I didn’t go quite as wild with writing today as I did yesterday, but I still did write another 1,550 words. My “short story” is already almost 30,000 words long, which is roughly as many words as are in Of Mice and Men, so I guess it counts as a novella. A lot of my “short stories” turn out that way. I’m not even sure how long Outlaw’s Mind is, so far, and that was intended to be a short story*.
Of course, as I said, I mean to pare it down quite a bit, but there’s only so much I’ll be able to do, and the story isn’t finished yet.
I also played guitar and sang a little bit. I don’t know how well my playing is going–my thumbs are still painful. But my voice is getting into better shape, at least, I can tell that much. It’s not really worth anything to anyone but me, but it’s still a positive, I guess.
I’ve also recently started taking the Calculus course on Brilliant, since I recently decided to download the app to my phone as something to do in spare time. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good way for me to study physics, but it’s a good way to review, and then maybe to learn, some mathematics. It’s good to start with the basics, which I’ve already long since studied, because it feels quite easy, and that’s a nice way to build up. I mean to work on the linear algebra stuff and further materials, because I’ll need that if I want to really understand General Relativity, so I can truly get why uniform energy in spacetime leads to repulsive gravity. All the rest of it makes intuitive sense to me, but I need to wrap my head around that clearly and precisely, or I won’t be satisfied.
Anyway, that’s it for today. I hope you have a good one.
Well, I went a bit more nuts than usual this morning, and between 5 and 7 am I wrote 2230 words on Extra Body*. It goes to show that severe insomnia at least can be useful in some ways, though it remains horribly miserable and miserably horrible. Still, at least I’ve made up some ground from being so under the weather physically over the last week.
The story is already — of course — longer than I would have expected it to be, as tends to happen with my stories. I’ll try to pare it down a lot during the edit, but hopefully people who read it will appreciate that it’s not just a quick and dirty tale, so to speak. It’s not as though I’m wasting a lot of time in unnecessary details; at least I don’t think I am.
I even got out the guitar and strummed and sang a bit this morning. Singing is weird, though, because when I sing even banal songs, I often find myself tearing up and fighting not to cry. It’s weird, and a little disquieting. It’s not as though I can express my emotions at any other time, and it’s not as though the song necessarily matches the feeling.
Oh, well. I’m a freak, anyway. What can you do?
I apologize for the length and oddness of yesterday’s post. It doesn’t seem to have garnered very many readers, or at least not very many “likes”**. I can’t really blame anyone; I went a bit nuts with that, as well.
I expect to work tomorrow, barring the unforeseen (as is, of course, always the case with everything), so I’ll probably get some more writing done then, though perhaps not as much as today. I don’t know about guitar; the bases of my thumbs are still giving me a lot of trouble, and it makes playing rather painful. Perhaps they feel left out, since so many other joints and skeletal and connective tissue structures act up on me.
Have a good day if you are able.
*I’m thinking I might change the name of the story before I publish it.
**Incidentally, I was surprised to realize recently that my song Like and Sharehas almost twice as many plays as any of my other songs. I guess it’s the song that’s most pertinent to the modern age of social media. It’s still only a bit over 500 plays — I have no idea what the stats are on Spotify or iTunes or TikTok or any other venue — which is NOTHING compared to normal commercial songs or even the songs of serious but amateur musicians, but it’s an interesting statistic to me.
Once again, I wrote just shy of 1800 words (1795 unless my figuring is off) on Extra Body today. Nothing on HELIOS, but I had no real intention to go far on that until Extra Body is done.
I did no real exercise between yesterday and today, but I did play a little guitar yesterday and today in the morning. “Play” is the right word, because it was not very serious, and I’m rather rusty and my hands are a bit stiff. Still, it’s somewhat fun. I need some new picks, though.
Anyway, further bulletins as events warrant, and of course, I plan to write my traditional blog post tomorrow. This seems like a good decision, since tomorrow is Thursday, and it would be odd to write a Thursday blog post on some other day of the week.
