Sadhu.

The razor-thin edge of forever.

Fri, 06 May 2005 03:11:33 GMT

I've been busy.

Today I took the AP Literature & Composition exam. With any luck, the person who grades my free-response essays will give me a thumbs-up, I'll score a 5, and I can take down nine credit hours at University of Iowa. Speaking of which, all of my UofIowa information is sent out, so I'll just find out now where I'll be placed in the dorms. I should see if there's a University of Iowa livejournal community. Maybe there'll be people I can meet through that who aren't freaks. Actually, I'm thinking about finding another blog source when I move out there.

Lit Mag work has stepped up in a major, major way. We have most of the submissions that we'll be taking. Which means my work will begin soon. And with my acting final finished last night (a scene from Whose Life Is It Anyway? memorized and performed in maybe a half hour, with some minor readthroughs previously. I'm on top of my game), I'm going to be shifting into cruise control for school for the rest of the year, minus my Drama 2 play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cap, gown, and tassel ordered. I've got to call off Honors Night and graduation with work. I've got a second job at Greenfield Village, or "The Henry Ford", as it's corporately-called. I need to get cracking on graduation party plans.

Last night was the Superintendant Honors Night, which I took Ms. Cookinham too. That was really nice. I was actually genuinely moved before I went on to speak about her. In an example of dramatic irony, my ex sat with Mr. Ikens across from me.

What else have I done since I haven't updated? Helluva lot, really. Saw Twelfth Night at Henry Ford Community College. Eh. Had some good stuff, some bad stuff. Lackluster performances. And in lackluster performances, we had Murder, You Must Be Kidding! at Edsel Ford that closed last Saturday. What a way to end my acting career at Edsel. You want to go out with a bang, a tremendous orchestration of lights and sound and action and what really happened is we went out with a fizzle. Like stale Coke that's passed its expiration date.

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. Look for more updates in the future in the bright, exciting world of Matt Nelson.

Maybe some good shit, too.

Sharing is caring, so here is my sharing.

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 06:38:16 GMT

At the time I'm writing this, my girlfriend feels like I slapped her in the face, my best friend is placing his faith in me that I care about him and that things will work out in the end. They're both right. And they both care about me, like a lot of other people I know. This is my sharing with you: I care.

I've decided to, money permitting, attend the University of Iowa, since the University of Michigan has denied my application. To be honest, I had nearly decided to attend Iowa even when Michigan wait-listed me. Why? Why uproot myself from my family, where I've really grown up, where I have so much invested, with the (let's be honest) most apt girlfriend I've ever had? Why leave the people who care?

Because I have to. This is dynamic change, the difference between static and dynamic development. No road trip will change me like this can. I need to uproot to re-plant, to stretch out my roots to seize earth and pull sustenance to myself. I need to jump into the deep dark pool, right into the deep end, absolutely none of that shallow end bullshit. It's half to see if I can. I'm scared. I'm pissing scared, but that's why I have to go. I have to go because I'm scared. That urge that we high schoolers feel, that wanderlust, it's just an expression of that dynamic change we have to experience. This is the time in our lives when we need to shake it up, to fuck it up, to twist it, bend it, stretch it, break it. If we don't move now, when the spirit moves us, when else are we going to? We aren't. Shaking and breaking gets harder the older you get. I'm not obsessed with leaving. That's just symptomatic. "I gotta get away!" isn't so much an angry and upset declaration of intentions but instead a plea. "Change me!" I say. "Make me different than I was."

If I don't do this now I don't think I ever will. If I don't do this, I don't think my life will ever turn out the way I hope it to.

If you're on my friends list, I care about you. Even some people who aren't; I still care. What you must understand is that I don't do this and I can't do this for you. I'd love your support. But I'm making this decision and I stand behind it. Our relationship can survive, you just need to have faith. I think I have so much faith that it allows me to not talk to people and then see them four months later and not a day could have passed, we'll still act the same. So much faith. I have faith in you, friends, so have faith in me.

"Everything gets better. It always does." I said that a long time ago. I should've said everything changes. It does. The best way to survive is to accept that change. Then ride the surf in the deep end.

It's final.

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 22:09:06 GMT

The University of Michigan denied my application.

So I'm going to Iowa in August. To prove to those fucking gold and blue bastards that they were wrong about me. If I can scrounge up enough money from FAFSA and student loans. And as soon as I get out there I need to declare myself independent and find a place to live so I can become an Iowa resident.

Fuck you all. There might be a time to swallow my pride but this isn't the time.

You wanna get knocked down? Step up.

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 02:21:37 GMT

Installed: one locking doorknob with three keys.

Location installed: my room.

Location secured: my room.

No more thievery, no more bullshit, and most of all, nothing else of mine will be ruined. As of this moment, I don't cover any more late entrances, I don't let anything else be borrowed, and I don't defend any more. This was the final straw that made me yell like I've never yelled before, over an over-priced Tim Burton book of illustrated poetry.

I can breath a sigh of relief now.

Oh, and don't start drama, either, because comment posting on this entry is gone.

The story so far.

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 04:54:41 GMT

I'm falling deeper in love with adolescent power fantasies the closer I draw to the most dead environment I've ever felt in my life: adulthood. I fear sex. I hate money, passionately, and everything it represents. I hate those symbols of everything that I don't - and probably never will - have: SUVs, a big home in the suburbs, and a soft desk job I can come home from on the weekends and watch television and be content.

I'm not content.

I'm not happy.

I want to punish the world. It all goes back to these twin-side mythologies I've erected for myself: I am Atlas, holding the weight of the world on my shoulders/I am Jacob, demanding God's due to me because motherfucker, you better pay up and you owe me. I mutter softly that I am Oppenheimer, I have become Death; I control it and I will sic it on you until you are as softly dead as I am and I feel.

