The Ethnic Chameleon

buffering

2009-08-04T02:10:00.000-07:00

All right so I have skipped a day because I possibly may have been a bit too drunk last night to figure out what my password was to log in to my blog...or I may have not even made it to my computer and passed out on our carpet. Either way I had the taste of gin and dust bunnies in my mouth this morning. So because of this I need two poem ideas.

I'll be honest I didn't think that I would be struggling this soon to develop ideas for poems. This shit is pretty hard.

So one idea that I have was the use of the term buffer in a show called the Riches. Buffer is a phrase used to describe ordinary people by clans of gypses/grifters. This was also a term used by the great historian Howard Zinn who used the term to refer to the middle class of capitalist socieites. Either way the term is used by a person who finds themselves stuck in the middle. though it may feel as though they are free in fact they are completely confined within their position in society and have very little choice. It is only within the extremities that one can find true freedom...or some bullshit like that.

The second idea I have is to have a poem that uses literally interpretations of really bad pick up lines. I am not really sure how this would work but I think it could be really amusing. I will have to flush this one out later.

Reanimation

2009-08-01T04:18:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been reading a book called Stiff by Mary Roach. It is the curious history of human cadaver research. The topic, though a bit macabre, is extremely interesting and treated with an air of respect by the author. Roach's writing style is extremely accessible to any reader and keeps a very light-hearted tone about a subject that pretty much deals with death and dead bodies.

In one of the sections she discusses what European doctors in the 17th and 18th centuries used to do to verify if a patient was in fact deceased. some of the more interesting ideas was to fill the mouth of a patient with warm urine, place an insect in a person's ear, or stick a red hot poker in the "rear passage". This idea of a person unsure of a person's state of health also got me thinking of a song by the frames called "what happens when the heart just stops". According to Roach a person who is brain dead can still be kept "alive" in order to retrieve organs from the body. Perhaps I could do a piece on being so detached that i need someone to perform some of these acts to verify if i am actually alive. Either way there is definitely a poem somewhere in this story.

My Odyssey...in space

2009-07-31T05:11:00.000-07:00

Poem idea:
A poem that depicts some type of epic space adventure in which an individual adventurer is stuck in a place known as the friend's zone and has no idea how to get out of it. yet more and more people keep showing up until the point that it overflows and all of the people in the friend zone escape.

I know this is pretty cheesy but I think it could work out if I really play up the cheese factor.

Eavesdropping

2009-07-30T05:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at work as in Tuesday I met a woman from the same area of San Diego that I am from. She had been in Fairbanks for two days in order to collect a bunch of possessions of her sister who died two years ago. It was a very nice story that she told of how she ended up in Fairbanks and at the Wolf Run. Then as I was counting the till I overheard her on a cellphone talking to what I assumed was a family member. She talked about how people had looted her sister's cabin and how it had been a very long time since she had been in consistent contact with her sister. The most intriguing thing was that she bought a candle at Fred Meyer to light in her sister's cabin. When she returned to said cabin she found that her sister had bought the same exact style of candle.

This incident got me to thinking about the things that we will inevitably leave behind. It is those little things that friends and family remember, not the most expensive cars, tvs, etc. The poem could be from my pov or hers

Hopefully Not Setting myself up for Failure or My year long poetry project.

2009-07-28T03:38:00.000-07:00

It has been over a year since I have written on this blog. I'll be honest a lot has gone on since this time last year. Probably a lot more than can be contained within this word box. Yet as that Shins song "pink bullets" goes, "I don't look back much as a rule." So on to the present. I came to the realization that for proclaiming myself to be a hack poet I really don't have a lot of hack poems. So I have decided that every day for a year I will either compose a poem or an idea for a poem on this blog, most of the time probably the latter. Hopefully this will help me utilize this more often. I have never been able to fully commit to something like this for a year...let alone 2 months. Also, poetry is pretty personal for me and well all of my ideas and the way in which my brain works is available for all to see...that's a little scary. So we will see what happens.

Poem idea:
A confessional poem about how my mother is actually a zombie. I can utilize the zombie metaphor and relate it as to how all of the things I do are influenced by her and how she haunts me from the grave...like a zombie. Could start out as a confession to a woman.

Letting the Literary Dork in me Roam Free

2008-07-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, my friend asked me to suggest a book for her to read because she is super bored in Arizona. The question caught me off guard and I was not able to answer here in time. So she ended up with a book titled "A Total Waste of Makeup". Now I have no idea what this book is about. I mean hell it could be a book about the horrors of the cosmetic injury and its crimes against rabbits, monkeys, and other assorted cute creatures. Or it could be about a very confused transvestite...you never really know. I have been asked this question several times (about book suggestions....the tranny question only came up once and it was mardi gras). It is one that consistently baffles me. I am of the opinion that books are a continuous dialogue between the reader and the book itself. Unfortunately, each person has a different taste in terms of this conversation. And when asked to suggest a book without knowledge of a person's taste I am left with a look of confusion on my face. Sadly books are like banana hammocks...there is no one size fits all genre. Yet thinking about this question recently I have decided to come up with a list of books that cover a wide range of tastes and are just really well written stories. I have taken 5 books of fiction and 10 books of non-fiction. The non-fiction are mainly history, philosophy, and creative non-fiction works. I realize that some pretentious jackass could state that history or philosophy can be labeled as fiction but so can any serious science book.

Fiction

1. The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole: A collection of the most insane characters led by the unforgettable Ignatius J. Reilly. This books is absolutely hilarious and appeals to both lowbrow (Ignatius constant talk of his rather volatile "valve") and highbrow (Ignatius' attempts at a strike in his place of work) humor.

2. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: Like Titanic this book appeals to those who love a good love story and the adventures of a superhero who is not really impervious to water.

3. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold: THis one is getting made into a movie but should be read before seeing said movie. The book makes child abduction and rape fun for the reader again. In all honesty this unique first person narrative deals with the aftermath of the lives of those who lose someone to a horrific crime...but in a kind of funny way.

4. Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman: A suggestion from my buddy dave. The novel takes a satirical look at the good/evil dynamic in traditional comic book stories. But also deals with the issues of acceptance...accepting that it is ok if your half cyborg with titanium alloy boobies cause in reality don't all little girls go through that stage.

5. The Gospel According to Biff by Christopher Lamb: A very interesting version of the life of Jesus Christ by his best friend....Biff. It is a hilarious attempt to fill in the lost years of Jesus' life that is not explained in the Bible. Utilizes a great deal of Eastern philosophy for hilarious results.

Non-fiction coming soon.

A Challenge has been Laid Down

2008-07-21T21:26:00.000-07:00

So next Tuesday there is a poetry slam at the college coffehouse at 7 pm. My buddy Raif is spearheading this venture and will be hosting, which is really nice because I haven't performed at a poetry slam that I wasn't hosting in like 10 months. It is an all ages slam so hopefully there will be a bunch of poets that aren't frequenters of the bar poetry sessions. Anywho the prize for the top three finishers is a spot on stage to perform at the Tanana Valley Fair. Unfortunately, I am already slotted to read at that event so I can't place during this slam. Thus my friend Lorien has challenged me to a one poem contest during the slam. The stipulations are that the poem has to be in the form of a greeting card for any holiday of my choosing. I have been throwing around a few ideas trying to find an obscure holiday I could create a poem out of. Here are a few ideas:

1. Dingus Day: A traditional polish holiday the day after Easter that consists of seeking out single women dousing them with ice water and beating their legs with switches.

2.Festivus: An alternative Christmas holiday that was popularized by Seinfeld

3. Buddha's Birthday: Pretty Self explanatory

4.Darwin Day: Ditto

5. Confederate Memorial Day: A day that must just be filled with a glorious amount of mullets and cousin loving.

6. Lee-Jackson-King Day - From 1983 to 2000 the Commonwealth of Virginia celebrated the lives of Robert E. Lee, Stone Wall Jackson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all on the same day..ahhhhmazing.

7.International Dadaism Month - There is no actual set month, rather it is celebrated on 4 February, 28 March, 1 April, 15 July, 2 August, 7 August, 16 August, 26 August, 18 September, 22 September, 1 October, 17 October, and 26 October.

8. Mole Day - Apparently some weird chemistry holiday.

If anyone has any holiday suggestions or believes that one holiday is superior to the others. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think

Back in the Saddle

2008-07-21T02:15:00.000-07:00

It has been almost two months since my last post. I guess a lot has been going on in these last two months. The lack of posting about these events is kind of a concern and so hopefully I will be flooding this blog with new posts to kind of catch up on the documentation of my last few years in fairbanks. I know this is not an exciting post but it is 1:30 in the morning and I am pretty tired.

Life Lessons From George Lucas

2008-05-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Recently I went to see the new Indian Jones. In all honesty I was a little apprehensive about the whole thing. The recent redux by Lucas have been shitty at best. And the addition of Shia LeBouf was a little questionable, I mean come on its Even Stevens trying to kick some ass with Jack Ryan its like getting Will Smith to play BA Baracus in a remake of the A-Team. Nonetheless it is Indiana Jones, how can anyone resist its call? After a second viewing of the movie I have discovered some real lessons about both myself and life in general. And since I love lists I present to you the top lessons I have learned from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

-No matter what they look like now, I would still have sex with any female celebrity I found attractive in my youth.

-If you put a Puerto Rican in a loin cloth they look just like an ancient race of Peruvians.

- An OCD like obsession with one's hair is hilllarrriiiooouuussss

-Monkeys will do anything for you if your hair looks just like theirs.

-The Cold War could have ended a lot sooner if the United States or Russia had invested more money into training a loyal army of Rockabilly Monkeys.

-Give any guy, even if they are built like an 11 year old girl, a motorcycle, leather jacket, socially unacceptable name, and some nifty knife flipping tricks and they will immediately be a certifiable bad ass.

-Its pretty easy to get back to civilization if your left stranded in the middle of a South American jungle. And if you don't wander around the jungle at night you'll be perfectly safe.

-An easy way to get around the jungle, and a great form of exercise, is to swing around on tree vines.

-If your Mexican and hopped up on crack than you can crawl on the branch of a tree like a koala bear.

-The best way to distract a Russian is challenging him to a drag race.

All in all my only regret is that the aliens in the movie weren't Ewoks. That would have just been way to cute.

Popping the Digital Cherry

2008-05-27T23:27:00.000-07:00

So I have decided to start a blog. I'm not really sure how interesting my thoughts and ramblings are. The fact of the matter is that this is probably my last year in Fairbanks and I will hopefully be travelling after this year so I figure I might as well document my trials and tribulations. Also this is a nice excuse for me to spend time on the internet and not vigorously search for midget porn and nun sex. But that is neither here nor there. Hopefully this will also keep all of those not in Fairbanks updated on my life. Of course this is dependent on people actually reading this blog...inevitably I can see this being a series of elaborate verbal masturbations on my part. But if it feels good...why not. So enjoy and please leave comments.