Yes Hello,

In the bright and cushy morrow, fair legion, I shall depart for the spindly skud-skies of Israel - for free, no less.  I intend to survive ten hectic days in a group of youths between the ages of 22 and 26 (I am 23 I am 23 I am 23 I am 23 I am 23).  After this sojourn, I, well, I remain in Israel for two days on my own.  After THAT sojourn, however, I will be off to a land benamed La Grecia, flying into the once-great city of Athena.  From a brisk, 8 hour train/ferry ride, I hit solid land in the olive isle of Corfu, as you know it, where I actually have reservations at a hostel.  Three days at that resort, after which I take a 10+ ferry to Italy - I am thinking I might stay in a monastery there, in a town 75 km from Bari, or if I am tired or lazy, I will simply hang in a hostel in Brindisi.  This is a boring entry.  From Brindisi, another 8 hours on train/bus/ferry into Sicily, where I will spend about two weeks wherever.  I have some CouchSurfing folk in line, but who knows.  I am secretly hoping to make it to the island of Vulcano, where the gas fizzles out into the ocean like a spa, spilling out into sulfur-scented mud baths.  I'll go there and probably end up the youngest fool within 40 years.  Or I'll die.

So, I'm back on the 9th of July.  Blow up a firework for me or something and I'll see you soon.

Cheers and Ted and Norm,

Eric

Hi Poop,

I will try to write updates in here about my trip, but I am not on it yet; this is a test.

Love,

Urine

Tuesday, July 3, 2007
I am BACK.  I haven’t updated my wonderful website in some two months or more - calculations too advanced for this brain - and by now, it’s too late.  My glorious-yet-temporary year is finished, and now I sit in the same chair I had one year ago.  Differences: my hair is longer; I have a bracelet on; I’m eating scratch pasta for lunch.  Mentally, what have I done?  I am not sure.  I’ve seen 17 countries in my eleven months, and I have been strikingly happy for better part of each.  I am listening to Lars Winnerbeck at the moment, thanks to the lovely, Swedish Nathalie, and confidence is now a fiber of my character’s fabric.  I have multilingual friends.  I now find faith in myself to live in Australia after graduation, and I intend to take advantage of the ESL brushfire throughout Asia, teaching English to ungrateful, spoiled, monolingual spats for worthwhile sums of money.  Delaying the realities of life in favour of travel, you see.  Not so bad.

These things are great.  I still haven’t properly reflected on anything yet, so the good journal entry will never happen.  Beh.  In the stead, I got my first writing commission for anyone that might glance upon this website.  
http://www.studentsville.it/eric_in_florence.htm

I received a hearty stipend, numbing in number alone, of FIFTEEN EURO (for the under-cultured, that’s some TWENTY-ONE DOLLARS!!!).  My writing is paying your bills, children.  If you don’t enjoy it, support yourself.

Okay no one, I will strain myself against my lengthy schedule of nothingness and pasta (or, I suppose, pasta) to paste some visual memoirs on this website.  I hit some beautiful places and they should suffice to make the both of us very jealous of The Old Me.  I’ll talk to you soon, then.

And goodbye.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007
I sit in the school library.  I say this, naturally, as I want to boast to you my own little surprising pros, something I normally do through the indirect flashes of negatives I so curiously and consistently flaunt.  Am I sure of why I do this, or of what sense it makes?  Of course not.  Somewhere in my brain, I feel that illuminating my pimples and pit stains makes me, as a whole, look much better.  I might point to an example, but I have none.  It makes no sense.  I just know that I do it, that I was set to do the exact opposite just there, and that right now I am content in saying that Harry Nilsson’s ‘The Most Beautiful World In The World’ is remarkably and appropriately beautiful in its own regard.  So with that, I will continue.  I volunteer at the school library and I sit here by myself for a few hours a week shelving and reading and contemplating as a way of trying to show the administration my appreciation for what they’ve done for all of us out here, in part, and because I like getting away from things now and again.  I also secretly (see: “no longer a _____”) do this, I suppose, because I want those girls that watch me in pubs, watch me with my friends, watch me talk and talk and talk, to know that I do this, too.  I am the most self-centered romantic on the planet; I often imagine my surroundings filled with tiny little cameras, that my life is a big Truman Burbank, and that all of this is building up towards some grand explosion of violas and skirt twirls and bold, lipsticky colours.  And so that is me, and it’s deplorable and shameful and embarrassingly mushy, but it’s my present state of mind and I suppose that in this moment you are stuck with dealing with it.  I regret writing much of that.
My life is just a big pile of fantastic, and thankfully this has yet to cease since my arrival upon this lovely continent.  I haven’t written you in months, I know (whoever “you” might be), but I have doubtlessly been busy, and should doubtlessly NOT be writing in this moment, but, alas, I am.  I never completed my letter from the UK, I believe, and I can’t fill in to you where I’ve been or what I have done since.  I had a birthday, including a party my roommates threw me (tiki-themed, then), and have been on, what, three class trips?  The last one was certainly a dooz: Amalfi, Pompeii & Herculaneum (I did climb Vesuvius, of course, and threw stones into her still-steaming crater), Napoli, Capri... I don’t know what else.  I just, you know, envy this existence.  I went nightswimming under a refrigerated moon on the rocky sands of the Amalfi Coast, drank fresh-pressed slush at the highest point of Capri, more or less, and closed another chapter of this life.  I’ve been to Brussels for my good friends Andrew Bird, Martin Dosh, and Haley Bonar, before whose show I stole away and witnessed the most dizzying sound check I’ve yet to see: the only one.  Andrew Bird is a great man, and after his shows he enjoys a large bowl of soup and a spot of red wine just as we all would.  By the way, go to youtube or similar and search for “Dr. Stringz” if you can.  Okay.

