from the vaults

holier than thou drivel a la courtney, age 22:

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dec. 28th, 1999

4:35am

in the december 99 edition of rolling stone magazine, my personal hero, michael stipe, said the best item to put in a time capsule to reflect society today would be videotapes of infomercials. i thought that was brilliant. and as i skidded my fingers aimlessly this evening across the tv remote control i had to focus all my energies on holding back vomit. infomercials on every second channel made me stare in awe. the most amazing thing about infomercials is the staggering number of people who don't see through the charismatic hosts. it's not the uselessness of the product, it's the acting. The cheerful excitement, purely synthetic, being pumped up everyone's asshole and most of those people don't even realize it's invalidity. it's sort of like being the outcast in high school and having the head cheerleader say hi to you so she feels like a good samaritan. if it's not real, people, it's not worth anything. on your wedding day, if your spouse-to-be sounded that forced while giving his/her vows, would you be confident in ending up with a quality marriage? no. so why do we accept these "product-cheerleading" campaigns when we know the only reason these people back the product is because they get a hefty check for doing so?

so i flip through the next 10 infomercials. "the fat trapper", "the ab-roller", "beautiful nails", "the secret to ageless skin". doesn't it bother anyone else that beauty is a product? hasn't anyone ever seen a bare tree under a street light in dense fog? and you're telling me beauty comes in a bottle? have you stepped outside lately?

4:54am

so i give up on television. that's always inevitable. i ponder the concept and mis-concept of beauty and mike comes to mind. he's one of the most beautiful people i know and i've felt that for 3 or 4 years now. here's the part where everyone cringes, but lest we forget, i'm not the one buying cellulite cream that doesn't work from ex-dallas stars. mike is an internet friend and has been only that for 3 or 4 years. i love him very much. unfortunately that's not something i have control over... and believe me, i've tried to repress it countless time. he's just now beginning to show his undesirable side, but even that i have an element of understanding for.

5:11am

email. both amazing and sad. amazing in it's abilities to reach anyone, anywhere, in seconds. sad because we've come to this. we've reached this peak level of techno-dependency and laziness. much to my heart-stopping surprise, i have new mail from mike. earlier i'd asked him to give me his final decision as to whether or not he would be here in january as he'd promised. his promises aren't all that binding. before january it was december, before december, november, etc. this, along with his deadbeat emailing habits, make up the aforementioned undesirable side [2006 courtney's note: i had no idea he was on smack here...]. i can understand why he's being so difficult about coming to vancouver. after 3 years of loving someone from a distance, it sort of becomes a comfort zone. the thought of meeting, to both he and i, is immensely frightening to say the least. what happens if we're not physically attracted to each other? i have no doubt in my mind that it won't be a problem for me because regardless of what he looks like, he's still mike and i love mike. i've been out with guys who look like they stepped off a page of gq and thought of mike the whole time. he's still the one who's spent over $5000 USD phoning me. daily after i was raped just to check up on how i was doing. he's still the one person i have a truly amazing connection with, beyond describable, beyond fathomable, almost divine. he's still got this mind that not only ranks way above genius on the IQ scale, but can contain the entire universe and still allow him to love with the intensity he does. the words that come out of his mouth, the sincere happiness he is capable of regardless of being burdened with the knowledge that the world is all wrong. the way he sheds tears when he describes how he loves me. no physical flaw could erase all that from the forefront of my mind. but he is still afraid, as am i. how sad that society has made us both so very cautious. we're conditioned to scoff when someone says "looks don't matter to me" because people who speak the truth when they say this are so few and far between.

5:46am

my brother likes music because the vocalist is "hot". this is, thus far, excusable. he is still 17. i , being 22, have gotten past that stage of my life, the idol worship, the sad longing, and replaced it with sad longing for non-idols. i'm giggling. i sit surrounded by posters of kurt cobain in my bedroom. i must rest my aching neck before the first rays of sun pervert the purity of night.

5:34 pm

my life is fairly simple. my desires as well. give me a warm place to sleep, a source of music & transportation, pens, paper, food and people to love and i'm happy. not many people get why i love my 1982 buick skylark (the mothership). i dunno, what's not to love? it gets me from here to there and back again. the only problem with the mothership is it's lack of an operable tape deck. if there's one thing i can't stand, it's having no alternative but to listen to the radio. all that useless talk and 90 percent crappy music and assholes yelling about all the great deals you can get here and there. it's as transparent as television. so a while back i bought myself a new deck. i'm awakened at some obscene hour this morning by my mother's phone call, saying. "if you get up right now and go to gordon's, he'll install your stereo for you" so i hang up the phone, throw on some clothes, grab a slice of cold pizza and fly out the door.

about 2.5 hours later, i'm driving home, listening to the radio. not surprisingly, the clerk at future shop had lied to me when he said that particular deck will fit my car. i sort of suspected that, just looking at the deck, but the clerk had insisted. anything for a goddamned dollar, these commission assholes, i swear. to the junkyard! ...maybe tomorrow.

Currently listening: Moving Units By The Moving Units Release date: By 04 February, 2003

Labels: mike

posted by Courtney at 10:22 a.m.

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