PaulBlog

I’ve found three things today that were ironic, and that seemed worth at least a blog post.

A friend’s Facebook status announced an “offical” snow day, which was soon replaced with a spelling correction, and a begging for pardon for the aforementioned error.  It probably means that someone emailed him to inform him of the spelling error. So, on a snow day, he got schooled. Ironic.

A thread on TNC concerned itself with the relative beauty of Serena and Venus Williams, with consensus indicating that Venus might well be the less attractive sister. As she is the one named after the goddess of beauty, I declare irony.

After being online for far too long today, I sought out via Google what simple wisdoms I might find on Internet Addiction. I discovered this resource. Though I would not impugn their mission, I did find this sidebar ironic:

An Internet Addiction Recovery Blog??

So, which of these three AREN’T actually ironic?  Scroll down for answer…

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None, they’re all ironic.  Isn’t that ironic?

Imagine you and a friend are walking into a party. The host comes up, looks your friend over, and says “Oh my god, so glad you’re here! You look great! Everybody’s been looking forward to seeing you!”. The host then turns to you and says “Hi.”

That’s basically how Valentine’s Day can feel to me, as a single person. Nothing mean is ever said directly to single people on this day, which works out fine if you’re secure in yourself and happy with life. But to every searching single person, there is the implication that one is missing out, undesirable and possibly defective.

Are there any other celebrated days that exclude people? Well, yes, religious holidays, but yunno, that’s just heritage. And, uh, Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, but we’re honoring someone else’s sacrifice. And Thanksgiving, I’m sure Native Americans aren’t too big on that one. That and Columbus Day. And there’s Arbor Day, but there are lots of people who hate trees. So fine, most of our annual celebrations exclude somebody. But there’s something very cliquey and exclusive about celebrating relationships, when there are lots of people looking to get into that club.

I’ve been working an online dating site for a coupla months now. No success. My standards are high; I’ve given myself lots of space to look at a profile and say “Nah, not worth the time.” I’m not looking to date for the sake of dating. I’ve decided that I’m comfortable in my own skin, and can tolerate being alone, so anyone that I find will have to reach the threshold of “Fun to be with” and “A catch”. So that’s fine. The women I end up writing seem to have some standards of their own as well, though, unfortunately. All I can do is to keep in my mind that I’m a catch, and be that catch.

I got screwed up by a particular female attitude that was much more prevalent when I was growing up. They would see a confident male and they might say “He thinks he’s God’s Gift to women. Pfft.” Me, being an impressionable and sensitive male, took this to mean that women wanted humble guys, they didn’t want show-offs. So I humbled myself. I put women on the pedestal, but then it was too hard to reach them. Why would any woman want me around? I’m so inferior to them.

Ok, I have some sympathy for women here. They wanted to take the edge off of the egomaniacal assholes who weren’t living up to their own hype, or who were hiding behind bling. I get that. And I understand that it’s necessary for a woman to bring a big bag of skeptical to any cock-walk. That’s fine. But otherwise, I think I might have had something stolen from me, back when I took the demand for humility at face value. It’s clear to me now that I AM God’s Gift to women. I have to be. If I don’t bring value to her life, why would she be interested?

Confidence is currency. Many of you already know this, but it’s a revelation to me, way way late in the game. It’s so simple. “I’m worth it.” “Heh, you think you’re all that.” “I am, and you don’t know shit. Next.” That’s the whole game. You’re in charge of making your own stock rise. There’s nobody else that has that job.

And the job doesn’t stop when you leave the club. For God’s sake, if you only ever practice at the club, you’ll definitely look like you’re practicing. Do it to yourself all the time. Find that ego, and give it a big squeeze. Strut. Give your best bedroom eyes to yourself in the mirror. Go shopping, and only buy clothes that make you look fabulous. Many of us are looking for ways to self-criticize; I say it’s harder to self-aggrandize, and it’s better for you too.

