My instantaneous response was “DID YOU HYDROPLANE?”

But I couldn’t even finish the sentence, as tiny as it is, before I started laughing. I had accidentally conjured an absurdly powerful mental image of this tiny cute rainbooted woman walking across a puddle and suddenly veering out of control, only to find her face planted into a green railing. The image was so vivid that I couldn’t stop laughing, even when Shira replied with “Fuck you!” and returned to her spot in line.

As we walked out I tried to explain it but found that I couldn’t because I was literally crying. Once I finally got the words out I found that no one else thought it was even remotely funny, but that my crying and poor explanation was mildly entertaining. When we neared home Sunny and Jill split to take a different path, and Ben nearly ran into a green railing.

Rob really wanted to beat Jill and Sunny home, so we started running. As we neared the stairs of our rescollege Rob said “Oh shit, slippers…HYDROPLANE!”

We giggled.

YES, MORE WOMAN MUSE PLEASE.

This dream I had last night was remarkable. It was myself, Tristan, and Michael Offerman at a massive dance party. There were some other friends there, but I don’t remember their faces or names, just the feeling. The party had been going for some time when Tristan started to do the Reject. This was no ordinary Reject, though, and as he did it (the Reject is like a backwards Running Man dance move) he actually traveled backwards around the room. Soon he was Rejecting around like an Olympic speed skater, and Offerman and I decided it was high time we joined him.

We began Rejecting around until we caught up with him, and by this time had attracted some more dancers. We were all Rejecting in this giant circle around the circumference of the dance floor when a really absurdly awesome thing happened. Instead of simply doing the Reject in sync, we all sat on each others’ legs, forming this giant Rejecting train of perfectly synchronized people. Eventually the entire dance party joined in and we were one massive, human train of Rejection.

It was so absurd and beautiful that I woke up from it giggling.

For some reason I can’t embed it into the blog, so you’ll have to just follow the link. A bunch of dudes with paintball guns made a giant painting of Marilyn Monroe on a huge canvas in a matter of seconds. Very cool!

Now, in dissecting the workings of a rave or of a random dance party in general, there remains one question. What came first, the raver or the uhntz?

Looking back through our musical and cultural history, it becomes very clear that the raver was the first reagent of the fat dance party. Peasants in the middle ages are even painted doing what is now referred to as “the jerk,” a dance move recently resurrected by The New Boyz in which the dancer appears to run backwards.

A peasant undoubtedly 'Jerking' to his buddy's lute.

More importantly, it was recently discovered by Beethoven experts that his composition “Moonlight Sonata” originally contained an extended part for the organ that looks like an ancestor to the now ubiquitous raver bass. Beethoven scribbled it out, writing over it “until men hold fire, this shall not be!”

He must have had some understanding of the possible consequences of unleashing raver bass during his time period. To release the UHNTZ on the world when the world was not ripe enough for it would cause disaster; revolutions would take place, people would soon lose their morals, and children would begin procreating at the age of 7**.

How can I be so sure of these consequences? By looking at a historical example. In the quiet town of Pompeii in the year 79 AD, life was easy, beautiful, and satisfying. That is, until Vesuvius*** unleashed the largest bass-blasting UHNTZ of all time. The citizens were unable to control

A Pompeiian beatboxing to the UHNTZ of Vesuvius

themselves; they danced so hard that buildings around them burst into flames while they themselves danced into stone form. It is no real surprise, then, that we find the bodies of those who perished in Pompeii in curiously raver-esque positions.

Looking back at our findings, it is interesting to note that the raver was born of humanity and the UHNTZ of nature. The union of these inextricably linked reagents to a good dance party couldn’t be more telling of the human condition; we are, as we always have been, products of the earth. Our dance parties now include fancy and safe sound equipment, but it’s clear that it wasn’t always this way. Humans took to their UHNTZ loving parties wherever they could before the creation of the modern stereo system. It just so happens that the power of the UHNTZ has been watered down from its days as bass thrown from volcanoes, and as such no longer allows us to dance our cities to ruin or our fellow man to dust. Is it better this way?

I leave that discussion to the ravers.

*phat: an American redefining of a psychologically painful insult to make it nice, likely due to the weight problem and our wanting to feel okay about it.

Eww she’s fat.

becomes

Ooo. She’s phat!

