It's Been a Rough Year to Say the Least

2017 is a year that will go down in Andyland history as the most severe with it's cosmic kicks in the ass. The culmination of which has been this June, my birthday month. It's hard to even wrap my head around all that has been happening. I usually hate talking about my personal everyday life on my blog, but it's too much for one head to contain. I had hoped this year would be filled with loads more writing in my blog, but right from the start it's been telling me to go fuck myself.

At the end of last year, I got news that my mother had stage 4 cancer. She'd have to undergo a lot of treatments, but they were hopeful. I took a trip to NY to visit my family back in February. It was one of those trips where everyone was spilling their guts more than usual because they didn't know if there would be a next time for anything to be said.

When I got back to California a few weeks pass before I get the news that my dad has cancer as well, but a much much more severe case. They do not expect him to make a recovery and put my family in contact with hospice care services to help ease his end of life care.

My ladyfriend and I also being forced to move from my apartment due to it being uninhabitable in it's current condition. Belmont Brokerage, the rental management company, informed my ladyfriend and I that they need to fumigate back in May due to the roach infestation that was brought in by the other tenants who leave their front doors open most of the day. However Belmont Brokerage failed to inform us (even after living there for 6 years) that they don't have a key to get into our apartment. At no point did they ever contact us to let us know this and I don't understand how we as the occupants were supposed to know they didn't have a key to access our apartment. So after preparing for fumigation and then slowly starting to put things back to a livable situation, we find out from the Holland's Red Alert Pest Control that Belmont Brokerage didn't give them a key to our unit so it hadn't been treated. They said they would need one of us to be there to let them in to do the treatment, wait around for them to do the treatment, then lock up and go away for 4-6 hours until the apartment was safe to enter again.

Naturally this would have been after we prepared for the fumigation again; which would mean removing everything from every closet, cabinet, and drawer, then covering it all so it won't get the chemicals all over it when they did the treatment. We decided right then that we needed to move out of the apartment. Belmont Brokerage made it abundantly clear that they do not value our tenancy. When we went to turn in our notice letting them know we would be gone on July 1st, they refused to accent our notice to vacate. They stated we would be responsible for the cost of rent 30 days from when they accepted the notice.

Fortunately in California Civil Code Section 1942 states that if we are month-to-month (which we are at this point) and there are conditions that make the apartment uninhabitable then we are allowed to break the 30-day notice requirement of the lease. The list of things that make a place uninhabitable include: Uninhabitable conditions, which only need to affect habitability, not necessarily unlivable, and which may include: a. Infestations of cockroaches, rats, or other vermin, as well as effective waterproofing and weather protection of roof and exterior walls, including unbroken windows and doors. These are both issues we have had to deal with.

My ladyfriend and I were so livid it took us a lot to not scream at the poor bastards they have running the front desk there, but it's EXTREMELY hard not to get upset. Especially given all the other shit that was going on in my life and it being Father's Day weekend to boot. It's more stress than I ever expected for a birthday month. I don't have any solution to all this crap, but I know I'll get through it.

No matter what happens with the shitty rental place, we will be moved into our new apartment on July 1st and not be looking back at all. Just need to survive the next few weeks for things to have a chance to mellow out again. Push myself through this and on the other side I'll be a world of worry lighter.

Lessons for 2017

Following up from 2016's kick in the dick:

Only the Pos

Rhys Darby in Short Poppies as Terry Pole

I'm not planning to try to win any sexy leg competitions in 2017, although my pasty white northern pins would take the top spot for sure. The butt load of bad news that the end of 2016 dumped all over my life has been making it hard to keep my head from falling. I'm taking a lesson from Terry Pole:

I have a habit of self-reflecting and only seeing the faults when I do. It isn't that there aren't things that I feel positive about accomplishing, but there are other things I get so hung up on the negative aspects of that it stagnates all my efforts to make something else.

There are a lot of things I can't control in my life. Many of those things are what has kept my outlook bleak and my efforts stagnated. I can always spend my time wallowing in the things I can't change. That's too easy and won't lead to anything positive in the long term.

Fixing What I can When I can

Baby steps to 2018

The other night I was sitting at my desk not really sure how to spend what remained of my vacation and I noticed my cup from my morning coffee was still on my desk. I'd not planned on leaving it on my desk all day, but I waved away the minute long task with the idea I'd be able to take care of it later. There I was at the end of my day contemplating going to sleep and the minute long task of taking my coffee cup to the kitchen had been put off nearly the entire day for no real reason other than I told myself I'd find time for it later.

I realize I put off the smaller things, because I don't see the goal of accomplishing the small things as being worth the effort when I'm trying to figure out a way to get the bigger stuff done. That leads me back to self-reflecting on what I haven't gotten done; which only discourages me from putting effort into the next thing.

