Autumn

My leg is cramping up.

This has to be due to the position in which I'd slept, this stretched out fetal arrangement that now while I'm picturing what I look like from a birds eye perspective reminds me of a cat relaxing in the middle of the floor under a spot of sun.

On my back is normally how I sleep and my legs do not cramp up, so I suspect something provoked my into this position. It could be the fact that the clock says 11:38am, and I distinctly remember setting an alarm on my phone for 7:20. The extra four hours of sleep taking me from refreshed and motivated to a state of laziness matched only by that of the domesticated felines I mimic with my sleeping posture today.

I'm recalling my sleeplessness of two nights ago. I must still be catching up on rest.

After cranking open the blinds I realize that by sleeping like I am, I might be subconsciously trying to retain heat in this position; all that swaying even the largest branches of the trees outside my window are doing just confirming what my ears were telling me somewhere within my deep slumber, and coupled with my vague knowledge of when during the year I am, autumn has broken through.

"But it was still so spring yesterday..."

The steady air stream sounds more like a waterfall and the air tastes a bit dry, and with the sun also only half awake and peeking out from behind the clouds enough to realize it neither wants to get up today, my skin is reacting as if it were the only thing between me and the fury that is fewer and fewer hours of daylight as each day passes.

I am covered in goosebumps.

Autumn has go to be my favorite season, primarily for the clothing.

Gangsters and Strippers, WHOO!

Isaac

Age 19

Raised in a radical household, Isaac brings a healthy amount of skepticism to everything he ponders. He is confident in his opinions on social justice, the perceived futility of individualism, deviancy, and rhetorical issues, and is always ready to defend his stance against any similarly outspoken adversaries. His narcissism and vanity oftentimes shines through the attitude he calls confidence, and is a point of ridicule from his friends and acquaintances. With a humble pair of ears and a committed memory he makes note, though, and takes it all in stride as if it were words from the wiser saying to him "you are not perfect". Isaac is very intellectually combatitive, on a seemingly endless journey to find a set of wits that match his own, and with growing despair he is hardly ever humbled. He sees his own expressing of opinion not anything of preaching, but as the only way he can make certain that he does not leave confused anyone like how his own intelligence left many of his peers and authorities confused as he was growing up. His early emotional independence left him with a strong set of personal philosophies before his ability to express them to others even existed, which seeded his frustrations over communication of thought that grew into what he now calls a "sporting spirit towards discourse", but as a child often left him feeling isolated and insecure about his way of seeing things. The oldest by one year in a family of five, the effects of early and accelerated cognitive growth had put a strain on his relationships at home, as well. Exploration and inquisition dominated his pre-education life, and laid the foundation for what has now become an assertive and charismatic interrogator personality.

Research on early learning has lead many to believe that in-utero music exposure gave his and other prodigious brains a formulaic jump-start in thought organization. Although he is not a talented musician, Isaac feels the strong connection between music and physiological and emotion state, and is an advocate for bands with eviceral momentum and progressive lyricists with passionate voices.

Isaac is currently a student at one of the country's top universities studying rhetoric, foreign culture, anthropology, journalism and new media. He is hoping to be able to communicate with like minds on topics such as how he thinks the priority of heads of state above primary demographics is to send young adults overwhelming signals to follow pre-fabricated paths to ideological successes which are eventually topped by glass ceilings through using an ever-evolving media system.

Isaac is completely foolish about women. He has had loves and losses, none of which bringing him any closer to an understanding of what or how a relationship with a woman is or works. He has only taken the time to build one substantial relationship with a girl, and has never quite grasped the idea of having to start from the beginning with each new exploit. He is thankful that his first relationship was what felt like a successful one, and due to the unfortunate circumstances under which it ended he has never rebuilt his own desire to put in that effort again. That, coupled with his platonic experiences with girl acquaintances, has created a sometimes unsavory, fairly confused, but unabound place of curiosity in his brain bespoke just for the girls. Watching him attempting to make chatter with a girl who he likes is a humurous if not nauseatingly awkward display, as he tries at every other time to make everyone aware of his self-image and knack for witty banter, because we know that in his head he thinks he has prepared a slew of appropriate remarks to cover any direction his conversation with said female may take him, but alas he is most often left scratching the back of his head laughing nervously in wonderment as she walks away. Within his group of friends he is both the most socially aware and the most socially inept.

