crinkle-crush of leaf underfoot

the after-enjoyment of experience is profound.
have you ever noticed, doing whatever it is in life that you are magnetized to do, that there is no purple ring of light around it? there is no shimmering cloud-edge, no cartoon thought-bubble that encapsulates it into a single, defined moment? that time all blurs and twists together; paper-maché strips that lose their identity in somehow forming a larger, more prevailing consciousness of who you are? do you remember how to make a paper-maché giraffe? you start with a balloon-animal, a hollow-shape, a form that is really based around a void. when you've glued enough colorful comic strips onto it and let them concretize, you can pop the balloon. it will stand on its own webbed bonds and architecture. it remains even though the superfine, extremely vulnerable structure beneath it - the thing that gave it shape in the first place - is gone.

why is it that matches feels so...mediocre most of the time? not, though, in the sense that you would probably expect. moreso he means that when he watches his thoughts as they pass, he doesn't notice too much polarization in any particular emotional direction. things happen, they are experienced and processed, and he is usually tipped slightly onto the 'happy' side of the tightrope as opposed to the sad. he tries to be optimistic, you see. this is the way that life passes in front of his eyes from moon to moon.

it all feels too plain~ and then this interesting thing happens. when he looks back on all the memories, which happens rather often, they have acquired something. some tinge of static, some splash of paint...he isn't sure exactly what, but it is there. it makes bright days seem brighter, and dark days seem, heavy. important. maybe darker, but not in a manner which amplifies the despair they perhaps held. they seem like valuable things; snowglobes to be marveled at and turned over in your hand. seashells to be put up to your ear. there is this strange nostalgia; reflection maybe; which filters and squeezes. juices moments for all they they hold or could be imagined to hold. makes memories fluctuate and sparkle, like having fireworks only once a year.

but it wasn't there to start with. why wasn't it there to start with? was it filtered out for economization? overlooked? was it a dash and a pinch, for flavor, added later? how would life feel, if memories were just as moments are? would it not be interesting, dramatic, emotionally-charged enough for us? do we take photographs to remember, or so that we can trigger this retouching? matches imagines that we have all had moments where we were upset, or exhausted, or surly; everything was wrong or unimportant in that moment and we wanted out. somehow they have the ability to butterfly into these incredibly captivating and nostalgic remembrances. somehow roadtrips, with all their dullness and tiring of our friends' constant presences, turn into these charming boxed moments that we love to pack up and take with us. somehow the most stressful times of our lives are character-building, laughable in retrospect.
matches' laptop battery is just about cashed, but what he would like to say is that he seeks a way to find access to these thoughts and emotions while the moment is still live. of course they are there...always there...but he wants to be able to channel his emotions in such a way that he can experience the full amplification of a moment as it passes (he would probably behave precisely like a crazy person if he found it, so make sure to check before committing him to any institution). it happens, of course, on occasion~ watching storm winds brewing; leaves throttling around on invisible tides. watching children play in water fountains and eat triple-scoop ice cream cones. these are appreciable things. but he wants a midas' touch of enlightenment; he wants the children to also be able to realize the intensity and the joy of their moment. and he isn't sure if that is possible.

how can you give that to a person? life. appreciation and awareness. if there is one thing that he has learned in the past while, it is that you cannot teach something to someone until they are ready to learn it. matches is not even sure he is ready to learn his own thoughts...hopefully that's why he fumbles with them like this~

mattress' shirt says "young for life", and it has an abstraction of a tree on it. dig upon that.

life in two-dimensions //

yesterday mattress walked into powell's (fyi, the most colossal bookstore known to maybe all of north america), and was stunned into repose by the cathedral column bookshelves that towered over his head. standing there in the aisles, he got a delirious spinning-sense that there is an immense amount to the world that our minds just cannot wrap themselves around in order to function in a day-to-day capacity. here is this hive of information...walk through it with a favorite author in mind, or subject yourself to the endless confusion and contemplation of what these volumes hold inside of themselves. worlds, really. if you have no point of reference to gravitate to, then you are thrown to the chopping waves of chance and drift along until something catches your eye, some book that you pull out (or does it pull you out) because it is somehow harmonious with your own personality - some reason to extract it from the endless rows and pull yourself through the frame of its vision into, who can say where. matches, standing amongst these small swirling worlds, deep within the honeycomb of possible thoughts and adventures that can be forcefully cracked into. injected into your moments like a perception-altering drug. matches, thinking thought is a form of escapism.
imagination is a powerful thing...but what really is imagination if it truly is a thought that revolves itself through the gears of your head? what makes objects more real, more truthful, than thoughts? what strips them of their ability to be pawned off as just 'mere' imagination?

