from the depths of a mangled auto-mo-bile: a cry, a plea...
Oh, Dear Gods, you all!
We are so wonderfully active tonight, and it makes my poor unsleeping heart pound a little less manic to know that I am not so very alone in all of this bathing-in-anxiety and selling my general soul to a rough prescription of paperwork and a formula of two completed applications a week.
None and nevertheless, things are going dreadfully (has anything changed? Oh, for the life of all great things, I cannot remember if it ever was good) and often I find myself wanting to run away to a quiet third-world nation or to die by a falling bookcase like Leonard Bast in Howard's End. How is it for the rest of you, or those of you distracted (or pained-&-tortured, or free-spirited, or unstressed, or dedicated) enough to post? How far have we yet to tread? Douglas-love, how many days until the Drunken Pruitt-Igoe convention at Amy's?
I do not know how hard that I must try. For all of my life I have been pushing ahead and pushing against walls and pushingpushingpushing so pernicious and madfierce and unresting and I am just too tired and sick of the artificiality of it all to live in such a way anymore. Please mind me, I am not ready to eschew the earnestness, and you shan't find me parading frivolous any time yet soon, but I am just very concerned, in this whole dreaded college process, about how much I should try to do the Great Project-like Things that I have always done for school. Half-way through my awful book of drawings and philosophy and poetry and photographs and typewritten letters and mysterious design techniques and a well-disguised twelve-page essay for the University of Chicago, I am finished with words.
Is it so terrible to shun beauty and ostentation,
and to just want to say enough to speak what is true?
This is the harder task, methinks--breaking through the words
to speak what is true. And I suppose I shall have to face this if I want
to change myself to stand behind my manifesto...I cannot go fussing
at my lovely friends who are busy making their own paper for their
epic novels of the hero's journey, custom-drawn and scrawled for their own applications to the likes of Reed.
Ah, me, these essays!
I want to write about the ghosts of trees, and about poetic manifestos and Joe Hill and the socialist-labor troubadors and about the glories of the Luddites and my manic crush on Sydney Carton and how Telluride stained all of my idealism with the rust & roar of the cities, and how I am better for it.
But I cannot seem to do any of that.
So I sat down tonight to write a simple, true essay.
O, Language, you are lacking, but you will never believe what came out.
Dead Animals.
Not pets this type, but extinct ones.
Some strange recounting of the first eight years of my life,
in which I was (as weren't we all?) some budding naturalist
bent on personally disproving the extinctions of several notable
species, including but not limited to the thylacine, passenger pigeon,
and stellar's sea cow.
I hope it will be cutesy, trite & touching.
Tomorrow is going to come slowly. Tomorrow means this: University of Michigan, Chicago, Beloit, Bard, and a nice pile on the desk of the College Counselor. (I make so many promises.)
And then I can regrow my heart and chop it all up again 'betwixt Old Swattie, Dearest Reed, Carleton, Oberlin, Cornell, Grinnell, Brown, Yale, St. John's, Amherst, and Haverford!
And then, and only then, will I be free to die.
I love you all immensely, especially when you are madly witty, because there is no humor quite as saturated and suggestive and laden and pure as TASP humor, and it is very, very much needed right now. JAKE: if you ever finish with your fiscal diagrams and plans to destroy/control/enumerate irrelevant things, would you be so kind as to post a list of Rash Generalizations (TM) for us to comtemplate? It would warm my poor dear teen socialist heart ever so much.
Ach--has it been so very long since July?
Be well & keep striving & don't sleep until you are satisfied
& stop when your soul says that you have done enough, yes, o loves?
And I have told Amy much about a strange new paradigm of thought concerning fatalism and time that is highly useful in the college admissions process. Send me the word, and I shall attempt to pen a blog manifesto.
Your Favorite Murderer of All Things Small & Fuzzy,
(And scaled. And fin'd. And amphibious)
Gesso-the-Wreck
Post-Script: I spent the bulk of my evening carving out the inside of a candle and filling the periphery of the aforementioned bas-relief with garbanzo beans. I then super-glued lentils to the garbanzo beans, covered the whole of the outer candle with white faux-fur, continued my drug habits and proclaimed myself the Queen of the Holy Roman Empire. Can you guess what I was building? A larger-than-life model of the villi for AP Biology! The Lord sends his blessings of glory and the muses down upon we crazies, I'd swear it! I would recommend that everyone worried & anxious follow the simple steps outlined above for a rapid return to a simpler way of life.
(Would anyone like to form an OrgCom come Decembre for the formation of Better and More Impossible plans for TASPSt.Louis activites across the country? We should do things in December, though I don't know much about whether or not colleges are opened or closed, because things shall be still & lonely here. Lovelove from Columbus!)
