This was a school project where we had to write a how - to paper. Mine started out as kind of a joke, but it kinda got too real so be warned.

A question I’m often asked is, “is there a way I can be you, or even just a little more like you?” It seems to be a recurring query in most conversations I have, so I decided I’d finally sit down and see what I could do. I am intimately acquainted with the state of being that happens to go by the name of Lou, and following these steps, will allow someone to in some part address the issue that is the undersaturation of Lou.

The first thing to do is cop the look. For this, pay a visit to the nearest thrift store and find the men’s clothing section. I’m talking jeans and t-shirts. Do a cursory sweep, and if there is any clothing in a particular dark shade of purple, pick that up immediately. It might not necessarily fit, but that’s not important yet. Next, go to the jeans section and find some plain jeans that look like they’ll be a fairly tight fit, but not quite skinny jeans tight. The final step is to go and get the smallest v neck t shirts available in the store, and any sweaters that are laying around. You can go try them on, and if they’re tight and blue/purple enough, you’ve got a wardrobe! Don’t worry about shoes, any shoe will do. You’ll only wear the vans knockoffs to the skate park though.

Now that you have the look down, you’re gonna want to take a look at your hair now, because that’s the next thing you’ll have to work on. As a rule of thumb, if it doesn’t at least barely hit your shoulders, it’s gonna need some work. That’s okay though, because you do still have time. While you wait, go ahead and visit the black hair aisle at walmart. It won’t be labelled as such, but you’ll know you’re there when you start to smell the coconut oil. Get any product with coconut or shea in the name. Argan and castor oil are also options. At the end of the day, as long as your hair is shiny and as black as possible, you’re good.

Finally, you absolutely can’t be Lou if you don’t act a little bit like him. This is the tricky part, but once you get into it, you’ll do just fine. First, you have to understand that before middle school, he’d been led to believe that he was a really special person. The realization that he actually wasn’t will inform a lot of his, and now your choices in the future, as he struggles to be what he’d always thought he was born as--exceptional. You’ll need to develop a fascination with people’s reactions, and those reactions should come to be a major reason behind most things you do. The idea is to do things that will have people saying stuff like, “Holy shit, I thought he was joking,” or, “I didn’t think he’d actually do it, Jesus Christ!” You wanna value your life, but at the same time, do remember to look at everything as really just a big piece of performance art. One way to begin to do this is to joke about stuff a lot. Every now and then, actually do what you’re joking about, and you’ll be able to throw people off balance a bit, which is what you want. If it gets to be too much for you, that’s fine--I’ve had that happen myself, actually. Don’t mention it to anyone, but it shouldn’t be too hard for you to modify the way you operate just enough that you’ll be good.

Now I can’t promise that following these steps will make you quite reach maximum Lou, but you can use all this information as a sort of starter kit. Life is more improvisation than not anyway, so as long as you understand the basic idea, you should be good. If you’d like to be able to know exactly when you’ve reached maximum Lou, I’d advise that you watch other people. When the theatre kids and the mormons begin to sort of hold you at arm’s length, but old people love you, you should be just about there. Ultimately, I don’t think worldwide maximum Lou would really be a good thing because we would all collectively just get too hyped and die, but we could so far use quite a bit more Lou, so go out there and be Lou!

"YouTube Doc"

This is a short story I wrote for english 9 about a camping trip I went on with my scout troop. It is very unpolished, because I ended up having to rush it so don't expect too much ^_^I think I might work on it a little more later and if so I will be sure to post updates.  That said, the story...

The jeep was warmed inside and out by the harsh afternoon sun. My eyes tracked the landforms that slid out of sight. They were fluid, knobby columns of crumbly rock colored by the iron in the soil. The terrain was irregular with an uneven distribution of muted green and yellow foliage. The occasional scrubby tree would make an appearance if I really looked. I leaned into the hard plastic trimming of the window and rested my head awkwardly in the corner between the door and my seat. It was hard to find a comfortable position in the muggy atmosphere. I sat up and looked outside at a distant hoodoo.My backpack sagged over the edge of the seat.

I pulled it up and unzipped it to get out my videocamera. I opened the window so that I could record better. After taking a few short videos, I put my camera back and shut the window. That would end up on my YouTube channel. We turned off onto a dusty unpaved road. Cows slowly looked up at the jeep. I saw in the distance  a huge landform that wrapped around the horizon. It broke up into tall hoodoos at the edges and balancing stones on the top. It became gradually more prominent as we wound along the road closer to our camping site.

The sun reached it’s peak of brightness and was now quickly retreating to the west.  There were lights in the distance from the cars preceding us that had reached the camping ground. Coming down from a small hill, we reached our destination. The jeep rolled to a stop on oddly smooth packed ground. I took out my videocamera again and tried to get some footage of a large hill that wrapped around one side  of our camping grounds. By that time though, it was too dark for my camera to pick it up. I noticed with some disappointment that the battery was going down pretty quickly. I turned it off and put it in my pocket so I could go help set up the tents.

I woke up to the distant sound of cows. Moisture from the air had made my clothes and backpack slightly damp. Somehow, my camera had ended up in a little bag hanging from the side of the “wall.”  When I had gotten dressed in some new clothes and put on my shoes, I took the camera out and took a quick video explaining where I was and what I was doing there. After that, I turned it off again and left the tent. I was surprised to discover that I was the only person awake.

The hill was a good deal more impressive in the early blue daylight. It had an incline of less than45 degrees that made it very easy to walk up, untill I got a little closer to the top. It was at that point where my footing became a lot less stable in loose, rocky dirt. When I got up, I looked around. I had gotten quite a bit higher than it felt from the climb. The whole camp looked very small down there at the base.  Across from me was another, taller hill. It’s makeup was much less dirt than a lot of broken up, loose rock chips. There was another camp on the other side of the first hill in it’s shadow. I got some video of the sun rising.

