Up and At'em

My brain likes to get me up nice and early. Always has. Doesn't matter how little sleep I might've had the night before (and really, I had about 7 hours of sleep, so I can't complain). But I just always wake up early.

I'm out of sorts lately. Bleah. Hard to put words to it, exactly. Just a bit off the mark of late, not in the sweet spot. Might need to whip out the dreaded List(tm) and start doing that, just to tick things off my list and get'em done. I hate doing that, but feel like I might need to, just in order to get the stuff done, to know it's done, all of that. I'm already in the "My Lord, it's almost Christmas" frame of mind, and we're in early October. Argh! This year was surreal. Not as dire as past years, but still a trippy kind of year. I got a lot of stuff done, but it's still kind of wild to think of that.

I've been craving biscotti lately, may make some in the next few weeks. I used to have some great recipes for them, but have lost them to the sands of time. So, I grabbed three other recipes I found online that looked good, may make those.

Had this weird, unsettled feeling about the country, too -- like is this how the country felt decades before the Civil War? Like irreconcilable differences of national opinion? Thankfully, Americans are likely far, far too lazy to actually engage in another civil war -- can you imagine that? I keep getting my brain around the notion of evil as "militant ignorance." That just feels so spot-on to me. Militant ignorance -- "Don't know, don't wanna know. And I'll shoot anybody for asking. Love it or leave it. Zero tolerance." And so on. Ugly, empty sentiments. That's what we're up against as a society. America's seen itself toppled from the pinnacle of power -- our generation (Gen X) is entering middle age in the age of America's decline. I read the other day that 40 million Americans are illiterate, and something like 50 million more are functionally illiterate -- ~90 million Americans are illiterate? Holy fucking SHIT. This is a national disgrace, a cultural failure of staggering magnitude. We have over 40 million uninsured, 14 million unemployed (and another 8-10 million marginally employed). And the political class is completely captive to the status quo. Those Occupy Wall Street folks are at least drawing attention to this reality. Our nation is in dire need of forward progress, but is being held hostage by hidebound dullards who keep us spinning in circles because they refuse to actually face reality. I saw that the average American who can read reads at the 7th grade level. That conjures up images of people moving their lips as they read. Our political class is representing people who read at the 7th grade level? That is who they are appealing to? It makes it very clear why things like evolution aren't well-understood by Americans. Or the need for energy policy. Or why we can't cut taxes and fight three wars and have a social safety net and raise revenue at the same time. And so on. Lordy. We dumb. I mean, really, it was only Sputnik scaring the shit out of the American political class that spurred the teaching of science in this country. Look at where we were before Sputnik, and you'll see that ignorance is really the steady state in American culture. The push for high-tech in the latter 20th Century may, in retrospect, have been just a hiccup. Just like the middle class (which was made possible by the GI Bill, that swelling of soldiers coming back from wars and taking advantage of that to educate themselves). The American middle class is gone. Whether people realize it or not, it's true. It eroded over the past 30 years, and it's gone today. That's the economic reality of it. The political reality of it is only now sinking in, I think. A lot of people with 7th grade reading comprehension are gonna be pissed off. Pitchforks and torches. Meanwhile, I try to equip my boys with knowledge and the emotional tools they need to thrive -- to help them face challenges without fear, to feel hope and promise in the future -- even as I think at some point they'll leave this country one day, because the opportunities will be elsewhere. In a globalized economy, allegiance to nation-state is a quaint relic -- so very 20th century.

41

I turn 41 tomorrow, figured I'd squeak one last post while I'm 40 years old, still. Ha! I vividly remember turning 30, being amused at being equidistant from 20 and 40. At the time, 40 seemed a world away. Now I'm about to turn 41. I've gotten a lot accomplished in the past ten years -- a couple of kids, home ownership (and sellership -- hahah), a shitload of writing, a decade of quality work for a prestigious employer -- none of that was there when I was 30.

It makes me optimistic for the rest of my 40s, coming into my prime, getting done what I need done, and doing it with style. At the same time, it's staggering how short life is. Even though 10-year-old Dave (1980), 20-year-old Dave (1990), 30-year-old Dave (2000) and 40-year-old Dave (2010) confront each other in a kind of quantum face-off, and I can distinctly remember things from those various decades, it's still amazing and humbling just how fleeting that time is.

