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Over the course of my life I’m made a few mistakes, who hasn’t? The particulars aren’t terribly exciting, and frankly bore me to explain them. Think the typical boy-meets-girl realizes girl is fucking insane and leaves girl (or gets left by said girl) fare. Afterward you kinda feel like the world is over if you’re the one on the other end. It reminds me of a line from a video game, Max Payne. ‘There are only personal apocalypses, and nothing is a cliche when it’s happening to you.’ Oh how true those words are. In all truth, in all these cases it’s my own fault for simply not seeing it coming.
Recently actually the ball started rolling early for once. In other words, I saw the breakup coming like a freight train.
Jeen-o been-o wrote something on her personal blog over on Open Diary (oh how I thought I’d never go back to that place again) speculating about why relationships fail, I then posted the subsequent reply:
“I think in relationships, especially long ones, people tend to believe that they love someone when in fact they only love certain aspects of their personality and so in a very passive-aggressive way try to bend them towards their will. Which leads to friction, which leads to arguing, which if not confronted leads to either a kind of bitter acceptance or total failure of said relationship. Of course that’s just my particular experience on the subject, it also may have something to do with some people being inherently cowardly or unwilling to assert their own will and so succumbs to a sort of domination by the other party.”
I have moments, between my weirdness and internal chatter where thoughts like that just bubble up out of nowhere and hit me like a truck. These moments only seem to come for me when I’m extremely tired. For years I used to intentionally stay up late hoping to be able to calm my defective ADD brain to the point where I could actually produce focused thoughts.
Click to continue reading “‘No Hero’”
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Over the course of the last month several things have been going on in rapid succession that have, in many ways left me scrambled, confused and otherwise ducking for mental cover. Primarily when events spiral out of control I find that writing is the only way to be able to sit down, structure them, and put them in a logical order so that I can understand them. Keep in mind that I have ADD, and being a stubborn bastard I refuse to seek medication or to seek other forms of release, such as therapy. I do this mostly because, well, I feel that ADD is part of who I am, and therefore, being a logical and reasonable person I should be able to adjust or work around it without it destroying my life in the process. The thing about me is that, well, I want to solve my own problems, in my own way.
There are many many article ideas for me right now, and a few that are sitting on the backburner. They will be done, I’m sure, just not sure when exactly. When my mind is focused on too many problems at once it’s difficult for me to be able to process it all. Like, for example, people who may be speaking to me and saying something I find repulsive or terrible won’t realize it right away because I’m still processing it, and when I finally come to a conclusion it shocks them that it was the opposite of whatever it was they thought I was in agreement with. I take my sweet time to consider things and then when I feel I’ve thought of every possible angle, then the decision comes.
This month I almost was fired from my job. You see, what happened was this, at some point during the week I was asked to take the bank deposit for the store, this is a fairly normal operation and usually the bank bag is placed on the counter. In this case, on this day, for whatever reason, after I signed the bank form … I left it on the counter. You see I had other things that they had given me to do as well, and in the process of trying to handle my other duties, I forgot that one. No big deal right? Just swing back and grab the bag I thought.
Well it was gone. Someone stole it.
So yeah, I signed the bank form so guess who nearly hanged for that one? Yours truly.
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Well, I suppose I should inform the general readership of this site as to an important detail that I have neglected to mention for the last three months. While I am aware that the general readership consists of basically friends of the Warden and people to whom I do not wish to associate myself with anymore, nonetheless I figured that I may as well make an announcement regarding the progress of the novel. You see, I told myself that if I was incapable of finishing the first draft by new years eve I’d give up this foolish quest to drag myself out of poverty via literary accomplishment and accept the fact that I’ll be working horrible jobs that I hate till I finally die in my bathtub by drowning in two inches of water as a feeble crazy old man. Sometime in November I realized I was going to actually hit my goal, by mid December I finished it.
What I did was power through the book like a man possessed. When I reached the end I went back and read what I had. Then I read it again and again. I’ve read it 10 times in draft form and it was on New Year’s eve that I tinkered with the ending a little and came up with a tidy resolution that leaves questions unanswered but puts a nice bow around the main plot line. I hadn’t posted these later chapters on the site because I knew as I was writing them, and even when I was writing the ones I DID post, that this draft version was going to be drastically different from the final edit. Since no one comments on this site, well my articles, other than Jeen and the aforementioned people whom I am not interested in the opinions of, I didn’t think anyone would really notice or particularly care one way or another.
