I know what the fuck she's talking about

They All Meant Well

Going to law school with a faculty who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

50,000,000 elvis fans cant be wrong? I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas

Abstract: I dont get it, the people who send their children to private schools to learn about writers artists and historical figures would do anything in their power to disuade them from following in the footsteps of said artists,writer and historical figures. As if to say " it was ok for them but dont risk it, dont you dare trade security for liberty".Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ''the rat race'' is not yet final.

	50

Such are the trappings of middle class and I would be lieing if I wrote that I wasnt deeply indebted to and angry with them. Part of being the child of parents who carefully designed their life so that you would be able have the utmost ability to, in turn, design the lives of your children ( as we are inevitably expected to reproduce) is sitting down at dinner tables in anonymous and spooky suburbs, to talk about the direction your life should take, and to listen and share about how this could look. Here is how it looks:


We pull into our parking spot in the neighbors driveway, one large home that remains vacant with a giant price tag on it in a faltering economy. I have dawned a pair of Khakis and a j crew heather v neck sweater. February is miserable and I pick and choose my steps carefully as not to get my shoes dirty. A friends father greets us and pleasentrys are exchanged before we are invited to sit at a dinner table and eat a feast of crab, Music from a farther room. Light bends warmly through wine glasses and reflects off of what appears to be josef albers painting of japanese cherry blossoms. The whole of the house is warm and spirits are high and the smell crab compliments it all nicely

Something is off here, before the last crab is cracked I will know why,and with whom. the mood seems to change as I sit at the table,the clinking of crystal and the cracking of crab, the various side conversations are like the sounds one hears while listening out their window to the seasons change. Even the light, the artifical light provided on tracks, as was chic when the house was built, seems to change, to shift on the artificial horizon untill it feals the way it does during winter months. Were talking about alaska in the context of " what have you been doing with your life." My thoughts shifted to the neuter austerity of those fishing grounds with idealism. " Well now that you have done that type of thing you know you dont ever have to go back, no no, I understand, its good to get it out of your system while your young." I think about king crab season.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

I think about the sunsets at midnight and king salmon as large as second graders.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats	5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …	10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

My friends mother talks about the fact that education allows us the ability to work with our brains rather than with our bodies, and that fishing is dangerouse and our education gives us the opportunity not to do this...

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;	30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

A toast to a special friend is made and glasses are clinked and conversations continue. a former class mate and friend replies to the mother and things became clearer, the mood seemed less unclear and the host of the evining began to reveal its self.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—	40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare	45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

" Fishing provides no time for someone to have a regualr life, where you can build toward things and show up in peoples lives." It hit me that I am the one who is off, the lives most people want are normal, their not crazy I am... 50,000,000 elvis fans cant be wrong, but freedome is something that dies unless its used, here I reach a crossroads if I am wrong, and the nine to fivers are right then several long held beliefs are wrong as well. I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

I dont get it, the people who send their children to private schools to learn about writers artists and historical figures would do anything in their power to disuade them from following in the footsteps of said artists,writer and historical figures. As if to say " it was ok for them but dont risk it, dont you dare trade security for liberty".Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ''the rat race'' is not yet final.




No one wonders why Americans have a love affair with clint eastwood or tony soprano, why working professionals return home and watch Deadliest Catch propelling it to number one on primetime. No one says it but it is present at that table, a very quiet fear, a very quiet sadness and lonelieness and desperation. Im not above it, im scared, the only difference between me and the uneducated "who have no choice but to work with their bodies" is that I can be much more articualte about the fear, much more vocal about what it is that scares me... thats the thing my education gave me... but if I am carefull and patient and honest, I can persue eduaction in the hopes that it will relieve this fear, thats the real mark of being schooled, we can transcend it, we can think and it will.

"That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now."

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,	50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—	55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?	60
And how should I presume?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets	70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,	85
And in short, I was afraid.