This is Che Guevara speaking, and here's a secret for you, my little revolutionaries: they have nothing on us. Nothing but weight held over our helds, power that we give them. Power comes from the barrel of a gun, but it also comes from our tacit weakness. The way we drop our heads like lambs at their threats. You know, the thing that I hate more than anything from my parents is the way they hold the debts I owe over my head like their roof, like its their way of controlling me. So fuck the debts, fuck whatever anyone holds over you. You don't need that. I don't need your mortgage, your credit cards, your fucking cable television. I don't need your car payments, your insurance, your fucking loans.

I don't want them. Fuck you.

It's Che here, again: join me, revolutionaries. Like any introspective moment, this just explains to me the deeper appeal of other things. I know why Jack Kerouac traveled on the road. I know why Allen Ginsberg did drugs. That's freedom from these motherfuckers with their fucking fuck attitudes. Stop letting the power-hungry fucks, those bastards in middle management, those small people with control issues from letting you live. You give them power and they'll hold it over you. So smash their institutions and their jaws. Smash their laws and their legs. Smash them into smooth pulp that you grind underneath the treads of your "shitty" car because we are the fucking revolutionaries, my friend.

Don't fuck with us; we'll burn you, motherfucker.

Here's how it goes.

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:27:23 GMT

I meander. I wander. But I never wander to some place that I haven't been before. Like a dog returns to its own shit to nuzzle its nose in the feces that are there, I return to what I've seen, read, or done before. I visit the same websites every day. I drive to the same places every day. I do the same things every weekend. I'm in a rut, and I'm nearly nineteen.

I figured it would be different, but I didn't expect things to be this way. I don't know what I thought they were going to be, but I thought I knew what they wouldn't be. And isn't that the crux of the whole wondering-about-the-future that everyone feels? "I didn't know what it would be, but I knew what it wouldn't be." Yet how we expect things to not be, they are. I'm bound by what I have said, or have done. Everybody knows me. Or has an impression of me, taken from what they choose to remember about me, that leads them to believe they know me. I feel choked by this knowledge of me. I feel choked by the intimacy of it all. I always have. I feel choked by my race, my culture, my beliefs, my knowledge. I feel choked by my own average-ness. Which is a fundamental problem with myself I've never been able to get over. No matter the situation in my life, from the play to my girlfriend; these people know me. And I can't shake this feeling that I'm leaving something left undone. I can't shake the feeling that I'm dying and all these things are left undone, unsaid. The anger of it fills me with rage and I would go in, striking down all those that oppose me, taking them up by their shirts and telling them Yes! You will listen now! What you thought you knew before was wrong, this is how I am! and then I will point to something and I shall be as that thing is. Indulge in that fantasy, where you have absolute control and you are God and no one speaks against you. Control is what we want, motivated by fear. From a pessimist's viewpoint, it's what has motivated us to conquer this planet. It's in the lines of a Radiohead song. It's in the movie Fight Club, when your word is law and not even someone breaking that law can piss you off.

I think that's why we try drugs, and sex, and alcohol. We lose control, and that's the greatest thrill ride ever.

I get called a nice guy, but just for the record; I'm really an asshole.

This is a Debbie Downer post, I know. But it's the best way I have to expunge my thoughts. To wipe off the dust on this graying volume, spread the spine gently and read a few pages, get some new material out there.

EDIT:

So what do I do? Set my course for the University of Iowa. When in doubt, always choose the path that will seem to shake things up the most.

The rules of the Internet.

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 05:30:33 GMT

The closer a website is to being totally devoted to movies, music, games, or other hallmarks of nerd obsession, the greater waste of time their message boards are, and by and large, the people that frequent those message boards are getting up in arms about pointless bullshit.

In other news, it's getting warmer outside, which means that it's time to bust out the New Found Glory and Fallout Boy and blow out the speakers in my car.

Harlan Ellison is the Second Coming.

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 03:35:18 GMT

A short little cocky bastard is what Harlan Ellison is. And one of the greatest writers - not an author, no, he is not merely an author - I have ever read. And it's not just because of what he's written, because what he has written is phenomenal. It's what he says.

He's egotistical.

He's cocky.

He's so fucking sure of himself.

And I respect him immensely for that.

Read any of his essays and you'll see this cocky little bastard pounding away at typewriter keys before we had these fucking computers, with their goddamn Internet (bless you, my companion and source that I will use and make my bitch in years to come, I swear) and instant messaging and cell phones and where have the horse-drawn buggies went, I wonder? and Harlan Ellison was writing before my parents were born and he is a god. He is a titan. He's the James Dean of the type-writer; so fucking cool and he knows it.

Worship Harlan Ellison, my friends. Here was a man who said "this is what a Writer is: me."

What a fucking prick. I salute you, sir.

You and I.

You and me.

The both of us writers.

I'll talk to you.

You talk to me.

I'll understand you, and you'll understand me.

We're the blessed ones. We're the damned ones. We're the ones who can do one thing in this world but oh God how well we do it! We can write.

Talk to me.

- Harlan Ellison

Re-christening a classic.

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 06:33:03 GMT

In light of recent events, along with both Reese (clairese) and Jen (pinkgraffiti) saying my car's name of "Cosette" is a bad Les Miserables reference, I've re-dubbed the Bitch "Fantine." Now it's more fitting, no more questions about a Victor Hugo novel, and "Fantine" is a bit easier to say than "Cosette."

Tagline: The French Whore Who Does it More.

Guess what I did.

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 03:54:53 GMT

I am a curling iron.

I am the artist who overdoes his graffiti.

And everyone knows.

Motor City Mayhem.

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 03:56:41 GMT

Being a local Detroit suburb resident, I never visit Detroit. Which is kind of regrettable, because there's such things as the Detroit Institute of Arts, Wayne State University, the Fisher Building, the Fox Theatre, gunnings at Hart Plaza, the filthy Detroit River . . .

Oh yeah, I went there. And it was awesome.

For my second date with Jenny, I prepared two things: one, a map to Campus Martius park so we could go ice skating, and two, a map from Campus Martius to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Why these locations? Because I'm an old-school dating kind of guy, plus it beat the hell out of bowling (for the time being). Being an Edsel Ford humanities alumnus, I would also be able to give her a specialized tour of the DIA using terms such as line, color, texture, unity, and other such keywords drilled into my brain through hours of studying Van Gogh, cathedrals, and the color red.

