Vman’s Site

There’s been these words banging around in my head, might as well get ‘em down.

The Hidden Sojourn

String
me
up.

Beat me
to
my knees
This is love ain’t it.

The kind
I
know
At least.

Color
me
Red.
That’s real isn’t it.

Damn
detours.
Burn
the
whole damn thing down already.

Feeling good’s got me dicey.

Frankly
it’s
time.
For some leather and some metal.

In the dim
we
are
alone
together.

All you have to do
is
brand me whole.

Vman (Make of everything what you will, ain’t no stopping you)

As every non-Amish citizen of this land is probably aware, America elected Barack Hussein Obama to be its 44th Commander in Chief. Once the euphoria of Tuesday night fades to its proper place, there are still disheartening realities and never yielding facts about the world that must be dealt with.

Among them is the rather depressing fact that this development is even ground breaking and barrier decimating. After all, in a truly progressive society should not the election of a black man be viewed simply as the election of an American? The question the nation should be asking itself is why there must even be barriers?

While it is perfectly appropriate to let a generation of heroic civil rights leaders and liberals revel in the grandeur of what they have accomplished, one should even for a second believe the responsibility of this nation to truly and definitively exorcise its racial demons has been fulfilled.

Though unseen and largely silent at the moment, there are still bigots out there cursing whatever god they pray to for letting this happen. To them Barack Obama is a black man, nothing more and nothing less, therefore, he cannot be president. It is against this odious portion of the populace the wars of the last 200 years have been waged.

Now, with an electoral defeat, resounding and clear, dealt to the bigots, the armies of change must march against themselves. Well meaning and politically correct liberals are the new bigots. For those of you still reading, it is imperative that you too eliminate race from your life, recognizing the danger of complacency and contentment.

Think of Barack Obama not as the first black president but simply as the President of the United States, refusing to judge him on the minority scale but rather pitting him against every white man to have held the title. Mr. Obama deserves nothing less than this standard, derived from the simple plea of a southern preacher to judge a man not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.

A chance like this, fleeting yet misleading, rarely comes along. Barack Obama is not an African American, he’s an American, as we all are and as we all should be. Enough with the race based admissions, enough with the race based dialogue and interactions, enough with race. The chains have been cut, now we must walk, cautiously yet decisively, through the cell door, open almost imperceptibly for less than an instant as the light floods in from afar.

Vman (Someone who’s getting his polemicist on)

The aesthetics and meaning of art has been endlessly debated through the centuries and the only defensible conclusion is based on relativism. As with questions of good and evil, right and wrong, it is nearly impossible, for humans at least, to come with a standard to measure an abstract concept. Therefore, it can be said—with caveats—that art is anything imbued with the intent of the creator. If a work is a simply a page with meaningless doodles, it can still be art. As long as the meaninglessness was a product of intent. Everybody who has heard punk and noise rock knows that a lack of meaning does in and of itself lead to meaning. Of course, simple occurrences in everyday life are not art. A dog that starves in the street is not performance art. Of course, if somebody filmed the dog starving, painted it or in the most extreme of cases, imprisoned it in a museum to be watched by an audience, that would be art. Someone has created something. As to whether art is an object or a process, it is a false question. There can be no object without process, and no process that does not at some point lead to an object. Regarding great actors many critics say that you can almost watch them think on stage. This is a clear example of the importance of process to the finished object, the cumulative performance. Besides, whenever one attempts to analyze an object, an evaluation of process is vital. Jackson Pollack would have meant nothing had we not known about him attacking his canvas with cans of paint to create a post modern whirl of colors. Apocalypse Now would not carry quite the same meaning if the audience could not see Coppola’s state of near madness when making the film reflected in every scene. Finally, art does have the power to change society. Throughout history, one can find myriad examples of art affecting the larger consciousness. Rock n Roll helped bring about the cultural revolution of the sixties and Ayn Rand’s objectivism has played a part in the Republican mess of today. Of course, it will be much harder to write the “big one” as Norman Mailer put it, in a society increasingly fragmented by the internet, the culture wars and noise canceling headphones, it can still be done. Just think of how much scarier the prospect of a  Sarah Palin vice presidency became after Tina Fey mercilessly and comedically showed the world who she really was. And with that, I put away my soapbox. My favorite diner food might actually be chocolate cake come to think of it.

Vman (Someone who is infringing the copyright on himself)

I suppose that the full effects and consequences of my transition to this new phase of life have yet to hit me. I have heard thunder but I have yet to witness the lightning. Knowing that my life is fully expected to diverge from its current vector yet foreseeing only a straight path ahead has left me stranded at an odd precipice, neither teenager nor adult; neither high school senior nor college freshmen, simply just me. I have discovered only that one’s environment is merely ornamental, leading to everything being seemingly different yet actually the same.

The rituals of campus life, the drinking, the beach volley ball games, the socializing and the tanning, constantly surround me yet I brush past them exactly as I had in the years past, a curious observer but never a subject. Perhaps that is precisely why this prompt evoked such a mystified response from me. As I began to consider how the first week has been, I could not help but feel that it was exactly like the weeks past.

