I don't know how much this applies to everyone, but whenever I am particularly struck by a work of art, be it music, a book, a film, a painting, I want to emulate it. I don't want to outright copy the work, or even take little pieces of it and reassemble them into something "new". I want to create something that will strike someone like I was struck. I want to make an impact, to say or do or show something that will make someone stop and think.
I still remember reading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman for the first time, and how much I loved it. I had always loved reading, mostly Goosebumps books and things of that nature. But The Golden Compass was something different, the way that it resonated with me. I was eleven years old. So I began writing. I never really finished anything I started, being so young, but I remember showing my sister a page or two of something I was calling A Heart Blackened. It was some generic murder story that actually began with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night..." She read it and told me that it was good. This was all the encouragement I needed, and so I continued. I never finished the story, but I kept writing.
I became sidetracked from writing for a long time once I began playing music, though I did finally manage to finish a story when I was sixteen. I still wrote, but that was mostly in the form of keeping an angst-filled blog. Music had become my passion, and I wanted to affect people the way that the music of others had affected me. I started a novel two months after I turned eighteen, wrote twenty pages of it, then forgot all about it for four years. I recently rediscovered it, thought about the plot again, and decided to start writing it again. Work is slow while I go back and fix the pages I had already written, but it's coming easily again. I don't know if there will be anyone who reads it and connects with it the way that I connected with the work of Philip Pullman, but I don't care so much at this point. I certainly hope it does, but it's not the main motivation behind my writing.
Music is still a major driving force for me, but the other night I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in years. I saw it through new eyes, appreciating all sorts of new things about it that went by completely unnoticed when I was a teenager watching it. It was somewhere around the time that Bruce Willis was running down Ving Rhames that I decided that I wanted to write a movie. So that's what I'm doing now; Working out a first draft of a screenplay for a Lovecraftian horror film with psychological overtones, tentatively titled The Obelisk. It's an interesting medium to work in, requiring a little less description, more dialogue based. I have been enjoying it quite a bit. I doubt that it will ever be filmed, but I may get enough ambition to one day assemble some actors and some cameras, and put things into motion.
So yes, dear reader, I am still writing. In fact, much more than I have in years. But none of it is ready to see the light of day. When it is, perhaps I'll post some of it.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
I AM A RESPONSIBLE FUCKING ADULT!
...proclaims the 21 year old with no job, no driver's license, and is currently living with his parents. But it's 2 PM local time, and I've already cleaned my bedroom, done the dishes, and cleaned out my ferret's cage. So I didn't cure cancer or anything spectacular, but baby steps, people. Baby steps. Considering I've spent the past 3 months in a lazy stupor, I feel pretty good about myself. Hell, some days I wouldn't even be awake yet.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
More Embarrassing Stories From Childhood
1) I AM MORTAL COMBAT!
I was something like four and a half years old when Mortal Kombat came out and boy, did I love it. For a few months, I was glued to my Sega controller, shedding the blood of every opponent on the Easy difficulty setting. I ate, slept, and breathed Mortal Kombat. My favorite characters were Scorpion and Johnny Cage, and when one of my siblings managed to pry me away from the TV, I would pretend to be fighting Liu Kang and Goro in our backyard. Sometimes I would be Scorpion, but mostly I was Johnny Cage. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mortal Kombat, the character Johnny Cage had a special move where he would do a split and punch his enemy in the groin. One day my dad saw me in the backyard, doing my best to imitate this particular move. He found it amusing to the point that he actually encouraged me to perform this attack on one of his coworkers at a company picnic.
Everyone(except the guy I punched in the dick) laughed uproariously, and I thought that I had genuinely just done something awesome. From that point on, I became the scourge of the household. My sister's male friends were all afraid to come over because they knew I would be lurking behind the couch or in the stairwell, just waiting to do my Johnny Cage impression.
2) First Blood.
This is another story I have no recollection of. I am told that when I was two years old, my sister had a pet parakeet named Kiki. Anyhow, Kiki was my sister's pride and joy. He would sit on her shoulder while she took showers, chirping things like "Kiki pretty bird?" over and over with more indignance until you finally answered him. Kiki was also kind of a bastard, and hated every member of the household but my sister.
