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Well the days of Carlisle,
PA are nearly two weeks gone and I have settled in as I always do,
standing confidently wherever I am and twisting to look at myself from
the side, making sure it all moves as suave as I think it moves, and
basically it always does, Milk and Honey, pouring down like money, day
by day and so many colors you think the taste will make you faint.
Jonas observed and I believed him: October and November gave me a long
time to digest and categorize, standing on the thinning grass staring at
thick maple branches as they spread up and out, splitting and rejoining
again. My graduation
was in May, my dear, and this is the longest breath I've ever
taken. A short walk. A jaunt around the pool, rippling
beside moist cement and the criss-crossing shadows of children. I still
don't quite understand why it never hurts, but if there's karma then
it's karma, and maybe once you master the intimate parallels between the
silly and the serious it's impossible to lose. Sure thing. I don't think
I'm trapped, but I can't explain why. And usually I'm laughing too
hard to feel guilt.
Turn OK Computer
inside-out and you've got Beck's Midnite Vultures. That
defenseless, brainiacal introversion becomes an outwardly confident
horn-section party. OK makes everything and everyone look
like lines shooting out of the top of your mindheart, and Vultures
puts you in a room where everyone else just wants you to dance.
And every song on both albums has it's own set of rules, trapping you in
a box with Schrodinger's cat. And sure, you can't tell whether the
little furry feline is alive or dead, but, well, that's the point.
As periods of categorization
go, my eight Pennsylvanian weeks were awfully productive. For a
bit of personal closure, I've made a list of everything I accomplished
during those heady, heady days.
-
cooked at least 40 yummy
meals with Jonas
-
watched about 35
episodes of The Simpsons
-
built a nice looking ten
page website for Pilgrim
Cutting Tools and made some Benjamins
-
painted three little
paintings
-
wrote five letters to
friends
-
sent 75 email messages
-
helped grow three plants
-
helped eat two plants
-
drove out with Jonas to
a Phish show on Long Island
-
visited Mark Papazian in
Lancaster, PA
-
constructed excessive
amounts of web pages for sixfoot6.com
-
shot five rolls of film
-
attended at least four Halloween
parties
-
gained ten friends
-
helped throw four dinner
parties and two keg parties
-
roasted three chickens,
with the help of Jonas
-
scanned, tweaked and
posted over 100 photographs on
this web site
-
ate a sugar cube and
took a long walk
-
took a whole bunch of
showers
-
burned over 100 CDs with
Jonas
-
read fifteen short
stories
-
wrote three poems
-
saw The Sixth Sense,
Three Kings, Dogma, Fight Club, American Beauty, and Being John
Malkovich at the theatre.
-
took five long walks
just to look at colors
-
played 130 rounds of Boggle
with Jonas
-
went out to the
California Cafe with Jonas and his parents
-
drove to New York city
to visit Allison, where
we took a rowboat out in Central Park; went to three restaurants,
two coffee shops and one wine bar; went shopping, played with her
cats, watched movies, walked around, and sat on the train.
-
got a New York City
parking ticket
-
filled up my gas tank at
a Mobil on the Jersey Turnpike, realized that I had no money,
casually climbed into my car and drove off
-
rented and watched about
twenty movies with Jonas
-
spent a wonderful two
days with David Fox
in New Brunswick, NJ.
-
climbed 300 feet along
the underside of a bridge, high above the water
-
took two casual drives
in the country and two casual hikes in the woods
-
watched The Matrix two
more times
-
mixed down, encoded, and
posted Lo Straniero to MP3.com
-
met a truly wonderful
girl named Kariann
-
slept well on a regular
basis
-
spent three days in
Washington DC with Todd
and his friends, where we played Frisbee, grilled burgers, watched
baseball, visited the Holocaust Museum, walked and talked, read
magazines, smoked cigarettes, had trouble parking the Granada, and
ate key lime pie at the Afterwords Cafe, part of Kramerbooks in
Dupont Circle.
-
saw Maceo Parker play at
Dickinson
-
saw Supreme Court Chief
Justice William H. Rehnquist give a talk on "Civil Liberties
During Wartime" at Dickinson
-
slept for 45 minutes on a
park bench
-
played chess in a coffee
shop
-
used 15 or 20 recipes in
my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook
-
cooked one gigantic pot
of chilli
-
ate salad almost every
day
-
sat by a stream at
midnight, with Jonas, listening to Phil and Friends
-
downloaded music from
Tortoise, Sea and Cake, Physics, and others.
-
grokked songs recorded
by David Fox
-
visited The
Hunger Site every day
-
sent a box of leaves to
a friend
-
had a pint with my
friends at a few bars
-
grew very close to Jonas
-
got some
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