A guy with a beard and a bedroll on his back and a smell around him and a general sort-of recreational-chemical deadness inside his eyes:

“Hey man, I hop trains, do you know where a freightyard is?”

And I don’t, so I get into my friend’s car and say, “That guy hops trains and wants to know where a freightyard is.”

And we pull up next to him and roll down our window and give directions and he peers redeyed into the car and says, “Thanks man, hey, do you guys smoke herb?”

At a busstop checking when the 16 comes and a man walks up with smiling lips and smiling eyes and wild gesturing cigarette:

“Youre a musician.”
“Yes I am.”
“What do you play, man, you play guitar.”
“Yes I do.”
“I knew it man, just look at the hair, everybody with hair like that plays the fuckin guitar, hair like fuckin god just like waaaaaah, blrrrrrrgblh, graaaaaaagh, fuck yeah man.”
“Haha, thanks.”
“So hey man, you do lines?”
“Haha, nah.”
“Just smoke pot then.”
“Haha, nah, just have the hair.”
“Well I tell you man I tell you what I got no cash man & my girl shes a dancer over at dreamgirls & my girl she always givin me shit about it & man my car is parked in a lot & I fuckin need 9 fuckin $s to get it out the parkin lot & I got a bag a powder & a bag a hash in the car & I’m just tryin to find a friend out here ya know.”
“Man, I got friends could help you out but none a them are out tonight far as I know, sorry.”
“Naw man, it’s cool, man, all ted nugent man like you can’t fuck with this guy, it’s like water man, fuckin water, its like water is just the fuckin essence a things ya know, without water wed all just fuckin cease ta exist, ya know?”
“…”
“& its all just fuckin water.”
“…”
“Anyway man, you have a goodn.”
“Yeahyeah, youtoo.”

A letter everybody is too apathetic to send me:

“Dear Douchebag,

Why isn’t your blog funny anymore?

-Everybody”

“I Am The Dolphin Sprayhole Fucker”

Fave Value has moved and changed name! Check out Sunshine Assassins.

It never ceases to amaze, how suddenly and thoroughly a piece of music can change your mental state. The idea that emotions are reasonable disappears the minute your treasured existential despair is dissolved in Black Moth Super Rainbow.

Mashed Potatoes, Enchiladas and an Easter Egg. My head told me no, my stomach the same. But for some reason I piled on a plate of inexplicable combinations. This was the result. Next time I’ll stick to beer.

Perish walks out from the shore
Pushes and plows
Streams from doors
Swinging force and control
Perish can find no flow
And he carried his weight
on his front
He carried to the lake
where he sunk

Four of the first six short films screened at the festival have smoking in them. My film, A Living Contradiction, is the fifth being screened. The camera’s subject matter is a runner. I knew I should’ve had the runner smoke. Fuck.

I am going to predict the outcome of the film festival. The judge’s selection for best short film will be Liška. This film festival was no contest. Liška had plenty of room for improvement [to the filmmaker: The pauses at the end of the film were poorly placed and too frequent. The cigarette falling from the girl's mouth fell all wrong. Do this shot over. The acting by the filmmakers on the bus ride was atrocious] but no other film was composed well enough to compare.

I couldn’t force myself to sit through the long films. I watched one and convinced myself that watching these films was ruining my cinematic brain. Also, I won’t be making any reliable predictions for the audience’s favorite film since it’s dependent on how many persons each filmmaker can bring to see his or her film. I hadn’t a chance to survey the audience much during the films but perhaps the film with the largest number of actors will win (Equinox?)

Ideally, the next student film festival will have hundreds of entries instead of a handful. Perhaps then the University can opt to have a festival of some merit.

The awards presentation is tonight at 7PM at Coffman Union Theatre. I will update this entry with the winners afterwards.

Winners
Short Film, Judge’s Choice: Liška
Short Film, Audience’s Choice: Li
Long Film, Judge’s Choice: Hearing Murmurs
Long Film, Audience’s Choice: Off Campus

There comes a time in every person’s life when they must appeal to a power greater than themselves.

In this particular case it was Susan Tillman.

