The Night Lies Eternal, For the Beauty of Caring, Survival, Whispers on the Wind, Hope Endures, Indefinite Bohemia.

One week ago. One week ago I was desparately waiting for a distraction promised. It was enough to make me go mad. There was the suggestion and the tension of expectation, but for her- she, the still point of the turning world- time was an agent and accessory not the cruel assassin it had long since become for me.

Long afternoons in the CIT. Long evenings in the Watson. I was writing something about Roland Barthes, Cortazar's "Blow-Up" and the language of photography. I called "Multiplicity and the Disjunctive Identity." I had clearly lost my mind to post-modernism.

I was hoping beyond anything I knew or held dear that my distraction - she, the eternally silent images on the wall that I could not read- would appear at any moment and ride me away into a glowingly brilliant sunrise.

She came just in time.

Crushed an without direction, I exited the Sun Lab and crawled soulless back towards Keeney. I was the anti-thesis of all the I was and had become known for. My spark was buried beneath work, finals stress, and cold responsibility. I swiped into Poland and took a long, dreadful look down the hall.

She was glowing, I promise. There was fire at the end of the hall.

(Enter the interlude: Walk to the MCM, room occupied, return to the Triple XXX (222), kick Evan out to Joy, Whispers in the warm winter air, Evan returns, the night will not go unconquered, kisses forever, hold tight and fast, fight for the dawn, a mission for sunrise, glory in the unoccupied morning air, indefinite bohemia)

I needed no more inspiration. The muse's invocation was like new breath in my lungs. I breathed a thousand fires and felt my mind open up a fountain of youth and love. I could write again as I had not been able to write years.

The muse re-found, re-forged, re-invented.

Misdirection, Playing everyone everywhich way, PennTV Returns, Harvard by the Balls, RISD Parties, Egyptology Help, 99 Problems, Midnight Blogging, the Journalist Triumphant

I'd start at the beginning if I could but there is nothing as accurate or imperfect as a beginning, and struggling to find one, I begin where I can.

You never know where it is that life will catch up you, or where the paths that you've worn in impropriety will cross again the path of your life as it is. In short, I mean that it is always fun, nostalgic, exciting, and entertaining to note that you were in the very space you suddenly are, for an event of altogether different substance. Difficult moments are contrasted with beautiful ones.

I am crossing Thayer at Soldier's Arch and realizing simultaneously that my last crossing was 11 hours before with a beautiful Egyptology student. It was 3:30 in the morning then, the fabric of imagination and enchantment close about my eyes and mind like the curtains closed around an excited soul.

There is no saving my current position: I am back in that most nightmarish of realities which is chiefly the attempt to program some java in the heart of the Sun Lab.

A week ago, I was coming off a weekend of the most joyful impropriety. Taking up the opportunity to follow up a project of my own devising, I found a camera from Media Services in the Sci Li with 2 minutes to spare on a chilling Saturday afternoon. I went over to Pembroke and woke up Sky. He was passed out on his bed from pushing the partying to dawn.

I collected Faust and recruited Blessing for the occassion. There was to be no going back or wimping out. Our committment to a road trip would have to be final.

Armed with a CVS bag of nuclear holocaust survival food, we traveled to Boston in Sky's rumble box Subaru. Even putting on the E-break made the car sound like it was taking a turn at Le Mans.

On the way up, we plotted angles, techniques and clever ways of trapping Harvard students into the same ficition that had made our first PennTV expose so popular with Ivy League bloggers. For all we knew, fame and notoriety had already exposed to the entirety of the Ivy League. Arriving at Harvard, we would surely be either welcomed as heroes and thrown virgins to entertain ourselves, or shunned and rode out of town- tarred and feathered- on a rail.

No such fate awaited us. After a delicious meal at Bartleby's- that most cherished and iconic of eating establishments- we made a go on Harvard Yard. We found suicidal first-year girls and pretentious Stanford Anthropology Grad students. They were neither as smart as we assumed nor as cool. Tepid answers exposed either weak personalities on camera or weak shit coming out of the Harvard social scene. Clearly, we would need to push things further.

