The Glass is Half Empty

When most people look at my city's beautiful landmark,
the Golden Gate Bridge, they feel good.

When I look at it, I think of the eleven workers who
plunged to their deaths while building the thing.

Kermit Moore; O.A. Anderson; Chris Anderson;
William Bass; O. Desper; Fred Dümmatzen;
Terence Hallinan; Eldridge Hillen; Charles Lindros;
Jack Norman; and Louis Russell.

Remember them, you goddamn happy people.

Famous 19th Century Baseball Players

Kid Mann
Redfaced O'Rourke
Frankie the Papist
Saloon Houlihan
Dutchy the Kraut
The Maynooth Moron
The Splendid Dandy
Tuberculosis Thompson
Fats McIlvane
Frenchy the Cuban
Adolph "The Jew" Hammerstein
Liquor Lemmon
Ed "Ginger Fists" Connors
Gangrene Legs Grayson
Giancarlo The Anarchist Shortstop
Rory "Lady" McMurson
Sober Sibley
Teddy "Nigger" Swedenborg

Crying a lot

Now that's life!

Famous Serial Killers

Dapper Dan
The Mormon Mangler
The Freeway Faggot
Bloody Claws Hanrahan
The Burlington Boy Eater
Rape Johnson
Fingernails Furman
Neil, the Creepy Piece of Shit
Harvey the Hobbit
Basement O'Sullivan
The Brain-Damaged Ice Cream Man
Bubbles!
The Cheesecake Factory
The Penis Chewer
The Vagina Carpenter
Wet Sheets Wilson
Vietnam Vernon
Officer Nailgun
The Man With The Van
Soundproofed Selznick
Carl "Jennifer" Burnside
Jimmy the Worm
The Most Evil Hippie
George "Skinner" Skinner
The Dallas Decorator
Quiet Boy
Woodshed Waverley
Donnie the Critter
The Pied Piper of New Jersey

What have you done that most people haven't?

1. Shot heroin
2. Gay sex
3. Seen the Melvins
4. Been arrested while wearing Rollerblades
5. Flipped off the moon

What have you never done in life?

Post your own list.

1. I've never seen "Ghostbusters."
2. I've never done acid.

Bar Romance

Girl: Hi there.

Boy: What the fuck is your deal?

Girl: I saw the glowering masturbator
with his ass crack showing and I thought,
"I want to be a part of that."

Boy: Are you listening to these people?
They're talking about the copper sculptures
they're making for their senior theses.

Girl: You hate art too?

Boy: You seem lonely and damaged. I can
tell because you're talking to me.

Girl: I'm a grad student.

Boy: You're a fucking academic. You're part of
the problem. You take everything that's interesting
and cool about the world and beat it to death.

Girl: So what do you do to earn your oxygen on
this rock?

Boy: I'm a forklift driver.

Girl: Really?

Boy: No. I work in a warehouse but the forklift
drivers hate me. They have their own enclosure
with a TV and Marilyn Monroe posters.

Girl: I'm bored.

Boy: Let's go to your place.

Girl: Alright. I'm parked around the corner.

Boy: Jesus, you have a driver's license? Bring the
Aston Martin at once, double-oh-seven.

Girl: You don't have a driver's license?

Boy: Shut up and load me into the backseat,
Roger Moore.

Change

Have you ever felt an urge to throw all your books
out the fucking window?

No, that's a bit extreme. You can return to a book and
discover new things. Books have replay value.

What about video games? Isn't it time to part with that
Super Nintendo? It was magical when you were seven.
Now you're 23.

Leave it. Put it in a box in your Nana's closet, if you must.

If you don't change, then what's the point of you?

It's a sad thing.

Am I just being an asshole?

My job

I work for a shipping company in a big warehouse in
Hayward, California.

The rear wall of the warehouse is lined with large metal
gates, which were formerly used for loading and unloading train
cars which pulled up right next to the building. At some point
this mode of transport was abandoned, and the train tracks
outside the warehouse are now rusty and forlorn. I've examined
the rotting railroad ties and rusty spikes and thought of the
Chinese workers who bridged the continent with these things,
thus allowing the further westward migration of pale Germanic
tribes.

My job can be grueling, but it beats school. Jesus Christ, I'd
rather eat glass for minimum wage than do homework again.

10 Things That Happen When School Begins.....

1. Six or more hours a day are spent horizontal on the couch watching any and all Halloween or Friday the 13th films.

2. Going outside and getting a bit of exercise, by which I mean walking to the corner store for some smokes.

3. Endless cups of coffee and/or black tea.

4. Thoughts of things that I'd like to do someday, all of which could be accomplished at that very moment (IE blogging/writing more, teaching myself to play guitar, exercising, or reading whatever book is sitting on the table beside me.)