I was climbing up the second hill when I noticed my brother and our friend Vuna walking around the camp. I yelled at them until they noticed me and started climbing up. I continued to climb closer to the top. They started to scramble up the hill, which was really the only way to get up because of the difficulty of getting a firm foothold. I called down again , asking if anyone else was awake. Nobody was. They got up to a large , stable boulder that I had chosen to stop on.

“Do you know what we’re having for breakfast?” Vuna said. I looked down at the camp, “Nope, not really. Probably just like pancakes or something.” I looked at the battery widget on my videocamera. It was at a dismal percentage of a full charge. I turned it off. “Hey watch this.” Damian said. He turned his body at an angle like a surfer and started shuffling down the hill side. We watched him start to pick up speed near the place where the two hills met. Vuna followed him , “surfing” in the same way. I turned on my videocamera and went down after them. After one near wipe out, I stopped recording, put the camera in my pocket and held out my arms to maintain better balance. We started jumping along the slope of the hill near the bottom until we reached the camp again.

At that point, almost everyone was awake and the sun was hot enough for us to take off our sweaters. The members of our scout troup were scattered around in small groups exploring the surroundings. A few of us, myself included, were gathered around the gril watching the food being cooked. It was what I had expected; Pancakes with bacon and eggs. I considered adding that to my growing collection of video clips of the camp, but decided not. That was something I could easily find at home every morning. The leaders told us to “go do something.”

“HEy, let’s go check out the top of that thing.” I said, turning towards the hill.”Okay,” Vuna said, “Come on Damian!” We took a different route that looked better for actually scaling the hill. It was on the west side, made up entirely differently of silky dirk covered in a hard crust interrupted occasionally with a rock or a footprint. When we were almost to the top, we stopped and looked down. It looked a considerably less forgiving fall.

As we came back down, I started looking through my videos. I deleted a few to save some space. There was some video from yesterday when we were driving to the camp, and then a lot from today. These would probably end up being uploaded in episodes. There was nobody waiting in anticipation to see them, but I thought that would make it a lot easier to understand what was happening. If my camera lasted until the next day, I would be able to have a little series of three videos like I had planned.

Camp was almost shut down for the day. The leaders told us we were going to the actual valley now. The place we were staying in was a few miles away from that. I put some of my more important stuff into my pockets and got into the jeep with Damian and Vuna. We talked a little bit and watched the everybody pack up. Lance got out of the driver’s seat and checked everything just to make sure, and then we left. We were the last of the troop to leave.

When we pulled up into the park, I didn’t really see much of note. It was a wide expanse of orange dirt. There was what looked like a massive dip in the ground. I got out and walked over to a pavilion at the edge of the dip.It turns out that was the actual goblin valley park. What I couldn’t see from the car was a huge valley type thing studded with bulbous and twisting sandstone formations. These were small enough that people could climb up on them and explore very easily. The massive scale of the valley was amazing. This is what we came for

I got out my videocamera and turned it on. The battery bar was red and it looked like I wouldn’t have much recording time at all. I pressed record. The screen faded away. Disappointed, I put it back into my pocket and ran down into the valley.

I'm bound by my mind
It is all self imposed
Why is it so hard?

I can't breath
I've buried myself
Help.

Head Down

Hey still living from my head down and still got nobody watching. So I got a new tablet for christmas. With a keyboard. Hopefully, words will now rain down from my fingers.

Stuff is happening. Not on this blog. It includes the slow death of my computer.

Response to a prompt

Warning:I decided to go into somewhat gruesome detail.

The quiet rumbling of thousands of people just waking up quickly became unbearably loud as they began cheering and screaming. The first float was drifting by, and it was much more than what they had expected. It was by itself fairly generic. Lots of colored paper flapping from the edges. Paper mache furniture. But it's occupants. They were something else entirely. A man dressed as a bulky, paper mache astronaut sat in one of the chairs, legs stretched out across the floor. Another man, the tattooed 2050 presidential candidate from Texas was screaming and flailing around. They were both very much on fire. Something in his ink made it quite flammable, and it was a spectacular sight. The strange shapes of fire that rose from the dark purple markings of his skin. Burning pieces of paper fell from the astronaut and into the crowd as he continued to give no regard to the fire. Very quickly, the crowds began to wonder at the realism of the special effects on the float. The astronaut was of course just a paper mache sculpture, but the movement of the screaming robot seemed a bit too fluid and varied. They spoke to each other, trying to figure out if there really was something wrong. A few people spread the news through the crowd that everything was fine. There was some explaining of the technology. They were apparently satisfied. The tattooed candidate had stopped moving. He was curled up in a fetal position on the float. Not moving. Still burning. Quite charred. The astronaut had burned away, and there was a strange and blackened flowing figure sitting in the chair now. Jerkily, it raised up an arm and waved. It was garish. A man started yelling. Protesting the over the top  gruesomeness of the float. He ran up to it and hoisted himself up over the edge. Two policemen stopped their cars and got onto the float. Yelling, they forced him to the ground and handcuffed him. They assured the crowds that everything was alright. At this point, they were louder. Angry voices. Parents. Screaming children. Vomit. Things were thrown. The police chose not to engage, and instead escorted the man into the car. A window shattered inward. They sped off. The float continued. Until the first few people found weapons and began to attack the wheels. They were beat at with sticks and crowbars from people's cars. It dropped onto the ground and the astronaut slipped off it's chair. It was stiff. More police arrived. They chased away the people and told them all to go home. The parade was over. Most people left. Both bodies were eventually autopsied. There was metal inside. silicon muscle, mostly burned away. The silicon skins were both gone. The company responsible was sued.