We went for coffee to take refuge from the impossible cold. Blessing bore our overt masogynism tirelessly and was unfailable in her ability to solicit subjects for our all-out documentation of Harvard loserism.

Sky maintained a personality of excellent charm and wit. He smiled when things got awkward and comforted people that this was not a scam (it is, incidentally, a scam). By the time we discovered some absolute iconic Tuxedo-Dinner Dress hilarity at Lowell House, we were all set for a full exposure of Harvard's lameness. A girl pointed out that Sky's fly was unzipped, that women were subverted and forced to be submissive by Harvard's male-driven social scene, and stood speechless when Faust hit her with an unexpected blast of Brunonia's most potent feminist propaganda.

By 12:00- I was at Sigma Chi dancing with women of questionable moral values and dodging a stalker under the skillful guidance of Nick G. I was asked repeatedly about pledging and promised Godfrey that I would consider it if he did. I toasted to the evening and the soapy snow falling outside the beautifully lit House as I slid home for bed. Everything in the world was amazing- I was guiding the GuerillaJournalism project and loving it, I was hopeful for a girl I knew, and I was ready to help Sebas become an MCM god. Sky was busy becoming an internet icon under the guise of a Penn student.

and I was drunk- at least, a little bit.

The Osiris Project

Ingredients:

1 Medium Bottle of Jagermeister
4 Cans of Red Bull
As much Marijuana as you can find

Only once I came down from the all-out destruction of the Osiris Project did I realize what it should be called or what infernal combination of chemicals had made possible its impressive potency. The room was strewn with empty cans of Red Bull and the air smelled slightly of Marijuana. Some strange lamp was hanging from the sprinkler system in a contortion so bizarre even Hunter S. Thompson would have been skeptical of its reality.

When I got back from more well-wasted hours in the Sun Lab, I found the room occupied by Sky Sky, Fasut and the Day Warrior. They were watching the Animatrix and tripping balls. Faust screamed occassionally at the anime-rendered depiction of the mechanization of man. Sky looked at me and gestured to a bottle of Jager that I had requested. I smiled, opened the bag, and pulled out a package of four cans of Red Bull.

"Jager bombs." I said.

He nodded knowlingly.

We did two Jager Bombs apiece and then smoked two bowls. The lights began to flicker, dim, and recite e.e.cummings to my twisted mind. I took another shot of Jager and hit another bowl. I did again. We matched rounds of shots of Jager with resin hits and small bowls. In a half hour, time became as lucid and dissolved as Dali portrait. I was tripping hard on the floor mapping out the nerve endings in my brain like they were christmas lights hung lovingly on a tree. They twinkeld, blinked, and recited Ginssberg in my self-imposed silence.

Suddenly, I leapt up and turned off the lights. I put on Trance and set the iTunes visualizer to display pure energy. We spaced out to Apple illustrations or music so profound that I felt my soul slipping away to follow it into the mountain.

I cut lose. I danced for an uncertain amount of time before finally collapsing on the floor. My body was cut into a hundred pieces. Thrown around the world. and then, slowly, reconstructed. I was ferried across the river of the dead and put back together again. I was resurrected and revived.

I was at the table at Bartleby's about to expose the fact that a Harvard student would never do something like I did the night before when it became clear what the process needed to be named.

"Dude" I said suddenly, "let's call that shit we did last night the Osiris Project."

A few days later, while pulling three nights of all-nighters to finish our MCM project, I suggested the title again as a name for our revamped iTunes visualizer. Seb and Sky agreed. We went ahead with three nights and no days of endless programming and MCMing. We built a site, a poster, a statement and a program that matched tagged photos from the internet to song lyrics. We re-invented the medium of the Visualizer and then crashed hard.

We were cut into pieces with lethary, recollected, reborn, and reignited.

We were Osiris.

Blogging, Misdirection, IvyGate

and so it is that my life catches up with me again and I remember all that I must accomplish before the curtain comes crashing down at the end of the semester. One thing is certain: I passed MC 75 with Tribe, and additionally managed to procure a position as TA for next semester's section.