Each moment is so precious, but as you get older, it's hard to appreciate the moments the way you do when you're younger, when everything seems new. The "been there, done that" mentality of age can erode the gloss off of living, if you're not careful. I live very much in the moment, and find peace in it. I know I brooded far more about time and age when I was about 25 than I do, now. I still find the magic in the moments, even though I may have to be a little more conscious of them than I used to be.

So, I face 41 with a surprising amount of peacefulness. Another step into my fourth decade of life.

Grant Hart, "2541"

Awakened

I went to sleep earlier, only to wake up when the Cheeseheads in town cheered the Super Bowl win. My computer was off, my television still incommunicado thanks to Comcast, so I had to turn on the computer again to find out, rather than bother friends by trying to find out for sure who had won.

Now I'm awake, have been for a bit or awhile. Reading my book and brooding. I haven't been sleeping terribly well for the past week, owing to that fucking flu (and if you get it, you'll know just what I'm talking about -- it's not the worst flu I've had, but it just sticks with you and nags and nags and nags and nags). Anyway, it makes it hard to focus and get one's feet under you. I think I'm a day or two away from fully rebounding from it, and hopefully I'll be back to being able to sleep properly again.

(break to get a glass of icewater)

There, I'm back. This week, I plan to query some of my books to other agents, sling out a bunch, just shotgun it, see if I can garner any interest. We'll see.

I'm thinking of adapting some more of my short stories into screenplays. I tend to write fairly cinematically, and while, as ever, the screenplay format daunts me, I'd still like to turn a few of the pieces into them -- especially a few of them that would play very well onscreen. Of course, this is even more of a longshot than anything else, but I have the material, so it's just a matter of adapting it and finding homes for it.

Was thinking about unrequited love today, as perhaps part of my monthly musing about Love(tm). Given that, according to a study, 98% of people experience unrequited love in their lives, that might be a worthy aspect of love to go into, although what a dismal graveyard that place is, yes?

It does, however, introduce a word most people don't likely know (at least by name): limerence -- an intense feeling of attachment toward someone (or, I suppose, something). Limerence can be felt as extreme joy or intense despair, depending on whether it is reciprocated or not. Wikipedia nicely sums it up...

Limerence is characterized by intrusive thinking and pronounced sensitivity to external events that reflect the disposition of the limerent object towards the individual. Basically, it is the state of being completely carried away by unreasoned passion or love, even to the point of addictive-type behavior. Usually, one is inspired with an intense passion or admiration for someone. Limerence can be difficult to understand for those who have never experienced it, and it is thus often dismissed by nonlimerents as ridiculous fantasy or a construct of romantic fiction.

What does a soul do in such a situation? Love stories have two limerent souls finding one another, of course, and that gives one the happy ending, the Hollywood Ending -- but an unrequited love is ultimately a tragedy, and can, alternately, be a horror story (one of my favorite horror movies, "May," has an absolutely cringe-inducing plot in it where the title character, the painfully shy and fucking weird May, falls for Adam, this coolio mechanic in her neighborhood, and May tries hard to make it work with her and Adam, only to have it go terribly wrong -- that part of the story is almost more horrific and squirm-inducing than the rest of the movie, which is actually darkly funny throughout -- good little horror movie, if you like horror movies).

Related to the "levels of love" I was nattering on about earlier is precisely that -- what do you do if you love someone more than they love you? That seems like a recipe for emotional disaster. Of course, SEINFELD parodied it comically with George Costanza obsessing about a woman who clearly didn't like him, was actually repulsed by him -- he said something like "She just hates me so much, it's irresistible." Which, of course, is just the situation George would find himself in. It's funny because it's painful, because George is such a twisted, fucked-up guy, of course, he'd dig that.

Anyway, as a Romantic, I don't like to think about unrequited love, obviously -- true love should win, true love deserves to win, so when it doesn't, or isn't shared, or whether someone's deluded and thinks they knew true love only to find it turning to ashes in their mouth, it's painful to think about. But it exists, for sure, and is definitely a part of the equation, even if it's the dark side of the coin flip. And it's surely part and parcel of the notion of the "Hopeless Romantic" -- and, so, I suppose I should dwell on it a bit. Consider this just a preview; gotta brood on it awhile. Well, it's tomorrow, now, so I guess I'll go to sleep!

