Category: philosophy

return to the cape

Posted on by admin

I can’t lose the sea legs. Every time I sit down, my head feels like I’m still on the waves.

I am not looking forward to sleeping.

I am also looking forward to sleeping.

Is that a metaphor for life or what?

Target: 400 words
Written: 247 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Power Of Now, Eckhart Tolle (so, so much to say about this fraud, but again, it's for a book idea)
Comics: Nailbiter 20-23
Music: Karma Police, Radiohead (I mean, these guys... not so much the later, more pretentious stuff, but everything up to OK Computer, right?)

bimini

Posted on by admin

It’s hot here. There is sun and sand and the water is a velvet blue that’s almost unreal.

Naturally, I’m thinking about death.

Well, an afterlife. I don’t believe in religion or God or any of that, though I won’t entirely rule out the possibility of a divine intelligence. I just don’t subscribe to anything specific. For me, anyone who claims to know the mind of God is full of shit; if it’s truly an omnipotent, all-powerful being, then our ability to understand it is equivalent to that of an amoeba grokking cutting edge physics.

Times a million.

Anyone who claims to know otherwise is trying to take your money or control you; that’s it, that’s all.

I know, logically, we decay and separate into atoms which then float out into the world and become part of the fabric of the universe around it (stardust!).

I would like to think our consciousness goes to another place, a new “heaven”, where I get to live out an entire life at each crossroads. Every decision that could have been, how would that have been. Every potential friend, potential lover. Every potential job. What if I took the time to become a botanist, a doctor, a sculptor, a mechanic, a ditch digger, a porn star?

What would it all be like?

Imagine getting to know, really, really know, the people that passed through your life, no matter how minutely. How that girl you saw crying on a bench from the bus window’s life went. What was she crying about? What if you had taken that chance? What if you had made that mistake? What if you did everything right?

You could live an infinite number of lifetimes; the joy isn’t in exploring what would have been different, but in really digging and discovering what was going on around you when it was the same, and how your perspective was coloured by or ignored it. It’s not about the sex you’d have with all those random hot passersby, but taking the time to really understand who they are, what they want, what their past was like, how they think, how they feel and how to connect so completely with them that growing together into something wonderful is inevitable.

It’s about opening up the entire world; in infinity forever. And once you know all you want to know, when you’re done learning, when there’s no more curiosity, then, you can step out the door.

Target: 400 words
Written: 602 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Power Of Now, Eckhart Tolle
Comics: Nailbiter 16-19
Music: The Karate Kid (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Various (don't ask)

beachin’

Posted on by admin

I love returning to the ocean. It is the birthplace of all the life that exists on this world – all of it can be traced to those first few sparks of life in the depths of our water.

I’m a water guy. As a kid, you couldn’t get me out of the pool. You couldn’t get me out of the lake. You couldn’t get me out of the ocean.

The draw is palpable when I’m near water, but especially that natural feel of a lake or ocean, the chill, the sand, the mud and muck, things flitting about you, the salt on your lips.

Bless us, mother Ocean. From your depths, we rise.

Target: 400 words
Written: 190 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Unlimited Power, Tony Robbins
Comics: Cyber Force/Hunter Killer 5
Music: Jump Back, The Rolling Stones (you know, you forget, sometimes, just how many great songs these guys have and you have to wonder... is the devil real?  Did they make that deal?  Is that how Keith Richards is still alive?)

post scene one

Posted on by admin

I was really hoping, thirty-seven days into this new year, that the first draft of the first novel (well, novella) I wrote in the canon of me would be a real banger.

Instead, it’s a steaming pile of dog feces.

I suppose we must walk before we run, crawl before we walk, and lay around screaming incoherently before that.

Weirdly, we end that way as well, most of us. We come in screaming, and go out spent, withered husks.

Hump day positivity, folks.

Target: 300 words
Written: 193 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Face It, Debbie Harry
Comics: Sex Criminals 13-16
Music: Jesus Of Suburbia, Green Day (like 3 separate singles)

old schooling it

Posted on by admin

Listen, I get it. This is a 2006 blog in a 2024 world.

People don’t want to hear about your whining, or your ideas on hope and achievement.

I’ve some interest in that stuff, but once you’ve read the basics of things intended to inspire you, and you’ve moved beyond it, because you realize it actually sets unrealistic, non-real world expectations (requiring riches and bitches, as I like to say), for most of us, it makes you feel bad.

Unworthy.

So, it becomes about finding the softer voice, the one that speaks to you without imposing its own views of success. Success isn’t a requirement of happiness. Neither is money or love or great sex with girthy members or gravity-defying breasts, or whatever you’re into.

(Both? Simultaneously? On the same person?)

These are nice to haves.

Right now, I’m writing about the crushing weight of the world, or the way trauma knocks us off our axis and fucks up our magnetic fields, so we’re forever pushed away from the thing we want most.

And it sucks. That sucks.

(Not the writing part – the crushing weight/trauma part).

It sucks that people, like us, like me, like many of you, have to go through this. And sometimes, it doesn’t get better.

I’m not sure what hope I could offer. There will be some good times, but it might not go away. It doesn’t, for a lot of people. Some eighty-year olds still bitch about how their parents messed them up.

A lifetime has passed to get over it. Why are these things still dictating behaviour?

But they do. They still do.

They fuck you up, your mom and dad.

Not my mom and dad – I fucked myself up. I’ll take credit for that.

