the hazards of love (for writing)

So I figure the easiest way to keep up with this whole blogging thing is to stop giving so much of a f**k about whether a post is 'perfect' or not. I can guarantee that this will be much more difficult at my horror blog, as I really want those posts to be pretty thoughtful and researched. But this one is all about my personal rantings, right? Those can be contradictory and weird. Why not?

I got a bunch of letters and postcards today in the mail. It was wonderful! I'll never get away from actual mail being so much of a thrill than a like or random comment online. For some reason, this mail made me immediately want to listen to 'The Hazards of Love' by The Decemberists as a full auditory performance. The night I went to see The Decemberists open their 'Hazards of Love' tour in Los Angeles was strange. Very emotionally confusing. Thankfully, what I remember best was how happy and tearful I became whenever the colorful spotlights set in the stage pulsed upwards and silhouetted Colin Meloy every time he sang "And the wanting comes in waves." That remains a top concert moment of mine. I almost wonder if anything before and since has topped it.

I haven't quite given up on Nanowrimo. I've probably given up on the actual writing portion, which is fine as I had intended it to be more about a month dedicated to revision than creating something brand new. I'm still mainlining the feel of Nanowrimo, and that's much more invaluable to me. Tonight (only five days into the month: alright!) I'm getting to sit down for a few significant hours of writing. So that's pretty awesome.

And the wanting comes in waves!

Time kicking me down the road

So I guess I really did set up my own personal blog, way back when, and I really did completely forget about it ever since. I feel like I created it just as I was in the midst of my 'Grad School or Bust!' ennui and I feel fairly certain if I had gone 'Bust' I would have kept it up. Probably over daily tuna melt sandwiches at Stell while I tried to pursue the whole writing thing. But I got into the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and this blog got left behind.

But look at that Earth. Look at that The Prisoner font. I can't just let this guy fester, unseen. Time for a resurrection!

I plan to begin a horror review blog this week so then I'll have two blogs I feel angsty about consistently updating. I also feel like this will be excellent stress on my system, forcing me to produce actual finished content instead of just scribbling endlessly in blank books. Though my scribbled thoughts are actually pretty cool. You can't see those, though. I did just send a few of my better horror fiction ideas to a close friend (who just sold her first book: congrats!) so that too is making me feel better about putting my work out there. It's so silly how keeping everything contained seems like the best idea, but then you see your basic 'brilliant' ideas used in books or movies or television and the initial thought is not "Hey, I could have sold that idea if I was on-the-ball" but instead "Man I'll never get anything published or made." How's that for being born under a bad sign?

Anyway, I still love my main novel idea, which comprised my final creative manuscript at Naropa and continues to exist in various revisions littering my computer's desktop. But since I was a young child, reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz way before I was ready for it (my parents were cool with all my reading and my grandma to this day stocks an awesome horror library), I've wanted to write horror and so that's what I'm going to do. "Naropa University doesn't produce horror writers," my favorite Redlands professor told me as I sat in her office and we talked about my future. Well, thanks to accepting me as of 2010, they sure as hell do now.

come sail away with me

if we can't pass judgment on someone yearning to become an integral part of your life, what use should we put our rationalizing, stern eye of ambiguous analysis to anyway?

my only regret is that just as soon as i reach a conclusion, i immediately reverse it and consider that avenue. sometimes, deep in moody thought while driving, i'm rather surprised i don't randomly run into some stationary object. perhaps subconscious survival instincts are stronger than surmised?

i much prefer the company of a toasted bagel to many people, so when i'm forced (ranging from meeting a friend's friend to related by marriage) to get to know someone 'new' i'm not exactly cranky but i'll strain myself a bit to be distantly polite. my best friend amber once remarked upon my ability to read people, and how i use it purposefully to keep people off-guard. i was quite happy with such a description, seeing how it aligned me well with dr. house, m.d.

but i've never really done much with said ability to develop it. if i have the sort of gift for innate recognition of drives and motives she described, it lives on the same primal level that its observations are processed on. the information and conclusions exist solely as vibes or intuitions: i can't grasp them firmly enough to perform the sort of in-the-moment psychological mayhem house has raised to an artform. don't think i wouldn't play along if i could, though.

