Burna

I don't know.  That's not true, I do know.  I get scorched sometimes.  Emotionally.   Not by anyone specifically or the selves within myself.  It's that the act of creation is a burner.  I have to crank it up to high and hear the igniter tick over and tap and I do not always know what the igniter will be.  The ignition coil accepts voltage over the course of hours and sometimes days and sometimes months.  It does not always click.  I would go as far as to say that often times, more often than otherwise, it does not click and the ignition coil never accepts enough voltage to arc and I have to hold a lighter down on that gas line and hope it takes before the house burns down and I'm sitting in the backyard smoking with no eyebrows wondering how I got there because the kitchen exploded and I was high off of my ass on fumes well before it happened.  I want it to work every time.  That's wishful thinking.   I get scorched a lot.  I am highly flammable.  Just the way the genes shook out.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of a writer I would be, could be, with greater mental stability, and then I laugh.  Because I would have bored myself to death in high school with pen and paper and I realize I would be the mathematician or the economist or the engineer or the welder who did it because it was something they could do mechanically and do well and do with hi fidelity in a very stable pattern and my interest would've waned and I would have sought out something more dynamic.  No wait.  That's me.  Me now, projecting myself backward and extrapolating to now.  Not what I was trying to describe at all.  I would have done those things and been happy to do them and never would have branched out to something I could be wrong at and still pursue with passion as though I was baseline perfect and sometimes brilliant, but not nearly enough to make that one diamond sparkle to my eye enough to push me to try for something with more cuts and more shine and more heart.  At least that's what I like to think.  Would happen if I were more stable.

Do I want the things that come with stability?  Of course.  You'd have to be a moron not to.  Do I want the things that come with instability?  Of course.  Not all of them, but at least 70% of them.  Maybe closer to 60%.  Thinking back, I never really was a very stable human being.  I remember getting into a spat at a summer camp when I was very young, came back to me today, cannot remember for my life what camp it was or if it was bible camp or something more or less or forced or if I asked to go to it.  It was a moment where myself and my peers were unsupervised and they were making fun of my shoes again because I had very bad knock off shoes.  Very bad.  Not even stylistically speaking.  Simply very poorly engineered shoes.  The soles were made of this weird psuedo plastic, translucent, compound so whenever we played "Duck Duck Goose" or "Steal the Bacon" in gym I would have to work ten times harder than everyone with regular rubber to make cuts and accelerate and slow down because the plastic stuff would glide on the waxed wood floor like skates.  I still won my fair share.  Unfair share?  I should have been undefeated.  It's probably how I got to be so fast early on and kept going from there.  Also probably how I got to be so frustrated when I get a job and don't have the right equipment today.

Anyway, where was I going....  so myself and my peers were unsupervised and I was being teased relentlessly and I didn't do anything for a while except shut up.  Partly because I knew however I spun it I would get the beating of a lifetime up until that point once I got home, and partly because I wanted to go grab a chair and beat him to death.  So I went straight for his throat because the middle ground was dealing with them making fun of you for having dirty nails, them not realizing you were keeping them as long as your mom could stand before digging that hook thing underneath or cutting them specifically for the instance when you may need to claw someones throat out of their neck.  It worked out pretty well.  He bled some and I was not nearly as strong as I thought I was then so he only lost some skin, but he was so freaked out he didn't even tell on me.  Or maybe he did and I've just blacked the aftermath out of my memory.  Anyway, I just remember thinking "awesome, why did I not do that sooner."  Strange days back then.

And now.  I know I can't be, but I believe I can be the greatest of all time.  I get scorched.  I melt down.  I've been so high strung emotionally with human contact.  It's rough.  Parsing things.  Knowing what to tell and what not to.  KNowing who to tell and who not to.  Going over events to parse what happened and what did not happen, but was later re-engineered from memories I didn't have, but took to heart regardless.  People I thought I talked to in depth, but never said one word to.  Real people that I see that I know I will not see again for some time.  Longing and wanting more and knowing I would mismanage it if it did happen.  The things that did happen that are stranger than fiction that I hesitate to retell to anyone because they wouldn't believe it either if they were there.  It's gutting.

A tough road, the feeling it.  The feeling writing.  Taking it beyond exercise to experiment and beyond experiment to theory and beyond theory to intent.  Taking intent back to exercise to ingrain it and then back to experiment to expansion packs.  Managing circuitry.  Without tripping breakers is a 99 by 99 game of Windows 95 vintage Minefield.  I was trying to explain to someone how communication, as I've learned it, is an experience of exchanged violence.  The base set of symbols.  Love growing from that basic set of characters.  Sometimes writing offers no release.  I can deal with that.  It's not so much that it's something that has to get out.  Someone else tried to put it to me that way and I accepted the assessment because I had no rebuff at the time.  To a small degree it is.  To a much larger degree it is conversation, within and without. Some internalized and leaking and some extroverted and speaking.