Isaac shows aspects of the thrill-seeking and adrenaline junkie personalities in his hobbies and interests. Applying his savvy early to practical applications, one of his first regular practices was reverse engineering. Between broken VCRs and kitchen equipment and clocks, his early take on the "greater than the sum of it's parts" idiom created a boy with a devilish affinity for disassembling and bastardizing gadgetry so to augment or, more often, limit functionality. The latter begun as a stream of failures in trial-and-errors, but later proved useful knowledge when applied to computing systems and small network management. He begun seeking his digital thrills by breeching the securities of a few small businesses, but with the speed at which technology evolves he quickly fell behind security curves. The tinkering carried on to larger experiments, notably motor vehicles, and in taking apart his first internal combustion engine, he was awe-stricken at the concept of harnessing thousands of tiny linear explosions per minute and converting that into rotational force. This stirred his interest in velocity and experiencing Gforces. Isaac is a skilled driver.

Isaac has experimented with a wide variety of drugs. Careful and objective in his approch, he researches and studies the effect of any substance he puts into his body. His first trial with marijuana was only to disprove to himself that the common perception of it being a gateway drug was incorrect, and he became satisfied when he did not desire to escalte his usage months after trying it. Later, his curiousity got the better of him and he decided to begin experimentation with various substances and document their effects. To this day he is not sure whether this disproves his own theory or is an indication of his lack of self-control. Experimentation gave him the opportunity to not only gain a objective viewpoint on substance use and abuse, but also to acclimate to a sub-culture that was completely new to him of which he'd only read speculatory information about. This period lasted two years and his departure from the way of living has become a subject of much debate between him and his friends, many of which still choose to belong exclusively to that culture.

Isaac is a prospect model and truly believes his striking good looks will take him very far in life if his intellgence doesn't.

Isaac has diarrhea.

Isaac is a douchebag.

All Isaac fucks with is gangsters and strippers.

fuck you, jon

i just got word that allen's mom died in a car accident last night. i was on the phone with him just a minute ago. he kept put together. he told me that we always try to prepare for changes in our lives. change of car, changing friends, changing schools, moving into a new house, and even deaths in the family. and he also said that we could have the worst day on the planet, and our co-workers might be having bad days so they won't talk to you about it, and sometimes your friends don't answer the phone, sometimes your siblings just don't get it, but you've always got your mom. he told me he was prepared for his dad to die because of the lifestyle he's leading. i couldn't feel as he was telling me all of this. damn. well, that kid's got a strong heart and a lot of love. he's going to be all right.

Do you have a minute?

