Catching the bug

by nature i'm very out-going and sociable: i try to ingratiate myself to whomever i'm with by being easy going and fun. sometimes it works and sometimes it just puts people off: makes them think i'm being fake when really i'm just too damn enthusiastic.

i've been watching allot of tv, reading allot of books, watching many movies...none of them have cheered me up...well except for Terry. terry does wonders for me and my rain cloud o' sullen.

i want to create something profound so i can feel as if i've GAINED anything from this huge media influx but all i can seem to do is become more and more agoraphobic and eat less food and more Junk. i just watched a patchwork re-creation of the last major season of House and it was wierd. i got the readers digest version of the huge o'er arcing over plot that persists beyond the daily "them's the sickies, make with the fixies" malarkey that keeps the med students interested...i have to say that it was jarring to watch not only my own interest flicker and flare alongside the heart rate monitors little blippy thing but to wonder at how the audience of the season paced display of all this could have been...so much death and antagonism, lost friendships and gained vicadin (this may be a mispelling but the spellcheck here is no help and i'm damned if the government gets to check me for porn AND the proper spelling of controlled substances)...dont read phillip k dick, william gibson, kurt vonnegut, terry pratchett, tom stoppard, jason robert brown, joe conrad and goddamn toni morrison all in the same break that you freebase House with Mr. Brooks and saving private ryan...it just doesnt mesh.

bah! i'm sleepy and will write more...Later *wooo*

Getting a little loopy

I'm a total waste when it comes to this up late malarkey.
Its 12:46 in the am of thursday and i'm bushed.

I'm back home for the holiday; trying to gather together the rather daunting list of novels(unt only novels) i need to read for the classes i'm taking next semester... woo for being a student again! i'm also vaguely encouraging my body to stop holding so steadfastly to the calories i'm so enthusiastically throwing into it. i blame my parents for loving me and wanting me to be well fed. and the government...i blame them too.

i've started drinking beverages of an alcoholic bent recently, i dunno if i've said that on here yet. it feels like a cross between the submission to an inevitable step forward alongside some sort of sullying of personal scruple. i think its something more akin to abandoning the hyper-romantic notion that i'm special for what i dont let meself do as apposed to being special for what i set out to accomplish...make sense?

i have an audition for the Contemporary American Theatre Festival this friday and i'm at the same time pumped as scared shitless. i've not done a proper audition in ages and this is one of the companies that helped cement my desire to become an actor professional-e...so theres that.

i'm exited to see faify and erika and their friends and roomates and romances though i fear that ever looming possibility of "we've all changed so much since then" and that we'll all aknowledge what had made us friends and now see between ourselves and those qualities the scabs and plaque of years or months or tragedy or growth or or some other change or obscurity...we'll see.

happy holidays to everyone and heres hoping theres so much cell phone static on january 20th that the whole damn grid collapses and President Obama can claim the throne of the newly de-technologied united states of Semaphores.

P.S. i wanna see you too, steph, but the lack of distance dulls the fear of changes in personality...weird, no?

Grateful

i count my blessings when i count my health, my friends, my family. you guys too, by the by. happy turkey day everyone.

In a library, briefly

Quiet Please! Thank you
Libraries are for Study
Not a make out spot

I'm here trying as well as i'm able to quietly type on the oldest keyboard on the north american continent and i'm noticing that because people are asked to be QUIET they think that they're in a private situation, where others cant see or even hear them. couples are making out at their computer terminals they're just doing it QUIETLY...weird. i'm printing out the scores for the show that will be, hopefully, the culmination of my extended stay in WVU and also the sweetest student production of The Last Five Years evAr...

more to come later

Reflecting on the gym...of all things

i go to the gym occasionally. i do this not to maintain a self image of a sexy beast waxing his guns in front of the o'er painted females of my generation, though that wouldnt suck too much to be so self-assured. no, i do it because my work demands i be physically neutral, leaning on the side of fit so i can adjust my body as needed and perform fancy tricks as advertised...and i'm always silently preparing myself for zombies. everyone should. if you're not then go get a cyanide tooth now and save yourself allot of trouble.

my legs hurt and i blame you, the american people for creating this overwhelming expectation to not be a placidly hedonistic tub o crap that i'm so good at being! damn.

