Nate Beaty's Brainfag

Death by book cover

posted in Home Jabber on June 28, 2005

I've been having really disturbing dreams. Last night I killed someone I thought was Jeremy with repeated blows to the face using the corner of a hardcover book. I don't know why I was trying to kill Jeremy, but it wasn't him. I was living in this large room with a bunch of other people, something like a hostel, and was preparing to leave. I was wracked with guilt. I started packing my things when a detective came asking everyone questions. I was simultaneously confident I had executed the perfect crime, and scared shitless I was so obviously guilty. The detective took a few things of mine and left. I followed him back to his home and demanded he show me what he took, as he hadn't filled out the proper forms to legally confiscate them. They turned out to be love letters from Soon Bok, so I said that was fine (thinking to myself they had no connection to the murder and were therefore harmless). Then I started sweating and babbling, giving myself totally away.

I woke up feeling so guilty. One of those dreams that you wake up so relieved that it didn't REALLY happen, but have a hard time believing that.

The other night I dreamt was sitting next to Aaron and some girl he was talking to during an open mic. I kept teling Aaron to shut up as it was rude to talk while the person was playing music. He finally lost it and said in an acidic tone "What does it matter?! I wrote a hit book!" Of course this was a total rip off of the greatest scene ever in Rushmore.

Aaron left yesterday for New York (and his first graphic novel, Spiral-Bound comes out in August). And Jeremy moved to New Orleans nine months ago. I guess I'm bitter about my best friends departing Portland, as well as jealous about Aaron's book. I just feel behind or something. I'll know for sure this is the source of these dreams as soon as I have a nasty dream about Alec, who also moved to New York and is well along the way with an awesome full-length story, Basewood.

People keep asking me what I've been up to, and I've been having this really uncommon experience of having no idea what to say. "Uh, nothing I guess." Maybe I'm just tired of going through the list of websites I'm constantly working on. That's all I can think of. I'm always doing a ton of things, but lately there just hasn't been anything at the focus of my constant activity. "Just stuff, I guess."

Today I built a record shelf and baked a pie in the time it took a friend of Soon Bok's to talk over the phone with a roommate who's considering a lawsuit to get off the lease of a house they just moved into. It really made me think of how many people piss away precious time on stupid shit.

I've been baking a lot of apple pies with my mom's crust recipe, and Soon Bok will not stop making fun of me because of it. As if she didn't have enough things to ridicule me about, I have to go off and bake pies constantly.

I met with a prospective client today in the Weiden+Kennedy building downtown, which had the most hilarious HUGE metal doors of the utmost artfag dorktasticness. I meet with another prospective client tomorrow, and I got an email from another possible job today. But they all made me so depressed for some reason. I think I'm really ready to give up on webdesign and get a dishwashing job. It's just not paying enough to make me stick with it, and the concept of having a mindless job that pays the same (say, $600/month?) with a lot more time to draw sounds sooooo appealing.