pixelated.me

finale

2009-03-22T02:23:00.001-06:00

Preface: This blog has gone through quite a few cycles of birth and rebirth. its purpose changed time and time again. From frustrated attempt at dealing with the challenges of love in my early twenties, to venting the heartache of that love coming to a end, to a sandbox for me to explore myself as a writer. In that time i've had a few readers who read my writing for whatever reasons. And although a review of a sci-fi show seems an odd choice for this final post in some ways it makes sense. This show was once something i shared with the girl i loved in 2004 when i started this blog and in coming to an end it is in some small way the very last "shared" thing to end from that time in my life. A very odd parallel that didn't occur to me until i actually started writing this. In a way i hope she someday gets a chance to see this final episode of the show we started watching together.

Now my thoughts on the show and the finale.

I'm not sure what i can add to what's been written and being written about BattleStar Galactica as a whole, and The series finale. It comes at a time of profound change for television and most other mediums. Newspapers are shutting down, CD's are woefully obsolete and TV shows that depend on things like Nielsen ratings or ad dollares are eeking by on business model that's slowly going obselete. Everyone is scrambling to find solutions. Meanwhile i do what i always do. Consume, Read, Watch, Listen to the things that move me, affect me, make me laugh, cry, or think in whichever way is quickest and most convenient. So i've downloaded every episode for the past year of BSG and the second they hit blu-ray i'll but the whole box set of them.

But i'm writing now not because i feel the need to drone on about new media vs. old media but because i know in my heart that the talent behind a show like BSG must and should be allowed to do what they do best. This show isn't merely entertaining but a beautiful representation of that uniquely human urge to create art. The word is loaded with cliche but art is the most wonderful abstract manifestation of humanities greatest trait. So although i still cringe at the idea of something so transient as a television show being called art, BSG is nothing less than a symphony. It has taken me through a 5 year journey and in bringing me to a finish line i find myself thinking about god, spirituality, and the tiny choices that make us who we are.

I imagine someone listening to Beethoven's Ninth for the first time must have had a similar experience.

wish

2008-11-16T01:49:00.001-06:00

we could all be friends.

known

2008-10-15T00:02:00.001-05:00

a few things i know.
I know that there is some sort of redemption to be had for love from loving again.
I know that when you're eating ice cream and you get a brain freeze it sucks, but i also know that as soon as the brain freeze has subsided the first thing you do is eat more ice cream.
Love and broken hearts are pretty much the same thing.

Fade

2008-10-14T23:59:00.001-05:00

Gonna try a little something.
just for me.
once upon a happily ever after i was enamored and playful with words.
No i'm in love and have seemed quite content to just be.
But damn it if i don't miss it. Stringing words.

It meant something to me. readership be damned.

on a side note Ray Lamontagne's voice could make my mental vagina wet.
It's just so damn....weathered. You believe it, instantly.
Sometime you need a little bit of that.
Hearing something with conviction. It helps.
The worlds in chaos, the pendulums swung right back and off its damn axis.
So anything that seems to say. "I know what i'm writing about." helps.

motherfucking blog

2008-10-02T22:46:00.001-05:00

so here's the thing, you start writing, it's almost like jerking off, you blog, you bitch, you do this whole auto-disecting thing and for a while it works. It helps and the more it helps the less you write until eventually you start wondering why you write your little blog, and who reads it, if anyone?

and so months have past and i've writen tech stuff @ stitchrobot.com and design stuff at macthemes.net
and very little of my life has found itself into this blog, and maybe that's okay.

p.s. Sarah Palin freaks me out.

i just watched the debate.

smile?

2008-08-30T01:06:00.001-05:00

she has the exact same smile in every single picture. I hate smiles that feel rehearsed.

ah my little neglected blog

2008-08-08T13:40:00.001-05:00

I've a new mistress and her name is stitchrobot.com
After two years of writing my random musings in this little sandbox of mine i realized that with close to nil readers i was really just writing for myself, despite efforts to bring others into the fold.
The truth is most people just don't give a shit about the well written bitching about a blokes inner struggle to figure himself out.
I know because i don't read too many blogs about other blokes well written bitching about finding themselves.
Enter : stitchrobot.com a blog for me to geek out, to tech cool hunt, to aggregate the plethora of wonderful that i find on the internets. A place to spout mac tutelage and the sort.
Something a bit more...accesible for people to read written by me.

This blog will continue in its current incarnation as a place where i play with words, spout, rage, smile, etc.
no format, no purpose other than to serve as a spill over for the stuff in my head.

and now the musical interlude.

on a lighter note:

2008-07-24T11:43:00.001-05:00

I LOVE IT!

Marks

2008-07-16T23:20:00.001-05:00

the more time passes, the more she becomes a stranger i once loved.
given enough time i imagine it will feel like remembering a dream.
a dream of being in love one with a tall albanian girl who liked being held.

She was my friend.

2008-07-11T03:22:00.001-05:00

I only just found out, she passed away in dec. We both moved back to Mexico from nyc at about the same time, late 2006, and the last i saw her was after i came back from spain in April of 2007, after that we lost touch, but she was always in the back of my mind, wondering when we'd cross paths, Today i finally sent her an email, but it was bounced back, so i looked her up on facebook, and saw an facebook group in her memory. Death has never ever felt so real as it does right now. I've known people that have passed before, casual friends, extended family, parents of friends, etc, but i was always somewhat insulated from the full impact by a slight degree of seperation. Cosette...well...it was an almost was that became a friendship over the course of 2006. I'd been missing her for months now, thinking, looking forward to finally calling her up and catching up, I miss her all the more terribly knowing that i will never be able to.

I'd never really given too much thought to death, to what happens next, all i know is that if in some shape or form we carry on, there is now one person i look forward to coming across,

strength and weakness

2008-07-05T00:19:00.001-05:00

"Your whole life, people are gonna ask you to be weak. They're gonna practically beg you. But all anyone really wants is for you to be strong." - The Hottest State

two years ago i met a woman who, in breaking my heart, would teach me that lesson.
When i was with her, i allowed myself to be vulnerable, to strip down to my trembling broken self.
I saw everyone of her fears when i looked into her eyes. I could see the beautiful girl who wanted to be brilliant and was terrified of being shallow. I saw to the very core of her and because of it i thought i loved her and because of it i let her see just how broken i was then and there.

But people don't want weakness, they want strength, quiet strength, subtle and open perhaps, but strength.
That subtle balance between openness and fortitude.

Things ended with her, as these things tend to do, and not long ago she suggested we meet for coffee. I confess that whilst appealing, seeing her would also be like walking into that room of people that saw you show up naked to school in your dream.

oh joy

2008-06-20T03:42:00.001-05:00

Mario Fucking Paint.
man did i love this "game"
SNES and a mouse, pure joy

and you can totally download a recreation and play with it on your computer http://www.unfungames.com/mariopaint/ fucking yea! there goes sleep

...catching up with him

2008-06-15T18:15:00.001-05:00

Father's Day.
My Dad has 6 children and 1 "illegitimate" child that he just found out about and is trying to build a relationship with. Of his children all of us at some point or another have been through therapy for co-dependancy and addictions of one sort or another and two have been through rehabs for eating disorders.
To say that the sins of the father reflect on the child is putting it mildly. We all grew up with, at various times, an incredibly absent father who was exceedingly generous financially, an interesting duality that for many years kept us from realizing just how absent he really was from our lives.
My youngest brother is the one who is really testing my father. He is 20. Never finished high-school and is gripped with such intense anxiety that he smokes pot every night just to try and go to sleep. When things started to unravel with my brother about three years ago my father decided that the best approach was to just let things reach a natural boiling point. To let things achieve a state of crisis. In hindsight he's admitted that was a mistake, but i also think he believed that he would be in a position to throw money at the problem and solve it when it finally boiled over. I don't think he ever realized that his financial situation could take a turn for the worse and that as a result he would find himself feeling far more impotent to combat the problems that finally have boiled over.

It's sad, deeply saddening to watch my brother so deeply dug into a trench of his own behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms. But what's worse is to realize that had my parents made different choices, and in this regard because my mother is bi-polar more of the blame falls on my father as the only physiologically stable parent, my brother david might not be in the state he is right now.

So on this fathers days my dad sits alone in a hotel room in Houston, overwhelmed by the weight of his responsibility to his youngest boy. Who at 20 years old is still just a boy, who's lost, and full of resentment towards a father that let him get lost, because at the time he thought thats what was best.

observation

2008-05-27T01:25:00.001-05:00

2 years just go by, they didn't even ask permission.

fuckers.

soon

2008-05-27T01:21:00.001-05:00

someday soon i'll write about my first love. At the very least for everyone who's read the rants and meanderings that came about because of it ending, I'll write the beginning. Those first three days in Dec of 2000. It feels like time to do it.

my first mac

2008-05-26T21:26:00.001-05:00

circa 1993-94

I got chicken pox and my perpetually traveling father came "home" to see me, although to be fair by this time i think my parents where almost divorced.
I was going to spend all week in bed, trying and failing, not to scratch myself silly.
My dad having just returned from a trip abroad handed me a brand new powerbook 150.
He said here. this is for you to keep you busy. So really this mac thing is all his fault.
I'm a geek cause of him.

fucking 3am isn't it

2008-05-17T03:32:00.001-05:00

might as well, write something.
shit if i do then i can pretend some part of the last hour of useless and slightly self destructive reminiscing was in some way constructive

add 1 part: thinking about ex, seeing her myspace, and wondering what the fuck if anything is left, yet again, reused thought, recycled, shat it out and ate it once again, and it still taste like shite.

add 2 parts: my ex-gfs sister is staying in my flat and has been for a week. She's lovely, and not at all like her sister, which is to say i feel i can relate to her. but goddamn if it isn't a challenge not to thing about the ex, the lack of contact, friendship, failed attempts at friendship, and wonder yet again if it isn't a shame that after 5 years all thats left is a little bit more than nothing and a friendship with her sister.

add 1 cup of: after 7 days, the diplomatically vague topic of P. the ex, came up with the sister in conversation. bits and pieces really, of who she is, seen through the eyes of a younger sister that doesn't always relate to her, nothing really of much use. the sort of half conjectured observations that serve only to highlight how estranged the once loved can become.

blunt: i hate that i give a shit. But now in the presence of a, house guest, reminder it saddens me that there isn't anything between us, it scares me to think that having loved so intensely and so blindly it or rather i left so little room for anything else, But hey man a bad break up is a bad break up, you get over it but it doesn't quite motivate you to invite the person for tea, or send an email every few months to catch up. There's always that lack of trust.