As for my other classes, I have an English Paper to write on Walter Benjamin (aka my hero) Roland Barthes (aka would marry this dude if he was still alive) or Michelle Citron (the things that I would do to her...) and a History Final next week. Just for fun, I have to make a Paint program for CS 15- and if I can survive that- a life worth living somewhere in January.

Recently, I have been enjoying playing the BDH, IvyGateBlog.Com, and my PennTV project all against each other. I write for one about another, blog for IvyGate while laughing that they include my PennTV videos and spending time that should be doing work, writing this post or editting the footage that burns Harvard on YouTube.

Life can have it however it wants it. It has every part of me that I didn't give to a beautiful Egyptology student in the MCM. I will laugh and cry myself through finals. I don't want to go home. To much has happened here. When IvyGate gets a second dose of PennTV it also manages to recieve a post on the lyrical genius of Brown's Pirate Acapella.

I wish there were an easier way to pass CS.

I better go.

The end of the blog is a girl. She's nice. She's doesn't know what she believes yet. She doesn't know what she thinks of me yet. She doesn't know if she wants to meet me yet.

Sometimes, this girl turns on the computer and starts typing. There are strange things in her head. They need to be written down. She wonders about publishing them. She wonders if anyone else would read them. She wonders if they're worth writing. The thoughts leave her, and she has nothing but a line of growing poetry without a context- and a blank screen.

The girl who will end this blog likes cursors. She likes when they blink expectingly on empty pages and laughs at me when I try to defeat them. I promise I'll never stop writing if she's near me.

She doesn't know what she thinks of me yet.

The girl who will end this blog likes seeing people on the street and making up stories about them. She doesn't know how to describe herself, but she likes trying to tell what other people are. She sees couples on the streets and wonders about how long they've been dating. She predicts their future: the man will get a better job in the bank he works at downtown, the woman will meet a wonderful librarian who she loves but her parents won't let her marry.

She feels bad for the woman.

This blog will be ended by a girl. She likes new mornings (not all mornings are new), coffee in the cold, scarves that whisper 'I Love You,' and postcards from people she does not expect. She appreciates the randomness of life. She loves things not going how they were supposed to but still working out.

She smiles when she's alone for no reason at all.

( If there is no one there and she smiles, does she really smile?)

The girl who will end this blog practices suggestive winks in her bathroom mirror while she's brushing her teeth. She thinks about leaving school and going to New York or LA- to become the actress inside of her. The girl likes books, warm corners, sleeping late on rainy days, pressing her nose against the cold window when its snowing. The girl likes life and wishes that whenever she is happy she could donate some of that happiness to people in her neighborhood who need it. (When she was little she once offered her smile to sad stranger- he took and it changed his life)

The end of the blog is a girl. She's beautiful. She makes me think up situations to run into her. She makes me plan orchestrated, mediatated events where we can co-exist and she can decide what she thinks about me.

She doesn't know what she thinks of me.

She doesn't know if I am worth thinking of.

Chapter XVIII: Death in the thinly lit spectrum, Smoking in the bubbles, blogging against myself, meeting Quigley, the Second Renaissance, an Understanding of Time.

I'm spacing out in the Bubbles. Faust and Godfrey are as high as Kites. Godfrey climbs up the side of the sculpture, eeriely lit against the neon orange cloud-sky.

"I think I might topple this thing." He says slowly.

"And by 'this thing' do you mean society?" says Faust.

No one else would come with us. Though the fog descended as predicted, and clouded Olympus like a myst of the fantastic, the mortals refused to mount our Everest. There were two girls in the bubble next to us.

I knock on the would-be door jamb.

"Hello, I'm from the bubble next door, would you guys like to smoke?"

Politely, they declined the offer. I was left with the two crazies climbing the sculpture and spouting nonsense. We finished the bowl and made a go at the chapel. Faust started playing on the Grand Piano and it was fantastic. I quiet the soul and obeyed the crescendoes willingly. Up, Up, Here we go, get ready it will fall out presently..........exhale, and down we go.

Godfrey lit candles while I wasn't paying attention. I had run out into the bathroom in the hallway and taken a solid two feet of paper to write raw horrorible poetry that was streaming out of my altered conciousness. The words were meaningless and impractical. But I looked up and saw Godfrey with the candles and almost died.

