I was feeling really low for the past coupla days . . . about the war and about how futile it was trying to make myself heard in class, where even if the only voices you hear are people speaking well of a certain story, the story can still be voted out of the magazine by all the fucking cowards who won't speak up.

But. To-day I'm feeling just slightly good and bouncy and etc. It's kind of a manic-good, because a part of me underneath is still stuck on how sinister the Existence is lately. But it's a good nonetheless and I think coffee'll help it along.

I did a new page for Doll Merchant last night. I think the Merchant and Eyeball Pale might even leave the pub soon!

Here's a tip:

Don't buy a cordless mouse.

Last night I was in the middle of playing Morrowind when the mouse stopped working. Why? Well, because it ran out of batteries, of course. AAA batteries, the likes of which were not located elsewhere in this building. I wasn't even able to exit Morrowind.

So, because I quite needed a mouse, I had to get dressed, go out into the pouring rain, drive to Food 4 Less, and purchase some batteries.

I think it can be safely said that the disadvantages of a cordless mouse greatly outweigh advantages such as . . . such as . . . oh, wait. There Are NO ADVANTAGES.

Anyway. There's a new page of Doll Merchant.

Shortly after my last entry, at around 6am on Wednesday, I left for Jury Duty.

I set out on foot, deciding to take the trolley rather search Downtown San Diego fruitlessly for a parking space, and then paying for the ten or so hours I'd be away from it.

It was cold and misty and invigorating and stuff. It was morning. True morning, I thing I see on only very rare occasions. On the trolley ride to Downtown, I first encountered the main difficulty that was to hound me throughout the day; if I sat still for too long, my head would begin bobbing strangely about as my mind drifted into sleeplund for a few seconds. It basically happened whenever my mind wandered, as it is frequently wont to do. On Wednesday, my body took "mind wandering" as being an excuse to start dreaming.

Fortunately, I was able to stay mostly awake for the journey--at one point I took out my notebook and did some strange doodles in it:



This seemed to help quite a bit. But once off the trolley, my body was quickly given cause to generate plenty of very useful adrenaline as I realised that it was now already 7:30am and I had to be at the Juror's Lounge at 7:45am.

The place's address was 330 W. Broadway, so I started walking down Broadway, assuming I'd come across it eventually. On the way, I was approached by two separate individuals asking for spare change (one of them specifically needed quarters), which I automatically gave to them, in spite of the fact that I was pretty low on cash at the time. But I'm a helluva pushover at times. Further down Broadway, at the Greyhound station, a guy asked me for six hundred dollars. I rather wished I had six hundred dollars I could randomly hand out to strangers.

I was reading the addresses on each of the buildings, and found that I had gotten to 220, and that 200 was across the street. Somehow, I guessed, I'd passed the 330. So I backed up.

The only place between 300 and where the 400s began was an abandoned building with construction scaffolding. So I took out the lousy little map that'd come with my summons, and began walking up and down each street intersecting Broadway, not daring to look at the time.

Finally, an old man on a crutch hollered out to me, "Where ya tryin' to go?!"

"Er, I'm looking for 330 West Broadway,"

"Oh, the Court House! Well, that's on Broadway!"

"Oh . . . well, I walked all the way--"

"Just go down that way and turn right [onto Broadway]!"

"All right . . ."

I started off again down Broadway, thinking perhaps the 300s began after the 100s. Which doesn't make much sense, but turned out nonetheless to be true. I passed the Greyhound station again and in my anxiety at being late, I hardly registered the guy who'd earlier asked me for 600 dollars asking if I'd at least give him 95. I really must look incredibly rich somehow.

