still alive

just a quick note to let you know that i'm still alive. i'm in the process of whipping up some new journals of all the stuff that went down in the past 10 days. been falling behind, hard. no good. we've gone left potsdam, gone to new york, and come back already. so here i am. will post some more stuff soon!


oh yeah, a friend of mine from albuquerque just sent me this great thing, a transcript of a conversation we had that she taped a long time ago, some months. i thought i'd post it here for you to read, because i think it's kind of funny.

here's the note that i got from her, with the transcript, i blocked out all the names though, to protect the wicked.

*******************

Howdy friend.....
I transcribed our conversation from when we were sitting on my kitchen at 3:30 a.m. by the fridge. The few people who've read it said it was the greatest conversation ever.

Here's our conversation:

Me: I said that you must be one of the A.D.D. angels cause you were talking about how your mind was reeling from the defeat us (da fetus) thing, and how it works on so many levels and how your brain was attacking it from these different angles so it made me think about how when you’re being A.D.D. or whatever and they try to sit you down in the classroom and draw stuff on this chalkboard and you have to sit there and look at it and you don’t want to just sit there and look at it. You wanna get up and get around it and get on top of it and stuff and like look at it from these different angles. And you would actually learn better in a different environment. So it’s just like, that you’re not actually deficient or something, you’re just, like…

Her: …too efficient for the first dimension.

Me: You’re, like, really good at doing something, but you’re just in the wrong environment.

Her: And then you said...

Me: And then I said 'oh, I’m getting sentimental because there’s honey at the bottom of my coffee.'

Her: You said weepy and sentimental.

Me: Did I?

Her: Yes

Me: No I didn’t, you made that up

Her: I did not! That’s why I laughed… I remember thinking of a weeping willow tree.

Me: I’m getting all weepy and sentimental because there’s honey at the bottom of my coffee.

Her: And so how does that make you weepy and sentimental?

Me: It doesn’t. It’s just like when I was hanging out with A. earlier and like I was saying I hope that M. isn’t all sauced when she shows up here in her car to come pick me up because I was complicit to her drunk driving or whatever. And he’s like ‘Oh, man, that’s really not good.” And I was like ‘Well, whatever, that’s why I’m wearing this tie.” And then I was like, which actually doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and he was like “Oh, I was just thinking, how does that help?” you know. It just sounds like funny to just be like because there’s honey at the bottom of my coffee.

Her: Right, right, right, right, right. And sometimes instead ofr saying because you can say so and that sounds good. You can say I was getting all weepy and sentimental, so there was honey at the bottom of my cup. Like you change the reason into this sub or post-reason. Does this make any sense?

Me: Maybe. That sounds good. Let’s try that sometimes

Her: Let’s try it all o’ the time.

Me: Let’s always be trying.

Her: Trying is just unexerted effort.

Me: Yeah, you keep saying that, what’s that from? Is that in your motivation that you’re writing or whatever? That’s the title of the book. It’s called “Trying is Unexerted Effort!”

Her: The best way to grow from a self-help book is to write your own self-help book, because everyone fucking knows what to do. You know like to helpo yourself lose weight and not be an obese fat rad…

Me: …like me

Her: Yeah, like us. You do certain things. You don’t have to read about.

Me: You know about the old cliché about writing self help books is that if you’re really successful at it you wouldn’t be able to write a sequel. But in fact that’s not true, because if you are successful at it you could turn it into a whole franchise. But, so, it kind of defies logic actually. It’s kind of a conundrum.

Her: (Laughing hysterically) All of the best self help books defy logic.

Me: Who moved my cheese? Have you ever read who moved my cheese? It’s all about the metaphor of dealing with new situations in life and it’s like about…you’re these lab rats in this maze and you’re used to getting your cheese from a certain place and then one day you show up to the spot and there’s no cheese there and you’re like Who moved my cheese?? So that’s the whole thing and there’s all these rules like you can’t sit and wait for the old cheese to come back or whatever forever. You’re eventually going to have to find a new place to get some cheese. So it’s better to look for new cheese somewhere else then just, like, wait there and starve. All this weird stuff but…

Her: God, I feel so inspired right now!

