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.
"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.
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*
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.
Heroes.
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.
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.