Halloween

Just got back from a party in a neighborhood off 210. Some golf-coursey kind of place with a blizzard of costumed kids whirling in every direction, cutting across lawns, sprinting suddenly and then slowing down for no apparent reason, falling in the streets with zebra/dancer/Spider Man legs pointing skyward, gobbling candy, crying, adjusting masks and bags, all under the watchful (if somewhat tippling) eye of the parents, who were distinguished not just by their height and sober dress but by their willingness to direct vehicular traffic with palms-out gestures and windmilling arms.

It was quite a scene, man. Made me verrry afraid. This is what I am now. I am one of those people. I don't live in their neighborhood, true, but the Billabong t-shirt no longer hides who I am; a white, middle-class parent with a mortgage (okay several), a car, a job, and ambitions for my poor son who only wants to enjoy standing up and falling down.

I, too, would have been directing traffic. I, too, would have been self-righteously complaining about the number of cars on the street, feeling a flush of happiness in my chest as the more paranoid/assertive mothers validated my outbursts.

Now, two quotes that ran through my head at various points in the night:

"I hate people who drive like me." -- Steve Lamott's proposed bumper sticker.

"I always wanted to be an eagle but one day I realized I was just a fuckin' sparrow." -- RTB

Your Two Sentences

Hey... I think it's pretty cool that you're kinda sorta making a good thing out of a bad experience. Sounds like a stressful bullshit kind of evening, but you boiled it all down to some mighty fine writing...

You should write poetry... you really should. Take a spiral notebook out on the surfboard with you some time (or your laptop...) and dump your thoughts and feelings and crank out some of those cool descriptions. You have a knack for word choices and paint pictures (and feelings). You really do.

And once again, I admire your balls-out honesty. That's something you've got checked off with permanent black ink on your "learn how to write" checklist. Fer sure.

And fuck all those people picking on Sting. I saw him performing at some awards ceremony recently (with Kanye West looking like an idiot as he "rapped" along side...). Sting wore a sleeveless t-shirt... tight cut muscle arms and abs of steel. Shit, I'd do him if he asked me.

Sting Worst Lyrics Ever

http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?ID=2886

Sorry to hear about Sting. He's fine, really. Just a bit pompous and overblown...and this, of course, is the hard part about sticking with any artist for a long time. When the aurora of fame and success begins to fade, the critics move in...and they pick and pick until they crack that nut and leave the deconstructed works lying around in pieces.

But fear not! The next stage is nostalgia, when Sting (and all others like him) will be restored not just to their original glory but to something even brighter and more spectacular. They will speak for lost generations. They will be discovered anew.

Who was is that said, "A classic is a book that doesn't go out of print."?

Long may "Fields of Grain" find a listening ear....long may "Roxanne" be downloaded on iTunes or its future equivalent. Long, long, long may Sting lay a sweet yogic fucking on his pliant wife...may they clear six, seven, even TEN hours of uninterrupted copulation. When I wake in the deep watches of the night, it's comforting to think that somewhere, at that very moment, Sting is laying the pipe. And laying the pipe. And laying the pipe. Counting Sting's pelvic thrusts, I am borne back into the sweet arms of Morpheus.

Two Sentences

I was thinking that I'd like to distill last night's action, with the prodigal drunken father returning to lay claim to familial love, etc. and here's what I came up with:

Last night I called the father a disgrace, a coward, and a bully while the north wind blew sand around my ankles and in the gray background surfers dropped into fickle waves.

Baby son pooped in the tub, two nuggets, one twice the size of the other, rolling in the backwash of the draining sudsy water.

Description

Howdy...

Loved your post about your son playing with his balls... but I want to know... who made that statement?

So... I'm wrapping up the final edits on the novel before sending it off, and I've got a monster set of assignments coming up next week, so I'm doing lots of writing work, but not draft writing in the mornings, and I miss it. Even if I didn't have so much other stuff on my plate, I know I'm still not ready to jump into another novel project... Even if I were, my first phase would be brainstorming, prewriting, building characters, etc. (everything I want that software for...)

In the meantime, I wanted to come up with something to work on that allows me to tap the vein... so I don't miss out on that daily bloodletting... I don't want to lose that routine and get stuck in revision/edit world...