Me: It’s like business metaphor, like self help, like business success manuals and stuff that kind of shit. The richest man in Babylon, y’know.

Her: The richest man in Babylon.

Me: Or, like, rich dad, poor dad, on PBS.

Her: Is that a show?

Me: It’s like this guy and he talks to you about what the rich dad would do and the poor dad does and money-management tips.

Her: You look like you’re dancing when you talk! You’re, like, gyrating around…

Me: This is to suggest that like, there’s more stuff going on in what I’m saying than what’s actually…

Her: So your tremors are, like, extra information from the great beyond?!

Me: Yeah, it’s like, you know, what poor dads would do, it’s jujst to suggest additional stuff going on. It’s like shorthard for me going “he’s going on a chalkboard” or whatever he’s doing, he’s talking to you about it, he’s waving his hands around, cause that’s what you do when you’re one of those animated motivational speakers. “I’m going to show you how to turn $200 into three new houses for your second generation’s family.” Or whatever, and you’re like “What is he…?” And he’s just like “Starts from within! No more red meat!”

Her: Good Lord, all day.

Both: (musical breakdown, beating on floor, singing bleacher songs from sports games)

Me: Yeah that part’s dope… Do you write like a bleacher song so you make millions off of the licensing deals when it’s a hit and they use it for sports things?

Her: No, I think you’re just trying promote your funky teeth. And so you try to pick all the words in which your teeth will be bared to the bleachers. And coincidentally, you can bleach your teeth.

Me: You eventually do bleach your teeth.

Her: He eventually bleached his teeth and that’s why he died, really.

Me: I know.

Her: No, he swallowed bleach trying to whiten his teeth.

Me: Oh god! …Bleachers.

Her: No, that’s not true.

Me: You just made that up. You’re confusing me.

Her: I’m Confucius.

Me: Man who fight with wife before bed get not peace (piece).

Her: Get no piece! Peace as in both words.

Me: Yeah, it’s like the stereotypical Confucian wisdom joke.

Her: Oh is it? You didn’t make that up?

Me: They’re always a double entendre about some kind of sexually explicit act being performed on Confucius…or something.

Her: Do you think, uh…

Me: No…

Her: Do you think when white trash weird folk hillbillies, aside from those who don’t know the word entendre, do you think they say “En-tender?”

Me: Entender??

Her: That’s like a double entender! That’s like Nintendo 3! It’s like when Mario comes…

Me: No, that’s Mario Cars. That’s a double entender.

Her: I didn’t intend it! I can’t pretend it.

Me: Unintentional entendre.

Her: Ah, that’s the name of my band…we’re the Intentional Entendres.

Me: Hahahaha, it’s art rock.

Her: Yo, listen, so I tried to cross the main plaza on UNM today and it was all blocked off by these caution ropes and all the police were walking around I was like ‘Oh my god, what’s going on?” and this guy was like ‘Oh, there’s this suspicious package”. It was the bomb squad. And I was like “Oh, my GOD, I can’t believe this. It’s probably a box of cookies.” And he, this… student, looked at me as if…I was totally NOT taking this seriously enough. God, I was like ‘ you fucking schmuck.’

Me: Haha, he was like “that’s really disrespectful. You hurt my feelings!”

Her: And then this girl said “It’s an art bomb! I think it’s a sculpture that an art student forgot to tell them they put their sculpture there. Art bomb!:

Me: I made this sculpture called the Info Bomb, but it was like, you know those real estate signs that have the plastic tubes with the red pencaps…

(leaves room for awhile, indecipherable)

