There is a side of me, the happy undaunting side, that I always show the world. Truth be told, its not always happy but it is what I want the world to see. It isn't the face of solemness, nor the face of solitude. It is the face that allows people to approach me to talk, and to allow me to listen to their problems.

There is the side of me that lives in the darkness in the corner of my mind. It is the side of me that whimpers like a little child, always battered, always abused. Allowed to come out once in a while, not enough to see the light, just enough to allow it some warmth. Its been neglected, not allowed out enough to show its true self.

Within this darkness a vault opens, filled with dark scrolls, marked with green runes. My mind reaches out to read them but the markings crumble to dust. They are secrets, secrets never to be revealed, never to be told, to those close to me. They are more than skeletons because they have flesh, something more than blood. They stumble towards my consciousness, only to entangle them. They wrap around so tightly that I cannot see, feel nor breathe.

Then there is something deeper. I can feel it. It is more than what I bargain for and more than I can see. I feel it through my pores. It escapes through each crevasse, each opening in my body. It runs through my eyes, and hits the light. But its not the same type of light. They fight each other, conflicting.

At one point, I would have said that I'm just a two sided coin. Now, I feel lucky to see if I'm worth a nickel or the paper I'm printed on.
I'm pissed off!

Today the Victorian Government (Melbourne, Australia) has announced that the movie Exorcist will not be permitted to be screened in cinemas on Good Friday on account that it will offend the sensibilities of good Christians!

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/2001/04/05/FFXYFUNY3LC.html
http://www.theage.com.au/frontpage/2001/04/05/FFXJOCYD5LC.html

What happened to separation of Church and State? Why the heck are Christian principles being rammed down my throat? It's not even like anyone is being forced to sit down and watch the movie. If you are so offended by it, don't go and see it! Sheesh. And the ironic thing is, you can still hire the original version of the Exorcist on video without any problems. You can still buy porn without any problems (would have thought that this would concern them more than the Exorcist).

And where does this stop? Do we ban Schindler's List on Yom Kippur? Do we ban Tora Tora Tora on Anzac Day? Do we ban Wall Street on Labour Day? There was a post on The Age newspaper website from one irate reader who summed up the ridiculousness of the situation with this comment:

I demand that the film "Chicken Run" be banned on St. George's day. It portrays people from Northern England as blood thirsty sadistic simpletons. St. George's day should be a reflection of how gentle, pure and important English people are. And if you are not English, then tough - you won't be able to see it on St. George's day - but why should I care about your rights. We English are more important and self righteous than you - so what we say goes.

I certainly hope this doesn't set a trend for the future ... maybe it's time I changed who I vote for ....

This is a strange love. It’s a love that isn’t about me, or us. It leaves a dull kind of aching inside of me because I want something I’ll never have. But in the end it’s about you. It’s about you and it’s about finding something so beautiful I’m sure I’ll never really find it again; enlightening because I know it’s out there and yet crushing because it is all downhill from here.

Well that’s a little pessimistic, now isn’t it?

You were getting ready for your exhibition today, and I helped you carry some of your paintings downstairs. And when I looked at the collection of your work, all laid out before me I was stopped with a sudden, rising, sinking sensation that I had might as well stop for good, because this was what I wanted to be doing with my art. This was exactly what I wanted my paintings to be.

And they aren’t.

Yours are.

And you don’t want me. Or even if you did, all my pining and my fawning have surely changed that by now.



In every possible, rational sense of giving up I have abandoned this chase. In every irrational way I’m still trying to let this all go. It’s going so slooooowly.

I think I might be finally coming to understand why I float so easily among genres and styles in my painting. A girlfriend asked me today – a girlfriend who happens to be a painter as well – what I was trying to do, what I wanted to make, thta I must know, then, if I’d found it in what he paints.

I want to paint beauty and wonder and grace. And you find these things just as well in portraits as in still-life as in abstract expressionism as in imaginary desert-scapes in dreams.

Tonight that almost makes sense.

It is exactly one month since I have been learning and playing chess. It’s been pretty good – at www.itsyourturn.com, where strangers ask me “are you a beginner?” and then offer to talk me through a match! It must be obvious that I’ve been making silly moves.

This is part of MK’s self improvement programme. Stuff I want to know, stuff I want to do, stuff I want to experience.