I'm taken back to the original mission.  The blueprint for the creation as a method of legacy.  I go back and forth often between life and death.  Self extermination versus procreation.  I do not play into it as often as I would like, or maybe, more likely, as often as I would feel comfortable with.  Is there a way to commit altruistic suicide for the greater good?  Yes.  I toy with the idea of dying of natural causes.  Thinking about having children and the million reasons why it would be better for that kid to never meet me.  I toy with big ideas of retirement and doing what I love, but even on that time scale of 60, 70, years, it's a long pipe.  What you want, sucka?  Not much.  I already have most of it.  It's getting to the point of formality and self improvement.  Competitive spirit.  How good can I possibly get?  I think that keeps me awake more often than any other meter.  When I know the answer, I'll rip the chord and bug the fuck out.  Selfish.  It makes me laugh to feel that way sometimes.

I get scorched.  I get thoroughly displeased with the quality of what comes out of me, but I know there's so much psychological garbage to sort through, there is no way I'm going to knock anything out of the park on a regular basis.  I play against myself.  It gets troubling.  Becomes troubling.  When your heckler is you.  Your clown is you.  You are your dealer and your fiend.  I used to do it for other people.  I used to do it for my mom and my dad before I realized the packages of carefully selected works were doing little more than collecting dust as soon as they unwrapped them.  When I realized sending them books for christmas was a waste of money and passion.


One of the best experiences I ever had was taking some of them back one of the times I was back home and never once hearing a single question about where any of them went.  XD.  I still get a rise out of that.  I was hot blooded for so long over it and then I realized it wasn't worth holding against anyone.  I think that's where a lot of my happiness stems from.  The knowing that there are people you can love and people you cannot love.  And I'm okay with that.  I still get scorched sometimes.  The factory floor fire spreads and work stations are abandoned and the fire spreads and the suppression systems kick in and they can't contain a god damn thing on the scale of what you are experiencing because you designed them in good times with hypotheticals and grossly miscalculated how swift and vast the psychotic destruction would advance.

So now I am back again and kicking at embers and trying to reimagine what it all was before the fire broke out.  Gathering the caucus.  Sending the calls and hoping to get a ping back from somewhere.  Anywhere along the rise and fall of consciousness.  Reinstalling routines.  Rebuilding structure.  Recreating from memory the blueprint and it's different every time.

If, at the end of it all, I can assemble something to make a future iteration of myself feel less daunted, or less alone, or less wrecked, or more hopeful for sunrise, or more comfortable with no one to sing to but the moon and the tone deaf clouds, I will be happy.  I don't always do good, but I do the best I can.  I know the cycle will eventually end and I won't be blown clear and the fire will consume, but what is the high worth if you'll never know just how high you could've been?  I'm not talking the highs that come with squared proportions.  False peaks?  I mean, would I trade the 40% bad outcomes for 100% decent outcomes?  No.  I don't think so.  In the worst times, yes.  Of course.  No.  I don't think so.  And it is difficult to wrap my head around.  Difficult to work around.  Difficult to not fall into myself standing on the foundation slab in a wilderness where a home used to stand and not feel something for everything and everyone who died in their beds who would have gotten up to jobs and friends that morning when the leaves were still wet with night and the paper boy was sucking oxygen looking at the weeks rounds on his front porch and the dogs were still dreaming and the shots in the dark were unreported and the spiders still had games to play and the cigarette burns still bled and fuck

As promised:  two pack.



///Five Deez - "So Good"  it's nice to be back.  nice to be feeling something.

///Amon Tobin - "Untangle"  slow verbs.

Skyline, Story Telling and How It's Put

Been watching movies. Just saw Skyline and I didn't not like it. As far as alien invasion films go it's nice to see the aliens win sometimes because, honestly, a star faring species would in all likelihood own man kind pretty hard. There were a couple of things that stood out though as I started fast forwarding to the end to see where it was all going.

The story telling struck me as pretty flat. When the guy from Scrubs died I didn't really feel one way or the other about it. I know I was supposed to feel "aw no, the main character's best friend just got eaten and now he's all alone in the world with his pregnant girl friend who seems to get randomly upset about things people are supposed to be upset about when they're pregnant." However, all I could really think about was how he probably could have made it to safety had his friend not body checked him with a bro hug in a weird attempt to pull him to safety that would, had they been playing basketball, have been an offensive foul. Rescue fail. If someone is running from a giant brain eating semi-sentient mech warrior thingy you probably shouldn't run directly into their only path of egress, whatever your intention.

