Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Incontinently Erudite's LiveJournal:

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Friday, January 29th, 2010
10:23 pm	analog vs digital before i even start, let me say that i'll be using analog and digital somewhat metaphorically as we proceed. and indeed might not even revisit them substantively. ergonomicon and i were at veovix and psyki's place admiring their ant farm when we had a disagreement over whether the ants' actions were determined algorithmically or not. he said they clearly were, if for no other reason than given the primitive nature of the beast itself. ants, after all, aren't known particularly for their mental depth. i disagreed, immediately, and for no very well articulated reason, but i strongly felt that it wasn't true. he was pointing to a pair of almost perfectly mirrored paths dug into the transparent substrate of the ants' world (literal, physical holes dug into the 'ground' they lived on), and saying that that kind of coincidence was too rich to believe. clearly they operate algorithmically, they're evincing their own predictability right before our eyes. but i still didn't believe it. i protested a few times, but didn't have anything very interesting to say in my own defense. and yet i felt that i was right. the world is too complicated, i now think, and imperfectly and implicitly then thought, to allow for any true algorithmic system. the thing about an algorithm is that it's an algorithm. once you throw it something it's not set up to handle, it won't handle it. it simply won't. and if it does then it's not an algorithm. and one thing the world is good at, is absolutely breathtakingly gifted at, is throwing you shit you don't know how to deal with. even if you're an ant. you're either able to learn from the world, in which case, by definition, no preset catalog of input-output rules could possibly prepare you for an infinite variety of possible experiences, or you're not. if the latter, you are an algorithm. if the former, you're not. this is what i've come to think about the issue. that being said, another advance has been made in the mobility of robots. "Creating order out of chaos" is a sub-heading of the article. "Whether climbing a hill or navigating tricky terrain, a new six-legged robot has got it covered using a digital circuit that mimics specialized brain cells used by insects for walking." you can see why this reminded me of the above anecdote. the little robot's legs wiggle spasmodically, twitch utterly randomly, until they zero in on the most efficient cycle of leg twitches to move them about. it changes with every contour of their path, and is constantly reevaluated by a central processing unit. or a central pattern generator, as the dudes in the article call it. learning, basically. learning. altering the code is how i instinctively want to phrase it, but is that right? am i seeing a level of complexity in the world that negates the possibility of a successful algorithmic response, or am i simply selling algorithms short? could we not imagine an algorithm that said, basically, 'wiggle your legs until you get up the hill without wasting too much energy'? does this count as an algorithm? if it does, how does it differ from what we call intelligence, by anything other than degree? 'wrangle thoughts with sufficient dialectic clout to subdue your interlocuter'. go. how is this different, expect by order of magnitude? maybe this is my own perverse interpretation, but to me an algorithm, or a machine, or anything else that operates by program, doesn't have sufficient reactant capacity for life in the real world. there are simply too many different things that could possibly happen to any one organism on the face of this earth, that there is no possible program rich enough to cover all eventualities. and even if there were, the draconian constraints of evolution would never allow the profligate expense of storing the ridiculously vast store of information that would surely constitute it. i simply can't countenance it. not in an ant, one of the superstars of evolution. and yet, maybe i'm wrong. maybe i'm obfuscating a crucial difference between what we normally call free will and the patterns of behavior evinced by ants in an ant farm. stated thus baldy, my brash stand begins to look tawdry indeed. surely there is a crucial difference between the free will of intelligent beings and the blind scurryings of the lowliest of insects? and now i sound insufferably sarcastic and superior, in an unpardonably back-handed way. okay, that was way too many twists and turns at the end there. also, apologies to ergonomicon if he remembers our conversation differently. our memories (mine, in other words) are constituted of what we think happened, and there's no terribly compelling argument for our reliability in these matters. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
8:27 pm	"Fire in Houston blamed on inflatable gorilla" i love the 'ap: odd news' section of links on the seattle pi website. "Chicken plays chicken with drivers on busy street." "Truck driver chokes on chili and crashes into home." these are actual links up right now. i confess that i haven't followed any of the links, or, obviously, read the more fully developed stories behind them. but when it comes to stories like these, do you really need to? is there not sufficient mirth, sufficient eyebrow cocked, blank-faced oomph to the very headlines themselves? i ask you. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 25th, 2010
