The Downlow

My photo
austin, texas, United States
aspiring writer, English and journalism student, hails from Texas. likes include writing, coffee, books, whisky and people.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

don't wake me

I lied about posting that night and I'm sorry. November is always a weird month. 
My greatest fear is that I will lose more motivation, a quality which I was born with very little of. I possess even less self control, and lately I've been content, and that's the problem. Today was the first time I've written in a while, and I attribute it to that I was anxious. The past month or so has been by far the best since I got to school but there hasn't been real progress concerning writing and my timeline is getting out of wack. I'm spending too much money and I'm falling to vices faster than I realized I knew how, and I want all of these things and a novel too but I'm terrified that I can't have both. I'm probably worrying too much, the scariest thing is the idea that I won't be done when I wanted to be. Time goes too quickly.
I desperately want to be rereading Candide right now to reinforce the irony in my life, but I have two essays to write and  I left it in Plano because I decided only to bring books I hadn't read yet. Next year I'm going to live in an apartment and there will be a bookshelf in my room, all of my babies are coming with me. No exceptions.


Right now I like coffee and red bull, smoothies with infused energy drinks, staying up all night, sleeping in two hours late, editing old chapters, the Postal Service, Russell Edson, talking about Oscar Wilde, articles on the front page, layering, leisurely walks to class, the academia in the air as finals approach, clutter, old notebooks, moleskine, morning showers, the prospect of working at cici's over winter break, best friends, and this one business major who makes me kind of happy. 
I will always love you, I will always be your friend,
Loch.


p.s. Those pictures are not mine,
but they are what I want.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Deceptacon

I am blogging from an itouch right now. Victory.
I'm in Plano for a long time right now and it's beautiful. Is it weird that I'm getting a little Austin sick? I love vacationing to p townn. I missed my wolfpack shoutout whut whuttt

I know it has been far, far too long since I've posted and I aplogize. This weekish has been full of good things. I'm on an itouch so I'm not gonna write a lot right now, but I promise I will post more tonight.

I love you,
loch.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

if it looks like i'm laughing

I'm up right now because I'm writing an eight page essay due in my 8 a.m. tomorrow. I have no intention of sleeping tonight and I'm already two red bulls and a latte into what I'm sure will be a wonderful memory of college. When I bought a four pack of energy drinks from the convenience store at 10 p.m. the guy working the register said "rough night, huh" and gave me a discount. hahh.


A weird wave of nostalgia washed over me about an hour ago. Facebook decided to put my page under maintenance and kick me off so I had to find other more unique ways of entertaining myself/procrastinating even more, and like the loser I am I eventually resorted to googling my name to see what would happen. I found an assload of newspaper articles and some sites I wasn't aware I'd been published on, but there were a few things on there I had forgotten about and the feeling I had freshman year of high school washed over me really briefly then washed away, and I wondered what it would be like if I had gone a particular route. Who would I be?


I am happy right now.


I want the sharpest life,
Loch.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

get sleazy

I find myself scrounging for as much time as I can possibly get in this basement.


There has been no time to write and I'm getting anxious, but I am by far more happy as of late than I have been in an extended period of time (ps. that sentence was awkwardly worded, yes?). I feel like I am finally really sinking my canines into college life. I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Also, I feel like I have to apologize for that more times than you deserve.
I really need to get back on track with this project. I'm not going to lie to you, it's been too long since I last wrote, like really wrote. I mean, obviously there's writing for the paper, but that kind of writing is an entirely different breed. You're typing but you're not really creating anything, you're just regurgitating facts so that the public can stay informed. Which is an obsession of mine, please don't misunderstand, but I do have creative juices that need to flow and lately I've had to put a stopper on them in order to focus on anything at all, which I don't like. I really need to work on time management and start blocking out space for this thing if I want to get it done on the schedule I had planned out. I have an eight page paper due at eight in the morning on thursday and I don't know when I'm finally going to get to sit down and release some of the stuff that's just floating around in my brain. My mental filing cabinets are slowly loosing space and I'm worried I might lose some of the material before I get the chance to get it down tangibly. 


For the past two days I have been blasting Ke$ha constantly and imagining a stream of glitter floating off of me as I walk to class. Someone in the newsroom stated half jokingly that one day we would all be homeless and drunk, and I want that life desperately, if only for the glamour of submitting freelance articles while sipping jack on the side of the road in ripped stockings and metallic hotpants. Please send me to the beach.


I adore everything that you stand for,
Loch.


ps. it has been brought to my attention that there may be some confusion, so I would like to clarify- I AM NOT NAKED IN THOSE PICTURES.
that is all.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

out of all the hours

Hi hello.

