In Medias Res

Okay, I know it’s been a very long time since I wrote anything here, and I’m pretty sure it started as a slight lapse in time or effort to continue writing here, but after awhile it also became an issue of embarrassment: how long can a writer not write before he has to tell everyone (and more importantly himself) that he is no longer a writer? How long can one have a blog and not add to it, how long can he say “Yeah, I have a blog, you should check it out” when he hasn’t added anything on it forever. One of the first jokes I ever heard about blogging was how everyone has one and they only ever have updates twice a year and they all start with “Hey guys, I know I haven’t been writing here, and I promise to write more...” and I know that I’ve made similar (if not wholly equal) statements in the past for this blog and others. But fuck it, man. I never start these blogs with any real intention of every-day or once-a-week use, I try to, but when push comes to shove I’m a really lazy guy who has bursts of energy and activity and slumps of inactivity and boring-ness. This is a thing I do not say with pride, and it probably has a bunch of reasons no one cars about, so we’ll just skip the pyschoanalysis for once and dive right into what I came here to talk about.

I’m a media junkie. It’s becoming kind of an issue. I found myself thinking today about a scene that I only know from clips and such of Dustin Hoffman whacking a taxi cab (?) and screaming “I’m walkin here! I’m walkin’ here!” when it nearly runs him over. When I thought of it at first, I thought it was Kramer vs. Kramer, which was probably way off. I spoke that guess out loud, because my co-worker hadn’t any idea what I was referencing (there was cab who was doing a rolling stop while we were crossing the street), and then had to explain it. THEN I had to explain (because my brain does whatever the hell it wants anymore, but we’ll get to this later) that this incident (Dustin Hoffman yelling at a cabbie [wait, was it a cabbie? Shit.]) was actually ad-libbed, because some guy drove through the shot and almost ran Hoffman down. So I basically made a reference to a movie I have NEVER SEEN and then explained it, and then added more superfluous information to this already annotated story in order to explain why I made the reference. And it may have been Drugstore Cowboy (another movie I’ve never seen) and I’m also not sure it was a cabbie. In a second, I’m going to go onto Youtube and find out because, as previously mentioned but not discussed, I have officially lost control of my brain.

Okay, so the verdict is one of three: it was a cabbie, but the movie is Midnight Cowboy, not Drugstore Cowboy (what is that, I wonder?) or Kramer vs Kramer (was Hoffman even in that movie? Fuck I’m losing it. Concentrate, goddammit, you’ve got to get through this). The important part of this ridiculous anecdote is that I am a media junkie that does things like identify with a scene in a film I haven’t even seen and try and use it to relate to people in real life. This can’t be a healthy exercise. Really. And not only that, but that I haven’t seen Midnight Cowboy (What the hell could it be about?) or Kramer vs. Kramer (probably a court movie, which went out of style around the time Dick Wolf started making television shows) actually makes me want to see them, just so  I know the context of my own references and to know why the hell Kramer vs Kramer is famous enough to be in my brain. And here’s the fun part: I will probably watch one of those movies, and I have no idea why. Wait, back up, I do know why: it’s because my brain does whatever it wants because I am a fucking junkie for media and information.

I don’t know when it started, but I think it may have to do with embracing curiosity about the time Wikipedia became a thing. I remember back in the forum days, trolling along in the interwebs, we used to talk (write?) about the interesting places we’d start on wikipedia and the crazy places they’d take us. I can’t remember specifics, but the thread was not unlike the Kevin Bacon connect-the-people game where you can line up Charlie Chaplin to Emilio Estevez or whatever. Say you start with World War I and somehow end up on the breeding habits of red squirrels or the shelf-life of pine nuts. It doesn’t matter, the point was what a long strange trip it was getting from one link to another, starting at one place or subject and then, simply because of curiosity, being taken to another just as interesting (if not more so [who doesn’t love pine nuts?]) and never going back, or having to close 45 tabs or, at the very best, spending days going back and reviewing them after spontaneously being inundated with new information (never happens except for ALL THE TIME). 

So I’ve decided that this is and may be and definitely has been a bit of a problem that effects not only me, but the things I want to do and the things I have done and not finished. Did that sentence make sense? There’s sometimes I feel like what makes sense to me doesn’t exactly make sense to others. And that’s why I am here now doing this. Trying to finish something. Trying to make a thing whole and maybe small but at least something to be proud of, something I can point to and go, “there it is, that’s the start of something and the finish of something. It’s not pretty, maybe, but it’s mine and fuck you if you can’t handle it.”

