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.