…it’s just a quick update/bit of bragging. I wrote about 1600 words this morning on Extra Body, and then I even played a bit of guitar for about half an hour (and sang with it). I’m extremely rusty, particularly the singing, but it’s nice that some things come back seeming easier than they did the last time I played. I guess I didn’t lose those learned skills, which is nice. Writing is always relatively easy, though it’s not as if I’ve ever really stopped doing that.
No posts or updates this weekend unless things change. I will write fiction on Monday, and if you want, I can leave little updates like this afterwards.
I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t end up writing anything on my short story yesterday, because there were many distractions and frustrations. I started the day in an unusually clear-headed and optimistic mood. I even read a bit of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible in the morning, and that was nice. But as the day went on and the chaos persisted‒especially the noise‒my optimism dwindled.
Then, in that latter part of the afternoon, I decided to force myself. It’s just a single page, I thought, so it shouldn’t take long even if I do it between work tasks. So, I got out the notebook and started up. I used two different pens over the course of the approximate one and a half pages that I wrote, but write I did.
As I wrote, I could see again my tendency to digress into details perhaps just a bit much; I need to keep a weather eye on that tendency.
Don’t get me wrong‒I like getting into details, and into the minds of my characters. Reading fiction and getting those insights into other people’s thought processes, even if they were fictional, really helped me in dealing with people as I grew up. That’s a potentially useful hint: if you’re a replicant among humans, read a lot of fiction. You can get whole lifetimes worth of insight into the their minds by doing so. Indeed, you can get more than lifetimes worth of such insight, since in “real life” one never gets to see people’s thoughts unfiltered.
I’m not saying that fictional depictions are perfectly reliable and fully accurate representations of how humans think. It’s fiction, after all. But across genres and works, across authors living at widely disparate times, there are commonalities that one can pick up.
There may be selection bias at work as well, of course, since all works of fiction have been produced by fiction writers, and they may have common attributes not necessarily shared by those who do not write fiction. But when findings from fiction correlate well with, and explain well, the behaviors and speech of people who are most assuredly not fiction writers, one can begin to assign higher credence to such things.
How on earth did I get into that train of subjects? Oh, right, I was talking about my tendency to digress a bit in my fiction. How very “meta” of me to digress even as I was writing about digression.
If I keep writing fiction‒assuming I don’t just die soon, which would also be tolerable‒I think I may adjust my guidelines during editing.
In my published works so far‒not counting this blog‒I made a rule that I needed to cut the final word count by at least 10% relative to the first draft. That’s right: Unanimity was one ninth again longer when I first wrote it! Anyway, I may decide to set my target at a more draconian 15% level in the future. 20% seems as though it might entail too much cutting, but maybe 10% is too little.
I guess we’ll see. Maybe I shouldn’t combine the effects of handwriting the first draft (which should encourage at least some brevity) and an increase in my culling target. I guess I have time to ponder this matter and let my subconscious mind digest it.
In other news, I did play guitar a bit yesterday‒just those two songs I mentioned in yesterday’s post‒and I guess that was a bit of fun. It seems my long breaks at least haven’t made me too rusty in my playing; I even feel that my intuitive feel for shifting between versions of a chord while playing has improved. I guess it’s possible.
I also walked most of the way back from the train station last night. I didn’t make it quite all the way before summoning a ride, since I decided I didn’t want to push things too much, but it was a good walk of more than three miles. I hope to increase it and add a walk to my mornings as well. This will eat into my time, of course, and I worry about it discouraging my fiction writing. I may go back to doing this blog less often in the future if I continue to feel able to write fiction and do get my walking going again.
I still have several moments during every day in which I think I just want to walk away from reality and existence, figuratively speaking. The world can be horrifyingly frustrating and painful for me, and since I can’t convince myself that it would be okay to destroy the world, there’s always the option of destroying the universe (from my point of view) by destroying myself.
They call it “unaliving”* on YouTube, nowadays, apparently, because the YouTube algorithms are prone to block or interfere with videos that include the word “suicide”. How stupid are these social media companies? It’s ultramoronic to impair the use of a word simply because it refers to a real subject that is not necessarily comfortable. The word “suicide” never magically induced anyone to kill him- or herself. If anything, bringing it up can help take the taboo off and allow people who are suffering to feel that it may just be okay for them to talk about it.