The day started off well, with a good shave of the beard that had plagued me like a homeless man looking for change. (The analogy is quite appropriate, you see, when writing about Detroit.) But there were important items that I brought with me were the maps of Detroit I picked up from AAA the day before, and the fuel injector/carburetor cleaner that I put in my car when I filled up - also the day before - to prevent the condition that plagues Cosette [my car's name, and there's a reason for it if you want to ask]: that is, stalling. First off, it didn't work, and secondly, the maps were never used. Why? Because, as I posted below, I have the directional sense of a homing pigeon, even though I'm pretty sure I've never been to Campus Martius Park in my life. For the actual route to Campus Martius, however, I went on Yahoo! and went to their map engine, which I've always found to be more reliable than Mapquest. But you know those little reminders at the bottom of those maps, in bold print - or they should be - about how you should always check your route, because of road construction? That applies doubly in Michigan. The route said to get on I-94 and take it down into Detroit, and follow it from there on some street, perhaps Rose Parks Boulevard. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Because every single exit to eastbound I-94 was closed.

Did I mention that Jenny lives right by Ford Rd., which actually becomes I-94? I didn't mention it at the time, but she did. Repeatedly.

So I drive all the way into Detroit solely on Michigan Avenue, just figuring I'll wing it until I have to bust out the maps and hope I don't get lost in Detroit, that Jenny wouldn't get raped, and that I wouldn't lose the fifty bucks or so I had in my wallet to serial killers/rapists/gangsters in Detroit. I mean, they wouldn't do that to a white kid in a thirteen-year-old semi-compact four-cylinder slightly-rusted sedan, would they?

They didn't.

Because I saw the aforementioned Rose Parks Blvd., and said "hey, this is on the directions, right? Right? Okay, we're turning here." What followed was a quick trip up to Cobo Center, around the Detroit River, up and down and in and out of a couple parking lots before I noticed the intersection that was exactly where we were supposed to be on the map. "Get out of the car," I said.

"Okay," was all Jenny said. She had no idea of the adventure that lay in store. Until I told her.

"What!?"

"Yeah, we're going ice skating."

"But . . . but . . . I haven't ice skated in like, thirteen years!"

"So?"

"So I don't want to embarrass myself."

Yeah, she's one of those. But it's okay, because it was the wrong park.

Of course, though Jenny had no idea of the adventure that lay in store for her, I had no idea of the adventure that lay in store for us; that we would run into Stephen Taylor-Weir (stevetw103) and Joe Wakefield (snipoless) filming their student video Exposing Joe downtown, on this very day of break. Damn good thing too, because it made up for the refusal of Jenny to actually do anything fun very nicely. (I say this because she reads it, and she will love me for how much I tease her.) So they say hello and ask us if we would want to be in their little production. Sure, I say. Okay, they say, you go over there and stand, then we'll come up to you and talk to you. Okay, me and Jenny said. We walked. They came over and walked. We talked. For an uncomfortable long time. I think me and Jenny made a good couple lost and looking for the People Mover, the monorail in Detroit. Which, coincidentally, was about three hundred feet away. Then we walked towards the camera, being VERY VERY CAREFUL TO NOT LOOK AT IT DO NOT LOOK AT THE CAMERA MMMKAY hey jenny take a look at the camera don't ruin the illusion.

After this, we walked down to the edge of the Detroit river, where I stood on a wall and looked at Canada. The ice was lying on the surface, everything was cold, but the sun was out, so it was all warm, and bright. So bright it hurt. After looking for a couple minutes I hopped down, realizing that I could very easily slip on this icy wall and fall, break my neck or back or other bony body part and cut our adventure short. If I had fallen, though, I could've easily been back at Henry Ford Hospital down-town, and I knew everyone there already.

We walked back to my car, arm in arm, "Like a couple in the olden days of Detroit."

"What?"

"You know, like those old movies and stuff."

We got in my car, and after a quick trip around in a circle to get on the right road, I fervently hoped, that would lead us to the DIA (Woodward), we cruise down for awhile. So much of "awhile" that I thought I was on the wrong road, but all maps said that I was heading in the right direction. Then, after a quick jaunt around, looking for a place to park, we parked in the underground garage of the DIA. Realize also, my friends, that my car stalled three or four times in the journey from Campus Martius and was on the verge of it a couple times on the way down to the DIA. So we parked and prepared for the main jaunt.

The last time I had been to the DIA, it was about this time last year, and much more of it was open. The whole modernist exhibits, which I had wanted to see so badly since I hadn't seen much of them before, were closed. What was left was an exhibit on glass-works. Which, in all our beauty, me and Jen got to see for free. The Murano Glass Exhibit was cool. We plotted what items we would steal for our living room, what would go on our coffee table, and which ones we simply liked. Conversation was like this:

Matt: "Now that looks cool.

Jenny: "Mmmm. (She nods)"

Matt: "We should totally steal that, that'd be something you put in your living room, huh?"

Jenny: ". . . yup . . . "

Of course, before we went on the glass exhibit, we swung by the Native American art room about five times in our circuitous course through the building. The overall re-design that they've done there I didn't like; they seemed to group the paintings by idea as opposed to artist or time period. And they had closed the basement print exhibit, which was one I had really enjoyed as I enjoyed printmaking and my interest in printing has grown as I've explored comic books and commercial graphic art more. After a couple hours walking around the DIA, I drove us back to my house, where we watched Tobey Maguire get the shit kicked out of him in Spider-man. I don't think Jenny caught much of what was going on, since a half-hour after we got to my house everyone else in my family came home from shopping and music lessons. And my family's puppy Java just wouldn't stop licking the hell out of both of us. The motif of not-catching-what's-going-on-in-the-movie has become a constant whenever me and Jenny hang out now.