There was a news crew set up in front of the Court House's big, predictable Greek column façade--I resisted the urge to stop and stare at the correspondent, whose TV-perfect hair and makeup and clothes seemed kind of silly in the light of day. Instead I hurried inside, deposited all my metal things in a tray, walked through the metal detector, set the thing off anyway (as always), had my ankles frisked, gathered my metallic possessions, and finally entered the Juror's Lounge. In this big room, a man was making a very boring orientation speech. Apparently he'd been a Special Guest or something, because he didn't give us any useful information. All the useful stuff came from the next guy, who would alternate between giving us utterly pointless, boring information, and giving us deadly pertinent information. And he wasn't very articulate. That's one thing I continually noticed about these employees of Law, from the last time I had Jury Duty to this one, all of these people were surprisingly inarticulate.

Once this fellow was finished--an acutely agonising 20 minutes later--we were all excused to the bathroom. It was on my way out of the bathroom that I spotted a girl in the women's restroom line carrying a hardback copy of Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

I sat down again, but after a few moments, I concluded the chairs were terribly uncomfortable, and that there was no reason why I should not sit on the far more comfortable floor. So I did.

I'd brought with me my notebook and my paperback The Brothers Karamazov. It's testament for what a very good book that is that I was able to read any of it at all, as I found reading gave me a similar problem to what I'd experienced on the trolley. Literature can be a bit too much like dreams on such occasions.

I also had to listen very carefully in case my name was called on the PA. I was very fervently hoping and wishing and willing that it would not be. But of course it was.

I was to go to department 52 on the fourth floor . . . instructions I'd barely caught off the PA and which were annoyingly not repeated. So I got up and hurried after the potential Jurors heading off for that department. It was up three escalators, across a bridge suspended above one of the city's streets, and then up another floor on an elevator.

I was surprised to see that the girl with American Gods was in my group, and I now noticed that she was really very cute. We were all waiting outside the courtroom for a few minutes, and I was considering going over to her and mentioning that American Gods is a fantastic book and that Neil Gaiman is my favourite contemporary author . . . but I was too shy to do so before the woman came out of the court room and began checking our attendance.

I decided that if the gods presented me with some kind of sign, then I'd go talk to the girl later on. Very cowardly bit of reasoning, I know.

So we all went in and sat down. 'Twas a little courtroom with lawyers and books and a judge and computers . . .

After we sat down, our names were read off in a certain order, and we were to sit in certain seats in that order.

I was number 9 and, for a moment, this put me right next to the girl with American Gods. This seemed like it could very well be a sign from the gods, and this did annoy me slightly. It's so much easier to be shy when you know for certain that it was just "never meant to be".

The girl was moved, though, when number 10 was called and put in her place, a bald middle aged man who, from the questions he answered from the judge and the attorneys, turns out to have a very naughty and unruly daughter who's probably breaking parole as we spoke.

We were all asked questions individually. When I was asked if I'd ever served on Jury Duty before, I told him I'd been called a few years ago, but the whole jury had been excused for some reason. When I was asked whether it had been a civil or a criminal case, I was forced to reply, "Er, to be honest, I wasn't really paying attention at the time . . ."

Which made a number of people in the room laugh, especially the defendant, and was probably the reason I later wound up being excused. It was a little disquieting that when I said that about not paying attention, the judge replied to me by saying, "Yeah, I have those days too,"

It turned out that only I and one middle aged woman who'd served on Jury Duty every three years for the past twelve years or so were excused. Maybe it was what she and I had in common that had been cause for our being excused:

When the defence attorney asked the entire group if we thought that we would be more likely to take a policeman's word as a witness than the word of a civilian, I was the only one who raised my hand. I told the attorney that the fact that a fellow's a police officer implies at the very least that he's had education and training, while "civilian", a very broad term, could mean just about anybody.

The middle aged woman who ended up being excused also raised her hand then to agree with me.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that the American Gods girl had also been excused much earlier on for having a job that would not pay her for the period she would need to be retained.

She wasn't in the Jury Lounge when I got back, maybe because it was during the two hour lunch break, during which the orientation guy had encouraged us to explore the wonders of Downtown San Diego. I decided I would rather chill in the lounge than be forced to go through the metal detector again.

I tried reading awhile, and I was able to for at least ten minutes, but I simply couldn't carry on longer than that. Then I brought out my notebook and decided I'd try writing, figuring as this would be a more actively engaging exercise, it'd have a better chance of keeping me somewhat lucid.

