I love people screaming at the top of their lungs

What is it that draws us to blogs and sites and beachgospels anyhow? Witty quips and blurbs… content? What is it that leaves us fulfilled after a swift jaunt to McSweeney’s, Fecal Face or Street Boners? Are you looking for love stories, schedules, bad news or celebrities? Are you looking for numbers? You certainly didn’t come here to talk about Night Surfing. Tough luck for you. Because today I dug through an old hard drive and located a swamp (do you like the imagery of this? I do) of unfinished features and shorts… which brought up an (decidedly lazy) idea for a series of posts entitled ‘Excerpts From Screenplays I Never Finished’. And the first excerpt I’m posting is from a short film about a band of junkie night surfers. I think I wrote this eight years ago. And I’m controlling shadows, the ocean, the sky here… but that isn’t really what bothers me. What bothers me is that it was only supposed to be about ten pages long and I abandoned it after seven.  I can’t remember anymore what it was that distracted me but I bet it was another short film. Or a girl. Or night surfing or McSweeney’s or Fecal Face or bloggy bloggies or funyuns.

Not too long ago my friend Jeremiah asked me to help him write a simple 500 word bio for the Remo drum heads website. He knew that I had been writing a lot lately and was probably trying to be supportive (and maybe a bit productive). This was simple, Jeremiah has always been one of my favorite people.

“Just take whatever you don’t know off of the Wikipedia website” he said. “And you can make up the rest from memory or whatever.”

In film school an instructor once told me that my friends aren’t interesting. “Nobody wants you to follow your friends around with a movie camera, it just isn’t going to work.” He said, “I don’t care if they’re surfers or DJs or whatever, don’t be lazy kid. Go out into the world and find an actual subject.”

It’s possible that I find my friend more enigmatic than the rest of the world does (could mystery be a common theme in most friendships?), but I’ve had a lens pointed at Jeremiah ever since bringing my first camera home. I still can’t capture him. It’s tough not to get lost in your talented friends, I’m sure it takes a certain talent of your own (which I still do not possess).

While attempting some quick Modest Mouse research on the web, I couldn’t help but notice that accurate Jeremiah information wasn’t readily available… there really haven’t been any interviews and the floating bios all quote the same Wikipedia blurbs he referred me to. Hey, he is enigmatic. It was time for a new bio. Take that Wikipedia, I can go straight to the source:

“Hey, Jeremiah,” I texted,”where did you and Isaac meet?”

“At a renaissance fair.” He sends back.

“Is that true?”

“No, don’t say that. I don’t think that even needs to be in there. It’s not that big of a deal, dude.”

Below you will find my final draft – a mix between memory, Wikipedia, and a few quick emails with his Mother:

.

As a method of keeping constant rhythm, Jeremiah Martin Green has a tendency to surround himself with a wide selection of samplers, drum machines, turntables (rocks, bones, fingernails) whenever possible. Wander alongside of him one day and you might notice an odd cadence directing your feet forward – beats tapped onto dirty jeans, jewelry and coins generating involuntary clatter on computers and steering wheels… Jeremiah’s perpetual swirl of motion, off of the drum set, seems a mystical code, unbreakable and busy. It’s when Jeremiah sits behind the drums that a secret decoding begins, a rolling familiarity sets in and we’re off into his travels… both real and imaginary.

Jeremiah plays drums in a band called Modest Mouse. Born in Oahu, Hawaii in 1977, his family moved to Washington State shortly thereafter. In 1980 Mt. St. Helens erupted. The destruction of the nearby logging roads brought Jeremiah, his older brother Adam and their mother, Carol, directly into the blast zone to help with the rebuilding efforts. It was during these days that Jeremiah’s earliest memories were formed in a small camp trailer nestled among the debris of a melted forest.

By 1989 the Green family had moved to the Eastside suburbs of Seattle. Jeremiah split his time between learning to play the drums and getting his skateboard confiscated by local law enforcement. In 1993 Jeremiah started playing music inside of a shed built by friend Isaac Brock. Eric Judy joined up, they named themselves Modest Mouse and quickly recorded an EP on Olympia’s K Records.

In 1995, while continuing to play with Modest Mouse, Jeremiah helped form two influential NW bands: Red Stars Theory with good friends James Bertram, Jason Talley and Tonie Palmasani and Satisfact, with Matt Steinke, Chad States and Josh Warren.

