Well, let's write down what 29 year old Keith has to say.This is a journal from this past summer

Walking exerscises the imagination quoth Celine. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That's it's strength.

Stoners are highly organized houseplants.

A dispute between neighbors at ABC No Rio. The guy says "I'm a vampire. The time I sucked my brother's blood, I only regret it a little.

July 4th. Neponsit Beach, Listening to Television (the band). I feel music taking a renewed importance in my life following the Saturn's Returns, recoping with my new refocused personality.

Constantly, I'm floundering in the digital age, yet in many ways, I'm adjusting to it better than most. Missing my lo-fi analog Chicago days. It was rock and roll as fuck for a little while there. Rock and roll doesn't leave much time for creative expression or, let's face it, any aspect of organized civilization.

Grandchildren will read these words someday. Hello future! Are there flying cars yet?

The day bagan at 6:10 pm with a shirtless walk up 5th Ave. I'm the only white man who takes his shirt off in midtown Manhattan. Perhaps it will catch on and I will be a zeitgeist. Summer must be so uncomfortable for the old.

I'm at Galapagos listening to a Marching Band blasting in my ears. Life has reached the coolness of cinema at this moment. There's something miraculous about getting this amount of people together. The performers outnumber the audience.

It's been wonderful to watch the transformation of my friends into adults. We've inherited a hot and sick world. We're the good guys, or at least the good enough guys.

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND 20 YEAR OLD

Happy Thanksgiving. Lacking creative impulse, but desiring to put something on my blog, I just pulled out one of my old journals from college and started typing some of the more interesting lines. Lots of references to classical works, so I assume this was in the Fall of 2001 when I took some classes on Dante and Homer. After the 9/11 attacks, so I was pretty bummered the entire year. In 2001, I was 20 old years and much more serious than I am now. I hope I'm a better writer, too. Anyways, here's to memory.

The Trojan War is regenerative. No afterlife is hinted in the Iliad. Dark Mist. Nothingness. In war, the process of living is stalled. Hades exists in the aftermath.

In the Odyssey, Hell is the deteoriation of society. Odysseus mourns the afterimages of used-up men. The dead know the past and future, but cannot know the present. A circular concept of time.

Human features are shaped by inertia and force. There is a mix of both qualities in the features of James and Harriet. Theirs is a life lived long. I don't know whether it is by ignorance, innocence, or creativity that country people's houses eviscerate the lives of their tenants-cozy and full of icons like a lady chapel

All this education has turned me inward to self-attention.

My computer came back to life today.

Sooner or later, memories of my ex-girlfriend, something I read in the paper about a winning Megabucks lottery ticket being sold from a small convenience store in New Jersey. Something about the memories of my ex-girlfriend, the lottery story, what my grandmother once said mixing in my head with a layman's knowledge of Sartre in my head giving a notion about the futility of even the purest intentions and soon I'm sitting on the stoop sobbing to myself just because.

I concede that the old downtown was gutted out before I was born. There is very little I can confess to sharing with my mother's memories as a child from the same town. Memories of Saturday afternoons on the street.

Without zoning laws or people resigning to be told what the can do with their damn land, the storefront face of the South seems malleable and messy as quicksilver. A Civil War battlefield can become a Wal-Mart, as quickly as a tanning salon can become a Living Gospel Assembly church.

I feel my worst quality is that I draw away from people I love while also needing them near.

If I was any more mundane and boring as I feel I am now, I would become tangible only in the form of pre-packaged lozenges sold in blister strips of ten at Walgreens.

I'm becoming unreasonably blameful at my family for being so grounded. I have plenty of room to fulfill my own Abe Lincoln-forged myth of rising above my rusticated roots. I don't know why, but I think about Abe Lincoln more than I think about anything else.

The Krystal commercials encourage you to take home a sackful of hamburgers today. I just drank a sackful of beers.

Readingthe recent article in the NYT about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a crafty $1.6 billion dollar Swiss clock which in addition to telling the time, also reads dark matter from cosmic rays, I'm struck with regret that I never paid attention in math class.
What sucks about being a liberal arts major is that scientists often invent things that promise to solve your lifelong search for meaning, but whose utility, function, and purpose sends you running to the bathroom for aspirin.
I can think of two specific examples. The first is the Large Hadron Collider, a device whose operation is so abstruse for the laymen, I couldn't even understand its function when Hollywood digitally spelled it out for me in Angels and Demons.
The second is The Super Kamiokande
From the moment I laid eyes on it, I couldn't help but want one for myself. A 3,200-foot deep cavern of photo-multiplier jellyfish bots surrounded by ultra-purified water and two little guys in orange jumpsuits rafting around. Why do I love it? Perhaps because the name and image alone conjures up the Crash Man stage in Mega Man 2.It's cute and eerie in the way that so many Japanese things are cute and eerie. But what, oh, what, does it do? Let's check their website

We have discovered neutrino oscillations by SK which was started its data taking in 1996. This discovery has revealed that neutrinos have finite masses, which was previously considered to be massless, --a clue to a new theoretical frame-work of the elementally particle physics. K2K experiment has confirmed the neutrino oscillation by using the man-made neutrinos.

