The Human Chronicle

A gyspy once told me during a tarot reading that I would find success only once I’d mastered the art of organizing. Which is a sinister thing to tell an already obsessive, loner of an Aquarian INTP. And I think she cursed me. I’ve always been kind of a wanderer. My sister and I were still only four or five our first trip to the east coast. The largest blocks of my childhood memories include road trips and daring adventures.

1. An enchanted rabbit farm in Utah.
2. The wilderness men of the Rockies who gave me the muzzle-loading rifle I now keep on display.
3. Or the time my sister, cousin, and I followed a sand partch through two miles of Florida jungle to the ocean. We were given strict orders not to go in, but we did. We couldn’t help ourselves. We played in 40 degree water for as long as little children could stand and then tried to walk the two miles back at late dusk. It’d been my first taste of death.

I can’t help but give in to work, writing stories. It’s a compulsion. Somewhere between temporal-lobe epilepsy and hypergraphia. And I figure since I was raised in a city of women the language center of my brain just throbs all day and I’ve adapted. Call it Addison’s diease. Which is a way of saying Adam’s disease. Wich is a way of saying cursed. Mortally cursed to wander and report, unable to find peace until I learn to organize my life and work and spin this pile of straw into gold. Mixing metaphorically.

I’m making my New Year’s resolution early this year…since I’ll be turning 30 in a couple of years and 2010 is the start of a new decade (the last one blew…hard). I bought a calendar a few months ago. I have a well-documented, almost Kantian, obsession with time and temporality.

Flipping through the pages and looking at how the each month is arranged–based on the internationally accepted civil calendar, the Gregorian calendar–I wondered how we settled on the design and arrangement of this tool we all take for granted and which plays such a significant role it plays in our life, our cultural perceptions, and how it dictates the way we interact with one another.

(Watch this)

One of our most significant advances as a species (as significant as discovering fire) was the moment we became aware of time, and more specifically the passage of time. That’s when our collective memory began. A flash and insight. In that moment we became aware of our mortality, an event in itself gave rise to art and civilization. We measured time in the cosmos. And everything about our existence then was reflected in the heavens. This gave rise to myth, religion, science, which in turn required language founded on symbol, utility, and complex forms of socialization. And all it took was a little advance planning.

So, there’s this rectangular sheet of paper hanging on my wall–a meditative Japenese Garden on a rainy day in one hemisphere and a 7×5 matrix in the other. The design is basic, strictly functional. Since the 24th of February 1582, we’ve used the same calendar, which is now accepted as standard throughout the world. Overcoming language, religious, philosophical, and political boundaries. But I’d never given it that much thought and have always just accepted the fact that we knew what we were doing with this thing. Obviously it’s not hanging there for decoration.

Then I’d remembered reading somewhere that Wittgenstein had arranged his Tractatus from a 7×7 matrix (with forty-nine main propositions). And even if we’re not consciously aware of how Wittgenstein has redefined the Western cultural perception, his ideas (as a whole) have influenced how we understand language, psychology, and social interaction. Or so I’ve been told. As with Eistein’s theories of relativity, only about 50 people in the world really understand it. And I think the same may hold true for Wittgenstein…though the number is probably less than 50.

How much of our cultural depends on these utilities, these easily transmitted precepts of memetic information? And that’s when I had the idea: a plot matrix.

When your closest friends are all women life is nothing but castration anxiety. Oh sure, on our way out it begins so innocently with, “Boyz are gross…” and ends somewhere around two (a.m.) in a bile-strewn room with a kind of Salo-esque, Dionysian bloodlust. And all my parts get tossed into the Nile. So, I don’t go out: survival is essential when you’re trying to make a living.

Don’t worry, though–it’s not all good news. The American Empire is in its final death throes after the worst economic depression since the ‘29 crash. The apocalypse came when we weren’t looking and we missed the rapture. I’m more content to stay at home with a good book–Bolano’s ‘By Night in Chile’ maybe, or Nabokov’s premier. Or, there’s always sexting. Skyping, or whateverthefuck.

We’re all fucked up in our own, special way(s). So don’t blame me if I smell like weed and cheap cologne and dress like an anoxeric teenage girl who just climbed out of a hobo shanty–I haven nothing but love for you. All of you. Even if you are all a bunch of twittering Yahoos. Go out, get your freak on. Just don’t cut off my balls.

