As it was written, so it shall be. The external hard drive upon which my media lived has given up the ghost, and with it so too the 100 gigs of music I'd shoved on there in the last couple years. It could have been the little-death that brigs total obliteration.

I will face this. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where it has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Thank God for Last.fm, though. My library is more or less available there already, albeit in a less-than-ideal setup for browsing.

This has been one weird week. I don't think I've slept more than 3 hours a night, I've been so busy and energetic, and still so many things remain undone.

The Past is not dead. In fact, it isn't even past.

What I've been thinking about when I should be trying to line up my next freelance gig: the scattered history of my words the internet. Well, the unsolicited ones.

1997 - My first website. It may still exist, somewhere in the miasma, buried in digital rubble under Geocties. It was a class assignment. Hartwell was the instructor, if I remember correctly. He must have been 25 when he taught that class - my age. I believe the site was about the Knights Templar -- cannily, I just posted the text of some research paper I did in Social Sciences -- that instructor was also the faculty advisor of the middle school drama club, of which I was a charter member. I got perfect marks in his Social Studies class, if I remember correctly. I definately remember shotguning cans of Budweiser with a kid named... Justin I think? -- quite a number of times before attending his class.

I am willing to bet my first webpage had an animated .gif of Gokou doing a kamahamaha.

1998/1999 - I certainly continued to goof around with HTML during this time, but the only site that ever went live was a very 1998 "fansite" regarding Dan Simmons' Hugo award winning "Hyperion." The internet not being what it is today - my intelligence was equally primitive, at the time - I was oblivious to most of the allusions to classical and Romantic literature and philosophy. I just thought Keats was a cool name for a cyborg, and Hyperion an awesome name for a crazy science fiction planet.

I wish I still had those books.

2003-2007: Ah, the livejournal. It was everything a livejournal is known to be: angsty, hormonal, embarrassing in the earliest entries (must have been before spell check was standard in every browser), quaint, occastionally revelatory. Over four years, I posted nearly 700,000 words before nuking it. All saved on my hard drive, thank God.

2007+: Who knows? There's this thing, the videogame thing, the fiction thing, quite a few myspace blog posts of substance... it's a mess. And it's almost universally terrible writing, lazy and sloppy, usually written after drinking a little too much coffee or alchohol. If there is a hell, I imagine my punishment will involve hearing the innumerable message board posts I've stupidly made recited to me forevermore.

It's ninteen miles to the coast.

Grapefruit Spoons

He looked up.

"Well?" she whispered.

"There are men out there. Men with ambitions, great ones. I have no ambitions."

"You have that paper cutout of Will Smith's face."

"I cut out the eyes. Stuck thumb tacks in his ears. Thought it would remind me of someone."

"Did it?"

"You tell me."

A grapefruit spoon suddenly manifested itself in his hand.

Looking though my archives, I came to find my "fiction" folder - wherein my scraps of half completed novels and short fictions and one act plays and ill conceived screen treatments and NaNoWriMo projects and other ephemera rest on my portable hard drive - has gone nearly a year without any alterations.

This will not cotton, no sir, and *this I vow*: once a week, every friday, at least a sentence of narrative fiction will be posted. I can automate these blogger things, right? So that every week, at least one sentence will auto post at 1:00AM Saturday?

Let's hope so.

late afternoon

No DDR at the Avalon last night. That is a serious oversight, and I hope the goddamn place goes out of business ASAP. Keeps all the cabinets in atrocious condition, too. Ground Kontrol caters to its audience; Wunderland should have no audience.

Then to the Triple Nickel, already half asleep. Blitzgreg bought me a Jameson's, improving my mood and alertness exponentially. Unbeknownst at the time, he was to end the evening incoherently drunk. We were discussing our mutual love of German style board games in measured, reasonable, audible tones when his drunkenness overtook him with stunning rapidity, like a thunderstorm in April overtakes a sunny day. God, I love Greg. I love this entire gaggle of friends trivia hath brought unto me.

Jenny is an interesting case. She's dated Michael for a half year now, but I have only been in her company a dozen times, at most. Yet a mutual respect has developed between us, insofar as I can respect someone from Florida (the Notre Dame of states).

Not writing on the subjects I should be writing on, if I want to advance my freelance career. Just writing, though - that is the key. Get my reps in. Get back in the habit of writing something, anything, every day.

I should try to set up an interview with the people behind Foo Castle. It might generate an article of interest to me alone, but that's okay. The world needs more information about Foo Castle in their lives.

what 60 means

Yesterday, my father was 60 for the first time in his life. 60!.

