Empty Weekend

Yesterday Chelsea said something about the weather that was rang true. "I like the rain- its the constant cloud cover that gets to me" Isn't that the truth!

And in life too I guess. I could take disasters with definite limits a lot better than I can take this continual gnawing void. Now maybe I should be glad that I'm not having both!

Yesterday (and yes, this is where the title came from) was one of those days when every one disappears to study and the house hums with the lack of people. Maybe it's just growing up in a house with millions of kids, but large empty houses nerve me out. On top of this, on Friday, Josh officially dropped out of school and Karl got fired. Karl had apparently been planning to quite anyway, so its not objectively that bad, but its depressing. And now he's gone to Washington. And Josh... I guess... I guess. So close to the end. It seems such a waste.

I don't know if I'm justified, but I really feel like the muddy and tired surviver of some war. What's left is so little- the grand hopes we started out with, dispensed with one by one in our disasters. What's left? Only a handful of people, too scattered and involved in their own lives to even say goodbye to each other. I guess we are setting out into the real world. But if this is it's harbinger, the thought doesn't comfort me.

lots of vodka

"If we had remembered earlier our Father's house
Where we grew together, and that old kindness,
You would not be dying now, oh my sister, my spouse,
pierced with my sword in the battle's heat and blindness."

C.S. Lewis

Concluding Mythological Postscript

The Noface. I identify with him a lot. In the story the Noface is creepy and eats people. (Note to self: am I creepy and do I eat people?) If you pay attention, though, he simply seems to be mirroring the people around him. In the bad witch's house everyone is consumed with greed, and shows it by begging for the gold he can give them. If they accept his gold, he, well, consumes them. Greed for greed. He is sort of determined by the people he's around.

Despite this, I think he really is just looking for a good person (and maybe a friend?). When Sen comes along and is nice to him and wont accept anything from him (though he offers quite persistently) he follows her, and lets her led him back to the good witch's house where people aren't greedy and he doesn't have to eat anyone.

Anyway. I went to Halloween as the Noface. It was a wonderful costume to have because for once I didn't feel like I had to act. That was just how I felt.

Kaonashi; Noface

And just because I'm pretty sure no one is reading this (PARANOIA:exceptforyourworstenemies
whoreadingiteverydayandaregoingtousethisinformationtodestroyyou), here's about Iraq.

You know every one is saying that the war is a conspiracy or that it was a mistake in the first place, or that Bush is a nut case cowboy, and therefore we should pull out. I am willing to grant all that, but it doesn't seem like that means we should pull out. For the simple reason that once upon a time Iraq had a government that could keep civil war from breaking out and keep other countries from subjugating its people, and we destroyed it. It may have been an evil dictatorship, but it did the things any government is supposed to do. How can we think that somehow the chaos which will ensue if we pull out before they have a stable government again wont be on our heads? That's like 'freeing' an animal that has been trained to never ever eat food that isn't in its dish by tossing it out in the wild. It has the wrong training for survive in the wild and it will probably starve to death.

If we pull out before they can handle it, is there any reason why the shit (that will go down) wont be our fault?

Unless of course you think that this is all a scheme to control the oil and therefore the nefarious orchestrators of this plot mean us to stay in Iraq indefinitely. But I really must know- if the war is really about oil- why in heck are gas prices still so high?

Thou, Nature, art my goddess

All in all, this was not a bad day. I woke up on my own. The day was unhurried and pearly sunny. I got a decent amount of schoolwork done. And I got to read two acts of King Lear out loud with friends, and we all didn't hate each other- and it was a good time. And Kristen did the Fool awesomely. It wasn't the best day ever. It wasn't horrible.

As traumatic as everything can be, it is sometimes comforting to be reminded that the bare minimum of being alive is... a good thing.

notes of a wandering mind

I was looking over some of my notes from class today. Here are some of the things I found.


(This was from the beginning of the term. It reminds me a little bit of The Snowman, by Wallace Stevens, which is suspiciously hanging on my wall. The 'you' is actually me.)

Judge for yourself the silence you must live by
Live in, and live unending
This becomes clearer everyday
As it grows greater
It is more than an escape or an action
More than a solution
It's a mighty ocean,
That you drift into day by day.
For it takes you into itself
Like a gull in the distance,
And you, the silent one, become the soul of silence.



Later in the term.


I've cut myself afloat, and drift in pain
escaping the land, it's burning rain
it's rolling banks of smoke, it's smog,
it's corpses lolling, it's smoldering logs,
it's rubble unending, it's cables and trash-
by the edge of the sea I lashed a raft
and cut myself off from the life I shared
though I surely die here, I wont gangrene there.


At some other point- chronology uncertain.


Lost from flights and fights uncertain in which very
many souls have been withdrawn, and hid beneath their stones
to pass the time I dally with leaves and skulls and berry-
ozzing bottles, uncorked and dripping over bones.
And by a foaming cup I dull the babble
of the lying dead that despise their place together
blown by cold fear like a wind in eddying rabbles
each gibbering its proof that he still will live forever,
and he alone. Far through the trees, rooks
are shaken up into the sky, as old bells speak
of battles heightening in the ruins where once men took
their war with heaven out in brick to build a tower and a keep.
To this riddle an answer I'd obtain
do I desert those fighters most to go or to remain?

Yesterday.

The oldest of brothers blubbered-
but not over his brothers grave-
why can't I fail more freely?
whoever finds me might not like me,
and it's more than I can bear.