JR, Dart, YF, Jon, Mark Wahlberg and myself took a spring break trek up and down the pants of the Spanish arm of Europe.  We had no plan or idea but for a rental car, whose reservation was lost by the rental company anyway, and, like brave knights, we pushed off, hoping to sleep in the car, surf, find love, whatever might attack us.  On Portugal’s Spanish border, we found a giant sand dune and built us a camp, stealing spare wood from the behind various establishments, arming ourselves with Port and gherkins and a sizable bag of shrimp, among other things.  Were those dunes haunted?  A local, in fact warned us that yes, indeed, they were.  Voodoo, she claimed was practiced there, and of COURSE the moon was full.  But damn was that shrimp delicious, and damn it was that sand soft and, well, crap, if that night wasn’t among the greatest of my life, I have plenty of fantastics to look forward to.  Who the hell believes in voodoo today?

And so anyway, we were attacked, and after a car accident, a gypsy incident, a ticket, a squabble, and every single possession of ours being thieved, I sit here telling you that if I could, I’d do it again.  Portugal is a big shrimp cloud of heaven, Spain is Spain, and my friends are amazing people.  I almost cracked a few times, I did I did almost almost, but the sand settled in a wonderfully scattered and unexpected pattern that was tough to sleep on at first, but having pulled away from it a bit, I mean, what the hell.  It was an exciting trip and I’m proud to say that I was challenged and I survived.  My own losses were completely replaceable, thankfully, and I see this one as the first little baby step on the causeway of travel.  It will only get worse.  It will only get better.

We are all mentally preparing ourselves at this point.  It is now the homestretch, no doubt, and in about two months -- one, if you’re dating it to the end of the program itself, when I say goodbye to everyone -- I’ll be home like nothing ever happened.  Every day I wonder if I’ve changed, and if Americana will be an easy transition.  I wish I could return home with an accent, a scar, something to have on me at all times, just in case I’m not that person that lived in Italy for a year but will be, instead, some guy at some Christmas party able to look at a wine label and say, “Oh, you know what?  I’ve been there.”  I hope that I’ve acquired more than these few Italian words, these shorts, this recipe.  I hope I have done something, I am something, I will be something completely different.

I also hope my writing will change, because I’m really hating it right now.  Damn.

Saturday, March 3, 2007

List of one-word things I love: music; family; friends; beauty; food; writing; Italy; Europe; ukulele; others.  I love my life right now, and I do every bloomin’ second.  It is just a beautiful thing, being able to walk into a cavern, greeted with shouts and hugs as The Who is being blasted over punchy speakers.  It is a beautiful thing to have had the chance to refuse the opportunity to lick John Lennon’s house.  It is a wonderful notion to know that you have family lurking in corners, sometimes maybe circumstantially dark, only to have them burst out on the scene with a showering of love like you haven’t felt in months.  It is a great feeling, having a multitude of people rooting you on as you reach the last stretch of the most significant marathon of your life, urging you to push, push, give it every last strain of energy before the tape is snapped.  All of this is so overwhelming and it makes me want to tear my shirt off and break down into tears.  Or something like that.

My last trip was to the UK.  I went with my roommates, three of them, and we rented a Volkswagon Polo from Bournemouth to Glasgow, making poops in a total of three countries along the way.  I fell in love with the car rental agent in Bournemouth, her beautiful British hair, beautiful British laugh, beautiful British accent, and overwhelmingly intangible nature.  Or anyway, she was really hot and giggled at my self-depreciating jokes.  I fall in love with maybe fifty girls a day until I actually have to talk to them, at which my dreams come crashing.  A fault not of their own, no doubt, but simply worth a mention.

