Another on Writing and God

1/5/2010 9:12 AM – 9:33 AM

And New Years is over and a wonderful time was had by all and I am tired and my joints ache and I am getting old and I’m looking forward too much to the first day back to work poppy seed tea. It stopped snowing a little while ago. I’m cold and I want to go back to bed except that I know that too much of this will mean that I will feel fake.

There is only one requirement they say. There is only one requirement for a writer, be they good or bad: you can’t not write. So there is that. They don’t stipulate how much time you can go for before you need to write again. I think the best I’ve managed is a year and a half since I was eighteen. The time is passed where I can become a master of some other form. I might get good at something else. I might learn to sing and play the guitar. I might learn to draw comics, as I’ve always wanted. And they might be Good Enough. But to be a master of these things, of anything, they must pass with you from youth to adulthood. They must be a part of the grit of life that clings beneath the fingernails, forever etched into the enamel of trouble’s memory.

I’m not real. Of course I’m real. On the days that I can’t believe in God, does he still consider me? Or is he like my old pastor, washing his hands of us failed experiments? The girls that I’ve loved, are they still real even though I kissed only one of them? Of the ones that I kissed that I did not love, did it stain as deeply as I feel it did? Am I become the vampire boy only to discover that the ability to attract consists chiefly in the fact that I don’t give a shit if I do or not? I’m not real, of course. I’m real. And these are stupid words but they keep with the spirit of the Old Ego. Those that I admire don’t realize that they hate me. I don’t hate them. I wish them joy. And failure. Keep something for yourself. In the infinite emptiness of space (of which we are a part), the true population is always zero whether someone is alive to see it or not. It’s not that God is real. It’s that I can’t imagine anything is real if God isn’t watching it. It comes back to the top, like a good essay should. It’s not that you have to write. It’s that you can’t not write. I thought it meant a shaking of the fingers. It means the turning of the globe. I am become the fool again. Like I always will until the creeping mud reclaims me. It’s all I ever wanted.

The Throwing of the Snit, Vol 42 (with duck)

12/18/2009 11:16 AM – 11:36 AM

Well, it’s finally cold here. I’m cold. My room is fine but the regular trips out to the stairwell to smoke creeps into my skin and lingers. I’m tired and grumpy. I want to go to sleep, but if I did that, I would have really completely wasted the morning. I was up by 8, but I spent the morning on YouTube and Wikipedia. Researching things that I’m only mildly interested in and have nothing to do with what I’m working on.

Grr. Grumpy Spike. Empowered to be sullen and dull. And the sun is shining and I have no reason to be grumpy. I haven’t written, according to my stopwatch program, in three days. I actually like the new project but I’m having trouble doing what I need to be doing – getting up, putting ass to chair and writing. I actually got up on time today. I put my ass in the chair. And then I did nothing but goof around on the internet. Aside from this stream of whining, which I have been engaging in frequently in my head, I’ve been thinking about love. It isn’t really there, you know. Not like death. That was me making fun of myself by the way. My humor is lost if I’m not there to be overly dramatic in person. It is fun to say the most horrible things that you can think of in public and be amusing with it.

I figured out a long time ago that no one really want to know what you think about things really. They want you to be amusing. Dance fat monkey. Dance. See. Grumpy Spike. Sullen and dull. So what magic can I whip up to save face? That’s the problem. Not just boring, I’m running on empty. Grr. Hot soup. Hot soup is the answer. Hot soup and hot shower. Together at last. Together forever. So I walk into this Duck Store and I say, “I’d like to buy a duck.” And the clerk says, “What kind of duck are you looking for?” And I say, “The kind that makes you happy.” And the clerk says, “Oh. In that case, you might want to try the Highly Improbable but Thoroughly Entertaining Daydream Duck. I’d recommend you have a side of fries.” The duck was tasty but ultimately impossible. You wanted more within a few minutes of finishing. What’s duck like? It’s like you want more duck. The clouds are rippled like old nylon batting, fallen from an over-used department store pillow. More adverbs! More adverbs, he cries. But adverbs I have none to give, Ebenezer. Circling. Circling the words. Circling the words, always looking for the joke. The one thing that makes unknowing palatable.

Small Worlds

12/15/2009 9:37 AM – 10:01 AM

And so now I’m going to be listening to some hipster music. Well, I’m going to try anyway. Not at the moment. At the moment, I’m listening to nothing but the quiet crackle in my headphones. When I was working on the detective story, I listened almost exclusively to pop dance music. It has a driving beat and doesn’t really capture the attention. Perfect.

I think that hipster music is music written by musicians for musicians. The rest of us get the occasional scraps of accessibility, but to really get into it, you have to be at least at a 4th level remove from the non-musician. Doesn’t mean it’s not good. As far as I can tell, it is. But people that are obsessed with music listen to it a lot and want to create it. For the most part, music is in my background acting like a sheet between me and my boredom. Since I moved from Buffalo and don’t have that 50 minutes of walking to work to dedicate to giving an album its 3 good listens to, I haven’t listened to any new albums. I’ve listened to some old albums for the first time, but mostly, I’ve been catching up with “classic” rock singles, because I wasn’t allowed to listen to it as a kid.

