Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in j's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, October 18th, 2009
11:22 am	A good thing for a better reason.  So remember that JK Wedding Dance video that got like 29 million hits on YouTube? They've decided to use their publicity for a good cause. On their website, they've got a link for donating money to charity. Which is fine, you know. Ok. Whatever. Then I read what charity it is, and why: they're raising money for the Sheila Wellstone Institute to End Domestic Violence. As a karmic offset to the popularity that they've inadvertently given Chris Brown. I really like these people. --jason (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
11:40 am	How bizarre. I haven't posted anything in like 10 weeks, and as far as updates go, almost nothing in my life is the same as it was then. But I don't have time for that right now, so instead some trivia on the bizarre death of Tennessee Williams: Williams "died on February 24, 1983, after he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York." Thanks, wikipedia. --jason (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
10:08 am	the vast ocean of banality quivering just below the surface. I'm remembering my dreams these days. This is uncommon. I usually don't remember any of them, a fact I have often lamented, as I, like everyone else, find my own dreams fascinating. Most of the time, anyway. I wonder now if I've hit critical mass. Maybe my unconscious only has so much to tell me, and if I remember my dreams every single night, maybe I run out. Like last night. Last night I was playing basketball with a pistachio nut. Not a giant pistachio nut. A normal sized nut. It didn't bounce, and I spent most of the time, as I recall, thinking, "this is stupid. This isn't a basketball. This is a pistachio nut." This I already knew. I'm annoyed with my mind. I feel like these ones I could just as soon forget.  (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
10:34 am	YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!  I need a haircut. I never realize this fact gradually, but rather one Thursday morning I wake up, look in the mirror, and think, "damn. That boy's got a lot of hair." I think it's because I just shaved. It made sense before. My head had a theme: fuzzy. Ill-defined borders. It was just one big furry object, but now? Now I look like an anime character. Job-u,   --jason (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
11:07 am	Hour 273 I'm not going to sleep with nicotine patches on anymore. While I like the absolute certainty that I'll be transported somewhere epic and/or insane, the unpleasant ones as just as common as pleasant, not to mention that when a stimulant is pumping through your blood while you sleep, you shoot up like a light at about 5 am. I notice, though, that even without chemical enhancement, I'm remembering much more of my dreams. Like this morning, for instance. My alarm went off at 8:00am, and groaning, I hit snooze until about 9:30. I shouldn't do this, I realize, but today, it wasn't just some soft moral principle. Today, the world was conspiring to get me out of bed. For starters, the random selection on my iPod alarm started playing an accapella version of "Crash into Me," which was so bad that I had to get up just to shut it off. But when I got up, changed the song, and went back to sleep, my subconscious got into the game. Between snoozes, in the span of 9 minutes, my first dream was a middle-aged Japanese assassin coming to kill me. I tried to out-wile him, but he, too, was wily. I fell from a small height and was playing dead, slowly drawing out my knife as he walked confidantly toward me, and was suddenly woken up by the alarm. I'll never know who won, but I think I would've gotten him. Undeterred, I hit snooze again... so this time, my subconscious sent dogs. Legions upon legions of furious bulldogs, an ocean with no end, all massive and muscular with glowing green eyes and rushing for the front door of my apartment building. I saw this from a 4th floor balcony, watched them ignore all the other houses and streets. These dogs were coming for me, coming to wake me up and send me to work. Realizing there was no escape, they would get in sooner or later, I grabbed the my dream-roommate's cigarettes off the counter and lit one. Aaahhhh.  All told, I think it was a wash. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
1:55 pm	Hour 251 I emerge here, from my relatively long silence, merely to say that I am absolutely certain, 100% sure, that Sarah Palin fucked a moose. It was only a matter of time.  (Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
2:12 pm	Hour 84a I'm just into quoting other people lately. Excuse me. For instance: here is a transcript of Christopher Hitchens, in C-Span, mocking the Ayn Rand cult better than I've ever heard it: "I’ve always thought it quaint, and rather touching, that there is, in America, a movement that thinks that people are not yet selfish enough. And I’ve met some of it’s supporters, they call themselves objectivists, and I’ve debated with them, but I’ve never yet gotten to the bottom of that problem. They think that America is a society already rotten with too much socialism and compassion, and it’s just so refreshing to meet people who manage to get through their day actually believing that." I love this man. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