Modest Mouse recorded with Seattle’s UP Records before signing to Epic just before the turn of the millennium. Since then, they’ve released three studio albums and four EP’s. In the last ten years Modest Mouse has enjoyed commercial success on tour with REM, as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live and earned two grammy nominations (amongst other things).

In 2007, Stylus Magazine ranked Jeremiah 37th among the “50 Greatest Rock Drummers Of All Time” right after John Densmore of The Doors. In the past few years, Jeremiah continues to experiment and record with side projects The Vells, Psychic Emperor and Plastiq Phantom.

Jeremiah currently makes his home on a peninsula, just outside of the Olympic National Forest. Here he continues to experiment and record music all day long in the trees. You can find the trees, soil, water, ash, lichen and logs all in his rhythms if you look for them. But don’t look too hard for surely as soon as he is tapping into the pulse of the Northwest, he will march it elsewhere… and then he’ll march it back again.

The Rapture – LA 2010

Rapture and Friends Dog Pile. Seattle, 1998. Photo by Brandon Harman.

Greetings Sir,

This is a terrible letter… I have no story to turn in. I will not be apologizing to you, however, I will be apologizing to myself. To my future self. My future, midsize SUV owning, strip mall driving, boring, Starbucks shopping self. How many people do you think recognize the Moby Dick reference in between espresso shots? Soon, I will forget. I will inhale their most fragrant blend and exhale all knowledge of literary whales.

I cannot do it. Joseph Campbell’s Gatekeeper has killed me. Picture the laser rays shooting from the eyes of the Sphinxes at Atreyu in The NeverEnding Story, except with a direct hit on me this time. If you truly want to know whose fault it is, blame John Cheever. I have read a lot of short stories throughout my life, and felt I have been affected (if you haven’t taken three minutes to read Saki’s Image Of The Lost Soul, then you haven’t truly wept) but my most recent run in with Cheever has forever changed my life.

Do you remember the moment?

It was in class; I stopped, mid-presentation, and asked you why you thought that he had switched from present to past tense (you briefly hesitated until I heckled you). You then explained that it was an allegory for alcoholism and Ned Merrill was losing track of time. Then you laid it out step by step… and you were correct. I had completely missed it. Previous to this moment I had, naively, believed that this was a tale about a man wronged, with a twist. A man with a zest for life, rottenly treated by jealous, blubbery, party folk. But it was much more beautiful. It was a justification of Cheever’s life. Cheever, whimsically, calling himself out. I could never have written this about myself, nor another man. My brain is not capable of it. I take myself too seriously. I take other men too seriously. If I had attempted it, it might take me a year to perfect. Cheever probably shat it out one morning, hungover and remorseful about blacking out at a dinner party the night before. He then went on to write Falconer, Bullet Park and a hundred short stories.

I could never be this man. I could try and be this man, but we are sick of the imitators aren’t we? It was worth the class to learn this and move on. It was worth the death of my soul to gain the awareness of its never having spoken.

How unfair! To have a soul unable to sing, strum or type… relate. If Cheever was Amadeus, I would not be Salieri. I would be that fumbling emperor on the piano (played by Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).

I am Gatsby searching, not for Daisy, but for Nick Carraway. Someone to follow me around and broadcast my thoughts and dreams to the masses with a bullhorn… to take longhand of my silly habits. It is not I who can do it.

Fear not! I am resilient, self centered and shallow. Therefore I get over things quickly (this works out in my favor when it comes to women, as well).

I have already found myself taking solace in an imaginary world where it was I who wrote The Swimmer and John Cheever who took your class. In this world (just sit down you, this is my final attempt at fiction) somebody invents a time machine that Cheever gets ahold of. He hops in with all of my work, travels back before I was born and authors it as his own. This is how I have ended up here, right now, in a world without my work… a world of constant, muted, inspiration.

And I am left with all the world’s emotions and no tool to expel them. Dissect the anatomy of a love song never written, and it’s merely love on its own. Love would never tell you of Walter Benton’s toothpaste kisses, Dominique Francon’s cold shoulder or the cool parts of the bible. Talent must tell you this.

What will become of the fans of the world, destined only to appreciate and never contribute? We shall lose our voices screaming at Elvis! We will assemble for primetime television… I have a lifetime to figure it out now, what we will do… have I, somehow, discovered a purpose within the disgusting text of this letter? I will begin my descent into conventional oblivion tomorrow, after burning my diary.

This is, perhaps, where America’s great mysteries truly lay, paradoxically, because no member has the ambition to pick up a pen and report their findings. Since it has already been decided that it is not I who can do it, maybe you can assign another student to go undercover… there should be a novel there, or at the very least some witty little essay just dripping with style (Suburban literature need not remain underground).

