blog

2007-01-13T11:25:00.000-06:00

11.29.06

Today I was conducting oral exams with students, and I found out that a student didn’t have much patience when reading. like myself. Maybe it wasn’t a lack of patience, but she said that it took her a long time to get through books. That might not be the lack of patience at all, but longsuffering. I wish I could hear someone say long suffering sometime in a conversation. This phenomenon seems to be only a written thing. But I probably heard someone say longsuffering in Christian high school, quoting the Bible and referencing God’s path. I was also thinking about the word mighty the other day, it’s been too long since I’ve been able to appropriately use that word in discourse. I think that one also showed up in some Hymns or Worship songs.

Five days a week I wake up around 6 or 6:30 so I can get to work on time. The fact that both of my bosses lack personality and humanity has a direct relation to my neuroses and nervous approach to making sure I dot all my j’s and such at work. Making it on time, turning in my folder with attendance, not wearing sunglasses during class, don’t letting students out early, being professional, not using white out, not mixing business and pleasure. When you work there often isn’t enough time to reflect about what the hell you’re doing and what the hell is what the hell you’re doing and what the hell everything is, which can also be a good thing.

That’s alright. But who’s here when I’m not here? Who’s here when there’s still presence but not I? some one is here who’s still present, some consciousself, Right now someone’s outside the window honking the horn, it’s 9:08 p.m. There almost always seems to be some sort of nocturnal activity going on across the street from my apartment. Outside my neighbor’s apartment. Dizque my neighbor’s an alcoholic, I’ve seen him a couple of times in the street. He’s around my age, a young man. He always tries to flag me down and speak to me in English, how’s it going dude, I guess he lived in California or something for awhile. I usually see him in the early afternoon, sloshed under a low sun. my girlfriend says that his mom doesn’t let him in the house and doesn’t let him out of the house, either. He has some pusher friends who drive Hummers and bring him drugs at night. I never want to talk to him, but, you know, he’s totally free to do whatever he wants because it’s right if he likes it and he’s not hurting anybody.

I like my neighborhood, though, it’s what is called “popular” in Spanish. It’s very traditional and there aren’t a lot of white people, there are a lot of stray dogs and some cats who are very noisy when they copulate, there aren’t hardly any people from the United States or Europe, sometimes with this feeling I feel free, or clandestine. Like I’m conducting a secret operation of a private nature. A project with (personal) reality. There is always someone selling cds or barbecued meat or fruit out of a truck or belts or brooms in the street. Maybe it’s quaint. It’s still novel.

I get out of class every day around 4:00 and often stroll around my house in the living room in the afternoon. Today outside my window in the apartment below mine there were children celebrating a birthday party. Some young barely along in years, the world is still a novelty to be breathed, creating a fragile curved drop of water dropping that you won’t remember accurately. They were hitting piñatas on clotheslines surrounded by concrete on all sides; I watched on nostalgically, surrounded by contentment and reserved joy.

Everything is usually satisfactory and all right and I’m drinking black tea and smoking a Marlboro Blue cigarette right now. Do they have blue marlboro cigarettes in my country? I don’t ever remember seeing them. It’s a real Nice Mild Blend. So, anyways, I try to keep a calm nature and when a problem arises I try to be the problem and not think about it, about separation between me and something else, you know, and all that other zen shit I’ve been into lately. A lot of times I forget to do it but when I remember it usually works and brings me some piece of Mind. It’s very pragmatically based, if you’re into that kind of applicable shit. I’m also down with its metaphysics.

The connection between “being somewhere else” and “being where you are” has a funny nature that continually uncovers itself, often revealing circularity. In any case it’s good to be where I am, it always should be good to be where I am. I have a fucking sty in my eye, though, it’s the second time I’ve gotten one since I’ve been in South America. What the hell is a sty, anyway? I think it’s a small mound of white infected puss that forms close to the orb of your eyeball, actually. They’re extremely annoying, I guess they can be cured with tea bags and prevented with sunglasses. That’s true.

Right now my girlfriend is out spraypainting advertisements for a release party for a magazine/journal of which she’s involved in the production. It’s called La Pepa. She’s riding my bicycle and is wearing a yellow and white fluorescent vest, she looked really cute when she left. I hope she doesn’t get stopped by the police and thrown in jail. Though she knows how to maneuver a bike well, my girl. and I would imagine she could make her way out of a pickle.

any day now

2006-02-27T23:52:00.000-06:00

it's at once entertaining and terrific to sketch my present profile in 75 hour work weeks, dominant interests include forms of feminine flesh and french structuralist bullshit, or an economic reality dominated by the logic of late capitalism, or by cycles of materialistic leitmotifs of sore testicles, odd sorenesses just at the edge of the lower ribs. jesus may be coming back any day now, and i really don't think i can finish off all the extra gravy that came with this countrie-fried steak.

it's all at once you've been told that convinces you that there could be something more, i Mean beauty manifesting itself in an ideological-physical whole sort of way. in fact the other night i was lamenting that i couldn't leave my own body, relegated to our collective realm of SEPERATENESS; perhaps the dawn of frontiers is indistinguishable from the dawn of sorrow. maybe it's all this fucking anglo-saxonic Distance, or we are sorry that we drew a part.

there's just way too much pressure to organize and inform procedures, phenomena and information according to the dominant paradigms and hierarchies. wait, i take it back, i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about:) i've really made a mess of this cottage cheese and country fried steak.

it's kind of too bad i never feel impending doom, anymore. in a way. it could really put things into perspective. instead all this shit blends together, i've started accidentally dumping loaves of bread out of plates onto customers' tables and filling out mundane paper work in dreams. it would be nice to end up in a book with pleasantly blank pages again soon, where i'd have to navigate a world of the semiotically unknown again for the first time. it's too bad there has to be a beginning and an ending. do yourself a favor and pierce me with Calvino's Paper Knife, whose textual puncture will at once signify, through a symbolically violent act, the creation of this bridge between You and I, an instantaneous beginning and end.

2005-11-29T19:26:00.000-06:00

the midwest begins again from a ( ) point of entry. they are putting the snow barricades up and there is space. and lack but not that kind of material lack, if you permit me or if i permit myself to dichotomize between the spiritual/ethereal and the material. but i don't want to wander around in those tunnels right now....

i've been on campus since around monday morning, 9:00. now it's tuesday, almost 9. papers and movement and things. hi, my name is zach campbell and i go to calvin college. various points of entry.

i had a good thanksgiving weekend. w/family and friends. now the trip back blurs it all, the memory of travel organizes itself into a singular fiction, condensed. condensed movement and condensed space with seat-back table trays and drifting in and out of consciousness in the seat on the plane and wandering through airports heeding the signs that lead me "HOME".

about the only thing that stands out in fact is the bar and smoking lounge in cincinnatti, a congenial asshole from minnesota, a middle-aged kansas citian with a broad hat and a bible, taking chances, an indian IT techie who is movement: from california to D.C. to milwaukee....

wait, funny that memory thing. i was never fucking in cincinnatti. i haven't been to cincinnati in a long time. (it's near kentucky). i went to milwaukee. chris filipini did go to cincinnati and i talked to him in grand rapids before he left. bored and is?lated midwest cities exchanging names amongst my synapses.

at some point late last week or last week-end my friend andy hill told me that for buddhists, the separation of the all into parts, or rather, distinctions, categories, the grid, or whatever you want to call it, only serves to separate us from the whole, or God, and it is the source of man's sorrow. later that night we drove around downtown and tried to find the projects, we came close like every thing; we really shouldn't have been driving anyway.

