New Year, new Entry. That's the way to do it. I'm in Amsterdam for six months. The larger preoccupation that must more or less cut through most of my time is, how else, a job. I have never held one. Minimum wage style selling of comestibles it is then.

I am looking up opportunities to work with psychiatric patients (real ones, not caricatures, of which I have had the misfortune to meet quite a number of times) and to simply talk to them through volunteering. A buddy program, basically. I'm seeing a psychiatrist with a mustache like that of a bloody walrus. A lovely man. A lovely plan.

I thought I was going to build houses in Tajikistan, but it might actually be in Ghana or Romania, and my English lit. and phil. degree (the one I'm working towards) is slowly moving to something more socially conscious. Perhaps for the better? Increasingly! Yes, I, as a man, dearly miss Sierra. Yet, I, as a man, dearly missed many opportunities for time to do these things. So these things will align my miscellaneous coordinates to this simple task of life.

Fuck, I remember why I hate diaries, agendas, and organizational tools.

It doesn't matter how apathetic you are, what you will be doing, what the sights will be in ten, twenty years. Most of what we know about our environment now will be irrelevant then, rats on a sinking ship. Citizens of the sensational overstated politik, religious persecution, the ADHD lever rising with the seas. No one can really escape the overdue notices of melting ice in the Arctic or how impossible really it is to imagine 300 million environmental refugees. Even presenting the problem as long term seems to distract people from noticing the little unusual changes in climate that seem more and more alien. Global warming will destroy my country. What about that? Parliament in the Netherlands just posted a bill raising the defences against the sea. But the projections keep getting closer to the present, it matters it matters, don't turn your head to it aim for a career. Then peak oil, hopefully hitting us before the sea. Scenarios for a dooms day. I'm sorry, it's happening now, and if we don't care, which we don't, well.

Let's just say that we'll look to days where everything happens as usual. They will. Until the next Katrina, until the next quake with rising sea levels, tsunami breaches and things.

is Sick.

Can't help thinking I'm better off not bothering to read the news. No, I won't link news stories about decapitations in Iowa, or three men holding a woman as a slave in Virginia, or another corrupted story debating the immaturity of Americans on the whole in this pointless, pointless country. So the point being that this nation was created in equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness replacing fraternity is proved when you see the other guy get your certificate in the legacy of some white lie. Then, when the banks crash, the yuan is adjusted to compensate.

In 2004 I was exchanging emails with Ian Lavsky of Constellation Records (GY!BE,ASMZ,DMST) about the (un)justified feeling of resentment towards the prom dance America has become. I can't pin point verbatim, I lost those emails once I left school in Ams., but this nature of profiteering and resulting identity fucking has something to do with what he said.

"The entirety of this social madness is based on collecting the next paycheck, rubbing each other in cracked gazes and finding the next brightly colored object" or something along those lines.

I'm not sure whether the assumption is compromised free market capitalism or whether it just comes off from the belief that individuals are all we have now. Neither are great or the basis of an integrated culture based on flexible values that make worth of individual and collective effort. I'll end my generalizations here and continue with Epicurus on atomic effluence.

/end rant

I've never been this happy before.

But

True: I've been happy
True: It's too beautiful for words.

Always there, always amorphous and free.

Sinds 19/09/07.

I'll say Yes now to years ahead, everything's possible now.

Write me. Or face the consequences of justice before her majesty the Queen, King George III. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.


MURILLO STRAAT 8 I

1077 NE

AMSTERDAM THE NETHERLANDS


Admittedly, I don't have too many friends, and I don't care to have too many. This may result in losing "face" ( I am an eighteen year old male) and the possibility of destroying contacts that will get me "places". I cannot pretend to not be bothered (double negative) by this, but as such (in this moment) I hardly care. Therefore, write. Write for the president, write for the janjaweed write. Write for the kid with the phone who refuses to write. I don't care what you say, I'm inviting you anyway.

