05.29.07
Posted in haikus, travel at 7:54 pm by electricvishnu
(jessica, aaron, and brian hawkins )
I thought we could fly
On this alleged Skyway
Chicagoians lie.
Deathmetal rocks me
As I traverse Chicago
And its underground.
An ugly jungle.
Motion but no poetry.
This skyway don’t dance.
The windy city –
These people weren’t lying:
It really blows.
Signs for Manhattan
Replaced by ones for Ohio.
Something must be wrong.
Wow, what an asshole.
Use your blinker, you fucker!
Chicago can’t drive.
West on ‘94
One away from ‘95
It feels like Connecticut.
That guy’s gonna jump
Please don’t do it, life’s still good
Unless you live here.
Graffiti Aaron
He really likes to spray paint
When he’s not asleep.
The Windy City
Has really inspired us
To write more Haikus.
Take the middle lane
And you shall drive enlightened
Says harley Buddha.
Permalink
Posted in haikus, travel at 1:09 pm by electricvishnu
more hawkins haikus
I play kick the mick
With my buddy Tim Colman
Then I eat cabbage.
Big Bird has molted
No longer must we follow
Cartoons on Harleys
Listening to Frank
Just does not have the same feel
In this stupid state
In Indiana
The clock gives us a headstart
We’ll eat cheese tonight.
Aurora, Illonois
Much better than Chicago.
Wayne’s World said it best.
Gary, Indiana
Looks a lot like New Haven
And that is real sad.
We all have problems.
In this car we ride like nuts
And we eat them too
Our endless travels
Through no man’s territory –
Ohio is the promise land.
The Second City
Chicago can kiss my ass
It just can’t compete.
And here’s the traffic!
Oh how I have missed you,
Thanks for showing up.
Well, Indiana,
It is time to say good-bye:
You were a good friend.
Chicago proper
Appears as our salvation
From construction cones.
Almost like New York
If you took all the ghettos
And put them together.
These asshole drivers
Are no match for the real deal
LIE for life.
Dempster St. Exit
Change one letter and you have
A more fitting name
The closer we get
I feel more and more troubled –
Will Chicago suck?
Permalink
Posted in words at 11:12 am by electricvishnu
“cops
nurses
group homes
jails
preachers”
Permalink
05.28.07
Posted in haikus, travel at 10:42 pm by electricvishnu
written by jessica, aaron, and brian hawkins
(en route to the west . . . [through snowshoe, pa . . . ])
Thruway plots our route
As the slogan hits our ears:
“Montana or Bust”
Brian makes the rule:
“Listen to all songs in full,
except Christmas ones.”
Biohazard suits
Or maybe oompah-loompahs,
Yellow rain gear sucks.
The parkway prophet
Says, “bigbird drives a harley”
I think we found him.
I am I-eighty
Big fat families in minivans
Squash my face.
Aaron tells us all
That he doesn’t want to sleep
The whole way out there.
I don’t believe him
Because he just fell asleep.
Narcolepsy sucks.
Summer reading bad.
Don’t care about red letters
On busts of old ladies.
Mile sixty-seven point six
Ronald McDonald lures us in
With tasty McMuffins
Elvis on the radio
As we leave the McDonalds.
How freakin’ patriotic.
Pennsylvania cows
Make me hungry for a steak
And perhaps some cheese.
Look at these blue skies
Now I want to drive some more
Montana! Fuck yeah!
Now I see shadows
Like the douchebag groundhog Phil.
Pennsylvania sucks.
A man holds a sign
He wants to go west with us –
Hitchhikers are weird.
Stopping in Snowshoe
We reflect on our journey
Ohio or bust?
