Twitter has ruined my journaling. Everything I want to say can be said in 140 characters or less, it seems. I've gone from writing a few paragraphs every week or so to writing a sentence fragment every day.

So how is school? I'm doing an extra year. Retarded, but I have to, in order to do Physics Education. Not PE, but Education concerning Physics. I think I want to be a math teacher. And being a substitute would be so awesome. My dream jobs are:

1. Writer
2. Rock star
3. Working at/owning a good record/book store
4. Teacher

There are other ones, too, like truck driver, Disneyland employee, park ranger, and a couple of others, but those are the main ones. Really, I have my entire life to work on the first two.

School last quarter... sucked. School this quarter is starting off great! My education class, Intro to Teaching Math, is a bit of a joke. So much of a joke that I have trouble putting much effort towards it at all. My math class, Intro to Proofs, is fucking awesome. It would've really helped to have taken that class BEFORE taking a bunch of upper-division physics, but oh well. I'm basically done with upper-division physics, anyway. Just one more class, a 5-unit advanced laboratory. This class just... makes sense, like most other math classes I took before college. My third class, French 5, is great! The play I'm reading right now is hard as hell, though. French has been my easiest class here, which has surprised and delighted me. J'aime le français! Je voudrais du thé noir et une madeleine, s'il vous plaît! Pronunciation is still tough, but I just need to study more. I study by doing my homework before class, and I've gotten all A's and B+'s so far. Should've been a French major...

I also got a job downtown, at Graphfix, a framing shop that also sells weird-ass novelties. It's not a bad job, not bad at all! Spencer got me the job and he's just quit, but I'm still going at it. I actually got the job about six months ago. It's already been six months, wow. Working downtown allows for awesome people-watching.

It's also been nice as hell weather-wise. For two weeks it's been 75˚, and it's supposed to be like that for at least another week! Ridiculous.Feels like a good time to start writing poetry again.

I've been reading a fair amount, too. Now I don't know what to read next. I can choose a story from my new Philip K. Dick collection, either A Scanner Darkly or Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. I could also read The Season of the Witch, a 60s hippie tale from the guy who wrote Midnight Cowboy. Or I could re-read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or the quintessential choice, Portrait of the Artist. I also have a new New Yorker, subscription, thanks to Justine!

Today was the first day of school, the final nail in the coffin of summer. The fact that the autumnal equinox was actually last night at 11pm is a good coincidence, too. This entire summer has seemed to pass by so slooowwly here in Santa Cruz. This was definitely the coldest summer of my life. Of course, though, in the last week or two I had the sudden realization that summer was almost over. I had fun, though. I've been riding my bike around still. Huge waves wiped me out at the beach the other day, which is always awesome. I like to lie on my back and wait for the wave to suck me towards it. It always manages to drag me into just the right location so that the wave will crash right on me. The scariest is when the wave pulls you up along with it to the very tip top of its journey before crashing over itself, guaranteeing a crazy wipeout. I try to dive out of the way at the last second, or ride it back to shore, but it definitely catches me off-guard sometimes. And sometimes I just face away from the wave and guess when it'll hit me.


After college I'm going to have to explore the world. I'm going to look up jobs that involve traveling to Europe and Asia. Because why not? I want to go somewhere crowded and active and exciting. Visiting LA last summer really gave me a lot of respect for it. Vegas too. I think I might have just been intoxicated by their buildings' brilliant sheen and glimmer, but it worked. Because I want to go back. Reading Bret Easton Ellis a lot and watching David Lynch a lot (I finished Twin Peaks, a brillliant series) has given me even more love for the city. Or, no, that's a bad word to use in reference to those two. Maybe "intrigue".


I finished Flaubert's Sentimental Educaton, which rocked, and now I'm starting on Hell House, a horror story by Richard Matheson, the guy who wrote I Am Legend. It's good so far, after about twenty pages. Next I'm reading more Cormac McCarthy, short stories of Amy Hempel and Borges (never stop reading Borges), and I'm still reading A People's History of the US as well.

I'll be back in Sac in a couple of weeks to have an eye appointment. The last time I was in Sac I ran into Zach Hill at a concert (Tera Melos, Religious Girls, Carson McWhirter) and I talked to him for about ten minutes about his music. He was such an awesome and nice guy. Maybe I'll see him again!

