be gentle with each other

Mercury retrograde in Aquarius [Jan 11 – Feb 1, 2009]

in the past few days i have seen my entire little town covered in unforgiving ice. i have been out of power in my apartment for three days. my roommates and i have spent nights on various floors. i have fallen on the ice. i have broken my glasses in my sleep. i have gotten drinks sent back at work. i have somehow strained the little ball in the rubber band under my tongue. i have not showered in 3 days. and on top this, i have had two 'relationship-altering' experiences concerning two very close friendships, one of which i do not think will really survive.

last night i found my last cigarette in the dark. i used my phone to find the last match in the matchbook. i went outside and just as i lit the match and brought it to my mouth, it flickered and blew out. i am not ashamed to say i cried a little.

i mean, goddammit...

mercury is retrograde. this means it will be difficult for us to be honest with ourselves and each other. it will be hard to tell each other things. it will also be hard to write things too and it will be difficult to be happy with what you do write. it is important that we understand this. everything will get better on feburary 21st, after that i am moving. in the mean time, we must remember to be gentle with each other and with ourselves.

the white birch - 'seer believer'

on repeat

i have come with a diamond sword

issuing from my diamond mouth.



i have come with a crystal apple

pulsing inside a crystal house.




i have come for the frozen berries and razor blade leaves.


i have come with crystal splinters in my diamond teeth.




i have come for the glassed up apples and the blackened out seeds.


i have come with a diamondback throat and a golden-brown fleece.




i have come to the crystal forest.

i have come for the meat.

i have come to the crystal forest.

i have come for to eat.

diagrama

i was looking at matthew henriksen's beautiful poetry diagrams a while ago. i was very impressed by them not only as tiny maps for poems but also as singular units of symmetry and design. it made me feel good to look at them. i felt rested. i am happy to know someone like this lives in the area.

i started diagramming a little after reading this and i have found i am more excited about what i am writing and the places the images are leading me. i have so much fun moving pieces around and changing words and making up pictures. i feel like a different kind of creator.

matthew also points out how these diagrams don't have to mean 'something' necessarily but that they do help generate words. i thought it would be interesting for poets and authors to include diagrams and concept maps in maybe the first few pages of their books of poetry and/or prose. i feel this would:

1. demystify the poet/author -- something which i feel is important
2. translate colander ideas into a new and more refined pictorial language
3. possibly open new vehicles for ideas and criticism

i feel like this could all tie in with wayne c. booth's the rhetoric of fiction somehow. i am not sure though because i have not read it yet although it has been strongly recommended.

does anyone know of any books or publications that have published diagrams like this or similar to this?

advice

when i wake up and feel sad in the morning i listen to this song to feel better.

cryptacize - 'cosmic sing-a-long'





when i wake up and feel lonely in the morning i listen to this song to feel better.

atlas sound - 'dog named apollo'




when i wake up and feel stupid i listen i listen to this song to feel better.

kashmir - 'the aftermath'

excerpt from my novel(lla)/chapbook/'something must emerge from this all'

things are changing or something. i am rarely sober at night.

i am sitting in my bed and everything outside is covered in ice. every night i listen to this song over and over.

tonight i am listening to a botched mixed tape i made for a friend's wedding. the tape is old so as it goes on the voices get deeper and sounds warp and garble until the end when the songs are barely recognizable.

i wrote today for five hours straight. it is the most time i have spent with a new idea for a chapbook or novella or something.

here is an excerpt:

I.

1. There is a man in the woods and he lives in a tent.
Every morning he wakes up with dew in his beard and a hatchet in his hand.
When he wakes up everything is dark and the ground is still cold.
He lies awake in the dark thinking of his work for the day.
He lies awake in the dark touching the hatchet with his fingers.

2. There is a man in the woods and everything in his tent is lined with moss.
When the sun rises he sweeps out the tent and folds his bedding into a corner.
In the morning he wanders through the forest with his pockets full of twigs.
He cannot walk without the sound of leaves being crushed.
For breakfast he has only hot goat's milk and roasted chestnuts.
Every morning he chops down small trees and leaves them to rot.

