Say it Ain't So, George. Say it Ain't So

Let's fact it. Like Elvis touring in 77, some great artists should not push for that one last moment in the spotlight without expecting it to expose all the imperfections they've cultivated in their echo chambers of yes-men throughout their careers. George Lucas is one of those great artists that got bloated by success and made myopic by the lack of need to prove himself in his drive.

When he was making the original three movies in the late 1970s, he was a young director committed to a vision he had for a story. His vision was so revolutionary that he needed to create his own special effects studio just to handle the demands of his vision. Flash forward through a few decades of coasting on the success of those films and you end up with George Lucas of today. He is not a bad film maker. He just seems to have no spine and certainly isn't hungry enough anymore to push his vision for a movie.  

Why is any of this being brought up now? Well recently a video clip was brought to my attention:

Ignoring the creator of the video's bad attempts at humor and his assumptions about what they are discussing. It is clear that George Lucas was not pleased with the results of his efforts. However, in light of the crazy fan theory that Jar Jar Binks was originally planned to be the most evil Sith lord in all of the galaxy, the above video takes on the context of a man seeing his grand opus fall apart in front of him.

Here is a video explaining the Jar Jar Binks theory; which I feel is pretty sound as far as tin foil hat theories go:

By believing this theory, it forces me to one of the following conclusions:

• George Lucas biffed his masterpiece so horribly it was unfixable.
• George Lucas got scared of following through on his plan after the public reaction to Jar Jar
• George Lucas didn't actually plan for Jar Jar to be a Sith and lost all his talent for story telling.

None of this forgives George Lucas for what was put out in his name, but it at least clarifies the reason why what was supposed to be the grand conclusion to his epic masterpiece ended up being a steaming pile of shit.

After seeing that Jar Jar theory video, I got sort of tempted to watch the movies again to see if I could spot some of the things they mention. God help me I even tried to start watching one of them. I even tried watching cuts of it that had been changed to remove the racist accents and such, but they weren't able to mask the stink off the pile of crap this movie.

We are stuck with Episode 1, 2, 3 for another 20 years until someone decides to do a special edition of the movies and fix it to reflect a better more robust story. I guess that as a one-time die hard fan of the Star Wars universe, knowing that George Lucas might not have actually planned to have his movie be garbage is at least someone comforting. Really that's all we could expect to hope for after all this time. 

Poem: Waffles and Time Travel

My breakfast waffles are getting cold,
sucking up the morning's chill
as I'm already preparing lunch.

There are melting clouds
clearing from the puddles of blue sky
as the sun climbs slowly west.

I am fantasizing about being a time traveler.
Not the exploring history kind
or the visit the future kind.

I just want to ease on the breaks,
slow the sun's rise down a little,
savor each bite of a hot breakfast.

As soon as I've taken the last bite
my day takes a flying leap
at the chaos of obligation.

I lose my footing and stumble
for hours, wishing I had
slowed down the start of my day.

My whole day would go down easier
if my morning start with frantically
trying to finish my waffles before they got cold.



NOTES: I am not sure I know anyone who really gets to take their time in the morning during the week. It's a luxury not everyone can afford without going to bed with the sun and waking up hours before it gets up. I have had many plates of waffles that got cold while I was frantically getting through my morning and making sure I had everything for my day.

