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Culture Shock

I am done with the south.

Not literally, of course, but more in line with the figurative 'i am SO done with this place.'

I went throught the initial novelty of being exasperated with the commercialization of what is already a struggling cultural powerhouse 'Mega-Church' demographic. i am not christian, but i respect the ideals set down by this Jesus fellah, but my animosity towards christianity as a social/political entity is unyeilding. Dogma and archaic ideology has been confused with 'morality' and the people who are trying to improve connectivity and broaden minds throughout the world are suffering because of the placement this monster has within our legislative body.

But that's not the point.

I suffered through what is a flagrant demonstration of how appallingly under-educated the lower/working/middle classes are in this country with the same grace you can expect from a nose-in-the-air snob subjected to the 9-5 grind of bottom rung theatre. it's good for us to broaden our understanding of what it is to be american and not simply assume that without a college education someone falls under the category of 'minimum wage surf.' the south is a brilliant crossection of this group, and i fear it flaunts it somewhat.

But this is not the point.

I have come to face my own distaste for obeisity in this country and have found myself surrounded on all sides by the causes and subjects of this epidemic. We are an omnivorous species and it has become that gastro-intestional truth that has allowed corperate science to merrily opportunize on our evolved desire for 'sweet' 'fatty' and 'salty.' Being unhealthy in your approach to diet and excercise one day and then going to abortion clinics to picket line the emotionally vulnerable young women who are making one of the most difficult decisions of their lives and doing so because you say that they 'disrespect the body and life god has given them' makes me want to light my own hair on fire and dance a jaunty jig.

Neither, nor, is this the point.

the point is, dear friends, that i am simply done. all and none of these things are the point because, when it comes right down to it, i feel as if i'm in the wrong damn country sometimes. we are scrambling at every second to find a conflict to win. not resolve, but win. we do not want the war in Afganistan/Iraq/Anydamnwhere to end because then we would have to work our asses off to find another contrived, amoral reason to start one eslewhere. we do not want Jesus or whomever to descend from the heavens to tell us that 'it's all ok, we're done here, let's go to heaven' because the actual reckoning of eternal accountability would call a good number of questionable 'moral truths' into a very stark, "christ, i've been a bit of a dick my whole life, haven't i" light.

i can't help it anymore! i'm ripping at the seams and i don't know what to do about it. all i want to do is pour this bile and disdain out of my head into a bound volume of unbleached, recycled paper, and then never have anyone read it and tuck it away forever(now dan, is that accurate? nobody read it, but then what's the blog for?) (...shutup). these are thoughts, i recognize, that serve only as futile ramblings of an elitist shmuck who doesn't know how to handle the conflict between what he wishes the world were like, and what it IS like.

It has been almost a week since i started writing the previous paragraphs and, returning to this, i am happy to report that i've been granted a full voiced, full bodied discourse with some friends from work and have, by and large, vented a good amount of my frustration that way. The previous tirade is still true to my perspective, i simply do not have the same fervor. give it time, it will come.

i suppose we could look at this as the hyper-sensualized ramblings of a sex-starved-someone looked back upon by his/her/their well laid future self. i have felt the passionate release of my energies and serve myself better for the lost bile...

Ew.

Language and it's uses

I love the english language.

Fair enough to argue, i know no other language with any real literacy/conversational fluency, but there is something about our bastard tongue that excites me.

Perhaps it is that it is so very alive, so constantly bombarded by foreign influence, so susceptible to trends and fashions...and yet so old, and so structured and vastly diverse in uses.

The languages that service the scientific laboratory, the political pulpit, the theatre, the school and the street are all the same, subject to the same origins and the same stories, though some may consider the others more or less valid.

This is irrelevant: perspective does not determine truth.

My love for this language manifests itself most in my writing style, becoming at once the twisting convoluted meandering of a guy who's making it up as he goes along but longs so desperately to have the know-how to truly pontificate like a learned man and the slang laden drivel of a child of the 80's and a citizen of the Aughties.

My writing is without polish, sure, i'm working on getting better, but i am a practiced speaker and i feel confident in my ability to articulate myself vocally as well as verbally (not mutually exclusive, but not always intrinsically bound, either). that said/written/articulated, i have been, more recently than ever, been accosted by my peers and co-workers for the way i use our language.

I'm getting made fun of for how i talk.

Really?

Are we still in grade school?

Does it offend you so much that i'm not afraid to use such words as 'existential' and 'mono-culture' in a series of sentences that make sense? does it offend you further that i choose to NOT garnish my conversation with references to racism, sexism, homophobia, religious extremism; the likes of which all contribute rather heftily to our international personae as inbred, under-educated fatsacks who would just as soon press a button to heat up their hungry man microwaveable meals as return an entire region of the middle east to the bloody stone age?