I could tell this morning when I woke up that today was going to be one of those days where I'd be subconsciously ready for all of the stresses that being Zac Malinowski puts on me. I could not tell you what gave me this indication, but it's a distinctive feeling I get from time to time. I asked myself "how do you feel today?" out of the blue and after a few minutes came up with a whole-hearted answer. It was something like "I am irate, dude. I feel as though social interaction has deteriorated in recent years due to the insurgence of social networking sites into next-gen living, all of which sites only give their users an opportunity to display themselves in whatever light he chooses and a catalyst for a generation of selfless egomaniacs to learn how to follow behind a crowd." Wow, Zac. Maybe people should ask you how you feel more often. But I'd been premeditating this for a few minutes or so, in thinking about how in today's society, one man's word is worth so little compared to how much it once was in years previous; how oratory skills only get you as far as the employee-of-the-month board or a few lucky kisses from girls who feel like they deserve a real compliment once in a while, where as back in roman times a skilled orator could make an entire steadfast crowd question their own judgement; how the simple pleasantries like "hello" and "excuse me" and "thank you" escape the majority of our daily lives; and it doesn't quite make sense to me, the ease of these things and the apparent difficulty practicing them. It's a lot like going green, but socially. We can do it, people. If everyone on the planet drove an electric car, everyone will have 100% cleaner air to breathe. This isn't likely to happen, but not because we don't want cleaner air, but because electric cars are expensive as a motherfucker. When nobody litters, our entire landscape looks beautiful. This I've noticed personally in my time on this earth has improved and our landscape is beautiful. But because of how I feel about the social network site, I'm judgemental of it's users, so this may leave my reasons for haveing one a little skewed. Now, I've never needed a thousand friends. I've never needed three-hundred friends. I've never even need forty friends. I've never needed that sort of masturbation. So if all I've ever needed was fifteen friends, in a worst case scenario they all live on opposite ends of the country, and I also in a worst case scenario had a need to keep up with each of them every single day, what is really so hard about just... calling them? Or is it that we all feel so completely alone and isolated and abandoned that we do need three-hundred friends? Think about how much more rewarding a few good words in person or on the phone is than a paragraph in print to one of your close friends. It's so much more real, more alive, more satisfying. It could be that we're all too conditioned to hold our true selves in that we're too afraid to let anyone know that we actually do become bored with seeing and talking to the same people day in and day out, and thus we need a full magazine of friends. Well, that's more of an individualized problem than a group issue. Myself, I will let whoever know that "...I'm just not that into hanging out right now because I've just about gotten my fill of you for the week.". And I'm sorry to those of us who can't accept that we also have friends who get bored of us, because we know it happens. Oh well, right? We've never needed three-hundred friends anyway. Something else that social networking has done for me, is that it lets me sit back with a nice cup of coffee and read about what everybody's been doing since the last time I'd logged in. And if any of your lives are as fucking interesting as mine, we all know how involving of a read that is. When did we stop taking time to think about ourselves and what we're doing with our lives and start thinking about what we can do with ourselves that will look good on our network sites so that all of our friends get to see how much thought we put into what they think? When we're not out at a party where there's nothing but beer drinking, tribal rallies, power struggles and empty conversation going on, taking self potraits with every person there so that we can all look back in five years at how stupid we all were "but look at all the fun we had and how close we were", we're sitting online looking at all the party pictures of the parties we didn't get to go to and affirming how much fun it would have been to have gone. Have you ever looked at how much time that takes to do? Try it next time, recording how much time you spend browsing your chosen network site, and on one of those days, one of those alert and productive days, take that amount of time and spend it thinking about something that makes you angry or sad or enthusiastic, so that the next time someone takes her face and points it in your direction, locks her eyes with yours, warms up her smile and says, "so, how are you feeling today?"
you have something better to say than
"hmm, pretty good, i guess."

Have you seen Sailor Jerry's tattoos?

I'd rather write. i love sitting down with a good book and just taking everything in i can about it, but i'd rather just write. i went to the bar yesterday with a couple of friends and we had some beers. usually when i go to the bar, i go just to have a beer. I've also been know to go to the bar by myself sometimes, too. my friends and i had a nice chat about their new girlfriends and boyfriends and how i really haven't had much luck trying to find one. i can already tell this post is gonna suck.
okay bye.
anyway, after the girl left to go visit her new boy, it was just us guys left and we started to relax and talk with each other about his girlfriend and how he's liking that whole bit. there came a point where i needed to use the restroom and i left him sitting there at the bar by himself. i was just expecting him to be sitting there waiting upon my return, but he was actually talking to this beautiful girls sitting on the opposite corner. my seat was in between them, so naturally i jumped into their conversation. she was sweet, we both made her laugh, and there were lulls, but i tried my hand at really involving her in the topic of conversation my friend and i were talking about. this post still sucks.
anyway, this girl ends up asking me about my tattoo i have on my wrist. i was more than happy, here at this bar, to tell her the story of my love. when people ask me at work, or in passing, i'm usually a bit apprehensive to divulge anything because it's such a long and involevd story that when i dont have time to tell the whole thing it's just not as good of a tale. this girl, and subsequently her friend too, after 5 minutes of story, were completely wrapped around my finger. i had no idea i was capable of telling a story that someone would actually listen to like that. i don't think anybody's really listened to me like that. i feel like i've always had a problem with people listening to me. between my oftentimes weak voice and tendancy to stutter, my lack of focus and poor memory, i've never really been able to be interesting enough to listen to me. what have i changed in myself that i now have this ability to enthrall? i have no idea. maybe it's my subconcious finally becoming fed up with not ever being heard. i have been noticing lately that i've taken up an interest in singing and performing in a band again. this time as a singer. a writer.
but these girls.
the girl sitting closest to me gets up and chats with a friend on sidebar for a while while i pause the story, talk to girl two one-on-one for a few minutes, and then begin telling just her the story. and i finish it. at the end she was completely floored and asked me if i were a writer. i don't know if she spotted my notebook in my back pocket or she really thought my story was good, but either way, i got a great confidence boost right there. i've never been told that, and i don't easily flatter, but that did it. when the first girl comes back i tease her for leaving in the middle of my tale and she laughs. i tell her, finish, and she calls me a writer. that's two. maybe she heard her friend tell me. i have no idea. but i think after considering being a journalist for life but only two months ago, this signified some soundness in my choice.
thanks, girls.
maybe i'll start making up names nest time i tell a story.
this post really sucked.

