Like a Bolt Out of the Blue.

"In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride."
- Count Zero, William Gibson

Like a bolt out of the blue, I just now remembered that this blog exists and that I can write whatever I want on it whenever I want. And the best part? No one will EVER READ IT. Because no one reads blogs anymore.  I love that for me. There are few things better for the soul than toiling in obscurity.

Not kidding, like I know that I have this weirdo little website and everything, but I do not know that I have thought about it in eons. 

Just now it occurred to me that I should see if I can even still log in. And guess what? I can.

This is very exciting for me. 

(Gawd, I forgot what a pain in the ass it is to format on this thing)

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It is Okay to Be Bad at Stuff.

Very slowly I have been working on a little poetry project. It is nothing to write home about, as I am not a very good poet. But I have been putting together a little collection of poems that I wrote for no reason over the last five years or so. Let me tell you, it is a lot of work because — again — I am not a very good poet.

I have a plan to make a small little book that is very designed. I want the text itself to move around the page and grow or shrink in size and to change fonts and width. I am by no means the first person to do this, but it is kind of a fun little project.

It does mean though  that I am spending a lot of time going through my old writing and so much of it is so very bad. Luckily I have been at this writing thing for so long that it doesn’t hurt my feelings that so much of it is bad. In any creative life, most of what you make will probably suck. This is true for pretty much everybody and I think we should talk about that more; it is okay to suck. What it important is to try. And to keep at it.

Between you and me, I even LIKE some of the bad stuff. If I ever choose to make a project exclusively out of my worst writing, it would be the easiest and largest project of my life.

There is something sort of enjoyable about sitting down with these old poems — old enough that I don’t feel them as mine anymore — and slicing through them with a red pen. There is great precision confidence in a good red pen. The redness makes you feel like you’ve made the proper choice.

I’ll tell you more about this project when there is more to tell. This weekend I’ll spread out all my papers in my dining room and grab at them randomly and slash them with my red pen until the whole room looks like a bloodbath. Should be fun!

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Let’s Talk About Text, Baby!

I’ll be honest here, I’ve been in something of a creative slump for quite awhile now. 2019 was a hard year for me personally and I’m not great at writing my way through adversity. So I didn’t get a lot written. Then 2020 … I had such high hopes as 2020 started. The — you know — there was some more adversity. The anxiety and isolation of the pandemic did not do much for me creatively. I did some stuff, I still made some things, but nothing that was worth anyone’s time.

Now as we are beginning to return to a world filled with interesting and inspiring things, I have been getting prepared. In much the same way that I have been trying to get my body ready again for the world, I have been trying to get my creative brain back in gear again as well. That is part of the reason I have started writing this here little blog again. I know that no one reads it, but I have never really written it to be read. I’ve always written it just for the writing of it. This is the mental equivalent of going to the gym. I just have to do it. I have to rebuild a daily writing practice and I have to reacquaint myself with the simple little joys of typing words on this keyboard. 

It has always seemed odd to me that a writer has to be an idea-haver and then a kind of story structure architect, someone with the loose whimsy to think up people out of nothing, but then also someone expected to have the self-discipline to sit down and write every day, but then also someone who has the dispassionate bloodlessness to slash and edit their way back through the thick damp word jungle that they themselves grew and tended. It is an odd way to exist. You can barely blame writers for having the reputation of being prodigious drinkers. It is a weird way to spend one’s time and life.

And I have been wildly unsuccessful at it. At least lately.

And yet, here I am on a Wednesday morning before work, typing away. Even when there is no inspiration in the fingertips, it is important to still type away. 

And I have  a few ideas. A precious few, but ideas nonetheless. I’ve been trying to tend to them like the sad, constantly dying herb garden I’ve been trying to grow since the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve had about the same success creating as I’ve had gardening, but the lack of success is not the same as failure; failure is giving up, everything else is just learning.

The other day I read a poem that I liked and it has been stuck in my mind for a while. I have been turning it around like a skillfully cut diamond, trying to appreciate the craft of it. This is what I used to always be doing. It feels good to be doing it again.

 

It is hard for me to dive back into long narrative writing, which was always my home for most of my life. So I have been looking at these smaller things lately. One can produce a small collection of poems in a weekend if one is properly energized. I’m not saying they will be good poems, but I have never concerned myself with that sort of thing. 

And I have a three day weekend coming up.

And I have my first late-pandemic out-of-state trip just days after that. 

And I have hope that those things will produce ideas.

And that those ideas might produce words.

And that those words might become text.

And that that text might become something called “writing” and then I will hold that writing above my head and proclaim, “Behold, I am a writer again!’

And then maybe if I say it, I will feel like it again.

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Inconsistent Failures.

 A friend of mine joked once that the third post on every blog says, “Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile.”

