"I think they're lying to you"

(quote: ATTN , video: snippet of a Cornel West interview)


I think the significance of an era grows in the years following. And I think that in 2009 we can start to see how this one sneaking out the door will be written in history. We'll look back on it as the time when technology really started to make us insane, extra-dimensional, and frenetic. And it will be remembered for violence in all hemispheres, just as each decade before it, but now we watch our craziness together in real-time and have to think about it and wonder what we can do before, alas, we realize nothing. And again we were fooled by hucksters and greedheads, and we'll never beat them because they work harder than us. And we remained enamored with silly contrivances and bad food and economic imbalances and ourselves, because that is all part of who we are. But there's a place for everything now, like there wasn't before, and our outliers and freaks and special people all get room on the crowded internet to seek their brethren. This is the year at which we might look back and see the beginning of technological saturation, not an end to further development of course, but a time when our telecommunications mojo became our over-arching human religion. How we came to solve problems and cause them.

This year is something biographical for me as well. I gained honorable discharge from another university, and having no classroom in the fall I'm poised to write more than I ever have in my life. This last month like 3 of my previous best combined. And I learned more about how to do it than in any class I could ever take. And if I could wrangle one piece of advice for a creative person, it would be 'work your ass off'. It will be so worth it.


Had a workshop for this story. Really good response and a worthwhile conversation about its problematic ending. The piece was filled with a few small experiments, techniques I had never really tried. One of these was an attempt to present expository information in as interesting a way as I could muster. Expository writing has always been problematic for me. It's a question of aesthetics more than anything, what is the perfect degree of information required for the story to have its effect? Clinical rehashing of past events is an overdose, it turns the work into some brief essay on a topic, makes the events impersonal and strategic-seeming. And flashbacks that are non-diegetic to the scene, segregated from the timeline, almost never work. They are clunky and out-sized and intrusive. But the information needs to be presented. And I think the only way to get it into the narrative without boring the reader to tears is to remember that everything is made up of narrative elements. 'It is stories all the way down'. More information can be packaged into sub-stories than a listing of details, and by conveying details through these smaller stories there are greater opportunities for characterization and development of an emotional disposition in the characters toward their circumstances. Anyway, interesting problem in the art of fiction.

»»  read more

"Of course you see me . . .there's cameras everywhere"

(quote: Cage, video: Robert Sapolsky's Class Day Lecture 2009)

For anyone in corporate environs, remember that they can't eat you. Today I got screamed down to by this fascist underachiever because I'd stumbled upon her fuck-up. And she wrote an e-mail to my boss calling me "arrogant" and my move "uncalled for". She is some weighty entity in the department of purchasing for our biggest client, and I spent all day hoping that everyone else would see the absurdity in it that I did. But the important thing is that I've come to a point where I can't muster concern. And I feel sad for people that need to attack ad hominem to feel valuable somehow. If she had ever created a piece of art in her life (and I'm not saying she should be an artist) she would understand that there is nothing so petty as small dominations, that there's little important outside of how well we treat each other, that no one ever really wins an argument. So, she can have her ignorance and frustration, and she can get up in arms and yell about something she doesn't understand . . .but she can't escape this little tyranny of hers and with each passing day she'll crawl an inch deeper into her bunker, and mount more guns for cutting down passersby. But some day she'll wonder why no one loves her, and she'll say that it is somehow the fault of everyone else


I'm the last person you want raising a kid. But, the admin in our office has this son. They've been long-hauling it through this incredibly messy divorce and he's going to be a senior in high-school and at least one end of the tug-of-war is pulling petty entitlements that end up encroaching on him. The poor kid's got no freedom. And this is his first summer with a car and a job, and that battered Hyundai ought to be burning up McDonald's wages and it's driver should be making one bad decision per night. Not felonies mind you, but something that his mother wouldn't advise. But his dad won't let him have the car when he's at His house, and reluctantly as his mother might try to push him out into the world it's difficult when he spends every weekend playing family with a step-mother he hates. Our admin asks me for advice and I preface everything I say with the same thing I began this with, and I try to say something reasonable. All the while remembering what that age was like for me. And I have to say that I was reckless and up-late and going to bonfires and learning to be myself in a world I now supervised. I made bad decisions that had consequences and rode in the backs of police cars and snuck in after curfew and there was a party if the folks were gone. I tried to live it up. But I made good decisions too. And I came out the other end of it battered and a bit wiser and enriched. Most of all I learned how to take risks, because I tested them and either failed or succeeded. So, I'm not sure if I could give any advice to my co-worker, but I think I could muster some for her kid.

--

Writers have a reputation for drinking. There are theories about this, how they set their own schedules or how they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as others. Both of these are bunk, though they might help. I have neither of these luxuries, I work all week and hit the keyboard at 6pm every night after. Yet, I drink my fair share. And have for a long time. On my mother's yard stick, probably too much. There must be other reasons. There is maybe some slightly higher sensitivity in creative types, one that gives itself to anxiety and joy (the twin advocates of whiskey and beer), and there is maybe a desired dissociation from the myriad failures and tedium of perfectionism. In the last few weeks, however, I've become convinced that a writer mostly drinks so that they can maintain the absurdity that they are in fact writing. That they spend hour after hour sprinkling dust into the void. It is not unlike when in a movie theatre you watch two hours of imagination and buy every line, but this suspension does not end and it runs on booze.