Wah wahhh

Something about a published novelist writing an online article whining about how hard writing is irks the fuck out of me. Any creative endeavor is all about a huge investment of energy and time. Writers write. Simple as that. Do it, and deal with it, and count yourself very fortunate that you manage to score a book deal for your troubles. So, it took you ten years to get it done? Well, so what? At least you have something tangible to show for it. I soldier on because writing is fun for me, and rather than it being hard NOT to write (alright, I write constantly, one way or another, so maybe this doesn't quite come up for me), but I understand that there's no penalty whatsoever to not writing, except the understanding that I'm not writing. It's integral to my happiness that way. I never whine about it; I just do it.

And for somebody who managed to actually see their book published? What the fuck is there to complain about? As someone who many disparate readers tell me routinely that I'm a really good writer who is also perennially rejected by editors, were I to actually find a home for one of my books, I'd do a happy, happy dance. I'd count my lucky stars. But this gal decided to whine about how long it took for her to get her work done? You know what you do to stop that? Write more. There's a certain narcissistic romance some writers engage in with the whole "Oh, if you only knew how I suffered!" kind of bullshit -- like ink-stained fingertips or a trembling hand on a sweating, aquiline brow leaving an inky smear upon it. To create is to swoon. Oh, the humanity. Give me a break.

There's no penalty for not writing. You do it because you're compelled to do it. And there are few true satisfactions in it (at least in terms of appreciation, recognition, and reward). But do it I always will, because it's just who I am. If a book takes ten years to write, maybe that's how long it took to sort out that particular story's problem. Or maybe you don't have that much to say as a writer, and it didn't inspire you. Who knows? The only cure for writing is more writing, and that can be said with any creative endeavor, and only creatives get this. Non-creatives may think it's a waste of time, or may think they can do it, but they can't (and don't and won't -- you all know who you are, you "idea havers" and so forth who have a great idea you never actually write or create). The ones who can simply do it. Ideally, you make something worthwhile, something you enjoy, and better still, something beautiful that others can appreciate, too, and still better, something others will buy from you, for fuck's sake, so you can carve out the time to do more and more of what you love. But it's really the process that drives it. That's the furnace within that stokes the creative spirit.

Maybe this writer in that article is really privately worrying that, having sold one book, one that took her a decade to write, that she's got nothing more to say. Who knows? She is right that reaching an ending is vital. Get it done, or else it's just an open wound. And please, please don't whine about it.

Ballbuster

Looks like Blockbuster Video is finally dying. This is a reasonably good piece about the demise of that chain. I'm amused that the ONION had pegged that trend years ago. I can't even remember the last time I actually went into a video store. I think when living in Indiana, The Land That Time (and Hope) Forgot. Otherwise, not since the late 90s. Just funny how retro that is. I remember the trips to the video store, scoping around for something interesting and/or amusing to watch.

I've been busy managing my post-vacation workload today, hence being somewhat quiet, although I've been trying to think of a decent name for a fiction blog, as well as thinking about life and story ideas and daydreaming in general. I really, really need to get busy and find a fresh job. Gotta get that done. It's going to be weird to remarket and repackage myself as a 40-year-old in need of a new job. Thankfully, I still have my boyish demeanor, right? Hah!

Grumble

I'm jonesing for some fucking World Cup, and have to wait until Friday for my fix. Sigh. Next to the Olympics for me is the World Cup -- I love the international events, makes me glad to see the rest of the world. The US is so insular and parochial -- it's nice to see us out in the big, bad world.

So, Exene's still sick. She responded somewhat to the meds they gave her, but the symptoms haven't vanished -- still swollen glands at the neck, night sweats, sore joints, fever, loss of appetite. She's 121 lbs. right now. She's got some follow-up appointments with doctors. She's peeved. We'll see how it develops. All of the infectious disease tests they did (and they did a lot) came up negative. Not sure what to make of it all, exactly.

There's the Exene people think they know, and there's the Exene I know/knew, and there's whatever she actually is, somebody nobody but her actually knows. I know her better than anybody (including her family), but even I only know a sliver of whatever is actually going on behind the mask she wears. That Exene (or those Exenes) will be colliding in the face of something serious, healthwise.

I've been productive on some prose fiction -- a book I'm working on. I shelved the screenplay; it was nagging at me, and I don't want to pay to enter it into a competition only to lose and be out that money at a time when money's at a premium for me. I'm comfier in short story writing and novel-writing, so I'm staying in that primarily at the moment, even though the opportunities for me to be noticed seem as remote as ever. We'll see.