That’s a funny joke, but it also speaks to something very true about our human tendency to let our ambition outrun our execution and I have got to tell you, I am feeling that lately. Back in February I started thinking about ‘redesigning” my life so that more of it would belong to me and less of it would belong to my job. I gave it a shot in March and had a good month. Then in April work completely consumed my life again. In May I have fine tuned the re-design and I was all clear to leap into it, but then I kind of just … didn’t?

I’ve made some changes that have stuck. I’ve been getting up earlier so I have more morning time, but I haven’t been consistent enough with it. Every morning I post a silly drawing on my Instagram (@standard_kink) and MOST mornings I write a blog post like this one. I’ve also standardized my bedtime and I’ve been able to stick with that. My diet is better now than it was a few months ago, I’ve even been eating fruit and vegetables consistently! 

So those parts of the re-design are functioning, but the other big parts aren’t. I’m not writing more, I’m not reading more, I’m only running and doing yoga sporadically. These are the things that the re-design was supposed to be in service of. A lot of the minimalism stuff I read/listen to tells you that what you actually do is what you actual value and if there is a misalignment between what you value and what you actually do, that is a point that you need to deliberately address. So obviously these are the things I need to address. I have built out a daily schedule that (generally) has enough runway in it that I COULD and in fact SHOULD be able to run and read and write all in addition to what I am already doing.

Admittedly it is hard to work a stressful 8 hours and then say, “Well, I need to go out running now even though I’m totally drained and it’s cold and gray outside.” I know that I have it in me to do that because I have done that sort of thing before. I just need to find a way to do it again.

I know that I am lucky to have such small problems in my life, but that doesn’t make them not problems. As I grow older, I really do feel the hallway of the rest of my life narrowing. I feel like I’m approaching a lot of last chances. If the person I want to be is someone who writes and runs and reads everyday, I feel like I’m running out of days to become that person. 

But the one great thing about the relentless forward movement of time is that every morning we get a whole new day. Let’s see what I can do with this one.

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Thinking on the Life of Lars Larce.

There is a Spanish idiom that goes, “Thinking on the immortality of a crab” and I only learned about it recently, but it has become one of my favorite phrases. It relates to daydreaming and it is a funny way of saying, “I’m not doing nothing, I’m actually deep in contemplation.”

So the usage would be like this:

INT. DAY. LIVING ROOM.

RINALDO is staring passively out a window. Enter MARIA.

MARIA: Rinaldo! You lazy bum! Why are you just sitting there while I am making dinner for the kids?

RINALDO: I’m actually thinking on the immortality of a crab.

MARIA: Well why don’t you do that while you set the table?

RINALDO: Yes, Maria.

MARIA: My mother was right about you.

And scene!

Now, whatever marriage problems Maria and Rinaldo might have are not the topic of this blog post. I am mostly concerned now about daydreaming.

I have spent enough of my life engaged in creative endeavors that I recognize how essential it is to daydream, to ponder and to simply let the mind wander. I’ve had trouble with it the last year or two though and I really do think that it is because of podcasts. 

That seems like a leap, but hear me out. The explosion of podcasts has made it so that whatever your niche interests, you can find a podcast. For instance, the inimitable Glen Weldon of NPR now has a podcast called A Degree Absolute that goes episode by episode through the 1960 British TV show The Prisoner which is the single most insane television program that has ever been produced. And listening to the podcast is absolutely delightful and I love it because it was clearly made for me and like the four other people in existence who would like to see David Lynch make a James Bond movie.

The problem is that my podcast consumption has been increasing substantially over the years and there are some days when I basically don’t even take my earbuds out. There is just SO MUCH information out there to consume! And some of it is good. It is not all bubblegum that I’m listening to. I listen to several daily news pods and numerous wonky policy pods and shows on minimalism and stoicism and history and all kinds of other smart and fancy stuff like that. 

But what I’m not doing much lately is thinking on the immortality of a crab.

Last night I was in bed trying to go to sleep and a name came to me. This is not a terribly unusual thing for a writer and I like odd names, I even keep a list of them. So even though I was warm and comfy under my blankets, I had to roll over and reach for my phone in the dark and that is why this morning I have an email from myself that just says, “Lars Larce”. Now I don’t know who Lars Larce is or what I’m going to do with his name, but at least it did not leave me in the middle of the night, which would have happened otherwise.

As I settled back into bed last night, I realized it had been a long time since I’d had to do that. This was my first Lars Larce in a long time. That makes me sad because when the creative process is really kicking, you are getting Lars Larces all the damn time. A productive writer lives a life drowning in post-it notes that say things like: “The feather is GREEN” or “the roof of the arboretum needs cleaned and so it’s gloomy when they meet.” Stuff like that is common.

