9.2.11
8.2.11
two
"I can't untag that one or Monica will kill me. My nose Just looks so big, i shouldn't let anyone tag me in pictures of the side of my face. Only front on. My eyes are a better feature than my nose. Why can't I just close my mouth, everyone must think I'm some backwater hick with my jaw hanging open like that..."
If this were someone else talking to me, I'd feel the urge to slap them with a self-righteous sense of authenticity-- something I obviously don’t possess. The sad truth is that its me. This is what I say to myself at 2 AM when I'm scrolling through facebook looking for what pictures to untag of myself. I look down to see that I haven't taken a sip of the beer I had opened. I was so excited for it when I picked it up from the liqueur store on the drive home. Its called Delerium Tremens. It was made by a Beligian family, using their family-specfic brewing technique that involves fermenting the thing three different times. Three quarters of this 9 dollar bottle will get you to that comfortable drunk point. Where you can still understand what is happening, even though you are pretty numb to it. It then becomes your decision to finish it and let the atmosphere carry you through the rest of the loveless evening, or to offer it around to different people displaying how sophisticated you are for not drinking Coors Light.
The thing is that I'm drinking this in preparation for the party. I had two finals in the last two days and I feel like its my right to get out of my head for a night or three.
I decide to finish the bottle.
As a result of finishing the bottle I leave my wallet in a desk drawer. I see that I packed a bowl this morning, but haven't even touched it. The comfort of having such mundane problems is astounding to me. I try to rationalize how I can live with myself with these sorts of concerns, or lack there of. Before I get anywhere with that quandary I get stuck on the absurdity of asking how I can live with myself. I label myself as over-dramatic and possibly fat and walk out my dorm room door.
"Alex, are you trying to roll?"
I definitely am trying to roll.
"Where are you trying to go?"
"We don't know."
"ok sweet."
Sometimes I feel like a bad person for preferring to walk alone. I like time with my thoughts, but I also don't like myself after I've had too much time alone with my thoughts. I need to see my friends more.
There is a simplicity to the New England countryside that I will miss. All these elements bloom and die together since this area is so affected by the seasons. All at once you are surrounded by a green glow and a sticky warmth the envelopes everything around. You can look in any direction and see limitless green meet limitless blue on the horizon line. I did a photography project where I captured a sunset in stop-motion pictures of 3 second increments. Its amazing how much more of that kind of event we can comprehend by watching it in a minute as opposed to an hour. Like those parts in PLANET EARTH where they speed up the growth of a flower.
As we walk through the Commons lawn or quad or whatever the fuck, we hear The Knife's "Heartbeats" playing in the distance. I learned from a very early age the ostensive signs of belonging and not belonging. In San Jose, CA planes fly over any part of the city seemingly every half hour. At college if you hear The Knife's "Heartbeats" playing loudly from a second story dorm room and you have to look up to see whose room it is, you shouldn't walk into that party.
The smoke stained walls are dimly lit by the $12 floor lamp from walmart in the New England liberal arts college dorm room, which is where you spend your thursday nights because ‘nothing ever really happens in this fucking town’. Being a humble Californian from a beach town in the scenic and ‘culturally starved’ west coast, you feel intimidated when you are the only one in the room without a pea coat hung on the edge of the closet. You sit with one foot resting on the other leg making a sort of baseball diamond with your crotch as home plate. You don’t smoke cigarettes but are afraid you’ll be judged by taking the joint out from behind your ear. The more Pabst Blue Ribbons you have the higher the chance you’ll accept the cigarette offered to you and you’ll open up a little more to the other humans in the room. Maybe you make some reference to how you’re scared for winter because the weather is stagnantly pleasant 10 to 11 months out of the year where you come from. Your constant attention is keeping track of how many times you say ‘like’ when you speak. If it’s less than twice in a sentence you expect that you still sound interesting enough, but maybe from a different type of background and are ultimately acceptable. I gracefully tread the line of intelligent college student and drunken idiot for an hour until I feel sated enough to walk home and watch an episode of House.
When I wake up at 6:42AM and my throat feels like a summer day in the LA river basin, I crawl out of bed and notice a weird bruise on my inner thigh. I get water from the bathroom sink because I am not going to walk all the way downstairs to the kitchen. I can see from the large plastic trash can in the middle of the room that someone ordered dominoes last night and ate none of their cheesy bread. I can also see that someone finally decided to use the joke deep fryer that was purchased with the dorm's budget as a joke. My feet get cold really easily so I rush back to my room to get back in bed. I notice the still untouched bowl on my nightstand and realize my sub-conscious does plan for these mornings.
