For You Know Who,

I hope you have found what you are looking for.

"Plan B"

The matchbook that holds up the table leg

The red jellybean
Which is inhaled while laughing
And choked on

The postcard recording the phone number of the woman from the bar

The piece of wedding cake stored in the freezer
Brought out on the first anniversary
Examined
And thrown away

The pencil supporting the mainsail of the toy boat

The song about the ex-boyfriend
Written before he announced his indiscretions
Sung for the new boyfriend

The on-line service free trial CD
Hung from the branch of a Christmas tree
After being microwaved for 3 seconds

The Victorian-era crib
Suddenly sold in a newspaper
To finance the termination
Of an unplanned pregnancy
At the age of 48

The racial slur used as a greeting between friends

The cardboard box fort

The collection of poetry notebooks with only the first two pages used

The thousand dollar computer
Replacing the eighty cent notebook and two dollar pack of cards
Made worthless by the reading of a seventy dollar programming textbook
Leading to the purchase of a two thousand dollar computer
Made worthless by the reading of five hundred dollars in textbooks
Redeemed by the seven hundred dollar upgrade
Funded with the money from the new career
That in two years would lead to the frustrated burn-out
Resulting in the purchase of an eighty cent notebook and two dollar pack of cards

The pair of old running sneakers that help the dogs find the body

Last night I signed up to go to American University for the next four years of my life. I'm excited, but I'm sort of wondering if there's anyone out there who's goes to that university... For me, this is a short but important daylog. /msg me, please, if you go there or have gone there or just know anything about the school. Thanks!

I'm listening to Pete Yorn's musicforthemorningafter, finding it the appropriate mood for me right now...

This weekend was another show; afterwards, I went out with the rest of the cast to Manny Brown's (a bar on South Street) we all frequent. My director was my good friend Josh (who we'll call JT); he brought with him a friend of his, also named Josh. When the bars closed, JT suggested we all go back to the Armory, the national guard headquarters in Philadelphia. (JT and Josh are in the national guard.) The Armory is this old castle-looking building; we went in, a group of us actors, writers, and directors, as well as Josh. As I'm playing darts (very badly, I might add), JT informs me that Josh is interested. So... We start talking. Getting personal. And so on. He kisses me when no one is looking. We go off to be alone.

Well, before you know it, it's 7:30 Sunday morning (after losing that one hour, also), and I've got to get home. We exchange email. I guess I won't be seeing him again.

While my sexual dry spell broke, I still feel lonely; and maybe I deserve it, in a way, but that always seems the way, bouncing from one encounter to another, but never finding anyone who maybe would be intersted in something more.

So I'll sit and listen to music, like I always do, and dream of being something else...


Do any of us talk to each other?
Do any of us hear each other?

Track 1: Total Annihilation, track 6

So, I've been on E2 now for a month and a half or so, I've written several writeups, had a few eaten, and even went to a recent E2 gathering. I've met a few people, said hi, and now have written (will have written once I finish) a daylog.

Track 2: Kronos Quartet, Meltdown

I've noded Kahn during my time here. I'm happy about that. Kahn is doomed to fade into obscurity; it's good to tell more people about it.

This site is a wonderful thing, and I've never seen anything both like it and as cohesive as it. It's really rather amazing. And #everything has earned a place next to #kahn; you'll be seeing plenty of me, if you wish.

Track 3: Chrono Cross, The Dream That Time Dreams

It's amazing: I knew qousqous before I came here. I knew him way back in the 3rd or 4th grade; he's two years my senior. It wasn't until I read his homenode that I realised I knew him. Go figure.

My first E2 gathering, with its node's obsessively long name, was fun, though I was unable to stay the night. jasonm gave me a ride to the MAX station nearest, and a surreal midnight run through Portland's mass transit system ensued. That's always fun; seriously, riding the light rail and the bus at night is always a trip, Portland being a fairly safe town.