But you can’t realize that the roof of the arboretum needs cleaned if you’re not letting your mind wander around in there. You can’t find your way around the arboretum if you’re focused on Glen Weldon talking about the state of BBC Four in 1967. 

I need to find a way to cram more non-time into my life. I need to spend more time thinking on the immortality of a crab. I need to open up some space for more Lars Larces in my life. After all, who is he meeting at the arboretum? Why there? And what’s with the feather? I’m never going to figure it out unless I find some time to.

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Taking Stock: Week 3.

Okay, so where are we?

This is Tuesday of Week 3 of my Getting-My-Shit-Together Plan.

Last week was rough. I got my shot on Monday and I experienced a lot of fatigue as a side effect. Last week was also the time change which didn’t help with that. Also last Friday was a big high-stress event at work that I’d been preparing for for awhile and so work kind of ate my life. 

So not a great Week 2. But I still did SOME of my Get-My-Shit-Together things: I showered every morning (funny how that helps), I did my daily drawings every morning (find those on Instagram @standard_kink), I did three of five of these daily morning posts. I ate healthy almost every night.

The weekend was still too lazy, I still don’t have a good plan for the weekends. I spend most of Saturday thinking about the film “We Bought a Zoo” and making random Twitter posts about it for my four followers. I also cleaned up my herb garden by getting rid of anything that was dead and planting some new seeds (I also bought a couple more succulents at the grocery store) and did my family Zoom call on Sunday. So not a waste of a weekend, but still not as effective as I need weekends to be.

Yesterday was Monday and I worked and went to the doctor in the afternoon and that ate up so much time I didn’t get to run. The doctor gave me a referral to physical therapy for my shoulder, so that’s good, but I kind of don’t want to do that sort of frequent close-contact stuff until I get my second shot, so I’m not sure how to handle that yet.

Today work will be a lot of meetings and I just hope there is time in between to get things done. We are going to plan on going running right at 5pm when I clock off. That means I have to clock off at 5pm. With last week being all weird, I haven’t gotten to enjoy the upside of the later sunsets (ie: more running time), so hopefully that will start today.

That’s where I will focus this week: just getting out the door for those longer runs.

The one area where I have COMPLETELY failed is in the mornings. I’m supposed to be getting up at 6am and doing a half hour of yoga and I have been consistently not doing that. The mornings here have been just the right kind of cold where I can’t quite bring myself to crawl out of my nice warm bed. I’ve also been waking up tired because even though I get in bed on schedule at 10pm, I am not going to sleep. I blame the phone. I know! I know! No blue light in bed, but the thing is I haven’t been TIRED at 10pm. But that’s what the runs are for; you make the body that good kind of tired so it can drag the brain off to sleep.

Okay, so that is the stock taking today. Let’s see how this goes.

Sorry this blog post is boring, but I needed to write it.

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Hot Turkey, William Faulkner, and the One Big Project.

Here is the new way I have come up with to justify to myself the fact that I am still sort of a C student when it comes to improving my life: rather than going cold turkey on how I had been living and going hot turkey on this new lifestyle, what I should have done was PHASE IN the changes. “Phase in” means that I should have done it over time, I should have spread it out. How did I not think of that? It is only LITERALLY what any article about changing habits says!

I’ve been doing a pretty good job. I do some small creative stuff (like this) in the mornings just for me, and I have been running almost every day and I have been very good about sticking with my healthified new diet (by “diet”  I mean “new eating regiment” as opposed to “diet” as a thing one does for a while to lose weight) and I have been reading and writing in the evenings rather than listening to podcasts and endlessly scrolling Twitter.

Where I have been failing is in the mornings, but we have talked about my shoulder and how stiff and sore it is in the mornings, so I have not been consistent about doing my morning yoga. The other way I’m failing is with my writing in the evenings. I’m kind of just tinkering. I honestly don’t have the ONE BIG PROJECT right now, so each night I’m kind of just playing around. And that is okay, because the important thing about writing that people aren’t told enough is that the most significant part of any writing practice is to put your butt in the seat everyday. The writing flows from that act, not the other way around. There’s a famous quote usually attributed to Faulkner that goes, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

That’s kind of what I’m doing in the evenings. I’m trying to rebuild that part of my writing practice. I’ve had a weird last few years — and while weird is not always bad — they have decimated my writing practice. There are a lot of reasons for this and we will no doubt get into them at some point, but for now, I’m doing a kind of writer’s physical therapy after a car accident and I’m metaphorically learning to walk again.  

So if you need me any evening, I’ll be sitting right here from 7:30 to 9pm, relearning how to place one foot in front of the other and remembering who I am and what I do.

