Detachment

My RSS reader has over a thousand unread items. I can't seem to keep it clear. People say things to me on Facebook. I get around to replying sometimes. Sometimes I don't. My desk is covered in paper and junk again. I feel like I am ready to disregard the outside world--ostensibly, even as I write this blog post for the outside world. I'd like to drop everything and go live on an island. I suppose this is a fairly common sentiment. The weather is nicer. Providing the island is tropical, anyway. Some island off the coast of Maine might not be as pleasant in that category. But in its isolation, perhaps that would be even closer to the ideal I seek. I don't mean this to come off in some depressed-sounding way. I am not looking to jump into the ocean and say fuck all to humanity. I just want to hang out with island people. And live on island time. And without technology. Or without too much technology. I mean, I do enjoy indoor plumbing, heat/air, gas stoves, electric lights, cable television, high-speed...fuck. I could rant all day about getting away from it all, but I am still hooked to this goddamn cable modem, and if you took me away from it, I might go into DTs, even in spite of the fact that lately I have let it slide.

Soon, I will go to work and sit in front of a computer for eight hours. And the fulfillment I get from that, you could fit on the point of a pin. So that's likely the source of my desire to escape. Hooray for the holidays.

That was creepy

I gave up on the self-portrait thing up at the top there. It was too creepy. If I want to see pictures of myself, I'll just look at Myspace or something.

I am off to work where work is becoming less like purgation every day. Whether it is moving toward the (probably false) light of redemption or down the abyss of a pure living hell, now that remains to be seen. Still I commute!

Blog as social medium

I'm still here, I guess. I freshened up the look of the place in an assuredly-to-be-futile attempt to write more. I dunno. Is this color scheme too goth looking? There's that camera-phone self-portrait too. If that's not a meta-comment on the absurdity of social media and personal projections on self-image, then I don't know what is.

So. What to talk about now that there's a fresh coat of paint on the walls?

Oh! Did you know that it's National Novel Writing Month? Yeah, I'm not actually doing it. I think it's something that I possibly could do, but why the hell should I? Sure, 50,000 words would be a great accomplishment at the end of a month, but for chrissakes, who needs 50,000 words of rambling, disconnected, Adderall-soaked prose? (I might if I could acquire Adderall, but I'm not exactly in college anymore, and drugs are bad, mmkay?) I tend to agree with Laura Miller. Still, I should be sticking to my goals, which I have been doing a pretty pathetic job of doing. Not a week goes by that I don't try some new method of getting/keeping my shit organized.

Oh well. I ought to get to work on something useful. There's some dirty dishes in the sink. And, oh yeah, there's that book I was thinking about writing. At this pace, I may have 15,000 words by the end of the month. Which ain't exactly a big stinkin deal, but it's still progress, and we all know progress is a good thing.

A post about nothing in the future...

I'm working on this thing right now. A story, chapter, vignette, TV pilot, whatever. Somehow this character in it has become a hapless fucking idiot and I don't think he realizes it. I think he actually believes he's a pretty smart guy, although he sees -- or perhaps because he sees some of his limitations in the "life experience" department. But either way, he's not too smart. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But he's kind of a racist. Not the exaggerated kind of violent political racist who burns crosses on a lawn or anything, but still a somewhat disturbing caricature of a guy who makes a little too much fun of someone else simply in light of his difference.

Of course, in revision, these issues will become irrelevant. So by the end of the weekend, he'll probably still be stupid, but quite a bit less un-PC, or at least only un-PC in ways that I am comfortable with. Nobody will ever read this first draft. I just felt like sharing.

Self-fulfilling prophecy or self-aware inevitability?

I have said that I would eventually abandon this blog.

This, of course, is the usual "It's been a while" post, though I am loath to use that phrase, since one might associate it with that godawful song. But I suppose that since I opened this thing up, I might as well write something about something.

I just don't have many ideas. I spend my nights drinking and sometimes working on something I want to call a novel, sometimes working on things that nobody sensible would call "cover letters" and waiting either for rejection letters or not to hear anything at all. Of course, I am aware that this pity-party bullshit is not what anybody wants to read. I know, because as I reread it, it is making me sick. I just don't feel like hitting the backspace key because, if anything, I am at least building up a word count.

