hello, how are you? like your shoes, love your hair…

Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 12:58 am. 0 comments

ventnor, nj… in the summer

Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 3:12 pm. 0 comments

some pictures from my recent trip to ventnor, nj

to the last five years…

Posted 3 months ago at 10:42 am. 0 comments

last night is was feeling sentimental, so i made this simple montage of my favorite photos from the past five years:

Music: Whatever (Folk Song in C) by Elliot Smith

wow, it is so bright out here

Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 12:54 pm. 1 comment

due to a recent change in my policy, acupuncture is now covered by my health insurance… so naturally i made an appointment.

when i went for my visit, i was forced to fill out some paperwork that asked very detailed questions about my eating and excersize habits, or lack thereof. it is amazing how you can be completely complacent with an entire lifestyle, never realizing that you are slowly killing yourself, until you are forced to write it down on paper. another scary thing that i was forced to write down was that i have a family history of heart disease.

as a result of this, and my inborn tendancies toward obsessive behavior, i have decided to make some radical changes to the way i eat and live.

what i have done so far:
sworn off soda, candy, energy drinks and pretty much all refined sugars
cut my caloric intake literally in half
starting eating breakfast every day (kashi and soy milk)
eating 2 tablespoons of raw flax everyday
drinking 2 tablespoons of fish oil everyday (yuck)
eating way more vegetables and salads
trying to eat more during the day and less at night
drinking tons of tea and yerba mate (for energy)
focusing on foods that contain anti-oxidants

what i still need to do:
develop an excersize plan
adjust my sleep patterns
develop a resistance to the disgusting taste of fish oil

my progress:
it has only been a week but i am already starting to feel better. although my body is having some reactions to the drastic change in diet, i find that my mood is much better and that i have a general sense of well-being. also, i feel much more alert, bright and creative… which is a boost that i needed.

stonington borough

Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 12:33 am. 0 comments

some pictures, taken in stonington borough, ct…

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you’re either dead or dying

Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 2:24 pm. 1 comment

this is an excerpt from a novel that i am currently working on…

Chapter 3

Have you ever woken up to the distinct feeling that you were either dead or dying?

A couple of years back, whilst in the middle of a particularly mundane dream, I was awoken by a familiar sensory experience… I was soaking wet. Before I committed to opening my eyes and surveying the situation, I recall having made some quick speculations as to the source of this chilly discomfort. My initial guess was the obvious one, the statistically favorable possibility that I had urinated on myself, and, if it hadn’t been for the absence of that unmistakable wet bread and ammonia odor, I probably would have stuck with that conclusion and gone back to sleep. Unfortunately though, with the mystery still unsolved, I was forced back to the drawing board, and next wondered if it was physiologically feasible for my body to have generated enough sweat to attain my current level of saturation. Visual confirmation was needed, and so, after I deemed it an absolutely necessary evil, I opened my eyes, only to find that I had been lying in a small pool of what looked a lot like my very own crimson red blood.

It is amazing how quickly you can come to grips with the thought that you are in the process dying via massive blood loss. For a split second, I felt a morbid wave of calm acceptance pour over me. It took a solid minute before my inborn desire to live finally kicked in and began questioning the situation. Had I been stabbed? Who stabbed me? Did my abdomen spontaneously rupture? Is that even physically possible? And most importantly, why am I not in any kind of pain?

A few minutes later, those questions received satisfactory answers when I discovered the can of strawberry-lime soda lying with me in my bed. Apparently, I had left the mostly full beverage on my nightstand. At the time, I was living on my own in Rhode Island and my apartment didn’t have an air conditioner. Since it was the middle of summer, it was also the kind of humid that makes you wonder if it is possible to drown in your own lungs. My guess is that, in some half-conscience dehydrated fit, I must have been attempting to drink some of the highly food-colored soda before depositing the majority of it squarely into my lap. The only casualty of that incident was my bedding.