The routines and staples of student life are the same as they ever have been and will remain the same with no regard to how I feel about them. Eat, sleep, shower, study, go to class, participate, write, edit, submit, I am trapped in the confines of those words as I have been for the last 4 or so years and will be for 8 or so years in the future. My concerns are as trivial as they have ever been, chief among them being what brand of cup noodles reigns supreme.

The transition from high school to college, for me at least, has been a matter of inertia. I have taken one look around and with an odd mix of comfort and resignation, realized that I must simply do what I have always been doing. There will gradually be less and less parental authority to answer to but the lines drawn long ago are still straight, time marches on. I am no different; nothing has changed, it just looks like it has. In response to the last portion of your prompt, if I was a diner food I would be apple pie since I am all American.

-Vman (Someone who wants to be gone, now)

Perhaps the most logical explanation for the selection of first term Alaskan governor Sarah Palin as Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain’s running mate is yielded by his preferred game of chance, Craps. After all, nearly all political observers can agree that choosing Mrs. Palin, after Mr.McCain was informed he could not choose a pro choice candidate, is at the very least a gamble.

Making her way from television sportscasting to PTA council presidency and then eventually, the Alaskan governor’s mansion for approximately two years, Mrs. Palin, a self described “hockey mom”, has continually cast herself as a tough female “maverick”, an unlikely conservative fighter for “the people” against the corrupt “elites” entrenched in power, willing to buck even her party to do what is right. Mrs. Palin points to her ethics reforms and largely symbolic actions such as selling the Governor’s jet on Ebay, firing the chef at the Governor’s mansion and lowering her own salary when mayor of Wasilla, Alaska as evidence of the tough, principled fiscal conservatism that Mr. McCain prides himself on.

At the Republican National Convention, Mrs. Palin also brought up her decision to refuse an abortion and carry her fifth child, Trig to term, despite learning that he would be born with down syndrome as further evidence of her conservative credentials. Although this narrative has energized a previously wary conservative base that is critical in John McCain’s efforts to win against his opponent, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois in November it has also proven to be ample fodder for newspapers and liberal bloggers eager to vet and scrutinize Mrs. Palin.

For example, Mrs. Palin’s politically shrewd attempts to claim the feminist, trailblazing mantle of former candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, Hillary Clinton, speaking of the “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” and railing against sexism in the media, are contradicted by her own previous statements labeling Mrs. Clinton’s charges of the very same sexism in the media “whine” at a Newsweek panel. When Mrs. Palin speaks of both her and John McCain’s extensive records fighting wasteful “pork barrel spending”, she ignores her initial support of the “The Bridge to Nowhere”, a 250 million dollar bridge servicing approximately fifty people that has been used by Mr. McCain himself as the foremost example of wasteful government spending. Mrs. Palin, in her first term as mayor of Wasilla, even began the practice of flying to Washington D.C. to lobby for spending, collecting earmarks to the tune of $27 million dollars for a town with a population of little over 9000 people. Despite running on a promise of reforming ethics and taking on the corrupt Republican party establishment of Alaska, Mrs. Palin herself is embroiled in an ethics investigation as to whether or not she improperly attempted to use her position as governor to get her state trooper ex brother in law, Mike Wooten, fired after a heated divorce with Mrs. Palin’s sister.

Her conservative values might prove to be somewhat extreme for the moderate voters the McCain campaign is eyeing since Mrs. Palin, a firm believer in the teaching of creationism in public schools, attempted to ban certain books she found obscene from the Wasilla town library, firing the librarian when she refused to comply with Mrs. Palin’s demands. In addition, Mrs. Palin, who received her passport only a year ago, has little to no foreign policy experience, undercutting Mr. McCain’s attacks on Mr.Obama’s readiness to be commander in chief. The McCain campaign counters that Mrs. Palin’s expertise lies in energy policy but Mrs. Palin has offered little but the refrain “drill, drill drill-all the way.” Mrs. Palin is firmly anti gay marriage and opposes affirmative action.

Mrs. Palin’s family has also morphed into a political controversy recently amid discoveries that her 17 year old daughter Bristol was pregnant and her husband Todd is a former member of an Alaskan secessionist movement whose motto is “Alaska first, Alaska always.” Mrs. Palin, herself, attended the Alaskan Independence Party’s 1994 convention and wished them good luck at their 2006 convention.  Others note that it appears that Mrs. Palin’s repeated insistence on abstinence only sex education has seemed to fail. Others, such as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, have pointed out the cognitive dissonance required in the Palins asking for privacy to make a choice about Bristol’s pregnancy and Mrs. Palin’s stance on abortion, which denies that choice to all families, even in cases of rape or incest. Conservatives are furiously attempting to tout Mrs. Palin’s maverick image and have co-opted Mr. Obama’s message of change.

