Possibly Epic Fail

It's one of those nights where you're walking home from the coffee shop and you're passing an unlit streetlight and you spit and the light flickers, flares and joins its brothers and sisters in consistent illumination and it shocks you for a minute but you keep going. Then, a few minutes later, another unlit streetlight and perhaps coincidentally, perhaps through some subconcious reflex, you spit again and that streetlight, too, flickers and flares and lights.
This time you're less shocked and more amused at the absurd parallelism. So the next time you see an unlit streetlight, about a block from home, you spit again. And that streetlight flickers and flares and lights. And then you start to think you can light streetlights with your mind--figuring maybe that your brain configures itself in such a way when you spit to send electric impulses to the fuse or whatever and you're something like a god. A god of streetlights, sure, but in this day and age where society seems to be relentlessly searching for new gods, who the fuck is gonna split hairs?
So I figure now is as good a time as any to tell you all something that'll humble me a little in immediate and obvious ways; and in more subtle ways that will only become apparent as the days and months and years pass.

The room is dark and it smells like cigarette smoke and cinnamon. You can't see it but you can picture the whisp of smoke still coming off the Christmas candle she just blew out.
"I just get bitchy and discouraged when I read something that I don't think is as good as what I write," I say. She's annoyed with me because I criticized the book she was reading to me from. "I mean, it's ridiculous to me that something that bland and shapeless could get published."
"Well then why don't you get published? Bitching about other people's work won't do it. Get yourself out there."
I snort and say, "You have no idea how hard I've tried."
"Okay, okay. Don't get defensive. I'm just saying, I've never seen you try so..."
She's got a point.
I roll over and close my eyes, picturing pages and pages of manuscripts I've turned out over the years and I have to admit, yeah, a lot of them are bad. Worse than bad.
There are the stories I write and the sotries I talk about writing. Probably the most famous of the latter group would be the novel that has gone by titles like Fucked Up!, How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, So Much Worse, Those Wretched, Those Doomed, The Doomed Ones, The Cursed Ones and The Book of Anathema among some other painfully cheery names. (And I swear it only occurs to me now how dreary and depressing those titles are.)
This is the book I've told people I intend to work up to. The magnum opus, my sure-fire materpiece. The epic dystopian satire weaving the first-person life stories of six semi-related people. The novel that begins on or around September 11th 2001 and ends some fifty or sixty years later. I imagine something in the nieghbourhood of 600-800 pages at least, despite my commitment to minimalism.
When I describe my idea to people they ask why I don't start it now. My response is usually some variation of this:
"I'm smart enough to know I'm not ready to take on something so big yet. I don't have the skill to tell it, the focus to research it or the simple ability to fix it when I fuck it up--which I will."
But lying in bed with nothing to show for years of honing my craft, studying the conventions and tricks and traditions, I have to admit that the reasons seem flimsy when sales of novels like the Twilight series are surpasing other lousy books like the Harry Potter series.
Seems to me I'm just scared that my best idea won't be good enough. And that reason, well, it's definitely not good enough.

