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i do believe that i am defined by my CD collection. first, there is the fact that i have a CD collection–most college students these days seem to owe their musical tastes to whatever mp3s they can get off kazaa. these people are like the mp3s themselves–tinny, with the tops and bottoms of the audio spectrum cut off. the sound is in-your-face, shallow, and lacking in life. there is the related fact that you download a song, a two-or-three-minute pick-me-up, in lieu of buying an entire album–the artist’s mind and soul for the space of months or years. offensive to me is the radio culture of ‘hits’, and the subsequent ignoring of the album in pursuit of the popular single. ...

i was sitting in the back of the room during cru tonight, listening to the speaker and trying to eat my quizno’s sub without making too much of a mess. unfortunately my requirement of taking the tomatoes off the sloppy TBG sandwich made this nearly impossible, and my antics must have drawn attention to myself, because a minute later i was singled out and called up front and the speaker was telling me about his daughter. people were laughing, but i had no clue what was going on, because i was still scooping some gooey guacamole off my hand-out and putting it in my mouth. don’t ask my why i chose to do this in front of a large group of people. i made the appropriate grunts of approval to the speaker’s comments and focused on the guac as he had some more fun at my expense. it was great. ...

the leonids of last night had nothing on the veritable storm of glittering, transient, dust daggers that was last year’s show. still, i was glad to give up a few hours of sleep and drive up to skyline in order to lie on a blanket on the top of a hill, watching the periodic larger-than-normal piece-of-space-crap become transcendentally something more for the blink of an eye. i’m sure someone, somewhere, has made an analogy between the human life and the brief glory of ultrafast burning dust, so i won’t bother. also, i’m not sure i would agree with it. ...

i got frustrated with trying to put my thoughts into words here on the blog, so instead i wrote a song. listen to it here. (The word “here” in the previous sentence is a link, for those of you not prone to mouseovering) in other news, in the past few days i’ve had special dinner, played paintball, read the first two harry potter books, watched a few movies, played guitar, and contracted frostbite. though not necessarily in that order. one of the more salient features of this list, of course, is the fact that it makes no mention of schoolwork, or, more particularly, the logic problem set which is due tomorrow and has yet to be started. thus, i am off for a long night of work and little sleep. ...

i hit the low point of autumn quarter 2002 friday morning. i had stayed up all the previous night (must be something about thursdays) doing a midterm for logic and reading some crap about rhetoric in the ancient near east for my greek class. i finally went to bed around 5am to catch 2 hours of sleep before getting to class at 7:30. when i woke up at 7, i despaired: the wind howled, and the rain lashed against my window in a constant thumping staccato. on any other day, i would have immediately gone back to bed, thanking god for the rain. everyone knows, of course, that you’re not expected to go to class if it’s raining. however, friday was different, since i had to give a presentation in greek. so i got myself up and psyched for the long trek to the quad – just at, or over, a mile in distance. ...

you should all be very proud of me: today i skipped class for the first time. not that that itself is worthy of praise; rather, it’s the fact that i’m in my 6th week of instruction and haven’t yet skipped. a personal best, if not a straight-out world record. of course, since i fell, i fell hard, and skipped all three of my classes in favor of sleep, which is a beautiful and blessedly delicious way to skip. ...

i didn’t go to sleep last night. now that i think back on it, there really was absolutely no reason i needed to stay up. i pulled a meaningless all-nighter, with no work needing to be done and, accordingly, nothing to show for it. still, there is something fascinating about the hours between 3 and 5 am. i feel like, if any time is my time, that cold and pregnant third watch is mine. maybe it’s just that, since no other soul is awake then, i feel a legitimate and unchallenged monarch of that two-hour domain. i love the tension, the restlessness, the fear that if you drop off either something horrible will happen, or something amazingly beautiful will flicker briefly into being without consulting or notifying you, and then just as quickly disappear, all while your consciousness lays chained behind closed eyelids. there is no such a crisp, cold, and clear time as the dead of night just before dawn, and whenever i am awake during it i feel as if i might accidentally start an adventure. ...

i laid in the darkened room, eyes staring up at the ceiling. i was on my back, and the sound wafted in shimmering waves, alternatively of rain and moonlight, from the direction my head was pointing. the lights were off, but the blinds were open, allowing a ghostly pale yellow to filter in from the street lamps outside the apartment. the yellow carried enough photons to illuminate the white ceiling, and at the same time cause it to glow faintly at the edges; an optical illusion due to the surrounding darkness. ...

a horrible feeling sank down and hung on my shoulders today as i ate three reese’s peanut butter cups and three bite-size snicker bars in rapid succession. the feeling consisted mostly in the following thought: “there will come a day, self, when you won’t be able to do this anymore.” and it’s certainly true. sooner or later my insane metabolism will slow down, and bite-size chocolate will become bite-size fat, instead of whatever happens to it now. the only solution, in looking at almost all the middle-aged people i know, is to set good eating and exercise habits now. habits suck, though. the only thing i’m really in the habit of doing is having bad habits. so we’ll see. ...

and that, in fact, is why i took to inventing languages. words are not tired revisions used to form the same expressions, that, despite any significant emotional cause, export a mundane sense to the listener. (this, is, of course, why we have made the writer’s craft the way it is – to say something novel, rather, to say something in a novel and thereby more interesting/emotive way, we are forced to use already existing words while investing them with new meaning). no: new words are new. in creating a language i bring myself to a clean space, uncluttered by the gnarl of English; a space rather like a pristine snowscape. there is no need for devices like metaphor, because i can impute the full artistic meaning and emotion of my angst or joy in the words themselves. to me, this is power. i stand and survey my antarctic scene, devoid of everything save my own footprints, and unsullied by the mucking about of millions of other people who’ve forgotten what language is for. it is powerful because it is pure, a fresh start, an eden with all the potential beauty not yet crushed by brutal actuality. if i could, i would live there, and take that purity for my own cloak, leaving behind the sordid and mind-numbing particularism of the Present Age. i would speak new words in my language: the language of the Age to Come.