But we watched the new Superman, and that was good, so there’s that.
Golf clap for me.
Target: 1500 words
Written: 328 words, novel: Father Lightning
Read: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Tom Wolfe
Comics: Gen 13 v3 10-13
Music: Fearless (Taylor's Version), Taylor Swift (no comment)My god, it’s a day off. No plans. A movie, at home.
Reading a book. Good heavens, whatever happened to insanity?
Oh right, it’s upstairs.
Target: 1500 words
Written: 2407 words, novel: Father Lightning
Read: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Tom Wolfe
Comics: Gen 13 v3 6-9
Music: Fear Of Music, Talking HeadsIs Jonathan Franzen going to someday read this, and call every publisher out there to blackball me?
I’m sorry, Mr. Franzen.
I take it back. It was wonderful and not at all poorly structured and written with underdeveloped characters, meaningless storylines and a deeply unsatisfying ending that inspired apathy instead of thought or emotion.
Of course, this is what apathy looks like. He might even call it a win for provoking a reaction, but I’ll tell you – this is the same reaction I had after my old roommate dragged me to both Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the first Fast & Furious movie.
I was livid with him.
We have such short lives – why waste it on bad art?
Target: 1500 words
Written: 1549 words, novel: Father Lightning
Read: The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Comics: Gen 13 v2 48-51
Music: Family Man, Black FlagLike, I don’t know you, Jonathan Franzen, so you could be a really nice guy. You could also be a complete dick.
I don’t mean to shit on your work. Maybe I missed something. Maybe it somehow flew over my head.
The thing is, I have a really good bullshit detector. When someone’s full of it, I pick up on it pretty damn fast. I called Donald’s rise to fascism the day he rode down that fucking escalator.
So when I see pretentious bullshit being lauded as genius, I get a little pissed.
It’s not that you can’t be a little pretentious. Look at Chuck Palahniuk or Radiohead. The difference there is that they’ve infused depth and meaning and real heart and guts into their work. It’s not just an intellectual exercise to give the appearance of infinite genius, like modern art or Moulin Rouge.
There’s a reason I’ll take the Vandals over Rush any day. And I’m Canadian.
(Rush is bullshit – there’s like two good songs, the rest is show-offy prog rock borefests. Sorry, other Canadians. You’ve got shit taste. Fuckin’ Nickelback, for Pete’s sake).
Anyway, maybe I missed the heart and guts and fun and investment and meaning of this book. Maybe you had a real vision you were passionate about.
Unfortunately, it still comes across like a rough idea that you tried to flesh out in the middle of writing it, but couldn’t keep track and then realized a lot of shit didn’t matter, characters didn’t behave how you needed them to behave and rather than going back and editing to make it all work, you just got bored of it and said fuck it. You even put your lack of care and abandonment of the idea in the book.
You were the voting public, who barely turned up and didn’t give a shit.
So why should we?
Did I just crack the riddle of what people saw in it?
Five hundred pages of poorly written setup, just to give up?
This reminds me of the time I watched No Country For Old Men and it was all build up, and then just ended, abruptly, pointlessly, in a monstrous letdown.
And the Coen brothers I like.
Target: 1500 words
Written: 436 words, novel: Father Lightning
Read: The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Comics: Gen 13 v2 45-47, Gen 13: A Christmas Caper 1
Music: The Fallout, DefaultWhere I’ve been awake for roughly thirty-six hours, rented a van too big for the small European streets, and immediately scraped the back right passenger side on the ramp out of the airport parking lot, to which I thought, “thank goodness for insurance”, before being thrust into a five lane roundabout (with stoplights! In the middle!) outside the airport, and we could get out of Lisbon fast enough.
We are Algarve bound, and thankful for it. The scenery is lush and green, with the terrible rainfall they’ve gotten, and distracts us from the fact that everything north of Porto is without power, for the better part of a week.
It soon turns to Sergio Leone territory, before becoming the land of roundabouts, and the taste of a shitty Portuguese beer down by the water and its washed out beach.
There are statues made of washers which are surprising lifelife (and kinda sexy, which is probably a weird thing to admit), but still, pretty darn cool.
