New Years Obligatory Reminiscence

Ah, the breach of the New Year is nigh.  I got a calendar for Christmas and I can hardly wait to use it.  I've fully practiced writing '08 on all my checks and the champagne is nicely chilled.  Damn it, I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be.

Looking back at the year, even now, its difficult to classify.  I was one man at the beginning of the year and another at the end of it, but in what shades, its hard to say.  It happened.  Change came.  That's all that can be said of it.

When the year began, I was a renter.  Now I own a house.  Its not a magnificent one, but it does all right.  More than that, its the first place I've ever lived that I've legitimately owned, not acted as though I owned, or said I owned, or wished I owned, but honest to god actually own.  This whole thing, top to bottom, failing roof to cluttered garage is mine.  Sometimes I strut around the place and feel the impulse to fly the flag out front.  And why not?  This is America and I own a house and I'm a man with lots of manly things lying around.  Its the god damned American dream and I'm living it.  Fly those Stars and Stripes, kiddo, I want the world to know.

That's how I feel at certain times, mostly in the middle of the month.  Often that feeling eludes me at the end of the month when the mortgage letter comes or at the start of the month when the bank deducts my account.  But that's the nature of investing, investing in yourself no less, and taking a few hits now and then is what being a man is all about.  Right?

I also bought this year the first car I've ever paid off.  Its a Ford, a good apple-pie SUV, not too big not too small.  It guzzles gas like a like shower drain and I can't say that's ever settled well with me.  These are new times, a new age, and Big Oil is as much a dinosaur anymore as the fossils they rely on.  This has hit home in a personal way for us New Mexicans.  Santa Fe is now under attack by Chevron and others wanting to prospect for crude in the Galisteo Basin and surrounding areas.  The move is itself a desperate admittance, seldom heard stateside, that oil abroad is getting hard to find.  That means t

he big boys of Big Oil are done playing with the Third World.  They're coming home and we're going to see first hand the level of destruction they're capable.  The battle is brewing in Santa Fe County and whether we succeed or fail at stopping them here, it will only be the beginning for domestic oil prospecting.

Me driving around in a chunk of Ford products doesn't help the matter much, but this is New Mexico and it still beats a horse.  I don't know if you've ever been to the Santa Fe area, dear reader, but it is a place of many contradictions.  Its one of the most liberal, democratic, pro-arts cities in American if not the most.  One out of every three cars driving along St. Francis Drive has a sticker on the back that is either pro-Democrat, pro-Green, or anti-Republican.  Save for the occasional funeral, I have never once seen a man where a suit in Santa Fe.  Even at funerals, boots are the standard dress shoe.

And yet, you look around as you're driving through town and you'll notice the prevalence of sport utility vehicles and pick up trucks.  In fact, on my last trip to California I found myself bewildered by the lack of pickup trucks and could measure my approach back to New Mexico by their ever increasing density.  The reason is pretty obvious.  More often than not your drive home consists of dirt roads.  Most people live at the end of one and even in the middle of Santa Fe city limits, you'll occasionally find yourself spitting dirt from the back wheel.  Albuquerque, the major city, is the sole exception and those living there can often forget that the rest of the state is one giant mud bog waiting to happen.

Santa Feans, then, are constantly struggling with the moral confusion of being rabidly liberal and driving all-terrain land tanks.  To be accurate, most of them no longer struggle with anything of the sort and mostly drive along contentedly .  And sure, you'll see a Prius or two around, often a-kilter in the slush.

In any case, I've lost sight of my topic and I'm dragging on when there's work to get to.  

Here's wishing you a great new year.

[Pictured: you're typical New Mexico commute.]

Impulses Returns (Now with Pictures!)

Holidays are dangerous.  This one's thrown me right off my game and has further tempted me with idleness.  Even now my bed calls out to me and it's the middle of the day.  A Saturday, sure, and I'm acutely aware that no one else in the world is working right now except for me.  I can see them all dancing out there through the window, all the blasted little Who's down in the Whoville, chanting and waving their infuriating song of joy:  "Dah who door ray!"  

I try not to take any time off at all.  I try to work seven days out of the week.  In case some one lost count, that's every day.  Its sounds a little insane, but I don't work the full hours a normal work-monkey would.  I only work the ones that I like and leave the rest for scraps.  Take into consideration how a normal work week would look if you divided the typical hours into a seven day period.  Its drastic.

