WARNING: this is looong, and i didn't write it...

...but i found it on my laptop today while searching through my documents from spring '08 semester. it came from the now-defunct DRA blog. i don't know when it was posted, or why, or really why i saved it, as it's sort of a random shaving off the sculpture of awesome randomness that was the blog for the short time that it existed. but i thought i'd post it here, partially so that you can read it if you want, and partially so that i don't lose it again. it might be meaningless to you if you're not obsessed with DRA, but hopefully it's not. there are a lot of things in here that i've often felt, said, or thought myself...i guess i vibe with a lot of it. is that really an expression? whatever.

i gots to go work on the BB post from last friday. cheers.

“ I have these terrible terrible days just like you, like anybody. A life of them. No breaks.
And that seems to be compounded by the fact that I chose ( I CHOSE) to make myself what I am. What I wanted to be when I grew up, which was some kind of writer or artist. Someone who wasn’t afraid. Because they are so afraid. Inside, in my bones, I am always mythology. I am always sure that in art, a person should be REQUIRED to be as fucked-up, as damaged, as beautiful as they are. Because what an honor it is to be ANY kind of artist. and for people to actually see you, well, that is something else. Something in me led me here.
Also in me, my heart, not my bones, is just a scared person. Terrified. And very easy to break. The last year and a half has been more of a growing up part of my life than any I can name. Mainly because it took me ten years to even figure out why I was doing this or how I was going to make it mean something.
I made a promise to myself A long time ago to fail like crazy, and to also succeed like crazy, right in front on everybody. I knew that went well with this implied code I found hidden away in my treasure chest of records and artists and poets that led me to share back.
I mean, we are Americans some of us, and what we don’t have culturally because we are such a new country is, historically insane people we treasure. At least maybe America didn’t have enough time to love those people like we should have.
I dont want to be anything but what I am FULL ON.
I see what people say.
“He’s nuts”
“He sucks, he hasn’t made a decent record since….”
blah blah
But you know what,
I fucking make my records. I work. I bust my ass. I GIVE IT AWAY to you how I feel. I let you SEE ME. I let me be a mirror to some part of you if you want.
I don’t charge you for that.
I don’t PRETEND to be a fucking thing.
I just AM.
that is what i like about art, what i like about the color orange, what i like about failure and what i like about feeling things. It happens to me and my art, my loud mouth, my failures and triumphs, they are about the truth. they are about simply getting up, trying, and seeing what happens.
I think this is important to share. Not to be an example, but because, it is fucking real, and I am always confused.
I love things so much.
I hurt so much.
I feel so much love.
I spends so little time “hating” shit and so SO much time loving LOVING shit.
They make websites where people discuss this stuff.
I saw my own verse, re-edited, or scaled down so it could be torn down, and I didn’t like that. Not one bit. There is this one guy in particular at one of the sites made to change the name so it was not my name, this horrible awful singer (he posted a link to his music once and it sounded like someone beating Gillian Welch up melodically) who for years, years just sits and anytime I am brought up thinks of the worst thing he can think of to be horrible about me. Why?
I don’t have that kind of time. I mean, I am ALWAYS working on something.
I am a work in progress.
I am also sometimes terribly torn apart, torn limb from limb from recent failures I might have prevented if I had super powers. I don’t.
I just love art.
I am at the heart of it, a rather simple human being who says and does things you probably think about or you probably say.
If not, then it’s fine. Then I am crazy.
And crazy is very good for art.
Crazy is essential to the balance of life.
I mean,
we live on a rock spinning in outer space around a fucking sun in the outer reaches of a galaxy the middle of nowhere in space, and despite your or anybody else’s faith in anything, I will bet your god or idea of of who your god is has not appeared before you and said,
“hey gerald, I am just going to borrow a pair of socks and go out in the town square and just, you know, tell every body what the meaning of life is because the violence and madness is getting a bit out of control, and I might have done this before so many people had been killed and stuff over however many wars and the french inquisition and the witch trials and the constant battles between warring nations for their belief systems, but you know, I was out late at the bar, and one thing led to another, and I ended up with this insanely hot girl who works at the MET. god, she has the most beautiful hands. got any aspirin…..how do i look, should i wear red or regular socks with these shoes when i tell everybody?”
NO
This is not what is going on.
WE are here/
we are lost on a planet in the middle of fuck all nowhere in the universe and you know it. You know that Polar Bears don’t get together and worship shit. they get hungry and sleep and swim and love little baby ice bears and find more ice stuff.