The feeling that you may, in the immediate sense, die is probably one of the most unique human experiences. Love can come and go, hatred fades with time… but a true near-death experience, whether real or perceived, will stick with you until the day you finally do expire. And I would know I’ve had quite a few of them throughout my life. The aforementioned “soda-crotch” experience was probably the funniest of them, but not by any means the most life-altering. The big one, my most traumatic, memory penetrating, near-death experience took place at that fateful intersection of North Rd. and Route 102.

Johnny and I were driving home from a particularly bad day at school. I had neglected to do my homework for European literature class and attempted, unsuccessfully, to pull the old floppy disk trick. (For those of you unfamiliar with that gem, the floppy disk trick is where you tell the teacher that you completed the assignment on your home computer but that your printer wasn’t working. You then present her with a floppy disk that allegedly contains your work. What the teacher doesn’t know is that before you gave her the disk, you pulled back the metal spring-loaded cover and scratched the inner black magnetic disk so that when she tries to extract your homework, she is met only with cryptic “cyclical redundancy” errors. This trick worked much better in 1998 than I suppose it would now.) She was unfortunately not fooled, nor was she amused.

John, on the other hand, was upset because he had spent yet another day confined to in-school suspension for throwing Andy Lapowitz down a flight of stairs. Andy made the mistake of referring to Johnny as a “dirty mexican”, a mistake that I sincerely doubt he will make again.

Over the course of our 27 minute drive home from school, not much was said. John lamented the iniquity of a school judicial system that based it rulings solely on the basis of who threw the first punch. I cursed the shifting paradigms of a world that is finally getting hip enough to technology that I can no longer exploit its illiteracy.

As I had mentioned previously, John was driving my car home that day. This was often the case, since I have always had a mild aversion to driving. I find it to be extremely monotonous. John, however, enjoyed driving and always took it very seriously. He silently resented me for having an automatic transmission. You could tell just by looking in his eyes that he earnestly wanted to forge a deep relationship with the vehicle that he was operating, and it seemed that simply putting the car into drive was not doing it for him.

Yet, despite John’s intense love for vehicular travel, he was still quite new to it and was not yet allowed to legally drive without the presence of an “adult” in the car, and since, according to the state of New Hampshire, I did not satisfy that requirement, our driving situation would have been considered illegal.

As we approached the corner of North Rd. and 102, John slightly overshot the stop sign, putting the nose of my old burgundy Mercedes about a couple of feet beyond the stop line before we came to a stop. This type of sloppiness was not uncommon and was a product of driving too much in a place where you never really have to worry about another car coming. After an almost unperceivable stop, John began to make his turn onto the frozen 102. Yet, it was no sooner then had he removed his foot from the brake that he abruptly slammed it back down as we heard the screeching sound of tires burning on cold pavement. Our necks simultaneous twisted toward the source of the shrill sound, giving us unwanted audience to the fast approaching harbinger of our all-too-sudden deaths. It was a gigantic white, rusting monstrosity of a mini-van, flying like a rocket down the shoulder of route 102 and its trajectory was that of imminent pain.

For a solid moment, we were both rendered completely inert, capable of neither thought nor action. And that moment seemed to just hang there, frozen like the outside air, as if time was giving us a moment to collect our belongings before being jettisoned into the unknown. This was the precise moment that I, for the first time, truly accepted my own mortality. The moment was strangely cathartic, but ultimately short lived. My enlightenment was shattered by physics, the effects of when a large metal object in motion collides with a significantly smaller metal object at rest. Damn you, Isaac Newton!

By my best guess, the car that hit us was going about 50 mph when its bumper made contact with my front driver’s side door. It struck me as odd that the driver of the other vehicle made no attempts to stop before slamming into my most expensive possession. The sheer force of the impact sent us into a spin. John’s head smashed into his window before slinging the other way and making solid contact with my shoulder. Amidst my body being thrown to and fro, I said a quick prayer for every anal German engineer who ever set foot inside a Mercedes plant and hoped that their reputation was enough to get me though this in one piece.