Merry Fox-mas

For those of you not in the know, Fox-mas falls on 12/16 this year. And what a merry Fox-mas it was indeed. My fox and I each thoroughly enjoyed exchanging Fox-mas presents, and then Sue immediately put one of hers to use, making us very yummy tako-yaki balls for lunch. What is a tako-yaki ball, you say? It's a very tasty Japanese dumpling made with Octopus. Osaka is famous for their tako-yaki balls. We made ours with peas, onion, and spam. They rocked.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term "Fox-mas," it is a day that can come any time of the year. Ever been out shopping, and saw something that just screamed the name of someone special to you? Did you buy that something? And then give it to that person when you saw them? For no reason at all? Haha. Little did you know, that you participated in Fox-mas. F0x-mas is a magical time of year that comes several times throughout the year. It can entail gifties of foods, drinkies, or even stealing flowers from a neighbor to give to your love constitutes presents of the Fox-mas manner. The only real requirement is that all Fox-mas presents must be given with love. Yes. yes. yes.

So if you love someone today, dole out all their presents to them today, because waiting is silly, and you know you want to play with all your toys anyway.

(Un/Re/I )Do Nominated for a Pushcart

Hi all,

I just received word today that "(Un/Re/I )Do" was nominated for a Pushcart prize. It originally appeared in this past summer's issue of Alligator Juniper.

In other news, I've been working on putting together my thesis for my final semester and I'm finding out that I won't be able to submit the full book as my thesis. The thesis limit is 200 pages, and I'm at well over 250 with 3 unfinished stories still to go in. This is kind of a sad revelation for me, but at the same time, I think it's going to give me a little more leverage room to assemble a smaller selection of already done stuff and then be able to spend more time on new material. I think the subset of Not an Autobiography will be masquerading as Fractured Self.

Zen and the art of computer fuckups

So I'm a computer guy, right? I should know better than to break my home computer. But you know what, I did just that. Below is a cautionary tale of sleep deprivation, time constraint pressures, and mild stupidity:

Two thirty AM and she still won't sleep. But bouncing, sootzing (everyone else calls them binkies, i call it a sootzer), and holding her close is keeping the howl from the depths of the abyss at bay. My only problem: I'm fucking exhausted. It's late into week three, and I'm leaving for school in a couple of days, and my child has not yet learned the blissful value of deep sleep.

Two thirty AM and I need to stay awake. Too many nights before I've nightmared about falling asleep with her in my arms--waking then in terror when she wasn't there only to find her in bed where she was all along.

Two thirty AM and I am reading release notes for SuSe 10.3. My laptop's already done the upgrade hoops. No frills, no problems there. Maybe I can take the leap tonight. Maybe I can upgrade the desktop too. Maybe it'll get done by the time my baby sleeps. Maybe I can do a wireless install.

Two thirty AM and that's one hell of a lot of Maybes. More rational, awake, aware minds would say, "Stop the fuck right there." Those minds weren't present that day at Two Thirty AM.

Not reading, the doc correctly, I fire up YaSt and tell all my packages to update from the server. Things go ok for a bit. Then the installs start failing. Packages die on the way to Nigel (that's the pc's name). Fuck. I abort, hoping not to have destroyed the system too badly.

Think fast at 3 am and you don't think thoroughly. I backup my fiction, and NOTHING else.

Three AM and I slap in the SuSe 10.3 install disk. I know this won't let me install over the network without a hardwire lan connection, but I figure I'll just do the base system and update in the morning.

Four AM, packages selected, install started, and the child is down for the count. System installs take forever, so I join my baby and we collectively hit the hay with my already sleeping wife. Till Day

Till it dawns on me when I check my PC that something seriously bad has happened. It's a failed package. I ignore it, clicking through, thinking "I've seen this before...probably a useless program that linux has 3 redundant similar programs to choose from." Package ignored, install continues, and I wait through it. Initial boot time comes, and INITRD fucks up. I don't know enough about linux to know much about this, but I do know that that means the bootloader just got fucked in the ass. And no bootloader = booting the OS. MOTHERFUCK is the proper term for the moment.

Still not thinking too horribly clearly, I try a full install update by hauling the pc down to the router and jacking into the lan. I waste the weekend with such configurations. It all boils down to a libzypp something or other that hates life and won't download or install.

I get desperate. School is rapidly approaching. I want to spend time with my wife and baby, and I still have all my workshop responses to do. I grab up a little bit of logic and reinstall version 10.2.

This works. Sorta. But it doesn't boot to the graphical system. Stupidity washes over me and I forget the "startx" command, and keep typing "Sax2" instead. (at least my monitor got configured, right?). At this point, If I would have stopped, thought, looked at a couple of things, I could have avoided everything that happened next. But I didn't do any of that, I boldly forged on and fucked up my computer to a point where someone from linuxquestions.org said "serious forensics" would be required to recover my data.

What did I do? A fresh install of SuSe 10.3. Fresh install means format drive, start over, page one.

Why would I do this without backing anything up other than my fiction, you say? Is it because I'd much rather deal with losing all our wedding pictures, honeymoon pictures, a lot of Sue's art, and 30 gigs of MP3s? No. You see, I thought that I backed everything up. My pc has 2 HDDs in it and the 2nd drive was supposed to be dedicated to holding my music collection, and being a 75gb drive, It had plenty of room left over. Under the 10.2 system, I thought I copied my home folder to the Music drive. Thinking and doing are 2 different things. The difference here lies in the fact that I didn't have the music drive mapped correctly, and actually, none of the data I stored in /music actually was on the 2ndary drive. All of it was on the primary.

So when the fresh squeaky version of 10.3 finally loaded and I mounted the music drive, every cell in my body said, "Oh Fuck!"

But I'm a computer guy, right. So all is not lost. (though I did give up for a few days, till my wife told me that many of those photos were required for Christmas gifts. [again Oh Fuck!]).

I flooded the n00b forum of linuxquestions.org and a coupla folks said "so sorry for you," while another couple said that my task was doable, but tricky.

Tricky because I couldn't remember if my filesystem before the format was reiserfs or ext2. And that's a big difference in systems. All I knew for sure was that my pc was ext3 at current.

So fortunately for me, SuSe when updating did a quick format, so I figured most of the data was still there. I downloaded a few live CDs, made specially for system repair, and lucked out with them. One of them allowed me to see the deleted partition, and restore it. Turns out it was reiserfs afterall...something that worked to my advantage because reiserfs has a goddamn wonderful command that allows you to restore a deleted partition. I did that, and within a few hours, data was restored.

In all, I recovered probably 90-95% of what was lost, with most of the loss hitting the mp3 collection (which fortunately is easy to replace).

During this ordeal I learned one hell of a lot about linux, and I also learned something more valuable than anything Pirsig ever talked about in the book that I stole this blog's title from: Never ever update your computer with a screaming infant in your hands.

Live from Louisville

Emilie Simon:



You know, you'd think that since I'm in IT I'd be much more net savvy, but I missed out on the rise of the internet. I don't own a cellphone, and hope not to, nor do I Myspace or really YouTube...but slowly, like an old man, I'm learning the new technology of the time, and as you can see above, I've found the point to YouTube: watching music videos I want to see, unlike my highschool days and MTV where I spent my precious 30 minutes before the schoolbus hoping that Garbage's "Only Happy when it rains," or Collective Soul's "Shine" would play, because if they didn't, if I had to be subjected to fucking "no diggity" or Destiny's Child, I knew I would have a shitty day. Needless to say, I had a lot of shitty days in high school. I think if YouTube existed then, and I had a computer then, I would have enjoyed high school, I would have bee popular, and I wouldn't be live in Louisville now, because Popular people are generally too happy to be introspective enough to feel driven to the forced isolation of the writerly life.

Oh and I miss my wife and daughter immensely right now. Right up to the point that I don't care about using that adverb in the preceding sentence. In my defense, how could I not miss pumpkin butt:

I love the internet.

Check this out:



How can you not love the internet for stuff like that?

Upcoming Publication

Hey all,

I just heard that Wordriot.org will be publishing my story "Abject Objectivity Goes for a Walk" in their November 15 issue. Rock and roll!

Home Sweet Home

Today, Sue, Molly and I just got home from another 4ish day hospital stay. This time, Jaundice was the culprit. I never really thought that We'd have to have Molly hospitalized for Jaundice (since it's such a common infant thing, but we did, and here's the story). Before I get started, though, don't worry. Everything's fine.

When we were originally released from the hospital, Molly's billirubin level was at 9. Billirubin is the stuff the causes Jaundice...and that stuff is actually broken down red blood cells and other junk that need to be shat forth with great force to be removed from the body.

A day after release, they sent a nurse to our house, who checked Molly's Billi scale, and found that it had gone up some more...to like 13 or so. From there, they prescribed Molly to be in a Wallaby. Wallabies, contrary to popular belief, are not miniature kangaroos. They are clunky heat spitting fiber optic light things for babies. The light stimulates the liver to process things and clean the billirubin out of the blood. Normally, a Wallaby is all you need.
And for 2 days, that's what we did. We put up with the loud, bright, wonky thing. It sucked for changing and feeding time because the Wallaby had to be wrapped around her chest, and it's cord wasn't all that long. The only cool thing about it was that it made Molly look like a glow worm.

