i would fucking kill for a drink right now.

too bad my organs suck.

FML.

there was a town in pennsylvania named centralia.

one nondescript summer day in this town named centralia, hot ash was dumped into a trash pit by men managing the local dump. a vein of coal running under the pit began to burn with the ashes, and several months later, that fire hit the warren of abandoned mine shafts that ran under the town.

for 20 years, these underground fires burned. residents pumped their gas hot, had low-level carbon monoxide poisoning, and otherwise continued about their business. most decided that it might be time to leave centralia when a 12-year-old named Todd Domboski was nearly swallowed by a 150-foot-deep chasm of fire that opened under his feet. in 1984, congress allocated $42 million to help the exodus; the fires stayed for free.

what a potent metaphor, centralia: a place where the ground looks solid but could explode any second, a place where "grocery store" and "throbbing sulfurous pit" are tentatively synonymous. Silent Hill did a decent job of exposing the horror of this ghost-town-as-liminal-zone, but what about the 20 years while people still lived there? what about the people who still do?

yeah, still do. i am not making this up. at first, i was also shocked by the fact that four individuals-- not just one, but FOUR-- find "crumbling crust of the inferno pie" an acceptable hometown description. looking at photos of the place, however, i can see why they might stay: aside from a few swaths of bleach-white trees, embalmed from the roots up, the place looks about the same as anywhere else. so the highway is cracked and a little smoky; where ISN'T our infrastructure getting ragged about the edges? have we not elected our latest president in the same spirit of hope, the kind of hope that keeps 3000 people living and working for two decades on top of a smoldering vein of coal and garbage?

we all have our fires, after all; things can get better, and things can be fixed.

it's been so long since i've done any significant writing that i feel uneasy using commas.
true, i suppose, all that stuff i used to say about style being mostly practice.

anyway.

the new year feels like a thousand clocks chiming at once. there are uncountable things i should or could be doing, but nothing besides the occasional need to eat drives me in the direction of any of them. meanwhile, the seasonal round continues at new college apace: i participate, sometimes, drinking and telling the same old jokes with people i've known for (can it really be?) years now. during slow days i find myself thinking about getting (don't adults have?) a real job, only to pause and remember that this is it, that here i am, that all those times i used to daydream about (was that really so long ago?) are now.

so what, then? write, paint, run in happy mindless circles because goddamnit i have no debt and i am healthy and my car is paid off and my rent is cheap and fuck if anyone can stop me?

i spend hours thinking this way.

then--- glorying in my liberation, intoxicated with the improbability of my nearly complete freedom--- i usually end up playing video games. exhausted, you see, from the ridiculous possibility of my life.

ring, clocks, ring.

this has been a really mixed year.

being a hedonist, i always begin with a year with a mental list of stuff i would like. more specifically, i often begin with a list of stuff i would like to do, and use that list to build a plan for a future that includes things i like.

various contingencies, however, have taken this particular year so far out of my FuturePlan Like List that i don't really know where to go. when i was younger, the conceit of "things will be predictable" was always a reliable one. in the past few years, however, that's begun to prove less true. people die, people lie, things change--- i could not have predicted, 365 or even 2 days ago, how completely different the landscape of my life is in this moment than it was before i woke up this morning. as i age, these banal changes accelerate and accumulate, jointly constituting the movements that i suppose are called aging.

humans look for patterns in things. it is these patterns that give us meaning, or so the old cult anthro saw goes. faced with contingency, i don't know how to continue linking my happiness to the ironies of paradoxical, wonderful, hurtful and fascinating and boring everyday life. i no longer feel comfortable saying "tomorrow," knowing as i do how little we can rely on today. one of those chicago school anthropology types defined american love as "enduring, diffuse solidarity": i think it's fascinating that we (I? you? "Americans"?) define love in retrospect, as an action that HAS happened rather than what "could" or what "will." of course, solidarity occurs in the present: but for it to be enduring, it must not only continue in the moment but HAVE endured in the past, be both a piece and the whole of the linked chain of events that we call Before.

i find the logical extension of this definition funny. if what links us all is an "enduring, diffuse solidarity," at no point are we ever BEING loved. we were loved, or we were not; it was, or it isn't.

this has been a really mixed year.

so, here are some things i have done recently:

go to europe. (german beer is fucking great.)
go to a metal conference. (malaysian metal is fucking great.)
decide to get a puppy. (more specifically, a used-up greyhound. pointy pets are fucking great.)
get more roommates. (bringing the total to five in a two-bedroom house, yeeeeee haw!)
decide to go home for the holidays. (not fucking great, but whatcha gonna do.)

i am sitting in panera in a VERY loud t-shirt.

