Barbecue Chips

I sit here. As I sit here I’m thinking. I’m thinking, “I hope my Internet connection doesn’t cut out,” and, “I wish this download would finish sooner,” and, “I wish I had some barbecue chips.”

I sit here. As I sit here I’m surfing. I’m stumbling into everyone else’s ‘I miss you!’ s and their ‘I can’t wait to see you!’ s and their ‘Hey, I read your blog the other day...’ s.

I sit here. I find your blog. I browse it until I find whatever they mentioned. It’s not what I thought it would be so I take it back out of context and add it to my list of disjointed romanticisms. I wish I had some barbecue chips.

I sit here. As I sit here I’m...

I’m crying.

I wish I had some barbecue chips.

Independence, Blistered

The cycle is constricted
by an outside force.
Inner workings flare up
in unsuccessful attempts to
remain in control.

Little victories power this night.
Mental breaks accompany
mental breakdowns
in efforts to keep them
from happening again.
The past does not fade away
during times such as these,
instead gaining intensity,
snowballing small but
ever-present obstacles
in ways which the victories
could never hope to combat.

Quick fixes rule the day-to-day,
like a band-aid on a bullet wound,
preventing more interference
from an outside force,
leaving inner workings to fester
in their failure.

Independence, Begrudging

Your eyes are saying,
      "No," and your face is saying,
      "No," and your whole body is saying,
      "No."
      Eventually, your mouth says,
      "No."

      I say, "Yes. Fuck you,"
and nobody moves on.

Lamp poem

An armchair crashes
in the light reborn
preceding the lawless beyond the unknown.
All who look on shudder.

Camera-eyes write in howls,
the cyberspace enterprise.

Us, language diverging in passes,
we stir with inchoate sounds
music.

Words,
dark roads of winged philosophy,
birds of narrow lies,
wind upward through the mute wood
and unchanged grasses.

The first emails wait
in the shadow
writing truth
in a still world.

Debrief

I hold in my head a True Vision,
but you don't care,
so you won't See.

You Look for the Conrete
meaning
in an intolerant world,
too constricted to recognize
Real conflict.

Imaginative exploits bring
out of my Mind
an Eye-
opening rendition of
You
as I wish you were.

Shy wonderings hold us
back, back
from Us and
we couldn't care but We
are begging
for a release.

The lock is ticking
away the minutes till Our
chance is no more.
A smith could fix
this, but You have
the Key.

Use this Information wisely.

An Ode to Why I'll Still Be Studying Tomorrow

Fuck this solitary addiction, solitaire
Confining me to academic heartache
With one ace shot.
Endless variations, tantalizingly new
Configurations still familiar
By virtue of the pack
Passed down through generations.
The rigid formation leaves
Little room for creativity, allowing
Emptiness to reign in the
Mind-numbing, card-thumbing
Edge of desolation.

My friends are doing their homework.

You gain a firm grasp on a cold, lonely reality. The quiet seeps in from all sides, as all the color sneaks out. Drunken promises, that joyous toxin happiness, fade away like blackout memories. Time stops, but life spins out around you. You fall out of orbit, stuck by the wayside. The everyday drags you in at first, but eventually you lose your thirst, your hunger, your desire. You scramble for control, for stability, in a painfully empty existence. People, you think, people. You want to be put back into the center of life; there aren't box seats on the fringes, after all. But the everyday holds on to its spot, because you are an exception, and the everyday hates a change in pace.

"It's my birthday!!!"

... said the blog.

That's right, ol' buddy, ol' pal, ol' readers of mine. It's this blog's first birthday. This means that I am entitled to type about how I and my blog-self have changed in the past year.

But that's not gonna happen.

Instead, I'm going to babble some more. Stick with me while you can; it usually gets funniest about two-thirds of the way through.

So, babbling onward. Now I'm on the spot, though, so it's actually harder to babble, you see. I mean, look, I'm babbling about babbling right now, and that's not funny in the least.

Things in my line of sight worth babbling about: Uncle Buck. God's gift to movies made in the late 90's. On DVD for $5 at Target, I am honored to own this movie. I just watched it, in fact. It is full of awkward, apparently-only-PG hilarity, and also giant pancakes. Oh, the giant pancakes! I want them so much. Do ya feel me, people who are physically near me on the date of my birth? I would love giant pancakes on my birthday.