Sigh

Spain smoked Honduras today (2 - 0; and Portugal flayed North Korea, 7 - 0). Spain's soccer play was really lovely to watch -- just good stuff. They should have won 10 - 0, just from the number of attempts that should have yieled goals, but beyond that, they played beautiful soccer, the loveliest I've seen so far in the World Cup. The Swiss played a strong (but futile) match against Chile, losing to them (barely) but still showing serious strength.

I'm bummed out today. Got the "How in the hell am I ever gonna make it as a writer" blues in a big way. I won't give up, I never give up (on writing, anyway), but it's frustrating just how hard it is to get noticed, how arbitrary and connection-driven it is. I really should have played the game in my youth -- I would send stories out when I was 18 and 19, but I should have entered the Iowa Writer's Workshop, get the connections one apparently totally needs to get seen. The editorial firewall is still so hard to get past. All I focused on was writing well (or at least as well as I could), when I guess I should've properly positioned myself and played the game more on the front end. Now I'm a 40-year-old writer, not even a "young writer" anymore. WTF? Bleah. Sucks. At least my boys'll have all of the writing I've done, so when I'm gone, maybe they can make hay out of it. And maybe THEN people will enjoy the work. Hah. By the time I eventually die, I'll have written so much stuff, at the rate that I go. It'll be a library's worth of unread fiction.

I'm keenly feeling just how shitty this economy is. Unless you work in some kind of boutique industry that serves the wealthy, you're really fucked in the Great Recession. God, do I ever need to find a good job to escape the Asylum before the walls come down. The main reason I sweat it is because I want the boys to be better off than their dad was, and I worry that in the far-more socially rigid America that is the unspoken reality we face, I've done them a disservice by not being a captain of industry...

Social Immobility in America

Sigh. I see my writing so much as me creating cultural capital -- creating something from nothing, something of value. But until I can make it work for me, it's nothing. Just a big pile of nothing. I want to help my boys any way I can, help them deal with the bullshit of "the game" that our society foists on us all -- certainly, I'm more attentive and supportive to them than I ever got. I am looking at what they enjoy, and what they're good at, and I try to encourage them to test their limits and explore. I don't want my sweet boys to be casualties in the "new economy" (that is, the medievalization of the American economy -- which is really the US becoming a de facto banana republic).

Whew (2)

Yesterday's diatribe was my 400th post on this particular blog. Just carrying a lot of emotional pain, alas. I roll with most everything in life, but there are a few things that are just too painful to roll with, and he's one of those things. I swear, the past couple of years have been packed with emotional pain! Good timing! It can only get better, I think. Move forward, onward, upward. That kinda thing. Try to stay productive, get writing done, get Exene the hell out of my mix (the dire economy of 2008-09, the Great Recession, really, really made those years dreadful), and find the fun and the happy. Get my own little place, move forward. I have discovered that I can handle a lot of emotional pain and remain functional; something I didn't realize I had that in me.

I've been watching Season 1 of "The Wire" -- good show. I don't generally like cop shows, but it's entertaining. HBO typically has it sewn up, those dramas. The absence of ad breaks and the ability to follow stories from episode to episode (versus having it wrap up in an hour), it makes a big difference. Good stuff.

Awake. For now.

I'm wide awake right now, in the mournful moments of the night, right before bedtime. Some days, I feel like fragging Facebook (FB) and just being done with it. While I like seeing people I know doing their things, at other moments, it drives me bananas. The virtuality of it all is troubling and irritating -- people trying to outdo one another with pert status updates, or being all cryptic, that kind of thing. And people being BORING.

My God, yes. So fucking boring. I've fragged something like 17 people from my FB "friends" roster for various Crimes Against Dave. Hah! Some were never around, some were annoying, a few were hurtful, a few were irrelevant, a few made big mistakes with me. Auf. Auf. Auf. Auf. Those were the motivated Aufings. But now, I sometimes feel like just randomly Aufing people, just to mix things up a little. Not that I will, because I don't want to do that to anybody just out of caprice, don't want to be rude -- I'm far likelier to just vanish from the FB and be gone for awhile. Just because it's boring the hell out of me. I'd rather concentrate on where I'm at here and now than maintain a virtual presence. Not to be all curmudgeonly, but seriously. Yawnsville. I think I'm entertaining myself more on this blog these days, anyway.

I think a lot about "Impression Management" when I think about the FB, and how some people work very hard to portray themselves in a certain way. I just post stuff that interests me, that I think others might enjoy. Sometimes I get slagged for it, sometimes people like those things. For me, the FB is a communicative medium more than anything else -- but part of that means there needs to be a good signal-to-noise ratio, and I feel like there's precious little signal out there, just flatlines.

*BWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE*

Like a bunch of people crammed in a room without having very much to say. Don't be boring. Please, please don't be boring. You don't want to do that, because I'll just disappear. And your world will be about 28% less fun than it was when I was in it. As I often say, I BRING the fun. I enjoy life, living, being, seeing, feeling -- all that stuff. I can find the fun almost anywhere. But if I'm the only one banging his cymbals together, well, that's less fun.

I miss my friends. Even friends of old, we maintain an ersatz association through the FB, but we're not really there. So, it's more like a bunch of ghosts crammed in a room, still without having very much to say. We hardly talk, anymore. There's just enough information trickling in that there's the feeling of being informed, without necessarily the need for active engagement.

Boring.

*BWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE*

I want fun, fucking frolic, and fire, Friend!

Suckage

I'm really bummed out right now. Sigh. Just a lot on my plate (and I'm juggling the plate upon which it's all on, to boot). It's weird, because I'm less stressed day-to-day than I was even a couple of years ago, but I've got far more to wrestle with now than I did, too. I think it's because I know where I want to be, and what I want to do, but it's just incredibly difficult to get there, and so I get daunted and broody sometimes. It's like walking up to the ocean and looking at that matchless mass of wavy blue and thinking "No problem; I'm gonna swim right across it." And I've swum out far enough that there's no shore in sight, and I can feel a charlie horse in my calves and I'm thinking "Oh, shit. Now what am I gonna do?" The ocean doesn't care if you drown in it or not.

Against the depth and breadth of that incredible apathy, it's hard to reckon with the smallness of your will, the paucity of your dreams. And then I think of my little boys in that stormy water, looking at me from their little raft that is our shared world, thinking that I'm Superman, knowing that there's nothing their Daddy can't do, and I don't want to let them down. My little guys. I want to make the best world I possibly can for them. I won't fail them. I may fail myself, but I won't fail them. My little guys. They're my whole life; they're my everything.

I'm tearing up as I type this, just thinking of them. I told B1 and B2 this morning that I was going to make it all right -- that I needed time to sort it all out, but that I would make it better.

Sigh. Deep breath, kick-splash, kick-splash, kick-splash.

Cynical, Cyclical

Sometimes B1 will ask me about something, and I'm torn between giving him the officially accepted(tm) notion of something, and my own cynical take on it. On one hand, I think he shouldn't be burdened with cynicism as a child; but, on the other hand, the alternative is, what, being naive and taking it on the chin?

My life experience to date has made me pretty cynical, I guess. Which is weird, because I still believe in love, in romantic notions -- it's just that I see so little of it around me day-to-day that I think I perhaps adopted cynicism as a kind of armor against the world. It's ironic to me how cynicism attained a negative connotation, and when it did. It walked hand in hand with the advent of industrialism and modernity. Before then, the classic (and accurate) concept of the Cynics was retained. What changed in the world in the 19th century to lead to a negative view of the Cynics?

It's almost like how "conspiracy theorist" evolved as a catch-all term to invalidate a contrary position on something. Like someone can dismiss you by saying "Oh, you're just so cynical" -- without actually addressing what you're talking or thinking about.

Saying something like "It's not what you know, it's who you know" gets you branded as a cynic, even though, in practice, more often than not, it's fucking true.

Anyway, B1 is so sweet, he has this conception of how the world works, and when things don't go his way, he's very reflective about it in a sweet and innocent way -- he reads the best in people (something, sadly, I don't do -- I've been told often enough that I read the worst in people) -- and when people fail him, he tries to figure it out in a kind and rational way, whereas my (ooh!) cynical impulse is to blow it off as a typical result of how people behave toward one another.

For now, I just let him form his own conclusions about things without seasoning them with my cynicism -- for now, B1 can detect my sarcasm rather well and will say "You're just being sarcastic, Daddy." He doesn't yet know that I'm damned cynical, too -- and that I don't think that's a bad thing, either.

There is the way the world works, and the way the world should work, and those ways seldom cross -- and worse, people often fail to acknowledge or admit that this is how the world is actually working. I see that and feel a good deal of pathos.

It's not an easy path to be an open-hearted cynic, let me tell you! My heart isn't hardened by the world, although it should be, given various things I've encountered in my day. I stay young at heart, even while my cynical instincts are always saying "See? I toldja so, Stooopid."