4:15 pm	get off your ass "The study followed 8,800 adults ages 25 and older for six and a half years and found that each daily hour of television viewing was associated with an 18 percent increase in deaths from heart disease and an 11 percent increase in overall mortality. "Those who watched television four hours or more a day were 80 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than those who watched two hours or less, and 46 percent more likely to die of any cause. And it did not matter whether they were overweight..." whoa. oh, and for all my geek friends out there, i'm pretty sure sitting in front of the computer counts as sedentary screen time. this is scary. i'm definitely guilty of the following, many days: "'For many people, on a daily basis, they simply shift from one chair to another — from the chair in the car to the chair in the office to the chair in front of the television,' said the study’s lead author, David Dunstan of the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria, Australia. 'Even if someone has a healthy body weight, sitting for long periods still has an unhealthy influence on blood sugar and blood fats.'" we're talking about people in their twenties and thirties here. "46 percent more likely to die of any cause." holy crap. stand up, folks. let's go walk around the block or something. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
11:22 am	blather saturday was a nice day. kelly went to a day spa for most of the day, so i just oozed around, had a lazy morning, read my book. my amp has been making horrible noises for a long time now, and i finally made it out to american music to see what could be done. i've been dreading this fix, expecting it to run anywhere from two to six hundred dollars for a major fix or even full on amp replacement. turns out a seventeen dollar power tube fixed me right up. goddamn right, i was very pleased. so i went home, plugged in the gibson, and noodled for a while. feet up on the amp, kicked back in my chair, playing nice and loud. then i went over to gordito's and got a couple steak tacos and a beer, sat and read my book and ate. wandered back home, sat on my back porch and smoked a pipe and read. then i showered, got all duded up, threw my gear in the car, and headed down to conor byrne. fascination street was playing that night. the first set was rough, we could have used another couple of rehearsals, but the second and third sets were rockin. a bunch of roosevelt kids ended up coming by, randomly. i think they were out at king's across the street and then decided to come by. so that was cool. made a bit of cash, got to rock out with my cock out. recognized a couple girls who'd been at the new year's show, making eyes at me. told me they're my biggest fans, ha. it's gotta be the eye shadow. sunday was football day. we went to bleacher's for food and beer and the afc game. i was really excited that the jets might be about to pull off an incredible upset, but that peyton guy is just a monster. he is really, really good. so that was a little disappointing, but really i like the colts, so i'm alright with it. the second game was rougher. yes, both my teams lost yesterday, but i can't feel too bad because i still like the teams that won. it's really tragic that the vikings just couldn't hold onto the damn ball. when your qb is interception happy and your running back is fumble happy, you're pretty much screwed. it was a painful game. but it's gonna be a hell of a superbowl. my money's on the colts. their d-line is surprisingly fierce, and their o-line stood up to the jets, which is really saying something. so long as peyton's got time to breathe, he'll kick your ass from here to next tuesday. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
7:09 pm	we're fucked i don't know if y'all were paying attention to the supreme court decision that just came down, removing the limits on what corporations can spend to support political campaigns. if so, you probably know what i'm talking about. if not, i guess all i can say is look into it. i've given some thought to making a long post, in the usual liberal vein, decrying the abuse of power, the potential for abuse of power, etc. but i just can't bring myself to do it. i can't seem to muster it. all i can think to say, looking at the last ten years of politics, at the failure of the democrat's majority in the past year, at the political culture we find ourselves in ten years into the new millennium, is this: we're fucked. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
1:05 pm	ptsd funny. i think i might have a touch of ptsd regarding employment. nothing heavy, nothing to seek help for or anything. but we just had a meeting here at work where we were told that february is looking to be a dismal month and we might be asked to miss a day or two of work unpaid. the actual worker boys might miss as much as a week or two of work. this was just fair warning handed down from management, and very deliberately couched within a reassurance that january was going very well, and that 2010 as a whole looked very promising. the company is strong, business is good overall, but we're looking to lose a shitpot of money in february. in other words, don't worry, folks. it's just february. just the one month. but i've got fear in me now. my stomach is roiling. i feel all shuddery, and cringey. my head keeps telling me that everything's fine, but my body's not listening. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
