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"Voted Unlikely to Suceed . . .

. . .coz my class was full of naysayers, cheaters and thieves."



Finally found an agreeable way to host PDFs, so here is the final story I submitted for class. It's based in Detroit, has a little bit of people I know in it. I realized writing about the city, or at least constructing narrative within it, is difficult. It's more suited to impressionist poetry and the like. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's hundreds of times better than the first draft. To be sure.

I've got draft versions of three other stories that I'll be taking with me on sojourns over the next couple weeks. Try to wrangle them into something unembarrassing. Cormac McCarthy has changed my perceptions on writing. Working to reverse what David Foster Wallace has done. Non-overlapping magisteria perhaps. I learned to revise this semester, at the very least. Learned that there is something that appeals to the thanatos in permanently deleting things I agonized over bringing into creation.

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12/13

My semester is essentially over. This marks the approximate halfway point of the whole Boise, get another degree business. And I now feel innured this institution a bit. I know people here now, and have allowed myself to be absorbed into the culture of the program much more then during the engineering gig. My fiction writing workshop was a bit disappointing . . .just wasn't all that pleased with the things I wrote. And not that encouraged by the classroom environment. The connection between the two is tenuous though. My 20th Century British Fiction course was a bit illuminating, owing to the prowess and demands of the professor. But my classmates were mostly disengaged. . .

It feels absolutely bizarre to be at the halfway point of this place. When I moved out here it felt like an epoch rolling out in front me. Immeasurable to my impatience. Yawning across vital years of my life. But the pressing things been good-god I'm still learning about everything. Swirling up latent entrepreneurialism. Pounding out words in volumes I once aspired to. Gradually revealing some primal discipline. And so I can't possibly imagine where any of this will lead to, like driving at it all with lowered shoulders and hoping you end up somewhere marked success. And I don't recognize anywhere or anything.

That feeling that you're getting old. Like some arrangement of chairs and intentions makes you realize "god damn I'm an adult" and it is not what anyone told you it was. It's daunting but not scary, it does not require perfection, it does not utterly destroy you if you slip. Risk is the most valuable part of life. Hard work is worth it because it makes you good at things, and being good at something is tremendously rewarding. Genuine experience is all that matters. Dahh . . .all the chinese fortune slips I want to write for these kids . . .

Reading Baudrillard between the melange smoke and gangsta rap and flipping ones and zeroes in SimBoise . . .the consumer as progammable and blind. A system of objects erecting itself into crude symbols of the abstract. The real world existing in everything that is not said. "The festival of supply and demand whose effervescence can provide the illusion of culture".

Somehow I feel like going to Olduvai Gorge is a pilgrimage that exceeds the scope and "spiritual" value of visiting the Hajj by orders of magnitude . . .

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Hip-hop. History. Hilarity.

2007 was a great year for hip-hop. Jay-Z has released what will be known as the penultimate classic of pusher-rap, a narrative concept album that reflects the full spectrum of emotion and tragedy. Rhythms that seem diegetic to the world as inscribed. Aesop Rock back to form, impressionist and tweaked, the place he's created now folding the scattered past in with the crumbling future. Pharaohe Monch back from exile, veterate yet hungry. OneBelo with "R.E.B.I.R.T.H., still absorbing this one. Talib Kweli. El-P. etc etc

I'm reading a book called "A Continent for the Taking" about African history. Most of it recent, but also discussing the pre-slave-trade state of things. I don't mean to blame the white man for everything, none of us alive can change the past. But we literally tore Africa apart. The British Empire fought west African empires for nearly a century before they submitted. History only becomes real to me when I know details. And I don't have the time I wish I did to collect them.

My wallet was stolen from under my nose. The gentlemen that swiped it immediately went to McDonald's and spent over $200 on my credit card. And rented a DVD from a Redbox DVD vending machine. Whiskey-tango-foxtrot. Hamburgers? I'm not liable for any of these charges, and this will be nothing more than a hassle. But I couldn't have come up with a better "spending spree" for the morons of 'merikuh to go on.

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Fatherhood. Forlorn. Foam.

My father has a difficult time understanding things that have not come to him as a product of television or the narrow tableau of corporate hierarchy that he has been witness to. Thus, when I told him that I plan to eject myself from the world of engineering (a 'good' career as it makes a reasonable amount of money) and into the impoverished world of the humanities he not only generally disapproved of the idea, it barely even registered in his frontal lobe. And yet now, when I tell him that I am at the half-way point of completing this set of hoops towards another degree he is jazzed and motivational. Tells me "that's great" for perhaps the first time in my life. Maybe he's just getting soft with retirement.

All the people I love or might have loved are spread across the earth. Leeching their essence into the ground so that a billion years from now there will be some trace evidence of their existence. I miss them every day. The amazing girl I left in the hood who is now as tough as anyone I know. The mook out there on the edge; born to roam. My Fellow Traveler poised to slap the scientific establishment upside the head. The raven-haired expat, daring the world to not move when she leans into it. . . .A dozen other people I want to share drinks and photos with even when I'm 40 and no longer worth a damn.

I read a thread on ask.metafilter about a guy that reminds me of me. He is reasonably successful in his career, is intelligent (at least he can compose a paragraph) and once a week he likes to get obliterated at the bar and absolutely lose control. Each time he drinks like this he ends up somewhere strange or he gets in some vague legal trouble or he . . . you know the deal. His girlfriend claims that she will break up with him if he doesn't seek help. Everyone on the thread exhorted him to go to AA and get himself cleaned up. Reading the thread, all I could think about what was getting unbelievably drunk. Like a mythical, existential drunkenness in which the hangover is so extreme that waking up on some stranger's floor is akin to being born anew.

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