Nuclear Annihilation and Bunnies and Kittens and Rainbows

I have decided that I am for the most part going to keep doing this type of writing in this blog.  It is the best way for me to get practice writing without putting much thought into it outside of the moment of inspiration. I tend to use it as a study break, between syntax and literacy and general linguistics, which I am starting to enjoy.  I am definitely going to study everything from a more linguistic-based, composition perspective.    I am going to try to go to conferences and get a TA position.  I am/think I technically have joined since I already meet the requirements
A). to be a grad student in the English Department
     and
B). came to a meeting and will continue to go to meetings and participate.

Those are the types of organizations I can commit to.  And yes, I just ended a sentence with a preposition.  Deal with it, grammar boy!  Fuzzuuuuh!  That was an anti-huzzah.  It was a fuck you huzzah.  A fuzzah!  Fuzzah yuzzah!   WAAAAAAAK!

Okay, that was ridiculous.  That is usually a good signal to me that I need to stop.  I try to come back around to the Dr. Jekyll side of my personality.  The calm and collective narrative part.  The part before the psychedelic freak out part, you know.  It is as important or more important.  The most important?   It is the lens in which I few all other parts of myself and the rest of the mortal universe.  Am I inhabited by an immortal spirit?  A lot of people would indicate yes, but my humanly scope of reasoning isn't capable of understanding it.  That is probably true; although, my heart wants to completely discount it.  That, again, is pride.  I think I said that in the last one, but I am continuing it as a theme from here out.

Right now I am not studying.  I will probably read a chapter on syntax and maybe then another chapter on syntax for another class.  That's right, I am in two linguistics classes that are only marginally different but the credits count for different parts of my schooling: I am going for my masters in English-Composition with a Teaching  English as a Second Language certificate and and literature certficate so I can maybe be an instructor and gains some experience teaching before I graduate and start pursuing a PhD -- hopefully as a teaching assistant, which I am politicking for right now.  Already have one instructor who will write a recommendation.  I am vying for two others.  I just have to impress them somehow -- I am hoping through my writing, which is key.  I am becoming quite the kick-ass essayist too.  I am just not as public about that half of my life.  I more mumble semi-coherentlhy about my fiction most of the time, but the essaying part is what's really getting me through grad school and hopefully getting me into a doctoral program at either Case-Western, Kent, or, if I can convince myself to move -- Purdue, Pittsburgh, or maybe, Ohio State.  I will probably apply at all of them just for shits and giggles.  First I have to get a TA position and go to conferences, present at conferences, start teaching.

I am really exciting about teaching freshman composition classes, so hopefully I get to do that or at least work in a writing center.  It would be good for me as well.  I am a fairly capable stylistician, or will be one by the end of it.  I am just now discovering, or consciously realizing this, and am developing it, based upon my writing history, starting as a journalist, and then an essayist (if an undergraduate one), then writing songs, and poems, short stories, a novel -- and back to essays again, with even more of a focus.  I love studying propaganda.  I will study the linguistics, the stylistics of it. It will be fun.

Ughhh...  Time to get down off the stage and stop shouting about myself now.  Sorry.  That was very self-laudatory.  It's a bad habit, like smoking or obsessing about a zombie apocalypse.  I would rather just be ready for any sort of apocalypse in general.  I would say a zombie apocalypse has a 5% chance, which is a better chance that being prodded to death by interstellar alien rapists, which has a 3.29% chance of happening.  Whatever.  My money is still on nuclear annihilation.

That's why I am doing what I want to do.  It is too late to be bored.

God I love the Internet.  I grew up without it, for the most part -- outside of a few friends who had it and I was able to get secondary exposure to it -- until after high school.  As a millennial, it put me at a slight disadvantage.  At the time it seemed like torture because I am by my very nature a lazy homebody sort of person, but now I am glad for it that I got to enjoy real life outside of the pop culture mind meld.

I don't think I am going out on a limb to say that electronic media of all sorts has turned us all into zombies.  In another generation we will be those people in the Matrix.  Not the ones who break loose, though, we're the one's still connected, completely oblivious to the tumult going on around us.  We get little slices of it in the news and whatnot, but it is hard to say what is really going on above the blankets.  We live in a Plutocracy and we are the proletariat.  You see, no matter what vision of the future, everything just short of actual, honest-to-God communism -- which seems by and large to go against human evolution because really we are still just pack animals -- there will be a proletariat.  Sheep.  Pacified and enlightened.  We need an alpha to tell us what to do.  We need to be fucking cyborgs plugged into (what I am doing right now, fucking hooked to a computer, with my Saturday morning PBS house-remodeling block) in order to be completely happy.  We have been pacified.

