Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

It’s a good Sunday evening to sit in front of the computer and say howdy or doody to the couch. I suppose I’ve been falling ever deeper into the crevices here, staring at the TV and watching the dog try and eat everything in sight. For that very reason, I suppose I’m feeling the burn for having spent the last two days exercising (if incredibly small in scope) by throwing a baseball around and hitting some fly balls. The running is new too.

It’s definitely spring time though and my body is going to be getting a nice little wake up call in the next few days as I start trying to squeeze out the most from six months of sitting on my arse, watching that lovely television.  Long story short – I’m sore. All sorts of muscles are in oh so many stages of disarray. Which brings me to some story action tonight. This an exercise from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. Asks for a three page monologue that tells a story; I got carried away.

Jeremy licked his lips and smoothed his overabundant eyebrows carefully. “You know it was a mistake. I’ve been protecting you for years. Why would I give it up now?”

He wondered that very same thing himself. The day had begun like any other Tuesday – stark, rainy, and much too early. His morning rituals were completed in much the same manner, all speed and efficiency, no pomp. Wake up, in the shower, sit up, push up, food down, shoes on, out the door. None of the pristine walls in his studio apartment, nor the carefully brushed furniture, were a hair out of place when he left. Everything was normal.

“You don’t understand. It was a complete mistake. I’ve never intentionally hurt you before. Just hear me out.” And yet here he was, surrounded physically and emotionally by a single small woman. Ann was no ordinary woman, of course. Their relationship took on so many dimensions he wished he would have stayed with physics in college, if only for the nerdy metaphors. In the ten by ten locked office space in the back of the Ikea where she worked though, there was only one dimension he need concern himself with. The flat, unhinged snarl looking him directly in the face.

“Okay. Here’s how it went. You know I’m very careful about these things. I woke up and everything was normal. I showered and ate, the usual deal. Then I left. It was a little early. I don’t know how I managed it. I’m never early, but today I was. When I got outside to the bus stop, I had fifteen minutes to wait. I didn’t even realize until I was there for three minutes and was still waiting.”

At this point, Jeremy was quivering. His suit, freshly pressed every morning, began to wrinkle and expand as he fidgeted about. Sweat from his brow greased both palms as he wiped repeatedly, subsequently finding its way to his pants. His hair, normally slick and hard, a corporate helmet, unruffled by the wind born exhaust, humid alleyways, or inconsiderate fellow sidewalkers rejected any attempt to remain under control. Already the brilliantine he used oozed down his neck and onto his ears. Only the constant swiping at his forehead kept it from his eyes.

He sighed shakily and continued, “So I decided to use the extra time and get my coffee earlier than normal. I didn’t want to stand in the cold. Walking is good for me. The doctor told me if I walk three miles a day, I could lose twenty five pounds. So I walked to Starbucks. The walk was actually rather nice. I got to Starbucks and ordered the mocha I always get, as many shots, that is – three, as I always get. I’d never been to this one though. You would think, because it’s only ten minutes from my place, I would. Usually I go to the one across from the office before I head in. It’s quicker and easier, and the girls all know me….yes, yes of course. I’ll go on.”

 

The rigid backed Granas chair he sat in, probably assembled by some lazy college student on a break looking for a place to sit, creaked under his weight as he shifted about. The walls, all blue and yellow, covered with service plaques and permits blazed around him, pushing in and squeezing more and more sweat from the various pores of his body. Ann’s lithe frame, perfectly shaped and constantly attended to, now dressed in the tropical wool suit of a floor manager, remained standing still, a hungry lioness ready to pounce.

 

“So, the girl at this Starbucks, where I’ve never been. She messed up my coffee. I can’t change my order like that. It just isn’t right. It messes up the whole day. So, I told her I’d wait for another. That’s when I missed the bus. She was just giving it to me when the bus pulled away and I wasn’t by any means going to run after it. I will tell you, though. I was quite upset. I have never been late for work, and I was not going to start today. Of course I called a cab. I did not however foresee the pileup on the freeway. Yes, you saw it. We were stuck in it for at least an hour. The driver was incredibly nice though. He even stopped the meter. Saved me some money.” What Jeremy neglected to share was that he had railed at the poor man for at least half of their time in the car to find a way around, and that the only reason the man had stopped the meter was to attempt and calm Jeremy down. In fact, Jeremy had failed to pay any of the fare at all on his way out of the car opting quite angrily to walk the rest of the way, directly off the freeway.