So I stole one of those tubes and I took it off of a real estate sign and I took it back to the dirty punk house I was living at, that Coal Place kind of reminds me of. The place was called the Ministry of Information. While we were there, I had the info tube cause that’s what it said on the side of it. What I’d like to do is I would go into the disgusting carpet and I would pick up little rocks and little bits of garbage and little pieces of hair and pop tabs from beer and O.C.D, like, make little piles of it and I started putting all the piles in the tube and then my glasses broke and I shoved those in there and people would get into it and put random bits of garbage in there and it was really disgusting inside the info tube, it was all this weird mold and stuff growing in there, I don’t know. But eventually, I was carrying around, when I left town, I had this old typewriter, we destroyed this typewriter, we shoved all the old keys into it and smashed up the frame and then took all the wiring and stuff from it and took the mount for the paper jam spinning thing and all the metal and stuff and put the info tube on it, and it was full of all these old typewriter keys and garbage from the floor and then I wrapped all the wiring around it and…from the thing, and then I was going to California to go to this festival from Minneapolis on a Greyhound bus and I wrapped it in a towel and put it in this kind of tarp kind of thing that I had sort of tied to the bottom of my backpack cause I was trying to carry all this stuff with me.

Her: Wow! So you had, like, this weird conceptual metal tail?!

Me: Kind of, yeah. And when they searched all my stuff on the Greyhound bus, I showed it to them and I was like, well, it’s a sculpture, and they were like “Well, it’s kind of like a bomb!”

Her: Like a BOMB!?!?! (Laughing)

Me: And I was like “Well, I’m going to this art festival.” And I was trying to explain about how it represented like the planned obsolescence of technology, just making up all this stuff. But they let me take it there and I nailed it to a wall in a little town that the festival takes place at. And when we left I didn’t bother to take it down or anything, I just made a little placard with my post office box on it, and I was like “$50” but that post office box didn’t even work, but I don’t know, maybe somebody bought it.

Her: …probably not, they probably took it. Or left it there.

Me: Or threw it away.

Her: Or they were like “Jesus, that’s probably a bomb” and they ran away.

Me: Yeah, I had a lot of weird stuff with me. I carried around a lot of crap. I want to pair it down to…. Minimalism is so cool, y’know.

Her: It sounded like you were saying parrot down, like Black Hawk Down, like…

Me: I wanna parrot down like black hawk down

Her: I wanna black bear it down pillow….like, oh what is in this pillow? It’s so soft. And you can be like ‘Oh, that’s black parrot feather down.”

Me: That’s black parrot down pillow feather

Her: Down

Me: But it’s really kind of extraneous, I’m trying to pair it down to the bare essential.

Her: Oooh, to the naked essentials. To the naked bear’s essentials. What are the essentials of a naked bear?

Me: I was talking to AG..….do you know A.G.? She’s like this weird little raver girl

Her: Is she the one with the white dreadlocks?

Me: No. But I was telling her, can I call you Threadbare? And she was like Fred Bear? No! Theadbare! No, like bare into the threads. And she was like “Sure, but I have to come up with a name for you but I can’t think of anything right now.” And I was like well, call me back when you fuckin come up with something! And I don’t know what I thought Threadbare was a good-sounding phrase.

Her: It’s not, really.

Me: It’s not good?

Her: I mean, it doesn’t have that flow. Maybe it will after I hear it for awhile, maybe it’s something that catches on, like it’s an acquired name.

Me: You never know.

Her: I don’t, obviously, know anything.

Me: Oh God. That’s a good position to take.

Her: I…am an Idiot. That’s a great position to… No, there’s a difference between being an idiot and not knowing anything, right?

Me: You can be smart and not know anything.

Her: Really?

Me: Sure.

Her: Well, that’s what I was saying.

Me: Idiots can know a lot of stuff.

Her: Yeah, I know some people like that.

Me: Contrary to popular belief. I don’t know, it all depends on what you’re gaging, what your standard of measurement is for intelligence or whatever. Whatever paradigm or whatever crap you’re looking at. I believe every individual is uniquely suited to do something really well. To excel in something.

Her: Yeah, like the Giver? That book the Giver.

Me: I never read that.

Her: That’s a shame. That’s a damn shame, and you should read it tomorrow.

Me: I’ll understand my weird high school girlfriend better if I read that book. She had this whole complex about it.

