Crumpet

Dreary dreary. My cat puked twice the last night. I had to get up and clean it at like 1 am and 6 pm. You can hear when he starts heaving, and then I get up and grab it with some paper towels and spray it with carpet stuff.

Dear past. I have to sensor myself on my blog. I've been writing though. And some good stuff has come out. Gooooood stuff. I just write without thinking. Like splattering paint on a canvas, it just spills out. Creativity is just about making things that come to mind - and then the sensor portion afterward. But that's easy isn't it? We're all our worst critic. The hard is the creating.

Creation is an act of sheer will, said someone whose name I think was Hammond in a Michael Crichton novel. Or maybe it was just the movie Jurassic Park. I read that book in like 4th grade, and wanted to be a paleontologist like every 4th grader around that time. Then I discovered that just like Indiana Jones doesn't spend his working days running away from giant rolling stone balls, so paleontologists also don't fight real life dinosaurs.

Turpentine. Blastysis, and dearmo.

Arbitrary Gestures

Today's Adventures:

Hair cut - Same as always, but my dyed, then bleached hair looked very strange as it was getting swept up off the floor. Like the mane of a baby lion.

Change Cell Phone plan - The year was up, I went in, got unlimited texting, and got me a chocolate. It's definitely the coolest phone I've ever had, and the one with the most appetizing name (way better than VX6895, blegh).

Shopping - Needed a few things. Dishwasher detergent, paper towels, cat food. What a difference some Jet Dry in the dishwasher makes, too. Oh and I picked up I Am America and So Can You as a book on CD, so that'll be good to keep the trend after Death in the Afternoon.

Writing - Dear readers, I stumbled in my pursuit. Friday I consciously decided to "take a day off," and then last night I just planned poorly and was too tired when I got home to really get out anything good. Both of these were mistakes. So today I'm doing a 3000 word marathon. I'm about half way thru and I like the results so far.

Discovery - Adventure Alaska or Alaska week or something starts at 9 on the Discovery channel and I love Alaska and want to watch it, so we'll see if I can't get the writing done before then.

Birds - April showers bring floods, and what do floods do? Kill birds. To help combat that, I've refilled the bird feeder I hung outside my window last spring. The Professor is enjoying crackelingly meowing at the patrons.

Tomorrow - Grind grind grind the pieces of my soul away. My first of five flights is on Thursday. I'm anxious to get out of that place.

Cheerio.

These Voices In My Head

Ernest Hemingway, again. Apparently he liked bull fighting. As immoral as it was considered, even in his own time, he found he liked it.

He wrote he has an interest in suicide. He compared something like the nobility of the bull, and the tragedy of their death even as a sure thing, with suicide. I think that's what the comparison was. Books on CD tend to wash over me, giving the continuum of the colors rather than solidifications of facts and events.

Where was I?

He has a voice, on this book on tape - literally, and in the more Euclidean sense. His writing has "a voice." This isn't new. I've even understood this before, but I never identified it with myself.

These emergent properties in this experiment. Not the right use of "emergent properties," really, but they're emerging the more I write, and their properties of my writing, and writing in general.

Last night I finished a story. About 6 thousand words (we've been going about 6 days). Apparently we found out some time ago that in the middle of every story, whether the story is told by a character, a picture hanging on a wall, or an invisible narrator, there is always always a persona, telling the story. Apparently when this sort of philosophical revelation came about writers experimented and tried to write stories without this voice. I'm not sure, but I think they were unsuccessful. We can't separate the is from the who, no matter how we try. We want to personalize things.

My story has a voice. I mention Hemingway because as I listen, the voice that's emerging from there is sincere, and caring. He's talking about something he cares about. The voice that emerges from my story is witty, I hope, empassioned, I think, and often times sarcastic. I imagine a greasy old New Yorkian wearing a gristle-stained apron, sitting in the corner of a diner, smoking, and telling this story.

If I can talk about my feelings for a second (Hi, my name is Kevin, and I write sarcastically), I wonder if this isn't because I'm not quite comfortable with what I'm doing yet. I remember when I first started "acting." Yes "acting". I often times played the character angry, even when it was unnecessary. It was easy. It was masculine. And it was defensive. I wonder if I might be doing the same thing here.

Defibrillator

The last of the psychedelics boil in my blood. I am Sheeva the God of Death.

But really, what is percocet? Aspirin with a sprinkling of THC? I doubt it even goes that far. The lights remain lights and the music continues to enter my brain only through my ears, unfortunately.

These days, they grate by. Like the door in a horror movie. For now, though, the killer's already in the room and he's just swinging the door back and forth for effect I guess.