So here’s my suggestion to the evil marketing conspiracy that promulgates the necessity of Valentine’s Day. You can expand your market to all the single people looking to be in the game. Two words – “Love Yourself”. Some of you are probably tittering a little bit out there, and it’s fine if at the end of the day, a happy ending is in your hands. But I’m talking about self-confidence, self-celebration. If you’re single, you have plans tonight. Do something that makes you uniquely you. Look your best. Go to the salon. Go to the gym. Buy yourself something – something that only you would buy for yourself. Read the Desiderata. Call up friends. Have a singles party, but no one is allowed to bitch about being single. Everyone is allowed to compliment each other, with abandon. And as you conclude your day, know that you are worth it to someone else somewhere. Don’t let that turn into a wish, keep it focused on you. You’re worth it.

You might read this sometime after Valentine’s Day. It’s not too late. Ask yourself out on a date. You might play hard to get, but keep the pressure on, you know you’ll cave.

From Improv Everywhere, their latest mission!

World Nude Day came and went.  Why do they have it on Feb 6th?  Horrible day to do anything nude, unless you’re a masochist.  Or unless you happen to live below the equator in New Zealand, which seems to be where the bulk of the video comes from.

NSFW!  But completely wholesome, somehow.

Nude Man Riding an Ostrich and other delights.  I’m linking and not embedding, for obvious reasons.

I vote that they have World Nude Day – Northern Hemisphere on August 6.

Cordially Invited

Things move far too fast for me to ever be a real journalist.  Well, yunno, if there was a real deadline I might move words a bit faster.  The Inauguration, from a news cycle perspective, is so completely last year.  It was covered.  But wait, I was there!  Hopefully, I have something unique to tell you about it.

I visited my old friend Lo in Arlington – drove there on Sunday night.  Her brother had scored tickets thru his congressman up in New York, but then decided that the trip and the event would be too intense and too unrewarding for the six-year-old that was to be in tow.  So, he FedEx’d the tix to my ex.  Many many thanks to you, bro.

I was sick.  A sort of sore-throat flu, achey and nasally raw.  It had started on Friday.  I did my best to slam it with fluids and pharma, and some additional rest on Monday.  I managed to shore up enough energy to tackle the event, but I was disappointed that I was not going to be partying in DC after the inauguration.  I made the best of it.

The city, as you know, was in full prep for the event, knowing that it was to expand by a few million people, population-wise.  It was super-smart for the organizers to shut the city down at the border, closing bridges and tunnels to car traffic, and forcing people onto public transport.  I have one shot in the video that I took where I’m on the metro, on a fully crowded car, heading over the train bridge next to the 14th Street bridge, where a caravan of 8 buses is heading into the city, parallel to us.  The name of the game was “How to Move 1.5 Million People Into One Central Location in a Short Period of Time.”  As far as I could tell, the planners were on their game.

My companion was fretting the whole way in – that’s what she does.  “We should have gotten up earlier.  We’re never getting in.”  was her mantra.   We stepped off the Metro into a massively crowded L’Enfant Station in DC, and shuffled slowly up stairs into morning sunlight, and attempted to figure out our path.  We were Silver Ticket holders (more about that in a bit), and we were able to find our line fairly quickly, thanks to a friendly guide.  Unfortunately, we found the middle of the line, and had to work our way down Independence Ave, directly away from the venue, to find the end of the line.  Lo’s mantra became quicker and more insistent.

We found the end of the line in front of a beautiful old Smithsonian building.  We got there at almost precisely 8 am, the same time that they were opening the gates on the mall.  The line had not yet moved, obviously, but as soon as 8 am dinged, the line began to move.  Quickly.  We knew the line was at least 10 blocks long, but after we had moved a city block in under ten minutes, we knew we were going to be fine.  I had to phrase it as a math problem to terminate Lo’s mantra.

