I have a love affair with the light. the way it changes everything it falls upon, light through red leaves at dawn, reflecting inner glow from pine branches to set the whole tree ablaze, shining in every puddle and every drop of rain to turn the world into it's prism, refracting every drop into the whole chaotic tenderness and joy. it is
exactly because I love light that my favorite time is the middle of the night. if light is everywhere, then there is no contrast; all the chaos of light refracting and striking everywhere cancels each other out and you just have day. the greatest beauty of light is to be seen when there is a contrast between the  ight and the darkness. streetlights glimmering like angels across the city, christmas lights shining in the rain, the stars...

Life is that too. the greatest points of life are those with the greatest contrast. finding joy when you are at the absolute bottom, when you have no safety and no hope, with a beat up car and no money, driving to god knows what but knowing only that you havetogetawayhavetogoNOW, driving all night past diamond headlights getting fewer and fewer as the night goes on, until it is only the lonely ones on the road, driving only to not be anywhere anymore. red lights ahead of you like the eyes of some ravening beast, watching you mile after mile in the blackness.

And then you come over the hill to see the sunrise. pale fog lit by the sudden explosion of light, shining through the leaves that are just beginning to change and setting them all afire, and suddenly you are driving through god's forest, climing the lifeline of the yellow line to that eternal horizon, to that glorious rising sun. beauty, love, hope, in the midst of horror, finding joy at the very bottom of the food chain when every shadow haunts your dreams...that is life as it should be lived.

it's what I do with stress; sit in a room letting it build until the only cure is another swig. speaking of which... *swig*.

angry and not ok with anything. the rage I felt earlier is starting to fade, though. to get down quickly what the source of that was, the meeting after orchestra hit EXACTLY the proper triggers to make me absolutely crazy, and I mean that fairly literally. all this talk of expanding responsibility, pretending like your school is the best damn thing on the planet just to play your goddamned games. "we have this great opportunity, kiddo, and I'm excited for us to give this opportunity to people to understand what being in a real orchestra is like!" FUCK YOU. I don't even have the words to explain quite what was said because I was too busy imagining crushing the man's skull. I know that's probably not fair, but...I KNOW it's wrong, I feel it in my goddamned core, it is the opposite of everything I consider good and right, this slow, methodical control of who you are to play a sort of make pretend game of PR, pretending one thing is true until it is. controlling, maybe limiting YOUR GODDAMNED SOUL to reach some arbitrary end that is composed of numbers and dry sheets of paper. it's dead, and so are you.

life is in spontenaiety, originality, and the ABSOLUTE heights of emotion. immerse yourself in your rage, joy, happiness--passion. no feeling is worth feeling if it doesn't consume you absolutely, become you, COMPLETE you. life is not in our imaginary fight to live the high life, when the high life is composed of the artificial. you're surrounded by REAL wood mantelpieces, REAL ivory lampstands, all in bitter mocking of the false personality; the false life, that you've constructed for yourself to con false souls like yours out of enough money to live like them.

EXIST. BE HONEST. BE YOU. if you're not you, then you're not anything, and NEVER will be. know people, find the beautiful faults in them that make them holy and cherish them. look at the light blowing through the trees, see the million flaming diamonds of a forest at sunrise, the strange collected souls of stars in the self-sufficient vaccuum of night; the witching hour. know life and all it's beauty, there is nothing else---and we can never be anything else.

I'm doing this to hopefully improve my mood before I go back to practicing all night. Although it's probably too early and I'm too awake for this to be all that interesting of a post, I need to hope, right? god damnit...

