1) Right now I'm on an iMac at the Apple store waiting for my credit check to run through so that I can walk home with an iPod. The purchase of this will allow me to get on with the rest of my life and allow me to throw money away on cavity fillings, airplane tickets, and, inevitably, alcohol.
note to future broke self: right now you're probably checking this email in another mac store as, no doubt, you cannot afford internet access, let alone power, food, cavities, or tickets to france. You probably hate me right now, don't you. Well fuck you.
2) Yesterday, in my first visit with Ben since last year, I singlehandedly erased his entire iPod, which he uses everyday for up to ten hours, to the point where on his ride home for the day, he has to listen to CDs because the battery has drained.
3) Purchasing this will hereby ruin any chance I ever had of getting any reading done over break, of seeing anyone else that I want to, and of generally furthering myself beyond my present music collection.
So this large, black man has just moved to the post-rural suburbs of Hartford, my own genesis. He purchased Mike Tyson's house in Farmington, after his ex-wife tried to sell it ever since he's been in the slammer. The best part, to me, is the fact that 50 considered his options, his millions, and thought, You know where I've always wanted to live? In the suburbs of a shitty city. I just like the idea of him moving to the country, looking for the simple life. In my mind, I see him walking into the farmer's market, looking for a grocery bag, a scale to weigh grapes, as the owners retreat to the back office to notify the police that a large, black man is trying to rob them.
Heard this song in a store in Northampton yesterday and almost started crying into a rack of cowboy shirts. So far being home has been strange and fun. I've seen my brother every day, and we've been to the bar everynight. The great part about my town is that everyone you would want to avoid seeing when you get home, is also lame enough to go to the new bar in the middle of town.
I did, however, make a few new great friendsters, which prompted me to realize that there are people whom I actually interact with who are not my friendster. Let's fix that right now, ok? sullivanb@kenyon.edu is me.
This is my friendster photo, it was taken between the time when I found out about the shit below and when I sat around my condiment-filled, foodless apartment for four days before coming home.
This man, whom I shall not name as he is no doubt likely to do a search for his name eventually, is the author of 60 books of poetry, prose, and drama. He's the foremost poet in Australia, a professor at Cambridge in England, the editor of this publishing house and he works at my small Ohio college, and I am his research assistant. This book by him just came out, and it was edited by Harold Bloom, a critic I've been following since I had to write a paper about Huck Finn in tenth grade. Essentially, he's a god everywhere but Ohio. He's giving a reading at Yale in December and he's asked me to be there to meet Harold Bloom, which yesterday is something I would have given a shit about. What I'm trying to say is that he is the first person to read my completed manuscript, and today he asked me to make a commitment to having him publish it.
Some sappy bullshit. 1) The problem with leaving school is that I get the same feeling each time. My stomach demands greater stability from me, and is therefor upset throughout the entire process. Ever since freshman year when Georgia, a junior high lover of mine with whom I lost touch when she went to private school, would give me a ride home, provided we left a day late so she and her girlfriend could have sex in an empty apartment, I've been figuring out what to do with the extra day.
The dining halls open for weird hours, the coffee shop is closed. For example, right now I really would love to have a bagel and hummus, but I have to wait it out. Probably 90% of the students are gone right now and it's just me and Georgia and her boyfriend who flew in from Connecticut. The precice mood I'm in is the new album by The Shins, and I'm listening to it on my headphones because it's the only thing that I feel would be appropriate, and yet would not remind me of the fact that this is the first time since freshman year that I have not driven the ten hours home with Amanda.
2) I hate thanksgiving, and I always have. The food, the ideology, the production, the family members calling every day to see what they can bring. I haven't been home in a year, and if I could find a way to see my brother otherwise, I would just do that. The best Thanksgiving Ever was last year in Brighton when my parents came and we ate Thai food. If Jay and Julie had come, it would have been ideal. I'll also pretend that the post directly below the one I've just linked to, the painstaking details of saying Goodbye, my life is meaningless without you, to Amanda in Heathrow Airport has nothing to do with the current funk.