Walking outside I found a little medaillon. Outside of a phone store, by a bench. "Republique Francais 1808" with a Romanized profile of Napoleon Bonaparte. I recognized the style, a Neo-Classicist approach to the new and "free" First Republic. Not only did France try and become a classic democracy, it tried to mimic many different styles of Republican Rome. It reminded me of the Holy Roman Empire as well where the Emperor allowed every sovereign to make coins in their principalities. Not principalities, states. Mimicking Rome throughout history has brought similar fates to the decline of nation states, similar to the downfall of republican Rome. America! There was an article on the privatization frenzy in the States that was compared to the last days of "democratic" Rome in Vanity Fair. Unperceivable. The creation of dynasties though in the last twenty years (cemented  with the almost unlikely election of Hillary Clinton) would make that reality a walking joke. Then there will finally be a day. How would an American dictator sound? Julius, Augustus, Solon, especially with the senate still in place it would hardly make much of a difference as it is. Presidents...the presiding authority. The ultimate call in a country's affairs. How about that veto power? 

 Okay, this is impossible. I've overlooked the significance of finding a commerative coin of the first republic on a personal level. A coincidence. But then something. I think. France! J'comprende pas! Dass kann ich besser in Deutsch aufsprachen. Monkeys have similar reactions to coins with mirrors embedded on them. Not simple mirrors, reflections of other things as well. If these mirror coins existed and fell out of the sky (as RF 1808 did) researchers, locals, and park guards in Africa would wonder at the resounding shrieks and yelps coming from the forests. 

I've kicked the medications. Better to be a twitchy and perceivable human being with feelings than an automatic tired robotic thing with less life in it than an orange. Lots of oranges live, and I did too on lithium and seroquol. But then again, it was more of the same. Stop kidding myself. It is almost close to eigth grade. What's next? A job, a little bit of travel. Basic. These months will go by fast without something to be busy about. Writing letters is not a job. Neither is it an accomplishment. But it is as it is. An affectionate transmittal. 

Tattoo: Art-deco/Greek owl on right hand shoulder with the first lines of Beowulf.."Hwaet er gardena in geardagum" or just "Hwaet!"(Hark! or Lo! Listen well! Depending on whose translation you read. Seamus Heaney does it well: "So.") Catching up on academically innapropiate reading.Feels like I've let off where I stopped ages ago. A year. Academically innapropiate in facing seminar books that have nothing to do with what I'm reading now. I'll never pierce anything, but a tattoo seems pretty important. All of a sudden, especially what I've been thinking about. Nothing too big or too grand. Hwaet!

Bad karma not to.

Leave a comment and I will...

1 - Tell you why I friended you.
2 - Associate you with a song/film.
3 - Tell a random fact about you.
4 - Tell a first memory about you.
5 - Associate you with a character/pairing.
6 - Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7 - Tell you my favorite user pic of yours [if it pertains].
8 - In retort, you must spread this disease in your LJ [or blog].

That I would be good.

Alanis Morissette, "That I Would Be Good."

Happy, in a delicate way. Amsterdam is looking more and more beautiful every day, there hasn't been a drop of rain in two months, the average temperature is 20 degrees Celsius at midday, and everything has bloomed already, resulting in a rather peaceful interim summer that swells and blows over. Winter in the Berkshires from photos on Facebook. I couldn't tell the difference between a landscape in May or October from them, save the obvious clothing differences. The weather is kind of...gentle here. In a rough way. What am I talking about? The weather. Unkept promises spring forth blah.

Just to get by from one moment to the next, and then I won't have to worry about no more. Darn tootin'. I've spotted my old Wicca books where they stacked my books into neat little piles to save in space. They looked really attractive.  One's green and black, the other blue on white, with little post-it notes sticking from the pages where I diligently laid my mind to ritual and ceremony. The athame, the coven, the sacred festivals. All fresh and balanced. Recall, recommunicate, reorder. Cleansing. Go back to the farmer's market on saturdays to collect herbs and spices for recalling. I've never lost my faith, I think. It was always there in some form. Just caught up in the travails of another honest life from one other honest life. That's what I'd like to believe. Rekindle the old innocence. Get my hands on some new crystals, forge a ring out of old keychains. But above all, detoxing my body from things and meditating. Get in touch with the Pagan Club at SR.

Somehow something like this is really important. I've always been spiritual. But in no other distinguishable way than in this. See what comes out of the new faith. Hm. Maybe I need religion anyway.

But everything in my head changes so fast. I can't decide. What is there to decide in the first place? Oh fuck me. Sleep is good. Self-destructive manic cycles are not. Especially ones that go on about actual things. I should stick to candy canes and magic ponies.