Every Monday when I come into work from the weekend I feel like I’ve never been there before. For the first half of the day it’s like I have to remember everything I learned. I’ve only been there for a month and a half, maybe it’ll go away. I kinda don’t want it too; Sometimes i like being confused.

And it’s not the weed, I’ve only had that for a couple of weeks, and I’m nearly out. Though that too has been causing some not-so-unwelcome uneasiness to the work environment. I don’t smoke before work or anything, it’s just that I seem to be such a lightweight that the night after smoking I’m still feeling the effects. But it’s enough to warp my perceptions, so that everything feels incredibly strange and interesting. It really beats just doing work and waiting for 6 o’clock.

But how long has it been since I’ve just plain written something here? What’s new with me, the readers must wonder!

1) Got a shitty office job (obviously).

2) Got some weed (obviously).

3) Got lost driving my friend to his dad’s funeral (sorry!).

4) That’s it. That’s all that’s happened. Well, I guess not counting the mountain of things I’ve said, thought, felt, saw and heard since I last updated like this. that’s actually quite a lot.

My scanner is still inoperable. I haven’ felt like fixing it. But I’ve got drawing’s I’ll put up when I do. For now, listen to these songs/videos I’ve favorited in the past two weeks.

I can’t relate. None of this beautiful music seems to have anything to do with me anymore. Beautiful art doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me anymore. Good ideas, jokes, conversations, people, events, everything. It’s hard to see myself in anything that I find amazing or meaningful or good.

Or maybe it’s that it alternates. Between the emptiness being in me, and the emptiness being everything outside of me, and the emptiness being just a corrosive interstitial fluid around everything.

Not always. But more and more.

I was thinking (this happens sometimes) in the car about Obama’s win, which has been mentioned to death but just humor me. It was pretty much a landslide victory, and that, coupled with the enormous, almost royal fanfare that accompanied his inauguration, is evidence enough that there’s more too it than him being a good candidate.

I think the voting population today has grown up more aware of the greed, callousness, and murder that has made this country great, in a way that’s more honest than ever before. Plenty of people could tell you about the collapse of “grand narratives,” stories which serve to legitimize actions, ideologies, whatever. The idea of a shining city on a hill, America the Divinely manifested, is undermined by the facts of history. There’s nothing divine about segregation, slaughtering natives, or industrial exploitation. There’s is so much counter-history that is toxic to America’s claim to legitimacy. The mind of a moderately informed American citizen is such fertile soil for cognitive dissonance, that it was desperately for pathos, for some kind of relief.

And I’m not boiling it down to white guilt, at all. Not any black candidate would have done. But if nothing more it’s an attempt at a declaration of independence from history. Take, for instance, the number of times the term “post-racial society” came up during and after the election. It really felt like a millennial celebration, eight years after the fact, shedding the bad parts of the last 2000 years (and holy fucking shit were there a lot) and having a chance to earn the right to exist for another thousand years.

I’d be lying if that didn’t excite me. There’s a lot these days to be excited about. But I’ve grown into a fiercely depressive optimist, which is to say I believe in slow, painful progress and the deceptiveness of dreams (and hope). Ebullience, while necessary sometimes, is easy to get caught up in, to the point where you’re no longer paying attention. Judith Butler wrote an article about it, calling it “Uncritical Exuberance”. She, in fact, explcitly says that “the election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption,” and that in thinking so “we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times.” she’s speaking of redemption from the Bush era, but the line of sin can obviously be traced much much further.

At this point it doesn’t seem like that is going to be a problem. It seems Obama’s being watched more than any other human being has been watched before. I kinda feel bad for him about that, but who knows, maybe he’s fueled by it. But he’s obviously a symbol of some kind of new America, long in progress. Symbols sell, and they’re powerful, due to their brevity.

Anyway, if that was too many words for you try this: lol dongs

autumn. I’m not sure if it’s now just localized in my house, since the doors and windows are shut and I haven’t been out all day, but yesterday it was cold and rainy and it felt September, like the beginning of school, which is funny cause I just so happen to be graduating soon, my last exam being tomorrow, and my ceremony being on the 22nd, and the my bachelor’s degree being issued officially i dunno when, which all makes me wanna curl up in bed and not move, which is what i do when the cold begins to show up usually. But what I’m saying is my feet are cold, because of the localized weather in my room.

My room is a mess, here are two (2) webcam shots to testify. I haven’t living in my room though, I’ve been living in autumn, and on noise and pictures from the computer box.

I like that one because it makes me think of Constantine the Great, and that whole myth about the cross appearing in the sky (“by this sign you shall conquer”). I imagine those kids as genetically engineered disaster agents. Justice, the band, uses the cross as a sort of band logo, which is equally cool. Their love for branding and iconography is also displayed in two of their other videos, which are also excellent.

I love the first one especially. Those glimmering, shiny logos from way back always did seem a little magical, despite the nasty feeling I still get from saying that about a marketing tool. Artificiality and commercialism gets me hot lately, because it’s hard to say anything is artificial anymore. It’s all in how you use it. But it might just be because I’m avoiding IRL and making excuses for not doing anything. Most likely it’s both, one excuse informs the other, both ways.

I keep changing what my favorite season is. It used to be winter way back, then it was autumn, then, for a while, spring. I feel like saying it’s autumn again, simply because of this lovely false whether in my room (which might just be real whether, i don’t know, still haven’t gone and checked). I think I might’ve just outgrown favorites though.

edit may 27: these videos keep going offline, so if your reading this from the future and their not working i apologize.

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