anyone with a taste for the absurd would appreciate this shirt. like all good indie shirts, it starts innocently enough: baby blue, a petite cut, long enough to tuck in. it begins getting weird, though, when you pay too much attention to the pattern: the shirt is razored with horizontal lines of alternating black, red, blue and white death's heads. upon closer inspection, one realizes that all of the death's heads have heart-shaped eye holes; moreover, every third is endcapped by a silver metallic star, or an american-flag print heart. upon even further inspection, the viewer realizes that each row is not only staggered but enlarged, so that all the images are magnified as they descend towards the hem. the combination of magnification and busy print produces a very stars-upon-thars effect, especially where the tshirt fits at the stomach. i bought it for the net visual appeal, one i would loosely describe as "postmodern image vomit." red white and blue, heartflags, sparkly stuff, and bubbly gigantic skulls and crossbones! BAM! welcome to my SHIRT!

only today, however, did i realize that it was made in vietnam.

hah.

this morning, i made a conference call to my boss that i assumed would be about contact numbers and volunteers.
she quickly turned the conversation, however, to christine jennings, a democrat currently running for congress here in the sarasota-bradenton area.

by way of background, my boss has been doing research on jennings' stances on issues like housing foreclosures, health care and energy policy to make some lit comparing her policies and those of the republican incumbent, vern buchanan. she asked whether i could help her find info locally on jennings' public statements because online, she'd found--- well, nothing. nothing that doesn't come from jennings' own website, anyway.

there's plenty of media on jennings' condemnation of buchanan's past electoral policies, and even more on the mudslinging currently happening around jennings' campaign finance booboos. aside from that, however, there don't seem to be any public or taped speeches, conferences or statements made by jennings on housing or finance issues in media outlets like newspapers. for a candidate that talks to creative loafing about her openness and transparency, she's got relatively little in the way of declared policy. she doesn't have a list of past, current or future appearances on her website, either, and i can't find one online. even her profile in the guide published by the league of women voters has no direct quotes or specific details on her plans to "bring real change and an honest voice to Washington."

does anyone work for her campaign and know where or what she's been up to recently? is there a reason all the clubs she's been affiliated with link their endorsements back to her site?

a week ago, i had to call my former youth advisor to get a job recommendation, and i've been thinking about it ever since.

i first met my advisor and her husband a month after i started dating evan, whose parents had the great wisdom to insist he stop playing the guitar and writing shitty high school poetry at least once a week. it was a strange night; evan hated YRUU, and had only taken me along to have someone to grope. they were hosting an (admittedly uninspired) meeting at their house, themed around UU criticism of free trade policies in the americas. by the end of the night, i was fascinated by the carrot snacks and bureaucracy-as-spirituality. as evan started making polite excuses to stay home and pout, i came back for the next meeting, and then more after that. by the time i graduated from high school, my advisors and i had shared a car in half the states on the eastern seaboard.

at the time, i felt like we had a lot of differences. i found them bossy and disconnected, my female advisor especially. when i called to talk to her recently, she reminded me that the entire church YRUU had told them never to have children. (they now have a child that's multiple years old, a fact i can barely think about without feeling creepily aged.) i also thought of them as categorically old, though in retrospect they were both about 27. (another fact i can barely think about without feeling creepily aged.)

talking to her the other night, however, i was suddenly reminded of how much of the person i am was shaped by the experiences i had in YRUU. it's where i learned the word vegan, was first told to watch Cowboy Bebop, met someone transgendered, read a zine, and got head from a guy with a tongue piercing. it was where i learned about communes and free tables. it seemed obvious at the time, but YRUU's unapologetic advocacy of personal responsibility and rights has proven one of the most radical ideas i've ever had the pleasure to internalize.

so there i was, thinking that talking to my advisor would be easy and wonderful. instead, it was really hard. it was difficult to hear her surprised at who i've become. it was difficult to hear about her child, difficult to hear her express regret at my divorce, difficult to confront the differences how i am now and how i was. it was difficult to suddenly miss YRUU, and realize that i can't get that involved with anything here knowing that i'll leave it. it was difficult to wonder why i can't stay here, to wonder what i'm waiting for. is the freedom i have worth the loss of car rides and sleepovers and casual plans for the indefinite future? talking to her made me miss the easy assumption of tomorrow, a month from now, and a year from now. it made me miss making plans that last longer than saturday night, and miss making friends that won't be halfway across the country in the time it takes to really get to know them.

one of the big UU phrases is "begin as you mean to continue," and i'm not really sure whether i did or not.

i can feel my uvula. it's swollen and stuck to the back of my throat.
it's been years since that last happened, and i was happy then too. i think i am allergic to happiness.

