You be the sea and I'll be the sky...

I haven't sat down to write a journal posting in more than a week. I'm always thinking of stuff to write while I'm at work. Once I get home, all I want to do is vege.

I've been worried that I'm wasting my life. I realize 26 is not the end of my life and I have plenty of time to get my shit together. I've let myself stress about the working world as if it really mattered. Paying the bills matters only until they are paid -- after that, as I'm single and have no kids, I should be working on self-fulfillment and the maximization of my utility to society. I suffer the tedious things too much.

It is time for me to recall what I'm good at, stat doing those things and get paid to do them. This means escaping crap jobs that don't get me anywhere. This means reconsidering the value of servitude. This means finding out whether anyone would pay me to solve their computer problems while I figure out how to get paid to write (and how to get good enough at writing to be paid for it).

Thus, I'm going to write about nothing involving my life. My life is dull because a bad job takes up too much of it. Perhaps you do want to read something like:

I fixed a few hundred items at work. Lunch was sharp Cheddar and hummus on separate slices of twelve-grain bread. The guy in the next cube played way more Moody Blues than I'd ask to hear. I didn't really mind because the other cubes helped to absorb the sound. I don't even dislike the Moody Blues; it's just that the entire box set, all at once, sounds like a blur. He's just a singer in a rock and roll band. Baby baby baby let's investigate the other side of life tonight. Cold-hearted orb that rules the night... oh wait, I actually like that line.

No, that's dull. I've let mundanity dominate my life. Fuck it. Perhaps the next step of thinking is in order:

Why are so many songs filled with the word "girl" or "baby"? "Baby" is a filler word, like "umm", "y'know", "crack". The best use I can think of is "Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon" by Neil Diamond, which actually describes a person offering reasons to grow up. Boy unto man, girl unto woman, crack-whore unto coma victim.

Even good songwriters will fall prey: "Baby! I got my mind set on you" was a line from Matt Johnson (The The). He uses the phrase to turn a song around, to punctuate, to start the show.

I'll go on with that story some other time. Right now, I've decided I want to start some kind of short fiction. I keep making cities in my head. I start to write them down, make maps, create histories. I never finish.

I have thus found a use for this LiveJournal. I will not necessarily submit what I've been up to or what I need to yell at myself to do. Instead, I shall start an online scrapbook of fiction sections. I don't get enough practice telling stories. This will become the place for my expressionist growth.

You can come here to read an idea. Perhaps you'll like the idea and riff on it yourself. If you do, let me know what you get, what helped you, what didn't. Perhaps I'll put a bunch of them together, cook them and serve as a future book.

I keep thinking about Over the Rhine, a great band from Cincinnati. There are some black and white photos of the neighborhood that named the band on their web site. I want a cityscape as easy to walk into as that picture (http://overtherhine.com/story/).

Now I shall start.

-and so the quest is declared, ps/d

Coming Back to Life

{The following is a rough draft. Very rough.}

It's not polite to joke about Martin Road. Of course everyone does.

It's hard for me to bite my tongue. I walk out of the subway station on Martin and Fichune and the smell hits me -- peanut oil is burning. Strung-out kids are selling bootleg movies and speaking in tongues.

I'm closer to Grandentine Boulevard than I am to the suburbs. I start walking briskly up Martin toward the only brand-name store in the neighborhood. These three blocks always drive me nuts. I shouldn't be lost. I used to live in a lousier place. Still, I'm ready to piss myself.

I pass two bodegas along the way. The first has Jesus candles blocking both windows. The candles spell "He cries for you", blue candles forming the letters and white ones forming the background. This store sells the best sweet potato pie in thirty miles, but it's never open after 5.

The second bodega is never closed. This is Hai Dahronn, "Fresh Delights". Whatever delights may have once been fresh in that store have long since been replaced with malt liquor and skeer. I feel the twinge, but I resist buying any skeer tonight. Skeer (schkrokkai dezhalbar) tastes a lot like carrots. You can swallow it, but you won't sleep right. If you chew it like gum and spit it out once you feel itchy, you'll be tweaking for a good few hours. Chew a little more before work and you'll be a great drone for the day. When you come down, you'll feel like you watched a short movie of your workday and now you're ready for bed. You will dream about monsters, but you'll be fine.

Yeah, us ghosties aren't supposed to know about skeer. I wear a tie. Other folks on skeer ask me how I don't fuck up my work on skeer -- type meaningless lines, say exactly what I'm thinking instead of lying deftly, twitch uncontrollably and get hauled into a conference room to explain myself. Skeer is for janitors and folks doing drone work. It's cheap, even though it's popular, because it's legal and anyone can grow it on a windowsill. It's best if you need to do some boring work for a month and don't want to think about it.

After a month, you move from itchy and productive to petit seizures and zombified. One time I had a hard time discerning night from day, even if though the sun was out. I felt nauseous but I hadn't eaten 36 hours. I knew this was wrong, so I stopped. Then I fell asleep on the subway. I woke up a couple hours later, figured out enough to get off, and walked to my bed. I couldn't remember walking. All I remembered was wondering if I should call ahead about not coming in on Monday. I woke up about 20 hours later. I ate a whole pizza.

I can't recall when skeer first showed up. I know it blew my mind that most of my friends, even the really hip ones, had never heard of it. I remember going on a road trip and telling some woman at a bar about it. She thought I was making it up. So I gave her some. You can't really fuck on skeer -- all the parts work, but you don't feel anything. You could be having a magnificent orgasm; you feel like you're in the kitchen making a sandwich.

Zombies. Martin Road has lots of zombies. I notice the zombie count is slightly lower than it used to be. A year ago, I saw two guys trying to mop the sidewalk. They were counting in rhythm -- "huul, sgaa, dinnett, poaway, nazh. Huul, sgaa..." Skeer will give away which planet you're from really fast. I learned a lot of Razu'i while on skeer:

De peddi shkaddaduhn vparez zhdaien? "How much for a bag of your wares?";
Gazaelihn nyarl foiess shkaddr. "Here's a tidy quantity";
Polti iv meenles. "Feelings are landings", or "you've come down because now you're cranky.". This is an expression describing the moment skeer has exited your system enough that you have a normal range of emotional responses.

When I gave it up, I had to quit both of my jobs. I'd earned enough money to fly home and never work again for ten years. However, it took eight months out of my life and added a couple years in gray hairs and fatigue. I found I'd been living in a small, dingy apartment one block from Martin Road. It wasn't until the third day off skeer that noticed the apartment building I lived had been condemned for a month. I went into my morning job and realized I'd been testing cement for stress factors; I didn't even know what the job was until then. I had lost half my body weight, a dream come true. I found notes all over my apartment reminding myself to eat, what types of foods should be involved.

The notes... those are another story.

You have a fuck buddy. Her name is Caldra. She lives three houses down. If she calls, don't mention you're from Earth.

When the power goes out, which it does once a month, you have two days to eat what's in the fridge. When the power comes back, throw out everything. The microbes are weird here.

This isn't Earth. Water can be expensive here. Don't drink the booze or you'll dehydrate.

There are more. Lots more. I notice now that most of them aren't in my handwriting.