Unfortunately, her Billi level kept going up, and on Saturday, we were sent to the hospital. To your left is Molly packed into her carseat. Isn't it darling?

Once we got to the hospital (St. V's instead of Hamot (our pediatrician is a St. V's doctor)), they admitted us to the pediatric ward where they put two big billi lights on Molly and drew a metric fuckton of blood before the doctor came in and started screaming at them for drawing far more blood than necessary. When we got to the hospital, Molly's billi level had already dropped a bit--down to 20 from 21 from the morning's check. The doctor had Molly admitted to the NICU, and Since Sue is breastfeeding, we got to keep the room in Pediatrics until things blew over. Sue also got to eat foods on the insurance company's bill because of the breastfeeding. I got to scrounge.

By Sunday, Molly's Billi level had dropped to 12.x and things were looking a lot better. The doctors and nurses also explained to us why things got so bad. Basically, all babies will have jaundice to some minor degree as their bodies expel the billirubin, but Molly's was a little worse than normal because of an AB blood type incompatibility between Sue's and Molly's blood. So when Molly was born, her body killed off all of Sue's blood in her system in addition to the other blood cells of her own, and a giant surplus built up in her system. Furthermore, babies don't start making new red blood cells until all the extra ones created in the womb are recycled. So once this stuff started building up in Molly's system, it made her very tired. The tiredness made it hard for Sue to get Molly to eat, which meant that Molly got dehydrated and then stopped peeing and pooping, and thus that's how we ended up in the hospital.

So they put Molly on an IV and had Sue continue feeding her as normal (though we did have to bottle feed the breastmilk at first), and slowly but surely the Billirubin level came down. On Sunday and Monday, Molly had a really ugly rash from the Billi, but that's pretty much gone now, as is most of that classic yellow skin coloring.

During our stint in the hospital, Sue and I were a nervous wreck, but we were very thankful that Molly only had Jaundice and not something more serious. Sue's mom ferried back and forth between the hospital and the house, taking care of us (making sure I was eating), and the cats, and helping with the phone calls and keeping everyone informed. She did a super job at keeping Sue and I sane during this rough time, and Molly's so lucky to have so many concerned and loving grandparents.

Notice the little sleepy eyes drawn onto Molly's "VR" goggles there in that last picture. One of the nurses did that. We thought it was awesome. In fact, all the nurses in the NICU were fantastic. Another one made a little Raggedy Anne namecard for Molly once things started getting a little more crowded on Monday. Everyone at the hospital did a wonderful job at taking care of our daughter, and because of that, we're home and happy again.

Project Dad

You heard it. On 10/1/2007 at 20:50 after 30 hours of labor involving way too many hours of relentless usage of Pitocin, my wife and I were rewarded with the most beautiful little creature love and marriage can buy: Our very own Molly Marie. Look at her, isn't she darling? I surely think so. Vitals: 7lbs 13oz, 20 1/4 inches. She's been happy, healthy, and an all around great baby in the house.

I'll be posting more soon, but good lord, she's darling.

Countdown Baby, and other things.

T-minus 10 days and counting to Molly's due date. Lots of folks have been saying that babies like to come out on the full moon. Here's to hoping that our little baby will be a werewolf then. Sue's been having on again off again contractions for about two weeks now, and we're both ready for Molly to just come out already. But, fortunately, the end is in sight.

Another fortunate end in sight is semester three of grad school. All around, this has been a really rough semester for me. My Extended Critical Essay drove me to the brink of insanity for several weeks, and with all the chaos of work, and baby, and sick cat, It's been awful hard to keep focused. But the end is near.

While the ECE did take up most of my semester, I have managed to finish one story, "Deconstructing Happily Ever After," as well as start two more. The latter two have been fizzling at the moment, but I think once all the dust settles from the baby and everything else going on, the both should pick up pretty fairly. The good news is that I'm rapidly closing in on completing all of the stories for the projected setlist of Not an Autobiography. I'm planning for 13 stories and I'm sitting at about 10 right now. With a good concerted effort, I may be able to push out the final three in conjunction to my Creative Thesis and use the whole book instead of just excerpts. We'll see, though.

Recently I finished reading Opium4. Great lit mag. If you haven't been to their site, check them out, http://www.opiummagazine.com I'm also nearly 2/3 through Maxx Barry's first novel, Syrup, which is a riot. Sue and the baby are enjoying it thoroughly as well.

Finding something

Note: This is a pretty long post, and it really doesn't go anywhere. I posted it more for myself than for you.

My Good Friend, Rod, posted this blog the other day, and I attempted his suggested exercise this morning. Clearly, something is wrong with me. Let me explain, I'm enchanted the idea that someday, somehow, I will achieve a zen-like state. And, truthfully, It's happened, and it's happened plenty of times. But it's the Zen-on-demand that I want (Hey, I'm American--I was brought up to expect to get what I want, when I want, If I want it). Kidding aside, though, I'd really like to get better at the grand scheme of calming the self. I get worked up (for good reasons and bad) far too easily, and then end up wasting a lot of time running the events over and over in my head, augmenting, changing things, until I end up either winning or losing whatever situation I'm currently obsessing over. When I used to walk to work, I'd spend my whole way there running shit by--medititating on mundinaeity, if you will.

Over the years, I've noticed that repetition breeds itself, and I'm really good at repetition. At work, I've spent days, brute force manually populating thousands of table records because no one else had the patience to do it. If repetition is involved, I'm infinitely patient, but at the same time, I'm stuck on it. And more unfortunately, I'm drawn to focus upon the bad repetitive moments of my life.

I've heard that horrible events imprint on your mind more easily than happy events because your mind becomes more active to try to deal with the horrible occurrence. And by the same action, it becomes less active during happy moments because there's no stress on the system; we feel safe when we're happy, and thus don't pay much attention then.

Sue's always telling me that I need to let go of my shit and pay more attention to the present. And she's very right. We're incredibly fortunate to be soon-t0-be parents, and furthermore blessed to have more than 2 friends thanks to all the great people I met at Spalding. But the nature of repetition comes with a definite drawback--repetition must always have an end point. You're always working towards some end or means. And such an assumed end point, causes the present, or the Journey, to steal from Rod's blog, to be obliterated under the weight of "the greater plan." And that end point, is always something a little ludicrous, a little idealistic, yet plausible. I want to write books and teach the writing of books; that is my end-point at this point in time. But the problem is that the end-point becomes the universal-problem-solver in the eyes of the man overtaken by repetition. It becomes too easy to say, "life will stop sucking once I reach my end point." And to say that, is to miss out on everything going on around you during the perceived time of suckyness.

I've spent the last several years fighting to break out of this cycle of grinding the millstone till I achieve x. First it was "I need a laptop so I can write more." Then it became "I need to go to grad school so I can write better." But in truth, I'm limiting myself. And Sue's been trying to tell me all along how much I limit myself by this sort of thinking. I just haven't been listening. And I'm sorry that I haven't. She's always right, you know, and I know it frustrates the hell out of her when I don't listen.

So I tried Rod's exercise today, both on the way to work and on the way home. I turned off the AC, rolled down the window, killed my radio (despite the fact it was playing some awesome music by Scarling), and I tried my damnedest to stay focused. I wasn't really successful. Work creeped in steadily. I also thought about Sue, and wondered when the baby would come, and tried to talk myself out of worrying about whether or not work would be ok while I took my Vacation time to be with the baby (of course work will be fine, but I have that horrible dedication gene that won't allow me to stop worrying that things won't be fine. (If I had a back up, I suppose I wouldn't worry so much, but out of my hands)). I also worried about some other stupid stuff--like stupid things I did five years ago or more. Point is, while trying to focus on driving, I thought about a lot of bad things, and not enough of the good things, and even less about my supposed focus on driving. All because I was driving towards a day that I perceived to be becoming "a bad day."

But nothing bad happened to me today. It was actually a fairly good day at work--I impressed the Executive Director with my automation, assisted a friend with some testing, and scored some free lunch (because Deb Rocks!). Then I got to come home to my wife, who is beautiful and loving, and so pregnant that it hurts (her). We both independently thought up "fish and chips" for dinner and enjoyed sharing brains for that moment. We snuggled whilst watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and shared mutual relief that our sick Chu is still peeing and hopefully on the mend. Now, I'm up here writing. This is a good day all around. In fact, it's pretty great, approaching grand, even. But yet, why would I assume otherwise from the get-go?

So what was the point of all of this? Why have I rambled on so long? Well, I guess I'm starting to understand what Sue's been saying all along. There is something more to life than the day-to-dailies. Something more than crossing things off an index card to-do list. Something more than going through the motions. I need to learn to embrace this "something more." To experience things in the moment, allow myself the emotional space to feel my actions and not just my fuckups.

My mind isn't quiet. And I'll never say that I lived a life without regrets, but I'm learning.

Rod, thanks for writing that blog, and suggesting the exercise.
Sue, thank you for being patient, and by my side. I love you very much.

Can you get high off of psychodelic rock?