So I drove her home and dropped her off and she wasn't chewing any gum.

Gems and gold mines.

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 18:48:19 GMT

Since we had a blessed snow-day today, I took the time to browse through some of the comics on the DVD that my chum in Britain sent me. Today my selection was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Fucking good read.

The more I read and study art, the more conscious I am of the artistic decisions we make every day, and how art, really good art, is just a sublimation and concentration of good decision making. Which is serving as a huge support on my new project, a four-page introduction "issue"-lite that I'm intending to package in the Lit Mag for this spring. And, with any luck, hard work, and good karma, I can keep working on with Caleb (mencheal), who's going to sketch the initial drawings for what I've tentatively titled "Babylon".

The hard part is just taking the pre-writing and conceptualizing I've already done and transforming it into a scripted medium, which has been difficult but I'm starting to gain a better grasp of how to write a comic book script to convey what moods I want. In a way, it's easier to write straight abstract words than it is to use a comic book as my medium for the ideas I have, but comic books also have more potential for what I want expressed than straight writing. I think the medium would be more readily acceptable to the ideas I have right now. And it's a different palette to draw from than just straight words.

Best thing I've done in the past year, literarily, has been to get into Dave Eggers and comic books.

Paranoid egotist.

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 19:43:19 GMT

Is it natural to assume that people reference a teenager, or keep things a secret from me, that it's about me? I don't think it is. I'm going to commit cardinal Internet sins now: I'm going to self-psycho-analyze myself, self-diagnose, and claim that I'm mentally disturbed. It's either paranoia, egotism, or a mix of the both. I wonder whether people keep me around sometimes as a mirror for themselves.

I read over my livejournal today and I sound like a solipsistic Debbie Downer, about 95% of the time. Whenever I get philosophical. So I'm going to try and change that a little. Because that's what my old livejournal was all about and that was a failure.

Break open the fortune cookie of random tales:

I'm a big fan of used bookstores. Cheap books at minimal prices, plus you can find some absolutely great, off-the-wall material. Such as today. On a quick jaunt to Rodegher's Used Book Store, just before the corner of Telegraph and Michigan Avenue, I found The Penguin Book of Limericks. And what, honestly, is not good about limericks? Here's one that kept Cal quite entertained:

There once was a man named Seamus
Who did things considered most heinous
He'd rummage around
and then he would pound
All manners of things into his anus.

I think Renaissance this year needs a page of limericks. Edsel kids, start writing, and the bawdier, the better.

That's all the fortune cookie had.

Forthcoming: adventures in Detroit with ~~Jenny~~ Jen.

This just in.

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 23:02:36 GMT

I have the directional sense of a homing pigeon. My driving technique is unstoppable.

And my call-sign? Ask for Maverick.

Dearborn, Michigan, you have no taste.

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:33:13 GMT

Borders is such a fascinating place to be. No matter what time of the day, there is always at least ten people in the store. One person is slack-jawed by the magazines, flipping through something with the same expression that they would have during the Superbowl. Another, a wrinkled old woman, is checking out three for two Chick Lit books, cranked out in a paint-by-numbers scheme of authorship. I suspect that most of these books aren't even written by the same person, but I'm not going to waste my time or money trying to find out. I'm snobby that way.

The graphic novels section is usually the section I go to first. Walk in, and to the left is the best and worst section of the store: thillers, mysteries, horror, graphic novels, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and westerns. It's the genre part of the store, arranged by section and author. It's also one of the most disorganized sections in the store, only behind the family section and the far wall where everything related to drawing and photography is slapped together, right next to the journalism and movie books section. Graphic novels are where I go first, to browse for a good fifteen minutes. I don't usually find anything I want, and you wouldn't find me reading the anime or manga there, ever. American anime has turned me off to it forever, and I would never abandon the wonderful work of Alex Ross or Mike Mignola for big cutesy eyes and softcore (or hardcore tentacle) porn.

After the graphic novels have been done and browsed, I move on to the science fiction and fantasy areas. I look over titles of books I've been recommended, decide to buy them, decide not to, decide that I really should check them out, but there was always that Steinbeck non-fiction I wanted to actually buy and own, or I should check out Hunter S. Thompson's Songs of the Doomed in reflection of his recent death, and what about the last graphic novel of Hellboy?

I need a job there just for the discount alone.

And there would be the perk of never having to be told that I "smell like food" after I come off work.

Before I leave the store, I go over the magazines and comics section. I never read the comics; I'd rather support Green Brain Comics in east Dearborn than Borders' pathetic selection, but Borders does carry various quarterly literary magazines, such as the Paris Review or University of Michigan's Michigan Review. Today as I browsed, flipping past issues of Poets and Writers with generically, well-dressed authors - why are writers well-dressed? I saw Sideways last weekend and a writer in it asks his friend what he should wear. His friend replies "Something nice, but casual. You're a writer." Why are writers well-dressed? What is this myth of business casual? We're poor. We skip meals to save money and buy more books, more little words that we can have and hold, cherish and adore - the quick, efficient employee above me was flipping magazines into the shelves. I paused for a moment, making sure I had eliminated any possibility of there being a rogue issue of McSweeney's in the mess of magazines under the "Literature/Writing" category.

"Hey, do you have any issues of McSweeney's in here?" I asked.

He kept sorting magazines like they were bullets shot out of a gun. "No, I don't carry them. They would just sit on the shelf so I just stopped ordering them."

McSweeney's!? Sit on a shelf? I paused for a moment.

"Okay, thanks," I said.

Dearborn, Michigan, you have no taste. This is a cultural indictment that you do not appreciate good, clever, and pretentious literature. This is an indictment of Borders, too.

Your shelves are fucking atrocious.

Riddle me this, riddle me that!

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 04:31:15 GMT

Why is it that when I search file-sharing for "Hellboy" audio MP3s, I get hits for Jessica Simpson and Nelly? Can you explain that, you kings and queens of ceiling wax and cabbages?

One moment more.