We went straight up to Stonehenge in the Salisbury Plain.  Heard of it?  Interesting place, I’m sure, as was the horizontal driving rain and G-force wind.  Touching the blue stones versus the red stones, each respectively composing the inner or outer concentric, gives off a different degree of warmth or coldness.  You’re not allowed to touch the main stones, but they give examples of this and no one can explain it.  It’s also worthy of mention that those bastard stones actually are not, that there was originally wooden henges in the past, and that the current slabs are a third underground.  Some say that King Arthur is buried in the center of the circle.  I just went because my roommates wanted so badly to, and it of course was one of those things you’ve seen to have seen, but, yeah, cool regardless.  I’m a lucky soul to have gone.

From there, we winged by Bath, the old Roman resort-ish town, which was quaint and stunning.  Everything was so remarkably new and shiny for a Roman Town.  Upon entry we had no money to pay a toll of some exorbitant sum, and the kindly British man working the tiny town boothway had his day shattered, telling us to go, get the hell out of there, and that we had better never drive past him again.  Good.  We literally had no British currency, though, and that wasn’t a story worth telling at all.  Not at all.  No sense in deleting it though, yes?  Having been lost, our car stumbled upon a rooftop view of the city from well across the river, and the sight of it made us slam on the brakes with great urgency and breathlessness.  I swear, friends, it bore semblance to a hounds-tooth coat, did the cityscape, each Mary Poppins’ Roof growing into the sky like a thousand fangs, each one a uniform picture set side-by-side with varying distances between them, all, in turn, giving the appearance of a muscle flexing beneath that great fabric.  That was literary cardiac arrest and I’m sorry to have subjected you to it.  

There, in Bath, we ate at what I swear was a Magic Mountain restaurant transplant, among the worst meals I’ve had at, no less, such a high rate, but then none of us could eat at the neighboring pub that was at least a pound more for every plate.  Eating there kept us, by the way, from visiting a cookie-and-hot chocolate shop around the corner, which, like the rest of the city, closed hyperbolically at noon. For my frugality, I went the whole trip without trying “Bangers ‘n Mash”, or whatever they call those things.  I had a meat & kidney pie in Stratford-Upon-Avon, at a fast food fish & chips joint, and it tasted like pale people, but we generally chose to gravitate polarity-style to British food.  Still, not as bad as they say.  Pub food is nice.

From there, we spent the night driving in circles, then playing pool in our hostel’s pub with a bunch of scene people and shitty technological music.  Doug and I destroyed.  They pour the worst beer I’ve ever tasted in this city, which was Bristol.  That’s to say, anyway, in that particular establishment, where further they tried to market a deal where, rather than the four of us buying four separate pints, we could instead combine our forces and get a bargain pitcher, the same amount of beer for only a few pounds more.  I just thought I’d share that with you, as I thought it absurd and still do.  The hostel was ecologically-minded, though, and we had a HUGE breakfast of organic foodstuffs the next morning that was delicious.  I’m in full favor of their use of beans at breakfast, and I think I may be the only foreigner to enjoy brown sauce.  Jon paid me a euro to finish a gulp of John Smith, into which he had squeezed a packet of the stuff, and I did it and it was awful.  Otherwise it is nice, though.  Nice.

We hopped the bridge into Wales, which is glorious.  As you want it.  Green and clean in friendly and ugly from inbreeding, a nice mist in the air and castles abound.  Their flag is pretty “bad ass”, if you aren’t familiar with it.  Caerphilly Castle is the second-largest castle in the UK, behind the obvious one in England known as “Windsor”, and it is located smack in the middle of a rather modern Ikea Town of fabric softener and yellow rain slickers.  We met a woman there at a gift shop -- Cameron was determined to purchase something with which he could proudly brandish his bloodthirsty lineage -- who informed us of a deal in a college town just outside of Cardiff where you can get a student flat at half price over the summer for the princely charge of 90 quid a month, which with hasty conversion sums to an absurd $180.  That’s with the dollar being at its low point, mind you.  Help Wanted signs hang in nearly every Cardiff Window, by the way, so you should take that into consideration, youths.  I’ll move there with you, perhaps, if you’d like.  Cardiff sports the world’s oldest record shop, opened in 1894 and named Spiller’s, and it’s about to be bulldozed for a shopping strip of The Gap and whatever other crap that is seen everywhere on the planet.  A great tragedy, as it is small, well-stocked, and the staff is kind and very well-educated.  I thought it’d be a tourist trap with such superlative splayed on their sign, but alas, no.  I in fact found a Beach Boys Tribute that I haven’t really been able to find anywhere else.  Go to their website and see if you can’t sign a petition or something (Spiller’s).  

This post will be continued, as will the pictures in the picture section.  I just wanted to give something for you sad souls to chew on in the interim.  

Love & Stuff.

Wednesday, February 7, 2007
In mere moments, a girl, to whom my roommate referred as a “Cool Chick” will be arriving.