Probably not, but I've been listening to one of Pink Floyd's earlier albums, Ummagumma, lately, and man, for as atypical as it is, I love it. Last week, while I was working 2nd shift, I popped the Studio disk in and went for a couple of midnight walks, and it was a great experience. The album is just such a break from everything that I normally listen to that I'm really connecting to it in different ways than I normally would. It's also cool to notice the groundwork for a lot of Pink Floyd's later works within this album. It's some crazy shit. Crazy good shit.

Over the last few weeks we had our two baby showers, and they were both very wonderful. Our parents (especially Sue's dad) went way out of their way to help us bring the families' first grandbaby into the world in style. Molly "Marzipan" Lackovic has more clothes and blankets and toys than I do. All thanks to the loving, doting grandparents. Having the families come together like this really ramps up the whole excitement factor. And speaking of excitement, I present 2 anecdotes: 1. My mom shakes and shivers like a little kid getting candy whenever she see's Sue. Then she immediately dives for the belly and starts talking to Molly. My teeth rot out every time. 2. We went to Baby's R Us the other day to pick up a couple of things that we didn't get at the shower, and the lady said to Sue, "I thought you had the baby already. I haven't seen Chuck in a few days." Yes, the lady at Baby's R Us, knows Sue's dad's name on a first name basis. And as a 3rd (unannounced) anecdote, Sue's mom has been making constant excuses to come up and visit. I believe she's coming up this weekend to help Sue "clean house." Yeah right, she wants to spend time with the baby. Point is, everyone has baby fever, and it's great. Molly's setting up for coming into the world spoiled to hell, and while I'd rather her not to be so, I don't think I have much choice right now. All I gotta say is our parents are awesome.


Also I want to thank all of you who went out and bought a copy of Alligator Juniper. I really appreciate you for taking the time to do so, and I totally didn't expect it to happen. If you still want to read the story, and don't have the money, let me know and I can send it to you.


Thankfully, work's been a lot less demanding of me lately (they actually hired someone to take care of all the tech support I was doing on the side for nothing), so I've been able to spend more time working on automation and a potential lead to have said automation rolled out to other call centers (which has been talked about for about 3 years now). So we'll see where that goes.

Otherwise, we're finishing up our baby classes tomorrow, and entering week 34 of the pregnancy. September 30 is the due date, but we'll take her as soon as she's ready to come out as a healthy baby. She's been moving a lot lately...and it's like world shifting moves; the kind that you can see from five feet away; the kind that make you think of the chest-bursting aliens in Alien...or the one from Spaceballs that pops out and starts singing (I like the singing better).

I'm currently working on last minute edits of my ECE, and, more importantly, the 3rdquel to "(Un/Re/I )Do" -- all about how Johnny loses his job (poor guy).

Dave has encouraged me to start reading and writing more poetry, and I've been doing a bit of both as time permits. I'm going to end today with a poem. It's still pretty early in its lifecycle, and I'm still early in my learning cycle, so suggestions would be great:

First Words

I don't yet have a voice
for these words spun in darkness.

Fluid filled, I speak
bubbles enriched with life.

I am complete. Unborn
within you.

Right now, you
are my world, and

I leave my mark
on your ribs.

Now in Print and other Rambling

As time whittles onward towards the inevitable future, a little blurp of excitement arrived via our friendly neighborhood postman today: my four contributor's copies of the latest issue of Alligator Juniper complete with "(Un/Re/I )Do" fastened somewhere between the book's cover. I haven't had a whole lot of time to flip through the book, but it does have some very cool photography in it as well, and I'm sure lots of other stuff. In short, the whole shebang looks very nice.

In other news, the first baby shower is this weekend, and we're doing it co-ed style in the sense that men are coming to an historically female dominated affair. Sue's mindset on it was that she didn't want to leave her dad, my dad and me out of the picture. I'm a little afraid to be entering such a sacred and secretive womanly domain, but I'm sure us guys will trample all over the protocol like a pack of snorting wildebeests, making everything at once awkward and new to the point that the women forget that we've just trampled tradition in favor of food and gifts for all expectant parents.

On the Up and Up (with fingers crossed)

Despite being scheduled 2nd shift during a packet week, I successfully completed and sent my 33 page first draft of the ECE last Friday. And while the pressure's not completely off, I feel markedly relieved to be at least done with the drafting stage. For me, drafting is the pits. In a way, critical papers are kind of easier than creative pieces because you have to structure them very thoroughly, and such structuring leads pretty much in one direction: supporting your thesis and proving it. The lack of the creative spark in such composition, makes critical sentence slugging kind of boring after a few pages. While thinking up the things to say, and researching is very exciting, laying it all down is pretty boring.

But at least until I hear back from Louise, I'm taking a break on the ECE and working on some new creative material and getting back to reading non-research books. I'm currently about halfway through Barthelme's Forty Stories, some of which I really like, and other bits that are just a bit too quirky to really capture me. I'm also reading Rachel Harper's book out loud 1 chapter per day to Sue. It's a great book, and I'm really glad that it was picked for this fall's book in common for fiction. Our nightly poem is coming from the Poetry section of McSweeney's Quarterly vol 23--they do this big poetry chain thing where 10 poets pick 10 poems. Since I haven't read much poetry, I'm hoping all the exposure will turn me on to some more people. So far, it's been kind of lukewarm; Dave's book was much better in every way. I'm also looking forward to reading Lincoln's Melancholy, the new issue of Fence, Opium4, Democracy (Joan Didion), and Demonology (Rick Moody). If I get through that, I'll be about half way through the list of books that I considered for this semester.

Change sucks until it happens, then everything's cool till it's about to happen again

For me, the writing area is a sacred place. There's a certain sense of comfort mixed with intention loaded into such a place. I guess there's probably a fair amount of psychobabble I could dig up to further establish this point, but I'll just point out that most sleep deprivation studies say that the leading cause for insomnia is because the bed is being used for things other than sleep and sex. Isolate your area, and it becomes damn near magical.

Anyway, in addition to being very attached to my area, I'm also very attached to not changing things. Today we changed things. With the baby on the way, we moved the futon couch upstairs into my room, and in order to get it to fit we had to do a lot of shuffling. One of my book cases moved around the corner into the other attic room, Sue's drawing table shifted 90 degrees to the right, a lot of her fabric found a new home, our D&D bookshelf galavanted across the threshold, and most terrifyingly (for me at least [until now]), my desk had to move. Granted, it was just a straight slide from one side of the room to the other, but god you'd think I was taking an icepick in the forehead for it....I whined a lot. And Sue persisted. In the end, she was right to make me move (she always is), but what a shift.

I have an "L" shaped desk and a slanty roofed attic. Originally, the slanty wall was to my left (and covered in index cards, papers, and other random stuff). The short arm of the desk faced doorward, and the long arm was to my right (so basically I had to walk the long way around my desk to sit down. Cramped and narrow, it became very cave-ish up in the attic. Now the long arm is against the wall where the other bookshelf used to be. It's pretty swank-ish (now that I'm getting used to it). Here are a coupla pics. For a long time, I've been thinking about getting a picture of my writing area up, but apathy always took center stage. Does anyone else share a sense of insanity with their writing areas? What kind of crap do the rest of you put around your writing nooks?

Metaphysical Angst and other BS

I live in a brick rowhouse in lovely downtown Lawrence Park, a suburb subsidized entirely by GE (well at least it was back in the day). All the rowhouses are pretty much the same looking, with the only major difference being open porch vs. closed porch, duplex vs. quad. I have an open porch quad (middle) layout (in case you were wondering). These houses are damn nigh centenarians, and despite creaky floors, small kitchens, and "old man showers" in the basement, they're generally quite wonderful, especially in heat dissipation. Well, that is until the daily high temp breaks 90. And that's exactly what's happened the last few days. It's 22:00ish now and 86 outside and 85 inside, 80% humidity on both sides. In short, summer in Erie sucks. I'd much rather be shivering in my attic office than sweating on my porch hoping that 1. my laptop doesn't overheat 2. I don't get eaten alive by bugs and 3. that sometime before I go to sleep it'll cool down a little bit somewhere.

Of course, all of this heat comes at a pretty rotten time. I'm two arms deep in ECE, and it's starting to stink. By stink, I mean rot. By rot I mean that I'm currently writing the third draft of my first draft. WHAT?! Yes, that's right. It all came about because I have this wonderful talent, see. I can read a book with intent to write on it, then I can read supporting books, one after another, for weeks. This ability allows me to think of all kinds of wonderful connections, explanations, and beautifully tight critical prose. BUT. This ability manifests in logorrhea. Basically, it's a left handed skill that allows me to talk about things in a manner that is logical to me...not anyone else. Also this process tends to lend itself to considerable over-writing. Packet 1's response told me that 1. I have 4 ECE topics worth of ambition started, and 2. None of what I'm writing would make any sense to the average reader of an ECE.

So draft 1, revision 2 began, and fortunately died at only 4 pages (Draft 1 v1, was fifteen before it got shot down). Rev 2 died thanks to a lot of good conversation with Sue. She made me consider the "Why" of everything in a much more logical manner than I was able to conceptualize under my own left-handedness.

In short, instead of writing about how Postmodern literary theory operates to create a layered ontology within Ben Marcus' Age of Wire and String, I'm writing Why Marcus needed to make an ontology, and how it relates to the reader in a meaningful way--it's really almost the same thing, but not at all...

I do miss writing fiction.

Angst. Angst.