Mickey Mantle

Two years ago, I’m in south Boston, and who the fuck do I run into but kevin Mc bride, I’m wearing a Celtics Jersey to try to fit in right. I’m visiting family but I dont have that south boston accent so, gotta be careful. Anyway, there’s Kevin mc bride with the brogue so thick you cant understand him, Fresh off the boat sounding. And he’s hammered (here’s my mickey mantle moment). I met the man through family friends, we didnt talk much about boxing, he told me about some unfortunate encounters with beautifull prostitutes sporting penises then he tells me a joke. Mind you it’s an enibriated Kevin Mcbride with a thick brogue telling it.
” So this drunks sitting on a bench at the commons, wondering how the fuck he’s gonna pay rent. Up walks a leprechaun who says “it’s your lucky day, I’m gonna grant ya three wishes.” The drunk perks up and says “I want a driver, cuz im wasted pretty much 24/7″ DONE! says the Leprechaun, the man goes ” i cant believe this!” He says he wants to be famous and the Leprechaun goes DONE! wow, I want to be famous, he looks out over the Boston Skyline and goes, I want all this to be mine. DONE says the Leprechaun. “now could ya do me a favor” says the Leprechaun. Ya sure says the old man, anything you want. Well would ya let me fuck ya said the little Leprechaun. The drunk thought about it, he had done worse for his fix at times and obliged the wee Leprechaun. So he drops his pants and the Leprachaun climbs upon the bench and starts going to town. The drunk looks out on Boston and goes “I cant believe this is all mine”. to which the leprachaun says “I can’t believe you believe in leprachauns”. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, It was Kevin Mcbride, that along with the location (OLD COLONY projects) and the previouse comments about swingin penises on tranny prostitutes
and I’m thinking, This guy touched gloves with mike tyson and lived to tell about it, and alcohol did this to him, So what the fuck kinda chance do I stand?
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
Boxing has never gotten its enlistees from the debutant lines from the local country club. Instead its recruits come from the crucible of the streets, boy-men who have fought their way out of the slums, the barrios, the ghettos, expessing themselves the only way they knew how, with their fists… A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to eachother, cats will wipe your face, hand you water, blow a bloody nose for you, massage your tense shoulders with no shadow of improvity, no question of motive.. this tenderness unseen elsewhere in our lives is nessicary for one reason, the gloves, they are incapacitating, the ungloved help those who are. From this central fact radiates the whole demeanor of the Game.
Some days I wake up and wonder why it’s like this, why Art has become a comodity, rather than ” the excrement of art, the real Art being the person who shit it out. Their lives being the actual art!” I wonder why popular ( and I use the term souly in the vernacular sense) people have to Buy things that other people have made to express their individuality in order to express their individuality. I wonder why it is that I’m Not much but I’m all I ever seem to think about. Its tragic, what passes as a contribution to culture. You can’t be a hipster and an artist, by definition.Norman Mailer’s The White Negroe Breaks it down, James Baldwin Breaks Mailers shit down and on down the line. It Takes Guts to grow up and become the person you were supposed to be, all these scensters got no guts, living out lives of quiet desperation inbetween cocktail hours at hipster hot spots… ALL THE SAME this is art and its fucking ILL, thanx die4

This morning, im at starbucks. I pay for my coffee and the girl is changing my twenty. In an apethetic monotone she rehearses ” hows your day going”. She didnt even look up from her till. I pause and I ask her “whats the standard answer to that question?” she looks at me confused (because thats not the next line in the script) and she says”fine… I guess”
“thats right, fine, thatss the standard answer isnt it. but theyre not fine so why would they say that
“I guess to have a conversation?”
” a meaningless one though.”
” ya I guess a meani gless one”
” so the question is whats more meaningless, the meaningless conversation. or the meaningless conversation we never have?” so later that day Im buying a donut and the attendee goes, so how you doing. I deviate from the script and say, just awfull. Im sorry (she brings it back to the script) what can I get you, without missing a beat.
I straddle the line between humanity and humanoid creatures that are human on the outside but lack hummanity. The line exists souly within my head. Im thinking, one day that donut girl might wake up, much closer to the end than to the begining and she will be scared shitless. scared because death will be definable, it will haVE features and maybe shell think about how the thing she was supposed to do was bring donuts with a little bit of hummanity. So is this it, all of life is reduced to the common ruble of benality and the only thing in between me and the shrieking nothingness is these scripted bullshit motions that im supposed to go through. It’s just polishing the brass on the titanic. So you see it isn’t the school or the car or the life stuff, its all the bullshit details that kill me…
Histeria...