I am for one am totally okay with it.  Pacify me.  Let me lead a totally meaningless existence.  I don't want to find meaning in a totally ridiculous primordial contest that has little or nothing to do with my actual needs or wants.  I am happy in my life, working a meaningless job, go to school to study something I find interesting so I can make money talking to other people with a similar interest, and anyone who finds it interesting enough to take a class or two on it just to feel a little cultured, more than just by reading a book every one and again.  I like the academy.  Intellectualism.  Okay, maybe even Intellectualism has it's primordial roots.  Why else is chess such a kick-ass game.  And risk.  I have fun playing them even if I totally kind of such.  That's why I play my computer.  It is a good pre-brainstorming sort of exercise.  If I don't know what to write about I just play chess, and it comes right out, just like a jizz faucet.  It is like thought protein.

I like writing.  Even if no one or only a few people are reading.  It is norishing enough to me to have any kind of audience, even if not everyone all the time reads everything.  As long as some people read something sometime it is totally full of meaning to me.  I appreciate any kind of audience.  It is a dream.  So this is for you.

And me too.  I won't deny it.  It is self-gratifying, in a public masturbatory sort of way.  Oops, I said it.   Oh well, I can't take it back now, even if I can delete it so easily.

God I love computers.  It leads me back to that.   It really does.  I guess my mind just works in weird, convoluted circles like that.  If I admit my flaws that somehow simultaneously invalidating them by validating them.  Ponder that!

Okay, that might not be true.  I at least make an honest attempt at honesty everyone once and a while.  (That was a poetic way of structuring that sentence, if I do say so myself -- hot damn!).

Yeah, it is sometimes self-congratulatory.  That's just my pride.  Whatever.  Everyone's got it, after all, there is no use in denying that.

It might be frivolous.  Inane at times.  I always try to come to a point, or several somewhat-interweaving ones, at least.

I hope that, someday, by being completely honest, or at least a writer's way of portraying honesty, even when I am completely full of shit and it is obvious -- I don't care.  I like being full of shit.  It keeps me warm at night.  It has everything to do with my fiction, because who can tell a story better than a bullshitter?

At least that is my philosophy, anyways.

Mud, meat Dirt, Dirty? Meat mud?

My name is Mud.  And I have written a book.  Now I am in the process of trying to force myself to edit it, and the eight short stories I have to finish.  Just sitting there.  On my desktop.   Beckoning to me.

I SHOULD finish them.  I CAN finish them.  I just don't.  Upwards of five of those stories just need edited or proofread.  The other three I could easily finish.  Jesus, I have poems too.  And two more book ideas, and at least two or three novellas, not to mention a thesis, class papers, and in the somewhat more distant future a dissertation?  Fuck me!  I have shit to write!   It ain't gonna write isself, yo...!

Damn straight it ain't.   Hellz yeauuhhhh!!!  Dickweed!  What's up?  I am like tote's writing right now even!  That's ridiculous.  I should just finish it all so I can move on to the next thing.  That would be logical.  Yes it would.

Sorry, I will stop talking to myself now.

Artsy Fartsy Mumbo Jumbo part Infinity

The Animals.  What a fucking band.  Eric Burden...  His voice permeates my imagination as I sit here tap, tap, tapping away at my keyboard, "Bring It on Home to Me" blaring over my computer speakers.  My diploma, ten years in the earning, of the completion of my bachelor's degree floats on the seafoam green wall above wear my desk seems to float, defying gravity or the depth of my walls out to the vast ocean are not immediately apparent.  Just the write amount of tiredness blurs my vision, and for an instant I am floating on the sea, listening to the Animals, now it's "We Gotta Get Out of This Place", which was my theme song when I was holed up in Ashland, a college dropout, looking towards a future that I could not have possibly imagined.  But that is all behind me.  Back in the mist behind me, just blurred at the edges of my vision, that if I look it will destroy the illusion of my floating, floating, away, towards some distant shore, driven by the power of the books stacked up on either side of me, fueled by my imagination, which has more energy that 1 million suns.  Maybe I am in denial, maybe I am blindly ambitious, maybe I am delusional, whatever...  It doesn't matter.  If I don't try, then it can be guaranteed that nothing will happen, but, I am pursuing my masters, and, eventually, God-willing, my PhD.  I read, I absorb, I consider, I write, I edit, write some more, edit some more, ad infinitum...  Until I have arrived on the distant shores of my own personalized Atlantis.  Here I am, but there I will be.  Someday.  Not now.  But eventually.  Slowly but surely I make my way, across these vast waters, guided by these and many, many more words, infinite combinations making sentences of infinite possibilities, guaranteeing, out of that infinitude, I can create anything.  I create my future.  Relentlessly.

Finishing the Book

What no writing class can tell you, what no writer can really tell you, is how to truly finish a book.  It's different from writer to writer, book to book.  There is no one single way.  It comes to be finished when it decides that it is finished, and no amount of short-cutting will change that -- unless the writer is will to settle for less, and, invariable, most writers who fail, fail because they settle for less.

Maybe that's what separates a writer from a professional writer, or, generally, anyone who has a hobby or a dream from somebody who actually does it for a living.  If you want to succeed, you can't settle for less.  You have to keep working at it, improving it, be honest with yourself about it -- because, if you aren't, then it you won't be able to accept outside criticism, either -- and eventually (I assume, I hope) you will finish it.