Anyway, there's no reason I shouldn't be writing something here all the time. I am sure I can find some way to entertain myself by writing something. About something. But not tonight. We'll just call this bit of nonsense... well, come up with your own metaphor for something that loosens something up.

What the sex is political speech anyway?

A woman was arrested for contempt of court in Lake County. Jennifer LaPenta walked into a courtroom wearing a shirt saying:

I own the (female body part) so I make the rules.

Well, sure. I can think of an entire lexicon of slang for various female body parts, but in the interest of art and good taste, I will assume her shirt said Georgia O'Keefe. As in, "I have the Georgia O'Keefe at this party, so I'm gonna paint this iris purple." In and of itself, I don't even see how this could possibly be offensive to anyone, much less Lake County Associate Judge Helen Rozenburg. I mean, one might predict a level of empathy for the shared struggle of women to achieve equality, as women still only earn about 78 percent of what men do for equal work, among numerous other examples of injustice. Back to that in a moment.

From a legal standpoint, this t-shirt's flowery prose is a tricky issue. I am sure we are all reminded of the landmark First Amendment case from 1971, Cohen v California. Paul Robert Cohen was arrested for disturbing the peace after wearing a jacket at the Los Angeles Courthouse that said "(Slang for sexual penetration) the Draft." It's a noteworthy difference in this case that he did not wear the "Posh and Becks the Draft" jacket inside a courtroom, but that he did wear it in a hallway. Anyway, as Justice Harlan writes in the decision:

We cannot lose sight of the fact that, in what otherwise might seem a trifling and annoying instance of individual distasteful abuse of a privilege, these fundamental societal values are truly implicated. That is why "[w]holly neutral futilities . . . come under the protection of free speech as fully as do Keats' poems or Donne's sermons," Winters v. New York, 333 U.S. 507, 528 (1948) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting), and why "so long as the means are peaceful, the communication need not meet standards of acceptability," Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415, 419 (1971).

This really is a brilliant bit of legal writing, right down to the famous lines:

For, while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric.

Well-said, unless you're some kind of ninny about the "evils" of moral relativism. However, it would seem that since the young woman in our case wore the shirt in the courtroom that she violated the authority of the court--rather than "disturbing the peace," which was the charge in Cohen. That is, Judge Rozenburg must have seen the t-shirt as a challenge to her authority--even though the woman wearing it was not a defendant or there for any official reason whatsoever. No, it would seem that in spite of whatever lofty notions we may have had about women's rights and solidarity, that the judge in this case has asserted that she, in fact, has the bigger Georgia O'Keefe. Take that, glass ceiling.

To the Chicago restaurant industry

I'd like to write a short, open letter to many of the fine restaurants and bars in the city of Chicago (and wherever else):

Join the fucking 21st century. The concept of consumer credit has existed for centuries, and the credit card itself, in various forms since the early part of the 20th century. In the 1950s credit and charge card companies began issuing cards to folks for use to make purchases at retailers and restaurants--Diners Club was the first independent card. Note what the fuck it was called: Diners Club. Because people want to use these goddamn things in restaurants. Since debit cards became widely available and convenient in the 90s, the use of cash has been declining:

There is evidence that paper money is being used less often, according to the Federal Reserve. Though cash payments are difficult to track, the number of noncash transactions in the United States grew from fewer than 250 a person in 1995 to more than 300 in 2006. Data on the stock of small-denomination bills and destroyed bills indicates that the use of cash peaked in the mid-1990s and has been declining since, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found.

And now there's an app and scanner for cellphones that can read credit cards. Do you realize what this means? Now bookmakers, prostitutes, and drug dealers can theoretically accept your Master Card in exchange for their products and services.

So tell me why, when you've gone to all the hassle of obtaining a liquor license from the city of Chicago, all the various permits and other bureaucratic nonsense that it takes to open a restaurant in this town, you insist that your customers not have the convenience of paying for their meal with a credit or debit card? To you I say, fuck your bogus wannabe taco stand. I am going across the street to spend my money where I am valued as a consumer, whether I have cash in my pocket or not.

It's not just cheap brandy

It's the cheapest.