I'd finished part 5 of my novel several days earlier, and in the few days afterwards, my daily writings had been to work upon the sort stories I'm submitting for the Acorn Review or to editing some of the last few chapters of part five. So it was there, in the jury lounge, without any sleep for the past twenty four hours, that I was to begin part 6. I suppose I could've picked a better time to pen such a crucial part of my novel.

I didn't get far anyway. It was only a couple of paragraphs before I noticed that my pen had stopped making discernable words and letters and had begun making a squiggling alien scrawl, and that I was rapidly forgetting words coming from my brain before I could put them on paper. Still, after the long digression of part 5, it was nice to get back to Nesuko . . .

I wasn't sure what to do after that. I stood up several times, paced, got an orange juice and a bag of chips from the vending machines, changed seats, sat on the floor, went back to one of the seats . . .

I wanted to try taking a nap, but I really couldn't do this as I needed to be alert enough hear if mine name was called. So I finally resorted to watching the television--and I somehow managed to prop my consciousness up well enough with episodes of All My Children and One Life to Live.

I came dangerously close to completely falling asleep at one point . . . but then I heard something through the fog . . . some dim familiar stimulus of noise that for a moment I thought was even calling to me personally . . . as I forced myself into full fledged consciousness, I realised what it was.

It was "I'm Deranged" by David Bowie.

Amazingly the makers of One Life to Live had decided to use this song in their episode, and it came to me like a life raft tossed into the needy ocean of slumber in which I was floundering.

It was the Lost Highway edit of the song, and I wondered if the TV show's writers even knew about the Outside album.

I got up to use the restroom and saw the American Gods girl was back and that she was talking on her cell phone. When I returned from the bathroom, she was relaxing in a seat, feet propped up on the chair in front of her, American Gods open on her lap.

I, cowardly, walked past her, back to my seat. It occurred to me that making conversation with someone would probably be the best way of keeping awake and that I had ample full for one with the girl, knowing, as I do, so many useless facts about Neil Gaiman. In my head I ran through things I could have possibly said to her; "Did you notice Delirium and Barnabas's cameo?", "Are you gonna go see Neil Gaiman when he's here for the Comicon?" and so forth.

I think what mainly kept me awake from then on was just the exercise of wrestling with myself, half of me trying to drag me over to her, the other half coming up with lame excuses like, "Oh, but it'd be so rude to interrupt her reading . . ."

I think I was just about to try talking to her when the voice on the PA excused everyone. I watched her go into the bathroom before leaving, and then I decided that I should use the bathroom before I left, so I did. She wasn't out yet when I got out . . . I couldn't wait for her. That would be too weird.

I left the room, and as I was going out the door I saw her behind me. I saw her behind me as I exited the courthouse, and as I walked a ways down Broadway, and then I saw her turn north on one street and that, as they say, was the last I saw of her.

Oh. Well.

We had actually been released early, at around 2:30, and I decided to go to Horton Plaza. I do so love that mall. I hung around there, drinking a Chai Latte, and having absolutely no trouble staying awake while reading The Brothers Karamazov. Maybe it was because of the very good feeling of freedom.

Oif. Well oif. That's just about alls I can say right now people . . . well . . . maybe I could say a few other things too. But oif is almost adequate on its own.

Have to stay up all night because of fucking jury duty. Fucking jury duty is at 7:45am, and since there is no way in any hell I could have possibly awakened at that time, the only logical course is to stay awake to that time.

Thank the gods for Morrowind and my Farscape DVDs.

Also for Amélie which I watched a bit of earlier. Possibly the key bright spot of an otherwise generally depressing day. I only watched part of it though. I walked away from it to go to Trisa's house to pick up a print out of an illustration I did for the short story I plan to submit to Acorn Review . . . only she couldn't print it because something was wrong with her disk drive. She did, however, give me copies of Sleater Kinney CDs and one of Hope Sandoval, which is quite good. But by then I was feeling soaringly irrationally frustrated 'cause I'd spent all day typing like a beserker or something. For some reason it left me angry at the world for not moving faster and more efficiently. I went to buy sodas and tomales at the mall, and couldn't help walking really fast as though I were in a great hurry, even though I wasn't.