is it because they are not as developed?
NO
it is because they did not discover
a. farming
b. mathematics
c. language
and as fucked up as this sounds, those are all ABSTRACT ideas. we have too much hair or not enough depending on who you ask, because SOMETHING happened to us when there was a food supply shortage sometimes around the Sumerian habitation of mesopotamia.
we started farming.
counting
making cuneiform documents
ABSTRACT
not natural
…now we talkj on computers and go see Jasper Johns collections even if they are just the Gray ones (who came up with that? so stupid- i mean, i’m glad i got to see a few pieces i love but cmon, do an overview, yr the MET for cryin out loud.)
anyway,
I go through a thousand lifetimes a day.
One repeat performance lately is regret.
I lost a love.
I lost myself.
I haven’t been so distraught and sober before.
I hadn’t dealt.
I am dealing.
And you know what, it felt good to put all that shit out there.
I think it was quite revealing. I think despite what anybody says, you can see me. I am so fucking human.
I am so weak.
But I don’t mind.
I love things.
I like the mystery of life. I think about why we are here and what for EVERY fucking day, when i wake up and before bed.
If there is a God, i think he might find that funny.
and when i have hit my knees to pray, when the shit hit the fan and i didn’t care anymore if i prayed or not, i told God really bad jokes and asked him stuff like, “do you get shit for having a beard in paintings. does anybody say you look like that guy from the Doobie Brothers? because, if you do have a beard, and are A WHITE DUDE (hardly, no way if there is a God he is white….sorry, white people is a new thing, nor is it a dude. sorry. (Most) Men are incapable of processing their view of the world in an emotional and rational way at the same time. We just were built to hunt animals, and along the way, with the help of a few organized religions, demonized women and repressed their natural heroic nature. It’s just true. Zeus is awesome sure. But I’m afraid if he dealt with having a baby he might not so cocky. Also put him in a workplace with a fine set of get-away sticks and you would see the lighting pointed not to the sky but at the water-cooler and Jim and Larry, who spent ten years masturbating and one year thinking about their purpose here on Earth, which probably had some conclusion that ended up in a subscription to a magazine about cars. Vile fucking creatures men are, most I should say, when they are not busy humiliating themselves. ) you need a new look.
I figure he needs a few prayers that ask him how he is doing. what kind of filing system he uses and if he is okay.
sometimes, if the universe is god, or vice versa, i think, she/he/it probably needs to take a break, make everybody stop for a second, and have a nice glass of juice and a bath.
it helps to stop for a second.
it really does.
Anyway, I liked running my own internet t.v. channel about being a human being. It was very real.
I have to go study some fabric and texture stuff for my paintings today and think about how, if at all, I would proceed with this, because, it was working. It was doing something.
I noticed some of the people that just were tagging along to call me a goods for nothing fuck-wit ( which i can be) or people who liked some of the music i made ( which i like too sometimes but it is never really that far out enough for me, and hardly what i really am. i prefer my writing and art to music but have trouble thinking about a life without music. i mean, it led me here) i noticed, some of those people started to think about art again.
REMEMBER THIS>
one day, a cave man picked up a piece of rock and drew a beautiful bison or buffalo on a cave wall and now,
now we are here.
we are here now, in a world of designs and abstractions.
so,
it might be a good idea to examine what a truth is and level the playing field some.
Making D.R.AdamsFilms Inc. was hard, HARD as fuck, not easy. Not something I got off on. It was a challenge.
Because I am the one hiding when i sing. I am the one who does not like interviews and would rather MAKE something.
It was my way of trying to be BALLS OUT like Black Flag or Franz Klein. I was trying to do something with myself.
and it felt punk as fuck to be REAL and HUMAN and not at all like the idea of what a typical rock musician is like.
So i am going to study. I work all day to keep this job too. I work like a madman on ideas and writing and i experiment with form and i let myself feel as much as i can.
in my opinion, as an artist of any kind, your work is between you and your canvas,
BUT
as a person, as someone who is making art to be seen,
you are at the service of others
who do not have that life, do not want to go that far, or are afraid
so
i always try and say the hardest thing
share the things that i love and hurt the most
and protect what i can of myself in the process
but i am still learning
and
in these advancing times
i guess
i am not sure anymore what is the line between a truth and an example of it.
so i am going to think about that.
meanwhile,
i love you.
every one of you even if you hate me, because you are special
a special event in the history of the cosmos
and you deserve special treatment
and to laugh
and to learn
one beautiful moment at a time.
thanks,
DRA ”

