10.27.2003:
11:22 AMI wrecked my car last night. Probably totaled it.
Hey, I was bored. So sue me.
Story to arrive soon.
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10.24.2003:
5:41 PMAbout "Alison's Starting To Happen To Me":
Well, first off, the title of the story is from a Lemonhead's song. I know that you were just ACHING to know that.
Secondly: If you live in the Atlanta area (or will be passing through) and want to see the statue in question, it's no longer at Spring & Peachtree. It's now a bit farther south, around 14th / 15th and Peachtree in front of the Alliance Theater, near the High Museum.
Third: Yes, I talked to Mandy after that night. She wasn't exactly clear that that was my way of saying "The End Is 'Neigh". And no, she knew nothing about this story, either. She tends to hear things through the grapevine, however, and I expect a phone call any day now.
Umm... That's it.
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10.23.2003:
2:42 PMOk, so I'm going to start a new thing.
A "Annoyance which has appeared periodically in the past but today has made itself so irksome that I have to give it it's own demarkation" day. So, welcome to that.
Today's AWHAPITPBTHMISITIHTGIIOD is the fact that Sarah McLauhlin's album "Solace" comes before her album "Surfacing" alphabetacally and is filed thus in MusicMatch. So, when I highlight her as the artist and just add "all tracks to playlist", it sticks that damn album squarely in the middle between "Fumbling Toward Ecstacy" and "Surfacing". As I come down from the acoustic version of "Possession" (last track on Fumbling Toward Ecstacty), i am so very rudely introduced to this god-awful pagan ritualistic lump of filth festival song which is "drawn to the rhythm" (track 1 on Solace). This just sets me ablaze. I can normally just suffer though a song I don't really like and hop back into the cool clean waters that are the other songs on an album... But not this one. I end up resenting her for the rest of the day and i just wipe all of her tracks out of my playlist in one fell swoop.
And that's sad, because I really wanted to listen to her today.
(See, this is a perfect BLOG entry - irrelevant and uninteresting, all while directly pertainent to the author's life. How wonderful the internet is.)
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10.17.2003:
3:04 AMJeff Buckley is my Elvis.
I simply cannot describe in words the feeling that grows within me when I think about the fact that he's not here. He's literally the greatest loss the music world has experienced since John Lennon was taken from us so very unfairly. And don't give me that shit about how Kurt Cobain was a greater loss than Buckley. Fuck Cobain. Just because Rolling Stone and MTV picked up on the Seattle grunge movement and let Nirvana be the poster childs for it doesn't make him a musical genius. If anyone from Washington deserves that tile, it's the Melvins - the band that Kurt got his influence from in the first place.
No, Jeff Buckley is sorely missed. I adore the man and every single song he wrote or performed.
So, the reason I wrote this - I don't fucking know. It's three o'clock in the morning in a city I've never been to before and I'm flying high on my twelfth cup of coffee in the past 3 hours. At this point, I can't even read the words I'm typing as they appear on the screen - everything appears like a gigantic blur because I am shaking like mad. So, pathetic as it is, you are just plain stuck reading about my adoration for a dead singer this time.
Besides, what did you expect? It IS a web journal, after all. It's GOT to suck, or else the blog police come and rip it down.
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10.14.2003:
3:50 AMMore crap from my old notebooks.
The original date on this entry is 4.12.1996. It's taken from a series of entries I wrote while on the job when I worked at the local mall. I worked at a kiosk which sold movie and television memoribilia (It was actually a pretty cool job, as I was a pretty big collector of the crap this store sold).
The series - 55 entries in all - are called "Mall Daze". Here's Mall Daze V (5):
Mall Daze V
Is this a new trend?
Booth Writing?
Today is "Fuck Up Day" at the mall. Every single gene pool reject ever created has come up to good ol' southlake mall to visit me. I want to scream. The barrage of mindless questions never ceases.
"Which way is Rich's?"
"Head toward the sign that says 'Rich's'."
"Where's the nearest bathroom?"
"Open your mouth, I'll show you."
Talked to Mandy last night, hard to do that when Michael keeps making jokes at her expense. She is really stupid. I have no clue why I am with her.
MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL
God, the most depressing figure of all time just walked past me. Eyes droopy, slouched posture. Short gait, shuffling past like quasimodo.
Slay the children now, spare them the tortures of shopping at the Gap.
I want a good body. One that I can travel the world unclothed with and no one would want to arrest me, for they love my body so much and are touched by its beauty.
The past is a freight train that allows you a moment's head start then barrels toward you and runs you right over. The only way to avoid it is to step off the track and onto the road beside, where a Yugo full of depression and decaffinated coffee slams into you at it's top speed of 40 miles an hour.
Yah. I know.
Anyway, In this "Mall Daze" series are 4 entries over 7 days, all of them detailing a new girl who had started working at The Limited store across from the kiosk I ran. In each entry, I went into detail about how beautiful she was, how her hair flowed like silk in an autumn breeze, how gracefully she seemed to move as she walked, her poise and posture, all that great stuff. I would go into insane missives about how I longed to learn everything about her - her greatest fears, her most cherished achievements, etc. and so forth.
Then, there's a 5th entry. It says:
"I met the girl from The Limited today. Her name is Megan, and she is a bitch."
And that's it. That's all it says.
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10.11.2003:
1:24 AMGot a message from a member of Mentally Incontinent today. Among the coolness that was the message, she asked this question:
Just wondered , do you make any money by having this site in some way ?
