my point, with a heavily poisoned body and mind by the Chinese sports authority, still denying the fact that she has always been sick. To wit: These are incurable diseases -- sick in the mind, sick in the body, sick in the soul as well.

There should be a thorough investigation over the Chinese miracle women swimmers using steroids and illegal drugs during the early 1990s. When the truth comes out, the world will know how sick China has always been, and China is still now.

Writing!

2008-03-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

Howdy Folks

2008-03-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

Well that last post was nothing short of an embarassing, sobbing mess of a post so i guess i'm just going to have to qualify it with... something.

So in the past few months i've been grappling with the question of motivation. Why am I going to classes and studying things that I literally have no interest in? it does not make sense to me. On that philosophy I have been fairly actively, not going to French and\or -okay "and"- Logic. What this means of course, is that for the most part, and with some great confidence, I am failing both courses.

Naturally this depresses me somewhat.

The dissonance occurs, of course, in the realisation that I care very little about either of these courses. And at this moment in my life i'd much rather be doing something that I legitimately love. This revelation might have sprung out of the utterly phenomenal quarter I had last year, what with my creative writing class and Rose in E105 with professor Ngugi and just all-around amazingness. But that's how it is.

This is a stupid philosophy, but these slipshod ideological trappings are simply there to convince myself that there is a guiding, unitary purpose as to why I would much rather stay at home and play videogames than go to class. It probably will not end well. My parents will probably be rather perturbed by this. At one point or another I will let it slip that "hey mom and dad, I failed two courses this spring. Intentionally... not like American superheroes that came ouf of a botched after-deadline drop attempt, but out of sheer negligence." And they'll be disappointed in me which really just

I hate these courses but I really don't want to disappoint them especially given the faith they've given me in taking care of my own studies. This feels like a betrayal of that trust because it is, and though I really do not like these courses (at all) I feel like I've failed them. and that fucking sucks.

So if you need me I'll be here in the library, trying to convince myself to stop procrastinating and get cracking so I can (maybe, hah, that's a gas) salvage my grades and not have to repeat three courses next quarter. Congratulations to failure of the century.

Run at the mind

2008-03-09T17:01:00.001-07:00

So I've been trying to figure out what I enjoy of late. It's a question that frankly, has been evading me because in the process of figuring out what and how and why i need to do things it's been something that i need to figure out

New York was about leaving high school behind, but since then I don't quite know where to move forward. I still do know what I have a slight aptitude for but writing's a stress relief and a joy. It's a passion yes, but it still - at least for me- requires such passion and drive that I very rarely engage in it at all. Gaming is there, yes, but competetive gaming against other players is my darkest side and regular gaming - while truly a joy - remains symptomatic of my hermitude.

REally if I think about it the majority of the things I do that I enjoy revolve around mostly never leaving the house and remaining shielded, aloof, and largely absent from the world outside. Many may recognize this as the lifestyle held by Andy in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin". This awareness does not lend well to any semblance of self-confidence. I'm not proud of who I am and what I enjoy doing. I'm not proud of being a gamer and I'm not proud of being attached to that culture of internet phantoms.

Simultaneously I don't know where to go. More important than the issue of ever getting a girlfriend ( though this point leads there, one hopes ) is the question of "what do you want"? And I do not know. My current vision of happiness involves somebody to laugh and share life with and happily experiencing the mundane together. But that's largely contingent on somebody else being present and getting there entails that I need to be happy with myself first. And that's really been evident in many social situations that I've found myself in is that I am fundamentally unhappy with the way that I am but I don't know how to change that.

I don't want to be stuck in this room forever, with this computer and this harddrive, locked enternally into this masturbatory relationship with an LCD screen and the internet. But beyond that I can't think of anything I enjoy doing by myself.

You have to be okay with yourself, be comfortable in your own skin. But I haven't and I don't. I have moments where I am but for the most part I'm not. And I can't rely on anyone else to do that for me, it's got to be something that I do.

Just remembered, I do love acting.

Maybe I should pursue that more.

Writing

2008-02-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

Few months ago I grew a beard. rather, a mustache. rather a mustache and a beard.

I grew facial hair.

at the time it was to signify to myself in some shallow and fundamentaly silly way that something had changed. And yet to think that change coul occur as such so sudenly is silly. Silly like a solipsism. Slippy Sloo Sly. Semantics aside I find myself roughly in the same place. Where and when do we signify growth or a progression? Ionno. It seems odd. I don't think i've changed much.

But on the plus side!

good changes:

taller, apparantly mustache thing is working good on looks or at least my family says and they should know seeing as how they were all quite blunt about calling me fat.
More self-confidence. Asked Lauren out to lunch, twice, in person too. So there's something
Learning how to flirt in a non-flirty way. That sounds ridiculously gay, but aside from that, it's true. Ionno. Empathy seems a better word. Maybe nice guys finish last but you know even if i don't get the girl who works the stand at the Zotstore at school you made her morning a bit by making her smile so whatever.
Better music taste. The White Stripes. Oasis. The 'Juno' soundtrack. The 'Once' soundtrack.
Offset by a continued devotion to well-produced popular rock.
Hanging out with friends: while a continued morning grab breakfast at the only place that is open at 9 in the morning has become a ritual that happens only after class, it's still something.

So yeah, like, thems somethings right? I mean yay! Actually trying for once, more confidente... thing. Oh wait now the list of things that I still am.

Am still:

enjoying the Oscars way too much for a straight guy
utterly convinced that I'm significantly more 'girly' than a lot of my female friends
unable to find a time or place to ride my new bike
looking for someone
playing way too many games
drinking way too much diet pepsi.
not posting enough
not getting that 'Once' dvd back from Talisa's place.
utterly and entirely jonesing for more of 'The Office'

So yeah all in all it's not that bad a list. Um yeah. more posts later. About past present and future stuff. Maybe not future, but no guarantees. You never know you see.

2008-02-27T09:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Today I saw a group of three stereotypical surfer boys traversing the campus.

Together they had more perm than all of my female friends combined in the last three month.

