opening

oolong hi is highly refined japanese moonshine mixed in equal parts with low grade dark oolong tea, typically of the pet-bottled variety. iced. a delicious travesty of both good liquor and promise proffered by oolong. but very drinkable. somehow metonomic. japan, velvet rut usa, both very drinkable, dericious even, accent on the r, but both, somehow, wasteful, riddled with holes and bottled in plastic. i meant to set up this blog a year ago to record some of the things i was emailing home from japan, but when i was there it refused to let me set it up in english. or maybe it was some other site, and i didn't want to do live journal because that's what the kids were listening to. not sure why. because. i am a kid too, just with earned money in the bank and a degree from a fine southern institution in uselessness and an ongoing defense/ offense with my mother about how long i will last as a career waitress/ vagabond/ champion of artful poverty/ free from paper towels/dilettante and the like. i plan on taking off sooner or later again. the middle tends towards the middle, except that now we're in the middle school pop-bottle experiment about emulsion, all being shaken. oil and kool-aid lava-lamp. if i were better at working days than nights, i would probably go into to some more political thing. but. i hate the khakis as much as i love my sewing machine. and i'm still trying to figure out if witnessing is enough, if, as i suspect, that the most ethical path for some of us comes from a politics of the everyday and has as much to do with sightedness and not being an asshole as anything else. and voting. why blog it? who doesn't want their diary published given that by some standards, the success of people in the arts is measured by our public access to their documents, their sketchbooks, matchbooks and the like. funny how many consonant "l" words refer to bodily functions or negative actions- slog, slurp, blab, blather, slap, sly, slip, slop, blow. so for a while this will be running both retroactively and forward, as i sort through the last year's worth of writing, and have the new stuff.

part of this is also motivated by an obsession with the degree to which real experience is now being mirrored, -meta-ed, metastasized by the web. i'm something of a luddite, i don't believe in airconditioning, prefer vinyl, etc, but i still find myself looking up the names of people i know late at night to see where they are, if they're mentioned, where they work. also, random strings of keywords, to see whether i or people i know have in some way been recorded or connected- red head teahouse waitress corset. sylph like new wave poetry live arts. cape cod trailer park architecture school buddhist meditation. sexual cypher male wednesday adams. french-kissing contest charlottesville. hookah bar bad service. cryogenic indie rocker. failed phd motorcycle enthusiast. i know a man who waxes his mustache. it seems to me that, with everything there, these things should exist again. more complete. occasionally i just look up my name (cordelia) but apparently, buffy the vampire slayer has sabotaged my parent's desire for their daughter to bear a unique and culturally loaded name. i find a lot of fan-fic. at least i never find the nudie pics. that's good i guess.