Small fixes/victories/accomplishments can add up if you let them. I know I can't change some of the immense things that cropped up in my life, so I can expect further stress from them. Small victories are still victories. I need to remind myself of that so that when I do manage to accomplish something I can take a proper measure of pride from the small victory and use that to fuel my efforts further.

In Closing

I'm not sure what I'll get out of this year. I had so much hope at the start of last year. I haven't lost hope. It's just been tempered heavily with reality. This year anything short of total thermonuclear war will be a pleasant surprise, so 2017 

2016 you've been a real kick in the dick

Like it says in the title. Such an enormously tall pile of bullshit was dropped onto the end of the year it skews the years overall worth sharply towards the negative side of things. It's too much to really even start listing without feeling the existential nausea kick in hard, so that's not what I'm gonna do here. I don't want to wallow in the misery of 2016. This is going to be all about making 2017 such a great year that it more than makes up for the events of 2016.

NaNoWriMo was a success. 52,678 words during the month of November. After it was over I lost track of the story. I didn't lose the story itself, but life and the holidays just drew me away from it with a suddenness I hadn't been prepared to handle. I feel like I learned a lot in the process of writing my story. I know the story was far from over or even really begun properly after all the words I put into it. I am hoping to spend some time in the start of this year to write up some of the lessons I learned from it for myself. Not as sage advice to pass on to others, but more to help my own understanding of how the process works for me so I can give it another go. I am gonna with the story I have so far, maybe finish it up if I can, or find a way to trim the size of the story I had in mind down. It snowballs every time I start to work on it though.

I've got a new camera it doesn't have a view screen for you to see the pictures you take with it, but it is digital so it has a massive and easy to access storage. I have always liked small toy digital cameras that take weird pictures I can't be sure will turn out until after I check them on a computer. I never liked the idea of taking 100 pictures for the 1 that you will show the world. That's fine for a professional photographer, but nothing I really need for myself. I'm hoping that I'll be able to use this year as a means to get handy at taking pictures with it. If not it will be fun at least to take pictures from my life for myself.

I've got a trip to central NY planned for the end of January to visit my family. My only thoughts have been on how cold it will be. Long Beach has been very cold lately, but it's still nothing compared to the frozen north country I'll need to trek through to visit my family. All of my colder clothes have slowly been moved out of my wardrobe over the years out here in the Southern California weather. Frost bitten extremities aside, it'll be nice to see my family again. It's been 3 or 4 years. That's the trouble of living with your younger self's life choices. Still trying to fix most of those.

I don't know what sort of plan I have for this blog in the coming year. I guess I'll just take it as it happens and see what I can get out of it. Maybe I should branch out to an easier format. Podcast or youtube channel or something. That'd be a lot easier for me to update and produce content to fill. My brother had mentioned some ideas before, but I don't ever know how serious to take his ideas.

Well here's to hoping 2017 turns out better than it looks.

NaNoWriMo 2016 Prep 2: Kickstarting my Noggin

New rules are all well and good, but I still need something to apply them to. Stories have always been something I thought you needed to be compelled to do. That's what you get when you give an impressionable young mind some too much beatnik literature to get all enamored with before they knew any better. I am not gonna go into my first attempt at the NaNoWriMo challenge without some sort of game plan.

I've got a few ideas I'm playing with. I'm always wary of thinking about them too much or creating too much of an outline, because I don't want to get too set on any one plot before I start writing it. In the past I've always done that, structured out the entire story before I wrote word one. I knew how it was gonna end before it started. I think running RPGs has changed my perspective on the benefit of planning a story before you're in the thick of it.

That doesn't mean I'm not going in prepared. I know what that I want to write a story about a protagonist undertaking a long journey. I don't have a clear idea of a main character yet. I know a general plot that I am playing around with. I want it to be a sci-fi fantasy. I know that I don't necessarily want to come up with the entire thing before I start and constrict it to that formation for the duration.

So far what I have is the idea that in the future everything becomes automated by robots controlled by a central network. The robots break and forget how to do all the things they were programmed to do. As a result society falls apart as it had become too reliant on the robots to produce food for them. Things fall apart, end of the world happens. My story would begin around here. I'm toying with reasons someone would need to take a trip in this world and haven't set my mind down on anything just yet.

One of the things that drove me away from writing fiction was that I would get these ideas as I write the story as to how I would make it better. I would feel overwhelmed by the idea of changing it and rewriting things and so I'd push through and by the time the story was done I hated it. I need to avoid that this next month. I am planning to leave myself open for a lot to change from my initial story. I want lots of space to wander through in that world.

I've still got 11 days to prepare myself for this. I'm pretty sure I am forgetting to do something, but I'm even more sure that I'm excited to learn from this experience, good or bad.