Ha ha. Just kidding. Nobody really wants you to talk about it, believe me, other than professionals who deal with the issues as part of their jobs, and rare volunteers, who are alas strangers, and who I suspect go into the work because of familiarity‒directly or indirectly‒with the problems of depression and suicide. Most people just don’t want to deal with it. I suspect that, secretly, many of them would prefer you to kill yourself rather than harsh their mellow.
Maybe destroying the world really would be morally appropriate. At least I can do it in fiction if I want‒and I have done so, and have failed to do so, in more than one work.
Anyway, sorry about the regression to the mean (or at least to the unkind) there near the end. I hope you all have a good day.
*”Unalive” sounds like it should be the opposite of “undead”. So, if the undead are, in one sense or another, walking corpses, then the unalive should be inert living beings. This sounds more like a description of those with major depression or chronic depression (dysthymia) than someone who has killed themselves, though the outcome of the former may certainly be the latter. The euphemism is confusing and misleading, if you ask me. The suppression of videos and the like that use the term “suicide” does not seem likely to decrease the rate of actual suicide, but may make a person contemplating it or troubled by thoughts of it feel even more alienated than they already do. I know of at least one case where this is so.
It’s Monday morning again, as tends to happen around this time of week. I hope you all had a good weekend.
I’m starting this blog post at the house, where I’m waiting to see if the Uber prices come down a bit before deciding to take one. If they don’t, I may decide to walk to the train; it’s relatively cool out, and I feel physically rather energetic. I may even take the bus, though that’s a circuitous and irritating path. I’ll keep you posted about what happens.
…
Okay, well, the price dropped an acceptable amount, so I booked an Uber, but the estimated wait is 15 minutes, which is unusually long for this time of day. That further cements my plan to try to make sure to walk back from the train on the way “home” this evening. Yes, it will take longer even than waiting for an Uber, but it will cost less, it will have a lower carbon footprint‒though I will make many more actual footprints‒and it will also get me some good exercise. I hope you can all help keep me honest and maybe even spare some words of encouragement.
I have some good news to share with you today. It’s not momentous, but it means a lot to me. I did not start on HELIOS, but I’m happy to report that I’ve started something else. The prospect of beginning a new novel, even a “light novel” sci-fi story, was a bit intimidating, so on the other spiral-bound notebook, the one on which my cousin recommended I write a zombie story, I thought maybe I would write a short story. I didn’t intend to write a zombie story (sorry, Lance) since I don’t even really enjoy reading or watching such stories, but it’s still a good basic idea.
I opened up my old collection of story ideas, from which came more than one of my existing works, and scrolled down. Most of the ideas weren’t that gripping for the moment, but quite a way down the list I found an idea whose time, it turns out, had come.
I won’t tell you much about the story idea here, partly because I don’t have the full thing sketched out, but mostly because I don’t want to diminish my drive to write it. It’s called Extra Body, and no, it’s not a horror story. If anything, it’s a sort of lighthearted sci-fi short story, but set in the ordinary, modern world.
I wrote one page of it at work on Friday, and then yesterday‒yes, Sunday‒I wrote another page and a half. It’s almost, but not quite, unheard of for me to write fiction on a Sunday, simply because I habitually mandate that as a mental break day from writing fiction. However, since I’ve been on quite a prolonged mental break from writing fiction anyway, I decided to get in an extra day.
Also, instead of setting my usual daily goal of 3 to 4 pages of writing, I just set my goal to at least 1 page. That takes a lot longer when I’m writing “by hand” than it does when typing‒I can type a full 400 to 500 word page in a very short period of time‒but that’s okay. I’m hoping this pressure will keep me more concise than I often tend to be.
I must say, it’s good that I’m keeping the target low when writing by hand, because my hand muscles are deconditioned for writing much on pen and paper. Of course, my writing is also terribly messy, but that is nothing new. As I rediscovered yesterday, I can always read my own handwriting at least.
This shouldn’t be too long a short story, especially not for me. It’s not going to be terribly deep or thought provoking, just a bit of fun. Then, maybe, once I’m done with that, if I’m still around, I can start HELIOS.