I'm tempted to hang all my paintings sideways. My furniture, I've keeled on the diagonal, almost all of it. It looks pretty strange in my bedroom, but at least it's interesting in a way that makes the word be able to describe itself. At least my furniture is doing something, and not just sitting there asking to be sat on. At least these rooms, they convey something. It might be just an aversion to fengshui, I'd show you the Chinese characters, but it seems I'm yet to install them on this computer, so great are my studying, maintaining, and prostrastinatory sins.

This is all an exercise, by the way. This is probably the first of the marshes a writer encounters that slogs him or her down and grabs for one's neck - writing when not particularly inspired to do so. I'm sure there were days when Beethoven didn't want to touch a piano, or when he sat down at it he just kept playing chopsticks over and over and hating that he was so un-genius-like. I refuse to believe there's truly something that sets apart Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Aristotle. "Evolution, Morpheus...evolution. Like the dinosaur." We're all carved from the same wood. It's the same dust and god-breath what flows thru my veins, and if I'm naught but 2% estranged from chimps, from a genetic standpoint, some garbage about the way Da Vinci's brain might have been organized differently, I find rather unimpressive, to be frank.

But then, I'm young, and foolish, right?

I for one would rather never learn I have limitations, except for my ability to fall off a cliff on to a spike and die.

That's just good breeding.

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, - Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods

My ex-wife wrote in her blog, "IF I love Him I WILL keep His commandments." Obviously we're assuming there's something real to love here, so putting that aside - This is true. Likewise IF you truly believe something, you WILL live your life by it.

I got in a tuff with a "Mormon" in my class over this. I say "Mormon" because he's been excommunicated but he still claims to believe every word of it, he just doesn't live by it. I said this is impossible. If you truly believe you're going to be punished for your misdeeds, you won't do them. IF there's a cop walking around with you, you WON'T steal. The same as, if I really DON'T believe there's a door in front of me, I WON'T bother to open it before I try and go thru it.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about dreams, and it goes something like this. IF I really want something, I WILL pursue it.

That's where if bites though. If I really want it. If I REALLY want it. And if I REALLY want it, why the hell am I not pursueing it?

Or does it just get choked under our obligations? Under these pressures that society, and pride, and the boogeyman put on us. "We work jobs we hate, so that we can buy shit we don't need."

So either I don't want it, or I'm letting it get choked. I'm hoping it's the second one, cause I'm just flapping in the wind if my dreams are something I really don't want. Just another check mark on the checklist the boogeyman handed to me some time in my youth. Cause he's got a stack that says "Baseball Player" and "Astronaut", and he's handing them out like candy at the park, to unsuspecting younglings that don't know yet about abortions and laziness and bipolar disorder. But for most people it must be something some best friend actually handed to them, or some TV show, or some girl that likes men in suits and fancy cars. Cause really what they wanted more was a family, or a cushy job, or some time alone on the couch.

So I'm reading The Gunslinger again, and it's one of those stay up past your bedtime books. One of those fuck-society I-don't-need-friends books. And I underlined something in the introduction. "Let it rip regardless of what anybody tells you, that's my idea; sit down and smoke that baby." He's talking about writing despite being young, about taking on big ideas when the older and wiser might shake their head and say you don't know the first thing about what you're talking about.

When did I stop thinking that? I said to myself, laying in bed, early. I used to write everything I could think of. When did I start being scared and when did I start not caring? When did I start choking and when did I start listening to the chicks that go after big cars? Since when did I let the warning labels and the has-beens tell me what to do? Since when did I stop saying my dreams are what make life worth living, and the only thing that will make me happy?

The answer is, of course, is never. I stopped believing it, and I stopped living it.

"If you don't claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned."

So I invite you, dear reader, to join me. I will give this three weeks. Three weeks. Apparently it takes 21 days to establish a pattern. For these three weeks I will write 1000 words a day, and see if I can't stop by the end of it. I have a calender on my wall and I'll check off the days, starting tonight. Today is the 9th (or a few days later for you maybe). By the end of April I'll have 21 days behind me. At the close of this month I will have chased my dream, truly and immediately, for at least three weeks. If the handwriting on your checklist is your own, and not the boogeyman's, or some ex's, I offer this opportunity for you to join me, to stop choking and come up for air. It's not too hard, it's only a blip in your life.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

On death and dying. That was a class at the community college I went to, I think - where they looked at writing about death, and death as a subject.

Because he is gone. The only tiny idea most people have of this guy is that he wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. What are you doing Dave? That Buuuh...buuuh....buuuuh....NA NA!! Song is from that too.