I gagged.

RIP Heath Ledger

2008-01-22T18:42:00.000-08:00

I feel like Ennis died. Which makes me very, very sad.

Uranus

2007-12-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

Today's featured Wikipedia article is on 'Uranus'.

I laughed

Last Class

2007-12-06T16:47:00.000-08:00

First: Something that has been bothering me.

On campus they posted a sign that read 'GIANT BOOK SALE'. I was intrigued. Meandering my way around the circumference of ring road to discover for myself this advertised marvel that was this 'GIANT BOOK SALE' and after a short (though tiring) session of walking I arrived at the destination, the so advertised 'GIANT BOOK SALE'.

For future reference, if you are going to advertise a 'GIANT BOOK SALE', I expect to find GIANT BOOKS. No reader, see what they meant to say was, 'LARGE QUANTITIES OF BOOKS HERE' or something to that effect. Instead, they advertised a sale for giant books and broke my heart yet again.

Every year they do this. I expect to find man-sized versions of 'Little Red Riding Hood' and every year they crush my spirit.

Why, reader why?

To other matters though, today was the last class period for me this year, a moment all very bittersweet for everyone involved.

My classes have been amazing this past quarter. I met so many utterly amazing people in Creative writing, everyone is smart, funny, bombastic and interesting and everything was beautiful. I will miss it greatly.

Then Ngugi's class, I had a chat with him after class and he was magnanimous, accomodating and very down to earth and we had a very nice chat about numerous things. The man actually put a satellite TV producer on hold for me, some random student. The man is an intellectual and folk hero, a Nobel prize consideree, and really really cool. I've learned much about modern Africa's history in this class, I cannot take Masiela's 'The Haarlem Rennaissance and Sophiatown' next quarter but I hope to do so sometime in the future when I don't have to take logic and stupid math requirement classes.

I will miss those two classes. French seems a yearlong boatride of insanity that never ends so we're not quite done with each other yet in those classes. Steven Oliveri's students own the 8:00 French slot, represent bitches.

And oddly enough, today I end with a prayer, or less a prayer than a hope.

Let people love, live, listen and learn
Let them find their happiness and joy, their sadness and sorrow
Let them find their legends
Let them follow footsteps of their choosing
Let them forget not the unstrained comfort of their friends
Let them live, love, listen, and learn
Let them lie
Let them lie swiftly, softly under a sable sky
Let them swing, let them whisper
To a cloud, to a moon, let us sing sweetly you and I
Let us remember to live, to learn, to love
The moment of our lives flies fast
And when the moon sets in the steep starry night
You'll be human in your heart long at last.

I'll miss you peeps, it was everything and awesome

-Viet

Happiness

2007-12-02T05:24:00.000-08:00

Howdy reader, it's not been so long now. But that is ony as a function of the readily availible nature of this blog as it is immediately placed on my homepage, as it is. It's dark as it is right now, been raining for a good long while.

Yesterday I played the Sims 2 all day long. I'm not particularly proud of myself, but there you have it. You know people always say i'm going to be okay reader, how do they know? Recently I turned in a story i wrote in a single night, how could you have known that its failing would affect me so greatly? The truth is, the reason i've been playing so much in days of late is because frankly, that fear I mentioned last post is academic.

Yeah it's true, I've not been keeping up with my work. a function of perhaps my own laziness, perhaps but also ... well my friend went through a particularly abusive breakup with her first boyfriend and I had to be there for her reader, you understand.

But it still doesn't change the facts.

I'm several assignments behind in French, i've done close to none of the homeworks, I don't know what's going on in class. All of the late critiques i've turned in for creative writing recently just got sent back to me with 6s for scores because in spite of the amount of work i put into them, they are still late and I don't think Frank has the patience anymore to actually read through them. I don't know what I'm going to write about for my African Lit paper, and looking at the facts streaming through the WGA strike right now, I'm particularly scared about my future job prospects.

Reader, over half of the WGA is unemployed, writers work job to job, paycheck to paycheck and most supplement their writing jobs with alternative employment that they keep well into their later years. Annual incomes can dip as low as 5,000 a year and even when you do write your opus there's no guarantee that some executive won't send you a smarmy little note asking you to add in more 'tits and ass'. Really though it's the money that scares me.

Reader, I do love what I do, honestly. I can't imagine doing anything else at this moment in my life and I love my writing. But this scares me, a lot. Right now another one of my friends - whose parents are unfortunately a lot more traditional than mine - is at the receiving end of the tradition stick for pursuing an english degree instead of her parent's mandate that she be a doctor. In their words exactly, she is a 'waste of money' with an attitude problem and she never thinks about how much she hurts them.

Tradition, what did we learn from you anyways.

I find that interesting about the state of asian-americans in this country, that dedicated adherence to the exact same principles of sacrifice and ... whatever that exists in black and white terms, refusing to adapt or change. It might not be applicable to other ethnicities but let me speak for a moment about the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese community as it exists in the United States is a dying one, doomed to eke out its meaningless and slowly suffering existence until the sheltered dreams of the 70s Saigon boat-people generation vietnamese die slow and miserable deaths. Why so? Because they have refused to adapt.

Two years ago I went back to Vietnam, what did I find? The language and culture had continued to evolve, even as our community leaders had adamantly insisted that 'everything under communism is bad'. They had a word for computer, which up until - well frankly now - my siblings and I had always called 'computer' in a vietnamese phonetic model (i.e. stereotypically vietnamese). The word was 'may vi tinh' translating literally into 'thinking machine' and it represents the problem of the Vietnamese in America right now. What culturally have we invented that is new in America? The Latinos have invented their own pertinent definition of Latino-American that is distinct from the culture of their South American counterparts, what then of the Vietnamese? We have maybe Paris by night, and then what else? Trumped up beauty pageants where over-make-upped beauty queens spout trivialities out of their clown-like faces? A dedicated adherence to a stagnant cultural moment that did not even exist?