In spite of my liquor-ish transgressions last evening, I have work to do today. And I think that writing a blog post about nothing in particular is what I need to do to get started. I suppose that the first thing on my agenda this morning afternoon (after this blog post, of course) is to write another blog post. That "professional" shit I was talking about before. I think that if I get enough swear words out of my system here (shitfuck) that I'll be able to create the appropriate content (fuckass) for the work I need to get paid for (goddamn bitchassfuckshit).

Then I will use that swear-free article as part of a writing sample for a portfolio that I will send to another employer who would pay me a lot better if they hired me. Nothing against my current employer, but this part-time stuff ain't paying the bills right now. Anyway, I've never made it a secret that I'm looking for a full-time job that would launch me into the dwindling ranks of America's middle class. I think it would be fun to have health insurance and all that shit. I injure myself sometimes. Plus I think I might have a cavity in one of my molars.

After that, I need to clean up the kitchen. The perpetual disaster that is my kitchen. I plan on making pizza tonight (which always wrecks the kitchen). I picked up some prosciutto at Trader Joe's the other night. That will be delicious on my pizzas. Come over if you want a slice.

And then maybe I can get back to work on that novel. Or memoir. Or a short story, maybe. Or the novella. Or maybe I can drink beer and watch The Simpsons. Whatever works, ya know?

Where I've been, why I've been there

I haven't had internet access at the house for a while. This is due to nonpayment to my previous ISP, which is something I should probably feel bad about, but fuck em. If they insist on providing services to poor people, it's their own damn fault. Just like all the banks that gave out loans to poor people. What I am saying is that we poor people can't be trusted to pay our various debts. We should all be locked away in debtors' prisons like they did to Charles Dickens. 

I've been working a little bit lately, and the promise of more work is ahead. So maybe I can start to climb out of this hole. I got a new ISP.

Anyway, the point of all that is that I've used the lack of access as an excuse not to post updates to this blog, even though I occasionally popped into the coffee shop for free wi-fi. I have also used the lack of work as an excuse not to write so much. Some fits and starts, kind of, but mostly just watching shit that Netflix sends me in the mail (have you seen The Wire? I mean, goddamn!) and listening to Cubs games on the radio. Getting back to work will help me to force myself to write. Especially since my work is about to involve writing. Doing a blog, some marketing type stuff. Sans the f-word, though, I imagine. But still, it's getting paid to write stuff. 

So that's where I've been. I am back now. We'll see how things turn out.

Mobile

Just trying this on my phone. Internet destroyed. More later.

PTSD, among other things

I think about PTSD sometimes. For instance, I recently applied for a job assisting veterans with mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. I haven't heard back yet from the potential employer, and I'm not entirely sure I want to, in spite of the growing desperation in my employment situation. Tonight I read an article by a woman who was diagnosed with PTSD after childbirth, a kind of strange diagnosis perhaps, but certainly believable, considering her circumstances. I am writing a short story that sort of deals with the subject of PTSD.

Regarding my own "issues," I doubt that I ever suffered with the disorder part of post-traumatic stress. I drank too much after I came home from Iraq. But I wasn't exactly a poster-child for sobriety before I left. I just had a lot of that active-duty combat pay in my bank account, and single-malt scotch tasted good and made the weird dreams go away. I probably had a serious predilection toward scotch-abuse long before I ever joined the army. In the past, occasionally something might have triggered a fucked-up kind of memory or instinctual fear. The best example I can think of is one moment when I was entering a freeway on-ramp and I drove right over some piece of trash in the middle of the street. I clenched up in dread as I expected that the rubbish in the road was some kind of improvised explosive that would blow me sky-high. But I was in Nashville, Tennessee, where there have been few (as in zero) incidents of roadside bombs in recent memory. And after that, I just kept driving. I think that someone with a real case of PTSD would have probably had to stop and shut down and suffer for a while.

