I Glanced at Despair...

I glanced at Despair

And she had eyes of depthless obsidian,
A gaping mouth of tar
Teeth that were stained with the dysfunction of life

Her movements were those of a nocturnal animal
Sick - stumbling
careening through the daylight hours - silently crying for help.

We are deaf.

Concern, tolerance, we have no souls.
Forgotten are the scars we wear so proudly,
no one sees the torn flesh or the blood dripping
like an insistent faucet, clogged with the brains and bile of humanity.

For one brief moment Despair grinned wildly

Clasping an empty sheet in one hand and a sickle in the other...
When morning came the earth stank and oozed,

For now I am alone, the land beneath me sweating off its fever.

A Dream About Bruce Campbell

Ok, so Bruce Campbell, for those that don't know, is the actor that portrayed Ash, the main character in the Evil Dead franchise. So he's basically a bad ass. He's funny as hell too. I've read his autobiography called 'If Chins Could Kill'. The punch line there is that he's got sort of an exaggerated chin and he doesn't mind poking a little fun at himself.

Anyway the latest movie I saw of his was 'Bubba-Hotep' and it was based off of a novella from one of my favorite authors, hisownself, Joe R. Lansdale. In it Campbell played an elderly man in a nursing home who claimed he was Elvis. It was a good movie based on a cool story, so check it out.

Now to my dream...so Bruce Campbell and I are sitting in a hazy, off-the-strip lounge in Las Vegas. He's dressed like Elvis, and sitting in a vinyl booth, I'm up at the bar. We're discussing our plans for the evening. I want to have a few drinks then go gambling, Bruce just wants to get straight to the drinking and stay at the drinking until he ends up in a sweat-soaked taxi cab at 4 in the morning, going god knows where as the driver runs up the meter.

The weird part of the dream is that Bruce is practicing his ventriloquist skills. He's sitting there talking perfectly, without moving his lips more than a few millimeters. It's kind of creepy really because talking like that just isn't natural. The other weird thing is that he was concentrating so intently on not moving his lips as he spoke that had his fingers all scrunched up as if he were partially paralyzed or had had a stroke. His hands were up by his face and the fingers were curled up like a dead spiders legs as he struggled at his ventriloquism.

I think I started to make fun of him just as the dream was ending. He wasn't really being serious so I didn't offend him, but the whole thing was just a little bit off. If you're bored this weekend go rent Bubba-Hotep or one of the Evil Dead flicks and check out Bruce. He's a great character actor who deserves more recognition.

Cheers everybody, have a nice weekend.

Soccer, home improvement, storms, and school

Hello world. I've got some things to talk about. Things which will probably seem stupid, droll, and mundane to anyone who doesn't know me. But the point is, I'm going to say them anyway. So without further ado...

I found a cool soccer deal on Wednesday nights. It's at these fields about 1 hour and 15 minutes from my house, and it's definitely worth the drive. First of all, playing is great exercise. Second, most of the players are pretty damn good, so I'm getting better by playing with and against them. Third, I get to hang out with one of my best friends when we're car pooling up there, and then out on the field. Basically it's a great break in the middle of the week and I get an awesome workout while hanging out with a great friend. You can't beat that with a stick, or as my dad says, it's better than a spider up your nose.

On the home improvement front we've made a lot of progress recently. Melissa was out of town for about a week and I had to dog-sit. So while I was there, I just decided to bust it out and work like a crazy fool on the kitchen. I completed the last section of cabinets that needed refinishing and I put a faux plaster finish on the walls and did a cool paint and glaze effect. I was pretty shagged out at the end of the week because I was working a full day then coming over to the house and working between 7-9 hours a night on that stuff. It looks great though. Plus after she got home we cleaned up everything, got all the extra shit out of there and it really looked like a professionally done kitchen.

If you want to check out my progress on all the renovation stuff you'll care to know, you can go to my DIY Blog. It's not all about my particular projects; there are some links and general articles, etc., but if you're interested in that sort of thing, it might be worth a look.

On to the storms...well, there was a huge storm that came through town just before the weekend. It lasted about twenty minutes and dumped 1 1/2 inches of rain and thrashed the living hell out of the place. Trees were down everywhere, power lines were snapped, and down by the truck stop there were transformers all blown out and smoking and what not. We lost one big old tree in the backyard, and one little guy up in the tree lawn. Power was only out for about 16 hours, so that's not bad considering that in other parts of the world when you get a storm like that you're lucky if you're not pulling bodies out of your backyard.

Finally, school. I am trying to craft my future...and it's not easy. There are philosophical considerations, there are mental health considerations, there are financial considerations, and then there are personal considerations. There are also concerns that no one should ever use the word 'considerations' that many times in one sentence, let alone in one f'ing paragraph. Anyway, I've narrowed my potential schools down to three, and my degree choices to about five. That's not bad since I had about seven schools and ten degrees on my list last week.

The main contender right now is an online school where I can get a bachelors degree in game design and animation. I've always been fascinated by this field, and I've always been an artist, so it seems like a good fit. Right now I'm in the process of getting all my applications and transcripts taken care of. The degree completion program at Malone College is still on my list of possibilities for a degree in business management, but that just seems so damn boring. I know it's general and a pretty safe choice, but I don't care for the safe choices to be honest. I tend to dream big, and I want a career that I can use all of my talents and interests and still make a good living.

As Jean Paul Sartre would say...Au revoir.