Setting Goals Too High: NaNoWriMo 2016 Prep

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the goals I set for myself. I have this habit of setting goals that I have no real hope of achieving as a means to confirm all my self doubt that I never had a chance to begin with. It's a self defeating habit that feels like a warm blanket to the lazy. I've used this as a way to explain to myself that I'm bad at following through; which aside from being a questionable fact at best, it only leads to further discouragement and fewer goals achieved. This is a bad habit and I recognize my own fault in it.

I've realized that I need to start building smaller habits, setting smaller more achievable goals, and allow myself the grace of defeat without a mass degradation of my self worth. I'm starting with simple things that focus on my general health: drinking more water, more consistent bed time, more consistent with my pre-bike ride stretching, try to get more done after work, etc. I feel like accomplishing some of the smaller goals, establishing better habits surrounding the mundane things in my life, will make getting to the more important things easier. It's like getting a running start at the things I want to get done.

To that end, I can't help noticing that over the past few years my efforts towards creative writing have dwindled a great deal. It could have something to do with my youthful dreams growing older and being wet blanketed by reality. It could be that the creative part of me was replaced by the practical part of me that wants to get along happily more than it wants the world to understand me. Or might also have something to do with all the RPG GMing I'm doing and the write ups I'm doing for those are soaking up brain juices left and right. Whatever the cause, it has been a long time since I tried to write any poetry and even longer since I tried writing any fiction. Naturally I thought there's no better way to get back into it than a panicked 30 day writing session for as of yet not conceived novel for National Novel Writing Month this November.

I've never tried it before: writing a novel. I've definitely never tried to write a novel in a month, but this year I'm going to try. I don't have any idea what the novel is going to be about or how I'll get 50,000 words out of a month. I don't know that I've ever tried writing 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or whether or not I'm physically capable of getting that many words out each day. That's why I'm starting early with my efforts to get some prep work in.

I spend so much time thinking about how to tell stories in RPGs that I am running. I want to translate that into solo fiction if at all possible. Between now and when I start on November 1, 2016 I want to come up with my rules for writing without brakes. I have a habit of editing as I go; which will be the death of this effort if I really try it.  I need to not do that for this. I want to see if I can try to test some of my GM-ing techniques with the solo-fiction I am writing. The entire whole effort will shove me out of my comfort zone enough that I'll hopefully have something to show for it.

Until next time, I'll be brainstorming ideas on how to keep going.

A Whole Summer Ago

It's been a whole summer since I last posted on my blog. I had grand plans about starting my YouTube poetry channel and posting them all on this blog. Turns out I need more than good intentions to get my ass moving towards something.

I've been distracted from my writing with my gaming. The game requires a lot of spontaneous creativity and the write ups always have a lot more flavor than the actual game do, but I've not really focused on my strictly solo creative works. Even with the RPG stuff I've had a a few issues there too. Midway through the summer there was some...unpleasantness that had me in a strange place mentally. I feel like I've only recently dragged myself out of that funk.

Also come to find out from watching the show Very British Problems on Netflix that all my social anxiety and weirdness with dealing with people isn't my own fault. Turns out I'm genetically programmed to feel awkward in social situations and fret about every small detail of my social interactions and/or dealing with people. Maybe that was part of the appeal of poetry to me. Being given an excuse to express feelings without having to be direct with the person or the feelings. Watching the show feels a lot like someone is explaining my own psychiatric diagnosis to me in a more entertaining than clinical sorta way. It is a slight relief to know that I'm not alone with my awkward feelings. 

I don't have big plans for fixing this blog, or even thoughts on what that would entail. Just like the Tweets I've been trying to send every day to no one in particular about the boring nothing new that is going on in my life, the idea is to just do it instead of making up excuses about why whatever I was thinking isn't good enough to be posted. I don't think anyone cares enough to complain. Besides, gotta start somewhere.

Short Story: Orville Makes Coffee

Standing on his dew dampened welcome mat, Orville Newton tapped the wand he’d made from an old car radio antenna, a griffin feather, and some conductive tape on his leg absently. He could feel the dull tickle the wand’s energies starting to wake up. These sort of homemade wands always needed some time before they warmed up for use. Any minute now the morning edition of The Cosmic Rote would be materialize on the doorsteps of all their faithful subscribers. Stealing his neighbor’s paper had become more of a challenge lately. The publisher had started using Stranger Danger Wards on their morning editions. If the resourceful paper thief wasn’t careful they could wind up zapped into unconsciousness by a misworded ward breaker.

The low sizzle and pop of the atmosphere being condensed into matter began to spread through the apartment complex’s courtyard as The Cosmic Rote began appearing on doorsteps. Orville jumped into action. Waving the wand around towards the paper and motioning towards a tattered notebook he placed in front of him.