“When he finally let me off downtown I was more than a little upset. You know how I cannot stand to be thrown from my schedule. It’s a shame, really. If none of this had happened, I wouldn’t have needed to make a complaint to the transit authority. I really had no choice. Regardless of my doctor’s orders, I wasn’t about to walk any further, so I stopped to wait for the bus. It came alright. Drove right on past me. It was then I realized I left my phone at home too.

“The transit authority didn’t help one bit. I couldn’t very well go to work. I was unprepared, and couldn’t count on just any bus to stop. I marched in there and asked them as best I could what I should do. I was absolutely calm with the clerk. Those accusations are ridiculous.” Anything but calm, Jeremy’s visit had left the poor clerk in all but a body cast. The bruises on his knuckles still showed after three days.

The tinge of blood in his eye, and the slight incline of his lip signaled Jeremy’s absolute conviction that he hadn’t wronged Ann. “And so the bloody ridiculous police locked me away for three days. I can tell you now. It was such sweet relief to see your gorgeous face with the bail money. And before you even say it, I had no choice. They were already on to me. Question after question. I had no choice. They knew about Jack. I can tell. It’s amazing, but they knew. It was in his eyes. Absolutely accidental. And on top of that, they already knew. So, if you think about it really, it wasn’t my fault at all.”

Smugly and much more calmly than anything he had done in her presence, Jeremy looked Ann in the eye and shrugged. She shot once, quickly and directly between the eyes, through the puddle of brilliantine and sweat.

Freelance Lifestyle, Observations and Thoughts

Pop culture has been around for a few decades. It couldn’t truly exist until the technology was developed that would make possible the dissemination of so many different forms of media in such a short period of time to so many people. Radio and film kicked the whole thing off and now here we are, a hundred years later watching as the industry grows ever larger and beyond the scope of sympathetic definition.

It’s a beast, a monstrous, mechanical beast. But, like any beast that humanity doesn’t understand, it will likely soon be taken down. This isn’t so much idle prognostication though. It’s already happening. Pop culture is evolving quickly and it’s because, once again, of technology.

Over the years, things change in the world. Pop culture adapts to the mindset of the culture it targets and while it may seem like the industries are setting the agenda, more often than not, major companies scramble to and fro trying to put together the next big craze based on what the people want.

What happens, is one company will take a calculated risk, releasing something that no one thought would be successful; something like comic books in the 30s or video games in the 90s. Today, it’s hard to think of comic books as ever having not been a major force in pop media. But, in the 1930s, when the kids behind Superman were first publishing their bravado and explosions of pop story telling, a lot of people were skeptical. It didn’t matter though. The kids loved comic books and soon the industry was booming and dozens of books were released every week.

You can look at reality television in today’s market. The first network reality TV show was Survivor. With monumental ratings, every other station followed suit. It’s how the industry works. One company takes a gamble and the rest wait to see what happens. When that gamble pays off, they all jump in head first. If it fails, they point and laugh as though they wouldn’t have followed suit.

Which makes today’s developments in pop culture all the more intriguing. Not only is it much more rare for the industry to properly read the consumers these days, anomalies of popularity arise all the time. And it’s because companies can no longer market their goods to the entire population and hope for good numbers. Today’s pop culture is no longer truly “pop culture” in the sense that everything is broken down.

Beyond the presence of a dozen different demographics that no one truly understands, there is the internet, and this is the crux of my point. The internet has redefined how pop culture exists and what is defined as truly popular and important in today’s media. There are no companies online telling people what to like and what not to like. Instead, it is the people online, sorting through millions of videos, songs, books, and movie trailers to decide what they want to watch or listen to.