(correlation is not causation?)

a day or two ago, i got a newer new job, this time doing something called "organizing." organizing is a complicated word, but for my last-minute purposes seems to mean "calling anybody i know to help me call everyone i need to call."

want to talk to random people about who they're voting for? if not, you should, because it's fun.

and, on a completely unrelated note, i haven't been giving enough time to satan, and really need to work more on my paper about metal. it's due--- er, is supposed to be in?? emailed in draft form?? i thought i graduated??-- on october 10, which i realized in an unpleasant rush is 9 days from now.

(wasn't yesterday june?)

i am currently being paid $9 an hour to sit in an air-conditioned, shady lobby, play on the internet and ask people if they are registered to vote. is this what it's like to have a job that you don't hate??

i feel like giving everyone i talk to a cupcake.

ok. so here's a recap of the past few days' financial events, put in convenient bullet point cause-and-effect.

1) Due to the not-recession, two "government sponsored enterprises" called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are bought by the Fed to prevent their bankruptcy. These two groups own the majority of US mortgages.

2) Wall Street panics. The market tanks and the Lehman brothers and their subsidiaries threaten to declare bankruptcy. Fearing worldwide recession, world buyers and the Fed split the Lehman brothers and their subsidiaries. Merill Lynch goes down.

3) After brief resurgences, the market continues to fuck itself in the ass. AIG--- American Insurance Group--- threatens to fail as well, and the Fed buys it for $85 billion to prevent a worldwide depression. AIG's holdings are a big part of Asian investment in the United States, and panicky investors begin to back out throughout China, Japan and Russia. Russia closes its stock exchange to prevent mass selloffs. Washington Mutual begins negotiating a merger to prevent bankruptcy, as does Morgan Stanley and Wachovia.

4) Suddenly, the US government owns the majority of the insurance industry. The Federal Reserve chairman becomes the functioning CEO of AIG. McCain, previously a staunch supporter of deregulation, stumps all over the Midwest about the "power of the worker" and how there should have been heavy government regulation of these markets to prevent devastation from "corporate greed." Despite protests from both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, both candidates support functional nationalization of multiple american industries--- no doubt, as the NY Times noted, because pro-union blue-collar workers are predicted to be the swing votes in a tight presidential election.

5) Socialist countries across the world shit themselves laughing at the collapse of free market capitalism in the United States. Karl Marx has major lulz. Economics students across the planet flip to the chapter in their textbook on "what happens when sudden volatile collapse hits a free market system."

We're livin' the dream, kids. All hail the glorious revolution.

in no particular order:

1) dark chocolate 3 musketeers with mint are fucking delicious.

2) i understand why people are offended by sarah palin. she's a bible toting religious nut that advocates abstinence only education (since it worked so well for her daughter) and government censorship (banning books? really?) and destructive political and social policies (big ups to big oil). that said, i think she was a brilliant choice for mccain's running mate, and one that illuminates some of the schizophrenia that america is currently bringing to the issue of gender and politics.

let's face it: sexism is a light charge these days. the majority of married women are in the workforce, gender inequity in hiring and pay are small enough in the US to get ignored on a regular basis, and legal abortions have made one of the keystone issues of first-generation feminism a defensive rather than offensive political issue. though debates on women in politics began with clinton's campaign against obama, clinton's political cred made her a fair target for standard american mudslinging. identity politics, however cheap, were all over the place: by the end of the obama-clinton travesty, multiple papers were reporting on the public's boredom with "blacks go obama and women go clinton" rhetoric.

palin, on the other hand, doesn't have clinton's political or educational background. she doesn't have experience in national government, in coalition building, or in cutting pork-barrel spending. all that she appears TO have is great hair, a blue-collar background and a nice set of very conservative tits, tits that are dedicated to causes that john mccain has traditionally distanced himself from.

don't get me wrong: i'm sickened by the causes that palin stands for. at the same time, is she not the kind of grassroots, family-and-business-balancing advocate for women's involvement in politics that the left has been chatting up for years? palin and obama both have young children at home; somehow democrats managed to avoid the question of "but who will care for his kids??" in regard to his candidacy for presidency. in an otherwise divisive election year, republicans and democrats have been surprisingly united in their condemnation of an (irritatingly) good looking woman who has the audacity to bring her (uneducated! folksy!) political views to the national arena. to top it off, asks the left's morbid new set of "what if the president dies" rumors, what would happen if rickety old mccain kicked it and left her in charge?

well, um, we'd have a female president.
start taking notes, NOW.