Hmmm…. A subset of the aforementioned self improvement programme is the self assertion programme. Or is it the other way around? It’s fun when you are trying to discover things about your self.

I’ve gotta node the Johari Window – if only I knew enough html to draw the diagram though… It is about disclosure/feedback model of awareness of one's self.

Think of four panels : OPEN, BLIND, HIDDEN & UNKNOWN; where information about you that is either known to yourself or to others, or both or neither. Yeah, I've gotta to node it - before someone beats me to it!

Well, I guess today will be my 'offical' first day noding, since that is what everyone on everything has been calling it. I'd like to thank Chrono for picking me off MIRC and getting me into E2.

Ok yoss, here is my first node. It's just a daylog, but expect good stuff from, well, me ofcourse. Sorry about complaining about the E2 server as well. Just thinking about what it could be soon...

E2 is very interesting to me. I plan to add my expertice to it and maybe I could even learn how to spell. I suck at as of right now.

I hope to write everyday in the day logs, and leave one question to solve during the proceeding 24 hours.

Today's Question: What does {Marked for Destruction} mean?

Later all! Hope I could help the cause!

back from vacation. Big fucking deal. I melted down while in the car driving home, asked M. to pull over, I couldn't face my son, my house, my dog, nothing. I felt abjectly miserable and completely despondent while a tiny spark of life kept bouncing around inside anyway, saying "live, live! Live anyway!". Very strange. I cried so much my face is still blotchy two days later.

I felt, again, that all love is fake, all friends phony, self-serving egotists, all acts of compassion and caring merely acts people do for themselves and merely pretend otherwise.

I have felt this way for about two weeks. Now I am beginning to believe that maybe, just maybe, there might be real love in the world. Because of two people, myself and M. As for me, I know I truly love my birth children and would definitely give up a lung, a kidney, and my life for them so they could continue on in this world. And that is not out of some selfish wish to look self-sacrificing or feel important or any other reason, but that's just how much they mean to me. I wish I could say I feel the same way about my adopted son, but I don't, honestly. And the other person is M. I do believe that he truly loves me. I am sure that there is no benefit in loving me, a survivor of incest, rape, indifferent father, and extremely abusive mother. I won't go on and on, but I know there isn't much here he can get from me.

Since these two people have shown, over a period of time, consistently, (at least me, not sure about M.), I know that somewhere in the world, there is another person capable of real love. And it isn't all about mutual grooming.

I have hope today.

Sat here trying to think in a public terminal, in a public place: high above the Tottenham Court Road in a glass tower above the street, surrounded by a Babel of foreign voices speaking languages of which I recognise not one syllable. A quick glance at the next terminal gives no clues. There's a notepad full of unrecognisable writing on the next desk. It could be Arabic or some Indian language or even shorthand, but to me, it's simply a meaningless sheet of rhythmic scrawls and dots, a visual mirror of the meaningless syllables around me. Most of the people whose languages I might understand are not around at this time of day. They're gone, swallowed up every morning in an Invasion of the Bodysnatchers-style zombie parade, turned into an expressionless meaningless mass which shoves and pushes its bulk into metal-and-glass tubes every morning until the hundreds of faces and hands crammed against the windows take on a horrible, smothered look. Last week, there was a tube strike. I stood at the bus stop and waited fifteen minutes or so. A crowd built up behind me. When the bus arrived I was physically borne up onto it by a scary tide of crushing bodies. Turning back would have been impossible: trapped on all sides. I looked around at the faces of people that were pushing me and saw no expressions on any faces, no smiles, nothing but grim determination to get on that bus whatever it took. It made me feel cold all over. When the bus finally lurched off, dangerously overloaded, the entire upper deck of people took out mobile phones and began talking in unison into them. Japanese girl beside me, unidentifiable language from the couple behind, Italian in front of me. Babel, again.