**7: as noted by the popular folk-rap duo, Flight of the Conchords, this could result in a “crazy russian doll situation,” as your children’s children would be rather small, and smaller still as the uhntzing continued.

***Vesuvius: This volcano currently takes the cake for having the most people live around it. If it explodes any time soon, as it is likes to do, we can expect UHNTZing of a whole new level.

Gage the Cloud

Gage was the largest cloud-lion to ever exist.  He knew of clouds before him who turned to rabbits, snails, and roses, but never, ever, had there been a cloud quite like him.

His tail, a great wisp of cirrus, stretched across the sky to the horizon, catching hues of purple and red on its underside. His head, a great round cumulonimbus, showed his fierce blue eyes. Gage was a powerful cloud-beast. Once he had wispily blown into formation he wasted no time in claiming the sky as his natural territory.

Cloud-bunnies and mice came to fear him. His shadow marked the end of days for any that breezed by him, and it wasn’t rare for the mere mention of his name to cause the younger cloud-bunnies to precipitate.

But Gage’s reign over the sky would not be complete until he had bested the great cloud-eagle, Mona, in battle. He blew forth from the eastern horizon and approached Mona, her eyes crackling with lightning.

Gage’s mouth opened to reveal a pitch black swirl. His head flew back and he roared thunder. Mona, wings blocking out the sun, brought her talons close to her body where they began to funnel.

Gage knew the time was now; if he did not strike soon, Mona’s talons would shred his body, leaving him to drift to the earth as fog. If he wanted to have all of the sky as his own, he would need to move.

He lunged. Mona’s body gave way and, with a deafening boom, his head burst through to pure sunlight. Her wings had blotted out the sun for the past few weeks, and now, with this single act, Gage had restored light to his new dominion.

After absorbing Mona’s mist, Gage went about hunting down the nearest cloud-bunny. The bunny quivered and droplets began to fall from its back end.

Gage delighted in the fear he struck into those in his territory. He opened his mouth and lightning spilled out onto the poor bunny. In a few minutes Gage had entirely consumed the shaken beast, and his heart was now overcharged with energy. Gage felt he could take on anything and, for the first time, he looked down.

What he saw was a world full of movement. The ground below held tiny creatures that he could scarcely see, and only knew existed because of his run-ins with their metal birds. Gage could feel the power, the electricity, moving from place to place on the ground and he decided he had to have it. He decided that his dominion had to reach to the ground.

And so Gage descended. He swept through a city at dawn and covered the sun, as Mona had done. He got close enough to see the creatures, all of which had grown multicolored shields. He brought his claws down hard, but the creatures didn’t seem to mind. Their shields kept him from touching them, and they moved about as if he wasn’t even there.

Gage whipped himself into a rage. He began to howl, and his fur began to raise. He buffeted buildings and shields and tore branches from trees, but only had the energy to beat the ground for a few minutes. His hair kept raising until, with a fading roar, he realized what he had done.

Coming down to earth had sapped all of Gage’s strength. His limbs had become thin  around the edges and his body had been pressed flat against the city. Gage slowly began to fade.

Before the last cloud bank broke from his body, Gage cried on the people of the city; remembering how he once thought he could make them his, but could now only make them damp.

It also seems that a majority of these memories are of me nearly dying. I now watch them as a spectator, marveling at my stupidity and lack of fashion sense. One such story goes as follows –

My parents had a dinner party with a healthy number of guests and I, being an attention-whore, was dawdling around trying my damnedest to be cute. I was 8 (as I recall) and so rather strange looking and generally annoying. The semi-daily beatings from my brothers had not yet molded me into a proper human being, and my mother’s glares only served to annoy me. I had yet to connect with my father on a more adult level, and so lacked the capacity to absorb his good advice.

Compile all this and you wind up with a strange looking attention-whore renegade with a penchant for disregarding intelligence and wearing swishy pants (the button down kind that no one wore shorts under). I was a recipe for disaster.

My parents were chatting with their friends around a glass table out on the balcony. Years later the umbrella weighted through the center of the table would escape, shattering the glass top…but as of that moment the table was whole and the conversation was good.

I began to intrude in my usual way, being a clingly swishy-walking beast, when I decided it’d be cool to climb around the balcony’s edge. Below the balcony was a 20 foot drop complete with terraced gardens bordered by concrete retaining walls. My intelligence woefully suppressed, I made my way from a low drop height of four feet to a more opportunistic location, one which presented me with the option of a 20 foot fall.

