Marry Me Squeaky Fromme
Dear All,
I leave Minneapolis forever in two days. I'm writing this from my neighborhood cafe due to lack of internet connection. A few days ago I finally found a reliable wireless network, and then God sought to punish me for Youtube-surfing by making it password-protected.
I guess that this is sort of by definition one of those watershed summers full of growth and what not-- or in my case lots of social young-progressive-in-the-city cliches and barely making ends meet and immersing myself in idiotic cultural white noise.
Friends came, friends went. Strings of hookah sessions and going to West Bank bars and weird parties in Dinkytown and stumbles home through Powderhorn and midnight swimming at Lake Nokomis. Somehow the complete sentence doesn't work for descriptions like that-- I need to put it in a list or a schematic, or go the opposite route and put it in a sheer ecstatic burst of interjections and oblique sequences of adjectives and adverbs, modifiers without a modified, all grounded by my own obsession with place. So let's run with that.
TEN PERSONAL RESONANCES OF THE SUMMER:
1. The drawings made from each page of Gravity's Rainbow, Walker Art Museum
2. The murder of Kitty Genovese, Queens, NY, 1964
3. The Television Personalities' "This Angry Silence," as listened to in my livingroom
4. The view of the Minneapolis skyline from Powderhorn Park at night
5. The crowds of Somali and Oromo immigrants on Cedar Avenue
6. The disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste, off the Spanish coast, 1872
7. The memory of sitting on a rock in the middle of Low Lake, Minnesotan North Woods, 2005
8. The Turk, a false chess-playing robot, burned in Philadelphia, 1854
9. The color of the sunset glistening in the polluted water of Lake Hiawatha
10. The crushed cans of beer on a cold night at the base of the mound in Matthews Park
But it was nice, I think, to situate myself here-- on a grid curving against the Mississippi, interspersed with lakes and waterfalls. In two weeks, I'll be back at my listless college studies, dealing with drama and alienation and any of the other hallmarks of my existence thusfar. I mean, obviously this isn't deterministic in any way-- I definitely have choices in this matter, but what are my other options? Complete isolation from other people, either via detachment or non-communication. Fuck being an embittered pop culture junkie, fuck those discussions that go Three's Company/Belle & Sebastian/Logan's Run/Shaft/Baudrillard, fuck college culture in general. But it's equally unhealthy to turn that exterior fire inwards. But maybe these are just the thoughts that flood a nostalgic mind, packing up my possessions and about to point my beat-up Camry back towards Iowa.
I leave Minneapolis forever in two days. I'm writing this from my neighborhood cafe due to lack of internet connection. A few days ago I finally found a reliable wireless network, and then God sought to punish me for Youtube-surfing by making it password-protected.
I guess that this is sort of by definition one of those watershed summers full of growth and what not-- or in my case lots of social young-progressive-in-the-city cliches and barely making ends meet and immersing myself in idiotic cultural white noise.
Friends came, friends went. Strings of hookah sessions and going to West Bank bars and weird parties in Dinkytown and stumbles home through Powderhorn and midnight swimming at Lake Nokomis. Somehow the complete sentence doesn't work for descriptions like that-- I need to put it in a list or a schematic, or go the opposite route and put it in a sheer ecstatic burst of interjections and oblique sequences of adjectives and adverbs, modifiers without a modified, all grounded by my own obsession with place. So let's run with that.
TEN PERSONAL RESONANCES OF THE SUMMER:
1. The drawings made from each page of Gravity's Rainbow, Walker Art Museum
2. The murder of Kitty Genovese, Queens, NY, 1964
3. The Television Personalities' "This Angry Silence," as listened to in my livingroom
4. The view of the Minneapolis skyline from Powderhorn Park at night
5. The crowds of Somali and Oromo immigrants on Cedar Avenue
6. The disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste, off the Spanish coast, 1872
7. The memory of sitting on a rock in the middle of Low Lake, Minnesotan North Woods, 2005
8. The Turk, a false chess-playing robot, burned in Philadelphia, 1854
9. The color of the sunset glistening in the polluted water of Lake Hiawatha
10. The crushed cans of beer on a cold night at the base of the mound in Matthews Park
But it was nice, I think, to situate myself here-- on a grid curving against the Mississippi, interspersed with lakes and waterfalls. In two weeks, I'll be back at my listless college studies, dealing with drama and alienation and any of the other hallmarks of my existence thusfar. I mean, obviously this isn't deterministic in any way-- I definitely have choices in this matter, but what are my other options? Complete isolation from other people, either via detachment or non-communication. Fuck being an embittered pop culture junkie, fuck those discussions that go Three's Company/Belle & Sebastian/Logan's Run/Shaft/Baudrillard, fuck college culture in general. But it's equally unhealthy to turn that exterior fire inwards. But maybe these are just the thoughts that flood a nostalgic mind, packing up my possessions and about to point my beat-up Camry back towards Iowa.