I have actually been asked this question a LOT. I never really thought of the financial aspects of running a site until this one - it's amazing how many people think from that perpective. At least, it is to me.
The short answer is no, I do not make one red cent from any of my sites.
The longer answer is merely an explination of why I have chosen one form of 'webmastering' over another. It could very well bore you. A lot. So feel free to quit now. My feelings won't be hurt, seriously.
Oh well... read on if you must! However, don't say I didn't warn you.
The traditional school of running a website teaches in "webmastering 101" that the best way to maximize your potential on the web is to make a few dollars running banner ads and pop-up ads. The typical line goes that websites cost money to run, and since the webmaster is providing the end user with entertainment for free, the end user should be forced to return something to the webmaster in the form of being the audience for advertisements. In some cases, that line is used as an excuse to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible by slamming ads all over the place and hosting a few pictures of naked girls.
Virtually all of my online presence is based around a user reading content on my site. I write these long stories, boring and silly and whatnot. It is my 'call to action' that the reader read through them and at the end of it all determine if the story (or another) belongs in a book, or make some judgement on the story in some way. This means that reading comprehension is a pretty important factor to achieving my goal - entertaining people with my writing.
Placing a red and blue flashing square on my website explaining to the user that if they visit a 'sports-related' message board, they will have the chance to see a large busted woman in a tight t-shirt bending over and smiling at a camera goes a long way toward completely demolishing the user's focus on the material. Likewise, pop-up windows flying all over the place advertising a new DVD release or what-have-you simply drives the user batty before they even get a chance to read what I've asked them to read. I don't want people to start a story in a bad mood. That's just silly.
After all is said and done, the bottom line is that I hope all of my efforts will translate into selling books. Big, thick books that were created, in part, by the people reading them. I hope to create a solid base of people who really like what it is I write, who will tell other people that what I write is worth checking out. Annoying them with banner ads and pop up ads and what have you so that I can make 60 - 100 bucks a month off of them is not worth it to me. 100 or 1000 or 10,000 dollars a month in revenue gained by annoying the very people I intend to entertain is a poor value propisition.
Of course, I want to - and intend to - make money writing one day. I'd love nothing more than for writing to provide me with an income sufficient to cover all of my expenses. However, A writer is nothing if people do not read what they write. Movie and music critics make all kinds of money based on their writing - but honestly, how much entertainment is truly derived from reading what they have to write? Readers are worth much much more than their weight in dollar bills. It is not nearly as important to me to make a buck as it is to gain a new reader - you simply cannot buy a form of advertising more effective than a friendly recommendation about your book / website / magazine article.
I want to sell books. Lots and lots and lots of books. I sincerely feel that advertising on my website would be a huge detriment to this goal. I don't think advertising on a website is, in and of itself, bad - just the opposite. If a links- based or movie-based or music-based site feels that they can make a dollar or 2 by running ads, more power to them. Even writing based sites can do it - It's their site. they can do what they want. I am just of the opinion that asking people to read a story on their computer monitor with a viagra bottle unscrewing itself and dumping its contents on the user's screen is just asking too much.
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10.08.2003:
3:15 PMRadiohead puts on a great show, 2 aspects not included:
1) The people who attend the show
2) The people who attend the show
Radiohead fans rival only U2 fans in terms of pure annoyance.
My friend Liz determined long ago that Radiohead fans are the type of people who write dark poetry with black ink at night in the rain. So, naturally, after the sun went down and it began to rain on us during Radiohead's performance, we HAD to write dark poetry with black ink. The only paper we had to write on came in the form of a cardboard insert from a poncho package. Thus, we have dubbed these our "Poncho Poetry".
Mine:
The Moon
Is Absent
Like my will to live.
I cry
Like the raindrops
Which fall upon this prose
And fill me
With Sadness.
Liz's (much better, in my opinion):
The sky weeps
as I turn my face up
to drink heaven's tears.
Freshwater fogs my glasses
clouding my hope,
obscuring my view.
I sob with the universe.
And yes, we write these upon request.
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10.06.2003:
7:30 PMI recently dug though a gigantic box of old crap that I kept over the years. I don't normally keep things unless they are of value in some way or another. Somehow, a few old notebooks that I wrote in made the cut. Most of them were from 10 or so years back, when i was 16 and first started "writing". In one was this thing I came up with - 150 stories in 150 words each. Each story was a puzzle to figure out - "What's happening in this story?" kind of thing.
They all sucked.
A whole, whole lot.
Execpt this one, I think:
He concentrated as hard as he could on the music. As each note fell out of the speaker, he picked it up, dusted it off and examined it carefully, dismissing it and putting it away only after the next note made its appearance. It was a country song - something modern, not a classic of any sort. As the model-quality "singer" left the bridge about how she was "turning her life around since he left", and entered the now-modified chorus describing what she was going to do with her new-found life, He bobbed his head up and down and began tapping his foot. His wife watched this behavior intently.
Softly, the music faded away. "Well, what did you think of that one?" The doctor asked.
"Hmm..." he said, smiling slightly. "Yeah... I like that one." Immediately, his wife broke down, overcome by the knowledge that her husband was truly gone.
Figure it out yet? If not, here's the answer:
He has amnesia.
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10.04.2003:
3:47 AMWell, here it is. My happy fun online web journal thing.
Whooooooooooooooo. I'm web-elite.
I expect that no one cares much.
However, I'll be posting short stories and other stuff that doesn't really belong anywhere else on any of my other sites here. So, you know... check in here and there. You may be entertained. But then again, you may not. It's all so variable.
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