9:53 pm	Hour 68a This American Life is one of the most consistantly amazing things I've ever seen or heard. They're at least two seasons through a television version, and I just watched the third episode of the second season on Netflix, "Going Down in History." I've written before about this feeling, that inspirational feeling that overwhelmes you, fills me to the point that I don't want to do any one thing, because any single thing would be too limiting. I want to sing, while dancing, while writing. On a moving boat. With all my friends and family. I regret that I so rarely feel a genuine, heartfelt appreciation for humanity, and I have never encountered anything that aquaintes me with it quite so regularly as this, in radio or TV version. Everybody has a story. The other thing that makes me feel this is the writing of JD Salinger. One passage in particular, actually, and I couldn't possibly improve upon it, not with all the time in the world:          My one terrible consolation is that my beloved has an undying, basically undeviating love for the institution of marriage itself. She has a primal urge to play house permanently. Her marital goals are so absurd and touching. She wants to get a very dark sun tan and go up to the desk clerk in some very posh hotel and ask if her Husband has picked up the mail yet. She wants to shop for curtains. She wants to shop for maternity clothes. She wants to get out of her mother's house, whether she knows it or not, and despite her attachment to her. She wants children-good-looking children, with her features, not mine. I have a feeling, too, that she wants her own Christmastree ornaments to unbox annually, not her mother's.          A very funny letter came from Buddy today, written just after he came off K.P. I think of him as I write about Muriel. He would despise her for her marriage motives as I've put them down here. But are they despicable? In a way, they must be, but yet they seem to me so human-size and beautiful that I can't think of them even now as I write this without feeling deeply, deeply moved. He would disapprove of Muriel's mother, too. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living, stopping off at delicatessens, seeing her analyst, consuming a novel every night, putting on her girdle, plotting for Muriel's health and prosperity. I love her. I find her unimaginably brave. There is real poetry in the title of this show. This American Life. Consider me inspired. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
1:17 pm	Hour 59a I had my first smoking dream last night. I was at Eastern Standard for my cousin Aaron's wedding, and the whole family was there, and Kelly and Aaron went out to smoke (neither currently smoke), and I had a cigarette, waking up feeling terribly, terribly guilty. I was waiting for this. I can't actually believe it hadn't happened before. Also - want fevered, lunatic dreams? Go do sleep with a nicotine patch on. Just don't come crying to me when you have a dream in which the homeless are of the size and disposition of horseflies, to be swatted or killed, if possible. (Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
1:06 pm	Hour 11a I woke up at about 9am, and my mouth feels like it’s had a pigeon living in it for about six months. A pigeon who smokes. Smokey the Pigeon. I’ve decided that along with Jonas Salk and Alexander Fleming, I’d like to elevate the ALZA Corporation and GlaxoSmithKlein. Nicotine patches are the shit. I’ve been at work for like three hours now, and not once have I wanted to shove a knife through my eye. Not even once. I was hesitant to take this path before... I’ve tried to quit a number of times in my life, and the only time I’ve succeeded (more than two months) was with Welbutrin, a little anti-depressant that for some reason binds specifically to nicotine receptors (or something) and helps you quit. I don’t know why I didn’t try to get it again before I quit. I don’t think I was taking this very seriously. I’ve tried patches, and both times I didn’t smoke while on them, but in neither case was there ever a time when I didn’t have nicotine in my veins. I would transition right from patches to giving up. Wikipedia tells me that nicotine patches have like a 7% success rate over 6 months, and that’s not a helpful thought. But I’ve got hope. For the last 10 days or so, it’s been a long, slow, uninterrupted yearning for cigarettes. A craving that would last 7 hours at a time. But I haven’t had a craving yet today, and when it does come, and it will, it’ll come in the form I’m familiar with, the one I’m ready for: ten or so minutes of spectacular, immobilizing desire, but waited through it fades away, like everything else. And that is a helpful thought.  I’m starting over on the count. 1000 hours has to be consecutive, pushing the end date to August 6th, 7 pm. I’ve adjusted the stats, so in 989 hours, I will be $308.50 richer, 790 cigarettes cleaner, and done with goddamn drug. Can't wait. (Comment on this)