Today two of my editors told me they hoped I got more sleep. I'm not really sure why? It was a little confusing.
I have been so busy since I posted on Thursday. I've gotten the most ridiculous amount of things to write and I haven't been able to because I've been working or spending time being social. Which isn't bad now that I look at it but I really just want to hole myself up in my room for hours to write, except for that I don't have time. I'm going to be busy for the next two days. I'm scared I'll lose everything in my head :(
I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing here, in college and in general. Sometimes I feel like I'm living a life like normal as a formality. I am looking for material when it comes down to it. I'm in college to work at the paper and I'm in life to discover new lies to be honest about.
The poem below has been edited. The dialogue below it will probably not make sense to you, but it's all I have time to write right now and I feel like it's important.

The honest truth is that no matter who you are,
I will love you regardless.

Love,
Loch.



An overdue message


Hello there.
We are diverse, intelligent, and focused.
We put aside differences.
Recognize that we shake things up
let that echo through the halls.


"So basically what you're telling me is that I have no reason in the world to trust you, but I should because if I don't then I'll trust someone else who I have no reason in the world to trust and then I'll die."
"Is it really that difficult to accept?"
"Yes? I'm not going with you. I'm not going with anyone, I'm going home. This is too much, I can't do it."
"You have to. You really don't have a choice."
"There's always a choice. There has to be one, this isn't real. I'm going to pinch myself and wake up, and you'll go back to wherever you came from and I'll be back with Kreed and away from you. I cannot express how desperately I want to be far, far away from you."
"Khole-"
"This isn't something that can work Derek. Like, I shouldn't have to explain this to you. I'm not doing it."
"Khole, don't be difficult. You and I both know that this is all that matters."

Monday, November 8, 2010

you can only say yes

Oh, hello. I'm sorry I've been gone for so long :(

This weekend was unexpected and will probably show up in what I write in multiple ways. I feel older than I did when I posted last. I found a few writing spots and cried more than I normally do. This weekend was so, so unexpected, but it was good.
What if you had done something differently? When I walk by people, I wonder, would you impact me if I gave you a chance? Because when you first meet people, they never seem important. When you met your best friend, I bet you didn't think wow, you and I are going to be ridiculously close one day and I'm going to march into your house for no reason and eat all your food without you getting mad at me sort of. Relationships can't be predicted. Imagine how many relationships you've passed up, the different lives you've inadvertently avoided by disregarding someone who you deemed unimportant. Why do things happen the way they do? It's such a strange phenomenon, when a bond forms, because there's really such a small chance that it will simply because our default expectation is to be acquaintances. No one goes out looking for a best friend or an enemy or a mentor or a lover, so isn't it strange that they manage to happen? And what if you had done something differently, who would you be now? What if I had done something differently?
I used to have a pretty good idea of who reads this but now it's much more vague, and some people who I didn't expect have told me that they follow it. When people talk to me about this blog it is literally the most flattering thing in the world. I love you so much if you are scanning these words. 


I need so desperately for everything to just stop right now so I can go somewhere alone and write with a pen and a pad of paper instead of typing virtual words. I want solid thoughts that I can scratch out with a pen and see and breathe and smell. I want time.


You are everything inside of me that I wish I could be,
Loch.

Ps. Here is a blackout poem I did in poetry today. I thought it would be a more interesting visual. It's a scan but I wrote out the text underneath in case it's difficult to read. Underneath it is the best picture I could find of the painting I did my ekphrastic poem on, and the poem beneath that. The online picture really doesn't do the painting justice, if you go to UT you should go by the Blanton and see it. It's in the modern art section, and I could stare at it for hours. The Dallas Chaos poem has been edited a little bit, but not as much as it needs to be, and the blackout poem has not been edited at all. The picture of Dallas Chaos II is not mine, the painting itself is done by Peter Dean.

(if you click on the picture, a larger version will show up that is easier to read.)

Berl feels
detatched and fatalistic
his life disintegrates. 
Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana,
and he is a blue ribbon, bull goose freak.
Berl's considered medical opinion is that
it will provide a comprehensible shape to his life.
He's the only one who can tell us that,
but I believe him.

Dallas Chaos II by Peter Dean


Dallas Chaos

It is sunny on a saturday. 
I am splayed out across the backseat 
hot leather on my back,
watching Dallas through the windows.
Sky scrapers, horrific traffic,
a city formed from grit and sweat
that makes the South
out of hospitality and smoke ridden skies.

We are out of the car and onto this knoll,
green and bright, unblocked
from the city, but somehow more still.
Here old women cried for a man they hadn't met,
and Jackie took the news that
shook Pennsylvania Avenue like meteors.
Conspiracies circle these skies like vultures,
and John cannot find peace while his name rests on our lips.