While I think I do a good job with story and dialogue and character (finally... that was a long battle, but I think I'm winning...) my biggest personal concern about my writing is that I don't slow down and take the time to really describe (and show) what's around the protagonist, from his/her point of view. I feel like this may be the last bit of the puzzle that I need to tweak... like working that six iron with a bucket of balls, hitting it over and over again until I can feel that sweet spot deep in my knuckles...

So... I'm thinking about spending a little time each morning working on description.

What I really need is to hire a little assistant (don't know why I'm thinking little... but an Oompah Loompah comes to mind... maybe because I don't think they can kick my ass) anyway... I need this little assistant to sit quietly in a corner and then get up and look over my shoulder when I start drafting a story, and randomly scream in my ear, "slow the fuck down, will ya!!" ...let your reader breathe a little bit... let him look around, smell things, touch things, feel things... experience the beauty or the chaos or the wonder or whatever it is about the setting that can and will affect the character's mood and therefore the theme, tone of the scene, etc...

Every once in a while I'm able to pull this off, but I think it may be the Rosetta Stone for me at this point... I feel like I have all of the other pieces of the puzzle under my belt... at least to some degree of mastery... maybe not quite that whole "unconcious mastery" thing... but close. If I can pick up the "slow down and help readers understand where they are, visualize things better, etc." merit badge, then I may just be able to write a real novel some day.

I've got to get cracking on the final edit... I'm tryin to get the manuscript to the post office by noon... but I want to take a little shot at maple trees in the fall.

As a kid, and as an adult living up there before we moved to Florida, I remember stopping on the side of the road to stare... Late fall, established maple trees that stand in ranks along wet roads. Maple trees about my age, giant swollen leaves hungover from their summer indulgence in the sun. They've lost their red and green, but not their physical presence. They are strong, bursting with energy. Ripe and heavy.

And then there's that brilliant yellow. God... that golden yellow against the tree's dark wet trunk, golden yellow swaying softly against the blue sky. I see some that haven't achieved their total golden formation... yellow at the peaks but still a hint of green in the center, rusty brown next to the veins

Looking up I see the shafts of morning sunlight pierce the yellow leaves, electrifying the gold, leaves that have had an out-of-body experience, dropping their green, the hard fall colors, survived the cold winter, ready to become electroplated with the sun's brilliance and become part of all that is gold in the sky... just for a moment before it becomes so much part of the light that it loses its life liquid and its strength and it holds on until a breeze helps it to the earth, to rest with its brothers and sisters and eventually be scooped up by some redneck in the woods who's out of toilet paper...

The Vagina Hammerlog

Hey everybody! Welcome back to GDTG, hope it wasn't too hard to find...now sit back and enjoy the vaginal discussion...and try the veal. Or the tacos. Really.

1. Beaver. Do they call it a beaver because a well-bushed vagina, viewed from about a 45 degree angle with the woman's legs spread, would look like a Beaver? I would assume that the labia etc. would form the tail and the bush itself the beaver's body?

2. In the groove. I believe this phrase was originally used to describe the act of coitus and like so many other sexual descriptives it crept into the musical lexicon. I think that's the rough etymology. So anyway, doesn't it strike you that "in the groove" must have started from the experience of having one's penis literally in the vaginal groove?

I don't know if this is interesting to anyone else, but I find it fascinating. The vagina is everywhere! Dug into the carpet fibers of our linguistic experience!

Damn I need to get laid.

Moments of Conflict

Thinking about stories with good conflict:

1. A troop of elite special forces soldiers, high in the Afghan mountains, come into contact with a group of goat herders who, according to intelligence, are not supposed to be at this elevation. The soldiers consult one another. If they don't kill the goat herders, there's every possibility that their mission will be reported back down the mountain. But to kill the goat herders would be inhumane. But nobody would know if they did. The leader of the troop decides to let the goat herders go, along with a stern warning to tell no one. Seven hours later the soldiers are surrounded by a militia and under fire.

2. A woman in a neo-Nazi compound, married to one of the leaders, bears him his third child. It is mentally disabled. The members of the compound treat the child with derision and make thinly veiled jokes about exterminating it. The husband cannot stand to be near the child. It is an emblem of his fears and prejudice. The husband quickly gets the wife pregnant again. The fourth child is okay, however, he continues to abuse the third. The wife decides to take her children and run away.