The Great Debate!

I'm a guest contributor for this blog made by and for some college buddies. I don't ever post in there, because _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ & _ _ _ _ __ _ _ sometimes _ _ _ _ __ _ but then  _ _ _ _ _ so __ _ _ _ _ _ only to find out  _ _ _ _   _ _ !!!!!

Today I came up with a post but don't know how to acess the website. So I'll use my personal blog to further my thoughts on trees and drugs:


Good God, all those leaves are jumping to their death!--When I see a leaf falling in Autumn

Good God, that leaf just went on a suicide mission!--When I see a leaf falling in Spring

Good God, all the leaves have flown to Florida!--When I see no leaves in Winter

Good God, that tree's really stoned!--all of Summer

Today, I recommend that you listen to a George Harrison song. He's the best!

Hi Guys! I'm Back!

Hi everybody! I know that nobody reads this anymore. But still, hello! I'm back! I finished the school year yesterday. There was a ribbon cutting ceremony involved and I got to hold the big scissors. No, not really. But that would be a much better way of celebrating than my executed method. Right now I'm babysitting in a high rise in DUMBO (a high rise? you say. I've only seen pictures of those in magazines!) I know. Up until now, the same was true for me. I don't think I even knew you could go inside them! But it's true. You can. I'm in one right now waving back to the Statue of Liberty. Those are the type of friends you make when you occupy a high rise. I would feel less comfortable writing about this if it weren't for my almost complete anonymity right now. That, and the fact I will only be babysitting in this high rise twice. So by the time they try to find me--I'll be gone. My food just arrived. It's linguine. Delicious linguine. And I will post more later.

I'm Not Really Writing a Novel Anymore

I'm working on short stories instead.

Check out my newest (and only) tumblr:

http://letterstoradiohead.tumblr.com

I've still got to write my letter to Ringo Starr.

My short stories are a lot of fun. Two things:

One, when I was in high school I ran cross country in the fall and track in the spring. My running coaches assumed I would do long distance in both arenas. One spring day a sprinter was injured, and I filled in. It turned out I was one of the faster people on the team, and stopped running the mile and two mile and started doing relays and short distances instead. Correlation? While the novel was fun, for now my energies are better invested in shorter works.

Two, when I was young my mom would play the piano a few times a week. I liked to get on the high keys and bang along as she played. She always asked me to stop, and I don't think I did. As a result my mother probably didn't play the piano as much as she would have liked to. Correlation? Little things can really get in the way of you having fun.

Dreams and Writing

I've started writing short stories based upon dreams that I've had. "Started" being the operative word. Dreams often give interesting propositions but not much substance beyond giving disturbing degrees of insight into my psychological state. For instance, the two dreams I had below are dreams I probably shouldn't be sharing with anyone but the internet gives you free reign to act anonymously, even though everyone knows this is my blog. Just a quick heads up I do not take these dreams to mean anything in terms of a desire to have children:

I had a dream about a woman who had a miscarriage, and was carrying the baby to a stream to place into the water. Once she was upon the bridge, she looked down and saw a dead man floating in the current. That's an interesting coincidence and I don't know what that means, which is why I started writing the story.

Another dream I had was about two men, A and B, having coffee in a train station. A asks B to do him a favor. If A's wife, who is pregnant, has a difficult delivery, B must go into the room and invite the children in and write about it. The next part of the dream was man B sitting in the delivery room, realizing any moment now the woman is going to pass away, but she won't do it until he calls the children in. So his dilemma is how much can he write in order to postpone this woman's death, essentially.

I saw a French film once that quoted dreams as interesting only to the dreamer herself (I think the film put it more harshly than that: calling dreams 'boring' and people who narrate them dull, or something similar). I only half agree. On a practical level I enjoy dreams. I find my friends interesting as well as their dreams, and enjoy their narrations of them. (I think the French dude would argue that maybe my enjoyment comes more from the payoff of being able to recite my own dreams. Whatever, either way, I enjoy it). Enjoyment on that level comes from the most literal and basic understanding of dreams: that they occur when you are asleep, you wake up, and recall them into the present via narration.

But dreams are often discussed and understood in far more metaphorical and metaphysical terms, especially in relation to their literature. Many writers talk about how writing is an unfolding of a dream; that successful writing will flow seamlessly and cohesively like a dream, adhering to its own unique logic and yet being cogent to the dreamer and audience nonetheless. Luis Borges wrote a _____* article on dreams, that I won't go into right now since I have ten minutes left before getting ready for work. But it's Borges, you should read it, and then see Waking Life, and get back to me.

In closing before I return later this evening to tidy this up: studying and understanding dreams is an interesting way to study and understand the creative process. It's also an adept introduction to thought on the function of memory and imagination in comprising a person's identity. I'll be back later!


*Brilliant, perfect, whatever adjective you want to put in there to describe Borges.

Quick Blog Post

Today is the first day off I've had in many, many moons. Count 'em, like 26. Making collages for my characters today. I found five design books lying on the street for the collage, so it's pretty easy to make it look awesome so far. The graphic designers did all the creative work; I just have to cut and paste. So far Miranda has the coolest, but hers is also black, and she is a bit of collage artist herself, so go figure. The best part about being a writer is that you can write in the first person about things you can't do in real life, but make it appear to be so. In my novel my characters are skilled at many things I'm abysmal at: playing guitar, drawing, cleaning house, and so forth.


