Tonsils, Indians, and Dreams...

I have succesfully made it through my tonsilectomy! I am at day 16 and beyond glad this whole mess is over. It went fairly well until a few days ago, when I started bleeding at Far Hills. I was with Billy and as I was spitting blood onto the desert floor I was thinking about the workers passing by in the morning. All they would see is a blood-strewn country side with nothing more than a ruined piece of paper with the name of clothing stores on it. Oh well, that's how it goes sometimes I guess. I thought that was the end of it but the next day I woke up gushing blood for twenty minutes so it was off to the doctor's for me. They said that it had clotted but if it were to bleed again I'd have to go to the emergency room and get surgery again, but it did not so I am finally done with it all! :D

Being bedridden definitely had its benefits though, as I got to read even more! I read The Day the World Ended at Little Bighonr by Joseph Marshall which was both imformative and depressing. For example,

"In the immediate moments after the defeaning blasts of artillery and rifle fire had stopped, the silence must have been utterly profound. The world has known far too many moments such as that, when the killing mercifully ends."

I thought one of the saddest aspects was how much respect the Lakotas showed to the white man, and how little they received in return. For instance, while the U.S. government referred to the Lakotas as "savages" and frequently called them "insane," the Lakota term for the white negotiaters was wolakotiye woglakapi, or "peacetalker." Even while the government was plotting to systematically destroy their culture, the Lakotas still saw the ultimate goal as peace.

I also got to watch Waking Life again with Billy and it seems like every time I watch it, different things resonate with me or I think I understand it more. On this particular viewing, I perceived the scene with the two men in the bar shooting each other to death as incredibly ironic. I think it would be interesting to lucid dream, and perhaps I will try to make that my next project.

De-Loused

has got to be the best album to write to. It is beyond amazing, I love everything about it. The Mars Volta are so creative in so many ways. Their darkness is so poetic, and their lyrics are both unfathomable and enlightening. They are so good at creating a scene for exactly the story they're trying tell. "You should have seen the curse that flew right by you...everyone knows the last toes are always the coldest to go."

McCarthyism

        I have just finished reading The Road and No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and I was very impressed. It has been a long time since I have read any fiction, and McCarthy is proving to be a real treat. I’d have to say I like The Road more out of the two, and that the film adaptation of No Country was excellent. I think the Coen brothers did an superb job of echoing McCarthy’s no-frills approach towards storytelling.

        I know The Road will be a novel I remember for a long time. Set in post-apocalyptic (most likely post-nuclear, although the novel never specifies) America, it tells the story of a father and son fighting for survival in a hostile world populated by killers and cannibals.

        The father is referred to only as “the father,” or “the man,” and the son as “the son,” or “the little boy.” McCathy realizes that you don’t need extensive background to build a memorable character, and the relationship he builds between the two is established strongly at the beginning and grown throughout the novel. You never learn the boy’s age, and it seems like he could be anywhere from 8-12 years old. The man seems torn about whether he wants the boy to know the truth about the world they live in so he can survive better, or if he wants to shield the boy from as much as possible. Either way, the boy cannot escape the horrors of their environment as he encounters everything from a basement full of people being harvested for food to an infant roasted on a spit.

        I noticed that a couple symbols from No Country also appeared in The Road, and this was the uniqueness and value of the father-son relationship and also the “carrying of the fire.” No Country ends with Sherriff Ed Tom telling his wife Loretta about a dream he had where his father rode on before him carrying the torch, waiting for him to follow. Several times throughout The Road, this conversation ensues:

        ‘Because we’re the good guys.
        ‘Yes.
        And we’re carrying the fire.’
       

Since the two are not literally carrying any fire, you can infer that McCarthy uses “carrying the fire” as a symbol to represent goodness and hope in the world, just like in No Country. When the man is dying, and the boy asks if he can go with him, the father tells him “You can’t, you have to carry the fire.”

        Another interesting thing about McCarthy’s style is his abandonment of quotation marks. This serves to make the dialogue seem more intimate and more real. Sometimes dialogues can become cluttered by all the punctuation and take away from the message and the feel of the conversation, so McCarthy just gets rid of them altogether.

        These are some of my favorite quotes from The Road:

“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably, but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Thing’s he’d no longer any way to think about at all.”
“What you alter in the remembering has a reality, known or not.”
“People were getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.”
“Where men can’t live gods fare no better.”

I look forward to watching the film adaptation for this novel.

How It Ends.

Pictures I'm Digging

This beauty is from Salvador Dali. One of his more simpler works, I think a version of this might look lovely as a foot tattoo perhaps? It would be fairly cheap too...hmmm...



I first saw Esao Andrew's work in the form of Circa Survive album art, but I'm really digging this picture as a possible tattoo? Pretty much every piece of art I like I say is a potential tattoo.

The Beginning.

First off, a confession: I'm probably the last person you'd expect to start a blog. This is for a number of reasons, the foremost being:

1) I used to think blogs were one of the most self-centered technological innovations known to man (and to a certain extent, I still do)
2) I'm an extremely private person

So, thinking as I do, why did I start a blog? I can answer this in two steps:

1) Tonsillectomy
2) Organization of thought

I recently got my tonsils removed because they've been plaguing me with illness for the past, oh I don't know, eighteen years of my life. As a result, I have been prescribed bed rest for one to two weeks. Given that I am usually an extremely busy person, I try to make the best of every moment of my day, and I decided what better way to spend bed rest than organizing my thoughts?

I appreciate what a luxury it is that I have the time and ability to sit down at a computer and work my thoughts out on the screen. I know a majority of the world doesn't have the tools and resources that I have and to not take advantage of them would be a shame.

So I might have been construed as "anti-blog" before, but I don't think that is quite right. I was more anti-narcissism, and recognized that many people write blogs because they want a great number of people to read them, which makes them feel important. While I recognize that the desire to feel important is a basic human aspiration, that is not why I want to start blogging. I honestly don't care if anyone reads this thing or not, because it is more of a way for me to map out and organize my thoughts in a readily accessible, organized format than anything else.

Anyways, that being said, I suppose a little bit of background about myself is needed. I live in Las Vegas and just finished up with my first year at UNLV as a history major. I started off as a business major but quickly discovered it just wasn't for me. I didn't feel fufilled or that I could genuinely help people with what they were presenting me. History, however is another matter.

I adore history. History, to me, is the study of everything, and what could be better than that? Everything you learn about has history, and history is in everything you learn about. History is the lens through which we can view all things. It is my opinion that you can't truly understand anything unless you know the history of it because history is the context of humanity.

Well, enough of that passion for now, I'm sure after I take my some more vicodin induced naps I'll have more to say :P