Well one day, Kiki got out of his cage somehow and was hopping across the living room floor. Trying to be a helpful little brother, I bent down to pick up the bird and put him back where he belonged, and that's when the trouble started.
My sister was beside herself with rage and grief. Her two year old brother had just stomped her beloved pet bird to death in front of her, so of course she was crying and screaming. "You have to do something about him! He's going to grow up to become a serial killer!" She bawled as she slammed the door to her bedroom.
So far I've managed to make it through life without killing anyone. So eat it, sis.
I was something like four and a half years old when Mortal Kombat came out and boy, did I love it. For a few months, I was glued to my Sega controller, shedding the blood of every opponent on the Easy difficulty setting. I ate, slept, and breathed Mortal Kombat. My favorite characters were Scorpion and Johnny Cage, and when one of my siblings managed to pry me away from the TV, I would pretend to be fighting Liu Kang and Goro in our backyard. Sometimes I would be Scorpion, but mostly I was Johnny Cage. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mortal Kombat, the character Johnny Cage had a special move where he would do a split and punch his enemy in the groin. One day my dad saw me in the backyard, doing my best to imitate this particular move. He found it amusing to the point that he actually encouraged me to perform this attack on one of his coworkers at a company picnic.
Everyone(except the guy I punched in the dick) laughed uproariously, and I thought that I had genuinely just done something awesome. From that point on, I became the scourge of the household. My sister's male friends were all afraid to come over because they knew I would be lurking behind the couch or in the stairwell, just waiting to do my Johnny Cage impression.
2) First Blood.
This is another story I have no recollection of. I am told that when I was two years old, my sister had a pet parakeet named Kiki. Anyhow, Kiki was my sister's pride and joy. He would sit on her shoulder while she took showers, chirping things like "Kiki pretty bird?" over and over with more indignance until you finally answered him. Kiki was also kind of a bastard, and hated every member of the household but my sister.
Well one day, Kiki got out of his cage somehow and was hopping across the living room floor. Trying to be a helpful little brother, I bent down to pick up the bird and put him back where he belonged, and that's when the trouble started.
My sister was beside herself with rage and grief. Her two year old brother had just stomped her beloved pet bird to death in front of her, so of course she was crying and screaming. "You have to do something about him! He's going to grow up to become a serial killer!" She bawled as she slammed the door to her bedroom.
So far I've managed to make it through life without killing anyone. So eat it, sis.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
TL;DR
Just words tonight, folks. Probably not even any jokes. But I feel the urge to write, and my topic is religion. I grew up in a very non-religious household. So far as I can remember, the first time I stepped foot into a church was for my grandpa Lauren's funeral, when I was not much older than five. I felt nothing while looking at my father's father's lifeless body. I understood that the crying people around me were going to miss this man dearly, and I felt bad for them, but I grew up four hundred miles away from the man and only got to spend a weekend with him in life. I was too young to understand the enormity of what had happened to bring us all together that day, and I certainly did not understand the building we were all congregated in. I spent more time in churches this way over the next six years, at weddings and funerals of relations I never knew, people who shared blood ties with me, but no experiences and no familiarity.
My first stint with religion began on March 15th, 2002. I had turned thirteen only eleven days previous. On that day, my brothers Matthew and Ryan were taken from this earth in a violent one car accident with a drunk at the wheel. I remember being awoken in the small hours of the morning by a knock at the door, two hours after the crash. I found two policemen there, asking to speak with my mother. Matt and Ryan were no strangers to trouble with the law, so I just assumed that they had been arrested, and went back to awaken Mom to this bad news. I went to my bedroom while she talked with the officers. Suddenly, the thought that maybe something more serious had happened crossed my mind, but before I could pursue this line of thought, I heard a terrible, anguished wail tearing out of my mother's throat. In that instant, I knew what happened, and I will never forget that sound.
Suddenly, I was faced with the harsh realities of death. I saw it in the strained, grief-stricken faces of my parents and sister, felt it in the rare, consoling hand of my brother in law. But I was numb. I could not react, one way or the other. I felt nothing in my heart. Occasionally, a stab of grief would pass through me, like when I heard their obituaries being broadcast on the radio, but then some unknown mechanism would clamp shut again, and oblivion settled back into my chest. It wasn't even bad; bad implies that there is something there to be labeled with an adjective, and there wasn't.