[you know i couldn't remember if that whole thing with the guys in the cincinnati/milwaukee smoking lounge happened on the way there or on the way back. if you let yourself think a certain way you can skim over those sort of more factual types of details.]*

i like the image of a door half open. we can see inside, but we're still restricted. our position is in between. neither in nor out, really - or a foot in the door. just one leg and a shoe around a sock around a mass of bones and blood and tissue and muscle and fat around dna and cytoplasm, just firm on the ground. always putting another foot in the fucking door.

i'm leaving grand rapids in 3 weeks. i'll be in ecuador for a bit less than two. then to kansas city to work? i hope i won't get stuck there. i'm firmly pleased by it all, but still don't want to be the one w/o a home. don't think of it as a conclusion. or maybe not even an ending or beginning in fact. this is not a beginning.

2005-10-29T16:59:00.000-05:00

enough obscure posting. today i slept off and on until about 3:00. i had dreams, maybe a bit more like daydreams or fantasies given the autonomy i had over them, myself (perhaps only myself metonymically) hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. i could try to explain to you what they were about but i doubt it would make any sense. i think it may have had something to do with divisions and sub-divisions of singular things and perhaps categories, and royalty as well, but that's as close as i can get. i got up and rode my bike around and saw some people i know, and had a mexican pizza. last night i hung out with my colleague Metal, and i mentioned that I liked when he said in his paper, althought this paraphrase won't do it justice, that metaphors are useful because they allow us to understand truth in varying degrees, rather than in terms of binary oppositions (Perspectivism as Anti-Realism, Kevin Cook, 2004). and then last night he said that metaphors are our strike back at language and it's inflation and proliferation of signifieds. i added a bit to what he said paraphrastically. and i agreed wholeheartedly and drank some more beer.

i think it's about it. i just wanted you to see this site, you might even like it. kneedeep in cliches.

http://alecsoth.com/bogota_web/pages/01.html

2005-10-14T12:20:00.000-05:00

37 distracted images, limited by math. sequences nearly mimicked, with room left for infinity. there is no bastardized moment, but creation, and repetition: humans weaved in through cyclical time, filling up language's empty spaces in a labyrinth of meaning and identity.

dreams and metaphors. dreams, dim mirrors, and plastic bags.

entrance into language, does the linear date matter.

2005-10-04T19:33:00.000-05:00

quote:why is there something, instead of nothing.

“WHY IS THERE SOMETHING, INSTEAD OF NOTHING?” why is it always now, now, now, not always, forever, neverending. how far are we from the real? is sailing a ship a good metaphor for this sort of a thing? where the fuck did i put my biology test score? why do i want to hurt you? do i have to hurt you? do i want to hurt you? why don’t we practice alchemy?

i am not an author. i am only an intersection. i am only an intersection.

Now is not the time for such questions. There are ghosts whom come only at night. They carry otherly-shaped things in their pockets, strange matter that won’t fit into language. Any sort of analogy that might be gasping it’s last breath ends here. ?

(walking cliches).

2005-09-22T22:22:00.000-05:00

this is my blog and all i have to say is, if anyone knows a place where i can get a cool cock (poultry) t-shirt, i'd be much obliged, preferably one of a cockfight. i have homework.

i'm from the kansas I SAID THE KC.

2005-09-01T09:14:00.000-05:00

i'm working in my dad's office today because i'm that kind of guy.

yesterday was the last day of my internship and playing office politics for awhile. i've had about enough of being 'professional' for now, which is such a vacuous term, besides.

but i don't mind office politics too much, honestly. 'suicide is easy' with women, it's the guys who really make you deserve. guys like peter berghoef. that's right. why don't you try spouting out 'history is the sum of all possible metanarratives' amidst a clusterfuck of quiet cubicles?

but i really got sick and tired of my co-worker, the one who will be taking my place and with whom i 'organized and implemented' an 'outreach project to the spanish-speaking community'. actually i pretty much 'organized' it, catchas. it's really unfortunate that for a mexican-american who moved to california at the age of 2, she has a FUCKING HORRIBLE SPANISH and she mixes up the gender her articles and translates phrases directly from english. where were your parents?

actually it's not horrible but i expected more from such a morena. i'd really like to give a shout out to the age of acquisition. but which one of you all cares about this?

it's funny to think that by this time next week i'll be playing dice and shooting craps in Grand Rapids, Michigan. i still don't know where i'm gonna live yet. does anyone have any ideas? i'm no NICK REYNOLDS, but i'd like to think that i can hold my own.

maybe i don't have anything interesting left to say, and should be kilt. maybe i've become an office guy and there's no turning back. bitter coffee sharpies whole punchers fuckedup printers and masks. plus several several and several years, but with weeks of exponentially increasing vacation-time!

on the other hand who wants to listen to some ethiopian jazz music from the 1970's? i know i'm game. i'll even smoke a cigarette and sink back into the most comfortable cliches...

2005-07-26T16:02:00.000-05:00

i left work early today. i even skipped out on the double-themed party for someone who's leaving and someone who's pregnant. they've moved me into a smaller room with a slower computer to make room for the new guy. who's actually not an intern. i spend my days working for a "NONPROFIT" translating "FORMS" having to do with ""VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION" and having meetings with "CLIENTS" to help them find "JOBS". now isn't that a mouthful! "WHEW!"

i really have to find some alternative to this whole working for the rest of your life thing though. i think that whole gig could really bring me down.

sometimes i enjoy all this. i've been stockpiling as many office supplies as possible from the collective drawer, walking down the street to eat in one of kansas city's oldest diners where they call me 'hun' and where there's no smoking section. i like smoking somewhere where there's no smoking section or ashtrays. sometimes on the way to this restaurant i even get to see a plastic sack being swept around by the wind.

in the evening i usually try to watch as much television as possible. sometimes i even read books, or think about grammar. the other day i found out that someone declared the narrative "an imaginary resolution to real contradictions". isn't that INTERESTING.

the heat lately has been enough to make armymen rape. today it rained though, cooled down, and i smoked out the window for to heat the outside.

disclaimer, note, exercise.

2005-06-07T12:11:00.000-05:00

disclaimer:

this is an exercise i wrote a bit ago which i have thought about posting for a while: a bit of intellectual masturbation. it's just i can't figure out who would really be interested in it among those who read this blog. but i'm posting it anyway.

in fact i like it.

note:

Although the exercise that precedes this brief note may not seem like art in the traditional sense, I cite the work of Marcel Duchamp and the ready-made, Andy Warhol and Pop Art, and in the realm of literature, Mario Vargas Llosa and the novel “Pantaleón y las Visitadoras” (among other contemporary authors), in which the traditional meaning of art and the role of the artist is subverted: instead of creator, s/he becomes curator of the cultural object and judge of what is or isn’t art, shuttling between artistic and non-artistic contexts those artifacts that may pertain to the everyday, the common, the popular, or even something else.

exercise:

Language Games, Traduttóre Tradditóre, or Man vs. Machine

There is a phrase in Italian—traduttóre, traditóre—which means “translator, traitor,” and which suggests that the two Latinate words may trace back to a singular etymon. This saying refers to the notion that, at least in my opinion, language pertains to and is limited by cultural contexts, so crossing a bridge between two languages via translation can imply a dramatic difference, because of the profound relationship between language and culture.

In fact, any given word itself is of a schizophrenic nature, despite being confined to its unique cultural space: schizophrenic for the multitude of connotative meanings that flow and prance rebelliously behind it.

