Thermopylae

Today, I worked at a booth selling “Tofurky” brand vegetarian hot dogs at the U of O street fair. One of many highlights was a discussion with my boss/friend, Dave, about Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen during their high time. He said they were like the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync of the day. “Lou Reed makes you really want to kill yourself, but then want to keep going. Leonard Cohen just makes you want to kill yourself.”

Dave is a biologist and works on fishing boats in Alaska, weighing fish and I don’t really know what else. One of my current goals is Alaska. In some form or other, I will get there. I talked to him a lot about it, and I will convince him to take me for three months to do some intensive fucking labor in January.

Maybe some day I will be on The Deadliest Catch. Maybe I will die on a fishing boat. How fucking awesome. My grave will be the sea. Like a true sailor.

Which reminds me, I had this notion about how The Decemberists is probably the most nautical band I can think of. In a novel way, though. Like picturesque, stereotypical anchors and shit. I don’t like the Decemberists too much.

The Shipping News, however. Talk about heavy-nautical.

Cat Power makes me want to cry and draw pictures.

I cooked a fly into my hashbrowns and I am sufficiently grossed out. It was like picking out the toasted corpse of Uncle Owen or Aunt Beru. There was this episode of CSI where this guy accidentally buried his friend alive at Area 52. I dunno it felt like a combination of disgust and guilt and horror.

Anyway, my browns have got some mushrooms and cheese in ‘em so I guess I’m over it.

Last night marked the Christening of the Datsun B210’s second coming. Escapades involved singing very loudly along to a compilation of songs consisting of predominantly Neil Young and Of Montreal. From there it turned into a stalker mission in which Cassidy Rios Kane was awoken from his slumber at 2:30 am. We jogged over to the park. I watched my two ex-boyfriends roll cigarettes for each other and talk about things of little to no consequence, but throwing in a good dose of humor for laughter’s sake.

The movers and shakers of broken youth. Cheers to the terribly good and wonderfully awful times this autmobile has brought me.

I return from my epic travels and I desperately crave more.

I planned to post some photos from Mexico, but it seems my mother took the camera to Wisconsin on her own travels.

But I CAN jack other people’s photos! just a sampling. more to come in maybe a week.

I love you all. Goodnight.

one puppy of many that i fell in love with

"peace."

Kirk and I are playing an epic game of Manhunt. The game’s been going on for about two weeks. The rules are similar to hide-and-seek, except the boundaries are the city limits.

I’ve shamefully been cheating and asking a bunch of people if they’ve seen him, but I decided to play fair a few days ago.

The problem is, I’m leaving for Mexico in a mere six-point-five hours. He remains unfound! And will just have to stay that way until I get back into the States. Hopefully, he won’t cheat and leave the city.

Anyway. I’m leaving. As mentioned. I will make a visual post because I’ll be keeping a journal/sketch book. I still need to add Alaska photos. Dammit.

fuck the fuckers that fuck the free world!

Today I am at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. As I have been since Saturday. My name tag reads: “ANNA/PONTO/rock star”

It is always nippy and gray here in this seaside town, but I miraculously remain a happy yellow bumblebee! Just kidding I am full of anxiety, but it is hidden away.There are many eagles and ravens. I feel this is the highlight because it is the one point I stress over and over to anyone who asks me about Alaska. I am just up here, chilling with some motherfucking birds of prey, y’all! 

Today I finished (?) a big octopus painting I will not be able to bring back to the continental US in one piece. I got into a very passionate discussion with some middle school children about whales and jelly fish. This little boy who is from Miami, FL told us about how every time there’s a lightening storm, his family makes a “thunder cake,” which is a dark cake (“like the color of the sky”), decorated with frosting in lightening shapes. In retrospect, that shit makes me so melancholy. Hearing about other people’s families. And anyone who knows me knows how amazing my family is. But there’s a certain longing that is just so deeply inset in me. Maybe a desire for my own family. Could be one of those maternal things.

Gosh how did I get on that subject. Whales and jelly fish. I am much more passionate about birds, but jelly fish frighten me. That’s a sort of passion, I suppose.

There’s a “free book” shelf outside of the classroom I teach in, and I picked up a copy of Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of don Juan. The juxtaposition of going to bed at night, reading about the New Mexico desert and the various rituals with hallucinogenic plants, and then waking up to a view of fog and snowy mountains by the sea and getting up to go teach some little kids violin is like whoa. Maybe I can’t explain that sentiment. 

I’ll do an Alaskan photo post once I compile everything and take more aesthetically worthwhile photos. 

I’m sort of dying here. I have been severed from my beautiful companion and I am very lonely in this strange new place. I miss my monster.

A recapitulation of these past months’ events? It be not so.

For a new leaf has turned since the last has fallen. Whateverthefuckthatmeans.

I’m out of high school, dolls and gents. Graduation ceremony is tonight. I’d weaseled my way out of rehearsal like the weasely weasel I am. I won’t sneak into your nests and go stealing your eggs though. Do not be alarmed!

Drinking water with the faint taste of plastic is so Summer. You just reach that point where you are so fucking sweaty and hot and thirsty, you don’t care whatthefuck your water tastes like. Except the weather is sitting comfortably in the mid 70s, so it just tastes really gross to me. Maybe come mid-July I’ll be welcoming the flavor. Plasticwater.