Her: Oh, she was probably awesome.

Me: Mm-hmm. She was so awesome and I was so fuckin dweeby and lame. It was just really bad. It was one of those “open relationships” that are one-sided.

Her: Like, she was open?

Me: No, like I was open the whole time. I didn’t really know that I wanted to be in open relationships in the first place, so I just lied to her about it the whole time, but then she would always find out about it anyway.

Her: And she still loved you.

Me: Yeah, and it was really bad. We would get into these weird fights with each other and do drugs together and have bad trips and stuff and all this weird shit. I’ve got all these amazing great stories from all these experiences from that that I tell people. I don’t write about that stuff, I just talk. Cause I don’t want to divulge anything personal about myself for some reason.

Her: No divulging. Cause, if you’ve got too much divulging, it’s bulging. Like, took at that divulge bulge.

Me: Well, I think about kind of like how a person is almost defined more by what you don’t know about them then what you do know about them.

Her: I don’t know what that means. What does that mean?

Me: It’s like if you’re a magician or something, your power is that the person doesn’t know how you do the trick. It’s a secret. SO it’s kind of like as a performer or as an artist, it’s like the source of what you have is like the strength in it and if you divulge too much of it then you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Her: Oooh, and you become this formula from what you do?

Me: I don’t know, I haven’t gotten a lot of perspectives on this opinion of mine.

Her: You should go around with a clipboard, like, so I have this idea, tell me what you think! And you can have a little check box with, like, agree…

Me: …happy face, middle face…

Her: …confused face, vomit face…

Me: No, but it’s just like a scale of happy face to sad face, circle which one this one makes you feel. And it’s like, Sad Face…oh god! I get a bunch of sad faces. Yeah! That’s dope. No, I need to like get together focus groups…

Her: Listen to my idea! Please listen to my idea! I think it’s great.

Me: OK.

Her: You know how Lucy Van Pelt from Peanuts had that Doctor is In thing and Charlie Brown would come over and weep into her…

Me: This freeMe street psychologist or whatever…

Her: Yeah! But listen, I was thinking it would be cool to set up in a crowded area this set like that but it’s called Advice or something and people would come up and write, there’d be a paper with, like the President, Old People, category, Drug Addicts, students, whatever and people would write advice for these different genres of people, yeah? And then you have some thing and you put it all up and show stuff, and you can have some shitty snapshot and put it by them, I don’t know, but it’s all local, and you know these people, it’s such a small town, I mean it’s big but everyone knows each other anyway, it’s bizarre, it’s that paradox, but it wouldn’t have to be advice, it could be surreal experiences, it could be anything.

Me: So you’d just gather opinions about various genres of characters of people

Her: No, For them, FOR them, advice FOR them, it makes people think of people outside themselves, like what are these people like and what do I have to offer them?

Me: Can we be the specialists administering the….

Her: Oh, we’re TOTALLY specialists.

Me: And can we be in doctor costumes

Her: Yeah, goggles??

Me: And I want to have a nametag or something that says Dr. Fraud

Her: HAHAHAHA! Instead of Dr. Freud!!

Me: And we have another one that’s Dr. Con.

Her: Like conning….

Me: And then we could have another one that’s called Dr. Awkward cause it…

Her: …sounds cool

Me: …is a palindrome

Her: …No it’s not.

Me: Yeah, D R awkward is a palindrome.

Her: Oh! That’s really, really cool.

Me: Yeah, this guy N. told me that once. A guy named N. that I know, he was a professional clown. He did this whole routine where he had this woman with him ahnd they traveled around Europe and he’d perform on the streets and he’d be in this hobo clown outfit throwing around oversized dollar bills and his tie would turn into a sledge hammer and he’d lay on a bed of spikes and the girl with him would break a cinderblock over his chest…

Her: Jesus

Me: Yeah, he’s way cool. He’s some crazy San Francisco dude or something. And he had this thing on his, one of his pictures on a Web page, one of those social profile things, it was a picture of him with a light saber and under him it said Metaphors Be With You.