Say, obviously, you work a 40 hour work week.  That's typically 8 hours a day.   If you're working a seven day week, you only need to work about six hours a day to account for the same total hours.  Actually, a little less than six hours per day, but for the record, let's stick to six.  It sounds more robust.  Six hours is about the maximum tolerable limit of writing that I can do in a day, unless I'm divinely inspired, in which case I can write for just about the entire day.  This sort of cosmic event happens once, maybe twice per year.  Its not something to really factor into the equation.  

What anyone else is capable, I can't really say.  I don't particularly care nor do I have any desire to know either.  My competitive spirit just might come out and I'd break my rhythm trying to prove I can work more than Mr. X, or Ms. Y.  Then, if I couldn't, my literal side just might interpret that as a failure of character.  After all, in the absence of any concretely deducible method of comparison between artists, the mind often grasps the material, no matter how absurd the comparisons.  A painter might say 'I go through this much paint in a week.'  A jeweler might quantify in terms of ounces--who knows.  Its entirely arbitrary, but tempting just the same, to compare yourself to those sorts of hard data.  Just remember the absurdity of it and carry on in the assurance that you will never be as prolific as some.  Entertainment, after all, the raison d'etre, is not measured by volume.  Admittedly though, you are often paid that way.

Christmas is one of the few federal holiday's I'll accept as an excuse to break from routine.  I really have no choice in the matter anyway.  Family demands, you know the drill.  I wouldn't trade the time I get to spend with them for any amount of work ethic--even though work ethic is possibly my greatest weakness.  So I don't hold it against any one to lay the pen down for a few days in the holiday season.  Its only natural.  

The danger is in letting it go on and on.  Don't, for instance, get caught in the trap of thinking like any other working individual.  You don't get an extended period off.  If the New Year rolls around and you're still guzzling eggnog then there's something wrong--and in multiple areas of your life, I'm guessing.  When Christmas goes then BAM!--you're back to work.  Hit the ground running before that tree even comes down.  Don't worry you'll find the time to take the decorations down, and if not they'll eventually fall off on their own.  

So . . . are you writing?  No?  Well get your butt back to work, solider.

The Christmas Story

I've been laboring at a Christmas Story for the past week or so.  I had intended it to be a gift for my Dad and therefore vicariously for the rest of my family.  We're a close nit bunch of bananas and our gift theme this year was to make something yourself.  Dad is a poet, my eldest sister a computer electronics engineer with a mean quilting streak, my middle sister a catholic devotee and a good cook, and the younger sister is--well, she's always been a little hard to define, but like all of us she has a dominant creative side.  Not to mention the droves of husbands, sons, daughters, girlfriends, boyfriends, that end up meeting, and possibly exceeding, the fire code occupancy of my Dad's house this time of year.  In any case, we had all agreed to make a little something for each other.  And my contribution was naturally going to be a story.

I love Christmas stories, hokey or otherwise.  Christmas is the most complex holiday's in our Western culture and there's a lot of material there for exploration in the storytelling form.  Even though we have centuries of material already on the books, there's still plenty of mining left to do as our culture evolves, however drastically or slightly over the years. 

Consider the holiday's many levels.  It is, in the popular conception, the calendar mark for the birth of the Christian messiah.  This means it was quite a big day for Christians, as they had been waiting around for him for a hell of a long time and had several false alarms in the interim.  But unfortunately, when the church arose several hundred years later, no one was exactly sure of the exact date of his birth.  So as part of a cultural battle against paganism and other religion sects of the time, the Catholic Church established the celebration of Christmas on the Winter Solstice of the Julian calendar.  Celebrants of the Winter Solstice, later persecuted by Christians after their rise to cultural dominance of western civilization, were forced to hide many of their practices in the guise of Christian tradition.  Thus we have many a strange cross-stitch of holiday traditions: the yule log, the decorated tree, the mistletoe, and many many others.  

But many of the old religions usurped by Christianity are making a modern come back.  Wicca being among them, celebrates the eight day tradition of Yule around this time.  There's also HumanLight, a odd little secular holiday started recently as a reaction to Christmas.   Add to the mix, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, the media-driven commercialization of gift giving, the continuing religious propaganda war waged to maintain the dominance of theistic overtones, the Hollywood-based propagation of secular movie themes, the various ethnic differences in traditions, the impulse to come home for the holidays, the family, the travel, the cooking, the decorations, the weather, seasonal depression, the financial difficulties of everything involved . . . and, man, you've got yourself one hell of a complicated holiday.