Another thing, in closing for the day: I did in fact look up the chords and tabs for All Apologies only to find that, though it was originally played in a form of the “drop D tuning”, it’s just a 3-chord song (not counting sus-2 and 7th chords, which one usually does not). I decided to learn it using standard tuning, because I don’t like having to twiddle with the tuning of my guitar so much. This meant I had to figure out the main riff for myself, since the tabs are not really any help, being all in the original tuning. That wasn’t much work, though. It’s a nice sounding riff, but it’s actually quite simple.
So, since I had the guitar out anyway, I decided to look up the chords to Close to You, in preparation for possibly recording my parody, Antichrist. This song has slightly more chords than the other one, but unless you count the “truck driver” key change in the middle, it’s also really a pretty simple song.
I guess most popular songs are not all that complex. One can get spoiled when playing around with Radiohead and the Beatles, let alone with having played Bach on the piano (and cello), or having been in pit orchestras playing West Side Story and the like.
Anyway, as may be obvious, I’ve gotten a slight boost in my overall energy, partly from better allergy control, I think, so that’s good. I hope it continues. We shall see, I guess. For now, at least I’m being slightly productive. I hope all of you are feeling at least as well as I, and that you have a good week.
It’s Monday morning, the morning after the Super Bowl, in case you pay attention to such things. It was a pretty good game, I guess‒I watched it‒but it never felt very exciting to me at all. Not much seems very exciting to me, honestly. I had gone for a couple of long walks and bought some snacks and ordered a bit of indulgent food for the game, but I’ve ended up throwing most of that away. I guess that’s probably good, in the sense that I don’t need the extra junk food calories and whatnot. But it is a shame to waste the food.
Still, food waste is not the biggest problem. Even in the places in the world where there is starvation, the problem is not that there is no capacity to get the people food. The problem is political‒local and geo‒in addition to economics that are born of twisted politics.
At least food waste is, more or less by definition, biodegradable.
I haven’t written any new fiction, of course, but I did something slightly creative yesterday morning. Somehow, the Carpenters’ song Close to You got in my head. As its lyrics passed through my thoughts, I again had the impression‒which often happens with this song‒that the person being described seems to have sinister, supernatural powers, or at least is surrounded by supernatural portents. Then it occurred to me that the words “close to you” and the word “antichrist” have the same number of syllables and the same (rough) stresses. So, inspired by these two facts, I wrote a parody of Close to You called, of course, Antichrist.
As someone who has long enjoyed horror fiction and who at an early age familiarized himself with the “Revelation of Saint John the Divine” as it is sometimes known‒the last book in the standard Christian Bible‒the lyrics came rather easily. I’ll share them below. I vaguely entertain the notion of actually recording my parody, doing all the various parts and whatnot, but since I haven’t been practicing or playing guitar more than once every few months, and have done the keyboards even less, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
I also thought once again yesterday about some slight tweaking to the plot of my “super hero” story HELIOS. This is an idea that took root originally waaaay back in my childhood, and was one of the “comic book characters” I used to draw, and for which I made some partial comic books and even an arch-enemy. But the more current version of the idea isn’t really a superhero story, certainly not the type that would involve costumes and secret identities and whatnot. I even thought, for a moment, that I just might start working on that story soon.
That didn’t last long, though. I just don’t feel any motivation to do it. If five living people, total, have read any or all of my books or stories, I would be surprised. So, writing them is a bit like taking all the pages of the finished works and scattering them into a hurricane. They just all go off somewhere and become mere parts of the detritus of reality, their information lost to all but Laplace’s Demon. And, presumably, He wouldn’t appreciate them as stories, even though He could keep track of each and every force and particle they entailed.
Maybe the fact that these thoughts and stirrings happened on the weekend, and after one full day off, means that if only I had some regular mental rest, I might find the energy to start writing fiction again, or playing music, or some other, similar creative endeavors.