The postmodern project has been characterized by a putting into question of once solidly confided in modern paradigms, including that of language, and, by extension, the institutions to which it corresponds. This new uncertainty, voire distrust, of language consequently opens up its role and meaning to debate and interpretation. Ergo, this new linguistic terrain is one on which games can be played, where we need not take language so seriously.

With all this in mind, the following exercise consists of a note I wrote to one Ramiro Noriega, a professor of a Latin-American “boom” literature course I took while in Quito, Ecuador. I wrote the text itself nearly simultaneously in both Castilian and English: while writing in castellano, I would refer to my native language in order to translate concepts I could express more accurately in that one, and vice versa.

The first two copies are the ones originally written by myself, and the following two are translations into the respective target language, an amalgamation of results from the products of various on-line translators, for what better way to engage in linguistic games and underline the inherent ineffectiveness of translation than with this new, odd query of modern technology? Perhaps you will enjoy it:

I. Ramiro,

Solamente quería escribirle una cartita para decirle cuanto he gozado estando en su curso este semestre. Nunca he tenido un profesor que me haya empujado a trabajar con la mente como usted, a tantos niveles de análisis, ni que tenga un conocimiento tan acertado en cuanto a la materia.

Yo estoy seguro de que, al mirar atrás en el tiempo, que empaña las cosas, le veré como una ficción construida con afición.

Con una sinceridad casi pura,

Zachary David Campbell

II. Ramiro,

I just wanted to write you a little note to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed being in your course this semester. I have never had a professor that has pushed me to work intellectually as you have, at so many levels of analysis, nor that has such an apt level of knowledge when it comes to the subject matter.

I’m sure that when I look back at you through blurring time, I will see you as a fondly constructed fiction.

With an almost pure sincerity,

Zachary David Campbell

III. Ramiro,

Yo apenas desear escribir usted uno pequeño nota decir usted cuánto yo tener gozar ser en su curso este semestre. Yo tener nunca tener uno profesor que tener empujar mí trabajar intelectual como usted tener, en tan mucho nivel análisis, ni que tener tal uno conveniente nivel conocimiento cuando él venir tema materia.

Yo ser seguro que cuando yo mirar detrás en usted con tiempo que vela yo ver usted como uno encariñado construir ficción.

Con uno casi puro sinceridad,

Zachary David Campbell

IV. Ramiro,

It only wanted to write a note to say to him whatever to him I have enjoyed being in its semestral east course. I have never had a professor whom he has pushed to me to work with the mind like you, at so many levels of analysis, nor that so has a guessed right knowledge as far as the matter.

I am sure that, on having looked behind in the time, which steams up the things, I will see him like a fiction constructed with liking.

With an almost pure sincerity,

Zachary David Campbell

2005-06-07T01:14:00.000-05:00

last saturday i was betting against policemen on chickens in a cockfight deep in Quito. this week i'm telemarketing for my father. i'm trying to tutor french and spanish but i'm not sure if all that'll work out.

and not even the love of my parents can save me from the Lonely Midwest. it's filled with silence and void on actual and figurative levels, but that doesn't mean i don't enjoy it, on occasion. it's just so imposing. it demands to be looked in the face until it makes you cry.

but maybe not? maybe i've just been looking away for awhile... what the hell do i know. every one seems so alone here. distant. myself included.

i do enjoy driving, being around family, and eating pizza, but these things get old. just give me a weekend in Grand Rapids.

not a whole lot else to say. we have a big screen tv now. wide screen HDTV shit. it looks kind of out of place in our living room, and no one in the house has mastered how the fuk to work it. i know there's some sort of lesson, parable, or perhaps irony hiding somewhere among these facts, but i'm either too dumb or too impatient to figure out what it is.

suppose that's about it. one more thing.

el ecuador ganó la argentina en fútbol ayer. ¡qué viva!

2005-05-23T14:11:00.000-05:00

congratulations graduates. way to go.

when did you graduate? was it yesterday? if so, i woke up drunk after four hours of sleep with a bruise on my face, having to get it together to go eat dinner with my girlfriend's father and grandmother. i should have been thinking about you.

so what's the next step?

discuss.

or maybe you don't read blogs any more now that you're graduated. good LUCK in the working world!

hanging out and being mortal.

2005-05-18T12:39:00.000-05:00

1. i don´t know what happens when i leave Here, or when i leave anywhere, either literally or metaphorically, just that change will happen again.

or don´t pretend to know the meta-Anything, but i can fix myself in the details, and learn to drink beer at room temperature.

and on top of it all, i´m in LOVE. and you can laugh and fill your heart with alcohol, i don´t mind. in fact it´s fun. the next round´s on you.

if you need me you can find me in the Womb.

2. how long do stars live?

we´re here, get pissed off, attack and get attacked, then think it´s alright because god gets the joke.

what if he doesn't? what if he´s in bed all day depressed chain smoking cigarettes? or that we are the voice that he can´t get out of his head when he´s trying to jerk off.

what does he think about when he jerks off anyway?

3. walk up the stairs to the balcony to look at the lights of the city, or spend time in someone else´s bathroom, it´s all the same.

and it´s alright.

you´re really mostly just water, anyway, and i´m willing to bet at least nearly all insignificant, self-important bastard, so try to chain smoke yourself to sixty, and good luck. just don´t leave me waiting there to give you a blue ribbon.

cigarettes, cortázar, water.

2005-05-04T09:23:00.000-05:00

my birthday and wine, bitter wine. wine is the rite of writing, or viceversa. but literary cum puddles leave a discarded blogged stain in time.

listen to him, he likes to hear himself talk, likes to hear himself form NICE SENTENCES, the one said to the other in the eternal give and take.

and last night the virgin mary hovered over your bed like a ghost while you were sleeping, wine bleeding from between her legs and staining her robes, what does she mean?

went to eat mexican food, god bless her. fajitas and quesadillas and aji and guacamole and sour cream and etc.

on the corner by the restaurant we witnessed a robbery. three naive northamerican girls trekking through a bad neighbourhood, one of whose backpacks was pried off her back while she screamed, the Blacks Strike Again. perhaps angolans, this time?

last night i enjoyed my chilean soap opera, MACHOS, the bittersweet story of seven brothers and their lovers. holy fucking shit: the father has just told one of his eldest sons that his son's wife was actually his mistress for fifteen years.

needless to say, the man went kind of crazy. running around yelling in the ocean and such.
i can't wait for tonight.

the metaphor of stumbling through discarded wrapping paper slipping through my mind's hands?

o, tits.

2005-04-28T17:10:00.000-05:00

oh, what a pity!

the world isn´t as full of wonder as it was just a few months ago. it gets harder than watching paper airplanes glide from third floor windows or appreciating the tile on the floor in wherever you go.

i suppose it has to do with the fact that my bi-daily grain supply has come to an end. but i know the world will live again. it always does through rides in machines and trips to the bathroom to gain perspective and closing then opening your eyes.

last weekend i went to the mountain.

i sent you pictures. we drove around in the country listening to the country accents and looking for a cock fight. unfortunately we never found one. walk through a greenhouse in the middle of the night blownout.

this week i´m doing homework and nothing and falling asleep early on my girlfriend´s bed.

like a goddamn slob.

maybe i´ll see a movie later. an israeli picture. speaking of israeli pictures, i choose to leave you with a quote from will:

"Tits! Is that too much to ask from a movie? Even Schindler got some action when he wasn't saving Jews. Hell, even seeing those Israelite gals run around naked in the camp was erotic, in a very macabre sort of way--the erotics of humiliation, perhaps--and there's something joyful and almost humorous about that scene."

let's hear it for grass roots movements?