We are so wonderfully active tonight, and it makes my poor unsleeping heart pound a little less manic to know that I am not so very alone in all of this bathing-in-anxiety and selling my general soul to a rough prescription of paperwork and a formula of two completed applications a week.
None and nevertheless, things are going dreadfully (has anything changed? Oh, for the life of all great things, I cannot remember if it ever was good) and often I find myself wanting to run away to a quiet third-world nation or to die by a falling bookcase like Leonard Bast in Howard's End. How is it for the rest of you, or those of you distracted (or pained-&-tortured, or free-spirited, or unstressed, or dedicated) enough to post? How far have we yet to tread? Douglas-love, how many days until the Drunken Pruitt-Igoe convention at Amy's?
I do not know how hard that I must try. For all of my life I have been pushing ahead and pushing against walls and pushingpushingpushing so pernicious and madfierce and unresting and I am just too tired and sick of the artificiality of it all to live in such a way anymore. Please mind me, I am not ready to eschew the earnestness, and you shan't find me parading frivolous any time yet soon, but I am just very concerned, in this whole dreaded college process, about how much I should try to do the Great Project-like Things that I have always done for school. Half-way through my awful book of drawings and philosophy and poetry and photographs and typewritten letters and mysterious design techniques and a well-disguised twelve-page essay for the University of Chicago, I am finished with words.
Is it so terrible to shun beauty and ostentation,
and to just want to say enough to speak what is true?
This is the harder task, methinks--breaking through the words
to speak what is true. And I suppose I shall have to face this if I want
to change myself to stand behind my manifesto...I cannot go fussing
at my lovely friends who are busy making their own paper for their
epic novels of the hero's journey, custom-drawn and scrawled for their own applications to the likes of Reed.
Ah, me, these essays!
I want to write about the ghosts of trees, and about poetic manifestos and Joe Hill and the socialist-labor troubadors and about the glories of the Luddites and my manic crush on Sydney Carton and how Telluride stained all of my idealism with the rust & roar of the cities, and how I am better for it.
But I cannot seem to do any of that.
So I sat down tonight to write a simple, true essay.
O, Language, you are lacking, but you will never believe what came out.
Dead Animals.
Not pets this type, but extinct ones.
Some strange recounting of the first eight years of my life,
in which I was (as weren't we all?) some budding naturalist
bent on personally disproving the extinctions of several notable
species, including but not limited to the thylacine, passenger pigeon,
and stellar's sea cow.
I hope it will be cutesy, trite & touching.
Tomorrow is going to come slowly. Tomorrow means this: University of Michigan, Chicago, Beloit, Bard, and a nice pile on the desk of the College Counselor. (I make so many promises.)
And then I can regrow my heart and chop it all up again 'betwixt Old Swattie, Dearest Reed, Carleton, Oberlin, Cornell, Grinnell, Brown, Yale, St. John's, Amherst, and Haverford!
And then, and only then, will I be free to die.
I love you all immensely, especially when you are madly witty, because there is no humor quite as saturated and suggestive and laden and pure as TASP humor, and it is very, very much needed right now. JAKE: if you ever finish with your fiscal diagrams and plans to destroy/control/enumerate irrelevant things, would you be so kind as to post a list of Rash Generalizations (TM) for us to comtemplate? It would warm my poor dear teen socialist heart ever so much.
Ach--has it been so very long since July?
Be well & keep striving & don't sleep until you are satisfied
& stop when your soul says that you have done enough, yes, o loves?
And I have told Amy much about a strange new paradigm of thought concerning fatalism and time that is highly useful in the college admissions process. Send me the word, and I shall attempt to pen a blog manifesto.
Your Favorite Murderer of All Things Small & Fuzzy,
(And scaled. And fin'd. And amphibious)
Gesso-the-Wreck
Post-Script: I spent the bulk of my evening carving out the inside of a candle and filling the periphery of the aforementioned bas-relief with garbanzo beans. I then super-glued lentils to the garbanzo beans, covered the whole of the outer candle with white faux-fur, continued my drug habits and proclaimed myself the Queen of the Holy Roman Empire. Can you guess what I was building? A larger-than-life model of the villi for AP Biology! The Lord sends his blessings of glory and the muses down upon we crazies, I'd swear it! I would recommend that everyone worried & anxious follow the simple steps outlined above for a rapid return to a simpler way of life.
(Would anyone like to form an OrgCom come Decembre for the formation of Better and More Impossible plans for TASPSt.Louis activites across the country? We should do things in December, though I don't know much about whether or not colleges are opened or closed, because things shall be still & lonely here. Lovelove from Columbus!)
posted by goodbye, goodbye at 9:04 PM
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