Weekly Words 2

Push yourself in school and get good grades. Get good grades and get into a good college. Graduate college at any cost, because you will be handed a career after college that will carry you through the rest of your life. Now get a car. Now get a house. Now get a mortgage so you can get a second car. Now get a credit card, use it constantly, and tell yourself it is for the card rewards. Now remember that this is the only way to become an adult.
A whole generation of people came of age at the tail end of an old way of life that was not a viable solution to living in the new millennium. This generation of people, whose parents were lucky enough to come of age when a high school diploma was enough to get somebody a steady job they could support a family with that job, has been struggling to compete in an economy built off the old ways of living life. Competing not only with each other but with people from older generations that are still competing for the same jobs due to the recent recession. Jobs that the lost generation doesn't even want in the first place. Jobs designed for the old economy with 40+ hour work weeks that leave little time for a personal life or creative endeavors, unless sleeping for less than 6 hours a night is fun for you.
For most people this is just what's necessary to hang on from paycheck to paycheck. A lot of people are dealing with crushing student loan debt and high rent prices that make getting by an accomplishment in and of itself. Trapped by expenses in big cities with dwindling job prospects and exploding populations. Few are able to get it together to get out of where ever they are, faced with a paycheck that leaves them two choices: spend what little extra was earned on something to make their stuck lives better or live with the patience and lifestyle of a monk to save up and get out. Neither is terribly appealing given that the two options are mutually exclusive in most cases.
I don't know where I'm going with any of this. Certainly not toward a new profound understanding of the problem or a solution. It's just been in the news a lot lately. What with Bernie Sanders is leading the national conversation with his presidential campaign. He's a crafty politician who is using the truth about income inequality and the rampant bribery passed off as political donations from corporate lobbying groups to get the population motivated to vote in next year's presidential election. Whether you're voting for him or not, he is still striking a nerve with the population that understands the way the world looks like it is shaping itself and doesn't like it.
I can't help feeling part of the statistics being talked about in most of these news stories. I still remember how excited I was back in 2008 to leave my then "unbearable" job to start looking for work elsewhere. At the time, I'd received a few other job offers while working at the place, so I'd expected it to be an easy task. Then the national economy fell apart and I stumbled for 5 months before I found something else. All it took was 5 months for the white picket fence dream to evaporate. That is an empty feeling that is hard to fill when you're unemployed. It's been a long while since then though. I'm way overdue for building a new happy ending dream. I'm just not sure what it could be yet.

Weekly Words 1

What's in a title change? Less obligation to an arbitrarily specific idea and more flexibility in this case. I get distracted by my weeks sometimes. Coming off a weekend and wrestling with the fact that I've got another 45 hours of work time before my next weekend, obsessing over the things I didn't get done. Life gets away from you when you pay too much attention. Needless to say I've decided my goal isn't a specific day of the week to spill my head, as long as it's done once a week. This could be the death knell of my whole effort: giving myself room to ignore my goals. I don't think so though, but this will be a good challenge for me anyway.

This week The Midnight Disease by Alice W Flaherty has been staring at my from my shelf for a while now. A book about inspiration as a replicable brain state that is written by a neurologist. She talks about how certain brain states caused by trauma (two examples she uses are postpartum depression and people that had injuries to their brains) compel the person toward creative express without every really knowing why they have this new need for it. Some people turned to painting pictures after a brain injury, after having spent a life with no interest in it previously. Her own experience with postpartum depression caused her to write prolifically. The book is very interesting in parts, but then other parts read like they were written by a neurologist.
It forced me to confront the idea that all the periods of my life that have been filled with my most prolific writing have been a result of whatever unique brain chemistry cocktail I had pumping through my noggin at the time. It is strange trying to wrap my head around the fact that my inspiration had been a compelling force out of my control, but it came from a place within me. Inspiration from my brain guts and not some exterior force. The idea helps put my efforts into perspective. At least in the sense of knowing that my chemically induced brain state is replicable. At least I don't remember any physical trauma to brain during any of these times; and I don't have any new scars on my head that I can't remember getting either.
I don't know that bringing about those specific brain states that caused all that activity in the "gotta write" center of my brain is necessary. I think moving forward is more a matter of training the conscious part of my brain how to better interpret the parts of itself that I try to avoid. It will be an effort in understanding the absences and silences in all my thoughts. When I find those places where there are things I can't say, won't say, or don't know how to say I'll look for the shape, broad strokes, and edges of it. The details come out in whatever I end up writing. Now if I can just figure out how the hell I'm supposed to do any of that I'll be set to have carpel tunnel inflaming hours of writing.

Wednesdays Words 4

I woke up this morning with my eyes feeling extra sensitive to light. This happens from time to me. It is my genetic inheritance's fault really. Some days it leads to a migraine, but today doesn't feel like one of them. There isn't that unpleasant beehive static buzz feeling behind my eyes telling me to prepare myself for the worst. It's been months since I got one of those. 