Websites like Youtube have become so prevalent in the spread of the next big thing and the 15 seconds of fame (or less these days) that certain video creators have actually found honest celebrity offline as well. The internet is no longer a giant encyclopedia to which school age children turn for homework advice and middle age men turn to for pornography. It’s the world’s largest forum for the free spread of ideas and new media and that power has started to make the internet a bigger force than television or radio. Already, you see more “next big thing” bands come from the bowls of Myspace and Facebook buzz instead of MTV. MTV rarely bothers to play music anymore, let alone participate in the dialogue over what is good and what is bad.

So, the people are in control of their media then, yes? If only that were the case, the power these companies wield over us could finally start to diminish. Rather, the companies are finding themselves forced to rethink their entire approach to marketing. Because of the sheer volume of new ideas presented on Youtube and the like, the ones that sink in have to be truly original and exciting. No one wants to see the same old schlock online that they see on TV. They don’t have to. There are thousands of genius videos that go beyond the schlock.

So, it is that everyone from car companies to political figures are taking their messages to the internet and trying new and exciting things to stimulate the quarter second attention spans of so many of today’s youth. The end result is a society that relies on brilliant new ideas that can be produced en masse, hundreds at a time, to keep everyone happy. The move to force creativity and intelligent thought out of today’s artists and media executives is amazing, but the problem with that creativity is that it quickly turns to gimmickry. Everything is now a gimmick instead of a progression, and gimmicks are easily mimed, which only leads us down the same path we’ve been down a thousand times before; that of waiting to see what the next big thing will be.

Cool Stuff, Uncategorized

The video gaming industry has been around for only a short while in the scheme of things. First arriving in the midst of the 1970s when the computer age was just around the corner and not really finding a grip until the mid 1980s when Nintendo broke through the wall that was consumer trust, at home video gaming was for a long time a novelty. It was a really expensive toy with a limited consumer base and limited technical applications.

It’s been a long time since those simple days of 8-bit turtle stomping and mushroom consumption. And in those days, the industry has exploded. Today, video gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry with as many games released every month as were released in certain years a couple of decades ago. But, what does it mean to the entertainment industry at large. Video gaming is no longer the fringe industry that it once was. It stopped being so when the major electronic and software giants like Sony and Microsoft jumped on board and started mass producing.

So, what does that leave us then? It leaves us a burgeoning mega-industry that is trying with every new generation and every new piece of software to outdo itself in all the things that big business deems most important – numbers. Every new game and every new console is bigger and more powerful than the last, with more incredibly graphics, more intense soundtracks, and more encompassing worlds.

Those are the ideas that Sony and Microsoft like to throw around, trying to wow their consumers with the biggest and best output from their products. But, after a generation later we see something completely different develop. Nintendo changed its corporate strategy and decided that innovation was infinitely more viable than power and strength. It’s like the Tortoise and the Hare, wherein the Hare is an overpowered, supercharged race car, and the Tortoise is a quaint family vehicle with plenty of space and comfort, both competing for best new vehicle in Family Circus. What Nintendo did right was read its audience.

Sony and Microsoft have only been looking at the industry in the sectors in which it is evolving, the older demographics, 20 and 30 something males.  However, the industry was not built on that demographic, and Nintendo did not become what it is today by catering to older, technology hungry men. What Nintendo did was innovate and offer new technology that wowed kids of all ages and adults alike. And their new machines, the Wii and DS both return to this mentality, abandoning the concept of trying to “look cooler” and “more powerful” than the other guys.

It’s about making a product that parents will see and think, “oh cool” and buy for their children. The Nintendo Wii has become something of a cultural phenomenon not because it’s the best console around, but because it’s the most inclusive console around. Kids want it because it’s the cool new toy. Parents want it because they know they have to get their kids a game console and it happens to get them up and exercising. Even the 20 and 30 something crowd likes it, because it’s made by Nintendo and it’s the next big thing.

That kind of thinking is winning the race in sales, and yet the industry is still a monstrous pit of money, a free for all for everyone who has the resources to sink into it. Sony and Microsoft will make do in the long run, but they will need to alter their strategies.

