I made the mistake of reading an article on MSN about whiteness studies. The concept of race usually annoys me and this was no exception. I did a Google search on whiteness and found this website:



Apparently their mission is "to deliver a simple, sincere, message about ethnic stereotyping", by ethnic stereotyping. I thought it was pretty funny. At first glance I think someone could mistake it for a white supremacist site OR an anti-white site.

Ethnic stereotyping is usually okay with me, as long as it's funny. I'm thinking of sending my grandparents a Fighting Whites t-shirt for Christmas, just to mess with their heads.

I'm going to visit my dad in August. He recently moved to an island several hundred yards off the coast of North Carolina. My maternal grandparents live on the same island a few miles away.
I would like to see them but I'm bringing my girlfriend, and they're flaming racists. Last night, I sent them this letter:

Grammy & Pop:

Hi there, it's me your grandson Tommy. I hope you guys are doing well, I'm doing pretty good out here. I finished the spring semester with a 3.84 so I'm pretty happy, even though I got one (1) B.

Anyhow, I was writing to let you know that I'm going to be coming out to North Carolina in late August and I would love to see you both. I'm bringing my girlfriend Kelly with me. I've been with her for over a year now and she's by far the nicest female I've ever been with. She is also a beautiful black lady; I wanted to let you both know ahead of time so as not to make anyone uncomfortable. I know she would love to meet my whole family and I can't wait to introduce her, but please let me know if you would rather wait until a later date.

your grandson,
Tommy

I swear I've read about this sort of thing before, but I never thought I'd have to deal with it in real life. I wonder if they know that if they don't get over it, they might not ever see me again. Sorry to be so dramatic.

I haven't told my girlfriend yet. Thank god she doesn't read this blog.

My dad used to piss me off a lot when I was a kid but we definitely had good times too. He used to work at a print shop that was situated in a medium-sized business park. There was a pool in the business park and for a few years he took me and my sister there almost every weekend. Looking back I'm not sure why it was so goddamn fun; the pool was pretty small, there were no diving boards or slides, and 9 times out of ten it would only be me, my dad, and my sister. I think it was fun because we made it fun. My dad was always good at conjuring fun out of thin air, if he happened to feel like it.

One afternoon we went to the pool and were dismayed to find a padlock on the gate. My sister and I were distraught until my father suggested we simply remove our festivities to the beach. When we got there, we rolled up all the windows and turned on the heater full-blast. It was already about 90 degrees outside and soon we were all dripping with sweat. I don't remember whose idea that was and I don't remember who was the first to break, but that was probably the only time I've run right from a car straight into the ocean.

Some years later my dad told me that we were never even supposed to be in that pool. Apparently it was the private property of one of the companies in the business park. "I didn't want you guys to worry about it", my dad said.

...the kind of drugs that enhance the pain.

The number of suicides in Japan seems to be about the same as the number of people killed by guns every year in America. I'm going to continue watching Most Extreme Elimination Challenge in hopes of gleaning some insight.

One day I was talking to Bob and he told me that he was afraid of being a Salieri. Sometimes I too wonder if I am damned to a life of mediocrity...and then I think about what would happen if I somehow went back in time and killed Jimmy Page. There would have been no Led Zeppelin. The greatest band in the world- never to be. Robert Plant would have been just another struggling musician who may or may not have ever made anything of himself, just like me. John Bonham would have continued laying pavement and arguing with his wife about quitting the drums. I don't know what would have happened to the other guy. Ha-ha. John Paul Jones would have remained a studio musician until the time came for him to unleash a diabolical, nine-part plan to take over the Avery Shipping Label Company.

It's not my fault I'm not a rock star. I just haven't met the right people.

Goddamn it annoys me when I read myself whining like that. I got a job: ten bucks an hour at a computer company. It's supposed to last at least 2 weeks. I'm sick of complaining. Maybe I just need some more sleep.

Maturity School

I really need to find a job. I've been looking almost everyday; a few interviews with temp agencies and a few applications have been turned in. I guess it's time to start acting as desperate as I really am, which means taking anything that comes along: fast food, retail, telemarketing...

I spent 2 hours playing video games today instead of looking for a job. It was just such a beautiful Sunday.

Since I entered SDSU, I have had to relearn how to provide for myself. It is difficult making ends meet on a fixed income. I did a lot better at it in the spring than I did in the fall, so I'm trying to go easy on myself. Obviously I still have a lot to learn. What confuses me is that before I went back to school full-time, I did it for four years without a major hitch. Even after the life-threatening fire that took almost all of my personal possessions I got back on my feet without ever returning to the bosom of my mother or father's household.

I look at the people I go to school with, most of them several years younger, and can't help but notice the differences in socio-economic standing. Their parents seem to help them with everything. I do not loathe them. I envy them. It's the sort of situation I want to provide for my children.