I have decided that D6 Tuning is my favorite.

My Italian Opera professor wants to publish some of my work but I won’t let her.

I have mint green tea steeping next to me and the pouring rain.

My ukulele’s headstock is currently facing “away” from me, to my right.

Two of these is a lie.

One of that is a lie.

One of the above two lines is a lie.

In two days I leave for the United Kingdom with some of my roommates.  We are renting a turtle car and will be driving at an appropriate pace for the duration, from the near-Stonehenge Bournmouth ending ultimately in Glasgow, which is not in England.  It is in Scotland, which is still part of the United Kingdom and home of Belle & Sebastian until they moved to Los Angeles, which is where I am from.

My last trip was a group one, full of youth and squalor and not as much wine as you’d think.  We went to some places with these Italian names: Padova, Verona, Vincenza and Parma.  I recommend them all, though the latter spot should be skipped as a group as it will otherwise beg for 91 college students to make the same pose, and with giant blocks of parmesan cheese, no less.  Oh, the novelty is limitless when in a Gran Padano Factory with your librarian and Dante Professor.  I love living in Italy more than M. Ward, and I was going to talk, just now, about how I really do love him.  It seems that I’ve had the wrong album of his over the last two years, and now that I’m digging into the other stuff, it makes the original nuggets glimmer that much more.  Lullaby + Exile is fabulous.  Fabulous!

My Italian is now to the point where I am able to understand bums’ shouts in the streets, yet I am still unable to get past my intimidation factor to converse with my Italian friends in their language.  Yesterday I gave a speech on Eleni Mandell for fifteen minutes one-on-one with my professor, after which we talked about how crappy my generation is and how her youthful vigor was all for naught.  I found myself saying, “No... da vero?  Che peccato!” with great frequency.

My time here is almost though and it gives me a stomach ache to think about it.  Barely 100 days left.  I feel like I could live a 1993 Bill Murray here for the rest of my life and be content, and we as a collective know how hard it is for me to stay content.  Even now, after a week of finals still incomplete, I’m feeling a tinge down for having sat around playing music for so long after my final this morning.  In any case, this life is a gift and I am so grateful for it.  I keep waiting to get hit by homesickness, but the thought of Los Angeles at this point makes me gag a little like my roommate.  He’s been vomiting all week, by the way, and he said that his diarrhea is like chocolate milk.  I just put NesQuik out of business.

My writing?  I have a long way to go, of course, and I haven’t been doing as much as I’d like out here, but at least with the loosening academic pressure out here, I’ve been a bit less pedantic and formal in writing for class when I’ve had the energy -- not that you care -- and I’m starting to get a little more confident in such realms.  One day I’ll sit down and read what I write (perhaps, too, I’ll proofread something) and perhaps my own self-disparagement will be validated.  It’s possible, but somewhere inside I hope that the odds are against it.  I wish I could be a musician with blind confidence and sufficient inspiration.  I’d bleed for you, audience.  I would.  I hope that isn’t as creepy-sounding as I think it is.

I am a terrible guitarist.  I really do like myself, by the way -- I keep ripping and ripping and ripping in this entry for no good reason -- and I figure that being ignorant of pitch and chord progressions and so forth is better than, say, if I were a rapist, but it is still frustrating.  This entry has run out of steam, but perhaps one of these days I’ll post something I’ve written... I can’t decide if I want to or not quite yet.  I dislike advertising myself (a funny thing to say on this, my own website), but more I dislike dumping my writing on people.  With that said, I need readers to tell me if I suck or not, so if there’s anyone lurking that has some spare time and some interest, let me know.  I don’t know if anyone has ever even read my first feature-length screenplay, myself included.  I don’t know if I even have the thing anymore, in fact.

Chum chuh chum chum.  This entry is a bit fat around the ankles.  Next one will be a touch more inspired, I hope... I had the feeling earlier while I was playing guitar, but I was having so much fun that I couldn’t stop until I was out of energy.  This is the ho-hum result.  Ho-hum.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Check out the apostrophe on this font.  I`m going to use it in any case.  No indent, either.

I have not written you in miles, darlings.  We miss one another.  For this reason, I shall begin, and in doing so I will retrace my steps to a few months back.  To Paris.  To Rome.  To Wherever Else.  There have been many things forgotten in between all of this, once again, and the scaffolding before my apartment has been razed in favour of this viewish thing.  I`m happy to call that rediscovered, as it is as amazing as is the mandolin.  The view is better than cheddar.  The city is now filled with new students for the new semester, and where the Italians had, before I left for winter break, treated me with conversational respect, they all now answer me in English and despise me once again.  This is frustrating and also interesting.  We`re all bastards and hypocrites in the end, eh?  It is exciting to meet all of these new faces!