The woman was on fire, she was pissed and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say she was this close to gouging Marnie’s eye out with a cuticle clipper. In all her melodramatic glory, Susie did not take disappointment well. Her short attention span, among that of her short temper, and her lack of patience with anything she didn’t gaze down on with a smile…all attributed to a diatribe which would make the most seasoned queen at the 90’s cringe.

“You crusty, puckered little cunt.”

“My cunt is not puckered,” Marnie said as she slipped past Susie and into the apartment. Then she frowned, wondering just what constituted a puckered cunt. “That’s a new one.”

“Yeah, it’s that natural reflex down there when you feel the threat of a forceful entry, which you are about to receive right now.”

“Are you going to rape me?”

“Close enough. You left me to have coffee, and cakes, and tea, and a full blown fucktard frat lunch with that weeaboo!”

“I had to –”

“You had to hypnotize yourself? Why would you want to do that? You promised, you made me get in contact with the weeaboo and then you left me there!”

Marnie sat down at the kitchen counter and swiveled in the chair. Reaching for a loose banana, she squinted her eyes at Susie. Yes, she had persuaded her to arrange a meeting; she had the intention of going to see that spectacle and fully enjoying the sight of such a creature.

Then came Julia and then came the podcast, which had wasted a good chunk of her day. The hypnotism didn’t work, that much was clear. Her inner voice hadn’t been brought out…anymore than it already was……and she didn’t feel like she needed to do anything at the moment. She wanted to rage on about it, but the energy just wasn’t there. She had no initial spark to pitch her into one of her usual bitchy tirades. As of now, she could care less about what she had forgotten to do. Susie, she wanted to say, I’m not sorry.

“I’m not sorry,” she said.

“Of course you’re not,” Susie said as her nostrils flared. “But you’re going to repent anyways.”

“Repent? Is this religious?”

“Shut up. You’re going to go see the Twilight movie with me and the weeaboo.”

“Twilight? Is that the one about emo vampires and Mary Sues, isn’t it?” Marnie asked, wondering where her usual sense of revulsion had gone.

“I asked the waptard to go see it with us.”

“She’s going?”

“Yes, she’s going. So you’re going to get it from both sides.”

“Am I going to be mouth-raped as well?”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure I can swing that,” Susie said.

Several hours later and a trip to the corner store, the two of them had in their hands: student IDs, cash, 7up bottles filled with a cocktail of soda, lime juice, and an insensible amount of gin. It was Susie’s idea. Judging from her reaction to her last meeting with the waptard (scratching her skin red around her shoulders and an unnatural revulsion to anything animated), she wanted the best ward from what she thought was sure to be a hellish evening.

“What does she look like?” Marnie asked as she surveyed the crowds. The walk to the student union was like any other. The sun and dipped down behind the glass buildings downtown, casting a spectered sorbet hue over the campus. She found herself smiling at it.

Contrary to what she believed of herself, she was rather excited to meet this weeaboo. She stood on the tips of her toes and craned her neck above heads to get a glimpse of something she wouldn’t recognize.

“Oh,” Susie sighed, “There she is.”

Marnie snapped her head in the direction Susie was pointing. Again, she expected the usual curl of her lip at the sight, but instead, she felt her body go light.

The weeaboo was nothing like she had seen before. She floated along the mint grass in her platform Mary Janes. And her thin legs cased in tights looked like a peppermint candy stick. She was all alight, channeling colors of the sorbet. Her hair was twindling strawberry blonde curls and her face looked like she had walked through a candy store. Shit, she looked like she had walked through a candy store with a frilly lolita fetish.

“I want to eat her,” Marnie said.

“What?” Susie said as she gripped Marnie’s arm.

“Just look at her, she’s so…cheerful.”

“Marnie, are you okay?” Susie said, shaking Marnie just the slightest.

She pranced up and hopped to a stop in front of them.

“Heya! I’m Sara, but please call me Sa-chan!” she said with bubbly popping enthusiasm.

“Sa-chan?” Marnie said.

“Hai! It’s a kind of nickname in Japanese!”

“Japanese?”

“Un!” she nodded with a sweet, cholesterol charged smile on her face. “What’s your name? I know Susie, but you’re new!”

“No shit,” Susie spat. Her eyelids were hanging low and digging into Sara, eh, Sa-chan…whatever.

Oblivious to any malicious intent, Sara kept on smiling.

“It’s Marnie.”