We proceeded.  Just past the Museum of the American Indian was a large cache area, a big pool of people, waiting to step up.  After wading thru the pool we came to a long row of gates, probably 50 gates with four attendants at each, which is why they were able to process us thru so quickly.  The Silver Ticket area was probably the lowest security ticketed area, as it was west of the Reflecting Pool, separating us from the interior arena.  There were 240,000 total tickets, and I would have to guess that at least half were silver.  So we were in a big general section with about 120,000 people.  We were in before 9 am, so I would have to guess that they were able to process between 20,000 and 40,000 people per hour.  I have to give them props for that.

A guide to the ticketed arena

Also, it seemed that our section provided a sort of security buffer.  Our view of the Capitol building was still impossibly distant; there was no way to even make out individuals from that distance unless you had some sort of military grade binocs.  My point is, theoretically, this section did not necessarily need to be ticketed, cos it didn’t necessarily improve one’s ability to see anything.  But, as we were a secured crowd, we provided a human buffer in front of all unticketed, unsearched individuals that started in the section directly west of (behind) us.  There was nothing short of a missile that would have reached the dais from that point.

I hope my interest in this part of the event is not unseemly; it’s a unique and terrifying moment from a national security standpoint.  Beyond our fears for Barack, our entire Federal Government was on one stage at one time.  All living Presidents and Vice-Presidents, all the top Senators and Congressmen, the whole Cabinet, Oprah… what sort of chaos would we be in if something had happened?  I’m in awe of the assessments and wargaming that our National Security wonks had to suss out; DC was a giant theater with millions of audience members, thousands of performers and hundreds of leading roles.  They must have considered some pretty awful scenarios in their planning.

I was taking mental notes for this blog post, and I was beginning to realize that I was witnessing a logistically successful event that I would probably write about in glowing terms.  And so I have.  But the next day, I got to read about these guys.

It’s also worth noting how weird it was that the lowest level ticket was Silver.  Yunno, the old song about the Golden Ticket.  Well, a Silver Ticket must be just below that, right?  What’s worth more, silver or yellow?  Keep your blue ticket, I’VE got a silver ticket.

So, yes.  We were in.  We had a Jumbotron in close proximity, the Capitol looming large but still a distance away.  We chatted with our neighbors, watched the ‘tron as VIP attendees were videoed making their entrance.  I chain-sucked zinc cough drops, and we enjoyed cookies and orange slices.  It was cold, yes.  Layers is the way to go.  Occasionally I would do a little jumping dance to get new blood to flow to my feet again; this dance was apparently all the rage.  Don’t call me a trendsetter, though.

Our view

I discovered quickly that the sound system was shit.  Really.  Take note, festivities-planners.  Whoever was in charge of that debacle needs to be given a job in some other field.  Either that, or the budget for the sound system was short by about half.  There are ways to design a large-venue sound system to account for synchronization problems.  There are also ways to determine how many speaker cabs you’re gonna need to fill a certain area.  It was fortunate that there was closed captioning on the jumbotron, cos otherwise the speeches would have been unintelligible.

I’ll process the video for tomorrow, and you’ll get a sense of the festivities down on our part of the farm.  People had no problem expressing their feelings for various members of the outgoing administration; it made me wonder, though, if the crowds up close had the same vocal attitude.  Not that I think Cheney would have cared what we thought, but when he entered in the wheelchair, it was clear that there was no love lost.  The wheelchair itself helped further caricaturize Cheney; it at once evoked Mr. Potter, Dr. Strangelove, and Dr. Scott, with a little unmasked Darth Vader thrown in.  How unfortunate for him.

The crowd obviously went nuts whenever an Obama was on the screen.  From 11:30 on, all official cameras were trained on the ritualistic passage of each of the players.  There were lots of corridor shots, etc.  Well, you saw this part.  But it was fun to watch the crowd’s reactions to each icon as they took their places on the dais.