It was after the funeral that I "found" Christianity. I had inherited Matthew's leather-bound bible, and I treasured it. I read from it every night, gloried in its onion-skinned pages, and prayed to a merciful God to keep my siblings' souls before drifting into sleep. This lasted maybe a month or so before I left behind my new found piety.
Over the next seven years, I found new gods to worship, and a flock of fellow believers with whom to pray. These gods were music, art, and a thousand other more fleeting notions that I would follow with all the eagerness of the zealot, but none of the substance of the truly holy man. I began to resent all forms of religion as I learned of the atrocities committed in God's name over the centuries, and I don't think I ever forgave God for taking away my brothers before I even had the chance to know them. I was bitter. I shunned the church and all its promises of salvation and eternal life, branding them lies meant to sway the masses into a lull of complacency. I even declared that there was no God. Instead, I focused my time and energy on playing music. My prayers were now in the form of drum beats and guitar riffs, my altar was my guitar amplifier, my saints were men with names like Jello Biafra and Thomas Kalnoky.
I laughed in the face of the ignorant believers, especially the old. I took a sadistic glee in the notion that these people knew their time was almost up, and in desperation they were turning to some mystical force that would forgive their sins and welcome them upon death. I denounced them as fools and sheep, with no inner strength and no sense of accountability for their actions. Just duck into the confessional once a week, and everything was just fine. I continued this ignorance for seven years.
It was death that once again brought me back to religion. On August 15th, 2009, my dear friend of nearly six years, Joshua Michael Giles, was run over by a car and killed in the middle of the night. Finally, death had struck a grievous blow on me. I was devastated, and the merciful numbness that had allowed me to get through the death of my brothers did not return to me.
I was at work that day, a Saturday. It was just me, my father, and my Saudi Arabian boss in the building when I got the call. I ducked outside to hear over the noise of the powder compacting presses, and barely kept my composure while receiving the news. I hung up, and it was when I told my father what had happened that I broke down crying. After giving me a half hour or so to work out my initial grief, I was taken home. Later that night, all of us gathered at his house, and I cannot forget that vigil. I popped the top off of a beer, a Magic Hat #9, and read the fortune: "How did You get like This?"
Again, I was destined to walk into a church for a funeral. It was not this that brought me back to religion; I could never agree with the faith that I had gone so many years of my youth despising. But it was then that I felt death in all his terrible power for the first time, and an aching emptiness welled up inside me such as I never though possible. It was different from the numbness I felt at my brothers' funeral, more acute and much more painful. I dwelt on the fragility of life, its fleeting and brief nature, and it nearly drove me mad. I couldn't stand that we humans had been placed on this planet to lead futile lives brimming with suffering, only to be snuffed out and cause more suffering in that final act.
One day in the middle of September, as I was sifting through a storage room at work in search of oil rags, I came across a box full of books. Among them was the book that changed my life. It was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by a man named Sogyal Rinpoche. I took it home, though I did not begin to read it until probably December.
When I finally did get around to reading it, I was blown away. The book begins with Rinpoche as a small child, accompanying his master, Jamyang Khyentse, as they are fleeing Tibet under the Chinese occupation. The journey was hard, and Rinpoche watched two of the monks they traveled with as they died. His description of the deaths of these monks struck such a perfect chord in me that the book had me completely enthralled and eager to learn as much as I could about Tibetan Buddhism. The book goes on to explain basic practices and beliefs of his sect of Buddhism, all of which I drank in with the thirst of a man lost in the desert. The words resonated inside me and filled my heart in a way I had never felt before. I finally found religion, after all those years of disavowing it as society's band-aid. It waited patiently until I was ready to receive it with open arms, and then, by chance or fate, religion had found me at the edge of my blackest despair. I was saved.
I took up the practice of meditation, and through it I have found a measure of peace, that grounding that all religions seek to impart upon their followers. It is fleeting sometimes, and the path I have chosen is a long one, fraught with countless obstacles. But no matter how deep my sorrows, no matter how little distance I have covered on this path, I retain that grounding, and it is my strength. My church is now the Earth, in all of her splendor and mystery, and my God is everything.