Ultimately, it appears that Sarah Palin is above all, a rash and impetuous choice for Vice President  considering that she is less than a heartbeat away from becoming the nation’s first female President if the 72 year old cancer survivor at the top of the ticket happens to be elected. Mr. McCain’s chief adviser Steve Schmidt was caught with an open mic suggesting that choosing Mrs.Palin was simply a political gambit, many would agree.

-Vman (Someone who was scared by her RNC speech)

On July 22, 2008, Facebook provided the conduit for a slew of birthday wishes, adorned with capitalized letters, exclamation points and all sorts of embellishments meant to convey the excitement and the “kewl”-ness of it all. Sadly it appears that, once again, I am a man apart as the dawning of those fateful numbers, 18, brings with it not the requisite sense of elation but rather a general everlasting elegy. Something irreplaceable, not just the luxury, greatly appreciated, of being charged as a minor, but rather that comfort in the vagueness and blissful uncertainty, derived from seemingly endless distance and dreams, of one’s future as an adult on this accursed third rock from the sun.

It is a familiar mental safety net for many a teenager, the never quite explicitly defined belief that after many a day, one will arrive at some magical place that requires you to give up nothing yet recieve all. The clause “When I grow up” is often used to introduce the intellectual children of this belief:

When I grow up I’ll be able to major in something I love and make a lot of money doing it too. Then I’ll find someone smart, cute and funny and then maybe we’ll have kids who barely cry and always love us. And we’ll still be young, we won’t turn into our parents. We’ll have so much fun, and we’ll be awesome parents too, never yelling at our kids just always playing with them and having fun. And death, that doesn’t really have to happen, at least not for a long long time. Whatever, fuck it, there are a lot of medical advances and stuff; aids and cancer will definitely be cured. God, life is going to be great. Sure there are some bad spots, there have to be, but everything is definitely going to work out. I’ll definitely be remembered for something great, I might even make it into the history books.  I mean I don’t know exactly what I want to do or where I want to go to college or what I want to major in but that’s so far away. I can figure it out later right?

Well, it appears that despite my best efforts, later has lacerated me while my back was turned. I became a grown up in a process that did not ask my consent; no forms were signed, no pledges given to accept responsibility for my actions, think practically and make good decisions. Simply with the tearing of one more page off of my calendar and the arrival of some day that people tell me I popped out of some woman’s birth canal on, I am stripped of all that I was before July 22.

I am a grown up, I am one of what previously was the enemy. I am off to a sensible college and then probably a ripe for networking law school, all to engage in a sensible profession that will make me financially secure and a well respected productive member of society. I’ve begun to even use terms such as networking and financially secure, words that the younger me would have scoffed disgustedly at.

All I can say, in a voice trembling with the notes of incredulity inspired by newly emerging specters of adulthood, is that we were promised, in the words of Roxy Music’s Brian Ferry, More than This. Of course, I cannot tell you exactly what that is and neither could any previous iteration of me. The difference being, however, that evidence that would excoriate and expunge his foolish dreams had yet to pierce, in a frighteningly quick and precise manner, the fabric of his imaginary future.

It is my sincerest wish, one that will indubitably exist as long as there is breath in my bones, that I could somehow protect what was once me from the harsh burns of those dawning numbers. I suppose this paves the way for my first and likely most important lesson learned as an adult, wishes do not, under any circumstances, come true and as such are better to left to stupid teenagers. Consider the idiot dead and sorely missed.

Vman ( Someone who is definitely going to abuse his newly gained right to buy tobacco products in the state of Maryland )

FICTION (I think?):
Captain’s Log

Aliases: Me (X), Dealer, Jedi, James Dean

1: Feeling normal, or as normal as one can be before contact with psilocybin or however it’s spelt, I’ll leave it you dear reader to fill in the blanks. This is both a literary tool and a method of avoiding illegality. I suppose that I have undermined in some way the attitude that comes with the use of psychedelic drugs by doing my research and restricting my odds of dying or a far worse consequence, a bad trip. One of my friends has deemed this entire affair sketchy; a more apt description has yet to be found.

On the human side of things, everyone is slightly on edge as they should be. The author of these self-conscious ponderings shall attempt to alleviate the tension with an immaculately selected array of phallic centered jokes.

As I write this I suppose an irony is being constructed in that approaching whatever I am about to do in an intellectual fashion ultimately makes you an idiot. Unfortunately, this irony may result in rather pathetic cessation of existence or to all the public school graduates out there, death…

2. (Let’s hope) Hope has worked, Barack Obama has been vindicated. Of course significant obstacles have been encountered. The emperor has no clothes and the dealer has no scale. Here’s to the illusions of grandeur involved in teenage drug use. The process is meticulous yet oddly whimsical. The latter observation is derived from the melting of 6 bars of wholesome all American Hershey’s milk chocolate bars to create “the product.” It’s difficult to not laugh as I write that last word considering that a coffee grinder was used to grind up the shrooms. Let’s hope they’re decaf.

