Cacophony

Yesterday was a bum day, well almost. It started with me feeling like vegging out on the couch watching movies. I spoke to Jyg for a little while before watching Garden Party – a must, by the way. After watching that, I started watching Mad Max, but then remembered to call Jyg because she wanted to go buy her new TV at Wal-Mart. The thing didn’t weight that much, so I agreed to go with her and get it. It was on sale, but still cost her $500. We went back to her place and I set it up because that’s what I’m good for and I remembered, while attempting to attach the stand to the flat panel, why I hate RCA products so much – they don’t just put the instructions for the product you just bought, but all the instructions for all the similar products. So there was about three different TV sets in that booklet and I gave up on attempting to figure it out through book and just did what I do best, figure it out on my own. That worked faster.

Afterward, we dropped by my place really quickly because I needed to take a pain killer and we went to comic book store that opened in Edinburg perhaps a year or two ago – Cyber Comics, I believe it’s called. Reason being, I was feeling quite nerdy and I wanted to buy the Kevin Smith Batman comic – Batman: Cacophony. Of course, I love Batman and I love Kevin Smith so the two only made sense, right? I haven’t bought an actual comic book from an actual comic book store since I was just out of high school. It was strange, but I liked the set up. I asked the clerks if there were any left and there was quite a few. I just bought the one, which they were surprised, but I told them if I looked around, I’d wind up spending more than I had originally planned because they had a dollar comic section and I know I’ll find a lot that I’d be interested in.

I liked the place and as I was leaving I told them I’d be seeing them next month when the second issue hit, and I will because the place seems a little more friendly than Myth Adventures in McAllen. Not to attack Myth, because they’re still one of the greatest comic stores in the Valley, but these people actually made conversation with me while checking to see if they had any in stock. Treated like a fellow comic book reader than just a customer from the street.

I paid for the comic and left with Jyg who called this mission a nerd mission. We went to McDonalds because the pain killer makes me queasy if I don’t eat something with it and it’d only been 15 minutes so I ordered a cheeseburger and we waited for both our meals. While doing so, Jyg noticed some lady just putting her drink on Jyg’s car. The lady who was with her and the one who decided to use the car as her personal cup holder, kept staring at something inside, or at least I thought they were staring at something inside. Leaving my comic book in their view, I began to wonder why they were taking so much interest in Batman. When we got back to the car, I noticed that there was a wing sticking out from the hood and a little bird had met its maker. We couldn’t come up with reasons why it would be stuck in the corner of the hood, but what really puzzled us is why the lady, after knowing there was a dead bird on the hood of the car, would put her soda there.

After arriving home, my mother pulled the thing out and we noticed that it’d been there for some time as the bird had decomposed. The mystery of the suicidal bird is still open. And Batman: Cacophony, despite the what the naysayers say, is totally worth it.

Replacement Host

more about “Saturday Night Live – Wayne’s World -…“, posted with vodpod

Barry: [ gets up ] Yeah. Okay, what I do is make sure everyone’s got their gear on, and I cue their guitars, and I bring ‘em out onstage.. [ demos ] ..and I start the mikes and make the sure the scarves are always in the right place.. and then, the most important thing – I gotta do a sound check. [ pulls the mike forward ] “Check. Check. Check 1. Sibilance. Sibilance. Check. Check. Check 2. Sibilance. Sibilance.” And that’s pretty much what I do.

Amado called me two hours before the poetry reading to tell me he couldn’t make it. No big deal, he has a family emergency and the guy knows his priorities and I kudos a guy who knows that. Fine, I’m going to host, only I don’t know what the hell I’m going to talk about because I didn’t plan to host yesterday so therefore my topics are limited to only the current events in my life which sums up to my surgery. It’s very not pretty.