After a while in a place like this you stop expecting meaning in what you hear around you, and begin to orient yourself by other methods. People, because you do not understand them, become an undifferentiated blur. Offices and shops and all things which all cities have in common become a blur, too, because almost any street in any city in the developed world has the same façades these days: Armani. Gap. Calvin Klein. Body Shop. McDonalds, coffee bars, cinemas, government departments and advertising agencies. Logos on tasteful steel plates or moulded shiny plastic with neon. Only the deep structure of the city makes any sense, the actual streets and buildings, which are far less subject to change. All the streets this bus is travelling through exist on 1894 maps, and at eye level on the top deck, not much has changed since then. If you could go back and take time-lapse footage along this route from 1901 to today, only the plastic logos would move around at any speed: in these back streets the chip shops and 24-hour shops and massage parlours and Schools of English and employment agencies just keep replacing and replicating themselves, while the buildings they attach themselves to grow black with age. Corpses of buildings, with blank grimy eyes. London is rotting, and slowly burying itself.

Underground, layers of sewers dating back to the Romans are sinking into the soft London clay, while forgotten rivers carry on carving out space beneath. In the time-lapse sequence you'd see the city as a black hump, slowly slumping and spreading at the edges, with thousands of tiny bright logos speeding past, buzzing and flickering like clouds of flies around it. Only the tags change faster than the logos: wild frenzy of paint slashes scribbling themselves chaotically across black rotting walls. They fight it out with the ads pasted everywhere, moving so fast on the screen they strobe. The dreamed sequence pieces itself together easily out of my visual memory bin, containing endless hours of crap TV sampled over the last, netless three weeks. Nothing on terrestrial these days except stuff which I can't imagine anyone wanting to watch. Talk shows which talk about nothing even vaguely interesting. News with politicians mouthing inanities or grimy footage of people dying, somewhere I've never been. Endless grinning celebrities who make smiling itself seem somehow suspect. Dull, repetitive police/hospital/soap dramas. Real TV about 'RealPeople™', none of whom are like anyone I've ever met, and I wonder: if they are real, what am I? Sat up here in a glass tower, with nothing but Babel around me, unable to understand any of it?

I read the evening paper, but it's worse than TV. Nothing relevant or really funny or agreeable in any way. Plagues, disasters, grinning politicians again. WE HAVE THE WORST TRANSPORT SYSTEM IN THE WORLD, announces an article, detailing more ways to fuck it up. More celebrities doing painfully dull things. Celebrity bodies: buy this magazine and you too can have one. Ads for penile extension and laser hair removal, in-and-out instant six-pack liposuction, baldness clinics. Ads for houses costing over a million pounds, flats to rent for £2000 a week. GRAFFITI MENACE IS RUINING LONDON, says another grinning politician. "We just have to give them something worthwhile to do." Details of scheme led by hip black young ex-writer, 'Crap' who now works freelance for Nike. Photo of him, showing perfect midriff and neon smile. He's stopped making innocent, happy graffiti pieces - the only things I see on the walls that aren't trying to sell me something - and started contributing to the real menace that is eating the city: advertising.
This is progress, apparently. And I think to myself:
only in places on the Net, like here, do I ever read anything that feels remotely like truth. Sure, e2 has its share of bullshit and bollocks, but most of it is made of real humans (as opposed to RealPeople™) talking about real things. And after a couple of weeks with no Net and nothing but official media, this place feels like a beautiful oasis in a desert of mindnumbingly dull Babel. Glad it's still here.

Well another day at work. I actually had some billable work! Rather refreshing. Since before I didn't have anything to do I wrote an Everything2 editor for myself in VB. Works pretty dandy. Lets you edit in e2 source or XML and does a preview so you can check your links BEFORE posting. All I need now is a spelcheck and I'll be set.

I'm exhausted today. I should not have stayed up late last night. But I got a lot done. My daughter is still a bit down but I think she'll be ok she goes to her mother's this Friday. I hope she comes back

I'm off on a vacation for the weekend seeing my in-laws tonight and then just chilling at home. The kids are going to be gone so it will be quiet and I can be freaky. Maybe I'll talk my wife into taking some pictures or play a bit.

Man, I hate truck drivers(no offence to anyone, most likely you weren't driving on the interstate when I was).

But anyways, it must have been Drive Your Truck Like You Own the Damn Road Day. I swear, I got cluster fucked the whole 10-mile commute I travel to get to work, and the whole time, the truck beside me was swerving from side to side coming so close to me, the truck behind me rode my ass the whole way, and the truck in front thought it would be funny to brake check me every minute...

