Hello friends,
I'm sorry I haven't been good at keeping this sight updated. I've been writing like it's my only friend but it takes a while to get it to this page for my own reasons. This is another entry from my journal on existentialism and my relation to it. I have a few more coming in the next few days so please do keep checking up on me if you find anything here interesting. I have some ideas that I've been working on in the area of dark, romantic existentialism on the way. I think anyone should like it if they want something to think about. Anyway, here's something that's not too dark or depressing for you. It's about Angst--funny thing. Write me with any thoughts: duffontap@hotmail.com

Regarding a very important German word that no one knows how to pronounce:
In the first and only fiction writing class I ever completed in college on short story writing, the teacher had us go around the room and share our favorite words with the rest of the class. I had one favorite word to offer: Angst. I had undoubtedly heard the word used in connection with some of the unbearable noise I listened to in those years of—relatively speaking—lesser artistic enlightenment. It is undeniable that this word has been slung around by the existentialists to no small degree. Angst, feeds existentialism, it is the air the existentialist breathes, or the glasses the existentialist looks through, or something of equal importance. I for one, welcome this unexplainable feeling of dread at all times. As egocentric as I and others seem to be, it makes perfect sense that we would want a feeling great enough to carry with it our own obvious importance.
What is remarkable to me about Angst, is that when we consider the great importance of it for living a life of good faith, and authenticity and all these things that existentialists (I include myself in this crude generalization) are so bent on grasping, that it seems to be so tied to geography. I spent a summer in California working with the youth group of a well-to-do but small church in Bonita, California and I am dumbfounded in hindsight at how few were the good existentialists down there on the sunny beaches I visited daily. I don’t know if I met one person who really had any grasp on what Angst is. Sure, a bad day was bound to roll around once in a while. Maybe it would get a little too warm and sunny—Heaven forbid it—or maybe a cloud would shed a few drops of rain and people would feel a little upset and perhaps confused as to why their world had turned against them when it was usually so pleasant. But all in all, there was no grasp of Angst in Southern California—“So Cal! Yeah!” I think they called it.
Two long days drive north and you’re in Seattle. It’s best that you skip Portland all together and go straight so Seattle because Portland is not known for expression of any kind—at least not the kind that you would be really proud of. You never know exactly what Portlanders are thinking and judging by number of “adult” bookstores, I’d wager a guess that you wouldn’t want to. In Seattle there are countless bands, and countless concerts in which you will get the idea that your average teenage Seattleite has a good grasp of what angst is, and they may even know the word and how to pronounce it. But why?
After months of careful consideration, I am still at the fist conclusion I came to when I first thought of the northwest and the southwest—and their relationship to angst. Life in Seattle and the northwest in general, is such a painful state of affairs it is impossible to forget for more than a few minutes that life is unexplainably miserable. When the outsider band comes into Seattle, Vancouver, or even Portland—let’s say, Jets to Brazil playing “All Things Good and Nice,” the northwesters will nod their heads and smile. “That’s really nice,” the northwesters will say and they will be sincere. But there is something about cold rain that never lets you think that life can be described in songs like “All Things Good and Nice.” But, perhaps we could live very pleasant lives of bad faith and inauthenticity in “So Cal! Yeah!” and never know the difference.