3. There is a man in the woods and he lives under a canopy of leaves and dew.
When he wakes up everything is dark.
Everything is dark and the ceiling sags down like a sickle in the sky.
Tiny beams of weak light break through the canopy and bury themselves into the floor of the tent.
When he wakes up he walks through the forest breaking off stray twigs and filling up his pockets with them.
When he wakes up washes his face at the river.
He watches the animals come to drink from the river.

4. There is a man in the woods and he sleeps under miles of leaves and moss.
In the morning he sets about clearing a space and felling small trees.
He collects small-, medium-, and large-sized twigs.
He checks his traps in the morning: one by the refrigerator, one near the washing machine, and one near the abandoned farm equipment.
Before breakfast he takes the twigs from his pockets and strips them of smaller twigs.
Every morning he builds a teepee and then sets it on fire.
Every evening he comes home with blood on his arms and wakes up every morning with a sword in his hand.

5. There is a man in the woods and he lives in darkness.
He is always moving back and forth through the trees in the dark, crying.
He does not know exactly where the thing is.
Just that it is somewhere and that many times he has perceived it as something else.
He has perceived the thing as another thing.
Something that was not that thing but a thing that was not there.
It was not there.
The thing was not there.

i am a flicker moonlight on a dark blue ocean of oil

the drunk sonnets at DRUNK by daniel bailey are incredible, incredible, incredible. everyone please read them all. they are so so tender and chilling and beautiful. i read them last night and i thought, i am slowly dying as a direct result of reading these poems. these poems will be the end of me.

****

i was looking at my flickr and i realized that i have all these pictures titled like dsc00143 or something. i do this because i feel it will make my pictures less searchable. so i thought 'maybe a lot of people do this' and so i searched in everyone's pictures for DSC00232 and i believe that i might have made a few friends. but don't take my word for it!!


meet big_booty_babe and her DSC00232 contribution.

here is teenage scene kid with a nice camera, wesleyraiin. and here is how she weighs in

introducing Lori0628 (lighthouses are so shane jones right now!)

the daring olli_steinmann and the dinner of bosoms

gay leperchan and our friend/dictator, iruleitstrue

graffitist and photographer (?) People Eating Burritos

the well-traveled philn98765

meet the goddamn cutest asian girl i have ever seen minchelle! hmm, what do you think?



this is everything. i am tired now.
i am going to bed now.

WHEN I WAS AN ELEPHANT

when i was an elephant

i pushed the sun-bleached bones

of my mother's body

through the desert

with my trunk



i called out to my enemies for bread

and they came for me

with water.



it rained for 40 days and 40 nights


when i came up from the water

seaweed was wrapped up in my tusks

laced with ribbons



in my seaweed beard there slimed

along the passage of two amoebas in discourse:


said one amoeba to the other:

'i must fightyou now.
i must showyou, now.

i mustimustimust.'


said the other amoeba to the first amoeba:

'i must break anything solid inside you

i must take everything out of you that is made of flesh

i must do this with a ice cream scooper

made of fine diamonds'



when i was an elephant

i found my mother bloated

and floating in the water.



her pink dress spinning

like a slow-moving top



this when i was an elephant

when i could never forget.

naturalismo

words on 'vega' at naturalismo

'units are moving, no?'

numbers

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.






