jackshoegazer | The answers just keep coming! (Reply)

INTERVIEWED by

atomic_goo

1. How did you meet Jacquelyn?

I was randomly browsing through my LJ friends' friends and I saw her LJ name, antarcticlust and thought it was a beautiful polarity, a divine dichotomy of terms. I looked at her user info and all it was was a great Bukowski poem I'd never seen before, which is still currently my favorite Bukowski poem. Coincidentally, I had just gotten into the Buk at that time. We started commenting on eachothers journals, then chatting, and it turned out she was moving to Madison, where I live, to go to grad school. I met her when she arrived last June and took her out to dinner. We were strictly friendly over the summer, even though we were fighting heavy chemistry, and we finally gave in toward the end of August and became an "item." It's great, but it's always weird to say, "Oh, we met on the internet."

2. What is your favorite Bright Eyes song, and what is your favorite lyric from that song?

I'd have to say, currently, From a Balance Beam and the lyrics...
It was in a foreign hotel's bathtub I baptized myself in change.
And one by one I drowned all of the people I had been.
I emerged to find the parallels were fewer. I was cleansed. I looked in the mirror
and someone new was there. Still, I was as helpless as a chess piece
when I was lifted up by someone's hand and delivered from the corner my enemies had got me in.
But in all of my salvation I still felt imprisoned inside that holding cell that is myself.
So I wait for the day when I'll hear the key as it turns in the lock
and the guard will say to me, "Oh my patient prisoner you have waited for this day
and finally you are free! You are free!"

3. If you could explore any cosmological body, which would you choose and why?

I tend to use the more archaic definition of cosmology, the study of the universe in its totality and by extension man's place in it, or in general, a structure of the universe. I consider all religions, mythologies and philosophies to be cosmologies. I try to study every one I see. I sort of view the Universe like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Three blind men run into an elephant and one grabs it's trunk and says, "An elephant is like a rope!" Another blind man pushes on its side and says, "No, the elephant is like a wall!" The last one feels it's leg and says, "The elephant is like a tree." Whereas they were all in a way right, they were in the whole, wrong. People and civilizations create cosmologies, their impression, their map of the structure of the universe, but they're all doing it from a certain perspective limited by society, culture, time and technology. They're only mapping a little part of the whole thing. Thus, theoretically, if I take every map ever made, every cosmology and figure out where they line up, I can put together a clear, or at least clearer, map of the universe. Like those photo-mosaics, if I put enough maps together, I might get a good picture of what the elephant really looks like.

4. If you could pick a fight with any historical figure, who would it be and why? (Totally snarfed from Fight Club.) What would be your weapon of choice in that battle?

You ask a movie question, you get a movie answer :) I would fight Genghis Khan with a baseball bat! (Please tell me you've seen Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure!)

5. How did you come up with the username [Unknown site tag]jackshoegazer?

One day, walking through an ancient Aztec site in Wisconsin, I was thinking of an idea for a novel and the name popped into my head, fully formed: Jack Shoegazer, Esoteric Investigator. I still haven't written a Shoegazer book, but I have plans for about five of them so far. I wanted to get away from my fnord777 username because I didn't know that would be my LJ name forever and ever, and I wanted something original and "me" so one day I paid my $15 and got a name-change token and became jackshoegazer.