April 2, 2002

advanced filing system

It was to be a short trip to Miller Hill and Best Buy.

It became a three-hour whirling dervish of composing hip-hop at Schmitt Music, detuning a five-string electric mandolin, playing church hymns with a wonderful organ sample, pawing through dozens of CDs at Barnes and Noble, and listening to them at nifty listening stations. Mark bought CDs and tea, I bought Mark Twain and Vonnegut. Doug wanted a $10,000 synthesizer that wrote music for you, Dani wanted a Slip ‘n’ Slide and Anton wanted a ride home so he could pick up his car at my apartment.

Doug and I pretended we were raptors on the way back to Stadium, and made a racket yowling and pounding our heads against the front door. Eventually the RA came and opened the door with a request. “Keep it sane, guys.”

College. Rocks.

Hmm, my room is a mess again. I apparently have an advanced filing system that takes place on the floor, as all other horizonal surfaces are covered in computer, electronics, notes, mugs, books, incense, notes, bones, pictures, Slinky, duct tape, cigar box, rocks, CDs and various other things whose original purpose I have since forgotten (why the hell do I keep an emergency flare around?).

So, the filing works as follows. Items near the trash can are to be thrown away, but may still be salvaged if a new purpose is found. This group includes a sleeve of stale saltines, last week’s Duluth News Tribune and a Hawaiian shirt. Items already in the trash can are thrown away permenantly, and the separation between to-be-thrown-away and are-thrown-away keeps my garbage rooting to a minimum. I’m saving that talent for after I graduate.

Near the trash can, and usually not confused with the trash can, are clothes to be hung up in the closet. Today in this group we have a nice pair of pants, today’s sweaty socks, stuff sacks from Zion and a Hawaiian shirt. Clothes too rank to be worn again are immediately tossed in the hamper at the foot of my bed, where they mingle late into the night, listen to poetry and develop philosophical treatises. “That’s some hep funk you got goin’ on there, cat.”

More later. Sleep and/or homework now.

April 1, 2002

pleasantly splintered

A pleasant day. Reporting at 8:00 was cancelled, replaced by 9:00 peer conferences for our stories (including my Zion article for the Ripsaw) due this Friday. I sprung out of bed at 7:30 without electronic means, and puttered around until quarter eight, allowing for my usual one hour fifteen minute daily routine. Showered, got naked, tossed wet shower clothes in hamper to moulder, brushed teeth while carrying on conversation with Tom, cleaned my room and defragged my harddrive while eating breakfast.

I love the term defrag… if you’re a first-person shootin’ junkie it conjures up images of taking the hundreds of opponents’ bodies you’ve accumulated and sweeping them under a carpet somewhere. However, this disposal practice can be quite problematic without the right tools. To hide bodies you need really deep shag carpeting and a vacuum that can handle the fiber jungles, like Mark’s vac that has three settings for low medium and high shag.

If you don’t defrag under the carpet, where then can a routine killer hide the bodies? A corpse is difficult to carry, and the shape makes them awkward to stuff in even the largest backpack. What you need is a corpse grinder. Stick the nozzle in the top of the backpack, stick a corpse in the grinder, and crank the handle for a delightful slurry. Not only does the grinder make very efficient use of the space in a backpack, the end product also eliminates the need for a water bladder, or even food for that matter. Just stick your Platypus in the slurry and dine as you walk.

When in use, the grinder also plays a nice little ditty to entertain nearby monkeys.

For breakfast I had that new Nesquik cereal, which claims it will turn your milk into a bubbling pond of chocolate and give sugar poisoning to any children in a 10 foot radius. In reality it is like Coco Puffs, but with smaller puffs that don’t explode like shrapnel grenades in your mouth. While I prefer Cocoa Krispies for my morning hit of culinary aphrodesia, Nesquik has won my favor until the box runs out.

I love how of those three products, none of them spell their name right.

The entire hour of Editing class was spent trying to get the damn SynchronEyes program working. Sitting on my laptop with 4% battery life I digested McSweeney’s.com, SomethingAwful.com and theOnion.com, and received college credit for doing all of it.