If this were someone else talking to me, I'd feel the urge to slap them with a self-righteous sense of authenticity-- something I obviously don’t possess. The sad truth is that its me. This is what I say to myself at 2 AM when I'm scrolling through facebook looking for what pictures to untag of myself. I look down to see that I haven't taken a sip of the beer I had opened. I was so excited for it when I picked it up from the liqueur store on the drive home. Its called Delerium Tremens. It was made by a Beligian family, using their family-specfic brewing technique that involves fermenting the thing three different times. Three quarters of this 9 dollar bottle will get you to that comfortable drunk point. Where you can still understand what is happening, even though you are pretty numb to it. It then becomes your decision to finish it and let the atmosphere carry you through the rest of the loveless evening, or to offer it around to different people displaying how sophisticated you are for not drinking Coors Light.
The thing is that I'm drinking this in preparation for the party. I had two finals in the last two days and I feel like its my right to get out of my head for a night or three.
I decide to finish the bottle.
As a result of finishing the bottle I leave my wallet in a desk drawer. I see that I packed a bowl this morning, but haven't even touched it. The comfort of having such mundane problems is astounding to me. I try to rationalize how I can live with myself with these sorts of concerns, or lack there of. Before I get anywhere with that quandary I get stuck on the absurdity of asking how I can live with myself. I label myself as over-dramatic and possibly fat and walk out my dorm room door.
"Alex, are you trying to roll?"
I definitely am trying to roll.
"Where are you trying to go?"
"We don't know."
"ok sweet."
Sometimes I feel like a bad person for preferring to walk alone. I like time with my thoughts, but I also don't like myself after I've had too much time alone with my thoughts. I need to see my friends more.
There is a simplicity to the New England countryside that I will miss. All these elements bloom and die together since this area is so affected by the seasons. All at once you are surrounded by a green glow and a sticky warmth the envelopes everything around. You can look in any direction and see limitless green meet limitless blue on the horizon line. I did a photography project where I captured a sunset in stop-motion pictures of 3 second increments. Its amazing how much more of that kind of event we can comprehend by watching it in a minute as opposed to an hour. Like those parts in PLANET EARTH where they speed up the growth of a flower.
As we walk through the Commons lawn or quad or whatever the fuck, we hear The Knife's "Heartbeats" playing in the distance. I learned from a very early age the ostensive signs of belonging and not belonging. In San Jose, CA planes fly over any part of the city seemingly every half hour. At college if you hear The Knife's "Heartbeats" playing loudly from a second story dorm room and you have to look up to see whose room it is, you shouldn't walk into that party.
The smoke stained walls are dimly lit by the $12 floor lamp from walmart in the New England liberal arts college dorm room, which is where you spend your thursday nights because ‘nothing ever really happens in this fucking town’. Being a humble Californian from a beach town in the scenic and ‘culturally starved’ west coast, you feel intimidated when you are the only one in the room without a pea coat hung on the edge of the closet. You sit with one foot resting on the other leg making a sort of baseball diamond with your crotch as home plate. You don’t smoke cigarettes but are afraid you’ll be judged by taking the joint out from behind your ear. The more Pabst Blue Ribbons you have the higher the chance you’ll accept the cigarette offered to you and you’ll open up a little more to the other humans in the room. Maybe you make some reference to how you’re scared for winter because the weather is stagnantly pleasant 10 to 11 months out of the year where you come from. Your constant attention is keeping track of how many times you say ‘like’ when you speak. If it’s less than twice in a sentence you expect that you still sound interesting enough, but maybe from a different type of background and are ultimately acceptable. I gracefully tread the line of intelligent college student and drunken idiot for an hour until I feel sated enough to walk home and watch an episode of House.
When I wake up at 6:42AM and my throat feels like a summer day in the LA river basin, I crawl out of bed and notice a weird bruise on my inner thigh. I get water from the bathroom sink because I am not going to walk all the way downstairs to the kitchen. I can see from the large plastic trash can in the middle of the room that someone ordered dominoes last night and ate none of their cheesy bread. I can also see that someone finally decided to use the joke deep fryer that was purchased with the dorm's budget as a joke. My feet get cold really easily so I rush back to my room to get back in bed. I notice the still untouched bowl on my nightstand and realize my sub-conscious does plan for these mornings.