So much of what is Vietnamese-American is harkening back to this 'loss of country' as the defining and rallying moment for all Vietnamese-Americans. As if it is our defining moment that we must take back and reclaim our homeland like the returning sons in an epic poem. Perhaps, maybe someday, but what until then? If you ask me how I define myself as a Vietnamese-American I will tell you in food, in religion, and in a trivial conglomeration of disparate details but culturally there has been no evolution within the Vietnamese community. This die-hard adherence to this cultural moment, this myopic paralysis within the community has strangled any and all chances for its new evolution outside of the boundaries of Vietnam.

It is why - I imagine - there is that reported split within the second generation Vietnamese, the characterization as 'valedictorian delinquents'. You create a model wherein those who toe the line with this archaeic social structure reap the rewards of societal support, but what then for those who fail? What the elder members (not all, but most) of the Vietnamese community fail to acknowledge is that even within the earlier society that valued success, those who failed to achieve the defined parameters of success had their place too. But not here in America so that when these teenagers do fail, they turn to the culture that is most immediate to them: latino gang culture.

Where is that vitality of language that would expand and reinvigorate how the Vietnamese-American youth understand themselves? Where are our words for 'computer', 'cell phone', 'video game', and all the other terms that we could define ourselves in? This is the failure to expand beyond this 70s moment that is strangling my capacity to legitimately define myself as through and through, Vietnamese American.

Ultimately I do not think my children will speak Vietnamese. Perhaps they will learn a few words to appease me and perhaps they will take a few classes to learn basic phrases but as it is, unlike the Chinese, Korean, and Latino communities Vietnamese-American teenagers do not speak to each other in Vietnamese. We cannot. We are communicating in a language that has stopped developing (here at least) beyond a certain cultural moment at the end of the Vietnam War and that paralysis is killing any chance that a legitimately seperate, Vietnamese-American identity will emerge.

A Demain mes amis.

-Viet

Secret Secret, can you keep it

2007-11-27T01:38:00.000-08:00

There is a secret boon to this blog. and that is this

Recently my mother has taken to blogging.

It's not so much that I dislike her doing so as the very prospect of my mother now actually having access to every intimate thought, personal detail, and humiliating moment of my life is one that I believe could even chill the staunchest of men to the bone. Ask Blackbeard what his worst fear was and he will tell you of the time his mother caught him gawking at the mistresses of the bordello.

Not that there's anything about mistresses in my blogs. Or bordellos. Blackbeard I can't promise he won't be in there.

Jokes aside, I'm scared. Very scared reader.
I fear greatly for my future, or prospective future, and given the amount of work remaining to do i fear greatly still. I'm haha, so ... i'll try my best but I am rather scared at this moment so you'll have to forgive me if i'm less funny than usual. I know you go here for the funny. At least I like to think you go here for the funny. Maybe you go here for the drinks, i'm not sure but while you're here i'll try to make you laugh.

Just, this is all I can manage today readers. I'm slowly unraveling at the seams, haha. Ah, finals will be over soon enough one imagines.

A demain

-Viet

Sims 2

2007-11-25T15:07:00.000-08:00

I very often do not write in this. So much so that even in spite of making this posting edition my homepage, i still find very little time to update.

As it is i've not been on the internet much (are pigs flying too?) no reader, it's simply been because of the thanksgiving weekend and my sister's come back down and we all had a grea deal of fun watching the office and just general cajoling with or at her expense. (Fix global warming?) Reader shut the fuck up, i'm not on the internet that much.

(...)

Fine, I concede the point but what I HAVE been doing is playing a great deal of the sims 2

(?)

The sims 2 is, well the sims 2 but since you already know i think i'll just tell you what's been going on.

when everything began it was initially just sissy jimenez, roberto jimenez, her husband, and albert jimenez, her friend. now as it was, I set it up so that she had double chemistry with her friend, and none with her husband which i argue is because he's dyed his hair and failed to keep up his weight.

SO EFFECTIVE was this technique that literally the moment i began playing the two of them hit off an adulterous relation just as the camera zoomed in. A long while after (Roberto was reclusive, he seldom left his room) Roberto discovered the two of them making out and in a fit of rage (his actions controlled by me) he broke off his marriage with Sissy and threw her out of the house. Sissy moved back in, at Albert's insistence and together they had a few good months of a relationship during which time Roberto remained (understandably) bitter that his aspiration of becoming a family man had been dashed before his very eyes.

He cried a great deal.

Finally he (wisely) decided to move out of where his old friend and his ex-girlfriend were banging each night within close hearing range of his bedroom to room with his friend, Seurat Georges the cat burglar. Seurat never quite cared for Sissy, he found her too ambitious.

also she often forgot to install fire alarms. For unfortunately after marrying Albert for a good three months during which time he celebrated his 50th birthday, the malevolent hand of god (me) decided to silently break the fire alarm that could have saved poor Albert from a violent and flaming death. Sissy was very sad about this. But as it was she had a good support network and herself, a loner, she found it very easy to lose herself to her job as a lawyer.

Sissy was in fact, a most fantastic lawyer. While due at times to make mistakes of varying severity she exhibited an incredible resiliency to the pressures of making her way up in the cutthroat chain of modern justice. Many friends, a few teased lovers but no roomates and a rekindled relationship with Roberto kept Sissy afloat during these years, and even long after that when she continued to drink her youth potions, holding an engagement like a doggy treat in front of the ever-needy Roberto who - lured by the promise of starting a family with a woman he once loved - took after his opportunity with gusto.

Yes, Sissy was canny but in her defense, her job was at the utmost of her priorities, and eventually with each excitened and denied sexual urge in all of her male friends and her legitimate connections with her female ones, she worked her way up to be the district judge of SimCity, otherwise known as 'The Law'.

Meanwhile, as Sissy made for herself her ultimate ambitions, Roberto also was grappling with a moral dilemma of his own. His friend Georges was charismatic, outgoing, and ripped to the core with a confidence to show it and a beloved Border Collie named 'Killer' who often took to rolling around in puddles and asking people to play with him. Roberto was none of these things and despite all this Luisa, the maid, still took fancy to him.