“Marnie! Susie and Marnie! Ou, your names are so kawaii! Hold my te, please. This is some serious unme!”

“What?” Marnie said, but honestly, she wasn’t really listening.

Sara linked arms with Marnie and Susie, flanking herself with them on either side. Marnie noticed a band of fabric on her head spilling ribbons and lace like freshly sliced guts. She wanted to crawl inside Sara’s hair and camp there for the winter. It looked so sweet and sugary warm with honey and all sorts of cutesy goodness.

“Don’t forget the fucking gin,” Susie hissed behind Sara’s back.

Marnie nodded, but she was much too taken in by the colors emanating from Sara.

“Let’s go, shall we?” Sara said.

“Yeah, Sa-chan,” Marnie said with a syrupy quality to her voice. Susie choked on an extra large swig of the soda-gin concoction.

Once inside the student union theater, they were seated much the same as they had walked in. It was truly a sight to behold. It was safe to say that 90% of the audience was freshman girls, the other 9% fat, middle aged women. The last 1% was Marnie, Susie, and Sara, which was…pretty self-explanatory. Susie was liberal with her drink; she was half done before the movie even started.

Alongside the many voices exclaiming EDWARD CULLEN 4EVA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and REAL VAMPIRES SPARKLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! a fairy vending out snacks noticed the gradual tone the audience was taking. He saw the need to intervene, and so he did.

He climbed on the stage and announced his dance major and began to prance about with his snack tray hanging from his shoulders. Apparently he needed no music. Susie began to gag, Marnie handed her the last bottle of drink. Susie shouted jeers at the stage and managed to squeeze in a few comments liking Twilight to the kind of stuffs she’d wipe her ass with. More than a few tweens and their middle-aged counterparts turned around and threw something. Susie threw stuff back.

Marnie took it all in with a smile.

“Do you like Twilight?” she asked Sara.

“Oh, tabun, not much. But Susie-chan asked me to come, so of course I agreed. I never miss a chansu to be with by tomodachis! Dai chansu!” she exclaimed as she nodded and clutched her fists together.

“Ah…sure,” Marnie said as the house lights came down. Turning her head towards the screen, she saw the fairy slink off stage and the movie came on.

It was nothing like Susie had described. Of course, it was complete shit, but Marnie was unconcerned with that. She felt Sara gently wrap her lace covered fingers around Marnie’s hand and squeeze.

She heard Susie sigh across the way.

A comprehensive and in-depth answer to the question of what a novel is and what a novel can do:

A novel has three basic characteristics:

1. It is ostensibly fictional.
2. It is written in prose.
3. It is a long-form work.

Elucidations/clarifications:

1. A novel is by definition assumed to be fictional (and generally claims to be fictional (on the publication information page if not in the text of the novel itself)), though it may be drawn entirely from life, be narrated as though recounting true events, be filled with factual information of all kinds, or contain original journalism and reporting.

2. The primary method of composition in a novel is prose (though it may contain poetry), but there are no stylistic limitations whatsoever on that prose. Most novels are narrative, easy to comprehend on the level of basic action, and minimally adventurous (if at all) in terms of the visual arrangement of text, but these qualities are not inherent to the novel. (A question for another day: what is prose?)

3. A novel must be at minimum long enough to be published as a standalone volume, but it may be long enough that it requires multiple volumes. Novels range from approximately 90-5000 pages (though I’m sure there are some novels that fall on either side of that figure (average length is approx. 200-500)).

That is as much as can be definitively said about the form of the novel (note that there are no restrictions with regard to structure, content, motive, authorship, originality, etc.). As for what a novel can do (or what novels do do):

Nothing can be said about this definitively.

I do love books, but they take so long to read. Even if I read all day every day, I make no headway into the vault of books I want to read; in fact, reading only makes that stockpile grow larger, for each book read provokes desire for a half-dozen more. But upon reflection, it is good that books come in the form that they do, because if books were food I would eat until no more would fit into me—until I was backed up all the way to the rim of my esophagus—and then I would vomit them all out and it would be like I had read nothing, and if books were pills I would swallow them by the handful and call a friend and tell them how many pills I’d taken and depending on the action they took and the speed with which they took it I would either die or have my stomach pumped, so perhaps it is for the best that books are slow.