What a week! I had three exams, so I haven't been daylogging like I intended too. Sorry but passing classes comes before e2 :P My advisor was *finally* in his office today, so I have the classes I need to take last semester lined up. I still haven't decided if I should go to summer school. I don't want to, but it might help get me out of here in less than 5 years. I'd much rather go live in Seattle for the summer, and work for my uncle. The pay's pretty good, but the fringe benefits are excellent (free room, free beer, DSL line, etc). Decisions decisions...

But enough of worrying and work, Thursday is the start of the weekend here, and it's $1 margarita night at Los Chicos. I finally found the testicular fortitude to call that girl I met last weekend, but she wasn't home. All that agonizing for nothing...

References to Edinburgh landmarks are purely for my own amusement, and knowledge of the relevant geography is not requirerd to read this writeup.

Bad Day.

Finally got the A Perfect Circle cd, as I feel guilty about having ripped off such a great band. I got it from HMV, which strangely has it in the metal section. Smiled at the security guards on the way out. For some reason, they do not like that.

Ran into an old friend from school on Chambers Street. He asked what I was up to these days and I told him I'm at University. He said Hmmm... I might be going to college next year... I'll see if I can be arsed. This guy is one of the most intelligent, creative people I know and he's spending his time bumming around town. Sad really. Oh well...

Popped into Starbucks on Bread St to sit down and read New Scientist over an over-roasted, over-priced coffee. The editorial on Dubya's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol got me very angry. Apparently he rejected it because it was flawed. But most of those flaws were caused by American delegates trying to protect their country's precious business interests. Again, very sad.

Got on a bus (a 16, iyc) and noticed the nice shiny new building at Tollcross. Became very curious as to what was inside, and whether it would make a good writeup.

Got off bus at Morningside Station for a haircut. I had my head shaved. Why? I have no idea. I normally have medium-legth hair, just too short for a centre parting, long enough to make a spiky-at-the-front kind of style, but today I decided I wanted rid of it all. It now resembles a bad US Army crew cut. Maybe I just can't be bothered looking after that crap on my head anymore.

Nipped over the road for passport photos. Came out absolutely ghastly. Three quid down the drain. What the hell is with these digital photo booths? They pick out every imperfection, every minute acne scar, and magnify it to crystal clarity. Even the two-week-old remenants of black eye, which I can barely make out in the mirror, showed up perfectly. Grr...

Got home and encountered the distinct impression that my parents fucking hate my haircut. Felt akward. Expecting hat as gift.

My Tool tickets haven't turned up yet. Checked the website, turns out they haven't been printed yet. The London show, June 11, 2001, has already sold out. Blimey.

Had another look at the resit information for my Digital Logic module. Not looking forward to it. I hated the module first time round, I hate resits on general principle, you do the math.

logged onto E2 to find three /msgs all along the lines of "thanks a lot" or "cheers for the suppourt!".

Maybe not such a bad day after all.

All work and no daylogs make Pretzellogic a dull boy.

I haven’t written a daylog in weeks. I’ve been meaning to, yet the work I have is fruitful and multiplies when I'm not looking. Even as I write this I’m sure in the dark and private confines of my briefcase they are fucking and squirming against each other, spawning and breeding more papers and dittos and essays to write and poems to critique.

The past few weeks have been busy. Other interesting tidbits involve me being yelled out as if I were a child by an aging professor of mine because I disagreed with him on a point he made. Normally an instructor enjoys a distention in the ranks as it shows that we're thinking and not just nodding our heads and mooing quietly, but apparently I was in error. He caught me on it in class, asking me why I was here "wasting my money." When I approached him during the break he whirled around and got right in my face—well, not right in my face as I'm 6'2" and he's five foot nothing—and began to yell at me as if I were five, saying things like "You DO NOT contradict the instructor, that's how you get an F!" and "I've published thirty-six books, how many have YOU published?" When he was done, he whirled around and started walking away as I went into survival mode and attempted to be rational by asking if I could talk to him. At this we spun around again and said that he was ready for my apology now. Stunned, I apologized and then began trying to rationally speak as he turned again and started walking away! I repeated this process four more times: he would walk away, I'd say something trying to salvage the situation, he’d whirl around and yell at me some more before turning his back on me again. This is in a public place, mind you. Eventually I became disgusted and gave up trying to speak to his back, and returned to the group. As I gave up I watched him turn around; the bastard was just walking away from me, waiting for me to give up! I swear I am not making this up. I wish I was, I used to have some respect for this cantankerous old man.