11:27 am	git 'er done i wrote last night. it was very satisfying. i hadn't had a chance to do so in about a month and a half. and not only did i just get to write, but i'm pretty sure i managed to bull my way through a rather serious plot issue coming up on the end of the story. i was having a hell of a time eventuating a crisis, trying to bend my plot lines close enough to each other to make them short circuit. but i made it happen last night, and, pending a re-read, i think it works. i'm nowhere near done, nor do i know, exactly, what comes next, but i've broken down a wall that was starting to daunt me. so good news! also, two fifty micro night is bad news. high octane porters and pales are on a different plane than my usual pibber. my memory of riding home is a little, how shall i say, hazy. but that's okay! and here's hoping i get a chance to write again next tuesday. i'm pretty sure kelly's rehearsal schedule is steady, so there shouldn't be a problem. how cool would it be to finish this thing? that would be three novels written. man oh jeez. people keep asking me how the publishing situation is going, and it's kinda depressing to always have the same answer for them: 'tain't. somehow i just can't muster the chutzpah to do any legwork in that realm of things. i need an assistant. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
8:27 am	wow, shortest article ever the by-line is longer than the article itself. by-line: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer said on Wednesday that Democrats are still discussing how to move forward on healthcare reform after losing their Senate supermajority in a Republican upset in Massachusetts." article: ""We want to get done what we can get done," Hoyer told Reuters. "We are still talking."" good job, guys. excellent, in-depth reporting. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
3:58 pm	iced americano fail i just stopped to get a coffee on my way back to work from the bank, ordered my usual double tall iced americano, and the girl made it an exciting new way. fill the cup with ice, then fill the cup almost full with hot water, thereby melting all the ice, and then dribble in the espresso. as such i have a luke-warm, watered down americano. fail. (Comment on this)
11:24 am	weight christmas-time of 2007 i remember having a kind of a body-shock, so to speak. the place i was working was putting together an office biggest loser competition, so they set up a scale in the women's bathroom and everyone was getting weighed in and talking about it and such. i went in there and weighed myself and realized that i was the heaviest i had ever been. i was around a hundred ninety pounds, and while i realize that to some people this might not sound like much, at the time my driver's license still read a hundred sixty-five pounds, as it had since i was sixteen. a full-grown man running one-ninety is no big deal, but realizing you're clocking in a full twenty-five pounds over the weight you still fuzzily identify with is another matter entirely. twenty-five pounds is fifteen percent of one sixty-five. that's a substantial addition. what with one thing and another, i feel pretty good about where i am two years later. i've cut fast food out of my diet to a large extent, though i still crumble occasionally, i've been riding my bike to open mic for two and a half years now, and just generally keep a gimlet eye on a rough daily calorie count. my mom asked me recently, when i was recounting roughly this same story, whether my secret was portions, portions, portions, since i'd mentioned my focus on counting calories. no, i said, it's more meals, meals, meals. i'm pretty convinced that one of the biggest difference-makers is a result of not feeling like i need to eat three big meals a day. usually i'll eat maybe two meals a day, with a snack or two thrown in. sometimes just one big meal a day, with a smattering of snacks. and i'm a nazi about sugar. if i drink soda it's diet, i don't eat candy, and i rarely put sugar in my coffee. (okay, i eat a little bit of candy, usually at the movies) and finally i do my level best to eat healthy lunches during the week. this is a big one, since lunch is usually my biggest meal of the day. avoid greasy burgers, refried beans, fried stuff, try to get healthy subway sammiches, pho, etc. for the past four or five months i've been hovering around a hundred seventy pounds. i feel good about it. i've put on some muscle since high school, so it makes sense to be a little heavier. and while i do have a big of a pooch in front, i'm okay with it. rock hard abs are for metros, athletes, and douche bags. and those who just have them without having to work for it, whom i feel perfectly comfortable hating. just kidding. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
9:01 am	books i read a book called 'founding brothers' recently, by joseph ellis. he won the pulitzer for it, and it was quite good. it was the first bit of non-fiction i've read in a long time, not counting the interwebz. the guy did a really good job of fleshing out the so-called founding fathers, giving them personalities, giving the reader a window into an extremely unsettled time. i found it particularly interesting to read about the beginning of partisan politics that sprang up pitting jefferson against adams, from the very beginning of adams's presidency with jefferson as his vice president. imagine having a vp who was the titular head of the opposition party, secretly (or not-so-secretly) campaigning against you for your entire term in office. pretty effed up. and washington was a compelling figure. he really was the father of our country, in a deep way. not only did he win the war for us, coming to realize after a string of failures that the secret to victory lay not in winning battles, but merely in maintaining resistance, in sustaining the continental army in opposition to britain. as long as they were fighting, they were winning, he intuited, and he was proved right. britain finally gave up. but that wasn't the greatest thing he did. in 1783 certain officers of the continental army were plotting to march on the rag-tag congress in philadelphia and take over the fledgling government by force, when washington walked into the room, looked them all in the eye, and resigned his post as commander of the army. without him they didn't have a chance of holding the force together, and a military coup d'etat was stillborn. and then, after practically getting strong-armed into serving a second term as president against his own wishes, he stepped down after two terms, firmly setting a precedent that stood for a hundred fifty years and making starkly clear to the world, his country, and to history that the leader of the united states was not a monarch, and that the transfer of power at the very top could happen peacefully. no one really expected it to work, but it did, mainly because washington didn't want power for himself. he wanted his country to work. jefferson, on the other hand, was a douche bag. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