The concept of this novel started with a loose collection of ideas that seemed related in some way. Ideas that actually, over the ten-or-so-years since they first came to me, have made friends of newer ideas and become my personal philosophy. A philosophy that, while I haven't the arrogance to call finished, doesn't take up as much of my time anymore. Less time is spent trying to piece it together and turn it over in my mind to check it for holes. Now it functions more as a backdrop to my life. Or better still, as a lens through which I view the world. A lens that helps me understand myself, the world and my relationship to it much better.
The philosophy seems to be ready to go. And this book was always supposed to be that outlet for me, a means of expressing my worldview sort of like Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (except, you know, comprehensible and well-written). So why not start it? It was a question I couldn't answer without making sorry excuses that did little but veil the afforementioned fear.
So start it I shall.
As of Monday I begin the considerable research period that will be required to make this story work. I've got a reading list a mile long that will take me at least three or four weeks to work my way through (and this is ignoring the very real possibility that those books will bring others to light that will also need to be read).
I've written things before that required research. I think the longest I've ever spent researching a single story was somewhere in the nieghbourhood of two weeks. This is an entierly different animal. There will be much note-taking, cross-referencing and mucking about with unwieldy volumes on topics ranging from Existentialism to Native story telling to corporate law.
I also believe I will need to do something I said I would never do: plot the story in advance. This will be my first attempt at writing something big enough to lose characters in, to tear holes in the plot or to suffer from any chronological errors. While I've always said one shouldn't know where a story is going until it's been told, I don't think it could hurt to plot certain check-points along the way to make sure my characters don't get lost, wind up in two places at once or die and return fifty pages later.
Also, I need to decide who my characters are. I have six of them to tell the story and they all have important parts to play in it. But I think it would be a mistake to give them life before I really know who they are. This is the first time I will write more than one character at a time and I don't want to make the mistake of playing favourites or giving too little time or attention to any of them. I may go so far as to fill up a notebook on each character so I know them and have reference material on them when I begin.
All in all I figure the prep-time on this beast will take me well into the New Year. I also think that once all the research is done and the plot drawn up and the characters fully realised I'll want to take a break. After that, there's a very good chance that fear will hamper my ability to begin the novel for a couple of weeks.
By that time I'll probably be back in school or getting very close to it so that will obviously slow down the writing process a great deal. Granted, in the past when I had ten or more hours a day to dedicate to writing I could crap out a novella in a couple of weeks. (Which, I know, seems fast. But consider the fact that I am a minimalist and I don't cut things out--I write fiction that way naturally so revisions are usually pretty short because even novels are pretty short.)
I don't harbour any illusions that this will come as quickly or even be presentable after the first draught. Even if I were to find ten hour days to work on it, this is a more involved piece of writing than I've ever attempted. What I'm saying is, I'll consider myself successful if I manage to finish a first draught before the apocalypse my story will attempt to predict occurs.

But I will begin it. I won't give it a name. I won't talk a lot about it--maybe I won't talk about it at all. But I'll do it. I'll work on it. And maybe it'll take years to finish, maybe I'll write other things in between and during breaks. But I'm not going to put it off anymore.

Calling Him Priest Does Not Make Him Priest

The trouble is that the nieghbour dropped off an extra-large double-double at 1:30am and, being oblivious to how my body has changed since I was eighteen, I figured I was cool to down the whole thing and still nod off immediately. Before that was the other nieghbour and his girlfriend coming over to watch a werewolf movie (which prompted the question: "Hey, when's the last time we watched a movie that wasn't a horror?"). Before that was waking up at two in the afternoon because I'd gone to bed at five in the morning.
So I'm still awake at 3:30am, fully aware of the fact that I will be awakened in something like six hours by a three-year-old ruckus in the next room, fresh from two nights at her dad's house and forgetful of all the rules of this one.
Yay!
And what am I doing at 3:30am? Reading Cities of the Red Night and discussing with Steph whether or not I believe losing Amy Winehouse to her addictions would qualify as a tragedy. And if you're having trouble guessing which side I'm taking, maybe this will help: I'm citing great musicians, artists and writers who died young and asking whether or not Amy Winehouse can properly be compared to them.
And it's as I'm listing names of more and less obscure talents that I surprise myself by mentioning Kurt Cobain.
I look at the book in my hand and depart from the topic completely (Hey, it's 3:30am, I've got the sleep schedule of an over-caffeinated cat and, like, zero attention span) and start talking about The "Priest" They Called Him--a nine minute and forty-something-second ep featuring W.S. Burroughs reading a short from his collection Exterminator! while Kurt Cobain plays some dissonant guitar in the background.
I heard it on CD way back when Kurt Cobain was still mentioned by everyone everyday. By that point I was more interested in Burroughs than in Cobain, but I had to admit that I was really into what they were doing.
Apparently the track was also released on a one-sided 10" picture disc limited to 50,000 copies. That sounds like a lot to a hardcore kid, but when you consider the followings that these two guys had, well, it doesn't seem like near enough.
Of course the recording is out of print. It's still available online at Amazon and, no doubt, eBay; and yet I find myself hoping instead to one day find it while rifling through bins in some dusty old record store in some major metropolitan centre. Maybe because that way there's a chance that I won't have to pay upward of $60 for the 10", or maybe because that's just how I've always done it.

