Rosy Minded Fuzz

Cold as it wants to be

2012-02-12T10:54:00.000-06:00

2012-02-06T12:40:00.000-06:00

Some Stuff I Made

2012-02-03T15:19:00.006-06:00

Wedded to Working

2012-01-29T20:55:00.001-06:00

Fighting Nihilism

2012-01-22T14:19:00.001-06:00

Faith in Kitsch

2012-01-11T23:09:00.001-06:00

Can't Lose

2012-01-04T13:22:00.001-06:00

Full Hearts

2011-12-18T18:36:00.001-06:00

Clear Eyes

2011-12-17T11:05:00.000-06:00

Back Home/Don't Wanna Stay

2011-12-11T23:23:00.003-06:00

Breakdown and Flee

2011-12-07T13:01:00.001-06:00

"Everything's afraid of you"

2011-11-29T18:35:00.000-06:00

Bradford owns a sizeable piece of my soul

2011-11-28T01:47:00.001-06:00

2011-11-17T01:14:00.001-06:00

2011-11-16T21:57:00.001-06:00

2011-11-08T09:57:00.001-06:00

2011-11-07T09:53:00.001-06:00

2011-11-06T11:24:00.001-06:00

2011-10-31T12:36:00.000-05:00

2011-10-27T22:15:00.001-05:00

2011-10-22T15:42:00.000-05:00

Possibly the beginning of a new kind of project:

2011-10-16T22:13:00.004-05:00

...possibly the beginning of prosing up the hilarious things Dan says around our apartment, calling Dan and I co-authors, and ending up with a mini like this one:

without translated Central European literature, I’d be an even deeper-sunk hole of emptiness than previously; without translated Central European literature, I’d be a man in all white in a vacuous room, also all white, looking eager into the spout of an upside-down milk bottle in my hand—looking eager—for the possibility of drops dripping out.

So Fucking Good

2011-10-16T21:15:00.001-05:00

My roommate Dan is wildly talented

2011-10-07T00:33:00.002-05:00

Proof, along with the above.

2011-10-05T17:53:00.001-05:00

2011-10-01T10:09:00.001-05:00

2011-09-28T22:23:00.001-05:00

2011-09-28T22:19:00.000-05:00

I was always on your side.

2011-09-26T23:34:00.002-05:00

Good luck in Florida

Hell yes

2011-09-26T00:46:00.001-05:00

2011-09-20T11:01:00.000-05:00

The most successfully 'zeitgeisty' thing I've read in quite some time.

I have a new favorite thing

2011-09-17T10:45:00.001-05:00

My Friend David is wildly talented!

2011-09-15T12:31:00.000-05:00

Dance1 from David Scheier on Vimeo.

Dance! from David Scheier on Vimeo.

Smash Mouse from David Scheier on Vimeo.

2011-09-14T11:20:00.001-05:00

The books I keep aesthetically stacked on my desk, to get me stoked:

2011-09-02T18:47:00.002-05:00

Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme
The Piano Teacher - Elfriede Jelinek
The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
Our Band Could Be Your Life - Michael Azerrad
Reality Hunger - David Shields
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Rabbit is Rich - John Updike
Correction - Thomas Bernhard
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley
White Noise - Don DeLillo

Where I've lived this August

2011-08-23T12:51:00.001-05:00

For falling in love again:

2011-08-20T13:33:00.001-05:00

From Tao Lin's "Eeeee Eee Eeee"

2011-08-16T11:34:00.003-05:00

"What do you think about the president?" Andrew said.
Mark put noodles into his mouth.
"I think he's smarter than people think," Andrew said. "He winked on TV. He winked fast, so only a few people would see. I feel like he's being ironic all the time." Andrew stopped talking. Mark did not respond. "I mean everyone on TV is being ironic all the time," Andrew said. "But the president knows he's being ironic all the time, so he's twice ironic. You have to be twice ironic on TV to be regular ironic in real life. So if you're not ironic on TV you're negative ironic in real life. That sounds good. Negative Ironic." Sounded like a rap-metal band with a right-wing fan base, or else an inchoately indepedent but then MTV-funded movie with a nihilistic premise but a feel-good ending, that came out last year—that always came out last year.
"Irony is so privileged," Mark said. "It's what happens when you don't need to do anything to survive—it's when the things you do have nothing to do with survival and you spend forty million dollars to make Steve Zissou and the Atomic Submarine or whatever it's called."