Once on the inside (having completely forgotten about writing), I will obediently get married, have a son and purchase a house. My house will not sit amongst the vagrant weeds of the countryside, nor within the walls of some great city. My home will sit in between. I will have a neighbor whose neatly trimmed grass will inspire me to tuck in my polos. The neutral colors of his synthetic siding will encourage me to whiten my teeth and lock up my liquor.

In memory of a silly ambition I once had, an old Underwood will remain on display in my den (some of my neighbors might have acoustic guitars in theirs). The Franklin Mint will provide fine leather hardback editions of Dickens and Hemingway for my shelves…

My son will grow and move into the basement. I will feel threatened by his anger and philosophies (I must remember to remove Nietzsche from the den). I will then spend the short years of his youth in my loafers – gliding over the glass floor separating his library from mine.

And then he will be gone.

The four bedroom split level my wife and I purchased will become ours again, yet we will have no idea what to do with it. We will spend long breakfasts at local diners without one word passing between us. At night, I will retreat down the stairs and into the windowless TV room in the basement (where I can be heard getting involved with and clapping loudly at my 32 inch Quasar). I will stop reading.

My wife will pass before me (thanks to my less challenging life of leisure), but it doesn’t change things much as it wont occur to me to break any routines. Words like Journal, Beatles and Rum will lose their meaning.

And then one day, I will recline back and experience my first real emotion in fifty years… happiness. For it will dawn on me that I have finally managed to destroy the last piece of creative fiction I had ever written… this very letter. Fatefully, it had turned into autobiography.

Cheever. Fucking bastard.

Sincerely Yours,

Gavin Feek

“Why don’t you walk on down to Spirit Lake? You can walk over there on top of that snow.” Harry pointed out a field through the kitchen window that was buried about four feet deep in snow.

“I will… oh sure… probably never to be seen again.” I smiled meekly at him. Harry grunted then lumbered over to the dim, galley kitchen and fumbled through some old newspapers. There was a system in there… cans and jars stacked inside the cupboards to the right – the overflow stacked directly below on the counter. All knives (butter and steak) live in the drawer to the left of the sink, forks and spoons stick out of mugs and glasses directly above it. The drawer to the right of the sink holds magazine clippings, empty key-rings, paperclips, matches and pencils. Coffee and cocoa on the left counter – dishes stacked above. Every kitchen in the world has its own system. It occurred to me that this particular one is about to be incinerated.

“You can walk right across that field and get a good view of the mountain and the whole lake. You’ll run into a boy down there. He’s just a young kid… you see that kid and you can compare notes. He’s got a lot of stuff. Nobody’s allowed up here for miles, but they let him up because he’s from National Geographic. That’s the only reason I let him around me cause it’s a nationally known magazine. They’ll have my picture all over the page of that magazine and that’s for posterity… for the future. If I die tomorrow that’s going down in history. Well, you go find that kid and I’ll do some chores. When you come back stop in, I’ll be here. I’ll take you down to the restaurant and let you take some pictures of the mountain out the window there. Ok kid.”

As I walk down to the lake, my Dexter hiking boots punch holes through silver layers of ash, dusted across the hard snow. I can’t find the “kid” from National Geographic. His footprints lead across the frozen snow covered lake to the far shore. Due to the constant shimmying of the earth below my feet – walking on water goes just beyond my amateur journalistic devotions. I decide to sit down on the bank and absorb the divine beauty of the last winter at Spirit Lake.

Harry had finished his chores – and was in the bar of the restaurant when I returned. He was watching the mountain through binoculars. It was quiet, so he turned his attention to the lake.

“See those docks down in the outlet? Waves comin’ in three feet high tore the hell out of those docks this winter. The wind blowed everything in my goddam place down. I go through this every goddam winter… have to rebuild every year. ”

“I feel like I’m here to write about those docks and the lodge and lake and mountain because nobody will ever see them again… I don’t want to have to write about you too, won’t you leave”?

“What would I do? I can’t leave this place. If the mountain wants to take me down that hill feet first let her try. I’m not goin’. People say I’m stubborn and bull headed. I’d die down there being away from this place, away from my cats and birds. I’d worry myself sick about my place – I’d die sure in hell. On the other hand, if I go down there and the mountain took my place I wouldn’t last a week – I’d die then. So if it’s gonna take me, let it come and get me. If it takes my goddam mountain, let it take Truman with it. They ain’t gonna get me out of here. Why now I’ll live in spite of them. I’ll live to be 110 just to spite them.”