VI.

how we spend our days is how we spend our lives

the power is out in our little apartment and soon it will be dark. i guess we didn't pay the bills or something. now we are looking for all the candles in the house and gathering them at the center of the room.

i laid down on the floor and thought about everything getting dark and not having a choice about the matter and about how some people used to have to go to sleep when the sun went down and that was just the way things happened.

then i thought about my days. i thought about how every morning i wake up around 10 and i think about how i don't have sheets anymore because i ripped them apart in my sleep one night a few weeks ago. now i sleep with no sheets on my bed when i wake up in the morning i am sweaty. every morning i think about my sweat going directly into my mattress and making a home for itself in the fibers. i wake up and stare at a spot in the mattress and then rub it and think about the home that is in there which i cannot see.

then i get up and read or play my flute or check e-mail. i do this with the sun coming through the window. or sometimes it is cloudy. then i stay in bed and stare at the ceiling fan. then either i play racquetball with my dad or i put on clothes and walk to the cafe and get tea. when i drink the tea i imagine the home it will have in my body and all the animals it will meet. i write at the cafe for a while and i watch the old people come in.

then i walk home. when i walk home i sometimes watch my feet walk and think about how funny it is. i look at my shoes and pretend they are people with personalities and quirks. sometimes i take the extra long way home and watch my feet step softly on the planet. it makes me feel like a philosopher or a stone in the forest gathering moss.

then i come home and read some more or record music until 3 o'clock when i work until 10. then i come and drink wine in my room and listen to music and talk with my roommates.

this is pretty much all i do now. i am very comfortable with this. i like doing it. however, i have decided that i cannot continue doing it even though i like doing it. i have to move and since my lease is up at the end of feburary i must now find a new place to live.

first i will live in lincoln, nebraska and participate in a drug study from which i will earn upwards of $1,000. this money will keep me alive and help pay bills. then i will take the train somewhere and then take the train somewhere else and then stay there for a little while and then take the train back and then stay somewhere else.

eventually, i feel, i will end up in portland. this is what my bones are telling me. but i cannot be sure.

if anyone from portland reads this, it would be best to begin our friendship now, over the internet, so as to minimize all sorts of social formalities involved in the meeting and making of new friends.

GUSTAF No. 1

i have just received a contributor's copy, with this short story included, of the first issue of gustaf magazine, which is a independent literary magazine from oslo and which i wrote about a few months ago. the layout is very pretty and nice.

english-writing contributors besides me include: brandon scott gorrell, tine hvidsten, tao lin, sam pink, and amazing artwork by deth p. sun and dangermitz.


this is my first ever publication. ever.
this is the first time i have ever seen my name printed next to something that i wrote.
it is all very exciting.

Sherwood Anderson

i am reading a collection of Sherwood Anderson short stories, edited by maxwell geismar (Sherwood Anderson: Short Stories). sherwood anderson used to be very popular in the 20s. he influenced hemingway, faulkner, and other writers. he used to write about sex a lot i think. the stories have a tendency to lull you into this 'Little House on the Prarie' or 'Boxcar Children' drone and then pull the flesh off of things so that it looks really pretty and bloody.

there is a paragraph in one of his stories where he is describing as a boywalking through the tufts of hair on his father's head and how the light bounces off his father's bald head and how the boy is trying to imagine a perfect place for himself.

in another story a woman writes her fiance this letter:

" 'In the letter she was very sweet and fine. "For a long time, after we are married, we will forget we are a man and a woman" she wrote. "We will be human beings. You must remember that I am ignorant and often I will be very stupid. You must love me and be very patient and kind. When I know more, when after a long time you have taught me the way of life, I will try to repay you. I will love you tenderly and passionately. The possibility of that is in me or I would not want to marry at all. I am afraid but I am also happy. Oh, I am so glad our marriage time is near at hand!"'"

i feel very sad reading this paragraph again. i feel sadder every time i read it through.

i first heard of anderson in a short story by william saroyan. then i found him again in an anthology of experimental prose and poetry called America: A Prophecy. i can't find it anywhere though so maybe it is out of print.

the name of the text in that book is called The Man in the Brown Coat. you can read this story if you click on that link. i used to have the entire text copy-and-pasted here but then i thought maybe that was kind of kitchy or something. this is one of the best short stories i've ever read.

i am writing this post to recommend sherwood anderson to you.

i like the band deerhunter.
i think the band deerhunter's newest album microcastle is really, very good.


i think the band deerhunter's previous album cryptograms is better.
i really enjoy the 'fucked pedal experimentation'.