Other things in my line of sight: all the artwork from MCM (that's Minnesota Children's Museum) that I never got around to wallpapering my room with. Fingerpainting, a bit of circle drawing, and a general boat-ton of truck-painting. Yeah, you read that right: truck painting. Painting with trucks, and other assorted vehicles. Lots of tire track patterns and stuff like that, but mostly awesome splattering when you find one of those self-propelling cars (you know, the ones where you pull 'em backwards, and then they're off), drag it backwards through the paint, hold the wheels still as you position it over your paper, then hope you remembered your apron as you let 'er rip.

This is how I spent my summer. I took children's painting activities, deconstructed them a bit, and usually ended up with fingerpainting, now that I think about it a bit more. All the colors were supposed to be red-themed for Clifford the Big Red Dog (you know who I'm talking about), but eventually there just wasn't enough red/pink/white to go around, so we added yellow and orange, and finally blue. So, I would mix the colors I didn't have, searching for just the right hues of brown and green to go with my current paint-flinging project. Then, I'd let a kid use my hue, and it would all go to hell, 'cause he'd mix too much yellow in there or something. His project was cooler than mine in the end, though, so I didn't really care.

Those kids were awesome painters, fo' real. And this is a museum, not a summer camp, so there were different kids there everyday. (I was there for a week at a time.) Every day, when I went to the Curiosity Center (where the paint lives, keep up!) to set up all the paint and paper and stuffs, I'd have to get rid of all the projects left on the drying racks that no one came back to get at the end of their visit. Only I wouldn't get rid of them all. Instead, I would look through them, find the particularly amazing ones, and keep 'em for myself. By the end of the summer, in combination with my own paint creations, I had about 5 plastic bags full of painting. But they're all awesomely unique, so I couldn't throw them out, like my mom would have preferred. So I brought them to college. Where they sit next to my bed, waiting for me to get into the creatively motivated hub of procrastination, waiting to get collaged in a manner that befits them.

Umm, I'm done babbling now. Sickness makes me sleepy. I talked about MCM and painting, and just talking about those is as good as a virtual birthday party. And this is a blog-birthday, so a virtual party is exactly what's called for. Feel free to go find yourself some virtual cake and ice cream, or whatever other virtual birthday treats you prefer. I recommend looking here.

Products of sleeping when the sun is up.

Sickness is so goofy. It's two o'clock in the morning. I should definitely be asleep right now. I am not physically capable of anymore sleep. Eight hours' sleep plus an eight hour "nap" with only four hours of consciousness inbetween equals insomnia during normal sleeping time.

My laptop is right under my bed. I could for totes be watching this week's White Collar. At the very least, I could be actually writing a post on this blog, instead of writing an email to my blog because Safari on my iPod is kind of a jackass.

Harrumph. I don't really want to be awake. I'd much rather be sleeping, 'cause I've got stuff I could be doing tomorrow. I just realized how messed up my sleep schedule is gonna be with just a few days of this. Good grief. Good gravy. Ooh, I wish my throat wasn't so stupid right now so I could drink some chocolate milk. That always makes everything better.

I think I may be legitimately addicted to chocolate milk. As in, I've acquired a physical dependence on it. Yesterday, when my throat hurt but not to the point that I was grimacing with every swallow, I kept drinking chocolate milk even though it bugged my throat and didn't taste very good. That's nonsense. Pure, utter, psychologically misaligned nonsense.

Speaking of nonsense, it is ridiculously hard to eat when you've got absolutely no appetite for anything. I can't decide whether I'm really not hungry, or whether my stomach is just ignoring its own emptiness. To be honest, I won't be eating much more than crackers, should food truly prove itself necessary. Crackers and water. Lovely. It's no wonder I've got no appetite when that's all I can stomach.

The invisible string of narration connecting each of these paragraphs is getting thinner and thinner as I continue to babble. I think I'm gonna call it a night, eat some crackers, take some Tylenol, and try
to catch a few zzzs.

Five bucks says that if you called me an hour from now, I'll still be playing solitaire on my iPod.

Sent from my toaster.

Sunday Musings: A poem with no title

I don’t want to spend my whole life getting ready,
Dressing the part,
Setting the trap,
Waiting for someone to take the bait.
My hunting style
Is not standing by the wayside,
Hoping to happen upon something worthwhile,
Taking what I can get,
And not looking back.
Because I would look back,
And I would hate what I see,
What eventually came along,
What I could have,
Would have,
Should have had all along.

Mechanical traps can win out in the end,
But hunters who stalk their prey,
Learn their ways,
Know how they operate,
And discover their weaknesses,
Have better success stories.