More than anything, i wish one of us had had the balls to end it sooner, before it got ugly, before the cheating, before the blog reading, before my faux attempt at post break up friendship because i thought she needed me, before she confided in me that she had a [removed at the her request as a courtesy], her process, finding herself through her darker side, i wish i'd known to walk away, COLD, because i think maybe today i'd have that occasional email to say hello, and it would be ok, as she seems to be okay now, except i wouldn't have born witness to her destroying the person i loved before discovering who she was.

maybe thats why i can't reach out or send the email i've been writing to her in my head all week.
maybe it all boils down to i haven't figured out how to forgive her for tearing to bits the version of her that i loved so utterly.

We had these very silly and very personal nicknames for each other, i was peep and she was peo, and really it was just the personas for two lifetimes of unexpressed childhood playfulness and wonder that we discovered we could indulge in with each other, One day, of the many shared with her, i playfully "threatened" to do something, lick her eye i think, and she squirmed and said "no, don't do that, it's the instant death of peo spot" i laughed at the thought, thinking that the playful childish side of her was in some naive way eternal, in the same way i though we were.

For months, and months during the course of the first year after we split, i kept thinking, "instant death of peo." over and over again, Aware of how ridiculous it sounded but also of how precisely it expressed my utter disgust and heartbreak. could it be that even now, somehow i haven't forgiven her for the "not so instant death of peo" and with it peep, some bit of my ability to love naively.

I'm not sure how to end this post. there's still somethings i can't quite bring myself to write.

remise

2008-05-07T01:07:00.001-05:00

I've noticed a trend. the end of the month/ beginning of a new month are slow blogging times. something in my internal clock takes a moment to realize that we have in fact carried on into the next month.
It's almost as if i'm a sailor trying to sail to the edge of the world only to realize its round.
I still think the end of a month should include a small pause, a day or two to say phew that month went by quickly.

that's it for now. but at least the May index of my blog archive has something in it now.

new species

2008-04-27T15:31:00.001-05:00

i've this wonderful wonderful book. But i won't divulge the name of it, not yet. and it's filled with the ability to mix and match animal parts to create new ones. I've decided i will from now on occasionally share some of these carefully concocted concoctions.

accordingly todays animal is:
a capricious specimen with a sturdy caparison hailing from the malaysian forests.

Roll Call

2008-04-27T12:35:00.001-05:00

Bueller? Bueller?
ok so despite the fancy hit tracker that shows up to the right of this post i really don't have any clue who, what, where, why, people read this blog.
so in an effort really do fill the time on a lazy sunday i've decided to do roll call,
except i have no idea what your names are (with one or two exceptions)
so everyone or no one.
please comment with at the very least, if not a name, a city, it'd been fun to see where people are stumbling onto this blog from.

flickr

2008-04-24T22:02:00.001-05:00

sometimes when nothing else seems worthy of my attention i cram my short term memory full of random images from flickr. I feel like i'm cramming them full of a random slice of lives. Laughter, people spinning, mediocre pictures of buildings and dogs, gadgets, half naked girls, pain, sadness, memories.

and then i'll move on. write. listen to music, do something unrelated and all that imagery that represents the fragments of someones life just vanishes into the mist of forgotten new memories.

and tomorrow i'll submerge myself in another set and it will affect my mood for a few minutes and then pass.

It's an odd sort of meditation on life and voyeurism.

processing

2008-04-24T01:39:00.001-05:00

I've stopped counting the end of my past relationship.

for some time now, I stopped paying attention to old anniversaries.

But i've sorted of done away with them in general. Some day this summer.

On a nice day with a good

breeze i'll somewhat arbitrarily say "it's been a year" for my new relationship.

No date. No anniversary. No marking of a calendar. I think it's nicer this way.

I'm at the part where i start processing the little random bits that were once me, us, her, that chapter.
some moments are awkward like watching my new gf put on the cooking apron i bought once for valentines many years ago with old gf. It seems so bizarre that my stuff, my things, my sheets, my pillow, my stuffed animal, a green frog, all once seemed so shared with that one person. They're all analogous with me i suppose. It's the realization that i'm sharing of myself again.

another something i noticed: no one ever quite fits in your arms the same way. the small evolved patterns of holding, nestling, sleep, are utterly different, devastatingly so, because however unfair it is to say so, a small part of me wondered if she would fill the spot on my chest that the old "she" once fit into.
instead it's my right ankle that notices her absence when i sleep alone. It's the leg with which i reach and touch her leg as it reaches for mine since we sleep facing opposite directions.

Quote: Before Sunset from Luis Sosa on Vimeo.

is something wrong with me?

2008-04-20T02:16:00.001-05:00

I stumbled across this song playing Rock Band.

and man was i into it. "jamming" to Seven by VAGIANT.

and boom. I'm singing along to the chorus but i'm alone, and the mic isn't plugged in.

cause "I----I-----I-----AYYYYY Got your back until i DIEEEEEEEEE-AYYYYYYYY"

and fuck me but i was moved by the fucking punk rocking stalkerish sentiment to this song.

moved man, fucking moved, thinking i want someone to love me that fucking much.....enough to stalk me....

enough to sing to me

"and I'------gonna protect you till i die....I won't let nobody hurt you again...i'll fuck up your next girlfriend if she breaks your heart"

HOME

2008-04-20T01:43:00.001-05:00

Got home more.

More than i did when i left new york for mexico.

More than when i spent 11 days in new york in March purging my belongings.

I got home a little more this time around.

some of it has to do with closing doors.

but more so it's about realizing what the corridors i've got in front of me are.

I can see the burdens on the horizon.

If i knew what to look for i'm sure i could smell them.

It's growing up time.

putting it off has been fun and necessary.

TIme to figure out what sort of man i'm.

Two Poles

2008-04-17T02:01:00.001-05:00

my mother's bipolar. It's a subtle bitch of a condition. It masquerades as stubborn pride or indignation but ends with her sobbing in self pity in the corner of her room. It starts with some round about logic about how everything you've agreed upon for the past 3 or 4 days has really been wrong. It begins with what sounds like a suggested alternate course of action.

Mother: have you considered that if you don't do what we've agreed upon because secretly i resent you for not being able to give me exactly what i want and feel i deserve because once i was very wealthy and beautiful and coveted and now i'm not, that it might actually work out better.

Son: well i can't do that. cause i can't afford to.

Mother: well how come your father has a nice house and a nice car and...

Son: well because he's a different person than you.

Mother: it's not fair.

Son: no it's not

Mother: well now i don't want anything. I'd rather not having anything than accept what you can give which isn't what i deserve.

"i've been driving WV cars since i was 16, why should i stop now!"(actual quote)

and it deteriorates from there.

But i have come to one conclusion. She's stable for 4 days. it's the 5th day that sends her off on one of her bipolar induced rages of self pity and anger.

My original return flight home was yesterday Wednesday at 8:50pm. It was perfect. i would have left right at her stability peek. But i had to delay my departure and now i've overstayed my welcome. Her brain is fighting back against my subtle attempts to placate her. to comfort her and control the mental tangents that lead her down dark roads of regret.

But in the end she resents me. she resents that i've accepted my fathers help and secretly and not so secretly at times just wants me to suffer her mistakes with her. to tell my dad to fuck off and shove his money and go hate him from a distance with my mother and my younger brother who did take my mom up on her strategy for all the good it's done anyone.

My father probably was a bit of a dick. I know him enough to accept that half what my mom has accused him of is probably true.

But sometimes. as i myself have recently discovered, you need to let go of the anger or it will just tie you to the person you're hating.

my mom's been tied to my dad through hate for more than a decade.

enough mom.

enough.

anonymous

2008-04-16T12:44:00.001-05:00

anonymous comments are delightful and vexing. mainly because i'd love to know more about my readers.

haha readers. there is probably like 5 of them.

But hey 5 readers is 4 more than the ones i have in my head.

anonymous comments remind me of secret admirer notes i got in highschool...or the secrete nemesis notes that i also got.

i never did find out who sent either of those.

love

2008-04-16T01:21:00.001-05:00

love.

i really believe it can only exist when two equally fucked up people come to understand both sides of pain.

breaking hearts and having yours broken.

that pain. that scaring permanence of loosing love that I'd started feeling was as constant as consciousness is the only thing jaring enough to have made me finally figure out who i am. (apologies for switching to first person but it was necessary)

So i stopped looking for damsels to rescue. or beautiful fucked up girls, broken girls, wounded girls who i could wrap in my sense of centeredness*

i want awareness of humanity. our condition is flawed. we slam into wisdom like jumpers leaping off tall erections and crashing into concrete.

I'm still learning. realizing how reluctant i've been to forgive, how much the loathing simmered and settled into a substrata that helped me force a distance between me and that one person i once loved so utterly. But i have to let go of that hate. It's no longer serving any real purpose, except ironically to tie me to her.

in hate as i was in love.

enough now.

enough.

something my mother said

2008-04-14T18:44:00.001-05:00

I'm in Houston. unpacking the boxes upon boxes that are the artifacts of a life lived in New York City. Boxes which up until two weeks ago had spent a year and half at a storage location in Harlem.

When we start coming across some decidedly feminine products. some empty facial cream tins, some decorative jars to hold bathroom supplies and other misc. She asks me what i'm doing with these things and i say "the were probably ______'s (my ex)" "She lived in my place for a few months after we broke up while she looked for a new flat. "Que bien la tenia, todavia vivio en tu depa?" (She had it nice, she actually lived in your flat?" She then asked how could it have ended if she had it so good, something which reminds me that in my mom's generation all a man really needed to do was take care of his girl and that's it. No messy emotional baggage to deal with, at least not on the surface. I say something about it being complicated and then in something that struck me as suprisingly naive for a woman as bitter as she is she said "But she seemed so in love with you when i saw her at your graduation."

"Yes" i say

"She was" i say

"We were" i say

but it had nothing to do with it.

and it didn't.

my changing ways

2008-04-08T10:38:00.001-05:00

There was a time when all i needed to lead me to my newest frivolous technology purchase was that rush of Dopamine that the mere knowledge of a new gadget would elicit. My life for my first 25 years or so followed a steady stream of update after update that kept me on the relative cutting edge of whatever.

in the last two years though i've started to mellow. Tech purchases now undergo a less that rigorous evaluation through whatever part of my frontal cortex is responsible for responsible. The words "do you really need it" mock me. I sometimes find myself doing what no early adopted should ever do...wait...for the next version!

my computer will be two years old in sept. that for me is an eternity and yet other than the limit on RAM (2gb) i'm actually doing quite okay with it which doesn't help justify the mac pro i want to buy.

*this is a fairly mediocre post. but in the interest of the daily. i'm just gonna let it float onto my blog like that piece of poop that won't flush.

a little something for saturday

2008-04-05T18:15:00.001-06:00

Because i firmly believe everyone should have a laugh at the expense of this blokes parents choice.

inn.o.vation

2008-04-01T23:09:00.000-06:00

much has been written about muxtape in the last few days by the blogsphere. and for good reason. It's exceedingly simple, beautiful, fun, and clever and yet like most things that achieve this combination of adjectives it runs the very real danger of crossing the digital overlords of the RIAA (who appointed them anyways. fuckers!) for those that don't know it's very simply a website that allows you to upload 12 songs (that's it) and create your online mixtape that you can share with your mates. simple. except for it to be legal i'd have to actually have permission from the 12 different copyright holders to upload the songs. It's actually much grayer legal territory since the DMCA does allow provisions for fair use. but fair use is somewhat subjective. I hope muxtape sticks around, because its cool and clever and created by new yorkers, and as former new yorker i tend to root for the home team.

old months

2008-04-01T22:03:00.001-06:00

once upon a time on this blog i said the month of june was my favorite. It was. but really it wasn't what i really meant was a favoritism for a remarkable young girl i still haven't met that i got to know in the spring of 2007. Today i had the chance to catch up with her. a friend i'd lost touch with. It was pleasant and was a pleasant reminder of the fact that sometimes people drift in and out of your life like ...things that drift in and out.

like migrating birds.

like a taste for Gun's and Roses

part of the impermanence of life is that on occasion somethings drift naturally back into your personal sphere, by an unseen osmosis and that is really quite nice.

Misu

2008-03-31T21:01:00.001-06:00

ok in the interest of journalistic integrity, although i'm neither a journalist or particularly integrated, i will say that by posting this i'm getting a free license to a kick ass program, but only because i was also part of the beta testing.

So the program Misu . I like to think of it as ipods mating. My 80GB ipod video gets to swap chromosomes (it's music) with my gf's 30gb ipod video. It allows for direct ipod to ipod music swapping without the intermediary step of passing the songs onto the computers itunes library. it's dead simple and a delightful way to share music from ipod to ipod.

the daily writer

2008-03-31T20:25:00.001-06:00

I really have no idea how many people read this blog with any frequency. i don't go out of my way to promote it, in fact i don't go in my way to promote it. but in the interest of keeping sane i will now write in this blog everyday. small observations, nuanced happenings. a simple hello world fuck you.

my hands

2008-03-25T01:17:00.001-06:00

my hands are smooth. My girlfriend says she likes my touch. the way the feel on her skin. She usually say's this as the caress the territory between the nape of her neck and the small of her back.

My hands have held pens, clacked over a multitude of keyboards, sent text messages,
they've given pleasure and on very view occasions caused physical pain.
My hands have kept me warm. They've walked with me through harsh new york winters but only for the few minutes i'd brave the cold to go buy a magazine or a cup of coffee.
My hands have assembled ikea furniture and cursed the person who invented torque screw screwable furniture.
My hands have carried furniture and heavy boxes as i've moved from one idea of home to another.
my hand's have stopped my mothers hand from striking my face (an action she felt was disrespectful), my hands changed my baby brothers diapers, my hands wrote fake notes in my mothers name to ditch school and skip gym class.
my hands have given comfort, congratulations, and condolences.

Yet, despite, in spite, or because of these things my hands have done i feel like they haven't done enough. They haven't made things, crafted things, they haven't built things, my hands have avoided these things by deftly using ATM cards to pay others to do these things. But tonight my hands for the first time felt the need to forge,craft,mold, something, anything, so that i can look at my hands one day and say these hands made this. It may only be a tiny this, a trivial this, a trinket some future someone will wonder as to it's importance.

something more than words on a page which is usually no longer a page at all but pixels upon pixels arranged as the facsimile of words on a page.

sad

2008-03-09T20:40:00.003-06:00

I was searching my email for something and instead i ended up rereading an email detailing all the abuse an ex-gf went through that i never knew about, that was never shared, the email is more than two years old but it hits me very hard to read it. When i first read it in nov of 2005 i remember feeling angry that she felt i should have known something i couldn't possibly have imagined. Today i read it and wished i could have given her a hug. There is nothing sadder than the things we hide from the people we love and that love us.

still

2008-03-07T01:57:00.001-06:00

i still have mine. though i'd hadn't looked for it in ages.
that is all move along now, nothing more to see

i hope we can still be friends.

2008-02-12T10:41:00.001-06:00

About once a month, when the "where are they now" itch strikes me I pop over to myspace, hi5, and facebook and look at the profiles of a handful of ex-girlfriends, some of who have made it clear that they would have very much liked to remain friends with me post break-up.

A line from the short film Hotel Chevalier found a spot in my mental drawer of "why didn't i write that" phrases. In a dialogue familiar to anyone who's had an acrimonious split Girl says to Boy "I don't ever want to loose you as my friend" and Boy replies "i promise, i will never be your friend, ever."

So the post break up friendship. especially after a long or significant relationship versus the two week casual one with the girl you met on myspace and took to see "Knocked Up" once before having mediocre sex a couple of times. She's the easy one to keep in touch with. Nothing was ever really at stake, so the friendship settles in naturally. But what's the motivation, the key to the post X year relationship friendship?

I think one natural motivator is a interest in that persons narrative. You bear witness to it throughout the relationship and regardless of how chaotic the break-up, as the years begin to pass you find yourself wondering what's happened in that narrative since you stopped being a regular viewer. So that usually meant one of two things, asking a mutual friend or making the occasional phone call to see how that person's narrative is going.

Enter: Online, Social Networking, Blogging

I'm not friends with my ex's because i don't need to be. I can follow up on a loose cliff notes version of their lives without having to so much as smile in their direction. I have a general sense of if they're doing well, if their dating, and how work is. Hell on any given site even friends comments can tell me whether she's watched any good movies recently or where she spent her holidays. There's pictures and journal entries, and after 5 mins, once a month, i carry on, having satisfied my curiosity but not having made the emotional effort or investment to build a friendship with ex's, some of whom bluntly broke my heart.

So:

Girl: I hope we can be friends

Boy: I will never ever be your friend, but i may friend you on facebook so i can see your profile and find out what you're up to without having to really interact with you.

Girl: ok. i guess i'll read your blog and leave occasional comments.

Boy: fine.

UPDATE: One of the profiles i wrote about in this post has now been made private. coincidence?

compliment

2008-02-08T21:38:00.001-06:00

i like the way you look naked.

Pattern Recognition.

2008-02-05T17:21:00.001-06:00

If i had the inclination to do so i'm sure i could go through the last two years of blog posts and find a definite pattern in my usage of time.

on the one hand I have since i graduated college in 2004 lived a blissful unencumbered by daily schedule existence. A freelance existence. Sat and Sunday are no more days off than Thursday afternoon if i feel like it. I don't have an office or employer to report to, and i have enough savings that most of the time i have enough to at the very least get by.

On the other hand all this freedom leaves waaaaay to much room for my old habits and demons to emerge, I am prone to both bouts of Consumerism (buying shit) and 24/7 sprees of co-habitation with whomever my significant other is at the time. Which leads to the occasional post where i bitch about feeling aimless, lost, or stuck.

The freelancers dilemma is not unique to me, Much has been written about the importance of giving yourself a schedule, getting dressed to go to work in the morning even if work is in your home office or on the living room couch with your laptop. And as the months tick by i've become aware that i really do need to take that advice to heart. Far too much time has been spent waiting on things to happen to me, or fall in my lap.
And i fear that if i don't start filling my time with specifics i'll waste it all on ambiguity.

slow start but feb 2nd seems like a good day to break the silence

2008-02-02T11:15:00.001-06:00

So 08. Good so far, i got married, built a car from scratch, saved a bug (i think it was a ladybug) from drowning. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your views of marriage and ladybugs none of the above is true. It just felt colourful to write. (p.s. i hate that my spell check marks coloUrful as incorrect, i wonder if British version of MacOs do the same)

In other news i would like to suggest that anyone interested in smiling watch "Juno" and then do as i did and listen to the soundtrack compulsively for days and days on end and marvel at Kimya Dawsons ability to string words into smile inducing patterns.

in 18 days i get my second tattoo. All my friends were right. It is addictive.

and finally i have bought and sold countless friends for profit and the human right organizations still don't have a clue*

*facebook app: sell your friends ROCKS...

supposed cool.

2008-01-05T19:51:00.000-06:00

"What Goes Around Comes Around" is...i want to say blasting but since the volume on my touch is set to about 70%, i'll have to settle for playing into my ears. I'm walking through Parque Mexico on a brisk but sunny saturday in Mexico City. The stream of hip, sexy people, seems never-ending and i feel fucking cool. I feel fucking cool cause i'm mouthing half singing the words to Justin Timberlake's song, and images of the 1930's tinged music video dance in my head.