3) You may have gathered, in correctly, from my conspicuous and unsolicited mentionings of Amanda in each post that I lament our break up. There is no way for me to express this to you, other than to say that I have no desire to be with her. Her ankles crack when she walks, she never does the dishes when I cook for her, nor did she ever clean our apartment on her day off, and she takes much longer in the bathroom at night than I think is necessary. When we left Delaware, she was furious with me because I had passed out after a work party the night before and didn't pack my car until nine and she wanted to leave at eight. We fought and I apologized and told her to leave without me. She declined and we waited while the gas slowly drained out of my scooter. We made up and walked to the end of our boardwalk so that we could say goodbye to the beach. She stood there looking at the sand and I immediately started crying. "What's wrong?" I'm going to miss the beach, I'm going to miss...this. "It'll still be here next summer. We'll be back." I already knew of course that we wouldn't be together before long. There was nothing to indicate, however, that it would start as early as august and drag out until december, nor that it would be the painful topic of every cell phone conversation I would have in that period. We almost broke up once before that summer, she left to go home for a weekend, and I couldn't sleep at all, with the exception of when I got drunk by myself and threw up in my sleep, an act which I discovered in the morning to my perplexity when I noticed my dinner on the floor and yet specifically recalled eating it. On the drive home, home to school after the beach-crying, we had a friends' walkie talkies and although at first we wanted them for emergencies, we drained the batteries talking on them the whole way. We tuned into the same NPR stations and commented on callers. We stopped at fruit stands throughout maryland and bought blue berries and cherry tomatoes. On the radio we said only cutesy relationship shit that you would have no interested in reading here, and would probably make you throw up if you---"I love you my little blueberry." "And I love you, my...my darling zuchini." "Big Kisses to My Gremlin, over." Maryland already had leaves turning colors and we kept eachothers cars in sight and separated for a while in Ohio, then caught up at the grocery store, and, pathetically metaphorical, lost eachother when we got to school.
Final Paper Due Today. Schedule of Events 3:45 AM Go to sleep
7:30 AM Wake up.
8:00 AM Breakfast, coffee.
8:30 AM Walk to library.
9:00 AM Espresso at new coffee house.
9:30 AM Claim computer in the library, spread books on desk.
9:35 AM Fall asleep in comfy chair, curl up in fashionable down vest, have awful dream about friend's girlfriend. Wake up and realize that no one will understand dream unless they've read the "Circe" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. Fall back asleep.
11:35 AM Wake up and notice that the place I've fallen asleep in, Bound Journals, has the entire volume series of Health Care Financing Magazine. Smile when recalling that getting paid for DJing saturday night will cover the cost of getting my tooth filled at the clinic down the street.
11:39 AM Should I got to lunch? Maybe I should just get started. Nah, go to lunch.
I'm in the middle of a paper about invented martyrdom and the Irish imagination. My basic point is that the oversentimentalized memory of dead people is a uniquely Irish phenomenon and yet one as flimsy and blahdeeblahblahblah nationalism is superficial, 9/11 happened.
What I hate is that I keep having to read this one Irish song which I hate for the same reason I hate our national anthem. And that is because I roll my eyes the entire time, even though it gives me goosebumps.
If I were in a band, I would play this song ala Iron & Wine. But since I'm not, I'm on the lookout for a good dance remix version.
Kevin Barry
In Mountjoy jail one Monday morning
High upon the gallows tree,
Kevin Barry gave his young life
For the cause of liberty.
But a lad of eighteen summers,
Still there's no one can deny,
As he walked to death that morning,
He proudly held his head on high.
2. Just before he faced the hangman,
In his dreary prison cell,
The Black and Tans tortured Barry,
Just because he wouldn't tell.
The names of his brave comrades,
And other things they wished to know.
"Turn informer and we'll free you"
Kevin Barry answered, "no".
3. "Shoot me like a soldier.
Do not hang me like a dog,
For I fought to free old Ireland
On that still September morn.
"All around the little bakery
Where we fought them hand to hand,
Shoot me like a brave soldier,
For I fought for Ireland."
4. "Kevin Barry, do not leave us,
On the scaffold you must die!"
Cried his broken-hearted mother
As she bade her son good-bye.