"just. what a horrible, candle-snuffing word."
~ finding neverland

to stroll down that path and let a random book select him was an engaging experience. it was probably more notable than most things that happen to matches in a common hour. it had peasant-like simplicity and also more complexity than is calculable. but mostly it was nice and he was throttled to some bendy-space, some taffied time that someone had thought up at some point and scribbled down. it was a neuron is his mind, a neuron for specifically that moment and that action, that never would have been electrified into consciousness except in that exact snapshot it was, all seemingly by adventure and gamble (could not decide between the two words, so they orbit). but it makes up a part of matches now (though the pie-chart would be too colorful and delicious, celestial strawberry-rhubarb) and that is what he finds romantic and seductive about literature.

now matches is sitting deep in the catacombs (no, really) of a delightfully enchanting coffee shop, and it is the same thing, and again the same thing. this is a space that there was no map for previously (in his mind); it was a grey void behind the picture-frame. and what matches means to say by that is that there is so confusingly much to explore in this world, that we take things in two-dimensions until we have reason (or perhaps we piggy-back onto randomness like riding a bus to the end of the line) to explore them. there are houses and shops lining every street, but we don't see their complexities and charms, we don't throw our fishing-lines of sense and perception into them. you see how the streets are becoming the bookshelves, and there are stories there, and what are they? the houses that matches sees are just photographs, one dimensional as jeff might critique in people, shallow...all these words fit together marvelously. there is some thread running between them, and it is stories and thought, and minds and people just like us. it is a history and a palette of emotions. and matches walked down the street with sarah two days ago, and she remarked on the beauty of a house...and the beauty was there certainly, but in the same way that with photographs of aspen groves you do not get the whipped mountain winds and the exhale as they wind through the tambourine-leaves. because it turned out that sarah had been a nanny at that particular house, and there were stories behind her eyes; there was depth to her picture, popping out through the seams in red and blue lines that m just didn't have the glasses for.

it is the same way with everything, with the world. there are tastes and fabric textures and perfumes (ah, the perfumes), unexpected-until-arrived-at associations, and it makes mattress shudder, in a good sort of way (for the most part), to be absurdly lost amongst them. those doorway-spaces coming or going where you are warm, or cold, and then the precise opposite temperature rushes past/through you, and well you might have to get matches drunk to get him to let slip what that rippling sensation reminds him of. but that is only somewhat the point.

what are some of your potted moments, planted and just waiting to be watered with expression? matches is a curious cat, in any sense of the word you would like to apply~

jack of a trade or two

sitting again in a coffee shop serving the never-disappointing "stumptown" coffee, matches is looking up from his laptop screen every so often to find many other people around his same age doing the same. we are currently the derelicts, the loiterers, the...unemployed : ) and as he watches them, he realizes that we are all webbed together on craigslist, vying for post after post in the jobs section. our eyes aren't so feral as you might expect when we gaze glazedly at one another, considering that we are probably in direct competition for positions (coffee-shoppers generally having the same chances, matches assumes, of landing a job...considering our patchwork rag-doll resumes of skipping from industry-to-industry just to keep our heads above water and try to keep out of boredom; salting our liberal arts degrees with mediocrity and street-smarts). we are actually quite congenial people, and we flash smiles at one another. our jobs have probably already been promised to sons and daughters of executives; the job-postings just a necessary formality of business-class standards. and we know it~

matches knows he will probably just be federal-blackbooked for mentioning it. but communism is just so appealing sometimes. bryan told matches the other day about a sedition movement that is gaining speed in oregon, washington, and a fragment of western canada -- to separate ourselves from our respective unions and form a new country. charming idea. will post the website once he remembers it. he just wishes that he didn't have to bend his mind to fit into little office cubes just to stay a decent citizen...he wishes he could ramble on like he wants to and divide his time as he will, and it will be alright because everyone else is doing the same thing, and working co-operatively, instead of this cloak-and-dagger thing that we have going on now. le sigh.

but really he knows he is very far from having drawn the short straw, and everything is okay. just frustrating sometimes.

does the exorbitantly-priced artwork on coffee shop walls really sell? does it keep these colorful people afloat? or do they all have timber-pile rooms in their studio-apartments where tapestries are thrown over vast rolling hills of unsought and discarded artwork? m typed in 'unbought', and spell-check had a problem with it, but he thinks that as far as a substitution and electro-recommendation 'unsought' works quite well. don't you?