This is alarming. This is a harbinger of things to come in my own life. My father is no longer young, ergo I am no longer young. As he begins slipping into the most undesirable target demographic, I have to accept the responsibility of adulthood, something I should have done a few years ago. Got to go to work, got to get a job -- during the worst recession in decades.

God, I want to work. I want the structure, the responsibility, the frustration inherent to all cogs in late stage American capitalism. The silly little dreams of my late teens and early twenties, conjured while under grotesquely unrealistic illusions of my own abilities and self worth, no longer hold much interest. Who cares if I become what I want to become? I just wanna subsist, man. Preferably in my own apartment, for Christ's sake.

Ford Walker turns 25 today. I am eager to showcase my Dance Dance Revolution skills before a throng of swooning female fans at his party -- at Wunderland! It's no Ground Kontrol, but I don't have any money, so it's moot anyway.

God, I'm tired.

2008 Music Wrap-up Stuff

Haven't written much about music lately. Must have gotten it out of my system, or something. Whereas 2005 and 2006 were dominated by analytical urges, desires to parse and examine my own instinctive or reactionary idiosyncrasies, and 2007 spent in evangelical furor, pushing whatever recent revelation I'd found to completely uninterested third parties with no rational, systematic thought beforehand, 2008 was a year of follow ups, and innovations therein: the quickie EP eclipsing a band's second LP in import, overblown indie hype darling-ism surging to new heights of preposterousness, more love for 'Lil Wayne. My personal proclivities were sasitiead above and beyond all expectations: more Wolf Parade, more Okkervil River, more Destroyer, more Shearwater, more Ryan Adams, more Will Oldham, more Mark Kozeleck, more Of Montreal (of which there will be much to say, later), more Boris (excuse me, BORIS), more Chad VanGaalen, more Constantines, more Mountain Goats. That's... kind of all I listen to, if we throw out classical music, which we are, because no one seeking out my writing cares what the performance of Mahler's ninth symphony I saw earlier this year was like.

At least give me this one sentence indulgence, a simple summation of my feelings towards the Ninth. Here goes: Listening to the final movement is like getting a preview of your own death, first terrifying, then mysterious and hopeful.

The trouble is, tradition dictates that I write some kind of music-y wrap up for the calendar year 2008 -- best of list, pithy introductory essay, that sort of thing. This would be the fifth anniversary of the livejournal post that started it all. To let yet another youthful, exuberant tradition wither in light of my growing apathy towards the internet in general and blogging in particular is just not an acceptable way for me to behave. But I don't have to be happy or rational about it.

So, whatever happens in the next few posts, happens. No backsies.

THE WHY THE FUCK IS THIS HAPPENING MOMENT OF THE YEAR
Skeletal Lamping, Of Montreal's grotesque, ambitious document of Kevin Barnes disappearance into his own asshole, might be the worst fucking thing ever conceived, musically or otherwise. The one positive quality the album possesses: it doesn't kill people, like the hydrogen bomb or the Soviet gulag. That's good news. However, just because the LP has yet to perpetrate mass murder does not exclude the possibility that it could.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, especially the second half, was about as successful as any white indie rock group is ever going to be at Prince mimicry, coming at the aural and the pansexual qualities of Prince from the perspective of a skinny white dude trying to get over his failing marriage. You wouldn't have thought it at the time, but Hissing Fauna was a remarkably cohesive and restrained record, and much better for it. Because, Christ Almighty, Skeletal Lamping.

Barnes, fairly early in the record, sings "I'm just a black she-male," and indeed, he wants us to believe it. Now, that shit is ballsy, but in execution it's an incredibly shallow conceit, pandering, and half-hearted, and if you're going to occupy this persona for an insufferable 58 minutes like Prince occupied all his different persona, remember that it was Prince's complete, heedless ownership of his words that made him a singular genius. When he wanted to be Camille, well - there she was. If he was going to get a hummer on his wedding day from his bride's sister, by golly, he was okay with it, because it didn't constitute adultery. No second thoughts, no ironic masking, just dirty, smutty, spoogy joy.

Oh, also: the songs were good. Prince created actual music, and you could dance to it. But Skeletal Lamping is a very personal record, I guess, because Barnes withholds from us any musical hooks to which we can use to drown out that other bullshit. Every time a halfway serviceable bit of songcraft manages to rise above all the ear fucking, like with "An Eludiarian Experience," some burst of nonsense comes from nowhere to derail it. Worst, it's like Barnes is taking a perverse joy from purposefully exploding his best instincts, gawking at us with the same bemused look on the face of a guy showing someone "2 girls 1 up," and videotaping their reaction.