But now I am rethinking this whole issue. It is February and Football Season Is Over, baseball season is two months away, and basketball, hockey, and the Winter Olympics all make me miserable. I am without sport to entertain me. For some strange reason in my personal economy, I still have cable on at my apartment, and I have the MLB Network, which broadcasts a lot of off-season gossip and shows that try to determine who the best right fielder was during the 1960s. I can think of three who were all the best: Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Frank Robinson. They also do these recap shows on entire seasons of Major League Baseball, and tonight they are showing 2003. The year we invaded Iraq. The year I went to Iraq. The year that the Chicago Cubs went to game six of the NLCS with a 3-2 lead in the series, all the way to the 8th inning of game six with a score of 3-0. After a flyout in the top of the inning, they were five outs away from their first pennant since 1945... and then the Bartman "incident." No rational person still blames Bartman for the Cubs' loss, much like no rational person would pay $22 to walk around a "science" museum that shows off mankind's recent relationship with living dinosaurs. No, the Cubs pissed that one away all on their own. Yet it still haunts me. I  recall thinking what a great moment this would be, while I'm stuck in a stinking shithole war-zone in the Middle East, if the Chicago Cubs could possibly alleviate my agony (I was really whiny about being in Iraq, by the way) by just making five more fucking outs and going to the World Series. We had satellite television, on which we could get not only all kinds of European soccer and pornography, but also rebroadcasts of the baseball postseason. And it was in October 2003 that my dreams died. Later that month, I came back to the States on leave, and after being home for no more than a day, my girlfriend broke up with me. I wandered around in a drunken haze for two weeks, barely caught the several flights I needed to make it back to Baghdad, where I suffered from an increasingly serious lack of motivation regarding my military duties, and then two months later got myself crushed by an overturned High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle and sent home with a tube in my chest.

So if you ask me if I suffer from PTSD, I'll probably say no. Until you mention the 2003 Major League Baseball season.

Mayor's son called to active duty

One complaint a lot of people have had over the past decade is the lack of prominent politicians' sons and daughters voluntary service in OEF/OIF. Say what you want about the cesspit that is Chicago politics, but you gotta admire that the son of Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley is going on active duty in the army. Who knows where he's going to serve, what his rank is, or what he even does (I don't really feel like taking the time to research it, because it really doesn't matter to me at all). It's just nice to see that the burden of military service is not entirely upon the shoulders of regular working class Joes.

About genius

I read an article today about Peyton Manning being a genius and a pain in the ass. I think he's a big ugly dickhole playing for a stupid team in an awful state, but no sane person would argue that he isn't a great and phenomenal NFL quarterback. And sure, he's probably a "genius," but I think more likely a savant. Leonardo fuckin da Vinci was a genius. If Peyton can solve the unemployment situation, or develop a feasible alternative to fossil fuels, or paint a fuckin fresco, then he's a genius. Anyway, the article's main point is about obsession and hard work, and I see connections to my own problems as a writer. I lack the obsession and work ethic that I have seen even in several of my peers in the writing game. I think I probably have some level of raw talent or ability, probably not much, but enough to get by for a while. What holds me back is this whole discipline thing. Work. I spend too little time reading and writing...that awful time that really good and of course, great writers spend on their craft. The time that shatters their relationships with the people they love. The time that drives them to substance abuse and suicide...though I am sure plenty of non-geniuses have drunk themselves to death or jumped off bridges. The thing is, I do read and write. Constantly. I'm writing right now. But it's the quality of the writing that matters. Perhaps it doesn't matter so much on that first shitty draft we all write (right?). But that so often is where I give up. I write a bunch of crap, don't finish it, and walk away. Somehow I lack the tenacity, or maybe temerity, to stick with it.

Where, then, do I get sticktoitiveness from?

Certainly not Icehouse beer and blogging at 4:30 in the morning.

A gay old time in the military

I've never put a whole lot of thought into "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," because I never really felt its effects (that I know of. I never asked!) But rationally, it's institutionalized discrimination, which seems about as sensible as racial segregation. Or the outdated, sexist notions about women in combat roles. (In case you weren't aware, men and women have been serving side by side in combat for the entirety of OEF/OIF.) During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today, Georgia Sen. "Sexy" Saxby Chambliss declared his opposition to the repeal of DADT. His rationale is that it would lead to a slippery slope of "immoral" behavior in the military, including:

Alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art.

And let me tell you. There is no better summary of my military service than this collection of words. I mean, if I ever get around to finishing the memoir, I should use this for my title. This is the most hilarious argument I think I have ever heard against allowing homosexuals to serve openly. I may have engaged in all of these things in a single night when I was in the Army. At least three out of four. And I received an honorable discharge...though I should admit that I did receive a Summary Article 15 for this one time when I was still in training. For whatever that's worth. Anyway, I imagine there's probably a ton of gay people who would be better soldiers than I was.