9:05 am	a start we've got band practice tonight, and thursday night as well. we've got a show at the conor byrne on the twenty-third of this month, a full three set night. it's been months since we've put together that long of a show, so we've got a lot of work to do in only two rehearsals. we played showbox sodo on new year's eve, which was a lot of fun. kelly stayed home, which i know was disappointing for her, because she was sick. we also had the kid at home, so it was good she got to keep him company. i got down to sodo around five after working a half day and then going home to rest and shower--at that point i was just about running on fumes. those two weeks were packed pretty full of late nights. after setting up the stage a bit, tony and i stepped across the street to the hooverville bar/pub/tavern/whatever, which has a single sign out front, reading 'BAR', for a greasy little pizza and some pabst. we shot the shit for a while before heading back for sound check. i ended up spending most of the evening up in the green room, which had a fridge stocked with free pbr. that rocked, and was the same when we played market last may. showbox knows how to do it. hung with rick and liz, tony and mica, sean and lizette, people from the other bands, evan, it was kind of a revolving door mini-party up there. anyways, midnight passed us by as we were standing upstairs, outside the green room, looking through a window high over the lounge area (we didn't play the big room, fortunately, as it has atrocious sound--instead they put the show into that side lounge area, which was shoulder-to-shoulder) at the surging crowd, waiting for the band before us to finish up. 2010 happened, but my wife wasn't there to kiss, so instead i went out and rocked. it was a good show, lot of fun. my amp is currently suffering a chronic horrible-noise problem that i have already once paid almost two hundred bucks to get fixed, unsuccessfully. i really need to get something done before the gig on the 23rd, but i can't decide if i want to spring for a new amp, which would cost five or six hundred bucks, or attempt another fix on my current amp, which, while it would be far less expensive, may or may not fix the goddamn problem. i would be seriously pissed if i put another bill and a half into the thing, only to have the horrible noises persist. i might would have to bus' a can o' whoop-ass on some kinda mothuh-what? so to speak. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 11th, 2010
11:44 am	blogification i've noticed recently that i don't write as much as i used to, and much of what i do write is about politics and science and crap like that, not so much what i'm doing in my life and that kinda action. i went back to my 2004 posts recently and read through for a while. there were a lot of posts, all about stuff going on in my life. i'm not sure what's changed, if it's just that friends rarely post here anymore, making me subconsciously view this forum as more related to what i tend to read while cruising the interwebz, namely news articles, or if it's a more general change in my place in the world. or rather my mental outlook on the world. part of me feels like i've achieved a kind of base-line arrangement with reality whereby i've oriented myself as well as possible in relation to it, mentally and emotionally speaking, to the best of my conceptual abilities, and now need to, for lack of greater specificity, live. what the hell am i talking about? well, maybe i've talked enough, roughly speaking. thirty years old is peeking at me, just over the horizon, less than three months away. the end of my twenties is screaming down the pipe, grinning madly, aimed straight at my face. or maybe my solar plexus. i've always thought of one's twenties as the time when you figure out where you fit in the world, where your sharp edges are, where you keep your soft white under-belly, and one's thirties are the time to let the roots you've laid down spread and take hold, dig deep and solid into the earth of life. the tumbleweed twenties lend themselves to diarrhea of the blog in a way that slow root growth does not. all this being said, however, i do plan to write more about what's happening, because i've discovered that if i don't write it down, it disappears. i have a very full, busy life, and time, i've noticed, is beginning to slip by at an almost alarming rate. weeks pass by quickly, months pass by quickly, and at some point i realize that there's an entire holiday season i haven't written about at all. it's a new year, there are all these fun nights and fun times i've had, and at this point they are just about gone forever. this isn't a tragedy, exactly. the minutiae of my life are only marginally interesting, even to myself once the original memories fade, but there are sometimes little gems. little gems. and then, at a subsequent point, i realize, holy shit, i'm almost thirty years old. when did that happen? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