Sun, 13 Feb 2005 06:26:53 GMT

We closed Cinderella tonight. What follows are blurbs. Snippets. Tiny moments that I remember.

"Beth is a liar."

In the production run of Cinderella, we had three cast members that weren't in high school. One of them was my younger brother Derek, who didn't end up performing the show on the stage. The other two were fourth-graders from one of the local elementary schools. TJ was the younger brother of Nicole, one of the assistants to the show. Clare was a girl who had once sang with the high school chorus for a song - "One Small Voice" - which featured a child singer. While TJ was a terror, talking with Clare was incredible. Clare came up to me as I sat in the choir room, and says in the most plainly innocent voice I've ever heard in my life, "Beth is a liar."

I paused for a moment. "What?"

"Beth is a liar."

"Why?"

"Because she's spreading rumors that aren't true."

Clare went on to tell me that Beth had told TJ that Clare had a crush on him. Which, as far as I couldn't tell, wasn't true. But the important thing to Clare was that it wasn't true. She neither condemned nor condoned Beth for it. To her, stating that Beth was a liar was simple truth: she had said something that was not true, therefore she was a liar. I kept talking to Clare. She was refreshing in a way that most high schoolers aren't. She had no preconceived notions, no prejudices. A pure mind. There's the story of a woman who saw a chair floating and promptly fainted, while her son eating breakfast at the table didn't blink an eyelash. The simple acceptance of the way things are coupled with a fresh perspective made Clare one of the most endearing members of the cast.

We're #1! We're #1!

Heckling the non-theatre veterans of the cast was a popular pastime for us old-school kids. Jeff, our Prince, it could be said with only slight exaggeration, has barely said more words in his life than I've said on the Edsel stage. Jasmine, our slight Cinderella, was only in her second production, after having a silent role in our previous musical Bye Bye Birdie. One day, in rehearsal, Jasmine asks me, "Have you seen my script?"

"Your script?"

"Yeah, the one with the #1 written on it."

"Oh, so you think you're #1 now?"

Thus began three weeks of calling her #1, bowing to her, looking away or covering our eyes in fear of her. Caleb and Brian picked it up, and after she got the #1 microphone system, we mercilessly dubbed her with a moniker that will endure until we all graduate. Which gives her another year, if she sticks around and does drama. Before this, she did cheerleading as an after-school extra-curricular.

I think I can speak for every single drama member when I say that drama is twenty times better than cheerleading.

The cast party that filled my house.

Normally, after we close a production, the cast and crew goes out to Cosmic Bowling or the like at a local bowling lane. But since we moved the opening show times to 7 o'clock as opposed to 7:30, we get out sooner. Nobody bothers to wait around; we all want to do something after a show closes. There's an empty feeling in the pit of your stomach when a show you loved is over, and hurling a heavy ball down polished wooden slats seems to fill the abyss. Until I decided that this time, since we don't do bowling any more, we were having a cast party at my house.

Who to invite?

I decided everyone.

And to get my hands on a copy of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

What ensued was something akin to the search in Fear and Loathing Las Vegas for ether and drugs, for the psychidelic trip that is The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Most of the cast were Rocky Horror virgins. It was time for a besmirching. A de-flowering. A mass extravaganza of cherry-popping that can only happen when you pack some forty kids or more into one room watching Tim Curry prance about in fishnets, caressing a blonde male model's legs. I text-messaged Kira to see if I could borrow her copy, but I never knew if she was around for me to swing by and pick it up. We entered bat-country though when the directors and pit orchestra conductor said they were coming by. Authority figures I don't generally have a problem with, depending on who they are, but these were going to cramp our debauchery style. They would bring us down from our lustful orgy of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon.

We waited until they left, and everyone spent an hour gorging themselves on the excellent taco and artichoke/jalapeno cheese dip my mother prepared, as well as the copious amounts of food and drink that were given to me from the concession stand from the director, before the fun began. For the next 100 minutes, "slut" and "asshole" were murmered, shouts of "WHERE'S YOUR NECK?" peppered the air.

As the elevator lowered, the bass began, the drums kicked in, and the glittering heels of Tim Curry tapped, Brian Cameron (eldiablo413) shouted "Guys, this is Matt Nelson." And I sang along to "Sweet Transvestite".

Homo mix v. 2.0.

Last production (Night of January 16th by Ayn Rand) I had said that I was going to burn a CD featuring songs from the 1930s, a compilation to take us back in time while we got ready for the show. Thanks to a poorly-timed computer crash (is there a well-timed crash?) I lost all the files I was working on for the show. This time, however, I swore to myself that we would have a CD for this show. And since it was a musical, big and over-the-top and extreme, we were going to have a dance CD. And not just any dance CD. A dance CD that transcended heterosexuality and especially homosexuality to be a marvel of compilation CDs.

What emerged was the Homo-Mix. Titled after the addition of "Funkytown" by Lipps, Inc. You had the classic Haddaway "What is Love", ideal for me and Caleb (mencheal) or me and Brian to capture a girl in and hump the hell out of her. And since me and Brian were wearing tights for the production, it provided us the perfect opportunity whenever the girls stopped in the men's dressing room to do their make-up to attack them with all the pelvic fury we could muster. Began with the "YMCA" by the Village People and crossed to the other end of the sexuality scale when it ended on "Shake Ya Tailfeather" by Nelly. We humped and grinded to the CD for several hours worth of before-show prepping of make-up and costuming, sometimes with the girls, sometimes with each other. But aren't we all drama fags?

The second CD I burned was "Head-banging Hair Band Heaven", featuring all the kitschy bands you've heard before: Journey, Motley Crue, Warrant. I feel an appreciation for kitsch is important to have. We all need guilty, pretentious pleasures. There's something perversely pleasurable in singing along with Sebastien Bach of Skid Row. I worked at it late Thursday night, after we opened Cinderella to a good audience. I don't know if it was much of a hit with the other male members of the cast and the few women who shared our dressing room with us, but everyone needs a little Def Leppard, every now and then. It was also during the providential order of tracks that we found that the drum beat in KISS's "Rock and Roll All Nite Long" was the same as Quiet Riot's "Cum On Feel The Noize." Furthermore, can you tell me honestly that a band with the song titled "Cum On Feel the Noize" isn't worthy of your artistic appreciation?