P.S. We went to my mom's today to escape into some AC, and got to see the original "Sweet Dreams" music video along with other 80s music videos on the magical Cable TV box. Someday, maybe I too can join the modern world and have cable channels other than Discovery. Maybe even a tv with a remote... Nah. Bitching about such lack is much more fun.

I gotta baby on the way

In case you haven't noticed from before, my wife and I are expecting to have a meeting with the ol' stork here in September. And though the drudgery of my gloamish job along with the stress of throwing together a 25-40 page masterpiece of critical writing have really been sapping my excitement for this upcoming event, I'm still really excited for the whole shebang to get on with the shebanging.

The due date is still pretty firmly the end of September, but Sue's fairly confident that the Ides of the moth sounds much better and I have to agree. Sooner than later, as long as sooner is a safe time for sooner to happen so that she won't have to hop onto a respirator or spend any unnecessary time in the hospital (Molly: when you decide to emerge, do so in a healthy state of mind. K. thx. bye.). In any event, that means Molly will be either a Virgo or a Libra. Sue's a Libra, and well that works good with me...but two balancers in the house may lead towards some headbutting (good thing I have that archery thing going on with the saggitarius bit...so I can snipe from a distance).

In all truth, I really don't know much of anything about astrology, so I'm really babbling, babbling more as a foregrounding to the lovely background images of the baby's room that we've taken pictures of. It's truly a wonderful mural, painted of course by Sue. So take a look.

In other news, as I've mentioned, I've been crunching away on the ole ECE, and after reading seven books of research and rereading The Age of Wire and String, I'm thoroughly ready to move on to something else. It's definitely one of those "I've conceptualized the paper, but I don't really want to write it" moments. I'm sure you all know what I mean.

Musically, I recently picked up Jill Tracy, Emilie Autumn, Buck Tick, and Tre Lux. Jill, Emilie and Tre Lux are all goth-vein stuff of varying levels of angst. Buck Tick was actually for Sue, and it's a Malise Mizer kinda sounding gothy J-rock band. It's pretty good, but that album lacks in consistency--about half of it is harpsichord darkness, and the other half is ska/Dick Dale kinda stuff...really off putting if you ask me. Tre Lux, a solo album from one of the girls of Switchblade Symphony is all cover songs of popular music...Weird in a gothy way. "Yellow," "Blackhole Sun," and "Karma Police" are among my favorite covers on the album. Sue hates Tre Lux. She says the girl's voice sounds like a cat being skinned alive...yet she likes Switchblade Symphony, which sounds about the same....go figure. Jill Tracy is pretty much a spooky piano. It makes me think of the flamenco dancers' music along with a little Addam's family and Elvira all jumbled together. Odd but interesting. Emilie Autumn is a very Dresden Dollsish type with lots of piano/harpsichord and violin work. I particularly love "Gothic Lolita" because it makes me think of the Harajuku goth scene as well as Nabokov's Lolita (which the song is probably based off of). The album is smart, angry, and very dark.

Happiness + Rejection letter = The New High

So I got a personalized Rejection letter today from Maisonneuve. It's the first non-form letter I've received, so I was pretty excited. It was for the story "Abject Objectivity Goes for a Walk," and of it they said "Everyone here who read this piece appreciated [my] ability to explore such a clever idea so thoroughly, but in the end we decided that the documentation of details becomes too tiring before the end of the story." (Oh Rod, why didn't I send this story to you for feedback back sometime in April? You said the same thing...)

In any event, they invited me to submit to them again, so on the eve of the eve of my best friend's wedding, I'm pretty happy.

Some Very Good News

So back in college, one of the primary thrusts that got me into the whole creative writing thing were the classes I took from Ann Pancake. Ann's a phenomenal writer, and her first book, "Given Ground" won the 2000 Bakeless Prize. I just found out today, that her first novel is due out sometime this October. Here's the Amazon.com Preorder link. The Novel titled "How Strange this Weather has Been" is to be about Mountaintop Removal, a topic that I know is close to a lot of your hearts. I remember a couple of years ago, Ann and her sister made a documentary called Black Diamonds about that same subject. Her fiction is very Faulkneresque with a heavy amount of grit and strong, almost poetic language. I think just about all of you would like what she has to offer. So if you're looking for a book in October, keep Ann Pancake in mind.

Oh and those of you living in Kentucky, Ann will be in Lexington in September to do a reading. Her readings are awesome, so if you get a chance, check it out. The information can be found on her blog (which you can find down in my links section)

Corey Peterman, Rest in Peace

Yesterday, my cousin, Corey lost his life in a car accident. He was 21.

He was a picture perfect ideal of the man's man. He hunted, fished, restored Corvettes, had a Harley, jumped snowmobiles at 100mph, and knew what it meant to work hard. He lived in his father's footsteps, and filled those great boots with ease. He had a sharp tongue, but aside from constantly picking on me (because I'm so mechanically useless), I'm sure he commanded a hell of a lot of respect from his friends.

Though we're five years apart, we grew up together, and I regret not seeing him as much after he finally grew up. But I guess that's the price I have to pay for living in the slow lane.

Corey, you were a good man, and we're all sad to see you gone.

Head filling, or amorphous ideas freely morph

So I'm well into my ECE research these days. I recently finished John Barth's excellent essay/nonfiction book called The Friday Book, as well as rereading some of my old timey favorites from Lost in the Funhouse and Labyrinths. I've also bookmarked a number of interesting looking articles from the library's databases (and downloaded the pdfs for casual reading). Oh and I'm picking through Barthelme's 40 Stories (and loving it.)

In short, I've been doing a frickin' lot of reading. To what end? Well, therein lies the story:

Originally, I went to residency all fired up on writing an ECE about Metafiction and authorial intrusion and the historiographic implecations of said tactics as exemplified via three stories: Lost in the Funhouse,(Barth) Theme of the Traiter and the Hero, (Borges) and The Story (Amy Bloom). Well the more I got to thinking about a thesis statement, the more bulletholes I found in the whole process....Yes, all of it works, and a good chunk of it can reflexively relate to the other stories, but 1. I couldn't think up an arguable position to justify what I wanted to talk about, and 2. there is actually four metric fucktons of critical essay data concerning the historiographical implecations of metafiction out there already....This cannot do. So,

After a brief meltdown, Sue and I got to talking and she made me do one of those mindmapping charts (of which I proclaimed I hated [until I tried doing it]), and I came up with some interesting thoughts. Namely, that I really need to actually spend my ECE talking about what Ben Marcus pulls off in the vein of metafictive authorial [albeit indirect] intrusion within The Age of Wire and String. And so, as gears change, I'm hoping that I'm onto something as I embark onto the beginning of rereading that wonderful wonderful oddity of a book.

In other news, I've recently picked up the following music:

• Buck Tick -- (for Sue actually) It's a gothy/Industrial J-Rock band that has moments of Rockabilly-ness interspersed between harpsichords and classic goth platform boots.
• Oasis - Be here now and Masterplan - I used to love Oasis; then I forgot about them for a while. Recently, I've been back into them a lot. The Song "The Masterplan" is one of my top ten favorite songs of all time.
• Emilie Autumn -- She's a sort of cross between Android Lust, The Dresden Dolls, and My Ruin. Lots of great harpsichord and string work in addition to gothy beats and occasional screaming.

I'll end with some pictures from Louisville....

In the Land of Topiary Decay, I'm Glad I Don't Have a Headache

(The Headache part will probably come tomorrow).

Residency is over, and I have to say that I'm glad to be home. Currently as Our Lady Peace belts "A story about a Girl" I'm also "waking up slowly" from the dream of being away from The Gloaming for eleven days. Tomorrow is back to work, and already I've heard from Peabody that the server is coughing and choking horribly after its near death resuscitation right before I left (you see, the server's kernel corrupted 2 hours before my shift was over on the last thursday before residency--I ended up spending 3.5 hours with it in the ICU trying to get it to come back to life....it did, but apparently the stroke caused some unseen [at the time] damage to the automation.)

So in addition to potentially 1,500 emails, and the office conversion, I'll also be heading into The Gloaming tomorrow full knowing that the Razorblade Netserver will be needing an overhaul in addition to a buncha other stuff.

But enough about The Gloaming for now (Big Brother might be watching, after all).

Residency did exactly as residency should, It gave me tons of useful feedback on my stories, a new and fabulous mentor, and strengthened all my friendships all the more. Yes, it made me an exhausted tired motherfucker, but also, it made me pretty pumped as the tail end of my MFA program slides towards me.

This semester's goal: an Extended Critical Essay on Metafiction, and hopefully a pile more fiction...ideally enough stories to start cinching the collection that I have in mind.

In other news, Sue and Molly "Marzipan" had a very nice time in Louisville, and Dave & Rod did a wonderful job into stealing our hearts and making us love Kentucky. So I say to you, State of Kentucky, Offer me a job when I graduate, Ok?

Finally, I've set up a writing collective called SWING (Spalding Writers is Not a Group). If you haven't gotten an invitation and you want to join us, send me an email.

Day one in the village of Louis

Day one?

Yeah we're here already. A day early too. It's about 18:00 right now and my beautiful wife is slumber-resting beside me after a long day of driving, wandering, and eating.

