Dog Day Autumn

In those blinking moments, as you rouse in the morning, you can convince yourself of a lot. If your brain was more sensible, maybe it would convince you to stay more allegiant to that new diet, or maybe it would tell you to ditch all of your intimacy issues and finally make eye contact with the tall girl who works at the frozen yogurt store, or maybe it could even convince you to spend the day thinking in a bright, positive, chirpy way. But, at the time in your day, and tenuously, the times in your life, when you're most polemically apt, you choose to convince yourself it's time to sleep. I've been lucidly critical (surprise!) enough of myself on certain mornings to take a step back and observe this serendipitous persuasiveness- it's really a state of simplicity. I see it quite simply, actually. When you fall asleep, you hand your reasoning, energy, and processing over to the depths of your brain- to visualize it, think of dipping to what's below the mantle of the earth; the rumbling, the puking magma, the erupting earth, yet unbeknownst to us, who stand on this radioactively, violently unstable nucleus day after day, only buffered by some miles of soft padding. I think of dreams that way. Our brains dream all day. In the background, our dreams consort, and operate like tireless machinery, refining little duties, never resting, but exploding in cathartic euphoria, when at night they cascade into black box theaters. Dreams are simple explanations of what drive us to exhaustive contemplation throughout the day, and sometimes strangle us with self-doubt, but only when we are overwhelmed enough are they eruptive and explicative enough that we remember them once we wake up. In your most comfortable stages, you can go weeks without remembering a dream, yet you always have them. Whether you are happy or sad, fulfilled or empty, has no direct bearing on the impression that a dream will make on your night, on whether or not it will be rendered memorable in the morning-- it is simply whether or not you are overwhelmed. Many of us trip and skip through the day, ecstatic or bereft, but become used to it, and our dreams dissipate from our daily dockets over time. Some of us, and Me, who enter new cities, live in new families, unfamiliarly walk the street without companions, dream like a hot spring or hornets nest. When your body is unaccustomed, it pumps dreams through your head in the evening, a kind of involuntary mental exercise, an instinctive form of inactive contemplation. We really can't help but create. My dreams are awesome, and I've began writing them down. In the morning, I scribe the beginning and ending times of my sleep, the date and the dream. I don't bother analyzing them. If I put that all on paper, what really keeps dreams interesting? Worth having?
I have learned here that dreams are what keep you alive. Ironic, because dreams are a part of sleep, a part of times trajectory when you are considered unconscious. No, not ironic because the happiest people walk in dreams. I heard from a friend who I love really dearly this week. Regardless of our current familiarity, she and I always have a relative understanding of the others character, and what isn't remative is my appreciation for how she sees the world. She is remarkable. She dreams, and sees, and always has an idea about what she wants next. Everything enveloped in her little enormous universe is exciting, and worth explaining. I have to reply to her e-mail, but as I walked down Rue de Saint-Germain this afternoon- it was hazy, sunny in a way that feels like morning is seeping out of the atmosphere all day until it is night, and in one pane of light before evening comes, the sun sprints around the reaches of the city, kicking in windows and whipping you with its lithe fingernails; the air feels like cotton, and through the trees, you feel camoflaged, as if you're constantly camped out in an undiscovered, yet inobscure hiding place- I realized that the only way to be truly unfettered, is probably by living in a dream. When you wake up, and live too much in the present, unaware of what in the future might make the present so sacred, almost transient, you slowly lose the ability to dream. The present becomes inescapable if you reject dreams too much, and the present that you slowly become incarcerated in leaves parts of you chained to the past. Your only true hope is camping out in the future, and dreaming now so that making more dreams will be possible. My friend reminded me in her e-mail that, to want things, to have ideas, no matter how boastfully grand, about what will fulfill you, or make your future feel more special, is the most holy thing you can do. I love her for it. I'm going to write her an e-mail tonight, but I hope she is reading this. It's for you tiny!
Anyways, here is where I convert back to dreaming. I can't live any other way, I just try to escape the other ways. I have to live not only on my own team, but lost in my own head. It is me.

