Magnifico's journal

I used to love to do creative writing, poetry and prose. Did it all the time, under the influence of a span of things from love to caffeine to pot to sleep deprivation. Somewhere along the way, though, I feel as though I lost the ability. Everything I write seems to come out rather weak, undefined, or just unavoidably bad. Anybody here with talent have any suggestions on what I might do to lure the muse back, and get in her good graces?

So a friend of mine loaded up a bunch of his pictures from our excursion to the great land of "Europe" onto a mutual friend's site.

First of all, if anybody seems to be doing anything strange in the pictures, it's because something was clouding our judgement. I'm not quite sure what.

So anyways, here are a few good ones:

The Forum des Halles(I think) in Paris.

The Eiffel Tower

L'opéra in Paris

Views from the Arch de Triomphe

The Arch de Triomphe itself

My friend Scott, obviously amazed by the beauty of the Arch de Triomphe and the Champs Elysées.

Dôme des Invalides (I think)

We were constantly intrigued by the weapons the soldiers were carrying. (In that last one, you'll note the brilliance of my friend Jay, as he poses just within beating distance of the nice soldier/police/gendarme-type guy behind him and to the right)

Staredown at a bullfight in Madrid

Most of the pictures we have up right now (if you go to the directory you can scan through the whole collection) are from Paris and Madrid (the majority are from Paris, and a number of them are shaky or blurry because the two people who took those pictures, myself and the owner of the camera, never slept on the plane ride over). I get my pictures back (finally) on Monday, and if those get loaded as well, I'll be sure to post them for your viewing displeasure.

This post was edited by Magnifico on Aug 29, 2004.

. . .she's dying.

A close friend of my mother's, a person who I've come to know and love, has cancer. She previously had breast cancer, but it had been operated upon and the doctors thought it had been beaten.

It's still there.

It lingers; for now, doctors know that it has spread to the marrow in some of her bones. It can't be removed.

A little over a year ago, my grandmother died; one of the side-effects of this unfortunate event was the total annihilation of my mother. She's still reeling from the pain. And now, one of her best friends has cancer that will, eventually, kill her. It is unsure, currently, when it will finally cause her death, but it will come.

I can't handle it. I want to help my mother, regardless of how often we disagree, and how angry I can be at her some times, I want to help. It feels like there's nothing that I can do, that I can say, to make any of this better. And when she dies; I don't know what is going to happen to my mother. If it comes sooner rather than later, this could be absolutely devastating.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
I don't know what I can do.

This post was edited by Magnifico on Aug 11, 2004.

Pieced together by memory from Poetry Night at Java Cabana in the heart of Memphis' culture-nouveau centre, the CY (Cooper-Young district):

We all sat at the château as the sky went dark;
Monsieur Dalle compared notes with the Croz and the Christ.
The sun set on his devil's chapel much later than it should.
I came out to burn away the last of Evie
black and white and blue
alone.
Not so. He sat there, quietly, an Indian with an iPod.
Silent, but for the understanding that this needed to be done.
Unceremonious sati of my stupid teenage desire.
That iPod would leave us in Madrid.
Plaza del Sol at midnight, it up and left.
From there after, the music was never digital
Flesh and blood from the hearts of the gypsies in Prague
Inspired as I was by the Marquis de Sade
Absinthe and Ernesto Guevarra
The fire I wanted to have
to use against skinheads, not SHARPs,
Black-and-white laces on Doc's and a katana.
Because I love you all too much.

It's rather garbled because I lost the flow and some of the lines (some of the transitions come off a little jerky because of that), but it's the first I've really written in a little while now.

This post was edited by Magnifico on Jul 16, 2004.

Last night I waited for you. You said you'd be back soon. It was 2:00 PM in Sapporo, you were packing, I was sitting in front of my illumined shrine, waiting for you. Glowing into my face, digitally divine. I miss you. I knew it would hurt, waking up the next day. This morning.

At 4:30 in your time, I finally turned from the screen. Went to bed. You never came back.

It was midnight in Bibai, and I was working. I still miss you.

I can't believe I missed you.

This post was edited by Magnifico on Jul 13, 2004.

Another night at the end of the weekend (we luckily get "Better Monday" or whatever this is off), and I've yet to do anything valuable with my time. My conscience is consciousness and Jeff Buckley breathing down my neck, begging "yeah, what have you done?" My solution is simple, suspended in pill-form, a demon in disguise and a djinn needling at my mind: caffeine. Sweet salvation in a bitter pill: No-Doz. 200 mg of caffeine, supposedly crystallized and imprisoned in a pill from the run-off of the process that decaffeinates Folger's coffee.

Down the hatch.