tuesday march 20 2001    |    12:41 p.m.

right now in my hot little hands:

๘ jim greer the big thieves jail the little thieves :: remember the early nineties? remember guided by voices in the early nineties? jim greer played guitar for them. he is also the sharpest, smartest, freshest rock critic ever to grace the underworld of rock criticism with his words. much like his writing, this album -- the first i've heard of jim in years and years, and i've looked. . . well, this album is the kind that grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you and forces your eyes open. i don't think there's been anything like this in a long time. it's that good. thank you wkco!

๘ guided by voices isolation drills :: oh. my. god. it's out. the new album is out. and it's inches from my stereo. more on this soon.

๘ sean na na dance 'til your baby is a man :: he's 19, and he's a beast. great sadistic bittersweet lyrics set to beautiful dreamy low-fi scratchy-acoustic-with-twists pop. this one came from my savings not the station.

๘ the black halos the violent years :: teriyakis pre-literate : post-necessary

yet another reason to hole up in my room with a carton of cigarettes and the stereo blasting. if additional were needed.

in his or his possession:   the crooked fingers. aiee! be still my heart my speakers!

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let's wake up the neighbors
let's turn up our amps
well we used to without a plan
we'll play a stones song sitting on a fence
and it'll sound pretty good
though i forget how it ends

there's a big day coming
about a mile away
there's a big day coming
and i can hardly wait

yo la tengo

the first day of spring and it's been beautiful out, which makes it easier to go around feeling optimistic about things.

i'm wearing new clothes. listening to the above-quoted. got up ready to go this morning at seven. classes were good. lots of smiling all around. worked on a poem last night and it is much much much improved. racquetball with nick tomorrow. comps turned in on friday at 4, followed by serious partying, hopefully extending through sunday. i hope this wave of good lasts a long while.

at lunch today, waiting in line to get sloppy chunky chicken salad sandwiches, julie and i were talking about how good it is to be liberated women. (good is a good word.) in the sense that we're totally comfortable with ourselves, essentially, inside, where it counts.

in the poetry class today we read robert hass' human wishes, and maybe it's the weather, but i found reflections of myself in his lines. line upon line like brushstrokes layered over each other on a canvas. "a blind man selling pencils" on the street, which is futility but also seeing beyond sight, reinventing sight, rethinking thought. the empowerment in the fact that there is no single right answer, and that this is a basic human truth. keats' idea of negative capability, which, to paraphrase keats and saskia at once, is the ability to dwell in mystery and doubt without reaching for fact or reason. and there is nothing negative about that.

as much as the unseen -- by which i mean what is written in between the lines -- bothers and frightens many people, here is where i choose to make my home. this is my transient home: the gaps, the uncertainties, the not-knowing, the latent possibility, the suggestion, and all the discernible meanings, and those that aren't. this kind of life comes with all kinds of assorted baggage: anxiety sometimes, worry sometimes, hard walls to hit sometimes, what have you. but for me there is no other way. allowing things to unfold without foreseeing, without planning. allowing the natural beauty of everything to come flooding in.

yeah, i haven't felt this good in a while. myself. whatever happens, whatever path is taken, well, it's a path as good as any. i shrug off all unnecessaries and i write this small manifesto. to celebrate myself, and to celebrate everything, เ la walt.

i wait for you almost patiently
we could slip away
wouldn't that be better