I left Adamus staring out a broken frame of glass that used to be a massive bay window at the top of the highest skyscraper uncertain about what will happen next but satisfied in his vengeance. No. I left Adamus standing on the train station to Hamburg to meet a friend he thought was long-dead. No. Adamus and Serra left the city and went to the ruins of the old world and rebuilt a small independent society knowing that in the end the peace they create will not last long. No. It could have been any of those three I suppose but it’s not. The past three months have been a major re-tuning of the framework I created last year in the big push, because I realized something after I had finished.
There was definitely something missing from the narrative. It seemed, to put it mildly, disingenuous; but I couldn’t place my finger on why exactly that was the case until a conversation with a friend of mine that broached the subject of the book’s progress. He looked at me deadpan and said, “this character sounds like he has a lot in common with you.” That’s when it dawned on me. I had been writing this book as though the main character and I were the same person, and therefore his narrative is really my narrative. How I would react to these situations, or at least how I’d like to think I’d react. The problem with the finished draft was the narritive style, it was all wrong for the character and who he was. So this re-tooling has been interesting because now I’m trying to say it like another person would.
So the main character’s a little more cowardly, a little more conflicted, and a little more confused about his role in everything. Outside threats become more ominous, confrontations inspire more dread. Serra’s different too, not just my idealized version of what loyalty should be, she’s more ambiguous now in her motives and plays off Adamus like a fearful element because she’s leading him, in his perspective, to do dangerous and unnecessary things. He’s less connected. Less in control. In other words, more interesting because the situation in the newer version I’m working away at feels like it may have hit the right chord.
Another thing I wasn’t wholly satisfied with was my original idea to kind of have a kinda classic/progressive rock soundtrack to it. Each chapter named after a song, each book named after an album. Which made me try to capture the mood of each song in each chapter, giving the narration a manic and uneven feeling. It’s not layers of plot building up to a final conflict, but many little things adding up to an abrupt end. This version lacks that, chapters aren’t dictated by an invisible soundtrack.
So basically what I have right now is a skeleton I’m applying muscle and organs to in the hopes of zapping it like Frankenstien’s monster thus unleashing it upon the literary public to screams of horror and rage. That’s how I roll, yo.
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In general, people are gloriously uncreative when it comes to provoking others. This is more readily apparent when you factor in my last enemies, ‘organized’ flamers. Frankly, explaining what an organized flamer is or what their site’s are about in detail would bore me to tears. Mostly due to the fact I’ve done it one to many times. Lets just say they are people who put up a front on the internet as a tough guy / airport lounge quality stand up comic and think they are super clever and good at getting under people’s skin.
They aren’t.
That’s because, like many trolls and dumb asses that have long flocked to the internet due to it’s amazing ability to act as a bullet shield from people finding out how pathetic they are in real life, flamers are horribly insecure and thus have to turtle into little safe harbors where they can form cliques and protect themselves from other trolls who smell blood in the water and people who know how to hit them back. This leads to an almost hilarious tendency for them to think that they are bullet proof, their words, being hollow, are often posted condemning their latest targets on their own web sites. I suppose their belief was that by simply saying a version of the truth that is obviously rendered from the point of view of a delusional egomaniac, that they have scored points over people they provoke.
This is also a cowardly two-fold method to keeping their sites active so they don’t get bored. These provocations were posted after any botched ‘invasion’ of another board. Think Pirates, only instead of sinking ships, getting treasure, and murdering the crews of enemy ships; you have about five people basically posting ‘FAGTARDS WE OWN YOU’ till they are banned from said forum. The idea would be, annoy enough people that you flee to your own board where the then invaded forum would feel they had the upper hand and come to your board. Then you’d swarm them, hurl insults and act like retards till they all left and if a couple stayed you’d claim you ‘stole’ members from the other board and integrate the members that stayed into your clique. The whole point was to keep fresh blood coming to these troll forums so that they wouldn’t get bored and turn on each other. Outside targets and occasional members from these boards coming in would keep things active. Then the same basic insults could be used on a whole new group of people, thus keeping things ‘fresh.’