A girl is walking a small Chihuahua on a brisk but sunny saturday in Mexico City. The stream of hip, sexy people, goes mostly unnoticed by her. She watches a man in mid length black coat, wearing herimbone glasses, and mouthing the words to some song. She shares a giggle with her dog.

So there's the rub. I felt magnificently cool. surrounded in my own sound-tracked bubble but to everyone outside i'm just a silly man, mouthing the words to a song they can't hear.

deflate

2008-01-03T01:04:00.001-06:00

*

image by way of xkcd

2008

2008-01-02T12:58:00.000-06:00

I have a pile of dishes i don't want to wash. I might buy a car this year but the most futuristic thing about it is that its got good gas mileage and an audio input for my ipod. My next vacation will probably be to one of the coasts of the united states, and this winter has been unseasonably warm.

The future happens so gradually that even those things with the capacity to amaze (iphone, water purification straws, OLPC?) feel normal very quickly. Someone really needs to fast forward the tech development and really make us FEEL the 21st century.

perspective randomness inspired by too much googling

2007-12-23T02:28:00.000-06:00

all i can see is beyond the make-up.
The constructed process of her captured image.
all i see is the moles that have been airbrushed away and a missing birth mark.
i remember cellulite and random body hairs.
the shear vulnerability of it all.

Behind every centerfold, porn star, erotic model, escort, hooker, stripper, or catalogue model is someone who was or is privy to their unconstructed self.

There's always a wizard pulling the levers,

truth is found in the good intentions we share even if we turn right around and turn them into falsehoods.

stired

2007-12-19T18:43:00.000-06:00

I spoke to my ex this evening. She'll eventually read this post which makes this feel a bit exhibitionist of me, more than a blog usually is, in any case.

"i don't feel any particular way good or bad about talking to you." i said, or something like that. I think i may have lied, because while i don't feel anything AS particular about talking to her as i did say a year ago, i do feel somewhat, stirred up. It's unprecise but there's this slight scrambled sensation in my gut/head.

So we exchanged pleasant updates about our lives, work, family, holiday plans and all is rather okay and unremarkable until she mentions she's in love and though it pains me to admit it, for it paints me as rather Neanderthal, i felt some odd sort of...discomfort at idea. It was somehow so much easier when my idea of her was of someone jumping from crush to crush with all the speediness of a tigress devouring prey, It made me feel uniquely privileged to have loved her, been loved by her, and somehow the knowledge that she's happy, settle, has found another someone to love feels bitter.
Sure i'm happy for her in some generic sense of the sensation but truely i suppose that despite my own life, my own relationships, my own loves, I liked the idea of her as not in love, but perpetually struggling through relationships.

Perhaps that is a bit petty of me or just selffish and egotistical, I may always be her first love but, in love, being first rarely means best since we tend to improve upon our ability to love the more great loves we've fucked up.

at least, like everything else in this blog, that's my opinion.

the knife is mine?

2007-12-10T09:16:00.000-06:00

"little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won't flinch and
I won't blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living does not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
I won't blame you,
instead
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and I won't use it
yet."

- Charles Bukowski

time

2007-12-04T17:35:00.001-06:00

It's an old ritual i suppose.
watching the clock. Hoping that somehow as much time has passed as you feel has passed. It never has. This might be of little interest to anyone but typing keeps my fingers from the phone.

If only i could type something a bit more useful.

waiting

2007-12-04T16:18:00.000-06:00

waiting can be one of the most difficult things to endure when you're trying to give yourself and someone else space.

Understanding that the minutes must go by, that decisions, thoughts, tears can't be rushed. That the silence is necessary.

every bloke i think has some part of him that wants to fix things now. Like a broken faucet or in my case a broken mac.

If i come across a problem with a computer, doesn't even need to be mine, i have a hard time not wanting to solve the puzzle then and there and fix it.

but the human heart is complex, and there is no wrench or techtool pro that you can you use on it.

So this girl that i love is crying somewhere, and the best thing i can do, even though it feels like the exact opposite of what i should do, and IS the exact opposite of what i want to do, is let her cry and wait.

which is hard.

lost parts - a short story

2007-11-28T00:25:00.000-06:00

She must have taken it with her. Some crucial part of him. the part or parts, he wasn't sure which, that allowed him be one of those 24/7 coupled pairs, the part that allowed him to think in "we" for the better part of his early 20's.....Read More

sweet and sour...

2007-11-23T20:52:00.000-06:00

I seem to come to these small crossroads by literally crashing into them. The past two days have been reminders of my demons. Old demons i'd thought gone, or hadn't heard from in a while so i'd stopped wondering where they were.
fears, anxieties, insecurities, and that ever familiar blanket of co-dependent behaviour.

It's ironic. Thanksgiving just came and went, a holiday that isn't celebrated at all in Mexico for obvious reasons, and almost as if to remind me, to give me contrast, for what i do have, my demons have come around to prod at me.

So a day late, but here is what i AM thankful for.

My family. My sister M. without whom i would have lost my path many times a long time ago.

My father who despite his faults, tries, and has never wavered in his desire to see and help me succeed.

My home, which slowly comes together, though on some days it still feels as alien and odd as when i wrote about it a few months back. The old futon mattress, thankfully, is gone

I am grateful for the girl in my life, she has through our entirely backwards love affair given me the space to feel things i'd almost given up on. I am grateful for her courage and beauty and that she chooses to share it with me.

I am grateful for language, words, and my ability to wield them well.

I am grateful for the reminder on my right arm that despite my triangular shape i can and will learn to roll on my own.

and more than anything today nov 23rd 2007 i am humbled because i realize that even though i thought i was done, done with the therapy, healing, growth, and challenges i am reminded that i am not. I am not done, because it's not an A to B sort of thing. Like a diet junkie who's weight yo-yo's back, i realize that mine is and will always be a constant process of self awareness, discovery, growth, and truth.

I allowed myself to avoid these things for the larger part of 2007, but in falling for a girl the damn burst open and that is a good fucking thing because i can now go back to the process of learning.

i'm also greatful to those few who read this blog, a handful of you are ex girlfriends with whom i haven't for various reasons kept in touch. I'm happy to share this bit of myself, in words, with you. And to those anonymous few, thank you for your readership, your occasional comments. This blog has always existed out of a personal need to chronicle some part of myself, but if in some small way it affects someone else, i am glad for it.

and because i am a geek. Live long and prosper.

stagnation

2007-11-20T13:17:00.000-06:00

There's this end of the year thing going on in my head. This bit where i look back at '07 and realize that the whole year has just been played by ear, on impulse, and i'm a little tired of it.

I yearn to grab the metaphorical hammer and build something. Sweat and break of bits of myself into something. I've allowed myself to be entertained by the girl i'm dating or the not so new anymore flat that i've been slowly molding into a home, but i yearn for the days of over caffeinated writing to dull out the pain of the wounds made by my ex.

writing then was about surviving, about keeping my mind functioning even though it begged me to shut down, to dive into some fucking writers cliché of alcohol and drug use. To indulge my friend Artemio when he tried to convinced me that given my initials i really needed to drop acid with him.

I went to Belfast, Madrid, and Barcelona on impulse, i returned to my old stomping ground of nyc on impulse, i'm dating a stripper, on impulse.

Very little in my life has been deliberate this year and i crave a little, a lot.

I loath the idea of new year resolutions, mainly because i think its bullshit. My ex was big on them, we'd make up list and the whole nine yards.

It's now, with this mediocre bit of writing, this post on stagnation that i force new habits, that will become my new impulses.

writings a lonely fucking thing to do, which is probably why i've been putting it off.

why i write in english

2007-11-12T18:13:00.000-06:00

A note about the author: I was born in Mexico City. Yet i rarely write in spanish. the following image* is an example of why i find my native tongue frustrating to use to express myself creatively.

* for the non Spanish reader: customize translates into "modified for specific requirements." my language apparently lacks a single word to express that. if anyone knows of one please leave it as a comment.

one reason to miss new york

2007-11-03T11:43:00.000-06:00

almost managed to wait.

2007-11-02T22:26:00.000-06:00

it had occurred to me that in 12 days on nov 14th i would mark the passing of 2 years. 2 years of terrible growth, pain, joy, ache, maturing, and all the somewhat cliched stuff that people go through after a particularly bad break-up. I would have said something clever, funny, sarcastic, i would have sworn a few times and made note of how time has not so much made anything easier as just made it part of a greater whole. It stands out less after 2 years...

You see there i go writing what i would no doubt have written in 12 days time if it weren't for a list of 100 things that someone wrote that i read tonight that reminded me a little of what the things looked like just before it all came tumbling down, and you know what, (you, faceless, nameless reader) things circa oct 2005 looked pretty damn beautiful, the water was calm, to borrow a mediocre metaphor. There seemed to be a lot of good in the little house of cards that was that relationship. I'm not sure what deep insight i can gleam from that, it's a bit unsettling to realize just how subtle the foreshadowing was to both of us.

but more than looking back it makes me wonder about the present, I'm in a somewhat new relationship with many of its own pitfalls and i have to somehow convince myself to just go with it, with full knowledge of just how abrupt the end can be.

it was nice reading that list though, even though things fell apart it was nice to stop for a moment and be reminded of the good.

Her hair smelled of pickles

2007-10-23T13:07:00.000-05:00

He should’ve hated it,
any of his ex gf’s who’d watched him with mild disgust as he picked the pickles from his McDonalds cheeseburgers would attest to that.
they would also attest to the fact that he refused to order the cheeseburger without pickles.

READ MORE

Enviroment

2007-10-15T13:57:00.000-05:00

Today is Blog Action Day, The purpose of which is to bring the enviroment to the forefront of people's minds through blogs. As my blog has a rather small readership somewhere between 2 and maybe 10 it occurred to me to almost not write anything about the environment. When blogs like lifehacker, google blog, etc are writing about this what sense is their in me doing so.

but then i realized that in a way that reflects the very same attitude most people have about their environment, there is a profound sense of impotence that keeps us from acting.

I live in Mexico City a large, chaotic city of some 20,000,000+ inhabitants. It can be very frustrating to see just how little everyone else seems to care about the other 19,999,999+ people they share this metropolis with.

