Ch..ch…changes

I still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test

I moved to Tumblr because of the perks and have slightly more freedom than WordPress offers. I don’t know if I’ll be releasing the blog link any time. It’s supposed to be kept as a log of the events that are happening while I’m writing and collaborating with a friend. We’ll see.

I Wrote something

I wrote something.  Actually, two things. Two poems. I’m gonna go work on them. Edit. Edit. Edit.

I need legal pads and post its.

“You will risk all their lives and their souls…” (Muse)

And Beg, you will beg
You will beg for their lives and their souls.

I was asked if I felt sad earlier. I didn’t then, but I’m beginning to feel sad. I should sleep. I should not think about the things I’m thinking about. I’m reliving last year again, this time I’m doing it on my own. Every emotion, every betrayal, every word uttered is being written on the page. I think it’s time I wrote something that matters for a change.

I started on a whim. I wrote 1659 words today. I just sat down and let it all spill out. Not sure what I’m going to call it, but we’ll worry about that later. It has a working title “Final Product.”

My word of the day indolent. Look it up.

Just cause

Ol’ Biker once said we should do something. We were sitting at the cubicle in the OSD – I was probably drinking some sort of soda or tea beverage to stay away – and he was sitting across from me attempting to read his books. One thing that should be obvious, when I’m around, very little work gets down, unless I’m working too. Anyway, Ol’ Biker said we should do something – was it tacking stuff on the cubicle wall? – and I replied, “I don’t think we can.”

“Oh, we can,” he said, “we’re just not allowed.”

I looked at him. Ol’ Biker, much like El Senor, has his moments when everything is technical. We wouldn’t be English majors if we weren’t. I shrugged and muttered, “You know what I mean.” He nodded. “I did. But just because we’re not allowed to do something doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”

“And just because we can,” I smiled, “doesn’t mean we should.”

I’ve broken that rule on my blog – I got mighty blog happy. I tried to stop myself, but last year was full of events – love, life, bees, sickness, death, pop culture, politics, bees, assholes, morons, writers, poetry readings, stalkers, lovers, bees, to name a few – that my blog became a vent place and a place where every funny little thing, interesting thing, dumbass thing got posted up here. And why did I do this? Because I could! I had a world opened to me through the internet that I just went wild and rampant with ideas that range from heartfelt to complete nonsense.

But at least, as I scroll through the past, I realized, just because I could didn’t mean I should’ve written about so many inane things. But if you don’t believe me, then perhaps you should believe a more professional writer:

Once-a-week blog entries turned into every 11-or-12-day blog entries. Coherent posts turned into rambling personal stories revolving around pop culture and my Netflix queue. And I became a little too obsessed with the notion of being able to post 1980s music videos featuring Rick Astley. My clever Kevin-ness wasn’t exactly exploding across the ‘Net as I’d planned. It was imploding on my career.

“So … I read your blog,” my dad said while I was out visiting him in San Diego.

“Yes,” I said. “And?”

He paused. “You’re not drinking during the day, right?”
[Alexander, Kevin. "This Writer's Life". Writer's Digest June 2008: 20-21.]

I wonder if my ranting, ramblings and derailed train of thought has brought me to the point that I’m at now? Maybe. I could fix it, and I probably will attempt to fix it. We’ll see.

The girl always wins in the end

As I recall I know you love to show off
But I never thought that you would take it this far

There was a lesson I learned when I was a kid. In the end the girl always wins, despite what the viewer sees.

I think it’s about time that I realize that I’m nothing more than an ashtray of lies. A part of me is empty and the void is filled with…

Grab the shovel. We’re going digging.

La Joya is my main character. Or at least I’d like to think she is. She’ll be the woman in the story. I know what’s going to happen, I just need to see how it  happens.

Oh, and Jenn, if you’re reading this, I’m still waiting on some feedback. No rush. Just nervous.