“I hope you do. I hope the mountain does too.”

“I know every ridge of this mountain. I’ve hunted and fished it. I flew this country for seven or eight years, before the war and after. Hell, I was up around the side of that mountain everyday and over the top of it. Been to all those lakes back in there…”

He went on for a long time, eager to talk. When it got to be late afternoon, I found myself listening less to him and more to my own worries.

“I have to go now, Mr. Truman, I have a long walk back.”

I hugged the old man goodbye and found that I had to hold back some tears. He noticed this and smiled.

“If you ever get back to this country look me up. I’ll be here when the roses bloom.”

- Mr. Truman’s dialogue is taken from an old, out of print article that I found buried under a stack of boxes in a Mt. St Helens gift shop the other day. It was written by Mary Ann Gervais. My own observations and dialogue were time-traveled back for.

At land’s end, let the recreational howling begin

Grey skies, soft trees – lay me down in lichen please

Night riders jitterbug around blue shadows

I’m standing on top of an old war bunker in Port Townsend where local soldiers used to guard entry into the Puget Sound. It’s abandoned, and nowadays only plays host to my friends’ graffiti. They live down the road and bike up here with paint when they get restless. The waters, down below, are frigid and nearly untouchable. With the right swell direction, waves can sneak around Vancouver Island and through the Straits of Juan De Fuca. I’ve even heard rumors of mysto spots breaking around Port Townsend and Whidbey Island. Most of these little gems are highly protected by grizzly locals and on shore winds. The Pacific coast is a two hour drive to the west and introduces a wide new world of sea stacks, whirlpools and shore-pound. Here, it’s still… and cold. To the East, directly behind Whidbey, sits my childhood summer home on Camano Island. I spent every summer of my youth digging clams and sea cucumbers out from under the mud flats that stretched across the bay. My Father, one summer, warned me about the channel that divided the waters between the two islands: “You get caught out there and you’ll be swept out to sea before we can reach you…” Of course from then on, I was horrified every time I watched him row out to the crab pot – or when my Mother, carelessly, water skied across it. From Camano, the channel runs around the southern ankle of Whidbey and then disappears from sight. Any child it wishes to “sweep out to sea” must definitely pass by our bunker here… today we’re watching.

“Because hate is legislated… written into the primer and the testament, shot into our blood and brain like vaccine or vitamins

Because our day is of time, of hours – and the clock-hand turns, closes the circle upon us: and black timeless night sucks us in like quicksand, receives us totally – without a raincheck or a parachute, a key to heaven or the last long look

I need love more than ever now… I need your love, I need love more than hope or money, wisdom or a drink

Because slow negative death withers the world – and only yes can turn the tide

Because love has your face and body… and your hands are tender and your mouth is sweet – and God has made no other eyes like yours.”

- The first page of This Is My Beloved by Walter Benton (1943). A “pornographic” volume – chronicling the swift cycle of a love affair from obsession to closure. Beautiful, explicit and destructive – you will feel this precious little paper heart tear in your hands – and be left sorting through the shreds, attempting to make out the final pages… You will piece them together and be horrified at Mr. Benton’s final observations… he did not even bother to use the word ‘love’ on the last page (four times on the first). He did not even bother to use the letters that spell out the word ‘love’ on the last page… unless you cut off the bottom of the letter ‘y’ in ‘chimneys’. If I cut off the ‘y’ then I can rearrange the letters to include the word ‘love’ at least once. Yes, I think I will do this… it will suit me better.

David Foster Wallace has a new book coming out (posthumously) next year that has a great quote in it. I have no idea what context it is in, as I have not read the book yet:

“Deciding to be less free = Deciding to choose in some kind of definitive way.”

Last year, The New Yorker published a few pages from DFW’s new novel so I copied down the above quote on a post-it note and stuck it in my journal. Only I can’t seem to find whatever issue that was, so I can’t really remember DFW’s point or why, exactly, I was inspired enough to write it down. Looking at it now, I still find it inspiring. It generates thoughts and makes me want to run with them: Was this character looking at some decision as a tiny little deduction of freedom? Can ambition and freedom coexist?

Jack Kerouac could only take the loss of freedom for so long – there are rumors that he took a bunch of benzedrine, wrote the original manuscript for On The Road in eighteen days and turned it into his editor on one long rolled sheet of paper…

How did David Foster Wallace really feel about freedom? In a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 he had this to say about it:

“True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

This is beautiful.