Philosophy was cancelled due to professor illness for about the 100th time this semester, and I’m starting to get quite concerned for my professor. The gifted hour allowed some loafing in the Wooch! lounge, for which I purchased thumb tacks during a lapse in excitement. Afterwards I slumped off to the library to do some last minute studying with Crash Test Dummies and Cake for today’s Media Law quiz. The quiz went fine, I went home, watched the deleted scenes from “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” for the second or third time (I still haven’t seen the movie) and ate a bagel heaped with summer sausage and colby jack. I went to my room to take a nap and saw that 55% more of the floor was showing than I expected. “Where did all my crap go?” I wondered… and slowly remembered that I cleaned my room this morning. All crap accounted for, I dozed off for an hour to They Might Be Giants.

With my evening after jazz I decided to run a bit at the track; my first bout of cardiovascular exercise since the summer. Well, first aside from snowboarding, which not really exercise and more of a refining of one’s ability to bear flesh wounds. I ran, it hurt, I ran some more, it hurt some more, I ran, the endorphins kicked in, and I kept running for an hour. Probably got in four or five miles, I’m not sure. Counting laps is for losers that need proof and bragging rights. The real men (and tough women) run until they get tired, then keep running.

I probably won’t be able to walk tomorrow. Luckily my computer is right next to my bed, so if I can worm across three feet of floor that has been plunged back into an absolute mess, you’ll get to hear about every bit of splintered muscle and grindly tendon.

March 31, 2002

cross-legged jabbering

I’m trying valiantly to study for my media law quiz tomorrow, but it just ain’t happening. All I want to do is drink plantation mist tea and draw pictures of lighthouses, trenchcoats, fedoras and sailboats. I want to dig out my Sam and Max comic book and do some firearm studies, maybe learn how to draw a stunning pair of crossed legs.

Sigh. Watch out, this is coming clear out of nowhere:

I must note that I don’t feel my level of college suffering is much worse than anyone else’s… it’s just that other students don’t have the words nor the forum in which to organize and argue against their captors. I have placed upon myself the burden of vocalizing the restless souls of kids that yet feel unfulfilled in college. When it gets down to it I really enjoy this burden. It’s cathartic, it’s chopping wood, it’s using tools I gleaned from the Collegiate Machine against it, and it has a kind of romantic deception to it. Call me Herakles. I’m gonna learn everything I can from my master, and end up killing the poor bastard.

I’ve been grappling with the problem since freshman year (a handwritten 100 page journal started at the tail end of 1999, and the two that followed, is evidence of this) and though I have made little progress in making myself more content, I’ve made significant headway in developing an unfortunate anti-college manifesto. However, all effort has not been lost, quite to the contrary. I did make myself much more marketable by changing my major from jazz to writing. While my future is still uncertain, it will now hopefully involve minimal intimate contact with gutters.

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance what seems like ages ago (I think it was only a year), and while it wasn’t the greatest book and didn’t shatter my world like all the praise said it would, it gave a few pages on college that were worth thinking about. I wish I had the book right now so I could review those pages, a bit wiser, to see if I still hold them as true as I did then.

Honestly, I don’t want to be miserable in my environment, and if I could find some way to reconcile my passions with college, I would do so in a heartbeat. In first grade we were supposed to draw Johnny Appleseed. I drew him getting eaten by a venus fly trap. In third grade I asked my teacher why, when we changed seating charts, I was always in back. She said it was because I was always drawing and listening at the same time. While I was able to draw all day and still do an excellent job in school, if other kids were to follow my example they might have been less fortunate. Junior high offered art classes as an outlet, high school had heavy involvement in the music program, and I still need to strike the balance in college. After nearly three years at the anvil, crudely hammering away at molten thoughts, I’ve found little commonality that naturally brings my two worlds together.