My birthday at the end of january
other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even
if those people are stupid and on that note it is possible to learn valuable
things from a stupid person.

Empanadas, Bolano. Good trip to Chile. Fuck Irony

Heavily tattooed is not the norm, tough guys eat ice cream. people payed attention to the tattoos.Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.
I have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the 'rat race' - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
hoffa needs some work, but a good start , im excited. tattoo enthusiasm. this is not supposed to be ironic. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean." FUCK IRONY... postmodernisms dead bitches thank you Mario Incandenza i love you more than I could ever begin to describe.
Sex with people you dont love is lonely.......It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it
Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.
cafe haiti, where one can get a decent cup of coffee "with legs" and I am told a prostitute.We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
September 11th happened here first, kinda cool to see.his is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
Family. Awesome..in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight -- 'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore' -- which evidently makes me look either as if I'm very rude and abrupt or as if I'm semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully...I've actually lost friends this way.
My King Crab boat!I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity....It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out
sweet bird tattoo.There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness
Acceptance is usally more a matter of fatigue than anything else.The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it... funny I could never do it here, in a church...
Ide say they are looking at whats coming but we never see that ...Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.
a popular question i got was "what do you think of chile". Anytime anyone asks me what I think I have to pause because the potential for me to alienate myself with the response is immense....... Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.
There are very few innocent sentences in my writing... I promise
The Beach House was dope as fuck.Thanx valenzuelas for the red carpet tour of CHILE it was fantastic!

It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...even if its jesus
If I worship money and things — if they are where I tap real meaning in life — then I will never have enough. Never feel I have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around...because im not any of these things...
Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth... I promise.
I was distracted by whine, and who owns the winery and what the people he has killed to afford the winery might think of the "bouquet " or the body of the wine...No wonder I couldn't appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home....duh...wine
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.... Oh ya...action!
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking? bottom line is that such thinking is a heavy yolk to bear... and ultimately none of my bussiness, what do my actions say, what do my actions say what do my actions say........
It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me... oh ya, action...
"TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST."
"They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier."
Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people
The endless land and sea, the backpack full of books, wallace, Bolano, they got me thinking about postmodernism, as I have been described as such.For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents. Lets be Honest your shaking your head, but you have no clue what those patricidal works were, dont worry, I am going to explain postmodernism in no uncertain terms in upcoming blogs... so you can repeat it outside of a mtng or in a coffee house and pretend you know what the fuck it is your talking about. thank me later... It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals nativete on this continent...
Mediocrity is contextual. zapallar was gorgeouse.
To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as "senor" in six different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.
Funny, sometimes I WISH I SPOKE SPANISH BETTER AT OTHER TIMES IM GLAD BECAUSE I CAN JUST FUCKING SHUT UP AND BE A PASSIVE PARTICIPANT IN A CONVERSATION.This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc. -- and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of it at any given instant

To The Burgeoning College Graduate

I'm speaking from experience here; remember that, maybe at some point of reading this, that small voice in the back of your head will say "who the fuck does this guy think he is". Or maybe because you are a recent college grad, or about to be, you will suffer from the delusion that you are unique and while what you are reading may hold true for the writer, you are far to well educated, supported to befall the same fate. The white middle class is exactly the same as everyone else in the secret unspoken belief ( or spoken belief, if you are a college grad) that deep down inside they are different from everyone else, unique. This disclamer out of the way let me share with you the dilema I find myself in.And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

I am educated in the Humanities,a kind of new age English major that championed the nobilities of the Human Spirit. Now Im graduated and I can't stomach as much as I could. That is to say as has been said before " one of the great paradoxes of education is that we begin to become critical of the system in which we are being eduacated." I want to hold true to my values believing that the point of it all is being of maximum service to _ _ _ and my fellow man but I have to do it on my terms.
Here is what I find myself looking down the barrel of: getting a job at a meager salery in a government or corporation that is already established. I would rise through the company slowly pay my dues, maybe go to UW nightschool for a masters or more in whatever field I am pursuing. I'd get healthcare, a good salery friends, a title that I could repeat to people when they asked me what it is that "I do" and a home and a car etc etc etc.

