"There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy"

[quote: Henry Miller, video: Doug Stanhope - Excessin Moderation]




So the thing has a new format . . .which might abruptly change again soon. I'm not an expert at this, and I'm lazy. But I realized my blog was the ugliest webpage I visit, so something's got to give I suppose.

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Since I graduated, I've been spending 5 out of 7 nights and most of the weekend by myself. Really trying to get something done right now and enjoying it, so no lament. But, on the growing list of lessons learned in solitude is a big fat one: learn to enjoy the memory instead of missing the thing. Also, have a pet and talk to it. Have your favorite drank on hand once in awhile. Have tiny elements of routine but recognize when they don't work anymore. Own a lot of music and put it on random once in a while. Remember to eat. Sing a bit. Get some sleep. Just use the goddamn air conditioning. Have landmarks on your calendar that you look forward to, plan to have something in particular done by then. Don't miss the really important, biographical shit. It's really been fantastic, but I realized the other day that I have an inside joke with myself. I'm not sure what that means.

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I figured out how to sidestep cliche. See, by focusing on some aspect of the cliche (in my case, I'm working on a piece with an amnesic in a supporting role) and making it as realistic as possible, beneath the simplification and convenience the cliche wields as a notion, you make it new. You subvert the cliche, almost make a commentary in it's usage. So, for instance, Amnesia is a widespread trope in narrative (after I had my basic idea, I accidentally came across two books and one film with amnesics). IN researching how amnesia actually operates, I found that it has not, to my knowledge, been shown for what it is. In movies and books it almost always appears as a loss of memory starting at the moment of brain injury. However, most commonly appears in real-life as both a loss of access to previous experiential/declarative memory and an inability to create new long-term memories.This has interesting side-effects: 'muscle memory' is retained and can be learned, a memory function called priming works surprisingly without experiential memory of the thing being primed, cognitive skills (problem-solving, playing music) often remain. Most intriguing to me is that the amnesic is able to remember sequence of events for as long as they remain highly engaged in processing ongoing causality (i.e. when they're in the 'zone' they can remember back to the beginning of the 'zone').
Anyway. It seems such a rich ground for narrative, so many aspects of it grow plots.

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