My heart isn't in this post this morning. I'm still distracted from last night. I ran a game last night with a surprising amount of success given a lack of sleep, feeling burnt out, exhausted, and hit by a caffeine crash during the break that nearly had me cancelling the second part of the game. I decided to suck it up and powered through (roll +Might = 12, WOO!). It was well worth it. The second half picked up the pace of the action and kept me going through the rest of it. I also feel like I'm getting better at story telling with this. It's given me a lot of ideas about the nature of story telling and what makes a story dynamic and interesting. Maybe that's a full post I need to do sometime. Though it'll probably end up at the other blog when I write it.

My morning got away from me, like it always does, and now I get to cram an hour's worth of morning life into the next 30 minutes. Happy "It's all down hill from here" day.

Belated Wednesday's Words: Monday Musings 1?

I missed it last week. I didn't even think about it on the day. My bike, aka my best method of getting to and from work, was on the mend due to a damaged cone nut. Panic set in a heavy blanket of background stress that kept me on edge most of last week. That panicked feeling of: what if it's totally fucked and I gotta get a new bike? How will I get around? Will I get chubby again cause I'm not exercising regularly?

I ordered parts and tools off amazon, they arrived, I set to work and realized I didn't have all the tools I needed to complete the job. I ordered more tools off amazon and set to work a second time only to realize that my freewheel as stuck on and I had to take it to a bike shop just to loosen the freewheel, then I get it all reassembled only to find out that the axle isn't placed right and the wheel won't turn. New panic set in around there, where I completely redo my monthly budget anticipating an expensive repair and/or needing to take the bus for a while to work.

Found a place that was open Sundays, took it in to get it worked on. 30 minutes and $12.18 later I've got a running bike again. Needless to say though, most of last week my brain was consumed with the bike and what my next few weeks would be like if my bike was not ride-able. I forgot my Wednesday's Words last week. This week will just get Monday's Musings and Wednesday will still have it's words, so it's a double dose of my over caffeinated morning blog posts.

http://www.tmcm.com/tmcm/

Wednesday's Words 3

I can't count the number of times my mind has brought back the memory of high school English class as justification for some wonky aspect of my writing or my methods of writing. Why am I still doing that? Today I'm thinking specifically of a time when my teacher was discussing what he felt was the great tragedy of the modern age: word processors eliminated the draft's existence. He sited examples of hand written manuscripts from Shakespeare or the idea that the change the text underwent would be lost. At the time, my head was empty of ideas and this one sounded like a solid one. I swore to myself that I'd forever write in ink so that I'd always have my original unedited piece of writing. I insisted on handwriting everything, so that my drafts would be preserved. Later on in college I decided that my brain thought quicker than my hand could move with a pen, so I needed a new method of writing. I sought out type writers, figuring this would somehow be a bargain between the speed of typing and a permanent record. Turns out they are a pain in the ass to use for the most part. Their novelty quickly wears off when you've made another typo and have no choice but to cross out a word and retype it for the sentence to make sense.

I'm not sure why I stuck with that for so long. I guess I never really questioned the idea that writing by hand was a better method of writing for me. I type somewhere between 70-100 words per minute, depending largely on my caffeine intake. There is just no way my hand can move that fast. Every essay I ever wrote was done electronically and never once did I hand write a draft to any of them. It doesn't make much sense for me to keep at that strict analog only writing method.

I think this comes back to giving myself the time to write again. That ever present issue I cause myself , needing to dedicate time to a skill rather than be empowered by some magical force that just uses me as a conduit to spew greatness into the world. Hopelessly romantic ideas about what writing is meant to be. I can't hold on to those ideas if I really expect to make any progress. I just need to keep reminding myself that changing an idea is not an admission of defeat.

Wednesday's Words 2

It's Wednesday again. I've already talked myself out of doing this and then talked myself back into it and then out again and here we are. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find time in the mornings lately. There are chores and other random things that take my attention away from this. I'm of course making excuses for giving other things in my life a higher priority than this. I have been struggling lately with the idea of writing. If you had asked me 5 years ago what inspires me I could have spouted off a does ideas that I would have written a poem about. I can't tell if my cynicism has taken over or I've just got nothing to really say. What ever did inspire me? Is it because I'm too aware of a critical audience and don't want to disappoint an unknown group of people who can't be pleased? Probably don't need to waste my time trying to figure it out.