loneliness in the middle of the night. I went to my orchestra audition, got callbacks, and then found out I was ranked concertmaster of the top orchestra, and rehearsals started in 3 days. There's really nothing else to say about it, I was flattered and I'm sure it will have its perks, but right now I really just don't care. It's more responsibility, which I certainly am NOT mature enough to handle, now or ever. My thought at the time was that it's enough being responsible for yourself, your own education and your own life and your own happiness, none of which I've been particularly successful with, without throwing in something like this that I don't even care about. So now everyone is patting on the goddamn back and saying how proud they are of me and how I've got it made and this is going to be SO FUN, and meanwhile I haven't done or felt anything worthwhile since I found out. My depression lately has its source in that the beautiful something that we had freshman year, when everything was hopeful and this is how we'd feel and this is how we'd be FOREVER, stopped so suddenly and so needlessly, almost without explanation, and I've been trying to get that going again, that feeling of an eternity of not being alone, of being with the same people and having them physically and spiritually right there next to you, and now THIS happens and I'm suddenly a prisoner of my own blind luck success. it's 1 in the morning, I'm depressed, and there's no one online and nowhere to go because I have to practice. Not practicing would make me eligible to lose my career, be suddenly attacked by the music school, and have everything suddenly end without chance of recovery. So I have to practice, and meanwhile I hate everything more and more and feel less and less alive, and more and more separated from everything and everyone. a little island in infinite mist, cold tendrils closing in. Drugs and alcohol are a sedation, but in the end they don't do anything to help. maybe a random party and more alcohol than I can handle would do the trick, just a sudden RELEASE in having a potentially life-threatening experience, like cutting but maybe a bit less stereotypical, and a bit more sustainable. I don't think that will do much, though. I need to find someone who makes me happy, no matter how little time I have. Certain girls in the past have helped, and certain girls in the present would help if it wouldn't do me and others more harm than good to see them. as pathetic as it sounds, I just want to be held right now. GOD DAMNIT it sucks being a romantic loner, let alone a chronic whiner stuck in self-pity. this at least lets me vent though, hopefully I'll feel better and get back to this little bitch and BEAT it, so maybe I can have a life later this week. I love my friends, and something grew from our friendship and the moments we shared that is greater than the sum of its parts, more beautiful and more meaningful than bodies in proximity. I don't want to let go of what we had or the possibility that it could be there again, albeit on a smaller scale. some scars don't heal, some friends walk out the door and never come back. but I want something, hopefully several times, something as beautiful and holy as playing slip and slide in a thunderstorm with people you'd die for. and I don't know how that will happen when I've got this talent monkey on my back (I'M AN UNGRATEFUL BASTARD) and everyone's busy telling me how great I've got it. if I could trade this talent for maybe, say, dedication to something I cared deeply about and a great monument of happiness like what I/we had, then I would. Have I mentioned I'm ungrateful? yeah.

This is helping a lot and I want to write more, but I'm out of things to say for now.

this message will self-destruct inBOOM!

and friends. Just woke up the morning after the show, really should have sat down and done this then but I was so tired...I don't think I even took my shoes off.

A few things I want to get down first before I forget them. First the experience of turning to what had previously been a bunch of kids with died black hair and folded arms nodding curltly at the beat, and had spontaneously combusted into a moshful of crazy kids, screaming, climbing onto the stage and jumping at the mike as it was freely offered to them and to everyone, and everyone was screaming, all ears bled. After a brief jawdrop of HOLY FUCK!, I dived in and screamed with the rest, jostled everywhere, arm in arm with strangers, and screaming at the mike in a circle when the singer threw it down to us and jumped in after it. There was a need to follow this crazy string as far down the hole as it went, so I yelled the lyrics I knew several octaves above what I knew I was capable of, and thanked god for amplifiers. As long as the band held the stage, we were all brothers in the pit and on the stage, the band having easily as much fun with it all as we were, the bassist improv-ing goofy dance moves with the keyboardist, the backup singers self-mockingly raising the roof, and of course the singer throwing his mike all over the fucking place, running over to the keyboard and pushing the kid out of the way to play something he'd just thought of while he sang before pushing the mike out to the grabbing crowd.

When it finished I looked around half expecting hugs all around. I was absolutely soaked, shorts hanging on and groaning with the sweat, stuffed with pencils and random bits of paper I'd grabbed throughout the show to write thoughts on, me being THAT PRETENTIOUS ASSHOLE, after all. Water time. We all ran over to the drinking fountain, and yet somehow it was important not drink too much or take too much time, no matter how many gallons of water we'd just lost (in pursuit of happiness). Everyone felt like a brother deeper than blood, somehow. I'm aware all this is very unnecessarily full of metaphor and takes itself way too seriously, but I think it's important not to fluff the thing off, like *saw a show, omg awesome!!!* that kind of bullshit. This was catharsis through distortion and bloody ears, the same kind of salvation that, say, Fight Club talks about--a complete release, a feeling like everyone in the room is on the same damn level right now, for once, FOR ONCE, you're not alone; no one is alone. Which explains the feeling of brotherhood afterword: You truly shared something with these strangers! It's a feeling not easily reproduced. "We all felt saved..."