been here for too long, and something that these baristas are doing smells like french toast. improbable. time to traipse through downtown in search of the next big thing. tune in next time; maybe matches will have found it. you have to know that's coming, right?

right?

the nu-nu

as matches is sitting in the midst of a theater/cafe called 'the living room', his mind naturally directs itself to a question of fluctuation and newness. well to be honest it was all started by this amazing mushroom and cheese crepe that he is enjoying at said cafe. everything is different here. to start with; mattress sits in an amazing contemporary-style lounge that also happens to be an independent movie theater (theatre? wouldn't want to offend their classiness). enjoying a crepe the likes of which you could only find in europe (not that he has been). he could, were the moment right and no immediate future obligations present, get ridiculously boozed-up on twelve-dollar drinks and stumble into a movie which probably only a relative handful of people in the nation get an opportunity to see. also currently only on the internet thanks to the city of portland's free downtown-wide wifi access. hint: you're supposed to have said "cool" to yourself after each one of the previous sentences~ and just went to use the bathroom, and it is amazing and marbled and if you know matches that well at all then you will probably know that this is how he rates most places. because if they take the time to spruce up the proverbial bathroom goose (what?) they get somehow a trio of thumbs-up from him.

the heart of the question is that matches wonders, which is better for one overall? crisp new experiences, or much-appreciated staples? admittedly if that is the question, then the previous examples are not such good ones. still. went to a sky-bar with sarah last night and got a few drinks; sarah, a martini times two. when matches asked what she found so appealing about martinis, she basically replied that they were always somewhat different at every locale and she enjoyed the vast variety of tastes that were to be found in this same-shaped stemmed-glass. she appreciated always being given something new, and that she would never again receive this same martini. it was in kind with the blonde in 'sideways' explaining why she is so into wine, but hit much closer to home as sarah is someone matches personally knows and whose tastes he has come to respect. actors saying something profound will never quite compare with someone you know saying it right next to you through their own medium. love to see the cinematic occur outside the confines of the cinema. something special about sunsets and confessionals.

m is starting to have seen a fair bit of places outside of colorado, and he cannot decide about what it means to his personality to have done so. on the one side, it could be said that he is much more worldly, and has developed certain parts of himself that must remain constant and steeled against external winds. probably would agree with this point. on the other side, being exposed to so much more has bleach-burnt some ideas of himself that he previously had, completely flooding and washing them out (hello, photographers, could not forget you). was a little sad for the people he saw still being in colorado, not having proper motivation to have been drawn in to another event's horizon, but also very much envied the stability that they seemed to exhibit, both in themselves and their lives. suffice it to say that matches often feels churned and rocked bothways and cannot sometimes find the proper ground to foot. which is exciting but also exhausting and oft frustrating.

it's brilliantly difficult to set up a value system for what sort of person you want to become, and even more problematic to foresee how your environment will shape you into whatever ideals you may decide upon. but matches has seen enough of people to know that everyone needs or thirsts for a certain degree of stability. whether that can be better obtained by constantly uprooting and seeing what small gemstones remain solid and hard within yourself, or by remaining stationary and finding deeper intricacies in your pooled world that you can appreciate allthemore, beginning to glimmer in caught sunlight as you brush away all the usual superfluities...antimatter cannot say. m respected thoreau a great deal, and he was an advocate of the latter. perhaps there is always a balance, and for every degree of frustration you feel at remaining in place, you must express it by digging deeper and finding different treasures than most people are at a level of seeking. and perhaps when you shuffle your deck over and over, you begin to seek some pieces of home and comfort within yourself and your surroundings.

"follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect each new hour."
~ h.d. thoreau

matt has died of cholera

well...matches has made it to portland. there was much less hunting of buffalo and fording of rivers than 'the oregon trail' would have you believe. and as expected, he got a little down after arriving...don't know what it is about changing locations, but it occasions something maybe chemical that makes him sad. overall very excited, especially about the area, but also reflective of what he has left behind in california and colorado. grumblehum.

and he doesn't have a chair or a bed to speak of. very restless movements about the apartment : ) until chris arrives with all of his household amenities, things will be rustic indeed, even on the thirteenth floor, where you would expect everything to be gem-studded. or at least deficient of plastic primary colors that weren't postmodern art-deco.

