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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.
Click to continue reading “Dreams of the Future”
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Mister Repose: So there’s this building in town called the I-4 Eyesore.
Mister Repose: This christian group was making it into like, this megachurch to house some Christian TV and other bullshit like that.
Mister Repose: Well they started building it before having all the money for it.
Mister Repose: So it’s literally been in construction for over five years.
Mister Repose: They need 10 million in donations, rofl.
Mister Repose: Some dude pointed out a line from the Bible that makes this fact hilarious and ironic…
Mister Repose: From Luke Chapter 14… Jesus is speaking:
‘When any of you wants to build a high house, you sit down first and see how much it will cost. You want to see if you have enough money to finish it. If you do not have enough money, you will not be able to finish it after you have made the foundation. Then all the people who see it will laugh at you. They will say, “This man started to build a house and could not finish it.” ‘
Teh Warden: sorry had to drop an emergency deuce
Mister Repose: Srs bizniz.
Teh Warden: Christians got punked by Jesus..
Mister Repose: I love it.
Mister Repose: It’s an obnoxious building.
Teh Warden: that’s the kind of shit you remember and then put into an article lol
Mister Repose: If you were driving on the highway at the right time the fucking mirrored glass reflects the sun and nearly blinds you.
Teh Warden: Xxxxxxxx said Winter Park is an obnoxious name for a place in FL where it’s like a hundred degrees.
Mister Repose: Like god is doing to our cars what kids do to ants with a magnifying glass.
Click to continue reading “Convos From the Darkside: The Fort Christmas Incident”
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In my previous article I stated that the homeless would not fuck with me again. Right now I am sad to report that those words were a tad bit premature. Now I know how Bush felt when he addressed the US a few months into the Iraq War with a giant ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner in the background; that, by the way, he totally knew nothing about. You see, I failed to listen to the sage advice of many famous tacticians from the past. That advice was, simply, don’t pick fights with people who have nothing to lose because there is nothing to be gained from fighting them and no way to make them stop. The homeless, apparently, couldn’t care less if you stink up their little hobo carts and they don’t seem to mind too badly if you throw them out. They’ll just find another cart to steal and fill with random junk and garbage, and bring it back. Frustrating, kind of like a mongrel dog you just want to go away, so you pitch a stick and the ugly thing just keeps bringing it back no matter how many times you throw it into traffic.
So, it seems that I have underestimated my homeless foes, and that they have decided to strike back by forming a grand hobo armada in the back of the building. As I write this, there are probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 homeless people living in the lot behind they building. They have gloriously erected a testament to the times which I lovingly refer to as ‘Hobo City’ or as one of my co-workers called it ‘Bum Fest 09.’ Hobocity is a wondrous place, where the denizens can enjoy all the perks of their downtown location, stinky old blankets adorn the fences of the lot to mark their turf, they have plentiful stolen lawn chairs on which to sit all day and contemplate things like cannibalism and optimal change harvesting locations, a nice building to use as a bathroom, and they proudly send hobo war parties out to collect change and food as well as cash registers. You heard me. Cash registers. This homeless army has got ridiculous. I thought it was bad when I first wrote about it but holy shit it’s turning into a regular sitcom. So get this, a couple of days ago several of the hobos from hobocity wandered to a business that is literally 50 feet from the lot they are staying in, shoved their way through lines of waiting customers, and fucking grabbed the cash register and walked out like they owned the fucking thing!
Click to continue reading “Hobo Wars Episode 5: The Bumpire Strikes Back”
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I think I’ve mentioned that I work in the ghetto. If I haven’t well, now I have. I work in the ghetto. Not even the loose definition of ghetto. This is a full-fledged prostitute filled, mostly minority (black and Hispanic people – or as the local mechanics oh-so-cleverly call them - ’spooks n’ spics’) populated, drug dealer market, hobo infested, wasteland of humanity. However, of all these nefarious elements which you find in the delicious cornucopia of human life known as downtown Orlando, there is one that I especially fear for their sheer number, smell, and lack of an education. I refer, of course, to the hobos. If you were thinking that I was talking about those damn ’spooks n’ spics,’ congratulations… you’re racist!
The hobos, yes. I hate hobos. They are thicker than fleas in the glorious city of Orlando. A city, it should be noted, that’s board of tourism refers to as ‘the city beautiful,’ which is such a distortion of the truth that I’m surprised that more people haven’t sued them for false advertising. I have a fairly good reason for hating hobos, aside from the fact that they lie about being hobos. You know what I mean if you’d ever been approached by one. Some smelly dude with a scruffy beard and no teeth will come up to you with some convoluted story about how his family needs bus fare back to where-the-fuck-ever or that they need a few bucks to rent a cab to get to the airport. Like anyone believes them. Nothing worse than needing money for booze and cheep bum hookers but to always try the ‘bus fare’ story, poor form Orlando homeless, poor form. That’s not the reason for my hate of the homeless local to this area. I’m sure there are some nice homeless guys, full for worldly wisdom and perfectly sane, in fantasy land; however, over here you get the best inner-city bums Orlando has to offer. The ones that will walk down lanes of traffic at red-lights banging on your car’s window and yelling insults at you if you don’t give them change, or the ones, that have made me hate the homeless in Orlando…. the ones that shit on your building.
You heard me, shitting on the building.
Click to continue reading “1, 2, 3, 4… I Declare a Hobo War!”
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You know, recently I’ve been mulling over a scenario that would probably work out better for me than the rest of you. That’s not to say that it would be entirely bad, well… depending of course as to what kind of person you are. The scenario is, what would happen if I became, either through fortune or conquest, the next great dictator of the world? So before I get a bit too dreamy eyed and start envisioning myself gloriously riding on tanks through the burning cities of those who dared, dared I say, to oppose my glorious vision for the future. Before I start to get a twinkle in my eye at the thought of standing before kings and politicians who my soldiers are forcing to bow at my feet. Before I get a raging boner thinking of the bountiful bosoms of the liberated womenfolk massaging my face like soft doughy sacks of warm chest fruit. I decided to put myself into a degree of perspective and run through my whole rein from glorious rise to inevitable fall, with advice I have received through the reading of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Robert Greene (Author of the recent book, The 48 Laws of Power). Bearing in mind of course, that I won’t be following their advice at all. So please, allow me to describe to you a majestic and gut wrenching (especially for enemy sympathizers and spies, but slightly more literal if you catch my drift) journey into a world where the next great dictator liberates you, The People, and brings an age of untold prosperity and atrocities unto all mankind.
Phase One: The Planning
(Codename: Operation Chili Con Queso)
The codename is based on the fact that, due to budget constraints during the planning process, I will be forced to assemble my dark council at the local Taco Bell.
Click to continue reading “The World Is Not Enough”
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