today i found a live recording of deerhunter in atlanta.
the live recording that i found today took place in 2005.
2005 was the band deerhunter's cyrptograms-era.

this track is about half an hour long of only the fucked pedal experiments from cryptograms.

if you would like to hear it go to southern shelter.
this is how i wish everything sounded. ever.

there is an iceberg spinning in my mouth

every night i listen to my brother


crying from the frozen lake where


half his body is solid below the ice.





in the morning he is blue and stiff.

in the morning there is a field of brightly colored feathers
stuck around the ice near his body.



when i woke up i was wrapped in a cocoon
of ribbons and strings.



the strings poured from my mouth



at the edge of the pond
i watched my naked brother
tear apart a wild dog
with his hands




there was dried blood on his mouth
and a fur in his nails.



i watched him walk into the water
carrying the broken dog in his arms.
when i called to him he did not respond.


his head bobbed above
while he struggled with the dog below.




i pulled a string from my mouth
and threw to him in the water.
but he refused it.



i sat on the shore until night
hugging my knees and weakly calling
to his head in the water



i kept calling and seeing if he would answer,
seeing if maybe he would say something back.

books i have recently read

Cathedral - Raymond Carver

this was the first thing i read by raymond carver. i really liked it because i felt like raymond carver was writing from a place that knew humans their weaknesses. most of the characters are weak people who deal with their weaknesses in weak and human ways. the amount of failure in all the stories makes me think about how much failure raymond carver experienced. a lot of the characters are alcoholics and i feel since raymond carver was also an alcoholic he knows what he is talking about. the first story, 'feathers', started out pretty slow and got kind of boring. but slowly the boring- and mundaneness of the narrative played into the narrative itself. another story that i liked was one called 'vitamins'. i think i liked it most because of how somehow was completely degraded in a bar while trying to have sex with his wife's friend. i read this book maybe three weeks ago so it's not so fresh. i also enjoyed 'a small good thing' which is about a family that orders a cake for their 8-year old's birthday. the boy gets hit by a car and spends his birthday in the hospital where he suddenly dies from a brain aneurism or something. meanwhile they keep receiving creepy phone calls about the little boy, like some creepo talking quietly into the phone. the book went by very quickly and at the end of every story i always put down the book and thought about everything i had just read. i felt like i had been looking at a painting. i think i admire his economy most. the way he says so much with very little. the text appears innocent and unself-aware, very organic and smart.

My Name Is Aram - William Saroyan

i have been a long-time fan of william saroyan and i feel like his voice is one of the strongest things i have ever paid attention to in my entire life. he is a lion of life, he roars around the countryside, immense and covered in fur. i feel wild and free when i read him. at the same, this book can also be considered to be about human weakness. however, saroyan spends more time celebrating it (along with pride, sorrow, eagerness, and innocence) whereas carver maybe exploits it, or uses it to make a story. 'my name is aram' is a book of fictional stories saroyan wrote about his childhood growing up in fresno. most of them have to do with growing up in an armenian-american family. normally things like this do not sound interesting to me but this book is beautiful and i feel less stupid and alone when i read it. the very first page is really very magical. it opens up with his cousin waking him up at night sitting on a giant white horse outside his window. all the stories are magical and surreal but you really only notice it after you finish the story. also, saroyan has this great command for small words that he blow up like tiny atom bombs when you read them. here are a few lines from the story "The Poor And Burning Arab":

If you please, my uncle Khosrove said. He is your son. You are my little sister. Please send him away. I love him with all my heart. He is an American. He was born here. He wil be a great man some day. I have no doubt about it. Please send him away [...]

I was standing too, and if my uncle Khosrove was angry at me, I was angrier at him.
Where is the Arab? I said.
My uncle Khosrove pointed me out to my mother--with despair. There you are, his gesture said. Your son. My nephew. My own flesh and blood. You see? We are all poor and burning orphans. All except him. [...]