New Dwelling

2011-08-03T19:37:00.001-05:00

From Robert Walser's 'Jakob von Gunten'

2011-08-03T18:27:00.004-05:00

I'm packing. Yes, we two, the Principal and I, we are busy packing, really packing everything up, leaving, clearing out, tearing things apart, pushing and shoving. We shall travel. Well and good. This person suits me and I'm not asking myself why any more. I feel that life demands impulses, not considerations. Today I shall say adieu to my brother. I shall leave nothing here. Nothing's keeping me, nothing obliges me to say: "How it would be if..." No, there's nothing left to be woulding and iffing about. Fraulein Benjamenta is under the ground, The pupils, my friends, are scattered in all kinds of jobs. And if I am smashed to pieces and go to ruin, what is being smashed and ruined? A zero. The individual me is only a zero. But now I'll throw away my pen! Away with the life of thought! I'm going with Herr Benjamenta into the desert. I just want to see if one can live and breathe and be in the wilderness too, willing good things and doing them, and sleeping and dreaming at night. What's all this. I don't want to think of anything more now. Not even of God? No! God will be with me. What should I need to think of Him? God goes with thoughtless people. So now adieu, Benjamenta Institute.

Tobin Sprout

2011-07-27T02:25:00.000-05:00

is the most underrated songwriter in existence.

Pitchfork Weekend, 2k11

2011-07-17T11:11:00.000-05:00

2011-07-08T00:56:00.001-05:00

2011-06-27T01:03:00.001-05:00

BATS IN THE BELFRY

2011-06-17T11:30:00.001-05:00

Gonna have to redirect you to Prince's hotspot on this one.

2011-06-13T17:52:00.000-05:00

Two Things

2011-06-10T14:27:00.002-05:00

A song:

Another book you should buy.

Everyone go buy this book on Tuesday!

2011-06-08T20:36:00.002-05:00

2011-06-07T12:47:00.001-05:00

2011-06-03T16:44:00.001-05:00

"Kiss your mouth to shut you up"

2011-06-03T14:19:00.000-05:00

2011-05-21T13:34:00.001-05:00

"My Tribe"

2011-05-16T19:38:00.001-05:00

My Tribe by johnawilmes

"Sunny Winder"

2011-05-16T16:08:00.001-05:00

Sunny Winder by johnawilmes

Why things kicks ass right now

2011-05-16T01:08:00.002-05:00

and

DAVID HAS COME TO LIFE. The new Fucked Up album is the most amazing shit imaginable.

Renaissance Ditty

2011-05-11T15:54:00.000-05:00

Off Day Day Off by johnawilmes

Things that are good

2011-05-09T00:56:00.003-05:00

I work here now. The one on the south side. It is easy: I shelve books and have a hold shelf with lots of awesome books on it. The books are all used so already quite cheap but I get a discount on them anyway. I play whatever music I like. I get to fantasize about things being like this someday soon.

The semester is nearly over. I enjoy school—with its community-ness, its rigor, its immersion—but now I feel need to hole up and 'recreate the wheel' for a while; to write and read my balls off and load up for the last two semesters. And finally finish a good, working draft of something fucking long and tweak to relative perfection the shorter things I have that could possibly, feasibly, maybe, somehow someday be publishable, maybe.

Califone, Polaris, Women, Fucked Up, Washed Out, Deerhunter

Pizza, and tacos

Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Bernhard, Michael Azzerad, James Baldwin, Frederick Exley, Junot Diaz, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Barry Hannah, and all the others who have rocked my shit this semester.

Summer. I'm still a student so I still get to live more kingly for the next few months. I'll: work 32-33 light ones a week, and write and read and drink and seek the sharing of <3's the rest of the time (A).

There's very little separation between work and enjoyment in my life, the two are very close to totally blurred, and that is a good thing; that might be The American Dream, or something, although I believe TAD may involve more money, but maybe it shouldn't. Maybe having enough money to live like (A) quite fully is enough money; I think it's enough money. I think if 17-year-old John saw nearly-25-year-old John he'd be stoked as fuck and I have to remind myself of that in my never-ending treading in pools of self-pity. I have to remind my stupid heart to take cues from my less stupid head. It's that I have to do this every moment of every day that is the hard part, you see. It's the part that never quite happens as well as it's supposed to, and that's where semi-tragic little always-accumulating human struggles occur and, boy, I just keep watching and swimming in my own struggles so they can be a thing I can transfer to others, to more fill the conceptual void that readers, viewers, listeners, that Audience extends their attention daily into in order to feel less alone with their struggles with the things that are hard to talk about, so hard to talk about that they must be made into myths of sorts to be talked about, it seems.