2005-04-20T11:25:00.000-05:00

so exactly what the hell did i get myself into? did i expect to find civil peace in a country that's thrown two of it's presidents out of office in the last ten years?

three dead, sixty asfixiated from the mustard gas last night. i went to the protest with my girlfriend, too be nice. but IT'S NOT MY FUCKING COUNTRY. they were chanting let's go quito, you don't fuck with quito, bitch. that's a rough translation of course.

everybody's in the street. and i can't get home because the roads are blocked off, and there's mustard gas? the motherfucking president is paying people to come in from the country to drink and to fight.
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/ecuador/txt/2002/0320shot.jpg

oh, that crazy latin america, what will they come up with next?

smirk on my face: "pray for me."

we are damned.

2005-04-12T11:25:00.000-05:00

i woke up this morning next to a bloody window, stumbled over my bedding partner, and

LOOKED AT THE DUDE IN THE MIRROR.

i had a couple puff from an ugly little pipe a friend gave me, it has an iguana on it. i made it to school in a comfortable blue cloud. i am getting somewhere

in buses, where i like to sit alone next to an empty seat. i am getting somewhere

*

in the lobby of the sanfrancisco i saw neil young's hair.

neil young on saturday night live on a big screen television
in ecuador in another language, somehow neil young didn't fit there.

*
a conscious leaf?

i fell in love seventeen times last week, but never outloud

i am looking forward to you
through time:

a.i can touch you,
b.you are here,
c.not here.

i am not here?

a conscious leaf at 11:46 a.m.

*

i woke up the other morning alone again,
wishing i could call some people's names
and faces i know
i'd like to get drunk completely in english for once. and completely.

and if you want to get or lose a grip on things you can drink robitussin from a bottle
and stare in a mirror

(1)but we all know that
(2)but sometimes when i walk outside then all the fear or guilt or____dissolves
or at least has eyes and i can be no one again
just like every body's else.

2005-03-28T14:06:00.000-06:00

i miss my friends and even some of the people who act like they´re my friends. i miss the united states, god bless her stained soul and brand new cheap shoes. god bless her good side.

today is the day that the lord has made. i will rejoice and be glad in it.

i went to an easter procession where men carry crosses, bands play, hay la bola de gente, and there are people dressed in robes like the KKK. only they´re purple. but with pointy hats and everything. i think they are supposed to be some sort of spirits that accompanied jesus in his death.

there was a man wrapped in barbwire and actually bleeding. i didn´t think it was for real, but i suppose the contextualization of jesus´death is all out and they suffer with him.

hell, christ seemed like some sort of masochist. i can relate, to some extent, i suppose, if only in putting out cigarettes on my arm.

and at one time, i felt pretty damn good up there on the cross.

the other day i really felt like a raw berghoef and egg sandwich on toast, but of course they were all out.

i´ve been watching movies and walking and eating. but not much else. i´m afraid i will never attain nothingness. which is allness, in it´s mask-like form.

today i got kicked out of class for not reading the story of the day. of the week.

fuck.
i guess i was supposed to go out in the hall and read it, from what i understood; still about 70 percent of the words flew over my head. i have to look them up. i guess it´s a story that all happens backwards.

fucking complicated alejo carpentier.

i love being a part of a BLOGline community.

2005-03-09T11:52:00.000-06:00

i'm going to bogota, the humble capitol of colombia, the week after next. it's fucking holy week. i'm a bit nervous about it because my girlfriend can't come with me, and i'm not sure if anyone's going to actually, so it might just be me against the city.

but hopefully not me against the FARQ.

*

this past weekend someone walked up to me with a rock in their hand and just said "un dolar". with a bad-assed face. i told him i didn't have a dollar, i had more than i dollar, i wondered what the hell he was planning on doing with the rock, there was no one around, i gave him 35 cents.

we met going different ways, but when we parted, he started following me. i noticed this. i went into the bus stop and he didn't follow me, i had to pay 25 cents to go into the bus stop, but i could see out of the corner of my eye he was looking at me, then an undistinguishable hand gesture.

i was kind of nervous and afraid. sometimes i don't mind being a coward in this way, because i know in other ways i'm not. but i think you could understand i get kinda nervous at the intersection of money demands and potential assault.

what is it with me and blacks, anyway? yeah, i should probably make some friends with blacks so i don't have to stereotype them, but 66% of blacks i have encounters with on the street really don't seem to help any public relations cause.

yeah, that's kinda racist.

it's just that how can racism feel so right when it's so wrong?

*

the other day i had a thought about being tired of the ivory tower, because before i thought i was doing myself a justice becoming aware of alot of things that have taken place in space and time, somehow drawing closer to the well of experience of humanity in a way, making half-assed theses up about stuff 90% of people don't know about or probably wouldn't care about, drawing closer to something...not eternal, but..i'm not sure of the adjective i'm looking for.

in any case, i thought, well, no, my experience is one that has been far more rare in the history of humanity (although it's becoming less and less), to be fairly educated and to have much more than enough, etc., to know things luxouriously.

and i thought that perhaps that hum of humanity, that constant drone, it may be, is heard loudest through the experience/s of the "common" man, as he's called, although i think that's a bit pejorative.

the working man? spanish expresses it better, i'm talking about a "sentido popular", a popular feeling, a popular meaning, popular referring to people, that mass, rather than the more modern definition we've given to popular as a current trend. or something. far more people have experienced life through eyes we call "ignorant". so why not try and connect with that, in a way?

but unfortunately i've been stained with education.

so that's why i kind of think all those people who give their money to televangelists, etc., i don't know. i wouldn't be so hard on them. because we all try to find some way to numb our pain, maybe they're just not as conscious of the fact that that's what they're doing.

we all need an opiate. mine's smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and drinking caffeine and having orgasms and watching movies and listening to music and being in love. those are my doors. and herbs when they're around.

and just because i'm conscious of them doesn't make me any better, though, does it?

but hell, if the rapture does happen soon i'll be on the first plane back to GR to burn timothy lahaye novels.

and have sex with you.

year of the dog.

2005-03-07T14:26:00.000-06:00

i love how this website (http://www.algonet.se/~anki-p/year-of-the-monkey-2004.htm) phrases things:

"Anticipate good times, much activity, and hardy emotional involvement. But Monkey´s influence may inspire Dog to be overly enthusiastic. Projects might not develop as planned and Dog may have to begin anew midyear. Honest Dog does best to avoid questionable enterprises or impractical Monkey get-rich-quick schemes."

2005-03-07T13:34:00.000-06:00

1. the wasting of my twenties filling up the incoherent babbles of a new century.

2. but i can´t find a pen to write with or a language to write in.

3. i wanted to be the man with lights cumming out the mouth, i wanted all the cake.

4. or buying candy off of a working class clown, in a bus to nowhere,

5. to "back to the city."

6. or i never wanted to finish my beer: the glass is more than half-empty.

7.

cumming in the men`s room when god is on your side.

2005-03-02T06:54:00.000-06:00

so this weekend, i went to the beach with a cuencan sociologist and a spanish economist that works for medicins sans frontiers (they`re shipped off to zimbabwe soon), and my girlfriend,

the latter of which i love, a sentiment that has already entered into personal history through speech, that is already gone and coming back again, like a circle.

and reality´s a fiction we like to draw near to when we open our mouths.