11:01 am	have more sex apparently if you have sex frequently, you'll not only be happy about the fact that you have sex frequently, but you'll actually live longer. it lowers your blood pressure, makes your heart more healthy, lowers women's risk of breast cancer, lowers men's risk of prostate cancer, leads to a slimmer physique, and, best of all, you're having sex frequently. YOU CAN'T LOSE! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
11:41 pm	stephen king is back in the saddle i'm currently about 45% of the way through his new book, under the dome, and it's goddamn good. it's the kinda good where i don't want to stop reading, at all, whether it's late and i need to work in the morning, or creeping past my lunch hour sitting in my car. the kinda good i experienced the first time i read it, where i'd set my alarm extra early to read before school, stay up way too late reading, read during class, finishing a thousand plus page book in six days at eleven years old. king's my boy, and ever will be, but he's been off his stride the past twenty years or so. part of me wants to say that quitting drinking, smoking and drugs had a negative impact on his writing abilities. i'd like for the man to stay alive, so i can't in good conscience recommend he recommence these habits, but i have to admit that it's been something of a disappointment to me. no doubt my own progression as a reader and a person, achieving adulthood somewhere there in the interim, has a great deal to do with my appreciation of his works, thereby lessening the force of any perceived change where i'm concerned, but all that to the wayside. this book is good. fucking good. it's got a bit of the mist to it, small-town folks in a contained environment, even with the disturbing religious overtones, and i gotta love the reference to the mist he threw in, no doubt gratuitously. but this book takes it so far beyond, sets up such a grander scope, digs into it so much deeper, sets it up so much more implacably, so much more deeply and inevitably... basically it's a crime i have to go to bed in order to wake up for work tomorrow. and yet i can't bemoan it too terribly honestly, because there's not the slightest chance i could finish the book tonight, even if i didn't have to work in the morning. and this pain does double-duty as delighted hand-rubbing, since it means there is so much book left to be had. because there's nothing worse than a good book, done too soon. i almost can't imagine stopping reading, yet i know that i have no choice. i was this close to heading off to write my own book this evening, and i haven't written a word in over a month, but that's okay. it's okay because i say it's okay. two thousand ten is a new year, and it will all work itself out. not being able to see the end does not preclude said end. and i have a fucking good book to keep me company in the meantime. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
2:22 pm	how the war on drugs kills families on december sixteenth of this year mexican forces cornered beltran leyva, a drug lord, in a town south of mexico city. he didn't survive the confrontation, and nor did a young soldier, angulo cordova. cordova was hailed by the government as a hero who sacrificed himself for the good of his country. he went down in the line of duty. he died with honor. the navy secretary presented his mother with the mexican flag in person. the next day--the very next day--gunmen broke into cordova's mother's house and gunned her down along with three other relatives. these four people were murdered in their home for the crime of being related to a national hero. will someone explain to me how it is better that these kinds of things happen than the alternative, namely that we legalize drugs? someone explain to me how it is that allowing free citizens to legally obtain mind-altering substances is worse than a gang of thugs breaking into an old woman's house and gunning her down the day after she buries her son, who himself was killed trying to uphold these same drug laws. in phoenix, there is roughly one kidnapping per day, the vast (practically exclusive) majority of which are directly related to drug running. home invasions, beatings, murder. the mexican army roams the streets of juarez, which saw eighteen hundred murders last year, in armored personnel carriers. and still it gets outgunned by drug cartels. do you want to know why all of this happens? there is one very simple reason for all of this bloodshed, all of this murder, all of this pain and terror: drugs are illegal. that's it. that's the only reason. can anyone seriously believe anymore that prohibition will ever work? could anyone possibly still be so blind as to think that if we just squeeze the bad guys a little harder, they'll suddenly decide, oh, you know what? the government's right after all. drugs are bad, and i should stop being a bad guy. all these millions of dollars are great and all, but i'd much rather get a job flipping burgers down at the mcdonald's. ladies and gentlemen, consider the gauntlet thrown. this goes out to every politician, policy maker, advisor, and council member: if you support the war on drugs, the blood of the cordova family is on your hands. if you stand in the way of legislation legalizing drugs, every drug-related murder is on you. every kidnapping. every beating. you are perpetuating the violence, willfully, deliberately, and self-righteously. god have mercy on your soul. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