This worked for a while, believe it or not.
Until they met a few people like me.
Click to continue reading “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies – Tales From My Final Web War”
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It’s been a while, and well, that’s a reflection on two things going on at the moment. One is a sort of writer’s block for articles, normally I have a lot of things I want to talk about but lately I’ve been at a loss for words. Just sitting back and absorbing the noise and the world. Digesting it, slowly. Getting the good bits, trying to find the important parts, trying. The other thing is the book.
Monolithic Horizon started a long time ago, when I was around the age of twenty. Sure other stories have come along and I’ve worked on shorts and played with a few chapters here and there for the hell of it, for a break, for whatever. But the end result is that the book was never finished, I just sat on it. I’ve been delaying finishing it since I started writing it because, I’m dreadfully afraid of failure. It seems as though my preference has been been simply to not try. When you don’t try and you fail, at least it’s easier. When you work hard for something, when you… for whatever reason, actually care about something and it slips through your fingers or falls apart then it’s a lot harder to deal with. At least in my case.
My whole life has been like that. It’s something ingrained in me ever since I was a child. So I didn’t finish the book because if I did and it never went anywhere than I could tell myself it will some day, you know… have that little nugget of hope. If I try and fail however, then there’s no excuse. There’s no fallback plan. I’ll have to face a reality of being broke and probably working miserable fucking jobs I hate till I go mad. Though, I have decided to take my own advice. A person can’t live life in fear of something stupid like failure, or anything else for that matter. For all intents and purposes for the large majority of my adult life this cowardly excuse has dominated my rationale to avoid finishing something that could lead to something I desperately want. That’s why I’ve been gone for a month or so from writing here. I’ve been pounding away on the book.
There’s three acts to Monolithic Horizon, each with distinct themes. Act One is about the present. Act Two is the past. Act Three is the future. Well, this is the first time in the constant re-writes, losses, and frustrations I’ve had thinking about, working on, and conceptualizing this damned book that I’ve reached the final act. Normally around the middle of act one I give up and go into an infinite editing look. I’m actually almost done with this god-damn thing. The new method I’ve come up with to power through and resist editing anything till I was done has worked fairly well. Sure once I’m actually at the end I can go through and flesh things out and fix typos, etc, but that’s not the point. My goal was to get the rough draft done by the end of the year so I can do the final final final FINAL edit and then start sending it out.
Then I’ll re-post the first act, as the final edited version starting January next year. It’s been seven long years, a lot of things have changed in my life and in the way I look at things, this book has been sort of like the Sun … the common experience (or object) by which everything else in my life has orbited. In order to truly move on with my life I need to finish this once and for all.
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I took a picture of myself making a stupid face, a hobby of mine when I’m extremely bored. Which, thanks to ADD is almost every waking moment of my life.
This is the picture in question…
I told my girlfriend, that this is the face when I’m behind her… doing, well, you know.
Click to continue reading “Convos From the Dark Side: Mister Repose’s Final Form”
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(Headnote: You’ll have to pardon the relatively dramatic kick the goodship Nonpersons has been on lately, I usually rely on my ally The Warden to counterbalance whatever I’m doing, but with a tidal wave of words from yours truly flooding the site in the last month anything he could do would just end up getting buried into a fusillade of my textual fury.)
During my time on these tubes I have encountered an unusual amount of desperate, lonely, and in some cases, eccentric people. This is because, due to my nature, I tend to avoid websites and such that are extremely large and/or popular. In the more obscure corners these kinds of people thrive. One of the deciding factors for my leaving Open Diary ten years ago stemmed from the fact that the place was outgrowing it’s users. Now, this experience in dealing with these types of people, is that you find out something which I feel is extremely important in life… that your situation is not special or unique. Odds are, someone else has been where you’re going or has just crawled out of where you’ve been. I forget where this quote is from that summarizes that sentiment, but I think it was a video game. I want to say Max Payne, but I’m not sure. Anyway it goes something like this. “There are no apocalypses, just personal ones; and nothing is a cliche when it’s happening to you.”