My sister who upon watching An Inconvenient Truth decided that amongst other things she would start separating her organic and inorganic trash was disillusioned when upon handing said separated trash to the garbage man saw him toss both bags into the same mix. She still separates her trash and perhaps one day she'll watch the trash man take note of her separation. It really is about making the little efforts that i believe will have a cumulative effect one day. It's about not letting ambivalence cloud our attitude.

Small choices can have small impacts and thats better than no impact. My sister keeps separating her trash and that reminds me to do what i can in my own life to minimize my impact on our environment.
I realize that what i have written are neither new nor revolutionary ideas but i write it because if in doing so one reader decides he or she will change her light bulbs, or shut of the water whilst brushing their teeth, then that will make a tiny dent in the problem.

and though i rarely write about technology in this blog it is very much a part of my life. Technology products sadly use materials that are horrendous for our environment. Mercury and Lead top that list. So i urge all 5 or 6 of you who read this to take a second look at that computer or cell phone you're considering tossing in the trash. Technology can be given wonderful second life's as machines dedicated to singles uses.
That 6 year old PC or Mac can't keep up for most new computing task but can still make an excellent web browsing terminal that can be set up for guest or children to use. Consider installing Ubuntu which is for most people with a decent understanding of computer a fairly painless task. It will give that old computer a a new lease and keep it from ending up in a trash dump.

observation:

2007-10-11T00:56:00.000-05:00

on fucking too loudly: is it really that big a deal. I mean really what is it about hearing other people engage in what is essentially a fairly positive activity that gets us all rilled up? I mean do we mind if we hear the neighbors laugh? I think it bothers people because it forces us to comfront the reality that people fuck, our neighbor, our teachers, the cop, the waitress, the starbucks barista, the old woman in apartmen 4c, they all at some point or another fuck, probably, and that idea is somehow uncomfortable, so really when the downstairs neighbor yelled at the top of her lungs for us, (us being me and gf) to shut the fuck up, it was less so because of the noise of one woman moaning and more because it triggered some deep seated issue with acknowledging that you live in a big fucking city, in apts crammed side by side and yes on any given day people are having sex in your building, sometimes loudly, sometimes at 4 in the afternoon, having forgotten to shut the window that opens onto the central airshaft.

it's a small world after all, it's a small world after all, it's a small web after all it's a small small web

2007-10-05T01:56:00.000-05:00

UPATED

1:30 am Mexico City
2:30 am New York City
11:30 pm Los Angeles
8:30 am Madrid

and i'm awake. somewhat bored. a mixture of sleeplessness combined with a stuborness to acknowledge the weariness in my body.
i've spent minutes that felt like more browsing my flickr contacts, a girl in brazil with a thing for posting pictures of her meals just makes me hungry, another girl who seems to post more pictures of cross proccessed film than anyone possible could just make me feel uncreative, nothing really moves me in any direction.
I contemplate porn, maybe i'll jerk off and go to sleep.
it's that peculiar non horny somewhat blase masturbation, it's a in lieu of a wam cup of milk, it almost always about as exciting as a half stiffled sneeze at best.

I point my browser to a website that is sort of like a blog that covers sex and not just porn, a site i might look at perhaps a couple of times a month, if that, since it usually such a cluster fuck of sex related news that it ends up as more "oh?" than "OH!"

tonight though at
1:35 am Mexico City
2:35 am New York City
11:35 pm Los Angeles
and 7:30 am London

i am struck by the most peculiar cluster fuck of emotion i've experienced in quite a while, there smack dab on the front page, top link, main page, front fucking headline if you will, is my ex-gf, THE ex-gf (the THE being there to emphasis the nearly 5 years we spent together) and she's half laughing as she holds onto a balloon dildo.

"oH?!?"

curiosity being the callous bitch that she is i clicked through to the link, all told by

1:40 am Mexico City
2:40 am New York City
11:40 pm Los Angeles
and 4:40 pm Sydney
time

i'd also seen the briefest but recognizable 2 sec glimpse of video of what appears to be her facial expression as she fucks or is fucked or who knows.

Having been somewhat aware of some of the choices regarding her...sexual history after we split i wasn't entirely surprised,

no, you see the shock, the big fucking holy fuck moment of it all is that a year after i stopped giving much of a shit, a year after i stopped reading her all too explicit sex blog, a year after i stopped..."looking" i stumble face or more accurately cock first into her and her NYC sex pot lifestyle,

and it occurs to me that the internet, just became a really, really , really small fucking place.

and i don't fucking like it, not one bit.

i think a fella should be able to look at porn and have about as high probability of seeing his ex-gf as that of winning the lottery? which last i checked where about 1-in-13983816.

I will admit most people don't get ex-gf's quite like mine, most break-ups feature at worst the awkward post break up "running into your gf with her new bloke on the street, or in the shop" moments. Most blokes don't have to worry about browsing for porn and seeing your ex gf face moan a silent "fuck" as she has her hair pulled back while she's on all fours.

small fucking place this internet, i miss stealing playboys when i was 14, it was much simpler.

p.s this is really one of those post where i'd LOVE to read a comment here and there. ;-)

p.s. 2: after a careful forensic analysis it appears i was mistaken, the video in question isn't of her, just one of those fucked up similarities. you know you see a face in a crowd and think it's your childhood crush and then realize it was just an emo boy with sun glaring off of him...alas it's still a small fucking internet though ;-)

observation:

2007-09-20T23:29:00.001-05:00

dating a stripper gets harder the more you give a damn. and given enough time you do tend to give a damn.

Love and Attraction

2007-09-16T22:08:00.000-05:00

"said the Klepto to the Thief"

2007-09-16T21:59:00.000-05:00

"it’s probably for the best” said the thief to the kleptomaniac. I never could get our roles straight.

READ MORE

People are transient.

2007-09-15T13:07:00.001-05:00

I keep in the pockets of my brain the names and faces of the people that have shaped me. The girls that wounded me, loved me, broke me and made me. I have note after note stuffed into the corners of me filled with their inner thoughts, the secrets, the truths revealed in moments of intimacy.

I keep them, these dreams, hopes, desires, fears. I look at them sometimes and feel the palpable cruelness of irony. These girls, with their frailties and broken parts who dashed in and out of my life but left so many snapshoted pieces of themselves with me.

Today they live in different cities of the world. They love there and laugh there and share their newest secrets with different men, every one of them feeling like the spanish conquistador glimpsing the new world for the first time.

They discover the way her body quivers when she comes, that odd syncopated laughter, that quiet desire to be completely dominated, the fears born from the marks of her childhood.
and yet,
and yet i once knew them too. I once felt the discovery of them.

In the most naive corners of my heart i still surprises me not to know them today after having known them so...intimately.

almost

2007-09-13T02:37:00.001-05:00

tonight i almost called her (an ex, the ex, my ex?)
out of impulse, because she wrote that she was catching an early morning flight,
and she'd never expect a phone call from me.
because she wrote "call me an keep me awake" and she'd never expect a phone call from me

she'd be right too.

tonight i almost called because somewhere she wrote "if you don't have my number it must be for a reason huh?"

does it count if for some reason despite not having thought about her 9 digits in about a year, i discovered that even though i deleted it from my mental phone book there was a copy of it stored in my inner sim card, that was readily accessible as soon as the thought "do i remember her number number" crossed my mind
yes, yes i do in fact. I tried the numbers out on my cell phone, the quick gliding from number to number. oddly familiar,
but tonight i ALMOST called,

tonight i almost called for the same reason some people get shitty tattoos whilst drunk: impetuousness in the early morning hours

i'm not sure what i would have said beyond some trite version of bon voyage, it was mainly about knowing i could catch someone off guard, but then what if that caught me off guard...

it's a funny old business isn't it?

paraphrase

2007-09-13T00:32:00.001-05:00

good writing is like vomiting.

the french girl that lives in my watch.

2007-09-11T22:26:00.000-05:00

every hour she's there. intoning in her very particular tone the hour and minutes.
she's there when i need her, at the flick of a button she annotates my day with the time.
she's there and every hour i think i'm falling more in love with her soft familiar voice.
if only she'd grace me with more than just the time.
if only she'd tell me of her hours spent doing french things in her french voice.
if i could only smell her soft hazel nut hair as she looked at the morning sun and said il est matenain sept heur sept minute....

sept 11th

2007-09-11T11:37:00.001-05:00

I have a second milder obssession/habit:
I have always been keenly aware of anniversaries, the passage of time is something i have a deep fascination with, our/my perception of it. I notice anniversaries for all sorts of things, beyond the obvious "relationships" anniversaries. Yearly anniversaries are mainly my focus. It's been a year since i moved from new york, a year since i was last in L.A.
Acknowledging this passage of time serves to remind me of how i've changed and how that lines up with what i might have expected from the time that past. I recently turned 27 and spend a good deal of thought meditating on what this past year was for me and how that differed from what i thought might transpire.
all of this serves as a somewhat long winded intro to acknowledging that it has in fact been 6 yrs since 9-11. I was in new york city on that date in 2001. I was not near enough to ground zero to see any of the truly horrific first hand suffering that occured but i will never forget the palpable sense of loss and sorrow that filled the air that day. In the days that followed there was also a beautiful sense of commonality that bonded the citizens of new york together. There was a sense of kinship that made everyone seem accessible. I look back on those days and weeks that followed with a mixture of both awe and incredulity. In the same breath that new yorkers where helping each other the united states government was concocting the seeds for manipulating the attack to their political advantage. It breaks my heart to see how the American public has been manipulated, it breaks my heart to know that instead of growing stronger and closer in tragedy the country has had a wedge of divisiveness driven into it, it breaks my heart because at the end of the day i'm not american, but i grew up in the country, i lived, loved, and lost in new york city,
many of my closest friends live in the U.S and it's with a great sense of impotence that i watched as the political events of the country unfolded. I hope that somewhere, someone, a new yorker perhaps? remembers what it felt like to feel brotherhood with a total stranger on the streets of manhattan in the weeks after September 11th 2001.