On the way there, I realize this is the first poetry reading I host that has a mic. Awesome. Now that I have mic I don’t have to talk too loud because it’ll do it for me. But as Jyg and I are in the car, I remember the Wayne’s World skit where Tom Hanks is a road for Aerosmith and I want nothing more than to do the mic test he does. Only, I can’t recall the fucking skit to save my life. I keep trying to remember the stupid word and know it starts with a ’s’ and has an ‘ance’  at the end, but couldn’t remember. Missed opportunity. Sigh.

We arrived early, as instructed by Amado and the doors are closed. Apparently no one phoned them to say that I’m now the host. But the Library’s overbooked with evens. In the Texas area, the teen manga group is meeting and there’s another course going on with yarn work. One of the ladies who works at the library asks if the poetry that will be read tonight will be friendly for six teenage girls. I grimace and say it all depends on the poet because we vary, though we normally do warn when we think the material is too adult in nature for some teens. It all depends on their parents, though, in this case, the parents won’t be around. Fine, whatever, I don’t care. I gave her my warning.

So there’s no other room to host this yarn work class, so they box us with the movable walls and they box themselves into the corner. We get to keep the food though. Somewhere along the way, a whole group of the yarn class kids comes in – there are more than six – into our section to listen, eat and work on their stuff. One of them reads, not bad by the way, her poetry.

While I did enjoy the reading, I was a little annoyed with the sudden change of plans that the library had by shoving two groups into the same room. From my understanding, we had the room since October and suddenly we have to share it. Very unprofessional on the library staff to do such a thing, but whatever. We still had a good time and we still enjoyed the reading.

Fever, Abscess, El Senor, Weekend & Books

All most of last week and the week before was a rollercoaster of fever. While 100.9F isn’t much of a threat, when you’re post op (a term, apparently not just used for transsexuals), it can mean there is something seriously wrong with you. The doctor told me most people who go through appendicitis normally form an abscess after surgery. Crap, that means I have to go back to the hospital to get that drained. He gave me a paper which said I needed to get a CT scan – he ordered one from whichever place I go to, is basically what it said – but then told me that if I hit 101 degree fever to just go the emergency room so I don’t have to pay up front. Fine. I had my plan, go during the weekend as to not inconvenience anyone. That plan fell through when the fevers left me as quickly as they came. Now I’m completely normal.

Friday, I almost stayed in but Jyg didn’t go out with her friends after all, so we went to JCPenny’s to search for the elusive sunglasses. JcPenny’s, however, doesn’t have any sunglasses so that trip proved fruitless. After walking towards other stores, I started to feel weak, so we went back to the car. We wound up at Hastings afterward because at least I get to rest there. While there, I found a used copy of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Penniless that I am, Jyg purchased the book for me as a gift. We came back home afterward and I started to feel really sleepy. After a while, Jyg went home and I fell asleep.

Saturday was pretty much eventless. I just sat around, catching up on my reading because I have yet to finish The Silmarillion. Sunday, on the other hand, gave me something to do. El Senor, after having his operation done Friday, decided that he needed to get out of his home and hang out with someone who wasn’t related to him – this meant me and we would go to Cuppy’s Coffee for yet another session of our talking out loud and bothering other costumers who are sitting there with their laptops, purposely looking as if they’re writing the next great American novel. We talked books. We talked sugeries. We talked about what we’re writing – me, a short story/novella and him, his thesis. Afterwards, we went over to CompUSA because he has become the victim of his children – they lost two of his USB drives. He saw some he liked, but vowed to buy them in the morning because he only brought enough money for the coffee.

After that, I learned that he has moved from La Villa to Edinburg. This guy’s now more in walking distance than before. After offering me to tag along on a family road trip – which I passed because I couldn’t fathom the idea of being anywhere near his daughter who suggested that I looked forty the last time we talked – we go to his place. He has some reading material that he bought for me during the summer, a book by Paul Ruffin, Islands, Women, and God. I also manage to borrow The Chicago Manual of Style and swiped Two-Up by Eric Miles Williamson, a professor at UTPA. We go to Juniors to pay a bill he had and then he dropped me off.