A man having already suffered through an adultery, the prospect of cheating on his once-again beloved Sissy with another woman stank of too much irony for the family-man Roberto to endure, and yet he continued. She was kind, he noted, and unlike Sissy she did not much care that he was overweight and largely unattractive. Luisa was a blessing, and each day as she came to his house to clean up he got to know her better and better until one day she began hanging out at Roberto's place with increasing frequency. A moment of weeks later, they kissed. And as the wintertime wore down and the snow began to fall Roberto had his first sexual experience with Luisa, the one he'd been so vehemently denied by Sissy.

Soon after this he began to question seriously how to break off his engagement with Sissy. She was a good girl, yes, but she had cheated on him before. Broken their marriage to run off with his best friend and slept with him (loudly) even while he'd remained in the house. Roberto was hurt. But still, he was afraid to do so directly and having nothing left to do, he invited Sissy over one evening and when he knew that she was within full viewing range, kissed Luisa full on the mouth.

The ensuing argument involved fighting, poking, slapping, and tears that flew violently around the room and by the end of it, Roberto had broken off his engagement with Sissy in almost exactly the same fashion as she had so many years before. He proposed to Luisa immediately thereafter on the spot as Sissy left down the street and as she fumed long away, Luisa blushed bright with happiness and accepted Roberto's marriage proposal. Later that morning they were wed.

As for Seurat, he'd always maintained his mantle of quiet indifference from the madness that occurred around him. His existence before Roberto's arrival was one of quiet tranquility: he awoke each morning to eat, work out, play with Killer, then at night he went his way about the world working his way slowly up the crime chain. as it was though, the nature of his job made it difficult to explain what exactly it was that he did do for a living, but as Seurat rarely ventured outside his house, this mattered not. He was there when Roberto and Luisa began to hit it off. secretly he settled the notion in his mind that there was a great deal more chemistry between Luisa and him than Roberto and her but as Roberto had already had enough of that kind of shit to deal with, Seurat had held back and waited for the next girl to come along. As it was, this next girl came along in the form of the replacement maid they sent in to replace Luisa when she forfeited her regular duties as a housemaid to move in with Roberto and Seurat. While Seurat was quietly not entirely happy with the additional bed that had to be purchased, since Luisa had both her maid's training to guide her and her cleaning neuroses to drive her, there was little that Seurat could do to complain about how thoroughly she cleaned the apartment each day he and Roberto came home.

As for the replacement maid (named Karen) while Seurat was very aware that he had no chemistry with the girl, he was also very aware that he was coming very close to 50, having worked most of his life in poverty he was nearing the age where all one can do is think about how people will be expecting one to retire soon. Seurat had lived a small, enclosed life with few friends and even fewer good memories and in his desperation ( and perhaps wisdom) he threw himself with reckless abandon into pursuing the girl and faced with the presence of a ripped, charming, outgoing young man Karen soon too came to wed Seurat. It was the shared sentiment of the house that the maid they sent after Karen was simply far too homely for anyone to wed. Perhaps the maid service had caught on.

At this moment in our story for Georges and Roberto, all was happy and grand. But as a month past, Killer first succumbed to old age and died a quiet death in his doghouse. Seurat was out of the house at the time, but it is said that when told he mourned quietly in his stoic way, the death of his longest-lasting companion. Both of them seniors now, their younger wives had both taken to prenancy with the hopes of becoming doting parents to beautiful children which they imagined would bring them nothing but joy. The babies they DID bring though, brought about a great deal of sleepless nights and suffering voices that rang for attention and changed diapers. Karen in this situation showed her mettle by neglecting her mother's duties in favor of her work and an ever mindful Seurat took to caring for his newborn child between his naps and his dentures.

Luisa too took care of Seurat and Karen's child, even as her pregnancy progressed day by day she would rock Seurat's child softly to sleep, her maternal instincts strong enough even to inhabit the vacuum of affection created by Karen's irresponsibility. They all tried diligently. Roberto even - embarassed by his wife's coldness - even took to caring momentarily for his child but soon found the task too daunting. Regardless, he still forsake sleep with every baby's cry for food.

It was in this circumstance then that perhaps in a stroke of misfortune, the work of a malevolent god, a fire broke out once again as the result of seurat's growing senility and slowly burned down the house, taking with it Georges, Luisa and her unborn child, Roberto, and even the adopted child that Seurat had accidentally adopted when Karen called the adoption agency to see if they would take back the baby.

Only Karen survived. But returning home to an ashen gutted frame of a house in which her friends and family had all died, she persevered for a day. enough even to clean up the house but as her memories took a hold of her she spiralled deeper and deeper into depression, manifesting in a sad motion of tossing a sack of potatoes into the air as though it were a child. And by the end of a wek a second act of diving intervention had joined Karen with her loved ones. And the house rang empty.

that's it for now folks, everything that I described above ACTUALLY HAPPENED

...

IN GAME

A DEMAIN MES AMIS

-Viet

About Love

2007-11-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

I do not believe in fate. Bee would like to believe that people are fated to be together but i've yet to see any evidence that anything in this world is not as a consequence of chance and the decisions we make in our lives.

See, it's nice to think that while you're in a relationship you were always fated to find each other and there's such thing as soulmates and what have you but when you're out of a relationship you realize how utterly bull that is. I mean seriously, this is all due to some cosmic plan? Fuck that. You are where you are not because of fate or stars but because you were lucky enough to find someone and you've worked to keep it working since then. There is no such thing as fate, only such things as people who try their best to get things to work and sometimes they succeed and they like to call it fate. But it's not.

there is no fate in this world, there's only the wily hand of chance that guides every aspect of our lives. To be lucky is everything, but even the lucky can't save themselves from failure. So accept things as they are. They're not the way they are because it was meant to be but rather as a consequence of the things that were and weren't done, the people that were and weren't there, the things that did and did not happen. You are lucky, people in relationships. And if you continue to be lucky it will be something grand. I wish you the best.

-Viet

Because the wind is high.....