*

i often then, this last week´s end, wore my public, quiet anxious mask, the uncomfortable one, pried off at times between gulps of alcohol.

i turned red, but not as red as last time. i ate seafood and drank juice and got bit by mosquitoes and ants, and wandered around searching for half-an-hour squinting out of eyes filling with sweat and suntan lotion--water and beer proved hard to find.

i stood in the ocean and felt nature´s rhythm, a tide rhythm that flowed through my mind later as i tried to fall asleep. i peed in there and stole seashells from god.

i came and took cold showers.

*

tonight i stumble now apathetically now eagerly through a julio cortázar short story called las babas del diablo. i was supposed to have read it two weeks ago.

i paused to write a poem

(imagine that a row of chairs were never understuck with gum,
and then you´re on your way.

vagina that has never bled of blood, nor one that never will.

a restroom that has never seen a seed that´s spilt out on the floor,
and then you´re almost there.

but then again, why yearn this version of a fucking world.)

that i began to hate shortly after it was born, after it´s existence was distinct and singular of my own. i feel i wanted to be a writer again, felt humbly unqualified and painfully unerudite, unaware of nearly anything, but realized i was a writer, any way. i do write.

*

several children counted change back to me, slowly, steady, right the first time,
but let´s hear it for second chances and 2nd tries.

1. you are the awkward mascot on my motley team´s side.

2. you are the soiled bride, bled red with life, like ocean cums on white.

some thoughts on rangeela.

2005-02-24T12:31:00.000-06:00

damn, i was hoping rangeela would fall at a time when i was present on campus, because i wanted to write to chimes talking about what a farse rangeela is, how it shares many qualities with the efforts at the earlier parts of last century to parade africans around in cages on show in major cities like new york. they did do that, right? i´ve heard tell.

in any case, it belittles Other cultures and the otherness of other cultures to a spectacle, instantaneously de-complexifying them and classifying them all together because of their otherness, which doesn´t make any since does it?, as a nice show for the white man to watch. a nice parade for me to watch of everything i´m not. they should have some sort of display of dutch culture, west michigan dutch culture though, or better yet the culture of my friends who get piss face drunk and chain smoke and stroke their dicks and sit around. you guys still do all that shit, right?

i´d like to be in rangeela myself, painted black with big red lips. could you see it? i´d do a little minstrel dance for the president byker himself, yes massuh!

com et va? :: anar tirant

2005-02-23T11:22:00.000-06:00

i would never put my money down on the Electric Light Orchestra if i were you.

this morning i saw a fellow student buying FOUR smirnoff ice at 10:00 am, and of course i thought of nick reynolds.

a paradox? a misunderstanding.

when a notion/concept/idea/understanding is first introduced into our minds, it´s semantic space is like that of an inflated balloon, that goes getting shaved down more and more processionally where the nature of said concept is revealed to us, exactified.

what seems paradoxical to me is the fact that the more this semantic space is narrowed, the more it becomes part of our subjective reality, the more proper the idea is to us, to our own minds, BUT, at the same time, this shaving down also puts us in touch with objectivity, in a way, a connection with the shared concepts of our socio-cultural reality, a sort of shared definition, if you will for me, a nearness...for example, all us angloamericans probably share more similarity in our concept of what it means to be poor than say, joe mbuutuu from botswana. but on the individual level thinking that our conceptions can often reach an equality is ridiculous, maybe. that and language is the bastard. language isn´t innocent...it´s a representation, it´s a lie.

this seems paradoxical. or it doesn´t make any sense.

i need to buy some flip flops.

you, why do you always feel the need to situate yourself in space and time?

"i exist, i exist", yeah, keep telling yourself that. asshole.

nothingness behind your masks.

2005-02-23T08:36:00.000-06:00

i met the latin kevin d.HA. he dresses and acts like kevin but i'm not sure if he's quite so neurotic. what? and of course he's from spain. he talks with a fucking lisp.

and i'm going to the beach again this weekend, with him. and someone else and someone else. hopefully i won't end up shedding skin for three weeks like last time.

peter, you seem to be going through a rough time. maybe you're confused. i just want you to know that_____can help. _____is always there for you, _____ always has been, and if you pray to_____, _____will listen to your prayer, and at least think about it for a couple of seconds. or a second. peter, _____loves you.

isn't it a bit paradoxical to live in grand rapids for a whole winter and NOT try to take your own life? i've always thought so.

quilt of bullshit.

2005-02-17T15:05:00.000-06:00

verily, i say unto you: cast thou glance upon all my friends, for their clothes are dirty but their hands are clean

and i am proud of them.

°

right now my mind feels like a gallon of neapolitan ice cream melting together in the sun

and does any one besides me remember when we were living in that hellhole off of wealthy,

then when will refvem walked into the living room with the tub of thoroughly knife-gouged margarine, jokingly commenting that it was a metaphor for his soul, with infinity in his eyes?

will refvem, lead us in prayer to apollo, and thereafter.

°

some times i´m afraid again. paranoid with that dick-grabbing, sleep-inducing fear that my parents were always right all along, or maybe that i´m spitting in the face of a sacred code.

°

look at how they shake those sirens, ambulances after midnight.

too many times i confuse mediocre canvas of my room´s rectangular window pane with obscure dreams, shrouded in nothingness.

°

horns, wings, the colours red & white.

2005-02-17T11:11:00.000-06:00

holy fucking shit.

the prospect of spiritual warfare going on all around us?

i should wear thicker socks.

girls, girls, girls.

2005-02-17T10:38:00.000-06:00

yesterday there was a huge protest and thousands of people took to the streets to march and to show their solidarity against the president.

alex says that things here are ran like a farm, but i think there´s something lost in the translation.

it´s been raining every day here, which makes it cold in the morning and more and more often i´m finding that it takes the motivation of smoking a cigarette to get me out of bed in the morning.

yesterday la Consuelo changed my bed sheets, now the color scheme clashes wildly and, who knows? that act could be solely responsible for the death of thousands of people in a couple of hours, or centuries.

last night i dreamt in french, and i was talking to my literature professor in french, because in my waking life i know he can pronounce a couple of words with a decent accent.

in my dream his french was fluent, though, and i noticed my accent was getting worse. i woke up wanting to go to europe, and wondering why i had a quite strange or more than amiable relationship with an anonymous fat girl in my dream.

i saw a good argentine movie last night called "historias minimas" which means "minimal histories" or "minimal stories", or something entirely different. i went home and read "the argentine writer and tradition" by borges, and i think i got something out of it, but i´m still not quite sure as to what "gauchesque" means.

my blog is a fucking waste of time and space. or at least i need to die and be born once to ever write in this blog again. i´m starting to hate it.

why is every singular thing so fucking fleeting and ghost-like? it´s meaning seems to already be floating away with the wind as soon as it is.

an author has said that due to the fact that we´re mortal beings we walk around like phantoms, never sure of the moment in which we´ll cease to exist, always in a hurry, anxious.

i leave you with a quote from my mother, which is probably a lot more interesting than anything i´ve written in this post thus far (i´m not sure why, but i found it humorous):

Hey back from Las Vegas. I felt sorry for all the people there using their bodies to make money.alot of mexicans are at each street corner handing out leafets (sic) for girls,girls,girls.

... but i'll play the game.

2005-02-16T12:05:00.000-06:00

josiah,

as for god’s unconditional and everlasting love, maybe you could talk about that to the street children in this city who sniff glue all day so they don’t have to realize their hunger pains; they could may use a pie-in-the-sky heroine more than i, friend.