At the time of the 'great revolt' I was defending the word choice in a particular piece in my writing workshop. Later that day she approached me and thanked me for what I said, as I was dead on in my interpretation. That made me feel better, and now we have a shared conspiracy to giggle over.

That was pretty much the only interesting thing that happened to me in these past couple of weeks.

Today was yet another stinker. I woke early, feeling like meat on a stick, and dragged myself around by the head in order to accomplish a minimal amount of errands and obligations. Went into town to get myself a hair cut and barely made it out of the barber shop alive. Apparently "just a trim" wasn't proper terminology, although it's what I always say to this guy. I ended up with a about a third of the hair I’m supposed to have and, as I have a Homer Simpson-esq head, I know feel like an idiot. Everyone does there best to tell me I look okay, although one particularly cute girl told me I looked like I was twelve. I will be wearing a hat until further notice.

Silver lining: today was beautiful. The Frozen North is no more. A lovely afternoon of sun and light breezes off of the dairy farms blowing through the remains of my hair-do. Shit, I have to wait a month before I'll look normal again. Clipper-happy butcher-barber jerk.

Tonight it is cool and quiet. People are leaving in droves as premature vacation bites them in the ass. I myself am stuck here until Saturday morning. C'est la vie. After that it's just me and my automobile; Pittsburgh or Bust. I could use some time behind the wheel of an automobile, any automobile. I really need to clear my head.

Today was another one of those days where everything seems to be against you. Most of the day was okay but toward the end it just became crap. I finished my shit and then some upperclassmen walk in and embarrass the shit out of me. another name to the hitlist. I bell rings and as I'm walking out, some guy runs up to me with a dildo and starts ramming it into my fucking face. As I'm walking away from him a door opens and slams into my arm. I push the door back and hit some freshman in the face with it. Oh well. I would have punch the guy with the dildo right in the gut had it not been for the teachers around.

On the way home, my friends tire dies on us. Then when we hit the back roads I light up a cigarrette and the ash kept flying back into my eyes. GOD DAMMIT I get home and go to sleep. My mom gets back from a 3 day buisness trip and bitches me out for not "helping" my dad outside. Jesus fucking christ is every one against me today? I finish helping him out after an hour and go to the store. The headlight dies on me and I almost hit a dog. I turn the radio up as loud as possible and pull into the store here in sebastian only to pull in next to a cop. The cop gets down and lectures me about driving with my radio that loud. Fuck you I get home about 5 minutes later and my mom and dad start interrogating me asking me what I was doing on the roof for so long the night before. I told them and that was that.

I get online to see whose on and NOBODY is online. I sat for 15 minutes and nobody came on. I got up to go to the bathroom and come back only to see that I was kicked offline. I sign back on and see now that people are online. I had just initiated a conversation with one of them when my parents say," Leave the room."(my computer is in there cause they think I spend to much time on it.) FUCK God dammit why has today been so fuckking shitty.

I'm am ready to die. Someone just fucking take my life. My day has been shit, and I'm sure tomorrow is gonna suck ass as well. My life is falling apart. Kill me please.

Note: I found out why I've been waking up with cuts on my body. Turns out the blade to an exacto knife has been stuck on my bed and cuttin me in my sleep.

April 5, 2001

I was sitting in computer lab today and and I found that when I clasped my hands together, they began to pulse. I know that it was just my heart beat, but I've never felt it like that before. I unclasped my hands and continued working on my lab. Then later I clasped them again. Nothing. Then I started concentrating on them. I could feel the pulses begin. Weak at first, but then they began to gain intensity to such a point that it felt like the pulsing should be visible from the outside, or glowing, or *some*thing. I almost felt like there should be a glowing ball of power/magic/spirit between my hands if I pulled them apart slowly. But there wasn't.


Then lab got out late...I stayed even later. At first, I just wanted to read some more E2, but then it was raining outside. So I decided to wait it out, hoping it would stop, so I wouldn't be drenched by the time I got home. I ended up staying an hour after lab, after the TA's all left and other students started filtering in to the now open lab. I walked home almost in a trance...my head didn't feel like it was connected to my body the same way it normally is. The trance was broken as soon as I spoke to someone and it didn't come back for the rest of the evening.

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