I've been thinking about finals so much lately that I haven't really thought about this summer, and how awesome it's going to be. The thought of summer has finally gotten into my mind, though, and it's like a compressed spring, aching to be set free and be experienced. I'm so close now. I finished my take-home physics final and just have my French oral and French test. I'm completely unconcerned about the French test even though I know I still have a good amount of studying to do. It's the French oral that's going to be scary. I mucked it up pretty badly last time but still got a B, but I think I'm going to do really well this time, because I wasn't nearly as worried the first time, which screwed me over. This time the worrying will prepare me. Maybe?

I need to write down my schedules more. I have too many things floating around in my head - books I'm going to read, things I'm going to check off my list of accomplishments, - basically to-do lists of every sort. I need to just write them down. Then I don't have to think about them anymore, and I can just think about my cats and dog, who I miss dearly.

I've been riding my bike at least a couple of times a week, and it's exhausting but great. Exhausting in that I can ride my bike twenty miles in Sacramento, no problem, no sweat (unless it's the summertime), and here the furthest I can bike without riding out of the town is about three or four miles, but it's so goddamn hilly I have to pant my guts out to make it anywhere. But I'm surprised at how easy it's gotten. I can ride up High Street in less than five minutes now!

I feel like I am really learning in school now. This quarter I'm taking math, upper-division physics, and French, and it looks like that'll be all of my classes for the rest of college. Wheeee!! I can't believe I'm learning French. If my eighth-grade self knew (eighth-grade is the year I got really good at Dance Dance Revolution and Counter-Strike, and had no girlfriends) that I was learning French, I imagine he'd be disgusted. French is for snobby people! Haven't you seen Holy Grail? Fetchez la vache! Oh well. For whatever reason, it's pretty easy for me, whereas Spanish was very very hard.

Right now I'm also in the middle of watching Twin Peaks! What an amazing show. I really love David Lynch; he's probably the best director still alive, even though I've seen so little of his stuff (Eraserhead, Mulholland Dr). I'm also reading a book on some guys who beat roulette in Las Vegas, using little computers in their shoes that could calculate where the ball would end up based on how fast the wheel and it were spinning. Crazy, eh? The way it's described makes it still seem feasible. Now there's a good summer project.

Speaking of summer, I'm going to stay here for the summer. I'm looking for a job right now. I'm really awful at getting a job. In absolutely every way. But that means I can only improve!

I've been sick for a bit over a week now (since last Monday or so, day before 420, great eh? I actually felt fine that day) but today I feel better than I did before, so I think I'm mostly over it.

Why haven't I updated my journal? I've had classes all quarter that have been even harder than last quarter. My grandpa died too, and so that's been crummy, but I knew for months that he was sick, so at least it didn't come as a total shock to me.

I've been wanting to go to a concert for so long. The last concert I went to, Scout Niblett, was at the Crepe Place, and was shamefully under-attended. I think there were about twenty-five people there? She played with a drummer, her guitar, and a few well-picked pedals. The tone was stunningly thick (I think she was using a BIg Muff) and she had such a great handle on dynamics. She'd pause, then sing just above a whisper, before hitting a big chord and shrieking. I love dynamics.

I don't know what I'm doing this summer. My parents say that I am required to get a job, and believe me, I want a job, but I don't know how to get any. I'd like to stay here, but where are the jobs? And if I went to Sacramento, where are the jobs there?

Another reason I haven't updated is that I spent the last month slowly making my way through Blood Meridian, which turned out to be so incredibly awesome, and also probably the most violent book I've ever read. A central plot point of the book is scalping Indians, so you encounter a lot of that, and there are a lot of shootouts. It's total lawlessness, and it's insane, and the vocabulary feels arcane and beautiful, and terrifying, which happens to fit in exactly with the setting of the America/Mexico border between Texas and California.

Next I'm reading Ask the Dust, a book by a guy named John Fante. I was looking through Bukowski's influences and this particular work cropped up a couple of times, so I ordered it off of Amazon on a whim. It's great so far. Proto-Bukowski, kind of. A guy lives in LA, making enough money to eat, fantasizing about women and publishing their stories in a big, renowned literary magazine.