I got to thinking about whether I even really should try including an illustration with my story--I'd been beset by so many obstacles to getting it printed that I was beginning to wonder if the gods were trying to tell me something--I mean, first I couldn't print it on this computer because--even though it's a black and white image, the fact that the colour cartridge is bad fucks it up by turning the greys into greens. Tim can't print it for me because he's missing a printer cable and Trisa--well, as I said.

So I was driving back from the mall and it suddenly occured to me, in the midst of my deciding whether to go with the illustration, that there're a lot of things that I used to know that I pretty much don't anymore. Something about humility and seeing that a lot about life just ain't roses and I'm better off not looking at it that way. It felt like one of those moments of revelation that shall define my actions for a while to come yadda yadda.

Before going back to Amélie, I decided it'd be best to get directions to where I'm supposed to go for the jury thing and as I did so, I turned on WinAmp and Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits came on and went over me like a blanket and made me wanna just sit around and listen to Tom Waits for hours. I dinna feel like watching Amélie at all anymore, but I nonetheless did for a few minutes.

I wonder if they'll let me sleep at the place? I hope so.

On the top of my list of things I enjoy far more than I ought . . . is orange juice.

There's just never enough orange juice in the refrigerator. Currently, there are two gallons. I know this shall not be sufficient for my thirst.

One of the things I really like about Anne Rice is that in her book Tale of the Body Theif, when Lestat is, for a brief time, transplanted into the body of a human, one of his most vivid, enjoyable experiences is a glass of orange juice.

Amen to that, I say. Amen . . . to orange juice.

My problem is that ever since I was little, I've had this thing where if I have too much citric acid, I tend to get these rather ugly sores on my lips. So I have to watch my orange juice intake. Although sometimes the threat of sores isn't enough to make me care.

I did a new page of Doll Merchant last night. I'm surprised I even did that much, I was feeling so extremely dreadfully zombily tired for some reason. I was too tired even to watch a movie, although I did. I watched Jean Cocteau's Blood of the Poet with my aunt. I'd watched it already a few days earlier but . . . I watched it again because it was good and thoroughly weird. My aunt said she thought Cocteau was being obscure on purpose, which I think is a rather simple-minded way of looking at it. Just because you can't understand something doesn't mean it's trying to confuse you.

In the end, I think she got the idea anyway. How couldn't you really? That movie's more succinct than the human mind is ready to comprehend.

I also foolish spent five dollars of what very little money I have left on Wild At Heart, a David Lynch movie being showed for one day only, one showtime only, at the Madstone cinema. I've not seen that movie in so very long as it's not yet been released on DVD and is out of print on VHS, and it was my first time seeing it in widescreen, not to mention on a movie screen. So the movie was very fresh for me in a lot of ways, which was great. I'd never before quite realised how good the sound is on that movie. When Sailor started beating up that guy at the beginning, the sounds of the hitting, of the electric guitar, and Lula screaming, all come together so startlingly well. One of the things David Lynch seems to do really well, if in frequently, is film really violent scenes of wish-fulfilment vengeance, as seen in Lost Highway's tailgating scene. How often I've wanted to do that to some asshole who's tailgating me. And how satisfying it was to see Sailor Ripley beat the shit out of that guy who was insulting Lula.

Originally, Trisa was supposed to accompany me to see Wild At Heart, but for some foolish reason, she preferred to stay home and study. So for much of the film, I was noticing this or that thing that I knew would have particularly pleased Trisa.

She and I went to see Adaptation on Friday, which was extremely good and, like Wild At Heart, starred Nicolas Cage. All in all, the past several days have left me with a rather positive impression of Nicolas Cage. Which I guess would be different if I'd watched Con Air and Face/Off instead.