myLife

...lives on this disk.

DNF

This brain has been disqualified. Sorry. Every thought therein is not applicable to life today; tomorrow. It has been replaced by server space somewhere in california, where all one could possibly know is indexed an can be readily accessed by any internet-capable device. Thanks google; no you are not a proper noun in my dictionary. Dare I voice my abstract opinion on the topic, with such a tangible fear of rejection by the people. So what is it that people talk about? It has to be something where opinion doesn't play much of a role so much as being a topic where from a view can be easily adjusted to fit the expectations of the audience. Theorizing is out of the question anymore, with every possible real-life scenario already having been played out some place, at some time, leaving room for no one but the most prodigious of minds headroom to speculate. Imagination doesn't quite fit, seeing as how a joke is a joke unless whom it's being told to isn't joking, then it's an insult, a threat, harrassment, belittlement, not funny, a total conversation killer. Wait, I just had an epiphany. Ideas! We can talk about ideas, so after we get ourselves all excited and worked up about what we plan on creating together tomorrow, it all winds up on the cutting room floor again. I think a lot of the time, we talk about other people. It's the high-class small talk we can all be a part of, so long as we don't mind any thought process beyond "smile, nod head". But where does that take us, talking about other people? What about other people do we talk about, what they are talking about? If we're all talking about what they're talking about, and they're talking about what some other people are talking about, and we're all talking about each other, doesn't that mean that we're all wanting to talk about ourselve but would rather say "he said, she said" than "I said"? I say that I think we're all mentally handicapped, based on the fact that our mouths work so well, but we choose to use then for such slanderous garbage. I will take all of that footage off the cutting room floor, piece it together to form a chronological take on everything we've chosen to take part in, perform a score that accentuates all the most dramatic moments with sullen piano riffs and hollow clarinet tones, have the entire audience in rapture trying to find the meaning behind my choice for a complete lack of color in the irises of our protagonist during the commencement ceremony in the last twenty minutes of the movie, only to find out that our hero never wanted to dismiss those academic children up against the wall during lunch in high school. Damn, what a tragedy. We'll make it. I have the drive. And the ability to forget I'm visible.


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So yesterday I started my daily runs for over the summer. Yesterday's was rough on me, I couldn't even jog the 2 miles without taking a bit of a walk. I suppose this is all right, considering how many cigarettes i've smoked in the past 9 months, and in how it gave me a very low starting bar to jump for the next day. Today I jumped the bar. Whoo. Ran the full two. Once I get home after a run, and i can feel my sweat glands squeezing beads of sweat out of my forehead, my vision woozy with the happiness of a drunken graduate, accurately being able to distinguish the scent of cow shit from the house down the road, God; I feel alive. When I feel alive I'm clear enough to critique myself on things like my social anxiety and why it's an intangeble fear, and why I even smoke in the first place. The social anxiety I can trace back easily, seeing as how I've literally been born in a barn. Might as well been a foreign exchange student from Mahaj or some ancient civilization. But the smoking thing, I can't. I just can't remember why I started. In thinking so negatively about my habits origins, I decided to ask myself a simple question, "Zac, sir of sirs, can you smoke?"
My answer was, of course, yes. Obviously the "what do you do at a green light?" trick doesn't work on me, so pat yourself on the back, Zac, you're just too afraid to commit to a desicion that can make you feel like a drunken visionary for the rest of your life. The satisfaction of such a wonderful run, the deep, healthy breaths, no. It's not quite enough for you. You pig, you, you've got all the excuses in the world, haven't you? And just at the point where I thought there was absolutely no reason I myself could come up with to quit, I was right. I do have all the excuses I am, of course, always right. About myself, at least. The mail arrives everyday conviently between the point when my run starts and my run's end. I'm glad the mail person knows what time I start my run everyday, because her kind gesture of delivering in the middle makes it very easy for me to check it on my way back into the house. Today, there were nothing but mailers. Mailers and adverts. Winded, thinking about my ego-insubordination, I thumb through them all only to have a bold voice jump out at me, screaming fidelity.