Paris is yes and yes and oh-lord-yes.  Paris is Piaf and Poulain and Piangere, and Paris is a City of Pastel Dreams.  My dreams.  That`s not to say that my dreams are pastel, but just that they co-align and blah.  My friend was as gracious enough to take me with her as was her friend to accept us into her Slot Car City-sized flat, and in bearing my temperamental mood trajectories, notorious by now, we sketched blindly a path through perhaps the greatest city on earth.  

Thanksgiving was spent here, friends, and it is a memory indelible.  It was an experience untraceable.  I`m still reeling in culture shock.  At yet another friend-of-a-friend-of-a-son-of-a-son-of-a-sailor`s apartment, I spent the evening noshing on an epic stab at American Cuisine with French Ingredients, bland gravy and delicious chicken stuffing amongst, chatting my teeth dry with some young Parisians about... about... ACHOOmusic.  I have a sickness, and they took great Pride & Joy in basking in it all night.  “Zhou know Charles Trenet?  Jacques Brel? Charles Aznavour?  Whadzeefuck?  No!  Fuck!” Laughter laugter laughter.”

I just realized that I already wrote about this on December 15th.  I will now stop and transition because it is too much work changing templates again.  TRANSITION.

I just got back from two weeks abroad.  I love life.  I was bedridden for days in Vienna, my favorite city of the trip, but whoo-boy was I set for the New Year.  I fell on my head in frost-crashes that you had to see to believe while skiing the Swiss Alps -- ask Jonathan Matthew Bobrow if you must -- but I maintained the lucidity to be able to jam my head into one of Erwin Wurm`s delightfully self-conscious exhibits at Wien`s rabidly contemporary MUMOK.  Leaving ourselves all of six full days to explore a city so underexposed as is Budapest left us with peaks and valleys, no doubt, but it also gave us an accidental taste of Transylvania and some multicultural activity to rival the river.  We toasted in thermal baths with the world`s ugliest humans, ran within it a whirlpool marathon, shared a mouthful of Exclusive English with a British Colombian, and we scrapped and sulked and put our wits to the end.  Not with the Canadian, though.  I don`t juxtapose my thoughts well, I feel.  In any case, we all had a shot of vivre of a tripper, I think, even if I was a crab some of the time.  Moody Blues.  My only regret on this trip was that I wasn`t more aggressive and adventurous.  This keeps going through my brain and, having met Steve, one of the most interesting and Australian men that I`ve yet to meet, I sometimes feel inspired to learn a thing or two from him.  We found him sleeping in the basement of our hostel, by the way.

I want to better outline this feeling for you, if I can.  I mentioned earlier the artist Edwin Wurm, yes?  Much of his exhibit, housed in that immaculate place, the museum of museums known as MUMOK, was probably not ART.  I don`t know what that word means, but part of me feels that it should not have been housed in a museum, while the other part of me loves the idea of that so much that it only means that much more that it is.  EW, which are the initials of Entertainment Weekly and also Elvis Westly and not of, say, Harold Baines or of his son, are also indicative of Edwin Wurm, making them as Austrian as he is and continues to be.  So The EW Guy does various things to you in his museum, and the feelings and concepts involved are not fresh or new but, to me, they continue to be exciting.  They confront you consciously, their main purpose to presumably make you feel like an idiot, just as most of art strives to do.  He sketches instructions in black ink on a ratty junkyard couch, a hole shot through its back, asking you to poke your head through.  He nails a lounge chair to the wall at around the height of your back and asks you to stick your head in that, too.  In both cases you have to touch the stuff and contort yourself in embarrassing and compromising poses, and you can be certain that the museum guards are purposefully strolling around in every moment you look around for vindication or escape or shame.  You are probably reminded of John Lennon`s description of the first exhibit that he had seen from Yoko Ono, where he had to climb a stupid ladder to hammer a stupid nail into a stupid piece of wood, and odds are good that you roll your eyes to all of it as I want to, but just... picture a museum.  Picture the tweed, the rectangular plastic glasses and the salt-and-pepper beards and the youthful piercings and the hands clasped politely behind boring and bored backs.  Picture how I appear, trying to fit into all of this, trying so hard for so long to convince myself of my own intellectual depth along with the rest of these professorial loons, the walls jamming insecurity down our green tea/corn pipe/other-things-that-will-go-unsaid-scented gullets all the while.  Picture all of this, all of us, blown up into fits of sheepish giggles.  Buckets on our heads.  Balancing dishwashing liquid bottles against the wall with our lamb`s wool chests.  Doing what and why and whatever because this guy said so.  The thing is that there was so much to work against, all of which I`ve been fighting since I applied to study abroad, and that I did not put my head through that couch, or that I blushed in that lounge chair when a docent walked by... it makes me full of shame.  I continue to this day to live like that and it upsets me.  I chose Budapest with my friends because I had hoped it to be different, exciting, challenging, but I think I treated it like any other tourist.  I do not explore Florence as I should, and I know nothing of Los Angeles because I have not the courage to go out of my own limb.  This is what I am working towards.  I think this is what Edwin Worm strove to expose, too, and I love him for it.  And so, at this halfway point, with time draining more quickly than the Blue Danube Rock, more memorably than the Blue Danube Waltz, I continue to strive to shed this buhdumbahdumbahdum.  I`m proud of where I`ve come, I`m pleased with where I am, and I`m in awe of where I`ve been -- I hope this does NOT sound like I had anything less than a brilliant vacation with my best friends in the world -- but I am here to learn a few things, to return a better fellow.  And so.


