Stoned and slightly inebriated

Currently listening to "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle & Sebastian.

There's an enigmatic sense of freedom and individuality about driving through the streets of LA at night. The psuedo-relationships of my daytime life disappear and I'm heading towards something real, something personal, something soulful. I don't know exactly what that may be, but hell if God knows, my foot never leaves the accelerator. I'm carefree again, spontaneous and unsure, following one blinking star after another like unnumbered dots to be connected. With each path I take, a foamy trail of white wine is left across the night sky to remind me of where I've been, what I've done, and who I've seen. Life is sheer madness, madness to think, madness to explore, madness to live. Jack Kerouac is my friend, listening and responding to my boundless curiosity towards love, life, and self. He doesn't care if I steal his lines to describe this longing for escapism; in fact, he's quite flattered. Anything and everything becomes a philosophical musing of some type: whether over the length of telomeres or over the absurd lyrics of the latest indie song, no one cares, just as long as someone's talking and someone's listening. There will be times when speed limits are non-existent, these are the times of uninhibited lust for adventure; there will be times I experience flat tires, these are the times I forget to wonder and question; there will be times yellow means faster and red means go, these are the times of intense passion and keenness to love. But no matter what time it is, one thing is sure: I will never stop driving. Under the soft champagne hum of the streetlights and the ghostly glow of the moon, I will never stop driving.

Tactfully,
T.J.

Speaking of concerts

Currently listening to "Wonderwall" by Oasis. I swear it's been resonating through my apartment for the past three days. Four chord songs are always the catchiest.

I like to think the reason that makes Outsidelands the worst concert I've ever attended (well, half-attended) compensates by making it the concert I will never forget, no matter how hard I try. The fact that I arrived 20 minutes after Modest Mouse performed muffles the pain a little bit. But heck, MIA, Band of Horses, and Tenacious D were still worth trying to sneak inside. I mean, it's Jack Black. He was probably going to pull some ridiculous stunt like get naked or lick some dude's ass. The plan: Dixon (the lucky owner of an actual ticket) would get in first and inform me of locations with sparsely populated security guards. The actuality: They are literally everywhere, clad in their "you can't miss me" bright yellow jackets. So, to make a long story short, I jumped fences, crawled under fences, hiked through shady-looking woods, feigned diarrhea (like ten times! Embarrassing!), all this, only to make friends with baked delinquents, land in a police compound, get kicked out three times, and walk the entire perimeter of Golden Gate Park, all by my lonesome, in 60 degree weather. Having my friend on the phone squealing about how smashtastic the performances were while I really needed to pee made me a little happier. In fact, I think I might've peed a tiny bit just thinking about how much fun she was having and how much free stuff she was collecting. So happy that I've become incontinent. Needless to say, traversing the park with strange people on ecstasy who think my name is Sammy is an experience I probably wouldn't have come across elsewhere in my humble life. At least four hours of trying to get inside Outsidelands only to end up outside Outsidelands makes for a damn good story.

On another note, I want to go to the Treasure Island Festival next week. And Regina Spektor's going to be in LA October 28! My good friend purchased early bird tickets as a surprise and what a surprise it was until I discovered I have an organic chemistry midterm the very same night! I shed tears of blood as I write this.

Tactfully,
T.J.

Extended metaphors (unintentional)

Currently listening to "Firecracker" by Voxtrot. What an explosive song!

So I was flipping through my journal last night and came across this excerpt I found particularly snort-worthy. I wrote this after a Beatles tribute concert held by the White Ensemble during the summer. I think it was sometime in late August, just around the same time I discovered I had psychic abilities and almost started believing in God.

The sky was a sleepy grey. The crowd was restless. Something big was going down and we all knew it. Tonight would be the resurrection of The Beatles. Old, young, ugly, short, fat, beautiful, we were all there. And we were both thankful and thanked for it, too. "Thank you all for being here. If you would like to buy our CD or T-shirts, it would be of great benefit to us. And of great benefit to 94.5 KOIT. But most of all, it would of great benefit to Mr. Kite." That was the switch to the greatest musical orgy I've ever experienced. And the best part was it was with complete strangers whose names I will never feel obligated to know or remember. It was loud, rough, and lasted a little over 3 hours. Standing at the front, I looked back into the sea of people behind me. Together, they literally looked like a sea, steadily moving up and down, up and down to the beat of The Beatles. Every song I vocally desired was played within five minutes of my request. Strawberry Fields Forever, Revolution, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, you name it, I named it, they named it. The night ended with All You Need is Love, which is a rather romanticized ideal, returned with an encore of Back in the USSR, which I thought was a heinous choice for an encore, and ended with a second (and more appropriate) encore of Hey Jude, the ultimate sing-along! Funny thing, I've always dreamt about being within a 1-mile radius of na na na na na's, but being the center of it?

Best orgy ever.

Tactfully,
T.J.

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.