“and he looked up, and saw the rich men casting their gifts into the treasury. and he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites. and he said, of a truth i say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: for all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of god: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.” (luke 21:1-4)

and how much more beautiful the offering of the widow who barely had anything to give than that of the rich men, how beautiful the love of the being who loves despite it’s difficulty than he who loves in abundance with facility, how much more tangible and real;

besides, accepting and relishing in the love of christ seems the physical equivalent of enjoying sex with a sincere prostitute.

(if you’d let yourself fall in love, tangible, organic, non-static love, maybe you’d know what it means.)

as for the wisdom of man v. the wisdom of god, tu quoque? you’ve spent the last four years in an institution that stands, within the scope of modernity, as a symbol of man’s attempt toward and respect for wisdom and knowledge, specifically self-knowledge, i.e. man’s effort toward knowledge of the humanitarian sort.

in any case, the word of god had to pass through a human filter, ergo man’s wisdom, in order to enter history. christ himself was a wise man, but fully man as well as divine, transforming his wisdom into a piece of that of the corpus of the history of the wisdom of man.

i reiterate that I feel that christianity is but a chapter in the history of man’s relation to the divine, a beautiful myth, of whose authors fortunately didn’t distinguish between truth and fiction nearly as rigidly as we do, but how can it be approached with any morsel of the religious objectivity that it demands?

my opinion holds that people believe something because they want to, perhaps because it fits well their social or cultural reality, but not necessarily because it’s “true”.

i don’t mean to sound asshole or mean, on the contrary i love you. you’ve opined on behalf of what i’ve written, now i return the favor. and it fits to note that i do believe in the divine, but i don’t think by any means that she’s beyond reproach.

sincerely,

zachary david campbell

p.s. (yet how much more does the superfluous character of judas suffer, how much does he himself sacrifice for enabling christ’s sacrifice?; much more than three days: now eternally, now infinitely in hell.)

history´s secrets.

2005-02-14T07:11:00.000-06:00

how can we possibly know if an act is right or wrong?

guanabana juice in the mornings.

2005-02-10T14:33:00.000-06:00

for it is written:

"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." (ecclesiastes 1:7-9)

and that which disheartens me is the premise that there are perhaps only a handful of singularities, a collection of only certain entities and that the substance of everything is made up of their variation, the infinite possibilities of the combinations of their nuances. there are perhaps only two or seven people in my life, in the world, each complemented by infinitesimal (sic?) personal nuances.

and to emphasize my point, the preceding paragraph is practically borgesian plagiarism.

*

outside, my respiratory system fills with smog and the mountains kiss the clouds. after dark, the quechua indians dig through garbage. at times, i´ve been able to mumble primitive syntax in their language and make myself understood, a fact which has made to smile, but more than anything they´ve wanted that i buy something.

at once, i thought they were here first, but later found that they, too, had been conquerors. and neither is there comfort in the fact that the conquest does not continue infinitely throughout time´s spiral. or does it?

have you ever thought, mr. gregory, of the horrid possibility that perhaps there was never a beginning. what horrible emptiness. what grotesque cyclicalness.

and that there are combinations of words eternally lost because eldon spangle isn´t writing at this minute, they are gone forever.

*

we are damned rational beings. here i´ve been told that putting a burnt match back in the box brings good luck. i only wish i were so superstitious.

in 1587 in what is now modern day perú, the quechua indian guaman poma de ayala wrote of los conquistadores

"Y que de día y de noche hablauan cada uno con sus papeles, quilca."

or roughly,

"And night and day each one of them would speak with his papers, quilca."

de Ayala was giving an account from the perspective of a strictly oral culture the phenomenon of reading that he was witnessing.

he narrates the process that these men, whom he describes elsewhere as having "faces covered with wool", undertook-some sort of magical communication, a talking, with this "quilca", which in quechua means "pictorial representation", or drawing.

de Ayala had no idea what the fuck was going on, so he mythically filled in the gaps.

and what i wouldn´t give to possess that magic, magic that reason murdered, magic which in aquel tiempo filled in the gaps, caverns that modernity has defined in only negative terms, and the mere presence of the word "ignorance" in my vocabulary is testament of that fact.

this seems an odd place to leave off, but friend, i have nothing else to say. i go to smoke a cigarette.

i really should be correcting a translation of an economic article in the new york times on how fucked the economy is here.

just wait...

chévere

2005-02-04T11:18:00.000-06:00

in a matter of hours i'm headed to the beach. we're all on holiday here.

i'm going to drink beer and turn red so y'all can let your dicks freeze to the pavement.

and drink beer as well.

because it's friday there, as well.

there's nothing else to say...except that i want a cameo in one of will's porn scripts.

c/o the bane of financial institutions, part II

2005-02-01T11:11:00.000-06:00

the final correspondence b/w "my video shoppe" and i:

(see the post entitled "c/o the bane of financial institutions" for further reference)

jigimama@sbcglobal.net
to me
Zach, I received your check today. Your account is in good standing. I will also contact CBCS to insure your name is removed from collections. Best wishes on travelling abroad.
CT Noll

zach campbell
thank you ct noll,it´s very refreshing indeed to be out of the united states, even more refreshing to be here.

thank you for taking care of my account.

zach

i still think they´re fucking cunts, in a way. jigimama??

and borges was afraid of sex

2005-01-31T13:15:00.000-06:00

the other night i was sitting on the toilet, and then i yelled to alexandra,
asking if she´d put me in a movie.

we were spanning time together in her friend´s apartment, they are currently in spain.

mostly it´s where she stays some nights, where i stay fewer than that, and where we act out semi-domestic situations together.

a few minutes earlier she had mentioned that she did the make-up for a commercial on television; i was looking and smoking absently out the window, and i glanced over the t.v. a second too late.

and next i heard her holler that "si", that she would put me in a film. right then i felt my ego skim into some smooth warm vagina, then the rest of my shit slid out, and later on i went home.

*

the term "being in love" is an example of language´s feeble attempt at framing a part of the succession of events that are called reality, and i think there´s an arrogance there, to expect that such a term can be applied equally and thoroughly over a period of happenings or successions that are called a "time".

*

a few weeks ago i went to the demo premiere of an educational video series entitled "ecuador pluricultural", which Alex helped to produce.

the series features the voices of members of various indigenous tribes narrating over video-tape of varying aspects of their daily lives. quite interesting.

during the reception after the video had been aired, i was standing around absently and alone as i often do, and a member of the huaorani tribe attempted to engage me in conversation in a language that neither of our parents spoke.

we were drinking juice.

i think i was able to communicate to him that no, that i didn´t work for audiovisuales don bosco, and that i was, in fact, a student studying spanish in ecuador until the end of may.

he told me some things that i had trouble making out, and he handed me a colorful pamphlet about the huaoroni tribe, in which someone had summarized their plight: the offering of invitations to their community in order to raise awareness about their dwindling resources in the face of ecuadorian governmental expansion.

i stood their for awhile, fondly leafing through the photos of jungle scenes and half-naked folk, and when he was leaving, for reasons i still don´t understand, the amiable man wrote down his number for me on a piece of paper and gave it to me. this confounded my girlfriend as well.

it could have been a huaorani custom, but judging from the pictures in the pamphlet i´d say the huaorani have a less than thriving telecommunications market.