Permalink
05.27.07
Posted in words at 9:46 pm by electricvishnu
firstly, can’t the eye-tie’s make an honest living? ? just kidding . . . michael vincent imperiale
the fountains of wayne do indeed rock: new cd, traffic and weather
60 minutes is insultingly unsubtle in regards to its coverage on iraq. tonight’s story, however, highlighted a hopefully small subset of the population who, i guess, needs that. one father, who went to iraq with the same battalion as his son, insists in the existence of a link between 9/11 and iraq. that’s why he joined up. are we serious? his wife, who eerily continues to address the reporter by his first name – something seems up with her – as the story continues, they all talk about her “mental health / depression” issues. her husband (who has flown 6300 miles to iraq[perhaps to get away from the wife]) says that she will obviously get undepressed when he comes back. of course – and the horrors he has seen + the horrors their son has seen won’t negatively effect things? but i guess there was an indisputable link between 9/11 and iraq . . . another guy my age says that the president and the other leadership “are all well educated and making the right decisions,” so he continues to have a great deal of faith in them (after his internal organs were ripped by an i.e.d. that the convoy they were leading.) is it just iowa? is it just 60 minutes picking and choosing what’s going to have maximal effect (even if it distorts an overall picture) sure . . . but seriously? it’s sad . . . it’s a mess . . .
they are losing lives escorting these people that work for private companies contracted to do all sorts of things over there. by all means, i am pro-private companies doing anything they want over there – as long as they compensate the iraqis well for whatever they take – rearrange – you break it, you bought it, buddy (good lesson for the leadership?) – however what’s wrong with letting these companies foot the bill and hiring private security forces. our stated mission is . . . what’s our stated mission again? let the companies pay for private security. . . not soldiers who signed up to spread democracy and freedom and see all the smiling faces and pretty flowers of a liberated iraq (hip hip hooray and the like) at least, signing up w privately operated security outfits like that would give them fair compensation (much fairer than the indentured servantshipish wages given by unckie sam.) this was not supposed to be a lefty rant. it’s not . . .
child brides are bad for the economy. if anyone has evidence against this, i’d love to hear it . . .
finally, couldn’t they have planted rice? or oats? or anything? (on the potato famine)
angela’s ashes is up there in the hall of fame in the land of overrated books:
“we were poor”
“we were hungry”
“we were irish”
“we were pale”
“we were sickly (that implies pale too, i guess)”
“our father was a [hopeless/useless] drunk / our mother (poor, hungry, pale, irish, and godfearing of course) was a saint”
“we were afraid of going to hell”
“we were hungry”
that just about sums it up. frank mccourt’s brother, malachy, also born of this hopeless drunken hungry pale irish home, wrote a monk swimming an exponentially better and more spirited book. frank is a great writer, no doubt, he certainly makes you feel the damp oppressive essence of that pale sickly hungry . . . yeah you get the point . . . but malachy at least cracks a few jokes. fuckin a’
Permalink
Posted in snapshots, words at 5:55 pm by electricvishnu
it’s weird. maybe weird isn’t quite the word – surreal may suffice.
leaving, as opposed to arriving.
seeing a place as you did a year before, two years before, or many many years before, or even just one semister before, but now having a whole new understanding of that domain, and a new intimate knowledge of every single part of it – or sometimes not even every single part. maybe it’s just an overactive center of nostalgia in the brain, or just an overwhelming sense of dread and fear that i didn’t get to accomplish everything i wanted to, or that life is passing way more quickly than i could have ever imagined. maybe it’s a cheesy end of a sitcom series finale kind of moment when the lights go out and there is that shot as the camera pans out of the darkened, but not entirely, set. you can see the track lights and the false props in all their glory. or maybe there is something essential about it. maybe there is a point (evolutionarily and psychologically speaking) of why exactly we get that.
i walked down easton ave the other night: there are so many houses, a few that i have been in, but many more just like those. so we storm through rutgers – four, five, however many years we are here, usually in a quick amount a time. we rent a house on delafield one year, stone the next, and so on. the tennis team might live here one year, the next it might be a group of jamaican born rabinnical students (not that i know any that go to rutgers, but one never knows.) one might decorate the room with pictures of hottie dudes and pink greek letters and the next might put posters of jimi hendrix on the walls, followed by a year of god knows what and so on and so on and so on. it’s just that these homes, where we call home for a year or more, become an extension of us and then so quickly they are homified by somebody else. does that freak anyone else out?