I love the people of college. I love my friends, I love Wooch! I love the nerds, I love the hotties in the hallway that make me quirl, I love my professors… I love how college gives me an excuse to chill with all these great people with interests that can be so similar and so different from my own. Yet I hate the things that dominate my time and distract me from the people. While I do enjoy alone-time, and would quickly go crazy with people jabbering around me 24 hours a day, too often alone-time becomes synonymous with homework-time in college. It’s either people, homework or sleeping. Lately with me, it is thinking about doing homework, distracting self with more interesting work, sleeping.

Beckons. Media Law. Heidegger. News Editing. Spin the roulette wheel and decide which one will get done tonight.

March 29, 2002

mwef tuth slush

I’ve gotta stop with these morning updates. I need to eat a hearty breakfast, as lunch doesn’t come until 2:00 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Today’s precipitation is a mix of rain, snow and mushy hail, that falls sideways and fills your windward ear with slush.

College needs more words to describe groupings of the days of the week. Weekdays and weekends are fine for the business world, but students live in different universes depending on the Monday/Tuesday modifier. We could call the three-day group ‘mwef’ and the two-day ‘tuth’. Both not nearly as beautiful as quirl, but sometimes ugly words rise up to fill a needed space, and there’s no time to be discerning in judgement.

March 28, 2002

anomalous wakening

Tuesday/Thursday mornings are wonderful this semester. I don’t have class until 11:00, and because of some strange collegiate anomaly I am able to wake myself up without artificial means, usually between 8:00 and 9:00. That gives me a solid 2-3 hours where nothing is planned, my mind is envigored and homework drops away like daisy cutters into the soft Iraqi sands.

This story scared the hell out of me. It’s long but worth at least glance. A New Yorker story on how Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people.

Later: Crash Test Dummies had it figured out:

When you go on camping trips

you’re stuck right out in nature

forage in the forest like a primate

using sharpened tools instead of hotplates

Yeah baby, just like that. Stick it right there. Take me back.

March 27, 2002

quasi-reflective jargon

A grisly fog is descending on campus. I watched as it tumbled down the mountainside and filled the dales and valleys with its muting fervor. I’m tempted to sit here in my 2nd floor watchtower and wait for the attack.

But then I realized I have class in a few short minutes; time that should be occupied with cramming some filthy Cocoa Wheats down my hole or something. I realized I see no dales and valleys… just a parking lot. A glorious parking lot that is slowly filling up with the necessary commuting culture of UMD. It’s a drainage ditch, a gutter. The automobile waste from years of yore collect within, and as evening falls it disperses back into the rich soil. Repeat for tomorrow. Repeat to infinite.

If on my walk I should fall into a large crater where the campus used to be, I will shed not a tear. I will pull myself up the muddy radioactive slopes, find some comrades, take to the Green Dragon and head back to Utah.

Ryan Hankins discovered the drafting table in the Wooch! Lounge. Hmm… how long have we had a drafting table? He started drawing a few caricatures, and after a few trial runs we decided to go professional out in Kirby Plaza. We got a few customers (Get yer caricatures drawn! Only takes a few seconds, it’s free and mostly painless!), and though most of them were Woochers we managed to sucker in a few other people to pose for our scrawling. While Ryan stuck with doing triangle jack-o’-lantern interpretations, my drawings faintly resembled the victims. We got bored after 15 minutes and moved the table back to the Lounge.

I’ve become very disenchanted with philosophy class. It used to be fun entertaining big questions with no answers. Philosophy was a challenging mental activity, and for a long time I was fascinated with its immense scope. Since my original encounter with philosophy our relationship has degraded into gritty answers that leave me unsatisfied.

The latest example is Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is an abstract mishmash attempting to define terms that (as far as my convictions go) cannot be defined. I lost interest after Hume, when I latched onto his abhorrence of abstract ideas. If it is not grounded in perceived reality, cast it into the flames, said Hume in so many four-letter words.

Heidegger apparently didn’t listen, and proceeds to define being… what we mean when we say something ‘is’, what it means for us to ‘be’, the pervasive spirit of human life, et cetera. He places it all in time, a necessary component through which we experience this being. It’s a cute exercise, yes, and I commend Heidegger for attempting such a huge bite of baguette. Why, I might even be interested in his words if my brain didn’t feel like its scabbing over in the process.