2007-10-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

Love is old, love is new.

Reader I am writing fatigued. It might be due to the simple reason that after two and a half straight weeks of writing every day for three hours or more, together of which has produced more than 20 pages worth of material. It could be it. But I am fatigued. At the moment I want nothing more to do with the story, anyone immediately related to the story, or even Joseph Story of Madison California.

What have I been up to? Well, there's the above. 23 single spaced pages do not make for a lot of leeway in creativity or even production of anything remotely creative but we shall yet see. I've been writing every day for the past two weeks and it has drained me utterly and entirely. I've dropped two of my electives, discovered I no longer give a crap about american or japanese comics (though I still hold a special place in my heart for Full Metal Alchemist), and I've taken to playing Team Fortress 2 like a madman.

The world extends very little outside of the few feet it takes me away from my porch and i've grown accustomed to living in this manner, biding my time with Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft. But it must be said, this here marks a new beginning for this blog. Readers you may be bored, but as there is nothing going on in my life that's truly worth mentioning i'll be blogging only about matters that are to my interest. It's a shame, but you weren't really reading this blog for me anyhow were you readers?

But there you have it. No more stories from the grey bottom dreckmen from Viet. From now on only smash brothers, Rocket Launchers, Draenei hunters and cattle. Always cattle. I'm writing fatigued and i'm done.

-Peace

Brain Drain Game

2007-10-21T16:09:00.000-07:00

Reader, I am draining my brain. And while it's not particularly that bad in the wider scheme of things, it's bad ENOUGH, so to speak.

Though it's probably because I'm writing. And when I'm writing the world stops.

For the writing.

I'm sorry readers, this is all I can muster, I hope it's enough. You know I'm well, I hope you are too

Best wishes

-Viet

Coitus Interruptus

2007-10-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

Yeah reader, no excuses, I know. I've not been writing here as much as I promised I would. In fact, it's only because I've been incredibly busy with other writing endeavors and every attempt I've made to write in this journal has been a case of coming in with the intent to do the deed, but resulting in a failure to go through with consummating the pact.

It's embarassing, yes. But it happens to more men than you can imagine.

All things said and done things have been busy. Busy busy busy. Busier than bees and honeycomb (and that's busy). I've written a 23 page story and now it's in the preliminary revision phase. That's really all there is really. Picked up WoW again, have been playing TF 2 and that game gets off my grudge matches.

I'm not witty today.

Though, as it were, while Talisa would much rather shower the world with her truly fantastic photographs that are brilliantly framed, executed, and have since ascended well beyond the realm of simple 'snapshot' I possess no such skills, and accordingly I can only leave you with this: something I saw this morning.

It's been gray in the skies for a few days now. The clouds hanging heavy in the sky, pregnant with the slow seed of moisture hidden deep in their folds. A damp blanket holding tightly to the California skyline, this morning it broke. at first with the first painter's strokes of clouds breaking up the imperial leadeness of the sky with flashes of white on grey, infusing the monotone pallor of the cloud cover with a shot of brightness, breaking the temperance of the grey-blanket cloud cover.

Well that's all I got.

A demain, notre amis

-Viet

A Recent Conversation

2007-10-02T15:02:00.001-07:00

[15:00] lostintransl87: link is teh dreamies
[15:00] Rosie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king
[15:00] lostintransl87: but he doesn't talk
[15:01] Rosie: oh i don't need him to talk
[15:01] Rosie: ...
[15:01] Rosie: LAWLLLLL

How long has it been

2007-09-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

Why yes reader, it has been a while. You must be wond'ring what i've been up to. What has happened to Viet? Where has he gone and where has he gone to? Is it a place with hummingbirds? Numerous gorgeous women perhaps. Maybe a llama.

Alas reader, all of the above are erroneous. Though were they, had they, could that they were true it would indeed have made for a wonderful story indeed. A story in fact, to regale you with mirth and humor and make you smile like you did while you were an infant watching Barney, blissfully unaware that the anthropomorphic dinosaur was an unholy creation borne of The Womb of Satan (c). But all is not the case, I have not been on epic travels, I have instead been refurnishing my room in the most extreme manner possible: with paint.

Now Viet, as many an astute reader might note, wouldn't a more extreme form of renovation be to actually BLOW UP your room? Indeed, but reader what you do not understand about this paint is that it is GREEN.

behold, a green room

And not only is this paint green, it is green only on two walls of the room. Two adjacent walls are green, the other two adjacent walls are also green albeit a slightly darker shade. The last touch was the chinese lanterns purchased recently from San Francisco's Chinatown. Together it transforms what was originally an ordinary room into now an ordinary room that bears a striking similarity to a Japanese restaurant. Astute readers may also note at this point that I just mentioned that the depicted lanterns were purchased in Chinatown, therefore there is no possible way that the room could look like a Japanese restaurant. Fortunately those same readers have been told to shut the hell up and read like the rest of us do.

Other than renovating my room, I too have two products to plug to you as strongly as I can. One is Across the Universe, something that i've been harping for quite a while now but have only recently been able to see. And as all the major reviewers have contributed their opines upon the matter, I feel it is only fitting that as a major reviewer (a lie) I contribute my opinion so that I may be paid exorbiant amounts of money for simply observing other people's works and criticizing it (also a lie).

Across the Universe is a muddled mess of a picture. It is at times eye-rollingly melodramatic, the first reel commits to big-screen release some of the same cliches that brought to life the undead amalgam creature that was Bratz: The Movie. It is uneven, poorly-characterized, and at times so banally literal that you could be as unabashedly vulgar as Seth from "Superbad" and still be more subtle than this movie's interpretations of the Beatles songs.

So why am I recommending it?

Because for all its' follies and flaws, its mediocrity portions and uneven execution, and nonexistent plotting, its triumphs are astounding and utterly mind-blowing. Taymor has created the ultimate love song to the Beatles via their own music, doing nothing with the work but thematically linking them all together in the lives of 5 20-somethings in the 60s. It is not an inventive device, but plot hardly matters in a movie where image, interpretation and spectacle are on display so utterly and entirely.