I've been hanging out with Aaron again. Aaron, I have determined, comes from the most functional family out of my five closest friends, with the exception of Dominic. Aaron's life is financially stable. In the past he has said that I could be where he was if I had really wanted it. I could have done well in college and gotten scholarships. I didn't like high school. I stopped concentrating on school in the sixth grade. Until then I was an excellent student. My parents divorced in high school and it destroyed every illusion I had. It wasn't the sort of thing that I could simply shrug off. So is it my parents fault I am where I am? I don't want to play the blame game. I don't blame anyone for the person I am. The truth is, I don't think I'm that bad of a person. Oh wait, I think I just figured it out: I've spent the better part of a year giving my all, or at least 99% of it, to one thing: school. I got one "B". The rest were "A's". I blocked everything else out: music, reading, writing, personal growth. That's how much I put into and I think now I simply want a return on my investment. The problem is, I don't think there's going to be a pot of gold and/or self-actualization waiting for me when I get my degree.

Nevertheless, I guess what I'm experence may simply be a case of the bends as I rapidly decompress from the pressures of academia.

But, to digress:
Perhaps I have always been on the path to financial mediocrity. After all, my parents have struggled all their lives. My dad doesn't anymore but that is because he married a woman with a master's degree.

Looking back, I think I will get out of here one day. That's why I liked Jay-Z right off the bat. I wanna change. Not all at once, I just wanna keep changing. All I want right now is to make music, my own music in the studio. Maybe I'll play with Dirtbike. Maybe I'll play with and Lee. I just want to pay my bills, pay off my smallest credit card, fix my motorcycle, and maybe get a tattoo.

Maybe I'll hump my girlfriend a few times and take her out to dinner.

...the kind of pain that drugs can't kill.

Renis

Mid-Life Stasis

It's fun to pretend you're not who you are
But how can it be that you aren't what you're not
When it's possible to see what you are when you're not
Being that which you're supposed to be
Which is something that's not who you aren't.

Where There is Life There is Hope

Hope for what? Hope for life? This is a vicious circle. I will have no part in it...

The Myth of Manhood

The myth of manhood
is that we want to fuck your pussies
that we need it to survive
like some gooey liquid elixir
of life
well,
we don't need it
at least
i don't
i'll be alright without it
although sometimes it's nice to meet you
somewhere in between

I heard somewhere that you've got to keep learning all through your life in order to stay young. I think I've narrowed it down even more than that: As I long as I keep learning languages, I'll always remember what it was like to be a child learning how to relate to the world.

As I continue to learn the French language I keep having these flashbacks of learning to read and write for the first time. I remember how things gradually fit into place, little by little. I remember the frustrated elation of learning how to express things I'd already been thinking about for a long time.

When learning to read and write became too tiresome I retreated into a world of my own where every made sense, instantly. Now, when French becomes too much for my brain to handle, I retreat back to English. I'm not sure it's an improvement over my childhood fantasy world; then again I'm not sure there's any difference. I think the difference is that then, there was a lot less of me to lose. I was a child with no defining experiences to fall back on, so I got lost easier. Here I sit now, still trying to figure things out.

Next post

I'm still working at a cardboard factory.

It's really quite magical in a way. That's why I keep talking about it, but I don't think anybody realizes. Maybe I don't want them too.

The "quality control guy". He's a riot. Sometimes I get in trouble because I lose myself imagining what his life might be like, imagining what he thinks about on a daily basis, minute by minute. For some reason I imagine him having spent a long time in some cold, large mid-western town, most likely Chicago. His uniform is the same every day: jeans and jacket of some unidentifiable discount brand and a baseball cap that seems to be a naturally occuring outgrowth of his head, so integral it looks on him. He walks around all day with a clipboard in his hands, pausing every once in a while to observe what's going on, making sure cardboard is being cut to the right length, ink printed in the right spot, etc. He doesn't have friends at the plant, even the managers seem not to like him for some reason. One night during lunch break I drove to a fast-food restaurant. As I was leaving he pulled up, got out of his car, and smiled at me. I glared at him, got on my motorcycle, and left.

Rage Against The Machine was one of my favorite bands in the whole world. So much so that it hurts to say was. Are they really dead? Yes, yes they are.

Audioslave is the proof. It's not that Audioslave is bad. They're exactly what they purport themselves to be: the first supergroup of the new millenium. I imagine myself going to one of the their shows and rocking out just like I used to rock out to RATM. How do I really feel? Well...

I was really drunk the other other night and decided I would watch MTV. I walked out to the living room, turned the TV on, and lo and behold the video for "Cochise" began. As the video played I noticed a rather tart, foul aroma had begun to linger about the living room, and soon realized that my cat had dropped a particularly pungent turd into the nearby catbox. Although I can't be exactly sure of the significance of these events, despite my drunken state I'm sure they mean something.

I'm almost finished with an 18 unit semster. I have two finals left- Essentials of Music and Piano 110C. I'm pretty sure I've gotten A's in everything else.

I hear that C's get degrees but I also hear that C's don't get you into famous graduate schools. The way I see it, going to an awesome graduate school is my way of getting the best possible instruction in music composition. I figure that if the teachers at a state college are pretty cool, they must really be something else at a famous graduate school. Thusly, I need to have a really, really, really high Grade Point Average. Right now it's a 3.64, which unfortunately means that from here on out if I get B's, my GPA goes down. I've been trying to study real hard for finals in order to prevent this from happening.

I didn't really have the intention of staying inside and having sex with Kelly all day today, but that's what happened. I finally made it to school at about 6:00 p.m. I think it's a reaction to the stress of finals.

Me so horny.

Why does it say "Conversations mith Gatan?"

what would Jesus do...for a Klondike bar?

Poeme #3

hummingbird shit on my book