Quixotica

1711 Holloway Avenue.
San Francisco, CA 94132.

Life is good.

Well, life is pretty much the same. I spent the last month or two champing at the bit to get up here and get started, and now here I am and class is in session. I'd like to relate some sort of jarring epiphany heralding my touchdown at SFO, but so far all I've got to show for my trouble are sore feet and an empty bank account. I hold out hope for a life-changing revelation to strike me in the street; I'll let you know how that goes.

Still trying to develop an engaging style; my roommates both left for the weekend, so left to my own devices I've been idly researching job opportunities in the Bay Area. Turns out I made the right choice in moving here, but it would be premature to mention anything more. Coincidentally I've spent some time becoming familiar with the state of New Games Journalism and how it relates to the media at large. This article is a bit dated but has served as an intriguing starting point, and I encourage you to poke around and take a look at anything that interests you. Racism, politics and religion are aspects of innate human perversity, and we invariably impress them on any medium we get our hands on.

Haven't had much in the way of notable photo opportunities, but here's some highlights:



A cozy little two-story across the street from campus, replete with complimentary shrubbery. Truly, we are as princes among men.



The theater building from our dining room table. How close are we to campus? Too motherfuckin' close.



Found these on display at the campus convenience store. Squid jerky is delicious.

I just spent an hour fiddling with JavaScript, and I need a break from digital media. More later!

That's the only picture I have of Jackie with her mouth closed. Just sayin'.

My camera died (permanently) about five minutes into the ceremony, so all the interesting pictures come courtesy of Verizon Wireless. Take it up with them.

Updates only seem to come when I’m at work bored out of my skull; this is a positive sign for neither my employment nor my dedication to personal journalism.

Had a great time at Jackie’s wedding. Had a horrible time getting there and back; Sonora is the kind of place you want to retire when you’re old, because it’s incredibly beautiful and so mind-fuckingly difficult to get around in that you never want to go anywhere more than a mile from home. I got lost both arriving and leaving, and received a traffic ticket from the only highway officer I’ve ever met (and I’ve met more than a few) who managed to be both demeaning, derogatory and downright dickish in the span of a few sentences. I confess, he may have been naturally talented; that kind of inbred discourtesy cannot be learned. He was like an autistic asshole savant, the Dustin Hoffman of fucktards.

I might have been less than courteous.

I was all riled up to spin fanciful discourses regarding social conundrums vis-à-vis the human maturation process, but I find that committing that bit of hate-filled slander to record has been remarkably calming. Don’t worry; when it comes to criticism, I always persevere.

Jackie’s wedding was a ridiculous and depressingly mundane experience, and I loved every goddamn minute of it. I arrived late and was immediately recruited into a sort of improptu volunteer workforce, an informal extension of the wedding party that in action resembled a surly Southern chain-gang more than anything else. We spent a few hours dragging the reception area into some semblance of order (under the hawk-like gaze of the blushing bride) and retired to a cramped and stuffy home a few blocks away to lick our wounds and prepare for the coming festivities. Sonora has a booming hospitality business (due in large part to the fact that if you manage to find the place, chances are you won’t be in any hurry to face the highway clusterfuck that leaving entails); thus I was forced to bed down in a tiny two bed one bath with seven other people, five of them female. The events of that balmy August evening were fairly mundane, and the night passed in a blur (though I distinctly remember vowing to chase down one of the resident canines, at one point doggedly exclaiming that I would “skin that motherfucker and wear it like a hat.”)

The next morning brought a renewed frenzy of activity, and after ransacking Jackie’s supply of sterilized poultry embryos we returned to ground zero and haphazardly threw the last bits of pomp and circumstance together. I ran back to the house to shower and groom myself to a level concomitant to my respect for this most sacred of ceremonies; arriving at the wedding site fifteen minutes early, we then proceeded to wait twenty minutes for a few straggling yokels to arrive decked out in shorts, flip-flops and weathered purple polo shirts. The wedding began only five minutes behind schedule, which I’m told is roughly equivalent to a man parting the Reed Sea in terms of modern miracles. The ceremony itself was wonderfully short, and with all the unimportant filler excised it lasted less than fifteen minutes.

The reception went swimmingly; good food and better company made for an enjoyable evening that demands more detail than I can afford to give at the moment. Office clock proclaims it’s time for lunch; I’ll see if I can post pictures and a less jumbled narrative later.

So I just found out the Internet is more robust than even I had imagined.

Grab your address bar by its wily stamen, and type in the title of your objective with no restraint. For example, fill that void with "San Francisco State University." Go ahead, try it.

I'll wait.

Isn't that badass? Anyway.

Saw this.





Awesome concepts and scenes soured by lame dialogue.

Just curious to see if I can post from work.

Hmmm.