Or you will give up.  And I am not willing to do that.  Maybe I have a job, maybe I go to school and work towards other goals in my life so I don't starve to death or live in a cardboard box, but I will, whenever I get the chance, I work on it.  And I will continue to keep working on it until it tells me that it is done.  Anyone who has ever written a book, or even a short story, and been successful at completing it, knows what I am talking about.

When I talk about "being successful" and "being a professional writer" I am not talking about being someone of that stature of Stephen King or Chuck Palahniuk, I am talking about someone who makes a living as a writer (i.e. can pay the bills and have a little bit left over), and probably teaches at a university (or I would even settle for a community college).

My goal is to find a small or a mid-sized publisher, if I am lucky and can actually find an agent who will work with me, and market to a small, but loyal, audience.  Maybe not the rock star of the company, but certainly someone who can be counted on to sell books.

I do have a marketing strategy and what-not, and, if I am not able to find someone willing to take me on in this capacity, then I will -- albeit somewhat reluctantly, because it's not ideal - go the self-publishing route, and, because I am cheap, I will probably only publish my work as an e-book.  Then I will have to market it myself, and -- seeing as how I have so many engaged readers already -- will probably sell like 5 books.

However, I will keep trying.  If it doesn't happen with the first book, then maybe the second, or the third, or the fiftieth.  I have no shortage of ideas.  As long as my brains still functions and I have means of getting the ideas out, I will continue to pursue it.

That's a promise, for a better or worse, that I will keep until I can no longer keep it.  I can't say it will last forever, because nothing in this world lasts forever, but it will last until it no longer can last, and then it will be forgotten, and I will be forgotten, because eventually everybody is forgotten, and since we will probably all kill each other somehow in the next 10-15 years or so, when the human race will realize that it is nothing more than a figment from the imagination of a zit on the ass of a trans-dimensional turtle (I wish I could say that I made that up, but that, minus the trans-dimensional part -- that was my addition -- was actually how my political thought professor, way back when, described the philosophy of Niezche).

Or not.  And we will all die of old age or cancer or whatever other disease from the nearly infinite multitude of diseases available out there, chomping at the bit to eradicate the human race one person at a time.  Either way, we all die somehow, and I don't know how that will be, and neither doesn't anyone else, although some people can guess more easily than others, but I am not a betting man so I am not going to even think about it.  Hopefully it is more entertaining than sad, though, if I had to choose, but anyway, it doesn't matter.  The awareness or lack of awareness doesn't make it any more or less true.  It is, and will always be...

I am not sure how I have gotten on this tangent.  I am sorry for getting all depressing there for a second.  I suppose when I am only loosely considering what I am writing two seconds before I write it, my subconscious can direct me towards one topic or another at random -- well, not at random, because it's not random, we just don't truly understand how it works.  Anyway, it might have to do with the fact that I am also watching Louie, and, although extremely funny and intelligent, that show can be damn depressing.

Anyway, it doesn't matter.  It is what it is, just like anything else.  I have control over it, loosely -- the amount anyone has control over anything -- and I am going to leave it as is, for better or worse.

Procrastination: A Means of Accomplishing Alternative (To Schoolwork) Tasks

In an effort to be more consistent in keeping up with this blog, I am going to write little blurbs here and there -- probably out of procrastination, but, hey, I'll take it.

Instead of watching TV or masturbating or getting high, when I procrastinate I tend to write in this blog or work on my book, a short story, or something else along those lines.  While it might not be the schoolwork I had intended on doing, I still feel like I am getting something important accomplished.

[Fun with parentheticals ---->] As a wannabe writer (I can't call myself just a "writer" until I have actually been recognized as such in some way, which I have not.  It's like being recognized as a nation.) -- since I am going to school, in effect, to be a better writer and to teach writing on some level or at least some aspect of the English language -- I feel it is important to take my writing and all that encompasses being a writer (including having a solid, consistent online presence).

Again, I fully recognize that I might just be delusional, either way this is a fun experimentation with A). honesty (i.e. my nonsensical ramblings/stream of conscience bullshit), B). sex appeal (for those who find ambition sexy, grrrrowwwllll) C). alternative perspectives (from the mainstream go to school, get any job, make money, buy a house, get married, have 18 children, and die perspective) and D). defining oneself (because if I am successful in my pursuits it will define me one way, where-as if I am unsuccessful, it will define me in another).

For the record, too, I am not saying there is anything wrong with anyone else's specific social context in differing from my own, it is just not my own, and I am not going to apologize for being different.  I don't feel like I should.  With the stagnation of median wages as compared to the consistent increase of the cost of living, I would be foolish not to play multiple hands, to give myself multiple possibilities, including those of my dreams, and, besides,even if I fail, I will be better off for having tried, because it's always better to regret something you have done than you haven't done (if you are willing to submit to a Butthole Surfers sort of logic).

And with that, I will leave you with the Butthole Surfers, "Sweatloaf" (if you can't hear anything at first, that's okay, you're not supposed to, just keep listening).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYGoougMHSQ