thoughtcrumbs

Recipie for a fabulous afternoon:
Shuffle two parts Guster, one part Counting Crows (This Desert Life - less brooding than August), Groove Juice Special, and the So I Married an Axe Murderer soundtrack. Drown out the neighbors' hip hop. Add one Dreyers Whole Fruit Bar (tangerine) and a blissful kitty (Hazel - Winter's too bitchy) sprawling on my supine torso. Crank the temperature to eighty, and have great reading material.

That material would be my friend Jacob's senior thesis, a novel in five stories. I don't know Jacob that well; we lived in the same dorms for two years, and he's close to my other dorm friends. But I see him around the honors college occasionally, as I did yesterday, where he was at that triumphant stage of turning two copies of the finished thesis on 25% rag-content bond paper in the requisite manila envelopes with title page affixed with a single piece of scotch tape. One day soon that'll be me. Jacob emailed me his stories, and they're exquisite. Heavy on the Palahniuk (another UO grad), but I think Jacob was probably already heavy on the Palahniuk long before Chuck started writing. Hints of Eggers. Brilliant one liners. The thesis reminded me that their are jewels among your friends and acquaintances. Talented people destined for greatness. Seek them out.

Some of my favorite exerpts:
"My current ulcer, which I call Ramone, sputters and twitches inside me."
"The future's never looked this not bad."
"Following the world from Gilgamesh to the Carthaginians to the Scots beating the crap out of the Scots to Hitler in Poland to Russians in Afghanistan to Americans just about everywhere, you've come to realize that chess really is a bad metaphor for life, because in chess, ther are actually pieces other than pawns"
"Wherever Danny Nixon walked, Jesus followed. This wasn't like a religious ecstasy sort of thing. This was like a stalking sort of thing."

As you can see, I'm a bit prolific today (can you be a 'bit' prolific?). Making up for yesterday when I was wrassling with javascript. Night, kiddies.