In Japan, the gaming industry has developed in a rather different direction. It’s always been about diversification and crossover success. The reason Sony succeeded so well was not because it was the better console or more powerful, but because it was the more established brand name and was able to snag big name titles and innovative software. Microsoft never stood a chance in that market, and Nintendo only faltered for a short while.

Today’s generation is clearly going to Nintendo and it’s because of their innovation. Dance and music titles have always been big in Japan, along with interactive games. Nintendo has more or less cornered the market on all things interactive with their new consoles.

And as major franchises start to jump the Sony exclusivity ship and join forces with one thought lost Nintendo and new man on campus Microsoft, it’s looking more or more like the other major draw in Japanese gaming is up for grabs, that of licensing and crossover success. While film, music, and television crossover has long been a hit or miss (and very often only miss) concept in America, Japanese gamers have embraced franchises solely reliant on their cross-entertainment brethren.

Major pop stars pen songs for video games, sometimes even appearing as characters in games. Anime and television series are turned into long running franchises, and the movie industry often picks up video game franchises for its own new ideas.

Regardless of the turn in Japan, a major indicator of the future of home gaming ever since they invented it 30 years ago, video gaming is changing. For a while it was a race to see who could make the biggest and best. Now, people are changing their minds and hoping to find the most fun and creative games around. It looks like the next few years might be really good for Nintendo.

Observations and Thoughts

There are three categories of films from my childhood. There are those that I watched and loved, but probably will never watch again in adulthood, because I know how horrible they are and my childhood infatuation was born of my infatuation with something similar. Good examples include The Wizard, Rookie of the Year, and any of The Mighty Ducks trilogy. I have extremely fond memories of all these films, but I’m sure that sitting down to watch them now would result in a painful realization of just how bad an eight-year-old’s taste in film can be.

The second category is almost exactly the same thing, except these are films that I would gladly rewatch with age. They’re still horrible, but the campy, kitschy revelations of childhood return with much warmer nostalgic fanfare than other less enjoayable children’s flicks. I include the venerable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among others in this category.

But, it’s the third category I want to talk about today, that of the true children’s masterpieces, those few films that I watched over and over again in childhood and would gladly rewatch today, give to my children some day, and buy when released on DVD again. There were not many films that manage to live up to these standards, but the few that do tend to be universally acclaimed. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Princess Bride are all films I’ve been watching annually since I was a child and will continue to watch into old age. Disney had a decent corner on this market once upon a time.

Quality films of universally acclaimed value, good for children and adults alike are almost non-existent anymore in this hyper-targeted, marketing addicted society in which we live. Instead, film makers make films for adults or they make films for children, and the middle ground is largely filled with television and garbage.

There were very few if any failed attempts on their part, and if you ignore the slight lull in masterpiece production in the years of World War II and in the early 1980s, every animated feature Disney released was a gem. It was however, only a handful of films into the mass production era (starting in 1988, after which a new animated feature was released every 12-18 months) that the quality started to dip more and more towards the dangerously low level of output we’re greeted with today.

At the same time as Disney released its first truly mediocre animated features, Pixar was getting started by releasing masterpieces of their own. It was as if the torch of creativity had been passed from the hand drawn to computer generated ages. However, there was no reason for the change. Ironically, the quality of animation dived inversely to the technology of the age. For whatever reason, there was a sharp spike in animation of inferior artistic value during the 1990s, seemingly an attempt by studios to shake things up and modernize the classics and their aging formula.

Instead of merely shaking things up though, the new Disney animation looked merely cheap, and relied almost solely upon fart jokes and shallow characters. Hercules, a story that could easily have been an epic masterpiece had Disney put the full conviction into it that other ages old epics such as Aladdin and The Lion King (Hamlet) had received, was no better than a protracted television episode. Tarzan, Lilo and Stitch, and Treasure Planet were bad, and The Emperor’s New Groove was horrendous (so much so that I’d forgotten it existed until I started looking up the list of films).

