Low Lighter

I've been mulling craft over. Disappointed in the body so far. I try to grade myself week to week. Did I nail it? Did I glance it? Did I make something I can stand behind? The answers are easy in a lot of fields. Harder in writing. One thing I miss about college was workshops. Sure, half the people there are only there because they need to have creative arts credits or just needed something to add to their schedule they could coast through. That's the major difference between writers and other people. At least at that level.

The classes are only as hard as you make them. Writers make them some of the hardest classes they've ever taken. Other people don't. Humanities and social studies is like that. How deep do you want to drive into the subject matter? The same goes for many of the other largely subjective classes offered at university.

I've been asked more than once and probably too many times how a person, or how I, know that I am or they are a writer. The answer can be answered fairly simply in many different ways using very simple, and also very personal, tests. I am not saying the answer to the question is simple. It's always complicated, but can be simplified in terms of the writing being done. One of the tests, I believe, is the level of dissatisfaction with "good enough." Not the good enough that tells you that item A or B is amusing or digestible to other people, but the good enough that hits the points and edges, lines and graphs, of the things you want to map. If that lack of good enough directs you to work harder than you are a writer. If that lack of personal good enough draws you to an "oh well, I tried" sort of answer than you are probably not a writer, but did manage to put words together into a coherent string. I dunno. It's tough. Goes without saying at this point.

I haven't been disappointed with the effort as much as the second effort. I usually relied on working with criticisms to see where things were failing and where things work better. Part of learning how to write is learning how to simulate workshops within yourself. Time consuming stuff. What I have been doing is working on very short time scales. Hours instead of days and weeks and months. The pressure works well at sharpening the blade or at least keeping it sharp, but does not do enough, for me, to make progress. So I'm working on a new idea, an old one, but new to the times, on a new channel. A low line.

I've been riding the high line for a very long time and the problem is it does not leave enough time for gestation and things get excessively hit and miss and I'm not happy with that. I have to give myself time to step away and look at it again and punch it right in the craw until it's disfigured and see how I can make it better and then do it better and then look at it again. Give things time to precipitate. I haven't given myself that time partly because I over estimated what I can do (arrogance), but also because running back over what you've done is rarely pleasant. It's not fun or enjoyable to see how badly you put something together and that's a lack of discipline.

So a second Auralport is coming at a much lower line. It's not going to be about cranking out and pushing forward as much as it will be trying to put one gem together in a week. We're going dual channel. A thing for every place and a place for everything. Or something like that. Just trying to satisfy the urge to put pen to paper and make it something worth seeing just once. I want desperately to be better at it, but all I've got is me, so we're gonna figure this shit out and make something ill.


///Bowery Electric - "Freedom Fighter" ... cue dreams.

Every Day I'm Shoveling

First of all, why is "every day" not one word by now? Or the various "every" constructions? If we as a people can come to accept "bling" as a word with real meaning, how can we not accept words with real meanings that don't lose those meaning with the space dropped out? A space between words is a fence between neighbors and fences are necessary. I'm not saying take out all the spaces and make every sentence a word, though that would be awesome. You could say what you wanted to say whenever you wanted to say it in like ten words or less every time. But instead of an organized neighborhood of streets and cross walks when you looked at a page you'd see a mosh pit. Every time you spoke to someone it would basically be you sharing your personal rave and trying to combine parties when they spoke back and that would just be... ...awesome. Also awesomely unintelligible. For a generation or two. Ultimately though it would probably make our children smarter, or at least allow them to think differently. It would change politics. It would make it pretty much impossible for foreigners to assimilate and then you really would need to learn other languages because that guy that only speaks Spanish or only speaks Cantonese would not be able to talk to you at all in broken English because the language would be so agglutinated and dense that it would be impossible for anything but an uncreased brain to grasp it with ease and build into it.

Second of all: why can't I sit in a park with a shovel after the sun goes down? That is just unfair. I walk halfway across town because I saw an awesome shovel out for trash and I forgot to go back and get it until the evening and besides my hands were full at the time. I walk halfway across town, granted I live in a pretty small town and get this nice, heavy handled, spade shovel that would be absolutely perfect for some yard work I'll have to do later and on the way home I cut through the local park and it's a pretty nice night out and the hills are all dotted with little Saturday evening fires of people in doors so I sit for a moment on a bench with my new sweet ass shovel, staring up and letting my mind wander over who those people might be and just enjoying the weather cold enough to drizzle the air with the smell of fireplaces. I've never had a fireplace of my own. I like to imagine what it's like. I saw a duraflame log once, one of those fake wood things for people who don't like to burn real wood I guess. Or maybe for people who like fire places, but don't want to do the things that having a fireplace requires you to do. That really is the story of modern America. I want things, but I don't want to do the things having those things will require me to do.