Anyways, I gave in to my Carl Rove brain this morning. I convinced myself that because I had a sore throat and a headache, school was absolutely unquestionably dangerous. I forget my logic, but it was so good. I should just hand everything over to my brain. At 11, I ended up waking up. I spent an hour in and out of dreams. As I drank more water, I realized that my throat was less of a problem than I anticipated. Then my headache died after a banana and a yogurt. It was beautiful, so I put on my shoes, my jeans, good ol' Harris Fever, my beanie, and hopped on the Metro to Odéon. Blocks later, I found a café with a lunch special of 11 Euro per une entree and un plat. Onion soup and lasagna, followed by a crepe and a Stella, and then a walk. From thrift store to boutique to Gap to thrift store in search of a winter coat, to no avail. It ended in a coffee and a donut at Starbucks. I've downloaded three albums in the past day that have totally enthralled me: "Psychic Chasms" by Neon Indian, "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" by Pavement, and "Slanted and Enchanted" by Pavement. I know the Pavement train has been long time coming, but it sure came. I'm ambivalent about "Far," Regina Spektor's new album. I had a total resurge of enthusiasm, residual from Sophomore year of High School, for her library while I've been here- namely "Soviet Kitsch," "Songs," "Begin to Hope," and various B-Sides. Here's the thing about album. Regina Spektor knows herself well enough, perhaps distantly enough at times, so that she can feign genuineness when it comes to songwriting. She is silly, intellegent and melodic, and older tracks are all indicative of this. But with "Far," it seems to me as if Regina may not have been in the place to write an album, yet, with an excess of b-sides and an urge to stay relevant, as well as pent up energy, she was easily misled into signing off on the production of an album. There are a bunch of tracks that are totally in the spirit of Regina, "Dance Anthem of the 80s," being my favorite, and "The Calculation," "Folding Chair," and "Two Birds" being really admirable compositions. But after so much performance, Regina chaperoned these pieces into the studio without a definitive image that she concocted for her songs. Instead, left up to very clean but seemingly forced, impersonal production of people who may understand her style but do not know how to enhance it or encourage its growth, Regina's songs like "Blue Lips," and "The Wallet," two of what I consider to be her most interesting and honest songs, completely deteriorate into what might scroll on the credits of "Desperate Housewives," gangbanged by elevating strings and crescendos of synthesizers as a cheap cop-out for meaningful emotion. Tracks like "The Genius Next Door," and "One More Time With Feeling," just don't do it for me- she employs her normal devices, roads to imagery and shrieking, giggle-inducing flirtation, even if it is somber and earnest, but never hooks me. I only designate a separate sentence to the final track, "Man of a Thousand Faces" because I always expect final tracks to make me feel like I've finished pooping out a Tyrannesaurus Egg, or I've just evolved a stage in Pokémon, yet I felt nothing. If anything, it's an impersonal, uninnonvative method of explaining how you can't really explain God. The album is all somehow about the loopiness of life, and how it is ultimately all chaotic enough that it is little, silly, and not worth understanding. Her creative process might have been tons more fruitful if she had set out, in the first place, with the mission of saying "I don't know" in the most beautiful way possible. Maybe she meant to, but I got a lot of disjointed insincerity from one of the most sincere artists ever. Even worse, a real lack of self-awareness from a goofy looking artist who woos the masses with her secret love affair with her silliness. But I definitely suggest the tracks that I mentioned. "The Calculation" is upbeat, earnest and excited, in a way that you hope Regina will dawn on you- she explicates love as a lifestyle that teleports you to another universe, one that deems everything outside of this connection irrelevant, like all else is in a foreign language. And "Dance Anthem of the 80s," in an almost polarized fashion, is goofy and playful in presentation, but twirls and bops in front of a backdrop of macabre disarray. At the end, where her voice devides mitotically and she seems to harmonize in a whipping, jaded, distorted profession of: "it's been a while since I've been touched/ now I'm getting touched all the time/ and it's only a matter of who/ and it's only a matter of when," reminds you of her actual maturity in reality, and her bluffed satisfaction, as she walks the street of a city solemnly: "I went walking/through the city/like a drunk but not/with my slip/showing a little." I would argue with anyone who thinks that this song is about a prostitute, which I've read commented on many blogs. She is a lost, desperate, out of place soul, with the same type of longings and obsessions as any solitary, urban itinerant. She sings as a sort of Clark Kent Regina as the song commences, playfully relating her affection for another to the way that others sexually fantasize eachother; as the song progresses, however, this fantasizing mutates into a desperate, Superman longing, a confusion, different voices harmonizing, overlapping, pleading, calling out. Fuck anyone who writes about this album like she's never written great things before- as if this was her only chance to prove her intellect, and the fact that the album has creative loopholes means that the rest of her greatness is unsubstantiated; especially Pitchfork, who shat on this album, but almost more heretically, impersonally. They wrote about "Far" as if Regina had no right to enter a stage of stagnance. They did the same with the BQE, dismissing it, not attempting to inhabit that dream that Sufjan gift wraps for the consumer. They should try reviewing three records a day with a little more heart. I wouldn't complain if they didn't dilute the popularity of the artist like mining runoff in a local resevoir.

Anyways, hi! I'm alive, here I am! More writing soon. All you need is glub.