At one time considered a canon of great films, Disney’s recent release list reads more like a trainwreck of creative failure, churning out clunkers like Brother Bear and Chicken Little. In the mid 90s, when the company started releasing sequels of its more popular films, no one batted an eye. They were of lesser quality, but still entertaining in a fashion. However, by the time 2000 rolled around, Disney was releasing more than a half dozen of the direct-to-DVD clunkers every year and with each new sequel, one more life long fan lost respect for the House of Mouse.

Today, years of poor decisions and mass production has led to the complete reformation of the studio. Pixar’s head animator, John Lasseter, the genius behind a decade of masterpieces in digital animation, has been placed in charge and the studio is finally looking to reopen its hand drawn studios and get back to the core of what made Disney the leading supplier of children’s entertainment in the last 70 years, good stories for all ages.

A year ago, this article would have been a plea for the folks at Disney to return to their roots and bring back the films that I so utterly fell in love with in my childhood. Today, I’m happy to say that I’d rather write about my hopes for the future instead. While Pixar has regaled us with enough quality films to keep the entire next generation occupied with nostalgic masterpieces in their adulthood, I’m still not convinced that Disney can fully recover from the poor decisions of the past decade.

And should I ever see or hear a hair of information about Chicken Little 2, I’ll forever swear off the possibility that Disney is worth any of my time or money.

Media Reviews, Observations and Thoughts

My friend librocrat put together this awesome little music video the other day and I thought I’d share it with my meager following of readers. It’s a good song and an awesome video. Here’s hoping 1/20/09 gets here a little faster.

Cool Stuff

It could just be me, and it might be a critical eye too fervently trained to pick apart the most basic miscues in Hollywood and the surrounding industries, but the horror film industry has hit something of a boon of late. It seems to come in waves. In the 1970s, it was exploitation, slasher flicks like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and going into the 80s it was the uber long franchise exploitation of that slasher formula in Friday The 13^th and Nightmare on Elm Street. Then there was a lull for a few years as audiences got bored with the same old movies.

Much like its oft resurrected villains, the horror genre always comes back though, and in the 1990s, it found its stride in the teen slasher genre, this time exploiting the exploding High School, College age teen drama with films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Fast forward a few years and once again the genre faltered. When you’ve seen one psychopathic, inhuman killer you’ve seen them all. And so, the next step was something much different, and much more disturbing, born of the proliferation of stylized violence in the films of Tarantino and the psychological mind screws of Asian horror.

Hollywood loves its psychopathic killers though, and so after a few years of remaking Japanese films and rewriting classic genres, the horror industry discovered something new – the torture subgenre.

It’s not new though. Films featuring sadistic violence and torture have been around for a while, but with nowhere near the following or financial backing of today’s Eli Roths. If you head back to the hey day of the 1970s exploitation films though and dig through those Cannibal and sexualized vampire films, you’ll find a huge array of scenes in which horrific, disturbing things are done to poor unsuspecting girls and young travelers.

What’s different about the Cannibal Holocaust’s of the film industry is that they were incredibly censored, buried and hardly watched by anyone, for foreseeable reasons. If one were to look up the top 10 torture scenes in film (and yes, there are a few lists if you look for them) you’ll find that almost all of them are in films made after 1994, with Pulp Fiction preceding most of them.

Tarantino’s famous leather-clad gimp scene started the whole flood and when film makers saw that they could make a movie with that kind of scene and make money, and win awards for it, the torture started popping up a lot more often. It’s a powerful storytelling device, if done properly. The kind of tension created by tying up the hero of a film and doing unspeakable things to them is two fold. It creates immediate drama, a situation that may or may not end in tragedy. Second, it creates the opportunity for revenge and exacting pain upon the perpetrators of previous torturous scenes.

It makes for good film. But, when the horror industry started drifting away from slasher flicks, a formula that’s fairly straight forward – psychopathic killer stalks and kills teen girls – and started introducing protracted, sadistic killers with ridiculous methods and disturbing, exploitative plots, things changed in horror.

