This is a collection of random things I think and hear and see.

• The best way to get a monkey high is to fill its cage with smoke.
• Can you take crack in pill form, or would it take too long to be absorbed?
• "I just had some inspiration for you--I guess that doesn't make much sense."
• Never underestimate the insensitivity of man.
• Two guys frolicking on Harvard Yard. Have you ever seen something so homoerotic? "I was sodomized on Harvard Yard."
• Inject crack right into monkeys' brains and cut their heads open.
• "Animal testing has let these protesters live 22.7 years longer."
• Civilization is an urge towards abstraction.
• Keith Moon's Illegitimate Children
• Riding the crest of a caffeine high, I realized I don't have many friends, just people who amuse me.
• John Updike, "Separation"
• Charles Bukowski
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• We've grown to expect the freedoms of film to the point that our plays only work as movies.
• "Ramble" comes from an old Dutch word meaning "to fondle oneself while walking around."
• Write page 217 of your autobiography.
• Possessed microwave
• 3 Rules of Fights: 1) Make sure you will win. 2)Make sure it's worth winning. 3) I forget rule number 3.
• Why would they buy the ice cream truck when they can get the popsicles for free?
• Answer to wakeup call: "We don't want any!"
• A man's home is his castle. Except without the dungeon. Well, I guess it depends on the man...
• I don't understand the concept of liquid.
• Add a stranger to the mix, and conversation gets even more shallow and trite.
• Frustration with intellectual shallowness is the most biting.
• Deepness comes at the deepest parts of the night...articulation, too.
• To write ideas and not synthesize creates pain approaching guilt.
• Everyone who graduates here has to be a little crazy in the end.
• Thinking is easier than not thinking.
• My writing comes from my exhibition, which in turn arises from my latent voyeurism.
• Colors are perception.
• I hope this isn't a passing trend.
• I have to force myself not to write. This is irony...or an utter lack of will or volition.
• At about 4:30, conversation turns to The Breakfast Club. This is a law.
• Britney Spears is the best fight music.
• Art requires alienation.
• How is it possible to endure a whole day without any noteworthy comments? Is it a function of who one spends time with, or how one spends that time?
• "I want that!"--the cry of the mainstream teenaged girl. When, exactly, did America become synonymous with greed and materialism? Or is what's new the ability of counterculture to conceptualize words like "materialism" and try to alienate its members from the ranks of enlightened hypocrisy?
• A little boy sitting on his mother's shoulders, trying to climb over the fence into Harvard Yard.
• Sometimes, things look posed for a photograph--out of real life, though--and the metaphor seems more real than the thing itself.
• "My mom's so happy--her boyfriend's nephew has cancer--Let me finish!"
• Love changes: sometimes it's comfortable, sometimes it's delicate, sometimes it's passionate--it's always true.
• Girls, when left to their own devices, will have pity conversations. It should be annoying, but isn't.
• You can pierce your tongue in five different places.
• Isolating oneself in a large group of people is surprisingly easy.
• "In 7th grade, a guy told the whole class he liked me because I was smart, pretty, and had nice boobs." "Well, at least it was in that order..." "Yeah, like an essay--save the best for last."
• "Why don't we get something different?" "Okay, you get Peking ravioli and I'll get fried wontons!" "But we share, so it doesn't matter! It's the same food!" "No, it's different."
• "Remember Matt Levitt? Well, he's decided to become a pothead." "What?" "Yeah, he decided that since he's already lazy and useless, he might as well." "Wait, isn't his dad...?" "Yeah, makes it kind of weird." "I dunno, buying it inhouse, he can probably get a discount."
• 2 Jokes In Bad Taste: 1) Whats the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza doesn't scream when you throw it in the oven. 2) Did you hear about the new German microwave? Seats twelve.
• Proof the South is fucked up: In 1974, a guy in Georgia told my dad and his new Bedlington Terrier "Hey, I had a nigger with a dog like that."