5. Masturbation (Friday night specials every day of the week! It's no longer confined to just Fridays or nights.)

6. Anxiety over what will occur in the future, while contributing absolutely nothing to the moment at hand.

7. Changing into my jammies and hoody before lunchtime. (I hate when it's time to wash them and I need to remain in jeans and a t-shirt during horizontal couch time.)

8. Taking 2 hour baths while the sun is shining outside.

9. Lethargy. Blurred vision. Excessive internet.

10. Interest in Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Kanye songs, all of which are listened to with my eyes closed, horizontal. That's how they're meant to be heard, right?

Fuck The Moon.

I've been making these Industrial songs
on my new digital four-track recorder. Most of them have
gone well, until my roommate took back the earbuds I borrowed
from his girlfriend. This night, under the light of what seems
like a full-ish moon, I tried to record this song onto my
four-track, but it didn't work because of the earbuds issue. So I'll just
reprint the lyrics:

Tonight
I flipped off the moon

I gave the finger
to the moon

Go fuck yourself,
moon

The Dennis Duffy Alibi

In one episode of the brilliant sitcom 30 Rock, Tina Fey's character comes home to her apartment in the middle of the day to find her loser ex-boyfriend sitting on her couch. She yells, "What are you doing here?" and he responds, "Look, I told my mom I got a job, so I've been coming here during the day."

Harry Sterling would like to admit to a certain loved one that for a period of time when he was supposed to be attending community college, he was actually going to the mall and watching movies. That is why I know the plot details of "Hannibal Rising" and that movie where Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe are CIA agents. I'm sorry.

I hate sleep.

It's 2:12 am. Last night I stayed up and took an 8:00am train to the Oakland
Coliseum. I was bored, and I wanted to see a baseball game. I bought a ticket
and lied down in the Coliseum parking lot and dozed off for a while. Eventually I came to,
and the stadium gates opened. I bought a seven-dollar hot dog and as I sat down
to watch batting practice, I realized that I hate the Oakland A's. Those yellow and
green idiots. I left.

I still don't want to sleep. Sleep is surrender. I want to continue
thinking and existing. I don't want to spend half my life unconscious,

Insanity: bring it on.

Breaking Down on a Bulgarian Street Corner

More to come.....

Honoring Michael Jackson

Earlier tonight I tried to pay tribute to the great deceased pop
singer by torrrenting some of his best songs onto my ipod, which
I then connected to an expensive boom box my dad bought me. I stepped
out onto the streets of San Francisco and clicked on the song
"Rock With You." Then I accidentally dropped the stereo, and then
I accidentally dropped the 40 oz St Ides I was holding in my other hand.
It shattered everywhere. I ran home.

Macho!

Write What You Know

1. Fearing that one's Dad will cancel one's credit card
2. Diagnosing oneself with mental illnesses on Wikipedia
3. Fearing that one's food looks junky and unimaginative alongside
roommates' exotic and nutritious groceries
4. The names of San Francisco Giants past and present
5. Arrested Development (TV series and early 90s rap collective)
6. RBI Baseball '94 for Sega Genesis (Bonds is the best hitter)
7. Feeling one's organs for signs of failure
8. Pretending to know what existentialism is
9. After five years and thousands of dollars, I still have no idea
how to smoke a cigarette
10. Dreams of armed black men with vengeance on their minds

The Grand Experiment

Our potential is infinite yet we insist on being simply human.
We live out our lives without ever testing the boundaries of what that means.
We spend our lives searching for those things which can never be truly attained.
We hurt, hurt, hurt.
Ourselves and all of those around us.
It's only conscious some of the time.
How can we learn how to love?
Or should love as we know it be forgotten, stricken from the language of our lives?

Advice Notebook

Last night, in a fit of something (bipolar disorder?) I bought a
notebook and a pen from a small bodega with the intent of writing
down people's advice. I asked the two clerks in the bodega what I
should do with my life. The younger Mexican guy was clearly
uncomfortable and had nothing, and in retrospect I don't blame
him. The older Chinese guy thought it over and said, basically,
I could continue down my current path (he's seen me before) or
do like him and get a fucking job. I then rushed over to the
Scottish-themed pub across the street because my real mission
was to ask for the advice of the Glaswegian who tends bar there.
I thought bitterly to myself, "Fuck you, Chinese guy, I don't
want to be a liquor store clerk, I want to be Scottish!"

Now two nights ago I had spent several hours shouting at this
bloke about the Associates, Aztec Camera, Celtic F.C., and Irvine
Welsh. In my imagination,I was the son he never had. This is a
pattern here, basing my entire self-esteem on the approval of a
single person. This is what is scrawled across the pages of my
notebook from last night:

"Fuck. My hero just left. I bought this notebok because I
wanted him to tell me something wise. He just shook my hand
and disappeared. He's Scottish. He probably doesn't want to be
bothered. He grew up on the streets of Glasgow. He's a writer.
I gave him some of my shit. I gave him some prose and poetry.
He said I had talent. But he also implied I was a drunken loser
who couldn't pick him out of a lineup. He asked me what I wanted
to do with said talent. He said I should probably write a
novel if I want to get my point across. What's my point? That life
in the U.S.A. sucks? He suggested that it might fly in the U.K."