Kevin turned to her in silence
Saying, "Mother, do not weep,
For it's all for dear old Ireland
And it's all for freedom's sake."
5. Calmly standing to attention
While he bade his last farewell
To his broken hearted mother
Whose grief no one can tell.
For the cause he proudly cherished
This sad parting had to be
Then to death walked softly smiling
That old Ireland might be free.
6. Another martyr for old Ireland;
Another murder for the crown,
Whose brutal laws to crush the Irish,
Could not keep their spirit down.
Lads like Barry are no cowards.
From the foe they will not fly.
Lads like Barry will free Ireland,
For her sake they'll live and die.
1) It occurs to me that everything I wanted to say in the last post was essentially plagiarized from High Fidelity. I still look forward to a day where that book isn't a great source of meaning in my life.
"But I have to say that I'm fucking good, that I haven't lost any of the old magic...I play Madonna 'The Ghetto' (which gets a cheer, as if it's my song rather than Donny Hathaway's)."
2) There comes a point in every night at about 1:15 where you can play absolutely any song and no one will leave. At 1:35 is when I play all hits to garner love. "Fuck the Pain Away" Peaches, "Stayin' Alive" Wyclef, "Last Night" by The Strokes. But when I knew no one could leave I played "Murda Box" by Dead Prez because I knew it was five and a half minutes long and I had to pee really bad. (followed up with "Stand Up" by Ludacris). But if I could do it over, I would pick "The Ten Crack Commandments" by Biggie. Also, if I had a better webserver, I would put all of those songs up right now so that you could really understand what I mean.
Last night, was the closest I've come in four years at this school to approaching the level of life-love we acheived in highschool in our all-party cover band "Ali Baba and the Cabana Boys." My school is the kind of place where we have things like an unironic Field Hockey team, the members of whom throw a party every year in one of the frat lounges (which we also have). They picked me as the DJ essentially because the captain is dating one of my dear friends and roommates.
The best songs to play are of course the worst songs to listen to on your own. I only actually played one which I would otherwise never do whole heartedly on my own ("All I Want For Christmas" Mariah Carrey) and it turned out to be the biggest hit at the team-only pre-party in the same way that John Lennon said the Beatles never got bigger than they were in Liverpool in 1962, they just went elsewhere.
I like DJing because it's somehow exactly like being a hit musician or a well-received cover band. People move and shout to the words you've provided for them. You get to stir them into admitting that they at one point did love "Lump" or that they bought the first Spice Girls Record, or better yet that they have memorized the entire "Here's the story from A to Z..." verse, or that at one point they sat in their room rewinding the tape and singing the Macauley Caulkin part in "Black or White."
The Point Is that there were other bands in high school, you know those kids who were always having practice and always carrying around large guitars? They had the real tallent, but they could never compete with us because we played "You Gotta Fight" and who doesn't wanna scream along with that? In the other frat lounge there was a real DJ with records and pitch-matching and a stage from which he spun. My set up entails a macintosh and a discman on either side of my mixer, with which I fade from one inside joke to the next.
[click on image]
Somewhere there is a trustee who drops alot of money every year so that students like me can attend a fancy college. And this is what I do with thirty grand.
Last night at work, a couple came in and the man told the hostess that he was going to propose to her (his date) at the end of the meal. It was probably real cute and shit because he was all nervous and wondered if we had champaigne, if champaigne were in order, etc. Halfway through dinner he walked out and came back in with the ring and he showed it to the hostess and the bartender and they fucking melted, which, to me, is the mark of a truely vapid woman. They snuck off to the bar to do it and everyone clapped and came up to them and offered them free desert. And I was thinking: that would be the best scam ever.
In a crappy video-art conference today, I walked out after the bitch at the podium used the word "text" for the fourth time in a minute. With nothing else to do, I walked across the street for my yearly walk through of Urban Outfitters. I do this with no regularity, but it happens about that frequently. In my predictable lifestyle, I never engage the word ironic for the same reason that I used to never never admit to being punk rock or straight edge or whatever else. If you feel the need to tell people something they can't figure out, then you have issues. Plus, as an english major, it upsets me when people conflate irony, coincidence, and ugly.