so much of my inner life, which dominates my entire life, is about finding meaning and trying to fit in. mostly by not fitting in as best as possible in the important ways, so please don't think me a blatant conformist. i want to blend into a crowd yet retain enough undeniable qualities that i somehow stand out. i want to wear my bleeding, emo heart on my sleeve yet remain mysterious and aloof. i guess i just want to get the joke, and find a way to uniquely communicate the punchline to as wide an audience as possible.

what i don't want is what seems most people do want. either that makes me a true artist or just another square peg in a world of round holes. my hope is that by finding a better metaphor to describe my cosmological positioning to Life, i'll find my calling. i'll let you know how it goes.

i've been enjoying a lot of my favorite things lately, but perhaps with added time on my hands (being in one of those 'transitional periods' we tend to find ourselves in these days) i'm seeing the ominous undertones to it all. imagine gaining a little distance from your life and possessions and, from that new perspective, seeing the lie behind the truth. where is your identity defined, at least in passing, if not by what fills your bookshelves?

i can't say it was an unconscious decision to lean heavily towards art and works that emphasizes individualism. being the only child of two self-contradictory loners, it was natural that i would tend towards solitary pursuits and pleasures. it's safe, it's comfortable, it's less scary to be alone than to rely on any unknown variable, even a friend. that, i believed, was the truth guiding how i lived.

and yet, perhaps by taste or by my soul manifesting in the most subtle of ways, i'm seeing now that so many of the tools i've accrued to inform my identity (what is gathering art after all but a way of defining the limits of our likes and, by extension, ourselves) are not just works that underline my aesthetic. they are lifelines and signposts and repositories of directions towards change. i've always been afraid of being boring, of being static. here then, already at my disposal, is enough to usher in my next stage.

that's what i'll be talking about here, even when i'm not. evolution is the name of the game, and it's time to see what's next.

'the prisoner,' patrick mcgoohan's signature work, is a british television program from the late 1960's. it ran for 17 episodes, it can be rather easily summarized, yet it is complex enough to be compared by serious critics to a piece of music. it is an apt metaphor: 'the prisoner' seems to have been less created than orchestrated, and regardless of contributors' later claims the lifeblood of the project is singularly mcgoohan's.

i'll be writing a small article at the cult film/entertainment blog about 'the prisoner,' unless i end up writing a long, scholarly article instead. either way, its importance to the world is as a brazen and timeless work that transcends small budget and productions woes to be an enduring genre-buster focusing on the tensions between the individual and the society to which the individual belongs, willingly or rather unwillingly as in the case of 'the prisoner.'

for me, 'the prisoner' is a wake-up call, a smart bomb that burrowed under my skin with the decoy promises of sci-fi spy adventuring and psychedelic story twists, and dug its hooks into my faltering consciousness with its harrowing of every cool image of edgy unique misfit chic, holding up each glossy pretension and demanding "why?"

i'm anxious to find out each and every 'why.' why wardrobe choices inevitably tend towards all-black, why someone so dependent upon social contact finds it paralyzingly difficult to find the courage to go out, why the ease of going somewhere new alone is forgotten upon arrival as the dread of going unnoticed manifests like storm clouds. why do i feel like i don't care about fitting in, but would be devastated to be permanently on the outside of things? where are the boundaries, anyway?

that's another significance to 'the prisoner:' one strong reading indicates its the spruced up story of how a man learns to move past his dangerous egotism to become a functional member of society. not of giving in to some benign big brother or sacrificing his beliefs to find a reduced status within a group, but of learning to balance how he wants to live with how one is able to live in the world. it's about learning to accept happiness instead of rejecting it along with everything else because protecting the self from harm seems to call for extreme isolation.

of course, one could argue we're all prisoners of something. escaping sometimes calls for help, and sometimes entails a personal effort simply to find the door and the courage to walk through on one's own. hopefully, i'll know my right door when i encounter it.

be seeing you.