1) a salon
2) sheer laziness
3) killer bees. like, for real.

also, the vehicle below is an alien disguised as a truck that was sent to save us from the decepticons:

visited david, pat and stu today. it was the first day that the new first years have come to campus while i haven't been a student. a hurricane rained out the beginning of my orientation too, and i thought about that while i walked around with renee and tried not to make "when i was a little one" comments more than five times per second.

i don't really know where the past few months have gone. august will be over in a week or so, and september will mark the third month i've been unemployed and mostly directionless since my graduation.

don't get me wrong--- i have lots of plans. deadline plans, paper plans, plans for things i will be doing, plans for things i have to do before my mother refuses to give me any more money. i would be acting on these plans if i could jerk myself out of the rhythm of the semester calendar, but i haven't been able to so far.

despite the intellectual knowledge that i need to start doing something besides reading comics and eating vietnamese food, i can't stop thinking in 4-month increments. i make complex resolutions to find a job or clean the house, only to get the feeling i should wait for a batch of classes and responsibilities that simply aren't coming. tardily, i chastise myself for thinking about a fall semester that doesn't exist, resolve to go on about my life, and wake up the next day with the same strange feeling that i need to put things off until i get my course schedule.

meh.

(life after college would be wonderful if i could make myself start it.)

i just made plans for an approximately two hour conference call with my mother tomorrow, re: agenda items
-sister
-dad
-insurance
-furniture
-other

she then started giving me a lecture about how talking to my father was getting very touch-and-go so i need to be careful, and i responded that "yeah yeah, i will follow your advice and not interact with the opposing counsel until such time as i can hear the potential liabilities of the situation." she then laughed for the first time i've heard in weeks, and informed me that i've always been her favorite client.

awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
i love you too, mommy.

amazing grace is one of those songs that never manages to be any less emotional for me, no matter how old i get. attending the funeral was simultaneously awful and wonderful; so many memories, all bittersweet. i was confronted, over and over again, by the similarity of it all; the eulogy, the whispered conference about what They would have wanted, the anticlimax that is mourning. i kept seeing my grandmother's face in the chapel on the side where she habitually sat, all the while hearing the dead man's name. the same and different, the same and different.

(james' folks are good people. there was no graveside, which was good, because i think i might have lost my ethnographer hat.)

today i am back in SRQ. despite my period and sister craziness and week-traveling exhaustion, it was good to hang out with james for a week and good to go out to ybor with renee last night. drinking, dancing, confrontations of the pleasant sort and playing wingman are all fun.

(i think i am going to spend tonight staring at some kind of media product and willing my emotional batteries back up to somewhere above .05%)

(oh, spam bots. you are full of hilarity.)

though i feel remarkably fine, i guess it's been a pretty intense past three months.
"attack of opportunity." hah, no kidding.
on the plus side, i have never been more confident that i will weather the singularity with a chuckle and become queen of the robots. that, or reach nirvana in the next 15 days. ya know, whatever.

either way, weirdness abounds. i am looking forward to furniture shopping, and adopting a new plant. lemongrass this time, i think.

i can't return my aunt's call because my sister is currently locked in the psych ward of tallahassee memorial hospital. if i call, my aunt will inevitably ask about my sister, and telling her anything about my sister would weaken her already weak heart. i also feel terribly guilty about not calling her, though, not least because her heart is so weak.

fuck.

i spent all day watching my mom cry, which was a little bit like watching aliens descend, park their saucer and begin to serve brunch. later in the day, after a series of epithets the likes of which he hasn't called me since high school, my dad began to cry too. i talked to him about sarah, and at the end of the conversation, he thanked me for "helping him." thanked me. guys, that has never happened before ever. like, ever ever. never. dad thanking me is the kind of thing that would occur in the parallel dimension that the brunch aliens come from, and his crying in front of me is only slightly more likely than the large hadron collider being made of bacon. bacon.

fuck.

of course i am fine--- everything is fine, everyone is fine, this is all going to be fine, this already IS fine, aren't we glad that things are fine right now?--- but i am relieved to be going home tomorrow.

spent all day blowing my nose, reading, and drinking a mixture of orange juice and black tea in the comfort inn's room 227. it was as unexpected as any of the life i've been living recently; mostly pleasant, definitely different.

though tiring, life of maybe has been good to me. since i've always been a planner, illness and accidents have often been the only thing connecting me to the forces of random at work in the world. it's been nice to let the better parts of random in again, to observe the forces of synchronicity at work for good instead of insurance premium.

i need to get in touch with kate. maybe i will go to new york. or maybe i will stay here, and make paintings and have an apartment. inevitable snot aside, i am confident for the first time in quite a while that anything i choose to do will turn out well. not perfectly, but well. maybe. hah.

(really good books always make me smug and satisfied. go get a copy of oryx and crake this second. also, this poem is sweet and makes me feel nostalgic for lunch boxes.)