How Hungry We Are - Dave Eggers

i really, really don't get it. jesus christ, i mean i i really don't like dave eggers. i feel the same way about radiohead: i don't understand why all the fuss. i mean, he's good. his stores are not terrible, they are interesting and creative and playful. he has a wonderful imagination and i would probably like him as a person. i really like his work in tutor centers and i think he is probably a good guy. but his writing just doesn't do much for me. in fact, it does very little. although not enough to ignore. or maybe i'm more confused about why so many people like him. the same goes for mcsweeny's.i always felt like someone was making me eat my vegetables. all the stories were like reading a bad joke but the bad joke is actually a novel.

fortunately, i am not alone.

andmanandmanandman

i just went for a walk through the woods and i feel like an animal with clothes on. i spent two hours napping on the riverside and listening to music and looking at the trees

i am standing on a moon in jupiter where there are oceans of frozen nitrogen and i am walking through the cracked canyons in the ice and i am thinking: this. this is too big. this is too big for me.

so look down at your feet
don't look at the whole universe and don't stare off at jupiter
look at the crack beneath your feet
follow it

The truth was the secret, God first, the word, the word God, out of all the things and beyond, spaceless and timeless, then the void, the silent emptiness, vaster than any mortal mind could conceive abstract and precise and real and lost, the substance in the emptiness, again precise and with weight and solidity and form, fire and fluid,

i feel afraid kind of, because these things are so big i feel maybe day they will crush me, do you know what i mean, i feel overwhelmed and what if one day it is too much what will i do with my family and all my friends

if they crush you then it was what was meant to crush you
and you will survive and grow and the goodness inside of you will live wildly and freely
what do you mean what will you do with your family and all your friends?

and then, walking through the vineyards, I had seen it thus, the whole universe, quietly there in the mind of man, motionless and dark and lost, waiting for man, for the thought of man, and I felt the stirring of inanimate substance in the earth, and in myself like the swift growth of the summer, life emerging from time, and the germ of man springing from the rock and the fire and fluid to the face of man, and to the form, to the motion and the thought, suddenly in the emptiness, the though of man, stirring there. And I was man, and this was the truth I had brought out of the emptiness, walking alone through the vineyards.

what if i have to leave them forever or something, what if i have to start over in a cave somewhere like doug batchelor of what if i have to live in LA i would hate that, i hate los angeles.

I had seen the universe, quietly in the emptiness, secret, and I had revealed it to itself, giving it meaning and grace and the truth that could only come from the thought and energy of man, and the truth was man, myself, moment after moment, and man, and the face of god in man, and the sound of laughter of man in the vastness of the secret, and the sound of his weeping in the darkness of it, and the truth was myself and i was man.

i was walking through the forest with the creek there and keeping the soil moist and there were dried up vines tangled up in a yarn of vegetation or something and i climbed through all of it and there are thorns in my hair now.

and when you do not feel strong you are given others to be strong for you

quoted from:
Saroyan, William . The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. "And Man", p 103, New York: The Modern Library, 1941.

Noah Cicero -- Treatise

A few weeks back Ryan Manning was nice and sent me a copy of Noah Cicero's Lulu version of Treatise. I know the book was written in 2006 or something and I know a lot of people have written about it but I am very excited by it and so decided to write words for it.

The book is basically about a college-educated twenty-something who gets sick of the emptiness in his entire social class. He decides to drop a class and takes up a job at a factory where he works for very little money and has no health insurance. Other things happen but I more want to write about how I felt about the book.