I don't know; it's best not to know, I think, almost all of the time.

I'm being critiqued momentarily

2011-05-06T09:17:00.001-05:00

The best song from the coolest score

2011-05-05T11:53:00.001-05:00

2011-05-04T23:43:00.001-05:00

Compare/Contrast

2011-05-01T01:50:00.000-05:00

'Let's do dis shit already'

2011-05-01T01:27:00.001-05:00

Just FYI:

2011-04-20T17:19:00.001-05:00

I'm on a fucking bloodbuzz.

Sunday, Newness, Shit like that

2011-04-17T12:49:00.001-05:00

Go Bulls

2011-04-16T23:27:00.000-05:00

Go Bulls.

Spring is here

2011-04-13T20:07:00.003-05:00

So what now?

This:

Then this

Friday Night: Duh

2011-04-08T19:16:00.000-05:00

Like everyone else,

2011-04-02T09:47:00.000-05:00

I'm sad that these guys are capstoning tonight.

Oh but then there was this

2011-03-25T17:53:00.001-05:00

Today,

2011-03-25T15:19:00.002-05:00

Today I pretended to care about a bunch of things that weren't this, but I didn't care about any of them, I only cared about this.

It's Okay

2011-03-20T19:46:00.002-05:00

"How to Date..."

2011-03-20T12:07:00.001-05:00

Sunday

2011-03-20T10:35:00.001-05:00

2011-03-18T00:19:00.002-05:00

honk

honk

as i try to sleep

fuck yeah.

that means my window's open, because it's warm out, and i'm not actually trying to sleep, because the myriad-extra sun rays into my eyes from willingness to be outdoors means superfluous excitement and restlessness.

Goodnight, perhaps.

Recovery

2011-03-13T13:56:00.002-05:00

All Shit Must Pass

2011-03-10T11:54:00.001-06:00

I can't stop writing

2011-03-07T00:06:00.001-06:00

Yes

2011-03-03T23:15:00.001-06:00

Nudging me through a bad one

2011-02-19T20:21:00.001-06:00

+ more Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Feelin like this right now

2011-02-10T23:08:00.001-06:00

Regarding the weather

2011-02-02T09:52:00.001-06:00

Holy shit, dude.

Bear Down

2011-01-23T12:34:00.000-06:00

This, plus J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, that's why I'm awake today.

The Conceptual Soundtrack

2011-01-11T22:36:00.003-06:00

Sometimes I make soundtracks for movies that don't exist, and that I have no intention of creating. Example:

"my indie <3 movie"

Alcest - Ciel Errant
Brendan Canning - All The Best Wooden Toys Come From Germany
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Five Easy Pieces
Kevin Drew - Back Out On The...
Peter Bjorn And John - Up Against The Wall
Yo La Tengo - Beanbag Chair
Animal Collective - Bluish
The Weakerthans - Time's Arrow
El Ten Eleven - My Only Swerving
Blur - No Distance Left To Run
Brian Eno - This
The Dodos - Undeclared
Passion Pit - Moth's Wings
Boris With Michio Kurihara - My Rain

Some of the songs are set to imaginary scenes (like the Passion Pit song, which would most definitely be playing at a place that the protagonist wouldn't really want to be at), and others are just in a thematic key, some of them set to certain parts of the arc that exist in every formulaic movie (like the Blur song: that's for The Sad and Lonely Part, where who knows if the couple's gonna make it). This movie involves a quirky and little-understood kid with a golden heart in a Big Ten college town falling in love with an older graduate student, from Korea, who doesn't speak much English, the two of them cozy to each other mostly through exquisite and very endearing tone management. There's a lot of Podunk partying in the movie, and a lot of one-on-one shit in stark rooms, and if it existed the way it does in my imagination, and you saw it, I bet you'd cry---as much from laughter as from sadness and happy-heart-swelling. It'd be great.

This is a fun exercise, and I recommend it.

If you don't already know

2011-01-10T23:48:00.003-06:00

Then holy shit, you better find out about Women. Absolutely can not stop listening to this band---totally filling my January-blank-slate-syndrome-hole, too, for what that's worth to you. Mad props to my man Cat P. for the tip-off.