My first stint with religion began on March 15th, 2002. I had turned thirteen only eleven days previous. On that day, my brothers Matthew and Ryan were taken from this earth in a violent one car accident with a drunk at the wheel. I remember being awoken in the small hours of the morning by a knock at the door, two hours after the crash. I found two policemen there, asking to speak with my mother. Matt and Ryan were no strangers to trouble with the law, so I just assumed that they had been arrested, and went back to awaken Mom to this bad news. I went to my bedroom while she talked with the officers. Suddenly, the thought that maybe something more serious had happened crossed my mind, but before I could pursue this line of thought, I heard a terrible, anguished wail tearing out of my mother's throat. In that instant, I knew what happened, and I will never forget that sound.
Suddenly, I was faced with the harsh realities of death. I saw it in the strained, grief-stricken faces of my parents and sister, felt it in the rare, consoling hand of my brother in law. But I was numb. I could not react, one way or the other. I felt nothing in my heart. Occasionally, a stab of grief would pass through me, like when I heard their obituaries being broadcast on the radio, but then some unknown mechanism would clamp shut again, and oblivion settled back into my chest. It wasn't even bad; bad implies that there is something there to be labeled with an adjective, and there wasn't.
It was after the funeral that I "found" Christianity. I had inherited Matthew's leather-bound bible, and I treasured it. I read from it every night, gloried in its onion-skinned pages, and prayed to a merciful God to keep my siblings' souls before drifting into sleep. This lasted maybe a month or so before I left behind my new found piety.
Over the next seven years, I found new gods to worship, and a flock of fellow believers with whom to pray. These gods were music, art, and a thousand other more fleeting notions that I would follow with all the eagerness of the zealot, but none of the substance of the truly holy man. I began to resent all forms of religion as I learned of the atrocities committed in God's name over the centuries, and I don't think I ever forgave God for taking away my brothers before I even had the chance to know them. I was bitter. I shunned the church and all its promises of salvation and eternal life, branding them lies meant to sway the masses into a lull of complacency. I even declared that there was no God. Instead, I focused my time and energy on playing music. My prayers were now in the form of drum beats and guitar riffs, my altar was my guitar amplifier, my saints were men with names like Jello Biafra and Thomas Kalnoky.
I laughed in the face of the ignorant believers, especially the old. I took a sadistic glee in the notion that these people knew their time was almost up, and in desperation they were turning to some mystical force that would forgive their sins and welcome them upon death. I denounced them as fools and sheep, with no inner strength and no sense of accountability for their actions. Just duck into the confessional once a week, and everything was just fine. I continued this ignorance for seven years.
It was death that once again brought me back to religion. On August 15th, 2009, my dear friend of nearly six years, Joshua Michael Giles, was run over by a car and killed in the middle of the night. Finally, death had struck a grievous blow on me. I was devastated, and the merciful numbness that had allowed me to get through the death of my brothers did not return to me.
I was at work that day, a Saturday. It was just me, my father, and my Saudi Arabian boss in the building when I got the call. I ducked outside to hear over the noise of the powder compacting presses, and barely kept my composure while receiving the news. I hung up, and it was when I told my father what had happened that I broke down crying. After giving me a half hour or so to work out my initial grief, I was taken home. Later that night, all of us gathered at his house, and I cannot forget that vigil. I popped the top off of a beer, a Magic Hat #9, and read the fortune: "How did You get like This?"
Again, I was destined to walk into a church for a funeral. It was not this that brought me back to religion; I could never agree with the faith that I had gone so many years of my youth despising. But it was then that I felt death in all his terrible power for the first time, and an aching emptiness welled up inside me such as I never though possible. It was different from the numbness I felt at my brothers' funeral, more acute and much more painful. I dwelt on the fragility of life, its fleeting and brief nature, and it nearly drove me mad. I couldn't stand that we humans had been placed on this planet to lead futile lives brimming with suffering, only to be snuffed out and cause more suffering in that final act.
One day in the middle of September, as I was sifting through a storage room at work in search of oil rags, I came across a box full of books. Among them was the book that changed my life. It was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by a man named Sogyal Rinpoche. I took it home, though I did not begin to read it until probably December.