It’s just that… there’s no content in there. It’s all word-mongering, a playful romp through Intellectual-Land while reality sits in the backseat making out with your ‘tit fille. So what did you do today? Oh, I came up with a definition of being… yourself? Oh, I fucked your girlfriend. The usual.

[note to self: due to strong language, change Cromlech to an 18+ show]

Descartes ran the whole damn thing backwards. He had a mental breakdown in his early 20’s because he had no solid proof that reality existed. He patched it up with a deft, rational argument that not only proved the existence of himself (cogito ergo sum, baby), but proved God and the external world as well. For Descartes, everything was now wrapped into a tight little package… and he only wasted his life to do it.

If the guy had any sense at all, the breakdown would have come after his theory, when he realized all his work amounted to nothing. All Descartes would need is one tiny trip in logic (if man’s concept of God had not been planted by God himself, for example) and his entire theory would be blown.

And now I need to go to jazz and finish this thought later. College would be awesome if it didn’t keep getting in the way of my brain. The way it stands, I can’t fucking do anything.

Later: And I’ve forgotten all of the points I was going to make. Feel free to stop reading now, as the rest of these words are going to be forced, meaningless trash.

Later: So, Descartes proved the world. Big farkin’ deal. Hume said that there are two parts to a person’s mind. There’s the part that functions in reality, buys groceries and eats soup, and there’s the part that questions reality, sits within itself and unravels the mysteries of existence. For all the words he wrote on philosophy, Hume remained convinced that questioning reality hardly affects how we deal with reality. I can doubt the existence of my soup, I could convince myself it’s actually a barking snake, but for all practical purposes it is still soup. If I give it to another person they will think it’s soup, if I eat it it will react with my body like soup.

And so it goes when you feel you’ve reached the dead end of your philosophical career. You look back and realize that your brain got some splendid exercise wrapping itself around huge existential issues, and your capacity for reason is greatly expanded… but your life is just as meager and pathetic as before. You feel more clever, but you find you have fewer reasons than ever to be clever.

Such is are the pitfalls of philosophy that Neitzche observed. Nothing but a huge game of King of the Hill, going on since Plato and Aristotle reared their ugly heads. We have seen every permutation of You’re wrong! No, you’re wrong! and we are no closer to agreeing on a construct of reality. But then, how important is it that we prove reality, that we prove being or time? The twisted path of philosophy has meandered away from my desires and I’m forced to bushwhack it alone. Being and Time does not tell me how to approach that cute li’l number at the emo concert. Descartes’ Meditations do not explain how to balance my passions with school, nor where to direct my maelstrom of creative energies for the most profound impact. Hegel’s History of Philosophy details many ancient empires, but never tells how to make people dance beneath the Dane Empire.

As Neitzche said, a new philosophy is in order. A philosophy that shoots toward the horizon with enough passion to shatter any number of mental obstacles. No more tired old proofs or abstract definition parties. I need to hear words that matter, words that reverberate through my soul until I am rendered an awakened, shapeless pile of goo.

If I don’t find those words soon, I’m gonna have to write them myself, g’ad s’arn it.

March 26, 2002

the tele-psychic drinks green tea

Quickly now, as I need to get to class.

We figured out what was wrong with the phone. Unlike normal people that have only one phone in their room (and my mother tells freakish tales of a time when there was only one phone per household), Doug has two phones. When everyone ran around checking phones we never noticed his headset phone. Turns out the phoneline has been dead for a week because Doug knocked his headset off the radiator and it turned on. Apparently if a phone has been on for a whole week the dial tone sputters out and leaves you with a ominous silence that is difficult to diagnose.

So the phone works now, and I spent more than an hour last night reviewing my voicemail, calling my editor, talking to my sister and yowling at Doug.

Later: Ha ha! Take that, foul Media Law book! The writers have gone out of their way to make the topic of tele-psychics dry and boring, so I went out of my way to dump green tea on the book’s absorbent pages. Nyah! I have forsaken you!