At a certain point, it becomes more difficult to be the noob. Maybe as my co-workers get steadily younger. I fake knowing. Mostly because it just saves time and ridicule. I’m not bashing ridicule, by the way. A light-hearted ridicule can be a good spur to action, but I’m getting old. I’m not old by current standards, 70 is, after all, the new 60, but in my line of work, the grunts of which I am a member are usually younger than me. With my brain, I should be better employed. Or I should be in the loony bin. The wash is that I’m a dishwasher. The problem with my upbringing, any tightly closed upbringing, is that, unless I was going to stay within the confines of the childhood world, most of the things that I had packed into my brain became useless. I’m too restless for that, so out here in the average world, I’m one step behind the rest. Even philosophy, universally accepted, is a self-referential world. Maybe that’s why I liked it. So we’ll try again with the hipster’s earwigs. Because self is all I've got. Because nothing is more self-obsessed than a hipster.

No. It's the Universe That's Weird. Stupid Lions...

12/12/2009 12:14 PM – 12:35 PM
It’s sunny out. Quite sunny but the sky isn’t that perfect crystal blue that means it’s really cold. It’s cold, don’t get me wrong, but not that really, really cold that makes the blue really blue. A plane just flew through the tree. It was a very small plane apparently, as it didn’t hit any of the branches. It flew very slowly for a very small plane.

Despite the sleeping pill, it took me forever to fall asleep. And now I’m up late and will be able to squeeze in about twenty minutes of writing. I might have to attempt the impossible and try writing after I get home from work. That is not the time during which my brain works. Nine hours of sleep, I think that’s unnecessary. But there are no babies to make me feel that it is, so I sleep. Or I could just do what I know needs doing and wake up when I’m supposed to and write and be really tired for a week or so until my body re-acclimatize to the new schedule. But I wrote a book! A short one! That’s two novels in my life time! Two more than most people! But that will slowly change. At least amongst the educated classes. To fit better with my demographic, I should be thinner and in better shape. And married.

On the married thing, I think I’ve still got a few years before I become an outlier. Which means more time to play at being a novelist. Well, if I married a girl eight years younger than me, I could probably get away with the 5-years-before-kids thing and that would give me another seven or eight years of playing. I froze there for a second; the strange confusion of the idea of being someone’s parent disoriented me. I almost ran into the lions that were sitting this chase out. Stupid lions. It is still weird to me that people that I know and did wonderful stupid youthful things alongside are issuing forth our replacements. And it has been this way for a long time. Long before my grandparents were born. It feels like there should be a universal system in place in which people that do stupid kid things are stupid kid things and people that admonish stupid kid things should remain people that admonish. That stupid kid things transform into people that admonish is just weird. Seriously. It’s weird. It’s not the occasional “whoops! We made a baby!” This is something that happens over and over again to most people. I'm 33 and I sleep in a twin-sized bed in the “big room” of my upstairs “apartment” in the house of my college roommate and his wife. This oddly makes sense to me. I’m a stupid kid thing. I’m not weird; it’s the universe that’s the weird one.

Writing, Dishwashing and Monkeys (Stupid Monkeys)

12/11/2009 12:09 PM – 12:30 PM
Oh. Right. Here’s this thing that I’m doing. So I didn’t even bother to set my alarm last night. I woke up at 11 after not being able to fall asleep until sometime after 2. This is bothersome. If I take the sleeping pills, I’m lousy tired even after I wake up, if I don’t take them, I don’t fall asleep. But here I am now. I watched “Bones” and drank coffee. Oh, and ate a maple frosted doughnut.

I haven’t worked on “real” writing since Wednesday and that was only like a hundred words. This new project is confounding me. In my head it veers back and forth between The Chocolate War and this YA fantasy that I can’t remember the name of but I read it as a kid. The one that I read that I can’t remember the name of ended up being an elaborate “it was all a dream” thing but you sort of knew it going in. The protagonist went from sometime in the early 20th century to some other fantasy world with magic by way of getting his head dunked in a barrel of water. The end of the book ended with him getting his head yanked back out, no time having passed. But while he was there, he fulfilled a prophecy and became king and did heroics. You know, “low-fantasy” typical stuff.