Shortly after DFW hung himself in, 2008, his wife gathered the pages of his unfinished novel (titled The Pale King) out of the garage and sent them in to his editor. The editor (Little, Brown and Company) has since decided to whittle the manuscript down from over 1000 pages to under 400. I can’t figure out what DFW meant to convey with the one sentence (above) that I quoted, and have no idea how a person could deconstruct 1000 pages. This is a terrible job and one better left abandoned.

DFW closed his commencement speech at Kenyon College with the following:

“It is unimaginably hard to… stay conscious, and alive, day in and day out.”

Do you think you know what he meant by this?

As one might sketch some ethereal writer, tucked into his twilit attic with journal in hand and candlestick lighting his page, I lie here before you now. The wide plank oak floor scratching against my belly stretches out to the window where my story lives. It is a warm night so I require no blanket. There is a slight odor of mould, but nothing I won’t forget about once we get started. Okay, I’m prepared to tell your story now…

Elvis Presley:

“I’m a mountain formed by pressure.”

Lou Reed:

“Music really isn’t that hard. You do your best to copy your favorite bands and then you fuck up and accidentally sound like yourself.”

Roman Polanski:

“It all comes back to Mia Farrow.”

Dr. Seuss:

“It’s a hard world that asks you to live with a lot of unlivable things.”

Brody Jenner:

“You need to put yourself in a position to influence people. Or else you’re nothing.”

Marco Polo:

“Italy’s cool. But you can’t get stuck in a sandstorm there.”

David Lynch:

“Everybody’s going to die in the end. Most films just finish before the characters get that old.”

1) Exclusive. This is my least favorite word. Somewhere along the line we’ve decided that the act of excluding somebody was a desirable quality for our new Ford to have. Recently I noticed a billboard for “L.A’s most exclusive condominium…” What is that, a big empty building?

2) Spotlight. Spotlights seemed to have originally been invented to draw attention to a singular talent or freak of nature. But ever since the race for fame began – everybody is craving them and they’ve taken a turn for the conventional. We have programs like American Idol that show crowds of wannabes craving the spotlight… but who gets to stand in it? The beautiful ones that sound like everyone else on the radio (I’d rather stare at the bearded lady).

3) Stunning. It takes a sledgehammer to stun. One cannot be stunned at the conclusion of a story or a view of the lake from their walk in closet.

“Thanks for the book – I don’t like it.”

Zelda wrote this in a letter to Scott Fitzgerald in February of 1920. In a letter that followed a few days later,  she softened:

“And I love you so terribly that I’m going to read McTeague – but you may have to marry a corpse when I finish… it outrages my sense of delicacy to have him violently proposing when she’s got one of those nasty rubber things on her face – all authors who want to make things true to life make them smell bad – like McTeague’s room – and that’s my most sensitive sense. I do hope you’ll never be a realist – one of those kind that thinks being ugly is being forceful…”

I post this here so I will remember it. I doubt that I will, however. I could post every single one of Zelda’s letters – one a day until they run out (God, what a wonderful blog that would be) if I thought that I would always remember to live up to the standards of FSF’s 19 year old muse. Nancy Milford, in her epic biography ‘Zelda’, hinted that it was even Zelda, herself, that created the great American character Gatsby, but got absolutely no credit for it. What I find most fascinating about the story of these two is not the possible pilfering of ideas, but the fact that either of them got any work done at all. Scott and Zelda had one of the great loves of the twentieth century – full of everything from blistery love letters at the beginning to reports of Scott’s ghost haunting Zelda in the end. It’s one thing to be a genius and another, entirely, to be a genius in love.

And for us to move forward, there can be no doubt about the fact that FSF was a genius. JD Salinger wrote a letter to Elizabeth Murray (longtime friend who seems to allow every letter she receives from Mr. Salinger to be immediately published) in 1970 that included the following statement:

‘Re-read a lot of Scott Fitzgerald’s work this week. God, I love that man. Damn fool critics are forever calling writers genuises for their idiosyncracies – Hemingway for his reticent dialogue, Wolfe for his gargantuan energy, and so on. Fitzgerald’s only idiosyncrasy was his pure brilliance. ‘

I agree with Mr. Salinger on the brilliance of Mr. Fitzgerald’s work. However, this has been discussed many times. I’d rather talk about how impressive it is that Mr. Fitzgerald could work at all…