After I'd had some water I walked around half-dazed and tried to talk to some of my new brothers, with limited results. There was one kid who'd been freaking out just as hard as me from the time the first band took the stage, Eric I think he said his name was. He disappeared, and the others splintered off to their cars bikes and mopeds. It was a chilly night and I was covered in sweat, so I started shivering a bit. The managers kicked people out, hit the lights, and locked the doors. The band stripped the stage, piled their crap into their trailer and drove off to do it all over again. But not before spray painting the t-shirts of anyone who wanted it done. I now have a relatively nice black t-shirt with BTMI! (bombthemusicindustry!) spray painted in gold paint across the front. The thought I HAD A RELIGIOUS FUCKING EXPERIENCE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT! crossed my mind, although not seriously. Looking around though, at the kid I'd been arm in arm screaming with about 10 minutes ago getting into a car with his friends, the girl I'd seen across the room dancing with her eyes closed smoking in the parkinglot with HER friends, the kid who'd climbed onto the stage and grabbed the mike dripping sweat and tears all over the stage biking into the darkness with the little lights on his wheels like dizzy fireflies...BUT WE'RE ALL BROTHERS! WE SHARED SOMETHING THAT SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO BE SHARED! blank looks and locked doors. At least I got a t-shirt.

I'm doing this because I feel a need to talk AT someone, if not with. I don't even have anything all that significant to say, except that the usual night solitude isn't enough, and sleep has never been enough, so here I am, internet! Take my guilt and pain off these weary shoulders, and divvy them up amongst the nameless masses!

Feeling some decent melancholy, which normally is practically enjoyable, plenty of self-pity and beauty in the situation to drive any pain to the sidelines. Right now though, I feel very alone, not in a silent vacuum like I normally do late at night, but like the wolves are closing in. Thoughts of girls here, completely off-limits girls at school who I like anyway (or because?), and a general feeling of being cut off from help with the shadows drawing near. Wine is dulling these feelings, but slowly, and I know that they'll pop up again sometime, when sedation is not an option, so perhaps a bit of opening up will drain the poison.

About to go back to indiana, which I'm happy about, although I get used to any situation eventually and buffalo has a kind of easy simplicity about it, I'll never feel like my humor isn't appreciated here, I can very easily just go into a certain mode of personality and be funny, and feel good about it. I can't get much real understanding, but it seems that's less and less present, anyway. I didn't think about that much, but I suppose it's kind of true. Scary. I think it's mostly the shit everyone's going through right now, though. I've talked about that before, I think, how mundane shit catches everyone I care about so much, and they never make time for the something I can never quite name..."the crazy" comes close. the feeling of being present and accounted for, being fully aware of your presence in this time, and making something out of it. that whole boy/girl across the room temporary soul-sharing moment thing, I've written about it before. But regardless of anything on either end of the travel line, I'm going to be happy to return to bloomington and give certain people hugs that, if this were a true and good land, would never have to end for something as silly as social graces. Whatever god or entropy's out there, watch over these people and give them grace, since I can't do better. such pain we've all gone through...and how unnecessary and petty it seems in retrospect. there is no pain or rage anymore, only love.

Dear (imaginary) readers: I have noticed a pattern in my writing here, that it gets more nonsensical from entry to entry. if this offends you, why don't you go fuck a rolling doughnut? why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooon?




This is a picture of a doughnut.

Just finished a concert with orchestra and got minimal pay for a HELL of a lot of work and stress. I can't really be angry, I doubt the orchestra has that much money to give, rather have them running then getting me alcohol money. Parents of course threw a big party for me, full of old people. I hate having to be nice to people I would otherwise have nothing to do with, getting jumped by a million strangers telling me how great I did and how it changed their lives, when I don't even know their names. Who the hell are these people? So dodged the fossils as much as possible at the party, even the kids there terrifying me after being so socially exhausted, putting so much strain on the gates that hold in the flood of weirdness in me. I ended up walking around and talking to a girl I watched growing up, was always one of the "big kids", maybe 5 or 6 years older than me. I would have really liked talking to her if I wasn't feeling so out of it, she's read a lot of good stuff and understands it, which frankly surprised me a lot. So now we're going out for coffee tomorrow sometime, adding to the list of girls I sort of knew when I was younger who is now asking me for coffee. It's an absolutely terrifying, disorienting feeling, like they're just waiting to get you alone in a room so they can pounce and devour your flesh, hang out your skin to dry on a rack to be sold as long underwear on the black market. If I could get over it it could be extremely fun, but my history with girls is so strange and confusing that there are a bunch of reservations, since I tend to either not give a damn or give one HELL of a damn, and they're all in other areas it would have the potential to seriously backfire. Then there's the wonder if this is meant to be romantic at all or if I'm just being an arrogant son of a bitch, after all if a girl is talking to me it's because she's highly attracted to me, I mean of course! disorienting, terrifying, and confusing, but with extreme potential if I can get the hell over myself. the older girl for instance is awesome and fucking beautiful, and I have a feeling that if something DID happen any weirdness would have to just get killed by how weird the situation was...in other words, we'd either go, "yup, weird..." and continue, or it would just become too weird. in further words, we'd have to acknowlege the weird or it would become overwhelming, and of course once you acknowlege the weird it loses all power, and we could just enjoy our business.