I'm starving. I had a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of tea. But I'm out of eggs and waiting for my landlord to show up so he can fix our heat. Something tells me he will show at exactly the most inconvenient time.

I have to go get glue and food. I will try to post more soon.

Ode to the Early Riser

(This poem might not rhyme):

How doth the little butterfly
Kiss me quite insane
In between the sheets
Where the dull brain that perplexes and retards---

Shoot, those are all lines from other poems. Begin again!*


When morning grabs your pinky toe
And yanks you out of bed at its inordinate hour,
You must be a wimp to not kick it back in its face and go to sleep.

Too verbose.

In China, kids are still sleeping.
This is a democratic society,
Not a communist one.
Still, you have to wonder,
If they have some things right.

Bingo!

This morning I cracked an egg with a double yolk. Aberrations in nature truly freak me out.

Speaking of aberrations, I put my cats on a diet (for their own good!) and they feel betrayed, traumatized, etc etc. They have not revolted and clawed me to death--yet. But Peter Pan, the feline of the more formidable girth, did spend half an hour this morning opening and shutting the cabinet door (where we keep the cat food). Open, shut, open, shut, pretty good for a creature without opposable thumbs! But it was at 7:20 am, and it surprised me, made me feel guilty, that I wasn't as tired as I thought I would be. In fact, I was a little groggy, but I probably could have risen (proper English?) at that hour. For about twenty minutes I debated getting up. Being one with the sun! Making breakfast in the cool blue silence of morning! A head start on the day! Not feeling rushed and panicked, like, I realized, i feel every morning when I wake up. An early riser: one who has time to take all possibilities into consideration! An exhilarating prospect.

I went back to sleep for another couple hours. Now, it's almost noon. And what have I accomplished? Zero, zil. An abnormal breakfast and so forth. I will pay someone to wake me up early.

Attached picture: this is what cats do when you put them on a diet for the sake of their own health and longevity. They cuddle up in your lap purring, refusing to let you do work, and also stealthily berating you for your own lack of drive, motivation, etc, in relation to the ample opportunity made to you, potential wasted and so forth. You can't tell from the photo, but he's really racking up the guilt in this moment.


*Bonus trivia: can you tell me what poems (and in one instance, a play) I appropriated and maligned those verses from?

Sickness

Yesterday, I was sick. Today, at first, I was sick. But I'm not sick any longer. I broke the sickness with the Feast of the Burrito.

Every sickness I have ever had was broken with the Feast of the Burrito. There was this one time, that I was love sick, and since I ate burritos with this boy I found it hard to recover from the heart sickness with the feast of the burrito. But I did it anyway.

While I was eating this burrito I thought of all the previous burritos I had eaten. I ate one burrito in the summer time, on the beach, when for some reason my face looked swollen and possessed, like a disfigured Mr. Potato. I was very sick, and found myself in the back of a car, and then, inexplicably, at a fair. I don't remember why I was there. But I wandered and decided to eat something, and got a gargantuan burrito. There is no way I will finish this, I thought to myself. But I ate it, all of it, and afterwards was very surprised at myself and my hunger. From that day on I was no longer sick. That was the first Feast of the Burrito.

The magic of the Feast of the Burrito is the ritual. The ritual causes you to think or realize things in a different manner than you would ever have thought or realized them before. The thoughts you have during the Feast of the Burrito are very significant. This feast, I thought of this one girl who I saw in the dining hall when I was an undergraduate, who was probably an anorexic. She was very very skinny. She never ate anything and she looked sad most of the time. I remember one time I was walking by her and she had in her tray a whole pizza. And she was smiling, the type of smile that threatens to levitate one if you're not careful. She looked beyond happy. After she left the dining hall she looked sad again, and I noticed she hadn't eaten her pizza. I thought about this as I ate my burrito, I don't know why. I will always remember the way that this girl smiled, and she probably will never remember it, not having seen herself with the smile, or even knowing who I was and that I saw her there every day, not eating and so sad because of it.

I can't remember what other thoughts I had during the Feast of the Burrito. While I was waiting there was a girl who was being very rude to the man making the burritos, and I wished that I could trip her without her knowing it was me. It was a ridiculous thought because I couldn't possibly defend myself against this girl if she found out that I had tripped her. She wasn't that much bigger than me but I couldn't ever get in a fight if I were the instigator, I know I would lose. I will probably never be in a fight, and I don't know how I feel about this. There are definitely days when I wish a good ass-kicking upon someone, and I imagine that I would be okay giving the ass kicking. But in reality fights are dirty and nasty, at least the ones that I've seen. I don't exercise or condone violence, but I don't think I'm a pacifist. I think most people who claim to be pacifists simply don't understand violence.

When you're in sickness you feel yourself wavering, in between two worlds. This is called, being on the threshold. The threshold is a special place you can only inhabit when you're sick. Since you're not there that often, you feel strange while on the threshold, and this strangeness could be the strangeness of the threshold, or the strangeness of you, or just the impossibility of what's to tell. It causes you and the threshold to be one, and all activities that transpire in the threshold are significant.


I've probably had at least five of those gargantuan burritos, and I have to say each one is revolutionary. It requires a lot of energy to digest, so I'm going to depart. I'll be back later with real news.