Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Thomas John Dittmeier's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
1:01 pm	I'm going to be home soon. I don't know what else to say. But yeah, I'll be home in less than a week. So... yeah. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 25th, 2008
10:19 pm	Hello. Hullo. Hi. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
2:09 pm	I thought maybe I had gotten over the whole anti-social thing, but I've realized that it just takes me 4 years in a social institution to actually make strong ties to people (with a few exeptions). So I'm going to try to avoid going through Junior High again. For my own sake. Aside from that, everything is fantastic here in Baltimore (which is where I am, in Baltimore Maryland at Maryland Institute College of Art). Art people are a little intimidating, but they're straight cats. As for me, I'm either working, reading, keeping good conversation with said cats, or playing guitar all day. Sleep is taking up a very small portion so far, and it's not a bad thing. That's about all I have to say so far. It's sunny here and I'm ready to make this place my own. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
2:08 am	"On and on and on, we'll stay together yet..." Some will, some won't. There are some things I miss. Whatever. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 8th, 2008
1:52 pm	Past, present, and future. I can't tell you what I've been through, or how I feel right now. It's complicated, exhausting, and I've little time left. My favorite feeling is that of dusky happiness, the end of something, when life is at the cusp of spilling over. I cannot escape my love for a man who has erected an empire of morals with me in tow. Instead, I have fully realized it. Fuck fame. I wanted to be famous? Fuck fame. The energy of revolutions churns my organs slowly, and while I drag my feet my blood boils. I am complete, and I have no regrets. What's art without a life? What's life without art? Which came first? These things don't matter, only because humanity can only recognize that they both exist. The most proactive thing a fellow can do is wholeheartedly pursue something, with little idleness and no regard for past or future. How did self-indulgence inherit badness? And self-sacrifice, grace? There's no such thing as self-sacrifice. Those who sacrifice do so out of a love that is substantiated by that pain. I thought about the double helix, and wonder; on a 2 dimensional plane, it would seem as if it consists of two separate proponents that join, come apart, and join again. But seeing it rotate in 3 dimensions, we observe that the two strands are constantly bound, dancing around each other as they move in contrary. A hypercube, in 4 dimensional eyes, is nothing more than a prism, while in the third it fluctuates in an incomprehensible, jarring mass of edges and sides. What am I getting at? Unity on a higher order within what is perceived as separation, I guess. I feel sad, but full. I think this will work out. And we all did okay. I think today we realized we all did okay. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
1:53 pm	4 more weeks until I'm gone. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 21st, 2008
9:33 pm	I intentionally got myself lost today. I didn't even have anything to run from- just people who needed, or wanted, me to be back home. I was at my sister's place at the time. I think it's mostly because John Coltrane has been trying to tell me something ever since we met, but I hadn't devoted enough time to really listen to him. So I finally gave him the chance. The pianist attempts to rationalize chaotic forces coming from Coltrane's horn and furiously spits the most frenzied chords he knows, ping-ponging modes and square progressions rotating against one another in flux. The drummer empathizes with anger, and classifies nothing. He keeps things moving forward, but remains unquestioning. But Coltrane attains complete harmonic freedom. Oftentimes he goes nowhere, repeating the same figure digested by the ear in countless ways as the pianist fruitlessly pins. He overblows and undercuts, he sweats and ascends, he cries into nothing. He explores mystery and laments loss. But Coltrane is somewhere else. What separates Coltrane and Albert Ayler or Kaoru Abe is only the fact that he has his band trailing behind, out of generosity only. Simply by allowing their presence, he is inviting us up. Love. It's A LOVE Supreme, isn't it? And yet it is such a chaotic piece. The crux of his free-jazz leanings, just before Meditations, but after the calculated, technical progressions of Giant Steps. It exists between these two elements, chromatic and somewhat polytonal, sometimes even modal, but existing for personal freedom alone, rather than technical or musical freedom. I think Coltrane was a fighter too. Miles Davis was the Picasso of jazz, but he was always an arranger and musician. Miles Davis was not a horn player. Listen to Dizzy Gillsepie once and that's clear. Davis knew it too. But with Coltrane, it's almost always about Coltrane. Coltrane was breaking spiritual barriers through art, and his music was spiritual music. His Testament and his experience exist in his recordings because he is a generous man- as generous as an artist on a quest for self-discovery can be. I can't say exactly what I figured out on that drive. I'm not living in Colrane's melodies- that's something to strive for. But I think I jibe with the Bass at this point of my life- experiencing at the back of things, and then, when all is silent, echoing, and softly guiding this story, this quest to it's next chapter, when everything is changed and changing. So I suppose the next step for me is to simply shout. Fumblydrunk like Dizzy was. "Blow!" (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