i try not to just go to the gym and do one thing the whole time. it would not only be ass numbingly boring but its also good for the body to have to deal with different exercises so that it never falls into a routine: routine is when the...oh nevermind, who cares about WHY, lets get to the wherefore. so i'm doing blah blah for this reason or that and i look over and see a pile of meat and manicured hair that i suppose passes for a normal person underneath his almost comical layer of bulky muscle mass. he's got his armband MP3 player and his t-shirt slit down to the waist so it shows off his wicked tight lats (latissimus dorsi, you jersy fuck), and gelled hair. he's flexing in the mirror as often as he's picking things up to put them down again and i see that, for all his stereotypical douche-ness he is in GREAT shape, and i wonder "god, is that how i should be doing that?"
i'm running about a big ovular or maybe oblong track, surrounded by the hopefully out of shape who are too intimidated by free weights or treadmills so they'll just walk in circles (oblongs?) until they're sweaty, discouraged, both, or they feel "the burn" that will inspire them to come back tommorow or next day to do it all again, but FASTER. whatever, i'm not alone and i'm somewhere between the embarassingly fit and the plain embarassed and i see a pretty girl jump onto the track. she's pretty like a dandelion is pretty: there are many like her and in no time at all it will all blow away under the lips of a malicious boy, but for now, she is lovely. she sits back into her center of gravity and easily lopes out a pace that makes me quietly join the ranks of the embarassed. she's pacing herself at a pace i have to huff and puff at just to fall behind. she makes it look easy, but its a way of running i've never seen before and i wonder "god, is that how i should be doing that?"
the climbing wall is where the nerds go to be sexy. low impact, non competitive, and favorable to those with as little erroneous body mass as possible: its a sport designed with the malnourished emo/punks of our generation specifically in mind. as quick as it takes me to fall off a v2 trail (2 out of five, thanks) some lanky bastid will damn near spider-man his way past me, pausing to take off his shirt, chalk his hands and flex...lean muscled no-body fat little prats. bu i watch them and they can hold half their body weight on the tips of their fingers like some overdressed african baboons (though baboons can hold their ENTIRE body weight with just two fingers. wow, right?) and they swing their legs in unison to the moving of their arms scuttling across the wall, making it look like someone filmed a crab on an uneven floor design and then turned the projector on its side to make it look like a magic wall crab. i watch them tirelessly and effortlessly traverse 20 horizontally on as much surface area as could be covered by half the burger i ate before i came here and i think "god, is that how i should be doing that?"
i'm leaving now and as i pass the line to get in and join the line to get out i see couples quietly co-existing, not hating each other but visibly devoid of love. i see that couple fighting over nothing, and i see this couple of beautiful young people, both so self absorbed with their muscles or bust display that they forget the reason they're here TOGETHER...you know where i'm going. i can look at these people, focused into themselves and their image that they forget each other, and in that realization i can say "thank god i know i shouldnt be doing THAT"

i'm feeling lovely today, i just heard that line "god, is that how i should be doing that?" as i was working out and in my head i saw how i wanted to use it...hope it meant what i wanted. how is everyone? (everyone, i think, includes erika and steph, cause i think you two are the only people who read this thing other than me. thanks by the way :))

story-time

I see you. as you read this. I see you without doubt or fear for my story is one to be true so what i have to fear? you, you read this and you do so through the palpable haze of incredulity and misgiving...its forgivable, your fear. beginning any story is one of faith.

as i see you so now can you see Him. he isn't exactly what one might expect from the circumstances of his living. you don't know his circumstances. all you see is a fairly fair skinned man with the sinewed build of a person who lives off of the capacity of their body to catch or harvest their food. his hair is long, at least to the lower most tip of his shoulder blades, held back in a thong of reed rope or animal guts. his beard, too, is very long and like his hair is completely and unflinchingly brown. no, not black like a ravens wing nor the flaxen gold of a wheat field. such a deep chestnut brown that its proliferation over his body almost camolflagues him into the tree against which he leans. Almost. to say that however does not mean that were we too bring out our view of our man to outside the immediate vicinity of his person we might not loose him in the tree...it would be easy to lose a team of such men in this tree.

come out here, where we float above a landscape that may ring familiar but is like one you've never seen nor will ever see. despite also being of a fiction, this world surrounding you is one flung so far into a theoretical future that conjecture on evolutionary patterns and tectonic movement are moot.

immediately ahead where there once was our man there is but a wall of vaguely undulating green: leaves as large as a queen sized bed offset by bunches of fruit likened to huge grapes in the shape of black apples. fruit and foliage of such proportion can only grow on a tree to match (or at least it is safe to say so in a world we can contrast but never fairly compare to our own) and they do so on a tree as high as would please a viking to see the gods nested in its upper most branches. our man isnt in its upper most branches but lower, 'round the middle on joint where branch and trunk meet as wide around as a london underground tube. around him, beside the fruit are the diving roots of the parasite banyon seed that give this particular tree structure enough to hold homes for half a crowded city block of people.

come back to him, to our focus. as quickly and smoothly as oiled fat his hand is out and back holding one of the black glass apples from a nearby bunch. no sooner has he his prize but that bunch is gone, wrapped in what looks like a purple slug large enough to slowly and deliberately eat a truck. this slug is far too fast for such metallic malice, and besides it comes from a hitherto unseen chamber of the trees immense coverage so its either a flying purple slug or its, yes a tongue. follow it back to see what every giraffe would dream of becoming if a giraffes skull was predominated with brains instead of stubby horns and tongue. tusked for flair and larger than the super sized cranes of ancient earths "fossil fuel" era, this towering thing inspires images of an ecosystem driven more by aesthetic than economy.


God...this is just so...dry. it makes me so happy to be writing again, to just put anything to letters, but to feel like all i can do with my own baby is make it into some textbook rendition of a much more interesting biography...gawd help the idea man who cant author his own book.
more to come later.