First the Driving. We drove from Erie to Louisville. AAA estimated 6 hours and 59 minutes worth of driving. Sue's dad estimated 9 hours after all the pee breaks he thought she'd take. In the end, it was about 7.5 hours, and all around not too bad driving except for the Ohio part.....Oh wait, most of the drive was in Ohio.

And why was the Ohio part bad? Actually it wasn't. Sure we were cut off by asshole drivers talking on cellphones and eating cheeseburgers as if the apocalypse were rambling up behind their bumper, but the true angst we feel towards Ohio is purely boiled down to a long standing general dislike towards the folk of the rolling flatlands known as Ohio. Ohio is the true redneck state. Not Kentucky, not West Virginia. O-mother fucking-hi-o. But I digress... Point is, I don't like Ohio, and Sue and I both were terrified that if we died in a fiery car accident in Ohio, our souls would have been forever damned to a place far worse than any hell any god could think up. Something between the nappy little hairs living on the neck side of a mullet and the stiff upper lip supporting a thin whispy child molester mustache.

So Louisville. I love you because you are in the South. There. I said it. A Yank professing his love for the south. Why? Because y'all (yes I just borrowed your vernacular too) are so goddamn nice. When we got to the hotel, the very nice bellhop man talked to Sue whilst I checked in. The checkin folks proceeded to tell me that I had to wait because, well, I was there before checkin time. Fine with me. I go back and tell Sue and the chatty bellhop that we have to wait, and the bellhop, in his charming Eastern European smile says this won't do and goes over to chat with our deskman. Two seconds later, the bellhop sends me back, and the guy at the desk says, "Well if you would have told us that you have a tired, pregnant wife, we would have gotten you a room right away." To which I responded, "I'm sorry. I'm from the north. I'm not used to people being so nice." So my hat's off to the Brown hotel, and all of Louisville for being so nice...

Except for the all too nicely dressed beggars. To you, you're a bunch of rotten bastards. If you're going to be a bum, look pathetic and starving, not like a lazyass waiting for the bus.

Anyway, after parking the car and whatnot, we went over to Safier for some wonderful Louisville Mediterranean food (the food in this city alone is enough to travel here for). Post-lunch we ambled Fourth Street, the Main Street, then some of Market before hitting up the Glassworks. But we got there at 3:30ish so paying for the tour seemed like a silly idea.

Instead we went to the Louisville Slugger place and toured the factory. Beware, Sue is now armed with a bat. Do not anger a pregnant fox armed with a mini-bat. Nancy Karrigan will wail in agony vicariously through you should you bring on her foxly wrath.

And now we rest and wait. Wait and rest. Soon we shall find a dinnering location, and thereafter the unknown.

Tomorrow, the science museum beckons, and perhaps other locations. And of course, the commencement of Semester 3 at Spalding for me.

Excitement begins!

**Spoiler alert!** don't read this post if you don't want to know what kinda baby we're having.

As you can see, it's a beautiful sweet and healthy looking little beanpod that's now starting to look more or less less like a beanpod. The baby actually looks like a baby, and has a wonderfully nice spine and big ole' head and feet that kick Sue's bladder and little hands that cover the face so we couldn't get a good 3D image.

Anywho, the big moment. Boy or Girl... But before I get into that, let's go back and say what everyone else thought. Sue and I voted girl, although Sue went back and forth because she had a couple dreams about having a little boy. Sue's parents thought it was a boy, my parents thought it would be a boy, Sue's sister voted girl, and Rod also divined it to be a girl back in my earlier post from the first sonogram....and well, since I don't often get what I want in life, I was granted a temporary reprieve, and come September 30 or so, we'll be welcoming a Molly instead of a Nigel into the world. Everyone's really excited, and for good reason.

So all of you Spalding folks, you can focus on thinking up creative girl names. Winner gets a very swell prize.

So indeed, today was a good day.

Beware the Ramblesnatch

Ahoy! (did you know that Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted us to say that instead of "hello" when answering the telephone?....Now you do).

Yeah, I haven't bloggered in a while, so you might want to take a gander and only read the headings that look interesting, that way you won't have to read too much of the logorrhoea babble snapping from the Ramblesnatch's mouth much in the same way Error gives birth to and eats her children.

Publishing News
Not a whole lot going on right here except for a trickling stream of dismissals...but hey, at least GlimmerTrain and Playboy took the time to send me a letter. I like getting mail, even if it's a "sorry, this isn't what we're looking for" type letter. I did however send five stories seventeen ways on Friday of last week, so my fingers are crossed that something will stick somewhere.

Residency Prep
Can't wait. I like Dave Harrity's countdown in his post. Since today's the first, it's down to 24 days, and once those worksheets come ramblin' in, those days will dissipate like a fart in a windstorm.
Speaking of the residency and all it's glory, I'm going to be driving down this time, and by that I mean to say that my beautiful wife and forever companion and really good friend, Sue (the Queen of all Foxes) will be accompanying me for this residency. We're both very excited, and we're planning on rolling into Dodge a day early so I can show her the sights and sounds of 4th street (or should I say Fourth Street [since none of you ever seem to abbreviate...{long winded southerners}]). So yes, Sue will be coming down for fun entertainment, and now that the sick days of the 1st trimester are over, she'll be up for plenty of eating and merriment in general.

How Goes the Pregnancy?
Glad you asked. Sue's doing wonderfully, and she's been very glowy and happy. We're both glad that the days of all day morning sickness are over, and now I'm spending more effort reminding her to take it easy than anything else. She's been painting a beautiful fairytale forest mural in the baby's room (I'll post pictures after we get all the crap out of the baby's room), and also lots of general cleaning and nesting. We're planning to raise somewhere around $50,000 next weekend when we have our yard sale, so that'll give us some very nice bling for our trip down South.
We still don't know if it's going to be a boy or girl, but we're going to find out on May 9, for sure. I'll be sure to post results and more pictures if we have them. Again, I'm pretty sure we'll be holding a contest for the-most-creative-names-for-our-baby-that-we-won't-use at residency. So have a list ready.

Music and Books
Since we're in our between-semester-time-off, I've had a chance to 1. spoil myself and buy seven cds and 2. Read some non-required reading. I want to talk about that for a bit:

1. Scarling - "So Long, Scarecrow" - Scarling, a band made up of Jessika (the former singer of Jack off Jill) and some other talented people, has been a favorite of mine for about as long as I've been on Pandora. The entire album has a very consistent wall-of-sound/noise-with incredibly-melodic-vocals feel to it. Lots of distortion and girly-goth angst.
2. theSTART "Initiation" and "Death via Satellite" - theSTART has a very edgy rocky punk sound with a great female vocalist
3. Hungry Lucy - "To Kill a King" - A while back, I fell in love with the song "Alfred" from her CD "Apparitions," but aside from that song, I wasn't keen on the whole album. However, Sue really likes Hungry Lucy, so I went ahead and picked up "To Kill a King," and it's an incredibly consistent downtempo-sort-of-ethereal-goth-darkwave-thing (with the exception to the three or four remix songs [which I could probably do without]). I'm just finishing my first listen through right now, and I'm very happy with this CD.
4. Nine Inch Nails - "Year Zero" - While I might not be an "original" NIN fan (I jumped on the bandwagon with the "Closer" album), I've been enjoying Trent's music for a long time, and aside from two tracks on "With Teeth," I was sort of let down by the last album. "Year Zero" seems to make up for that letdown of the last album. It feels like a sort of going-back-to-the-roots-of-industrial-rock cd with lots of sampling and vamping and heavy fat beats. At times, while rolling in my Honda, I feel a little bit like I'm in a ricer with all the Bass in this album, but it sounds Very much like a NIN album, but it doesn't sound rehashed or boring to me either. I'm very happy. On a side note, listening to it today, I began to wonder if Trent tries to Sing like David Bowie, or if he just sounds like that nowadays...either way, I can hear a little bit of Bowie in his vocals this time.
5. Android Lust - "The Division" - Android Lust is described somewhere as a sort of Female version of NIN. The girl was born in Bangladesh and like NIN, she's the primary musical vision for the group. The music is very synthetic/industrial with samples of moaning and screaming at time. Visceral, angry, female vocalist, awesome.
6. Kelli Ali - "Psychic Cat" - Kelli Ali was the original lead singer for one of my favorite bands, The Sneaker Pimps. She wasn't an original member of the band, and eventually, the band kind of wrote her out of the band. However, fortunately for me, Kelli continued making music. "Psychic Cat" sounds similar to the Sneaker Pimps' debut album "Finding X" and I'm particularly a fan of her song "Speakers."
7. Joey Goebel The Anomalies - Ok. I'm done with music. I want to talk about this book. I'm sure all of you know Joey. If you haven't read any of his books yet. Do it. Stop reading this post. Stop looking at Pr0n on the intarnets. Get out of your house. Buy his books. Make him a famous man. Because he's a fucking genius. I read this book aloud to Sue as a sort of nightly bedtime story thing, and the book was entertaining as hell, yet deep. Real, yet funny. Depressing, true, and solid. When reading it, I couldn't help but project Weseley Willis' speaking mannerisms to Luster Johnson's dialogue, and goddamn if Joey didn't intend it, then well Weseley's ghost must have been flowing through him when he was writing. In some parts, Sue and I laughed until we nearly cried. Indeed it was a Harmony Joybus ride. And immediately after finishing it, I grabbed his 2nd book Torture the Artist and put it over at the bedstand. We started it last night, and it's shaping up to be just as wonderful.
8. McSweeney's Quarterly Review #23 - I'm not finished with it yet, but there's a story in it by Wells Tower. He's phenomenal. If you happen to get a chance, read "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." It appeared in the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories Edited by Ben Marcus. Wells has a way with really drawing you into the characters and doing things in weird shit situations. Sue actually hated the Wells Tower story in this particular issue of McSweeney's, but It reminded me a lot of my dad's camp and some of the folks that live up there all the time.
9. Steven Millhauser The Knife Thrower and other Stories - John Seay, a former Spalding student, turned Law student friend of mine recommended this to me. The whole thing is a bunch of Magical Realism type bits, and there are a couple of real gems in there. This is the first collection of stories I've read that relies so heavily on Magical Realism, and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way in that I felt overloaded with the "suspend reality for this one, ok?" motif. They were all well crafted, and Millhauser is excellent at using a 1st person plural narrative, but all smashed together, it kinda felt like a little too much too fast.