Ultimately, what it came down to, I decided, was that no one in the film had any real motive to do anything they did beyond the fact that they were supposed to. Which sounds like a reasonable reason to do anything at all, but in terms of telling a story it is the worst thing in the world. You could almost see the writer pulling the strings of the puppets and animating the actions and progressions by sheer harm of will. Not unacceptable, but noticeable. I think that is one of the chief challenges of story telling and writing. Making the strings invisible. Growing motives. Building back story and momentum so that actions are not knee jerk responses to chisels and hammers on a blank canvas.

It was an interesting film. The other thing that stood out pretty starkly by the film's close was that the aliens could have been replaced by just about anything. It could have been a movie about tornadoes. Or a tsunami. Or any natural disaster. Or any sort of invasion. Absent the plot device of them needing brains for whatever reason and you basically have an empty template of two dimensional good looking twenty and thirty somethings trying to survive a blank social upheaval. What sets something like Colossus: The Forbin Project or District 9 apart from Skyline is the construction and development of the nemesis and the invader as a character unto itself. If the voiced actors in Skyline are by and large two dimensional, the invaders are one dimensional and that sort of held it back, though the action was interesting. The film could probably have greatly benefited from thirty more minutes of plot development and enrichment of the hero's foil. If the deaths of the characters are to hold weight as lynch pins in the plot, their lives have to hold weight too and if their lives do not then the executioners must.

Which is what I strive to learn how to do. Craft that balance. And I do not believe I succeed often enough. And so I keep working at it, because it is important to me and the stories I want to tell. Too much of the action and dialog in the film was foreseeable from miles away and though interesting and visually entertaining, it was not much more than that. The other thing that sort of stung me a little bit was some of the final scenes. Why do the brains glow at all? Is that really the best way to extract brains from things? Why not harvest animals instead or in addition? Given the difficulty of the operation, why not find somewhere else less developed? If stars can be crossed, why inferior human stock at all? What about when the brain supply runs out, as it seems the brains burn out so quickly with the difficulty and energy required to procure them in the first place? And I think what really annoyed me was that with all of their technology and apparent ability to regenerate themselves, why were they not just synthesizing brain matter in massive orbital laboratories or something? In the end I was sort of hoping for a larger theme to solidify, but it never did and to end the review I think that is what sent me looking for why I felt a little off after watching it in the first place. Plus, I'm pretty sure if, say Donald Trump, wanted to harvest human brains, he could probably find a better way to do it then creating a giant pile and brute force searching each for brain matter. Just gotta put your mind to it.

Story telling isn't easy. It was an okay movie, but I wouldn't watch it twice. So that's part of why I work on writing so much. I want people to want to read my stories twice.

While I was wrapping this up I noticed the tag still on the blinds I put up recently. The warning tag about the cords. "young children can STRANGLE in cord and bead chain loops," it reads. And I thought, yeah they can, but if you wanted it to really hit home it should probably say "young children can be STRANGLED with." But then I thought about it some more. That's probably not what you should say. People are strange. People like suggestions. People sometimes take suggestions they shouldn't. People sometimes file law suits they shouldn't. How weird would it be to have someone murder their children because a dangling tag on a cord gave them the idea. How much stranger would it be to have the family members of the accused sue the company for giving the perpetrator the idea. I'm sure stranger and more ridiculous things have happened. Like movies where everyone does what they do because if they didn't there wouldn't be anything to show and tell. Silly times. A fine diversion.



///Five Deez - "Sexual for Elizabeth" sometimes the best stories are told in sounds that don't make words. It's all in how it's put.

Back at Bits for Flames and Hearing Some Hip Hop

Well the recap will have to wait until later tonight. Right now I'm back at Bits For Flames content injection into the fiction section of the site.

More graffix. This will be the Rant.Muse logo:



graphics will go up once i finished the other three panels. Partly because I want to do all the php at once, and partly to crack a whip on my own ass to "get 'r done". Hope you're liking the new and improved use of grammar. Remember when this thing was entirely stream of consciousness? Ah, the rebellious days of a couple weeks ago. Feels like it was just yesterday...

///Five Deez - "Sexual for Elizabeth" If hip-hop, at it's highest, most visible, most accessible and marketable levels were all about the instrumentals for just one month out of every year, it would be a beautiful thing. I would say "bring art back into hip-hop", but art didn't go anywhere. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder (something I'm honestly not always willing to do when it comes to hip-hop). This track, though not brand new, still inspires me to look a little closer instead of turning away from the entire scene altogether.