My tub is half empty

The Don'ts of Avoiding Suicide

From Night Train, by Martin Amis:

"Don't work around around death. Don't work
around pharmaceuticals.

Don't be an immigrant. Don't be a German, fresh
of the boat.

Don't be Romanian. Don't be Japanese.

Don't live where the sun doesn't shine.

Don't be an adolescent homosexual: One in three
will attempt.

Don't be a nonagerian Los Angelean.

Don't be an alcoholic. It's suicide on the installment plan,
anyway.

Don't be a schizophrenic. Disobey those voices in your head.

Don't be depressed. Lighten up.

And don't be a man. Don't be a man, whatever you do."

Harry's Self-Appraisement: Thumbs Down!

My self-education has been unfocused. I've read a lot
of criticism, humor, and novels that alleviated my sense
of loneliness, but very little in the way of hard
suggestions as to how life should be lived. As a
result I've been able to get away with living a very
chaotic and inconsistent life, with an ever-rearranging
conscience that that fails to tell me whether my actions
are right or wrong. Sometimes I feel excessive guilt
over transgressions that are probably insignificant,
yet other times I weasel out of accepting blame for
situations in which I was clearly in the wrong. I have
justified my dissolute lifestyle by relying on the
pro-drug rhetoric of authors like Hunter S. Thompson,
John Dolan, Mark Ames, and Charles Bukowski, yet
there is no denying that drugs and alcohol make me
dumb, mean, clouded, incontinent, and confused.
I have avoided athletics out of some deep insecurity
and self-consciousness, despite the fact that I love them.
I write pieces that are essentially pointless and show-offy,
because I have a bottomless need for approval and
positive feedback. I try to impress everyone I meet,
regardless of whether their personalities have any value;
If I was stuck on a bus next to Charles Manson, I would
be cracking jokes and worrying whether he liked me.

I eat too much meat.

Previews are the New Feature Presentations

My students ask me if we can watch a movie every day. This week, I let them watch a film.

What instantly struck me was that their collective attention span was that of a five-second pop-up internet advertisement.

Four movies were begun over the course of an hour.
The class would sit somewhat silently at first.
Within five minutes they would then start fiddling with their cell phones.
Within ten minutes they would all be whining.
"This film is so boring, can we watch another?"
"Do you have anything more interesting?"
"This is stupid."

I began imagining what would happen were I to show them an hour-long string of film previews. Would that satisfy them? They never exceed 5 minutes and are usually quite gripping.

I remember a time when meeting with a friend required two things: A time and a place.

We watched VHS tapes, listened to CD's or LP's, called house lines, or simply knocked on the door.

Things weren't better then than they are now, but they certainly were more simple.

They were also more conducive to the development of a decent attention span.
I can sit down, in silence, and read a book for hours.
The youth that I see here may never be capable of doing that, as the idea of sitting in silence isn't hard-wired for them as it is for me.
How is the race to continue when the gadgets of our daily lives distract us from ever examining those lives?

Bathtub Dilemmas

I was standing outside today thinking to myself, "what the hell am I doing with my life" when suddenly I was cornered by three old women. They are all neighbors, one of them has no teeth on the top-left side of her mouth, and the other two spend all day sweeping up trash on the street.

"What are you doing?" they asked me.

"Going to the post office to send these" I said as I showed them the four postcards I had in my hand.

"Oh, you need an envelope for these!" one woman exclaimed.

The conversation went from there. All three women went back and forth discussing whether or not it was necessary that I put the postcards in envelopes. I continued with my insistence that there was no need for an envelope, but two of the three women wouldn't hear it.

Each day has been a struggle lately as I can't do anything without wondering, "to what end?" How can I be expected to go out and exercise when sitting in the bathtub for hours on end reading feels so much better? Exercise? For what? A longer lifespan? Why? I feel fine as I am.

Ultimately, would I lead a more fulfilling existence if if I had so little on my mind that envelopes were enough to render me fully engaged?

Existential Terror

Richard Speck

I'm hunched at my computer in my little room in a city on the western coast of the United States. I have a
vicious cold. Crumpled tissues and Robitussin bottles everywhere. My curtains are drawn. There's a sea of
blackness out there. I go to a website that culls interesting clips from youtube. I click on one video. It's a
documentary about the mass murderer Richard Speck, who killed eight student nurses in 1966, and his
subsequent life in prison. The video is VCR-quality and seems to have been shot in the late 80s.