This is hopefully a detour in the Of Montreal catalogue, something like "Metal Machine Music," because I would hate to see one of the interesting guys making pop music today continue self-sabatouging himself like this. We already have one Rivers Coumo.

It is mid September. One thirty in the morning. Two days ago, David Foster Wallace hung himself until he died. Inside his home. Alone. Sometimes, when a writer or musician ceases to exist as a going concern (weather by their death or by their irrelevance), I feel they gave the world everything they had to give. Not with DFW. He was a narcissist, but all great writers are. His fiction was postmodern in act but not postmodern in spirit. I loved his writing; I thought he would be an okay guy to chat about things with, someday.

He finished his first novel when he was 25. I finished my first novel when I was 22. His was good, of course. Mine... well.

These have been trying times, frustrating times. Too much free time. Struggling to find work again -- more accurately, struggling to find the courage to go though the whole rigmarole; the canvasing, the interviewing, the resume-making, et al. Everyone hates doing it, but they do it.

Five days of active socializing in a row last week. Marcus' birthday, Marcus' birthday grill, Jill's beer snobbing, my book clubbin', and trivia. I never do that. Had a pretty nasty cold, too. Made worse by the sometimes excessive drinking.

Learning to behave around new people in different ways than me in the past. Still frustrated when I percieve my personality like an outside observer. "Who is this guy?" I think, when I think of me. More important: why does it matter?

Of uptmost importance: why should I blog like this again? Why do I feel... compelled to do this? I need the outlet; I need to be judged; if I am to feel pity for myself, the world should know. It's embarrassing, and that embarassment keeps me from feeling bad about myself. Too much.

It took too long, but I did write about the Dreamcast. For the game blog. I need to force myself to post there; I need to force myself to post reasonable things there. Less than 6,000 words would be a good start. No one needs 6,000 blog post words. That's half a New Yorker article. Tim Rogers could get away with it, once. I don't know if he still can.

I am going to try to sleep. The cough is keeping me from succeeding, so far. But it can't hurt to try again.

Sometime in 2007

I love to take long walks, by myself, after midnight. There is nothing as serene as a lifeless suburban neighborhood in the dead of night. I'll stop, sometimes, at Terra Linda Elementary School for a cigarette or a brief ride on the swings. I force myself to focus on the present, on the stillness of every sound and the gentle, chilly wind against my skin, or on the smoke contrails from my cigarette, illuminated by the streetlight. The twisting, flowing patterns of smoke, in the right light, in the right frame of mind, are unique and beautiful, a natural chemical reaction moving with balletic grace. The smoke can look exactly like a Van Gogh painting, if you let it.

I'll walk into the adjacent neighborhood though the overgrown switchgrass that frames Saltzman. I'll stand far away from the passing cars and close my eyes, until I hear ocean waves crashing ashore. The timed indoor lights click off in many houses at the exact moment I pass. *click. click. I can pretend to conduct the lighting, waving my arms in a silly fashion, hoping that no one sees me. Just live in the present, I tell myself.

I haven't gone camping or hiking or mountain biking in some time. I regret that. But the natural world is alien to me, in some ways. This place, with its' soulless homes and inefficient use of land, is what I've acclimated myself to. This is my outdoors, my nature . This is home.

The Netherlands feels like home to me, too. So does Ashland, despite the short amount of time I spent there. Now, I'm going to have to find home among my extended family, in the California desert, while my mother's mother slowly starves herself. It has only been a year since the man she married, the man she lived with for over 50 years, passed away, and I can only guess what a terrible hole that must leave in anyone's heart. Given my maternal relatives' well documented struggles with... melancholy, we'll call it, it is no surprise that she's clinically depressed.

Why, I am but one in a long tradition of half-mad and mad people. I love the story of my great-great grandfather, who was once extraordinarily wealthy, owning much of the land and timber rights in Washington State. Then, out of nowhere, he decided he wanted to be a dairy farmer. He gave most of his assets away and moved to some ass-backwards place near Spokane, dragging his whole family with him. Soon thereafter, his beloved wife died, and in his grief he decided to sell the dairy farm and live as a transient, as penance for his sins. That was when my great-grandmother got married to the first person she could find, at age 14. Her husband was something like 27 years her senior.

I feel incredibly lucky I have no land rights to give away, actually. That is the sort of thing I can see myself doing.

I escape all my baggage with my solitary night-walks, and I hope I can continue this tradition in the high desert. I know this move is the right thing to do, unequivocally so. After my grandfather died last May, I was shocked by his accomplishments in his life. I never knew him as an adult, as someone more than the guy who would always buy me candy whenever I saw him, the old man absolutely fascinated by my Playstation even though he never quite figured out how to work it (he could never remember to press the 'accelerate' button whenever we played racing games together)... even though I had the opportunity, I squandered it. Now, I have the training another opportunity to learn who my family is, with another grandparent, and like hell I'm letting this slip though my fingers.