“i mean we’re looking at wayne’s basement . . . but . . . . that’s not wayne’s basement”
while moving shit out of our house, i felt more deeply plugged into the new brunswick community . . . firstly, there was the dynamic duo of tammy and gary – tammy took away my tv (i made her year with the admittedly p.o.s. sony trinitron from the reagan years.) gary had quite a lot to say (in a mr. wendelian way we shot the shit on a couch that was in front of our house while waiting for my housemate to come back [t>35mins, call the cops| she probably pulled a piece on him and/or perhaps hacked up the body by now, the car is junked in the s. bronx already and she's getting thirty bucks for his ring finger on the black market ("you want a finger? i can get you a finger!) give it six more minutes and she'll have copped already in that park down the street, shit . . . sorry man] but he came back don’t worry. sometimes we get lucky . . . but gary had a lot to say about a lot of stuff . . . sort of a walking advertisement for not having a fucked up life and usin’ and boozin’ it out of control, but it was trash day (or beginning of trash week, rather) in new brunswick, so he was doing alright.
after this, the futon, box spring, and chair made its way back to 43 guilden, where my new brunswick shitshow began, nearly exactly three years ago to the day . . . maybe it’s referential delusional thinking, but i thought that was kind of niftily circular. the price is always right when it’s on the street. in populations where style matters relatively not (like frugal college students and others with severely limited budgets,) most of what is put out goes . . . it’s a beautiful thing . . . giving back, in a silly sort of way to new brunswick and the future generations who will sit in our chairs, sleep on our beds, do all sorts of dirty things on our futons, be elated, pissed off, drunk, angry, sad, happy, loaded, high, studious, wasted, silly, and everything else in our homes. it was a moment, i guess, that could only come from letting go, and setting aside possessions and going with that flow. peace out prosper st.
Permalink
05.23.07
Posted in words at 11:48 am by electricvishnu
an interesting opinion piece about forcing vegan “values” upon newborn babies and its effects . . .
Death by Veganism
by nina planck
published: may 21, 2007
Permalink
05.21.07
Posted in supposedly moving snapshots at 3:57 pm by electricvishnu
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tign09D5IgE]
Permalink
05.15.07
Posted in words at 1:48 am by electricvishnu
So a coffee shop that shall not be named has come up with quite the idea: serve breakfast sandwiches all day long. Here’s the thing: I love bacon egg and cheeses, with a passion, on croissants, bagels, English muffins, and any combination or in between that one may think of. So it’s with wary excitement and skeptical unease that I await these heralded breakfast sandwiches. The post card size promo that I was given claims that it will be “the perfect complement to your coffee.” That would be dandy if the morning coffee was part of my daily ritual (outside of work, where half cups of a black sludgy substance most closely imitated by motor oil infused throughout the day suffice.) Bacon egg and cheeses can (and should) be enjoyed throughout the day (morning, noon, or night, like that place where there is always a smiling face . . . ridge diner) so here they are:
Classic sausage
Peppered bacon
sitting out in the open for a few weeks does not necessarily make cheddar aged . . .
Reduced-fat turkey bacon (with cholesterol-free egg & reduced-fat white Cheddar cheese on a toasted multigrain English muffin)
Sweet-life-health-nuts, I’d also like to start ordering my skim milk latte with soy milk, thankyouverymuch*
Black forest ham
Is that some kind of hans christen Andersen german thing?
Eggs Florentine (w spinach, egg, havarti, and creamy herb)
So does the spinach come in the frozen egg-product or is it delicately placed upon the airplane egg by the thoroughly trained barista?
Permalink
05.08.07
Posted in snapshots at 1:32 am by electricvishnu
Permalink
Previous page