And so the ceremony started.  One neighbor of mine was facing me during the Rick Warren invocation.  I suddenly processed that he was in a posture of protest, facing away from the dais.  For me, the Warren nod was unfortunate, but I took it as just a ‘politics as usual’ moment.  This gentleman, however, was clearly deeply offended by Warren’s presence.  I considered joining him, but chose to be Switzerland, for a number of reasons too personal to really get into here.  I watched his facial expressions as he quietly noted the points of irony and hypocrisy in Rev. Warren’s invocation.  This became one of the most moving parts of the whole event for me.

It’s been noted that Noon is the moment that the transfer of power occurs, and not at the conclusion of the oath.  Biden was quickly sworn in at 11:57, and I was expecting Obama to follow.  There was that musical interlude, though, which took us past the noon hour.  Right at the moment when Itzhak and Yo-Yo struck up the band, which was pretty much noon, there was a sudden appearance of a flock of birds directly above the mall.  It was a beautifully timed and surreal appearance, as if the Earth itself was expressing relief at the passage of administrations.  Four dozen gulls swooped and circled in sync to the strings below.  It was a very high moment.

Then, boom.  The Oath was taken (such as it was), we saw the handshake, and the crowd went nuts again.  It was a great feeling to actually see this effort thru to fruition.  Right?  It’s about that moment.  Two million people standing for four hours in a cold crowded arena to be there for that exact moment.  And boom, boom, boom.  The 21 gun salute was fired from cannons – we could feel them in our feet, even from a half mile away.

I loved Obama’s speech, as much as I could follow it (the sound problems), but I cheered for the proclamations that I could understand.  I spent some of this time listening to the unique audio effect of Obama-voice bouncing off buildings, echoing and reverbing.  Barack knows how to work a PA, man.  Even with shitty, echoey audio, he still sounds awesome.

When the speech was completed, many in the crowd immediately went to depart.  Everything following Obama was anti-climactic, sadly.  We weren’t really sure if we should start to head out, so we waited things out.  Might have been an error.  Then again, I don’t think we would have gotten ahead of the crowd in any case.

As with all things, the exit strategy was poor.  To be fair, it’s much harder for event planners to plan for the mass disgorgement of the mall.  One just has to hope that people will use their common sense as they stumble and shuffle their way out of the arena.  However, nobody really had a sense of which exits (read: streets) would be best to use.  More signage, please, next time!  Or some sort of map, included on the website.

After climbing over a few barriers, we headed west on Independence Ave, seeking schools of fish to join up with  as we swam upstream.  The weird thing was, EVERYWHERE was upstream.  Eventually, we came to the intersection of Independence and 12th, where we experienced Human Gridlock.  An entire intersection filled with people, nobody moving cos everyone wanted to go in every direction.  Amazing, and slightly frightening.  In retrospect, it is a beautiful thing that there were no real incidents or arrests (so I’ve heard).  So, though it was utter chaos, it was a peaceful chaos.

Independence and 12th

We eventually escaped to Arlington on foot via the 14th St bridge, and down thru a park on the Virginia side of the Potomac.  I was sad that I was not attending some fabulous DC after-party (screw the balls, a bar or a house party would have filled the bill), but I was exhausted and numb and strung out on DayQuil.  We ate Thai, then napped for three hours.  Par-tay!

Still, I have confidence that I didn’t miss the best part of the day.

(photo credits to Lorraine Brasseur)

“Did you hear that?  That’s the sound of a stalk of celery snapping in a silent film.”

“The Noises Rest” from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

brought to you by You Look Nice Today.

I have this game I invented a while ago.  It involves coincidences.  You know how you might think of someone, and they call you two seconds later?  Or you think about a particular episode of Seinfeld, and they show it that night?  Or you can’t get a particular girl out of your mind, and you need to clear your head, so you decide to go on an exotic cruise that launches from Rio, and you fly down there, and you board the ship and get situated, and then head to the bar, and you order a shrimp cocktail, and a beautiful girl sits next to you, and SHE orders a shrimp cocktail, and you look up and you realize that this cruise was a pretty good idea?

