i know these are from two weeks ago, but still...

coin-op



subterranean homesick blues...


mr. kato

mike + kat @ hilly + tori's

i'll tear you in half with my naievete!
yeah.

went with marta by bike to mt. storm on friday to lie in the sun and read "love in the time of cholera" to each other in spanish. i fell asleep listening to her...

but that was then. and i'm not gonna do a goddamn thing. hahah! i'm like a greyhound, all i like to do is run.

the night before ashley told me that we should hang out because we live around the corner from each other. so i said sure. and knocked on her door late one night...
we saw chico. he told me he's got cancer. pancreas. no insurance 'cuz he's doing the social work thing for runaway kids. that man is one of my favorite people in existence. maybe a year left? he's twenty two. i don't want him to die. he deserves a long life and a couple of kids and smiling friends and family and a good meal on his 83rd birthday.

go go go go.

i like anarchists. they are ridiculous and never ever get a goddamn thing done but they're fun to be around. good people.

saturday night ashley was speaking in rhyme. we also had a conversation using only hand signs which was completely effortless. she drives like a maniac and is something fierce. i like fierce. fierce means you believe in something, have some hope, maybe.

(when i was in france i met a man who's wife of nearly fifty years had had a stroke and was in a vegetative state. he cared for her by himself, continously. he showed me a picture of her, nineteen and beautiful, standing on a slope in the alps with a smile on her face and then with the saddest and most proud look i have ever seen he said to me "elle est une femme formidable.")


the end.

Steve and Steve, somewhere in the polish part of brooklyn. I can't remember the name of the place as I was inebriated.


Steve and Steve.


a shop in soho with EVERYTHING.

Dieders' birthday par-tay:

zach. being fabulous.


the illustrious Mr. Mayhem. hawt.


a nice young lady, with vince being a cock in the background.


the birthday girl herself!


Banzai Biehler!


mirror! mirror! it's in focus.



hillybonez straight thuggin'.

there are parrots in brooklyn
NYC over spring break. i took notes. here they are (the first day, the drive up):

steve (on finally meeting amy's dad): now everything makes sense about you and jody.
amy: yes, because jody hung out in my dad's garage and i was raised by my grandparnets. jody was strong and chubby as a kid, and i was sick all the time. jody tough, and dad could rough-house with her. he could relate.
steve told us about his childhood in indiana, growing up in the middle of cornfields and cows, tapping maple syrup trees. i was reminded of my own childhood, surrounded by sorghum, and the ubiquitous cows.
we saw a cop pull a u-turn on the interstate, crossing the median, not even putting his sirens on. amy said "he doesn't care."
drove through a land of silos, and amy pointed out the composition of their arrangement, the simple block shapes of farm architecture.
a winter field, full of snow, a backhoe parked in the middle.
talked about politics, bout taft. "as ohio goes, america goes," amy said. new no-tolerance drug laws gonna cause more problems.
the skies, the water, the silos, all the same shade of grey. yellow corn stubble poking out of the dark brown earth, frosted with snow. the darker brown of bare trees and the rusty red of the barns.
we stopped for food and saw a tow truck that said "EL BURRO TOWING."
the three of us talked about maybe going to boston, to MIT, and steve said "i'd have trouble relating to those kids. i'd say to them 'your college experience is a lot better than mine. you have a nice place to live, whereas i live in a fucking shanty.'"
talking about houses, architecture, and anthropologists being bad at designing things. steve quipped "haven't you heard? anthropologists are bad at intelligent design."
we passed near muskingam, and steve and amy told me about this tribe of indians that live in a village inside a warehouse, as a sort of tourist attraction. "imagine what this was like when it was all indians," i said. forests so dense and thick and massive, small communities spread out, more ecologically friendly.
Drove around wheeling. past the cememtary, where someone smiled and waved to us. we drove past a huge, absolutely massive nail factory, made out of tin sheeting. it must have been six or seven stories at its tallest point, and was probably an 1/8th mile on a side. it said "La Belle cut nail plant, the largest in the world" in painted letters on the side. it was surrounded on all sides by flying highway overpasses, and steve said "those are the cathedrals of our time, " quoting david byrne as we went under. wheeling felt truly rust bowl, industrial, drab as hell, and feeling abandoned or left behind. amy said "seattle has parts like this, but sunny and happy."
amy: i wonder if we'll sit around and tell stories of when we were 20 when we're fifty, like about the canoe trip when eric fell in the water, or when jared saved dave thomas.
the landscape in PA more rolling, but otherwise very similar to n. Ohio. the barns are white, though. dusk in the darkly forested deeply creased hills, with that blue cast to the light after the sun has disappeared but the light has not yet faded. windmill generators on a hill.
lines of light moving through the inky black shapes of hills in the dark.

at this point, i took over driving, and drove through all the white-tiled, flourescent lit tunnels to NYC, where i traumatized amy by driving like a new yorker. steve was pretty quiet and didn't say anything, but he didn't let me drive on the way back, which i think says it all.

***

being good isn't nearly as hard as i thought it was going to be.

in other news, i'm poor and need a job that pays more than $200/month. conversa is shafting me. meh.

rousseau was such a hippocrite. like, wtf, 'n stuff. knocking up yr maid and putting yr kids in orphanages cuz ya think ya won't make a good dad after writing "man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains" ain't too terribly punk rock. no-body's perfect. 'cept maybe dead people. i'm learning middle english in my medieval lit class. which i'm taking for fun. bwahahahah. i'm fucked up.

met the most beautiful girl today, her name was leli, and she was five. she had big brown eyes and ponytails, and told me that she had two toys and two books that she didn't know the name of because she couldn't read. leli laughed when i told her i was a bit deaf, like it was silly of me to let that happen (and it was). leli asked me about the school i go to, the friends i have, where i got my backpack (i told her a good friend of mine gave it to me).

like i told amy sue later (of course i had to tell her, i think she's the only one that would understand what i mean when i stammer and stutter), i had to tell amy sue that this leli, she's going to be beautiful when she grows up. not just pretty beautiful, but amazing beautiful.

in other news, i am wanting to do another project with josh and mingus. i'll call it THE WIRE FLOWERS or something equally obnoxious. off kilter noise that's all static smoothed out and ringing. enough of this fiddle-faddle, from now on i'll make my valentines out of bloody beef hearts.

got up today an hour late, missed shakespeare class cuz the night before i was up to three or four or so. i went over to hilly's after making some music with jake and josh. i put together a model of Cornelius from planet of the apes sitting on the floor of her room. i kissed her three times before i left, and i remember each one clearly. but in any event, i skipped shakespeare, which i'm doing pretty miserably in. i rode my bike wearing my steel-toed boots for the first time, and went to brit lit. turns out i got a C+ on the midterm. it's only 10% of the grade, though. ironic that i'm doing much better in spanish than my english classes. after brit lit i went to math, listened to my headphones and gave all the right answers (which was no answer at all). the prof. was talking about flipping coins and probability so i told kristen the story about a man, a 17th century composer named jeremiah clarke, who on being jilted by his lover decided to kill himself. he flipped a coin to decide: heads was drowning, tails was hanging. the coin landed on its edge in the mud so he went home and shot himself.

after that mess, i biked up to kroger and got my weekly ration of peanut butter and stole some batteries for my mp3 player. went to work, and interpreted for a jennifer lopez (no shit) and her baby jesus. he pissed on the scale when he was weighed. mike (michael felger) is my trainer, and i like him a lot. about 25, he's a little taller than me, with short red hair. he is clean shaven, with freckles and clear eyes. he looks tired all the time, looks like the world is getting him down. he teaches spanish to kindergartners in addition to interpreting and is going to grad school for spanish lit. he rides bikes (he wants to get a track bike and is interested in critical mass) and plays guitar in a rock band called Crazy Ivan with a few of his jazz-studying friends from CCM. i like him because he has a good soul and is patient. he cares about lives other than his own. maybe i'm not making myself clear, but i at least know what i'm saying.

after work i got some skyline. sitting at the bar, i tucked the napkin into my collar and it reminded me of my dad. i came home. i dozed on the couch for a little bit, and then i went to my parents house to watch Bringing out the Dead. scorsese's new york makes me feel, just like sandberg's chicago or kerouac's america. olivia and i sipped on gin and orange juice. "It need's more orange juice," she said to me, and i said "ah, no it doesn't" being careful not perpetuate patriarchy. mama gave me a ride home at midnight and we talked in the car. she mentioned all the dumpstered bread in the freezer, and i told her that the crew had gotten more than enough food to feed 30 people for more than a month - the food that one mid-sized grocery threw away. i told her how much this country, this way of life bothers me, how fucked up i think it is that for me to succeed, someone else must fail. she agreed, but i don't think she's comfortable with my nihilism, my bitterness. i explained to her that it's because of the shit i see that i fight so hard to make things right (i don't think of what i want as "right" i just think of it as not wrong). i told her i loved her and went into my apartment.

tomorrow is valentine's. a bunch of gangsters got killed in a garage in the north side of chicago on that holiday in 1929. i believe in valentine's about as much as they do.

that said, i love you all.

i just got home and found a note saying "thanks for the glory" on my door.

This is a rough draft/outline of my senior thesis. it is the product of a mushroom trip. i knocked it out at three this morning.


Collective Constructivism: A New Way Of Experiencing

Post-structuralist theory is built on a fallacy. This fallacy is the concept of the binary. Post-structuralism holds that there is a mainstream voice and a marginalized voice and that they are in a constant state of upheaval, that the two voices are reactions to each other. The very nomenclature – marginalized and mainstream – implies dominance of one over the other. In other words, post-structuralist theory implies that the mainstream defines what is marginalized and vice versa. This dualism does not exist. Simply because one voice is different from another does not mean it is the opposite. The world is not black and white, there are shades of grey. Yin has a spot of yang, Yang a bit of yin.
Polyphony literally means “many voices.” Mikhail Batkin postulated that there are many voices in any given text, such as individual characters, with the voice of the author being dominant as the author chooses the manner of presentation of those voices and so colors them. The voices may be harmonious, dissonant, or totally independant, but all are subsumed by the voice of the author. The text itself is essentially a presentation of the voice of the author.
Intertextuality is the idea that the manner in which one perceives a work or text is shaped by every other text one has encountered. Edmund Burke called this individual shaping of perception a “terministic screen.” In other words, ones understanding of the works of Plato affects ones understanding of the works of Aristotle, and vice versa.
Intertextuality applied to polyphony yields interesting results. From the moment one is a rational being, one is exposed to a grand clamor of voices – a polyphonic matrix. However, as one continues to be exposed to these voices, each voice shapes our perception of every other voice. Eventually, one only hears what one wants to hear. However, the fact that one chooses to assimilate a certain voice into one’s terministic screen does not affect the voices not assimilated. Those voices are still present in the matrix. Some voices may be more popular than others, but all voices are equally present.
Information is already distributed being distributed in this manner. On watching CNN, one may see on the screen a newscaster, a panel containing facts relevant the story being presented that moment, a breaking news ticker, and a stock ticker and one must process these simultaneously. One may consider the stock ticker completely irrelevant to the story being presented or one may consider the ticker completely relevant. Regardless, the ticker is there.
In the Zen sect of Buddhism, there is the concept of zazen, which literally translates to do-nothing. Zazen consists of meditating until one achieves a state of emptiness. It is in this state, free of pre-conceptions, that one supposedly achieves clarity and sees reality as it truly is. By focusing on nothing, one may see everything. Boxers use a similar technique while fighting. It is considered bad form to watching the opponents face or fists, for by concentrating on one area, the boxer will miss the opponents attack. A feint will not work on a good fighter.
Now, let us apply this to the polyphonic matrix. By giving no voice special consideration, all voices are given equal consideration.
Consider a text in which all voices in the text would be equally “loud” and would not be overwhelmed by the voice of any particular author. The text, so to speak, would be authored by the generators of those voices. The narratives, though parallel, would not necessarily be linear. The art of the text would lie in the choice of which voices to include.
This intertextual, non-focusing mode of experiencing the polyphonic matrix is collective constructivism.

sick as a dog.
think it's the flu.

school's not going so well. i don't really care though, i just want to get through the quarter so i can have summer.

this summer's going to be the best ever.

so what's been happening in rafe's neck of the woods?

i'll fast forwared to this month. I built a bass. I'm failing school. I've gone to some great shows. been hanging out with my friends. I'm kinda worried about jared cuz he's himself and he just kind of gave up on everything and...well...he's living in his studio and it's hard to get ahold of him. poor guy. he's got some great friends, he needs to do them right.
i got a job. working at subway - oh yeah. $6 an hour, but hey, it's possibly the lowest-stress job i've ever had.

nancy, jody, dave, and i are moving into an apartment near campus. round about august. i'm thrilled. and a little terrified. but mostly thrilled.

so today as i was getting into my car after work i saw a 30 year old non-skinny dude with long long blonde hair wearing a Save-A-Lot uniform take a running start and jump onto a cart sending it (and himself) sailing across the parking lot whereupon he spread his arms (just like he was nailed to a cross) and then he shouted "I'M KING OF THE WORLD!!!"

fin

24 Hour Party People

Katie Koga! Holy Shit!


Joey being sixteen.


Lex Being Fabulous


Zan. Her libido is powered by Heineken


Lara hard at partying


Tom on drugs


Vinnie not on drugs


Jason never saw it coming


Brad and Andi being adorable. Awww. Can I get a goddamn?


Ellie then said something sardonic

FREAK POWER.