You can take the effort and trace it to the Japanese roots from which it directly arrived, or you can look to childhood inspiration of the Tarantinos and Rob Zombies out there and the exploitation flicks of the 70s. Neither direction is entirely right, as the roots of the genre are a mix of just about everything. Today’s horror films are direct relations to the 70s exploitation flicks in style. Teens wandering a desert road on spring break, attacked and chased down by sadistic killers to commence in a painfully long, ever-tense sequence of events.

However, today’s victims are often not as innocent as they once were. The killers are still insane, and their motives skewed by that insanity, but film makers are finding more and more ways to imbue their motives with a sense of urgency and the exploitation of commonly ill-considered traits. Eli Roth’s Hostel, the most disturbing and gory horror film released in the past decade or so prey’s upon the hedonistic expectations of European backpackers.

Many might disregard the torture films of today as disturbing, self ingratiating visions from disturbed filmmakers, but they are something more entirely. Instead though, I think it’s a natural progression and exploration of genre methods that we’ve visited before, but never quite accepted. In a society that finds itself inundated with constant fear of bodily harm, ideological warfare, and an enemy intangible in almost every way, these films offer a very real, very physical release.

Looking at exactly how the torture is portrayed within the film is equally important. It isn’t merely a matter of capturing a few backpackers and removing fingers. These films are about figuring out why someone could be so disturbed and how anyone could survive such brutality. With that kind of terror and pain, what could possibly occur that could be any worse?

It’s the same argument that horror film popularity has been using for decades, and like it or not, war time and mass fear breeds artistic angst and disregard for decency. Horror films are a great example of that.

Media Reviews

I talked a couple of days ago about adding some of my creative projects here to share with the world, hopefully garner some comments and even more, hopefully garner some inspiration or motivation to finish projects and write some more (It’s really hard to find motivation when I’m typing dollar spot work all day to pay my bills). I’m gonna throw in some thoughts in separate posts as to the process of writing random genres and random styles. Why, you ask. Why not?

Without further ado though, here’s the first entry, a collage I wrote for a class a few years back. I liked writing this, mainly because there are absolutely no constraints and most everything makes sense (plus I can steal from other sources). By the way, everything here is from another source, all things are copyright of their respective sources, etc, etc,
blah, blah, blah.

Sixty-Seventh Street

Y not?

I was talking to my mom on the phone one day. She says to me: “I was watching National Geographic the other day. They had a special on amazing animal tales. A female white spotted bamboo shark at the Belle Isle Aquarium in Detroit surprised zookeepers by giving birth to two babies. Supposedly it was a virgin birth: She hadn’t been near a male for six years. Wouldn’t that be something?” I made a joke about Jesus. She got angry and told me to go to church.

Dreaming In Batman® Underoos

But the most beautiful thing about my Batcave is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over. For the time being, however, the silence is still with me. For hours I can stroll through my passages and hear nothing except the rustling of some little creature, which I immediately reduce to silence with a non-lethal tranquilizer dart, or the pattering of soil, which draws my attention to the need for repair; otherwise, all is still. The fragrance of Gotham Hills floats in; the place feels both warm and cool. Sometimes I lie down and roll about in the passages or slide down the Batpole with pure joy.

Saturday Afternoon on My Parents’ Tape Deck

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Like a Rolling Stone

Young people of every society are a problem to adults. In economically struggling communities, especially, it is common for the next generation to leave at the earliest opportunity. There is a standard call that resounds from New York or Los Angeles or Houston or Minneapolis. That call says “Come here. Make your mark here! The call does not reveal that the real chances for success in these areas rest on turning one’s back entirely on the values and relationships of the past.

“Don’t You Want To Join Us?” I Was Recently Asked By An Acquaintance When He Ran Across Me Alone After Midnight In A Coffeehouse That Was Already Almost deserted. “No, I don’t,” I said.

I really did want to, but Kafka sat on my shoulder whispering the whole time, “Don’t do it.”

Garden State

A great film. One scene in particular stands out, when he goes to a party with some old school friends and is given a tab of “X”. He sits in the middle of this empty couch while the speeded-up party action goes on around him. He only snaps out of his observational, elevated status when addressed directly, and when he feels all eyes are on him, sweating under the pressure to entertain, he’s forced to be funny.