I’m going to Alaska in about a week to teach at a middle school arts camp. I guess I will be coaching some string players and in exchange, get full access to their art facilities. It’s in a tiny town where I will feel in complete isolation. I will paint like a madwoman. My dad tells me they have ravens like we have crows.

Then about a week after my northern journey, I hop down south to build a house in Mexico in the slums of Concordia. It’s like fucking apocalypse out there. Epic. Fucking epic. It’s like everyone out there is a pirate, stealing electricity from the main lines from these makeshift power lines. There’s no garbage system so they just burn their trash. You can just see all across the dessert, smoke billowing up here and there. What is really touching is seeing people who actually have gardens outside of their shitty shacks they call a home. Sunflowers springing up in huge patches. I’m way stoked.

today, a wise man asked me “would you rather completely control every aspect of a mundane drab world, or feel weak and alone but surrounded by overwhelming beauty?”

I love my life.

Last week, my family and I journeyed up to Portland for a rock show at the Roseland Theater to see a band that typically rocks large outdoor venues and probably a few basketball courts. It was refreshing to see the Flaming Lips again, but this time at a much more intimate venue than in the past.

They performed the always glorious opener, “Race for the Prize,” a song about two scientists on an epic and dangerous journey to find the cure for an unnamed disease. This is the sort of vibe the Lips pull so often that is so epic. So many of their songs are about epic fucking battles against robots and monsters, and voyages to outer space and encounters with aliens and the like. It’s all very cartoony and beautiful. I was psyched they didn’t stick primarily with songs from their latest, and less than incredible album. We were graced by a song from The Day They Shot a Hole in the Jesus Egg, which is an older outtakes and demos album; four disks long of raw and sometimes hard-to-listen-to, lo-fi gritty… rock?

It then surprised me they played a song from the album Zaireeka. This album consisted of four disks that were meant to be played and listened to simultaneously. I guess this seals the Lips as an experimental concept-band, but some of the shit they’ve pulled is incredible.

So I was feeling pretty deeply in love after a very pretty haunting song from this album I’ve never heard before, when Wayne Coyne showed us this little instrument he had. It was an electronic insert to be placed inside of a bugle, and then plays a convincing rendition of Taps to played at military funerals. The reason for this invention was because many Vietnam vets and well as American soldiers are dying and nobody wants to join the military bands anymore. I wonder why. He went on a tirade about how disgusting the”instrument” was and it was strangely spiritual for me.

They closed a second encore with The Stones’, “Midnight Mile.”

My sister and I rocked the fuck out.

Life, dogg, how you doin’? Great? Awesome.

rich boy sellin’ crack.

I went to Body Worlds today at OMSI with fam+cass. It was very uncomfortable. Which i realize in some ways is incredible immature of me. There was this bactrian camel “plastinate,” as the specimens were called, which was really cool because a) it wasn’t a person, and b) I never realized how fucking huge those beasts are! Cass nd I shared a very surreal Star Wars moment, standing in front of it. The other cool thing was there was a section of the exhibit showing only blood vessels in various animals/people parts. It was so intricate and, dare I say, beautiful?
Yeah, up for discussion. I mean, these people willingly donated their bodies to be preserved and displayed like that, so no arguments here. But still. It was fucking weird. Real people. Dead people.
Cass and I spent the ride home playing the Battlefield 1942 demo on his laptop. Rather, he played, and I hit keys sometimes to fuck with his shit.

What else. I got a job at Coconut Bliss, labeling stuff. It pays very well, though I believe the job will be ending in November. Market also ends. So I will be out of work once again. But a FAT resume I will have!

I crocheted a really cute hooded SCARF. I finally finished and I gotta say, there are just some things I do well, you know? Like, people say to me things like “dude, you’re so awesome/funny/nice(?)/talented/cute/amazing/etc.,” and I am all “damn dude, I know.” I just have this knack sometimes for doing it so incredibly right. Cassidy says to me “you can’t be King Shit all the time” and while that’s true, it’s only a little bit so.

More stuff more stuff, et cetera. Life is treating me well on most fronts. Very intensely so. But not so much in other areas. I’ve got a few friends in some not-great places and not a thing to be done about it. Sucks.

But hey. I gotta beautiful boy, a big ol’ birthday coming up, and a whole lotta potential I think I might be ready to attempt to fulfill. No, it will never happen, but that’s LIFE!

I plan on making a Flaming Lips semi-review post when I upload pictures.

When did my little dog get so freaking FAT? It’s so damn cute! She’s like me!

I am going up to Portland Wednesday evening for a Flaming Lips concert at the Roseland theatre. theater. cheque. sceptical. yeah. big band+small venue?

I sent Wayne an oil portrait of a Russian Orthodox icon in his likeness. Bastard never wrote me or anything! And here I go, supporting his stupid band by having my mom pay 40bux to go see them. I’m like a lost fucking puppy.

Mr. Wayne, woud yu pweez take me in? That means missing band practice. Cassidy doesn’t know yet.

MAIJA IS LEAVING FOR COLLEGE TOMORROW HOLY FUCK. I’ll be down to like. 1 friend. boifrand.