Perhaps it's more stuff like that that offends you.

I'm sorry, then, that i offend. Let it never be said that Dan Stevens wasn't one to try the amicable approach to social discourse...see, there i did it again: showing off for the Internet.

//

I'm writing more and more. I can't stop the outpour of words, which is nothing new, but now i have a structure, a story, a world to work within and it's working.

It may be contrived and cliched, but it's my contrived, cliched world and i'm happy with it.

An apology to women

I am a decently sympathetic soul.

I can appreciate the ideas behind what it means to be deeply religious or spiritual (i have been and am still a little of both, after all). Intellectually i can even appreciate the comfort behind bigotry and fear based cultural relations. I have experienced the tumult of teenager-dom in America, so i don't completely discount the rancorous outcry from toady's youth over...everything. I am capable, i think, of appreciating the origin and reasoning behind almost any perspective or attitude, even if i vehemently disagree with the conclusions drawn from that attitude.

That said, i am terrified to try to write from the perspective of a woman. You people terrify me.

I understand that a woman's perspective is not entirely defined by the fact that she is female. We are no more exclusively defined by our gender identity than we are our political view, or religious practice, or ethnic origin; i get that. what i experience the most discomfort with is that there are, quite simply put, marked differences between the perspective offered the two sexes due in no small part to do with things entirely owing to genetics and biology and not personality.

this is a truism that i have never been entirely comfortable admitting outloud. i think that is to do with my fear of castration and effigy mutilation. not because i fear that i actually AM sexist, simply that i will be percieved as such. this, ladies and gentlemen, is the curse of socially indoctrinated guilt.

it's certainly not that i think that women are the only creatures subject to cycles of hormonal highs and lows; the ebb and flow of our natural similarity to the lunar cycle. i've come to recognize that i have a monthly cycle that takes quite a prominent place in how i deal with the situations set before me. i have good days, bad days, and days somewhere in between, and i'm coming to recognize the schedule in which they operate.

but how the hell do i write for a synthetic organizm who identifies as female, was designed as a fascimile of a ten year old girl, is now over twenty years old and wants to rebuild herself in the image of the woman she feels she has become? how do you adress that kind of distinct shift from girlhood to womanhood without making more about the person (for this A.I. is a person, no doubt) making the augmentation than the...augmentations themselves?

help me, friends. women, women everywhere, and i'unno how they think.

Lyrics to songs i'll write once i learn how to write music

I remember then, a while before,
I sideswiped a Chevy four door
In a town so very precious for
The blonde bombshell borne in Pigeon Forge,

My timings terrible they tell me,
And i hate to admit i agree,
Though i remember at twenty three
Being a touch more true to my capacity to gracefully structure a line...

Don't ask this broken brain the time or day,
Or expect a named remembered please,
But lets shake hands and friendlies stay,
As we exchange our brainy pedigree!

(Chourus)
A nerd, a nerd, you've fallen on a nerd,
though in this day and age, the title is absurd,
Neither of the two of we could ever disagree that
We've stumbled mightily and serindipadly into Valley
Valley of Nerd and Bard and Thinking corners,
Where the mighty thoughtful Jacky Horner
Did pull out before my unbelieving eye
An idea like a plum from this existential quandary pie.

So follow me well fast behind my oft loquacious find
for you and i have but hours to get our minds in lind
Before the party starts and the music plays
And the air takes on its hazey ways
And we all take a moment to kindly realize
That the friends and the family before our eyes
Are those we can value to a degree quite absurd,
Because ever single one of us, ever daughters son and sister
Every waistcoat and bowler cap and ugg boot wearing mister
is an un abashed and un relenting...

Nerd!

(Chourus)

where the hell am i?

Pigeon Forge, is where.

I'm in some strange limbo for the high school social network dropout. That kid that was e'er on the outskirts of social clamouring during adolescence? Me. Choice and circumstance always saw me an observer as apposed to a participant in the ever twining network of connectivity and gossip that constitutes the majority of a person's life when they're in school (primary and higher). I just never caught the appeal, and always found the practice of engrossing oneself in the life of another person for the sake of opportunistic voyeurism a little distasteful (he posted on his blog. hypocrisy strikes again!).

that is this place. we're all gossping, partying children again. but now we don't have a curfew, we don't have homework, and our parents are so bloody far out of the picture that we might as well be in never never land.

it's exhausting. the investment we lay in our personae building, the charmless way we attack each other through each other, the barely masked animosities we hold to ideas or principles at conflict...it's exhausting.

i have these next three days (monday, tuesday, and wednesday) to recover before i'm back to work. wish me luck.