Arguments do occur but all things must pass. There aren’t any real conflicts yet, just a trivial disagreement on the effects of temperature on the potency of the trip. We speak with half remembered facts from shoddy Internet research and poorly recollected stoner comedies. I volunteer that tests have shown that there is no detrimental effect on the potency of the drug when heated. Science has come in handy, thank you education.

3. Hmm, “The taste of foot.”

If God made drugs taste good then it wouldn’t be fair would it?

“Fuck the Internet, it’s Dealer.”

How fucking encouraging. You see there is a conflict presently occurring as my years of accumulated sense butt against a stoner’s “wisdom”, a mythical entity that has yet to be discovered by living men. Dealer is putting random doses into the “product”. Little did we know, that dealer had actually put three times the safe amount of dosage, proving, in essence, that anti intellectualism really won’t get you anywhere in life.

“Pizza bagels later” – Dealer What else?

No ominous proclamations before moment zero, perhaps I’m fucking myself over by building some modicum of internal drama before the second I leave it all.

6: How the fuck did it go from 3 to 6. Apparently the stoner system of thought has infected me. Still honest.

Presently learning how to roll a joint. A valuable skill that will serve me well in today’s global economy. What a precise art, a scientist would approve. I can’t help but feel that everyone’s father should teach his son how to roll a joint, passing down a lost art that will serve him well. Extinct arts are quite dispiriting.

Pirsig wants the worlds of art and science to make their peace. I’d much rather see the worlds of drug paraphernalia and science collude even further to produce the safest highest high possible. But of course a safe high defeats the purpose somewhat does it not?

“Think less eat more X.” That seems to be the overriding sentiment directed towards me.

FINAL MOMENT ZERO.

7. (Let’s hope again) (come on Barack). Tastes like chocolate. I have no choice but declare that the edict god has placed on drugs and their taste or lack thereof, has been undone by a pan of Hershey’s chocolate cooked over a pan of boiling water. How sacrilegious.

SERIOUSLY MOMENT ZERO.

8. (Let’s hope for real)

Somewhat rough.

Eating now.

This is a timeless narrative. I wonder if that’s a mistake of some sort but some holes are best left for the audience to fall into and navigate their way out of.

“Tastes like a Wonka bar.”

I believe that I’ve found the golden ticket.

“Show me porn on youtube”

Anecdotes are being related, no adverse effects have been observed. Apparently I did not ingest all my like chocolate like a good little stoner. I believe that I’ve offended the drug gods; more chocolate is consumed, still chocolate, still rough, still extremely illegal.

“I feel like people read too much into doing this.” – Dealer

Ouch.

A discussion of weed ensues. Oh back to the anecdote.

“The Canadian mounted police recently received a distress call from a woman reporting that she had drunken fake coke. After an initial taste test the report was found to be false. The Mounties still encourage citizens to be on the lookout for fake coke.”

9. “Crescendo-lls”- that is the response to a request by the author to spell out the name of the band we will be listening to when the tripping commences.

One of my friends is ingesting as much as he possibly can. Upon an initial viewing, he seems like someone whose list of favored activities doesn’t include substance abuse simply due to the contentment he exudes, “happy bubbles” as he puts it. Still, he lives the most dangerously, or as dangerously as a sheltered suburban existence lets you. This could be why he’s content though. Life on the edge doesn’t make you one of the people wistfully wondering what dalliances with death are like. Oh well he is a friend and I am not a clinical psychologist. Therefore I must stop this.

“I feel like I am making a big mistake eating all of your chocolate.”

It’s hard to not like the kid, smiling in the grim face of ODing. Everybody needs a little James Dean, living vicariously is still living, or so you tell yourself.

The other members of our party is in the bathroom enveloped in the smoke of Camel Blacks. James Dean and me give each other looks yet say nothing. He is already feeling it in his legs and his face. The author is in a state of excruciating placidity.

“I can still type, that’s good, the computer’s not trying to eat me yet” – James

We hear sounds from the bathroom.

“Open your mouth and just suck in”

A half heard line, stated just perfectly.

I wound if the old stoners would criticize James beginning the trip by texting, going on myspace and digg. Is nothing safe from web 2.0?

Lots of giggling coming from the bathroom, more gay jokes come as naturally as the tides.

James and I notice that it got darker. We conclude after vigorous, slightly retarded debate that it is the setting of the sun and not the shrooms. So far nature’s defenses have prevented a trip.

GOD:1 US:1

Our merry band of misfits scored when we made the shrooms taste good. I expect thunderbolts but none have arrived.

“Maybe I’m writing too much to get high.”

Everyone thinks that James and me are high due to our giggling. We proudly inform them that our conversations always have the quality of those between not yet fully developed teenage girls.

“I’ll do this again. I feel good so far” -Me

“Dude you’re not even high yet.” – Dealer

Enter laughter.

“Dude I want to be your dealer, you pay 25 bucks for absolutely nothing” -James

A certain amount of cred. has been irrecoverably lost.

“Dude, this is like the first two hours of acid, when I was giggling like a little bitch” -Jedi

Jedi is an interesting character himself. I soon find out that I am wrong and that being a cliché, while fun due to its constant predictable behavior does not lend itself to actually being someone of interest.