SARTA, meet fist. fist, SARTA.

so, it was pointed out to me by a friend of mine that my transportation woes for the rest of the summer (getting from kent to canton and back) could be solved by simply using public transportation. so i hopped on www.sartaonline.com and tried to work something out. unfortunately, the line that goes to akron (which would only necessitate making the akron-to-portage bus at a dead run from the station through downtown akron in 10 minutes any time of the day OR sitting for a few hours in downtown akron until the next bus comes around) starts on cherry avenue in canton, which is completely inaccessible from any of the bus lines that come anywhere within walking distance of navarre road, which is the main road off the allotment where my parents' house is.

so, unless i had a car to get me to cherry avenue (thus negating my need to take the bus in the first place), the quickest route that i've been able to find in an hour or so of looking at maps contains three separate bus lines i'd have to take around canton (which is about the size of spokane and its environs) for god knows how long (likely something like an hour, all told) to get to cherry avenue, to take that bus to akron (another 30-45 minutes), after which, assuming i make the almost-impossible conversion to the PARTA line in my alloted 10 minutes, i can take the PARTA (because people in akron and kent actually use the public transportation line and thus there are actually useful routes) straight from downtown akron to the KSU student center, where i could easily walk to the edge of town (where i need to be) in about 40 minutes.

not only is this problematic in the sense that the entire trip time would be something like 4 hours and cost something like 5-10 dollars each way every time, it also requires an incredibly intricate amount of planning each time, and there's always the element of possible catastrophe in the sense that i could miss any of these connections at any time and then just end up trapped in the middle of canton or akron, forcing either one of my friends (which i would feel bad about since the point of the bus ride is to not force them to drive me in the first place) or my parents (to whom anything unexpected at all in the universe is a massive, pulsating nuisance, provoking sighing and fury) to come rescue me.

if only there was some way to take the PARTA from my driveway to the KSU student center...

i suppose i'm not really complaining about the shitfest that is SARTA; they're consistently low on funding, nobody uses their lines, and the people who do are (95 percent of the time) just getting from the grocery to their home or vice versa. ohio public transit isn't set up for long distances; i guess i'm just spoiled by washington's public transit, which can get you from spokane to pullman or pullman to moscow in the blink of an eye for a reasonable price...but that's just as much a function of geographical arrangement of cities and roads in both places as it is funding and public support of RTA-apparatuses.

it seems like, i this part of the country, you just need to have a car to travel anywhere. and that's stupid. but i suppose that's the mentality our country is built on.

verizowned one last time

even in death, my verizon account continues to torment me. after spending an hour today trying to figure out how to pay my last bill (which is mysteriously 116 dollars instead of 75 dollars, but at this point i'm so exhausted from dealing with this fucking shithole company for three years that i'm just going to pay them the extra 40 dollars to just leave me alone forever), i have now logged a total of three hours attempting to make said payment.

first of all, i had to endure a decent amount of phone-operator chicanery to cancel my account, and now they won't even make it easy to take my money the final time. verizon is so pissed that we're breaking up that she's just going to leave all her furniture in my apartment to prove a point. whatever point that is.

i had a fun weekend in columbus, but it also made clear to me that i'm not particularly ready to be a parent yet, in the sense that a lot of it was sitting still in uncomfortable seats for hours to experience one or two minutes of something important happening to someone you care about, which seems to be the center of the american parenting experience. i took lots of pictures with the new camera i got; i'll try to post some next time i can get my laptop online...right now i have no way to transfer photos (or any data, for that matter) from my laptop to the home computer. so the multimedia posts will have to wait.

incommunicado

so, i left my cell phone charger at bowes's place yesterday. obviously, this is just something i have to get out of the way at the beginning of every visit to ohio. anyway, i probably won't be able to get to it until monday or tuesday at the earliest. so if you call me, i won't answer my phone. at least for a few days. possibly for a week or two. 'tis all.

aria of sorrow

despite sounding like a metallica song title circa "...and justice for all", "castlevania: aria of sorrow" is a fantastic gameboy advance game i've been playing a lot lately. i'm not going to do a full-on review or anything, partially because i haven't finished it yet. but it's one of those excellent genre-bending games. it combines the usual awesomeness of castlevania platforming, whipping, and item collecting with an exploration mechanic very similar to the 2-D metroid games and then adds an icing made of a really simple but not so-simple-its-pointless RPG interface, which involves collecting enemy special moves by killing those enemies, buying weapons and armor at shops that boost certain skills and not others, and collecting special abilities throughout the game like being able to dodge backwards quickly and being able to jump again in mid-jump. there are two other castlevania games on the GBA that i haven't played yet. if they're half as good, my brain will explode.

i played "metroid: zero mission" and "metroid: fusion" last week, all the way through (about 3 hours each) and they were both fantastic, but now in retrospect castlevania blows them away. they both introduced an interesting new mechanic to the metroid formula though: "fusion" had the virus-storyline that had you exploring an abandoned space station mostly at the behest of a computer which could open and close certain parts of the ship when necessary and could give you certain weapons "downloads" throughout the game for performing certain tasks. it was very story-driven compared to other "metroid"s, but it was really good. "zero mission" was originally largely a rehash of the first metroid game, but then it introduced a bunch of story elements and moves, items, etc. from "fusion", and the third act especially had a lot of innovative (for metroid games) gameplay moments that made it almost as good as "fusion".

i'm going to try to finish "aria" this weekend. i finally tracked down a copy of "symphony of the night" too, which i've been hearing awesome things about since it came out in lik 1997 or whatever. so it'll be fun to play that.

i wish i had a guitar. i want to write a song.