My God Can Beat Up Your God

“I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get struck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation”… “I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality. Love from within is your deity, and you want no other.”

Life Sucks

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty five years and you pay it back and then one day you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then one day you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

NationalGeographic.com
Kafka Americana “Rob K’s Notebook” Jonathan Lethem
“Like a Rolling Stone” Bob Dylan
Franz Kafka
Garden State
Life of Pi Yann Martel
The Stranger Albert Camus

My Fiction

It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon today, not entirely unexpected, but at least a little bit of a perk for a day off that was going to be spent watching movies and baseball with a side of sitting around. A trip to a local park in the heart of Viewridge yielded an hour or so of embarassing Tennis, in which the net and fences recieved considerably more action than my dusty racket. Regardless, the outing was fun and the beginning of a long and hopefully productive spring and summer of athletic enjoyment (Pro #10 of Unemployment btw…check for tomorrow).

Regardless, the point is that I was having a great time enjoying the weather and the unexpected spring boon. I am, of course, back home in front of the computer and entirely exhausted now, after a rather long (yet amazing) evening last night which resulted in a night not quite as full in sleep as I’d like. I still hate how horrible the Mariners are doing (6 game losing streak – same old crappy team…people are getting canned soon) and I’m out of things to write about.

As for work, the life of the unemployed is as entertaining as ever. I’ve finally settled into a nice rhythm in which I write a decent amount every day, answer lots of emails, have enough work at most times to keep myself on track and am able to relax the rest of the day and enjoy my free time (and decent paychecks) as arrived, unless I’m incredibly lazy (see Con #10 of Unemployment).

Anyways, this was supposed to be an update on my progress, but Con 10 has been more prevalent this week than the rest; a nice side effect of being on vacation.

Observations and Thoughts

It’s been a long and tortured history I’ve had with the oft forgotten Major League Baseball team in the Northwest. Cut off from the rest of the nation by at least two states in any direction, the Seattle Mariners rarely get the coverage or recognition they deserve, or at least that’s what the hometown fans like to say over and over again.

This year wasn’t necessarily supposed to be a better year for the team. You can look at my past posts and see how much I approved of the team’s off season moves. They’re likely a bust once more, even if “King” Felix is finally ready to be the amazing pitcher he’s been touted as for the last four years. It doesn’t particularly matter. That’s 1 in 5 games, and if Weaver continues to throw a 15+ ERA, that’s another 1 in 5, and the two just off set each other.

So far, I’ve yet to be fully upset by the games so far. There have actually been a few sparkles and points of interest, in which the team has shown that it can be good. Felix Hernandez almost no-hit the Red Sox, Richie Sexson has hit a few home runs, Vidro actually gets a couple hits, and Beltre might finally be useful (if not great). Unfortunately, the rest is the damn same. The team isn’t producing runs, the bullpen is melting down, and the 30+ year old “new additions” to the starting rotation have more or less failed. Ramirez got a little lucky with the rain out in Boston.

And so, I’m looking at the losses, at the sub .300 batting averages (all but Ichiro and Johjima), and the painfully obvious fact that this team is not quite that good. We can look forward to at least one thing: the firing of Bill Bavasi. Opening Day, two weeks back, sitting in the midst of a chilly April afternoon and watching Felix Hernandez turn in a real gem, I was excited for them. And for 9 games, we were actually above .500, but with today’s completion of a sweep by Minnesota, we’re back under that oh so elusive halfway belt and in the territory we know so well.

Observations and Thoughts

Having just returned from vacation, I’m still stumbling along, trying to get any kind of inspiration or motivation worked up to do my work, let alone write on here on a regular basis again. So, I’m going to spend the next few days throwing out some stories and pictures I’ve accumulated of late. Honestly, I’m just hoping to kick myself in the rear and whip up some energy for getting work done. Inspiration is hard to find; let’s see if I can manufacture some.

That said, I have a pile of old stuff that I want to rework and look at and I don’t know where to start. I also have some projects I am interested in starting and have some outlines for. Oh, and some cool children’s stories that I’ve been poking around with for a little while.

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