2.2.11
one
The room was aflutter with the snap sounds generated by all the lilliputian speakerboxes in the digital SLR cameras all aimed forward like the eyes in a cinemaplex. The lighting spelled the word dramatic. The lenses were focused at a podium that of all furniture in the room was lit the best. The lighting’s intention was to illuminate all the more clearly the sign pasted to the front of the podium that read COMMUNITY in bold typeface. The eager crowd of journalistic photographers and photogenic journalists were awaiting the arrival of the president. The message had been CCed to everyone living under a rock with a smart phone. This was going to be a big moment, one of potentially lasting effects. A change, a shift, a tangential turn, a complete 360 over a double flip over an extra-tall hurdle and over the great wall of china. This was it.
The president approached the podium with a portly stoicism that matched the room grabbing attention of Winston Churchill. There was an obvious tension, though tension might not be the word for it. More akin to the visceral nerves triggered on the beginning ascent of a roller coaster.
The standard cough-then-tap-microphone routine was not lost on the president and founder. He was prepared to speak with full candor.
“Good afternoon, I’m Ted the president of the board of directors at Frito lay, and the sign in front of me says community. We at Frito-Lay believe in community, it was community that supported us enough to get off the ground back when the Frito company consisted of one Charles Doolin in San Antonio, Texas. All he had to his name were the rights to a corn chip recipe and $100 that he had to borrow from his dear mother to start up what later sold to a group from Nashville known as H.W. Lay & Company. And in 1965 a merger was planned with the good people at Pepsi Cola. You see the Frito Lay family, along with Pepsi, has grown as all of you have – Together – through every Super Bowl, every child’s birthday party and every quality casual event you could think of with friends and/or family. Because you see…”
The room was still in anticipation of where he was going next.
“What we care about, is not corn or potato chips, though we do have a knack for them as made apparent by the wide audience for this press conference. Chips are not what’s really on our mind, and believe it or not – neither is weather we end up in the black or the red at the end of the fiscal year, though that does help us to provide for our families and those of the greater Frito Lay family. What we care about is right here on this sign in front of me.”
Pause for dramatic effect.
“With every party size bag of chips made with authentic American corn grown in the heartland, we aim at bringing community closer together. To alter an old adage, a community that eats together, stays together. And while times are tough and there is all this chaos in the world, we rest assured that if we can help inspire a tight bond between all members of family, local community, and hell the entire American community – we’ll be able to reach the light at the end of this seemingly endless darkness.”
The number of blinks in the room could be akin to an array of cricket sounds, like those at the beginning of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Orlando and Anaheim.
“I might as well stop boring you all with abstractions and get to the crux of why I came to speak in front of all these cameras and microphones. We at Frito Lay have been cooking up this idea for some time now, and we’re at a stage when we’re ready to begin discussing it openly. We’re putting together a website with a few bright students just out of MIT. You can create an account by giving us some basic information or log in using your facebook account. This site is a platform for people to come together through Frito Lay. You can upload videos in the youtube format describing your favorite memories with your community. Exchange ideas of how to get people in the same room to enjoy each other’s company. Together we can bring everyone together. And we at Frito Lay believe that will help this community of ours get back on the right track much more than a new flavor of bbq sauce, which we are also working on, heh heh.”
The reactions in the room were varied.
“I’ll take any questions you might have now.”
No one really knew what to ask.
“Ahem, Thomas Dery from CNN, umm… How would you respond to accusations that this community inspiring website is in reality a free market testing solution in sheep’s clothing? I think most people would find it hard to believe that this is a purely altruistic endeavor.”
“You all are real vultures you know that. We’re people too! We breathe the same air you breathe!”
“Yes but…”
“No follow ups” said a man with a flat expression with a secret service demeanor about him. That appeared from an unlit area of the room behind the President.
“When will the site be up and running?”
“Within a couple months, I can’t give you an exact date right now.”
“Do you really expect us to believe this project is not financially driven?”
“Look if all you people are going to talk about is money, I’ll just leave. There are things more important than money in this world, and you should all take some time to consider that. Thank you”
He walked out in a huff. The feeling in the air was uncertain, several journalists were left to wonder if they were the real idolaters.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)