In the process of moving around on the internet I’ve made several friends that I no longer speak to. That’s always been the way I’ve dealt with my life, in general. I’ll team up with someone for a while but when I feel that whatever bond we shared has been resolved or the common thread is severed I move on. This is a pre-emptive action on my part, since I’ve lived under the fatal assumption that everyone will end up leaving me eventually, so I make the first move. Hit the road, so to speak. Now, it’s not like this assumption is entirely baseless. As a matter of fact, nine times out of ten once someone has gotten what they want out of me, whether it be some advice, an emotional crutch, or simply a friendly ear to listen to them, almost invariably they stop speaking to me when the trouble passes.
This has not made me bitter, believe it or not, since I understand how these things work. Once the situation passes, once the trouble is gone, well what else is there for two people to say to each other? It’s not like I have a lot in common with anyone. In general my outlook is fairly pragmatic in terms of making friends. If they stick around for a long time, if we have a lot in common great, but you know that nothing lasts forever. It’s become increasingly difficult for me to trust anyone, or even get close to people. Instead I look for all sorts of reasons not to. I know that I should not be acting this way, but as much as I seem to enjoy saying ‘good-bye’ to people, one can only take so many partings before it begins to become extremely tiresome. Being left behind can do things to your ego no amount of insults or violence could ever hope to. And you know what? It’s my fault for taking these things personally, but I guess at the time I didn’t quite grasp the situation as clearly as I did then, looking back on it.
Click to continue reading “Light at the End”
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An incident occurred tonight, about fifteen minutes ago, of which I am somewhat attempting to wrap my head around. I was in my room, minding my own business and sorting through my stuff because I’m boxing things up in anticipation of moving in the next month or so. My little brothers are out in the living room, playing Halo. A game I despise, by the way. Anyway, they are doing what young kids do. Drinking playing their x-box, hanging out. Just another normal night at this house, and while I find the constant noise somewhat obnoxious, nothing is worse than the crazy idiots that seem to be attracted to my family like moths drawn to a forest fire. There’s a quote by Jonathan Swift, which rotates on the right side of this site every now and then, that says “When a great genius appears in the world the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” If that’s the case, then my brothers must be the next incarnation of Einstein, with the sheer amount of morons that seem to constantly be out to attack them in retardedly (I know that’s not a word, shut up) petty ways.
So I hear this screaming outside, just pure nutty-ass screaming. This is unusual for a place that’s full of dying old people. It’s this short, fat, blond woman. About 45-50. Yelling so damn loud that it’s making my ears hurt. So I go out there, and keep in mind that in most normal situations I don’t tend to walk into a swirling torrent of crazy because it’s fucking pointless most of the time, but for some stupid reason I thought perhaps I could talk some fucking sense into this lady. So this is what I managed to gather, her son is a degenerate fuckup who was drinking in combination with taking pain pills and stumbled home, told this crazy woman who apparently is his mother, and after punching him in the face, decided to wander over here and accuse, of all people, me, of giving him alcohol. Well, not really me, anyone who happened to walk out of our house, but I took personal offense when she said it to me. So I told her to get the fuck out, and also pointed out that I ‘almost never drink, you degenerate retard’ in those exact words too. She left, I assume, because she didn’t know me, whereas she felt she could fuck with my brothers all she wanted because they are younger. Apparently she pulled in the lot, nearly hit my brother, and got out the car shoving him and screaming at him. I had to ask him why he didn’t slap her across the face the moment she laid a finger on him, because I sure as hell would have.
So I go back inside, fairly annoyed by this point, and start to collect the garbage. As I’m heading out the door, this crazy fucking lady pulls back in the parking lot and starts wandering around knocking on people’s doors apparently looking for my grandfather’s house. In the middle of the god-damned night. She’s going to wake up my poor, sick, grandfather to scream at him because her son fucked up and wanted to blame someone get her off his case? I don’t think so. Before I go out there again to tell her to get the fuck out, again, my brothers friends do so for me. She threatens to cal the police on them and they basically tell her to go ahead, mock her, and generally insult her for being an idiot. She leaves.
