Pictures of Me Getting Licked

Above: Old Nick.

That's me, moments after yanking my head free of a giant nostril. Two Japanese tourists, apparently mother and daughter, stared on with blank expressions, talking quietly to one another. I don't know what they were saying, but I like to think they were impressed that I didn't get my head stuck this time.

Below: pedaling a giant heart. It lights up, alternating red for arteries and blue for veins, hot-cold hot-cold, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

"Fuck!"

Oh, that word! I love to say it, I love to sing it, I love to mouth it. "Fuck!" It can be sexual, violent, enthusiastic, awed. Its sound is hard, explosive, melodious. It is versatile. It fits. It feels good. It's easy.

And I'm trying, really trying, not to say it so much.

This is not because I've gone soft. Plenty of room remains in my heart for such sentences as "I'm going to knock your fucking teeth out if you shit in my house ever again, Larry." Phrases like that please even the Lord.

Here's my real problem: vague, ambiguous language promotes verbal and mental laziness when overused. "Fuck" and "suck" are frequent stand-in words. They emphasize opinion over observation.

"That new Tore-Up Anus CD really sucked!" You might say, just for example's sake.

You have used the word "suck" to express your position succinctly. But it's much more productive to say "The new Tore-Up Anus CD's sound quality was awful, the guitar was about five cents off key, and the melodies all sounded suspiciously similar to Black Sabbath hits." That's not so hard, and it's a little more sensitive to your Tore-Up Anus-loving friend because it says that you at least listened and took a moment to build an informed opinion.

I admit it's impractical to be that long-winded all the time. Nothing's wrong with saying "That sucked!" to save breath. I just aim to make sure that my opinions are well-built and substantive. Who wants to stumble their way through a judgmental, poorly thought-out, poorly expressed inner life? Human beings are partially defined by their opinions and ideas. I prefer to learn what I can even from art, music, and people I dislike.

You have limited time left in your life to taste as much of the world as you can. Why dismiss any experience as unworthy?

Autumn in Hell

Few people know this, but for years I've obsessed over the classic computer game "Doom."

In case you don't remember, "Doom" is a run-and-gun game in which the player must escape the denizens of Hell, battling to survive while exploring strange surroundings and looking for a way out of the nightmare.

Over the years I've learned how the game works from a designer's standpoint, and found excellent tools for creating new maps, monsters, and so on. The above screen capture is from a project I've been picking at this week, a map meant to look Halloweenish and evil, as though it were Autumn in hell. Trick or treat! Senseless carnage, reflexive hand-eye coordination. I love it.

* * *

Later that night...

* * *

It is fiendishly late and I still can't sleep. I miss my friends already, though they just left a few hours ago. I used to be such a hermit, bent over my desk night after night, no visitors.

What happened? I guess the right kind of company makes these things easy. For the first time in my life I'm feeling receptive, and I have an urge to tell my closest pals: "Hey, the door is open! Come stay for a few days, work on your art, your reading, whatever. Escape." Sometimes I feel it would be only natural to form a pack of sorts, sharing food and lodgings, sleeping in a massive pile like lazy lions. I am a better person in the company of my good friends. I like to have 'em around.

Like most people, though, to be truly happy I do need a room to myself and a door to shut behind me. Every day.

But even so, most of my conscious life's been cloistered: reading and writing and studying and learning the guitar and learning to sing and learning to compose. These things eat hours like candy. Finally I'm learning to balance it out, to mingle. It feels good. But I fear the Autumn, fear the words "Farewell Summer," because when the leaves are falling my mates may all be gone out-of-state where I cannot see them. But I'll write them letters, at the very least.

Letter writing is miserably underrated. It's much like keeping a journal, but more interpersonally productive, more communal.

Alright. I have a nine-hour shift ahead. It begins in four hours.

Goodnight.

Invisible Ink

Hanging on my wall is an unfinished piece of music that looks like a line graph.

It was intended to be a loose, freely-interpreted piece with a line and dots representing melody. Performers choose whatever pitches and rhythms they want, deciding what they think the line should represent. The lower the line dips, the lower the pitch. And so on, all along its squiggly shape. It's a vague guideline.

This process of "decoding" the line to create music is similar to reading a book: a set of agreed-upon symbols is interpreted to reveal an idea. This process is so commonplace that we rarely pause to think about how amazing it all is, these systems of sharing information.

Sometimes I look at languages I can't read. I admire beautiful symbols that I can't understand—it fills me with a sense of immense possibility. Sometimes blank books have this effect on me as well, that sense of "this could be anything."

It's also fun to sometimes look at things that were not intended as language, interpreting them as though they contained messages: if I chose, I could read the tackholes in my wall as musical notes and sing them. I could arbitrarily decide that the phases of the moon dictate my attire: no pants allowed on a full moon! Why not? Who's going to stop me? I've gone mad with freedom!

Ahem.

Occasionally a certain object or set of objects will speak to me almost as though they are language itself. A few weeks ago, it was a package of poker chips: I felt I needed to buy them. I don't play poker, but the little discs seemed importantly symbolic. So I'm sitting here, pushing the chips around, stacking and sorting them by color, laying them out to form color patterns, trying to get them to reveal their significance to me.

It's strange to look at an ordinary object and sense that your subconscious associates that object with...something you can't quite express. It's a little like knowing that something in your mind is reading over your shoulder, and that creature deeply appreciates the object as a symbol. And you feel it, you feel it, but you can't quite consciously know it.