odd habits

2007-09-06T16:05:00.001-05:00

i collect email address.
as in, i seem to have an disproportionate amount of email addresses registered.
mostly it happens because i think of some cool name for some as yet not functioning, recently conceived of company that will do no end of cool things and i then rush to gmail and see if someone else has thought of _____@gmail.com usually no one has and i chalk one more email address to my list.
at present count i have:
12 email addresses of which i regularly use 4.
There's some odd, collectors bug in me that keeps wanting to come up with new and interesting email accounts.
Some technopunk, pattern recognition, wanna be hacker vibe in me that enjoys the process of signing up for a new gmail account, 7 of the 12 emails are gmail.
Somewhere in the is the idea of emails as identity, It becomes part of our personal calling card, email me @...
They are like trying out differet characters or personas,
Someone who still holds onto johnsmith0934@hotmail.com seems to me lacking in cleverness or cool.
I have a mental catalog of criteria by which i immediately judge someones email address.
people who have email address composed of their first and last name rock, i wish luis.sosa@gmail.com was available, it is not.
in second place are emails that are clever without being stupid.
people that use L33T in their email address feel cool. such as p4ola@_____.com
or h4ck@____.com
in third place are people with some variation of first name and initial,
lsosa@____.com etc,
in last place are people who still use the email address they came up with when they were 15
butterly69 or sexychica18,
anything that sounds like it could be a handle for a webcam porn service basically.

so there it is, in odd minutia filled detail.
one of my odd habits.

i want to fall in love with a bi-curious lesbian

2007-08-30T14:26:00.001-05:00

She'd be beautiful but unassuming. She wouldn't give a shit about makeup but couldn't help but look feminine without it. She'd quote oscar wilde poems and be obssesed with jeff buckley.
She'd envy me for having a cock and i'd lend it to her to play with whenever she liked.

She'd feel slightly closeted about her bi-curiousness's and pretend we were friends when her lesbian girlfriends were around
but i wouldn't mind.

she'd have dark brown eyes that spoke of all the great movies she considered her favorites.
We'd both get turned on by seeing Scarlett Johansson's behind in sheer panties during the opening sequence of lost in translation.

It would lead to great sex. She'd laugh and compliment me by saying i ate pussy like a girl and i'd tell her i thought she gave the best handjobs with all the fascination of a teenage boy discovering masturbation...

we'd both laugh.
and then she'd break my heart, no doubt, soundtracked by "this is our last goodbye"
she'd tell me she missed eating pussy and i'd sugggest we'd do it together.

she'd laugh and say she could never, she'd be embarrased for me to see her do it.
and then she'd walk away, move to a country where she could get married to a tall nordic blond who liked listening to morrisey.

she hated that i hated morrisey.

something wonderful

2007-08-29T20:37:00.000-05:00

Discovered this wonderful site. Makes me Smile so i've decided to share it.

http://www.explodingdog.com/

it's tough being a writer who doesn't write

2007-08-21T16:43:00.001-05:00

Writing is such a curious bitch. There's no recipe. I've read about all these writers who force themselves to write x ammount during y time and so and so forth and i think its bullocks. I write. There are moments when things take longer to make their way to the page, screen, google blogspot server, etc and yes i am completely full of it and making excuses for the lack of updates. I wonder if there needs to be some filter, or if just the random observations of my day to day are worth sharing with the faceless more often than not commentless few who frequent this patch of internets.

observation: dating a stripper is sort of like dating a nudist or a girl who frequents the French Riviera. You sort of stop making such a big fuss about exposed breasts. I still love breasts but really sometimes we really do get a bit fixated on them as men.

vagina's on the other hand are still beautiful magnificent, delicious, mythical bits

rehearsing?

2007-08-13T01:32:00.001-05:00

Was it all just a dress rehearsal? Running lines to make sure we nailed our marks and hit the right notes with our “i love you’s” Cause lately, i fear, it’s all been for a performance that doesn’t exist.
Am i the 5 year old boy dressed up as a carrot with no lines because no one cast him in the play.
Will we just keep being slightly better version of ourselves with every guy and girl we find fits a little bit? Do we keep telling ourselves they’re just another dress rehearsal when it all goes to shit? When inevitably, perfection never comes? Always the missing prop, the fumbled line, the cue we somehow missed. All for an opening night that doesn’t really come, because it’s all improv isn’t it? So who ends up with the best version of who? who gets the best version of you? did i?

Romanticism CTRL + R

2007-08-11T14:48:00.000-05:00

antiquated romantics:

The noble concept. The Romantic. The dashing hero. Richard Gere riding in on his white limo. These are enduring images. They exist in almost mythical quantities in our literature, cinema, and music. I grew up with these concept driven into my skull by having the misfortune of reading far too much Shelly and not enough Bukowski.
Of having an awful preference for rock ballads. I also grew up frustrated by being labeled as a really nice guy, a proper gentleman, and not getting laid nearly as much as i wanted.

The thing is, the rub, the jux, of it all is that these concepts, the idea of the romantic as its presented to us is surely based on some antiquated concept of women that ceased to exist somewhere after the first bra was burned. Who is this woman who swoons at the gentlemanly courtship, at the outlandish gestures? If this was a lecture i would already see the smiles creeping across some of the female faces, i can picture the many who would say "me, me, me" but ladies, ask yourselves how many very respectful, gentlemanly nice guys you've put in your pockets as "friends"? I think the noble gent existed at some point out of some necessity. Those grand gestures needed by woman who for hundreds of years lived in secondary roles in society. Needed for assurance, comfort, to make tangible the intangible? "Prove you love me" subtext: because i'm insecure and need assurances.
and so we tried and much of our concepts of the romantic were born.

Standing for hours in the rain just to see you. CHECK
walking 500 miles just to see you smile. CHECK
giving up forever to touch you: CHECK and nicely written by the Goo Goo Dolls
Slaying the dragon, knight, evil king, to win your heart? CHECK

So we slay the dragon, walk the walk in the rain, and nod a polite no to forever when it's offered. Expecting i imagine the maiden in distress to tend to our dragon inflicted wounds or massage our tired feet after walking for so many miles, at the very least to offer us a towel to dry ourselves off and maybe wash our soaked clothes. perhaps i lived in New York City for too many years, maybe there is a very particular kind of bird that lives in that city, but somehow i can't imagine the average (and few of them are average) NYC blackberry toting, web-marketing exec, Carrie Bradshaw idolizing woman to meet those expectations. She's probably dating a drummer or a wall street exec who treats her like shit but who's GORGEOUS.
Many of them would no doubt disagree but i think romanticism needs a refresh. It needs a dose of sincerity.

I think romantic is to say yes your thighs look fat in those jeans, which is why i prefer you naked! Or i fucking hate your dog but i put up with it because i love the way you give head.

Would it hurt to say no you're not the most beautiful woman I've ever seen but I'm absolutely fucking delighted to be here with you.

Maybe it would, or maybe I'm just confused. After all I'm dating a stripper who took very good care of me when i was ill and walked to to the pharmacy for me in the rain.

the no smoking section "FORCE FIELD"

2007-08-09T19:47:00.001-05:00

It's early morning. I'm sitting at one of the indoor tables at my favorite cafe "el cafe de la selva". It's my favorite for two reasons it takes less than 5 mins for me to get from this desk to one of their tables and it's cheap. The Cafe has outdoor seating, which offers a delightful view of the fountain in front but which also draws a larger share of smokers.

I'm inside enjoying my breakfast when one of the other customers lights up. I turn and look at the table in front of him that reads no smoking, i then turn and look at mine and see no such sign. At my sisters suggestion i ask our waiter. Excuse me is this whole section no smoking. "oh no just that row" he replies with a smile "you can smoke at this table if you like" From the 14 inches or so seperating the non smoking row from the smoking row i deduced that the proprietors of the cafe had installed one of those cool star trek like force fields that would force smoke to adhere to their rather slim margins of seperation. FUCKING COOL. I LOVE TECHNOLOGY. I mean to have two rows side by side and have smoke completely stay within the confines of the smoking row that's fucking incre..(cough.cough.cough)

Callousness Rehearsed.

2007-07-28T22:32:00.001-05:00

She barely had time to ask. In fact I'm not even sure if i gave her time to ask. I was wearing my headphones listening to a piano version of some radiohead song that made my walk from the supermarket through the park to my flat seem that much more cinematic.
I did manage to hear her say "disculpe la molestia" (Excuse the bother)
instinctively before my mind had finished processing who she was or what she might want i threw up a polite but firm, very well worn, no sorry don't have any. She might have been asking for directions, clever quips, hell, maybe even mac advice, all of which i would have had to confess i had plenty of.
She may have also wanted money, of which i had some.
Beggars, Pan Handlers, Bums, Street Urchins all of these are common fair in most large cities, and more so in the more affluent neighborhoods,
Sadly as i walked away i realized she was none of the above. My mind finished processing the visual clues as i reached the edge of the park.
She was dressed normally, wore some makeup, had her hair gelled back, and seemed in genuine distress. I'd seen her moments before she asked me, ask the man walking towards me and watched his reaction, his well rehearsed shrug off, and as i walked, as i in fact started thing about writing about this experiencing, slightly appalled that the writer in me would somehow profit from the moment, i realized maybe she was just like me, or you, or anyone i know who through fate and circumstanced needed to ask for 10 pesos to grab a metrobus, maybe there was genuine need of a helping hand and not merely the every day begging for a handout.
But my callousness is a coat i throw on even on the most unbearably hot days, without much thought, as i grab keys, wallet, music, callousness and head out the door.
Somewhere along the line, with the everday litany of people asking for money i became a man who wouldn't even stop to hear what that woman had to say, and for that i'm sorry because at the very least i could have let her get far enough past "excuse the bother" for it to actually be a bother.

in response to anonymous comment on home:

2007-07-18T13:48:00.001-05:00

i think it becomes a process of embracing and letting go simultenously. we all have concepts of home, built on childhood, great loves, perhaps even a dog and we look for those patterns in new places, we make those choices, to live with white walls, and not invest emotionally, it seems easier perhaps, to be a vagabond, to act like some wandering nomad with innner roots. For me ultimately i have to try, i have to find it in my selection of teas that i brew in one of my favorite cups, i find it in the familiar things i have brought with me, but some days its harder than others, some days i crave something so intangiable, so unspecific, that it feels like the noise of the mosquito buzzing past your ear at night even though you've already killed that mosquito.

dog shit favors

2007-07-16T17:31:00.001-05:00

"would you mind taking our dogs for a walk?"
asked delightful british neighbor

that's a deceptively simple request. After all her dogs are very nice dogs, and i do like walking, but really what she was asking was,

"i'm on set all day tomorrow and my dogs need to be walked twice, cause otherwise they might go stir crazy and possibly shit in my flat, I've got the first shift covered but not the second, so would mind taking them out at around 8pm and following them around until they both shit, then picking up the shit and hunting for one of those elusive Condesa public trash cans to dispose of it properly?"

