An Existential Schizophrenic

She was a librarian
black hair pinned back
hands folded in lap.
She sat at the front desk
imparting her owl eyes and Gogh ears
on the domain that was hers
and only hers.
"DaVinci in Row Five," she declared,
"Machiavelli in Row Eleven."
"Kierkegaard, you ask? Row Zero."
Head held high,
she answered question after question,
solved mystery after mystery.
And what about you? a familiar voice inquired.
In which row do you belong?
It was a simple question, an easy one at that.
She opened her proud lips but no sound came out
Flustered, she snapped --
"There's no talking in the library."

Arrested Development

In an attempt to liberate his child from the all too well-known shackles of a high-expecting father (as well as a personal act of rebellion against his own father), Jason Bateman, a typical business-oriented man, watches in warm satisfaction as his son, a chubby-cheeked, pre-Juno Michael Cera, burns down the family-owned banana shack. The next morning, an orange-clad father of Bateman, imprisonated for defrauding investors and using his company as a bank for his family's personal expenses, looks his son straight in the eye and says with subdued tension, "There was $250,000 in cash lining the walls of the Banana Stand." You know, it's scenes like this that have me hooked on the TV show Arrested Development. There's something strangely heart-warming about an ecclectic family with wide-ranging personalities and incestual interests. Sibling competition, forbidden love, parental screw-ups...hello Wes Anderson? The narration/filming and quirky family dynamics remind me of The Royal Tenenbaums (one of my favorite films), and even the photo above is corroboratory of this statement. The absurd recurring jokes and foreshadowing techniques are sufficiently subtle to pass as just another one of Hurwitz's eccentricities, but noticeable enough to play catch-and-connect, which, I have to say, makes a non-frequent TV viewer like myself quite proud. Dixon introduced me to the show and I'm surprised I've never heard of it before, especially since the seriocomic humor is just my cup of tea. Usually, I'm not the most avid watcher of TV shows, but with the Velvet Underground playing in the background as the Bluth family members find themselves in the most realistically unrealistic situations, this might be an exception.

Hey Judas

When society becomes a burden,
look inside and find Tyler Durden
'cause you know he's the only one
who's brave enough to pull the gun

Forget the frail traitor -
the faceless narrator -
religion's no longer real
and anarchism's your last meal

Beyond the dull needle of prozium
lies the truth to Plato's symposium
so go ahead, put on your Fawkes mask
99 barrels will finish the task

They say it's not treason
if you got a good reason,
so when the world's in convolution
hell, why don't you start a Revolution

A Toast to the World

Currently listening to "The Gift" by The Velvet Underground. Good storyline. Very Tarantino-esque.

Once upon a time, I ate a cold black plum and I swear it was the greatest black plum Cain ever reaped from the ground. I drank a glass of milk and I swear it was the tastiest milk on earth. I sat on the balcony on an upside-down box and I drank the night air and I swear it was the most nitrogenated air I ever inhaled. I stared at the city lights and I drank them too. I told the person sitting on the right-side up box beside me that I believed in two realms of life. The first was materialistic and jealous of the second and would not let go of the physical particles it possessed. The second was spiritual and introspective and so accepted only the metaphysical assets of the world. I explained that the city lights were a reflection of the stars and that was why the light bulb above us was so fucking bright, because of that one star that shone bryter than the rest. To test my theory, I wished upon a stoplight, but the damn thing kept moving before I could finish my wish. I laughed to myself but secretly I was disappointed. And so that night I drank the stars and I swear they were the most beautiful I'd ever eaten. They tasted like one dollar tacos on a Wednesday night.

Tactfully,
T.J.

Nothing to write
Only to wrong

Dear Sir George Henry Martin

Now somewhere in the sleepless city of LA
There lived a young girl named Tactful TJ
One day her curiosity ran off with speedy Adidas
Left her in the dirt, she didn't like that
She said one day I'm gonna find my curiosity
So she drove away into the night
Her only passenger the Nowhere Man from Nowhere Land

To talk of many things

A giant cockroach frantically scurries across the room, struggling to dodge a storm of cascading red apples. An Algerian man accountable for the death of an Arab stands indifferently over his carcass, shot multiple times for no plausible reason. A timid captain meets his doppelganger face-to-face in a dark L-shaped room, located on a lonely ship in the middle of the ocean.

Kudos to you if you can pinpoint the literary pieces that contain these mindwrecking scenes. They happen to be part of some of the greatest literary works I've come across, all portraying a human enigma I've never been able to fully wrap my head around - the id as a societal foreigner. The id by definition is inherently human, it defines our most basic impulses and wants - survival and sexual satisfaction - and constitutes the amoral, instinctual side of our personalities. As opposed to the societally influenced conscious us, the id is us at our most basic level. And despite this, we try to hide it away into the deepest corners of our souls, ashamed and embarrassed of the raw, infantile thoughts of our minds. We have this inborn urge to constantly suppress our "dark side" and mask them with superficial images of good and righteousness. We deny our primal desires when we know they are universally human and natural. We follow a path of artifical, self-created morality, but under what authority? We are unreliable narrators of our own lives. Repression of the unconscious mind can only lead to self-consumption; acceptance, on the other hand, fosters independence and self-discovery. Power to Hobbes, but I'm not saying we're inherently evil people. I'm saying we shouldn't have to feel like we have to mold ourselves to what modern ideology brands as bad or good. But I have to admit my criticism of this human hypocrisy is hypocritical in and of itself. I, without a doubt, fall victim to mankind's fixation with constructing a facade of virtue. There are a lot of things you don't know about me and well, I'm sure there are a lot of things I don't know about you. If I reveal them to you now, I'm still the same person, the same friend, the same daughter you've always known, but regardless, you will judge me. Perhaps that's the reason. We hide ourselves because we are afraid of being judged. Maybe I should return to God. That way, if I do something "bad", all I need to do is confess to be redeemed.

Hah. Fuck that. Writing is salvation enough.

Tactfully,
T.J.