I've always talked about inspiration while reminding myself that was just a word given to well thought out ideas to give it a more fantastical feel to it. Inspiration only gets you so far if you have no idea what to do with it. It takes time and daily efforts to make progress at it and to turn inspiration into something usable. Waiting for inspiration is a mistake. Looking for inspiration is a mistake. Creating inspiration is what I need to practice more. Hard work and effort will get it for me. Harlen Ellison, my spirit animal, once famously sat in a bookstore window for five hours and wrote The Night of Black Glass based on an unseen sentence that was given to him. He stressed that that's what writing actually was. There wasn't a trick to it. You just needed to work on it and give it time until it became what you wanted. That is something I have not done in a long long time, if ever. I used to dedicate whole nights to writing and giving up sleep as a means to do it. I have not done that in forever. I can't even remember the last time I spent more than 40 minutes working on writing something creative of my own. I should change that. I will change that.

Wednesday's Words 1

I woke up this morning and didn't think I had much to say, but then I always do. There are a handful of blog post drafts I have half finished. I usually start where I feel like I'm on the cusp of something great and then never get to that point where I think THERE it is. I'm overly critical of my own work though and I'm addicted to "what if's."

There are times when I feel like I need to just get it done. That's when I post a whole grip of blog entries at once and they all get lost in each other. I set schedules I know I can't stick to, because I feel like I should be able to stick to them. It's a matter of establishing a good habit, but even the best of habits are hard to jump right into full force.

I am not gonna filter my head one day a week. I don't know what I'll get out of it, but that's not the point. I need to build a habit and the best way to start is with a first step. I can't keep holding onto endlessly justified what-if delays that stagnate my efforts to a near stand-still.

There is this feeling I get when I start brainstorming story ideas. I like to think of it as new idea energy, similar to new relationship energy that people like to call the honeymoon period of a relationship. I get excited about the idea and cant' wait to run around with it showing it off to the world. The problem is just like the honeymoon period of a relationship, it doesn't last. My idea starts asking for more out of me than just pillow talk and grand plans I won't end up following through on. That's when I start to lose interest.

Coming up with the idea is motivation for me to get it done, but without a genuine need to manifest the idea it tends to fizzle. This has been a huge step for me in breaking that habit. I'm stealing the title of these posts from a guy I knew in college who would make a myspace post every Wednesday where he ranted about some random thing at the college or about society that angered him. It was mostly recycled South Park jokes, but who doesn't like alliteration in their titles? Also got a friend (and player) who has been spitting out a block of text daily for the past year or so just to do it. Hell if that guy can do it, I can get to it at least once a week. -AB

Bicyclists and Drivers: a semantic argument against the bullshit

Few people like to openly admit they are bigots, but in a bike filled US city you can find a lot of people openly admitting to how much they hate bicyclists/drivers. You will here all sorts of generalized complaints about all of the group based on one or two interactions with them.

You will hear some people complain: bicyclists go through stop signs without stopping or they go through red lights or don't signal when they change lanes, and how that justifies driving aggressively around bikes. You will hear other people complain that cars always crowd them to the side of the road, or cut them off, or honk and yell to get out of the road and how that justifies ignoring traffic laws on a bike.

Most people who ride bikes also drive cars. In most major cities in the US, it is nearly impossible to get by and not to own both.The problem with that sort of broadly generalized bigotry and short sighted thinking only causes to further create us and them categories to lump large groups of people into. I'm not above that myself, but I feel like a lot of times people are trying to re-categorize people that already have a clear and justifiable label: inconsiderate assholes. They are assholes whether they're riding a bike or driving a car.

These are assholes on bikes.

This is an asshole who was driving a car.

The reason a person on a bike ignored the red light and cut off cross traffic isn't: because they ride a bike. The reason they did it is because they are an inconsiderate asshole . The reason that person in the car honked at the biker and crowded them to the side of the road isn't because they are driving a car. The reason is they are an inconsiderate assholes.

Everyone wants to use the roads and everyone wants to survive their trip without any life-ending accidents. If we remind ourselves that we are mostly the same, except for the occasional asshole, we can share the roads and show each other a little courtesy so we all get to our destinations safely. This is why I feel it's incredibly important to straighten out the semantics of this discourse. As with any social discourse, we should not use generalizing terms like bicyclist or driver for our gripes with specific assholes. Instead we are all people on bikes and in cars who all are dealing with assholes that want to ruin everyone else's good time.