No excuses, son. Join a gym, there's a rebate. No excuses. Quit smoking, you cock. No excuses. Well all right.
This seems to happen to me a lot, a loss of faith creeps into my thoughts, I'm at the end of my own hopeless rope, completely unwilling of helping myself or anyone else, and a clever mail lady gives me a wink while making her final stop to drop my mail in the middle of my afternoon run.



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I love technology

Yay! Toasting an epic bread!


And yes, I do use straight blades to cut my breadz, thank you.
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Demonstrative rhetoric: Literally, the argument of the future.

Now unless i'm sitting through an entire battle with my mother with a tape recorder, it's hard for me to recount everytyhing that was said. all i know is that when she begins to talk at me about "things that i hate" or "things that i think are stupid", all i'm thinking is, "you fit under both lists in my eyes when you talk like that". just today she was ranting about how she thinks my dad getting the window motors fixed on his car was stupid. i concede. yay, it's all over now. but no, it';s time for her to reinterate, over and over, how we should just take the windows out of her old junk and us install them. sure, whatever. i try to say as little as possible to prevent talking over her head and making her feel genuinely stupid, because for that I'd feel like genuine shit. In my silence, she compares me to my dad. The difference is, however, that his silence is not voluntary. I tell her,
"yeah, that's a good idea."
and it brings her mood up a bit for a minute, until she starts thinking stupid thoughts again.
"after those windows, that's it. your dad should just junk that car. it sits there like a piece of shit."
"yeah. make sure he saves the engine. we can fix it up."
"no you won't. it'll just waste more of our space and never get fixed like everything else you take apart."
mom, i love you. you and your undying faith in your son.
"well, in 5 years when i have time to spend with him, we'll fix it."
you see, right here is me trying my best to instill some amount of optomism into my mother. note the future tense of the sentence. that's me trying to deliberate, trying to get something acomplished. the environment i grew up in was always so negative, so brief, so unexplained. the latter years of my life have all been dedicated to preparing myself for the outside world, where people communicate with each other. a place where the desire to be part of a group can actually help a person advance in society. a place where people all around you are ready to tell you your idea are shit, but are also flexible enough to consider them and possible change stance. This is the world in which I wish to live. I'm going to make sure I get there. Where I grew up, I learned that I can do anything, I have the capability to hurt others, but I should not for the good of everyone; that this earth is truly free. I'm lucky for my upbringing. I just wouldn't wish it on my kids. What my mother says next is a prime example of why,
"well, you have time now, so why don't you now?"
Instantly, i think of all the reasons why i don't do it right now. these reasons aren't even for me, either. My dad's a busy man. He's got a stressful job where at he works hard, a huge yard to take care of, some horses, my mother's exhausting demeanor, his car keeps breaking down, he's busy.
okay well i'm taking off, i don't have all day to sit and vent. i've actually been over this whole situation since it ended, so me trying to recall all of it wouldn't quite give the same effect as being here.
What I wanted to remember was that every time I try to bring one of my mom's fights from a blame-shifting, name-calling slump, by using future tense statements, by taking her side on her thoughts about how certain things are stupid, she finds some way, SOME WAY, to make it back into a defense-offense battle between her and the world.
Mom, the world isn't out to get you. I can show you so. I'm here to help you.
I love you.
Read the book I gave you.