I'm sort of getting to know kids around here all over again, and it's kind of difficult because I know exactly how to act around my friends at school, I feel completely comfortable around them because there are almost NO triggers, I can say whatever I want, no matter how weird or offensive, and usually get a laugh out of reggie or elijah, at least. Full of love and sympathetic weirdness. Here it's like starting over...I can't borrow from any of my old friends unless I have someone there who I am able to get laughs from, emotional support, sortof...I just want to get back. Maybe I'll feel differently when I recharge my social batteries somewhat, right now I just want to take a walk by myself in the dark, or just wander around the house...no exit by sartre...interesting concept, hell being trapped with people you hate...since your hate is in a way your own problem, you're trapped with your own hatred, your own demons, embodied by a few blobs of flesh and personality quirks. interesting. I'm just feverishly rambling now, paranoia and ennui and who knows what else pounding at my heels...luckily man man is there to soothe the jangled nerves...who are we to love at all, indeed?

Disclaimer: none of what you just read makes any sense, and we are sorry.

I just got back from seeing Food Inc., and I'm going to try and get my thoughts down while they and the feelings behind them are still fresh. Food Inc. is a documentary about the food production process, and it turns out that if there is a man behind the curtain, he's hidden behind an absolute mob. corporations putting their own people in the groups that are supposed to police them, "understandings" with political leaders to punish the illegal immigrant workers and not the companies that hire them, laws protecting food companies from libel and loss of profit preventing anyone from criticizing them--it's insanely complex, the web is subtle and immense, and it's everywhere. I see, or rather sense, connections between manipulations here and problems with oil, trade, our politicians, and the media, but I can't keep up with it all, and all the time there's the knowledge that many people who see the movie will let it fill them up and flush them of their stronger emotions, only to leave cleansed and unchanged, thanks to a lifetime of exposure to the media. It's also much easier to sedate yourself with video games, tv, drugs and alcohol than to assess the state of the world today, especially since there seem to be so many forces attacking us from all sides, that it appears hopeless, too complex to find the foe, overwhelmed. The bars of our cage twist and bend around each other until it's impossible to grip them at all, so it's easier on the mind and the soul to just not look at them. I realized finally why I like books that predict the end of the world like brave new world--it's a way of absolving responsibility. I have a sense of things being terribly wrong, but I can't find the bars, and am filled with rage and self-loathing for my inability to find the bars, find the words to express the terrible wrongness that I see everywhere, and I imagine many people do. Brave new world shows an inevitable failure, makes the forces you're fighting in ourselves, makes humanity inherently flawed and ultimately doomed, an orgy of hopelessness. I have felt so alone in this sense, maybe helped along or helping along my sense of disconnection from other people. I am not alone, and even if I am SOME voice speaking of the terrible wrongness in the world gives me courage, gives me words and gives me a fire to find the wrongness in the world and kill it, even if it takes me with it. I will no longer sedate myself with technology, and no longer use alcohol and drugs as an escape from loneliness or boredom. I will attack every day with my full strength, give myself the tools and the words to name the world and it's demons, finally, and I don't give a damn if this sounds pretentious, there's nothing more special in me than in anyone else but that I want to fight, and never hide again. I will start looking for answers in books, and if there are none, I will MAKE them. change has come to me, at least. share the wealth.

alright, we're going to try this again. the stupid internet cut out and made me lose everything I'd typed. so I'm going to try and reproduce some of it. bottom line, I never really write in my journal anymore, and yet I'm always on the computer. so hopefully doing this regularly will help to get a grip on time, or at least make some sense of it, keep me from going into autopilot. Half the time I'm bewildered by life, lonely, confused and wondering why I'm doing half of what I'm doing; I'm trying to satisfy too many goals at once and it's making me feel like sylvia plath in her fig tree. So tired. So. Fucking. Tired.