*

a few days ago i came across a very colorful piece of paper showcasing the various indigenous tribes of ecuador, complete with a diagram of their respective provincial ubication. the huaorani, a community of 3,000 people, live in the north-eastern amazon of ecuador, and they speak huao tiriro.

an adult male and female huaorani together with their infant child were represented in a quadro-color near-naked illustration, and, as if the ethno-fires of alterity hadn´t been sufficiently fueled between the huaorani and i, it looked as if the depiction of the huaorani adult male in the illustration was in possession of an erect penis.

i wasn´t positive, though, because their seemed to be a belt-like string spanning the circumference of the huaorani´s waist, which could have been holding up the silo.

i asked alexandra about it, and she said that yes, that the string was holding up the silo. only she didn´t say silo.

so i think i might give that guy a call one of these days, to see what´s up.

i wonder if he drinks beer.

*

i realized a few days ago that i had ignorantly and happily simplified life again, and that the graves of my more difficult and melancholy selves weren´t dug very deep, and that they were only sleeping, anyway.

or maybes these were the selves of others?

welcome back, in any case.

desde la cara de dios

2005-01-24T15:29:00.000-06:00

how come no one ever told me in such explicit terms?
that
the world is filled with those that possess/ed the Verb, the Word, logos, as they call it (¨to do", i suppose), and those that just borrowed it.

quite interesting, the idea that western expansion that led to a global culture obliges/d those who didn´t share such ideas, who were content in existence sans progress, expansion, perfection, and only as part of something, to justify themselves as Men in light of this new global era.

but i can´t undo my western-ness. and that´s fine. because i probably wouldn´t have, then, pink floyd in my headphones.

or then maybe i would.

(we call it riding the gravy traaaaaaain)

*

going to another country always makes unfold my ignorance before me, effortlessly. just lays it all out. and i feel, in verisimilar-ness to all the clocks on the wall in all the places here that have nearly exactly the wrong time (for the on-and-offing of electricity?i´m not sure), that i lose some conventional meaning i had at some point.

but maybe i never had even that...as for the clocks, and for me as well, i´m not sure with what it´s replaced.

nos vamos creando, puede ser. O nos vamos estar creado.

i know at least i am the stranger here.

*

last night i was looking at a map, looking at where i´ve been. it´s still all so close, in so many ways.

i feel, and i direct this particularly to you, Mr. Gregory, who, in your regretful absence, make known your presence, that i must, at some point, penetrate the un-west.

but not the un-westerner, necessarily.

*

right now i write you from the valley.

from the illusion of order, the fashion show that is the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito. where most everyone´s a lighter shade of brown. i like my professors, but i really haven´t made many friends.

last week alexandra and i went to a school-affiliated party to which many of my compañeros de clase were alleged to attend and at which i aspired to make friends. but the lighting too absent, the music too loud, i nair (sp?) met a soul.

even several months ago this sort of party would be right up my alley, i think i would have been able to fulfill that maldita cycle that so often calls me by my more secret name, complete with awkward and half-conscient nocturnal emission, morning unfamiliarity, the end in regret.

you know, the hurried emptying of that cup of thoughtless, clumsy passion.

but i just didn´t have that in me anymore.

*

a couple of nights later, she told me that she would go anywhere in the world with me, and then
i had a feeling i´ve never had before.

oh but that fucking cowboy, that freedom spirit, no matter how artificial or deceptive be he, o! and now i love him now i damn him!, is still a very integral part of my soul.

i leave you wishing you could come and have a Pilsener here with me, feel this weather on your soul, this being...

so drop a piss for me.

mountains, cigarettes and foreign names.

2005-01-09T18:14:00.000-06:00

so i made it to quito.

these past few days have been very nice. i really haven´t gotten used to the city as of yet, but i´ve hung out with good people.

i think the toilet water just goes straight down.

i think i´m realizing that i´m in love. which is some wicked type of magical shit. it only takes a self.

i can smoke in the house and the guard lets me out at night. he lets me in during the day.

i stand out like a cum stain among all the brown faces, but it´s alright. there are a lot of honkies here.

i was thinking that will revvoem should come here. i´m not sure why. i think he might enjoy himself.

yesterday i came, and today.

abba´s playing in the room of internet.

until later,
right now i´m just all eyes and pussy.

c/o the bane of financial institutions

2005-01-05T22:53:00.000-06:00

for lack of anything else more meaningful to write, i include the text of an unnecessarily wordy letter sent to My Video Shoppe of Grand Rapids, MI, which reads as follows:

1 de enero de 2005

To whom this may concern at My Video Shoppe:

My name is Zachary Campbell and I have been one of your customers for awhile now. At some point in the late fall/early summer of last year I accumulated some late fees for a few DVDs at your locale. I was informed of my tardiness and of the fact that financial matters would be turned over to some sort of financial and/or collecting institution if I weren’t to turn in my viewing selections either that night or the next day. I promptly returned the discs in the time allotted.

Earlier this past month I was contacted by a credit agency alerting me of a matter of debt I currently have with My Video Shoppe. Said agency had not been able to contact me until then because I had undergone a change of residence; I wasn’t aware that I owed My Video Shoppe said debt. The week of 20 December I contacted My Video Shoppe and discovered that the amount was around $88 USD. I am enclosing a personal check in the amount of $90 USD, in order to settle my debt.

If there is any further matter that needs to be addressed between us, you can contact me via e-mail (as I will be living abroad in the following months) at zachcampbell@gmail.com.
I wish you success in your continued pursuit to offer films of a higher quality and variety to the populace of West Michigan. I appreciate your fairness in this matter.

Best Regards,

Zachary David Campbell

sometimes the best present of all is a helping hand

2005-01-02T17:59:00.000-06:00

so it's my last sunday in the ole states united for awhile. the past few weeks at home have been good and family. i've had way too many doctor's visits, so it will be nice to leave and to think of my health as a distant vague idea rather than something that could drag me down and eventually really give me the old fuck over if I keep disregarding it.

but of course maybe it already has a few times.

i feel near invincible in some ways, though. for all my vaccinations.

you can give me your yellow-fevered, hepatitis-ed, typhoided, malarialed beings as company if you wish. and i may play Judas to your Dr. Jesús.

speaking of the man's birthday, i spent the last few hours of christmas in a shitty suburb karaoke bar surrounded by people whom i would have loved to piss off if i had had more than one beer in that place. in any case, i listened to 50-cent's 'birthday' and i thought of the christians' Saviour as just a shorty in the manger, being serenaded by 50-cent himself.

quite a powerful multicultural image.

my new year's eve was filled with tamed revery. my friend smoked me of his smoke that seemed to be laced in some way. i'm not sure what it was, though, save energizing. i think he got it from one of his relatives and said it was the kind of weed parents smoke. parental marijuana. i threw up stomach acid and potato peels later for a good ten minutes and he said it sounded like i couldn't breathe.

suppose i'm not quite cut out yet to be any sort of a parent.

and those type of moments are antithetical to the ones in which i feel invincible. i can take on nearly any third-world disease now but i can't make it through my twenty-second fucking new year's without throwing up.

funny thing, mr. gregory never even stuck his nervous being around on new year's. i wonder what he's been up to-most likely fumbling around in his hope chest in infinitesimal failure. i wonder if he'll find out that what he's looking for has never even been in there...

* * * * *

some sort of sour melancholy is starting to grow like mold on the outer boundaries of my consciousness. i'm not sure for what it's there, or even if it's singular.

i'm really anxious about leaving, in a way. and about alexandra. even though i feel like i do it time and again, i know i do have reservations about throwing myself into situations where i may never even figure out W.T.F. is going on.

the best thing for me to do in those types of situations is to just keep smoking cigarettes.

the size of my grand rapids-shaped hole.

