Friday, January 13, 2012

Gateway

I have no internet access and am not overwhelmed with things to say. I have had some good ideas to video people reciting the MLK "I have a dream" speech in all regions of the country and then editing it into a montage with different accents and races and creeds and such but I ended up getting no footage. Every good idea either ends with a success or never starts. IT seems there's no in between. Either I take steps toward completing the project or else it withers and dies on the vine...or the seed never germinates...or some other metaphor that adequately describes an unfulfilled idea.
I've pondered the decisions that have me crisscrossing the continent. There has been the mentality that if I keep going then around the corner might be something that will illuminate and enrich my life that I would never have experienced had I not kept going around the corner. And that has been mostly true...which leads me to expect illumination. And there has been the challenge of coming full circle, like the Pisces that I am, swimming in circles if only to see if I can make it happen. I have mixed feeling about it. The research for my Kerouac inspired book is complete. There's nothing left to accomplish. I don't even get excited by wilderness because there's no way to top the Labrador back country. I'm more engaged when I speak with flea market owners of muffler shop mechanics. I don't really care what their opinions are but I've become like a connoisseur of humanity. The differences appeal to me and the quirks (in small doses) interest me. People's funny hats and men in the library writing stock names down to track and kids in jackets asking questions. Blogging has helped keep me writing during a time when I don't have a notebook. Like most things, you won't know your limits unless you push as hard as you can. I'm not sure I've reached my ceiling with the guitar because I haven't really spent the 8 hours a day playing and practicing. There was a piano, a nice spinet, at the thrift store today and I might buy it along with some car ramps so I can work on my friend's muffler. I'm not sure how that fits into the blogging world. It could go on indefinitely, this wandering and blogging, and it would result in a crazy tapestry of experiences that not even I could interpret, but when I first read The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, I knew that I could interpret things, that I had a peculiar gift of perception and explanation that was fulfilling. Gathering the material to interpret has been engrossing but the bits of interpretation I have done in essays doesn't really get to the core of what I'm aiming for. It's all been tentative adventures on humanistic exploration...finger foods for the fast food junkie...but I want to write the main course that captures the savagery and delight I witness and challenges me to engage the reader for longer periods of time, to plot longer cons with slower burning wit. No more cheap jokes at the expense of my employers. It's been time to do this for a while but I was compelled to chase the Arctic wolf into the last region of North America that I'd never visited. Now there is no excuse. I don't want to be a stand up comic who gets away with one-liners anymore. If I want to push the boundaries of my own capabilities as a writer I will need to aim high. I don't know what this means except writing longer passages with slower developing morals. I had a whole essay about Whole Foods deli counter and how the abomination that is Flying J truck stop deli counter is fattening the calves for the slaughter that is the diabetic aisle at the supermarket. There is no plot to debilitate the truckers of America but that's what is happening with the chicken strips and potato wedges and 2 slices of pizza for $5 or 1 for $3.49. There is a magic number there, the number at which you will buy and eat an additional slice of pizza rather than simply buy the one slice you really want. I need a mathematics person to find the ration. The point at which getting the change back is more burdensome than merely eating another 700 calories of fat. These are not questions I want to pursue in the real world but they are definitely questions that characters I create will pursue long into the night. And in order for that to happen then I need to explore them a little...and tolerate the idiots who question my research because my coat is dirty from working IN A FUCKING PARKING LOT ON MY VAN IN THE WINTER WITH FREEZING HANDS. The snobbery of New England bothers me as New Hampshire grows 5% of the food eaten by people in NH. The rest comes from Tyson chicken lip factory in Indiana BUT YOU SHOULD RAISE AN EYEBROW BECAUSE MY FUCKING SHOES ARE DIRTY AND I LIVE IN A FUCKING VAN!! CALL THE FUCKING POLICE WHY DON'T YOU??? BUT KEEP EATING THOSE CHICKEN LIPS AND GOAT CUNTS WITH KETCHUP!! When priorities are prepackaged by Fox News and sold on Ebay then you run into some fucked up scenarios...that I want to further explore and interpret for the future pale poets of American's post apocalyptic destiny.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.