I’m sitting on a chair away from the bed the others are on. Metaphor achieved.

ME: 1 GOD: 1 THEM:1 (2) – They feel good, a diversion from the natural state of things, God is getting fucked over by the chocolatey goodness. I gave myself a point because I have remained above it all.

9: (Or something) Continuous writing has been occurring. My mind is beginning to leave me.

The sun is going down, it does not want to be a part of this.

“You guys are giggly as shit”

“Moving is officially now gay” – Me (X)

Something’s hitting my head. I do not know precisely what. The offhand reference to tides finds its place yet once gain.

10: Thank god we did not decide to go on James’ proposed adventured to the wild aisles of Target.

Perception is officially rebelling against me, leaving me pondering whether an interruption of perception leaves one with something greater and more profound, or just makes it all bullshit.

“Don’t fight it, don’t fight It.” – Dealer

11. I’m writing way too fast. I feel muscles twitch that should not be twitching.

“X’s feet look delicious” – Dealer

I proceed to hide my feet.

I’m beginning to forget aliases. Not cool.

We’re in the “I love you, man” phase commonly associated with the now seemingly futile hobby of those around me, drinking. It’s all terribly tragically wholesome isn’t it? Perhaps we really do love each other. God I hope not.

My handwriting has sped up tenfold.

My writing abilities are under attack.

How edifying. James and me partly relatively sober.

“My arms are way too light.” – me

Perhaps a stopping of existence is what shrooms are meant to receive.

“Pink Floyd’s going to make me cut.”

For those of you familiar with the characters in this story, the utterer of that dialogue should be eerily apparent. May the force be with him.

My body’s not as it should be. Tremors. Lightness. Unbearable almost. What the fuck?

Soundtrack: Daft Punk’s Around the World

The music throbs, pulsates and refuses to leave us be. Drugs must have been consumed in its creation, its ability to both amplify and bring into chaos my world is simply too great.

13: This is somewhat stimulating to getting in.

“Too many big words”- James

I hope will be able to dose this tale with exposition later.

My stomach is feeling things it shouldn’t be. I must not question the rebellion.

FUCK U GOD.

Seriously though, I’m extremely concerned over this proposal to go to Target. James keeps adjusting his hat. I cannot move my head very quickly, something fragile is occurring.

“X, yes or no on this again?” – Dealer. He needs this, he needs us. He could’ve been someone entirely different, but his grinded up pieces of subverted nature remain his only way of reaching out.

“Yeah, definitely.” – me. Let’s hope the verdict remains unchanged. God knows the gods detest hubris.

“I’m going to fight it.”

“It’s not going to get me this time.”

Inevitably it does.

17:The world swings precariously between light and dark far too quickly. James has lost his ability to speak, a talent he hadn’t quite mastered anyway, running his conversations on an odd mixture of Internet parlance and typical “bro” speak. I have concluded that writing within the lines is officially cool again. Nobody remembers me ever getting really fucked up. Now they shall, everyone wants to see blood. Dark Side of the Moon upsets us. My arms feel weird. I really shouldn’t fight this. So many questions left. I have forgotten my greater responsibilities as I relinquish control.

“Pink Floyd sucks” – James. My back is far too different. I stretch and attempt to retreat back to consciousness. Something wrong with my wrist. Smiles arrive upon me and I know not where they came from. My determinations keep changing. I cannot calibrate the time of the night now. My grasp of myself is vanishing. We tell Jedi to get rid of his defining character trait and stop hitting people.

“Why don’t you guys want some more screamo in your lives?” – James
He has always been counter culture, refusing to apologize for his atrocious taste in music, movies and if he read them, books. He wears it like a badge of honor and blasts music with little to no redeeming value. It is my sincere belief that it is necessary to keep people like James around just to fuck with the baby boomers.

“How are you writing?”

I am utterly convinced that this notebook is keeping me sane. My body, James and everyone else are completely gone. The notebook is the constant. I’ve learned from this experience, if nothing else that Pink Floyd is good music after all. My brain is trying to devour me. Is this a good trip? Yes it is. Writing things doesn’t make them true, I remind myself.

They are trying to pop our happy bubbles. James and I are distant from them, choosing, in an extremely wise decision, to not engage their faux turmoil and put on aggression and instead, to just stay in our happy bubbles.

The music is affecting our moods. Timothy Leary was right. Stop trying to leave James. Pink Floyd is gone. I need it. Fuck you dealer.

“Too many thoughts” Maybe so. Vortexes on the page. The walls are red.

“Jedi, stop saying that you are melting.”
His craving of attention by casting himself as a martyr against all the bullshit in the world begins to tire as he comes across as someone full of exactly the same shit he hates.

13? Eyes closed, I go to different place. The inside of my eyelids have always fascinated me in their capacity to reveal exactly what images currently preoccupied one’s mind. Presently, the darkness gives way to heretofore unseen colors and images. My senses are being taken to foreign heights. I back away and open my eyes to regain precious sanity. A foot blocking the blinds, how fitting. Everyone wants Dealer’s password.

