[ xVx-01 ]

Need to start writing fiction again!!!! Maybe I will do Nanowrimo again this year.

It sucks when you have a long-term ongoing fiction project that gets left to the side due to life obligations, like finding an apartment, moving apartments, losing your apartment, finding a new apartment, finding a full-time job, hating said full-time job because it doesn't allow you time to work on your ongoing fiction project, quitting full-time job, needing full-time job cash, finding a new full-time job, etc. Not to mention school. Yeah it was really hard to try to write novels around homework. I think the first year I tried Nanowrimo I also had 25 pages of essays to write during the same month. I swear, if my lifetime hadn't been structured so rigidly by the system I would be a novelist by now for sure. Come on society....priorities!

Well I finally have a good apartment and I work from home, maybe it is finally time to go back to the writing. The only problem is all the old work I have that is now so lost/disorganized/stale. Do I just start again from scratch? Or spend epic time re-sorting and re-structuring what I do have? There's so much of it....somewhere.

Here's an excerpt to prove I'm not making it up.

***

"We mostly need people who can understand electronics." The word was somehow jarring to Raymi, like a magic spell. He couldn't recall if he'd heard it before, but he sensed its power, the beauty of its syllables. Before he could become lost in its contemplation Lead spoke on. "Those people are hard to find and I doubt you're one of them. We need people who know the wild lands around the city. We need to run cables, repair the infrastructure. The further we can connect, the wider our communication network can be. Spreading out is one of our highest goals. Controlling its borders is the only way we can take the whole city. Incidentally, this is
where your Tattica..."


"Not mine," broke in Raymi, surprised at his own outburst, remembering the child Brat who, if any version of Tattica ever belonged to him, was lost the moment she dropped that diminutive. For the first time since he had initiated the conversation, Lead looked up from his glowing monitor.


"Even still," he continued, his voice softening considerably, enough to betray that he, too, was hurt by the sound of her name. An unspoken trust seemed to unfold across the room, little by little, tile by tile bridging the distance between the two men.


"Even still. We offered her the same deal and she offered us all she knew of the forests in the north. Our clan has scarcely seen a more ambitious contributor. Between her ardour and her invaluable knowledge of the northern territory, she is one of our most valuable assets."


But his praise was mechanical and calculating, his voice frosty, concealing perhaps an anger for her magnificence and her absence.


"She's always out now, working on the lines. She leads a team, and they look up to her.



"Finally," he said, dragging the conversation back to its intended purpose, "we need grunts, labourers, men to haul things and carry heavy loads and do repetitive tasks. It's not pretty but it'll buy you a meal."



Today I had a mental crash that I could consciously associate with a seratonin exhaustion. It wasn't a bad mood so much as a lack of focus and what I called an "attack of dumbness". I took a 5htp and that seemed to fix me up quite well. I am sure I brought the seratonin crash on myself with my recent actions and lack of attention and care to what I've been putting into my body, but I find it interesting that no matter what I put my brain through these days, nothing seems to hurt it nearly as much as the steady diet of white flour and refined sugar most North Americans live on, including myself until a few years ago.

It makes me wonder how many preventable mental health issues exist that could be remedied with a little bit of simple nutritional change.

Contrary to everything my thinking mind tells me and contrary to most things I've been taught in school, it seems that the treatment for my lack of energy is actually to do *more*, rather than less. Sure, my brain is *always* running, sorting through ideas, planning, and learning new skills. But my body has gotten stuck in a small loop, mainly because every time I want to go outside and get some exercise a little voice says to me "no, don't have fun, there's work to do. Get all the work done before having fun." I blame school for this extremely pervasive attitude, which is actually very damaging. I seem to be repeating all those long days when the sun was shining outside and I was in a stuffy room doing homework. Not healthy for body, soul, or even mind for that matter. The actual experience that seems to run contrary to the picture I have developed in my mind is that the more exercise I get, the more physical and mental energy I seem to have. I would think that the more rest I get, the more energy I would have. But it simply doesn't work that way. Exercise and socializing just seem to continue to give me more and more energy.

So on top of running my business I am going to get back into dancing again, this time with a more professional lean. I am going to try to book performances and do some physical training around it. I want to do ridiculous stuff like backflips in stilettos one day.

What I have learned from this experience is this: if the sun is shining, don't do your homework. Even if it's late. Even if you will get an F. If the sun is shining, go outside and play. That's what school should teach us.

I'm trying to learn to accept myself as a person who makes mistakes.

It's really hard.