Adventures with Viscomi.

Saturday matinees are the bane of an actor's career. It's the worst time of the day for a show and usually has a low-turnout. Now, in a movie theatre, this isn't a big deal. There's no interaction, no feedback. But on stage, if it's a slow day, the audience feels it and so do we, and it's that much harder to present something energized. For that reason, I think that The Rocky Horror Picture Show must be such an incredible show to perform because the audience is into it a frenetical level that you never see in other shows. Of course, Greg Viscomi, the drama director over at Dearborn High (Edsel's greatest competition) came on Saturday's matinee.

Greatest thing that could've happened.

To explain: Viscomi is a theatre freak of the highest degree. He believes in the superstitions, such as the Macbeth curse, i.e.: you're not allowed to say "Macbeth" in a theatre. It's just not allowed. It's bad luck. To break the spell, you have to recite a monologue from another Shakespearean play, walk outside the theatre, spin around in a circle three times or some gibberish like that and asked to be let back into the theatre. He's also an excellent director who runs a tight ship, and though his ego is titanic I respect him immensely. To have him in the audience in front of me pushed me to be a little bit better and work a little harder to wring laughter out of the audience. (And yes, in Saturday matinees, you wring until they're dead and limp.) After curtain call I saw him chatting with Ms. Hurst, our director, and I went up to say hello. I'm a bit of an oddball, I think, among the drama and music circles. I don't view the arts as competition. Although a healthy level of competition between people pushes them to do a little bit better. I want to see more people in the drama circles meet up and know each other. The best thing that could happen to the drama departments at all the schools would be for a huge party to be thrown wherein all the high school actors in Dearborn (and recent alumni) get together and just get to know each other. We love to perform with and out-perform people we compete with. But we also love to perform for our friends, and I don't think that it is a bad thing to be friends with Fordson's drama department or Divine Child's.

But I digress. Viscomi said he really enjoyed my performance of the King. And the Lord God spoke from on High saying "Lo, this was cool, and all that followed was cool, including the potluck where Matthew ate most egregiously." Dictionary, for those that need it.

The Meredith Monologues.

After the show was initially cast, nearly everyone was pissed with the cast list, for one reason or another. As soon as cast lists are posted, you see the worst of people, nearly immediately. It can be the highest or the lowest point of an actor's career at a theatre. When I was cast as Dracula, people said I was beaming. When I was cast as the King in Cinderella, I felt only sick to my stomach. I couldn't leave Edsel fast enough. I said nothing to anyone else, really, until I got out to the parking lot, where I cursed the show and the cast list and Mr. Olsen and anyone that was responsible for me not getting the lead male role. I bitched with Mary (wizardvash735) and Caleb in the parking lot, then got home and was treated to Meredith (raspberry28) instant-messaging me with a hearty "WTF?"

I don't really talk to her any more. I don't think anyone can blame me; we're both better apart. I think that's a mark of maturity, even more than getting over your past destructive relationship with a person. You can put lots of things behind you. We all do. It can be easy to forget. It can be easy to go back to the brick wall you bashed and spilled yourself on so many times before. But it's a lot harder to stay away from it. Especially when every day that wall tempts you to bash and spill yourself upon it again.

However, past history can't be an issue in theatre productions. It's unprofessional. As unprofessional as someone telling people not to come see a show because the actor involved thinks its going to be bad. And past history is all that we could bring to the role of being the King and Queen. Mrs. Bailey remarked to Evan, one of the members of the pyramid (now a triangle), that me and Meredith had good chemistry, but quantified it by saying that off the stage we were like cats and dogs. I don't know if that's the right analogy. Cats and dogs can get along. Maybe they just don't fit. So maybe that is the right analogy. All I know is that although we agreed we were going to steal the show, we didn't. I wanted so badly to dance on my last jaunt on the Edsel stage, and we didn't. I loathed the choreography on the only song we had, but had nothing better. (Not that I tried, either, when I noticed she wasn't.) We didn't steal the show. We waltzed through it without waltzing. In a way, it was the perfect motif to be one of the enders of my senior year. A lot of pain and anguish that I'll try to forget and leave behind, ultimately unfulfilling and enraging. Me and her are a microcosm of my high school experience, summed up and packaged neatly to be tossed away as best I can, in just four short months.

Two quotes and an idea.

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 16:11:03 GMT

Thom Yorke: "dont get sentimental, it always ends up drivel".
Holden: "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

Stand still for a moment. Wherever you are. Feel every single motion of air, each sound, and fathom that there are millions of people the world over, breathing and feeling just as you do. Feel the touch of nothingness. Know that you are influenced by my words, and I by yours. The slightest tremble of the branches on the trees stirs an artist to paint a poem before killing himself.

"You may be able to buy this world," he said, "but my words can still destroy it." Words. Think about words. Verdant. That word is green. Say it, roll it on the tip of your tongue, in your mind. It's green, it is uniquely the colour green. It brings to mind the abstract concept, unquantifiable, of green. Urine is yellow, antiseptic. Piss is what we do in dark alleys. Life is full, for a four-letter word. And word, oh word, you are Oppenheimer.

The way to live is to be nonexistent. You are at the glorious mercy of thousands of things. You cannot comprehend this. Don't even try. Just let life be, and let yourself lie, and you'll paint a tree that stands tall or a desk that takes the pounding of a revolution. Let go of everything as it comes and absorb it into you. Let your experience pass through you and weave into the core of your being.

Call me "Atlas."

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 03:36:58 GMT

I'm tired. And I hate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. aka entropy.

The entropy of Cinderella is exhausting me, and no matter what I do, I can't stop it. I can't reverse it. I can't kick the ass of the fifth kid in the town hall scene to get them moving. I can't list the "I can'ts" because I'm too tired and I know it's going to wear me down even more than I am.