OK, yes, she was supposed to be the femme fatale.  So cheezy, though.  But that’s my point – it’s NOT cheesy if it’s a true story.  It is cheesy if it’s a contrived Hollywood plot device.  In fiction, we can shrink and stretch the universe with our pen, and the against-all-odds coincidences happen as a matter of course.  Like the time I went to rescue a Princess in this giant space fortress halfway across the galaxy, and we almost hooked up, but then it turns out she’s my twin sister.  What are the odds?

Still, poetic coincidence is a very romantic notion, even if it has nothing to do with romance, in our traditional sense.  In my correctly-proportioned universe, even hearing a song lyric that answers a question that I’ve had in my head is a sign of the divine.  Or confirmation of the silliness of God.  One time I was driving thru a typical commercial area, strip malls and car dealerships and such, and I was listening to some old Andrews Sisters as I drove.  They were singing:

Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar (ai! ai!)

I looked to my right at that exact moment, and in a shopping plaza, there was a store I’d never noticed before – The Yankee Dollar.  Soooo weird.  This of course led to the thought that the Andrews Sisters were in that store in full island costume, performing that song for all the plastics-shoppers.

Anyway, I call this game Twins.  It describes that moment when your outer life reflects something in your inner life.  The inverse doesn’t count, obviously – we reflect on things we see outside ourselves all the time, as a matter of course.  It’s causal.  BUT, when we think a thought, and then it appears outside us completely independently… it’s not causal, but it’s fun to pretend that we’ve manifested our inner will on the universe.

OK, look, put down the funny farm net.  I know what the word ‘coincidence’ means.  But this has happened enough to me, in my life, for me to make a game of it.  Twins don’t have any sort of concrete meaning, other than reminding me that I’m alive.  If it makes me happy, or makes me feel like I’ve experienced something special, then that’s enough, right?  Most of all, it makes a great story.

Like the time that I thought to myself, “Gosh, you know, I haven’t spoken to my friend Chris in ages.  I’d love to see him, but he never comes up from Florida.  Wonder what he’s up to?”  So I called, and I got his mom on the phone, and she tells me “He’s on his way up to New York right now.  He’ll be there tonight.”  And he was.  Nice!

Or the time I’d strategized a miracle plan to see a Phish Halloween show in Chicago.  (They played Quadrophenia by the Who for their second set; it was awesome.)  I did tix by mail, ordering up two pair, hoping to use one pair to barter for some crash space for the duration of our stay in Chicago, as we couldn’t afford $150/night hotel rooms, and we couldn’t camp.  A few weeks later, I got the two pair, and immediately went to rec.music.phish to post my offer.  Before I did, though, there was already a message there from someone of the same mindset – crash space in a Chicago dorm for a pair of tix.  But that’s not even the weird part.  I wrote the girl, and noted from her reply that she spelled her name Susannah, and that she was going to U Chicago.  Wait… (type type type) Are you Susannah that I interned with at Circle Rep three years ago, that was planning to go to U Chicago?  Response:  Holy shit, Paul, is that really you?  And so, a tearful reunion ensued shortly after landing in Chicago, and shortly before the greatest concert ever.

But wait, there’s more!  Recently, I had a thought of vandalism.  Just a thought, sir.  No action equals no crime, right?  You can be a legal seditionist in your own head.  Anyway, my evil thought:  there’s a street near where I live named ‘CANAL VIEW’.  I pass it on my walks to the bagel shop.  I imagined a modification of its street sign – the obscuration of just one letter with a can of green spray paint yields a much funnier, much naughtier street name.  You figure it out.  Inside, I laughed, and then went on with my life doing much more productive tasks.  Turns out I never needed to worry about this task – a week or so after this thought, someone had taken care of it, exactly as I had imagined.  I looked at it, freshly painted, and wondered “Did I do that somehow?”

Twins?  I got dozens of ‘em.  Seriously.