I had the most revolutionary thought today. What if I started writing in my LiveJournal again...as a journal??

I desperately need a place to reflect on my self, my work and my growth without the fear of being cut down, but I also need a place to ask questions and get feedback, or at least to feel like I might be heard. I'm getting bored of the solitude of writing things to myself on pieces of paper and shoving them into the bottoms of drawers. Growing up and going professional means that I have to start editing my online presence to hide my childhood mistakes and misdemeanors. And aiming to be a professional artist means that the presence I create, online and in the real world must be an opus, a portfolio, a display. I am starting a new blog (I have a few articles written but it's not online yet). It is supposed to be a place for me to publish articles that show my credibility as a writer so that I can start getting accepted into more publications. But that lacks a personal outlet. I was going to use *this* journal as a photo blog, or poetry collection, or *something,* but none of those things seemed to fit the medium. But why should I get a Tumblr, a Wordpress, a Blogspot, when I already have a perfectly good online journal? Well, I guess it makes a difference of who will read it. Who reads Livejournal anymore anyway?

Then it hits me: Livejournal is the perfect tool to be...exactly what it is. An online journal with a small enough readership that those few people who read it might actually care. A little community, rather than a mass broadcast.

I have a few thoughts on the design styles of Wordpress,Blogspot and the like. I really believe that the original tends to be best (in this case, Livejournal) despite the dated stylistic elements. The reason? Because it's a piece of history, like an old stone building that still stands up, that inspires people in the ways that new steel condos don't. There's something sturdy in old code, in tried and tested methods. What's more, using Livejournal is like taking part in history, if you're open enough to believe that digital history is being made as we speak. I noticed that wordpress' theme menu clearly took elements from Livejournal's layout. How cool is it to see, on the "new internet" with floating boxes and widgets and drag'n'drop interfaces, elements reminiscent of earlier designers' work? Designers working under different restrictions, being as creative as their CPUs could handle?

I recently saw a cartoon that showed the evolution of man (from mud puddle, to amphibian to ape to human) overlayed with social networking platforms. The punchline of the joke was that Facebook was the caveman and Google+ was the evolved human. The mud puddle was Livejournal. I miss the days when Livejournal was "the thing". It suited me. (It suited me way more than Facebook ever did). Well, I think it's time for a Livejournal revival. Not an upgrade, not an attempt to turn Livejournal into the next Tumblr, but a revival of using Livejournal the way it was originally used. As a somewhat shy, yet eager, semi-private but partly public, sharing of our inner thoughts and fears, our teen angst, our drama, and our most profound visions.

It is this obscure, yet special place that allows us to speak, knowing that someone may listen and care, yet not fearing the opinions of the masses. It allows us to share things that no one would ever care about except a few of our very personal, very special, very important friends.

Dear Livejournal:
Today the building manager and contractors left a ladder to the roof of my apartment building set up in the back yard. I discovered this when I let my cat out in the early hours of the morning. I climbed up and took pictures of the CN Tower and birds flying in the sunrise. It felt like something good was about to begin.

I'm going to start a new blog for information-based articles on a few topics I think need more examination. I think it's important for there to be as many alternative voices as possible out there sharing info and speaking out from different points of view than the corporate media. I don't know how big my readership will be but I suppose I have to have faith and believe that my voice will be heard and will matter to some people somewhere!

I'm thinking of keeping this blog up for posting more out there visual art and fictional/poetic writing. We'll see how things go as they go.

Hi Livejournal.

I might start updating you again one day soon.

You know you're a graphic design geek when discovering www.dafont.com and www.cgtextures.com make you want to go crazy with excitement.

---

I made a fairly large life and career decision recently: I'm giving up Windows and switching to Linux entirely, which means no Adobe and virtually no industry standard software for digital art and design. Obviously this will affect my work if I decide to freelance, but in my opinion it will affect it positively. I will have a niche, the chance to explore unconventional, up-and-coming software and a more unique product. Mostly I'm excited to be able to argue informatively the merits of open-source design software.

I'm considering shifting the focus of this blog to documenting my adventures. While it may be an obscure niche, I imagine it could be quite a useful source of information for other designers running (or wanting to run) Linux.


For some eye candy, here are two recent photos edited in the GIMP.

So my friend Max stated that people could give him anything they wanted for Christmas, so long as it had no physical dimensions. What follows is my answer to that challenge.

Touchless

"Max's Christmas Present"

You will never see it
Never hear it
Never be it
Nor be near it
You can never touch it
Neither taste it
Use it all and never waste it
You cannot smell it
Write or tell it
Despite what's said,
You cannot sell it
It makes no noise upon the stair
It is the thing that isn't there.

