OK, Karisa and I, through the magic of instant messenger spontaneously took off in a contest of bad Eureka College slogans. They just write themselves. Now read and laugh and marvel at how clever we are. Oh…many of them are based off the below photo of Nick. I’ll just put it back up. Look at it and read…

Ah…but in all honesty, I love my little brother and think going back to EC was the best decision he could make.

Lenore is in the blue. That means her eyes fog up a light blue color and she gets a little duller and she will soon shed. Egyptians believed this was a sign of a snakes true immortality, that it could slough off old age, rejuvenated. It also means she isn’t particularly hungry (not until she sheds anyway). And, amongst the hidden shadow courts of the mouse kingdom, there was much rejoicing.

I myself am in a funk. Not the sad kind…but the delirious variety. I was up till 8 am this morning, writing a story for short fiction class today. It took all night. It’s a story I’ve tried to write for two years now…I could just never make it fully work in my head. It’s a monstrous amalgam of Oedipus Rex, an Edgar Allan Poe poem, and Jerry Springer…I just had the audacity to squish it all together…a sort of Gothic Absurdist Greek Tragedy (welcome to the age of hybrid genres!!!). It’s called “The Complex.”

The story always intimidated me, and it always won the stare down competition. In fact, I’ve written at least two stories and thought up several more, to avoid writing this very story (one of which, “Teddy Bear Rex,” will appear in Eureka Literary Magazine this Spring…check it out). So I guess it’s constructive procrastination. On the other hand, once I finish all these alternative stories (along with the “The Complex” and “Teddy Bear Rex”) I will have enough Oedipus Rex derived stories to cause my therapist concern. Well…I don’t have a therapist…but it causes my hypothetical therapist much concern (though…to be honest, I think she suffers more concern over the fact that she doesn’t exist, which causes all sorts of philosophical problems in our talks).

In any event…I could use a good rejuvenation, through sloughing off my weary skin. But I’ll settle for 8-10 hours sleep tonight (as I don’t work until 3pm tomorrow…today).

I’ll leave things at that…except for one last detail. I visited the Eureka website today and what do my delirious eyes spy? My brother’s mug. Observe…

Doesn’t Nick look adorably studious?

Pleasant dreams to all.

And To all a good night.

…I have to confess I’ve had a lot of zombie slaying dreams lately…but one of them involved an amorous encounter with a girl (what can I say…I’m a romantic at heart).

Halloween season is not quite upon us yet…however it’s close enough for me to start planning some October activities – haunted houses, costume parties, ghost tours, and other events besides. There is always Bachelor’s Grove cemetery that is begging for a revisiting (right Ron?)…particularly when it’s not dead of winter. It’s been a few years since I and a group of compatriots went out to a suitable local and exchanged ghost stories in the middle of the night. Hey…combine that and Bachelor Grove cemetery and you have a winner…

For those who would like more INFO ON BACHELOR GROVE CEMETERY, one of the most reputably haunted Chicago-land locations, click away.

Now…close your eyes for me and picture please, some large city (let’s say Paris). Would it not be a cool world indeed if some group of fantastically eccentric locals went down into the uncharted catacombs beneath the city (the ones that are on no maps and that the city officials don’t even know of) formed a club, restored the underground chamber, dragged sound and theatre equipment down there, and ran a secret cinema?

It is a wonderfully strange world as this does exist (how would I make it up?). For the full story, click this anonymous obscenity: @!*$&*#$!@&!%!!!

They even watched Dark City, one of my all time favorite movies!

Hmmmmmm…and double Hmmmmmm…

Now my thoughts are mixing and bleeding into one another in a weird sort of alchemy. I’m thinking HALLOWEEN and WATCHING MOVIES IN STRANGE PLACES and remember that sweet WIDE SCREEN TV I was shown in Pritchard Theatre…

Tell me Rich and Karisa and Kris – would it be possible to do a horror movie night at Pritchard, some time in October??? I’m picturing a giant TV, spooky theatre at night, a marathon of horror movies, kettle corn, etc. What sayith you?

