Getting Older

I think my cactus is slowly dying.  I mean, everything is slowly dying, but generally before one is visibly dying, he/she seems to be living.  This cactus has looked brownish since we got it.  I keep it in the window that gets the most light.  It at least has a nice view.  Plus, my office is not a bad room to be in, either.  The cactus certainly doesn't have to worry about being bothered by animals in here -- not that it would have to worry about that, anyway.

I sit here, analyzing the past few days, which are definitely hazy -- although I do remember them.  For instance, I am listening to LL Cool J right now, and I remember buying it; however, I still don't understand it.  The NWA I understand a little better -- I have been wanting to buy that album for a while.  I also bought Nouns by No Age earlier in the day yesterday, and that is definitely more my taste.  I like branching out a little, though.  Giving other things a chance.  It's good to be open.

Getting older is interesting.  Yesterday I didn't feel any different.  Today I feel like a different person.  I am ready to leave certain aspects of myself behind, move forward, towards the future.  It is time for me to really buckle down and work towards something.  This blog is a great part of that.  I feel like the more I write in it, the better.  It's great practice, anyway.  I don't know if I will write in it everyday, but I will certainly try to write in it as often as possible.

Now that the party, a.k.a. my twenties, is over, I can work towards making a living.  My way, of course, but certainly an adult pursuit.  In my twenties I didn't count on a future.  I just tried to live for the moment, and that worked for me for what I was going through.  I feel like I am beyond that now.  I feel like I can plan for the future, because I am living in the outskirts of it, and I need to focus on reaching the center.  I have my first novel and companion stories to edit and get out to the work, I am in grad school, and I am also working as a manager at a restaurant.

I know I keep on talking about  it -- but, hey, it's my blog, so deal with it -- but I am working a multifaceted plan to maximize my potential.  I am buckling down and really hitting the books hard, doing as well as I can in my classes, networking and making connections, getting my professors' confidence, and getting a teaching assistantship.  That will allow me to quit my job (actually, I will have to quit it) and focus more on my career path, both as a writer and as an instructor/professor.  I am getting my MA in composition/rhetoric, as well as a TESL certificate and a literature certificate.  If I decide to not go on and pursue a doctorate, I will be still qualified to teach at community colleges -- and other stuff.

I believe my writing is key, both fiction and essays.  This blog can't hurt, either.  I just have to keep up keeping up, which will be harder as the semester progresses, but easier once I reach a certain point with it.

Anyway, I feel like I can be more consciously concerned with the future.  Maybe it won't turn out at all how I figure, but I feel like I have slightly more control over it.  I am certainly not going to sit around and wait for things to happen.  That almost never works.

I think the point is this.  I have been dancing around it, but I feel like it is time.  It is time to do less partying, and more schmoozing.  It's nice to socialize and have fun with friends and family here and again, but I am through being so heavily reliant on certain substances.  I want to retain some level of control over myself, and it is certainly harder when I am feeling "free", which is how I feel when I feel how I feel when I do what I do.

This isn't anything formal, but it is on the record.  It is something I can hold myself to, but not something I have to so rigidly.  It's not a court-order.  It's not an ultimatum.  It's more a goal.  I am not going to say that I will never do it, because that is absurd and unrealistic, but I can certainly hold myself to not doing it very often.  I am better than I used to be most of the time, but I aim to improve yet.

Don't call it a come back.

Tribute:

http://youtu.be/u31FO_4d9TY



Express Yourself

[Dr. Dre:]
Yo, man... There's a lot of brothers out there flakin' and perpetratin
But scared to kick reality.
[Ice Cube:]
Man, you've been doing all this dope producing.
You had a chance to show 'em what time it is...
[Dr. Dre:]
So, what you want me to do?
Express Yourself...

[Dr. Dre:]
I'm expressin' with my full capabilities,
And now I'm livin' in correctional facilities,
Cause some don't agree with how I do this.
I get straight, meditate like a Buddhist
I'm droppin' flava, my behaviour is heriditery,
But my technique is very necessary.
Blame it on Ice Cube... Because he says it gets funky
When you got a subject and a predacit.
Add it on a dope beat
And that'll make you think.
Some suckaz just tickle me pink
To my stomache. 'Cause they don't flow like this one.
You know what? I won't hesitate to dis one
Or two before I'm through.
So don't try to sing this!
Some drop science
While I'm droppin' English.
Even if Yella
Makes it a-capella
I still express, yo, I don't smoke weed or a sess.
Cause its known to give a brother brain damage.
And brain damage on the mic don't manage
Nuthin'
But makin' a sucker and you equal.
Don't be another sequel...