»»  read more

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

(quote: Cormac McCarthy, video: Sasquatch! 2009 [some friends of mine appear])


You know a person is a hermit because they talk about their cat, animals that matriculate to their backyard, queer things they've noticed about neighbors. They carry very little gossip around with them, not out of strict disinterest but ignorance. They have inside jokes with an audience of one. They name things in their depopulated world, assign superfluous superstition to things to mystify what is otherwise routine. I'm gradually drifting that way and have been. My brain is being rewired to run on silence and the detritus of my third-eye. The extrovert that I was for my formative years waits for my free night of the week. It doesn't even tap its feet anymore, it has learned that its time will come. I've taken to saying lately that I enjoy getting older. That when people groan about their birthday they should be grateful, for each day that passes is a day in which they are more themselves. And maybe it doesn't work that way ubiquitously but I find that as I'm getting up there in years I am gaining some scant wisdom, a longer fuse, a realignment of my self-consciousness from paralytic to snide content.


The Observer Effect my metaphor for everything now. I've been researching the means by which we measure personality, a desperate urge for one of the characters in the long-form book I'm working on now, and it seems many of the methods involve self-reporting. The individual taking them knows they're answering questions intended to gauge their empathy quotient, or systemization style, or Autism Spectrum score, or Briggs-Meyer profile. And even if consciously every answer is honest, the fact that one is reporting on themselves introduces such margins of error as to undermine any credibility. Taking the test the second time is like not taking it at all. The basic unit of our personality is the individual choice, no matter how small, and even in the act of answering one simple question we are further defining ourselves. The measurement appeals to ideals and envies and disappointments. And in coming to further understand this, and realizing that my character would need to reach this same conclusion, it occurred to me that narrative is the only real personality test. Stories qualitatively define aspects of an individual, this function perhaps their primary value in the post-Survivalist world. And they are scalable: even your top drunken anecdote says something meaningful about the person you are. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a well-researched biography may be the best technology we could concoct to model the testee's brain. Fiction on the other hand designates archetypes, filling them in with conditioning that could only happen in the setting's environment, forcing decisions on them in unique arrays and documenting the results.



I've been studiously editing a couple short stories (and just finishing up a first draft and a finalish one of two pieces that comprise nearly sixty pages) and feeling the process become more careful and open-ended. I concern myself less with getting a few pages edited than I do spending a couple solid hours at it, whatever the results. And so I read a paragraph three times, or four, and change a comma or add an article or delete one. Or the whole paragraph goes out the window in favor of a new one. Recently a friend sent me a copy of a book self-published by a guy I know from years ago. A guy I'm happy has survived. It was a cool moment to open that envelope and read that first page. I haven't got to all of it yet, and can say little about the content so far. But there was a glaring typo on the first page that made me cringe. My anxiety over the typo (not in this blog so much, but in fiction) keeps me up at night, and I almost imagine them as I read. I plan to self-publish a book later this year, a collection of short stories, and I'm phobic about the misspelled word, or the poorly chosen comma. And yet the process seems interminable, like picking through weeds for broken glass.

»»  read more

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

(quote: Bukowski, video: Alice)


The other day I had this glorious bike wreck. I'd spent all night downtown buying rounds, in transit via my good friend's 'garbage' bike. And I did shots and paid covers and danced for three minutes at least, remembering my quote of the week. And then on my lonely pedal back I was so drunk I lost it. One of these landscaping rocks we use in the west to remind the citydwellers where they be at. At full tilt with that moment in my head where you think 'oh shit' and the camera zooms in and out like Adam West Batman is changing scenes. And I flew through the air maybe eight feet and landed on a damp pile of dirt like god's own drunk. The bike was destroyed, unridable, and I hiked it up on my unfazed shoulders dialing drunk friends on my phone. In the long morning next's hangover there was nothing left to do about it but laugh. And I laughed walking through the cemetery rain.

I haven't been posting as many blogs lately because I have been writing my joyous brains out And now I understand how much school obstructed the occurrence of real writing. Even when I tried to write there was always the huzz of anxiety . . .that some book needed to be read, some paper written. And now it's gone and I wake up earlier than you even want to hear and write for an hour and then bicycle to work and keep as dissociated as I can for 8 hours and come home and write another two or three. Or four. And then the weekend.

The weekend. The best thing the Man ever kicked down to us. There's no such thing as the American Dream, but whatever withered intention of it remains lives between Friday at 5pm and Sunday at midnight. And maybe if they let us work four days a week instead of five without risking bankruptcy by chest cold, the yeomen and -women could all have jobs even with less money to scrape by with. That extra day to read something, to work in your shop, to record a song, to make sure the TV is raising your kid alright.

Happiness comes and goes. And when you're up like that you might be best enjoying the sunshine and knocking it off with the questions. We're all addled now living in this alien camp and when it doesn't suit us we call it depression or ADD. And though no man on the street can even talk sense about the world leaving us behind, we think if our children get bored they must be lunatics, and if we don't want to get out of bed on some loveless, jobless morning we must be out of our goddamned minds. No one gets a say on the place they're born into, and I'm done judging this one except to say that I don't think my brain works the way that Web 2.0, or the Democratic Party, or marketing research says that it should. We're supposed to feel things, as hard as we try to contain all of that mess to television. And so when you do feel something, you're not alone. We're all hiding it, because that's what we think we're supposed to do. Unless you're happy, ecstatically happy, then you just have to be comfortable with people thinking you're high.

»»  read more