What I've been writing
Not an Autobiography has been moving along pretty smoothly considering the slowness of semester 2's beginning. I'm up to seven stories, and I have two very strongly identifiable selves, the beginning of a 1st person self, and secret plans of somehow trying to unite Johnny and Clare's paths. The last couple stories I've written focus heavily upon the nature of the Gloaming, aka, the deplorable condition of my locale of employment. I spent most of the last three months actively trying to find another job without much luck. So for the moment, I've given up and turned to spewing my aggression into fiction, and it's helped.

And thus the Ramblesnatch eats itself, ending the post.

Good News on Short Notice

So today at work (my 8th day in a row of a 10 day stretch), I saw an email congratulating me on taking 2nd place in Fiction for the Kentuckiana Metroversity Writing Contest for my story "Runaway." And it was kind of one of those slo-mo moments because, well, my computer was really slow at the moment and the Gmail notification bit creeped on screen with the power of a sloth on Luudes, but anyway, it was some very good news considering that every day I spend at work is nothing but another pile of bad news. And if you can't tell that I'm rather sleep deprived, well I must be hiding it well, but in any case, I shook my fists mightily in the air and gave a single hoot and hollar in celebration before going back to the grindstone of getting ground down by THE MAN.

The only bad thing is the folks at the contest want me to come down and do a reading on April 15...kinda short notice, and there's probably a good chance I won't even have the day off, so I'm guessing that there's no way for any intervention there, but none the less, maybe "Runaway" will get her five minutes of fame during a reading at residency....

I miss all y'all Spalding folks, and can't wait to commiserate in a month and a half.

And if you're interested, here's a brief bit about "Runaway:" The story is told as a triptych and follows the life of Clare (another self, somewhere). Clare lives a life of self inflicted isolation, and when her past comes up to bite her in the ass (her father, that she hasn't spoken to in 12 years up and dies), she falls apart and goes into downward spiral of misery and regret. The whole thing is paced by Foreground/Background scenes that more or less reveal Clare's life and (somewhat poor) decisions.

*Edit: Here's what the Judge had to say about the story: "'Runaway' succeeds by blending its fractured narrative with fractured formal structures. While the visual imagery flashes all over the periphery and the reader's eyes must at times dance across the page, the narrative is strengthened rather than obscured by these well-considered features of the story's construction."

Another Big thing

So over the last few weeks, the whole of my existence has been changing rapidly--rearranging itself in a lot of ways. In six months, I'll be a dad. Seven months ago, I became a homeowner. We have a car payment, and bills and live in a dense suburbia type area. We have a Wii and Cable Tv (well the Discovery channel at least), and a rowing machine and some karate mats down in the basement. All these changes have really gotten me to thinking about myself and my future and my role in this big ole game called life that Milton Bradley copyrighted before I was born.

So all this thinking has really kept me up later at nights and generally opened my eyes, if you will, to the world around me. I've come to realize that I'm pushing myself way too hard. All this reading books and trying to write stories with some vain vague notion that I'll somehow make a difference. Really it's silly. And selfish.

So I've decided that I'm going to give up on writing completely. And reading for that matter. I'm also going to give up on this blog, because it too involves writing. Instead, I'm going to do like everyone else in America: Vote the Republican Ticket, let New Conservatism take over and rule the country hand in hand with the religious right. I'm going to start nodding my head to everything they say on Fox news, and I'm going to definitely start going to church. Not that I'll believe in any specific religion anymore than I already do, but because that's what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm going to get a keen interest in football and yell at the tv when my shitty team doesn't win. I'll call the players fuckups and cowards and bitch about how much money they get paid for being as such. In short, I'm going to take up the American Dream and live it baby. Live it large.

No more obscure music, movies, art, anything. It's going to be MTV, FoxNews, and Motherfuckin Will Farrel movies every goddamn day.

My kids will likewise play team sports and eat McDonalds cheesburgers until at age 10 they're 195 pounds and then we'll all go on Biggest Loser together, because a family that eats together can starve together too.

Oh and while I'm at it, I'll buy myself a Mustang on credit, and start cheating on my wife with some gap-toothed chick from work. Because infidelity and wanton materialism is also part of the American Dream.

I'm going to have it all..........

On second thought, nevermind. Happy 4/1

The Big News

As I previously stated, something Big was supposed to have happened yesterday. Well, Bureaucracy and general all around gloamish behavior forced yesterday's big news to be suspended to today. And though such suspension put me thoroughly on edge, the relief received and the excitement injected once the Big something occurred truly put me on one of those cloud nine type places that we as people wake up to live for everyday. But,

I preamble for too long. In fact, I've kept all of this under wraps for too long. So instead of giving you a thousand words, I'll give you a picture:



And so in 29 weeks or so, I'll be a full fledged dad, and we'll have an even littler fox scampering about the house. Right now she looks like a little kidney bean, and is only about 11 cm long, but, man, on the sono, she was flipping out better than any ninja that NinjaBurger ever hired.

We were really hoping for twins, since it runs in Sue's family, but one healthy kid is just as good as far as I'm concerned.

And furthermore, I expect all of my Spalding friends to bestow upon Sue and I an ecumenical bounty of suitable names that we won't use; just like we all did for Matt.

So there you go. That's the big news.

A Big Day

Wednesday of this week will be a big day for Sue and I. Stay Tuned!

Harbor Creek High School Chaucer'd!!

Ok, so Chaucer'd!! doesn't work at all as well as Punk'd!!, and I'm in no way looking anything like Ashton Kutcher, nor am I married to a woman nearly twice my age (nor would I want to be (Sorry Demi)), but today my old High School got Chaucer'd!! and I did the Chaucering. And,
It was a rock n' roll harmony bus ride.

I read three sections from the Canturbury Tales to three different classes of Hutch's 12th Grade English students; I partook in the wonders of school lunch food; I commisserated with my old teacher friends; I had a rock n' roll good time (I said that already though).

As for the Chaucer, I don't think anyone was really prepared for the madness of 10 minutes worth of middle english, but as far as HS! kids go, it was received really well. I read The Pardoner's Prologue, pieces of the General Prologue, and a good chunk of the Pardoner's tale, and afterwards kids in all three classes I read to came up to say how cool it was to hear me speaking in Middle English (which to them sounde like Irish). Also, I came to the very astute realization that, I really like standing up before people and captivating them in literature. Any doubts I may have ever had towards a future in teaching are now pretty thoroughly quashed. (So now all I need to do is graduate, publish a ton of stuff and hope that someone's hiring in about a year and a half).

A bit about the food:

1. Since I graduated, they installed "The FAST Lane" in the caf. No one uses the fast lane, because you needs the funny monies that no one has. I lost my place in the regular line (that stretched for MILES) because I mistakenly tried to jump into THE FAST LANE.
   
2. I got free food...Not that I was trying to cheap-o the HS, but I guess my visitor status meant that I got to eat on someone else's bill. This is a good thing because,
   
3. it was hamburger day and the hamburger looked more like a piece of country fried something. But it was neither fried nor country nor any identifiable form of something. I used a lot of mustard on that bad boy. But on the plus side, there were Tots. No I did not put them in my cargo pocket for later (though I was sorely tempted)
   
4. They had more choices than just milk. This made me incredibly happy; I enjoyed the hell out of my Welches Grape Juice.
   

Old Commisserating
I was an art nerd in HS, and all of my English projects back then had a visual collaborative piece to them, much to the delight of both Hutch and Humes. And so I paid homage to the old art room (now remodeled) and was pleasantly surprised to see that the drawling of Frank Zappa attacking dragons on a ship still hung on Humes' wall (my gift to him on graduating), and that he kept my old Drawling table that I had for my very own through 11th and 12th grade (now the matte cutting table).

Hutch also told me that she still had the Romantic Era painting that I did after that Wordsworth poem about the Reaper. Yeah, I was like a pig in shit today. Everything was shiny and happy with all the good memories of HS and getting to impart some oddity upon the new blood.

Hopefully I can keep such a gig up year over year, because good lord, any excuse to read some Chaucer is a valid and much warranted excuse in my book. So pick up your Canturbury Tales and sing along with me as we wend our way on a jolly pilgrimage chock full of odd ball ruffians and gap-toothed women.