It changes the nature of the favor doesn't it, and least for me. The truth is i love...well maybe just like, dogs. I'm certain i like them, but having lived in NYC and seen the delightful ritual that is the plastic bag crap scoop up i am convinced that to clean up dog shit, to not mind doing so must be very much like changing diapers. No parent i know of likes doing it, most of them find it a bit gross, but they all do it because they love their child, and i think those people walking around carrying their dogs shit in plastic baggies love their dogs, and their dogs love them, and its a beautiful symbiotic relationship.

But i do not love the neighbors two dogs. I have in fact only met them on two occasions. The truth is i'd be much more inclined to pick up my neighbors shit than their dogs, them at least i know.

2007-07-09T15:35:00.001-05:00

plainspoken truth.

home

2007-07-09T13:59:00.001-05:00

somewhere just south of nowhere
near the park and a fountain and a pile of garbage waiting for its ride to the city dumps.

In there, some where, The hard floor was a shiny white something which made him think of a hospital waiting room.
It was the floor he'd wake up to in his shinny new but old apt.

The ceiling looked like the pockmarked face of a teenage Bukowski, "popcorned" was the term they so charmingly referred to it as.

It was a home, but not quite home. It lacked the little bits of memories that had filled his small avocado green living room on east 35th st or his unearned highrise apartment overlooking central park.

There'd been no great loves in this room.
No breathless "oh god's" to mask an "i love you" that's bashing to get out.
No snowy days spent in doors watching movies.
Just sex, good sex, fun sex, but..

...There'd been no arguments filled with bile and love
no promises,
no broken promises
no betrayals or reconciliations.
no hard hitting, core diving, conversations on a living room couch, no truths, no beautiful girls that would break his heart, on a beige living room couch, in fact
there was no couch here, just an old futon on the floor that didn't belong to him and didn't belong to the person that'd lent it to him.
Just an old futon that smelled of sex, and uneasy sleep, and strangers dreams.

His books and movies stood like soldiers against the wall, a cardboard box and a plastic shelf from his fridge were the extent of his coffee table,
He doesn't spend much time in this makeshift living room.
He wakes in the mornings and imagines a large wooden table that would welcome coffee stains and tea rings and nights of writing on its dark wood surface,

He wakes in the mornings and takes to the familiar confines of his music library and the people on his buddy list. To the list of movies or albums torrents he's left downloading overnight,
to the comfortable surroundings of the websites he reads, the blank "page" of a word document, the porn he knows is tucked away on his computer, that he'll rarely ever bother looking at.

To the half watched documentary on Bukowski that sits patiently paused for the last few days.

And his feet feel the cold shiny surface of that white floor in his bedroom,
and his feet walk to the living room, the slumped futon looking very much like an overnight guest asleep after a very heavy night of drinking, he opens the doors to the balcony, the tiny balcony that smells of dog piss when it rains heavily,
that overlooks the treetops and fountain and pile of trash,
He does this and thinks...this is home.
he does this and thinks...this is home?

in sleep

2007-07-05T14:27:00.000-05:00

in sleep duality disappears.
the most complex women look kind.

pardon me

2007-07-05T14:13:00.000-05:00

but i'm going a tad bit...

"Show me all the blueprints. Show me all the blueprints. Show me all the blueprints... show me all the blueprints... show me all the blueprints... show me all the blueprints..."

from my eyeballs

2007-06-27T20:19:00.000-05:00

there something so intriguing about the way something like an american apparel advert stuck on a wall can seem to gain an ounce of truth in its decay

sexed?

2007-06-25T20:01:00.001-05:00

i once had a girlfriend who became an ex girlfriend, so i suppose i could have said i have an ex-girlfriend (cause you never really loose an ex-girlfriend, she'll always be an ex-girlfriend, maybe i should celebrate ex-gf anniversaries)

this ex-girlfriend had a blog, a blog i read for much longer than really was healthy or sane, i.e. i kept reading it once she had transitioned to ex-girlfriend status. In this blog she wrote about her sex life with the same graphic bluntness that most people use to describe disgusting things their new babies do that they find fascinating. She'd go on about her varied sexual escapades like a lost fifth Sex in the City character HBO would never have aired. Ironically the last gift i ever gave her was the fucking dvd box set of the show.

Reading her blog for me was a mixture between a voyeuristic thrill and being kicked in the balls by an angry fifth grader, but alas i learned my lesson "don't date girls with sex blogs" and if you do don't let them become ex's and if they do "don't read their fucking blog!"

This all brings me to a question i asked myself, should i or should i not let this blog touch upon, the sometimes interesting, sexy, funny, messy. and occasionally painful, observations on my own sex life? I've always been less exhibitionist and more voyeur, but isn't there an unavoidable exhibitionist streak to any personal blog.

I have little problems talking very bluntly and openly about sex, over coffee, sipping tea, drinking vodka, but in person. I decided that that kind of sexual openness should at least be accompanied by gesticulation and facial expressions.

"she showed up wearing jeans and an old tshirt which was goofy in a sexy slightly deliberate way that reminds me that..." - made up celeb interview

2007-06-16T17:15:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading a GQ interview/profile/excuse for having someone to photograph/ on Jessica Alba.
She comes off as low key, sweet natured, trying very hard to be something more than just a tantalizingly sexy woman who seems plague by an public interest that doesn't stray far from "when is she going to do a nude scene"
The interviewer in his own description seems empathic to this, to the fact that the 'industry' keeps trying to put her into bikini's and yet the accompanying photo shoot seems to go in direct contrary to this empathy. The last photo of the piece is a medium close up of Jessica Alba in a white bikini top, holding a water bottle and dribbling water down her lower lip and onto her chest. What the fucking fuck?!?
It is a good photo, sexy, well shot, and Alba seems to nail the whole pseudo improvised, "i don't care" attitude of the shot but i still felt a mild revulsion towards it.
I'm a pretty straight shooter, i like calling things what they are and the rest be damned, so if you want Jessica Alba for a cover so you can put her in fucking bikini then for god sake don't fill an interview with empathy over her having to do the whole 'bikini thing'. Acknowledge that you too GQ are part of that 'industry'

In the end it got me thinking about the role of beauty. It's a old debate but frankly i'm getting a little bored with beautiful women who seem so aware of their beauty. I believe in the following quote that I've always heard attributed to Ingmar Bergman "beauty that is unaware of itself is the most beautiful"

and really, girls. women, any and all of you who are genetically blessed. How many times can you hear a guy tell you you're beautiful before you begin to crave something a bit more substantial, substantial even if it is still superficial, like...wow you're really elegant, or poised, or stylish, hell...even cool would seem an improvement on 'you have beautiful eyes'

Maybe i'm wrong, but i've dated very beautiful women and in most cases it wasn't me telling them they were beautiful that carried any weight, but the substance of conversation, connection, click that really gave the situation any headway. I love a pair of beautiful eyes, or a striking nose but both are really quite dull if it isn't in the context of a brilliant cackle. laugh, a witty remark, or a bit sincerity.

So while in reading this celebrity interview, a genre which gets more and more painfully predictable with each issue (notable exception of a recent GQ interview with Halle Berry)
I can't help but wonder why bother with the pretense of intimacy, why mention that Alba considers herself clumsy, or that she tugs at her shirt nervously, but that it also makes her shoulders look sexy. Why bother when the accompanying pictorial rarely ever reflects the superficial intimacy gleamed by the author for the interview?

Tuxedo

2007-06-10T03:19:00.001-05:00

i'm 26 years old. tonight i wore a tuxedo for the first time. These are my thoughts at 3:20 am sitting in my boxers and black socks, having careful undressed and hung up my tuxedo and its accouterments in the closet:

Tuxedos make you feel like the pimpest motherfucker in the room, unless that room is full of other equally pimp feeling motherfuckers. (or any other fuckers for that fact.)
walking down the street, stepping out of the taxi, running into your hot 19 yr old neighbor and her friends drunk in the elevator, you feel like one pimp, suave, debonair, GQing son of a bitch!
but for the most part the occasions in which one is required to wear tuxedos are those in which every bloke wears a tuxedo, and lets face it, tuxedos vary very little, trying to...differentiate the tux from others usually ends poorly, like the bloke i saw with the pink cravat.

So right now i'm thinking come tomorrow morning i should wear that tux to grab a morning cup of coffee while i read the paper, i should wear a tuxedo next time i get laid, not TO get laid, but while doing the laying, i should wear a tuxedo taking myself for a walk, because man does it feel good! Tuxedo's are wonderful things to wear just as long as you're not in a room full of other blokes wearing the same.

personal narratives

2007-06-09T00:05:00.001-05:00

the average human life span is 73.43890 years. (That figure is completely made up)
We divide and subdivide our personal narrative into years, months,
relationships, cities lived, people known but almost always within a
very narrow forecast.
But in doing so we overlook the fact that some patterns will only
emerge over the course of longer units of time. Decades for example.

I've spent the last 18 months of my life trying to forecast patterns
for some of the people who are or have been in my life, trying to find
the ways that the might fit into the narrative, like an overcaffeinated
writing staff on a sitcom trying to write back in a character.