Her: Um….so why does he have to hate on the similes?

Me: Cause it sounds like May the force be with you, like form Star Wars.

Her: Met-a-phors be…

Me: Metaphors be with you.

Her: ……Metaphors be with you!! OH MY GOD!!! WHAT A GENIUS! I LOVE HIM!
Jesus, do you think he made that up?

Me: I don’t know, maybe. But I’m going to propagate it because it’s so cool . I almost said steal it but I changed it to propagate.

Her: Propagate on , brother.

Me: But stealing is fun too. I mean, they say site you sources or whatever but…

Her: I say STEAL your sources

Me: Steal you sources! And then laugh about it later.

Her: I say ignite your sources.

Me: Yeah, ignite your sources.

Her: I say spread an inferno, a town-wide source inferno. ….Jesus…, it’s almost 4 in the morning.

Me: Uh-oh.

Her: What?

Me: Four in the morning.

Her: Do you know what happens at four?

Me: You turn into a werewolf?

Her: I mean, have you heard the stories? They’re terrifying. I don’t even remember them, cause I lose my mind.

Me: We never remember whatever happens at four in the morning! Oh God. It’s like one of those horror movies where everybody blanks out in these weird psychotic states they don’t remember and then they wake up and there’s all these dead bodies everywhere or whatever and they’re like “What happened?” and then it’s like the whole movie takes place within a flashback of a flashback.

Her: Yeah, and it’s also like what happens at 4 a.m. stays at 4 a.m.

Me: Oh god, like Vegas?

Her: Like it.

Me: (singing) Vegas will make us or break us

(Fridge begins to hum)

Me: (strokes fridge)Good machine, excellent

Her: Haha, he’s humming along to your song

Me: Do you want to be a technologist? Oh yeah! Oh Holy Stopwright! Thank you for granting me access!

Her: I’d like to thank… I’d like to thank, the U.S. Army for this line, this fat line that I’m about to do on the light bulb.

Me: Oh yeah! Where did that come from? What were we talking about?

Her: Something about you sleeping in. No, no, no, I was like if you were a soldier of the U.S. army, you would have been up 5 hours ago, it was, like, 11 o’ clock. We were talking about how they made it possible that you could sleep in.

Me: Oh yeah! Then I was like, I gotta thank those guys for defending my freedom to let me sleep in!

Her: Yeah, that’s exactly what you said!

Me: And then I woke up and was all like “Yeah, every time I do a fat line I’m going to be like ‘Thanks a lot U.S. Army!’”

Her: (Laughing with tears in eyes)

Me: Cause they come back and they’re all like “I didn’t serve in ‘Nam so you damn hippie kids could fuck each other and snort lines off of lightbulbs asses!!” and whatever.

Her: (still laughing)

Me: That’s what they say. You go to the protest or whatever and the veteran guys are there and they’re like Well, when I was your age, and I’m like We’re living in the 50’s now and, you know, Tokyo is about to explode!

…….

Me: I mean, their consumer product cycle is three times as fast as ours or something. They have like new models of stuff all the time. It’s INSANE!

Her: You’re insane.

Me: Yes. I got the Internet when I was, like, 14 years old or something.

Her: Oh yeah, and then you read about the anarchist cookbook and making bombs and shit. You did, didn’t you? You memorized the anarchist cookbook. Remember the one about like burning the toothbrush to get change out of the phone machines? You burn the bristles and put it in there and it like forms and molds and…

Me: Oh cool. And then you can , like, …I watched B. do this thing where he just opens up a whole newspaper box, he just walks up to those things and he’s just like KHOOM! and grabs, like, ten newspapers and he’s just like “Here, it’s Sunday, here’s the classifieds, go get a job!” That’s what he said to me.

Her: I love his accent.

Me: He has this whole routine, he’s always like, Why don’t you chill out for a while and stay in Albuquerque and get a job? Work a shitty job for a couple months then save up some money THEN travel around.

Her: Jesus, you do that so well! You sound just like him!