But chaos came from down the road,
the police station where a soul's explosion 
broke masks of flesh and bone and blood
revealing a face as ugly as
dogs like pigs that snarl and spit
masked police with hard blue eyes
and media who care for naught but
cold hard facts and hard evening news.

Ruby eyes pierce a soul that breaks
and the solar system circling his head
protects this man in glittered pants and pinstriped suit
who avenged a life and forgot his own.
We stroll sixth floors and grassy knolls,
museums that miss the blue of his beard.
The Ruby red that flooded skies when Oswald died,
Where has it gone?

Thursday, November 4, 2010

friends with shadows

Before you begin reading this blog, please note that I am sorry for the exceptionally stupid looking array of pictures, I just really didn't want to leave you guys hanging in the visual department again. I'm lacking in the camera department right now (shout out to julia, the digital from eighth grade is finally dying) but I swear to god once I get one I'll be more artsy, or at least I won't look like an idiot. :)


I waited to caffeinate until like 3:30 in the afternoon today? I feel like how I'm feeling is the intersection between being anxious and being asleep. Def weird.
I got up this morning and skipped class to register for classes, which sucked. Yay for being a freshman! All of my classes start at eight or nine in the morning. Not like I'm a night owl or anything, it's cool. I slept a lot, too. After registering and before the event I covered, I mean.
This is the first time I have ever been a little anxious to leave the newsroom early. I would gladly spend all of every day in this basement, but I made plans for tonight that have me a little more worked up than I usually am, which is saying something because I'm kind of a worked up person. 


You know what's weird?
Being in this basement is what I want to do for the rest of my life, right? I mean, figuratively. I don't actually want to be in this particular basement, that would be a weird life goal. But being in a newsroom I mean, reporting, being a journalist. But here's the thing,
have you ever been to an art museum and wanted desperately to be an artist, but only for an hour, or in a courthouse and wanted more than anything else in the world to be a lawyer? Walking by a violinist or a doctor can make me change my dream for twenty minutes. Of course, when I lay down at night to sleep, my conclusion is always the same- it doesn't matter what I want. I am a writer, it's all I know how to be. Words come to me before anything else in the world. But it's a strange emotion, wondering what life would be like if I had been born a different person, picturing it and feeling it and tasting it and then forgetting it. I never know quite what that should mean to me. In some ways I guess that's what writing is- allowing yourself to live vicariously through characters who can be whatever you want, or in the case of journalism, finding out whatever you can about other lives and reporting about them to the public. Writing lets you taste and try on different professions. The catch, I guess, is that no matter how much you love them, you inevitably must always put them back in order to maintain the pen in your hand. The only part of my life that's ever stayed constant is for me is the pen.


Yesterday a girl told me that I looked calm and she didn't want to strangle me as much as she usually does for being so ridiculously happy. I haven't written lately, or at least I haven't written as much as I would like. My poetry class went to an art museum to write ekphrastic poetry, and if I can find a decent picture of the painting I wrote about then I'll post the poem. I don't know what it was about the painting but I couldn't really stop looking at it.
ps. I'm taking another poetry class next semester. It was entirely unplanned. Hahh.


You know what I want? Money to spend on more books.
I probably love you more than you think I do,
Loch.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

you make me feel

I am in a really fabulous mood.


First off, halloweekend was far more exciting than my usual weekends because of events I will chose not to disclose for several reasons, the most dominant of which being "keeping it classy." Secondly, I get to cover the election today! Granted I'm covering the State Board of Education elections and not the governor elections or anything, but still. They trust me with election coverage :)
Yesterday night I got my computer and an Edgar Allan Poe collection and went to the library to write, but I ended up being so brain dead that writing turned into sitting in an arm chair staring at the computer screen for an hour, and in that hour I did some serious thinking. It occurred to me that my Plano and Austin lives go through cycles of converging and diverging based on relationships to one or two people that I've maintained back home, and right now I'm in a divergent cycle. I spent a while thinking about the expanding length of diverging sections and declining length of converging sections, and how eventually my Plano life won't be mine anymore, it'll be something I think about every once in a while when I look through high school yearbooks or do some intense facebook creeping. That reality is something that college is going to require me to break away from. Thinking about that is the only thing all day yesterday that put me in an icky mood.  It's really weird too because most of the people here who I hang out with are people who I went to high school with but didn't know at all in high school (which is plausible, my graduating class was 1300), but I can't classify them as part of my Plano life. Like, mentally I'm blocked from placing them in anything but the Austin category, even though when I go home I'll still be able to hang out with them. Weird? My Plano friends are an entirely different group of people.
I probably shouldn't be blogging right now since I'm supposed to be doing news things, hahh. Tonight will be interesting because I'm probably not getting home until midnight and I have a sociology test tomorrow that I have yet to study for. Yay!
I love you more than loch ness, kind of,
Loch.