Express Yourself...
Express Yourself...
Come on and do it...

Express Yourself...
Express Yourself...
Come on and do it...

Now, gettin' back to the PG.
That's program, and it's easy.
Dre is back. Newjacks, I mean hollow,
Expressin' ain't their subject
Because they like to follow
The words, the style, the trend,
The records I spin.
Again and again and again
Yo, you on the other end.
Whatch a brother playin' dope rhymes with no help.
There's no fessin' and guessin'
While I'm expressin myself.
It's crazy to see people be
What society wants them to be. But not me!
Ruthless...
Is the way to go
They know.
Others say rhymes that fail 
To be original.
Or they kill where the hiphop starts,
Forget about the ghetto
And rap for the pop charts.
Some musicians curse at home
But scared to use profanity
When up on the microphone.
Yeah, they want reality.
But you won't hear none.
They rather exaggerate, a little fiction.
Some say no to drugs and take a stand,
But after the show they go lookin' for the dopeman.
Or they ban my group from the radio.
Hear NWA and say "Hell no!". 
But you know it ain't all about wealth.
As long as you make a note to...

Express Yourself...
Express Yourself...
Come on and do it...

Express Yourself...
Express Yourself...
Come on and do it...

Express Yourself...
From the heart.
Cause if you wanna start to move up the chart
Then expression is a big part of it.
You ain't efficient when you flow
You ain't swift, movin' like a tortoise.
Full of rigor mortis.
There's a little bit more to show
I got rhymes in my mind, and better like an embryo.
Or a lesson - all of 'em expression
And if you start fessin' -
I got a Smith and Wessun
For you.
I might ignore your record 
Because it has no bottom.
I get loose in the summer. When in spring and autumn
It's Dre on the mic, gettin' physical.
Doin' the job
NWA is the lynch mob!
Yes, I'm a cob?
But you know you need this.
And the knowledge is growin'
Just like a foetus, or a tumor.
But here's the rumor:
Dre is in the neighborhood
And he's up to no good.
When I start expressin' myself,
Yella, slam it!
Cause If I stay funky like this I'm doin' damage.
Or I'mma be too hyped,
And need a straight jacket.
I got knowledge and other suckaers lack it.
So, when you see Dre, a DJ on the mic,
Ask what it's like.
It's like we gettin' hype tonight.
Cause if I strike
It ain't for your good health.
But I won't strike if you just...

Express Yourself...
Express Yourself...
Come on and do it...

Express Yourself...
Express Yourself...
Come on and do it...

Express Yourself...
Come on and do it...
Come on and do it...
Come on and do it...
Come on and do it...

The LL Cool J Conspiracy

This is a sketch, folks.  An illustration of gullibility: my own.

[Wow.  That was fucking intense.  I really went to a dark place there for a moment.  I'm sorry about that folks.  I am still working out the kinks.  That's where this meta-narrative comes in handy.  Yes, that's right, I have just turned this blog into a defense of meta-narratives... no...]

...a ululating orb of self pity, shrill as the noights air, suffering forth upon yonder rock ledges, yonder past yon trees...

[No, no.  Not popular fiction...  This was more social outrage in nature.  Anti-pop-culturish.]

http://youtu.be/vimZj8HW0Kg.


I saw an ad for NCIS: Los Angles and got on Amazon and bought the mp3 album of Mama Said Knock You Out.  Then that inspired me to download Straight Outta' Compton, the 2002 REMIX. 

Thank God it wasn't anything by Marky Mark and the Funkybunch.  At least I bought good shit.  But anyways, I would do Calvin Klein ads if I was Mark Wahlberg too.  I heard a conspiracy theory once that Mark Wahlberg has a third nipple.  I would just like to say, unequivocally, I sincerely hope he does.   [No wait, that's not what I was trying to say at all.  Sorry, I am extremely easily distract-able tonight.]  Or maybe that was the point.  At least I didn't buy pure crap.  Next time I might not be so lucky.  Unless it is someone like Taylor Swift.  Then I'll at least have something to masturbate along to!

http://youtu.be/5OsD2iGozUk

CHECK IT!

I have posted some brand new, never-before published poetry on my poetry page!  Just follow the link above and it will take you there!

Also, if you haven't ever checked out my fiction, I have posted on the fiction page (immediately adjacent to the poetry page link) three previously-published-on-this-blog short stories.

Enjoy!

Peace!

Nanu! Nanu!

Live long and prosper!

and May the force be with you!

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.