With my feet planted on the stage I belt out a tune while my fingers dance across the frets of my guitar.
The Amboy Dukes are playing and I attempt to emulate them through my fingers through the strings, through the pickups across wires, across more wires to a new kind of computer amplifier, through my earphones as I stand in my office and just jam away when I should probably be working on my papers. These things are legit, you know. They could make me or break me. I have definitely built up a lot of hype to my professors and classmates so I had better live up to those expectations (that I set for myself) otherwise I will be broken and forgotten.
Not really. I am strong. I can power through initial rejection. I am weaselly. I buckle in and sit down and go for a ride another way.
I am looking forward to being a writing tutor.
I start playing something more upbeat.
The music swells, pulls me along. It's about my life. This is the buildup to the Center of My Mind, which is kind of more where I am at write now.
I am already on the Journey to the Center of My Mind.
Haha, Ted Nugent, I lament is a great guitarist.
I can't believe I like Ted Nugent now. Man, I really have sold out. I used to get my kicks out of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Now it's Ted Nugent and fucking ZZ Top. Although, Billy Gibbons is a great guitarist. Enough said. If he's good enough for Hendrix (who's shirt I am always wearing), then it's good enough for me. Supposedly Hendrix gave him a guitarist. That could just be an internet rumor. I did, after all, get it from Wikipedia. Not exactly the beacon of hope for truth. I guess they just feel the truth is malleable because in a way it is. The truth that we teach in our schools is just some other man's truth. He has the right to tell that truth because he has conquered and is in control. The next logical step is Big Brother. If taken on a long enough time frame, one could rewrite our history as the story of 1984. Our 1984 was 1777.
I don't know what I think about it. But it is certainly going to make a great plot for my next book, which will be called Born in 1984. I came up with the idea, while, as you might imagine, working in the retail customer service industry since I was like 18 or 19. I won't go into the plot any further but it is definitely an experiment in an alternate universe. I am surrendering into Vonnegut-esque satire. My first book I am seriously going to finish by the end of the year. Once I hit Christmas Break in two weeks (and I am done with these papers) I am smashing it myself. I think I have made a determination to go it myself and publish my own stuff with Amazon and Barnes and Nobel. If I do well enough I can branch out into paperback, having them individually printing on one of those sorts of websites. I will use my shorter works to publish in other markets and use them as advertisements for my books. And I will be making 70% of the profits from my books or whatever I publish directly through Amazon. This way I can forgo the traditional publishing route all-together and be all self-righteous about my writing and keeping it the way that I want it to be. Yeah, that's right. That's why the stories have to be more straight forward and break less rules. Or more rules, as is with the case with this blog. I try to break as many rules as possible as many times as possible as long as I can in some way justify its use.
That for me is the whole point of this. To write what I want, how I want, however I want it, and not feel the need to go back and change it once I feel it is done, unless there is a major, glaring typo I can't ignore. It's no different that the type of judgment calls I was trained to make while a student journalist. Some typos just aren't worth the time to go back and change them. Others are. I just get to be the ultimate arbiter of that here.
That just doesn't apply to my short stories, at least not in the same way, definitely not in my academic work, and definitely not in the same way as my novels. I try to write as cleanly as I can in my important work. This I want to be more cutting edge, documentary style. Real life ramblings, you know? Colloquial style stuff.
Hahahaahaha! I sounded like such an academic turd there. And a stinky one at that. The day after a beer-drinking binge. Oh well, it's what people expect. I feel like I should in some way live up to those expectations. It's a lot of pressure, really. It shouldn't be. It should be easy because this is what I like to do. Write. It's my thing in life. I enjoy it so much that I care. I care how it turns out. I don't want to sound like an academic turd robot.
With an artificial smell.
Blah~
Not my taste, although maybe it should be. I just like to be the rebel, even if only in my imagination.
[note: the music has reached the song "Journey to the Center of My Mind". This is where it really starts to get exciting, this is the raunchy part of the mind fuck...]'
I want to be me. To write like me, expressing my ideas. In my way. I will just tone it down in my short stories, amplify it here, and provide a moderate amount in anything I plan to try and sell.
My best short stories I will try to get published on real websites (with a little work to the stories, first, of course -- part of which are mostly already edited, a couple of them are nearly finished, a few of which I have already published (as my portfolio). Maybe I could put that online? What does everybody think of that? It will be a teaser. I have already published it (it is in the reading room at Kent State with all of the other writing portfolios, by the way. it was entered into a contest on my behalf but I guess I didn't win. Whatever. I am not butt-hurt about it) and this would be a good opportunity for me to get them out to the publish and see what the public thinks about them. A wider academia at least. So that leaves me two or three stories I can get published (which is by far enough if I hold out for the right markets [by caring of course, about readership and capability the most]).
That section took a long time to get through. Maybe because I had to go back and change a lot.