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WATCH THIS SPACE

 I’ve been a bad blogger the last few years, but look, I’ve been very busy. At least I shared photos! But then I was heartbroken to discover that somehow this little blog has become unlinked from the Instagram account I was using to update it. That’s why my last several years of posts are all just ghost posts now. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it, but I am a bad blogger, not a web-internaught, so - you know - this process is going to be terrible.

In the meantime, just know to watch this space, because we’re living through a pandemic and possibly the last democratic election America will ever get to have. It seems like someone should be writing about all this shit as it happens. And not on your social media, which is so ephemeral and combative that it doesn’t even ever feel like anything but anger bubblegum. 

In the weeks and months to come, I’ll be here. I’m not promising to be helpful or useful or enlightening or - let’s be honest - even interesting, but I’ll be here. And maybe I’ll even figure out where the hell all my pictures went. It’s like my past has disappeared. I’m basically the boringest version of Jason Bourne.

Watch this space.

P.S. Have you listened to Fiona Apple’s latest album. You outta.

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Back to the Grind.

Some years ago when I started writing this blog, the Earth was a different place. It was still ruled by dinosaurs. They had feathers, they were very dangerous. It was a time unlike this one. It was back before Twitter, before Facebook was an organ of a foreign power. I was in my 20s and I had SO MANY THINGS I wanted to just shout out into the world. I was impatient.

I’m still impatient.

The last several years though I’ve been in grad school and that took up most of my bandwidth and so I have not really been here very much. I feel bad about that because I have missed it here.

Back when I was a grown-up with a grown-up job and grown-up responsibilities, there would be days when all I wanted was to sit at my kitchen table and write something to post here. But that was a long time ago. Since then the dinosaurs have all died out, followed quickly and obediently by all the bloggers. I think the bloggers all have podcasts now. That reminds me, I’ve been working on a joke:

Q: What do you call a group of white men?

A: A podcast.

I’m not saying it’s a good joke, but then I’m not a comedian.

What I am is a writer. For better or worse. That’s the thing I have to hold onto right now. I’m in one of those post-grad school type slumps. The freelance gig that was supposed to be paying my way right now turned to vapor, so I’ve been having to look for work while simultaneously trying to figure out my next step in life and as a writer.

None of that is terrible on its own, but I’m no longer in my 20s and going through a transitional life period is far less charming when you’re old enough to have gray hair peppering the stubble along your jaw.

But I’m diligent and I know that one of my super powers in this life is the ability to grind it out harder and for longer than is really even reasonable. It’s how I once ended up running an accounting department without ever having been trained as an accountant. It’s why I have an MFA now after years and so many rejections. It’s why I still go running, even though I am literally the slowest and silliest runner anyone has ever even seen. People who drive past while I am running probably DO consider me a comedian.

For Christmas I received as a gift Rachel Aust’s new book called Less: a visual guide to minimalism. I am a big fan of hers and while so far nothing in the book is really new, it is a beautiful book and it has reminded me that back in 2012 I committed myself to living a life like the one the book describes. A life with less crap in it. I committed to owning less and to carrying around less baggage. I committed to a life where I try to do my best, every day, every time, every chance I get, and in so doing am relieved of the existential dread that comes from living poorly. I’d rather be poor than live poorly.

And let me tell you, it has at least paid dividends in this regard: I certainly am poor.

I also fail at that whole thing quite a lot. Like alotalot.

I’m telling you all of this not because I think you’ll find it interesting - “you” don’t even exists, no one does or has ever read this blog - I’m telling you this because today could have been a shitty day and last week could have been a shitty week. And this whole life right now could just be a shitty transitional period. But sitting here and writing it all out helps remind me that today was not really a shitty day, it just wasn’t an ideal one. That’s not the same thing.

What today is, is my life. It has not been a life well planned, but thus far it has been a life pretty well lived. So I’ve got that going for me.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m the last unembarrassed blogger walking the Earth, but then I realize it’s because I can’t do THIS on Twitter and it would make a really boring podcast and I’m not funny-ha-ha enough to make this kind of thinking into a stand-up act, but what I can do is sit here and think everything out with this keyboard. I think you can think anything out with a good keyboard.

You know who didn’t have any good keyboards? Because they didn’t technically speaking have fingers or an alphabet? Dinosaurs. And they’re all dead now. And I’m still here. Writing. Because I can grind it out.

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Angry Johnny.

Just saw a trailer for one of those second tier cash-grab Harry Potter movies and are we still casting Johnny Depp in stuff??? I remember moving him to the persona non grata column like two years ago, the way we all knew we would have to one day. It's like how Mel Gibson movies are somehow still on cable. Admittedly I don't pay much attention to these things, but I'm very confused. I'm going to go ahead and not see that movie just like I was going to not see it in the first place.


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7 1/2 Minutes.

Today I ate all the brownies I made yesterday.

I’m not bragging.

