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| Baby, nothing, nothing, bear, Oscar the Grouch, Casper, ghost, ghost, can't remember (probably ghost), can't remember, can't remember, bum, wizard, snake charmer, suicide, suicide, suicide, suicide, nothing, nothing, 80s teen movie zombie, nothing, tinfoil suit, luchador, luchador, Japanese game show host. |
| Everything is difficult. |
| Cold's coming on, I'm wrapped up in a hoodie huddled in front of my monitor, tempted to start a small fire in my wastebasket to keep me alive through the rest of the day. I'm not made for the winter, despite my proud Scandinavian heritage - I'm a summer boy, meant to float lazily on the surface of the lake, gently pushing lilypads out of the way of my air mattress. Meant to drink lemonade on the porch, watching the sun go down late, late at night. Meant to sleep shirtless under the stars, grass growing into my back overnight. |
| Trying to wrap up some loose ends this week, cleaning up and bustling out as I get my ducks in nice easy rows. Finishing a long-delayed freelance web design job as we speak, hundreds of photographs scanned, sized and cropped, slapped into HTML and forgotten about. Sending out portfolios to art directors looking for work. Cleaning up my desk, stacking my pencils high and sharp. Cleaning up for winter. |
| Significantly less than functional today, the day-long adrenal peak of Saturday's festivities has run its course and now I'm wobbling at the end of a leash, trying my best to keep pace with Sheba as she tears erratic ovals across the grass of McCarren Park, a chunk of leash in her mouth running figure-eights around my ankles, tripping me up, bringing me down. I dust myself off and run after her. |
| I'm up at 5:30 and on the bus, forgetting to eat in the excitement, my only nutritional intake until much later that night was marijuana and water, and how cliche is that, smoking pot on your way to the peace march? I'm blood-sugar crashing as we are walking the streets of Washington, DC, sloganeering and sign-waving, I'm playing crippled chords on the guitar and trying not to fall over. I'm on the bus back, head smushed against the window, sleeping my way to another day. |
| Last night hours talking to two of my closest about my brain and what goes on inside it, the way I build my life and the way I see and don't those in it. Consensus on their part seems to be that I am constantly self-deluded, lying to myself about the way that I feel, positive when negative is demanded. That I'm too trusting, too optimistic, too unrealistic. And I'm torn, I really am, as I feel closer to peace, closer to contentment than I ever have, but is it just another veil that I wrapped about myself? Is happiness real? |
| Spent last night at the Madagascar Institute putting together some signage for this weekend's upcoming anti-war protravaganza in DC. I'm going with these guys, as they've brought the ludicrous theatricality and goofiness that I need if I'm going to make a public spectacle of myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally and thoroughly against the war - I've written a bindle of letters in the last few months to representatives elected by fair means or foul, but sometimes you gotta holler yourself hoarse to get yourself heard. |
| Oh, yeah, that big announcement! Here is is. Last year, I took a trip around the country by Greyhound bus and had a bunch of adventures. Now I'm writing a comic book about it. It's called "Red Eye, Black Eye." It will be serialized on the Internet, three pages a week, for the next year and change or so. It lives here. Please read and enjoy. |
| Working, thinking, accumulating - I opened up a store a few years too late to jump on the E-commerce bandwagon, I'll never catch up to those hippies at Amazon at this rate. Saving my pennies and nickels to move out on the first into my new place, out a ways in Bed-Stuy but with a door that closes and a bed that sleeps me well. |
| I'm absurdly hungry today for no real reason, my diet has been stable and healthy for nearly a year now, but with the onset of winter some deeply-lodged synapse fires and commands me to start stocking up on the bear fat and waffles, start lining the walls of the cave with hide, even though I've got a space heater and some natty sweaters. I'll be okay, I worked too hard to lose this weight to put it back on now. Although a waffle or two does sound good... |
| Every year the shelter has the annual dog parade, where the unadopted and neighborhood dogs and owners get costumed up and go to the park, accompanied by marching bands and festivites, for a dog show. I take Sheba from the kennel, of course, and another regular volunteer looks at me aghast. "You know about her, right?" she asks, and I reply that I walk her every week and she's my favorite dog. "She bit me three weeks ago," she says, "nobody can control her," and she rolls up her sleeve to show me the scars and marks left by my favorite dog's teeth, as I look down into Sheba's brown eyes and wonder how. |
| After the housewarming at two in the morning in Sunset Park, the only place open for us to eat is a bottom of the line Cuban joint where the walls are lined with those birthday cakes that have the photos printed on the icing. We all get french fries that are so salty we involuntarily pucker, and I send them down to meet the whiskey already in residence. |
| Doors closing, slamming, opening, creaking, the world is in a constant state of motion, we are in a Winchester house of deadfalls and dead ends, constantly being built by our pounding hammers, constantly added on to, new atriums and porches, bedrooms and foyers, and yet there's not one place I can lay my weary head tonight as one more door slams closed. |
| I quit RSO last night, just unable to convince myself that I could spend four hours on the train to Jersey and back every week if we didn't even have a drummer. Talked to Ryan on the phone, embarrassed, dejected, remembering our first practice, so many months ago, where I broke down crying because I forgot how to play the guitar. And I feel bad about it, I do, I'm going to miss the spark and frenzy that we had in Pennsylvania as we exploded into a cool Amish evening, but sometimes we need to save our fire for other winters. |
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At the reading last night: "Hi, my name's Thor, sometimes I feel like a ghost that got eaten by another ghost on the moon." Audience: (laughter) "Uh, that was supposed to be more plangent than funny, but OK, I guess." |
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On my eighth birthday, my mother took me to the Pacific Science Center because I was a nerd. There was some sort of laser demonstration and a small crowd quickly formed around the area. The high-pitched keening of the laser bored into my ears and I felt my heart begin to race. I told my mother that I needed to sit down, but she told me to wait, to watch what was happening. I felt my entire body tighten. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, a circle of horrified faces staring down at me. I now know that that was my first panic attack. It wouldn't be my last. |