Now the album has reached to "Baby Please don't Go". It's a much different place from "Journey to the Center of My Mind". I love the Them version of this song. Fucking Van Morrison! Yeah, that's what get's me switched on! Good music. Ted Nugent's guitar playing is sensation on this Amboy Dukes album. I think it is the best I have ever heard of him. He was definitely the white, Midwest anarchist Hendrix.
I am the white, Midwest anarchist version of Elmer Fudd. Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huhh.
This music really brings out a bizarre side of me. I truly apologize to anybody who is still reading at this juncture.
Oh, here we go again with the apologies.
Fuck off.
Listen man, this is your super ego speaking, and you have just really got to stop this nonsense.
Why do you have to be all old and bitter, Midwest anarchist version of Elmer Fudd?
Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huh-huhh.
I see... That is very profound.
But you can't say that about me. It's like John Lennon always says "I am me and you are you and we are all together..." I think that's how it goes. I am just another side of you. By you calling me profound, you are in fact calling yourself profound, which is just a little too much self-aggrandizement for any reader. Stop jerking yourself off and get on with it already.
Okay, I think I can do this. I think I can bring this to some sort of end. I am not sure I can make any promises that it will all make sense, or any of it will make any sense, at the end of all of this. In fact, I would definitely be disappointed if it did in fact make any sense.
Real lyric to the song I'm listening to:
Why are you, greener than green?
It's the same sort of thing. It's a high person's version of profound, which is, that is to say, not profound at all. I prefer it that way. I prefer to get lost in the music, play my guitar, just let my brain flush itself out through my fingers, like they are doing now on this keyboard. Guitar playing is much the same for me. I just like to jam and do my own thing. It's very liberating. I think I know enough scales and chords and stuff to make it work. I think I know what part to skip to in my book anyway, the last little piece of the puzzle, to truly make jamming and recording worthwhile. After that, it will be all by ear from there.
I hope to be able to record my guitar and bass playing (with either a real live drummer somehow or, more likely, with my drum machine, which I will, or maybe a former real live drummer that I know, will record, maybe with keyboard parts, and I will sing, or we could get somebody who can sing to sing, and we will just write the lyrics. Maybe with another singer/guitar player that we both mutually know, who we are already working with on other projects, and we all three can write the lyrics together. We could record it onto one of our computers. This, of course, in addition to other projects, while we can. And our real lives. That's why I need a guitar case. So we can get together and jam over my Winter Break, and, hopefully continuing every once and while (though not by far ever having to be regularly, just whenever we want, when we have an opportunity, whenever). I feel like I've reached a point in my life where I can afford to do something of this nature and still do well in school. After the guitar case I won't have to buy anything to make it work. I already have (albeit crappy) software and a mixer and a good mic. And my guitar and amp, and a drum machine and a keyboard. So, really, I have enough equipment for two of us. The third already has his own equipment. So it would work out easily enough.
The Amboy Dukes just ended. Now I am listening to Johnny Winter's The Progressive Blues Experiment. My favorite album of his by far.
Anyways, we could put the music on a blog and have an interactive, multimedia website experience. Everything anyone could ever want in a website.
I can make my own website a sort of prototype for my ideas (which is already is), so I can figure out the whole music thing with music I have already recorded, or can easily record after my papers (and between writing and social obligations and wifey time, which is most of my life). I have ideas for a couple of songs. We'll see how those ideas turn out once I get to actually putting them down. I don't know. If not, there is already music that I have put other there that I can use.
I always have so many ideas I want to accomplish. Being in school is a great gift that affords me the time, in addition to my schoolwork which only really encourages it. I want my classes to be interactive, multimedia experiences. 21st-century style. Propagandistic. I could wear a monocle.
It would make a great book, eh? That's two good book ideas in one day. I don't know if I told you about the other one, I got caught up on the one I am already pondering while I am finishing up the first one. I have no shortage of ideas to keep me busy for a few years. Time to build an audience anyway. My own audience, my way.
Then if I am unsuccessful I at least have school, and I can always write fan fiction erotica like I have always wanted.
I could always go the bizzaro fiction route. I will at least model my ideas after the guys who started bizzaro fiction and have built themselves up. Anybody want to go in with me on this? I am thinking something like The Publishing Collective of the 21st Century or something like that, if such a thing doesn't already exist. And if it does, I want in. Maybe I could join an already existing one. I think I could sell some of my stuff along the bizzaro route. Definitely Born in 1984 and maybe the novellas I have to complete. My book now I could definitely publish in two or three distinctive pieces. Shorter would definitely work better. I could sell the pieces more cheaply and put them out one at a time, so that way the publishing of the first would push me to finish the second. I think I would do three pieces. That would be the most effective way to break it up, I think. That means I will be done with the first piece definitely by the end of the year.
I just need to make a solid decision about what is best for me and go with that. Really. I think it is all contingent on me going to school and doing well to enable me to work on my fiction and my blogging and my online fiction presence and really do what I want to do. And still make an adequate living. In fact, doing better than I have working as a manager at a restaurant.
Anyway, this will all seem really crazy to everyone until I actually do it, so, in order to not let all of those doubters be right, I am going to get to work.
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