I <3 the new dashboard

Normally I don’t have anything nice to say about the geniuses who man WordPress because I think they’re a bunch tight assed prudes who cry at anything adult related and pray to their nonexistent gods, but they finally pulled something out of their asses that is worth while. So kudos, WordPress team!

In other news, I haven’t been writing here because I’ve been writing several different things and I’ve got sidetracked. Sorry about that. I’ll keep you posted on all my writing projects when I’m done with them.

You Looking at me?

I’ve been busy working on “Outside the Diamond.” I like the way it’s coming out. I’m trying to take a rather banal subject like working outside the baseball stadium in the summer into something far more interesting. The follow is actually a conversation I had with one of the baseball patrons last year. Only rather it being a woman, it was a guy. And instead of it being all too serious on the visitor’s part, he laughed when I started telling him all the things I wanted to tell everyone else. He was a friend of several of the workers inside and befriended me – hence, he got in for free all the times afterward. I’d sell him one ticket and he kept it until he lost it. Then he’d buy another one. Told him it wasn’t necessary, thta it was merely a scam job that the Edinburg Coyotes played on their fans.

A car pulled up and Cool Breeze strolled up to it and asked for the two dollar parking toll. The woman, in her twenties, gave him the look that both he and Soulfly knew rather well. “Two fucking dollars, are you serious?” she asked.
“Quite ma’am. Us parking attendants don’t joke around like that,” Cool said.
“Are you kidding me? Two dollars?”
“I wish I were, but that’s the fee.”
She looked ahead at the parking lot closer to the stadium. “How much is it over there?”
“Same price,” he said. “Better to park there and have your car smashed in by a baseball than to park way out here and walk.”

He parked in parking three after my warning of baseballs smashing car windows. He only parked in parking one or two when it rained. On those days, I was kept up front.

“Everyone’s a winner now we’re making that fame” (M.I.A.)

Some some some I some I murder
Some I some I let go
Some some some I some I murder
Some I some I let go

All I wanna do is (BANG BANG BANG BANG!)
And (KKKAAAA CHING!)
And take your money

I dug up some of the notes I made last year while working at the Coyotes. I’ve put them to use by writing something entitled “Outside the Diamond,” a story that was working on in my mind while I stood alone at parking lot 3, baking in the heat. The original concept of the story has been lost as I never wrote down the plot, but the names have sort of stayed the same. Cool Breeze, though, a name I took off Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, has been bumped up to be a main character.

I started jotting down the idea for the new plot. After a while I wanted to listen to music. Because I only found out a month or so ago who sang that song from the Pineapple Express trailer, I thought it was time I download the fucking song. When I finally sat down and listened to the lyrics, I realized that it synced up with the plot I had jotted down. Awesome, I thought. Maybe I’ll call it Paper Planes instead. We’ll see.

When Ennui gets the better of us

I started writing a short story Saturday night and finished it Sunday. It’s actually a short story I wrote a few years ago revamped because after it being rejected from a student magazine, I sat down and read through it to see what I could fix. I realized it was actually two stories in one so I just split it. I wrote what I’m calling The Poet Story because I’m still working on it Saturday. I changed a lot of it because I wasn’t buying the whole kidnapping storyline from the original. And the dialogue is still giving me problems. Philosopher and a friend said it was natural flow and I believe them, but I’m still going to work on it.

[...] “Holy shit,” I said. “Is this your friend?”
“Yeah,” he said, inspecting his keys. “His name is—was—Dick Masters.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. “What happened to him?”
“Nothing. Well,” he said, “nothing other than the fact I shot him.”
“Dead?”
“Not at first, no. It took two bullets to plug him.”[...]

I kept the name Dick Masters because, while it feels so fake, I still like it. I might change it if need be, but who knows. Other than that, the two still venture into La Colonia to dispose of the body, much like the original. I subtracted the Amie characer from the story because while I loved the fact that Character Unknown and her meet up during such a traumatic time, I didn’t feel that she was shaped out enough. I’ll just have to put her in a story of her own like I had originally planned.

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.