• One of the scary things about life on a college campus is the sea of people one sees every day. Scary not for its crushing numbers, but for the fact that there are always reoccurring faces. If the only tenable, romantic position on the issue of fate vs. free will is that, somehow, there is an ineffable plan, but it's up to the individual to make a fateful grasp for it, then every one of those faces is a lost plan for life. And when one is old and tired, what could be worse than to ask "What did I do with my life?" and have the answer be "Noting of importance..." For then, how can one keep from reflecting on the untouched pattern in that long-ago sea of humankind?
• I continue to make conscious attempts to emulate great writing, even though I know I always fall short of it. Sorry.
• "How to score on a first date? Make sure the date's with a girl from Hollis!"
• "I really see it as Paradise Lost meets 'Mork and Mindy'..."
• My writing is vaguely a form of self-analysis.
• Artists congregate because it is difficult for others to comprehend the guilt that comes with living through the fabrications of the mind.
• Another thing we lose as we mature--besides the obvious, the sense of wonder--is a dissatisfaction with imperfect endings, to the point that lack of closure is applauded for its great aesthetic merit. This disturbs me, because I see it in myself, and all I can ask is "Why?" Because it's good, or because it's easy?
• "Male slut"--there is just something fucking COOL about that term.
• Strangely enough, soap operas seem to require as much if not more background as a great dramatic or literary work.
• Workshops work; they work not because of the comments of others, but because when you're supposed to be critiquing others' work, you have a perfect time to zone out and think about your own.
• Rhetoric is a symptom of falsehood.
• The answer to any physics question involving liquid is "viscosity."
• Is it possible to write a play wherein the stage directions, when read, give a totally different story than the lines themselves? Not something as simple as Beckett's "Let's go--The do not move"...a full running narrative that makes every word, every event in the play different? A novel, novelistic drama.
• Is this just a notebook of thesis statements?
• Michael Frane, Cophenhagen
• I can think of few aspirations nobler than to be a writer great enough to explicate the soul of Varnado Simpson and those horrible events at My Lai.
• Wouldn't it be funny if there was a narcoleptic monkey? One minute he's swinging from tree to tree, and then THOMP.
• "I dunno, my daddy always told me that when I heard a lot of loud prayin', go an' check the henhouse."
• "A ruler? What do you need a ruler for?!" "It's blue!"
• The scariest thing about The Shining is Shelley Duvall's face.
• Caffeine and nicotine rhyme.
• I drew a separating line without having anything to say. Oops.
• "Did you know Ethiopia made beer?" "So what? Name a people who don't like getting drunk." "But they're starving!" "Your point? So're the Irish."
• If you make the lines move fast enough, people will laugh because they won't know why they didn't find it funny.
• Humor is the release of the solved terror of a moment of incomprehension.
• Laughter is closely tied to terror; tickling is preparation for stress; giving in entirely to another person like that can be, truly, orgasmic at a spiritual level.
• "...he also sucks cock for money." "Really?!" "No, not really."
• There are Starbucks in Hell.
• "It's funny, because taken in adolescent context, that could be vulgar!"
• "Jessica offered Sam her cherry as compensation for a debt which has not yet been paid."
• The feeling you get after crying is euphoric. Except for the taste it leaves in your mouth.
• Do lesbians give their vibrators female names?
• Irony: a web site about how TV and radio have changed the face of popular culture.
• How many Everclear songs, exactly, revolve around Art Alexakis' ability to bring women to orgasm?
• All tragedy is missed opportunities.
• Irony is an escape from profundity.
• All my writing sounds the same. Is this style or unoriginality?
• Youth likes Plato. It's reassuring.
• The most learned writers are only the best liars. The trick is avoiding pretentiousness.
• Don't dream.
• Patterns are base. Ideas are developed, and can die. Things in primal form, though, these can survive forever.
• "...and maybe then I'll rape her, for dramatic effect."