“I don’t really care.”

19:I can’t hold on anymore. Goodbye dear reader. I like Jordan. Good night. Listening to music together that was fun. This is the end of act one. Allusions to pop culture. I’m outside every group but inside every club.
Requisite sanity stretch. Sanity stretches not working.

“What if I die today?” – James

“Don’t say you’re going to die. If you’re going to die, I am too.” – Me

23: Pure, no body remaining. Pink Floyd is back. Thanks everyone. My head is trying to leave my body. I’m leaving all of you. I’m so sorry.
I fought it but I’m beginning to realize that it is nothing to fight. I exist, nay we all exist as so much more without our bodies. Our mortal coils force us to focus on what we can see, what we can buy, what we can steal. Death will set me free.

“Crackhead. We’re becoming crackheads” I’m not. I would hate daft punk, but they’re critically acclaimed.

I have given up my post of observation to go look at myself in a full mirror. They are fighting.
“Anal lube”
What the hell? The words pop out. Hmm, my handwriting is bad, I’m sure I ain’t seen nothing yet.

There are still avenues I wish to explore with this text, but my sanity has gone from being a literary device to something I desperately cling to.

“Fuck life, I’m not going to college, you are. You have to go to life.” – James
He’s right, he’s too right. While I will wrestle with angst as I wrestle over what someone in the future is going to pay me to do, James will not be deviating from a life spent following every whim and desire. He hasn’t had to work, he hasn’t had to achieve anything. The real world will eventually be cruel to him as it will to all of us; while we prepare for the crushing, he refuses to see it coming and continues moving, always moving.

I look good, better that usually look but my appearance follows the lead of the rest of my world and refuses to be constant.

20:James never stops talking. The narrative backbone of this is somewhere. Oh yeah. Oh what. I wonder, but I don’t. I suppose that my taking refuge in the pages will make the insanity leave me alone.

“Is he okay?”
“He’s just writing in his own little world”
Why, yes I am, sadly it will not stay mine.

“Hello my friend X” – Jedi.

Dealer does look oddly sinister. My corner has been invaded as confessions abound. Why must Jedi come into my corner? I notice, for not the first time, that Jedi wishes to make himself feel deeper and naturally, wishes to converse with the kid writing in his notebook. Even in my altered state, nay, especially in my altered state I know that I would rather not waste any mental capacity quietly mocking everything he’s telling me. James and I exchange looks. James looks tired, yet I do not worry for if alcohol poisoning only left him with a good story to tell, the drug we are taking will not leave him much worse.. Observations belong here but the experience makes it so that thoughts simply refuse to arise, unsure of the altered mental landscape. I’m being fucked in the romantic sense

50: Can I please be in my corner? Not James though, we’re cool. Hmm I don’t want to be here but leaving is the purpose real or virtual. I am gone.

I need to experience this chaotic world. It is necessary to transcend these conditions effectively. But I can’t.

“This is nice.” Sane observation I suppose. I am a vessel for something. What? Must keep writing. If I don’t write, I am gone.

Focus, focus on something. ”I’m trying to help you Jedi” – Dealer

“I can’t find itunes.” – James

James is always fucking with people; an odd sort of phenomena occurs as they begin to enjoy it, even crave it. Jedi, desperate for James approval and even love, dismisses it as funny and good natured“, putting aside his internal chafing at James’ antics for his desire for James. Read into that what you will, I certainly have.

“Drugs help us achieve nothing. I don’t see shit ever” – James. I know. I can’t be there so much though, I must leave .

“What’s that quote?” –Dealer. Dealer is inching dangerously close to my corner. I really wish he would not. I need to be alone. I can’t become them. I keep building up to the goodbye, but if I accomplish that then I am left with nothing. The narrative is a device but it comes from recognition that eventually it will be my time to go.

I am failing you reader. I am failing you. I don’t want to leave you without my thoughts but they are mounting an insurrection. I am being broken. Hopefully, I will see what’s left and then be put back together again the way I was. There is too much riding on hope for this to be safe.

“Shit Jedi, into the bathroom.”
Good solution.

Everybody needs to write, force themselves to witness the beautiful disintegration. Our self conceptions will never come back after this.

Perhaps a mouthful of liquor would have better suited our purposes, varied and idiotically adolescent as they may be.

“I don’t know I’m out of this body now.”

Too many expletives. This is a family publication.

“Did we do too much or not enough?” One of the great, unanswered questions of our time.

If I stop writing for one second, the experience will overtake me, and I will become it. I don’t want to lose me.

21:Focus. Flip the page, write, pen on paper. They are elsewhere. I am somewhere. I know of neither location. I’m trying. My essence, in my head, I see it a bit clearere. There is more to say, there are more things but…

We are all god. Come out of this alive.

I wonder what we are. Everything clear. There is something, a surge of happiness. I must concentrate.