When I finally did get around to reading it, I was blown away. The book begins with Rinpoche as a small child, accompanying his master, Jamyang Khyentse, as they are fleeing Tibet under the Chinese occupation. The journey was hard, and Rinpoche watched two of the monks they traveled with as they died. His description of the deaths of these monks struck such a perfect chord in me that the book had me completely enthralled and eager to learn as much as I could about Tibetan Buddhism. The book goes on to explain basic practices and beliefs of his sect of Buddhism, all of which I drank in with the thirst of a man lost in the desert. The words resonated inside me and filled my heart in a way I had never felt before. I finally found religion, after all those years of disavowing it as society's band-aid. It waited patiently until I was ready to receive it with open arms, and then, by chance or fate, religion had found me at the edge of my blackest despair. I was saved.
I took up the practice of meditation, and through it I have found a measure of peace, that grounding that all religions seek to impart upon their followers. It is fleeting sometimes, and the path I have chosen is a long one, fraught with countless obstacles. But no matter how deep my sorrows, no matter how little distance I have covered on this path, I retain that grounding, and it is my strength. My church is now the Earth, in all of her splendor and mystery, and my God is everything.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
I have not posted anything for quite awhile now. It is sort of for lack of trying, and also sort of because I don't want to clutter up this blog with the stuff I've been writing in my notebooks. Things are still kind of stressful and I am still unemployed, though that also can be chalked up to lack of trying. But for the time being, my life consists of music, Fallout 3, and Netflix. I feel bad wasting all this time doing nothing, but I'm having troubles getting myself motivated. I suppose you could say I've lost my muse. With any luck, I will find her again soon. But until that happens, I'm not sure when you're going to hear from me again.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Another missed deadline.
Perhaps one of these days I'll be able to organize my time wisely enough that I can finish a post once a week. The past few weeks have been hectic and full of strange upheavals that mostly aren't my business to discuss. If you're looking for gossip, may I suggest you turn to Livejournal?
Are Livejournal jokes even funny anymore?
Anyhow, I was saying that I've been busy and stressed out. The long and short of it is that on November 5th, I will be out of my current job with no guarantee of a new one. I live with my parents so it's not like rent and bills are a pressing issue, but it's just so easy to get sucked in to unemployment. I certainly don't want to do that again.
So in between filling out applications, band practices/gigs, work, and just trying to relax once in awhile, I find it hard to sit down and write.
Also I think I am getting sick.
In fact, I need to go lay down. But I will leave you with beautiful music from an incredible musician:
And the news that I will be launching the blog of my zine The 814 Times later this week! I am pumped!
P.S. A spider just descended from the roof and NEARLY LANDED ON MY HEAD. Not cool, bro. Not cool.
Are Livejournal jokes even funny anymore?
Anyhow, I was saying that I've been busy and stressed out. The long and short of it is that on November 5th, I will be out of my current job with no guarantee of a new one. I live with my parents so it's not like rent and bills are a pressing issue, but it's just so easy to get sucked in to unemployment. I certainly don't want to do that again.
So in between filling out applications, band practices/gigs, work, and just trying to relax once in awhile, I find it hard to sit down and write.
Also I think I am getting sick.
In fact, I need to go lay down. But I will leave you with beautiful music from an incredible musician:
And the news that I will be launching the blog of my zine The 814 Times later this week! I am pumped!
P.S. A spider just descended from the roof and NEARLY LANDED ON MY HEAD. Not cool, bro. Not cool.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
I Fail.
...At regular updates, anyhow. On Friday last week, I was sitting here looking at my unpublished posts, thinking "Oh yeah man, I can totally finish one of these for Sunday! Then I'll have a schedule of one post a week!"
But then real life happened and I had a crazy hectic weekend and now I'm back at work, thwacking out these words on the world's dirtiest keyboard. What happened? Who knows. Sorry for missing the deadline you guys didn't know about til now. Hopefully some time in the middle of this week I can finish something that'll make you all laugh. Or it might horrify you. Possibly both? Note: I am not responsible for headsplosions resulting from mixed feelings of horror/hilarity.
But then real life happened and I had a crazy hectic weekend and now I'm back at work, thwacking out these words on the world's dirtiest keyboard. What happened? Who knows. Sorry for missing the deadline you guys didn't know about til now. Hopefully some time in the middle of this week I can finish something that'll make you all laugh. Or it might horrify you. Possibly both? Note: I am not responsible for headsplosions resulting from mixed feelings of horror/hilarity.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)