When I am older than these Goddamn Hills

Rufus Wainwright...he wrote the words to the song that belongs in the soundtrack in the movie based on the book that i just havent gotten around to writing yet.

Bugger.

but honestly who's going to be that interested in the story of a man living millions of years into our future, the sole survivor of our race for no real apparent reason save for some un-asked for responsibility to be the caretaker of the world (kind of) who then finds out that, despite sex and species precedent, he's preggers. what kind of a story is that anyway? thats like 10,000 B.C. in the opposite direction...

i'm home for the weekend and because grandma is in town i'm in the basement. that statement back there, the one about grandma, thats damn near unprecedented because grandma hasnt spent time in the stevens family household in recent memory...well for me thats about a week so lets say since i was ten. yeah. twelve years since the dear old prune has come out of the shriveled appendix of America, the elephant graveyard of the twilight Jewish community, Florida. oh well, i hope maybe we'll have a relationship now that she's going to be within tactical missile range.

i'm not in a bad mood, i'm just sleepy so words come out as they will and i'll read this tomorrow and decipher their propriety (and spelling) then.

next semester should be my last and it so being will make it my most stressful. two shows (hopefully) on the mainstage and my capstone all on top of at least 12 credit hours, and that last one's dependant on how fancy i'm feeling and if i wanna take a climbing/yoga/fencing/tae kwon do class.

there was a hot minute where my mom had me thinking that the government would enact some insane martial law type-jobbie that would keep dear old Barry O out of the oval office and keep the white house just so, and during that time i was imagining this blissfully simple scenario of something between Red Dawn and Into the Wild. a young anglo man is sent into the woods to escape a military occupation but in doing finds himself in the wandering hills of a (relatively) untamed wilderness (i mean, it is west virginny, after all, redneck land can be called savage only so much before it just starts sounding MEAN). i would stock a backpack with cliffbars and high calorie/protein energy shakes and multi vitamins, a tarp for weatherproofing and my sleeping bag and just GO. its a fairly straight shot from mo-town to shepherdstown and a compass would save me the task of learning too terrible mucho woodsman-ship. the whole thing appealed to me very much. so maybe i'll do it anyway. summer break i'll pack up my sack, stay to the woods and see how far i can get on foot.

ha. i'd totally die.

A-Ranting i will go...

I'm poor. Financially, at least. rich enough am i to say that i'm a happy bloke/dude/man/fucker and even if They offered me a fistfull o' dolores(the spanish pronunciation of dollars, not the woman's name...though the idea of being offered a fistful of a grown woman as incentive is pretty funny) i'd still wipe my ass with the letterhead of the contract for a goddamn business ruining mind numbing Reality SHOW...gah.

did i mention the ranting?

more to follow, gym first.

Too Much Brain

Wikipedia is a magic place. They tell me.
I was bored and went to the magical forum of uselessness brain fill that is the Wiki and, in my awe inspiring humility, decided to gague my IQ against that of the average homo-suckface. Huzzah, i'm smrt. More than that i checked what is considered average and realized that these numbers were insisting to me that normalcy is shaped like a national geographic teet or a school house rock diagram of a dildo both of those things make me think that the people living on that purple pants rocket are fucked. not fair right? i mean, here i am, presumably more intelligent than the dude next to me and i feel like all my heightened brain matter is doing for me is filling me with self doubt, the desire to create extra wordy hyper-introspective blog posts, and the small comfort that i can someday find myself SELF-ACTUALIZED which (in normal people speak) means i'll become a rich ass-hat with no concern for how people view me. i think that might be cool but i DIGRESS...
'too much brain' means i think that whats happened in the flow chart of smart-people-ness has me in a valley whose opposite wall stretches off the grid into the realm of the ascended (shaved head beardy types with long names and very small meal plans), the dead (the dead dont come back to life unless we force them and when we do they're PISSED, so i figure dead people know something i dont) and Michael Phelps (honestly! the man takes in and burns more calories in a day than i do in a week so either he's got the brain power of a modestly sized MIT classroom hiding under his swim cap or he's a nine foot dick...and i've seen the man in a speedo and i doubt David Blaine could make that kind of magic happen)...alright i'm kidding about phelps, but anyway...
BRAINS! they only serve their users in respect to their number when working towards a genius grant or making computers that play chess rather well and to the rest of us it really does just seem to be a burden. i like knowing lots of words and appreciating the difference between modern and contemporary theatre (with an -re, even) but honestly i feel i could be a good deal less intelligent and thusly more happy. think about the real brain people: Poe, Shakespeare, Einstein...they all had big brains etc and yet their persnal lives were fucked.
i look at it this way: you're either just smart enough to know that you're not too terribly bright and will thusly become okay with it, smart enough to have a MacBeth-like desire for more brain and would be willing to eat stephen hawkings wheelchair to obtain said brain matter, or your so smart that you dont give a hump who stephen hawking is: you've got your Genius Grant and you gan royally fuck off if you've written some BOOK.