Me: No I don’t.

Her: Jesus, yes you do. That’s crazy.

Me: Yeah, you get really good at mimicry when you start practicing the whole way of becoming fast friends with people and adapting to your environemt. It’s a survival mechanism, you have to adapt to your environment.

Her: Do I have an imitatable voice?

Me: (Imitating) Do I have an imitatable voice? I mean, everybody has an imitatable voice.

Her: Try more. Just go on a rant about painting.

Me: Ok, painting…

Her: About how everybody today sucks…

Me: No, I can’t, it’s too contrived…

Her: OK, go on a rant about salamanders. Go. You’re on the spot.

Me: YOU go on a rant about some random topic. You probably could, you’re good at stuff. I don’t claim to be good at being randomy randable randabalot randall brot set like the fractal Warshack Test.

Her: I was just thinking that.

Me: The Warshack Test?

Her: No, the whole thing. That whole messy R slur.

Me: Really?

Her: Yeah. I’ve been there brother. I’ve been there and I almost never came back.

Me: Yeah, we go around and write this weird poetry and sometimes you get this one long really good drugged out rant or something and then you go out and read it at open mics and stuff and weird literary dudes are like No, I relate, I was there on every one of those lines and you’re just like that’s crazy cause I was all fucked up…

…..

Me: They’re inextricably intertangled.

Her: Drug culture and sub culture? That’s cause you gotta keep drugs on the down low so you gotta keep the culture on the downlow.

Me: Or is just that every culture has it’s drugs or something?

Her: Yeah, well, I mean, high class they use coke, they just don’t talk about it. That’s the rich kids….

Me: The sanctioned drugs of the official culture.

Her: Yeah, like beer.

Me: So you would say there’s the national drug and the state drug, it’s like that isn’t it?

Her: Yeah, I like that.

Me: Yeah, the state flower is, like, the hummingbird and the state drug is Zoloft or whatever.

Her: HAHAHA! The state flower is the hummingbird?? HAHAHAHA! Can the state French fry sauce be shoe polish?

Me: I guess. There’s a lot of weird things that you could do with shoe polish.

Her: You can use it as a lubricant when you’re raping a shoe!! (laughing)

Me: Yeah, OH YEAH, You’re like size 4!

Her: What did shoe do today?

Me: I went home.

Her: I raped a size 4 Oxford.

Me: Oh God. That’s what shoe salesmen do when no ones looking.

Her: Oh yeah, that’s why they’re so shiny!

Me: The shoe salesmen?

Her: HAHA NO, the SHOES!

Me: Oh OK.

Her: No, everything, it’s like a really shiny store, they come out and wax it with everything, it’s sparkling glass, the people the shoes , the floor, the office phone keeps ringing and nobody picks it up. Why do they do that? Jesus!

Me: They’re like I don’t get paid to answer the phone. It’s that bitch’s job!

Her: Even the boss says that.

Me: Yeah, he’s like I’m not getting paid to be here! Why are we here? It’s a volunteer store, a volunteer shoe store. I don’t get paid to answer the phones or sell used shoes. You buy your own shoes; just leave some money over there. That would be cool. What about, you know how they have free stores? Have you ever heard of the free store?

Her: No, no, no, no I haven’t.

Me: It’s like a store where it looks like a astore but everythin’s free.

Her: So people just drop off shit there?

Me: Yeah, and then they put it out..

Her: That’s amazing.

Me: Yeah, it’s like for homeless people and stuff. They had this great showspace that was in the back of this punk bike co-op place and it was down the street from, like, a cop shop…

Her: Wait, can I shape your beard with clippers?

Me: Oh God, Shave it?

Her: No, shape it.

Me: Oh, shape it.

Her: We’ll shave part of it.

Me: Yeah.

Her: Really?

Me: Yeah. What are you going to do, make it look diabolical or something?

Her: Can I have free creative reign on your beard?

Me: Oh god.

Her: No, I’m not going to make you look stupid, it’ll hardly change.

Me: Ok, fine.