Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   shit, piss, puke and dope
Sunday, January 11 1998
 
 
A

  frustrating dream came to me as I slept last night: I was either back in high school or college, and I was taking some sort of simple exam for a psychology class. For some reason I feared I'd procrastinate and be distracted instead of buckling down and actually taking my exam. I was completely unprepared; I had no blank paper to write my answers on, so I was ripping the blankest pages I could find out of a glossy magazine and writing on those. But my pencil was so dull that I couldn't write legibly at all. When I sharpened the pencil, the lead kept crumbling away, and the sharpener was clogged and misaligned. Beyond all that, my mind was failing me. I couldn't focus on the simple task of writing brief essays. I attributed this to being drunk, and I cursed myself for my lack of preparation.

I think this dream reflects my feelings of inadequacy in terms of motivation when it comes to this enormous scanning project I'm supposedly doing.

M

atthew Hart and Angela are going to Richmond today. Unfortunately, I fear this is another one of their "urban field trips" if you know what I mean.

[It turns out that Deya, Zach and Peggy went too, and they went on a basically conventional shopping, drinking and bowling excursion, and Peggy and Zach had a big fight, but that's not my story, so I won't tell it.]

Meanwhile, Shira the Dog was attached to an incredibly long leash in the back yard. The leash was comprised of the cable components of one of those pulley-based dog runs that is yet to be installed (pending the means to drill the necessary holes). Matthew and Angela thought they were providing Shira incredible freedom with such a long leash. But of course she quickly lost all this slack around the many trees and bushes there. I took pity on her and went to rescue her from her pathetic state, but to do so, I had to set her free. And of course she ran around and mocked me and refused to be recaptured.

M

onster Boy dropped by unexpectedly while I was trying to capture Shira. He posed with her for some pictures:

Shira the Dog
Here Shira is gnawing on a vodka bottle (one of two that I occasionally use as a restroom).

Monster Boy with Shira the Dog

Monster Boy with Shira the Dog on his neck

Monster Boy had a number of movies he'd just rented. We smoked some pot, drank some Budweisers and in my room we watched River's Edge. What a fun creepy little movie.

Samson, the chief protagonist of River's Edge, reminds me of an intelligent version of Lennie from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. River's Edge sort of begins near where Of Mice and Men ends, but the story takes a mighty excursion before it reparallels the plot of the older story.

In the opening scene, Samson is seen sitting beside a large river, smoking pot. As the camera draws back you see beside him a naked dead girl. The special effects people did a wonderful job making her eyes look glassy and unseeing.

The plot moves quickly from there; little kids view the murder scene, and Samson casually mentions his murder at school, and ends up giving a series of tours to the crime scene. Samson's friends don't seem to care about the dead girl at all; they keep the murder a secret for at least a day. One of the friends finally rats to the police, and Samson is taken to live with a psychotic paranoid amputee (played by Dennis Hopper).

In its twisted way, the movie is a fascinatingly jaundiced exploration of such issues as friendship, acceptance, peer pressure, group dynamics, youth acculturation, and deviance.

There were two things that really struck me about the movie. One was the gradual revelation of aspects of Samson's character. He was an unusually well-developed villain. He was philosophical and spoke tersely, but with a big vocabulary, and seemed to have an unhealthy attachment to older relatives, coupled with babe-in-the-woods naïvité. But he had no emotional warmth at all. Nothing seemed to matter to him except for primitive issues of honour. Yet, for whatever reason, he had the loyalty of his classmates.

Which brings me to the other thing that was interesting about the movie: the way it depicted the youth culture. These kids seemed strangely familiar. They were all the "bad kids" of my high school, the ones who wore denim and plaid, grew their hair, failed their classes, smoked pot, listened to heavy metal, smoked in the student smoking section, and drove ludicrous modified cars (the River's Edge punch buggy has smokestack exhaust pipes of course). I was reminded of all the hanging out I did with a redneck heavy metal guy (Josh Furr) in the early 90s. The movie came out in 1987, the golden age of heavy metal youth culture.

S

hira the Dog hung out with us a little, but when the movie was over, Monster Boy discovered she'd shit and pissed in that one room she uses for that purpose, and she'd puked or shit something that resembled refried beans in the living room. Normally I leave that stuff for Matthew and Angela to take care of, but it was too much this time, and I bent to the task at hand.

Monster Boy decided to take Shira for a walk, but she escaped from him and would not come home. When Matthew and Angela returned from Richmond, they went looking for her. She was eventually found.

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After months of delay, I finally added another painting to my online art gallery; this one I captured directly from live video.

 
 

one year ago

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