CHICAGO

ST. LOUIS

and a blast from the past:

mohawk in dec. 03!

my skin against hers copper on olive my arms stretched tense and muscle against her warm soft roundness cause I am a little boy and somewhat afraid of being alone and I don’t know how to deal with it so here I am my skin against hers, my arm stretched around her with my hand in the small of her back cause that’s her favorite place for me to put my hand and cause I like her to be happy and the other is around the nape of her neck the hairs prickly against the palm of my hand my lips are pressed against her neck and her mouth is opened in that little downward curl that she makes with the corners of her lips and it means her eyes are closed and she’s enjoying it and my skin against hers my body doesn’t belong just to me anymore it’s something that is held against her and in her and she she she is everything to me there is nothing else in the world at this moment she is the bed I will cling to when I die the woman I want to be an old man with the girl that I want to call mine and I want her to call me hers and for it to be true and real and beautiful just like her, just like the music I hear in my head but can’t ever figure out how to make just like the feeling I get when she’s crying because I’ve broken her heart just like being a boy and free. Goddamn if I don’t want to be everything for her and that’s because she is everything for me. She closes around me her heels press against my back her nails dig into my skin against hers and the sweat from my body from her body it sticks our skin together where it touches I remember hot summer days on the bed and she was on top of me with that look of ferocious dedication and all I wanted after all was to hold and be held and today I realized that all a man can hope for is to be missed when he’s gone, all a man can be is what he tries to be and to her I tried to be everything and guess what I failed. I failed. I failed. I don’t know that yet though and so she is pulling me to her into her against her skin is against mine my life in her hands my heart in her hands my head filled with her and her eyes that make me cry when I remember this because she means it and I’m letting her down because emptiness loneliness is such a drag so’s getting old and when I get old I want her to be around but I’m not sure if it’s for all the right reasons and me, what do I know I’m just a very scared confused lost proud boy who can’t find his way and I won’t admit it, why won’t I? because I’m ridiculous and what have I learned? That it’s not always good to give people what they want, that you must want, not need, that sometimes…sometimes….you should never let go of what you have.

at this point, i shrug.

and for the three of you who read this (and the cat):

HEAR THIS (you beatniks)!

i am rafe davis, proletariat, one of the toughs, a kosmos. i am nineteen and bohemian, coffee and women, junkyards and guitars, marijuana, art and leather jackets. streetlights guide me and sometimes when i'm down by the river the road and the lights seem to go on forever; my car has inertia and sometimes i don't think i can ever slow down from sixty-five - this stone could roll forever.

guess who's gonna go see the pixies sunday.





!

i'm 19. i'm going to graduate with my degree in english next year. and while admittedly i'm still a young 'un, i have to look forward. i do not want to raise my kids in a country this backwards. we are bent on consumption, obsessed with profit, and run by a bunch of facsistic theocratic authoritarianists. we have to work 50 hours a week just to make ends meet. my generation is not going to have any sort of social services by the time we hit retirement (which is now 75, if you didn't know). if i get sick, i'm knackered. no health insurance. the schools are an utter, utter failure. the economy is going downhill. we are in the largest depression since the 30s. we've lost more jobs in the last five years than in the great depression. this country has no future but death, destruction, and decay. we are fighting a war the world is opposed to, and there's a good chance that i and most of my peers will be drafted. there is no political freedom. this is not a democracy (it never was, anyway) and it doesn't look like it will ever be. we now have to speak our minds in "free speech zones."



it's a big shit, and i want out.


wow, that was negative.

i moved into the house in avondale with jared. productivity has shot through the roof. this is awesome.

amy and i are official now. i still miss nancy.

the new song (Twenty) is finished. got trashed and recorded the vocals last night in the kitchen. jared and i did harmonies for the backing vocals. good times. the chorus goes like this:

we could get in my car
drive away real far
we could even go to mexico
you've been burning in my heart like a fire on the freeway
we gotta get away gotta get away gotta go (Go go go, go go go)

it's total RAWK. i shall upload it soon.



last night after going to bed at 3:50 i woke to the sound of jody giving jared head. they were both kind of wasted.

the contents of our fridge: eggs, celery, ketchup, Jungle Juice, and a whole lot of beer.

this is the life.

This is what the world looks like when I'm stoned. Soft focus, hazy light, a little blurry, and a whole lot warmer.



JD:





Meg & Adam



Meg



Amy standing in a doorway in Over the Rhine around 1 am.



Amy being sophisticated





Modrad, my namesake



Santi, Julie's little brother



Neal's roomie



House in Lexington



Motel in Lexington



Modrad again!