I doubt that will happen, though. I’m in the middle of the ocean treading water as it is. How am I supposed to locate a place to rest? The odds of me happening upon some Gilligan’s Island type of refuge are pretty low. I’m just biding my time, waiting for fatigue and hypothermia to get the best of me. In a real ocean, that would have happened a long time ago. Unfortunately, metaphors are not as lethal as one might like them to be.
Anyway, there’s not much more to say. I guess I’ll close by giving you the lyrics of my parody. Here it is:
ANTICHRIST
A parody of Close to You (by the Carpenters)
–
Why do crows suddenly appear
Every time you are near?
Seems to me
You’ve got to be
the Antichrist.
–
Flaming stones fall down from the sky
Every time you walk by.
Plain to see
You’ve got to be
the Antichrist.
–
On the day that you were born the demons got together
And forged a waking nightmare built for strife
With storm clouds heralding your birth and armies of the dead that came to life.
–
Businessmen and others who want power
Before you now will cower
They just know
It must be so
You’re the Antichrist.
–
When at last the time arrives to show your true dark nature
all of those who bear your mark you’ll pierce
With fire and brimstone in your breath and ten horns on your seven heads so fierce!
Hello and good morning. It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so. I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.
I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though. It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used. I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.
Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote. It’s a good song (off OK Computer). Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.
That album really is one of the greatest albums ever. It’s not a concept album. Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them. They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.
For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album. I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.
That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs. It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time). Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.
I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying). “This is the place. Sit down. You’re safe now. You’ve been stuck in a lift. We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*. This is the place. It won’t hurt ever again.” And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”
I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.
On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days. So lighten up, Squirt.” That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation. After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.
I’m overreading things, probably. In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so. It’s art, innit? You can interpret it according to your impressions. Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.
As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond. The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting. I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time. I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube. I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point. I might have shared it here, though. Yes? No? I’ll try to find out before I publish this. If so, I’ll put a link: Here.
If not, I won’t***.
By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer? It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday: to give my thumbs some rest. That does seem to be doing at least some good. The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.
Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today. I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs. I do really like them, though. And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them. Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.
Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?
Anyway, that’s enough for today. The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda. My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it. I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.
I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not. It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.
TTFN
*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”
**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”
***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file. I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on. You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time. I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing. Here it is:
I’m back at the train station this morning, writing as I wait. There seem to be fewer people waiting at this time than at comparable times earlier this week and last week. I cannot say anything more broadly, though, since the new train schedule has thrown any generalizations awry, and made the detection of legitimate patterns (as opposed to constellation-style perceived patterns in the random) tricky at best. It will require more time and observation to learn if there really are tendencies to be seen in the number of people waiting for the train at a given time in the morning.
I left work early yesterday, because I was really starting to crash. I ate and then fell asleep by about 5:30 pm. I then woke up around 9:30 thanks to some irritating noises from outside, and I decided to watch some music reactions to songs from OK Computer.
At that time, I carried out a notion that I’d considered in the past: I got up and, in addition to singing, “danced” along with the songs. I use “scare quotes” because my dancing is never going to be considered an art form, though it is at least a bit of exercise.
Since I was alone, I was more than able to “dance like no one is watching”. If anyone was watching—spying on me, perhaps, for some inscrutable reason—well, they got what they richly deserved. Possibly they suffered the fate of those who have dared to glimpse Yog-Sothoth or one of the worse forms of Nyarlathotep: horror and madness. At the very least, they would be at risk for PTSD.
“Dance like you’re listening to the cosmic flutists that eternally entertain Azathoth” might not be a catchy expression, but in my case, it probably applies.
Still, it was kind of fun—I got somewhat melodramatic because I was singing along to the music as I danced. I also tend to air drum at various points while dancing, because it’s all part of the rhythm. Anyway, I went back to sleep not too much after midnight, and actually woke up to my alarm playing Good Morning Good Morning by the Beatles. That’s a remarkably rare occurrence.
In the morning yesterday, I saw a Readers Wildlife Photos post on WEIT in which the pictures were taken in Cape May, New Jersey. My thoughts traveled down peculiar lines, as they are wont to do, and it occurred to me that there could be “capes” named after various months—if indeed Cape May is named after the month and not something else entirely.