So there are a few things that I’ve been working on, and they seem stupid sometimes and (my all-time favorite reason to stop something) too big to be real things that I can make exist. Writing projects. Like, sit-down-and-spend-some-fucking-time-writing-godammit-projects. One, I think, I want to finish before the end of November (yes, novel-writing month or whatever). I think it will be the “religion” project, as a story that I am absolutely afraid of because it deals with beliefs and madness and death and heartache and pain and somewhere, hope. It’s a story I’ve been sweating for a year? two years? Doesn’t matter. It needs to be done because I started it. The other project I have in mind is a compilation of stories based around a deli (I know, I’ve kicked this around a million times), but this would be more of a collection of short stories with a mild framing story to hold them together, like the early Treehouse of Horrors, and the stories usually have nothing to do with the deli at all, just because fuck work, it’s life that’s interesting.

So anyway. This is the plan: write. The only issue I have (other than confidence or my finishing-things issues) is fucking media. My constant cycle of switching channels, flip to Jamestown, history of; Pocahontas: Reality vs Legend; Disney movies I’ve never seen, The physics of lifting a house with balloons, That Penn & Teller Bullshit! when they take on the Boy Scouts, The Republican 2012 Platform, skip-a-few Hoovertowns and the Great Depression. I’ll do my best to keep my internet bullshitting to a minimum, but we’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed.

Losing the Muse

Alright. I'm not gonna be happy unless I write something on this blasted thing, am I?

I haven't written anything here for a little while because, well, let's be honest. I don't know. Yesterday I started two separate articles and decided I couldn't back them--they were stupid and mean-spirited and after writing one for twenty minutes I decided I hated it and it was total bullshit anyway (it was about hipsters, and why I find them so fucking annoying [it's mainly the ones who are totally insincere that bother me, the ones who dress like hipsters but have no convictions about anything. We get it, man. You've taken the "I'm so cool, I don't care" thing and turned it into a style. The only thing you forgot was that your "not caring" just shows that you actually care the most, and just want to be accepted by anybody who doesn't have the balls to challenge you. Fail.]) and made me feel like I was treading water verbally, instead of just coming out and saying what I wanted.

That's my biggest problem with writing, and writing while in school. In my writing, I write to please me. Whatever works. If it's a sappy story about the nerd falling in love with the cheerleader and her shooting him down, but then realizing he's great, so be it. If it's a science fiction story about robots or a horror about rats in an attic or a fucking two pager about bed bugs, so fucking be it. I don't need anyone else to look at it to know I like it, because it's for me. Writing stories and poetry and all that jazz is selfish as hell. Yay for selfishness (sometimes), it gave us great works like East of Eden, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Great Gatsby. Stories like American Gods and Misery and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Those were written for the author and them alone. They weren't staying up late for deadlines and money, they were writing because they needed to get it on the page.

But with school, it's a whole different ball game. With school you write for another person. The whole fucking time. You can't just say "Book A is useless and boring and sucked six ways to Sunday," you have to say "Book A is considered to be one of the greatest books of all time. Joe Shmoe from Cocamo praised it winningly, stating, 'it is as lovely as the smell of my own farts on a windy summer's day (Shmoe 98)." Half the time what you really think of the book is lost in useless rhetoric that you have to use simply because if you are too direct, you might be plagerizing someone you don't even know about. In acedemia, there's no room for your opinion unless other people back it, so the only way to have any type of opinion is to have someone else's opinion. And then, even if your ideas are valid, your prof might fuck you just because they disagree. There's no way to tell.

So, I'm having a hard time writing. Could you tell?

Wreckless Musings [i]

I should be working on a paper, but instead I'm watching Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride, a movie about Hunter S. Thompson that apparently I watched before but don't recall watching at any point in time. My guess was the last time I watched this was after a night of drinking rum and cranberry juice, something I am prone to do when I have easy access to either. I tend to do things like drink enough to get drunk (not much) and then do something menial and mundane, and then forget whatever it was I was doing before. This is in contrast to others I know, who drink steadily all night and black out and wake up in a hotel room tied to a broken lamp surrounded by vomit and blood that isn't theirs. I guess the point is, if a camera crew followed some of my friends, you'd have something fun and perhaps entertaining, whereas the majority of the times I'm drunk and blacking out, I'm watching Fight Club and wishing I had Tyler Durden's balls. Not much fun in recording that.

