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Bushism of the Week
do yourself a favor. don't vote for this quack-head!
Week of 9.13.2004
"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their
love with women all across this country." —George W. Bush, Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004
Week of 9.6.2004
"We will make sure our troops have all that is necessary to complete their missions. That's why I went
to the Congress last September and proposed fundamental — supplemental funding, which is money for armor and body parts
and ammunition and fuel." —George W. Bush, Eerie, Pa., Sept. 4, 2004
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10.10.2004
it just occurred to me tonight that time has caught up with me. i felt this sense of longing and nostalgia for times
not so long ago, for the feeling of starting fresh. there is something about the first two weeks of school, a comfort and
joy that i find i never experience again for the rest of the semester.
for me, the line was drawn very clearly in the sand when my grandma died the first week of September.
I think, in a way, i became a different person. because i could clearly identify myself in stages... when grandma was
alive, and when she was dead. it changed me in a way i still havent fathomed yet. much of the way i relate to my concept
of time is through music and emotion. the way the first two weeks of being here went seemed like magic compared to the emotional
turbulence i entered shortly following them. even then, there was a sense of foreboding, a sense of "enjoy it while
it lasts, enjoy your youth."
I remember watching Donnie Darko. A very dark movie. It was a parable about a boy who thinks the end of the world is
coming and his messenger of this apocolapse is a giant rabbit with a death's head. It sounds cheesy but the movie left me
with the echo of the feeling, that something was coming in the approaching fall, as the days counted down. And the ax swung.
It was the fall. The heat was gone, and time was gone. My life stopped and then started again. A spirit that was always
there departed, and a part of me went with it. The wake of all of it was like slowly crawling out of a hole, and only now
have i looked back and seen the darkness that once surrounded me.
Reflection is a very strange thing. A part of me wishes i could be there again. Before the fall. Innocent, with the
feeling that nothing or nobody will ever leave me. A feeling that nobody dies alone, that I will never die.
Yet today I realize that is not so, that it's all a fiction. Today I feel different.
I feel like a man.
9.18.2004
It just occurred to me today how much i really love progressive rock music. It sort of happened in the same manner
that i got into reading Tad William's sci fi trilogies that profess a seemingly neverending plotline. I hate it when
things end. Stories, songs, they're all alike. prog rock, lovingly termed by fans and critics alike, can range
anywhere from driving metal with obsessively layered structures and textures, to space rock and psychedelica as it mixes in
jazz and experimentation. The one thing i can say for sure, prog rock creates a compositional style of music that goes
on and on. much of it involves concept albums, overtures, stuff like that. i suppose that in the same way that
reading a mystery or horror novel that ends after 300 pages doesnt satisfy me, modern rock top 40 radio leaves me feeling
empty and cold.
today i'm listening to Rush and Dream Theater profusely. For those who dont know, rush is a relic from the sixties
and seventies, a Canadian band that was once lauded as a Zeppellin rip-off, after which it subsequently became especially
fond of progressive opuses that far surpass the plant/page pop rock stuff. while bassist and singer Geddy Lee can kind
of get on ones nerves after a little too much banshee-wail mode, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart always astound
me. their early pieces are before their time. right now i'm listening to some of their work from "Moving Pictures,"
an album i highly recommend.
Dream Theater has also risen to become my all time favorite artist. Some people think these guys are part of the
ego driven hair metal acts of the 80's and early 90's but i beg to differ. In fact, they seem to have taken the cues
from Rush as well as Yes, another favorite band of mine. They have, however taken this a bit further. Their albums
are an integration of the epic and conceptual structures of those 70's prog bands and the metal and hard rock of Metallica
and Tool, with emotionally charged and sometimes operatic vocals. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, one of their recent
albums, has been cycling around in my cd player for the past month.
so thats my take on music today. i guess sometimes i just need something that doesnt end in freakin' two minutes
and sound like a bad version of the beatles, or the stones, or a less talented incubus. sometimes we just want the real
thing.
9.17.2004
sleep.
last night i got seven hours. but i was awake with a start, eleven am and somewhat misplaced in the world.
sleep comes easily only in my idealized daydreams of being the perfect me. life in reality is nothing but a blur.
sometimes the night seems hungry. alive and vital. to waste such a thing makes me feel like i'm squandering some
luxury. some days i want to run. i say i'll get up bright and early and jog about campus. I look straight
ahead and my body weighs 220 pounds. I look down and I'm 180.
This life is nothing short of confusing. Feeling comfortable in one's body is considerably a greater challenge
than the ideal. I found myself wishing today that i could be rid of it all... the worry. Letting such things
subside is the greatest challenge of all.
cookies are my favorite things sometimes. what is it about a cookie? its soft and round and chewy, but sometimes
crunchy. the soft chocolate is the best. maybe i see myself as a cookie sometimes. heterogeneous bits of
dough and chips jammed together and baked into a random shape. Ready for life to ingest me like the cookie monster
it is.
Or is life the cookie? And are these years the calories, the greatest moments of it resembling morsels of chocolate...
To consume such a thing.
It is the paradox that i think of today. Am I consuming life, or is life consuming me?
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