item: let it be known that idaho has by far the worst, most angry nighttime drivers. there were shady exchanges just inside of both borders and on throughout the state. very curious. are you angry that matches passed you since he feels like driving slightly faster, or just because of the state you live in? matches is talking to you, silver corolla S. isn't it funny how we identify cars on the road merely by the slight observations we can gather from their exteriors? "come on, texas...get over, texas." m has toyed with the idea of having license plates be cell phone numbers instead. it has a couple pluses and a couple minuses~

applying for jobs comprises some of the worst few months that mattress has experienced over his short life. there must be a better way to do this. we read minimalist job descriptions grouped into categories of specialization (to make us feel special, even if that group may be 'clerical' or 'service expert'), and make some decisions based upon what little someone scripted about what their company does. need more...need perhaps a short online video about the people in the office, and their day-to-day thoughts and patterns regarding the ever-ambiguous 'work'. half the time one goes to an interview and decides that the position is not nearly so appealing as a short paragraph made it seem; it is all hidden in the specifics.

maybe matches could be a between-the-lines analyst for job-hunters and employers...digging deeper into listings and applicants than is usually expressed.

the whole job situation is so surface-level. even the resume is silly...let us see a few unoriginal, templated lines into which you need to squeeze yourself somewhere, usually only by means of the application of a pronoun, or two if you're feeling saucy. if m ever starts a company, which is sure to happen someday considering how disappointed he usually finds himself when working subordinately, the resume process will be dubbed the resum-blay (blay being a past-tense verb for blows, as in yes resumes blow, let us take a different angle on the problem). it will consist of a short article in which a person describes themselves, and expresses whatever they feel like expressing. i want to know if a person is capable of original thought, not whether or not they are versed in microsoft office suite. everything after the fact can be easily taught (especially considering how obscure a business matches is sure to scrap up). keep your eyes on the stock tickers for MTCH...it's going to be simply incendiary~

a question arises of how to decorate a bedroom in a good way. every bedroom antimatter has decorated has turned out yes, quite cool, but at the same time sort of repellent to him. not one to say that there is anything to feng shui, but the arrangements that matches usually orchestrates end up being more depressants than stimulants. need some plants, perhaps. worried about killing them. supposedly bright things to have around, or so goes the word on the street.
matches needs to make a list of things to do, because all this crisp new experience in 360 different degrees of potential movement around him is dizzying. keep on forgetting about everything. also, very satisfying to take out the pen and strike a line through something. it's very much like smiling...try it sometime even when you have no occasion to, and you will get a little lifted. just don't become an addict...nothing more nauseating than line-striking or smiling addicts. productive and bubbly as they may be~

keep in touch.

land of opportunity

today matches embarks for portland, so instead of his thoughts travelling at nigh lightspeed through the cyberverse they will be going roughly 85 mph through the actual universe. catch them if you can~
hoping for a safe trip.
peas,
matches

trip-hop

been everywhere lately. will be much more consistent with this once i settle down and can thieve wireless access in my apt building in portland~
okay...here's some of those promised mountain pictures->




and that's all for now since matches does not want to overwhelm your senses.

sigh...not sure how to not have expectations of people. they cause so much frustration because nobody seems to follow through, but how do you avoid having them alltogether? is there some zen-puzzle way of living in which one can be completely self-sufficient, but still be engaged in the whole social machine? it seems to mattress that for every step you take away from someone in terms of expectations...that is, for every degree of distance that you decide you can keep in order to not have any sort of dependence on someone else's whims, the relationship also suffers a drop in trust. because this is what we want from people, isn't it? matches wants to be able to trust them with his feelings and hopes, but it is so disappointing when people don't care, or don't follow through, or drop the ball as they say. relationships are brilliant and transcendental when there is trust between two people...confidence enough to say whatever and to be whomever, and to know that the other is still there, for and with you. "Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid" ~Goethe (Faust). when you truly care, there is a sincere lack of expectations just because you can feel the gravitational pull, the orbit between the two; nothing short of a meteor is going to break it. wishing this fiery loyalty was the standard. wishing that it were not so easy to be let down, that we could all be a little less cautious about where we trust to expectation. because you have to have hopes, have to invest in people...this is one of the most noble parts of the human spirit - would not trade it for the world. sharing your life shouldn't be problematic...it should be chromatic, it should increase the colors and the world and the experience that you are corkscrewed into. but there are so many contrary forces at work, and people tend to stretch themselves too thin.

matches would like to think that people can expect him to fight to keep this connection and trust alive~

but he will need some help.

"Crushed like a bug in the ground
Let down and hanging around

Shell smashed, juices flowing
Wings twitch, legs are going
Don't get sentimental
It always ends up drivel

One day I'm going to grow wings
A chemical reaction
Hysterical and useless
Hysterical and ... "

~ Radiohead - "Let Down"