Paradox
Pandora's box
It keeps the birds
Arrayed in flocks

Formless as water
Touchless as gas
Lacking width and depth and mass
Like reflections in the glass

It is the meaning in the script
The memory of what's been done
The information in the bit
The zero and the one

The bud inside the winter branch
The shadow in the cave
The rock before the avalanche
It is both particle and wave

Cut the cell and magnify it
You will not find it
You cannot add or multiply it
But dreams describe it

Forever heated, never cool
It binds the atoms in the molecule
Forever moving, never still
You cannot catch it, never will

You cannot measure, cannot test
To nothing concrete is it bound
It is a riddle without a guess
Search and it is nowhere to be found

In the dance it lies between the steps
The moment when your feet lift off the ground
It is neither in the keys nor in the frets
In the song it is a note without a sound

It cannot be split, cannot be broken
Its name is the word that cannot be spoken
It is the circle in the square
It is the thing that isn't there.

“It's been a while,” she said, more to her heavily creamed coffee than to him. An old jukebox skipped, making incoherent noises that blurred into some kind of avant-garde remix. Dirty yellow tables, dirty yellow walls. Dirty yellow classic rock crackling on the radio.

“Just your kind of place,” he said. She was damn classy, so classy she loved slumming it. Her taste ran to this washed-up retro vibe that she turned into magic and history. The only girl in the world that could turn a six-year-old coffee stain and the smell of kitchen-grade sterilizer into magic. He thought he might be in love with her.

"I been out of it for a while,” she said. “Far away from everybody.”

“I guess we all get far away in our own directions,” he said. “There's no centre without people out on the fringes.”

“No,” she said. “There were centres out there existing without us, beyond our scope, outside of our knowledge all along, that we never even could touch. And we missed them.” She looked deep into her coffee like she was divining the secrets of the universe in the murky brown, the colour of a faded 1970's photograph of the void. “You know how it is, sometimes you just trip up, and suddenly the walls of your apartment are crawling and staring at you and they're aggressive, and you get locked up in this little room where everyone else is far away, and you remember only what the walls tell you and it's never pretty. And sometimes you think you've seen the bottom but eventually you learn there's no bottom because there's always more down and down and down the rabbit hole you go like...”

Stop.

“...I can't think of anything that it's like. But anyway you know there's a hundred thousand parties going on out there, one for every star in the night sky and they're in love with life and in love with each other and there's music and dancing and costumes and lights and you're not invited to a single one. Not even one. But you know they're there, because you can feel them deep inside you, feel the pulsing vibes, the beat that is not your own. But you're so far lost down the rabbit hole that you can't find your way to the source. You've lost your way home, and eventually you begin to think that you never even had a home in the first place. And that's the story. That's how you get lost.”

“But you must not have gotten lost completely because you can still transform the world into your special dream.”

And she actually smiled. She damn well smiled. And he thought about leaping over the table and knocking her to the floor just to be with her then and there.

And--crack--everything broke. Her coffee was ice and they were sitting on the ceiling looking up at the floor and the jukebox was playing the radio and the radio was playing Led Zeppelin in reverse and she was smiling and smiling and smiling.

*

The drive started like the coffee, weak and bland. Little clicks of bad dance-pop on the radio but it was in and out. The road grew darker, the trees grew closer, leaning in, tunnelling the road, encircling it. The headlights became the sun, moon and stars and all the light in the universe. It began to rain. The wipers made rhythm, clicking with the radio which was more static than music, like the popstars were coming in through SETI from the next galaxy over, an ancient and hidden wisdom about the nature of love and intercourse channelled through their feeble voices.

She was sleeping in the back seat and little drips of rain leaked in through the crappy seal on the hatchback window. Her hair was damp. He had to use all his will to keep his eyes open, to keep from surrendering to the sweet lullaby of windshield wipers and deep breaths. He thought he had never been this happy in his life and tried to forget anything else ever existed, tried to believe that this was sweet eternity, the perfect mix of thrill and comfort, somewhere between the slick road and the soothing heat blasting from the radiator.

He pulled over and climbed into the back seat with her. She woke up a little but did not push him away. “I fucking love this night, and you too, I think,” he told her. A massive splash covered the windows as the roadway carried on its life without them. She turned beneath him and he felt the beltline of her jeans.

It all melted into prismic multicoloured water. Everything began to drip, to flow until there was no more form, no more body, only awareness and intention.

“You can still transform the world into your special dream.”