by Josh Delman
I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"
If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.
This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.
2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September
© 2009 and beyond
Contact me.
March 2009
Join Or Die #
Join or Die is a series of paintings by Justine Lai:
In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order.I rather enjoy these paintings (for their artistic value). She blows Lincoln!
By the way, if you didn't know already, "Join or Die" was a political cartoon by Ben Franklin. According to Wikipedia, Franklin's original intentions were to unite the colonies against a possible French attack, but later the phrase was used for (duh) the American Revolution.
***
We started traveling west on I-70 (fragments of a journey) FICTION #
We started traveling west on I-70 and we didn’t stop until Ted fell asleep at the wheel. He was drinking quite heavily, if I recall correctly, but his driving shift was mostly a straight shoot (and we planned this accordingly, given Ted’s love for Mezcal) so his actual driving abilities weren’t the issue. It was that Ted was practically narcoleptic until I leaned over and pushed his leg into the break pedal while steering us off the road from the passenger seat. We’d traveled one thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight miles through Missouri and some of the more geometrically boring states, like Kansas and Colorado, finally exhausted by a full day of driving and fighting and a brutal fucking stop (that will be further expounded upon later) in Denver. We stayed at Motel 8 in Monroe, UT.
The conversation in the car had been manic, as the flat and featureless roads of the Midwest tend to pry at that mental door of insanity. Around 700 miles in, in the middle of my driving shift, Ted and Varun started thinking every word “just didn’t sound right” or something like that. Post, post, post, Varun was mumbling, repeating it like a mantra. He had written the word down on a piece of paper over and over again, with a blue felt-tip pen, in different sizes and shapes and all different lettering — did I mention Varun is the lead designer at some font company in Silicon Valley? — and the two of them just couldn’t understand how a word like post could be spelled like that. I think it’s something about the “st” that was getting to them. I just turned up the radio and tried not to let it get to me, because I knew if the madness spread we’d have to pull over and cut our day short.
The next day I woke up when my cell phone started vibrating. I burped out a raspy hello — the first utterances after waking always sound a bit like you’ve been smoking cigarettes all night, even if you haven’t been.
“Hey maaaaaaaaaaan,” the voice said. “Guess where I am?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Maaaaaaaaaary,” Maaaaaaaaaary said. “Guess where I am!”
“Wal-Mart?”
“No way,” Ma(10x)ry said. “I’m in Amsterdaaaaaaaaaaaam!”
I hung up the phone. Amsterdam? They were maybe six hours ahead of us. She had probably already had showered, had breakfast — and I was in no state to communicate with someone like that. I did need to get Ted and Varun out of bed soon; we had to hit the fucking road. Ted was sleeping on the floor, but as I wound up to kick him in the side, he sprung up and blurted out “we need to hit the fucking road, hard!” There was now a majority and quorum. Ted and I packed the car, then we both kicked Varun awake and we took off. Our vehicle was a semi-reliable, Clinton-era Nissan Maxima, a glossy black box with a custom sound system that was so powerful the subwoofer’s vibrations could induce severe nausea. It was useful when we had to blast music just to stay awake during long night stretches, or drink lots of coffee (though this route was often avoided because of its diuretic properties — we didn’t want to stop every 30 minutes for a tinkle), or else take some of Varun’s Adderall, which in case you didn’t know is usually prescribed for attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and is basically speed with some other potent psychostimulants thrown in.
Surely everyone has a different reaction to the drug, but they all fall in a similar class: your brain feels like it’s been shocked with 100,000 volts of pure focused electricity. Your efficiency increases; new neural connections form at a quicker rate. This drug brings you closer to the image of God than He could have ever hoped for. At least these are the things you are willing to claim when you are on a drug that makes your mind work like a Swiss watch, with all the gears in line with each other, everything in sync and spinning, each part unaware of what its neighbor does, but still churning away indefinitely for the greater good.
The sky that day was the most brilliant blue I had ever seen. I stuck my head out the window somewhere on I-15 — we had started going north towards Salt Lake City when I-70 just ended and we hit one of those serious road forks in the middle of nowhere with two big signs pointing in either direction where someone has to say, alright, which way do we go? And Ted and Varun and I collectively know the answer before the question is even asked, because without a definite goal in mind, the idea is push as far as you can before you hit your own limits. So we went north. ♦
***
A.J. Gentleman's assessment of scientific progress #
Among the yellowed pages of my books,
I search for knowledge, universal truth,
Laws of nature, not divine, reasoned forth
From one generation’s fruitful tolling
Temporary enlightenment sought and found
- A.J. Gentleman
***
Higgs Boson #
A hypothetical Higgs Boson as would be detected by the Compact Muon Solenoid. The LHC is supposed to be back up and running September 2009.
***
It looks like an alien! #
“How would you know what an alien looks like,” I say.
“You know what I’m talking about. Those big eyes, the bulbous head and the tiny body.”
When people tell me that something looks like an alien, I reach for my phaser.
***
Haikus, Pt. I #
Comments now open
Refrain from douchebaggery
Click on the pound sign
Tommy Lee stood strong
His prodigious wang in hand
Wait, the wrong Tommy
On Television
The brain is rotting
Eyes tear up and vision blurs
When's Lost coming on?
Keeps my junk static
Lowers my sperm count to zip
I prefer boxers
On Elephants
Grey tough and wrinkled
Intelligent, prehensile
I mean, their trunks are
Five syllables first
Then add two more for seven
And we're back at five
On Diet Coke
First sip burns the throat
Second makes me burp up gas
Why do I drink this?
You're so proper sir
Hannibal Lecter Oscar
Please don't eat me sir
***
The Wrestler #
Weird: I've seen only two people watching movies on their laptops so far in 2009, and both people were watching The Wrestler, which isn't out on DVD yet. A quick check of The Wrestler @ Pirate Bay.
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Scanwiches #
Scanwiches, a tumblr with scans of cross-sections of deli sandwiches for "education and delight." Some favorites: Bagel w/lox, Pastrami on a hero, and Chicken cutlet, bacon, and munster cheese. Don't forget to subscribe to their RSS feed!
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DFW in the New Yorker #
D.T. Max has published a piece in The New Yorker about David Foster Wallace entitled "The Unfinished" and his life dealing with depression, writing novels, short stories, and nonfiction pieces (but mostly on his unfinished novel, The Pale King.) The piece mostly deals with DFW's relationship to his work, which was of course infinitely interesting to read about. A lot of post-mortem pieces on DFW seemed to focus on his aloof genius qualities which were of course interesting but I always felt like they were depicting him in a sort of robotic sense. Max chronicles Wallace's struggles to complete his work. Just reading about it makes Wallace seem less like a genius robot and more like a human:
Wallace began writing “The Pale King” around 2000. A severe critic of his own work, he rarely reported to his friends that anything he was working on was going well. But his complaints about this book struck them as particularly intense. Pietsch remembers being on a car ride with Wallace and hearing him compare writing the novel to “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” On another occasion, Wallace told him that he had completed “two hundred pages, of which maybe forty are usable.” He had created some good characters, but the shape of the book evaded him. In 2004, he wrote to Jonathan Franzen that to get the book done he would have to write “a 5,000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside.”
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