Moth Balls and Turkey Shoots

Where's Waldo is down to :45 seconds. Snaps for me!

I do not know why, but a craving fell upon me to play Baldur's Gate II, after several years of putting down my troll blood-stained scimitar. Being a gnome illustionist attracted me all of a sudden.

I knew that I had mounds of homework to do, and that the last thing I neeeded was to get addicted to that fucking game all over again. But I began a search to find the pesky game, and I was able to find 3 out of the 4 CD's to install it on to my computer (FERK, I HATE it when that happens).

I tore up Pop's office looked downstairs into Mom's office clawed down the baskets of computer parephenalia dogpiled in my closet opened drawers closed drawers checked cases for misplaced CD's looked in DVD piles found my copy of Rushmore rejoiced then continued and I could not find it anywhere.

I decided then to bring the campaign into the garage. A task not suited for later in the day, as our garage is a just a heap of junk. We have never been able to fit a car in there since I was 11. Eventually I gave up the search, and was about to return when I stumbled upon a box of Grandpa Jack's leftover letters. A lot of them were from his school days when he was an undergrad at UCLA and later doing his postgrad work at USC and Harvard. He was a Political Science major, but he did a lot of collaboration with pyschology and sociology as well. I red a little bit of his dissertation of the academic development patterns of certain ethnic groups. It keeps reminding me of how brilliant that man was.

He died a year ago. This will be the first time we observe his birthday without him.

I have not thought about him in God knows how long. It came when I was busy doing schoolwork and trying to revamp the club I was president of, and I just did not have any time to sit down an grieve. Then again, I was grieving him for about two years before that, ever since he got his stroke and began to decay. There is nothing like an old incendiary, a political lion of textbook Saul Alinsky status robbed of his ability to speak or move or do anything but watch TV.

The stroke slowly took its tole on him. I remember how little things began to be a challenge to him. He used to make some quick one-liner joke about it, but little by little you could hear the frustration creep into his voice. One image that sticks out in my mind was watching him struggle to put on shoes. He could not use a shoe horn effectively anymore, and my dad had to help him. After that he got continuously worse every time I saw him.

He called me when I turned 16, thinking that I was going to get my driver's license fairly soon. He showed me a couple pages he printed out on the computer of different poisons. He talked to me seriously about "staging" an accident, one that no one would have to know about. He did not want to carry on in his present state. When I rejected that proposal, he talked to me about me driving him to Oregon once I got my driver's license. Oregon is the only state that allows euthanasia. I yelled something indefinite to him, that he was not a dog and I was not going to put him to sleep that way. He never talked to me about it again, and I was further discouraged to get my license. I still do not have it now.

The last year was the worst, when he moved in with us and I had to sleep next to him so that I could help him go to the bathroom when he needed to. I remember hearing him cry himself to sleep, only the stroke made them come out like howls, as if he was a mother wolf crying for dead pups.

The office called me in during lunch. They told me my mom had to pick me up. This was September 11th, 2006. I knew already by the call what it meant. I did not cry, though. And now I realize that I did not have to. I was already doing it years back.

I do not remember much about the burial services. I can recall the stench of formaldehyde. He had a Hawaiian shirt on too, in the end.

I never knew him. I tell people that we were close, but in reality I never knew him. The whole time I was in love with everything he represented. He was deeply dedicated to academia and the progression of humanity. He believed in the power of grassroots democracy. He reveled in obscure arts. He was more bohemian than any cigarette-smoking fuck who lives today. But he never let me close.

I could remember wanting him to sit down with me, right before he lost his ability to speak coherently, to give me some lasting advice. I wanted him to pour his heart out to me, that he loved me, that he was proud of me, that I could live up to be half the man he was. I wanted him to tell me I was going to light the world on fire and fight against all odds, like he did. I wanted him to approve of my theatre, my essays, my writing. All I got from him was fucking criticism.

A fool and his time is soon parted.