I'm getting scared that I will never finish college, with all these breaks and diversions and transfers. I take some solace knowing that I almost certainly would have flunked out by now were I to have attended school like a normal person. I got fired from "Bed Bath & Beyond," for Christ's sake. That is somewhat difficult to manage. You really got work at it to get fired there. But the 'traditional' approach hasn't worked too well either. Last year, I was miserable. I tried to hide away in my apartment, doing my best to ensure I made no friends in Eugene. It got to the point that I was stockpiling lithium and seroquel, "just in case" I felt the need to off myself. Fate intervened, my family didn't have enough money to pay for two kids in school at the same time, and it was too late to apply for a loan, and I came back home. Most likely saved me some serious trouble and medical costs.

I want to delete the above passage, but I shouldn't. I have to keep myself honest by presenting it as it was to a select few. I would be surprised if there were any men less stoic than I am.

After I got back from my walk last night, I fell asleep, exhausted. This was around 1:45 AM. The cat got into my room at about 4:15 AM.

Maybe the reason I stopped blogging, quit the music-review circuit, started posting less on message boards, all that -- maybe I stopped because I came to the realization that I'm not the writer I think I should be. No, that's not extreme enough, and it is also misleading.

I'm getting pretty emo here, but that is what this forum is for: expressing really emo stuff. Bear with me (although the only person who has to carry this burden is... me, isn't it? Well, good. And bad.)

I read articles by professional journalists, writers, &c. written in a clumsier syntax than my own. There was a pretty interesting discussion on Insult Swordfighting regarding Hilary Goldstein's review of Bionic Commando Rearmed; we all agreed the article was poor, but we couldn't agree entirely why the thing was so awful.

This is the sentence he excerpted, which I will also excerpt, for my own archival purposes:

Capcom is finally revisiting the classic with an updated version that takes everything that was good from the past, modernizes it, and then adds new layers of awesome.

I'm with Mitch Krpata: "adds new layers of awesome," is grammatical nonsense. It's

and then "adds new layers of awesome"
"verb adjective noun [of] noun?"

Can we use this form to make a coherent sentence?

Bubbles "was completely of monkey."

Nonsense. The only exception I can think of is along these lines:

"Jesus socked stoic Franklin of Bethlehem"

Okay. That's dumb, but...


Some argue that "awesome" is a colloquialism and therefore permissible. Considering how often I pepper my writing with slangy, purposefully jarring bits of prose, I shouldn't complain.

that's the trouble, though; I have yet to develop a complete, complex, internally consistent voice in my writing. I need to prove mastery of the conventional, Stucker/White school of composition before exploring the limits of my command.

The only way to create a voice like that is to discover it, though composition. I know this, but my prose is so far from what it could be -- hell, from what it used to be, 3 years ago -- that I figure, hell, why not give up?

Well, because I'm compelled to write, and I'm obsessive about writing. I might not understand why I want to disseminate my thoughts expressed though my language on the internet, but I feel awful if I go too long without doing so. But I'm too much like a high school cheerleader gripped with a need to wash her hair 24 times a day or a homeless man stepping on each brick in Pioneer Courthouse Square 5 times before moving forward; these are not a compulsions with any tangible benefits.

It's gotten so bad right now that I cannot bear to read the things I write. I get sick looking at them: I see nothing but flaws, hundreds of sometimes groin-grabbingly obvious flaws, typos, &c. I freak out. I can't take it. I can't go on.

I'll go on.

SUMMER OF EMO continues:

I've really noticed, in the last four weeks, how contemptibly out of shape I've let my self become. I'm not corpulent or anything, but I'm doughtier than ever -- which, while perhaps not the greatest thing in the world, to be 10 lbs overweight or thereabouts.... it's not so repugnant I can't stand to see myself naked.

But it is a definite sign that I cannot eat whatever I want, in whatever quantities I want, any longer. I had an "a-ha" moment like this in high school, as well -- dropping from 180 to 140 lbs starting the beginning of junior year and going 'till the end of senior year -- but I'm pretty sure I developed some minor eating disorder-like behavior in that timeframe, too. I also know that I have become less moderate in the past 7 years or whatever, prone to eating huge amounts of food without thinking, prone to running and running and running until I absolutely "hit the wall," and collapse like a adipose sack of medical waste, prone to drinking until I can no longer drink, prone to staying up all night, prone to sleeping for days...

Getting fired makes one pretty down on oneself. I hope that's it.