Well, it doesn't help that the entire website is in Engrish, but I just don't understand what the hell any of this means or why it has to be so deep underground to discover why neutrinos have masses. Why is it important? What's the value of finding this information? And inevitably I always stumble across that spooky and confounding term one finds in every science article.

The 23% of them is found to be a dark matter which does not emit light, but can be observed by gravity. The dark matter is expected to be a new elementary particle. The direct observation of the dark matter will be a great help to understand the structure of the universe.

"Dark Matter." I feel it's important to understand dark matter, to grok this concept so as to understand what the hell is going on and why I'm sitting here, me, this self incarnate in a body. But then I realize that to understand dark matter, I would first have to understand matter, by which I would have to first understand atoms, which might actually require me to do some math which calls to mind Mark McConkey stabbing himself with a protractor in 9th grade and textbooks which had covers that looked like this, but insides that looked like this and I just can't go back there.

If I still drank, I'd be pretty bummed that Four Loko was being taken off the market. For a young burgeoning drunk in the mid-oughties, energy-infused malt liquors seemed to be the most interesting development in alcohol since. . . well, man first crushed grapes. At no point in its history has the sublime kick of booze been augmented. I spent about eight good years solely devoted to task of discovering what the quintessence of being drunk is, and I submit my findings thusly:


"It makes people wanna commit incest."

Of course, we've spent milleniae attributing a Willy Wonka grimoire of different psychoactive qualities to different distillations of what is simply a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules:

"Tequila makes you feisty." "Vodka is friendly." "Beer calms you down." "Jagermeister is liquid cocaine." "Pernod makes you hallucinate." "Scotch is nostalgic" "Whisky is spiritual" ad infinitum.
In truth, Sparks Energy malt liquor, with its tangy mix of guarana, taurine, Siberian ginseng, and caffeine, was the only beverage that actually delivered on it's promise of being a different headkick.
I remember one hot July Summer night in Chicago back in 2006, there was an outdoor concert, Intonation Fest, sponsored by Sparks and Vice Magazine. At the concession stand, a twelve ounce beer was $5 while a sixteen ounce Sparks was $4, so, you know, do the math. It was a ginormous amount of people in the dead heat and the entire body politic was hepped on energy booze. As the Boredoms began playing their catastrophic drum set, I remember a mania and insanity coursing through the audience like a Bill Haley and the Comets concert behind the Iron Curtain. The potential for bedlam was everywhere. By the time Ghostface Killah mounted the stage, the thousands of us had melted like ice cream into a sweaty, flesh-walled slurry of hemmorhaging pheromones. We were a stupid bull cow, like Katja Kassin being finished by a purple-polychrome centipede dildo courtesy of the mandingus general.
Suffice to say, the stuff was poison, but I ain't forgetting such days anytime soon.
I feel old as I actually find myself supporting the ban of a substance. Me, the libertarian who believes every home ought to have a marijuana crop protected by Smith & Wesson actually in favor of banning a substance or at least suing the bastards. Why? Because with its fluorescent urban camo can, I think you're marketing it to kids. It has the same wacky can that appeals to those in love with the acrylic, epoxy-gooey world of toy guns and Nerf. I'm sure the manufacturers were targeting frat boys and guys from New Jersey, and it's no fault of the manufacturers that douchebags are into the same color schemes little kids are into. .
I think of the way I drank when I was 19, and I'm sure I would have been the kid whose heart exploded on this stuff. The problem lies in that alcohol is the only thing substance that, for whatever reason, one occasionally drinks twelve of, without intention to. It's a trucker's speedball.
So, I say, take it off the market as a alco-pop and re-introduce it under a brand name geared towards men in their early thirties. Dress it up. Have Ralph Steadman design the label and emboss David Foster Wallace's suicide letter scrawled in tortured longhand along the sweet gleaming lip of the bottle. . . Give it a puzzling brand name like "Quantum of Chappaquidick." Then I'll buy it.