I was lucky to have a grandfather at all, do not get me wrong. To this day I keep wondering if he would be proud of me. I wonder if he would approve of the choices I was making. My dad does not criticize me at all based on his experience of grandpa always attacking his ideas. Sometimes I want it though, because I want to be better than what I am now. I wish he was alive so that he could have heard me on the radio. I wish he could have heard my speech on Global Warming, so he could see his grandson following in his footsteps. Out of all his apathetic grandchildren, one was going to carry the Belasco torch.

If only he could have held out three more months.

I have decided Waiting for Godot will not only be dedicated to a particular friend of mine, but to Grandpa Jack. He would have approved of this, especially of my motivations to do this play. It has a message that I want to communicate to all the seniors. It is an important and urgent one, and I do not know how to communicate it any better than this. Kairos has a week, I have two hours.

God, that was far more bleak that I wanted it to be. Samuel Beckett is devouring my life.
October 5th and 6th at Mission PAC. Please come.

Procrastination on Calc tests always leads to Youtube...

Found Waldo in 1:15 minutes today. Shit! Maybe it is not best to do this in the morning.

In the Last Days of Tecumseh...

Today I try on my retainer for the first time since I came back from Mexico. Needless to say they hurt more than it would to give birth through my urethra (I'm sorry, that visual was totally not necessary).

Lauren's doing great. We went out to Yanagi's last night, then had coffee at Linnea's. They had a little toy wrought-iron tea table that we decided to occupy, as another folk duo braved leaving their garage on a Friday night to try their luck in the cafe's famous main room. I have yet to see anyone utilize the saloon piano there yet, and it feels just so utterly lonely there. Learning a nice song to play on that mother just made my list of things to do. I am not sure what yet, but I have been listening to a lot of Grant Lee Buffalo lately, so probably something like "Honey Don't Think" or "Mockingbirds."

We stayed there as long as my legs allowed me to straddle the tea set chair before they started to cramp out on me. Lauren told me about her recent exploits in the bay area (which often includes an obligatory romp through Ashbury), moving into Cal Poly to keep a friend company during WOW week, and how work has become Godzilla for her, man as well as rubber suit, her free time being downtown Tokyo. Every time I see her I realize that she's just days now from packing up and leaving to UCSD. Going to miss her like a mother, but she'll be happy down there, and that is the important thing.

Finished the ticket designs for Waiting for Godot. I have to say, I am pretty damn proud of them. It makes the play even look more and more like it is going to come true. The Getty flyers are done too, as well as the ones for Political Activism Club. So things have been fairly P-R-O-D-U-C-T-I-V-E.

Was on the bus today. Social worker was taking some adults afflicted with Down's Syndrome to McDonald's. Very friendly people. One was a woman with cottonball cheeks who kept calling me "very attractive." Another one kept on asking me for high fives and wished to be called "Big D." I tried to keep my Freud sensors from flaring up. Terribly difficult thing to do.

Anyways, I thought they were going to McDonald's. The third one, who remains nameless to me as I never saw his nametag, was acting particularly loud and the social worker had to resort to stopping the entire trip. "That's it, buddy, no Happy Meal for you!"

I never saw a person's eyeglasses fog up so quickly. "YOU CAN'T DO THAT! YOU PROMISED! YOU CAN'T BACKSIES OUT NOW!" He stood up as the bus was in motion, stretching out his big arms like how a camper would do to intimidate a black bear. "I AM THE BEAST! YOU CAN'T SAY NO TO THE BEAST!" He started to spit all over the place, screaming and beating against the windows. I slunk a couple seats down, preoccupying myself with the horrified looks of car passengers in neighboring lanes waching the drama unfold. The bus driver eventually pulled over and ordered the social worker and her possy out. Despite being "The Beast," the incendiary gentleman was quickly drawn out by yanking his ear, his bloodcurdling roars for the pleasure only a Big N' Tasty would bring drowned out by the sobs of his morose contemporaries. The bus then shuffled along upon leaving, no one saying a thing.

Funny how the weirdest things occur, and our immediate response as a anonymous crowd is to not say a thing. Then again, there is probably nothing to say. Scenes like that speak for themselves.

