Conflict resolution

Here I am, the last day of my week-long vacation, and I'm writing a blog. I've been here before; the thought of returning to the incredible malaise and undirected angst associated with my job after I've been away for a little bit puts me in the frame of mind to simply emote. I look back and see the void left by everything I wanted to accomplish but didn't, I look to the future and see only dread, and withdrawals from my newly acquired video game addiction. Summer classes that are going to take up so much of my reading/moping time. Seriously, I'm gonna be either in class or at work all the time. Balls.

So.

Here's what has happened on my vacation: Saturday was a day full of reading and hope for the rest of the vacation coupled with relationship-associated angst. I don't remember it a lot, except that I finished Lipsky's DFW thing. A girl named Jessica Pettengill was killed in a car accident Sunday morning. Though I never really "officially" met her, I knew of her somewhat through her family and mine; the Wheaton part of my family. I had also helped her with something at Wal-Mart about a week before the accident. Her death has kind of cast this pall over the past week. I think about it a lot. When I went to Joplin a couple days ago it was hard to drive in all that traffic. Traffic stresses me anyway, and I've always had some anxieties associated with driving, which I'll go into another time, but here's the point: this dread associated with this 17-year-old girl's death has nearly put my car-related anxieties over the edge. I make stupid decisions while driving. I pulled out in front of someone at a light, changed lanes without looking. It's an awareness issue, essentially. There's a new block in my perception while driving.

It's somewhat disconcerting.

So let's talk about something else. Stuff I wrote, like I said I would. Did I write something everyday? I didn't keep tabs like crazy, but I think so. I wrote poetry, snippets of songs. Mostly I worked on a single story that isn't quite done yet. It's at about 6-7 pages and is probably going to finally run at least twice that. I may post it, I'm not sure.

Songs. I've never written a full song. I need to, though. I can definitely see it happen.

Roaring seaward, and I go.

I seek out encouragement everywhere. I crave it: I'm mostly Irish by blood, a heritage renowned for producing literary talent; Geoffrey Chaucer was my great great great great great great grandpa, or something; I get good grades in English class, I grub for them, get weird, possibly disingenuous notes returned graded papers; I'm a Scorpio, just like Kurt Vonnegut, Zadie Smith, and Colson Whitehead. This can't be coincidence.

Occasionally I even write.

(I just started a . . .what? A sister blog, maybe? To this one? It's called What the hell, Hector? and it strives toward overbearing, outrageous entertainment. Much fun, new story coming this week.)

Who was it that said good literature is the product of a conflicted heart? Faulkner, I think it was.

Maybe I can find faith in that, as I've been rather conflicted lately.

So. I am on vacation. On each day of this week-long vacation I will complete some literary act. Or maybe the week will be one long literary act. Maybe it'll be performance art. Maybe I'll post blogs as I go; maybe I'll post them as one big blogsplat at the end of the week. I haven't decided yet.

Here's what I've read this past week: John Dies at the End, David Wong. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky.

All good in their own ways. LtGWS especially, is heart-rending.

I realize that this blog is pretty much directionless; I'll work on that in the future.

Maybe I should've just numbered my posts from the beginning: they'd be easier to name.

New phone today, old one went apeshit. Some sort of divine miracle that I was eligible to upgrade very early. But. . . I learned things about myself that I sort of wish I could unlearn, in the quasi-panic brought on by that briefest interuption of cell-service. I'm not that person, I've always thought, in fact, I'm a venerable mountain man, sociality-wise. All self-delusion.

Brittany's Grandpa had a stroke today. Everyone include him in your prayers, please. He's a very good person. He is, at last notice, recovering. Recently learned stroke statistics echo in my mind, unbidden. Something like 20% of stroke victims are more or less invalid for the rest of their lives, and a much larger chunk are never. . . quite normal. By which I mean, the same. I hope she doesn't read this, but I don't think she reads my blog. I don't blame her. Prayers. Pray.