But he was so much MORE than that, to me. A couple weeks ago I went to the Half Priced Books, in West Omaha, and bought I think like 6 or 7 of his books. The birthday present Amy gave me was one of his books also.

He was born in England and knighted there, but he hated it. So at some point he moved to Sri Lanka, and he said he never intended to return to Britain. If you read that article you can see he was one of those authors, like H.G. Wells, that wrote about concepts before they happened.

I have little doubt that some of his other books will be made into movies. The sci-fi he wrote never had aliens in the intergalactic war sense, never had star-wars esk lazer fights, or warp drives. That's why I appreciate him. For the most part, he write's sci-fi for the world he's in, and not the next one to come - even when talking about hundreds of years in the future.

Rendezvous with Rama, for example, is about we human beings here encountering the first aliens as a huge cylinder - this vehicle wandering through our solar system - programmed literally thousands of years ago by some intelligent species - and on it's way from somewhere we don't know to somewhere we don't know, probably completely oblivious to us.

Because, if evolution is true, which nearly all scientists think it is, the possibility that we're the only life forms in the universe is getting smaller and smaller, the more earth-like planets we discover. And it's very possible that these life forms could predate us by millions of years and hence be far more advanced technologically, than us. This idea returns in The Fountains of Paradise, where what's basically a huge computer database comes sailing through our solar system, it's soul purpose being an information exchange with intelligent civilizations. We send it our encyclopedias and it tells us what else is out there in the universe, then sends that back it it's home planet - itself many light years away.

But I'm sure I've filled my geek quota for the next week, so I'll end and say that even if you're not a sci-fi fan, check out one of his books - 2001 if nothing else, cause I know I'd have no chance of understanding the movie if I hadn't read it.

RIP Arthur C. Clarke.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future" (Clarke's second law)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
Arthur C. Clarke, 1983

It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
Arthur C. Clarke, First on the Moon, 1970

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

When I went out this morning, at 10am, the sky was clear and it was 60 degrees, blue, and bright. After a few hours, clouds had moved in and made everything a still gray. Then the rain began, running off the packs of leftover snow - and just a bit ago, snow began to fall in mix with the rain. Soon the twig snaps of falling rain will stop as it gives way to nothing but the silent snow, spreading over the ground.

You can really see the change in seasons here. It's not an ambiguous slide from below freezing nights until, in august, you realize there are lines of heat seeping out of the asphalt, and you're drinking two gallons of water a day and yet your pee is still the color of autumn leaves (hopefully not the red ones). Spring as pushing against winter here and it's a change you can see and feel and watch as it plays out in front of you.

I see now why the ancient Greeks had stories like Persephone and her pomegranate. Even in a world now that we can understand through science, we see ourselves - our own stories and emotions - mirrored in the world in which we humans are wrapped. And so it's no wonder we see characters all around us, and can feel happy when the sun comes out from behind a cloud, or feel tranquil at the image of a snowy night in the woods.

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near,
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake,
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Sound in a Vacuum

Here lies this blog, found slumped over and starved in it's cage, dead from neglect. It once filled much the same role that the marmonts at the zoo do. Nice for something between other things. Not a main attraction, but every once in a while there'd be a chase for a piece of fruit, or one of the marmonts would flip out and just be pacing back and forth for no apparent reason, and the people going from here to there would stop and go, "Huh." and move on. But the marmonts' fur started getting haggard and their health went down, and eventually there were just lying around, panting - so the viewers got less, and less, and less, until one day, one of the zoo hands was sweeping up gum and happened to look in and see...nothing.
The wind blows sand around their limp, rotting bodies.

So maybe I can start a project to fill the void. Never made a new years resolution I really thought much of.
This year I said I'd read a book a week. A book a week! Six weeks in and I'm going, more or less strong, my current book may bleed into next week, but otherwise I'm caught up.
So I can probably do something like a review each week. Nothing very comprehensive, and mostly just to help my own understanding of what I'm reading.
Last week I read the play Waiting for Godot. I think it's what Waiting for Guffman is based on name-wise. It was recommended to my be an old friend from the good ole days in the Saugus High Playmakers. She's actually pursuing an education related to the dramatic arts.
Now, I'm guessing she read this play in a playreading or writing class, and they analyzed it and maybe even acted it out. It seems to me very awkward.
It's an English translation of an originally French play, translated by the author. I did my best to read out loud and put emotion behind some of the more awkward parts, but some, I still can't imagine them being acted out without the audience feeling uncomfortable by how unnatural the dialogue is.

