Dharma Bums

I've been in a funk and I've got the mean reads. I'm angry because something was taken away from me. About three weeks ago, the Speech & Debate Team's funding was cut. The program was cut. This is just one more thing that can be added to my list of "things that are out of my control." Fuck that. I love performing. I can't imagine my collegiate experience without speeching. I've been performing in some way or another officially since I was in the 6th grade, unofficially since I was a fetus. The idea that after April 20 I will never perform again freaks me out. What do I do after college? I went to college never intending on actually graduating and finding a real job and living in the real world and becoming a real person.


One of my pieces this year revolves around defining what art is.


And that got me thinking. Why do I do Speech? Why do I make movies? Why do I write?


I do all of these in what is probably a vain effort to somehow control the world in which I live, recreating it in a manner that satisfies my sense of what the world should look like and be like. I’m just interested in the truth. And what I like best is the complicated, messed-up truth. The one that’s so imperfect you know it’s true.

We Cannot Afford To Be What We Have Become

"There's your karma, ripe as peaches."

"You never die enough to cry."

"But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?"

"We should be wondering tonight, 'Is there a world?' But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin’ on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out."

"My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I'm a wretch. But I love, love."

"This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do."

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."