When i listen to audiobooks i go Vonnegut...*Warning: i use racial slurs, though i do not wallow in their hatefulness*

Steven has no place in the situation that he is in.

Stephen is a man. Young by the standards of his time, Stephan has, in the entirety of his twenty one years of walking around the blue ball of water and dirt that he lives on (though he's never tried walking on water, he's pretty sure it wouldn't work out so well for him. I've got faith in him, though), never once seen a man with skin darker than his own.

Nor a woman, neither, but the usage of man was in keeping with the passively sexist usage of 'man' as a generic reference to any human.

Stev'n has never seen a person with skin darker than his own.

Stephanie can't remember the last time he was this exited.

I lied just a moment ago: To say that Sanguine has never seen a person with skin darker than his own (by the way, Salvia is a kind of man/person/human referred to an albino. Albinos are the happiest people in the world because no matter how brown their parents are they are always as white as the milk of their mother. Mothers milk is white enough for you and certainly enough for me. When Scandinavia was born, his mother, who was herself an albinic negroid, like her husband, her mother was as happy as you please.

"This nigger as white as the sheet they'd hang him with!" she said.

Nigger is a cruel and hateful meaning word with a funny sound. In the history of words with horrible meanings that are inappropriately fun to say 'Nigger' takes the cake. Were there a consolation prize available to the words next in line it would go to...

okay, finish it. what's the word? why is S- in a place to have never seen a dark skinned person? of what worth is a black man who is 'as white as the sheet they'd hang him with'? tell me what to do next.

And the kitchen sink...

When i am an old man, and far from here,

The gentle tide of my living will crest

A crashing wave in my memory where

The softness of my sunken breast

Will see my memories ashore again in you,

Washed up against this black leather island.

We lie, entwined like so much a braid

Of legs and books and breath, in repose

On the sprung sand castle couch we've made

Here we watch the world we chose

To leave behind in a thrashing surf of yes and no

A dinner, date, movie and kiss ago.

This tide of worried life and expectant faces

A salted sea with blood in mixed to the soil of places

We've set down roots to grow together, here and there

But this squall of stuff-er-ing follows everywhere.

So here we've found an island home,

Black and sticky in October sweat;

A place to park after a day to roam,

To suction to in our post day heat.

An old man remembers these moments, i'd think

When he's far away from the places he knows

Caught up in the lives of the places he goes

And reliving love, and life, and the kitchen sink.

a rough compiling of two images i found compelling (the old man and the black leather couch as an island.) they probably belong in different pieces but whatever; i'm tired and i had to get 'em outta this skull 'o mine.

Peace in a Ritual

When i am dead, allow my family the peace of a ritual.

Do not hold off on arcana for the sake of my broken spirit,

I am a Godless heathen, sure, but my family deserves comfort

So in the time of my passing, offer them the process of

Mourning my death not as determined by my living belief,

But by what it is that defines comfort to them.

voices conjured on a quiet walk

If you happen upon a strangers hand,
Left astride it's havers hips
astride your own,
(the familiar two that belong to you)
If they find you in a brush of static
That reminds both hands
that they belong
To a working, feeling body;
If in the hustle of a cross town bustle
You catch the eye of a fellow passing-er
(Someone you've no chance to
Catch the eye of ever
everevereverever
again);
If your barking dogs take you so far
Far from the door that you call yours
That you're all the way
To the cross-town library
And a baby-girl scholar bounces past
(Book in hand and feeling grand)
To her mothers side in a rush of noise...

Smile.

My little problem

I have a problem.
That is, there is a problem that is mine that i'm not entirely prepared to deal with.
What i mean to say is that if one were to say that a problem exists and it is mine, that one would be correct...
I think i'm a writer.
I've taken to talking to people about my idiotic ideas, my preposterous plot devices, my obsessive alliteration...shit.
I even think that i can write a bloody comic book! a collaborative art form that, when done well, is a mind altering experience and, when done poorly (as is the norm) is also a mind altering experience. A bad one.
And yet, i have no interest in writing the thing. I don't want to type it because, to me, typing is a sterile compression of my expression through the only medium i've any artistry in: heroically bad handwriting. Anyway.
I have writer's block, but in calling that i do myself too much credit. i have Poser's block. i am, at best, an aspiring blogger (because Buddha, Allah, Jesus, and L. Ron Hubbard all know I'm shit at keeping up with this)...Oh! i've been watching 30 Rock and man oh man is that show funny
Love that Tracy Morgan/Jordan.
Anyway, that's me. I'm trying to undertake my first serious writing project by co-authoring a Steam Punk western slash grecian style multi-plot epic with allusions to such contemporary issues as:

A. lower/middle class obesiety because of government subsidized food stuff
B. a damaged post-war generation raised by the PTSD generation of their parents
C. other topical stuff. leave me alone, i'm tired.