So there. Institutional discrimination is bad. And I was a bad Army-man.

The Snail's Pace (and other cliches)

I have been working on a short story this week. I've set my expectations rather low and am trying to write something to contribute to the old grad school alumni magazine. It's not that I don't respect the publication and all of the work that goes into it...a lot of good writers have published work in this magazine...it's just that their acceptance rate is pretty high from what I understand, as long as you're a current student or graduate of the Notre Dame writing program--the only sources of writing the magazine accepts anyway. Which is fine, it's a good outlet, and I'm glad that even well-established writers and graduates of the ND program still contribute to it. Plus, I never sent them anything when I was a student. I suppose I just feel like I ought to be setting the bar higher for myself. Still, I'm putting every bit as much effort into this writing as I would for any other manuscript, and I am enjoying the narrative that I've got going so far, it's just that it's taking a goddamn long time. I seem to be writing sometimes in these haphazard kind of fits and starts, but lately, I'm just blocked or bored or distracted or whatever. This whole unemployment thing is really fucking with my rhythm. Plus I have a wonderful cold or maybe bronchitis or maybe pneumonia right now that my lovely wife gave me.

But this is not a good excuse. After all, I went out last night, checked out Bad Meaning Good, a fun little movie event at this dive bar in the neighborhood. Everyone gets together to drink and watch a terrible movie and holler at the screen fun things about the movie's awfulness. It was a lot of silly fun. And if I can muster up the strength to walk to this joint and watch a terrible movie, I ought to be able to write a decent short story.

Or a bad one, even. I suppose I should stop this nonsense and get to work.

Or go to the store to get the stuff to make empanadas. That sounds really delicious to me right now.

J.D. Salinger and my Facebook friends

My Facebook news feed, modest with my 147 "friends" or so, erupted today with the news of J.D. Salinger's death, before I'd even seen the obit on the New York Times web front page, which I check far more compulsively than Facebook. I have never seen this much outpouring of "RIP JD. S." or various quotes from an author's work. I saw one "RIP Howard Zinn" yesterday, which really I don't take too seriously. But to each his or her own. My friends in life and, reflected in that, my contacts on Facebook are a random smattering of the extraordinarily literate: writers, English graduate students, etc. and blue collar/service industry folks, all of whom I share something in common with in my own background. (And of course, my favorite people are somewhere in the middle, like restaurant people with master's degrees.) Anyway, when John Updike died last year, I recall very little in the way of any of my Facebook contacts even noticing. David Foster Wallace got a couple more pings, but only from young writers I know, people in graduate school. I'll admit, a lot of my writer friends are sometimes a bit reclusive themselves and hardly effusive on the social networks, but my point is: people from all walks of life went onto Facebook to spread their grief over the death of this American literary icon today.

And that's what he is, and probably the last one. Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer, both very, very important American writers who died in recent years, and there's dozens more, but I wonder how far their reach really went with "regular people" my age. That is, it seems as though every-goddam-body picked up a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and read it when they were teenagers, and if they didn't read it then, they read it later. I know that isn't true, and that plenty of people outside of the literary discipline have read Slaughterhouse Five, and dozens and dozens of other important books that I have yet to read (for instance, I've never read anything by Dos Passos... it's on my list). But who else is still alive who has written a work of American literature as important to as many people as Salinger? Works in the class of Huck Finn, or The Great Gatsby.

Shit... I just realized that Harper Lee is still alive (and eerily similar to Salinger in her publication record and famed reclusiveness), so really my point is losing whatever slight bit of merit it may have had. I can only continue to brainstorm about who else out there is still kicking (I'm pretty sure I had something dismissive lined up to say about Roth's importance on this scale). If you've read this rambling nonsense this far, sorry to have wasted your time. But I'm going to hit "publish" anyway. It's my blog and I'll rant if I want to. I'm going back to Facebook now.

Just what I needed to hear

Today is a kind of anniversary. When my life began to change quite drastically and suddenly just three years ago. And again I find myself rooting against the Indianapolis Colts. I really hate that team.

This is just the kind of reassurance I need. Sometimes I forget.

I'm going to go watch this game now and hope that the Jets can win without making that bum from USC look good.