2004-12-21T18:08:00.000-06:00

so today i found out who my host mother will be in ecuador. a certain Consuelo Guzmán of middle-class stock. alexandra told me that she lives in a central middle-class area, which is really nice because that way i can keep away from thieving low-life spics who want to rob me of my gringo-ness.

i bought some x-mas presents today for the family. i feel like they may really be enjoyed. at least some of them. i got my father a clint eastwood film, my mother a jimmy stewart film. (so far at least they're original). i got my brother ryan a cd, bonnie prince billy's 'master and everyone', which i think he'll enjoy, and my younger brother brett a copy of salinger's 'nine stories'. i kinda hope that one opens new doors for him in a way, it did for me. i got rose a Dr. Seuss book. one she'll be able to read, hopefully. i was looking for some book that could help in some way with the formation of her identity, as she's growing up half-black in a white world and i feel at times my parents could be doing more to introduce her to culturally diverse or non-white cultural situations, or could at least have more black friends (hell i'm not even sure i can express what i'm getting at here), because I know at some point there will be confusion on her part. but it was difficult to find something she could read as well as something that would be appropriate. she's seven years old. for awhile i was wondering what a malcolm x children's book would really do to her. i know she wouldn't really be able to wrap her head around it, but of course i know my parents might be upset with me if she became a radical black-panther first grader the week after i left for ecuador as well.

but that would be funny.

there's often this temptation to try and take part somehow in the development of my younger siblings, though i'm not sure the nature of its motives. in any case, i hope that temptation to take part in the formation of my 'underlings' is still there if i ever have children some-day. or not?

i'm getting an MRI tonight to eliminate, in the good doctor's mind, that 10% chance that my swiveling knee is swiveling for the reasons he thinks it is.

i hope you're all doing well. all two of you.

fuck. how lame am i? i could just e-mail the both.

and take it easy.

everything is going as planned

2004-12-20T13:30:00.000-06:00

There have been some interesting developments in my life as of late, Mr. Gregory. While the trip home went fine, I was almost sure the weather/otherwise-stained mattress was going to fly off at any point. a few hours outside of des moines, IA, my mother locked the keys in the car, as well. in her purse. which is fine. it all made for an interesting ride home.

upon arriving home, I checked my e-mail to find a bill from my former roomate, an unspeakably large telephone bill, for calls made to the ever-expansive waistline of our hemisphere, specifically the mountainous capital-city of Quito, in Ecuador. I'm currently slaving, Mr. Gregory, in father's office to pay off said bills. I may break the zero-threshold and have some money for my trip down there to our little cousin continent. That is, if luck is on my side, and it seems it surely is, it surely has been for awhile.

If that weren't enough, Mr. Gregory, I've received advisement from an old orthopedic-surgeon acquaintance that I cancel my plans for said odyssey next year due to a certain torn ACL-muscle in my right knee. Although he's not sure that it's an ACL tear, Mr. Gregory, he explicitly said, and I quote, "If I had 10 chips in life, I would throw 9 of them in on this being a torn-ACL. I would throw the 10th one in if...(mumbling/misunderstanding on my part)". He said something about throwing 1/4th of the 10th chip in if it were divisible...one can't divide such chips so eeeasily, now, can one, Mr. Gregory?

It was quite a performance by the old Doctor. He went on to tell me I would be risking having to take on a series of knee-surgeries and/or replacements and possibly be plagued by early arthritis in my youth by post-poning said surgery. He inquired, exhaustedly, keeping up the performance that has perhaps beefed his income in the past, if it were possible to cancel said trip in favor of surgery and three-month rehabilitation.

Oh, and you know me by now, Mr. Gregory. I assured him it was certainly not possible. There was simply too much at stake, on too many a plain.

Unfortunately, Mr. Gregory, the history of this doctor fellow and I is certainly not over. It has, indeed, only begun. I may have one this first battle, but the doctor has my good health at his disposal. Blasted Doctor and his arsenal! I am to have an MRI tomorrow evening, 10:00 pm sharp, and I can expect you, Mr. Gregory? Or will you be up to more of the same?

In any case, seems things have been going swimmingly, giving me a real love for life.

Hopefully everything will continue going as planned,

X_____________

my ode to dan gelderfuck.

2004-12-09T13:34:00.000-06:00

it's almost the end of all school for 2004. last night i was to do home-work and catch-up swim exercises for a swimming class i've attended rather casually, but i got distracted by the prospect of drinking, as well as the fact that my knee was re-injured by the help of a certain andrew, groping my asterisk. the last time i did make-up swimming i saw my 'coach' there, my instructor dan geldersomething, who was finishing up swim team practice, and i thought he might be happy to see me since i was doing the equivalent of 'make up work' for his class. in fact i've been swimming my ass off this week, sometimes twice a day. and that can be hell.

so i saw him at the window of his office as i was picking up two size 9-11 fins from the bin across the way, and he raised his hand reluctantly, looked more like a nazi salute than a greeting, and he gave me a kind of disappointed look. like it was really a bitch he had to see me or something. the kind of look you might get from a pious christian virgin whose wife denies him sex on his wedding night in favor of reading from the bible naked together. i don't know what his deal is. it just increased my already negative view of athleticism.

anyway, i really plowed into those milwaukee's beasts at about seven, and they ended up to be the beverage of the night as i went out later with peter and his new flame to pick some more up. a good new flame, mind you. this morning was a bit of a struggle to get up again, hitting the alarm several times. it took a bit longer to get my shit together and go 'cause my hair was all frizzed out from the chlorine overload.

i've got to go lead a conversation group in french in about fifteen minutes. it's sometimes quite enjoyable, but not usually. in this first group there's a middle-aged woman who's learning french so she can use it on her yearly trips to "Provence" with her husband. pretty bourgeois, but i like her effort. she can at least get her fucking syntax together, which is more than i can say for most of my students most of the time.

a plus,

ultra sounds are safe for your unborn babies.

2004-12-03T10:44:00.000-06:00

yesterday in class a professor told me i looked like i just woke up. i told her no, and would've told her that i had in fact been up for several hours but i couldn't think that fast in spanish right then. i failed her quiz about five minutes later. the day is a worn-out ritual this time of year. went out last night and had a pretty good time. why is it I feel like I can see so much better at night-time?

I got tested for HIV yesterday. negative, yeah. you can't get much more nervous than a waiting room at an STD clinic. at least i don't think i could. it was even more bothersome because the nurse who administered the test was in a rush, so it was chaotic as well. i felt bombarded with information about safe sex, overwhelmed. and actually, there is some pretty helpful information about how that damned modern plague of all plagues the HIV virus is spread:

1) blood
2) semen
3) vaginal fluids
4) milk of human breast

so watch out for those things if they're coming to you unprotected. one shouldn't get caught in the cross-hairs so to speak.

i think i may have a beer later.

'are you my arthur?'

2004-11-30T15:19:00.000-06:00

i think it was a couple of months ago, somewhere in the blur of the end of the summer and the beginning of school and fall that i really started realizing i'm going to die some day. if i really had to narrow it down i think i was having some psychedelic thoughts, silly but important thoughts like thinking of my body as the union-point of a holy place or wishing i really felt more solidarity with the whole of the animal kingdom. anyway it scared me that some day i'll be nothingness. nothingness in more explicit terms than nothingness inside my soul or a nothingness you can find on the dirty floor of my room.

and you'd think all those thoughts would encourage me to get my act together. or i'd think so. but sometimes i'd rather hang out than strike some sort of chord with the eternal.

but i have to go now.