I'm sorry I can't work with Meredith.
I'm sorry I can't keep everyone energized.
I'm sorry I goof off too much.
I'm sorry that this show is not the best that we will put on.

But that doesn't mean I want to talk it down. I heard that someone was talking down our show, and I was pissed. Why the fuck would you want to do that, I ask myself? Why? Don't tell people not to come to the show. Yes, we all have our misgivings about one thing or another. But to deliberately sabotage it is unprofessional, and immature. I'm tired of immaturity, in myself or others.

I want people to see the art in what we're doing. And I don't know how to make them see that. Is it possible to transcend our collective egoes for one project, a unified vision on that stage, that will be the best with what it has? Drama isn't just an after-school activity. Why not let ourselves be something magnificent? Why not work hard for it? Why not fucking blow people away with our productions? We can. I don't believe that talent is the only thing needed to put on a good show. It's a big role. No disputing that. But we create an art on that stage. We make something magnificent. Larger than ourselves. Please don't complain.

And don't forget, I have no right to say these things.

I'm too much of a fucking idealist. I'm imagining lights and action and incredible things and no one sees my vision. No one wants to open their eyes to see it. Aim high. Let's do this.

I can't even pep-talk right.

And it's not just Cinderella that gets me down. My friends getting bad grades makes me feel guilty. I hate feeling guilty because I'm smart or good at something. I think we put stock in things that don't matter. We do. Try not to, okay? Because when you do, you take a lot of joy out of your life, and I think that if there's one thing we should try to do is not to take the joy out of our life.

My nose is a fountain of snot.

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 23:29:46 GMT

I hate being sick. I don't know exactly when this aversion to poor health struck me, but I know it wasn't always with me. At one point I liked being sick. It was kind of trippy and cool. Then I grew up and the slightest inconvenience to what I want to do or need to do just gets a "Motherfucker!" reaction out of me.

The chilly limbs.

The red red red Rudolph the red-nosed snot-filled reindeer routine.

The lying in your bed coughing sniffling snorting Nyquil symptoms.

The calling off work part. Man, that's a bitch, when you love money as much as I do.

That's what I hate about being sick.

On top of it, I hate the winter, and I love it. I usually tend to get sick during the winter - and not just during flu season. Flu shots are for pussies. Yes, I'm calling grandma a pussy. That little four year old Tyler? Yeah, he's a pussy too. TAKE YOUR VOMIT LIKE A MAN.

It's incessantly aggravating when you've got nothing done that you wanted to. And I hate feeling physically out of whack. I started to appreciate my muscles one day, and the work that they do. And not being able to use them effectively and often, that's a big-ass buzzkill. I also hate medication. I have an aversion to Tylenol, even, which I suppose stems back to my appendicitis and I was popping all sorts of pills to numb my senses. I hate pill-popping.

Does anyone else notice that I alliterate a lot?

Wait, don't answer that.

I have school tomorrow, and I think I'm going to go. Just going to take it easy. My throat feels like it's been gargling glass all weekend long. I also have the hit movie Saved! downloading right now, and that Jena Malone is a hot, hot piece of ass. Donnie Darko's girlfriend? More like my girlfriend.

My nose is redder than a senator's. Oh, and on the subject of my looks, I'm going to try and get some sort of digital camera picture so you can all see me in Jesus/Moses mode, with a beard and long shaggy/curly hair. For all the cool kids who don't know me in real life.

On Writing.

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:28:30 GMT

Sometimes I feel like I'm a pretender to the writing lifestyle. By that I mean that I wasn't blessed with the precocious ability, from a young age, to write down everything I had in my head and make it melodic. I think I was a fairly retarded youngster. And a bit of a little bastard. But I never kept a daily journal, nor write in a daily journal now (although perhaps I should). I don't go on alcoholic writing binges or document my exploits with the opposite sex. I suppose in retrospect I have documented some of them, but only the ones that play key issues in my life right now.

There's the questions of what is a man, what is a writer, what are the things I want to be, frequently knocking on the door to my head, asking to be let out or at the very least postulated upon. Whenever I attempt to answer them, I invariably find that I am none of them, so why keep asking the question? No real point to it all, but then you start to think that if you don't fit the description for these things then you obviously shouldn't be doing them, but that leaves me with being a pretty white bread kind of person, and I'm not a fan of white bread, which is to say that I'm not a friend of modern suburbia; people in small to large houses never talking with their neighbor, avoiding eye contact as you pass someone on the street. I'm still fairly rebellious so I think I may dislike suburbia for awhile.

That was a tangent only loosely related to point of this (I believe) small post. I feel like a poseur. Poseurism seems to be a large or important motif in today's youth culture, because we don't know who we are and aren't really willing to explore it. On a quick examination, I'd say that I'm bad at spending money on important things (or saving it for aforementioned important things), pretty hopped up on hormones, reasonably intelligent (which is to say intelligent than a lot of people, but not more intelligent than, say, a physicist) and a tad bit homosexual. Just a tad, though. I'm going to steal from Dave Eggers and say that I rate about a 2.5, a 3 on the 1-10 straight-gay scale. Again, off the point: I'm a human being. That's a minute thing, in contemplation. So my species is surviving on a little air-wrapped hunk of rock in a galaxy. Big fucking deal.

Well, it is. I'm gonna walk a little taller because RorOog and Krunk mashed two stones together, and now Rick and Kevin fly jets at supersonic speeds over the Mojave desert.

Let's call this theme "Species Pride," wherein one member of the species takes credit or pride in the achievements of his species that he didn't personally accomplish but he'll use as inspiration for his own lofty projects.

Man, humanity is the shit.

Time to look on the Mr. Brightside.

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:14:44 GMT

I rubbed the shampoo through my hair, kneading at my scalp, singing along with some song on the radio. What it was doesn't really matter; this is about the song that came after.