1:45 am	Hour 266/Hour 0a Well, fuck. I've had a strong conviction this would happen for the last 4 days or so, a convinction strengthened by my mentally indulging it. In fact, I think I decided I would do this about four days ago, and have just tortured myself with it since then. And now it has. I went downstairs to run an errand, and in a fretting mess, a stunted spastic mess, an emphatic FUCK IT, I bought a pack. I ripped the cover off like it had a golden ticket inside, pulled out a cigarette, lit it..... ahhhhh. For like 60 seconds, anyway. As predicted, the entire jittery anger faded into a slouched happiness, an addict's happiness, that lasted about a minute. It tasted like it used to, that thick taste that will forever take me back to tmy backyard shed circa 1998, thrilled that I was getting away with something so devious. And then: -What the fuck are you doing? -This isn't as good as I remember. -There isn't anything about this that you need. -I feel my tongue getting burned. -I feel terribly guilty. -I feel terribly envious of Kelly, out there somewhere, fighting the good fight, going to bed a winner and waking up a winner. -Why do I need this to hang out with Sam, or Anna, or Blessing? Why I can't I just see them? -Why do I feel like I need this to write? -Am I pimpled from the candy and chubby from the overeating, lungs clearing, starting to smell things, starting to taste things... for nothing? -The badness, the withdrawl, seriously can't last forever. It can't. -I can live my life without these. -I will live my life without these. Then I went back inside to buy the patch. My dad asked me today, and my Mom and sister have apparently been having the same discussion, "why cold turkey? why do you feel like you need to do this differently from everyone else?" I knew I would feel all these things, I think I just wanted to experience feeling them. It wasn't enough that it was in my head. What I have to realize is that I cannot do this on my own. In a vacuum, maybe, but I must acknowledge the fact that for me, right now, quitting without patch, gum, losenge, or pill is too hard. I can't do it. This is not to say I can't quit, a common mistake, but that I can't do it without help. So now I have help. So let's think about it this way: I had one cave in me, and I just got it out of the way. I actually was convinced that I couldn't do this now, because everyone I know is gone, Vikki's gone for most of the summer. But this is way better. By the time she gets back, I'll be fine. And this is a helpful thought. I don't want to lie about it, so I'm not. This happened. But I can do this. Tomorrow morning, I'll wake up, take a shower, pick myself up, dust myself off, and resume the fight. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
11:56 am	Hour 252 So this is how this works: I wake up, feel fine. I can take a shower, get ready, eat or drink something, walk to the bus, and get to work with no issue at all. Then I get to work, and the thumbscrews start. The sheer tedium of this job gives me nothing to think about, all day, but how much I want to smoke. Ways to get around it. How, where, when I could smoke. Trying to get myself to A) just have one, and B) start smoking full-scale again, and I go back and forth between them, endlessly searching, squirming, feeling, tirelessly testing the borders, smashing myself against the walls of this little prison, looking for weakness and finding it and poking it with a sharp stick until I fucking lose it. I only thought I hated this job before. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
10:26 am	Hour 226.5 And on a completely unrelated note, this city is stupid. This has been the grayest June I've ever seen, the gloomiest so far since 1903 and in the running for gloomiest of all-time. We haven't seen the sun I think since June 5. It's misting outside, like the entire city is shaving in the bathroom while Providence takes a shower. The 21st was supposed to be the longest day of the year, but instead, it was the longest gray of the year. Yeah. If you were to recreate this month on the stage, it would be the longest play of the year. If someone lost their Dachshund, it could be the longest stray of the year. If tekiah gedolah was sounded on the shofar by a donkey, it would be the longest bray of the year. If the homosexual porn industry held an annual penis-measuring competition -  Yeah. We're done here. (Comment on this)
10:08 am	Hour 226 One of the constants of sadness, mine anyway, is the suggestive finality of it. That it feels as though I'll never be happy again. This, I know, is nonsense, but it's not always easy to remember that. That said, I almost cracked last night. I came very, very close. Vikki and I were at Green Street, and the screaming futility of this struggle hit me, suddenly and all at once, and I earnestly wanted to stop. I would've smoked 20 cigarettes if I could. Fuck it. I don't care anymore. She talked me down, her and the knowledge that if I did cave, I'd have to tell my sister, who's out there fighting the good fight along with me. So I didn't. And this morning, with a bit more clarity, I'm feeling damn good about this. Vikki left this morning, for steps 1 and 2 of her 4-Step program to avoid Boston all summer. She's in Vancouver until the 3rd, then a cruise with her parents for like 10 days, which means she'll come back around the July 14th - which for quitting, will be just short of a month. And this puts it in perspective. It's only been 9 days, but after 30? I'll be alright by 30. Either I'll have started again or I'll be over the hump, but I'll be alright by 30. I know it. "One way or another," I said to her last night, "this will be over by the time you get back." This is a helpful thought. I feel like I can see the goalposts. (Comment on this)
