mood: careless music: 'rain king' by sonic youth

Beatniks drive dirty Beetles easily containing crisp cookies and evil bears.

so tuesday was the winter solstice. it got me kinda down. quite pessimistically, i figured that it was the shortest day of the year (9 hours, 20something minutes of daylight) but that from that moment it was only going to get sunnier for the next half year.

lately i've been like stella the diver: always down. (interpol in-joke) i've been up on the long's roof for the last few days, reading my book, palahniuk's choke, and tonight i finished it. it's good. maybe not as good as everyone's been telling me. what it is is extremely intricate. palahniuk is really good at weaving little truths and eye-openers into his plots. there are little literary motifs all throughout the book, as in repeated structures and phrases. at some points, the story reads very much like poetry with fragmented and inversely structured sentences. i give it a 7 out of 10.

so anyways, i finished the book early in the evening, and for some reason, this made me extremely hyper. maybe not optimistic hyper. more like pessimistic hyper. i guess apathetic or nihilistic best describes it. whatever i was, i decided to go to west l.a., more specifically, the westside pavilion, for the sole purpose of the bookstore/cafe. i boosted my pseudo-sugar high with a real sugar high; its medium: a gigantor peanut butter cookie and a double tall breve latte.

afterwards, i walked around the shelves and browsed a few photography books until i made my way to the 'cultural studies' section. here i picked up a book on 'sex, drugs, and rock n' roll'; sometimes i just can't refuse a good cliche. after flipping through it for a few minutes, a tall skinny indian man asked me for the time. i gave it to him, but he didn't go away right away. he asked if we'd met before, and we hadn't so i told him just that. quite randomly, he started to go off as i politely listened and every once in a while chimed in. i forgot his name (something very indian), but i do remember he moved here from new jersey and goes to usc now. i guess he picked up that things were going to get awkward fast, because our conversation dissolved like *snap*. meanwhile, i got back to my book.

having finished my page-hovering antics, i scanned for a new book in 'cultural studies'. a hand-drawn illustration caught my eye: a woman wearing a black dress seated at a cafe, obviously european because of the background architecture. she held between her index and middle fingers a long black tube with a cigarette attached and lit. she had a mole in just the right place. the title of the book: The Bohemian Manifesto. if anyone was standing remotely close, they would've noticed my eyes widening and glimmering. i snatched it up and read the first chapter. i've always loved the 60's: mods and bohos, free love and beat poetry, james bond and twiggy.

i read through this author's interpretation of bohemia and found a lot of things i agreed with. i spent about four hours at the bookstore and escaped just before closing time, but before i left, i took a quiz at the end of the book. 'which boho are you?' or something to that effect. i didn't have anything to write with or on, so i used that sentence i opened with to remember my responses to the 11 questions. so it turns out i'm:

4/11 beat
3/11 nouveau
2/11 gypsy
1/11 dandy
1/11 zen

it figures i'm mostly beat. beat stands for, you guessed it, beatnik types, coffee and cigarettes and poetry and all that lost generation stuff. nouveau actually has more to do with my financial situation. basically, nouveau bohemians are the heaven-sent friends. they're the guys or gals with the money and no inhibitions on where and how to spend it. carefree cashflow is what nouveau bohos supply. (not that you would ever take advantage of them...)

---Goei---