So feel free to plumb the depths, fellow writers.  Forget about the meaning, the message, the typical themes of Christmas if the convention of it is holding you back--just go write a good story.  That's all that matters and there's plenty of material left.  Take for instance, my favorite Christmas movie: Die Hard.  In a genre overstuffed with families, kids struggling with the meaning of Christmas, old misers learning to give, average joes learning the importance of their place in the world, Die Hard came along and gave us a kick ass story about a cop stuck in skyscraper with a bunch of terrorists.  And we're all the better off for it.  Damn straight.  Yippee Kai-Yay and Merry Christmas, Mother F*ckers.

So here I am knee deep in a Christmas story that, in true "M.D." form became far more intricate than intended, having completed not one-third of the damn thing, and only two days left to go before game day.  And lets face it, no one in the family wants to read a 40 page short story when they have food and presents to attend.  I've come to the gloomy resolution that the story must be put on the back burner, at least until the after the holidays.  I'll finish it but just not as a family gift.  In the meantime, I need to think of another, SHORTER, story to fill in the gap.  And damned quick.   

If that fails, always remember: poetry, even bad poetry, makes a great pull-it-together-at-the-last-minute gift.  Its short, simple, easily revised, and no one can hold it against you for giving it to them because you made it yourself.  Its perfect art for us slackers.

Anyway, wish me luck, o' my brothers.  And happy holidays.

Stiff

(Warning: blog contains nonsense.  Literalists are advised to skip the italics.)

Is rhythm, like art, only a perception, a thing only observed and made sense of by conscious mind.  Often, its thought has the basis of nature, but maybe nature has nothing to say of it, maybe there is nothing to be said in the absence of us.  We only see the point of the wheel returning to its start, when in all this time the wheel has been traveling and we hardly thought to notice.  Rhythm of the wheels, rhythm of the chords, rhythm of the careening world.

Sorted up and holding forth, nothing but a loose strand here dangling like a tart, poor dear.  How she hardly knew herself when the world took a dive.  Paid me out in spades, when the ticket was cashed.  I did love her look, that storied air of misbegotten confidence that had swelled up into a tumor from all the winks and curdled grins of men with sick-smelling breath.  Tumble, kid, take your chance.  Sometimes I'd make a beggar of myself because she'd expect it.

You little quiet creature, thinking up a memory of myself in a winter coat, the glass breaking underfoot, the tree bending under the snow, the snap of a book spine, the burning of a paper mill, the creatures running in the heat of the fire.  What a wonder you in the five o'clock, the sun at your back, the light through the curtain, the angel dance, and that perfect union, wondering through it all why the light was never quite right as though it were a memory I was misinterpreting.

- - -

I'm growing stiff in this box I call an office.  A man shouldn't be able to feel his tail bone, but there's no way to write without sitting, without being still, and without absolute quiet.  These are days, when my discomfort is so raw, that it feeds back into my senses, sharpens them.  I can hear each leave tumbling along the road outside, the clinking of christmas lights in the wind, little pattering of cat paws on hardwood, even the hum of the computer, usually by persistence ignored, drums at the thin bubble of my focus.  

If I could by movement, write, I'd be in heaven and I think there would be a massive breakthrough in the craft from all the other giants out there.  If we could turn our motion into words . . . odd, thought, that, but isn't there inspiration in just walking?  The way it quiets the mind, humbles the ego, sharpens down the blunt force of consciousness into creation.  Or riding a bike, dancing, driving, flying, fucking.  Any of that, I'd prefer right now over damned chair.

I'm almost warmed up, now.  Sometimes my brain just feels like an old v8 with a dirty air filter . . . attached to a crank start . . . on a muddy Jeep Willy with a crate of medical supplies, three wheels spinning in a mud bog somewhere in near Naples.  Oh, brother, this is going to be a interesting day of writing.

Self-Delusion, A Writer's Friend

Some days, I swear, BEG you not to write.  They get down on their hands and knees and say please please please do anything else.  This typically starts early, around the time your eyes first open in the morning.  Any earlier and you'd be asleep and for all I know, it does actually begin in your sleep as an attempt to keep you that way.  It certainly feels like it when you wake up, because damned if I want to get out of bed on these days.  

Never relent.  Procrastinate?  Sure, but never ever relent.  No matter how hard it is to get started on days like this just remember, if you don't write today, tomorrow its going to be twice as hard.  And the day after that?  Four times as hard.  Its a rampant exponential increase in difficulty.  It sucks I know, but this is the life we choose, my fellow writers.  All we can do is carry on.