Track 4: Nine Inch Nails, Just Like You Imagined

So, here I am on Everything2. Lesbians! Monkeys! Soy! man's desire to blow shit up, and to have a nice attache case. This site is, if nothing else, a repository of almost all knowledge that can be found online, which is almost, but not quite, everything known to man. I think I've got the hang of things.

Now watch me make an ass of myself.

end track

I'm staying up late this morning, so I may as well node what's happening on such a fine spring day.

I went outside a little earlier (which is something I don't do often during the day, because I work overnight and sleep all day), and I was once again reminded why I love living in New Orleans. I only walked around the block, as I am sometimes wont to do before bed (which is coming up in a few minutes), and was inundated by the olfactory assailants of spring: growing grass, palm trees, willow trees, moist dirt, and a thousand year-round gardens. Spring is my favourite time of year, particularly when I experience it in New Orleans. Uptown, it smells so fresh it's almost overpowering, but it's not yet fetid like it will be in a few months, once summer arrives and the air starts smelling like Crisco for some reason.

Thanks to Yo La Tengo and my copy of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, I've been listening repeatedly to Our Way To Fall and crying about it not because I'm lonely, but because I miss intimacy. I guess. I know I'm not lonely -- six months living alone and I'm not sick of it yet -- but I'm a sucker for love songs. Particularly when they're played by Yo La Tengo.

I have an appointment with my psychotherapist tomorrow morning, and up until about 10 minutes ago I had no idea where her new office was. (She moved about two weeks ago, two weeks after my last appointment.) Supposedly she was going to send me a notification by mail of her new address, but if she did, I never received it. Thank "Bob" for 411, lest I would've had to skip the appointment altogether and had one less chance to badger her about finally writing that letter of approval to my endocrinologist. My endoc needs her approval before putting me on a "real" hormone replacement therapy regimen, and I've been bugging my therapist about such a letter for two months, amid her promises that she's working on it. As a result, my endoc has only perscribed me 1mg of DES, which is weak at best, and 10mg of Provera, which is helpful but it's not all I need. Ideally, I'd have persriptions for spironolactone, estradiol and Provera together. I'm getting a little sick of DES's weaknesses. Supposedly, it's a testosterone suppressor, but I'm beginning to doubt that since the only adverse effect it has on my testosterone levels is my lack of a sex drive, which could easily be caused by the 40mg of Paxil I also take, for all I know. If I can't get a letter out of her tomorrow morning, I'll have to switch endocs. That's not a major problem (yet) -- I know an endoc who's a trannygirl herself, and would surely sympathise with my plight.

Oh, before I submit this entry, check out Dead Inside and then go by the CD.

Sitting, getting lost in the music from the radio, in front of the computer. One of the best sensations in the world. Peaceful and elating. Very still yet I can feel the energy coursing through my veins, hear my heart beat faintly in my inner ear.

The taste of a halfway-gone orange Cream Saver is in my mouth, smooth and sweet, tangy. And I'm happy. The house is a mess and it's going to storm outside and I'm happy. I won't get to see my object of affection for nearly two weeks, but I'm happy. I have a psychiatrist appointment in a couple hours, and then later I will be killing my muscles doing Shotokan Karate for two hours, yet I'm happy.

I reflect. How fickle an emotion is happiness. And I'm happy.

I should be in class



Aside from being a student, I am also a campus cop. Every Sunday (and whenever else I get an extra shift), I work from 8 o'clock AM until 4 o'clock PM, doing rounds at my small campus, making sure that no one is smoking pot and opening doors for people who have locked themselves out of their rooms.

Pretty mundane, right?

Usually.

But this Sunday past, a pervert psycho maniac managed to infilitrate the girls' residence through a basement door that had a malfunctioning/shut off alarm. He made his way up the fire escape stairwell, got into the 2nd floor hallway, and started checking doors - opening the ones that were unlocked, of course.

A girl I know was in her room alone, when she turned around to find him in her room with her.

