Okay...whoa...I must have blacked out there for a sec. What was that? Like 4 months? Yeah, something like that. Time flies, you know, when...um...it does.

You'll be glad to know I'm safe, healthy, living and working my way to fame and success. Oh, and I moved to New York.

Where to begin?

Today is Thursday. Yesterday was Wednesday. Round here they say Thursday is the new Friday. My friends and I, however, are cooler than most, so we went ahead and exappropriated Wednesday and made it the new Thursday. Take that! And Tuesday, you ask? Yeah, it's gotta be like Christmas or something.

So anyways, last night we celebrated our tremedous feat of renaming Wednesday (now Thursday) by getting drunk and playing pool with seedy older men. There's more to this story: you see, while my friends drank and played pool, I was keeping a secret. I was secretly fighting off pnemonia. I have this cough and this soreness and this inability to get any sleep whatsoever. It sucks. Perhaps I should have qaulified my saying I'm healthy earlier. My bad. It's not so bad though, my illness. It's just pnemonia. Maybe smoking wasn't a good idea. Sure. But all in all it wasn't that stupid. I mean, when you think about it...

So, we drank a lot. 2 beers each, then sets of shots, 7 maybe, 8 to be safe. It's funny that I remember these things. Things like numbers, amounts, relative size and poistion. It's funny because I don't remember anything else. What I can piece together is that sometime around 5 am I woke up in my friend's (we'll call her Katerina Ivanovna, K.I. for short) room. The lights were out. I was sleeping on the floor. Maybe I wasn't sleeping. Maybe I was just sitting there on the floor. Or maybe on the bed. The bed? I think my clothes were on. I am pretty sure of that. I think my friend (the Mop) was there? Was the Mop there? This is of crucial importance, whether the Mop was in fact present, as you will see.

I kind of suspect K.I.'s into me. Which is a shame, tragic really, frustrating even. You see, I'm not into K.I. Not in the slightest. And now, though I enjoy her company, our friendship has this terminal illness. Her liking me is this unholy cancer that's going to eat up all the time we spend together. I'll have to push her away, with the end of a broom, so as not to get contaminated myself. It's sad. Maybe it'll end in violence. Or suicide. Or suicide?

I bet she's just confused. Or desperate. Or both. I'll help her out. I'll find her a guy. I'm good at those things. Hooking people up. Like Love Connection. *5 minute pause filled with fond memories of said early 90s tv show*

Who am I kidding. I can't do that. And this is all selfish. She doesn't like me. She couldn't. She's taller than me. Shit. And now she thinks I am a freak because I sprinted out of her room at 5 in the morning, running, though drunk, like a trackstar.

Sitting (or sleeping) there on the floor, it all dawned on me in one horrible second, a torrent of a revelation, a lake of poison spilling over the lip of a dam. Why am I drunk? Aren't I sick? Wasn't I going to quit smoking? What happened? What did I say? They see through me. They see through me. It's so dark but they see through me. What am I doing here? Jesus, what am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here?

"What the fuck?"

The one problem with making Wednesday the new Thursday is that Thursday morning I have to do stuff. I did none of it. Instead, I'm hiding. I'm hiding from K.I. From the mop. Quite possibly from the police. I'll say the police just to play it safe. So there won't be any surprises. Now I am toying with the idea of getting out of New York, making arrangements to visit a friend in Boston. It's so damn cold here. Maybe it'll be sunny in Boston.

Staying up all night is kind of creepy. I'm used to sleeping at night. When I wake up, I can't help but feel refreshed. This isn't supposed to be New Agey but if you think about it waking up is akin to being reborn. It divides one day from the next; past from present. It gives you the distance required to move on with your life. When you don't sleep, however, you loose your optimism and sense of well being. You start to perceive the continuity of events. You realize the sins of an evening are not cleansed with dawn. The timeline stretches all the way back, linking you to the barbarity of the mongols and worse. It's kinda sad.

OK CYA!

I didn't post because I was playing xenosaga. I took me fifty two hours to beat. To be honest, towards the end I stopped enjoying the game. Actually, the only thing that was keeping me going was the hope for some kind of powerfully redeeming resolution. I hadn't really understood any of the story until then. In fact, I was so impatient for everything to be explained to me, I had long since stopped paying much attention to the cut scenes.

Now it's over. I've reached the end. I've past it. I've entered into what I will forever call the "post-xenosaga" stage of my life... and, I feel like I could cry.