One thing that I failed to mention is that he also offered me a job. Not with his business, which is manual labor and while I’m all up for it, my body isn’t. Instead a friend of his is looking for people with Bachelors to teach courses to the community. My job offer? To help others find jobs. I swear, that saying is true: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. It’ll be a bilingual class, but at least I’ll have a translator because my on the spot Spanish sucks ass.

Reading, Writing, and killing my story

I’m done with NaNoWriMo. That’s all I got to say on that subject, but I go into a little more detail here.

Well, it’s been a slow reading, but I’m still working on finishing Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and I have to say that I’ve never realized that I like the fantasy genre, though I think I’ll simply stick to Tolkien rather than reading anyone else because I normally don’t read what I can’t write. My Sci-Fi genre void was filled by Heinlein and I have Philosopher to thank for that. Horror has been filled by Lovecraft.

Anyway, Silmarillion is really a book that I read when I need to read something different. Books outside my literary fiction genre usually take me longer to read because there’s just too much going on that I lose track easily. I’m halfway done with it, and The Children of Húrin is next, followed by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I need a break from my usual books because I haven’t read anything outside of it in a long time, save Never Let Me Go, which was still literary for the most part.

Speaking, what I was talking about earlier, the blog that I linked was to my Sex, With Strangers blog. The original purpose was to actually post the chapters that I had already written up for the public to read. But because I actually read the chapters and the storyline is clotted with plot holes, bad writing, rants and really poorly researched sex stuff, I decided to rewrite most of it. If you know my habits with writing, you know that rewriting something is hard and painstakingly long. I feel like I killed my own story before I even got it off the ground.

And and because Project: Gospel has been sitting in the back burner for a while and the other day I started writing what looked like the first chapter of that and then there was the other project that includes the samurai research I was doing has come to light because I never knew how to begin it and the research might have been in vain.

So who knows how this’ll go. This, by the way, is why I hate long writing projects, because I have writer’s ADD and would prefer to stick to short stories.

Early morning reading and writing

I woke up early this morning because I’ve been fighting a fever since mid week last week and all weekend long. Finally I get some good news as my temperature only read 97.9 F this morning and I sighed in relief, but this doesn’t get me from calling a doctor or mean that the bug is officially gone. I’m gonna take it slow from now on.

So I started the day by concluding an article from Esquire that I started reading last night before the medicine kicked in and I drifted into a blissful sleep. On a side note, before I get into it, I received my November issue late because I had to resubscribe but under another name – still my name, by the way – because my real name’s subscription had expired and they sent me a re-subscription under my nickname rather than the one I’ve been using for a year. Why? I don’t know. But it got me a deal, so what the hell? Anyway, because I got the November issue late, I missed out on a lot of things that I wish I hadn’t. Like, for instance, finding out that Halle Berry is the sexist woman alive before the other readers (as most subscribers get their issues slightly ahead of the newsstand buyers). But really, I could care less about the Women We Love columns because most of them I can’t downright stand – no I am not a homosexual, if you were a devout reader of my blog, you would have read that post.

Like with my occasional Playboy, Esquire is solely for the articles. I kid you not, I’m just that nerdy. However, people believe me more when I say that of Esquire, but not so much when I say that for Playboy. I don’t know why though, if you’ve seen one fake blonde, plastic based woman, then you’ve pretty much seen them all. Anyway, I digress.

In the November issue of Esquire, there’s an article by A.J. Jacobs that I think my intelligent friends need to read because it’s rather interesting how our brains apparently work. This explains so much about us as humans and why a great percentage of us are completely ignorant and are willing to believe in such trivial of things. I have to say that must’ve been the most interesting thing I’ve ever read in Esquire, fiction or non-fiction (fiction, by the way, was the sole reason I started to subscribe to Esquire and why I read an occasional Playboy, though I do only buy an issue when it contains an article that is relevant to me).

