why i should not be president

if i was president, evangelist, gun wielding, god fearing rednecks and parents that fight at pop warner football games would be taken to large arenas where people who have an iq between 100 and 130 would be able to watch the rednecks and football parents fight to the death, after they are told the opposing "team" called them or their children "gay fag losers who think them sissy liberals are kinda fancy".

also the people in the crowd could openly drink and when they are done with their sponsored beer bottles, they can hurl them at the barbaric activities in the center of the arena for prizes.

the children of the rednecks and overly aggressive football parents would be taken away from the television, away from the microwave, away from their parents' guns and high school football trophy cases that still remain as the centerpiece for both the living room and dinnertime stories, and taught philosophy and why being able to only comprehend a single perspective is degenerative to human development.

also, you would have to pass an intelligence test in order to procreate.

science!

this is my dad

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/events/public-lectures/spring-2008/the-ocean-floor

copy and paste i dont know how to set a hyperlink

a man yelling

its 230 am. i just spent the night rehearsing for a show at a shitty bar i dont want to play at. however, from that, things i am passionate for came up. original songs, things to do with the songs in the future; things to work towards.

next topic

i smoke cigarettes. i smoke them often and i am poor and recently my roommates and i have been buying 2 dollar tops tobacco and rolling our own cigarettes. in an attempt to save money, i in fact, simply smoke more.

next topic

i wanted to smoke a cigarette and there was no full tobacco packets. i then decide that i will bite the bullet and go out onto the block and buy tobacco, and a 2 liter of coke (by request of my roommate when i asked "you need anything from the outside world?")

when i get down to the 24 hour bodega, i see a guy in a silver sportscar with doors that open like a lamborghini or a delorean. i say "thats a cool door" to the large, well dressed black guy that walks towards the window.

he then proceeds to yell at the man of persian/middle eastern descent; of which specific ethincity i have no idea. and hes fuckin yelling.

he had apparently asked for a "HEI-NE-KEN" not a fucking "GUI-NESS". he then, continues to yell as he says "I haaave money! I have fuckin money!" as he whips out a large - i would honestly guess about five hundred dollars- wad of cash from his tan, matching velour pimp suit thing, worn with tan timbs with the tag still on, a large bling watch, a few rings, a hat with the 50/50 hologram still on, brim unbent. he probably has more bling around his neck.

the bling dude then explains how he has "dark windows in the car, opened the beer without looking (because he was driving) and took a sip only to find his heineken was, in fact, a guinness. i personally would have not cared in the slightest if that beer mix up happened to me.

ANYWAYS he continues to yell at the poor skinny bodega dude behind the spinning window, who from all i could see was just putting his hands in front of him as if to say "i dont understand exactly, please slow down and stop yelling at me so we can figure this out because im fucking scared of you and your yelling."

i put my hands in my pockets and just watch bling blong yell at scared persumably arabic dude. i felt like i was in trouble too. the yeller then gets the guy to refund his beer, and calms down and turns to me and then very calmly reiterates his rant, that people on the next block could have heard. i just sort of say "heh eh. i guess its a uh um simple misunderstanding." (mr large rich yelling black guy)

the yelling bling dude then gets in his car, flips his kick ass door back down, and puts back on the techno dance music i am reminded of three minutes ago when he drove down the block to beat me to the bodega. as he drives a way i see that his license plate says "rockstr78" if i remember correctly.

i get what i came for and go back towards my house. i then think about how that yelling guy totally over reacted and i would have never done anything like that. i would have calmly gone to the guy and said "yo i asked for a heineken and i took a sip without looking and its not what i asked for."

then i thought about where i live and how im sure that a lot of people try and scam out the bodega owners. also that the bodega owners scam the customers, changing prices daily, five cents to a quarter at a time. also selling lucys and all the other phone card-condom-gum things that come in bulk with no actual price known to the customers.

i THEN thought about what i have been LEARNING about the middle east and the cultures that make it up and a little bit about how the language is organized. also how the language actually sounds to me, and it sounds like a lot of words with very few syllables. a lot of "sound" words that-to me and my uneducated, completely foreign ear-sound like a lot of tkths and tkkhhss and thlamaslada and shit like that.

THEN i considered how "guinness" and "heineken" might sound to a person who speaks a presumably middle eastern area language, when being given directions through a thick plastic spinning window at 225 on a tuesday morning.

i said guinness and heineken it a staccato tongue with a lot of tka and ths and stuff. essentially i did a poor job at saying a word in an arabic/islamic/persian language. i tried to place myself in that situation, as i speak two langauges poorly (not including my english),and how not having the full grasp of another language, the organization of the words, the enunciations, inflections, and phonemes is quite difficult when taking orders.

im back at my steps unlocking my door and i wonder if this dude had gotten to where he is by yelling. not by yelling because hes an asshole, but a sort of conversational strategy to get what he wants when he needs it.

because shit gets done when people yell. and if you come out yelling, your more likely to get what you want quicker, especially if there has been a misunderstanding and you didnt get what you ordered. going back to what i would have done in that situation, i would have been calm and polite, which if someone is A) trying to scam me or B) didnt hear correctly, but is afraid of being scammed himself, might not actually work. it would turn into an argument of who isn't being honest. and though a plastic window at 230 in the morning, will probably not end well.

i think thats it, im starting to lose my tense and write run on sentences

february 11, 2008

i have been up for 18 hours now. i just watched donnie darko. that movie is awesome. i wish i had some pot. s to cook with.