What I've been up to

I have been avoiding you. I began writing a post last week after I watched The Hurt Locker, which turned into less of a commentary on the film and more of a paper on verisimilitude in the war movie genre. A sprawling, rambling thesis-less essay with references to Baudrillard and postmodern stuff that I don't even understand. And since I half-wrote that and never posted it, I have been avoiding writing anything else here, for god knows what reason.

I have been doing some work, however. Some good old fashioned Southern fried fiction, which is not exactly the same project that I began when I began this blog, but it's work, so shut up about it. Southern fic is also what I've been reading lately. I read Provinces of Night by William Gay, which is a nice little novel about not much at all but very well written, and A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews which is the most brutal and disgusting thing I've ever read, and also probably my new favorite book ever. I mean, it's got racism, misogyny, animal cruelty, every kind of aberrant and abhorrent human behavior you can imagine, and it's only like 170 pages. I recommend that everybody read it. Or reads it. Is that subjunctive? I can't remember.

And I guess that's all I have to say right now.

Doing the artsy Chicago thing

The wife and I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art this evening, since it's free on Tuesdays. Free is always good, even when it's freakishly weird art. That isn't fair for me to say, though, since they have a pretty good exhibit of Italian art produced from 1968 to 2008. I have a kind of fascination with the year 1968, and it was interesting to see bits of why it was a pretty tumultuous and shitty time for everyone in the world, not just people in the United States, Vietnam, various Eastern European nations, etc. It seems that sometimes I only think about America, Czechoslovakia, and Southeast Asia, and tend to forget about all the other places in the world.

I also created some "art":



I've never really tried to edit video before. It's just a little joke, really. But it was neat to see if I could pull something like this off. I'm going to play around more in this medium. I'd like to try it with something a little better than a cell phone sometime.

As far as the writing goes, I'm getting to that next. This was a warm-up. Late-night seems to be as good a time as any for me to work.

Progress like marching through a swamp

Well, it's no surprise to me that after I went to all the trouble setting up this blog (picking out a template and changing the font from sans-serif to serif took a lot of careful consideration) and then writing that cheerless post yesterday that I am only three pages into the real work. It sort of makes this whole blogging project look like one of those documentaries about all the things that went wrong with something. The dark part of every episode of Behind the Music, where the drummer from Def Leppard loses his arm, or Nikki Sixx dies and is revived just to go home and shoot more heroin, or when Ozzy snorts ants.

If only my life were more like Ozzy snorting ants. All I'm doing is wasting time with stupid things like looking for a job and spying on people on Facebook. This takes us back to attention span, I suppose. I can drum up the energy to blather on here about myself for a couple hundred words, but without any meaningful deadline, I'm at a loss to complete some good work. Day Two, and this already seems like a bad idea. How does one keep the writing going without an arbitrary grading system attached to it?

I guess I could grade myself. D-minus-minus.

I should finish reading this novel that I've been toting around tonight. Maybe I'll write something about it.

Ok, here goes.

I've done this blogging thing before. I always run out of good reasons to keep up with it. I think maybe I have a short attention span, particularly when it comes to my own "creative" projects. There's another site out there with a bunch of garbage I've written which has a very nice little url and its own web hosting which is going to expire at the end of this month. Since I don't have a job, or any good reason to pay for it anymore, everything is moving here.

Except that nothing is moving here, apart from my own brain. Which is ok, since this is an altogether new project.

I began writing a novel this morning at about 3:30. It isn't the first time I've ever begun writing a novel. Or begun something absurd in the middle of the night. I have a feeling about this one though, a sort of optimism that I can't say I've felt before. A sense of internal organization about the project that might actually compel me to get beyond just a couple thousand words. And so I'm going to write on this blog about what I've been doing...not about the content of the book, of course, that would be insane. But to keep up with my progress. And I'm going to tell the world about it and invite all the literate and literary folks I know to follow along if they want to.

I am sure there are thousands of these kinds of blogs out there. People who get big ideas about their art and decide to keep a sort of journal to keep track of what they're up to. Probably most of them end in a fizzled-out pile of ashes, goals and dreams derailed and set aside. Maybe that's where we'll end up with this. But maybe, if I can keep it up, I can produce some interest and energy that will keep me motivated and end up with something better than a half-assed graduate thesis that doesn't come anywhere near being a book. There's only two ways this can go, really. Success, or self-destruction. The story of my life.