He was preaching. The twin beacons of church candle's hung over the altar and ebbed through the room and unholy light. For the pious this was a place of prayer. For the dispassionate and apathetic, it was a place of solace. For the rogue, uncultured, unbaptized element, it was a place of great fear. Nothing in the world is as frightening as the halls of something that is charged with more that heat and electricity. Nothing is as frightening to the burgeoning intellectual as the idea of raw, blind, unwavering faith.

It does not quiet the soul of a scholar.

Faust was running out of material to play from rhote memory. Godfrey proclamations were growing more sacrilegious. Much as this was Brown, and much as falsifying the Gospel in the Chapel seemed perfectly in line with the Brunonian Dream, I became convinced that we were tempting and awful fate. There are three things in this world you cannot fuck with lightly. Faith, principally, can accept no ridiculousness.

So I ran up to the Choir balcony and stood surveying the scene. My memory flashed- an uneasy parallel- two weeks before the scene was similar but frightfully different. For a moment I saw the Rave at the loft on Matthewson, and everything was undone. It was an impossible connection, and struggling out of the link, I fell backwards down the stairs and almost killed myself.

I got back (eventually) to the top of the stairs and found the loft empty save for a partially lit closet to the far left. I opened the door expecting lucifer and the Faustian offer. I had it once before. I have been greatly awaiting the return of my demon, though I still know not how to deal with him.

I called the preacher and we went into the closet. There was a ladder and a light in the attic. We were on the top of the Chapel and able to touch the very flagstone that had constructed Brown two centuries before. A single match would destroy though place. A single spark of love in the loft would undone the Godliness of the chapel. It was SO tempting.

But I grew frightened and we retreated down the ladder. Our vibrations were growing wild. I demanded an exit. The two crazies were refusing treatment. I left out the front because I knew the curtain was falling.

Chapter XVI : The Journalist Re-Emerges

I will set you right into the thick of it:

It is ten of nine, the large Mead, McKim and White State House looms alit like Minas Tirith in the balmy November air. It is noticeably, unseasonably warm. I am walking along the river alone clad in my Birthday suit- Emmanuel, black with Pin Stripes, tailored for last year's Semi-Formal as a gift of my Brother. I lack matching shoes so I substitute reef flip-flops that look almost black in the dim light, and seem almost bad ass against the suit that I am modeling.

I am going to the Brown Daily Herald staff party. There are promises of open bar and 'revelry' in the emails that I have continually recieved. I have just spent 5.5 hours programming Tetris for a class I have come to despise. There is no justification. I deserve to get hammered at this party. It is my right.

So I am alone on the patio to the former Bella Vista restraunt set along the hillside to the WaterPlace Park basin jsut opposite the Providence Place Mall. I go in, cheesy Sinatra and the loud babble of small-talk fills the room. I slide in, nervous. I know about five people on the staff, but with any luck and a lot of free drinks, I might know everyone worth knowing by the end of the night. They are carding at the bar, but an editor gets me a Gin and Tonic and lets me sip it gently while he introduces me to some of the regulars around the office. I shake hands and smile. We are practicing a rite that will become ubiquitious to people of our profession:
"Hello there, I'm Zack."
"Peter"
"What do you do?"
"I write Sports and manage Monday's editorials. You?"
"A little bit of everything"
"Oooooohhh. (Eye brows raise) Are you a first year?"
"You got it."
"I knew it. Every thought about writing Sports? You like Sports? Because I am the incoming Sports Editor and I could really use some solid writers..."

I stroll over to the open bar with my empty G&T and order another one.

"Another Gin and Tonic?"
"Yes, Please... (I register that this is an open bar and that they are letting me order without an ID) Actually, better make that two (wink, a dollar into the tip glass. I will not be carded or bothered about drinks for the rest of the night)."

I turn around and give my spare to an Arts and Culture Writer who takes Photography and the American Novel with me. We joke about Holmes, our TA, discuss his brillance, and ponder his sexuality. She introduces me to her friends, teases me for being a freshmen and suggests intimacy.

A psuedo-mentor, who emailed required praise to me on a Staff requirement, comes over to assist in my drunkeness.