It is where Taymor brings her own work to the table, be it with an acapella arrangement of singing 20-somethings in a field of grass or a mechanical carousel of morphine-injecting salma hayeks, that the work gains its greatest heights of spectacle, wonder, and amazing visual interpretation.

Scenes like the above mentioned, and various others (none of which spring to this reviewer's mind at the moment) are so utterly enjoyable and fantastic in their conception and execution that it almost makes up for the ticket price of awkwardly written college student dialogue and early drama that ring of nothing but page 309 in the writer's guide to movie cliches

much props to asian-american actress T.V. Carpio for getting so much screen time as a asian-american lesbian from ohio turned hippie playing not a caricature but a fairly believeable portrait of an asian-american citizen. Save for the very odd phenomena whereby parents in this movie are either cliched in speech or entirely nonpresent

So in the end Across the Universe should be treated like your children, should you have or ever have them. Forgive its flaws, appreciate it for what it is, and you will enjoy it. You might return to it someday, but enjoy it for what it is, where it is great. Because when it soars, it soars higher than any musical in recent or past history has ever gone before. So enjoy it where it is, where it will be remembered, and where it'll go soaring Across the Universe.

And seeing as how that's such a frigging awesome ending, i'm just going to call this post quits where it is and call her off 'till later reader. I will see you where the sun rises to the west again.

-Viet

From the Wiki article entitled "Loneliness"

2007-09-17T21:33:00.000-07:00

American Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho taught: "We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much."

Harold Weis: The Giant James Broland

2007-09-12T18:49:00.000-07:00

In 1932 Harold Weis dreamt of becoming a superstar named James Broland. He dreamt it was 1982, he had black hair and a wide-set mustache that covered his face from side to side. He stepped up to the microphone, spotlights glared down upon him from the rafters above. He stared out into the crowd and beheld a giant stadium of empty seats.

Disappointed, he dreamt he moved time forwards into the few hours of the night ahead where he played on his guitar before a crowd of millions and millions of fans admirers and observers who crowded into the open auditorium where he had just hours before stared and beheld nothing. To him it seemed unreal. Behind him his face projected onto a screen 75 times his height and width, a gigantic explosion of his persona onto a canvas larger than any man had any right being. He dreamt he grew to that size, his persona switching with the screen as the screen became his size and he grew to the size of the screen.

Below him his fans still cheered, the writhing, jumping masses of people enraptured, engaged, enthralled by the sound of his playing; James Broland: The Giant.

That night The Giant played as he never had before and never would again in his life. The songs sprung from his hands and lips to the ears of the crowd below and into the heavens above. Harold Weis lost himself to James Broland, and James Broland sang a quiet anthem to the universe above where it registered nothing, except for the tiny movement of an asteroid that felt the vibration from the earth and shifted a pebble in modest applause.

And back on earth James Broland played in his moment, the man 75 times larger than the other men played on his guitar the size of a starship to the crowd below who crooned their sighs and breaths of thanks.

But as soon as it happened James Broland found himself slowly falling, he began to shrink again as the heavens made their ways away from him and while he had then heard the faint trumpeting of the angels at the gates of heaven when he was The Giant, James Broland the man shrank to the empty stage beneath the gaze of the endless universe above him and once more beheld an empty auditorium. His guitar was still his, as it was, unable to float the tiny island of Palau to safety. He was once more James Broland, the dreamt creation of Harold Weis from 1932.

But for a moment Harold dreamt a moment more and as James Broland he stared off into the heavens and looked to the skies for answers to what it meant.

And the universe answered nothing.

Save for a pebble on an asteroid.

Joint Project

2007-09-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Because this has gotten out of hand of late I've joined together with my good friend Rose to run this project to get myself comfortable in my own skin. We've yet to come up with a title but in lieu of thinking of anything honestly truly serious i think i'll go with Project Positive, which I shall only be referring to as (P.P.) henceforth. Thus begins the first in a hopefully productive ego-boosting sessions because if you know me at all you know that I ain't got shit for self-confidence.

PP

My name is Viet, I am 20 years old and I have never been in a relationship because I am waiting to find the right person or rather I am waiting for the right person to find me

I am smart, I am funny, I am sensitive and kind and romantic. I could be there for you when you're sad, be there with you when you're happy and be charming when you need me to be. I can sing, I can write, I believe in pusuing life and love above all other things and I'm worth having, I'm worth being with, and I'm only single because you haven't found me yet.

I could love you the way you're supposed to be loved, I could be everything you dreamed of, minus Paul Rudd and that odd fetish for feet. I am me, and we deserve each other. And it will happen.

Apologies, reader for you having to read this, but it seems a necessary exercise on my part. We'll see if it bears any fruit. (If it does not, this is all Rose's fault)

Paste

2007-09-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

There's paste between my fingernails.

I'm sorry, please don't be mad at me.

Happiness is 80 degrees of magic

2007-09-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

I've been happier today than I have been in a long long while and it is for a few reasons (listed below)

- I've been able to play the Guild Wars Expansion Pack: Eye of the North

-The temperature in Irvine has been able to drop below the mind-melting high of x>100 degrees

-I discovered where I'm most comfortable and witty when I'm in Irvine (Best Buy, any time any of y'all want to see me at my A-game, it's there)

-New, glorious foam pillow that makes sleeping on anything literally a breeze and a half. Everyone must have one. Now. So, if you want one, leave me a comment and I shall (maybe) send one your way, I've an extra.

-The Happy Fairie hit me over the head with her Happy Stick(tm)

Day 2: The Madness Begins

2007-09-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

It has been roughly 3-quarters of the time that I've spent away from Guild Wars and I am beginning to fall silently, but surely into a spiralling morass of madness and wickedness. Do you hear that sound? That is the sound of a man who is left with no more options, without purpose and reason in his life. Only this time last year did my gaming hard drive crash handily into the ground, taking with it several year's worth of downloaded games, and any means of entertainment outside of online gaming. While at the time this was not a crime, I see now that in depriving myself of an entertainment medium devoid of "Rules of Conduct", I may have exhibited some short-sightedness in making ripe the perfect conditions for this travesty against humanity (i.e., my current situation) to have been instigated.