From "Notable American Women"

2011-01-10T15:38:00.002-06:00

Thinking back on my own life, which technically does not interest me, there was a time when I felt a distracting curiosity about mountains, as much as I tried to discipline myself against it. Something felt unfinished in me when I regarded the hills and swells around my childhood home, areas my father referred to as "mistakes in the terrain." I thought, Even though the world spins so fast, how come it hasn't smoothed down these so-called mountains? Why are they still so lumpy when the wind has smoothed everything else? Are mountains just a failure of wind? Shouldn't the earth be less interesting? Otherwise what does one do with something that is merely pretty? And ultimately: Why am I being tested this way? I felt as though I had eaten someone else's emotions and they were swimming in my body, that I had strong feelings that weren't my own. I was hosting another person inside myself, like that man in the famous book who eats his family to protect them from the sun. My choice: either digest the person or perform it out of myself, invert myself and cleanse my feelings. (This is what it is to feel things: to feel like someone else.) It wasn't the loss of control that made me sick, but my utter unfamiliarity with myself, the disappointment of discovering reactions and attitudes to the world that seemed so highly predictable. Here I was, just another girl responding to the beauty, and the inevitability of this disposition to the world seemed like a terrible loss of control, a vastly disappointing conformity I had hoped to be exempt from.

(by Ben Marcus)

The Winter

2011-01-09T16:40:00.000-06:00

It's tough to get through, I know, I know.

Words from James McManus

2011-01-04T19:40:00.004-06:00

My competitive impulses used to be satisfied playing baseball, golf, hockey, tennis, and basketball, and by rooting for the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks, Yankees, White Sox, and whoever was playing the Cubs. I often spent twelve hours a week watching Bulls games alone, then several more gloating over their exploits on ESPN, local TV, and in the sports pages of of two or three newspapers. Why? Because that's what red-blooded men do when there isn't a war to be fought: we bask in other men's televised glory, trying to deflect some onto ourselves by showing off how much we know about our surrogate warriors' eptitude and virility. You see him split that double team, man? No way Money don't finish even if weakside help arrives. Four-to-one says they take it in five. Now, macho one-upsmanship strikes many people as trivial and pathetic, and no doubt they're right, but it's also a fact that without this competitive ardor, humans would long be extinct. One reason we're not is that the sociobiological legacy of our days as hunter-gatherers causes levels of testosterone, the primary hormone of both male and female desire, to rise by as much as a third when the local team does well. He shoots, he scores! And later that night, so do we. Edward O. Wilson calls these urges "Pleistocene exigencies," reminding us that humans have hunted and gathered for over 99 percent of our history. Most of the hunting these days is performed on TV by our surrogate warriors, but their fellow tribe members still react the same way.

-From Positively Fifth Street

2011-01-03T12:16:00.002-06:00

On Monday, January 3rd, how can I not crave change? The Chicago streets are emptied of snow, and the commuter bodies are back to moving circadian through them. Reversion, I at least want some reversion. Instead I'm in the bed I just awoke in, facing the same blank pages and 24.5-year-old realities of I'll never be famous and I'm just another guy; realities known rationally for quite some time, but starting to finally register like well-accepted lifepangs, these days. Loser romances are fading, too. No longer am I convinced of the coolness of my minimalist apartment, food stamps, book collection, and lack of television that amount to no money, no glory, no women, no nothing. "I guess this is growing up." I guess the winter always does this to me, January bogging me down in the nostalgia it forces me into, with its blank slate hopes and projections. I guess I can make too much of abstractions, but what else have I got?

a new spot

2010-12-30T13:59:00.002-06:00

It's a nice day to walk and it's about 1.3 miles from my place. I go to a new coffee spot (new to me, not to the world). It's in a less hip, more subdued area than the one I usually go to is in. They accept charge, and wireless is free. BOXER is playing. The tea is good. It's the new spot, and the accordion on "Slow Show" drives this point surging-home.

Christmas Eve

2010-12-24T18:18:00.003-06:00

I wonder what people do on holidays. My family is tight-knit and loving, but we all love solitude. When we are home, we are alone and in separate rooms. This is the rule, gatherings the exception. Right now I sit drinking microwaved tea, staring at the DFW short stories I'll be getting back to, praying I defeat the numb waves of potential head-cold-sickness I feel coming through me. Happy Birthday, Santa. Merry Christmas, family and friends. I am of course online and wonder why more aren't. What are y'all doing? Does your family truly spirit you away? I have a tough time envisioning anyone of my generation spending their free and down time not with laptop buzzing near. Do y'all avoid the internet to create a sheen of family interest/affection/engagement? <---This is my cynic-gut thinking.