Another zinger in the November issue that got me was the Stephen Marche column, and I’ve discussed one by him a while back, “A Thousand Words About Our Culture.” This month’s was on loyalty, which, as I was reading it, suddenly invoked the PUMAs as they were so quick to betray their own beliefs because of some over blown conspiracy theory.

It’s just now coming to my attention that I no longer read the magazine solely for fiction. After a while, I grew addicted to Chuck Klosterman’s column, Stacey Grenrock Woods’s witty sex advice column, and now the articles are becoming more socially relevant to me. This is beginning to scare me greatly. Has the guy who first went by the pseudonym Poet Demas finally realize that perhaps he’s growing up?

Well, it’s a about fucking time.

“Come on fallen star I refuse to let you die” (Placebo)

All the centrefolds that you can’t afford
Have long since waved their last goodbyes
All the centrefolds that you can’t afford
You’ve long since faded from their eyes

I’m having nightmares again. I’m not sure if it’s the outcome of surgery, the meds I’m taking, the fear that clutches me heart that is imperishable, or something else entirely. At times I think I’m sleeping with ghosts. Their celestial bodies cloaking my mind, polluting my thoughts.

Last night, I attempted to go out with Jyg to Barnes – I was looking for the book The Children of Húrin, which I saw on sale before my hospital stay, but was gone by the time I attempted to buy it – but in the midst, my knees started to feel weak and I started to perspire so we left. I’m going to make another attempt in a while. Hopefully I’ll find it at the other Barnes.

I started NaNoWriMo yesterday. I think Sex, With Strangers will be my project considering that a lot of it has to be rewritten anyway, so I opted to change it up a bit. The only chapter that will probably suffer the least is, of course, chapter one. We’ll see.

Home Alone on Halloween

My staples were removed yesterday. The hole where the Jackson Pratt drain was placed last week is sealed up. However, while I’ve been going out (like to the doctor’s and the hospital to make arrangements to pay for my surgery and stay), I don’t think I’ll have the strength to last a Halloween party or a trip to the bookstore. Instead, I’m home alone reading: story of my fucking life.

I’m not sure how one deals with the after surgery week. It’s been a week. It was a week Thursday. And now I’m here, staring at my computer screen, every once in a while, picking up Tolkien. I thought about watching scary movies, but my eyes hurt. I thought about taking a walk, but what if I get weak? I thought about calling friends, but what will I say? I’m bored here, at home, alone, reading The Silmarillion.

I haven’t even voted yet, but now there’s not chance until election day. I never vote on election day. I early vote. I hate lines. I hate bastards who bitch about waiting so long. I’m one of them, but I have reason. Since early voting started, I’ve felt like shit – What’s your excuse? All this week I’ve dedicated my time to watching the entire trilogy of The Lord of the Rings – and not the theatrical releases, but the extended versions. I’ve really nerd it up. The Matrix trilogy is there waiting for me as well. I feel like watching Sin City, though. I feel like going out. I feel like if I do this stuff, I would feel better, but I know myself. I’ll be out and then I’ll start feeling week.

I should’ve pushed myself to go to Jyg’s sister’s Halloween party. I was going to dress up in a gorilla mask and gloves with a blazer, a nice shirt, slacks and dress shoes. When asked what I was supposed to be, I was going to either reply, “A republican,” or “A McCain supporter.” Jyg’s brother-in-law, by the way, is both. I don’t know. If I had gone and if I had gotten sick then there would be conflict somewhere in the night and I’m too weak to deal with conflict. I hate conflict.

Oh well, I think I hear Tolkien calling me again.

Read like a writer

My first creative writing professor, René Saldaña, Jr, constantly told us – his wonderful students – to read like writers. What this meant, at the time, I didn’t know know. I suppose in many ways I’m still attempting to read a book, short story, poem, essays and blogs like a writer and I still rarely succeed. The fault was not of his own because he explained it greatly and constantly told us to read the stories assigned to us not like readers, but like writers.