Escape [temporary] from WageSlavery

Yesterday I took a vacation day originally to go to my High School to read some Chaucer, but it got cancelled last minute due to some assembly or what not. And Chaucer reading was rescheduled for this coming Wednesday.

So instead of not taking a vacation day and slugging forth eight miserable hours in the temple of the gloaming, I stayed home anyway. This worked out superbly for me, as I received my 2nd packet comments yesterday and had all day to work, absorb, think, and send out a whole bunch of stuff for potential publication.

If I listened to Rap music ever, I might have said that Ice Cube's "Today is a Good Day" applied for yesterday. In reality, I may have mumbled, "Heute ist ein gutes Tag." or "Kyo wa ii desu yo." But really, no, I didn't do that, I did a lot of printing and E-submitting and coverletter writing, and a little bit of revising.

I sent out the following stories:
"Substrate" -- A story about M.D. Stein, a lonely man in a lonely and rotting apartment that receives [and obsesses over] a strange postcard proclaiming proudly in Sharpie: "HELLO FROM TULSA!"

"Alone at the Top" -- A story about twins, and death of the [other] self--it doesn't really work out how they planned it.

"Downtime" -- A story about Edgar and his mindtrip through all the [im]possibilities of his life that spreads out like the flat Nebraskan tundra before him.

Oh and also, for other folks interested in submitting things these days, Playboy has a very Rock n' Roll cash prize contest going on right now: http://www.playboy.com/magazine/fiction.html
I figured it'd be worth a shot.

So now for me, It's the waiting until I start hearing back from those stories, and the other ones that I'm currently working on are ship-shaped up enough to be heave-hoed out to the smarmiest buyer.

That's the news as I see it. Until next time...

[Medieval] British [High School] Invasion

One thing that I've taken from High School (which now is almost a decade back in hindsight) is the role of Mrs. Hutchinson in 12th Grade Advanced English. She imparted upon me all the things I hoped and dreamed for in the realm of English literature within that year. Culminating in the early part of the semester with Beowulf and then later Chaucer. And later still Samuel Taylor Cooridge and all those other Romantic era poets. At the time, I was all about the Sublime and anything that had anything to do at all with things medieval or remotely medieval.

Of course, you all know that I'm a giant D&D nerd, so this shouldn't be a far stretch of the imagination. But,

The year before, in American Literature, I hated it, (with the exception of Poe). I spent the entire year trying to draw parallels to the early American authors and the English authors--saying that Twain stole the adventure story from the British, and etc and etc. It was a bad year for me and Literature, and truthfully, I've never been able to get into early American lit. But,

Anyway, 12th Grade English lit with Mrs. Hutchinson was the best. And I mean the best. With each unit, Hutch had us do some sort of big project, and the Medieval unit convieniently encompassed the beginning of English Literature up through Chaucer. Our project options included things like: doing a report on medieval times and life, reading additional works and reporting on them, creating/drawing/painting/sculpting something medieval and bring in a presentation based upon that creation, make an antic filled odd-ball highschool movie, etc.

I did all of that save the movie (which I ended up assisting with the following year for my one-grade-below-me friends). I read as much of the Knight's Tale in Middle English as I could (hoping there'd be dragons and fights and other cool things--too bad Chaucer's knight did all his fighting before the pilgrimage.) And then I wrote up this crazy story, in calligraphy on tea-dyed parchment paper. I drew a picture of the story's main character (I was also an art nerd in high school), and when I presented the whole mess, I did so in my best early-impression of an English accent. It was ballsy. I didn't prepare enough ahead of time, nor did I know much about the "proof read your fiction aloud before actually reading it aloud" bit, but I did it all anyways, and it was like a 20 minute read.

The result: A for the year. But I didn't stop there. I painted paintings after Wadsworth poems and after high school, I went out and bought $500 worth of pre 19th Century English Literature from Cooridge to Byron to Spenser. And honestly, I haven't really gone back and read much of it. But,

What I did do was go to college and drop the Chemistry major my mom wanted me to have, and applied myself full time in the English department, fully expecting at that time, to study Medieval literature. Well I did in a way--I took a wonderful Chaucer Class and leared to read and speak Middle English, but at about the same time, I learned about Postmodernism and experimental fiction.... Well that hooked me but good. So,

Coming up this Friday, I'm about to pay homage to my Roots. I'm going back to Harbor Creek and I'm going to do a bunch of readings in Middle English from The Canterbury Tales. It'll be my first time back to Harbor Creek since probably 1999, when I made a couple appearances to visit Hutch and Humes (the art teacher). And I'm very excited (especially since I'll be taking the day off of work to do it).

A not so Random FiRD

So today, being the day that my 2nd packet is due, and also being my second semester at Spalding, I'm required to send a piece of fiction to everyone in my group. And considering my last post, I thought I'd throw that piece of fiction up here as well. The story, formerly called "Four out of Five," and now entitled "Between the Lines," can be accessed in Adobe PDF format, here. Basically the story is a microcosm of action that gets skipped over in another story of mine called , "(Un/Re/I )Do." "Between the Lines" shows the breakdown of Johnny and Stacy's relationship and the build up of the eventual relationship between Johnny and Elise, which happens by the end of "(Un/Re/I )Do." "Between the Lines" itself is a sort of nested story that doesn't really "go" anywhere but constantly inward.

Also, since today is (was) Friday, I'm going to include another story, "Downtime." It's considerably more random and encompasses the other half of the type of fiction that I generally write. "Downtime" is both vulgar and absurd, so don't read it at work , and don't read it if you don't like a profluence of potty-mouth.

I hope you enjoy either or neither of them. In any case, I'm going to go to bed a lot earlier than I expected to tonight.

What I'm working on

Lately the ole blog's been more random than writerly, so here's an insight on what I'm currently working on:

The Big Project: Not an Autobiography -- a collection of linked short stories more or less about yours truly--except better than real life, and very considerably darker. I've recently decided that the book will appear as three parts, now tentatively called: [Dark Erie], [Grey Erie - Dreary Erie], and [Light Erie - Fleeting]. Each section is going to follow the general theme set by its section title with Dark dealing more with the "bad shit" and light the "good shit" with Grey being a repository of shit that doesn't really sift to either side. I'm thinking the Grey section will be more of a morass of snippits and short shorts that are looking for definition of one side or the other but...failing on that endeavor. Dark will be longer than Light in terms of stories, and that's about it.

Current stories in progress:

[Runaway] - A triptych: This contains remnants of the story that kicked off the whole idea for the book. A revisualization of certain aspects of my life through the eyes of a very goth girl going through a period of extreme mundinaeity that gets instantly fucked up by the death of her father that she hasn't spoken to for twelve years because of some bad shit on her behalf during her parents' divorce. The "Left" and "Center" Sections I'm pretty happy with, but "The Right" hasn't earned its ending yet, nor does it really arc well enough as it's own story. This is a "Dark" side story.

[Medieval Weddings and something or the other] - This is a pair of stories written in Middle English originally for Sue for a wedding present. They tell the story of us, and a story about foxes. I'm at a standstill with this one at the moment. I'm still not sure how to wrap the stories into the proper context, since slapping 20 pages of Middle English on the page without any form of translation/explanation is going to go over like a lead balloon. Also the story about foxes needs to be rewritten to be more dynamic, and I'd like to make an attempt to improve the language/rhyme scheme (ie create one), or at least do something so that it doesn't read as choppily as it does. When finished, this will be one of the stories in the "Light" side of the book.

[Four out of Five] - This story is an expansion on a period of skipped time within "(Un/Re/I )Do". It's my newest endeavor, and currently it's scope is waaaay too wide. It's basically about Johnny meeting and working towards dating Elise, but in a very asshole sense. It strips away the hopeless arty victim characterization of Johnny in the parent story, and repaints Johnny as a complete womanizing asshole. This is definitely a "Dark" side story.

And those are the big Key items for the moment.

Stamp out Corporate WageSlavery

I've said it before, and to just about every person I meet, but good god, I [Censored by Corporate America] my job.

Let's not get too far into the logistics that brought about the slow buildup of [Censored by Corporate America] over the last 4.x years, but instead cut to the last few weeks.

At my place of [Censored by Corporate America] employment, I work three jobs, none of which are company sanctioned in the sense of having an actual job title/position/appropriate payscale. But, none the less, I've carved these three jobs worth of activity out of necessity to make the office a better place, and, in all honesty, the work itself is kind of cool--find ways to make the office use less paper and less manhours to make working life more productive and have more time for sluffing, and do all of it on a budget of $0. Turns out I'm really good at this sort of thing. I saved the company something like $786,000 in my first year and nine months of doing this, and the savings by now are probably pushing a cool million--all on my back.

However, [Censored by Corporate America], has decided that since only my boss knows what I do, and no one else in the building can do what I do, that I must, in fact, be doing NOTHING. *angst* *angst* *angst* *angst*.

So in the infinite wisdom of [Censored by Corporate America], I've been returned to my actual job title, in my actual department, and the office is now 100% without any form of tech support, after having me wait on the management and craft folks for 3 years, fixing nearly everything in house for no cost to the company, and now all of that is gone.