That's probably part of the point. The characters are probably supposed to be archetypes of some kind, and with a stretch, I can put some kind of analysis onto it. The two main characters, from the get go are in a sort of barren landscape, and what they're doing is in fact waiting for someone named Godot. Spoiler alert: He never comes. The only other two main characters are what seem to be some kind of rich man, who goes blind in the second act, and his slave "Lucky." The slave hardly speaks except when told to "think" out loud, whereby he rambles on stream of consciousness style about what comes off as high-handed white noise (successfully annoying the actors and, I'm assuming the audience).

The end is hopeless, with the two main characters deciding to hang themselves.

The first parallel that springs to mind is that of The Second Coming. These characters' lives are poor and full of suffering. Their glint of light in the distance is this Godot man, who seems to me to be somewhat of a savior character. The message would of course be shown in that in the end, he fails them.

Still, the writer, Samuel Beckett, won the nobel prize for this, so I can't imagine it having such a controversial message.
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, "Beckett tired quickly of “the endless misunderstanding. Why people,” he said – as far back as 1955 – “have to complicate a thing so simple I can’t make out."
It reminds me of "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." written at the beginning of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When I, in exasperation, quoted this back to my 10th grade honors English teacher after weeks of thematic analysis, he said, "But that's the great IRONY of Twain." If that's irony, color me rainbowy.

What are these writers playing at, if what he says is true? Is it like playing hard to get? Have they tapped the psyche of the populace to such a great degree, and do they believe their own works to be so significant as to con people into sucking meaning out of them like sucking water from sandstone? It seems like too much, to me. Too many games. This is the business of writing, not poker. It's like the Chinese guy in the prestige. Even outside his work, his whole life is an act. Somehow, I doubt it.

That said, even what Beckett saw as simple in his play, was way over my layman's head. I found it disconnected and monotonous. I know I haven't watched it and I'm no doubt not appreciating it on some level. I accept that, this is just what I've taken from it. A sense of hopelessness in present and in prospects. An inability, or unwillingness on our part as a species to take control of our own destiny, and the ultimate consequence of our impotence. That's what I took.

I'm happy I read it, though. It's a piece of our literary background, and obviously it means SOMETHING to lots of other people. But there's really not anything much deeper that I can say about it.

Oh Snap

Get a Cash Advance

What, don't they teach you how to use a toaster oven in a Masters of English program?

Renaissance Soul

I think this article is talking about me. I especially reverberate with the part about being jealous of people that have only on passion. I think I can jump into things and be really into them for just a bit, and then I quickly move on to something else.

The trick is just to make whatever I'm doing productive and creative. It seems like Leonardo DaVinci might have been this kind of person - painting, anatomy, inventing. I need to be independently wealthy so I can pursue whatever I want whenever I want.

Slaves to Laws

I think that we, as Americans especially (maybe it's true for all of humanity, I don't know), have to be really careful that, in the wake of something that makes us feel insecure or unsafe - like a tragedy - we don't see our mistakes as more than they are, and push too far the other way.

After 9/11 we said, "never again," and then came the patriot act.

Now, after the VATech shooting, some people are looking at creative writing as indicative of potential violence. But if stuff is happening like what's in the link up there, it needs to stop. Good god, if violent writing meant violent behavior the writers of Saw, Fight Club, and Braveheart should be mass murderers - we need a little perspective.

To Do

I think I'm taking after my grandmama on my maternal parental unit's side. Every night, as far as I know, she makes a list of what she needs to do the next day. I haven't been doing that, but I have a list of all the things I want to accomplish ranging from apply to colleges (which I can't do for another year and a half) to vacuum (which I should have done a week ago). And then every day in the morning I'll make a list sometimes, or just hilight the things already on the list I want to get done today.

Today: Vacuum.
Finish Collapse
I've been reading that book for nigh on 2 months. It's interesting and I like it...but it puts me to sleep whenever I try to read it. I don't know...I like a lot of the specifics, and I like the overall idea of the book, it just goes too long on some bits, for me. I mean, the guy won the pullitzer prize for his last book, so far be it for me to critique his writing, but once we've talked about tree rings, pollen samples, and top soil erosion...sometimes I just can't hang in there when the next sentence is "Moving in to the next major climate zone in Australia, we encounter five new major problems:" I'm just overwhelmed with the nearly irreversible environmental damage we've caused...and I need a nap to get over it. I have 150 pages left and I need to knock those out today to get on to the rest of my book stack:
Also I want to finish the first draft of a short story I started yesterday. Short storys always pose a problem for me cause when I started doing any writing, when I was in like 3rd grade or something, it was always in imitation of Lord of the Rings or Narnia. So I'd just go on and on in whatever epic quest these mythical creatures were on and I didn't have to worry about tightening up the story or characters. But when all you have is 5000 or less words, you have to be a lot more economical and impactful with the little you write.