alright while I'm at it, what's with all of the mismatched comparisons of other bands to Radiohead? Every time someone's told me that a band sounds like Radiohead, what they've really meant is that the band's singer sounds like Thom Yorke. The only bands that I have heard that sound anything like Radiohead (obviously I'm not saying these are the only ones) are (1) Wilco (for guitar-based Radiohead) in terms of the song structure being led and defined by guitar riffs and tones and (2) Thee More Shallows (talking about non-guitar-based Radiohead here) in terms of songs being characterized by textures. Whatever.

for some reason it's not all that fashionable to slobber all over Radiohead anymore, but they are still so far and away beyond everything everyone else is doing it's amazing. In terms of just having damn good parts and changes in their songs.. the best bass player, drummer, and guitarist around. Not to mention just sound-wise.. tones, the whole sonic makeup of their songs. And doing all this while staying totally listenable and enjoyable, not getting all esoteric. Keeping the right focus.. yeah.

So I had a pretty interesting moment today. I was at my office and decided to go have some lunch, but I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to go. So I just walked to the end of the hall. In this building there are little nooks hidden away to the side of the elevators on the ends of every floor, and I saw that someone had left a chair at this one today. So I decided to just sit down there for a second and think about what I might want to eat. It was a really striking view today for some reason. I was up on the third floor, surrounded by glass looking right out on campus corner. It was such a beautiful day - totally blue sky. 72 degrees. People going about their business below me. It was just a really unusually restful moment.

Then I noticed this buzzing sound. I looked down and saw a wasp on the floor flying around right at my feet, bashing into the windows. I am really uneasy around wasps and bees (I've never been stung). My first impulse was to either just leave or smash it. It would have been easy to kill. But I've been feeling really kind-hearted torwards insects over the past year or so, and I really hate to kill anything anymore (stupid? maybe).

So I was in this weird position of conflicting feelings - the really peaceful and relaxing view, the possibility of getting stung at any second, and compassion for this wasp that was stuck inside. I just sat there as long as I could (a minute or two) and tried to just distance myself from the situation and meditate in a way. Be perfectly calm and still enjoy the view and it's peace, even with this wasp flying all around my bare ankles. It was such a transcendent moment.

just an idle realization: no one is ever who they used to be.

Rene Brabazon Raymond (James Hadley Chase) died the day I was born.

Okay so just now I was listening to a Gordon Lightfoot album and Song For a Winter's Night came on. But right when I heard the very first few notes I realized that it sounded just like another song that I love, Gypsy by Suzanne Vega. So I went over and listened to that song. That's when I found out that the reason the first song sounded like the second was because they both start with the exact same chord fingerpicked in the exact same pattern. Neat, huh?

The same thing happens on the Legend of Junior Sapp CD with tracks 4 and 5 but in that case they're a step and a half apart.

man, I have seriously been going crazy for these Norman high school news shows on channel 18 lately. I've been watching them a lot. They're just so weird to watch.. it's like the outsider art thing where it's something that's familiar in a way - it resembles normal art, but at the same time it is just so strange. Like a picture of a person with the eyes upside down, that's always the creepiest because it's human and recognizable in a way, but at the same time it's just so wrong. I guess that's what makes these high school news shows so engaging for me; the editing and video quality and everything is so different from everything else on TV. Except for the city council meetings I guess, but those don't have much editing. I have watched those some too and you get a similar effect (there are some real weirdos there sometimes), but they're also a lot more boring.

One of my favorite things to do is to go out for a walk and after I've gotten out a bit look around for the brightest light that I can see and then walk towards it to see what it is. Once I've reached it, I'll look around for the brightest light that I can see from that point (without going backwards), etc. I will do this for an hour or two. After doing this I always feel a lot more creative and energized.

On another note, one thing that I really loved about New York City was that people were always hanging out in the city parks at all hours (i.e., Union Square). And if you were going there it seemed like there was never any concern about what you were actually going to do there. You'd just go there and talk to people, watch people, play soccer, dance, read, whatever. I wish there was a place in Norman where people gathered every evening just to do stuff like that. There's really no reason why there's not, I guess, except that it just hasn't started yet.

2007-08-05 Dreams:

I was in some kind of futuristic society that was cannibalistic. Certain people would be "harvested" in a way - always marked to be eaten at some point with a big red tattoo on their body (that kind of looked like the elements on the periodic table).

I didn't like this practice at all. I ordered one girl to eat and then instead kind of raised her up myself (they came to you as toddlers or so). Then I decided to do it again, and ordered another girl to eat. The first girl that I had ordered really wanted us to eat this new girl and was outraged when I was saying that we wouldn't - we would just raise her ourselves instead. I was crying a whole lot, crying my eyes out over all this because it was so emotional - life and death! I had to tell that first girl that she was meant to be eaten herself (she didn't even realize that).

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I was in some dark dirgy old room with my family watching TV. I decided to go into an adjacent room through a door and there was another dirty dark room, but in it was Marilyn Manson! There was a lot of weird dark stuff in there. He had just released a new CD, that had just a mat of skin with a bunch of nails sticking out of it with blood dripping down as its cover. He was in the room, kind of around the corner on a bed.

I tried to reason with him to have him be less violent, and he would listen to me and kind of appease me for a bit but then strike out at me. Most of the time with these dirty needles, trying to jab them into me. Each time he did that I just got real close to him and grabbed them away from him, or broke them off, or just pushed his hands away. It was pretty scary but I kept trying to talk to him and reason him out of doing these things. Other times he would attack me with these weird cast iron rune things that he had back by his bed. He would try to stab me with them or use them to curse me. I did the same thing to deter him here. There was a third thing in his room that he would use to attack me too, that worked in the same way.

I kept going in there and trying to reason him out of his violence but he kept feigning that he was listening and then attacking me. Then I would go back out into the adjacent room with my parents and watch TV some more, then I would try again. My whole family was unresponsive.

Finally, I just left this whole apartment area and started walking down the street away. I think I had some interaction with Marilyn Manson through his window as I was walking away - he threw something at me or something.

I must visit the G.W. Exotic Animal Park before I move away.