3:12 am	A botched attempt at summer musings. Since returning from Ireland I've been trying to find something to say about things. All things, really. What am I doing? I'm trying to play the artist. Why am I doing it? Because I'm selfishly ambitious. Towards what am I working? Perfection. But for what purpose continues to escape me. To what end is unanswerable. But what I've been fighting is saying less and learning more, observing more and living more. At this point we are on the dividing line between Creation and Truth. It doesn't come out because it's such a blur in my head. Frenzied and episodic, waking and dreaming, beaming and scheming, and breathing, and seeing, and being, and being inside, and being alongside. And being under. But trying hard to make it without a false sense of being above. I'm fighting for something. I'm always fighting for something. Maybe this would come out easier if there was more THC in my blood. LSD in my spine. Psilocin in my brain. El Greco wasn't recognized until centuries after his death as a master painter and a godfather of modernity. Arthur Rimbaud lived frustrated and misunderstood, and was stabbed by his only lover. James Joyce wrote Ulysses during the war. Upon finishing it he furiously revised it, and immediately began working on Finnegan's Wake, which was received poorly prior to his death. The frustration I know. But how can this be? Ulysses is generally accepted as the greatest novel ever written, in any language, in any time. It is feared for it's dense impenetrability and loved for it's lucidness. But Joyce remained skeptical for his Dublin, and frustrated until the novel's end. Indeed, it feels pained and frustrated in it's insurmountable task, and yet there are moments of joy fully realized in Finnegan's Wake, soaring sounds of childlike joy immersed in a sudden burst of undeniable energy in the evening sun, in the place you were born and the place you'll remain. It taps into a higher realm of existence and brings is sifted and shifted into waking reality. It lives and breathes, and yet life constantly responds and imitates. Ulysses was my means to understanding that end. Ulysses was my bible. But the only thing I discovered on my trip was that I would never understand the text, nor would I ever fully empathize with or get to know Joyce. He spoke furiously in code- his thin lips moved fast, and he turned with smooth precision like an owl does. But I never got to look him in the eye, and his monstrous city scrambles for his ciphers, which lay buried in his hands. He was the point on a clear day where the smooth gradient of the atlantic ocean melted into the sky, indiscernible and imprecisely beautiful. Landscapes became harsh dripping geometrics, umber brown and sap green, laced with the yellow white of that mass ahead, swallowing the rocks with prehensile white fingers. He was that subtle breeze and stomach churning fear, the slashing and dragging of my pen, the useless peripheral. But he is also a ghost. To be that uninterrupted sky, to be the force of that sloping, breathing sea, our lovely mother and our wirey hair, would feel so natural. But my whole life I have been fighting implicitness. That's what I'm fighting and what I've been fighting. But fighting to become something that I can't understand is a frightening commitment. Artists are fucks. I don't want to be a bad person. I wouldn't be completely unfulfilled if I didn't strive for all this, and I would lead a happier, longer life. People would be happy, and I'd try to make them happy. And nobody would question me beyond what I actually know about my life. About my role as a human on all sorts of levels. If I really did define it myself, I don't understand how I could not know it and still want it. Artists are martyrs, bitches, soldiers and live grenades, hashish and oxytocin, mirrors and lights. But I want to be an artist, and there is one thing that I know about my role, the thing that makes Artists all of these things. In order to be an artist I must be myself above all else, and that self must reign supreme over reality as I perceive and live it. Ego is omnipresent and must be for the potential of omnipotence. And to strive for that is blind ambition. I just need to keep believing that it is not complete blindness. That's all I know. That's all I can tell you. It's a little sleepless, but not sad. I smile on sunny days and breathe deep on rainy ones, knowing that I'm getting there, and that it will one day be mine to make. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
6:26 pm	There's one. Sorry about the red; I flubbed on Photoshop. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, April 28th, 2008
9:15 pm	Once again, I'll find myself painting into exhaustion. Oh boy! Also, here's a finished one. I haven't posted in a while. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