It puzzles me how food companies or restaurant chains like McDonald's have websites. It makes me curious as to who actually goes on, intentionally searching for menu updates, deals, locations, or to feed some intellectual thirst. What satisfaction could a thorough investigation of something like a superficial web page for artificially flavored snacks?

More importantly, Who the fuck has time for that?

Found Waldo today in 1:10 minutes. I am out of shape.

The last time we talked, Mr. Smith, you reduced me to tears...

Going to see Lauren in half an hour, and this is the perfect place to kill time.

Got an email back from Clifton yesterday. Appears to be having a blast learning the art of priesthood in Colorado, despite being surrounded by Religious Fundamentalists. He did not speak of returning to California anytime soon, clearly trying to avoid my supplication to return to Mission and teach Theology IV. Instead he gives me one of his left-field semi-effective analogies:

Have you ever played Warcraft or Starcraft? If you don't build barracks, you're screwed. You see, I'm in the priest barracks right now. In two years I'll appear outside and call out "ready to serve!" Then I will go berzerker and unleash my orthodoxy on the Monterey diocese. Meantime, more and more soldiers... I mean priests... will be formed. Pretty soon there will be flying gryphon's shooting flaming axes and ... ok... So I guess the warcraft metaphor has its limits."

"

Not that I can complain too much about my Theology class now, I guess. We had an interesting discussion today pertaining (using that verb a little too much) to the omniscience of God and whether or not that conflicts with idea of free will. One of the cornerstones of the foundation that makes up my strong secular nature, Granitz pulled out a textbook Catholic logical proof on how God COULD pull it of:

So basically, God's omniscience allows him to know everything, hence the use of the word omniscience, right? So who are we to restrict that to the knowledge of ONE reality? Why would God stop at making just one reality? Perhaps there are hundreds, thousands, millions of different strands of reality that branch off of ours, one for every possible outcome and consequence. God, being omniscient, would have the ability to understand all dimensions of the universe. Hence, free will conforms totally with the idea of omniscience.

Nice argument, is it not? Five hundreds years of having to beat those damn Protestants in theological battles and a couple of millenia feigning the idea that they are in fact smarter than the pesky heretics (or any man of reason) has given the Catholic Church plenty of time to iron out their arguments.

But let us disect this proof. First of all before we begin, we have to establish that God is a all-knowing, all-powerful, and rational being. The Catholic Church already believes this, so we do not need to backtrack (Thanks Thomas Aquinas, I owe you a cold one). If dimensions exist for every single possible outcome or reality, then it logically follows that dimensions exist in which Jesus did not come to save, or died for the sins of the world. What of these people then? Are they damned for eternity for never even knowing the Lord God, or the "right path"? Why would an infinitely wise and rational God allow such dimensions to exist?

"But perhaps God visited all dimensions in human form!" True. God could just not allow those types of dimensions to exist. God is omnipotent, after all. But it is in my opinion that utilizing the "God is omnipotent and therefore can do whatever he wants" defense is a bit of a dialectic cop-out, a theologic "Just 'cuz." OH WELL, guess you win then.

The problem with using that argument however is that it opens a Pandora's Box of possibilities. One can reason to any conclusion using the omnipotence defense, as they release themself from the box of logic to deduce any conclusion they please. By then you are not dealing with reason. Rather, you are dealing with beliefs of your own construct you flaunt for mathematically arriving upon. It is the only way so far I have seen Catholics use so far to defend their belief of God, which bothers me so. Still I concede that it is through this proof only that one can defend Catholicism.

Mr. Granitz. He is such an interesting figure, besides the fact that he constantly fidgets his hands in front of him as if he is resigned to kneading a small invisible object for the rest of his life, or the wandering eyes that choose a victim in the classroom and awkwardly observe them for the entire session, or his proclivity for presuming his students are up to date on Hindu terminology but can not grasp exotic words like "shun" or "collage." His eyes seem to betray something just below the surface, and from his references to his past it is obvious this man has a colorful history. He certainly did not on his arse watching Huell Hauser on PBS. I can not wait to see how he psychologically unfolds before us.