I also want to say that I want to revise what I feel to be the greatest film of all time after my third viewing of it, if you care.  Not my favorite, I say, but perhaps the best.  BEING THERE.  Please go watch it.  It has human thought by the balls.

I am currently listening to lots of M. Ward, Dean Martin, Animal Collective and The Brunettes.  I think the catchiest song of the year must be Chinese Translation.  In writing this I was listening to Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Loudon Wainwright III, Medeski Martin & Wood, and of course The Who.  By the way, my Uncle Mark, once again, just sent me a great deal of music that I anxiously await to digest.  Greatest gift I can hope for, as you all know.  My family also replaced my iPod for Hanukkah, and I finagled a box of Pop Tarts, teriyaki sauce, jelly beans, and this year abroad out of it, too.  Thank you, by the way.

Thanks again for reading this and being there for me.  I love most of you more than I`ll ever be able to understand.

Eric

Sunday, December 17, 2006

I’ll warn you that no one will want to read this post.  I chose to post it, part of an ongoing anthology, to capture the brilliant nature  of my wonderful roommates.

ERIC is in the shower and has been for thirty minutes as this is his favorite place on earth.

JON is on Eric’s computer, looking up MySpace and likely sabotaging his friend’s computer with some sort Giant-related virus.

CAMERON is on Cameron’s computer, a mere elbow away from Eric’s.  He converses with Jon, who again is in the chair next to the former character of this paragraph.  Cameron, shown in red font, believes that he is talking to Eric under Eric’s screen name.  Again, Jon is on Eric’s computer, which is located inches from Cameron, and Eric has been in the shower for one half of one hour at least.  

In this installment, Jon convinces Cameron that video cameras have been installed in the apartment.  Let’s see how he reacts!

AIM IM with H2 uh O.
6:26 PM
where are you ghost-man?
scream
not here
now
f you
cmon do it
i am in the house
looking at you. look left
scream pig
hahaha just kidding. you looked
are you out on the windoeW?
i am in the fireplace
just kidding you looked again
idiot
i know
stop looking around
i see u
FUUCK
where are you
i am gone
want pasta?
yea i do
pesto sound good>?
always
k
i am still loking at you
do something
?
dont stretch
ever
i am not outside sat little man
ice cream face
wtf
wtf
do you have a com in here?
i have a com?
cam
i have a cam yes
cmera
camera
you freak me out
it was here before we got here
riiiight\
there is a tv that displays everything in the main room
uh huh
it is in doug;s room
in the closet
go look
bulloshit\
i swear look
i am in there
no fking wayh
yup
scream
nope
doug is reading
dave is studying
i am watching you
6:35 PM
you are so funny when you blink
...
get that dirty finger out of your mouth!
ok i believe you

Friday, December 15, 2006

I will never write the proper dictum about Paris, nor will I of Rome.  I won’t capture any of it, I’ll forget what songs those Italians played, drunkenly, on their black acoustic guitar as we sat on the Spanish Steps at midnight, and that is okay.  I’ll forget what I ordered in the Latin Quarter that night -- stuffed mussels, duck l’orange, and perhaps profiteroles -- and I’ll hold with me forever that anti-American waiter in Paris, the only rude Frenchman that I’ve ever known.  I’ll gradually lose the memory of how the Sacre-Coeur looks at night, or of the African that tried to scam a bracelet off on me as I made my way up the hill to Montremarte.  The colours of Parisian Neon will fade with the conversations I had with my French friend, Lucien, on Charles Trenet/Aznavour, Edith Piaf, Jordy, and Yves Montand.  I won’t forget Rome.  I’ll never forget Paris.

Indeed, I have been to Paris and YOU, dear reader, must go.  Don’t listen to the words of one Tony Snow or whomever: France waits for you with open arms and you’d be an ignorant fool to miss it.  I want to cry when I consider that I won’t, in this life, be able to spend a considerable amount of time there.  I want to cry in thinking that about Oslo, Stockholm, Rome, Urbino, Perugia, Florence, Melbourne, Okinawa, Barcelona, your bed, the Indian Ocean, Malta, a 1957 Chevrolet Corvette (white with red intakes, red bucket seats), center field in Dodger Stadium, the library, and the beach.  Seeing so much, I am seeing what I haven’t seen.  It makes me depressed.  I want to spend the rest of my life chasing after all of this.  Would I sacrifice marriage, a family, a comfortable bed for the insecticide hostels in Vietnam and the Easter Islands and Wyoming?  I’ll tell you yes within this moment.  