Trisa and I rented The Good Girl on DVD starring Jennifer Aniston. The movie involved mostly two-dimensional, unrealistic and occasionally annoying and unintentionally amusing characters played by very good actors, caught up in a generally unoriginal plot that was oddly relaxing. The high point was seeing Jennifer Aniston's tits.

Trisa ran panicked from the house before she came in danger of seeing Friday's very wonderful episode of Farscape, one of the series' final three episodes. What a wonderful show that is. I think I'm falling in love with the female Scarran commander, who reminds me of the Duchess from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The beginning of the episode featured a delicious somewhat S&M moment between her and Scorpius. Both characters are always dressed for such occasions.

By the way, if anyone ever wonders what I look like, here I am:


(created using South Park Studios' Create a Character)

I feel like I did just about everything on Thursday. It was a damned cluttered busy, multimedia day.

I finished the short story I was writing for the Acorn Review. I read it aloud to Tim and he seemed to respond well to it. So that's good.

Also purchased twenty dollars worth of The Dreaming, slept with a cat, purchased Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow for less than ten dollars, and ate at Del Taco.

Of course, I simply had to watch Sleepy Hollow all the way to 4am . . . sigh. And my sleeping schedule was starting to improve!

Bad writers are natural sadists. At least the ones in my city are.

I spent some time earlier to-day going through student submissions for my school's Acorn Review. I only got through about half of them before I finally had to stop, having begun to feel as though these people were shoving a dirty sock down my throat while trying to explain to me how necessary it was. And alls I could say was "Hmmmrmrrrrph!!"

Didn't do a whole lot of moving to-day. Did not, in fact, leave the house. At all. Pretty rare when that happens.

I lagged anyway on internet correspondences, choosing instead to spend most of my time on reading, writing, watching television and, oh yes, those miserable Acorn Review submissions.

Morrissey's right; “The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores”.

I think that's my favourite song at the moment. Whenever I hear it, I can feel the deepest reaches of my soul weeping, crying, "Yes! Oh, it's . . . true! Horribly true!"

Most people I meet in life are boring. Aggressively boring. Even some people who in the past I really respected. Some of these people have now grown up and are listening to Shania Twain and/or Kid Rock. Or are listening to Sheryl Crow and thinking they're being "outside the norm" by doing so.

Ack. It's past 2am, and I'm only just now starting to feel motivated . . .

And I only just now finished my morning cup of coffee. The incredible thing is, when I poured it, it was Tuesday morning.

I felt like I had a lot to do to-day, but suddenly, with a gap of an hour and a half between now and class, I've got options. I'll probably go to school early and read for a while . . .

Just made a pot of coffee, and poured most of its contents into the thermos my aunt gave me this morning. It's a weird, metal thing with a lid that took me a few minutes to figure how to drink from. It's like a cup on the top with a white disk in the centre that I need to push to open, or push to close. When open, coffee seeps out from all sides, filling the little cup area.

An interesting, even experimental way to drink. Fun!

Whoa. What I had typed as an e with an accent mark above it, turned into ¨¦ in the published blog. I don't even know how to make that character. And, perhaps less surprisingly, it turned the mysterious kanji character into iD.

Ah, that must be it. The blog's Id has bypassed the blog's Ego and SuperEgo and is causintg mischief.

Hmmm . . . Lemme experiment . . . é . . . í . . .

Every once in a while, something happens to me or at me that reminds me that life is in many ways a super great awesome thing of splendour in a billion trillion kinds of ways, or at least in one way.

Such happenings as what's happening now . . .

I am currently drinking rice milk from a Vanilla Coke bottle.

Take that people. Oh yes. Take it.

Hm. I wonder why part of my name on this screen has turned into a kanji character? I wonder if it's like that in the published blog? I wonder what this character means? Whatever it is, I guess it's created by a combination of "¨¦", space, and "S". Producing "îD". Very inneresting . . . must dig out my kanji dictionary . . .

Gotten some writing done to-day. As I've done every day for the past week I'm happy to say.