Click to continue reading “All Growed Up”
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Ten years ago, I was a hurt, lost, stupid, angry person. This was the first time that I began to write. It was on a blog site called opendiary.com. When I was that age, around 16-17 I was so angry. It was eating me up inside like a cancer. There were all those cliche’ feelings that one normally associates with being a teenager. The largest and most prominent feeling was that no one cared about or understood me. My family and I had nothing in common, and in being adopted, I discovered that in some way I felt like I didn’t belong. Still don’t. Likewise my school days were awkward for the same reasons, but in the group of misfits that hung around with they were loyal to me and they understood me, to a degree. I lost contact with a lot of people that I really got along with, time rolls on, you know. I turned to blogging because it was anonymous, I could say how I really felt to people and see what they really thought about me without the fear of being lied to or used or whatever that was what
The schools. My parents, my real parents. My life. How I looked. There were a lot of things that were wrong with young Chris. My adopted father left me. My mother made me live with my control freak grandparents, and this is where the story began for a lot of people. One thing that I have noticed about personal blogs is that most people speak in vague generalities about their lives, delving rarely into the specifics. It’s like how you would imagine a support group meeting would go. Everyone already knows why they are there, everyone already can infer the details based on subtext. The ones that didn’t do that were the ones I read. People who were there to talked about the specifics. People I could relate to.
People like Morgan (aka Dublin Sublime aka Lachlan), who became a lesbian stripper sometime between then and now. Nothing wrong with that, she seems happy about the whole thing. Fanboy wanted to be a journalist, he said it was to ‘give the weak a voice.’ I don’t know if he was successful in that endeavor. When I first posted my story, Monolithic Horizon, the first chapter, unedited, raw, sloppy, he read it. I always assumed that because it was so awful he avioded reading me from that point on. Probably wrong about that. There was old real life friends that between then and now have faded away. There was Serenity, no seriously that was her name, whom wrote about being so lost and confused that when out with friends she ended up in car wrecks and drinking binges. Sometimes I wonder what ever happened to her and if she’s alright. Belowblackstar, Jesus Chrysler, and Wire were all roommates. Blackstar became an egotist who hurt his friends with his selfish and egotistical behavior. On my last site I eventually had to rid myself of him. Jesus was a mysterious figure, he faded in and out again. I don’t remember much. Wire… Wire is a bastard. That’s all I’ll say on that matter lest I go off on a tangent. Doomed, doomed was an odd fellow from Australia, humorous and weird, but ultimately dropped off the radar.
Click to continue reading “The Times, Theys a’ Changin’ Sis”
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Picture a skyline, and it goes on for as long as possible till it’s cut off by the edge of the horizon. Even at that distance you can see great buildings and towers rising up like giants to worship the rising sun. The buildings, the skyline, is not pristine and beautiful. It’s dirty and grimy, and in that sky you can see bridges, little specks of life moving about, cables hanging, things moving. Platforms and odd-looking vehicles. Signs everywhere, a suspended sea of architecture and neon extending for what seems and feels like forever.
The future is not something I view with much hope in terms of progress. When I see the future I imagine in some cases a mere continuation of all the crap and garbage we have to put up with now only on a larger scale. Sci-fi authors, in the 40s and 50s seemed to have some sort of uptopian delusion wherein they pictured the future full of chrome and high-technology complete with self-cleaning houses and flying Cadillacs. My grandfather used to ground me a lot when I lived with him and as a result the only things I could spend time with were old sci-fi and western novels. Believe me, when I tell you he had a lot of them. Apparently he’d buy whatever the public library would be phasing out of their book stock at the little store they had for a huge discount. Most of these books were not classics by any means, don’t get me wrong some well-known works were in my Grandfather’s library. H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Some various works of Issac Asimov. Tons of Louis L’amour westerns, which, from what my grandfather says, is basically the most accurate western fare you can find. The rest was all stuff with corny titles and features such as hilarious cover art depicting some dude with a mullet on mars holding a ray gun with a fawning space-babe on his shoulder.
So you can imagine me, grounded for something stupid, curled up in a ball in the back bedroom reading nothing but old dreams of the future day after day during most of the year. A lot of these books were from the 40s through 80s. Almost nothing current but I made due. When reading these books some were surprisingly good, some were utterly forgettable. The future was a shining place, filled with high technology and adventure. When I was older this stuff could be real. I could leave earth and go into the space fleet, scour new territories, explore the stars. As time went on and I kept reading westerns as well. I began to see romantic parallels between cowboys and space explorers. Rough and tumble types always using thier meager resources and thier wits to save the day and get the girl.
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