Anyway, I'm sitting there and a car comes rolling up real slow and I don't look back to see who it is. I know it's a car. I know that pebble crunch anywhere. I also know people don't like it when I make sudden moves, and besides I have nothing to hide. I'm just a dude with a shovel. I keep listening to this car rolling closer and then, in the background of my mind because I'm still thinking about the hillsides and the gorgeous night, but my head is also running through all of the sound clips of tires and pebbles and speed equations, I realize the tires are doing police cruiser and/or drive by speed and/or jump out and stuff in the backseat kidnapping speed. So I stand up and I figure one of those three things will happen and sure enough the flashlights come on and the questions start in and why the hell do you have to shine that shit directly in my eye sockets anyway. I have a shovel. I'm not running anywhere with a damned shovel. Or at least not far anyway. So now I know. It is officially not okay with society to just be a dude in a park with a shovel between the hours of 7 PM and 7 AM.

I haven't really been eating. Not my fault though. I have been eating. Because I'm pretty sure I give off this pheromone when I don't eat. I'm kind of obsessed with how I smell. I try to match it with what I've been doing and putting into my body. Not farts. Those are totally easy. I'm pretty sure you can tell how someone's body functions based solely on how their ears smell. Well maybe not solely. And you probably have to lick them like licking a nine volt battery to see if it works to get the full suite of diagnostic information available through smells. What am I talking about? I get lost in theory sometimes. So I have been eating some. Enough to keep things going, but little more. Mainly because my sink doesn't work and I don't want to have to slog all my dishes down six flights of steps to the sink that does work. Naturally the answer to that problem is: don't do anything that requires the use of dishes. So I've been skipping a bunch of meals. I don't really miss them. I do miss them in that it makes it a lot easier to stay awake. Staying awake has become a full time job again. Partly because of the lack of intake and hypermile-ing my body, but also because dreaming has been so incredible I can't help but want to be there constantly. It's becoming less of a second life and more of a single joined seamless in phase existence. You know people that complain about how they "already did that" in a dream and then like have to go to work again? That used to happen to me. Long ago. Now it never happens.

Of course I feel completely unrested because I am basically alive and in phased consciousness for twenty hours a day, but the people I've met and things I do... it's been ridiculous. Also pointless to tell you about it in those terms because you weren't there. Definitely a "dude I saw this movie and it was awesome, you should have been there, but let me continue to talk about the movie in terms of superlative adjectives because if I frame it in enough paper thin hammered gold you will totally be inspired by the blank space inside the frame containing the picture only I can see."

So the dish thing I learned from my dog, Jack, rest his angry, fun loving, visitor hating, best friend for life, little Shelty bones. We would go on weekend road trips and he didn't want to poop in the house so he would basically not eat or drink, though we always left him plenty of food and water, until we got back. Maybe it was equal parts "if I don't eat then I won't have to poo" and vigil for me. "That's giving an animal too much credit," shut your face. I can't give that old bastard enough credit. He was the man. Seriously. Except for his fear of thunder and lightning and his rage toward fireworks he and I were basically two of a kind and alternated top dog roles depending on the situation, but we were basically 1 and 1A. Learned that little trick of no input equals no output, body wise, from him. More bravery per pound than most people who are not also Marines. Probably more stupidity per pound, but we were, again 1 and 1A on that front too. If you are a cat person I don't hate you, but you have no idea what you're missing.

Which is why I should never be a parent. Me and my kids will be the baddest family on the block. Partly because I would be way too fair to them. With my dog, he would bring me a sock for tug of war and being like three times his size, maybe four if I just ate a couple burritos, the only fair thing to do was meet him at his level. I figured his teeth were probably a lot stronger than mine, what with his eating bones from time to time (never understood that, but I do have a propensity for walking around with spoons in my mouth), maybe four or five times so naturally I used my teeth for tug of war. If I lost a couple, no big deal, so we got it on. "I'm a take you down to China town!" That's how we threw down. Gotta be fair. So instead of setting a curfew I would probably tell my kids they can stay out or stay up as late as they want, but they have to fight me for it and if I win then they have to go to bed when I say. I wouldn't kick the crap out of them. I never actually hit Jack. I would scuff 'em a little. More like lioness to cubs kind of stuff. Only minus the breast feeding. Do they even do that? Or do they come out of the womb craving a hearty meal of lightly chewed, but still fresh, Giraffe. Instead of telling my kids not to go set fires, I'll probably stop them at the door and say something like "make sure you bring fireplace matches so you don't have to stand too close to the accelerant, because I'm not driving up to the woods to put you out." Sure, I wouldn't let them blow themselves up. I'm not a monster. But I will make sure they know how to set a charge properly and it would be the best father/son or father/daughter tandem ever. We will be feared. Probably. Anyway. What I'm saying is every day I'm shoveling so don't cause any problems and there won't be any problems. I'm just a dude with a shovel out for a walk.

Trying to get back to writing fiction, but it's been a long and heady road full of potholes. I'm not dawdling as much as I am reflecting. I wrote a fairly long draft of a science fiction short called Scanlon, but I haven't back over it in almost eight days now. I'm trying though. I apologize. I will try harder. Life's too short not to try, so don't spend all of your time "doing".


///Deadelus - "Taking Wing"

the next time (p1) 01/10/06

Subject : the next time someone says PART 1
Posted Date: : Jan 10, 2006 12:49 PM

the next time someone says to you that your eyes are bigger than your stomach.... say to them "my eyes may be bigger than my stomach, but so is my determination, ambition, and perserverance so fuck you and worry about your own god damn plate... asshole."

building respect one over reaction at a time.