I ran through several months and they worked to varying degrees, but of course, once I got to “Cape October”, it occurred to me that this would be an excellent name for a horror story, or maybe even a murder mystery. Perhaps it was a long spit of land with a hill at the end that had been first been discovered and colonized by those who went on to become Ray Bradbury’s “Autumn People”.
It could even be the beginning of a two-parter, paired with another title that occurred to me a long time ago: Murder Beach. That one’s easy, because I’ve often thought that Myrtle Beach sounds almost like “murder beach”, and I was amazed that no one—as far as I could find—had written anything with that title.
I do this sort of thing rather often: I think of fun titles that sometimes lead me to write stories. I won’t say it’s my usual way—normally I think of the story first—but it does happen.
Of course, I haven’t begun writing nor even plotting any of these stories, and I haven’t gone any further than a sort of plot summary for last week’s rom-com idea of Up-dating. As I think I mentioned last week, I see the latter story as more of a screenplay than a book, but I haven’t written a screenplay since high school, and the one I wrote then wasn’t really in official screenplay format. It was just a “play” with some thrown-in camera and other descriptive directions in parentheses.
It was, according to my friend Joe, a movie that was not worthy of its excellent title—Night Vision. He was far from wrong, as was usually the case with Joe, but I had tried to write a screenplay that I could actually produce with the equipment at hand: a VHS camera belonging to the father of my friend Jim Leone.
It never went very far, because it turned out that wasn’t really enough equipment to make and then edit even such a cheap movie. It could be done now, I’m quite sure, with the readily available and cheap-to-free video and audio mixing software, to say nothing of the ubiquitous, high-quality video cameras, many of which we carry around in our pockets.
I did write some music for Night Vision, including a main theme that I still know by heart, and which is quite pretty, I think. Oh, and I did a horror/bad guy’s theme for it that was grown from the kernel of Chopin’s Funeral March played backwards*. That’s pretty good, too.
So, I still have no complete dearth of creative ideas. I just lack the will to make them, including to write the many stories that still lie waiting in my head. Maybe, if I were regularly able to get a total of nearly eight hours’ sleep, like I did last night, I would do better. Certainly I feel a bit more chipper today than I normally do in the morning.
I suppose if there were some wealthy patron who commissioned some or all of these works from me, I might be able just to sit down and crank them out, since the actual process of writing isn’t that difficult. But I sincerely doubt that’s going to happen. The only thing making it more likely than winning the lottery is the fact that I don’t play the lottery, and any probability at all is greater than zero**.
Anyway, we’re getting close to my stop, and I’ve already written quite a lot this morning, so I’ll wrap this up. I hope you’re all having a decent run-up to the oncoming holiday storm of Christmas and New Year’s and various other solstice-adjacent celebrations.
If there are any wealthy people out there interested in sponsoring me to write any of the above-mentioned stories or screenplays or whatnot, please, get in touch.
*This was, supposedly, what the carousel from Something Wicked This Way Comes played when it was running in reverse and thus making people younger, and that’s where I got the idea of using this as a theme for my villain, Jameson Summers, who was in a sense returning from the dead.
**I suppose that, in principle, one could win the lottery without even playing it, if for instance someone bought a ticket and gave it to another person as a surprise or to pay a debt or something along those lines. That is an extremely unlikely event, and when layered atop another independently extremely unlikely event—the ticket actually winning—it seems still perhaps less likely than a wealthy patron deciding to sponsor my writing.
It’s Friday morning, the end of the work week for many—though not for me, this week—and it’s also the first full day of Hanukkah. I won’t post any more pictures of dreidels and so on, but I may still remind my readers daily while the holiday lasts.
It’s not as though the world is politely restrained about the other upcoming major festival, after all. Though, of course, Hanukkah isn’t really that major a festival in Judaism, compared to things like Passover or Yom Kippur and such. It’s just become major in competition, if you will, with Christmas, as a children’s holiday.
I don’t have any issue with that. The more reasons one can find to celebrate with friends and family and encourage joy in the darker days of the year, the better, as far as I can see. That growth curve might level off and even dip downward eventually as one piles on more and more such reasons for celebration; reality is rarely governed by truly linear equations, after all. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near the peak of the curve, so have at it.