I went for a late-nigth walk in bloomington, and it gave me the familiar feeling of beautiful tragedy, floating through the world like a ghost wanting to cry from how beautiful everything was. I also got the feeling that always comes with this, wanting to show it to someone, someone who understood and would feel the same way about the world and wouldn't judge me, be uncomfortable with me or make me uncomfortable, wouldn't pat my head and say, "oh, you're so funny alex." I realized I couldn't really think of anyone who would get it, although emily, elijah and reggie are pretty up there. So much of what everyone's so worried about all the time is so unnecessary. all that matters is 2 or 3 people walking and looking at it all, not wondering am I talking too much, am I talking too little, what's she thinking about, why is she being so quiet, why isn't she looking at me, I'll bet she thinks I'm just faking this for effect, she doesn't believe me, etc., etc., etc. all that matters is being aware of the other's conciousness; floating along like that like ghosts the bubbles that keep your souls prisoner merge somewhat and words become unnecessary. there's also the concern of trying to live a life made of the same kind of beauty as these walks, stripped of all the hubbub and bullshit, full of the same sort of childish simple idealistic love that comes from looking at all these simple things. no drama, no complications, just biking downhill in the middle of the night to brown county on a whim to go camping for the weekend, taking a road trip to california or new york, hitchhiking, going to very weird parties and crashing on foreign sofas only to move on the next morning with their friendship hanging from your pocket, etc., etc., etc.

along with this I've decided to just not care anymore. that is, not wanting to scare people away with my antics and so just waiting in the corner for people to come to me. I just don't care, I'm not going to find anyone this way. I need people for a movement, to find the critical twitch towards a meaningful life and be there when it happens. a conscious decision to attack everyone and everything, every minute. I'm getting off this now, read for a bit.

been awhile since I did anything on here, not going to make a big thing of it so I can get some stuff off my mind. I'm done with my sophomore year of college, I'm half done with this thing and that's terrifying every time I think of it. At home for 5 weeks, then back to bloomington for a summer session. listening to nullsleep, and feeling very sad that I don't have my ipod at the moment. Galaxy Tonite gives me a great feeling, but slightly melancholy, like that look you give the girl you're with at a party in a perfect moment, but with the knowledge that you're both being pushed out to different seas. This moment is here, this moment matters, but tomorrow all evidence of it will be gone. All we can do is acknowledge it for this moment, and even this moment will be dead tomorrow, when you're left of a memory of the moment, and then a memory of the memory, and on and on a copy of a copy until this thing that briefly but brightly and truly touched the livewires of your souls together for that one spark of meaning is just a faded photograph seen out of the corner of your eye, gone as soon as you look. It matters intensely, is the most meaning your life has ever had, and at the same time is just as transient as anything else, and this combination makes it beautiful.

Fearless Flight gives me a great feeling, too, a perfect image of one, maybe two pixellated people flying into an 8 bit sunrise. somehow an image of a flying paper cow with a dopey face shows up too. all so beautiful though. These blogs might be more useful than I thought, its much more for me and moves quicker than writing in a notebook, I can go more freeform so I don't lose the thought and don't start questioning my sentance structure. we'll see. everything is beautiful and lonely.  A part of me wants to come up with thoughts I've been having, things I've been doing, and talk about it here, spread out my thoughts a bit. mostly though I just want to sit here spitting dozy gibberish in the early hours of the morning. Crimson should do some nullsleep. not sure if it would lose all the goodness in translating it to band format, though, probably. This song is spinning a little computer chip cocoon of happiness around me, a dark little world where beauty lies. I'm starting to be self-conscious, that last statement was pretty unnecessary. but really, all I want to say is that its all so beautiful.

that's all now, goodbye.

i feel like i should blow off some steam. i don't feel like talking about most of what happened today anymore, im just tired and hate things. i don't really know where my individuality lies anymore, if i ever really knew at all, although that doesn't worry me right now. nothing bothers me right now. all the emotion is burnt out. i can't maintain any strong emotion for long anymore, if i ever could, i can't remember. im just tired and negative about everything. i think this is where my bitterness comes from, burnt out hatred and anger. regardless, i leave for aspen in a few hours and i don't want to go, anticipating a world of musical hell and isolation. i'll miss my friends i suppose, and a nice safe house, but overall what i'll miss is the security. not having to take care of myself in an enviroment and with a focus that are hostile to myself. enough rambling, i need to sleep. this will be my last update for some time, unless i manage to somehow get access to a computer over there.
g'nite all. time to rest.