I was called over, and managed to run into him on the 3rd Floor. He was sweating profusely and acting like a jittery crackhead. I asked him what he was doing, and he bolted down the stairs and out the front door.
After that, he showed up in dining hall, some of the guys' residences and even a don's suite - asking again and again for the location of the girls' dormitory ... after he'd already been in there, of course.

Fucking Sicko

He didn't look or dress like a "normal pervert" - he was very well dressed in expensive clothes, was clean cut, shaven and generally well groomed.

After seeing a notice up at the front desk of the girls' res, a pizza delivery guy told the front desk worker that this character has been seen down around St.Mary's University as well as up here at the University of King's College.

I talked to the cops and they told me to call them ASAP if he showed up again (well, no duh) ... I hope he doesn't come back, that was a bit too creepy for me. He had that look in his eye like he could've hauled out a knife and shanked me just as easily as he could've run like he did.

Trust no one.


Today I am immersing myself in the oeuvres of the following musicians:


P.S.>>I also took out a book by Slavoj Zizek (sorry, no idea how to type those accents) on Schelling - the front cover is a picture of a dead octopus lying on a yellow sheet. I find this repulsive yet intriguing.

Yesterday, 1730hrs

We sit on our haunches in a bush outside Tesco's, Margate with the capsule from a Kinder Surprise on the ground. I pour some glycerol into one half, Adam sprinkles potassium permanganate into the other half.

The pharmacist had told us that potassium permangate turns water a brilliant purple.

'Sounds fun,' Adam had said.

When you add potassium permanganate to glycerol, a brilliant purple mixture is formed. Royal purple, purple like a black eye after a good fight. This lasts about a minute.

As the two mix together, they react together within the confines of the plastic capsule to produce large amounts of smoke and a fair amount of heat.

As I run around to the entrance of the shop with the capsule hidden up my sleeve, I am aware of this and try to move as quickly as possible without shaking the capsule and aiding the reaction.

Once inside the shop, the capsule pops in my hand, and I know I am past the point of no return. I drop it, and without looking back I move quickly out of the shop. I run, safe in the knowledge that the entire store will now be at a halt as the thick smoke fills aisle 3 - pet food.

Next time I'm there, I'll look for a purple splash on the floor - the damage from the first blow in our own personal Project Mayhem. But for now, I need to get the stuff off my hands.

I had an enjoyable breakfast at Panera Bread today, at 6:30 in the morning. I think I was the first customer there. The bagel that I purchased was freshly baked, flavored 'everything', which is a mixture of sesame, garlic, and all others. It was as soft as dough. The orange juice was slightly disappointing. They always seem more sour than actual oranges. It tasted like it was freshly poured rather than freshly squeezed. A total of around $2.60. Finding out Panera and other café's were open this early was a surprise discovery on an early morning walk.

My original crazy plan was to not sleep so I won't miss my 9:00 a.m. class. There was a secretary of defense press meeting on CSPAN last night. The questionaire session ended abruptly and everyone started to leave, when one of the journalists jokingly announced: "Thank you for coming. We have no more questions. We must be going now." and "we would like to ask more questions, but we are very busy." OK, so maybe that wasn't so funny.

I ended up falling asleep in the morning and missing my classes. Hmm... Maybe staying up all night isn't good after all.
Well, a rocky start. The following writeup briefly saw the light of day on E2, before running afoul of the Terrible Swift Sword of editorial excision. No complaints. The ed(s) in question were kind enough to offer reason, and advice, and one suggested I stick to daylogs for the nonce.

See, I'm gonna be writing as someone else. As a fictional character. He's a journalist and commentator, among his many traits (many of them downright disgusting). He maintains, despite his depravity, a down-deep longing and loyalty to the core of the journalist's creed, the responsibility - nay, the duty - to find, expose, and tell the truth so that the world can evaluate what goes on in full, fair and free discourse. To pull the hidden out from under the muck it's been thrust beneath, he should stop at nothing - or, well, very little - and should walk without fear. So, in this small, bullshit, virtual online way, shall I. All I can say is that I don't care about XP, nor levels, nor even Golden Trinkets. I do care about speaking the Truth as I see it (even if no one listens, which, I suppose, is their right!)

