ooh, so i ended up in niagara falls last night also, paul had a performance in this building we had to find with bad directions, so it was a kind of scavenger hunt. (i have always thought having one on elmwood or allen would be so fun where clues are revealed by spending time in various shops and/or bars. probably bars.)
so yeah, it was in this old high school, which we finally found, but first got lost on the most desolate, abandoned, burned out shells of former streets i have ever seen. it was like a ghost town ghetto. i am rarely scared of neighborhoods but i was truly frightened. we kept going down dead end streets with these ghastly turnarounds.
so we finally get to the old high school, part of which has been converted to artists' galleries/space but the rest empty and desolate.... -- in the lockers were gum wrappers and i love charles and whatnot, binka baby and bugs wuz here class of 92--- exploring places like that is great fun in that what was once a structure in a citadel is now just a mostly purposeless building that a lot of people left something in. it is fascinating to me. someday when we destroy our planet and hence ourselves, this kind of thing will be the anthropological evidence we leave for future(?) humans (or other) to piece together. super fun, huh?

mind.

it is seriously fucked up, this place. it has a hold on people like i have never seen anywhere else in the country, not that i've spent large amounts of time in any one other place but.... people who leave for supposedly greener pastures always end up "coming home" this is fine because i'm in my 'i like it here' phase (right now) but there are times when i hate it here and can't wait to get the fuck out and live in a *real* city. whatever that means.
what really gets my goat tho, is especially if you were raised here, it's ingrained from frickin infancy to think small. anything that might qualify as a 'big dream' seems so impossible. new york and toronto are around the corner, but almost everyone i know has gone to school here (hey, i'm not knocking our fine learning institutions) and wants to stay here and work and live. again, fine, but if you have a dream, it *can* be pursued-- i have a weird theory (hm, it might be from being raised here) that if you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere. still, maybe it's the beast of burden which is now so shortly upon us, but buffalonians are not people of great expectations. (which i am reading right now, it's a masterpiece i think.) it is a bit sad, and strugglesome.

a friend was telling me about frustration in the grocery line when , as a strange vu (there are two others besides deja: presque vu (almost seen) is when upon experiencing something, you feel as if you came pretty close to experiencing the same thing previously but can't put a finger on it, and jamais vu (never seen, which is when, upon experiencing something, you know you never have before but can't shake the feeling that yes indeed you *have* (this is the strangest of the vu s to me: those wacky frenchies)) ANYway--a strange vu came over me in that i recalled this time a very long time ago at the grocery line when an old woman struck up a conversation with me about my knitted hat, and what a great time we had, and i later wrote about it in these old fashioned things called notebooks. but how if my friend never mentioned her grocery line experience, or if perchance i never found or read the notebook, i wouldn't have remembered it so in effect, it never really existed. encapsulating things in memory makes it real, and so i have a hard time with the past as i retain details and information of experiences only very vaguely. i can remember the odd smell of the mouthwash my deceased grandmother used much more so than anything she said to me or things we did together. my friend with an incredibly detailed and accurate memory often exclaims "you don't REMEMBER that?!?!?!!??!!!?" but then i find her meticulous cataloguing kind of useless, and a bit lacking in color. she remembers events pretty much how they occur. is this normal? memory to me is like a very old quilt, hand dyed fabric, individually sewn stitches, many varied patches making a pattern. every so often a square that was hidden will reveal itself, and it can bring you to tears, that that's a part of it, but you forgot.

i feel this is the verb my tv is practicing all the time. it is much stronger than mere hypnotizing. i once made a comic about a little alien that lives inside of tv's and sucks brain waves and feeds them to big government, who in turn secretly allows the aliens to a) inhabit our planet and b) keep some of the brain waves for themselves, which are like candy or cake to them. they ran out of brain waves on their planet.

given that i feel this way, i should probably beat up my tv with a baseball bat and murther the alien with a butcher knife. also known as a chef's knife. also known as a french knife.

here i is, cause where the recipies at? ain't none, til me. yeah, thass right... i saw a funny thing on the tv about our genius prez in yet another brilliant address to the nation. he said, quote, in that friggin annoying "recap" style he uses for EVERYTHING, "lines of communication are now open.. (characteristic 5 second pause).. the left hand now knows what the right hand is doing." except as he did this he gestured which hand was which... and got it wrong. ha ha!! surprised anyone?

matt, the tortoise is hilarious in that picture since he looks 5 times his normal size. and scary! (which he isn't, so it's funny)

i just realized yesterday that i possess nothing that requires me to purchase insurance for. well, except a body, but that's ridiculous state of affairs anyway. why did the days pass when you'd give the good doctor a basket of eggs and sew him some curtains as payment. maybe half a heffer when killin time come. alas.