In other news: I seem to have a couple of leads on amps, I'm just about ready to sit down and start writing something serious, I'm going to be listening to both Blue Train and Yanqui UXO tonight if it kills me and I've decided to forgo buying a motorcycle until after London (unless a stupendously good deal comes up in the meantime).
By the way, the link to my nieghbour's book does not constitute an endorsement--I have not read the novel. In fact, I feel compelled to warn you that if all I've read about Publish America is true, they'll publish anything. Nonetheless, there it is. Take it for what it's worth.

Clarification and Whatnot

THE ENGAGEMENT
So I'm sure I've inititiated some cognitive dissonance out there for folks who have known me for a long time. I can picture one or two people scratching thier heads and saying, "Can he be serious? Or is this some sort of social statement?"
I'm serious. Also, it may be some sort of social statement.
For years I eschewed the idea of marriage. It seemed an unneccessary arrangement entered into half-blind by most people; all too frequently resulting in shit like heartache and financial insolvency. A good solid coke habit, I reasoned, would probably turn out better. Or a self-administered lobotomy. (Which, by the way, are the same thing, really.) I figured marriage was looked at one (or both of) two ways: Either it was a social contract issued by a society that I had nothing in common with and whose institutions mean very little to me; and/or it was a religious contract and, as you are all aware, religious contracts are not high on my list of priorities.
So why this socio-religious institution? Why now?
I've settled into relationships in the past. They were fulfilling in a certain sense since I wasn't looking for permanence. This is not to say they lacked depth or passion or love. But they were ephemeral, fleeting things and most of the time I realised this going in.
The thing is, when you're not looking for permanence, you start courting the transient, seeking it out. Probably because if you know at the outset that it won't last, it will hurt less coming out the other side. This is precisely what happened in my last relationship. We talked about marriage in a half-hearted, jokey way but we always said that there was no such thing as forever. "It's a word designed to give hope to a hopeless culture," I said.
So coming out of that relationship I felt good--that is to say I felt like I'd been made a better person for my involvement in it and like I'd salvaged a real friendship for knowing when it was over. I felt ready to take on the world. There was no protracted period of healing, no fear of getting hurt again. And it is in this mindset that, as chance would have it (if you believe in chaos or unbound freewill which, let's face it, are far from certainties), I happened to meet what may very well be the only girl with whom permanence seems possible.
The component lacking in all my past relationships that kept them momentary was understanding. An understanding of who I am, why I believe (or don't believe) as I do. An understanding of what is most important to me and why. A respect for the deepest foundations of my character.
Stephanie seems to understand. She doesn't always agree, but she gets it.

All that being said, I am practical about this. Because I have accepted so many temporary relationships as temporary, I go into this with eyes wide open. I know what kind of work will be neccessary to make permanence happen. I know it won't always be easy and fun.
But I suspect it'll be worth it.

LITERATURE
In other news, it seems that I'm starting to feel a bit writerly again. I'm getting small story ideas and my fingers seem to be moving over the keyboard with a modicum of grace and ability once more. I'm not sure when I'll be able to tackle a novel again. With something like three failed manuscripts in various drawers I may just be a little gun-shy. However, Broken Pencil has a short story contest coming up. Perhaps if I submit something I will find the old confidence--and should I gain any recognition for it, all the better.
I've also found that engaging in reading material of the sort which I would normally decline has helped. Genre fiction, pulp paperbacks and such. Not that I'm rushing to write the next horror novel you'll find on a rack in an airport and forget after your flight--but reading those types of books is an interesting experiment that seems to be exercising my creative muscle.
Another helpful factor seems to be my place of residence. Maybe it's because artists tend to be shit-poor most of the time, but I seem to be reading quite a few manuscripts by aspiring writers (not to mention listening to songs by aspiring songwriters and critiquing the fruits of other sundry artistic pursuits) since I moved to Taylor Ave. Some of them are really good. Some of them are really, really bad. But it helps to know that there are others out there pushing thier way through the muck and slime of anonymity.