My nom d'octet is spiderjerusalem. The character on which I'm based is found in the series Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis. Spider writes a gonzo rabble-rousing column on life in his City called I Hate It Here; so, too, shall I. Please don't confuse 'here' with E2. It is meant to describe the larger world, the vasty fields of data and of information in which E2 swims as well as those dim and earthbound roots on which that world rests.

This first column is really just an intro to the whole thing, and (as QXZ has pointed out) is really indistinguishable from a Warren Ellis voice-imitation exercise. That's partially what it is; before I begin to deconstruct current events through Spider's eyes, I wanted to see if I could describe the goal through his typewriter. If I couldn't, then there wasn't any point.

Without further ado, adieu; I submerge into part, and apres moi, le deluge.

Who Is This Bald Guy and Why Is He Squatting on my Balcony?

I hate it here.

That's the name of my weekly toe-rag out there in the steamy shit geysers of that alternate place. It's not so much a place to live as a continual state of mind, disruption and jangle, the dischordant wails of people all over the world realizing individually that the world they were promised when they were small came with bills due, the steering broken and an enormous pile of shit in the back seat.

Fuck it. Let's talk about here.

Who, they say, is this Spider Jerusalem? Bald, ugly, obscene, rude, mean, strange, unreliable (a big thanks to the editors for that one), unbribable, balls-out, uncensored, biased, they answer themselves. Up there, in that place, over there; hiding behind walls of glass and lies while their fucking servants sweep up the lost crumbs of the world's riches that they can't manage to stuff into their faces, shove up their noses, or just plain screw. Me? I like it better outside the wall, leering at women, powerdrinking, chain-smoking and occasionally committing the heinous crime of the Written Word here for all of you to see.

The New Scum.

That's us, baby. We're the ones that keep their shit up there. There's not much we can do about it, by ourselves; not much we can say about it hasn't been said a million countless time over the centuries since the first ape got ass-railed by a bigger ape and made to mow the lawn. Nope, that's it, finito, vaya con Dios. The New Scum.

Now, what I am about to say will quite possibly blow what little minds some of us have left, boys and girls. It will take these few privileged, about-to-be released individuals and lovingly help them to burst the rivets holding together their rotting fontanels. Hear the cracking? It's those lovely pre-stressed seams you see atop every human skull ever removed for the edification of medical students, for the demonstration of Danish princes, or even for the filthy rut of some grave-robbing pervert's last gasp and shudder. Boom. Blow your mind.

Here it is:

It's not all bad.

Sure, your life sucks. Sure, there's shit on the streets and shit in political office; the cops just wanna know whether you got AIDS so they know whether bleeding on them is grounds for decon (and, boys and girls, you *will* bleed, that's the point of the adventure). You can't afford that bottle of hooch you stare at so longingly on your stumbling way home from the subway, 'cause if you did buy it you'd probably have to let some white-collared fuck in a sequenced outfit have his New Scum bruisers come by and repossess your Upper Plate, ripping it outta there and giggling as your indebted teeth tinkle on the floor. Our President is an oil-money silver-spoon who couldn't even get that right and was born with it shoved up his nose instead; he's busy appointing all of daddy's old friends so that they can all pursue the grand group gangbang they tried to have ten years ago, before the aging bitch of a whore that is the world shook them off her flabby shanks and said "not tonight, ducks, I go' a screamer of a tea an' cake."

Old white men and older white women, whose expensive pursuit of youth is just fucked over enough by the miles they got on the chassis to show through; fresh paint and new Bondo that looks great up close but when you step back ten feet you notice the guy who put it all together followed a body line of the car that was torqued after the accident. Fucking ancient, the lot of 'em.