I feel neutral and slightly delirious. I wish the Bulls were on right now. I barely understand holidays. I prefer weekends and the grind; holidays are third, at best. My life is a series of fun laps. I'll see you in the morning.

Alt Christmas Jams

2010-12-19T14:27:00.002-06:00

2010-12-18T21:40:00.001-06:00

"I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass."

-Frank O'Hara, from Meditations in an Emergency

Original Music

2010-12-13T16:36:00.001-06:00

I occasionally make ditties on my MacBook. Here are two:

Pastoral Wannabe by johnawilmes

PinkAche by johnawilmes

2010 in MacBook Photos

2010-12-13T14:35:00.012-06:00

Spent most of 2010 in the suburbs. Sometimes, Ted came over, from his suburb, before he moved to Oklahoma. But now he's back. Anyway:

Went to Pat's cabin in 2010. It was a dog-days-of-February trip. At this point, I was very unemployed and very anxious about word from Grad Schools. So:

I probably shouldn't have done drugs at the cabin. I did. I was having a good time with the drugs, but later on I definitely wasn't.

Later in the month I went to Hawaii. Had never been there. It wasn't so terrible there. My life is pretty easy.

Kyle came over a lot, in the suburbs. We played a lot of guitar but we were dumb and smoked too much weed and have a hard time remembering anything we wrote. Recession Blues.

The Recession.

Drove to New York with Pat, in August. We saw Carl there, and Luke. It was great. Andrew came with too.

Moved to Chicago. Started Grad School and started thinking about stuff.

Will comes over a lot.

On Halloween I dressed up like THE OIL SPILL. Totally killed it.

Grad School: growin out my hair and hangin hard with Matt. Definitely worth the tuition.

Sup, 2011?

2010-12-12T14:16:00.005-06:00

The other night I was at an art gallery, on the seventh floor of some building in The Loop. In the middle of the plain-made place were some walls, partly enclosing a space. From the walls hung several tight-wound clear nylon strings, oddly shaped primal rawhide shards and beastmasks hanging from them. Six or so girls rotated through the area, dragging themselves through, against, around the pieces. They piled them, pushed them to the wall, wore them on their heads arms legs. They crawled and kneeled and made progress, they lost it; scattering, piling, kicking and throwing the shapes. Occasionally, a string snapped, and more pieces fell. I wondered whether there was an arc---if it started one way and was meant to end another. I walked all about the gallery but kept coming back to this spot, to check wide-eyed in on this two-and-a-half hour maybe-progression. As my eyes hung on these girls I hoped they didn't think I was being creepy, and I wondered how often performance artists think about audience that way---I wondered how sunk into being colors of a moving amorphous picture one could really be. (I've been pretty into some musical performances I've been part of but I usually catch myself before I get all-too-theatrical and think I am a human being, I am not a melody, I am not a rhythm. This is a conceit and now I feel silly, and then I probably look uncomfortable and not at all like the rock star I just thought for a second that I was, strumming hard, and usually lose the place of the song at least a little bit.) I wondered how much art can be about anything that's not art. To me it's either: A) part of everything or B) only part of itself, which means that it's in some vacuum and means nothing to anything else. I think that it's A, that it's part of everything else, and that so is everything else. My friend Dan approached me as I sunk into the piece, made some funny comment about the girls, who were now spilling out of their space, getting a bit interactive. I made a comment back. "It's about the art, man," I said. "No one knows where it begins, where it ends." Dan laughed and then saw me sink back into the piece. He stood uncomfortable and eventually let me be. I leaned hard against a pillar, my awe peaking; I was hard to engage. I'd been nuking my brain with thoughts paradoxical to each other and with stressballs and admissions made and my most-intense-yet travels down the cavernous endless wells of self-realizing pursuit, and this was only the other night and now here I am.

Easily the best aphorism of 2010

2010-12-09T09:56:00.001-06:00

"I'm living in the future, so the presence is my past. My presence is a present; kiss my ass."

-Yeezy

Sometimes

2010-12-05T15:29:00.002-06:00

I think of how much good writing there is still to read, and curl up in a scared anxious ball realizing that I'll never get to most of it, and how much writing and working I'd have to not do to even come close.

I am so excited to sleep that I can not sleep.

Quantitative Achievement

2010-12-03T16:21:00.002-06:00

It can do wonders for one's mood.