Hand over hand I tooled around the edge of the balcony, smiling and making eyes at whomever I could. The climb was smooth until I grabbed a knob of post and, to my disbelief, it came away from its fastening. I was in such shock that I went mute as I tumbled twenty feet to the flower bed below, rebounding off a concrete wall in the process.

I landed with a THUD and air tried to get back into my lungs but found me too insolent of a boy to keep alive. I gasped and sat myself up. Moments later I began to sob uncontrollably and, as I climbed from the wreckage of the bed, I began to bleed.

I tore the majority of the skin from my left hip and right elbow. As I gimped up the stairs I bemoaned my situation as loudly as possible, baying like a cow and shooting liquid from my eyes like a bombardier beetle does from his ass.

I reached the top of the stairs to find that the dinner conversation had lazily moved forward and that no one took the time to notice this 8 year old’s research into the resilience of human skin.

Ego-slap aside, I clamored to the edge of the table where, to my dismay, my dad asked “What are you crying for?”

I explained to him that I was practicing my fucking gymnastics but couldn’t quite manage to stick the landing in the flowerbed.

Sarcasm aside, my parents took great care of me, and showed me the beauty of metaphors in the process.

All the attention whoring I had been doing left me covered in blood and dripping from most available orifices. I suppose it isn’t that different from legitimate whoring, only that I’d at least discovered the relative hardness of human skin.

Then again, perhaps that isn’t that different from legitimate whoring anyway.

“FUCK, MAKE SOMETHING!”

and it’s really starting to make me angry.

More than that, I think it’s making me sleep strangely. I now have class at either 11:30 or 1:00 in the afternoon, and so my sleeping schedule has moved forwards approximately 5 hours. I go to bed around 2 or 3, wake up at 11 or 12, and move on from there. However, I’ve noticed that I am almost impossible to pry out of bed before I absolutely must get out of bed. As a result, I’ve taken to staying up later to get work done, write, work out, etc., and so have continued the cycle.

The strangest thing, by far, is the fact that whenever I’m up at 2:00 in the AM and look at this box of sharpies in my second drawer, I end up writing all over myself. Sometimes it’s random thoughts, sometimes it’s quotes, sometimes it’s pieces of my poetry, written or unwritten. Tonight was especially bad, as I called in one of my friends to write a massive quote down my back and then continued, for about 45 minutes, to write many more on my left arm. I’m multicolored and full of language and I feel good.

But here’s my issue. I’ve been trying to write the archive for this book I want to write. By archive I mean backstory, history, etc., of the world and story I’m weaving. Besides a few brief moments, I haven’t been able to really explode all my thoughts onto paper. HOWEVER, I am frequently overtaken by the urge to write all over myself. Sometimes it’s weird stuff that I didn’t know I had on my mind.

Regardless, it’s really damn annoying that I can accidentally spend an hour tattooing myself with words but can’t find the ones to build a story with.

And I haven’t had any daydreams in a week. What in the hell is going on?

I took all my daydreams from the past week or so and stitched them together when I was high on stress at 2:00 in the morning. I rather like how it turned out, besides the painful part about hymens. There’s some additional formatting on it, but  it’ll do fine as is. ENJOY.

Light-Headed

Black blazer slack jeans purple collars and white shoes wear

the peach colored fabric of a boy with clammy hands

and a shaking right leg.

He has Asian glow growing before the door

Opens, despite his whiteness and sobriety.  A

poem nestles itself in his ear as he asks in a bouquet tone

what her favorite date is.

Imagination tumbles into vertigo and her lips part and whisper

“Thursdays in September.”

His heart tries skipping merrily but trips over a feeling, crashing

through his chest, grappling for reciprocation. Like a badly timed

high-five, it  looks cooly away and slicks back desire.

Reality punches a hole through his occipital lobe as the door

Opens in slow-motive. His heart reaches through its chest-tunnel and presses

the portal open.

Bathed in hormonal light, he sees her wade through the door

Way. He’s not listening now, but his eyes see her mouthing

“How are you?”

And the daydream punches through his face like a fighter

jet through a hymen. The mind tumbles in free fall, drifting through clouds

of imagery on its collision course with reality. Lips smother the sun; fingers burst through clouds; earth

shadows sky.