I have been trying to find words to write about but I have many opinions and thoughts but I can't put down anything substantial. Here are some things that express my opinion and critiques about the book but which are not 'legitimate' or 'conventional' venues of criticism. I am pretty sure this will be disjointed and terrible.

gmail chat with alicia pernell about noah cicero's Treatise

have you read treatise

yes
and burning babies

what did you think about treatise

well, i must say that i've never experienced the situations presented in noah's books

me neither
i felt like some of them were contrived
can i throw some thoughts out
i just finished reading it
i've been writing a blog about it for the past week or so but it's all jumbled

i read it a long time ago
but go ahead
tell me what you think

ok
i mean i don't think it's anything monumental to say he wrote with this kind of righteous (almost self-righteous) anger, that's even nihilistic kind of

i definitely agree that his writing is angry

i think it comes down to a combination of his perception of reality, of how he talks about truth, and of his writing style itself. the way he talks about his reality makes it seem like the blue collar class are the ones who are really experiencing reality or something. the way he talks about truth it makes me believe like there is some form of absolute truth which i don't believe in, and finally his writing style which has a objective tone much as any 'treatise' would.

kind of like documenting the lives of wild animals?

yeah right. i feel like he perceives humans as animals, and that the human animal has detached itself from the elements and from its specie, from nature with asphalt and concrete and indoor plumbing and so maybe the working class is the only strand of human animals to be close to nature because of how they live you know?
yessss exactly

like working class people don't discuss the meaning of life.. they just get up everyday and follow their instincts
and, naturally, instincts lead them to do things that will (hopefully) decrease their own suffering

yes and he is saying that this is how humans should live. it's seem he's fetishized it or romanticized the working class lifestyle much like the transcendentalists romanticized nature. but in the end what i see him doing is substituting a subjective reality in which people are careless and pompous and detached -- a reality which he perceives as immoral -- with another subjective reality that is just as arbitrary and unsatisfying and as pompous as an empty rich one

it took me a couple of reads, but i get what you're saying

and he reinforces this proposed reality with pseudo-values, like when he says 'poor people are honest about what they want, if they think you're an asshole they will tell you, if they want what you have they will steal it'. like he is trying to convince us of his reality with these values that are inflated with just as much emptiness and arbitrariness. i don't understand how this 'value' is more enriching or more contingent on this 'cicerian ultimate reality' than any other arbitrary moral i assign value to. i feel like the book is a retarded kid at a puppet show who suddenly stands up and starts screaming that these puppets are not real 'you're all puppets! you've all got a hand up your asses! you're not real! don't believe them!' and then he throws himself into the curtain and collapses the entire set and then the evening is ruined and everyone has to go home does that make sense? thank you for being patient, words are hard to do

i know, my dear, words are very hard to do

i think i am just going to copy and paste this as my review of his book

A Drawing I Made of What I Imagine Noah Cicero's Brain Looked While Writing Treatise (This Probably Does Not Matter)

A Song I Recorded That Makes Me Feel Like I Felt After Reading Treatise by Noah Cicero (This Probably Does Not Matter Either)


Treatise.mp3


Words About How I Perceive Social Classes After/Before Having Read Noah Cicero's Treatise

This summer I worked at a cannery. For one day. I got hired through a temp agency and worked from 8 PM to 6:30 Am. I absolutely hated every minute of it. I guess I really wasn't made for physical labor. I only lasted one night and it was miserably hot and as temp workers we were given the most pointless and shittiest cleaning jobs on the entire site. The next morning I came home and crawled into bed with green beans in my hair.

However, we were paid very well and although we didn't have health insurance as temp workers, the factory was eager to hire in new staff. This was probably because they went through cleaning workers like hotcakes. The permanent workers I talked to worked up to 60 hours a week at $10+/hr depending on how long they had been working there. With overtime these guys were easily making over $30,000 a year. (I don't even know if that is a right number for yearly earnings. I just made it up.) Anyway, it was supposed to mean that they could live very comfortably within their means, even with a family. But a lot of them would buy boats or houses or giant big screens. Or even blow a lot of it at the casino here. I used to tutor a guy named Marcos and he told me how his supervisor at the factory would go to the casino during her lunch break. She came back one day from lunch really pissy because she had lost $3000 in 45 minutes.