Kickstarter: The Nitch by Satyrus Jeering

The Nitch by Satyrus Jeering

Self-publication can bring to mind countless books that were written by and published for an author's ego. With the internet, these books no longer exist in an echo chamber of self-congratulatory me-space. These things do not find a home. Sometimes though, when book collectors are lucky enough, self-publication means the author's vision for the finished book is not something that can be published any other way than by hand.

The Nitch is a children's story design to ostensibly resemble the "original journal" of the obviously very real Satyrus Jeering. It's a hand stitched leather journal style book with about a third of it being the full page illustrations that look like something that the love-child of Dr Suess and Tim Burton would draw:

The book also apparently has hidden riddles in it that unlock a website and lead to a game call the Rook and Biddles that promises real buried treasure. They are promoting the idea of getting kids involved through something they are calling "Mentortainment."

Personally if a man in a strange animal mask had come into my school, handed me one of these books, and told me he'd left a riddle in it for me that would lead to real life buried treasure, I'm pretty sure it would have been a life changing event for me and I'd probably be off Indiana Jonesing it up all over the world right now. At the very least I would have thought this was amazing. I hope these books are purchased and handed out to little kids by the thousands.

To Shave or Not to Shave? That is the question.

Full disclosure, I may be biased: 

This is my beard. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. 

Beards; one of the many depression era styles and habits making a return to the collective US cultural hegemony. Beards in particular reflect this rejection of modernity. A whole generation is coming of age in a world with fewer opportunities than the generation before it.

Consumer culture has taken total control of the modern social discourse. New developments are only as good as their market value. It gets out of control with unnecessary changes increasing the price without an associated increase in end customer value.

Look at the ways men's razors have changed over the past two decades. Few people who actually know what they are talking about, and aren't trying to sell you something, will tell you that 5 or 6 or 12 blades on your razor will give you a better shave than 1 blade can.

It could be argued that these changes were made out of a genuine concern for the consumer, but like organic foods and earth-friendly products the manufacturers are selling you the idea that you're getting something better for the extra money rather than actually giving you something better. If these product were genuinely designed to help the world, then they would be priced out as alternatives to what's already on the market. The problem is as long as people are believe that idea that they are getting a better product when they pay extra money for 5 organic earth friendly blades on their razors, there will continue to be more uselessly marked up products that aren't actually better products than what was previously available.

So how does my beard fit into all this? For me at least, there was partial motivation to reject the needless men's shaving products arms race. Now I know, one less razor sold won't change the world. It won't make any company stop their ridiculous quest to one up the other razor companies and create new ways to jam more amounts of nonsense onto their own line of razors, but I will at least save some money on all those expensive razors and creams.

I can't help thinking this comes off as me trying to make more out of my lack of shaving than there really is to it. I can't remember thinking any of this when I decided to stop shaving, but I always loathed buying new razors and new shaving creams; so although it may not have been a conscious thought, I'm sure it was there someplace though.

My beard has been with me for the better part of the past year, albeit always smaller than it is now. Truth be told when people have asked me why I grow a beard, they don't get an earful about ridiculous razor blade arms races. When I need to explain it to people I fall back to the wise words of  Nick Offerman:

That and it keeps my face warm while I ride my bike.

Kickstarter: Metalbeard Saga by Matthew Hoddy

Metalbeard Saga on Kickstarter

"A young viking prince is exiled to the moon mines after losing his beard in a tragic hot soup accident. This is his saga."

Vikings? Moon Mines? Beards being lost in tragic hot soup accidents? There is no part of the tag line to this campaign that doesn't make me want to hear more of this Metalbeard and his saga. To be fair, if I were to list the things I'm into, Viking moon mines probably would be left off, but only due to me never really knowing it was an option.

The creators of Metalbeard Saga are a small Canadian graphic novel publisher named Space Pyrates; which takes it's name from it's first run of graphic novels: Space Pyrates. Normally I'd try to tell you about their earlier graphic novels, but full disclosure: I haven't read it...yet. Plus I couldn't possibly hope to describe it better than they do, so here's a description of Space Pyrates straight from the horse's mouth aka their web store:

"You want a description? FINE, OK. Two kids living in a shanty in the middle of a dump are forced to pay rent. Rather than move out they try find jobs, even start a band, but ultimately turn to intergalactic piracy. Along the way they discover clones, robots, aliens, the secret of Christmas, a nickel, some string, a king, a captain, and a crazy cat lady."