I feel pretty bad about it, actually.

I think my pants are already tighter.

I did other stuff today too, mostly job hunt stuff, but all of that was pretty boring compared to the brownie thing.

Last night I talked to one of my brothers on the phone and I said that right now while I am looking for a stable work, I am in a “low power mode” I said, “like when you go to sleep for deep space travel” I don’t think I had quite realized that that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve been running and I found some free weights that I use while I’m watching TV, but one is a 5 pound weight and one is a 10 pound weight, so I have to switch arms after each set, so that’s weird. I’ve been waking up with sore and floppy arms though, so that’s a good sign.

It feels right now like I am in a suspended animation. That’s probably okay. I’m certainly not complaining, I just need to get to whatever the next part of life is. This is like when you have HBO and in between the movies have like seven and a half minutes of stuff you don’t care about, but you know they need that time to line up their schedule properly? Well right now I am living inside that 7 ½ minutes.

It’s boring, but we have brownies here, so I’ll live.

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Making Brownies.

Today I made brownies. I do not know when I last made brownies. I think I’m kind of bored. And cheap. And like small projects. Lately I have been thinking about making breakfast as a little project. I get set out all the things I need: mug for coffee, mug to scramble eggs, tiny frying pan, etc. I like steps and I like to clean as I go, and I like to be able to sit down with my eggs and coffee and say, “PROJECT COMPLETE!”

Yeah, I don’t have enough to do right now.

I’ve been looking for work. Few things are as destructive to one’s sense of worth as looking for work. I’m on three different job sites and I am on them every day and I’ve only been at this for a few weeks (less than a month) and today I just kind of hit a wall. It is all the same today as it was yesterday! So I decided to make some brownies. I’ve been trying to eat better lately, but some days a grown ass man just wants to bake some brownies, you know?

I should be writing more than I am (my NANOWRIMO is not going well, guys), but I’m still in that weird post-MFA funk. I feel like I’m still recharging my batteries, although I did finally get the proof for the book I made about my residency in Nebraska, so that's fun. I’m going through it now looking for problems/errors. I also created an actual book using letters my grandfather wrote during World War II. So I’m not doing nothing, but I don’t feel like I’m doing enough. That’s the story of my life though. I have felt this way as long as I can remember.

Anyway, I have to go take my brownies out of the oven. I just wrote this because I was standing here in the kitchen with my laptop open. TTFN.

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So It Goes.

Well, hi.

It has been quite a long time since this blog about writing has had any writing on it. So … yeah, sorry about that. But look, cut me a little slack! I have been very busy. I’ve spent the last two years in rainy Portland, Oregon getting an MFA degree. I have that degree now and have entered into what is generally referred to as the post-grad blues.

Many of you have likely experienced this; it comes after any graduation when the deadlines and classes and requirements all fall away and you are left suddenly alone. Imagine walking through a bustling desert city and enjoying all of the clanging and noise, the buses thrumming by, the homeless people shouting for a buck, and then suddenly all of the buildings and streets are sucked up one by one into the sky. You watch a condo complex shoot up into the clouds. The lamp posts jiggle themselves loose from the sidewalks and blast off. Then the sidewalks themselves lift up like packing tape being peeled off a box. Then before you know it, you are standing there alone in the desert in a gloomy dusk. Where once there was the sizzle and noise of life all around, now there is just you and the weird heavy quiet of an empty world.

That’s kind of what I feel like right now. That’s the post-grad blues.

Now I am in a better position than most. I’ve lived enough weird lives, started and ended enough life chapters, that I knew this was coming. I saved as much money as I could (not a lot, but enough for a while), and set myself some vague but reliable plans.

So it was that a couple weeks ago I left pretty, friendly Portland. I filled my little car with the few things that survived my most recent minimalist purge, I put my cat in her carrier, and I headed south. If you scroll down to the various pictures I’ve posted, you’ll be able to track the trip so far. I’ll go into all that in detail some other time. The gist of it though is that I got to road trip my way down Oregon and California. I got to see old friends and I got to stick my feet again in the blue Pacific Ocean (the best of the oceans, in my humble opinion).

I made my way eventually to bright and sunny Tucson, Arizona, where I am now as I write this. I have family here and I’ve always liked Tucson. A funny thing happened when I got here though. I was looking into teaching (I’m desperate to get back into the classroom) and accidentally stumbled across a job posting at the local community college. It is a quasi-administration job focused on student retention. Basically it is job focused on helping students on the edge stay in college. I want this job. I have experience with these sorts of students (I used to be such a student) and I have a lot of administrative and management experience from my previous life as a grown-up in the private sector. I applied two days ago and the listing closed shortly thereafter. I don’t know how realistic it is to think I’ll get an interview, much less get hired, but the simple act of applying opened me up to that fantasy land of imagining, “Well what if I did get the job? Could I really make a life here? HERE? In Arizona? A RED STATE?”