The trade off is simply too great, Adults, no matter how well educated they tell you they are insist on repeating highschool antics. There are popular people, dorks under achievers and the lot, all of whom will be talked about by the workers in whatever corporation it is that I find myself in. Here we see what it is that coined the term "office politics". Thats code for: "pandering to human insecurities". I'm not above pandering and schuking an jiving but I wanna do it for something I built.



Do I go for the secure route, most of the reasons for which boil down to fear, no matter how rational or sane it sounds if you say it out loud. Its no measure of sanity to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. I see this in other writers and youth, this contempt for those who couldnt go it alone, who couldnt carve something out that allows them to lead with their strengths, to utilize who it is they are rather than what they are told to be or what they show aptitude in. As I will be in Dutch Harbour and the berring sea fall and possibly winter people ask me " arent you scared, the waves the nature of the work?" Not to be even more grandiose than I have displayed already but. You got to be willing to die to fish in Alaska commercially but there is something much more terrifying than drowning in the cold, alone: Living the career life, thinking we have control over our lives. Whats more terifying than dieing is thinking a career or the security it brings could possibly secure what goes on in my head. were all getting ready to die, to go out, some of us Know this others will wake up much closer to the end than the begining and realize that the only thing in between them and the shrieking nothingness is... the security of their shit. I'm ranting now.

Point being some folks need to be given a job, others are capable of ceating one for themselves.., if they can differ the feeling of security on both the superficial and esthetic level but also the deeper, "whats the point" level. Ille carve my piece out, those given can have their shit taken as they are seeing in this economic crisis. which sheds light on one of my favorite things Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

People go to scool for freedome not security, at some point Fear got them twisted between the two.The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

There's a paradox in the United states of, the people who get really powerful jobs tend to go to the top schools. Often times in these schools they study the liberal arts, philosophy,Humanities etc. and its all very much about the nobility of the human spirit and broadening the mind and from here you go to a specialized school to learn how to sue people or to figure out how to get people to buy a certain type of SUV. Now there are things (among the top, my paycheck) that I don't like about my JOB but I love that I get to use everything iv'e ever learned or think about...daily. This goes a long way considering that sometimes its lonely or unsuccessful work and I remember this when I start to complain: I know that in America there is a very specific class , the upper and middle class, who had parents that could afford to send them to very good schools and received excellent education and are working in jobs that are extremely financially rewarding but have nothing to do with what they were persuasively taught was important and worth while. I never thought of it in those terms but it is a paradox.
I doubt that a Highschool grad who is working in a factory wakes up and says "well at least I dont have all this Humanistic learning I'm not using". Furthermore, I doubt that he's any more nourished inside by his job than that ivy league guy who wrights SUV add campaigns. What you and I are is a class of graduates who can be much more articulate about what it is we are feeling uneasy about. I think if there is something that characterizes this generation of educated graduates, its not that we have come up with any new problems or solutions to them,rather that we are endlessly verbal about the level of disease we feel concerning our career paths. Maybe that is a start.

LaMont and me, we are alot alike...

KEEP AN EYE OPEN FOR WAGNERS NEXT SHOW (Lamont didnt get it but Mike knew what Lyle was talking about)


‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ … ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they?’ … ‘Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

LaMont Chu is an eleven year-old student at the Enfield Tennis Academy. Chu has dreams of going to the professional Show, and his bedroom door is "completely covered with magazines' action-shots of matches" (757).GT criticizes Chu because he ceases "'to seem to give total effort of self since you began with the clipping pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls'" .

LaMont Chu recognizes that his obsession with the Show is hurting his playing; he states that "he wants to get in the Show so bad it feels like it's eating him alive" (388). In a discussion with Lyle, Chu says that he "won't take risks in tournament matches even when risks are OK or even called for, because he finds he's too scared of losing and hurting his chances for the Show and hype and fame" . To this, Lyle notes that "'After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are" (389). When Chu acknowledges that he is trapped, Lyle states that he "might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage", which Chu does not fully understand.