The new Crystal Castles album is awesome. It's darker, by being ever so slightly more serious, and better-produced, which gives it a calculated, slightly more sinister quality. "Baptism" is a great song. I'm amazed by the new Xiu Xiu album, which takes the abrasive, confrontational stuff of Xiu Xiu and crams as much pop into it as possible without losing any of the seriousness. He used a DS to make it! And there's a song about a cannibalistic Sacramento serial killer. The new Zola Jesus EP has an awesome, Joy Division sounding dark muffled production to it, which I really like. There's a festival in LA in July with MIA, Die Antwoord, Flying Lotus, Joker, and some others. The new Flying Lotus album is also the shit. It starts off with a bunch of really short songs bursting with all these different ideas, random pretty noises sprouting everywhere, before doing an awesome song with Thom Yorke and then going crazy. There's free jazz sounding stuff, with super spastic drumming and bass like Squarepusher, and the whole thing can get pretty dubstep-y at times, which is great. (By the way, the new comp This is Dubstep is super intense and bassy dubstep, the dirtiest, my favorite). Everyone also needs to hear the new Jamie Lidell. More people just need to hear him, personally. He's super talented with a great voice, started out doing electronic but now he does soul, soul mixed sometimes with electronica, and on this album he goes everywhere, doing all sorts of stuff, and it all works! "Enough is Enough" has the sickest, catchiest flute on the intro. I actually like the new She and Him album, the songs all get stuck in your head and she has a good voice. So what's wrong with that!! The new Erykah Badu is also totally beautiful, soulful and sometimes subtle but psychedelic in her own way and sensual and impossible to stop listening to. There's also a band from Sweden, Black Blug, who (I swear) sounds super punky but scary, like Joy Division (same sort of awesome melodies too), and also screamy and super distorted and pretty lo-fi but that's okay! Lo-fi is kind of like acoustic in that it strips away the magnificence of the sound for something a bit more raw and direct. I like it!

Yesterday was a lovely little protest that shut down campus for the day. I know that a lot of people don't like these protests because they think they don't do any good. In this case I have to say that doing something is better than doing nothing. It was done to show that people care about their education. These protests are done to raise awareness about the fact that our state AND our school's administrators are not spending money properly, at all. The administrators nearly fooled me, too! They sent out many emails decrying the occupation protests (which are admittedly not as smart of an idea) by saying that the lack of funds was completely the state's fault, which is now known to be a total lie! That's the part that really gets me. They LIED to us, saying they had no extra money, and then returning $200 million to the state, so they could turn a profit instead of spending the money on teachers' salaries. Actually, that article goes into a whole lot more than that, discussing how our tuition money is used to fund extremely risky investments, investments that have been losing money.

What is the solution? It's really easy. Stop spending all of our money on war!!!!!

My dad's friend told me the other month that a third of our taxes are spent on the military. That's disgustingly ridiculous. I didn't really believe him so I did some research, and it made me realize I probably shouldn't have.

It turns out that not one third, but over one half (52%) of our taxes go to the military. That is completely jaw-dropping. America also spends more on military than almost the rest of the world combined. China's in second place with $80 billion spent, and we spend NINE TIMES MORE than they do. We are set to spend $533.8 billion on the military this year. It's so fucking disgusting. It's proof that we live in a fascist society. Want more proof? There are fourteen things all fascist states have in common, and out of the fourteen America identifies strongly with twelve of them, and indirectly with the other two. The twelve are: powerful nationalism, disdain for human rights, identification of scapegoats as a unifying cause, supremacy of the military, rampant sexism, obsession with national security, religion and government intertwined, corporate power protected, labor power suppressed, disdain for intellectuals, obsession with crime, and rampant cronyism. It's pretty obvious that America fits in with all of those without much of a debate. The two that I left out are controlled mass media and fraudulent elections, but they're basically true too (we don't get pictures of dead soldiers while Fox News says whatever BS they want, and if you think Bush won fair and square in 2000... he didn't).

If we spent that money on education, we'd be really smart. Instead, we spend it on weapons. Weapons do not make us smart. They make us dead. If we spent ten percent of the money on education, even, we'd be a lot better off! California is also the only state to not tax oil, which is absolutely retarded. Legalizing marijuana would also help a lot and bring in tens of billions of dollars in sales, making billions in tax revenues. But we can't have that. Instead we pass laws telling gay people that they can't get married.

This place is so unbelievably ass-backwards. I have a feeling our generation is a lot smarter (we are basically the first generation to support homosexuality, be against the "drug war", and "believe" in global warming) but it remains to be seen if we can even fix this mess we're in.