Oh Lord! Lenore is on the rampage again. Let’s have the official count judges…

LENORE’S DEATH COUNT: Hey boys and girls! Mighty Mouse says, “Good God! Lenore has ravenously devoured 18 young mice. I…I couldn’t stop her. She was too strong. Oh the humanity! The HUMANITY!”

And finally, here are some dug up bits of free writing…

“CAPTAIN TONY AND THE HANING TREE”
The roots dug into the floor. The branches exploded through the ceiling. Someone had built the bar around the great hanging tree decades before I was born. But Key West was the place to say things like, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

He was more surprised that it answered.

Well, I’m back after a weekend of emotional roller-coasting, full loops and rises and falls and a little turbulence here and there.

Friday, I went back to Eureka (after being away far, far too, too long-long). It was then I realized how much I MISSED everyone. There were a lot of good friendships made on that little campus (pre and post graduation) and I’ve been hard pressed to match them anywhere else.

I got to see Kris’s play. Way to go Kris, Rich, and Karisa and all the rest. That must have been a difficult play to do. Kris then unveiled, for me, the new toy of Pritchard Theatre…the most beautiful, giant, flat screen, wide screen TV. Wide screens are special to me, because they make a statement (“Fuck TV, I want to watch a movie!”).

From there it was party time, at the Pimp and Ho party (“Dear Mom and Dad, you’ll be so proud about what I did this weekend at school…”) with some long lost pals, a lot of rum, and no less then five Doetsch men (I think my DNA started vibrating). T’was fun. T’was full of socializing (which I thought I forgot how to do, holed up in Springfield…I’m just glad I remember how to talk and that throwing things at people is rude). Kurt, it was fun sharing a drink. Karisa, it was fun “reading” some intoxicating “books,” from Steve’s “library” and discussing the various clubs on campus.

But, I didn’t get to visit with everyone as much as I wanted to (Sorry Rich, a potential brawl indirectly involving my brother kept me from getting to your room for quite some time). But that was OK…there was still tomorrow (Saturday) to party and catch up…

…so Saturday, we played a LARP game at Jeramie and Amy’s and it was a good time. The plan, simple enough, was to leave from there to Eureka and get there some time between midnight and 1am (plenty of time to visit and have some fun). Well, some embarrassingly missed and messed up turns on a very familiar route and not noticing them for quite some time, kept Nick and I from getting on campus until 3 am…3 FREAKING AM! I blame drowsiness and EXTREME sexual frustration…which has cut my already precarious attention span in twain.

Spending that long in a vehicle with the space and time not making any sense and missing an opportunity to have fun with everyone put me in a pretty foul mood. On top of it all, Beth was mad at Nick, thinking he had purposefully ditched her (and what can a guy do in that situation except tell the unlikely truth and hope it doesn’t sound like an excuse), which made me feel guilty on top of it all. I was too tired to do anything and too frustrated to sleep.

Sunday, I visited with Genenda and we had a talk. Over the summer, faced with conflicting thoughts about the future, we decided to split up and explore other options (while keeping in touch on occaision). I spilled all the feelings and particulars into a few long posts on my old UJournal (which seems lost to me now) so I don’t have the emotional energy to put them all here. We talked out our loving stalemate and I realized how opposite and diametrically apposed each of us was in our dilemma and weakness. Genenda knows what she wants in her future, and her sight reaches far, but kinks in those plans sets her off balance very easily and she is terrified of not attaining what was originally planned. I, on the other hand, live in the now and I’m much better at enjoying the present for what it is (I like not knowing were I might be next month…or the next day)…but I’m pretty useless when someone wants to know my future plans.

Smiles, tears, and all between and I wondered which was the greater angst – knowing exactly what you want (but not knowing if you can get it) or knowing exactly what you can have (but not knowing what you want).

Sometimes I think the situation is going to tear me in bloody halves and dammit all but I don’t have a mop.