I have been letting myself play in that mental place. The what-would-I-do_if-I-lived-here space. This has prompted some soul searching on my part about what I really want out of this life moving forward. I’ve been making a list of goals (I love me a good list!) and also a list of what in the hell I would actually do out here in this desert if this became my home. After all, aside from some family, I know NO ONE in the entire state. So I’ve been making a list of the things I would like to do that I’ve just never had time for before. I want to learn to speak Spanish, I want to take a photography class so that I can learn how to use this damn heavy camera I’ve been lugging around for years, I want to take a drawing class because I have a short story I want to illustrate, I’ve always wanted to get back into theatre and Tucson might be a small enough city where I could do that, and I want to take one of those work-out classes where you have to drag chains around for no reason and flip over big tractor tires. Is that called crossfit??? I’m making a note on my list right now: find out what that tire flipping thing is called.

I’ve also priced some apartments online, just for fun. The great thing about these small cities in America is that the cost of living is crazy low. I can find studio apartments here in the $400-$500 range. Can you EVEN BELIEVE that?! The place I really want is downtown though and more like $800, a boy can dream after all.

My mental and emotional project this week seems to have become: making a good faith effort toward building that life. I’m sending out some resumes and writing up some cover letters (did you know BTW that the trend now is to remove the ‘Objective’ portion of your resume because your cover letter is now supposed to be legit and so should cover what used to be stated in the Objective? Gone are the days when your cover letter could be a templated piece of trash. When did that happen? Who is in charge of these things? Who knows? So it goes.

My original plan had been to spend a little time here in this prickly saguaro city and then to move on. To head east and north up through this wide and too-big country to the little state of Connecticut where I have some family and a place to stay. It’s been my intention to spend some time with two of my nieces (who I seldom get to see) and to bundle and sweater my way through a New England winter. That is still my plan, but on the off chance I do get offered that job here, then I may stay here. Who knows? So it goes.

Before I left Portland I had talks with the friends I’d made up there. Talks about possibilities and futures and options. Most of them were younger than me and so were still experiencing options and futures and possibilities the way one does in their twenties or even early thirties. And good for them, I’ve been there and enjoyed having the whole of the world available to me. The view is a little different when you’re later on in your thirties, as I am. 40 is far far closer for me than 20 and I having living memories of my father’s 40th birthday and that haunts me a little. I don’t regret the life I’ve lived; my life has actually been pretty fantastic so far! I do however worry sometimes that it is ultimately inconsequential. I’m not sure what to do with that feeling. I’m not sure what to make of it. My life doesn’t suddenly become more consequential if I have a monthly paycheck and a toaster oven, but somehow, for some reason, we kind of act like it does.


Or maybe I’m just projecting my own insecurities onto society at large. My last shrink in Portland said that I used to do that. For instance, she said that I don’t actually have body dysmorphia, I just have a really poor opinion of what I think other people see me (it turns out you can’t get any of the good drugs for that, BTW). Similarly, you probably couldn’t give a shit less that I’m pushing 40 and don’t even own a toaster oven, but when I think about you thinking about me, I feel like that I look like a failure to you.

But I have an ace up my sleeve with regard to this problem! You see, it has been so long since I have given this blog any attention that y’all have stopped reading it. That means that these are all confessions I am making to no one! Those are the best kinds of confessions. This is the reason that I believe the Catholic Church will ultimately choose to replace priests with those menu kiosks McDonald’s uses now; it is just way less hassle and the kiosk can listen to you, assign you some Hail Marys, and then immediately wipe its memory banks of everything you said. That’s pretty much what this blog post is for me right now.

Obviously I have some time right now in my life, so you can expect me to be posting here more often in the days and weeks and months to come. It is important for me to begin developing a new writing practice, one that is more like the way I used to write before all the school, before all the degrees and deadlines. That’s how this blog started about a million years ago and for now I think I need to return to that.

I’ll keep you posted here on my travels and various adventures. I’m nearly done with another weird ass book project, I’ll tell you more about that soon. I will also let you know when I figure out what that tire-flipping thing is called.

TTFN


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Bad Bots.

Yes, I know. I have fallen behind on my daily Vignette City posts and all of the Russian hacking bots that read my blog are very upset. I know this because they keep sending me emails about checking my credit score, refinancing my mortgage, or wanting to meet for coffee and viruses.

So listen Russian Hacking Bots, I am in GRAD SCHOOL and so obviously very busy and simultaneously completely unimportant.

But I will get caught up this weekend. I totally swear.

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Saturday Night is Alright.