The creators are being as transparent as possible with where the money will go and they even drew a handy little graphic to display it. Their style is simple forms with elaborate compositions that works well to fill scenes with smaller details you'll notice on your second reading. I feel like giving these people my money will make the world a more awesome place for people that deserve it to be awesome, bonus to that already awesome outcome: I get a rad as hell comic out of the deal. 

Mazes and Monsters: I watched it so you don't have to

This was that one time that Tom Hanks made a movie about how playing tabletop role playing games will naturally lead to live action role playing which leads to losing your mind and soul to the devil, worshiping false gods, and being an enormous disappointment to your parents who are themselves struggling with their own marriage because of your role playing. Yeah you remember that one. It was right after his hit show Bosom Buddies launched him into super stardom, but before anyone was actually paying attention to him. I watched this movie so you won't have to. You're welcome.

This made for TV movie came out in 1982, during the height of one of those generational misunderstandings that happen. Parents see their kids doing things they don't understand and/or don't like that their kids do. "I never did that sort of thing when I was a teen. They must not have learned it from me. The media is to blame!" Rap music hadn't taken hold yet and heavy metal was still young, so Dungeons and Dragons wound up in the cross-hairs of the misguided parental fears of youthful change. Day time talk shows were filled with people from middle america willing to tell the world that when they played Dungeons and Dragons they hadn't realized it was really a way to worship the devil until the devil was upon them.

The story follows a group of college kids who are returning to school. All of whom have unhappy lives at home, as shown in the various opening scenes where these deeply troubled youths come from broken homes or homes where there parents are trying to be supportive of their child whom they are openly and deeply disappointed in. Then of course Mr Hanks comes in to play Robbie Wheeling. We first see him being driven to school by his parents. Both of whom are lecturing Robbie on his addiction to Mazes and Monsters. Apparently Robbie had been kicked out of numerous schools because he played Mazes and Monsters so much. Robbie is of course dismissive of his parents stern lecturing. He promises he will stay away from the games and stick to studying, but with Mr Hanks stellar performance we can clearly see his heart is not in the promise he is making to his parents.

Upon arriving at school Robbie meets a pretty girl at party who peer pressures him into playing Mazes and Monsters with her group when she finds out he has a high level character that everyone in the group is thoroughly impressed with. Robbie relents despite his parents warnings, because the girl has boobs and who is Robbie to argue with that.

They begin to game and everything is great. Robbie is gaming more than ever, spending time with his new girlfriend, things are going so great for Robbie he decides to take the next step: ask his girlfriend to move into his dorm room with him. This scene plays out when Robbie has her close her eyes shows her into his dorm room and reveals that he had purchased a double bed. *GASP* It's all so sudden she is overwhelmed and turns him down. Thanks for Mr Hanks' stellar acting, we see this rejection crack Robbie's already delicate psyche

Shortly thereafter during a live action version of Mazes and Monsters, Robbie loses his grip on reality and believes he is his character and goes insane. I can't even force myself to bother with the details of this. The over the top detective character who knows the dangers of games like Mazes and Monsters, the awkward scenes where Robbie wakes up from terrifying dreams of lizard men, his girlfriend moving on to another man to show she never truly cared for Robbie in the first place, the way the other role players try to hide that they were involved with gaming and hanging out with Robbie after he disappears, are all over the top examples of the jacked up morality that went into the writing of this movie; which also do a fine job of making it nearly impossible to force yourself to watch the movie in its entirety.

It's hard to even get angry about this movie, or the misguided writers of the TV movie, or the original book for that matter (because it was clearly so good the first time it was written down someone decided it needed to be transferred to a visual media). The whole thing comes off the same way it does when someones grandparent try to explain their new computer to you, or a 5 year old explains how their plastic telephone works to call the various muppets; like someone who doesn't really have any idea what they are talking about but is positive they have a firm grasp on the entire situation.