Then I got to see Nick before I left. Everything between him and Beth is cool…a relief. And he seems a lot happier with a new year of Eureka ahead of him. He was in a sticky, “real world” trap and he managed to get out of it before his eyes went dead and his step lost some life. There are lost souls, trapped in traffic jams, somewhere, right now, who were not so lucky.

But now I’m back in Springfield. Lenore is two months old today (that is, yesterday) and her appetite increases exponentially (I’ll have the official mouse count later).

Not a bad weekend…it just had its twists and turns…

(PS – I think my titles for these entries are just getting longer and longer and longer.)

Are electronic media destroying literacy? Will no one ever read a book again? Are the youth slipping away and society perpetually decaying in a bleak…blah, blah, blah, blah. This VERY GOOD ARTICLE explains why that is all BULLSHIT.

Today, an angry home schooling mother berated me for the price of the tickets that she had already bought (fully understanding the price of the tickets at that time). Home schooling parents tend to be a snappish lot – afraid and even hateful of the world around them. That’s why they throw their children into a whole and cover it in sand, trying to protect them, trying to stop time. Great strategy guys…force your children to go through the social awkwardness and terror of the opposite sex (that we all go through in high school) while they are in their 20’s. Very healthy.

I recall, when I visited the Mandinka village in The Gambia, during the Eureka/Africa trip a few years back, that Mandinka boys don’t just grow up. They are tested at manhood. They are then ritually scarred. They are then, not just adults, but Mandinka Warriors. Adulthood is not something that one just falls into, but a privilege and a responsibility.

I recall this and now I know the lesson the home schooling parent had not learnt.

Yeah…there are scars we should have at 21.

Speaking of conservative fears, I think back now of all the brimstone dusted things my Grandma used to warn us kids about and…now…well…I guess Jimmy Buffette said it best when he sang, “We are the people our parents warned us about.”

And now to bed.
Tomorrow I go back to Eureka.
Back to friends.
Back to a home one step in time removed.

A;lkdjf;lakjf;lasjfd;lasf;lajsf;klakljsd…I’ve been organizing files on my computer all day and my mind/hands/face are going numb. Ah well. I received an email from an actress/writer I met on Urnikis’s independent film Black Days over last winter. We exchanged some writing (as we promised to do when we met outside the Batman Begins set over the summer…never go in though…but we did see the Gotham City Swat team and a helicopter). She gave the kind of comments that keep me writing for another day. She said I was “sardonic” (I love when people say that) and that I wrote women very well (that comment made my day). But I ramble…and about myself…but this is a journal…

I’m always fascinated by short-short fiction. During the Spring, one of the students in my short story class introduced the idea of Flash 55 fiction. Stories told in 55 words. As an exercise we had to take three random words and write a 55 word story using them, in five minutes. I got the words “tickled,” “wiggled,” and “giggled.” This would suggest a happy story…but I wasn’t going to roped into that…no sir. Here’s the story (another of the things I have rediscovered as I dig deeper into the files of my now healed computer).

“DUCK-TAPE WEBS”

I still giggle.

Yes, Lenore has struck again! However my last count was off, as she did not eat one of the mice, but hid it from me (the little scamp). Anyway…let’s have our official count…ahem!

LENORE’S DEATH COUNT: Hey kids! Fivel says, “There are no cats in America…but there are Indigo snakes and Lenore has eaten 14 mice and she ate my whole family…soooooooomewhere, oooooooout there, weee’ll find…” Woops! We regret to inform the boys and girls that Lenore’s count is now 15. We’ll have a new spokesperson next week.

Ok…one word of the day…and then I can sleep…

Scrumtrulescent…no, wait…that’s not a word…

Screw it. I’m going to sleep.

Wow…I would have guessed me being a Brian. But the test don’t lie! Well…I do stay up, into the we hours (usually sun up) working on one mischievous end or another. And I think, especially as I get old, I’ll squander whatever intellect I have on one strange obsession or another – like mastering the perfect Christopher Walken impersonation or teaching my snake Lenore to play Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on a key board…and a do enjoy a good cackle now and then…

Which Family Guy character are you?