9:42 pm	work work work work work work work work after typing the word out many times, it begins to take the form of onomatopoeia being hit on the head by something metallic and pliable wooooooooooooooooork. i've been told by many people at many different points in my life that i'm talented. that i'm going to, and supposed to, do something great. see my name in lights i never thought it was fitting. james joyce, samuel beckett, marlon brando, &c. those are names that you can hear yourself saying. terse, preconceived, sombre and memorable, tragic and ominous. thomas dittmeier is not one of these names. it's drawn out and pretentious. maybe you'll be referred to him in a footnote in a book about more important things. i've been told by many people at many different points in my life that i'll be famous someday. but even in the smallest instance of recognition, of real voice and public existence, i buckle and sweat. perhaps artists recede into childishness and seek autonomy so that they don't have to think. produce carelessly. burn all the paintings. forget your friends. call your mother when she's dying, then move on. you've got more work to do, and more paintings to burn when you're done with them. perhaps artists are really the most terrible people. and i want to desperately to be liked. maybe i'm not to be trusted, either. and those artists who were true, they're dead, or obscure. i wouldn't mind being obscure, but those are the brilliant ones. with real skill, something carnal and inbred. the romantics are all dead. because i think they asked themselves, 'who am i to be trusted in the first place?' i don't have voice. i don't have presence. i don't have answers. these are all feeble and universal statements. i just made the very western mistake of trying to find answers, and find solutions. but that's the way it has to be because there is a rollingdrop of a liquidvicussoul that creeps down my collarbone and shimmers in the moonlight, the singles bead of white paint on a silhouette. in light it casts a shadow, an impasto application left to saturate and dry for years, to chemically oxidize into hardness under the watchful eye of aristotle and marcus aurelius. because the greatest and happiest painter was uragami gyokudo, and he played the guqin and painted in ink, lived and died in the mountains and lived for no-one. Current Music: Wilco- Hummingbird (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 31st, 2008
9:14 pm	It's all paying off... I honestly never could have expected it. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 24th, 2008
10:00 am	"We were all drowning in cruise control Far enough, far enough Wasn't far enough I stood on my heart supports thinkin' 'Oh my God, I'll probably have to carry this whole load.' I couldn't remember if I tried I couldn't remember if I took my brain out, threw it so directly at the goal I couldn't remember if I... I could have my mind erased And still not know exactly what I don't already know Even as I left Florida" (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
11:31 am	David Lynch Problem Solver! Awesome. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
5:40 pm	I'm not scared. I'm not complacent. I'm not guilty. (Damn right I'm somebody) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
9:19 pm	MUTHA FUCK! I got into Maryland Institute College of Art! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
4:29 pm	I feel good about myself again. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 10th, 2008
10:36 pm	Every Sonnet has a turn. (you wouldn't dare take me to woodfield mall) parry and repose, recompounded composition of the western tradition and the Jesus-centric Watson and Crick the historicity of historical bookish glasses wearers spitting acting obscenities not there yet in a heidegger fit the geometric proof pages and pages I get it. Here. Here's how it goes. The universe knows your face and vibrates for you as you vibrate for it, a father and son as one entity, the trinity enlarged into a legion of millions, screaming the tritone, falling down diminished chords through calamity and graphite, through steel strings and ectoplasm, in a universal orgasm, always, and there's a turning away and there's a turning back, there's assault and battery and there's passionate love, but in the quail qualm calms there's real flight and real kisses, and pursed lips reply, bleed, and accept in the cold weather kept in memory yet unkeepable collectables, and photographs not retellings or frozen actions, not novels stoic stories, not paintings pictures of live, but breathing writhing things breathing, heeeeeeeeeaving, yes and when the song changes and your step quickens it's there pushing you. I never believed in the illimitable nation and I never believed in myself, hopelessly bookish and tragically Hamlet. The lexicon should only operate under the conscious. To grasp antiquity every waking second brings the insanity of complacency, and ultimately death swimmer fights the tides yes. And then the chest rises yes. Filled with gunsmoke yes. And now the Omega tastes like lead and wild strawberries. (Comment on this)
7:56 pm	To sum up my feelings at the moment, I suppose. Another bit for creative writing. It needs revision. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was…” This was to be his epitaph, a close second to “everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt”. But in the changing of the times Vonnegut was to be regarded as classicism, one would suppose. William Faulkner had practically become Aegean and Virginia Woolf had been devoured by the earth. Just as the visual art world has yet to digest Picasso, just as musicians remain hopelessly devoted to the Pixies, so had men of literature yet surmounted James Joyce. But the Portrait of the Artist was as bland and isolated as an Edward Hopper painting: matte, with an obsession with architectural detail and the diagonal line- the sheets reeked of Cezanne (he casts them aside) and his mind was troubled with an even deeper disconnection. His hair was a dirty Goya brown, the color of the ground, curling madly into pubis with disrepair. He would hope his pose and the folding of the cloth would make him look like an Odalisque, but, as if the sea of crumpled up tissues and dirty underwear