This is what Christian's in 1982 actually believed:

If you're looking for an after-school special to watch the next time you're too drunk to find daytime television or need to remind yourself just how far Mr Hanks has come in his career, then this movie is for you. I'd also like to say that if you were alive in America in 1982 this movie is somehow partly your fault. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Finding Fiction Again: Why I got into this writing bullshit in the first place

Captivating an audience with words I chose to form a story I had made, from life, fiction, or some place between the two, has always been what got me into the idea of writing in the first place. I wanted to find readers that would love my stories so much that they would compel me to write more for their entertainment. Freshman year in high school my brain was poisoned with beautiful nostalgia for the dying of the analog age of writing. I felt everything had to be written out by hand before it was typed. Senior year in high school hearing Allen Ginsberg's poem America shifted my focus away from fiction to poetry. I got a quicker return on poetry and readers were easier to find; which was ideal for an over caffeinated year round cabin fever sufferer who couldn't write quick enough for stories. I used to try to get everything written down by hand first.This was perfect for poetry. Short lines jotted onto a small piece of paper by hand. Plenty of room to work out a line if it needed to be fixed.

This was not perfect for fiction. It created  problems when I would work out a story in my head then try to write everything out by hand. I'd be 2/3's of the way through a story, come up with an idea that I liked that I wanted to add, but it would inevitably require some thread from earlier in the story for it to make sense. The idea of trying to hand write the stuff back onto the page would feel too daunting. I'd shoehorn ideas into the stories to get them finished, then after typing the story I'd be too put off of the disjointed mess I ended up with that editing felt too much like work to be any fun. The stories would inevitably be put away in some forgotten folder on my PC to be ignored for the rest of my life.

I have always felt that anyone who says that they don't write for anyone other than themselves is just too timid to take criticism. Of course I used to fight and defend my work to anyone that offered criticism. In my mind it was just a great way to discuss writing structure and the passage of the writer's voice from the head to the page or spoken aloud. My hindsight sees it more from other people's perspectives; which is that I was the asshole that didn't believe in other people's criticisms. I suppose never letting your work see the light of day is a similar effort to avoid confronting the problems you know are present in the piece.

It's been years since I've tried to tell a compelling story in more than a few stanzas. I feel out of practice with it, but I figure that is probably a good way to get back into it. I can relearn the ways to tell stories in more than a page an a half. I don't have any plan so far, but I am not clinging to the nostalgia for an analog age my brain never really fit into in the first place.

I'm not sure what the next step is for me to get back into the fiction that drew me to writing in the first place. It's like trying to go back to a neighborhood you lived in as a kid but haven't been to in 20 years so none of it seems quite right the way you remember it. I suppose that's the best place to be when writing fiction, not completely sure how it will turn out so making it up is really the only option I'll have.

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Terror etc..

When I was growing up, there were always rumors about videos that were kept behind the counter at video stores. Not that sassy ones with the naked ladies, but the secret ones that the video store wasn't supposed to have. Tapes made by random people with too much time on their hands and too much video and audio recording equipment at their disposal. Embarrassingly produced corporate promotion videos that were never supposed to see the light of day. Test footage or final cuts of movies that were killed before the studio ever released them. These were the stuff of urban legend, but everyone knew someone who knew about the tapes and if you found the right kind of video store you could find those tapes. 

Then came Hollywood Video and Blockbuster Video and the mom and pop rental places started to go under because they couldn't keep up the way the big stores could. The videos all disappeared from view for a while, but then the internet showed up and brought us the analog quality digital conversions of the videos that used to only be available if you knew that day that one video clerk was working and you told him your friend's older brother sent you.

The other day I found an article on Wikipedia about what was practically a unicorn in the world of duplicated VHS tapes, a movie called: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2. 

"I wanna lay you out on the floor and plow into you like a caboose, but a gentle caboose baby a gentle caboose." -Black Guy in movie

I remember hearing about this movie growing up a lover of zombie movies and VHS tapes, but never actually saw it. It was one of those things I chalked up to missed opportunities of my youth (like having a birthday party where all the invitations were custom made slap bracelets, or gotten a school picture with lasers in the background, or an over-sized pair of light up shoes). Of course when I thought that the internet wasn't the mass storage space for every pieces of media ever created accessible to those who look. Thanks to the ever diligent elves of the internets, someone got this movie on youtube.  