Today is also the anniversary of what was, in my memory, the most horrifying news event in my young life: the murder of John Lennon**.
I’ve said it before, the Beatles were my first true religion, in a sense. I cannot recall ever not knowing almost all of their songs by heart. I was the youngest of three children, I was born in 1969, and my sister and brother were big fans (for as long as I can remember, anyway, which is of course, not as far back as they can). So the Beatles were ever-present.
The number two spot in my list of favorite bands has varied over the years—the Police, Pink Floyd, now Radiohead—but the number one position has never been seriously challenged, even as I’ve heard more bands, even as I’ve heard and played more music of all kinds, from “ancient” to modern, from western to middle-eastern and eastern and so on.
Of course, the Beatles have recently had their latest new number one single, Now and Then, which was grown from the root of a recording John had done on a cheap cassette tape*** in the late ‘70s. I won’t say it’s on a par with In My Life or I Feel Fine or Come Together, but since John Lennon was stolen from us by an insect—as it’s put in Elton John’s song, Hey, Hey, Johnny—it’s what we have, and it’s not bad at all.
Still, it’s terribly sad to think of what the world may have missed. Not long before he was murdered, John had gotten back into the recording studio after a long hiatus, releasing his album, Double Fantasy. Who knows what might have happened had he lived? A true Beatles reunion of some kind or another might have been in the offing, and in any case, it’s almost certain that John Lennon would have created much more music in the four plus decades since 1980.
One often sees memes with clichés about how, if one has left one person’s life better before one dies, then one’s life has been worth living. Imagine then the massively negative weighting of the life of the person that stole from the world potentially forty years’ worth of John Lennon’s music. And that suppurating rectal fistula that did it—who, as far as I know, has never contributed anything to anyone, least of all himself—is still alive.
If I found myself responsible for his medical care, I probably would do my duty and care for him to the best of my ability, since a shit-stain such as he would not be worth violating my medical principles. But goodness, it would be tempting to give him an IV infusion laced with fluid from a campsite outhouse.
I imagine (sorry, that wasn’t intentional, but I’m leaving it in) that John himself would probably counsel against even the notion of revenge. Then again, in his cautionary song, Revolution 1—the first version, that is, on the “White Album”—he seemed conflicted, singing, “But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…in.” That little second thought doesn’t appear in the more rocking single version of the song, but remember, this is the guy who wrote Norwegian Wood, with shades of perhaps not-entirely-figurative arson, and even Run For Your Life, for crying out loud. Still, I suspect that he would have wanted to be the sort of person who would not wish to seek revenge, even against his own murderer.
Then again, that snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings that killed him also robbed Sean Lennon of years and years with his father, and robbed John of such years with his wife and his children, and all because that endometrial teratoma that had been mistaken for a human child was so pathetic that he wanted to kill celebrities as a way of becoming famous.
Anyway, that’s enough of that. I remember John Lennon, and enjoy his music, far more often than I indulge in violent fantasies about what to do with the “man” who killed him, and that’s certainly as it should be. I will listen to some of that music today. And I will have a peaceful Friday (probably), and I will work tomorrow. So I will write a post tomorrow.
Until then, have a good day, if you can.
*This refers to the song by Paul Simon, which commemorated the deaths of blues musician Johnny Ace, and of JFK, and of course of John Lennon.
**I consider the murder of an artist such as John Lennon to be much more repulsive and distasteful than, say, the murder of a political figure or instigator of social change, or even a religious figure (depending on the religion). The latter types of people are, to borrow a phrase from The Godfather, “in the muscle end of the family”. Artists are creators, sometimes of breathtaking beauty. To seek out and deliberately kill an artist (without some extraordinarily good reason) is an insult against the very value of joy and beauty and existence itself.
***It’s quite interesting to remember that my brother and sister and I used to make various recordings of various things, also on standard cassette tapes. Sometimes we sang, sometimes we did little shows, sometimes we recorded the sound of TV shows such as The Incredible Hulk so we could listen to them when going to bed.
Robert Elessar 