All this sunshine and good weather–it’s enough to make one ill. No one appreciates quality cynicism anymore. Now it’s all about irreverence and charm and cache of wit. Where did all the heroic sufferers go? Those carrying the figurative weights and metaphorical burdens of creative life? Bohemians and loose women? God, I miss the loose women. Relationships are so overrated. Whoever said misery loves company didn’t know people very well. He was probably the same douche-bag who said there’s someone for everyone.

 And so it goes…

Frankl would say suffering ceases to be suffering once we define it. Kubrick would say we must come to terms with nature’s indifference. Schopenhauer might say that it doesn’t really matter either way, because the world will carry on with or without you. House would say living sucks only marginally less than dying.

But, I remain the eternal optimist. This is the best of all possible worlds. Truth is beauty; life is suffering. Let’s go eat some worms.

Just now setting down to part two of the work day and will probably write on through supper if I can keep my concentration. We’ll see. I’ll be glad to make it through the next piece and maybe chapter in Burn Pattern before my first cigarette break.

Spent morning updating, checking e-mail, sketching and writing. Over the past couple of days I’ve realized how important setting priorities might be if I hope to get through the mass of work I’ve created for myself. First off, and what I worked on for part one was the massive revision of TVT, which is now called Queenstown and designed around a central plot structure–however loose the structure–and am editing the stories to fit. TVT is too scattered, too much of a collage. My goal is to repackage it, resell it for reprint as a new title. I don’t know.

So, thought I’d end with a few videos to start off The Day, part two:

 Still haven’t heard this album in its entirity…but the video is hardcore.

And how do you feel about this Levis Jeans commercial?

That’s incredible–I haven’t done anything with this blog since last May. Oh, how so much has changed. When we left off, I was working as a stock-clerk for a large, and dying, corporate bookseller in sunny ole Austin Texas. I’d arrived a few months earlier on a quest for fortune and glory as a young novelist, but within the first year have achieved little more than a few short articles.

The lit scene in Austin is progressing slowly thanks to the dilligence of a few flame barers. Between the Ransom Center archives and BookPeople and TSU’s library archives, I’ve seen in person writers like Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, William T. Vollmann, Sarah Vowel, etc. etc. and have seen up close original material from Baudelaire to Stoppard, Beckett to Mailer, DeLillo, McCarthy, Faulkner, the Kerouac Scroll–all that good stuff we writers sluff off like dead skin cells. It’s been a better education than I could have ever wanted, but doesn’t much help feed the moths in bank account.

Thought you might like that.

Dear Customer,

Recently we informed you that we were raising our Overdraft Fee and Return Fee to $39. After careful consideration of the many factors “currently impacting” the economy, our business and our customers, we have decided to leave our Overdraft and Return fee at $38.73 per item.

_______

Because We Care!

So, my life as I know it is over. I’ve been given a responsibility far exceeding my aptitude. 1) It involves counting. And since I spend all day every day alphabetizing, I know absolutely nothing about numbers. I know that when counting, one number usually follows another, except when it precedes. But then I’ll wonder, what is the antecedent of five? Is a number a single entity, or is it the sum of its parts? What is the value of zero? How can place two numbers together to make a new number, but if you add them together you get a different number: like, why does 1 + 3 = 4, but not 13? 2) It involves money. Considering I lost business and house and declared bankruptcy last year, I’m not sure I’m the person best qualified for this responsibility. 3) What’s a “toggle exchange”?

It occurred to me yesterday that the difference between a career and a job is a cash register. If you handle money, you have a job; if you manage accounts, you have a career. I…have a job, and not a good one. I’ve been perfectly content these past six months working in a stock room, breaking down pallets. I don’t need to count and handle money to be happy. Ya know. But sometimes life isn’t fair. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. All that I ask is when they crucify me for fucking up that you speak well of me at my graveside.

Technology of The Terminator Cyborg

Tags: Christian Bale, john connor, McG, t-1000, t-800, terminator

“Where would we even start? Things got no head.”

“Take a ride through.”

“Ride through. On what?”

“East. Elmshire. Provost. Take your pick.”

“There is no East side.”

“Fucking dead ends. Nothing on this guy. Address undetermined. No numbers, I.D. Nothing. Who the fuck is this kid? Shows up in a tank, after a fire? One of two survivors, and he’s a nobody. Doesn’t exist. Or, at least he did until he walked out the goddamn front door. He’s a sketchy frame from a ten year old camera pointed in the wrong direction.”

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