I’ve had many chats with Dr. Saldaña after class and took a creative writing workshop with him the summer that followed. That is where I met Richard Yañez, a writer from El Paso. Anyway, back to my subject – I’ve had many chats Dr. Saldaña about the writing. While he did have his say about my work, his style never seeped into it. I suppose in most cases, every creative writing professor, lecturer, teacher, instructor and student tends to enforce their writing style into the works of their students and peers:

I often make these remarks to a beginning poetry-writing class.
You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you. Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me. But I hope you learn to write like you. (from The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo)

And while I learned all that I could from Saldaña during spring semester and early summer – the writing institute/workshop is only five days long and embodies three daily meetings that run about three hours each – I still didn’t grasp his reading like a writer concept. Two years before I even had a seat in Saldaña’s classroom, however, a nifty little book came out that I would later acquire for free in a box left out by professors cleaning their shelves in order to make room for a new shipment of books (yes, college professors, I know you’re dirty little secret – we all do!). The book discusses a wide range of metaphors, similies, allusions, etc. in literature that only college professors only seem to grasp – you know, because they’re well read and all. However, reading like a professor was far from reading like a writer, wasn’t it?

A literature professor is mapping out a pathway of what the writer of a text has read, what he was trying to say, what he wanted the reader to take from it, what he wanted a reader to recognize and all that jazz. I started to piece together the concept of reading like a writer – something that I started to do back at that fateful spring of 2005 which mapped out the path that would eventually lead me to this keyboard, typing out this concept (or at least, what I believe the concept is) in first draft, which goes against everything Saldaña, Jose Skinner, Richard Yañez and Emmy Perez have taught me (let’s face it, however, this blog is about thoughts and my thoughts cannot be revised unless I plan to sell them, but my thoughts, as of now, are free).

What I  figured out as a writer – I’ll use this term quite loosely because a lot of people tend to use it without merit and I don’t want to be one of them – is that reading like one is fucking horrible. Not that it’s not a good idea to read it like a writer, because if you are one, then you have to do it, but to really enjoy a book, I have to shut off everything Perez,  Yañez, Skinner and Saldaña, as well as, the countless literature professors have taught me. It just ruins the book. And maybe I’m a maverick in the English department when I say this, but whatever, I graduated and that’s all right with me. I just want to make clear, that I don’t disagree.

When I find myself reading like a writer, I have to really just sit there, reading the same sentence, phrase, paragraph, page, chapter more than once until I truly see what the writer was thinking and why he decided to use such and such in his work. There was this one short story that I read in that creative writing in spring of 2005 entitled “Do Not Disturb,” written by A.M. Homes – which, if memory serves me right, turned out to be a female writer rather than the assumed male writer a certain college professor thought she was.

It’s never been on strong point to describe people, which, I suppose, makes me a bad writer, which is okay because I never said I was any good – those who like my writing said that. In her story, A.M. Homes wrote:

The nurse comes to take blood. “They called Barry Manilow—he’s a very good surgeon.” She ties off my wife’s arm. “We call him Barry Manilow becuase he looks like Barry Manilow.”

When Saldaña asked the class what they thought as writers about the story, a lot of people started listing things off their fingers. While I read the story, I didn’t read it like I should’ve, I suppose because when he asked me, I simply said, “I don’t like Barry Manilow.”

This, by the way, left people in shock and I believe one woman asked, “What do you have against Barry Manilow?” which was probably followed by my answer, “Because he sucks.” But there. As a writer I would never ever compare any my characters to any real life celebrity. I don’t know why. I just won’t.

Are Clones Human?

I just finished reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and while the novel is beautifully written, the dark overtones of a contemporary England setting sent chills down my spine. I’m glad that Jyg bought me the book because I would never had heard  of it otherwise.