OTHER
The amp I have been using has been returned to its rightful owner. I'm hoping to borrow one for a while to continue writing/recording some music.
My landlord is a jerk-ass. Though, I don't suppose that's news to anyone who has ever had a landlord.
Gwenyth has the energy of an atomic bomb and the discipline of a three-year-old. So I guess that's just about right.
George Carlin is, regretfully, still dead. Along with Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, Joe Strummer, Bill Hicks and a host of other erstwhile rebels. Dick Cheney is, somehow, still alive.
And so am I.

Struggle with the Medium, Continual Tedium

This is my favourite time of year. The cold, the rain, the unsettled sky the colour of faded denim--all this plus picking wet leaves off the soles of my boots before coming inside.
Woke up at six in the morning after falling asleep at three thirty--got out of bed at seven. Made coffee and smoked cigarettes and read the news. Sweeney Todd, the Demon Kitty of Taylor Ave decided to crash out on my lap while Queen Isis mewed at her empty food dish. I'm sure I'll miss the sleep I might have had if I'd stayed in bed and forced my eyes to stay closed--but really, will I miss it as much as I've enjoyed this morning?
Somehow, I doubt it.

Steph and I checked out Monkey Unit? at the Elephant's Nest the other night. A couple of pictures have been posted for your enjoyment. My personal favourite is J.D. doing the robot.
The band is a good time if you're looking for mid-to-late ninties modern rock covers. Not my thing but they're all swell dudes and they do what the do well. And hearing songs I heard on the radio and disdained when I was a fifteen year old punk kid make me smile now.
After the show we had taquitos and Pepsi, went up to J.D.'s apartment where he and I drunkenly discussed our writing over whiskey and water while Steph and Pike wrought audio havoc, playing the new Metallica album.

What does a writer who can't write do? He blogs the tedium of his daily life. What good is he? Not much, I suspect. But it might just get the old fire burning... if he can sustain the heat.

The ninth rule in the Thinking Person's Guide to Suicide is as follows:
Do what you do, suck it up and force yourself through. If you haven't tried you can't give up. (Anyone noticing a theme in these rules yet?)

Galvanized Corpses

Coffee: I'm heavily considering making the second pot of the day.

Rain: I keep hoping that it will wash away the vague uneasyness in my mind--to little avail, of course.

Cigarettes: Runnin' low.

Monkey Unit?: At the Elephant's Nest tonight. Maybe I'll take some pictures and post them here when I get back.

Top five works of art blowing (or about to blow) my mind right now: Endless Blockade's Blackprint Sessions (still); Mary Shelly's Frankenstien; Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night; a neat little zombie flick called Vanguard; and, last but not least, Gwenyth's laugh (I have officially become a sentimental jag-off).

I went for a walk in the rain earlier because Steph couldn't hear her game over my loud, screechy guitar playing. I had this moment (born, no doubt, of far too many horror flicks watched over the last month or two) of certainty that the hobbling form approaching me through the fog ahead was a zombie.
There was a pure, crystaline minute of anticiaption and joy. A moment where my brain said: Dude, it's finally happened. The world has cracked under the strain, the dead walk again. This is your time to shine. Get a shotgun, steal all the canned goods from the corner store, fortify the apartment and live out the end of days in exhileration.

Of course, it turned out to be a drunk. A drunk who wanted to borrow five dollars, no less.
Then it occurred to me how truly bizarre my moment of happiness was. I suppose it was the part of me--the enormous part of me--that's sick of looking at billboards and watching commericals and eating Big Macs and trying to find something worth looking at on the internet. The part of me which, when confronted by a happy little liberal who tells me Obama has won and the New Age of Reason can begin, says, "Yeah? So?"
I guess that part of me would rather deal with zombies who want to eat my brains than the ones who want to colonize it with unsavoury ideas and desires. Probably because I can shoot those ones without fear of reprisal.

And on that happy note... I'm off to the shower.