Target: 300 words
Written: 1143 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Yours, Cruelly, Elvira (way better than you'd expect, given, but then, I've always been fond of Elvira - even as a child, she gave me tingles in parts that maybe shouldn't tingle at that age, but then, I was always girl crazy - see above note about gravity and defiance - her humour was equally sexy though - like a dad joke with boobs.  Anyway, it turns out, she's pretty cool, and she's lived a hell of a life.)
Comics: Fight Club 2 8-10, Fight Club 3 1
Music: You've Come A Long Way, Baby, Fatboy Slim, A Jackknife To A Swan, Mighty Mighty Bosstones

so begins canon

Posted on by admin

I’ve been poking at it for a while. Haikus and flash fiction are all good, and comic book scripts and thinly veiled political rants are something else, but proof of life, proof of concept, of talent, skill, hard work, dedication, adaptability, open-mindedness, and good old fashioned sex appeal lay in the pudding.

(Or Jello wrestling mud pit, if we’re talking that last thing).

The point is, there’s no me, as I want me to be, without books. Reading is only halfway to completion. It’s the act of creation (which is really just exploration and discovery, connection and understanding), that’s the thing that fills the cup.

(Or Jello mud wrestling pit).

The bottom line is, me as I am now? I’m not happy with that person. That person sucks. That person writes split-sentence haikus and pretentious shit about hats.

(I love them both dearly).

This person that I want to be? He gets dark. He gets into it. He understands subtext and trauma and helplessness in the face of adversity.

He knows how to crush you – your soul anyway.

(He’d likely lose in the Jello pit).

I want to make you uncomfortable; to remember that happy endings are not the only endings, and neither are grand tragedies.

Sometimes, it’s the little tragedies that wreck us whole.

Target: 300 words
Written: 794 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Getting Things Done, David Allen
Comics: Southern Bastards 9-12
Music: You Only Live Once, The Strokes (The Strokes with Eddie Vedder doing Marvin Gaye?  Fuck me sideways, does it get better than that?)

improvement?

Posted on by admin

I may have improved that dreadful third draft of Get Back Again. I hope I did. It still looks like it needs a lot of work, but hey, gotta manuscript sometime, right?

Fuck it.

I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea what I’m doing, most of the time. I’m lost, alone and largely confused.

Unskilled.

I never learned to buckle down.

I never learned to commit.

I never learned follow through.

It’s enough to make a man want to weep, but fuck it. I’m not the weeping type, except when it comes to memories of the people and animals I’ve loved that are no longer with us. I weep for the fact that they won’t ever be anything other than a memory ever again (a truism for all), and for the fact that the memory of me might not be worth the recall.

I want to make a mark, a slash across the sky, a rift in space-time that cannot be ignored, that lights up the night sky with things of wonder and beauty that no one can deny.

But instead, I’m writing about angry ghosts who can’t accept that their outmoded style of governance is on the outs.

And it’s far past time for something better.

Target: 300 words
Written: 2135 words, short story: Get Back Again

Read: Getting Things Done, David Allen
Comics: Southern Bastards 1-4 (I wish I would create atmosphere like these guys - damn well done.  You can practically smell the barbecue.)
Music: You Don't Come Close, Ramones

just bad

Posted on by admin

I’m a bad writer. I’m re-reading the third draft of this story and it sucks. I somehow took a bad first draft, made it into a workable second draft and then fucked it all up and went too far, shitting the bed entirely in my third.

Even this story wants me to get back to where I was; and then find a way out again.

Getting lost in the light is better than never being found (so say the Hip).

After all, it’s the foundation, even if this story doesn’t necessarily reflect that. It’s better to do the thing you love and not have the world’s acknowledgement than not to do it at all.

Not quite the same thing, but close enough.

Thanks, Hip.

Target: 200 words
Written: 1168 words, short story: Get Back Again

Read: The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher
Comics: Fanboys Vs. Zombies 13-16
Music: Yield - Pearl Jam, Yo! Bum Rush The Show - Public Enemy, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots - The Flaming Lips, You Broke Me First (Single) - Tate McRae (it's been a musical kind of day)

regress

Posted on by admin

There’s always the chance of regression. One gets too lost in one’s regrets or some wrong that’s been done to us (more often than not either petty or legitimately wrong, but no longer truly a factor in our lives, save us making it one), and boom, suddenly, you’re that insecure, angry, neurotic, obnoxious loser all over again.

We work so hard to move on, only to be anchored in cement by the shame of our past.

No matter how we try to move forward as a society or individuals, there’s always someone who wants us back where we started, in to the familiar, the old, the no-longer-the-best-way, because they fear change or the thought of improvement.

Then, there’s the others of us, so desperate to get away from the old, to rocket ourselves into the future, that we forget sometimes – things may work the old way; I doubt a single person in this world feels more present or happier with our hectic, crazy making technology – there’s something to be said for being disconnected, lost to time on the edge of a lake with a bonfire and some friends. Present, instead of captured on a screen.

Wherever we are, we want to be somewhere else.

Target: 200 words
Written: 323 words, short story: Get Back Again

Read: Start With Why, Simon Sinek
Comics: The Legacy Of Luther Strode 5-6 (what a series.  "Do better."  I feel that in my gut.)
Music: Year Zero, Nine Inch Nails (the real deal now), Years May Come, Years May Go, Irish Rovers

romance #1

Posted on by admin

Everyone has a first. This is my first. Goofy, absurdist comedy with little point or depth, only there is a point, there is depth, only no point, but interpretation of a point and Jesus, I’ve been listening to too much Night Vale.

All hail.

Target: 200 words
Written: 792 words, comic: Romance #1

Read: 5 Steps To Controlling High Blood Pressure, Mayo Clinic (not be confused with the Mustard Wellness Centre)
Comics: Mind The Gap 17 (damn it, McCann, give us the rest of the story!  I'm hooked.  I have questions!  Questions that demand answers, damn it!  Once more with feeling!)
Music: Question The Answers, Mighty Mighty Bosstones (that's fucking soulmusic right there - spaceless intended)