Twins can take many forms.

As a response to people:

• One thinks of a person and they show up – especially cool if in a neutral location
• One imagines a person saying something, and then that person says it
• One imagines doing something with a person, and that person is visualizing the same thing
• Two people witness or experience some event, and they have the same reaction to it.
• And of course, the classic:  Two people say the same thing at the same time

As a response to media:

• One thinks of a piece of media from one’s past, and it shows up in some uncontrolled context
• One experiences two pieces of media at once that seem to refer to each other – like driving while listening to David Lee Roth’s “Easy Street” on the radio and passing a street sign indicating Easy Street (yes, this happened too)
• One has a problem to sort out in one’s head, and a piece of media provides a key element or suggestion or bit of wisdom that works
• One wishes that a reclusive media star might release something new, or make an appearance, and they do
• One notes something about a piece of media, a unique critical response, and then someone else has the same response
• One dreams of something specific, like a buddy movie starring Tom Hanks and Benicio Del Toro, and suddenly the movie is in the theaters

As a response to environment:

• Imagining a place or a space or an event ahead of one’s arrival, and one arrives and it presents itself as one imagined

This is not yet a complete list, I think.  If you have any suggestions, please.  But this list will get us started, yes?

Once you think you might have birthed a Twin, you must subject your new notion to critical examination, using these four corollaries:

Coincidence corollary: One must look hard to discover whether something conscious or unconscious might have given you a clue that a Twin was impending.  The closer it comes to a true coincidence, and not a part of the brain’s actual predictive functions, the cooler it is.  EG, if you imagine a friend saying something cos you’ve heard them say it a million times before, and then they say it, it’s not a high quality Twin.

Time corollary: Twins have a shelf life, a statute of limitations.  If one thinks of a song, and it shows up somewhere four months later, that’s not a Twin.  A month, maybe.  A week, that’s mildly interesting.  A day, that’s worth sharing with people.  A half hour, well, that’s a friggin’ miracle, isn’t it?  If it’s the very next song you hear, you know God is talking directly to you.  He’s telling you “Yeah, I dig this song too, glad you thought of it.  Can I get a copy?  Heh, just kidding, I’m God.”

Thoughts and Phenomena corollary: In the course of a day, a lot of thoughts happen, and a lot of phenomena happen.  It’s a big world, and it’s a big brain you have, too.  Twins are pretty much inevitable, odds-wise.  The nice thing, though, is that this game encourages you to become more aware.  Oblivious people don’t see many Twins, and are missing out on the fun.  On the other hand, people with super-active minds on specific topics may disqualify Twins, just based on the fact that they’re always always always thinking about that one topic.  EG, if you’ve obsessively wished every week for 25 years that the Police would have a reunion tour, and then they do, that’s not a twin.  If you had the thought a week before their big announcement, and only occasionally before that, it could definitely qualify as a twin.

Uniqueness corollary: This corollary is the only one that increases a Twin’s stature – it’s  a corollary to the corollaries.  If a thought is completely and utterly unique, and then it appears outside, the other corollaries must give up their respect.  Uniqueness extends time, it defies coincidence, it transcends common thought.  For example, the buddy movie with Hanks and Del Toro that I mentioned before:  nobody’s ever thought of that, not even Hanks or Del Toro.  So if that were to happen, say, within the next two years, I could still claim King Twin, despite the time corollary.  Except, now that this idea is on the Net, it just means that they stole the idea from me (see coincidence corollary).

These corollaries are very important – without them, one ends up somewhere between crazy and dull, seeing Twins everywhere.  For some, the corollaries may seem big and mean – they want to steal away your newborn Twin.  But don’t approach it like that – they’re really the best part of this game, cos they sharpen those critical thinking skills that your professors talked about in college, but never really taught you.  It buffs up your “Is this really true?” muscle, which is handy in sooo many different contexts.  And the end result is, you end up with the best, shiniest, most amazing twins, and when you tell people about them, they might actually be interested.