I've felt jittery, I've commented on it in various forms on this very
blog, and in the end i realized that in trying to script them into my
narrative i was just getting in the way.

sometimes you meet the love of your life a decade too soon, and
sometimes the love of your life becomes a life long friend...and
sometimes people are just momentary catalyst that poke at your insides
and remind you that you still have them.

*

2007-06-03T23:23:00.001-05:00

time can destroy anything, just give it time.

from a certain drawer.

2007-06-03T23:06:00.001-05:00

you were 5.
every picture of you showed you pouting or frowning.
you hated being photographed.
you're on a beach and don't want your picture taken.
your father tells you that if you close your eyes you'll turn invisible and won't show up in the picture.
you told me this as i looked at a photo of you, 5 years of age, in only your swimsuit bottoms with your eyes firmly closed.
I was glad your dad lied.
it's a beautiful picture.

this is what's left behind.
talking to a woman who happened to mention what she was like when she was a baby, i found myself distracted by the memory of your childhood pictures.
i will remember you in random moments.
inopportune moments.
i will randomly remember something random from the drawer marked 2000-2005

everything is paid for in eggs.

2007-05-31T23:14:00.000-05:00

I've recently been poor, broke, skint, strapped, impecunious, indigent, destitute (well not really)...but i had very little cash. A payment i was owed was delayed which lead to me low cash flow situation. This served to put things in an interesting perspective: the perspective of eggs.

9 days ago i was down to my last 90 pesos ($8.30 USD) The fridge was starting to look emptier and i went into what many nyu film students know as ramen noodle mode, except i fucking hate ramen noodles, they make me fat, and i'd rather be hungry than fat. no offense to hungry or fat people. I've been both.

So 90 pesos and i knew i had at least a week before i had any money coming in, what to do?
Eggs i though surely 90 pesos is enough for at least a dozen eggs, i can eat eggs twice a day for the rest of the week! Might even have some money left over for some bread or some cheese!

Well i walk over to the woman who sells fresh produce and eggs from a little hole in the wall (a block from starbucks, just to give some perspective, i hate cliched ideas about mexico having dusty roads, tequlia, and cacti, i've never seen a fucking cacti in mexico EVER.)
I ask her for a dozen eggs, she informs me they sell the eggs by the kilo and that a kilo is roughly sixteen eggs and each kilo of eggs is 13 pesos ($1.21 USD)...13 motherfucking pesos ($1.21 motherfucking USD) ! i had to ask twice. Yes 13...'cuantos quiero joven' (how many would you like young man) Fucking hell suddenly my 90 pesos no longer felt measly, i felt well off, i could feed a whole village of well...one or two people for weeks on 90 pesos worth of eggs. I asked for a kilo. 16 eggs which i've yet to finish.

ever since, everytime i pay for something i do the currency exchange.

my 36 pesos grande capuccino at starbucks = nearly 48 eggs.

the starting meter rate on a cab 20 pesos = 22 eggs give or take

an airport extreme base station 1,923 pesos = 2366 eggs!!!

puts things in perspective.

maintenance

2007-05-28T17:51:00.000-05:00

Day's slip by unnoticed and i feel I've lost my grip on the steering wheel.
It's been a straight road and I've been lucky, but i think i just saw a sign that says "dangerous curves ahead".
Deliberate-ness, choices,
'course laid in Captain'

The rest will fall into place. Gotta know where i'm rolling before i can invite someone to roll along.

Time to clean the fountain.

i like to think i do.

2007-05-27T05:39:00.001-05:00

but the truth is i know fuck all about what i'm doing.
it's mostly just impulse.
i crave joy.
it feels like a phantom limb on a war wounded statistic.
it's the difference between what's real at 5:37 am
and what i think....FEEL should be real.

this is me venting.
i will now go to sleep.
somebody fucking comment!
you know...cause it's nice.

observation

2007-05-25T01:31:00.001-05:00

Fuck you's are more fun.

They satisfy that 'instant gratification' part of our brains.

Silence is infinitely more effective, cruel, indifference. Those are the 'words' that tell someone 'i'm done'. It's in not doing that you truely let go. Goodbye's never need to be said. If you feel that urge, that need to send one last goodbye or a well worded fuck off and die, ask yourself if you're expecting a response.

for may 23rd

2007-05-23T14:47:00.001-05:00

i want you
for me,
in whispered moments
in morning breaths
anticipation of uttered words.
of 10 am's 'i'm hungry'

want you,
damn it. with me. because.
just.

seemingly improbable, i want to be one of the great loves of your fucking life.
i think i'd be fun.

at the very least a beautiful mess.

proxmity cool

2007-05-23T00:40:00.000-05:00

I've decided that i like having old late 60's early 70's movies playing in the background as i do other things. There is something about those old color stocks that they used that just 'feels' cool.
as if, by osmosis. I, sitting in my blue stripped boxers and beige t-shirt, will somehow absorb some 'Cool' from Bullit or Doc, or hell Newman in...anything he did in the 70's.
they had some really great wardrobe designers back them.

I once read an article in GQ that mourned the utter lack of off-set movie star style in our present day movie stars. i.e. how many times have you seen Leo DiCaprio wearing fucking sandals and socks....anything higher than "0" is one too many.

So here's to 70's movie stars playing on the TV in the background as i write about them and feel a proximity cool

* and yes that is a black and white picture taken by peter schroeder of paul newman, i stumbled across it and thought it was cool so there it is.

small irony

2007-05-22T23:00:00.001-05:00

i was browsing through my blog settings and i realized i'd set the blog up so that only blogger users could comment. since i doubt the random reader gives much of a fuck about registering just to leave some off-handed comment about my writing i have changed that setting.

anyone can now comment if you should feel the urge.

love, fairytales, and self

2007-05-22T19:00:00.001-05:00

'all you need is love' - the Beatles

'what the world needs now, is love, sweet love...' - the carpenters

'At last, my love has come along, my lonely days are over, and life is like a song' - Etta James

'As long, as long as i have you' - Elvis Presley

Beginning to see a pattern? The holy grail perhaps? I've been in love. truly. honest i have. We in fact loved each other. In the end that really meant fuck all. I don't mean to give the wrong impression. That in and of itself is rare, and it was a large part of the years we shared with each other, but in the end love really had nothing to do with it.

Nothing new right?, i could find and equal number of songs detailing that one fact 'love is not enough' in fact that's a nine inch nails song right there. The irony is we are fundamentally conditioned to believe the opposite. We are bombarded by happy endings, love stories, fairy tales. We place love above self. We attribute it as the reason for any number of silly things.

"you're nobody till somebody loves you...." says Dean, and Dean Martin can sound awfully convincing when he's crooning those words. But i think we can handle romanticism without the fairy tales, i think we can deal with the fact that love is only the main ingredient in a recipe as complex as Molé Poblano:

1 chicken or turkey - love is perhaps the chicken or turkey in this analogy

11 ancho chiles - sex

6 mulatto chiles - sex

3chiles chipotles adobados - sex

3tablespoons chile seeds - making love

5pasilla chiles - sex

4oz. almonds - cuddling

4oz. peanuts - sharing

8oz. sesame seeds - communication

2oz. pumpkin seeds - compromise

1bar dark chocolate - chocolate

6 allspice - humility

6 cloves - understanding

1 cinnamon stick - humor

A pinch aniseed - spontaneity/adventure

4 tomatoes - passion

10 green tomatillos - ego, self, to thine own self be true

3 cloves - joy

1 medium onion - pain

3 tortillas - self confidence

1 stale white bread roll - stability

1/2 lb.lard - all the messy misc. stuff

2tablespoons vinegar - independence

I'm sure I've left out a few things. but it gives you a rough idea of just how over simplified our ideas of relationships are. Maybe if we knew going into it how complex the recipe was we'd never attempt it?
As it stands, we clutch onto the first chicken we see and wonder why the fuck we aren't feasting on mole poblano yet?

i fear my analogy is starting to fall apart but it looks too clever to let go of, so I'm gonna hold on, Relationships are like mole poblano. OKAY? and love is just a chicken.

*the original text of this asterix was here for the wrong reasons, now it is gone.

today

2007-05-22T02:32:00.001-05:00

today i realized i wouldn't know what to say to you.

if i let you back in my life.

i would probably stare and wonder how you changed so much.

and know that you'd probably be wondering the same thing.

and sometimes you say vanilla and i say vanella.
and the distance between the two is astonishing.

temporary temporal

2007-05-21T18:41:00.001-05:00

i have come to the temporary conclusion that everything i wrote before i was twenty-rightnow was shit! I find myself cringing at the naiveness, at the recklessness with which i would use clichés. The overabundance of metaphor. I must have thought i was in some contest to test just how many of the fucking things i could come up with to describe the same thing.

There is something to be said for saying 'you're fucking beautiful' instead of 'your eyes like emeralds glisten and i sat gasping for.... fuck! i think i just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

now i don't mean to be cruel to my younger self, he tried, he didn't know any better, i hope he never reads this and has his feelings hurt or worse gives up entirely.

no, no, that would be sad. Instead i hope i read this, in 9 years, when i've come to the temporary conclusion that everything i'd written before i was thirty-righthen was shit! i hope i read this, laugh, and go easy on my twenty-six year old self, and i hope i never ever read what i write about me then.

smiles

2007-05-20T19:44:00.001-05:00

When i lived in new york there was this lawn in central park called sheep's meadow that would always close for the winter. I would walk past it and contemplate hopping the fence.

i never did (i think i should have) but every year in the early days of spring when the air was still cold they'd open the gate up and i would feel a delightful joy at being able to enjoy this meadow while the air still had a crisp bite to it. It wasn't 'really' spring yet. new york was still cold and few new yorkers enjoyed the lawn in the cold, but it was a rare delight to enjoy it before it was truely 'time' to.

By June, the meadow would usually be packed full of people.

flickeur

2007-05-15T20:51:00.000-05:00

http://incubator.quasimondo.com/flash/flickeur.php

this is beautiful.
this is tapping into the dreams of an emerging artificial intelligence based on the stuffs of our digital selfs.

i see such beautiful random images, they are fleeting and i wish i could keep them.

this also works really well if you're listening to "how it ends" by Devotchka