Finally the drift settles on a man diving from a ladder.

His purple collar rumpled and pressed to his neck with

invisible resistance and his eyes wild with sun, projecting

blue light. His target lay 15 feet down and 7 feet left; a woman,

dressed as sky, smiling to the sun and the man diving as starfall

toward her.

And the ground struck and the heart-shake was gripped by another and

he was once again aware that she was looking at him, still standing in the door

where she had been when his mind reeled-in the dreams she gave him. His heart stretched through the past to now and rappelled down his esophagus.

“You look…”

And her irises hit horizon and forever until he sat, cradled in their perfect curves and sinking

into the black hole at the center of his new universe, watching the flares of yellow and green become static.

The dream rushed from the base of his spine, a powerful violet light that did not pulsate but simply was,

and showed him an accidental future at a wedding of a friend. He met her there, instead of in this door, and fell to her eyes. They kissed, he blacked out, and awoke a day later with an IV in his arm and an understanding that he was allergic to a part of her. She had stabbed him with epinephrine twice. A violet rash the shape of Africa shadowed his belly, where two punctures seemed to orbit around his navel…

“beautiful.”

And his hand stretched this time, through the dream to her and touched just to

be sure he wouldn’t need to be stabbed twice and IV’d. Relief swept

the stairs free of leaves and they descended together. He didn’t know how

this would go but he had broken the door

So it couldn’t close easily and her fingers had woven into his and she said

“Aren’t you…”

but he heard nothing else as the violet swept his spine free of leaves and

they ascended together through the clouds he fell through and the sun she kissed

and the stars he had fallen and the crushing singularity they had gotten caught in and he

knew he would have to wait to find what she thought because feelings travel as light when first detected

and he may only find out after the blast but he didn’t care because he had opened the

door.

So, of course, when I moved in to my apartment in St Louis this past weekend, the first thing I thought about was getting access to the series of Tubes. Sadly, all of my neighbors are smart enough to use protected wireless networks, so I was forced to go to a Panera (called St Louis Bread Co here) to use order service. I checked out Charter, which had a great deal for the lowest end service, but the cost tripled for an upgrade, which I thought to be too ridiculous. AT&T was a better deal for faster Interwebs, and they had a deal online where if I bought phone and DSL service I would get a free modem plus $60 credit for my first three months of service. I figured I just wouldn’t bother getting the phone, and then would cancel that part after 3 months. Turns out things wouldn’t be so simple.

I finished my order online last Sunday, and went home thinking that I’d have a modem arriving on Thursday. Because I was a little skeptical about the website’s behavior, I decided to call the next day to make sure everything went through, even though I had printed confirmation of my order. The woman I talked to couldn’t find my information for a long time, and had to talk to a manager to get to it. She then informed me that, in fact, I had not ordered DSL at all and had ordered a different phone line than my confirmation said. I was a bit baffled, and had her redo the order. Since now the order was over the phone, I wouldn’t get the deals but I didn’t want to go through the hassle of starting the order over. She offered me a big coupon that would be similar to what I would have gotten, and said the service should still start on Thursday.

So then comes Thursday. I went to work, excited at the prospect of having access to the world when I got home. When I got back, my modem was nowhere to be seen but I had missed two calls from AT&T trying to install my phone line. This seemed promising, but the customer service woman had seemed pretty certain I’d be getting it my modem on Thursday as well. So I called again.

After one woman couldn’t find me in their system at all, another one eventually did after talking to a supervisor. I was informed that, again, I had  only ordered phone service and not DSL. I told her that I had printed confirmation from my first order and verbal, human confirmation from my second, that this simply  wasn’t true. She insisted it was, so I insisted that she just cancel my entire order and start over. She said that she couldn’t until the service started, and that it would have to be done via the phone they were supposed to install and that I didn’t want. When I asked if she was saying that I would have to purchase a phone, which I never intended to use again, just so I could cancel a service that I didn’t want and they were going to have to waste their time  installing just so I could cancel it, she talked to a manager and had them cancel the order. And we started over. The date was now set for next Wednesday.

Can you guess what came next? Half an hour later, around 7PM, there  was a knock on my door.

WTF

I knew what that was. And I was right. It was a modem.