He thought for a moment about what words he would use to let the magic know his intent “Ego quoque fregit praebere,” his latin sounded Italian, he could never get his accent to sound natural.

Despite his butchering of the words, the book in front of him began flipping through it’s pages. Moved by some unseen wind as the worn pages filled up with copies of the text from The Cosmic Rote. It was a little lighter and much smaller than what was in the paper, but what do you want for quick magic from a wizard who hadn’t even had their coffee yet.

The headlines on the front-page seemed like they’d been the same for days. Unemployment among wizards was still on the rise, terrestrial industries were pre-screening all new applicants for magical abilities to weed out potential liability issues, while the Council of Ethereals fought with the International Terrestrial Protectorate Initiative about whose fault it all was. It seemed like none of them had any new ideas and were too busy tearing down each other’s ideas to come up with any of their own. Nothing out of the ordinary for global politics, but that didn’t make it any easier to sit through.

On the kitchen table sat an empty saucer with a dark coffee stain ring on it’s surface, “Joe?” Orville called out into the empty apartment.

He could never find anything in his apartment. It didn’t help that it had been awhile since he had cleaned up the place. The clutter seemed to be getting the better of all his flat surfaces. Empty packages of instant noodles, alchemy ingredient wrappers, and open books lay across all the counters in the kitchen.

“Did I leave you someplace?” he asked half hoping he might hear some sort of response.

His living room coffee table was a collage of past due bills and the tickets from unlicensed magic use violations he’d gotten since he’d failed to renew his license. He had no idea how many violations you could rack up before they actually came after you. He had no intention of ever finding out, but still hadn’t figured out a way to pay them yet. A sound from somewhere on the cluttered bookshelf drew Orville’s attention away from his fiscal predicament and back to his search.

“Come on, Joe. Is this really necessary? I’ve told you we can play hide and seek after breakfast. Not before,” Orville approached the bookshelf with caution.

Without warning his fuzzy blue bathrobe came flying out from behind the sofa at his face. The robe wrapped around him and the cords tied themselves behind his back as he stumbled backwards. Something hit the back of his legs as he retreated, tripping him, and leaving him sprawled on his back. The robe loosened it’s grip and slithered into a pile of fabric next to him. He saw two socks were tied together and stretched between the wall and the sofa. The soft sound of porcelain rattling came from the now empty shelf.

“Glad you think it’s funny, Joe. I suppose this was your idea Left?” the socks untied themselves and began wriggling on the ground in a mime of laughter that his bathrobe had already started, “You’d never have gotten the drop on me if I’d had my coffee already.”

Joe the coffee cup was puffing out small clouds of steam as it clattered away in its porcelain snickering. Tiny drops of coffee burbled from the top as it chuckled and hopped about on the shelf.

“Alright, alright, that was pretty good. You got me,” Orville said as he scratched the heels of the socks, “Let’s have breakfast.” Joe was already happily hopping towards the kitchen with the socks inchworming their way after him.

On mornings their pranks were particularly inventive, Orville thought about how Joe and the others had been an accident. Orville had been moving to a smaller apartment one car load at a time after losing his job,when a cat had shot across the street unexpectedly. He had to slam on his brakes, throwing much of his well packed car’s contents into the front seat.

The box of Bolivian Marching Powder Moving Dust a friend had loaned him came sailing over the seat and smashed against the front Window. A dusty pink cloud filled the car. Every inanimate object the dust landed on suddenly burst up with life. There was a moment of chaos as all of his belongs came unwillingly into conscious existence. The existential scream of his toilet- plunger still haunts his dreams.

A moment later his car doors were opening on their own and spit him out with the rest of his belongings. The car reared up on it’s back wheels, blasted its horn, and screeched off down a side street. His stuff scattered in every direction. Rolling, squirming, walking, and sliding away from him. Even the clothes he was wearing slipped off and slithered away.

Standing naked in the street, the only things that had stuck around were a brand new pair of socks he hadn’t worn yet, his fuzzy blue bathrobe, and Joe his coffee mug. He’d thought about replacing them with less rambunctious inanimate versions, but he didn’t have the heart to get rid of them, or the money to replace them for that matter.

At the kitchen table, Joe was settled back onto the saucer and filling with coffee, “Extra strong, extra sugar, and no cream this morning Joe. I want all my synapses firing at peak efficiency.”
The sun was just now peaking through the blinds painting a tall streaks of light across Joe. Joe couldn’t remember what coffee made by hand tasted like, but whatever brew Joe made the first sip always tasted like a warm hug of energy. Left, Right, and the bathrobe were eating up some dryer sheets Orville had left for them. He felt the reassuring warmth of the first cup of coffee for the day spread over him from his stomach. He decided today would be better than yesterday.