1:30 pm	the fallacy of the unspoken premise there's a headline on google news right now that says something along the lines of 'the stimulus was a waste of money'. it goes on to say, basically, that even after congress and obama spent 789 billion dollars (forgetting, of course, that all the money hasn't been spent yet), a bunch of jobs were still lost. the recession didn't end immediately and magically, and we didn't add millions of new jobs in 2009. the implicit assumption in this asinine blog post seems to be that if congress had not passed the stimulus package, the economy would have rebounded much more quickly and we'd all be living high on the hog right now. apparently this guy doesn't remember what people were talking about back in the beginning of 2009. things like 'global economic collapse', 'possibly on the brink of a major depression' (i'm paraphrasing). apparently this asshole thinks that the 'private economy', by whom presumably he means people like the major banks who were falling like flies in late 2008, would have magically been solvent and doing robust business in 2009, if the big bad federal government hadn't swooped in and stolen all their money. jesus christ. what a fucking moron. and the worst part is, with a country that has roughly the attention span of a retarded fruit fly, millions of people are going to believe him. sometimes i wish that i would stop reading the news. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:38 pm	bungalow bill when i was a kid we'd go camping in my dad's camper and me and my sister would ride up in the camper part, playing five card draw and mastermind and generally passing the time. i remember one time she decided (she was usually the author of our pastimes--wait, did i say was usually? i meant was.) that we would sing that beatles song, bungalow bill. she started singing the chorus part and i chimed in once i got the drift, which didn't take long, as you can probably guess if you know the song i'm talking about. it pretty much just goes 'hey, bungalow bill, what did you kill, bungalow bill.' repeat ad whateverum. the weird part, and the reason i'm taking us down this meandering and questionably interesting path, is that those crazy beatles switch time signatures in the middle of this particular chorus part we're talking about. it sounds real simple, and once you hear the song a few times you almost don't notice they're doing it, but they go from 4/4 to 2/4 and back again, over and over. it's three bars of 4/4 followed by one bar of 2/4, repeat. so, back to childhood, we're chillin in the camper, jen's singing the song the way it actually goes, going back to the first 4/4 bar after the 2/4 bar at the end of the phrase, and i start telling her to stretch it out. the nascent musician in me, who'd been listening to 4/4 time since inception, basically, heard the absence of those last two beats and said, hey, wait a second. you're missing a couple beats there. the cool part was that i convinced my sister of it. she, too, had been listening to 4/4 time since inception, and once i jolted her out of her memory of the way the song was supposed to go, and introduced her to what the song would feel like if you stayed in the same time signature the whole time, she was terminally confused. both of us were young at this point, probably six and eleven or so (i'm the younger), so neither of us had the experience or authority to really know what the hell was going on. but i always remember this exchange. the fatal conflict of memory and expectation. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
10:49 pm	the third book i'm creeping up on the end of my third novel, and have no time to write. it might not be a bad time for me to not have time to write, since i find myself in a place where i don't have any idea how to tie things up. alternatively, this might be the worst possible time to not have time to write, since the only way i could really figure out just exactly where i want things to go is by having time to write. in the interest of being generally pleased about life, etc., i'll go ahead and go with option number one. it certainly won't kill me to take a break, and it's entirely possible that a bit of a breather will allow me to come back to it, at some indeterminate future point, with a so-called 'fresh eye'. granted, the thought of approaching my own writing with a 'fresh eye' gives me the creeps just a little bit, but i have to say that i've become remarkably more tolerant of my own writing. everyone says that the only way to write is to write, and the more i write the more i believe it. i don't know if it's just that i become more inured to it, or if i'm getting better at it, but there's no doubt that it's gotten easier and easier to go back and read what i've written. there is some fear in me that a satisfying resolution to the corner i've painted myself into in this latest book will elude me. i think about it at odd times, go over the characters, the situations, the tension i've built up, and wonder, christ, what the hell is supposed to happen next? but that's how i write. that's how i've always written. i don't know what's going to happen next until i get there, and by that point i'm already there, so the point is moot. this realization is not terribly helpful in the attempt to assuage the above fears. (Comment on this)
10:33 pm	chances are good that i'm wrong about everything this is a brief caveat to my previous post about man-made climate change, just in case i gave the wrong impression. i was less saying that i'm becoming more sure about one thing, and more saying that i'm becoming less sure about something else. basically the whole thing is looking more and more complicated and borderline unknowable, at least by me. basically, in case i creep too close to any high horses, everyone should know that chances are quite good that i'm wrong about everything. (2 Comments |Comment on this)