Things I Have Seen In The City Part 7333526

Man 1, walking up to small tree, looking intense: I'ma choke the shit outta my enemies. (Grabs tree, starts to shake gently.)

Man 2: Let go that tree, boy, it didn't do nothing to you.

Man 1, muttering: Tree try to murder me...

Falling Man

Americans all have their stories about 9/11. Where they were, who told them. I have mine. I was in a suburban middle school; I’d never been to New York. I was in Home Economics and they had an announcement over the intercom, saying would all teachers please send a student up to the main office right now to carry a message. We all waited for a minute and then a little girl came back with a yellow piece of paper and the teacher read it and I’m pretty sure I was the only one who saw her cry a bit just then. Then she turned on a TV and we watched the news.

Then the bell rang for the next class and we all shuffled on. I went to English class where my teacher called them bastards and motherfucks, and then he turned on the news too and we watched as the second plane hit and a girl near me screamed. My teacher, he was this tall, thin, quiet person, he just sat in the back at his desk and muttered bastards, motherfucks. I don’t really know what else he could have done. We were twenty middle schoolers being faced with the sublime. We watched people jump and fly out of the towers and one girl cried, but most of us were quiet because we didn’t know what to do.

Then there was another announcement over the intercom, which said that they were going to let out school early. They rang the bell and we all came out and all our parents were there, cars lined up into the distance, waiting to get a hold of their sons and daughters, hundreds of miles from the crash, they needed us safe and in hand.

I Have Not Been Updating My Blog

Surprise, surprise.

Basically the only thing that will keep me updating regularly is likely to be a requirement of some kind that I do so. Something which actually applies on the TSTL blog-we're making sure everybody posts at least once a week. (And getting at least 500 views a week as a result...)

So who knows how often, or whether, I'll be updating this thing. The name's really dumb, which is another reason I usually don't. But whatever, I feel like basically any blog name is going to sound preposterous until you get a huge amount of readers.

Anyway, I'm now in a creative writing class, and have suddenly discovered that I am a big fan of writing and plan to do much more of it. Not for any particular reason, mostly just as an outlet. (That said, if somebody approached me with SIX ZILLIONS OF DOLLARS for a publishing deal... I'd consider it.) Fiction, mostly. Because I do not know how to write poetry effectively.

As a side note, I would like to comment that Neal Stephenson has a real knack for coming up with totally absurd details in his books. Such as the name of a metal band which figures in his novel Zodiac: "Pöyzen Böyzen." Quote from one of the characters: "Not bad for a two-umlaut band."

Maine: A Reflection

So I am heading back to the city roughly 11 hours from now. I will really miss Maine, but I am ready to take on the city once again. Mostly, I will wish I was playing with The Ladykillers.

Here are things I have discovered or come to better understand during my stay in Maine.

-I am not a city lad
-I enjoy a slow pace of life
-I can still deal with life in the city
-I need to be making music constantly to feel right
-I can choose to not include people's obnoxious actions in the memory of my life
-There are awful and wonderful things in the world, but everything is beautiful
-"Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be." -Abraham Lincoln


-God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

I suppose that if we do completely destroy the planet Earth, it will be because it is supposed to happen.

If the bombs drop, and everywhere there is a holocaust of living things, then there will probably still be some people living underground. My theory is that they will have a guitar down there. They will probably play the blues.

If we lose our sight, if it atrophies due to a lack of sunlight--a necessity to avoid the fallout--then we will learn to hear and smell and certainly feel a lot better.

It is my theory that the world will go in cycles. Eventually, some person will be crazy enough to shoot it all the rest of the way to hell. But then, life will find a way again. We will have bizarre, deformed plants. Cockroaches, devoid of natural predators, will evolve into strange new beings. Maybe most importantly, humans will probably not have access to electricity in their underground hideouts.

When they finally do emerge, it will be unto a completely new world.

Inevitably, however, they will feel the need to discover. They will feel the need to find out all the actions that they could possibly do to anything. Those that they find to be useful, they will use.

Working together, and with roach-dogs as pets, people may even re-invent the nuclear missile.



Whatever the process actually is, it will really be a beautiful ride. What if humanity moves off of the Earth? What if there are tiny colonies which all subsist on snakes and grass?



I am a believer that whatever happens will be what is supposed to happen. I believe in that.

This is why I don't become terrified at the thought of bizarre killing machines, Fat Men and Little Boys. Humans can do whatever beautiful, stupid things they like. Death is not such a horrific thing. We are programmed to avoid it, because if we were not, we would all just die. But it is not a cause for the terrible alarm it raises, not in the least. When I die, it will be precisely when it was supposed to happen. I will be content, because I will know that I have always done the best that I could to be and to do the best that I could. I can imagine no better life than that.

I have been reading some more Vonnegut.

I have been doing some more writing.

Good night.

vonnegut vonnegut vonnegut

another, along the samelines as the last

Something I do not understand is that we seem more and more discouraged--and unwilling--to have and to use imagination. Watching films even from 1950 is 'boring.' Reading books from then? Even worse. I should amend that. Most people I know read maybe a book a year. Or less. Not everybody but most. Everything is obvious, nothing is left to the imagination, we all have ADD. What do we blame? Society? Barney? I don't know but my kids are going to read a damn lot of books.