But it did occur to me that I was ironically engaged in going into Urban Outfitters and that their entire stock was a production rip off of the current irony-laden trends. There's no need to go off on another paragraph about a store that everyone knows sucks. But I will say that I appreciated doing an inventory on t-shirts that I've seen and admired on people I respect ("NJ-Only the Strong Survive!" "Ciao Roma!" "IDAHO, no UDAHO") because I can now go back to hating them.
Somehow--and I'm not sure if it's the car-fixing half of me or the lit major half of me--I believe that all I need to avoid or repair a problem--friendships, break-ups, post-interaction awkwardness--is a fundamental understanding of how that system is designed, how its causes create its effects. And yet I also know that never works out.
A note about living in the future: Half of my DJ set from last weekend is now on my iTunes on my "Recently Played" playlist. It tells me exactly when I played each song and in what order. This seems like it would be great, but instead I looked it over and thought that I had cracked under the pressure, that perhaps I suffered from premature song playing. I have, for example, ODB's "Baby I like It Raw" preceding George Harrison's "I Got My Mind Set On You," which I apparently followed up with DMX's "Party Up." What sort of tasteless madman would do such a thing? I also recall being extemely into my beat-to-beat fade up from "No Diggity" to Wyclef's "Stayin' Alive" at around 2:30, but there is no evidence of that happening. Yet there is a lot which says that I played the party hits "Fuck the Pain Away" and "Hella Nervous" within two tracks from eachother. But then I forgot about relatively large ratio between CD's I played on a different fader and MP3's which I retreated to on the other.
1) Last night I DJ-ed at a party and much of my world fell through. The music part went fine, but this one embarassingly drunk girl kept coming up to me and saying the things that I always thought I wanted girls to say. Turns out I didn't.
Since high school, I've always beleived that I would meet someone great and that their consumption of music, books, and movies would help me figure out who this would be. She kept coming behind the booth and commenting on my song selections, the degree to which the song I selected is better or worse than another track on the album, etc. It occurred to me that we were in the middle of enacting a scene from High Fidelity, a book and film which I respect and enjoy in equal proportions, when she turns to me and says, unprompted, "and meeting promising women was what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about, am I right?" (more or less a direct quote from both formats).
She then goes on to tell me that, ohmygodIlovethatmovie, and begins to question why I am not dancing. Everytime there's a silence on my part, when I fade up or down or search for a new track, she would dig out some strange interaction we'd had--again, I always thought that I would be into girls who remembered your first meeting or one who paid attention to your details like that. This is terrible because she's also the kind of insecure person who apologizes for everything. Once I ran into her in the dining hall and startled her; I had to relive it with her for ten minutes.
2) My friends and I have begun to get ironic about being ironic. Somehow we are going through a second-wave of irony appreciation, or the cultivation of things that really suck. Ironically enjoying irony, so far, has proven better. Last night we ate dinner in Long John Silver's (I carried in Taco Bell) and somehow everything, everything struck us as hilarious. I won't even try to word this in such a way that will make it any less I-guess-you-had-to-be-there. Everything from the attempt to deliniate the flank of fried chicken from the flank of fried fish, to the eighty-year old cowboy who had the quaker-shakes so bad he could barely get the tarter sauce in his mouth. It reminded me of getting real high and going to Subway in junior high.
So this large, black man has just moved to the post-rural suburbs of Hartford, my own genesis. He purchased Mike Tyson's house in Farmington, after his ex-wife tried to sell it ever since he's been in the slammer. The best part, to me, is the fact that 50 considered his options, his millions, and thought, You know where I've always wanted to live? In the suburbs of a shitty city. I just like the idea of him moving to the country, looking for the simple life. In my mind, I see him walking into the farmer's market, looking for a grocery bag, a scale to weigh grapes, as the owners retreat to the back office to notify the police that a large, black man is trying to rob them.
I did, however, make a few new great friendsters, which prompted me to realize that there are people whom I actually interact with who are not my friendster. 
This man, whom I shall not name as he is no doubt likely to do a search for his name eventually, is the author of 60 books of poetry, prose, and drama. He's the foremost poet in Australia, a professor at Cambridge in England, the editor of 