Tonight, my friend came over and talked behind another person’s back all night.  Surely I contributed, but I tired and very picked up my ukulele as they kept on.  I drank wine.  I showed my friend, Kelli, my music collection.  I promised her a proper mix.  Kelli and Susan went home, but more people arrived and went to a place called Lochness Pub.  A friend, Sal, works there and clears us of the 3 euro membership fee, but many of us have lost the access card.  Tonight I stay home and play guitar.  Tonight I stay home and read Tom Robbins in bed, wondering what would really be the daring thing to do in this situation.  I’m bored of pubs.  Staying home in bed, reading, is very comfortable.  I feel like I’m failing my aspirations out here; why am I not climbing up to Fiesole at this time, nearly 3:30am?  What am I still scared of?  I ponder this often.  I wonder what I’m keeping myself from doing and I become upset: I’ll stay home one weekend in partial interest in money, and I’ve yet to join my friends at a Florentine nightclub.  I have yet to travel alone, and frankly I have yet to travel anywhere scary.  I deserve to be scared.  I, deep in my soul, desire to be truly uncomfortable, but I haven’t the nerve.  I’m ashamed of this truth.  In time I will right this, perhaps.  In considering my options, I see ESL in Japan, ESL in France, working Chili’s jobs in Australia, and adding a minor in journalism and studying in Sydney for another year.  I want to learn Japanese, I want to see Taiwan, I want to rid myself of the spare tire accumulating around my waist, and I want to find work that keeps me moving.  I think of my future, the potentiality of sitting behind a desk, answering phones for some self-righteous film executive, and I want to cower.  What can one do for oneself in the interest of never stopping when one is so afraid of so much?  This is a crossroads, friends, and I am begging you to use your influence to disallow me to be conservative.  If I say, “I want to move to Japan to teach English, but I don’t know Japanese, nor am I wildly enthralled with their culture or with the prospect of spreading our chunky language to foreign cultures,” don’t be logical.  Be a bad friend.  I know all of this is stupid.  I dream of a stupid and daring life.  Unfortunately, I’m not that sort of person.  It scares me, and I’d probably fall into the trap of annual salaries and Audis and baby showers if I let myself.  I just don’t know.

Tomorrow I go to Vinci with my school.  Leonardo da, I mean.  This is what I’m talking about: America sucks.  This is the Age of the Renaissance, all, but what else is there to be seen?  I can’t swallow this.  It is not fair, considering what there is to see.  Tomorrow I see where Leonardo da Vinci was BORN.  This is merely modern civilization.  This is the surface of all.  There’s the start of humanity in the direction of Budapest, sure, and I’ll blow a kiss that way, but there’s also the Mayans and the Samurai and the Olmecs and the aborigine and the future.  How many boring museums have I yet to see?  What kinds of wine have I yet to taste?  There is not enough time in this life, and for this reason I want to cry.  I will marry and I will have children and I will love both scenarios as I will bore of them just the same.  I’ll never eat poisonous worm in Guinea.

Soon I will put down my 1960 EKO Junior for two weeks and embark on a journey with my best friends in the world.  Next week I visit the birthplace of Mozart.  Venice is sinking and, by January 5th, I will have seen it.  My great-grandchildren will not have this opportunity (because my legacy will leave them financially crippled, I mean).  I am so lucky to have seen what I have, but for this reason I see it as my responsibility to see even more.  Parties and clubs and pubs have not ceased to bore me.  College life is enviable but not the ultimate life climax.  I’m not sure what is. This is exciting.  Here’s to life’s shadows.  Here’s to earth’s corners.  Here’s to Paris, to the Trevi Fountain and the Uffizi and this bed and to Harry Nilsson, wherever he may be.  Here’s to finally starting to address life as it should be.

Here’s to my family for affording this to me.

Monday, December 11, 2006

I currently sit perched above the Fiume Arno, shivering in the Christmastime Breeze, spitting sunflower seeds onto drunken tourists passing in their mindless splendor.  We find brotherhood in this regard, though I am not walking.  I am perched, and with a bottle of wine I check my fantasy basketball team, I listen to WWII-era Italian Pop, I get a few head-pokes from my roommates, they themselves offering quick listens to their own collections of French or Norsk Pop.  Alone, now, I Jewishly opt for Christmas carols to snuggle warmly with the river’s reflections of the facing sleds and Santas and shooting stars painted in Impressionist smears of good cheer onto the remarkably still aqueous surface before me.  This, I assure, is what heaven looks like.  Hopefully in heaven I’ll remember my jacket, though such a thing to say is presumptuous if my religion even subscribed to heaven at all, which it does NOT.  Whatever.  I’m here and I’m happy on my short-term (construction work) balcony; this is how solitude was meant to be.