Our Feature Presentation in SHOCKING 2-D

What I love about this movie:

Anytime you watch George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, it is interesting to see how zombies as a movie trope have evolved since this movie. The Romero zombies aren't completely lost to the brain rot. They smash the headlights of the guy's car, they know how to use weapons, they seem more interested in killing their victims, and eating them seems to be an after thought.

This is not George Romero's movie though. This is what happens when nerdy film students from Jersey get together for a film project that they are pulling out of their ass at the last minute. It is a re-dubbed version of Romero's movie. It is filled with strange clips spliced into the feature of some found footage with the narrator telling some schlocky joke over the footage. There are also times when there is a phone ringing in the background that no one seems to answer until the narrator yells at someone and there is a jump cut in the narration. The jokes are over the top slapstick, crude, and incredibly dated as reflected by the frequent use of 90s slang and insults.

I can't remember the last time I laughed this much at a movie. The plot is rewritten so that the zombies aren't undead, but rather overworked and under paid wage slaves who have lost it and decided to fight against the "normals", aka people who don't have to work long hours for shitty pay. It's like they had an idea for a zombie movie, but had a budget of less than $100. 

Movies and found footage like this always feel like I'm watching the secret video-diary of someone who didn't really expect the world to be paying such close attention. It's endearingly heart-felt art in that way, but without that filter in the creative process of tailoring the work to an audience to make it be anything other than honest. Albeit in this case, the creator's honest art is a re-dubbed version of someone else's work filled with corn-ball jokes and poop humor.

Poetry Post: Too Early For a Family Reunion

The sun is not even out of bed
but my family to shows up for a surprise reunion.
This is especially impressive
with home three-thousand miles away.

When I cough the dusty sleep
out of my lungs
I hear my mother in the rasp of my throat.
I un-tuck my face from under my hair,
my father's younger self smirks at my genetics.
Hidden in the angle of my nose
is a fist mark the shape of my brother's anger
Peaking out from the corners
of the blue in my eyes,
is a smile my sister and I have shared since birth.
And bad habit justifications sound
like my littlest sister's grand plans of
nothing out of the ordinary.

The sun creeps out of bed,
breakfast is a childhood memory
 of my mother's oatmeal
drowning in the strong coffee
of my father's forty hour work week.
I have never felt far away from them.
Someday I hope to learn to miss them.

The Year Ahead

This is normally around the time of year people are supposed to come up with their new years resolutions for how they will change their lives over the next calendar year. This is typically a reflection of all that didn't get accomplished the previous year. All the projects that weren't completed, or ever started for that matter. It's letting go of regret about what we couldn't do by fooling ourselves into thinking we'll change through long term goals we will put off until we forget about them.

If you Google it, there are no shortage of random charts with no data and/or dubious sources to back them up that prove what I'm saying:

I don't want to be statistic fodder this year. If the type of grand plan thinking involved in New Years Resolution worked to accomplish my goals, I'd have been the #1 best selling astronaut rock star billionaire writer who owns the world's first solar-powered perpetually-flying house by age 10 (a resolution I made when I still didn't understand that resolutions weren't like birthday wishes; or the unreliable nature of birthday wishes for that matter). Trying to use that type of thinking is only giving myself a chance to fail at a task I probably don't really want to do anyway. This is usually because of the overwhelming immensity involved in what I set out to do or I set the bar so low the accomplishment isn't really worth mentioning. Though last year's resolution to find a better smelling body wash has paid off pretty solidly.

My old resolutions have always involved changing various habits (write daily, work less, exercise daily, eat less junkfood) yet even with those type of resolutions I have a hard time acting on my desire for the change. Resolutions by their very nature tend to be immense life changes that are all or nothing situations. I've never considered myself a cold turkey kind of habit quitter, so I can't imagine I'm the type to pick one up similarly.

That's why instead of making an overwhelming demand of myself in the guise of a New Year's Resolution, I'm planning to try to affect more subtle daily changes to my habits. Give myself room to improve rather than be disappointed in myself for not accomplishing the overwhelming goal I'd originally set out to do. Looking at it this way gives me a chance to improve on plans I make depending on how they work out without the worry-weight of a huge decision. 

What's this feeling I've got? Did I have too much coffee today? Not yet I don't think. Wait a minute, I remember this. It's that same feeling I had heading west from NY after college. It's optimistic hope for the weeks ahead. Hope, welcome back to my guts.