The guitar riff began somewhere high on the fretboard, picked, by finger or pick. Two guitars. The bass begins, the bass drum begins to be beaten. The riff played repeatedly, that kind of riff that you can't get over how fucking cheery it is. It's high, it's melodic, and your heart is lifted for some odd reason. You can't explain it. Cheery treble goes and you're soaring.

The story begins as the lyrics are sung. A story about a boy, and a girl, and another boy, or another girl, but it doesn't matter. The story has been sung before, in a hundred different verses, choruses, refrains, and bridges. It's been permutated through a hundred different genres and scribbles on notebooks and music-lined paper. It's written somewhere in the Bible, I'm sure, and it's written somewhere in a constellation.

And the story has the get-over-it part. Hey, isn't that beautiful. Hey, isn't that great.

And that's not sarcastic.

"It's all in my head," the singer croons, and calls "I just can't look/It's killing me." All the jealousy and pain of past time, you have to let go. I knew this was a song to listen in the shower to. When you've rolled out of bed, grabbed some clothes (maybe they match), and linger under hot steamy water, you need something that gets your heart awake, because your eyes are barely there and if your heart's not in it for the day, what do you have? You ain't got nothing. I know you've got that song that will wake you up in the morning. AC/DC's "Back in Black." Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll." Britney Spears "Toxic." Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson "Mozambique."

I woke up, showering, to "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers this morning.

"Fuck. That's good," I said.

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 06:17:54 GMT

Sing, O Muse, of the desire to be valued. Sing, O Muse, of the base human desire for an individual to be loved on their own terms.

You see, that's the dichotomy of love. You (and I) do not merely want to be loved. That's the simple, easy way of putting it. "You know, I just wanna be loved." That's simple. And elegant, in its own way. But it's not the truth. A truer statement is that "I want to be loved for being me." That is what we want to be loved for. That's what I want to be loved for. I want to be loved and valued for the same things that I love and value myself for. I want to be loved for my knowledge of books. I want to be loved for my taste in movies. I want to be loved for my acting ability. I want to be loved for these words that you read and hate or love, and through my words hate or love me.

I want to be loved on my own terms.

Now, what this is more about is that I can't be loved on my own terms. No one really can be. Or maybe it's that while I'm pushing every person away for not loving me for who I am, I'm not giving them a chance to understand me, get to know who I am, then love me. Whatever, I don't know if that's important or not, so I'm going to disregard it. Hey, this is all my fault. I know it. Whether I keep doing it is another thing. I'm an emotional coke addict, with blood dripping out my nose, and I'm telling you I'm going to keep snorting my solitude for a little while longer. That's a bit melodramatic, but it's the metaphor I picked. If I were a little more generic of an Internet user, this is where I'd give you the finger.

When I get down to the root of the problem, all I see is myself. It's a solipsist. It extends outward from me to other people then loops back to me, wrapping itself around me. I look at other people, people loved and valued and respected, in ways that I feel that I'm not, and I wonder why they have it and I don't. I'm an outsider and I still feel like one. This human race, my god, I don't get them either. I suppose on one level it's envy. The problem is little jealousy burning brightly. I once painted, for 10th grade Humanities, a scene from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The convict that Pip rescues looks outside, from the cold and damp moors, the swamps, and looks inside at Pip's house. The tiny window into the house, off in the distance, is yellow. Yellow is warm. Yellow means warmth. The yellow is what he wants. Warmth. Of a physical sense, of an emotional sense. I want the warmth, and immediate acceptance, and love. I just really don't want to work or risk getting hurt to obtain it.

And I read this same kind of confession or complaint or claim from other people. I know it's not just me. I know we all feel like this. The only way I think I can get beyond this is to focus on beyond-me. The cliched "big picture." But I don't want to. I want to wallow in the solitude, wallow; a pig in icy mud.

Claiming we're fucked up won't help anyone, so why do we do it?

I don't know the answer, but I think I know what isn't the answer.

Charlotte's Web versus Lord of the Rings.

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 21:54:42 GMT

Existential misogyny.

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 03:27:50 GMT

Sartre once wrote about nausea. The nausea he felt in his life. The nausea of disconnection, the nausea of being totally seperate from reality. In a way, it's similar to the Narrator's insomnia in Fight Club. It's not just disconnection.

It's dysconnection.

The female form disgusts me. The gender of "woman" makes me angry. Not angry in a way that I want to beat something. Not angry in the way that I want to run screaming out in the middle of the slushy and brown snow streets. Not angry.

Do not misunderstand this as a confession of homosexuality or chauvinism.

This has been building up for years. It's not bred into me. If it's an argument of nature versus nurture, this is nurture. It is nurture because that's what society is. It's what women are. There is no ideal woman. There is no pedestal to place them upon. I wondered once if there would ever be a woman to place on a pedestal, but none of them are worth it. The rejection that drips off their beauty-queen lips turns my stomach. Their mascara-smeared lashes and black circles under the eyebrows just draw emphasis to their eyes, those deceitful and black, black, black eyes. I want to drown myself in the deepest pupils surrounded by irised rims of green, or hazel, or blue, or brown, or gray, and pull the plug on that black pool. The black drains away and all that's left is the white of their eyes, blank and blind.

Even women hate women. Is misogyny universal? I want to be broad and say that the feelings, the nausea I feel from women is just a facet of humanity. And the nausea I feel is directed at humanity. But right now, the people that stir the existential stomach juices are women. Women that ostracize me. Women that reject me. Women that never look at me.

They are succubi weaving spells of gossip, the red lipstick on their soft pink lips like hellfire. And they have burned me out.

Chances are, you've got a greater than 50% chance of being one of these women that turn my stomach. If you are one of the few that I have not come to loathe, I'm sorry. I do not hate you. I am jaded and bitter.

There's no solution to this. I cannot change the nature of the female race. I cannot change the names that I will associate with pain and rejection and fear and loss, and the utter intense humiliation that comes with all of those. The humiliation and shame. Shame for once trying with any of them. Humiliation that I wasn't worthy, that I was never a second glance.

This is my Nausea.