were to reply to him, his figure, neglected in wake of new artistic endeavors, was uncomfortably Reubenesque (and infinitely more hairy). Play the laughtrack. He looks at his yellowed toenails as his feet hit the floor. His mother always called them cocaine toenails due to their length- he supposed that late at night she wondered if they really achieved their supposed utility. He’s sniffling an awful lot lately (it’s winter). He’s needlessly edgy (it’s school, or perhaps it’s you). Play the laughtrack. He drips limply in the shower. Notes; Standing erect (before he slumps and slops to the floor) he is approximately 4.13 inches from the showerhead (we leave it to the reader to divine his height). His buttocks protrude awkwardly at an arc of 37 degrees (if one were to mark the circle’s center at the hip-bone), especially in relation to his legs, (which were thin as a Sheile limb), and due to his increasing lack of fitness one could see the bone that marked the joints of his arms, a skinniness due primarily to the inheritance of skin-and-bone traits from the Indian subcontinent. He struggles to open his eyes, suffering from the redness of what he perceives as hard work, the summation of a handful of hours, set apart from his precious friends, yielding very little due to frequent breaks of concentration. His hands are adorned with paint, as if to say ‘I’m an artist, please don’t laugh at me.’ But as he pulls the black sweater over his head and the peg-legged jeans over his hips, the ensemble seems to scream ‘it doesn’t get any better than this.’ (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
6:55 pm	Writings I'm in creative writing now, so I'm getting used to writing things that are not extremely personal. Enter hazel face of an Irish boy, sauntering roughly, wind-whipped and squinting against the cold winter winds, stirred by the highway cars and the howling of T.V. babies. A shock of black hair that curdles and curls down his forehead, sinews of the Dublin sea, drifting- the embodiment of late 19th century etchings, the bimorphic afterimage of wet women’s dreams, the dark eyes of cliffrocks by the sea, ebbing freely, illuminated by the distant misty lighthouse glint that parts that obscurity, the fine froth that can only be induced by the romance of the human Homeric epic. It’s warm there but he lives here, where his shoes grate abrasive against the rocksalt and iceblock. Where Ginsberg cried until his beard froze. Where Wilbur loved and lost his angels. Where the marriages are buried. Where the dreams scream for ice cream. John Milton wrote a book about it. He opens the door like Sisyphus and enters like the town drunk, in a fit of escapism, and steps in time to a bar dance- like the dog debutante he scans the walls, looking for an untouched instrument that travels in step. His crackled palms yen Ezra and smell George Dyer. But he smells the dissonant resonance more than anything- ‘More pricks than kicks’, he comments dryly. He lightly follows the woodgrain with his eyes and runs his fingers along the nylon strings with the upturned concentration of a museum curator, nostrils wrinkled, lips pursed, head full of feedback flying far into the highway. A red young one, the budding red of a daughter, sweet and eager. Looks past the wall and palpitates Lenehan’s luscious lumbering, forlorn for Molly Molloy loved livvy. Guitar sleepy surrenders, he licks his teeth happily until feedback’s crack. He waits for Go(go) ‘Don’t rush me,’ motions to kush dreams starry. But the instrument is obtrusive- it’s white noise. In slight disagreement with his soul, compromising all artistic integrity and self-sufficiency. He returns it to its hanging place, where it belongs. Does it real slow. Running it through his head. He sat for a long time, in no hurry to find his mate. His hands were calm, yet poised. Never hungry or impatient. For what’s the use of passing flings and material things? He’s searching for rich, low-timbre ecstasy. For unity with vibrations of superstrings. He walks out, opening the door like Sisyphus, leaving like the Pope. He shivers innocent and waiting like a flapper debutante Mallone, howls and wails on the joints, the impact of a cold iron hammer. He then drives home alone alone. *** What’s the use? Passing phone calls, vacuous kisses, idle chatter, assault and battery to unchecked beauty and when you shee it shit bricks and then let me know. Empty hallways cry for information defied by I belong to noone in saccharine lying to past and perfect tense where’s the future steeple stoop yes when your sheets shee it too the rocks rife with, wanted, to! Whereas orange trees and green things spew nonsequiturs pint by pint of silence, Bloooooooooooooming with vroom into sunset rooms (Haughtily Chanting Euphemisms), Whereas home is cosmically distanced by the rotation of the earth, Whereas logical fallacies are science’s phallacies, Whereas cellist strings snap with heavyweight machete children, Whereas spilt milk dissipates on a stone, Whereas beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, Whereas blood flows in my guiness, Whereas unkiss’d lips crack, Whereas scaffolds groan stone, Whereas cannons according to canon, Whereas western bands quicksand, Whereas Nestor divines dice, Whereas Thisbe kills mice, Whereas Elsinore bodkin bare, Whereas prince dagger dare, Whereas silver bullets sting the throat and rock the boat. Where is it warmest? *** The sun shines more brilliantly on the old car than the new road. He’d wake up in another state and the same state. He’d smell the sweet sea and awake in sour sweat. He’d live Yates’ poem. Over. And over. Feedback would be best! (Comment on this)