I've found that it helps me to self-propagandize.  If I allow my negativity to dwell on the subject, if I keep telling myself I don't want to get started, then its likely I won't.  Slowly, I've learned to catch myself in the act of moping about it and turn myself around, if only superficially.  It may sounds silly, sort of like forcing a smile when what you really feel is murderous rage, but it does work.  Its clinically proven folks!  Give it a shot.   The next time you're feeling lethargic and evasive, just tell yourself how you'd love nothing more than to be writing right now.  I love it!  Its fantastic!  There's no greater thrill in life and I'm in complete control over my abilities.  And I look great doing it, too!

Why not?  If you're going down B.S. Avenue you might as well go whole-hog.  Just never admit the truth, that writing is sheer terror, horrifyingly difficult at times, draining of all your essences: physical, spiritual, mental.  Never admit it.  And if you do, recant immediately--like this: 

What I meant to say was that writing is one of the greatest challenges we can present ourselves as intellectuals and as artists.  To create from the raw ether is a majesty reserved only for the few, the bold, courageous, the incredibly stupid who can't do anything else to save their--

Excuse me.  It can be difficult to keep ahead of yourself sometimes.  The point is self-delusion is an invaluable tool at your dispense.  Use it wisely, and by that I mean often.  At some point--maybe--it may even cease to be self-delusion and agitprop.  That would indeed be something.

Automatic Writing

Don't be afraid of this dissonant sound, it is only the noise of fissures in the brain, gaping at the wide open world.  Dreaming, in the quarter of sleep, all drawn up like bundled package, there came eager visions.  Today, they've bleed out into the morning, like wet ink paintings seeping across the canvas, dribbling down the easel, onto the floor.  Whatever they meant, I've lost that direct sense, but something of the direction they attempted to instill in me is left and I can guide myself at least by that.  So we'll see where this sends me.  Hopefully, over some vast precipice, never to be seen again.

--Stop-- 

I've heard several theories--really, less than theories and more opinions--on the nature of automatic writing.  It used to be a central concept of my work and since I've stopped using it I've found myself drifting away from the voice I used to have, into something more populist.  This is not necessarily a good thing.  I consider a populist style to be dry, simple, readable prose.  You can find it anywhere on the best seller list, if you care to take a look.  I certainly don't champion the idea--though, I don't dismiss it either--and I'm considering scraping the whole experiment and returning to the old practices.  I think, by admission, and by opening this blog, I already have.

What is automatic writing?  Its nothing more than the process of shutting down conscious intention, and distancing any rational thought from the act of writing, or for that matter, anything else.  It has been used in other art forms, drawing, painting, musical composition, you name it, and sure, some crazy hipsters probably given it a shot.  Surrealists were the first to really pick up on the idea, believing it instrumental in the exploration of the unconscious mind.  Even early psychotherapy incorporated the idea.  I don't know if its still used today, but I'm doubtful it is.  Does it tap into the wellspring of the mind, that deep-seat realm of the unconscious.  Is it the substance of dreams that pours out onto the page during the practice. Hell if I know, folks.  But is sure is a lot of fun and I recommend you give it try at least once in your life.  

Once, come to think of it, is probably not enough.  Doing it once, you might notice some differences in content, but I doubt it would be anything to truly interest you.  Get into the concept and practice it several times a week, or more, and with regularity, and you, if you're anything like me, just mind find things coming out of your brain that you would have never expected otherwise.  I will admit, to the credit of the lunatic fringe who believe automatic writing to be more than just a tap into the unconscious, that it does feel at times like something else has taken a grip of your mind, in some weak connection, and is using it to communicate.  Its very peculiar and in some cases, very overwhelming in the sensation of it.

I won't speculate what it means or even the validity of it.  I'll leave it to you to make up your own mind once you give it a little whirl.  Unless, you're just completely chicken now.  I won't hold that against you either, particularly if you're one of those fundamentalist types who now think I should be burned or stuck on a rack for even bringing up the subject.  --And before you ask, yes, it has been featured in occult practices and rituals.  But so have knives and you still eat steak, don't you?

In any case, expect to see more and more of free or automatic babbling around here now that I've decided to come back to it has a method of warming up.  Just look for the italics.