Or is that high-fantasy bookended by low-fantasy? I never figured that particular genre classification scheme out. Once again, there are a billion things that I should be doing with my mornings in addition to writing. I am not doing anything including writing. A brief rest and then back to work, that’s what it was supposed to be. Bah. I cut myself twice last night at work. Both wouldn’t have hurt if I hadn’t been soaking my hands in dishwater for four hours previous to the incidents. Dishwashing as a vocation has certain drawbacks. I find it odd that people assume that it’s an easy job. I don’t think that there is such a thing as an easy job. The amount of work that I have to do sandwiched into eight hours is not physically possible unless you’re Barry Allen. That’s the Flash. DC. From the comic books. Admittedly, most of the time, my mind doesn’t really need to be fully present to accomplish the task at hand, but it’s still not “a job a monkey could do.” A phrase that I have heard an unusual number of times in my dishwashing career. Often from bosses. Often from non-bosses. Seriously? Then buy a fracking monkey. For the initial laydown of 10K, you should be able to get ten years of excellent dishwashing for banana’s and the occasional cage cleaning. But I’m thinking about work while not there. That’s a no-no. Back to something.

Stuff and Intellectual Property Rights

12/9/2009 9:51 AM – 10:16 AM

I really need to get back into the habit of early to bed, early to rise. I’m not up as late as I was yesterday and I feel slowly coming back aliveish. It’s snowy outside but that’s getting melted by the scattered rain. It looks like March outside. At least my bones arent’ cold. Actually, I rather like today’s weather. All gray and windy.

I really need to remember to get good coffee. I’ve been drinking the backup can of Folgers for almost a week now. It takes a lot of cream and sugar to make it drinkable. Which is why I keep forgetting because I make good coffee with lots of cream and sugar. Yesterday didn’t go so great on the writing front. I added about 300 words. I’m behind already. It’s okay though, I’ve got 49 days now. That’s a lot of time. I still have to get the rent. I puttered about yesterday and then it was too late. I have this theory about the future of artistic endeavors. It’s not particularly profitable. Thing is, where would I be if Hammett and Chandler hadn’t done it? And what if I had to pay them for blazing the path?

If a law becomes unenforceable, does it cease to be a valid law? There is a long-standing argument within the libertarian camp about the nature of intellectual property. St. Ayn maintained that all property springs from intellectual property and therefore, intellectual property must be guarded. There are others within the fold that hold that intellectual property is a nonsense phrase. You can own the original painting, but the copies of that painting are not yours. And someone had to invent farming, should we all still be paying his descendants to farm our own land? I still haven’t made my mind up on this one (bit torrenting included). Then there’s the question of medicine – for some reason, people maintain that it’s wrong that pharmaceutical companies make lots of money off of the drugs that they created and tested. Obviously, I say: bullshit. However, once the drug has been created and sent out, there’s a brief stall while others try to figure out what they did, but honestly, that stall is about 6 months tops. Drug companies aren’t’ going to make up the cost of R&D in that 6 months, are they? Don’t know. Just like I don’t know how much pay is too much to pay a CEO. Never had to do it. And my silly little detective story? I emailed it out to about a dozen people. Who owns it? Bah. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot. And I get pissed when people who haven’t done more than repeat a party mantra that they read in an Agitprop pamphlet claim that they do know. You. Don’t. Know. Damn. Nit.

First Day Portents

12/8/2009 10:31 AM – 10:52 AM
Well, today is the first day of the new project and I’m not sure about the normal world problem that’s supposed to be an echo of the fantasy world problem that the novel presents. And I woke up late. And I’m supposed to go to the bank and get the rent since it was closed by the time I got there yesterday. And I ate all the soup last night so I don’t have any for lunch today. It was good soup.

The project is 65,000 words in 50 days. That was actually accidental. I was just figuring out how long it would take to get to 65,000 words if I was writing 1500 words a day, except for one day a week when it’s only 500 words. Also, I gave myself only 500 words on holidays. It ended up being 50 days exactly. Synchronicity. And they say the age of magical thinking is dead. Wow. I want to sleep. Sleeping is awesome. Yesterday, I slept until 11:30. I couldn’t fall asleep the night before, so it only ended up being 9 hours, but now my body thinks it should be allowed to sleep until at least 10:30. Habituation. This is one of mankind’s saving/damning thingies.

Maybe I have an idea about how to give the hero a real-world problem… Anyway, maybe I won’t even get to it today. Though I probably should. I think YA stuff you need to get to the action pretty quick. This will be weird. No explicit violence, no swears, no sex, what is there to write about if not those things? Ah well, I’m sure it will make for an interesting 7 weeks. And I can’t think of things to write about and I’ve got five minutes left. There is my wart. I don’t know how I could get a wart, five days a week I spend at least four hours a day with my hands in semi-caustic chemicals. The sky is overcast. At the moment, there is some pale yellow that kind of looks like a frozen lightning bolt down in the far corner of my window. When I was waking up, which took two hours, the sky was all red-tinged. I kept thinking “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s take warning.” Also, “hey, that looks like New Mexico.” It’s always red sky there. No, not really. Only in the morning and evening. Sailors are confused. Especially since I’m not sure what a sailor would be doing in the middle of the high desert. I just went down to put in the second load of wash and discovered that all my work pants were in the bottom of the basket. Dress pants to wash dishes!