So here I sit, on a balcony atop the shitheap. I can see steam and souls rising out of the City in swarms of small white desperation; I'll raise a glass of Old Panther Sweat to the puffy bastards.

(pah.)

Final question, no doubt. Why am I here? What, possibly, can Spider Jerusalem tell me, the New Scum king, about the shitty state of my own world? The anemic little git doesn't even have a world, he hadda drop out of a fake one invented right here in mine. Well, that may be true, old no fuckin' pal of mine. But let me tell ya, the creed I run by works here as well as there; it'll work for anywhere you give enough of a damn to drop trou and brand.

Veritas.

No, not that fucked-up Them-incubator with the threadbare people and the overstuffed suits. Nope, the lady, the one that spawned their twisted little motto. Truth. First part of Superman's Holy Trinity. Hardest to find, easiest to fuck over, but longest-lived of 'em all. Veritas. Truth. What, Spider, is the truth? I can see and hear you all out there waxing your cranks and muttering that Spider's finally lost it bad, talking about Truth. Doesn't that topic ID you as the walking dead to the suits in E1? Maybe. Spider, have a beer, don't get caught, and don't forget to fuck their mother, too.

This Internet thing, it's just a city. New Scum everywhere, different but similar assholes in office. Repeat after me, boys and girls, the name of the clarion and the top of the column that henceforth will probably grace your shores, unloved, unwanted and unsung.

I hate this place. And it's my unloved task and charge to see if I can make a few of you hate it enough to want to change it. Then I can drink in peace.

This is Spider Jerusalem with a 1/4 bottle of Jack in my hand. My recommendation? Look at the world we live in. Have a stiff drink, give it the finger, and climb back into bed. Maybe, if you're really lucky, by the time you've woken up we'll find out that it was all a dream; that our current President is living in a South Texas chain gang for crimes committed while in office against the 'American people' whatever the fuck that means, and his chain-neighbors are horse-trading for the rights to his patrician ass.

Things could be a lot better.

Of course, they could be a hell of a lot worse, as well.

Still, I have not yet found a sign that any of you people care. I'll keep looking.

I hate it here.

-Spider Jerusalem

A busy day. I was up before 8, to collect extra baggage that had been shipped from Cape Town to Heathrow. I arrived by tube at Heathrow about 9:45, caught a bus to the Cargo company’s building. In the cargo compay's reception office, the TV was on: Westminster Abbey, laying the Queen mother to rest. They gave me paperwork to take over to Customs, a mile down the road. I walked over. But it was a decent day, bright and cold. I felt tired. I have not been breathing very well the last few days, maybe a bug, maybe the damp and dank air. I was back with more paperwork from customs by about half-past eleven.

Inside, the choir on the TV were singing hymns, and nobody was doing much, just standing around. This must be the two minutes silence. I sat down quietly. A tone sounded over the PA. A minute passed, another. In Westminster on TV, the service continued. Another tone sounded, and quietly the people began to move and talk again.

They were clearly not used to people showing up to collect baggage without a vehicle.

The only option to move by belongings was a taxi, to I requested a minicab – 42 pounds to get across town, less than I had feared. The cab turned out to be a Pakistani gentleman in a suit with a very nice Mercedes-Benz. “For chauffeuring” he explained in adequate English. It took two hours to drive across town. He avoided the funeral route. The car had a CPS/map/voice thingy, which told him where to go, but he often ignored it to chose a route that avoided the city centre. When he deviated from it’s chosen route it would say in a cut-n-paste female voice”make a U-turn as soon as possible”, and after a few minutes, adjust to our new position and start issuing directions forward again

I unpacked all the stuff, and crammed it into corners of my small room. Then on to my first face-to-face interview – shave, get into the suit. Rather be too formal than not formal enough. This is London, after all.

The interview went Ok, I thought I presented myself well, but I don’t have all the experience with ASP and Web pages that they wanted. Nine other people are being interviewed. Bah. I am not happy, but am persevering with this process.

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