farmer in the deli

ok so i had this dream last night that i was in farmer in the deli. for those of you who dont know what it is, it is a deli on myrtle ave in brooklyn where i live. it is run well by arabic and mexican dudes. they run it like clockwork. your in and out with a sandwich the size of a cat in 5 minutes or so and it is always less than 6 bucks.

however, in my dream this afternoon (its 1:15 and i woke up recently), farmer in the deli was like one of those elks club places and it was a bunch of old white people running the place. men and women who seemingly, in reality, have nothing to do after their retirement and just fill time with these activities. except the old man who was helping KEPT FUCKING WITH ME. i alwasy get the same thing at "f in the d": roast beef and munster, with lettuce tomato, mayo, oil and vinegar and sweet peppers.

i had to tell this mother fucker time and time again to make me this sandwich and would give me suggestions as to what a better sandwich was. meanwhile the store has gotten larger and my brother and his friends are sitting down waiting for me. (they have sushi for some reason). so finally this old fucker makes me my sandwich after arguing about nothing. so finally he gets to making the sandwich and i watch him put turkey and pickles on it. so im like what the fuck and he just hands me the sandwich over the counter. i dont know what to do so i just look down at it. then he hands me like 1/4 pound of salami for ME to put on my sandwich which is now on my side of the sneeze glass. then hands me a whole pickle to put on it.

at this point i dont care and i just want my sandwich. so he finishes, FINALLY, and writes down the price on the wrapper (like they do in the real f in the d, and thats what we call it so fuck off) and its fucking 23 dollars!

so i obviously lose it on this guy and as i lose it towards him, he sort of sneaks along the back wall behind the other old people making sandwiches and lights up a cigarette. so im yelling at him and he's smirking because he pissed a youngin off (and btw this guy is really content and though i was asleep i was fucking MAD). so finally i confront this guy after he sort of gives me the spin-juke move over and over again as i get near to facing him and talking to him. and i say my first piece.

Section A of the tell off was "ive been coming here for years and it never costs more than 6 bucks!' he laughs.

Section B of the tell off was "and you didnt even give me what i asked for! and then charged me for that!". but as soon as i was about to really REALLY lay it on him, the fucking kitchen lights on fire (i dont seee it i just know thats whats happening because people are looking in room that is on fire. trust me.)

so here i was yelling over pandemonium at an old man who purposely pissed me off via my sandwich. that old ass mother fucker. so needless to say i have been up now for fifteen minutes and im annoyed and i want a sandwich.

things that make me nervous

my thesis project has become more and more complicated the more i work on it. the thesis, as a pratt senior, is only a chapter in this novel, apparently.

i started writing it about a year and a half ago. it began as a sort of experience where the main character is one of our world and finds himself in another where humans are not the dominant species. that idea came about from the things i see in our modern world; the energy crisis, the fact that corporations rule our world, and the irresponsibility of the people who are influenced by the coporate-mandated media. my father is a geologist so i am constantly in arms length reach of scientific research and progress of today, which is a big influence on my behavior and art.

i decided that making this a linear project would be less interesting than making it exist in the dream world, which is where the fro character comes in. the entire thing takes place in this man's coma and the character from our world with gasoline, elctricity, and television is actually the last part of his consiousness personified. sort of a wake up beacon.

eventually this developed into a deeper story when i began to listen to the mars volta's "de-loused in the comatorium" religiously. i found out that the idea of a man in a coma is pretty much the idea of "de-loused" as it fictionally re-tells the story of julio venegas, a friend and mentor to cedric and omar from the mars volta.

a few months later i was bored at work and decided to google my name, a rare one. upon looking not to far, i found that there is in fact another dan mountain who uses the internet. sort of. it turns out that this particular dan mountain experienced going into a coma, waking up, and writing about it. he made an album with a man named mark black.

fuckin weird right?

it gets better.

i have a big problem with corporations, churches, and mass media. and stupid people that just willingly believe what they see or hear, rather than think. church, corporations, and mass media want people to be stupid, want people to have the attention span of lab rats, and just willingly spend spend spend. so i developed a colony to resemble the original colonists of north america. so now in the story there are two types of society. those one the forest side of the fence, where monsters and danger lurks daily, and those on the other side of the fence, where you can only enter upon signing a form that gives up all of your human rights and responsibility.

at a bar one night my friend autumn was telling me about adolus huxley's "brave new world". now, i have never read this book, but she explained that there is the same sort of concept going along in that particular novel. a barrier between a "civilized" and "uncivilized" society.

today, i am working on the thesis, and i read (past tense) up on the mars volta's second album "frances the mute" which is about a diary found by one of the former, unfortunately deceased members of the band, Jeremy Ward. it turns out that the diary found was about a person who never knew their biological parents and their search for them.

i read this today, december 10, 2007, but developed the same sort of idea for the fro character, Murphy, named after Murphy's law because this man is bad luck.

why is it that i get things already?

i can understand the mars volta-ness because i listen to them all the time, but honestly i dont know the lyrics nor do i try to decipher them because they are so cryptic. maybe its the feeling of the music. they say they sort of imagine movies happening to their music, and its sort of free form.

but why the other stuff? i dont think i am unorignial because the way i came up with them was out of the air essentially, from feelings i have about the world and people i know or knew.

so what the fuck!

i think in a few days ill re-write this. but i have work to do now

december 8, 2007

i saw a homeless man was in front of my apartment this morning collecting soda cans. as i am writing this i can hear him rummaging through the garbage collecting more.

upon crossing his path to my front door i gave him my last 5 dollars.

i think john lennon might enjoy that.