I don't know where that came from. I was originally planning on writing how I changed my guitar strings yesterday, and how stupidly easy it was. I had just never read any instructions on how to change guitar strings that weren't incredibly awkward, misleading, or convoluted. They are shiny and smooth and sound lovely. After I finish reading Lords of Chaos, a history of black metal, I'm going to read Blood Meridian, which made Cormac McCarthy famous. Brothers Karamazov is very difficult but I have decided not to give up... for some reason.

This is the best reflection on the 1960s that there is. The last paragraph makes me twist up inside reading it. I watched Fear and Loathing last weekend, completely unknowingly on the fifth anniversary of Thompson's suicide. This passage popped up during the film and caught me very off-guard. I had remembered it from reading the book (when did I read the book? I thought it was while he was still alive. Was I really just fifteen when he died?) but in those few years of growing I've learned a lot more about the 1960s and have now driven to San Francisco many times, becoming much more personally intimate with the city. The tollbooth bit has now actually happened to me, too. But enough talk, have at me:


"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

I'm at the library right now. It's reminded me of the books stacked up on my desk in my bedroom, to read:

1. a book on pi (about to return it, I learned a lot in Chapter 1 and the rest is too boring even for me)
2. Bros. Karamazov (I got to chapter 3 and realized Russian names are really hard to remember so I'm going to restart it. With wikipedia by my side. I'm excited! Next up is Gravity's Rainbow)
3. The Rules of Attraction (ahhh, just what I need. Some love triangle partying. Next up is Crying of Lot 49.)
4. Harmony (music theory, uses outdated notation, so it'll probably confuse me)
5. What is Mathematics? (A lot of number theory but it's so pretty!)

I've been riding my bike a lot lately, despite the weather (rain or mist, mist even more beautiful than rain). Did I tell you I got a new bike? I got a new bike, from REI, and it's simply wonderful. I rode up to campus for the first time with my new bike, and it was a goddam breeze. It was the first time I used the campus bike path, and it's almost too easy. There's a slope that's kind of hard for about five minutes, and I think it was only hard because I had just walked home from campus, which takes over twenty minutes. Going back up took less than fifteen. After riding my bike in Sacramento, a very flat town in the middle of a very flat valley, I thought I'd be totally screwed coming here. Not so! To get back to my house requires going up a very steep hill (http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=36.972695,-122.044555&spn=0,359.992468&z=17&layer=c&cbll=36.972723,-122.044443&panoid=8OBtGiWL4__XD4DKLvFBgw&cbp=12,164.16,,0,19.62) and although it's steep, it's short, so it only takes a couple of minutes. The best part is that going up a hill means that you can eventually go down it again. Although, without a helmet yet, I am still a little worried about smashing my head all over the road.

My linguistics class is completely wondrous. We're learning how sentences have a "deep structure" that has their bare elements laid out, and then is allowed to be transformed into other phrases. It's weird and awesome.

The Maverick's surf contest is tomorrow! Hopefully I'll make it up there, since Andrew has a car. It's insane that the place with the biggest waves in California remained a secret for fifteen year while one guy rode the waves by himself.

I need to go to San Francisco. It's screaming my name.

Last quarter I slowed down a lot. I felt like an old person. This week I've just has shown me that I'm going to be hitting the ground running this quarter. I got a bike, and now I feel like I have wings. Yesterday I rode along West Cliff from Natural Bridges to Bay, and it was completely amazing. I did it a lot over the summer, and then fall quarter I didn't have a bike. The ride reawakened whatever hadn't been woken up from my classes last week:

1. Math
I took this last year. This quarter I'm getting a goddam A+.

2. French 2
My French 1 professor, Madame Gautier, is maybe the best teacher I've ever had, so this quarter isn't going to be as smooth, but I still want to get an A. I am going to continue to make an ass of myself every class. French is surprisingly awesome, because it tries to be neat and pretty, which makes it fun.

3. Syntax
This class is THE SHIT. I now remember my best subject by far: grammar. It was never a challenge. Never even remotely a problem. I now know that I'm going to be challenged this quarter; challenged to think, at least. It doesn't hurt that I can already tell my professor is a TIGHT professor. Nobody else is excited for this class. I am going to overwhelm you with my excitement, just wait and see.


I wrote this entry this morning, and then got up and forgot what I was going to say. But I'm going to use this more, hopefully. This time!