Please do share your Twins here, if you got ‘em.

(all stories presented here are true, except:  the reunion wasn’t tearful, but the departure almost was.  And I’ve never been to the Death Star, or Rio.)

Yeah, long time no post. So a meta-post might be good.

I’ve been using a lot of my time sorta questioning and re-orienting my motivations in life. I think it’s true that people get set in their ways, but only because the routine of their life sorta keeps a lot of habits in place. I have a little freedom at the moment, so I’m taking the opportunity to really muck out the barn, so to speak. And it’s good. But for those on the outside watching, it may be a little disconcerting. For those people who have been asking, I’m fine… sometimes a car is in the shop for a repair, and sometimes it’s in for an upgrade.

One of my concerns about being a writer is how deep I can go in revealing myself. A journalist can hide themselves entirely from view, or let a public persona form. We know Anderson Cooper, but we don’t really know him. A poet can hide in abstractions. A novelist can hide behind the word ‘fiction’. A propagandist doesn’t set out to write truth in the first place. The stuff I’d like to write here is just Paul stuff, but it’s very iceberg-ian in character – you’ll only see about one-seventh of what I’d really like to put down.

In the morning, I usually write in the private journal first, to get warmed up. It’s swell to know that I have no audience, and it usually is very meta – writing about writing. Dull, dull, dull, but it feels good coming out. I picked up the technique, sorta, from the book The Artist’s Way, which suggests a daily creative cleansing by writing non-stop for three pages. Absolutely no audience, no judgement, no rewriting, no pausing to think of a good vocabulary word. It’s sorta like stretching before running. The author of the above book was pretty stringent about the criteria, I don’t follow it exactly. I also don’t warm up my car for two minutes like you’re supposed to. I think that the general idea, though, is very good, and probably translates well into other mediums. Of course, it already exists – the sketch book, the morning run, scales and warmups…

But then there’s performance. I want to put up good and interesting stuff here. Which means that if nothing strikes me, I go postless on this blog. Well, if nothing appropriate strikes me.

Here’s the two ‘appropriate’ variables. The first, I’m breaking right now – I love meta, I hate meta. I am talking to you about talking to you. It’s so dull, and it’s so pointless, at least as a long-term writing strategy. I wanted to take some of my daily journal energy here, but I wouldn’t want to subject people to this meta meta meta on a daily basis. You came here to hear a story, and I’m telling you about telling stories. Not the same thing.

The second – I don’t view my life as a reality show. I think most of the people on these shows are pretty low-functioning, petty drama queens. My revulsion for this form of ‘entertainment’ keeps me from writing about the personal conflicts I have in my own life, friendships and relationships and familyships that need my attention in a private, safe space. I would love to be able to write about my Dad, for example, but I just never can allow myself to do it. It’s unlikely that he would ever read it, but it’s not even that. I need to be respectful, he is my Dad, after all. But trust me, he is a character in search of a context, and I am constantly capturing his uniqueness in my mind.

And this week… man… big fight with an old friend that I don’t know how to resolve. And a person that I care about just de-friended me on Facebook with no provocation or explanation and I can’t reach her to find out why. And I just found out that I get to hang out for a few days with a girl I really admire (read into that all you want.) All of these are actual stories, even excellent stories. But I’m not going to write about these very real situations with real people with whom I have real relationships. Now, I’m no saint, if you were to call me up and pester me for details I would give them up. But a private conversation is so, so, so much different than this blog-writing thing.

There’s one small upside that I just found – if the person who just de-friended me is truly intent on annulling our friendship, then I get to write about her now, right? Heh. I think there’s some good fiction in my future.

blog post over here.

How is it that I’ve never heard this guy? Pretty intense. For all the bullshit rock n roll “I’m so crazy” hairband crap, this guy may have genuinely been insane. Pure Pellegrino to everyone else’s tap water, know what I mean?