And cats. Lots of cats.
So, you know, good.
Target: 1500 words
Written: 3524 words, short story: Never Worked That Hard
Read: The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
Comics: Fables: The Wolf Among Us 40-43
Music: 39/Smooth, Green DayWeirdly, I ate super light yesterday, but did have a customary glass of red wine, as one does, on Sundays.
We drink red wine on Sundays, or so my father-in-law tells me.
He’s also a man who feeds his other daughter ice cream and Coke for dinner on a regular basis, so he’s not exactly the sommelier we look for.
But still, for some reason we do it (and I do love a good red), but it seems to have triggered a relapse from the night before’s horrid gastrointestinal adventures, and now, I sit, having lost another couple of hours of wondrous sleep.
Plus some weird fuckin’ dreams.
Weird fuckin’ dreams, man.
I liked the ones I had before the acid set in; The Last Showgirl apparently wormed its way into my subconscious in the forms of Song and Ship.
Sorry, honey. It was involuntary. I can’t be held responsible for what my unconscious mind dredges up.
Target: 1400 words
Written: 3315 words, comic: The Stuff 4
Read: Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn (we're livin' the full catastrophe, all right)
Comics: Fables 135-137, Fairest 21
Music: 20 Years Of Hell, Vol IV, Anti-Flag/One If By LandI mean, probably. Well, definitely. The question is really when and how.
Is it when Trump starts the end of the world? Is it a pandemic exploding through us because morons think vaccinations are somehow worse than the disease they’re designed to protect against?
Is it climate change?
When I write, I’ve often dreamed of it as being read still hundreds of years hence (I imagine that’s true of many artists). At this point though, hurtling toward climate collapse at least, I’d be happy if we still had books at all in twenty years. Or if anyone was around to read them.
Maybe someday, aliens will settle our barren, self-destroyed plant, and find those written and using supercomputers we haven’t dreamed of, translate them and think, Jesus, what a bunch of fucking assholes.
And then they blew it all up.
Damn, dirty apes.
(A story, as told by a fatalist, using cultural references aliens probably won’t get, because I don’t think we ever beamed Charlton Heston to space. We are the monkeys, man! The monkeys are us!)
Target: 1400 words
Written: 1071 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: Tesla: Man Out Of Time, Margaret Cheney
Comics: Fables 40-43
Music: 06.27.01 Peel Session, The StrokesI’m still writing about feces and doormats.
Steinbeck wrote about the Great Depression. Fitzgerald about the vapidity of the rich.
Shakespeare wrote of love and loss and tragedy, of empire and family.
And I’m writing about feces on a doormat.
Perhaps I’m not really cut out for this whole literary genius thing. I’m the Meatballs of the Great Canadian Novel. This generation’s A Clockwork Orange is actually a rendition of Porky’s, by way of American Pie.
Porky’s did bring us Kim Cattrall, however, and that’s a fucking gift.
Screw Sarah Jessica Parker. I never liked her anyway.
Target: 1400 words
Written: 2321 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: The Never-Ending Present, Michael Barclay (and now I'm crying, damn it)
Comics: Fables 1-4 (finally, something good)
Music: Workbook, Bob MouldSee, these are reboots that I can get behind, because the movie was whatever. The series though…
The problem is, we don’t need to need to reboot everything. Where’s our new ideas?
Where’s the innovation?
No wonder fascism is on the march.
Everything old is new again, and we’ve apparently run out of ideas.
Target: 1400 words
Written: 1392 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: The Never-Ending Present, Michael Barclay
Comics: Bloodstrike Brutalists 23-24, 0, Bloodstrike Battle Blood 1
Music: Wolves In Wolves' Clothing, NOFXYou think Donald sees that baby and thinks, man, I wish I could have that kid’s life.
Or do you think he’s just so worried about if Daddy loves him that he’s just jealous Satan actually thinks his son is cool?
Target: 1400 words
Written: 906 words, novel: Bad Neighbours
Read: The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Comics: Youngblood v3 1-2, Youngblood GT Interactive Special 1, Awesome Adventures 1
Music: Will Of The People Muse