9:30 am	Hour 225 There are real financial benefits to quitting, but like most things in this tedious bog of self-betterment, the benefits are exclusively long-term. Smoking costs me $0.25/hr, $6/day, $180/month, $2200/year. That's a good amount of money, or seems like it anyway, until I think about the shit that I buy because I'm not smoking. It's been 225 hours. Consulting my chart, it seems that i've saved $56.25. Ooh, not bad... save for the fact that in the last 9 days, I've spent more than that on fucking Milk Duds. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
7:04 pm	Hour 211 I'm waiting for the bus after work, and the kid next to me is smoking. And what's noteworthy about this is that he looks like a fool. Not because of cigarettes, necessarily, but certainly in spite of them. Compare this to 3 days ago, where I'd see a piss-crusted bum with sores on his face pick a soggy half-smoked cigarette out of the gutter and light it, and I'd mutter spitefully to myself, "lucky." (Comment on this)
1:14 pm	Hour 205 I am not yet at what I like to call The Pleateau, a long, seemingly stagnant peace with my desire to smoke, but I'm looking forward to it. The Pleateau is functional normalcy puncuated by periods of intense desire, and in both secondhand anecdotes and personal experience, I know that the only difference between this and how I'll feel 10 years from now is the intensity of the desire. You'll always want one, they say. My mom confesses that she still occasionally wants a cigarette, and she smoked for I think for a grand total of twelve months, something like 35 years ago. This is not a helpful thought. I can't really remember, but I believe that last time I quit, that the desire after a month or two wasn't so bad. Mostly ignorable. Desire is managable. I want to go back to New Zealand, but can't, at least right now. I want a bottle of Macallan 25. I want to fly a F-18. I always want popcorn, but I almost never have any, and it's not as if the unfulfilled desire makes my life unlivable. And this is a helpful thought. In the interim, I'm still having fits of whimpering petulance and seething bouts of rage. For the most part, these are horrible, and happen at all the wrong times and at all the wrong people. I owe Vikki something shiny and/or delicious for putting up with me for this long, and being so gracious about it.  But sometimes, the irritibility and anger feels good, especially when it's at something whose feelings can't/won't get hurt. The door to the walk-in cooler at the bar, that doesn't close all the way and therefore asks me to punch it. The check taking 20 minutes to get to me. The utter stupidity of something I have to list. It's pure catharsis to have a bombastic outburst over some meaningless bullshit, and I always feel better afterward. Like this: Vikki and I saw the poster for this last night: http://www.maj.org/P2009/therapy.html Muttering about it is fun. What would you rather do than see this show? I think I'd rather murder this man than watch his show. And I don't want to murder him at all. It's hard to say how helpful that thought is. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
1:56 pm	Hour 182 I fucking hate this. I don't want to feel like this anymore. (Comment on this)
11:52 am	Hour 180 From the carcinogen that brought you "There's No Point in Living if You Can't Feel Alive" and "Come on Baby (Just This Once)" comes today's track: "Abject Misery." I got high last night for the first time in over 6 months, which was fine I supppose, and woke up this morning feeling depleted and to Rufus Wrainwright's Hallelujah, which has more or less set the pace for the day. I feel depressed. Proper depressed. Why Even Bother depressed.  I just got to the newspaper office. The good news about this job is I can show up whenever I want. The bad news is that means I'll have to stay until 8pm. I'm such a child about this today. "It's not fair!" "Good morning, Jason, how are you?" "Suicidal. And yourself?" I am, of course, not actually suicidal. Before I killed myself I would definitely have a cigarette, which would fix everything - quite literally everything, everything I've been upset, annoyed, dismayed, morose, macabre, depressed, miserable, furious, and fearful about for the last week, everything - in less than 90 seconds. I know this. And all that would be replaced with a not insignificant sense of guilt, a feeling of failure... but it seems a small price to pay. This is the rationalization of the day. That I'm tired of fighting. If I were to give up today, and someone were to ask how long I lasted, I'd have to respond with "7 days," which sounds paltry, like some kind of afterthought, like I pondered giving up smoking but had never committed to it, never even really tried. But in these 7 days, these 180 hours, I have fought thousands of battles, one every few seconds for the first five days, and one every few minutes since then - cigarettes and withdrawl have tried to get back at me literally thousands of times, and I've won every single time. And I'm tired of fighting. I want the guilt, the clear head that will come with this drug, I want the fog of withdrawl to lift and to be able to see clearly, just for an hour or so, how I did want to quit, how it is a good thing and something worth doing, because I don't have any sense of that anymore, and I think this misery would be mitigated by a something, anything, to remind me what I'm doing, and why. This is a pretty good one. The best yet, I'd say. God. Who needs a drink? I'm buying. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
9:22 am	Hour 129 I said it was getting better. I suppose it was. But not last night. Last night was fucking awful. The service industry is not for quitters. (3 Comments |Comment on this)