Richard Speck has breasts. He has been taking female hormones that have been smuggled into
the jail. He parades around in a pair of makeshift "panties." A voice asks him, "do you like being
fucked by men?" he says, "absolutely."

Cut to an academic-looking narrator, who describes to me the concept of "queen bees." In prison
some inmates feminize themselves and perform sex acts in exchange for treats like liquor and cocaine.
It is not made clear whether this is consensual , but you'd have to be an idiot to believe there isn't
some level of coercion involved. I start to feel very ill. I leave my apartment and stumble into the street hoping
for relief.

I don't live on a particularly comforting street. I don't know what I was expecting. My street might
as well be named Richard Speck Street. There are no lawns, no sprinkler systems, no stars,
and no kittens.

That video. This universe. Why? Our prisons show us how flimsy our concept of civilization is.
Put a group of homo sapiens in a room, and they will create hell.

I didn't always believe that life is hell. As a kid, I distinctly remember believing that the universe
is a beautiful work of art. That life is good. That everything is going to be all right.

A Brewski For Youski

I don't give money to panhandlers. After moving
to San Francisco you quickly realize that you will
lose all your money if you give street people change.
I need my change, for the same reason the street
people need it: malt liquor.

However, last night I broke my own rule because a
homeless African-American man said to me, "Hey man, I'm
just trying to get a nickel for a brewski." I was so
enchanted by his use of this outdated slang that I gave
him all the change in my pocket.

So you see, the key to getting me involved in
charitable causes is to use weird words that nobody uses
anymore. Maybe they say "brewski" in Manitoba a lot,
but I don't think it's been heard in Northern California
since a 1985 Stanford University frat party. Well played,
homeless man. Well played.

Perhaps I will take an interest in Darfur if somebody
describes the situation there as "Applesauce."

Love Is In The Air

There's a girl I like who lives in my building and works as a
waitress in a restaurant I go to frequently. Every time I see
her pretty face I think to myself,

"AIDS AND BABIES AIDS AND BABIES AND BABIES. HOW WILL I
SUPPORT MY UNWANTED CHILD WHILE I'M DYING OF AIDS."

I'm terrified of sex. Thanks, 1980s.

The Fear

Last night was unusually clear. Over the past few months, I've spent hours sitting on my balcony looking up into the sky. The stars always filled me with an overwhelming sense of hope; a positivity and feeling of unity with the universe that I hadn't ever felt before. The vastness of the universe provided comfort for me at the time because my existence as a product of it felt as though it were the answer to all of the big questions.

Although I understood the chaos, incomprehensibility, indifference, and amorality of the universe, I was able to derive a hope and optimism from it. I thought about how different things could be tomorrow, how people, attitudes and emotions can change so suddenly and how all worry, stress, and fear is fruitless and unnecessary because everything that we'll ever need is inside us. All it takes is the realization that we are all perfect. That everyone of us are as perfect as we're ever going to be, it's just a matter of fully actualizing that perfection that resides in all of us.

Last night, however, I cowered at the sight of the brilliant stars above. All that had once given me so much comfort only brought panic. The hope that I once felt when I imagined the infinite possibilities of tomorrow was turned on its head. What if I feel a pain in my stomach tomorrow that turns out to be a malignant tumor. The endless string of positive potential that I once saw turned into a mudslide of misery, all of which lead to the same bleak ending.

For a short while now death has never strayed far from my mind. I'm constantly preoccupied with my own mortality. I understand that the universe is random and amoral. I understand that it can bring about positive as well as negative events, all of which have revolutionary potential.

As Camus pointed out in the Myth of Sisyphus,

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

With the absence of a god, that dreadful punishment becomes our daily lives.

I think that I agree with Camus' assertion that the only worthy philosophical question worth asking is that of suicide. Undoubtedly, I choose life over death, that's not the issue I wish to point out. What I wish to point out is that although life is the obvious choice, the prospect of committing to a life with the promise of a happy ending is far more obvious and more easily justifiable than committing to a life with the promise of nothing. It's become increasingly difficult for me to focus on only the positive potential for tomorrow, for the potential horror of tomorrow is increasingly apparent to me.

Is it simply a matter of developing the same disinterest with the question at hand as the universe has in our respective lives?

Afternoon Beers

Haiku

How many people
are blown up annually
by gas-powered stoves?

Future Presidents of the United States

1. Sebastien Chalfont. The second Roman Catholic and first openly bisexual president. He eliminates taxes
for the rich and raises them for the poor, putting his faith in a Pre-Revolutionary French economic system.
He outlaws the wearing of clothes by farmers.

2. Besodeiah Smith, the first Mormon president. He alienates the Pope. He enjoys board games.
He is elected to office at age 103 and serves a full eight-year term.

3. John Oak, the 93rd Protestant president. He spends much of his presidency on the front porch of the
White House, squinting at nothing. He reads Doonesbury every morning and hates it.