"Dude, we need to do some shots."

We approach the bar. Virgil raises his hand and orders seven Spacenators. I ask him what a spacenator is. He shrugs. An explanation comes later in the night that one of the bartenders invented the drink while messing around in the back one night.

We do a line of seven shots with some other staffers. I shake hands and make more friends. We do another round. I buy a Cosmopolitan and a Gin and Tonic for two beautiful senior girls who can't seem to find their IDs. I smile at the bartender and wink again. She laughs and gives me my drinks. I turn around and do likewise for the girls.

I end up on the balcony overlooking the stirring River Basin and the city of Providence. I smoke Camels with the outgoing editors and joke about their new directions in life. Justin is trying to get a job. Robbie is off to Columbia Journalism. Katie is off to Georgetown Law. I smoke cigarettes and feel badass.

The Journalist is re-emerging. I re-becoming myself.

Hell is 26 hours in the Computer Science Lab with a program that will not finish. Tetris is due in 3 hours, and I am NOWHERE near finishing this thing. Seriously, I have spent hours talking with the TA's trying out code, and really getting absolutely nowhere. God has forsaken me. (I mean that was obvious before this, but now its serious.) God has sent me to purify in this techno-centric hell. I will burn my eyes on a LCD Samsung Monitor until the cones of my irises have been so scorched that I will never again discern between colors again.

This is my penitence. This is the purification of my soul: 27 hours coming up on programming this shit with NO hope for the future.

Can I still drop this class? Can I still pass? I have a 100 right now but fuck me after Tetris has had its course, I might have to drop this class.

Inevitably, someone complained that I had not been keeping up with sober recollections of full scale University debauchery. I apologized, and promised to write more. Enter this post...

Last night was a classic. It wasn't that anything good or fun or exceptional happened, it was more that I got vastly out of my comfort zone, drank to correct for strangeness and ended up spouting wonder on the steps outside my room at 3:30.

It was the last day of sailing for the season and an absolute beauty. A weak northwest wind wound its way through an empty Cranston harbor and puffed longingly against sailboats set against glorious sunsets.

There is much to hope for on nights like that. All of Friday evening lies in front of you- undisturbed, unexplored, undiscovered. I had the quaint idea that I might not drink. I might sit in my room and try what I tired last weekend instead. Edit films until the wee hours, let soccer players who live upstairs have sex til 4 and keep me up crying that it wasn't me.

I did drink. Surprise, Surprise. I ended up playing Mario Kart Drinking on an N64, but frustrated that I could not win or place second for a shot, I got desperate and did 6 shots in the next half hour. I was toasted but not krunk. I rolled through the center of campus drunk and hoping to see Po Ab kids dressed in Western Business for Brown University's Simulation of the Model United Nations.

I had no luck. We rolled back to Keeney and smoked a bit.

Faust and I had already made a go at the green menance. He packed a bowl and asked me if we should do before or after I worked on my MCM project. I said we'd leave to chance. I pulled PLEASURE out of a shuffled stack of Tarot cards and we went off to it.

When I got back to Keeney from whatever it was I was doing (Sigma? Josiah's? Buxton? Grad Center?) I met up with some friends and let them cut my hair. It is half bad. We sat in the hallway and watched clips from Fantasia. Why not? If you are stoned, drunk (i.e. Krunk) and a post modenr heir of the counter culture revolution, then these are the things you need to be doing.

(I look across the quad, with leaves hovering in the crisp November air, and see one of those amazing girls that I would die to be with. She is beautiful always. She is smiling always. She is a Texan, a southerner, and she holds a secret fire New England men cannot resist (understand that the heart of the New England girl is a book of Shakespeare and a pre-destined calculus). She is gone now. Off to something better or more desirable. I am soon after her.)

Riders on the Storm communicates the gentle jazz that is trying to make sense of my stormy soul. Who am I really? Who can I love? I fear finding the truth but missing out on someone to love. What will I do then?

Morning begs off into the afternoon, and I have commitments. Tonight will be no better. I am considering a night of movie-watching in Providence or a trip to Boston. What will suit me? I don't know.

Better go. Life is waiting for me outside the door.