Working through love? Working with love? Not so easy…. Not a love like Zelda’s. All reports suggest that this was a terrible love. A beautiful, all encompassing (stomach pains instead of butterflies) kind of love. This kind of love includes time inside mental hospitals, skiing in the Alps, nights spent proof-reading her short stories (instead of your own), tracking her down, sending money, constant worrying, attending all of the parties, heated discussions about grammar and plenty of rumors. Although, I’d rather have Zelda describe it. I’ve been reading her letters (published in many volumes) since I was a teen, but only recently (today) re-discovered the following highlighted page in my old copy of The Letters Of F Scott Fitzgerald in my parents’ basement. For those familiar with the story of The Fitzgeralds (and more importantly how it ended), I think you will find within this letter an impressive amount of foreshadowing. I include Zelda’s letter here in its entirety – as a symbol of true love, a true dreamer and true production (also, because I worry that it is now out of print). Not all fools in love need to run off to a magical island together and live happily ever after… some prefer to stay behind and affect the world. And if I could, I would reproduce it on the backs of all napkins, postage stamps and boxer shorts:

“Scott, my darling lover – everything seems so smooth and restful, like this yellow dusk. Knowing that I’ll always be yours – that you really own me – that nothing can keep us apart – is such a relief after the strain and nervous excitement of the last month. I’m so glad you came – like Summer, just when I needed you most – and took me back with you. Waiting doesn’t seem so hard now. The vague despondency has gone – I love you Sweetheart.

Why did you buy the “best at the Exchange”? I’d rather have had the 10 cent a quart variety – I wanted it just to know you loved the sweetness – To breathe and know you loved the smell – I think I like breathing twilit gardens and moths more than beautiful pictures or good books – it seems the most sensual of all the senses – something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell – a smell of dying moons and shadows.

I’ve spent to-day in the graveyard – it really isn’t a cemetery, you know – trying to unlock a rusty iron vault built in the side of the hill. It’s all washed and covered with weepy, watery, blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes – sticky to touch with a sickening odor – The boys wanted to get in to test my nerve to-night – I wanted to feel “William Wreford, 1864″. Why should graves make people feel in vain? I’ve heard that so much, and Grey is so convincing, but somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived – All the broken columnes and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances and in an hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue – of course, they are neither – I hope my grave has an air of many, many years ago about it – Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves – when they’re exactly like the others, even to the yellowish moss? Old death is so beautiful – so very beautiful – We will die together – I know – Sweetheart.”

- Zelda Sayre, Spring, 1919

The sound of Van Morrison sniffing in T.B Sheets always makes me laugh. But it isn’t very funny because the song is about some girl who stays up all night dying on her deathbed. Last year I went to Ireland with my girlfriend to meet her family. Her uncle works in the music industry and told me that Van Morrison is a “vile and wretched person in real life….” and that he’d once seen him vomit all over a woman. But that made me laugh too. For some reason Van Morrison just makes me laugh.

Avoiding boredom at work today, I impulsively purchased seymoursfatlady.com from GoDaddy for ten dollars. I’m wondering now what to do with it? Perhaps a photograph of Hulk Hogan or some livecam over an airport might be suitable…. The beauty is it could be anything really.

“I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.”

- Annie Dillard from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

She then goes on to talk about how the cat was later gone and how she came to miss “something powerfully playing above me”.

Once, I read an article by a retired football player who spoke of how lucky he was to have his health and safety on a daily basis… how much he enjoyed spending time with his family now. He was peaceful, yet a part of him missed the daily violence. I find myself, romantically, relating this to a surfer in the seventies. He paddles out into the crisp, cool water with some Beach Boys song in his head. The salt drips off his bangs and straight into a bloodshot eye… blinding him briefly – just long enough to miss the oncoming wave which pummels him. He is held underwater, spinning and bouncing off the sandbar. The energy not yet allowing him to take a breath… until it gives. Paddling to the surface with a smile, he then goes on to surf for an hour or two before bodysurfing onto the beach for a nap.

I find that I need to get yelled at, pinned by a wave, very very cold or hungry every few days, or I am miserable to be around.

I have an old tom. He used to hate me. He wouldn’t let me go near him the first year we knew each other. Now, he is a big fuzzy heart with soft claws and bad breath. But every night around 4 in the morning he gets up from his warm blanket at the foot of my bed and lets himself outside. Four or five hours later we both have our breakfasts. I eat my instant oatmeal and watch him pull the matted fur out from beneath his claws before he eats. Later, he indifferently watches me prepare for work.