“Twat”

The time frames. My time frames. I’m cool. We are all god, shit, must explain, can’t just say shit. Whatever it is about God that personally causes so many, myself and James excluded to place so much on the concept, has to do with his victory over mortality or the confines of physical means. I am god. I am not confined, I see me, I see ideas, I see things, I altered everything, I exist in the world of ideas, for brief hours the human me has died as my perception is shattered into a thousand remains, I am halfway between the red and the blue pill, I haven’t completely left the body behind, but I am me, and I am not there, I am god.

Still not seeing the god, maybe it’s because it can’t exist.. Everything has become ideas. Nothing is concrete. Ideas, me, them we’re all the same. There are things that we use to create meaning, I see them.

I see myself again, I keep seeing my face, I notice things. I wish I could remember what though. There is a disconnect, I cannot bring on the experience dear reader, if I did, you might not come back. I don’t even know if I will.

We fade into everything. There is something divine. I’m trying to think.

“Insane”

Words. Obsessions. They invaded my corner.

Do not leave the room.

“Shut up”

23:They are out to get me dear reader. It’s just you and me. I take respite in the pages, dear reader. I must keep writing. It is keeping me sane. It separates me from them. These pages protect me. If I leave then I am gone. It’s you and me dear reader against them.

It all revises itself. I can’t leave the page. If I do, I leave it all, everything. I fall into being one of them, and lose whatever precious meaning I have stored into me at my corner.

“Yeah it’s fun” do they really believe that?

James observes me. It’s all one. James always has my back. He’ll give me a ride. He’ll let me escape and go back. I don’t need to be god, god doesn’t exist, I might not exist if I don’t stay.

Must stick to the concrete. What do I know? Locations, names, people. Shit must use aliases. Dealer, cp, his apartment. Jedi, in the bathroom, angry, about to kill himself.

“Time” – Jedi. “It’s what I’ve been talking about man, we’ve been living our whole lives based on time man. Time.”

Stop fucking talking about time. I don’t want to hear you pseudo philosophical bullshit Jedi.

“I wish Jamie was here.”

God, stop it. Must remain at the pages must not join them.

“Jamie really gets me man. He’s the only one that gets me.”

Why doesn’t he go back into the bathroom. It’s better when it’s just James and me. James always has my back. James is not in the fervent pursuit of an image he is attempting to create for himself; if he is, he hides it well, guess who doesn’t.

The pages try to keep me from escape. Ideas and people they’re the same. There are no physical components to us. I melt. I plunge into the abyss.

We live with our mortal selves in mind, and refuse to see that what’s reflecting off the mirror is not by any means us. I refuse to be irresponsibly intellectual enough to suggest that drugs are the only things that let us see what is, but I must let the experience speak for itself.

“I hate you.”

Jedi is afraid to be judged.

“You make me not like myself somehow.” Called it.

ME – PAGE

Them — to each other.

Around all of us, exists the mythos.

We are in the blogging generation. We are ironic. We use cell phones in concerts instead of lighters.

Must stay away from them. Dear reader. Narrative backbone. James’ functions have been overcome. I am running out of pages, but if I have been effective, then it’ll be cool.

I complete something but the medium isn’t the meaning. Wait it is, no it’s not. Self examination must be terminated, I have living to do or at least I hope so. There’s that word again, too irrational to live well are we?

Missing a lot of pages. It is loud. Ok, they’re there but you’re here. I risk repetition.

“Must we transcend?”

They wrestle in and out of prose. This is cool. I’m tuned into something.

The pages are red. Need them; my head is no longer light. The drugs become my decision.

Ok, establishing what’s black and what’s white. Bad idea. We’re all god. Ok. I don’t want to focus on them, because I’m cool with me. Transcendentalist. It’s cool, existing here, that’s all I’ve been trying to say. I can lie here forever, can’t I. I’ve never been socially cool.

Focus on self-preservation, clearly we’re all bad at it.

30:It’s all good, we’ve expressed sentiment I believe. James seems so sensitive sometimes. People defy categories. Ok, we need to eventually leave. I confirm this with James. Shit is so different now that this happened. Everything I’ve written had been written once before. We’ve been living life on hold.

I feel philosophical but I shudder to think of what I might say. I don’t want to be mystical dear reader, there is enough of that bullshit assaulting you. I simply wish to show you the experience. It cannot be seen.

Interrupted again, need to write.

-Vman

Fiction:

What are relationships? An extension of the usual kindness? It appears that the best attempts of man, the most enlightened stabs at definition, have all rested and laid down their arms at the sacred halls of love. But even love, a definition must be had. There are two components to it are they not? First there’s the emotional, the hallowed part of it, that nobody is really allowed to touch. For fear that they desecrate something they’re not even sure may exist. It’s the same thing that happens in political elections and such. The outrage over the “bitter” remarks only occurred because Obama was infringing upon a sacred cow in the political sense. The good old days. The ones that nobody is allowed to discuss except in glowing terms. Apparently there was a time somewhere in the early 20th century that every one who wanted to could earn a living wage and send his or her children off to achieve something greater could and was even helped by the perfectly functioning government. Well, it is not my place to burst anyone’s bubble, but Billy Joel would not have had so many things to sing about in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” if the world really wasn’t burning all along. Vietnam and the reasons behind the first wave of feminism are both things that ruined the good old days that nobody wishes to speak of.