I don't care how overplayed this song is, or that some of its midsection pales toward its intro:

A Mix

2010-11-28T18:47:00.005-06:00

Made one year ago:

The xx - VCR
Wye Oak - Siamese
The Knife - Heartbeats
The Avalanches - Electricity
LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
The Clientele - Reflections After Jane
Boris With Michio Kurihara - My Rain
Broken Social Scene - Love and Mathematics
The Smashing Pumpkins - Here Is No Why
The xx - Crystalised
Pavement - Elevate Me Later

At this time I was much calmer than I am now, in general. I was living at home and so were most of my friends---many of them still are---and we were all freshly-enough shot out of college to still really be enjoying ourselves a whole lot more than I do. We were still victory-lapping. The LCD Soundsystem song was like a rallying cry for this lap, for me, with it's drowning of soulful nostalgia in the hope of seeing more and more friends. And I saw them all, because it was Thanksgiving and everyone came home to hug and smile and laugh and love and hooraaaaay. It was good; that's what the nostalgia tells me, anyway. That's what the music tells me. I was enjoying the onset of winter, the roads unfolding fast, salt-whitened, and cracking ahead of me as I went back and forth to the airport and city and everywhere else (lots of driving, lots of traveling). I enjoyed visiting the city I now live in and playing this kind of music; imagining myself as part of the hip stream in the giant urban gritty boom. I imagined hearing my favorite buzzing tracks leak daily out of retail shops up and down Milwaukee Avenue and loving it, feeling like I belonged, wanting more, finding women. (It's great to be here, but it's nothing like I imagined). I co-opted the stolen Marvin the Martian statue from Franzen and threw it in my back seat to surprise Jordan, once. It's standing on my fridge, now, pointing its laser at me as it pokes into mine and Jeff's high-arched ceiling. I watched three seasons of Mad Men on my laptop, in less than three weeks, all in my bed and on my intensely exciting MacBook. The episodes were blurry and poorly-dubbed when I found them online, which I often did, because I couldn't wait for the Netflix to arrive. I smoked too much pot in my suburban bedroom and wrote and wrote and wrote the book that I'm still writing and it seems like I loved it but I can't imagine how bad it was then because it still needs so much work. My grandpa died (the first important death of my life) and I dealt with it and think I can handle more people dying in my life, now, so long as they're very old. The best part of all that was when my dad's best friend took a few days off of work to drive eight-odd-something hours, and long plain-plagued miles westward, just to show up and be a signifier for the whole Nebraska funeral ordeal---a far-more-than-pleasant surprise---and for the lasting good will of our race and its bonds, or something like that. That was the only time I cried during the whole thing and it was really good crying. I went down the block to Family Video a lot, and perused for far too long, just for the sense of community. I went to Pat's basement a ton to watch The Sopranos and shitty movies and Jersey Shore and horror movies. I jogged. I took a trip back to Iowa City that led to lots of vomit and scraped skin and sinking-hurting organs but more fun and good times than any of that stuff. Emmett's with its thick expensive in-brewed beers and glossy wood was the only Downers Grove bar I cared about and it's still that way. I got rid of stuff constantly---clothes, trinkets, clutter, whatever---to feel better about myself (a still-lasting JWilmes tradition). The leaves looked really good in the front lawn and I enjoyed hulking them into wet neat scattered piles and then peering at them like little hills, from my bedroom window, as it lightly rained and I smoked another bowl. My new Dinosaur Jr. shirt felt like an important part of my personal brand. So did Dinosaur Jr.. Where The Wild Things Are deeply moved me, or maybe I just told myself it did, to move falsely toward that hip Chicago thing I was all-the-time imagining. I think it was when I went to DC to visit Franzen that this mix was replaced by constant-spinning Yeasayer and the era the mix represented, with its associations and nostalgias, basically ended. But I can't really know because everything just bleeds into everything, all the time.

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T10:30:00.002-06:00

Coming home, for me, is more stressful than not. It's tough to explain; the terrain of existential/emotional/sociological complexities that family life is has drawn and outdone many a writer/filmmaker/person. (I'm cringing at how bad and lazy of writing these repeated slashes are, but not finding any expressive resolution). When I talk about this with others, I can hear how dumb and uncomfortable we are with managing our new life narratives against those are parents fulfilled, and that our siblings are fulfilling. It's the worst kind of sound and fury. So, I won't go there, yet. I'll try to get calm with it, first.

Last night the Bulls came back down from twenty, on the road, on the tail end of a back-to-back, against Steve Nash, and won in double overtime. Hell yeah. I've seen the Sportscenter summary three times this morning.

I've got a lot of work to do this weekend.