In other news, I have decided that in order to increase test scores in any area, I must practice a diverse mix of mental exercises that flex my cortex. I bought from Mission thrift several "Where's Waldo" books, and I have resolved to do one every day. We will see how fast I get at it by October, when I take my next SAT. We begin that tomorrow.

Waiting for Godot opens in a month. I'm actually doing this play. My left arm has become permanently red from excessive pinching.

Docking at the Cape of Good Return.

I guess I have to be a good host to anyone who takes the time to read this, so here it goes: Welcome to my little sanctuary of sanity! My previous ledger of thoughts, my trusty moleskin notebook, has been relieved of its duties to take on the more presitgious role of keeping track of all the books I have on loan. Plus it has been too long since I have written in there, and it carries some rotten memories that I neither have the stomach to return to or have the heart to clear out. That's what happens when you leave things far in the back of the fridge, I guess.

I introduce myself: I am an 18 year-old living in central California. I feel as if I was born out of my proper generation, and should have grown up with Generation X, the Baby Boomers, or some other glamorous granfalloon that would be much easier to assimilate in. A week ago I realized that there are people competing in American Idol that are younger than me. Three days ago I realized that in two years I will be twenty, in twelve thirty. Yesterday I realized that ten years ago I liked pokemon, a number that felt so impossibly big eight (shit) years ago. This is probably the first of a long series of reality checks that will make me feel the gravity of age.

I really should not feel that old, I supposed. I have my whole life ahead of me, so I am told by older and envious folks. And to a large extent that is true. The bite comes from realizing that I am not a kid anymore, the tree forts and GI Joes were sold at garage sales a long time ago. Now I am mature, a fresh young individual about to extinguish my identity within the work force, the Western World's Atman. High School has left me no vocational trade however, not even any clerk experience. All the jobs I have collected were mascot gigs and assistant instructor parts at theatre workshops.

I was born into a conservative Catholic Mexican family. My mother married an atheist, however, so I was always behind my cousins in learning the mysteries of our Church. During one particularly memorable funeral service in which I uttered out loud a question several decibles too loudly ("Mom, who's the guy on the stick!?"), my grandmother resolved to take my faith into her own hands and save my cursed soul. I was baptized and sent off to catechism. I remember not minding it too much, I enjoyed trying to learn all the prayers and was eager to learn exactly what I was supposed to believe in. My very own philosophy handed to me with no work involved whatsoever!

Things went sour when my parents enrolled me into a samll private school, one that catered to Reform Jews. The beliefs I was being taught during the week began to conflict with the teachings I was being handed on Sundays. Mormons moved in next to us as well, and we were visited early. Now in addition to being told that Jesus was a charlatan and that there was no trinity, I was being told that he teleported to North America after his crucifixion, and that I can marry several women. Fairly early I began to realize that perhaps truth is harder to obtain than just by nodding your head. Maybe truth can't be found. Maybe there is none.

So yeah.

After I left my Jewish School I went into the public system, getting a well-rounded secular education right up until high school. Now things come full circle, and here I am in Catholicism again.

Good ole Catholicism.

I work hard to receive good grades, because people say I will get into a good college that way. My counselor tells me that. My parents tell me that. My friends tell me that. Everyone else says I do not stand a chance, though. And the nay-sayers always seem to be more intelligent, more in-the-know.

Despite what everyone says, I do not think getting into a "prestigious" college will land me happiness, especially when it gives me so much stress right now. And nothing I do ever seems to be enough. The carrot gets dangled farther and farther and farther. If university prestige makes you happy, why isn't everybody at Harvard Buddhist? Or smiling?

Applications. Scholarships. Homework. Theater. Metaphysical Daydreams and Tangents. Walking in the middle of suburban streets. Mowing mowhawks on my front lawn. Friends. Running to bus stops. Getting allergies in used book stores. Thinking that night will never come. Hoping that night will never come. Getting T.S. Eliot stuck in your head. Getting Elliot Smith stuck in your head. Bouncing mercurially between thinking life is predetermined and irreconcilably absurd.

These are my best years. Will I want to remember these memories? Will I rewind the tapes to hear these greatest hits?

Off we go again.

(Note to self: Stop quoting Samuel Beckett so much.)