… continue reading this entry.

The text of my email to my English teacher which he chose to read in class and shoot down:

I chose not to pay attention in Math class and instead chose to ramble in my notebook, here is what follows, I believe it is relevant to a discussion we had on the first day of the semester:

The ability to put thoughts and feelings into solid and symbolic form is one of the most basic skills of the civilized man. One must wonder though if the essential primal function of writing, communicating the contents of the author’s mind has not been diluted by the modern analytical approach to writing in vogue today, relativism. To avoid falling into the trap that I am so self righteously positing that others avoid, I shall be explicit in my statements.

I wish to examine the relativist or audience centric perspective regarding the study and analysis of both rhetorical and fictional texts. You see, in order to sidestep the calamity of inferring a meaning from a work that the writer did not wish at all to invest the work with, anyone attempting to delve beyond the surface of a work from bored housewives to well established members of academia escape to a school of thought called relativism. This intellectual shelter shields them from being purely false by asserting that the meaning of a work rests not upon the intentions of the author but the interpretation of the audience. If this theory were true then no work has any innate value. The attempts of authors to create meaning are all for naught, as audiences are the ones determining what they take away from the work. The essence of the work lies not in the mind from whence it came but in the mind of the reader. It doesn’t matter what the guy on the other end of the literary telegraph is attempting to communicate in morse code, whatever the person receiving the communication wrote down, no matter how wildly inaccurate, is whatever the sender’s communication meant under this school of thought.

Never mind, the logical errors of relativism and its ideological cousin empiricism, if one simply strips the function of writing to its absolute essence, the communication of thought from one person to another via the process of symbols imprinted in solid form, one finds that the shelter’s walls quickly dissolve under the rains of actual inspection. If you, the reader takes away from this essay the conclusion that I believe relativism is a perfectly valid mode of thought and that I have presented a incredibly well reasoned defense for the theory, which I so clearly detest, then I will have diverted my precious attention from the ramblings of my AP Calculus teacher for nothing, nothing at all. By judging everyone’s opinion equally valid, relativism leads to a thousand different truths, thereby defeating the definition truth itself and leaving the work nothing but ink on paper.
On a side note, if AP Literature teachers truly do believe in this relativist approach then rid the world of the institution called AP Friday. The college board assumes that the author has invested the work with meaning, and grades the students based on the similarity between their conclusions and what the author actually meant. It is wildly hypocritical and entirely all too convenient to tell a student that the meaning they derive from the work is all that matters, yet hand that same student an F when his meaning does not match the established meaning of the work. Perhaps that is why the best students are always failing.

On a final note, the current approach of the English department to Literature, one that denies the importance of objective truth or the meaning the author puts into the work, falls in the face of reason. Reason is man’s attempt to reach this objective truth or Plato’s form, through observation and logical constructs. If this objective truth doesn’t exist then we are truly shooting our rhetorical bullets at thin air. All our essays are aiming to figure out the effect the author intended with the choice of a certain word, an extended metaphor or a juxtaposition, should be burned by the busload as they assume that there exists this objective meaning. The english department’s denial of objectivism flies in the face of Plato, reason and is logically self defeating, not to mention it is the reason the author will probably achieve nothing more than a D on the next AP Calculus test as he fails to match the objective truth of the equation’s solution because he was too busy writing pointless letters to his English teacher in a (most likely) vain attempt to bring a contrarian perspective to established literary theory.
by

Vman (Someone who believes that everyone should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

In observing the recent happenings in the contest for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, I have been struck by the importance of defining the word black. Of course, the easiest path around the fray over the definition of black in the socio cultural context would be to strip it of meaning and simply define it as a color, a portion on the visible light spectrum. However, this would mean that the common practice of referring to a select group of individuals in our society with dark skin as black is grossly inaccurate. After all, many of these people are merely brown and none is pure jet black. Some suggest that black is merely an outdated substitute for African American. Yet, this definition also does not hold under scrutiny. In fact, a significant number of African American columnists have come out saying that Barack Obama and recent immigrants from the continent of Africa are not black since they did not descend from slaves. Technically though, Barack Obama is an African American since his African father and American mother had a child on American land. The definition of the word black takes on even more importance when one considers the political implications of African Americans, a large portion of the Democratic Party, not recognizing Barack Obama as a black man. To further complicate matters, Bill Clinton is often referred to as the nation’s “first black president.” Surely, Mr.Clinton, a white Anglo-Saxon male cannot be more black than a man whose father is from Kenya. In addition, a person from the Carribean islands who is not exactly African yet shares the skin color of an African American would be seen as black in the eyes of many. This leaves one to refer to old Supreme Court ruling on the definition of obscenity, which while slightly ignorant when applied in this context still works, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

-Vman (Someone who has the audacity of hope)