That sentence prior was not particularly well-made, but what can one do. I know this blog has very few readers, it may even have none. But let me say to you readers, reader, or Nil, the existential stranger that by 12 AM tomorrow morning if I have not flown to Australia to brutally murder Alfred Nolan of Sydney Australia, living at 19533 Almond way in the 13th district by the Nuclear Energy facility across from the bay, I will be playing with rapt fascination, Guild Wars.

And it will be good.

And in the event that it's not up by then, Alfred Nolan, I've a plane ride to Australia.

Heat

2007-09-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

The heat in California has since gotten so awful that literally I am only able to operate fully at night. It is so hot I can't even joke about it anymore. Meanwhile I am still suspended from Guild Wars. Life is meaningless. Waiting on roughly 2 days from now. Until then, nothing funny. Without my videogames I am nothing but a shell, sans Ghost.

I'm not gay ( I swear)

2007-08-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Just because I

-Like musical theatre
-Can sing
-Enjoy Dancing
-Have Abba/Cher/The Village People in my iTunes
-Have a rainbow bumper sticker on my car that says "I like it when balls are in my face"
-Insert my penis into other men's assholes

doesn't make me gay.

I think

I'm not sure

Can't write this shit

2007-08-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

I was going to write something to amuse you reader, but this is much simpler.

That's all I've got to say about that

iTunes

2007-08-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

Let's be honest people. Your music is an adequate representation of who you are as a person. And as for me. In my case my soul seems to be 20% japanese, 45% rock and roll, 31.5% rap, and 5.2% Mongolian throat singing.

Also my soul is 142% not good at math.

Lies

2007-08-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

Reader, it is my duty to inform you that in addition to writing a professional writer must engage in a number of other duties, several of which do not involve writing. It is a prerequisite of the writing profession that one must be a recluse. Indeed, there are several professions that require this from the hermit to the hermit crab, but only in the writer is the case for some solitude truly unique. Though it is not immediately apparant, being a writer also requires a unique art of the internet, television, movies, videogames, and numerous other entertainment medium. Knowledge of these alternative mediums of entertainment are essential because they all distract from the actual physical act of writing, which is the writer's bane. Indeed, in any given day a writer can only dedicate at most one to four hours to writing. Other hours of the day are given to other scholarly pursuits such as Guitar Hero, perusing the internet, and the obligatory solitary sexual act which is the writer's only outlet for sexual tension.

It is ironic then, that the very people who are supposed to be writing about life are so very often the people who experience so little of it. Confined to tiny rooms, writers are supposed to take in the world around them and express on paper their interpretation of the world. Hopefully their expressions are well-written and may someday be chosen to be placed in an anthology of some kind, a book deal or a writing part in a magazine. Most likely though, the writer will continue working at Kohls or Ralphs or waiting tables at the local Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. , watching as his friends and family move onto bigger and better things. In the meantime, in his insular bubble for one to four hours the writer sits, in between sessions of masturbation, waiting for the muses to come.

When the muses do come, they invariably come in the form of something other than the classical greek portrayals of young lithe, nubile nymphs, for while one can only assume that at some point in human history inspiration did actually come forth in the form of these nymphs, the modern writer in his sexual deprivation would simply just be more moved to perform more solitary sexual acts rather than to write. This is why, now in modern times, there are very few references to the muses appearing in the forms of women, but rather in alternative forms. What in ancient times would have been referred to as the coming of the muses today would simply only be called coming in a wet dream.

Obscenities aside, this is truly the existence of a writer. It is also the reason why it is so difficult to make good writing. For the writer must hang in the delicate balance between experiencing life and translating that life onto paper. The writer's stock and trade in life is expression. Many of the best have lived little outside the confines of their rooms and yet have expressed multitudes and fantastic works within their confines. Expression and the quality of expression is the only thing that matters in the profession that is the writer. It is not glamorous, the hours are shoddy, the payoffs often nonexistent. But it is the life of a writer nonetheless.

I thank you for your time reader

Begin at the beginning: A Blog (alternate titles considered: Hogarth, the Hungry Hobo Hungarian)

2007-08-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

Reader if I may , I must inform you that throughout my childhood, I was unique among many other children in that I was able to claim that I had attended no less than 5 different schools in a meager 8 years of education. It was not, of course, a function of necessity rather than a consequence of circumstances. In 1st grade my parents got divorced. At the time, within the Vietnamese community this was a significant and horrible taboo. Though I did not notice it at the time, I was later informed by my mother that in those years so strong was the taboo against divorce that strangers would call our house to place curses on us, my mother's children, condemning us to futures of unavoidable suffering and misery.

While I did not yet notice the phone (too preoccupied was I with the wonders of the electric keyboard that played hits from the early 90s such as Rick Astley's "Together Forever") What I did notice were the consequences of the communal rejection my mother suffered at the hands of the larger Vietnamese community (of which I henceforth ascribe the name "The Vmob", a portmonteau of "V" the first letter of the ethnic designation "Vietnamese" and "mob" as in, a mob). The first noticeable thing that I can recall is often my mother would stay up late at night crying, sometimes hugging me close to her while I wondered quietly what was going on, why she was crying, and why was I up at the godawful hour of 10 PM (I tired earlier then).

The second thing that I shall recall for the purposes of this story, which for all sakes and purposes shall be called "A Story", is that in the transfer between 2nd and 3rd grade, there was a shift in the administration at Northwood Elementary School in Irvine, CA 92620 (I feel no need to protect the anonymity of that institution which - though they are just rumors - is purported to have placed lead in the paint of the poor black children) from the previous principal (I've forgotten her name, let us just call her Mrs. White) to a more stringent, more moral, more disciplined sort of administration in the form of a single individual (as i've also forgotten her name, let us call her Mrs. Shit). Suffice to say, Mrs. Shit represented to me, and to the greater of Northwood Elementary School, a cold pall over the (well, let us be frank reader, nothing changed at the school in the first year except for the icy aura that emanated from the new principal. Individuals who have been within 500 metres of Dick Cheney can testify that a human being can in fact emanate such an aura) previously lighter tone of the campus.