• Aphorisms are a way of thought.
• Religion's controversy is due to the fact that its sense of "good" is both vast and static.
• Steal an oak log. Treat it like a person. "Dante wants a Coke." "No." "But he's thirsty!" "Dead as a log." "Dante's got wood!" "He looks a little bored." "I'm sure he could do better. If only he would." "Dante logs onto his computer." "Was that some kind of a j-oak?" "Oak-ay."
• A syllogism: Childhood is wonder. Education is the cessation of wonder. Thus learning is what ends our childhood. School matures us, not age.
• All poetry is about sex or death.
• Meta-standup: the comedian creates humor through citing other comedians. "Bill Hicks--'Nobody move, I've got a soccer ball!'"
• I'm finding myself answering an implicit "Why?" far more often than in the past.
• Except for conscious moments like this, this thing is an indirect journal of my personality. I didn't know I could do that.
• In a new ad, Best Buy is basically saying that learning how to channel surf is an achievement on par with learning how to talk. Does this scare anyone else?
• Modern literature is bleak because authors are bitter that all the real money's in screenwriting.
• I am realizing, again, that Jesus Christ Superstar is a far better transmitter of Christianity in the modern world than, ironically, enough, any religious effort to do so.
• I would be so pissed off if I was one of those scientists who fix evolutionary theory to work with modern science, since Darwin still gets all the credit.
• Everything is relationships.
• Once an idea enters the minds of the people, it cannot be stopped until it is so endemic that it cannot help but contradict itself. At that point, one who is permeated by the idea will awake to his culture's idealogical flaws.
• I have this weird thing, where I'm always really interested in hearing about people's lives and problems, but never comfortable if the conversation isn't focused on ME.
• Did we always "see" our memories like a movie, or is it a result of being inundated by a video-soaked culture? Did our mind's eye always act as an "eye," or in ages of oral storytelling was it sound, or words in a print culture? But wouldn't that be a higher level of abstraction, visualizing events through aural or logical symbols? Or is the true achievement of abstraction being able to abstract oneself from oneself, to look at life from the third person?
• "This is kinda shiny, wanna play with it?"
• Confirming a drug deal across the street from a police car. "Is that that bitch cop?" "Hey, guys, how much do we want?"
• Explication is a crutch for the weak, an attempt to bring about the essence an intelligent individual experiences upon reading, and thus, inevitably, inexorably, fails.
• I use my sense of the written word to hide a lack of true depth of thought. Surprisingly, such literary hand-waving works best in non-fiction. People are more critical of imagination than of professed truth.
• "Bob Marley died when he was 33. That's only 3 years younger than Jesus."
• America gains stability from its heightened sense of self-awareness.
• "He's...he's a pot-bellied pig." "That's cool, since, like, it works on two levels..." "Yeah. He's a pig for the pot and he's a pot for the pig. Wait. No he isn't! That doesn't make sense."
• Writers describe with words. Poets evoke. But so do playwrights and screenwriters and directors. Does that mean the performing arts are more like poetry than literature?
• I'm only relaxed when I have a script; ease comes from rules, not freedom. But freedom is the natural state. So is it normal to be nervous?
• I notice I've gone back on my original concept, that this would be a collection of images, or analysis, not both.
• A little tidbit: I'm noticing that I write most of these in practically a trance-state; sometimes I don't even remember what I write until I read it days later.
• How many times, per week, do journalists go out of their way to say things like "criterion" and "datum," just to sound smarter than they really are?
• Last night, before I fell asleep, I had the chilling thought that maybe my friends just use me and despise me behind my back. Down this path lies paranoia.
• Economic unity has only worked in the past because the countries in question were basically the same idealogically. The WTO is trying to tie together truly disparate lands, and thus is failing.
• Theory: there are no names in Heart of Darkness because Conrad was too stoned to remember them.
• "You put 18 and 76 together and you get, well, Brussels."