Of course, [Censored by Corporate America] expect me to continue doing everything, but I'm not stupid, and so not even two full weekdays after going down to the old department, [Censored by Corporate America] already had to rig up a replacement to cover for me while I fixed a completely useless report that had been misfiring data since Saturday. A report that they know I need to manually fix usually every day for the first 10 days of the month. So instead of having me work on keeping the office running like a well oiled, but severely corrupt, broken, and evil machine, they've decided to see how long it takes for it to grind to a halt.

Between Friday and Monday morning, I identified eight things that needed repaired. After today, I noticed that entire database tables were steadily corrupting themselves, no one had inspected the operators' positions for 4 days, and another host of stuff was broken.

All I have to say is that [Censored by Corporate America]

I just hope I can [Censored by Corporate America]

FiRD - I Was a Teenage Retard

In thinking about the whole Friday Is Random Day (FiRD) spiel that I've started here, it reminded me of The Question of the Week, from days of yore. Days in which I was a massively retarded immature kid that thought he was a badass. In reality, from 1998-2003 I was a dumbass completely, totally and without a clue. Thankfully, Sue pulled my head out of my ass and somewhat painfully showed me what kind of dumbass I had unknowingly become.

Granted, at every milestone stage in my life, I look back on previous times, and say, "God, I was a dumbass. So probably in five years or so, I'll have another random post debunking today's post, but for now, in my head, I've survived dumbassed-ness, and am on some level just a goof, or something akin to that.

But anyways, Back in THE day (that being the days of my first two semesters of college, and being the time between classes spent in the computer lab getting my first true injections of "Teh Intarnets") I immediately founded my first website, which somehow, by stunning luck still remains as a disheveled graveyard of mostly broken links and inane pre-blog-era blogging. Unfortunately, the section that I remember most fondly, The Question of the Week (QotW) is long gone and eaten away by the little bugs and insects that gnash and gnaw upon all the goop that makes up the abandoned webpages floating around on the net.

But the QotW was in fact an edifice of absurdity. The questions, as I remember them, were rambling oddities that seemed like half-formed math questions, but loaded with Monty Python-esque language and silliness. I'd post a question sounding something like, "You have an ice scraper, a quarter tank of gas in your '88 Plymouth Acclaim (with with 3 dents), and you are starving to death. How many Llamas are maimed in your search for food along the strip mall strip? And of those llamas' how many have alpacan relatives, and of which county do they reside in?"

The answers, garnered from my friends, were generally equally odd, and took on the form of a rambling, and occasionally, connected (to previous QotWs) narrative of absurdity. I scored each entry with a random point value and then chose the winner of the week. I think vaguely at one point, I even started giving out real prizes... but they were things like gum wrappers, bits, pieces, and other things that could masquerade as pocket nuff.

I have no punchline for this post, so I'll end with a .

The Life and the Times

So what's new about you?
Post New Years, post the 2006 Christmas fiasco, post stomach flu, post-modern (but no flying cars quite yet). And along the theme of Posts, a post, posting (obviously) about the past and times thereof and aroundof the current. So henceforth, posting like post-its, let me post (with bullet-point accuracy) some things that are noteworthy...I mean postworthy:

* NPR
* Pandora dot com
* My Chemical Romance
* Five things I love
* Moleskin
* The Age of Wire and String
* Scarling
* Wii
* Grape Vodka
* Work
* Loot N Pillage
* The Gloaming

So starting with NPR.... Recently I hit one of those milestones (with a helpful nudge from Kilean back at residency) to start listening to NPR. Aside from the anger-inducing drivel concerning el Presidente and his ongoing failures, I'm finding that I enjoy NPR greatly, and somehow can withstand the anger because of the generally interesting format of NPR in general, especially so the dedication to other Media, the Arts, and a general all-sidedness (to a degree) when covering the news. In the last few weeks, I've heard about the new wave of Aggressive-atheist evangelists, how 80% of chicken can have a bacteria in it causing the vomiting, and a bunch of stuff regarding the state of Iraq that you won't normally hear/see on the scheme of network TV (not that I'm watching anyway). But going back to the media thing, they've talked recently much on the "best of 2006" stuff. Two things were mentioned that particularly captured my interest. One of them, Pandora.com, I've followed since early February, and the other a band that I'd really not paid any attention to, but thanks to NPR's constant raving, I am now happily enjoying: My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade. Going back to Pandora, if you don't know it yet, It's a super-fab internet radio program that creates radio stations based upon your musical preferences. Feed Pandora a band or song, and it will play musically similar songs to what you like. You can store up to 100 different radio stations, and it's free (as in no cost and no commercials) and only has banner ads around the player. You can run it on any pc with Flash 7 or better, and it has some sneaky neat ways to 'keep' the songs that you really like. All around, Pandora is much loved.

Moving onward. Number one of Five things that I love (no particular order). With some of my B&N giftcard money, I picked up one of those little moleskin notebooks--you know like the kind that Hemingway and friends used to use. I'm not really much of a Hemingway fan, but previous to the moleskin notebook, I had been using a little paper pocket notebook that looked like it had seen the insides of a ravenous rabied wombat...twice. So I'm hoping this newfound hardskinned friend will be much more of a pocket nicety.

(Number 2) Recently, also thanks to Kilean's advice, I read Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String. It struck me both as a phenominal poetic book with massive massive amounts of kooky weirdness to the point of tipping over the brink of inaccessibility, but at the same time, I enjoyed not really knowing Marcus' world of Wire and String fully. It's hard to really say what the book was about in words, since the world Marcus created is so different than ours, but truly it is an edgy, tough, and wonderful book, and it felt totally worthwhile spending ~140 pages in a state of being somewhat lost within the text.

(Number 3) The band Scarling. They're a Pandora find, and I've been enjoying them actually for many months, but they're very small in their fanbase, so I've yet to actually get their cd, which seems to heighten my enjoyment for the band all the more, since I'm relegated to waiting for Pandora to play one of their songs. YouTube has a couple videos (City Noise) and some real bad cameraphone live videos. The band itself is fronted by Jessika of Jack off Jill fame, and it is her voice that draws me to the band the most--truly it's wonderful.

(Number 4) My wife bought me a Nintendo Wii for christmas. Actually, it was quite a fiasco for her too. When I was at residency, she preordered one through Wal-mart, and when she went to pick hers up, they told her that they sold it to someone else (even though she'd already paid full price AND checked the day before to ensure they were in stock). To make a long story short, she wrote a nasty letter to Wal-mart Corporate, her dad did the same, and she got her money back plus a gift card to Wal-mart as an apology. Her dad was put on an unofficial list and was called to pick up his Wii a day after he decided to wait outside of Gamestop for fourteen hours to get one. So, in the end, Sue's dad got two Wiis, and nearly kept the second for himself, but I think they ended up taking it back, but I got one Wii, and man is it ever fun. At christmas, everyone, including Sue's 83 year old Grandfather was bowling and boxing and cracking homeruns out of the park. After years of slumping with the N64 and the GameCube, I think Nintendo has really hit home with a great system.

(Number 5) Grape Vodka... what? I'm not really much of a drinker, but we were over at Sue's boss' house (because Sue's boss and her family are good people), and they made us these really tasty drinks with Grape vodka and White Cranberry juice. The drink is mostly cranberry juice, but man is it tasty. Sue and I mixed up plenty of those drinks on New Years Eve as we played Drunken Guitar Hero, Cloodle, and Uno Attack. It was good times for all.

And Lastly, on this megapost of nothings, I come to the topic of work, that hateful, teeth clenching ediface of the day to dailies that makes me mean and nasty and generally feeling like there isn't any point to anything. The good thing about work lately (and there is only one) is that the building next door, formerly the State Headquarters, lies currently in a funk of abandonedness. And currently, everything remaining in the building is being pitched. So we've been silently and sneakily scavanging through the building for interesting decorations for our cubicles. To date I've found the following: A large 1970s oil painting of a conquistador in oranges and browns and reds, eight MahJongg tiles, some crazy old cartridges that when played upon the old cartridge player, are tapes of strange alarms and system alerts punctuated by bleeps and bloops of autodialers. We also found some great antennae that look like they should be attached to a football helmet covered in tinfoil so that the wearer can communicate to aliens better, a couple of really powerful magnets, two tape demagnetizers, a slideshow on "Your Telephone Personality," a sculpture made out of Banyan T-connectors, among other oddities and/or vaguely useful things.

But, in general, if ulcers were to be formed by stress (they're caused by bacteria), I would probably have three to twenty of them on behalf of the job environment. In the ever growing morass of the Corporate Gargantua, our office, has been increasingly and more prolifically driving our center into the ground. We've seen two Management layoffs, the stripping of pensions, a massive increase in managment health insurance, the stripping of recognition for a job well done, and the beginnings of an internal reorganization hell-bent upon making all management more miserable than a poverty stricken coal miner with nine kids and black lung. Oh and in addition, despite my dedication, hard work, and massive amounts of in-hous innovation, I'm being told that "I don't do anything" because no-one besides my boss understands the complexity of the work that I do. So to Fucksville I travel and with the quickness at that. Hopefully the train's brakes will be broken and we'll bypass that shitstained town, but I'm not counting on it. Not one bit.