Clogs

Some days are just different.  Here I am, sitting in this one, waiting for some relevance to percolate from somewhere, anywhere, maybe from the deepening invariance I am experiencing now on a daily basis.  I think the greatest danger here is to my senses.  They grow weaker from the encroach of boredom as their disuse continues.  I hardly use my sense of touch anymore, for instance, only in the case of food, or in the few moments before sleep, when the satin brush of the bedding lulls me into comfort.  But on with it anyway.  What's all to say about it?  Just that it is, and won't be forever one hopes.

There are certainly brooding needs out there, I learned from a little trip to the mall.  I discovered there, that I too am not immune to the need to be desired.  Curiously, I had always thought this a woman's domain, but when I spotted a dark hair woman glancing down the isle of Macy's, clearly following me and my movements, I couldn't help but feel a surge of confidence.  Not that I went over there and spoke to her or anything, I have to maintain some level of decorum when I'm in a relationship--I guess, but man, it sure put me in a good mood.  Did I mention she was pretty?  Anyhoo.

I'm on the second scene now of a story I've been writing for about a week or more.  Maybe much more.  The mind blurs.  In this case, probably deliberately to conceal its lolligagging.  I can hardly blame it.   I've been writing about two characters driving in a car after a heist.  Its the first time they interact, fighting about how one of them is too reckless.  I trudged through it with all the grace and celerity of walk up a mud slide in the rain.

This is a warming sign in writing.  I consider it the immune system of the story, sending out antibodies that attach to your fingers and slow you to a crawl.  Its the story's way of telling you that something is horribly wrong and needs to be addressed, reworked, altered, removed, edited, whatever.  I find it tremendously accurate.  There have been countless times when the work has shut down to a trickle and with a few minutes of reflection, I can usually identify the problem, fashion a solution, and move on.  You just have to be careful the solution doesn't send your outline into a tailspin.  

The problem here?  I didn't know who I was writing.  Who these characters essentially are, where they've been, how they see things, how they talk, how they move, what they love and hate.  Most of the time this will self-illuminate during the process.  Not always.  This is one of those not-always cases.  They'll sneak up on you sometimes.  And these are the characters I thought I understood the most.  Turns out I hardly know their names.  I knew this, though, come into it.  I knew on a subconscious level that these characters were poorly defined, nothing but pawns to are assigned actions.  I just couldn't come to admit it to myself.  I'll know better next time at least.

Now to begin working on character bios.  After that, we'll see how much better the work flows.

The New Beginning

Blog-city has been a home for my not all together coherent ramblings for the past several years, and I can't say it hasn't been a particularly bad one.  It wasn't marvelous nor was it always free.  We had our good times, our bad times, our highs and lows, but we'll always have our memories, blog-city.  We will always have our memories.

Until you delete them at the start of the new year anyway.  That's right, I'm probably one of several hundreds, if not thousands of refugees flooding in from that site onto this google sponsored one and I'm glad to be welcomed here.  If you don't know, blog-city has decided that giving things away is no longer profitable and have canceled all of there non-paid memberships.  Once the new year rolls around, all of those free pages will be dumped and I among them will have no record of ever being there.  Those years of blogs will be gone from the web unless I decide to transfer them here.  I don't know that I will, frankly, having looked back at those old entries.  They were rife with ancient melodrama which I can hardly relate to anymore.  Though there was a post or two worthy of record, and I may just transfer the worthy ones to my harddrive, the vast majority are now embarrassments of the highest degree. 

I think its best just to start fresh.  

Start fresh with what, you ask?  With the great tradition of nonsense, we've all come to love and ignore out there in internet land.  As you've well observed, most blogs aren't worth the few seconds it takes to scan them, the bulk of them being personal journals, entries of drama, love interests, terrible poetry, random thoughts that last for no more than four sentences, pictures found with stumbleupon, ad infinitum.  I don't think this blog will be of much more interest to you.

For the most part, it will contain my daily writing warm ups; essentially, little more than unconscious swill, seeping out my organs and staining the page via automatic writing.  Should you be interested in such blah-dee-blahs, you're welcome to read it.  I don't mind.  Just don't expect anything profound.  And if you find anything profound, don't expect it to happen again.  If you continuously find profound things in this blog, then I must insist that you consult a physician, as your brain may likely be clotted.

Other times, you might expect a few observations, poems, emotional shake-outs in which I write for the sole purpose of understanding my condition, maybe a photo or two if I feel like it.  Whatever, really.  And nothing special at that.  Interested?  No?  Fantastic.  Then I can begin with the proper anonymity I so enjoy.