So I received the modem that belonged to an order that ATT said I didn’t make, and on the day that I was supposed to receive it. So someone was wrong. At least once. Maybe twice. I’m still waiting to receive the next to modems…

So I called them again yesterday, explained that I received a modem anyway and that, firstly, I wanted to make sure I was only getting charged once and, secondly, asked if I could go ahead and start service that day since I had the modem. They said they still can’t start it until Wednesday.

WTF

But, she seemed optimistic that I wouldn’t get charged more than once and that I wouldn’t receive any more modems. I’m inclined to disagree with that optimism.

This past Wednesday (September 30th), UNIFI (the UNI Freethinkers and Inquirers) celebrated Blasphemy Day by sending out a horde of non-believers to cover UNI’s campus with sidewalk chalk depicting blasphemous images, jokes, and phrases. Here are some examples:

“You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.”

“Imagine no religion.” (With a picture of the World Trade Center towers beneath it)

“Why does Jesus get all the ladies? Because he’s hung like this!” (picture of Jesus hanging on a cross)

Some of the most controversial blasphemy simply read, “FUCK JESUS CHRIST” in all capital letters, written in high-traffic areas. Many of the chalkings were scuffed out, spit on, or washed off by the time the day was through. People showed up on campus to hand out Bibles, and a preacher appeared by the Maucker Union to give a public sermon. A group of 50-75 people congregated around the preacher, but their attention quickly turned away from him and to each other as they began to debate the limits of free speech. The group persisted for about seven hours, arguing about religion and censorship as they day pressed on. The day ultimately ended peacefully, and everyone who was on campus that day was unable to avoid the blasphemous messages written everywhere. And if someone by chance happened to miss the messages, you can be sure that they heard about them. It rained the next day, washing away all the chalk, leaving nothing but the memory of the event for people to roll around in their minds.

So what was the point? Why would UNIFI go out of its way to specifically write anti-religious slogans all over campus and cause a huge ruckus? In my mind, the ultimate objective of Blasphemy Day was to overstep the boundaries of free speech to demonstrate why it is important. Many people have commented, “Why didn’t you just write ‘Defend Free Speech’ all over campus?” My response is that writing something so vague and simple wouldn’t cause a reaction at all. Any person walking by would say, “Yes. I will defend free speech! I don’t want someone restricting what I want to say.”

However, on Blasphemy Day, many people were not in favor of free speech. In the discussions at the Union, many people made statements like, “I am in favor of free speech, but I don’t think you should be able to say that!” This statement is an opposition to free speech. Once a qualifying statement is added to the end of the sentence defining what you can and cannot say, it is no longer free speech. That is why UNIFI did not simply write “Defend free speech!” all over campus. Because everyone would have agreed, and no one would have understood.

Now, five days later, the dust is clearing, and we are all more able to look back on the event with calmer emotions. Ultimately I think that Blasphemy Day was a success. Sure, we offended a lot of people. But how those people reacted to their offense was what made Blasphemy Day a success. While some of them went out of their way to wash off our chalking and censor our message, others engaged us in discussion about the purpose of the event. The latter group are the ones who caused Blasphemy Day to be a success.

I personally had an experience where a Christian student approached me to talk about the chalking. He was so furious that he could hardly see straight, but we talked it over for a good 20 minutes, and by the end of the discussion, he had thanked me for being part of Blasphemy Day. The UNIFI president, Trevor Boeckmann, was coaxed into sitting down with a guy whose primary interest is mixed martial arts. The guy brought seven friends. After an hour of heated discussion, the guy apologized to Trevor for the way he reacted and for the things he had said about Blasphemy Day and about UNIFI over the past day. Many of us had experiences like this, where someone approached us angry and left thankful. Some people have accused UNIFI of using Blasphemy Day solely as an excuse to piss people off, but if that was the objective, we wouldn’t have stuck around to exchange ideas with people who disagreed with us.

We wanted to show people that free speech is what it is. You can’t decide what can or cannot be said, because you are not unbiased. Nobody is. Free speech is all or nothing, and my ability to blaspheme coexists with your ability to preach. If we restrict one, we must restrict both. And once we go down that road, we restrict the freedom of thought.

So now, looking back, I think we can all agree that Blasphemy Day was a bold move and a risky way to make a point. And while some people understood it at the end of the day and some didn’t, the point still reached those who were willing to listen.