steam punks my genre...the story will work itself out.
write loving things to me.
i despise you all and would, were the power mine, compress you all into one middle aged accountant and make you my gimp. whom i would loving take care of. in my basement. jesus i need sleep...

snow, blade runner, etc.

i took a photograph of the sun
and stared into it all day.
my eyes don't hurt-
not even a little, i swear-
but i keep thinking about
(over and over it rolls,
like i'm pawing at a yarn
)
a picture of you i've kept
it has neither the shine
nor the new photo snap
of my dark room Solaris
but it burns my eyes
sears them and tears them
rolls them in their orbits
like the thought of you
spins my mind in ellipses
...
i mean to say, though,
that my thoughts go
wherever it wills to go
and who am i to know
who i am in the snow

someone smashed the moon to pieces last night
and flakes and shards of it fell to earth and froze.
a blanket of soft, downy moonstone, shining bright
and ball shrinking cold covered the streets and signs
and turned a four wheel world into a two leg town.
pure as white and as free to have and to hold-
until it melts fast and free away- as light and love.
rutger haur just killed his creator in Blade Runner and he did not enjoy one minute of it.

What do you do, with a B.F.A. in Theatre?

I've been teaching Children.
A family close to me since high school is the name attached to an open community performing arts after school...school.
Walker Performing Arts.
I am, at present, one of the assistant teachers cum substitute cum bloody goddamn director of the junior high-school/senior high-school acting class. The project for which i so colorfully claimed director for is a 'class project' production of Shakespeare's whimsical dalliance into sparkles, fairies and bestiality: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
I adore these children. Even the hellacious little bastards who have no interest in Shakespeare, the Theatre, nor even in usages of our language vaguely reminiscent of that which one might find in an english primer.
(quick side note: the word primer when used in reference to, in fact, a reference; do you say it like 'he accidentally inserted the wire into the explosive primer and was incinerated in the blast' or 'one could easily say that Liza Doolittle became significantly primmer after her education, courtesy of mr Henry Higgins' )
Yes, i love them all. And every one of them is missing out on what should be an exhilarating introduction to what is, in my eyes, the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The world of the theatre is a world that allows, nay invites, nay demands you take off your hesitations like soggy boots, mired with the sweat of a day's work and worry, and prance about nimble toed and light of mind in the presence of your peers and friends to discover something important, something provocative, or something purely entertaining. These children are being slammed through a 'program' so deliriously disorganized that i don't think any of them save those who came in with some idea of how the theatre worked could tell you word one about the workings of theatre. nothing more complex than 'you learn the lines and the moving about bits and then you say one while doing the other,' that is.
I feel partially responsible for this because i've not made enough active attempts to offer insight for these kids, to give guidance. I've just taught them the few theatre games i know (i've never cared for the things so i never learned 'em) and then made them do yoga.
Theatre is not games and yoga. Theatre is any number of classic stereotypes (truth, passion, comedy, tragedy, a mirror up to life, hopelessly commercial, a-moral, the last bastion of morality in an otherwise corrupt media culture, etc) rolled into being one of the most compelling art forms i can think of. A well composed play can have the imaginative pull of a well composed picture, the whimsical grace of a dance, the rhythmic soul of a song and still manage, too, the intellectual gravitas of a novel...a well composed play, produced to it's full potential, creates, on any given evening, a shrine to a divinity not to do with any church or dogma. The theatre's success is built on the crystalline foundation of our willingness to believe, latticed up from it like a shadow stuff seedling that grows and blossoms and bears a beautiful fruit that, even when picked and enjoyed is gone with the rise of the lights. but the nourishment it...oh, well listen to me.
So i wait tables.
I work at a restoraunt in shepherdstown called Shaharazade's Tea Room. I've discovered that i'm neither a bad waiter nor a very good anything else. i can chat up the people, bring them their food with a smile and a joke, offer them this that or the other and walk away with a not too shabby tip...now writing down reservations, balancing the register, or even remember to roll silverware? notsomuch.
So i'm in movies.
I've developed a relationship with The Factory, an offshoot of Douglass Community College and an affiliate of the Tom Savini School of Make Up and Special Effects. Tom Savini being one of the big names in 1980's and 90's horror/sci-fi make up. So these guys like making horror gore-films and weirdness like that. That said, i've been called in, thrice now, to fill in gradually larger and larger parts in different projects. i'm far from anything akin to a big deal, but i'm meeting the young men and women (few of them at The Factory, tell you that. good thing, too, cause 'bro-itude' runs rampant in the place) with whom i may someday work with on other projects and who may, even, call me in to help them in work as they've done in play.
So i'm dying to get out.
I've an audition in march.