I have not actually written much of anything since the election. Not just on this little blog, but at all. My higher brain functions have been doing other things; trying to solve social and electoral problems. Also, the new Gilmore Girls came out and that ate two days of my life.

So tonight, after spending several days on a research project for class, I went and bought the cheapest pizza I could find, the cheapest red wine I could find, and now I’m going to find the longest Pixies playlist that Youtube has on offer and I’m going to sit down and try to write.

It won’t be good, but it will be writing. I have never been able to successfully meditate, but the closest to any zen that I have ever gotten is when I’m tapping out words on a keyboard, so I am going to try that for a little while. That’s what Saturday nights are for, right?

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NANOWRIMO!

I have not made a big deal about it because I have not decided yet if I am all-in, but I have quietly been working on a NANOWRIMO novel (failing at Nano is just what I do in November, you know?).

My current word-could is: 5,165

That puts me 164 words ahead (for the day), and I hope to write some more tonight.

I will post some snippets from it on here once I figure out if I’m serious about it or not.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

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What to do with a one-act play about Hitler.

A couple weeks ago I spent an entire day gathering up all of the various pieces of short writing that I have (two lines long all the way up to 30 pages long) and sat myself down and started submitting it out. This is something I try to do every six months or so. I was not able to do it early this year because life just got so chaotic and busy. It was starting to bother me though that I had not published anything since the end of 2015 and if I now that I have started this MFA program, I can not reasonably go around bitching about wanting to publish “for real” (ie: a serious work with a serious publisher, and preferably a novel) if I do not have my nose pressed against that old grindstone. So I submitted out about 40 pieces total (stories and poems) and now they are floating out there in the ether.

I’m making it sound easy, but it really is an endeavour. I like to go to the Poets & Writers database of lit journals. If I have pieces that I already think would appeal to particular journals, then I get those out of the way first. Then I - sort of randomly - pick out a punch of lit journals and learn about them and read some of their old stuff and then read ALL of their submissions guidelines (this is one of the most tedious ways to spend one’s freetime) and then if everything looks good, I submit.

As of this morning here are my stats:

I’ve had 2 pieces of fiction accepted for publication.

4 pieces of fiction and 5 poems rejected.

There are 36 other pieces still floating out there.

Believe it or not, that is not bad. That is actually pretty fantastic and I am very happy so far.

Sometimes it can take months to hear back from a magazine or journal, assuming your hear back at all, many places just never respond, that’s why I wait about 6 months before doing a big push to get stuff out there. One of the more prestigious locally published Los Angeles journals (which still required paper submissions) has never gotten back to me at all and I submitted to them in 2014.

Once I get a few more rejections in, I will go resubmit that stuff out again. I also have about two dozen more pieces that I did not submit last time because I just couldn’t find a good place for them (For instance: I have a one-act play about Hitler. You know how hard it is to find a place that will even consider a one-act play about Hitler?)

Doing all of this stuff is a little stressful because it means that the writer is going through every day always knowing that at any moment a new rejection email can come in (On Tuesday I got two completely separate rejections within hours). That, however, is the life.

I often wonder if any of this means anything. Unless I’m getting published in The Paris Review, does it make any difference? I don’t know. And here’s the thing - which I have always suspected, but since starting this MFA program feel truly confident about - no one else knows either. There is no career path for a writer and no prescribed guideline.

I guess the best shot any of us have is to do the best work we can and then try to get it out there into the cold and cruel world. Don’t take the rejection that hard, accept that it is part of the process, and keep going.

There are two other new and interesting things I have been working on:

I got in touch with a small press I have always liked that is down in LA and asked how their submissions works, hoping to pitch them the book I am working on as part of that artist-in-residence thing I did with the San GAbriel National MOnument. Well I was able to get the first half of it into their hot little hands. I doubt that anything will come of it because its not quite their jam, but still, they’re reading it. That in and of itself is cool. I have never had the courage to do that sort of thing before.

Long have I wanted to play around with some of the print-on-demand self-publishers set up to work with Amazon, so I took a poetry chapbook I had sitting around (about 30 pages long) and went over to the PSU library (because I no longer have a PC) and set it up using a company called Blurb. The layout was incredibly frustrating to learn, but will likely be easier in the future since I have kind of learned it now. Through that company I have ordered a (hopefully) real-looking version of the book (I made a cover and everything!) and it should be here this week. If it looks good enough and I’m happy with it, I can get it set up to sell on Amazon. How cool is that?? Now, obviously no one is going to buy the thing because I am a TERRIBLE poet, but still it would be pretty cool.

So that I what I have been doing. In addition to, you know, all the work that goes into earning an MFA degree while also looking for a job and also trying to write a Nanowrimo novel.

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Manifesto.