To my two loyal followers ;) sorry for the silence. It's been a busy, stressful time in my life. I've been writing some, but too little to bring me any satisfaction. But too little to make me crash, too, at least. Something I've noticed: When I write something good, I'm so fuelled and uplifted by the experience that I'm more or less on walking on air for the rest of the day, but the day after? I feel ashamed. Ashamed of not writing constantly. Of maybe letting too little of myself go. Maybe of pride. Proud of a short micro-story that's somewhat poetic but the only thing you've written in a month and the only thing you'll write for a month? Silly. Then when I lay down at night to go to sleep, in those in-between moments after sleep has teased me and now finally holds up the covers to her bed a veil is lifted and I see myself miserable, poor, and still working at fucking Wal-Mart in five years. I need this to be an addiction. I need to let myself go in it.

The few times that I've done it right: the synergy of hard work, greasy creative process, and blank paper filling up with me. It's a drug I can't get high on quite enough to get addicted to. Maybe I need to up the dose.

Farm Boy Zed

Is the name of the comic that I'm collaborating on with my sister. I just finished the script and turned it over to Jerika for actual drawing. Pretty exciting. Think Jhonen Vasquez's stuff; only a little less humor (though there's still some,) and a little more horror. I have no problem wearing my influences on my sleeve. It's all fun and games anyway. I'm wondering how hard it would be to publish electronically? Set up a free site (since we're not really planning on making any kind of profit anyway) and it can be viewed in full color.

I do like the way a physical comic book smells though. We shall see.

David Foster Wallace...

...wrote Broom of the System when he was younger than me. This is disconcerting.

Music, Spring, etc.

Finally, consecutive days of sweet, rejuvinative Spring weather. It's getting hard to want to go to class, it's getting markedly more difficult to even contemplate going to work (ugh, saying the mere name of that association strikes fear and loathing into my heart) and music seems to fill my ears everywhere. My dad is playing his home-made banjo, a gentle, soothing sound drifting through the house even if I don't like bluegrass and even if my dad hasn't mastered the thing yet. I've rediscovered hardcore and heavy metal (major Mastodon jags, and I'm looking into the Dillinger Escape Plan's new one right now) and feel of the sweet air pushing through the open windows never fails to remind me of Manchester Orchestra's Mean Everything to Nothing. So I've given that a couple whirls.
Spring. The season of lost and found. The season of the cruellest month. The season of Green. Of plans. Of hope, maybe. The hope and the planning are the things that brings the music out, I think. Or maybe it's not that the music was ever gone, but that it means something different in Spring than it does in other seasons. It serves mainly to keep you warm and unalone in Winter. In Summer, it's (unfortunately, sacriligiously) a mere soundtrack. In Autumn, let's see, what poetic yet sort of true thing can I say here...In Autumn, music keeps some fire alive. It keeps you moving so you don't slip into hibernation. But in Spring... That's the season when you discover songs that mean something to you and always will. Maybe it's a part of the rebirth. I wonder if the pagan's pulled out the instruments more in Spring, to chase away the emotional havok wreaked by Winter.
Who's to say? All that is meaningless, except music. Music is life.
So what's new with me? Started a comic (again) with my sister illustrating. A zine is in the EARLY, early stages of planning. Restarting my alt-history story, which has been playing hard-to-get with my mind since I started on it months ago. I think I've been using the wrong perspective all along. We'll see how it works out. Enjoy your music.

Sunn O)))

I'm not a metal fan by any stretch of the imagination; too lugubrious, even for me, too much association w/ local meth-heads, etc. I can hold a vague appreciation for the instrumental abilities of the practitioners, and I have some nostalgia for the days of my early teens, before I discovered punk rock and the Pixies, when I actually did listen to Godsmack, Metallica, and Tool on a regular basis. But aside from that, I usually forget that the genre exists.
Except. . .some reason I bought a Sunn O))) album on Amazon. (I think I'd read that John Wray, a favorite writer of mine, listened to them or something.) And I can't fucking stop listening to it. They sound like an H.P. Lovecraft story. Like something huge coming up from underneath. I feel an unusual sense of anticipation when I hit PLAY, something I don't even feel when I put in Grizzly Bear or Radiohead. It's. . . exciting. Not that those other bands aren't exciting. Both are filled with ur-talented musicians who write insanely great, original music. But, as original as it is, one grows to expect it, to intuit the next move, like a that of a friend with whom you've played chess for years and years.
I guess it's just time to change it up a bit. Sunn O))) will never be my favorite band (still Radiohead, I'm afraid,) but they'll always be the sip of something hard I keep hidden in my desk drawer.