Wednesday, June 30, 2010

free association

when i see this,
all i can think about are these

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

skull & bones


Today I have been researching (not-so) secret societies out of boredom and wikipedia roulette. I learned that the members of Yale's Skull and Bones society are assigned nicknames that have some sort of tangential connection to their skills or prowess. George H.W. Bush was graced with the nickname Magog, traditionally awarded to the member who had the most sexual experience.


tonight i will finally be able to see josh ritter live! he rarely comes to LA and when he does I'm never around, so this is good.


Feeling pleasantly detached and productively restless.



Wednesday, June 16, 2010

no need for lies or false pretense

here are some words from my fingers


i can't get to sleep until 3 or 4 lately and i sleep til afternoon, my dreams are punctuated with unsettling pseudo-nightmares featuring people i think i know and places i have never been but that feel like old vacation homes. they're sinister and strange and slip through my fingers in the morning like dissolving salt, i'm not sure if i want to keep them or not, but if i did at least i could get over my writer's block.

so i turn to other people who don't have this affliction and whose torrent of words both humbles and inspires me but never to the point of actual productivity. recently i read a man in full by tom wolfe and continued my tradition of being mainly absorbed by fringe characters and only slightly involved in the lives of the main players. it's an enthralling behemoth of a book. i also just finished prague by arthur phillips, whom i recently discovered through the egyptologist and who has quickly become a favorite author. prague is a novel about disillusionment and the reckless, restless, lazy ways youth prevents itself from happiness by focusing only on the minor details of what might otherwise be a full, rich and maybe even meaningful life. as this has been my somewhat hazy philosophy since entering adolescence, despite the fact that i can never actually untrammel myself from these superficial binds, it was either a book i had to read - the spark to ignite blah blah blah - or another book that will destroy my willingness to put pen to paper.

not meaning for this to become a book review post, but words have been my respite this vacation, trapped as i am in a small house with many members of my extended family. i love it here, i love the inhabitation of the house and the thousands of objects crammed within its walls, the italian grandmother forcing me to eat and unaware of my peculiar dietary habits... i've taken in new york and philadelphia and a darling little jersey shore town. adding that to my seattle trip makes a nomadic may-june. a settling will occur tomorrow as i return to LA for the next months of summer and my sophomore year at USC.

wandering thoughts make for bored readers. signing off.

to be trite - remember, THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING