Jesse Catastrophe profile picture

Jesse Catastrophe

Wake me up when you're done being cool

About Me

I'm hopelessly caustic. I wouldn't be able to stop from making fun of anything I could say. It's a defect. These days, my life seems to revolve around the time in between spilling coffee on myself. That and being informed that other people are dead. An almanac of cold coffee and ended stories. HA!

My Interests

philosophizing with a hammer, wholesale destruction, witticisms, vindication, mercenaries, anything between the years 1618 and 1918, planning schemes (planning only; this is very important. carrying out these schemes is in no way anything i wish to be associated with. ever.), walking around and looking and thinking (the worse the weather, the better), anything apocryphal, aggrandizing pigeons, finding new and interesting ways to engage in unprovoked acts of intransigence, monitoring my newfound obsession with not becoming like Hunter S. Thompson, hyperbolizing my literary efforts to the point that I have some claim to the title of writer without seeming to, traveling / exploring, the frequently contested end of never losing my sense of humor, the itinerent membership in my literary group--whose ranks have swelled to as high as three or four, but which most of the time rests confortably at one.

I'd like to meet:

"Greedy for life, we forgot in body and soul about our hopes for the future until reality taught us that tomorrow was not what we had dreamed, and we discovered nostalgia." -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of my Melancholy Whores.

Music:

Crimpshrine, Fifteen, Jawbreaker, Screeching Weasel, Avail, Fugazi, Minor Threat, Monsula, Social Distortion, American Steel, Strike Anywhere, Against Me!, Small Brown Bike, Tilt, NOFX, Swingin Utters, Filthy Theiving Bastards, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Subhumans, Pinhead Gunpowder, Pegboy, Lungfish, Wilco, Radiohead, the Shins, Redemption 87, Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly, Sick of it all, Agnostic Front, DOA, The Circle Jerks, Rancid, Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards, Dead Kennedys, Pavement, All Bets Off, Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Lizst, Buddy Holly. ...and the Rashomon Effect *sigh*

Movies:

LOTR Trilogy, Star Wars (the older ones), Akira Kurosawa movies (any and all), Lawrence of Arabia, Rushmore, Clerks, Boondock Saints, Grosse Pointe Blank, Usual Suspects, Heathers, the Alien movies (well, the first two at least), Thin Red Line, Jim Jarmusch films (yes, films, laugh all you want), The Professional. One could shorten the list by saying, basically, that I like movies that make guns more than just guns, without making them too much. For the most part.

Television:

Heroes.

Books:

authors--JL Borges (Fiction and Nonfiction), W Gibson, DF Wallance (Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, The Broomstick of the System), T Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Mason and Dixon), S Dobyns (The Wrestler's Cruel Study), M Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), J Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn), S Rushdie (Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Midnight's Children), GG Marquez (100 Years of Solitude, Love in the Times of Cholera), JRR Tolkien, R Jordan, J Fforde, I Calavino (If on a Winter's Night a Treveler...), J London (To Build a Fire and other Stories), HP Lovecraft, N Hawthorne, FS Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night), E Hemingway (earlier short stories), T Mann (The Magic Mountain), F Kafka, S Beckett, T Hardy, PB Shelley, W Blake (fucking everything; this man was a genius), C Dickens (Bleak House is his best), T Fielding, W von Goethe, T Carlyle, Milton, H James (The Portrait of a Young Lady), G Elliot (Middlemarch), Cervantes, F Dostoyevski (Devils, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot), Gogol, I Turgenyev (On the Eve, Fathers and Sons), H Balzac, Stendahl, Dumas, Homer, Cicero, Ovid, J O'Connell, J Keegan, S Kierkegaard, there is and will be no end to this list.

Heroes:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (certainly not the first, but one of the most deservedly celebrated, and reckless, starving artists). Anyone who has sacked Rome at least once in their life. (I include Hannibal, who never quite managed to sack Rome, and yet do not include Julius Ceasar, who technically did sack Rome, although for much different reasons than the rest.) Gustav XII Adolph of Sweden. William Blake. My older brother. St. Jerome (who remained a hapless pagan until the day he was butchered, and for it rewarded with the special immortality of being the Patron Saint of philosophizers, among other things). Sharazhad. And anyone else with enough wits to realize that an appropriate admixture of derision, indifference, and determination is the best chance we all have at survival.

My Blog

None Worth the Name, Article V, Subtitled My Thought should be Axiomatic

Sub-Sub-Titled: You May be Pardoned for Listening to this music too much and mistaking your life for a bad theme song.I'm not gonna say anything more on the subject of the sub-sub-title, because it ma...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:13:00 PST

I must be Crazy

By the end of the day, I will have submitted "Trials of a Benign Catastrophe" to: the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and McSweeneys.  This will be my first time submitting anything to a ...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Tue, 19 Dec 2006 03:46:00 PST

None Worth the Name, Article IV, Subtitled Snow

It's been snowing lately in Seattle.  Two days of it.  In spite of the fact that I could in theory slide twenty blocks from uphill Capitol Hill, where I live, to downtown, where I work, no o...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:59:00 PST

Being Done.

What began in 1999, almost seven years ago, what as been since that time a constant source of joy, frustration, wrath, nostalgia, forgetting, and fever-induced decisions to make my last stand with a b...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Tue, 21 Feb 2006 09:05:00 PST

Marxism as a Polemic against Kryptonite.

At a tender age, when I was less jaded and more impressionable, I made a terrible error, a complete lapse of my usually sound judgement, one whose faultiness still haunts me however many years later: ...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Fri, 20 Jan 2006 02:53:00 PST

A Pseudo-satire on Fake Friends...

So here's the bulletin that's been posted variously over the past few weeks (maybe more):   Why do people who are friends on people myspace list never write back and why do some people have a mi...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Fri, 09 Dec 2005 11:54:00 PST

None Worth the Name, Article III

So after having examined the properties of Blg Groups, I've come to one fundamental conclusion, so evinced by observation that it may well be a physical (or virtual) law: Blog Groups are fucking point...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Mon, 05 Dec 2005 09:38:00 PST

None Worth the Name, Article II

Really, I'm only waiting for coffee to brew.  That's all.  I woke up at 4:30 am this morning, so that I could see katie off to the airport.  It's left me feeling disoriented: my left fo...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Wed, 23 Nov 2005 06:40:00 PST

I, Jinx

So it's become clear to me that I'm officially a jinx.  California went officially non-smoking on New Year's Day, 1998.  I had just turned 18 71 days earlier.  While I enjoyed smoking, ...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:13:00 PST

My girlfriend just punched me in the face. Seriously.

She says that it was an accident, but I'm not sure I should believe her.She's also the only girl willing to spar with me, so I suppose that I kinda deserve it.  If not for any of a number of othe...
Posted by Jesse Catastrophe on Sat, 05 Nov 2005 06:59:00 PST