New Brunswick is a strange place for me at this point in my life. I don't think I ever really expected to be here at twenty-seven, slogging through an English major I have little to no interest in at a school that is costing me $12,000 a year, trying to figure out what the fuck my "plan" is.

Plan. Ha. I don't think there is one rational person here who has a real plan, and if they do, they're probably damning themselves to a lifetime of aimlessness and horrifying boredom. I mean, how many people actually find a job out there that matches their major? Teaching? Sure, I guess that's a possibility. But you actually have to have passion for teaching, and half the "Future Teachers of America" out there are cold-blooded crazies with red eyes who actually hate children and just want a job doing something that's kind of lucrative and is always open. Teaching is like owning a funeral home: There's always business.

Then there are the scientists and mathematicians. These people have plans. But I'll never understand them because it's all fucking math. These are the people who think math is at the basis of all existence. Maybe they're right (actually, probably [actually, actually]), but fuck, man, who wants to live a life where you're surrounded by numbers? Why? What point is there to an existence where you are but a statistic, a number four hundred zeroes behind a decimal point? Maybe that's why people back creationism, as ludicrous as it is: Science is so fucking clinical and cold. Science is heartless and doesn't care if you die (if anything, it's interested in your death). Well, whatever, I don't want to get too far off point (which is what exactly?), but I just think math is stupid, because it's not something that keeps you on the feel-good side of life. And who wants to go to school and then surround themselves with that? Ugh.

So what's the plan for people like me? The lazy-minded crazies who don't want what the world wants for us, the ones who feel they can't be a statistic, the ones who fight tooth and nail the ignorances and weirdness of those who want us to have 9 to 5 jobs and wear suits and ties and punch a fucking clock?

I have no idea. I guess I'll just have to figure that one out later, cross that bridge when it rears it's ugly, mortared head. I guess I'll just have to buy the ticket, and take the ride, and see if I make it to the end.

You know, when I started this thing I thought I'd post regularly at a regular interval, like every night at nine o'clock I'd sit down and write for an hour, pretend I was writing a letter to someone who was eager to hear from me, someone who could look past all the weird shit I say and find the deep, inner me inside.

So much for that.

It's okay, really. I don't mind. I just wish that the blank page and that blinking cursor wasn't to fucking daunting. I wish that it's magical properties did not always seem so frightening and that I could once again feel confident knowing that what I was about to do with that blinking cursor was something that could be considered amazing or at the very least interesting enough for someone else to be eager to read more.

So, that is/was my real, ultimate purpose to this blog--to write a small amount every day to remember how to make the words come, how to make my story keep going.

I have two stories I'm working on--Ha that's a lie. I have one story I constantly batter myself for not finishing yet, one that is constantly giving me some sort of emotional problem. I used to think maybe it was a book, it seems pretty long so far, but I don't know if I'm even capapble of finishing it, much less actually writing a fucking book like a real-life book. A novel. Something you might find on a bookshelf or a bargain rack. Fuck, anywhere. I want to see my name on a book somewhere. I mean, I'd like to see people reading it, I would allow an Oprah Book Club sticker (even though I think her club is fucking stupid, I mean, how does Oprah tag Middlesex as a great book and suddenly people think it's amazing, but when it won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, nobody gave a shit? Good lord the nation is fucked up when Oprah means more than a Pulitzer).

However, the other story I'm working on is also good but dead for now. I know what I want to do with it but I don't know how. Or I know how but I fear fucking it up. Good Christ. I'm a mess. And somehow I seem to have lost the muse for the moment. Shit.

So now I've realized that this whole blog thing is totally overpopulated anyway and no one is going to care very much if I ever stop writing or reading or whatever. I'm not famouse or a star of the screen. I don't write novels and I don't pretend to have superpowers on a tv show. I've never been anywhere too intereseting and for all intents and puposes I'm just like any other sap that exists today. I've got nothing to bring to the table, nothing to show for my life so far and really nothing to hold on to other than my family and the few friends who can tolerate me for longer than three hours at a time.

Whew. That was a pity party and a half, wasn't it? Wah, oh woe is Wesker. Cry me a river. See this, this is the smallest violin in the world playing 'my heart pumps purple piss for you' over and over again until I stop complaining about my fully functioning body, my healthy family and my job and vehicle and intelligence.

So this blog just got so emo my heart stopped and I had to be revived.

Anyway, how all are well, whoever is reading this bugger, thank you, and those who think this is all I do, you're wrong, just give me a chance to prove it.