There was also a weird sense of identity they all had to the factory. There was loyalty and everyone tried to help everybody get out on time. It was very obvious their identities were entwined with their job. I mean, they spent up to 70 hours in there a week. Marcos told me he cried at his supervisor's funeral and he'd hadn't even cried at his own mother's funeral. He said he didn't really know his mother but that he felt like his supervisor was the closest thing he'd ever had to a mother. He said his supervisor got sick and started working with a respirator pouch or something. Soon she couldn't even work like that but she still kept coming to work. She wouldn't get paid but she just kept coming. She liked to sit and watch and joke with the workers. They were her family.


Closing Comments/Pseduo-intellectual 'Post-Modern' Insight Dribble on Noah Cicero's Treatise


Humans, specifically these humans, can find meaning in anything, in working for a corporation, even in working a mundane factory. I am not sure how much workers would really care for Treatise. I feel that the book was written for the middle/upper classes as a guilt trip. If so, it does it very well. But then book runs the risk of its audience thinking they 'get it'. That they consider reading the book really 'roughing it'. And then they will justify their worldview to convince themselves they are not rich or needy.


I finished the book this morning while giving plasma. I looked around at the people laid up in beds with pencil-sized needles poked into their arms. Many of them had baggy jeans on, piercings, and were reading books about World of Warcraft or Tom Clancy books or something. The people who come here are poor and need $20 for the weekend to get drunk or buy weed.

Noah's character Nikolai seems to be literate and an intellectual. He lives in a trailer house and finally presents the protagonist with some kind of 'blue collar manifesto'. Nikolai's characteristics seem to depict the Noah himself. But I wonder how many people like Nikolai there really are in the working class or how greatly Noah romanticized him. I don't feel like Treatise would be something people at the plasma center would read or care about. If so, then what's the point?

(via jonesthought)

2009

GOALS:

1. move
2. self-publish
3. become the person in this video

2008

JANUARY

new years day woke up warm in bed and happy, woody allen's manhattan. sick as a dog for three days. started to journal. endless endless snow. sex in my basement.

FEBRUARY

found jeffery heart's art and subsequently the 'internet writing scene', wrote my version of 'night owl', tried to write more, didn't. more and more anxiety.

MARCH

south by southwest. atlas sound, HEALTH, no age, an albatross. saw hanson brothers on the street. partook in a medical experiment, more and more anxiety

APRIL

drove 3 hours from lincoln, ne to des moines to see the tony danza tapdance extravaganza. the website billed the time wrong and we saw only the last five minutes of the set. 6 hours in a car for five minutes of tony danza. panther, panther was born. i began drawing pictures of bigfoot for my friends. 'bigfoot buys hard liquor', 'bigfoot masturbates in the shower', 'bigfoot wears skinny jeans'. even greater amounts of anxiety. 'heartbreak'. katie carlson was a strong mountain for me.

MAY

greater and great levels of anxiety which culimnate in not caring about anything, graduating barely, moving out of my house, saying goodbye to my beautiful friends, hitch-hiking to denver, being backstage at MIA (awkward).

world's largest anxiety attack under a bridge in brighton, colorado after being in the hot sun for hours and not finding a ride, taking a train to lincoln and rolling into the city with the sky all pink and gray.

JUNE

sigur ros in omaha, moved to arkansas, lived in a shack on my parent's property, began summer depression, painted my house, recorded GAZEBO, rode my bicycle, tried to get a job, watched television all day, quite unhappy. stopped journaling, my computer was struck by lightning.

JULY

nothing. ky moved here. we drank a lot. it was sad. i don't want to remember this month, everything was gray. i dreamt a lot. saw HEALTH again.

AUGUST

got a job finally, moved out of the shack and into a townhouse with three strangers, they became my close friends, began to climb out of sadness,

SEPTEMBER

begun having problems with getting out of bed in the morning,

OCTOBER

rode a train to LA and played a show with rio en medio, came back and released an album called VEGA

NOVEMBER

worked more, wrote things, took walks, went to lincoln and saw old friends, everything felt better

DECEMBER

played another panther, no panther show. saving money to move, ideas: portland, denver, lincoln i don't know.