James Bezerra’s

Writing Manifesto

Calm down,

no one cares about your masterpiece until you’ve written it. (1)

If you have a story to tell,

determine the form which is most advantageous for that story. (2)

Read everything ever written in that form;

learn to breathe that form. (3)

Now write

until it is written. (4)

If you have no story to tell,

stop wasting everyone’s time. (5)

Despite themselves,

all people enjoy the occasional use of the word ‘fuck’, (6)

learn to use it sparingly and effectively.

Also, do this with all the other words too. (7)

If ever in doubt,

sexy is always better than not. (8)

Always know more than your reader

and always tell them you know more than them. (9)

Understand that love and fear are basically the same thing, and

that fundamentally those are the only things. (10)

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(1)

Most of the writers you meet don’t write. Not really. Most of the writers you meet are low-rent philosophers, aspirational authors, deeply hopeful searchers, or lying. This explains the growing prevalence of theory-fictions, of writers writing novels about writers writing novels, of the reduction of the Humanities to relativistic pseudo-sciences. Having an idea is not the same as successfully birthing that idea into a piece of writing. The idea is not the thing. Writers, to be writers, have to make the thing.

(2)

If you are packing for a ‘round-the-world cruise and you would like to take your pet dolphin with you, it would be wise to have a vaguely dolphin-shaped suitcase in which to put him. A smaller suitcase is no good because it isn’t big enough to hold him. A too-large suitcase is no good either; how would you move it? Consider the weight of the water in addition to the weight of the dolphin. Once on the cruise ship, you can put the dolphin in the wave pool, so all you need is a tool to get the job done. This is not a decision that is ideological. It is a practical decision. As a responsible dolphin-owner, you should be familiar with many different types and kinds and shapes of dolphin-transportation-suitcases, so that you can choose the best one for any of your dolphin transport needs. This is also true of the form and structure of a piece of writing.

(3)

There are many things I like about running, chief among them is the fact it is simple. Own good shoes and possess the will to go out and run. That’s about all there is to it. One need not study Usain Bolt to improve as a runner; because none of us will ever be Usain Bolt. This philosophy does not, however, hold true of the structural engineers who build bridges. We ask those engineers to know everything there is to know about bridges. We ask that they have studied bridges: big bridges, little bridges, bridges made of steel and bridges made of stone, good bridges and failed bridges. We ask our bridge builders to know more about bridges than we do. We ask a lot of them. While there are some other similarities between writing and running, in this regard, writers are engineers.

(4)

There is no easy way to break this to you: the only way to write a book is to write it. It will involve many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many hours of your life spent sitting still and hallucinating into a keyboard and likely no one will ever even notice or care. You may spend years of your life writing it and a quick reader will read it in a day, shrug, and go microwave a pizza. No writer, no matter how profound, will ever stop the Earth from turning. Despite these things, there is no other way to write.

(5)

Writers descent from shaman and fireside story tellers. The written word is an extension of the spoken one. Storytellers serve a social function; we have a job, a duty, an obligation. Writing - good writing - is not only self expression, it does something. It is something, if it isn’t then it's nothing.

(6)

Believe it or not, not everyone says the word “fuck”. My grandmother abhorred it. But she did like George Carlin and sometimes he said it. Be it naughty, or offensive, or even a little mean, we all sometimes like to have our boundaries pushed. Also, “fuck” is a versatile word.

(7)

If you ever get the chance to stand very close to a Jackson Pollock painting - so close that it makes the security guard in the gallery a little nervous - you will begin to notice that it is not quite as much of a mess as it initially seemed. There is control in it, there is even order to the composition, though it is a Big Bang kind of exploding order like the explosion one can get by shaping a plastic explosive before detonating it. The energy that created a Pollock painting is controlled, effective, and even - when you really look at it - sparing. Write like that.

(8)

“Sexy” is a transmutable word. There can be sexy in the grotesque, in the violent, in the well-crafted sentence, in a good line of description, in a well-rendered tragedy. Sexy is that which makes a thing attractive to us. Often that attraction lurks somewhere below what we say or do or understand. There is an animal instinct within us that determines what is sexy and the writer must try to access that.

(9)

The reader has to make an investment of time (and therefore of a quantity of their own life) in you, the writer. It is your job to be good enough not to waste their time (and therefore their life). The reader likes to know that you are not going to screw them over on their investment. The reader likes to be able to believe in you. The reader wants to believe in you. The reader should be able to read you and stand confident in you. Your writing should allow the reader to believe in you.

(10)

When boiled down to their essential elements, most emotions are only either love or fear. Though somewhat different, these both can strain the knotted muscle of our heart. Both make us sweat and dilate our pupils. Nearly all things can be reduced to either love or fear and the writer must know that and must be able to control those things and use that knowledge as a tool. Manipulative as it may be, it is only this way that the writer can cross the gulf and reach out to the reader.

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