March 25, 2002

fleshy content and vigor

Whoo hoo! What do we have here? Welcome to the skeleton of Cromlech 0.15. From these bones will be hung the new fleshes of content and vigor, all freshly renewed in the scratchy deserts of Utah.

Things are gonna be a mess around here for a couple days, and by a couple days I mean a couple weeks. Please bear with, for soon I will make it all worth your while by posting pictures of n4k3d w0m3n and such.

Wow I’m a nerd. I can spell in l33t sp34k without even looking at the keyboard.

Augh. Dreamweaver is fucking stupid. It’s wonderful that I have to go to class now and don’t have time to figure out how to make it stop pouting.

The natural progression of emotion: Whoo Hoo! Wow. Augh.

Our apartment phone has been dead since the Friday before spring break. My guess is that UMD forgot to pay the phone bill. The repairman (actually a surly college-aged fellow like ourselves) came by today and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He picked up the receiver, fiddled with some of the phone jacks and left for class.

“We’ll be back tomorrow morning,” he said. I don’t want them to be back tomorrow morning. I want my phone fixed now. I want to call my sister, I need to call my Ripsaw editor, I need to hear a freakin’ dialtone before I go insane.

March 24, 2002

venomous man grit

Back. Duluth welcomed us home in a most hospitable way, with shimmering white sheets of northern lights dancing across the night sky. We watched as the folds coalesced into a single stellar chandelier, which continued to pulse with energy as the desert-blooded Woochers froze and retreated indoors.

Trip was incredible. Time to shower for the first time in a week and eat pizza.

I’m covered in man grit… gonna go fix that…

Later: Eep. My body apparently got the wrong impression of my showering actions. What I intended as the working up a fine lather my body interpreted as a harsh scouring with brillo pads. I lost a precious layer of skin down the drain (and the layer under that was stolen by my towel) and now all my scabs need to coagulate anew. So… tired… words stealing away thought.

Soft bed so inviting. No rocks, no sacks of venom.

March 14, 2002

ever since then I got disseminated

This is how new language gets disseminated. My article in this week’s Statesman uses the word “quirl”, which is an archaic word that somehow weasled past my humor editor and two copyeditors. The word is so distant from common language that it doesn’t exist, really. I invented ‘quirl’ in this conversation with a friend, and I liked it so much that I’m apparently introducing it into everyday use.

But what does it mean, this quirl? Why invent a word when there are thousands of others that could communicate a similar idea? In short, I’m a freak. In long, it explains something that I felt the English language was lacking. Shakespeare invented all sorts of words, so why can’t I? He was considered a hack playwright back in the day, and I’m just a shlock author.

Quirl is a verb that is a bit like swooning, but swooning suggests a much stronger flood of emotion (“to be overcome with ecstatic joy”) than quirl. Quirl is more controlled, more of an appreciation and longing for the object of one’s attention. You faint when you swoon but not when you quirl. When you quirl you stay awake to enjoy the object you are quirling. When I look at a beautiful girl and gently moan within, I quirl. It is a mix of the joy and sorrow that comes from seeing incredible beauty. You have been graced with a sight of pleasing aesthetics, but a voice whispers in your ear that the spinsters of life will never weave you together.

Pronunciation is still up in the air. I’ve been saying kwirl, but kwaerl is another possibility. Both have very appealing sounds.

Out of curiosity I checked the dictionary for the word quirl, thinking perhaps it did indeed exist and I was just a fool using a word incorrectly. Quirl does not exist, but ‘querl’ does, a noun that means a coil or twirl, or a verb that means to twirl or wind around. Surprisingly, this is close to what I intended with quirl. As a girl watches Johnny Cash with misty eyes I had visions of her idly twining her hair between her fingers.

My word has now graced newspapers across the campus, and hopefully by context people will be able to infer a meaning and adopt the word into their everyday vocabularies. When I return from spring break I expect to hear everyone telling stories about quirling in Cancun.