My Existential Crisis

I cannot handle living according to bureaucracy. So fuck my registration exams. I am quite done. I quit.
Plus I just do not posses this machine mentality, it's far too boring for me.

Sticky situation

Lately I have not found ample time and therefore material to be able to report to my blog. The reason is that I have been glued to my desk. Glue is a sticky substance that binds objects together. It used to be made of things like horses teeth and egg whites, but now it is composed of a bunch of synthetics and chemicals. Sometimes it is brushed onto strips of paper, and is called tape. Sometimes it is formed into tubes and passed through a plug-in gun.

Good Life

I talked to a 6'-1" tall male from Pittsburgh last night. He left Pittsburgh to go to NY. Mr. Belvedere is a fictional butler who left England to go to Pittsburgh:





Buddha was a Nepalese prince who wandered through India teaching his beliefs. He believes that if you live a good life, you'll have a better after life. The Owens family believes that Mr. Belvedere will bring them the good life.

Countdown / Timer

I am currently devoting my life to my registration exams. These are 9 tests necessary to become liscenced in my profession. My profession is architecture.

Exam is short for examination. To examine is to inspect closely. I am closely inspecting architecture.

There are piles of things I'd rather be doing than sitting at a computer all day. A computer is a machine that makes the infinite universe only 15.4" x 1.6" and 7.6 pounds.

I study at my computer. I consort with other test-takers using a forum I visit on my computer while I study. I take the exams at a testing center at 1 Penn Plaza on a computer.

I have passed two exams so far: Construction Documents, and Materials and Methods.
I have failed one exam so far: Mechanical Electrical.
I am waiting to hear the results of one exam: General Structures.

I am taking Building Technology on December 19th, and Lateral Forces on December 31st.

I am currently having a mental shut-down due to too much technical information in my brain. My brain likes visual information. My brain also likes solving puzzles and problems. My brain likes intuition better than memorization. Intuition is the ability to sense somthing or know something without overprocessing it. Throughout my life, all teachers or life instructors have told me I am a highly intuitive thinker.

When my brain gets bogged down with words, I clear it with pictures.



This is the work of John Breiner. I stumbled upon 2 paintings of his in a gallery in the Meat Packing District over the summer. That is an area of NYC located on the west side of Manhattan island below 14th Street. That is where animals were slaughtered for consumption starting at the turn of the 20th century. The turn of the 20th century brought some of my favorite art and design.

I wrote an email to John Breiner because I fell in love with the paintings. He wrote back. His studio is in Bushwick. That is a neighborhood of Brooklyn next to mine. That is where many of my friends live. He invited me to some of his art shows. I went to two. I invited him to Miss Favela's. Miss Favela is a Brazilian restaurant below the Williamsburg Bridge. Meeda is the bartender there. She let him play his ipod on the speakers. He and I sat in Miss Favela for four and a half hours and had lengthy discussions and sampled Meeda's recipes for fancy shots. He could guess what number I was thinking. I suppose this makes him a possibly intuitive thinker as well.

I will clear my head with the work of another artist I recently met tomorrow. Her name is shantell martin. We both have curly hair and like the number 27. She is famous and I am not. I do not ever want to be famous.

Here is today's battle picture. It is a "how much time left til christmas" display in someone's window that I saw this week while walking home in the middle of the night:

Food Fight

One week ago exactly, some friends came over. These friends are: Meeda, Toya, Ago, Vica, Nick, and Matt.

These friends came over after dinner: Greg and Kim. Kim brought her friend: Cortney.

Meeda brought her black pitbull: Ayla. Ayla chewed up the legs on my kitchen table. That is what puppies do.

All the people who ate dinner have shortened versions of full names. All the people who came after dinner have shortened versions of full names too, except for Cortney. I never met Cortney before. Some people call me D for short. Only some.

I went to Billy's Supermarket on the corner of Grand and Havemeyer after work. Supermarkets in Brooklyn are small. Different supermarkets carry different brands depending on the neighborhood. This is because Brooklyn has a great diversity of ethnic backgrounds and demographics.

Toya is a professional and self-taught chef. Some know her as DJ Pegasus. She came over with her own knives and utensils which she carried in a tote bag. She made dinner in my kitchen out of these delicious ingredients which made us all very full:

2 green zucchinis, 5 plum tomatoes, 2 yellow squash, 1 head of green broccoli, 1 orange pepper, 1 yellow pepper, 50 green snow peas, 1 yellow onion, 1 bunch of basil, 15 white mushrooms, and 4 pieces of pink chicken, 1 jar of organic tomato sauce made by Ragu and 4 boxes of bowtie pasta in honor of the fact that bowties are a funny shape for food.

When we were all together, we argued. After that, we mainly laughed.

Here is what happens when we get together:

Designer Plywood

I practically live on a construction site. Every vacant lot in a 20 block radius is being developed. This is just the natural progression of urbanization. It's ok, although ask any of the middle america transplants to the neighborhood, and just listen to their ironic genetrification woes.

I personally get excited by all the motion. Even the pneumatic pile driving that begins at approximately 7:30 each morning.

Pile driver machines strike enormous tree trunks into the ground with great force. This is the way that the building can rest on firm rock deep below the dirt.

Before big apartment buildings are inhabited, there are heaps of neat treasures to look at on construction sites. Sometimes these sites are enclosed by chain link fences. Other times, plywood is used instead of fences. If you are lucky, the plywood has little windows cut out so regular people can look in.

Lots of activities happen late at night. For example, one where boys and some girls write on the plywood with paint. It is not legal. If they are sneaky enough they do it often without getting caught. Some people even do this on trains. Trains are exciting because they travel places and then so does the pictures painted on them.

Recently I found that plywood travels places too:

Origin

The whole reason I decided to start a blog happened yesterday when I was visiting my friend Nick Z's website. He is a fascinating artist. I like checking his website from time to time to see new art he has made.

I found a new link on his site.

click

It took me to his blog.

The blog was full of pictures he captured on his phone. He has a Sidekick. This is a brand of cell phone with special capabilities.

IM is short for instant message and is called that because it is a way to send other people messages instantly. Other people are called buddies.

Nick IMed me at the moment I was scrolling through the photos on his blog. That is when I decided I will challenge him to a phoneflick battle. Hence the birth of my blog. However, my phone plan sucks and I will have to pay for photo uploads apparently. In this economic slump, I will just have to use my camera. I may have just automatically lost the battle...

If not though, I think I will win the battle seeing that I live in Williamsburg Brooklyn, land of the weirdest and/or most intriguing spectacles anyone could ever imagine. And he is moving away (boo hoooo) from this land of oddities. It will take more creativity on his part. He has tons of creativity though.

Today was quite rainy so I did not take any pictures. However I will post this photo I took from Cortney's roof, which pretty much sums up my neighborhood fabric:



This is Johnny. I call him Rubber Dog for obvious reasons:


I am going to go out in a little while to enjoy my friend DJ Pegasus at her weekly at Hope Lounge. There I will drink one vodka soda with lime, watch some scenes from a horror movie, listen to the music, have a conversation with Ago who will be wearing a suit because he came straight from working for the government, probably talk to a drunk person sitting at the bar for a few moments, and then go home. I'm going to bring my camera with me. This battle will be fun. It will make life like a treasure hunt.

Armadillo in a Poncho

I was sitting in a bar in brooklyn on Saturday night minding my own business, when the bartender hands me this napkin and an empty shot glass to be filled with whatever I wanted....

"from a secret admirer," he said.

i got a shot of tequila and stuffed the note beneath my leathery shell. the rest is a blur.