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"and when I'm sad I slide" |
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Slow, slow down, O dogs, reeling and rolling, I take Sheba to McCarren Park and she goes totally mad, spinning loops around me as I squint away the gray sky, try to stabilize my balance against the weight of my inhumanly heavy head. She's rolling on her back in the wet grass, her mouth open in a crazy lolling-tongue smile, flipping and flopping in the evaporating rain and by God, I want to know how she does it. |
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Whiskey rotting my insides, the slosh of beer and fluids cursing every step, I hunch over on the train, my head in my lap, spikes of pain ratcheting into my eyes with every squeal of brakes, my joints dry and croaking. It's a long collapse all the way up to Harlem, and I can barely keep myself together, barely keep from chundering into a pile of vomit and waste-flesh. Why do I do this to myself, I think, and then I come to the realization that it's the only thing I know how to do. |
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When I was young, I was so tiny and flexible that I could bend, cramp and cram myself into the tinest of spaces, like a little bespectacled Houdini. And, of course, I loved to play hide & seek, fitting myself into unlikely hiding places all over the old house in Snohomish. But it wasn't the hiding that I wanted - it was the knowing that even just for a while, someone cared enough to look for me, to find me.
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On the brink again? Something feels crumbly inside, like it's about to give way, like I reached the top of the old rickety Cyclone and we're about to plunge again into the vortex. But then I realized that that's why you ride a rollercoaster in the first place, for the downs as well as the ups, and when you're done, your hair crazily angled on your head, knuckles white and heart pounding, you're where you started but a little better off for it all.
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I can't stop rhyming, writing - being in so many bands has kicked my song glands into high gear, relaxing oer a beer and a chorus rings in my ear. Wednesday nights me and Doug drop rhymes and try to figure out how to make beats, Thursdays me and Ryan and Friggle shred away in the New Jersey basement, Fridays in the space with Rachel and Leela and Ellen and Christian and whoever else we can finagle in, wall-of-sounding all night, and I love it more than almost anything.
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Motivated, fire under my ass is lit once more, up till the midnight hours working on projects both fair and foul. I feel good, oddly enough - like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, making me free to buckle down and get down to business once more. There's that big announcement coming in two weeks, you know, and you're not going to want to miss out on it. There's the music I'm making with those near and dear to me, the art I'm drawing, these words I'm writing, the girl I'm slowly digging a tunnel to. They're all right where they were. I can just appreciate them a little bit more.
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Well, unsurprisingly, the free rent deal fell through. Family politics made it impossible for me to occupy Doug's spare room for less than $1500 a month, which is dangerously close to how much money I make in a month. So it's back to the drawing board, and now I need to come up with some ways to make a lump of money pretty damn fast so I can slap down rent and first month's deposit. Any suggestions?
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Even though I was out until the wee hours, I still manage to scrape myself off the floor and get out to the shelter to walk some dogs. However, since it's a crisp, warm Sunday morning, there's more volunteers than they know what to do with, so I only get to take a few out. No big, though, as I give them huge, hour-long rambles and strolls, meeting people, drinking water and feeling each ray of sun meet a freckle on my arm, and match up perfectly.
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Siberia, underground, the latest in electroclash ludicrousness as the wave of mutilation sweeping the city's culture industry has deposited us like so much driftwood on the shores of yet another party. It's a release for one of those magazines that's nothing but pictures of the editor's friends, and leafing through it, you see that most of them are in attendance, some even in the same outfits. The toilets have been stopped up but people try to flush them anyways, and sewage floods the dance floor.
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Working hard at the end of the week, trying to spackle tight my job once again, reading and writing and coding and pasting, barely enough time to sit down and throw out these limpid lines. Left my cell phone at home for the first time since I got it, feeling naked and strange, like everybody in the world could be calling and all they'd get is rings.
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Something I've realized as I get older is that being alike is vastly over-rated. When I was a callow youth, I heaped scorn on those who didn't share my rarefied aesthetic in music, movies, and other forms of culture. I couldn't imagine wanting to hang out with someone who didn't share my obsession with Afrobeat and the films of Jan Svankmeier. All this came back to me last night as I lay curled up with Rachel watching the season premiere of Dawson's Creek. Everybody's got their things that mean the world to them.
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Baseball. I'm immersed in it; hip-deep in it, my desk is covered with sports pages and glossy Fleer cards and assorted ephemery. The whole city has baseball fever again, of course, as the playoffs are apparently here, but I'm not really interested; it's work for me. I have to find a way to translate the baffling matrix of statistics and factoids that is America's Pastime into games for kids to play on the Internet. It's a bit like making calculus into Pac-Man, but with a break for beer in the middle.
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Sun's out again, oversleeping again, biding time every day until I can move into my new place, any day now, any day, it's been any day for days and days and I'm starting to get a little antsy about the whole deal. I've been on Tomas's couch for ten months now, give or take some breaks when I've been traveling, and that's too much to ask from anybody, no matter how good a butler I am.
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SEPTEMBER
all content (c) 2002 k. thor jensen