While some might point to this description as hyperbolic (in fact the case might be made that the entirety of this blog is hyperbolic), I assure you that at the time, as a 9 year old boy I often took great efforts to crawl beneath the sideboard, out of sight of the principal as to not stare directly into her eyes and be turned to stone. Jokes aside, I did try my best to make like a ninja and be unseen by the principal. She regarded me with such a look of utter disgust and venom that it removed what little warmth there was in my soul and spit it into my face where it burned and metaphorically seared the soft fleshy parts of my eyes. Later, I discovered that this look was informed by bigotry, but we shall return to that point later reader.

As for the principal herself, she - and my 3rd grade teacher - provided the catalyst for my first in medias rex transfer from one school to the next. At the behest of my 3rd grade teacher (who seemingly found a 3rd grade asian child with a vibrant imagination and aspirations of becoming a cowboy as infuriating as red would be to a bull in a bullfighting ring) my mother and I met in the principal's office to discuss certain techniques that could be used to reign in my clear and distinct lack of respect for authority (I was not good at PE, I much rather preferred sitting in the shade thinking about the episodes of Ghostwriter and Wishbone i'd seen the day earlier). The principal suggested that perhaps I was acting out as a direct consequence of my mother's divorce from my father and that a possible solution, for the good of the child was for my mother and father to be rejoined. After all, statistically speaking, single mothers are unfit to raise their own children and their offspring grow up to be delinquents, drug addicts, or worse yet: Democrats.

If this sentiment that was expressed to my mother seems at all harsh and unprovoked, reader, let me inform you of a previous incident that could have, and probably did inform the principal's attitude towards my mother and I.

See earlier that same year I'd been called into the principal's office for some entirely innocent reason. See, somebody had informed me that the F-word rhymed with "duck", and being the super genius that I was, I had run down the alphabet until I'd struck gold with the word. That is why I was in the principal's office. The other thing you must know, reader, is that I was very fond of Calvin and Hobbes. In 3rd grade it was a major pastime of my mother, myself, and my siblings to drive down to the wooded end of Irvine in the appropriately named Woodbridge, by the artificial lake and peruse the Barnes and Nobles, my mother reading the jokes from Calvin and Hobbes to a 9, 7, and 5-year old. One of these jokes involved a punchline where Calvin called his mother a communist. I, attempting the lighten the situation, asked the principal if she was a Communist.

Mrs. Shit, a Reaganite, immediately called my mother in from work to demand to know where her son got the giant cajones to insinuate that the principal was a communist. So, as it was, this previous incident now informed the injustice that was being inflicted against my mother. Suffice to say, it was more than a straw that broke the camel's back, and by the end of 3rd grade plans had already been put in motion to transfer my enrollment from Northwood Elementary School to Westwood Basics Plus, further away from the house. I believe my 3rd grade year was best summarized by my single exclamation at its conclusion. I only had one exuberant sentence for my mother as she came to pick me up from Northwood Elementary School for the last time.

"Mom! I passed third grade!!!!"

It's been a while, friends

2007-08-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

I've not been entirely honest with everyone, 'tis true. In fact for the last few months i've not been updating this damnable thing because frankly there has been so much else to worry about and think about and do. Still, it seems only natural that as a writer (or at least a purported one, speculated but never verified) I would return indoubitably to the source of the writo-nomical-necro-monicon, and write.

But unlike few months prior I now have a story to tell you dear reader.

And a beard.

Prepare dear reader, for this is a beard that will fill and enthrall you, lift, and elate you. And the story's pretty good too, so please, at your leisure, tune into the beard and the story

Gratuitous entrances

2007-04-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello, hello, and GOOD EVENING.

This is the obligatory first post of this blog, this blog which I imagine in the far (or near) future will be abandoned to the cold, desolate, bitter winds of the empty internet ever while nobody cares because nobody ever read it to begin with.

BUT NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR NEGATIVITY

Now is the time for action! excitement! and the gratuitous use of exclamation marks!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ah, me the distance between our hopes and our achievements. So bittersweet. ALAS, FOR I AM BUT ONE PERSON AND YOU ARE BUT ONE BEING WITH EYES (so I assume)

But, admittedly reader, i must resist the call of the internet demons that beg and taunt me to turn this into a desolate morass of depressive and broken posts. If such fare is of your taste I'm sure you can find innumerable posts of said tone on other blogs. For here reigns the silly. and the silly demands that I post the following as a formal treatise to the vast army that is laying siege to my house. Ahem,

AWAY VILE SQUIRRELS

If they do not leave, I will be forced to take up drastic measures and possibly be reduced to once again calling Chuck Norris to aid me against the squirrels. This will be epic. And as there is no true way to segway away from Chuck Norris roundhouse kicking squirrels, here are some non-squirrel related pictures:its like, a house, in the dark, with the glowy, that I photoshopped!

Bright ideas, more photoshop, and more darkness

And finally, at this point in this long and rambling introduction reader I feel obligated to tell you that at times this blog will be depressing. It will make you privy to sadder, less exuberant posts of mine, all of which will be accompanied by pictures. But I hope that you will continue reading. For if nothing else i believe that my writing is entertaining enough to possibly be deserving of that inifiniteseminally small time in between studying for that psychology midterm and flipping aimlessly through webpages that you've alotted to god knows what. I hope that in writing out my thoughts and feelings in this manner, i will possibly make your life brighter, happier, better, and in doing so aid in the process of you not forgetting me, for it is a fear of mine.
And Great Danes, i am absolutely terrified of Great Danes. It's a tall order to be sure, but I hope to try it, at least for a while.

And so i'd like to end with a picture, because every so often i'm shocked to rediscover that even suburban Irvine can be beautiful at times:

Streetlights

DREAM DEEPLY