The book deals heavily with childhood fantasy – those daydreams where you once imagined yourself as a movie star, someone famous, a mother, even love, etc. – gone awry. Imagine living in a world where the people outside your surroundings are allowed to grow up to be whatever they want to be and you’re future is set for you. Imagine knowing that you’re different from everyone else and are hated for that. That others like you outside the gates of your private school are abused and mistreated and you’re given the lap of luxury. Imagine that your only purpose in life is to grow up, stay fit and healthy and give up you life in order for others to live. That is the life of the clones in Never Let Me Go, a narrative told through the eyes of Kathy H., a carer going on her twelfth year.

The clones are split up between carers and donors. It is up to the carers to keep the donors morale up as they are healing. But carers, when the time is right, are called for donations in the end. The clones are created in order to cure the maladies once thought as incurable. Cancer, in this dark new world, has a cure. That is the sole purpose of these “creatures.”

After realizing the purpose of the clones – and that they were clones – questions started leaking into my head and I’m sure it was Ishiguro’s intent. Because as students, the clones are taught art mainly, it is left the door open – and the question is asked late in the book – to ask, “Do clones have souls?” I know I’m not one to talk about souls, but the very fact that they are able to create without mimicing is what left that door open in a world where a god does reign over. Because some may not believe that humans have souls – I hold my doubts – then let me ask this: Because clones are copies of other people, do they have minds of their own? Each clone has a possible in the world – meaning a person they were modeled after. What are the chances that their future aspirations (even though they are not allowed a regular future) are the same as those their possibles had, or have? Not to mention the mannerisms and personality, are these their own or are they embedded in the cloned DNA?

On a more ethical question, seeing that the clones were raised as children into adulthood, only to “complete” during their 30s, you must ask if it’s ethical to harvest the clones for organs and the like? The sole purpose of their existence is to give up their lives so that others may live. However, it seems like a dark world to create a life in order to kill it. And this all comes back to the soul/mind questions: If these clones lack souls/minds, then one can say it is perfectly find to harvest them for parts so that others can live as they are no different than a lab rat who is given an ear to grow on its back. However, the fact that they have artistic talent, holding with traditional thought that one must have a soul to create art, proves that they do not lack this. The fact that they can feel love – or at least grasp the abstract concept of love and emotion – proves they have a mind. I cannot be certain that they have either, because their lessons are to model humans as closely as possible so that they are not pointed out in public places as they are feared by the majority of people.

If they have minds of their own, then the answer to the next question is yes. If they don’t, then there is no logic in the question, which is: Can clones logically believe in a higher power? Because they know how they came into existence was by human will rather than a divine power, it is hard to grasp if a clone can believe in a god. I won’t get too much into this question, so I’ll leave it at that.

Are clones seen as demons? Most Christians are already on a witch hunt to prove that homosexuals are sinful and spawns of hell, but at least homosexuals were born in a natural way even though their sex lives aren’t viewed as such. Because they were created, not born, into this world by science that is not natural biology, I have to assume that clones will be seen as something other than human. It’s not far from me to think that clones would be seen in a negative light by believers (well, most believers) yet be accepted as perfect donors because we know how ignorant some might be.

Anyway, these were the questions that I came up with reading the book. There might be more, but I’m sure these cover all of the fields.

“The only thing that ever made sense to me is the words to a song from an american movie” (Everclear)

It can come from out of nowhere
Hit you when you’re safe and warm
Take it easy my star
Your time is gonna come

I couldn’t sleep last night. Between the fear that my front teeth falling off and my inevitible choking death, I kept waking up last night. I attempted sleep, succeeded, but was awakened. Now I’m just not tired anymore. Oh well. Nothing new. I’ll get some more reading down as I finished the novella, Innocent World. It’s written by Ami Sakurai and translated by Steven Clark. I’m not sure who I should blame for the book’s shittiness, but one of them has to pay. There’s more on the side column about the book, so I won’t get into much here.