Not only does the end of xenosaga not tie up any loose ends, but it seems to ignore the entirety of the story line. It denies its context -- an ugly rock at the end of an ocean. Jesus, it's like the developers tried to shake the weight of the monstrously complex plot which had accumulated, close their eyes to the truth, just pretend it never happened, like a cancer patient who makes believe he doesn't have a terminal illness.

And, their stubborn refusal to explain what I've been doing for the last 52 hours means that approximately two days of my existence is totally meaningless. Fuck metaphysics, the truth is I spent a significant portion of my life sitting crosslegged on the carpet playing a game which fails to justify its own being. It's like a drug, one of those addictive ones, that have long since ceased to affect a user and which are now only consumed to satisfy a habit. It's a parasitic, self-gratifying cycle, draining me to sustain itself. It's creepy, xenosaga propagates itself endlessly and pointlessly like a... like a virus. It's totally out of balance with its environment: all take and no give. It's like Ikea, destroying our planet's rain forests to make stupid furniture with names like FUKU. Yeah, well fuck you FUKU.

When you think about it objectively, the whole thing is brutal. Human beings are no match for the dark dark truths that drive xenosaga. The human animal is far too optimistic and far too deluded by hope to ever resist. Our innate positivism will doom us every time. It's like a meat packing plant. Or Terminator. No room for hope at all. That's why one day xenosaga may kill us all.

Granted, the game I played was the first episode in what purports to be a longer series. But still, everything I've said is true. Actually, it's worse. Now it's like Nietzsche + capitalism. Xenosaga exists to continue its franchise and make the Japanese money. If playing ps2 gave you lung cancer, xenosaga would be like cigarettes.

What I am slowly starting to realize is that my entire life is like xenosaga. I don't want to spend much time talking about school, so I'll just say one thing: Calculus. The point here is that I live my life believing that the things I do have meaning. When I die I want it to be like End of Eva, where my liquefied body becomes a soup to nourish the regeneration of humanity and life in general. Sadly, I have a feeling that this won't be the case... all my energy is co opted by the system, to feed and sustain a select few at the expense of everyone else. And I'm too mesmerized by the spectacle and by KOS-MOS's fabulous tech-attacks to do anything about it. I'll probably only attain clarity in the "post-something" parts of my life when I can reflect on what I've been doing: my "post-xenosaga," "post-school," "post-career," "post-life" life. But by then it will already be too late to change things. It'll feel like today, only worse. And most likely I won't even have had the joy of piloting an A.G.W.

Fight for our future,

This post has a moral.

A friend of mine, we'll call him Griffen, finished his last final at Berkeley yesterday, which, for me, meant that I had to pick him up, give him cigarettes and drive him around so he could get drunk. He had been driving his own car, an old 2002, until a few weeks ago, when it disinitegrated underneath him. It sits in front of his house now. I wave at it every time I drive home from work.

Anyways, Griffen was supposed to get a map, but all he managed was a printout with some major streets and a big red star indicating our destination. There wasn't any address, just this star which could cover 8 square city blocks. It goes without saying, we did a lot of driving and then we parked and did a lot of aimless walking. If Griffen wasn't being so damn optimistic, I might have realized how absurd the whole thing was.

We had a plan: find the epicenter of the acursed star and knock on doors. (It was 11:45 already and although Griffen was immaculately groomed, I looked like a hoodlum, with an ugly black sweatshirt I rescued from somebody else's trash.) So it was a shitty plan, but Griffen has the uncanny ability of getting what he wants without doing anything at all. The first door we tried was the party.

It was a pretty normal party, which means I was pretty bored. For some reason they were playing Indian music videos on a computer monitor, though, which fascinated me beyond description. Aside from this, and the appearance of one random girl from high school, there was nothing worth mentioning.

This girl was really beautiful. In high school, she'd bury herself in make-up. People said she slept with it on. Now, however, she wore no makeup and even had put on a little weight since I had last seen her. She was still beautiful, but her beauty was now strangely tragic, and she looked sad. This made being around her kinda awkward. This and the fact that a really terrible thing happened between me and a good friend of hers a while back, and I am sure she knows every rotten dirty secret about me. In fact, the whole night I was terrified she was going to lunge at me and expose something horrible. She didn't. Well, she couldn't. I systematically avoided her all night.

I left at 1:15 and sprinted the quarter mile from the party back to my car. I was running partly because it was cold, but mostly because I had a final in 6 hours that I hadn't studied for.

The moral of this story is that, as Morissey put it, "there is more to life to books you know, but not much more."