one lonely success

julia sits alone in the darkness and dreams. it’s four in the morning and the stench of vomit is fresh in her mouth and the last thing she wants to do is hear his platitudes. he cleared his conscious and he felt perfect like the setting sun, like a lonely boy playing his innocent game.

“you feel so alive, so free of conscious, and free of guilt as if you’ve never loved before. so is that all you have to say? You know this helpless romantic is hanging on your every word.”, she pleads.

the bitterness rises up in her mouth and she thinks of how they meant so much to each other. but this is easier for him now and she fears the verse and the chorus and the bridge and she holds on tight as she looks down at her ash covered body and wonders what he must think of her.

“When you feel your fingers on his body, think of me and then hold tight to your rosary because i’ll be there with you, waiting for your blessing, waiting for your atonement and waiting for your pardon from purgatory. i pray to jesus and to the saints and to the foreign gods that betray me that this lone prayer may reach you.”

she realizes that if this bond can’t hold them together, then nothing could and the vows of humanity and of self-worth fall wasteful on a shore of lies.

and julia is shivering because it is night and she is naked, wondering where he could be found. but the darkness beckons and it feels so wonderfully peaceful to her, free from hurt and wonderfully calm.

…and julia shook as she awoke–alone.

today we had our first exam in this doctoral cancer physiology class. i’m sitting there taking this exam with seven other “future leaders of science” and when your answering twenty essay questions about all things cancer you can’t help but be ultra-sensitive about every detail of your testing environment. Whether it’s the temperature of the room or the lack of ergonomics of your desk, i become intimately aware of my surroundings and was once again reminded of how everyone has their own style of test-taking.

for instance, there’s heavy-sighing guy who upon reading each question let’s out a sigh that let’s you know he’s not happy with the question staring him in the face. There’s shifty-chair guy, sniffly-nose girl, and talks-to-himself guy. oh and i can’t leave out bone-popping girl, who before each question finds it necessary to pop her back, her neck or her fingers.

so how about me? well, i’m noisy-pencil-guy. my preference for old-school #2 ticonderogas lends itself to that cool, dull pencil on paper sound. when i’m sitting there writing away, i feed off the audible feedback that i get when i hit my stride and become increasingly confident as the noise becomes more and more rhythmic.

why am i telling you all of this? i have no clue. did i mention i just came out of a three hour cancer phys exam?

some may be dissapointed that it’s not a beautiful, sunny socal day.

instead, there’s a uniform blanket of grey clouds draped over the sky. it would be inaccurate to say that it is rainy–some would say it’s misty. it’s a nice change to finally have the weather agree with your mood. no condecending sun mocking you for being sad or taunting you to go outside when all you want to do is hide under the blankets. i sat outside for a while and it’s completely calm. there’s hardly a breeze and the mist is falling silently. i’m going to enjoy this perfectly beautiful weather on an otherwise imperfect day.

yesterday, i wore my pseudo-punk-studded belt. it’s white-trash-punk-bling and it weighs about 5 lbs. so when i wear it, i don’t take crap from people because when they catch a little glimpse of those chrome studs on my belt, they know that i can bring the rock whenever i want.

had some time to kill, so i walked over to the local mega-commercial-guitar-supercenter to play around with the fancy martin guitars that i can only day-dream about owning. the guy working in the fancy-humidity-controlled-acoustic guitar room was a nice guy and all, but he kept trying to push these crappy martin knock-offs on me. and i was all, “dude, apparently you didnt see my pseudo-punk-studded belt.” and by the look in his eye, he knew that i would bring the rock if my hand were forced and the crappy guitar-propaganda-talk ended right there.

in other news, hyphenating strings of adjectives is my new-favorite-writing-style.

so our little show went off pretty well last night. we ended up playing six songs and we were happy with each number–especially considering that it was our first time playing to a large group.

drummer_bobby brought his sister’s high-end video camera and our buddy crocket served as the band’s cameraman. we had a couple of other kids shooting video from different angles, so we should have a lot of really good raw footage to splice together. oh and one of the guys brought all of these black lights, so we were able to get the place really dark and the only lighting was the purple glow of black lights. this made for a really cool effect and after a few bars of “tradesman” we had the kids dancing around like they just didnt care because everyone there knew we were about to bring the rock.

so we’ve got a mountain of media to sort through including tons of digital pictures and of course the video footage. hopefully most of it will be sorted through this weekend and i’ll post all of the gory details up here for the world to see.

…the Pope is still dead.

For ongoing coverage, just turn to any cable news network.

Since the Pope’s death last Friday, has anyone else been concerned by the 24/7 news coverage of his death? I mean, I can appreciate his global contributions as much as the next guy, but seriously, there has to be other stuff going on in the world. Right? I mean, all the cable news networks have been Pope-TV since his death and it appears that there “ongoing, comprehensive coverage” is going to continue on until the old guy’s buried away and we start watching the Vatican for little puffs of smoke telling us that there’s a new sherrif in town.

Do we really need a 24 hour shot of St. Peter’s Square to know that he’s still dead? In this case, no news is certainly not good news.