I had intended to make my next update about my recent jaunts to Rome, to Ostia, to Paris, to Ravenna, to Assisi and to the Adriatic Coast and to wherever the hell else I’ve been, but given the lapse of time since, it is obviously not my style.  Writing on wine and insomniac fumes after a gloriously uneventful -- oop, an Italian sounds as if he is about to vomit just below me --  weekend at 2am, I suppose, is.  I’m trying to work my way to Tom Robbins, you see, but frankly, I’m too uptight.  Know what is amazing about my apartment?  There is a wing of the Uffizi that no one knows of -- off-limits, I suppose, to public eyes -- and from where I sit in this moment, from this frosty windowsill, I can see through exclusive portholes glowing corners and frames and half-faces of ancient and obscure paintings, all without so much as a neck-arch.  I feel grateful for this.  I feel grateful for so many things right now.  I can’t say with confidence how often I’ve used the word “grateful” with full conviction.  While I’m at it, I’ll also note my overuse of “jaunt”.  I like it and I’m sorry for that, but only for your sake.  Bahbahbahbahbah.  I was fully conscious of that when I wrote it.

I will take pictures soon of this city, friends and loves, to show you the majesty that is living here.  Strung over all main boulevards are a cornucopia, a crystal spectrum of glorious lights in every Lucky Charm shape imaginable, and they brighten even the most depressed and isolated of evenings.  Though it has hardly dropped under 50, it feels like true Christmas.  I didn’t know how that felt ever before, and though I do not celebrate the birth of one Jesus H. Christ, I find that no one else does, either, and therefore I partake.  Oh, do I partake. Yesterday, my wonderful landlady came from her residential Bologna to give us an overdone supply of Christmas supplies and trinkets.  I have a Christmas tree.  I adorned the apartment’s salon with a Technicolor string of tasty bulbs.  I took my gleaming-new speakers and blasted Nat King Cole and Aimee Mann and The Chipmunks without a twinge of spiritual self-consciousness.  Jon, Cameron and myself couldn’t stop smiling as we dressed the apartment in a temporary lie, and whenever we expect to miss family during this holiday season, I think, we look to one another.  We all know how it’s feeling, and there will never be another person beyond the five of us that can understand a mote of any of this.  I may not be be unique, but I know to the marrow that I am privileged within a very select group, and that is good enough for now.  Forever, even.  I am FEELING something that I’ve always done my best to write about, and damn the imagination for the sake of what I have.

Thursday I am inviting my friends over for a Hanukkah/Holiday party, and you can bet that Doug and myself shall cook-off latkes and brisket for all.  My father, hopefully (if he is reading this...) will send me his unparalleled latke recipe my way so I can shut this bastard Weissman up and show these Catholics what it’s like to shove JewJuice into a worthy face.  Either way, we will have a gift lottery and all will, hopefully, feel a touch brighter in this December mist.  That’s a load of bullshit, but sitting here, I feel that it is my duty to be indulgent and obnoxious; if you were sitting here now, you’d probably go inside and get a jacket or, more probably, you’d go to sleep for your 9am class.  Still, you’d have felt these pangs an hour ago and perhaps you’d feel like being indulgent as well.  I’ve spent too long being self-reflexive, in regard to the last few lines.  The point is that YOU ARE JEALOUS.  You better be.  Sure, I have moments of sadness, of missing family and familiarity, but I’d be heartless if I didn’t!  No, this is the greatest time of my life and I intend to advertise it as such.  Some of my friends are going home in a week (I’ll never see them again), so give me shit for being mushy in describing a future do if you want. Go write for pitchforkmedia.com, you sourpuss.

Anyway, I’ll post pictures of Paris and Rome and all, perhaps tomorrow, but I’ll leave you with this: Montmarte.  Go there before you die.  Rome is mind-blowing and beautiful and historically significant far beyond my own brain can register sitting here in this moment, but Paris is Paris.  Parisians are Parisians.  If you ever hear a soul talk shit on the French, fart on them as if I were there.  Paris is the greatest city I have ever entered and I must return.  I will return.

More about this very soon.  In the meanwhile, my toes are as cold as is my glass of wine, so I must retire.  I love some of you and like all of you, and I wish you the very best that my mind can create.  You deserve a great new year.  I’ll think of you this coming January (from, uh, BUDAPEST... I can’t believe my fortune).

Go listen to ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch’ for me as it is brilliant (sincerely with love),

Eric