To be honest, I don’t have anything to write about. I’ve got a biodiesel column to write, but I imagine I can take care of it tomorrow; I’m still waiting to hear back from the source for a possible interview.

I remain firmly in a state of mild shock that the barrier to entry in this industry is so flimsy; I edit copy from contributing writers that bears all the distinguishing hallmarks of a middle school student essay. These people get published; perhaps not in a first-rate periodical, but they get published. The relevation that I am essentially capable of penning a piece and peddling it to publishers in exchange for legal tender has slowly dawned upon me in the last week or so.
EDIT: One of the editors just came by to double-check the spelling of my surname, then inked it in on the proofs I compiled. This equates to awesome.

Anyway. I guess this is sort of a bittersweet epiphany; while the revelation of my sudden viability is empowering, it means the bar I had so recently begun sprinting towards is set depressingly low. No worries; just means I’ll have to try out a few of the more innovative aspects of the major when I get San Fran. I suppose I’d better ferret out a proper place to stay; I hear it can get chilly on those foggy September mornings.

Obama wins.

Bitches.

The man's got a face hewn from stone and lips as black as sin; the obvious choice for the leader of the free world.

Can we still call ourselves that?

Frequent spacing gives my passive prose the weight of deliberate and meaningful thought; also, it makes it look bigger.

My internship is awesome; well, actually it kind of sucks, but in a good way. I get to do boring uninteresting tasks all day, but it's preparing me for a career in which such painfully mundane tasks build to occasional crescendoes of mind-bending joy and fulfillment. It's like a stepladder to Heaven built entirely of razor-sharp d4's.

Random segue? Oh yeah, that just happened.

I imagine you think of a d4 as being rather puny, as damage dice go.

You've obviously never stepped on one.

Anyway.

Sooo, I work about 40+ hours over six days out of the week. I make it out to the gym four days a week, averaging about an hour and change each visit. I make multiple shopping trips throughout the average hebdomad* in order to keep my woefully bare pantry in some semblance of repletion. I try to go for at least a 45-minute to an hour walk every day. Twice a week, I bum around in Matt's garage.

I guess what I'm trying to put down is that I'm awfully damn busy, at least as far as young college men on summer furlough are concerned. And yet, here I sit on a Tuesday evening at just past eight, with absolutely nothing to do and no one to do it with. Dusk is settling and the temperature's finally dropped off; I'd love to go out and kick a ball around with "the guyz," watch a crappy movie in shared agony or just go out and "keep it real" for a few hours before I have to retire in time to be up for work tomorrow. Yet, nothing seems to be going on. Logically I can only deduce two valid hypotheses:

1. The majority of my acquaintances are busier than I am.
2. The majority of my acquaintances are doing stuff that doesn't involve me.

I suppose a third possibility might incorporate horrible illnesses, debilitating dismemberment, and a shared consensus in which many were as one in sitting around twiddling their thumbs and writing semi-angsty "blog" posts which occasionally dipped deep in the waters of pedantic hyperbole; still, I find it best to restrain myself from desultory attempts at humor. Thus, having likely joined the unwashed ranks of the socially undesirable like Mitch and Tyler (sorry Mitch and Tyler, but I figure the chances of you reading this are rather slim. If so, hey! We're losers together! Let's hang out sometime. Shower first.) I feel an ever more pressing urge to get away from this area; it's almost depressing, to savor the essence of this same foolish ignorance and willful folly welling up when I so often lambasted friends, family members and lovers intoxicated by its fragrance. I won't say I was wrong in my prior judgments, only that my actions now are purposefully perpendicular to the route my feet once walked.

I was going to end that paragraph with some adriot and didactic line about the soles of my feet catching the briefest whiff of wanderlust, etc. etc.

Unfortunately, the sheer overweening ego of the sentence was too great for the structure to maintain (grammatically correct though it was,) causing the entire thing to collapse into the endless void between paragraphs.

Thirty-two vowels, ninety-three consonants and one brave period lost their lives in the tragic aftermath.

Never again.




*Fuck yeah it's a word. Look it up.

A recent email:

Dear Alexander Wawro:

San Francisco State wants you to know important facts that pertain to your life as an SF State student. For information about the following topics, please refer to the web sites.

Blah blah blah boring financial aid, graduation and registration information ad nauseum.

A printed copy of this information is available on request from the Registrar's Office.

Best wishes for a successful semester at San Francisco State.

BWAHAHAHA.

This is gonna be ridiculous awesome.

A recent headline from the campus paper:

"Students join longshoremen to voice dissent on May Day"

Longshoremen! They have longshoremen up there! I've never even seen a longshoreman!

Also, you cannot delete an account on Facebook. I know, I've tried; it's simply impossible.

It's come to my attention that as a writer, I'm actually a bit shit. Given the circumstances, this could prove to be a bit of a persnickety wicket.