• "It's better to do a bad thing to something bad than to something good." "What do you mean?" "For example, is it better to kill a child molester or a priest?"
• I can create an uncalculable number of college admission essays. This is potential, not hubris.
• I am, truly, quite immature; my cruelty to others is a result of either jealousy or shyness and respect.
• "Inertia is real. It's a real thing."
• "Hell yeah I'm going to services! I'm gonna get my Jewve on!"
• It's ironic that school, which is about learning, keeps me from writing when I want to, and, more importantly, have the spark.
• WHY THIS FIXATION WITH IRONY?! Is it me or pop culture?
• No one seems to care about this new wave of anti-free-trade protest because it is so global. The only ones who can see how it permeates the whole world are intelligence agencies, who, of course, would never give the protesters any sort of legitimacy.
• When spots appear on your field of vision, is it really hiding anything? Or does that merely show reality--is vision actually the mind interpolating based on incomplete and constantly fluctuating data?
• Drugs fill the same hole as love.
• You know you're down when you ally with Ireland.
• The best line in Wallace Steven's "The Emperor of Ice Cream" is "Let the lamp affix its beam." The lamp acts on itself. It affixes itself. Death causes its own clarity; paradoxically, it creates itself. The only thing that makes itself is God, and thus Death truly is the only Emperor, the Emperor of Ice Cream.
• More poetry. "A Heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er/She looked on, and her looks went everywhere." --Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess."
• Apple is France.
• "He was so funny! Not like intentionally, but..."
• Except for sex, everything that feels good kills you.
• The best metaphors come from reality; that is, the theme gets wrapped around an image. They don't really exist, not even so much as ideas do.
• In less than a week, I think I've experienced the best and worst days of my life; the best was artificial and the worst was all disillusionment and reality.
• I desire love because love shows that I rate somewhere on someone else's priorities, in contrast with the utter apathy and rejection I currently sense. Life isn't livable without others' concern. It all is slipping away, the illusions of my life are slamming down, rattling the dirt of my deluded psyche. I've hit the wall.
• It's like all my ambitions and talents have been hijacked by others, and I can only watch from a distance as they live my dreams.
• Angst: it's good for the soul.
• Writing these depends on momentum.
• My problem is that at the center I have nothing solid, no foundation. Instead, there is a vacuum, an utter void so powerful and so at odds with its multitude of satellites that its surface appearance is solid. But things fall through...and at a critical point, everything will.
• The only important thing in life is legacy. Ironic. The only important thing in life is what is left afterwards.
• The beauty and power of thought lies not only in its ability to give form to the intangible, but in its singular talent m for allowing physical impossibilities. What physical model of opinion could portray both the utter disparity between "like" and "dislike" while also showing how simple it is to be undecided.
• What about a bong, but with Arizona Green Tea instead of water?
• Idealism's importance stems from the generation gap--it is, in many ways, its cause. The difference between youth and old age is often mistakenly defined temporally when it is far more philosophical in actuality; youth believes we can change the world, adults think it is constant. Authority is derived from the flawed belief that experience is always right, a belief which ignores a glaring logical flaw. Unlike the shift from childhood to adolescence, which is a gradual loss of wonder, adulthood comes with one event. It comes when idealistic crusades fail, and that failure becomes a symbol of the innate constancy of life. But it is a fundamental tenet of logic that just because an operation is negative once, it is not, necessarily, always so, and thus proclaims youth.
• It's somewhat incorrect to call the scientific method "inductive logic." True induction makes specifics a general rule; the scientific method merely requires that general rules contain specifics.
• "Consume my heart away; sick with desire / It knows not what it is" --"Sailing to Byzantium", W.B. Yeats
• "The sex life of fish is very boring."
• I feel time and life and opportunity slipping away from me and I DON'T CARE!
• People say we all change over time, and I must admit I don't identify with my recollections of myself, but how much of that is real, and how much is merely forgetting myself?