To-day I worked on a short story I'm writing for my school's Acorn Review. I've decided to use a couple of characters that I created for a comic I never finished from a long time ago. The same two characters that I wrote in an illustrated story that I haven't finished the illustrations for yet (it seems to take me a lot longer to do illustrations than it takes me to do writings, I've noticed). Let's hope that this time, these two characters shall be read. And I'll be able to get feedback on them . . .

Personally, I think they're cute.

I put up a new page for Doll Merchant last night, but I didn't post here about it because . . . well, I don't know. I've just been feeling for the past couple of days that I've had to push myself really hard to do anything, and this includes playing Morrowind.

So what do I do instead? I go about . . . doing other things. Like laundry or pacing or simply staring into space.

I hope I break out of this soon . . .

I talked to Cryptess on the phone last night which was exciting and fun. She's got a really cool job now.

Now, I should probably get ready to go . . . maybe I'll finally shave to-day . . . one of the things I've been putting off is buying shaving cream. Maybe that's the root of all my sluggishness . . .

The power went out a couple nights ago whilst I was in the middle of playing Morrowind. In pitch darkness, I successfully dressed myself, found my wallet, keys, and hat. When I was putting my shoes on and one of my laces broke, I even managed to find my spare shoe laces and replace the broken one.

I am Creature of Darkness--kloh-klah!!

Not much else to say . . . I've a lot to do to-day. I've been having some bad dreams that I think are due to the tap water and Victoria the cat has been exceptionally affectionate to me.

I purchased the new Farscape DVD yesterday and now I'm almost broke. It's been a while since I've been that way, thanks to the thousand dollars I got for Christmas. I know, many would say I should have saved it. But you know what? I can't imagine spending it in any way better than how did . . . Making very few large and expensive purchases, the money allowed me, for a few months, to utterly and completely not think about money.

And that, my friends, is the greatest gift of all.

It is hot in this room.

This night I've been alternating between two compulsions--playing Morrowind and reading Alan Moore's Watchmen.

It's an insideous combo I've stumbled on . . . I play Morrowind for about an hour until I begin to feel feverish and frustrated. Then I switch over to Watchmen, which is breaking my heart, and I go back to Morrowind to sort of get out and get it off my chest.

Anyway. Don't think that this evening's Morrowind revelries are indicitive of a loss of self-control. I'm happy to say my little rule is holding up and I've gotten an extraordinary amount of writing done this past week. I know I've got quantity, and I feel like I've got quality, but I'm of course not sure how objective I am on that latter note.

I finally managed to see Marty on Friday . . . we swapped books and videos . . . That morning I also discovered a strange but attractive young woman in the garage giving a professional looking haircut to a strange man. It's Sunday now and I still don't know the story behind that . . .

I'm incredibally tired for this time of night so I think I'll go to bed now . . .

To-day seems to be a day for men wandering randomly in the middle of the road.

First one I saw was on a street running parallel to the 8 freeway. He was an old man wearing a baseball cap, and he was moving slowly, zombie-like shuffle, in my lane, towards my oncoming car.

He was waving his arms slowly in the air and he seemed to be yelling something. He wasn't looking at me though. His eyes didn't seem to be looking at anything I was capable of seeing.

Later on that same road was a gentlman in a wheelchair, and after him, a ways down, was a man standing contemplatively in the centre divide.

In another part of town, there was a couple of large, boyish mexican guys holding a boisterous conversation in the middle of the street. I had to swerve to avoid them.

I seriously thought for a moment that there'd been a riot in a nearby asylum. Who knows? Perhaps there has been.

...

Wrote for a very long time at the best Starbucks in town--I went through two grande lattes there.

It's the best Starbucks in town because it's one of the two that has the old machine, and of those two, it's the most comfortable and easiest to get to. I think word's gotten around because the place was filled with elderly italian men playing poker.

Yay! I've got Paint Shop Pro again!

In honour of that, I did a new Doll Merchant page.

How did I get it back? Well it turned out that all this time I was able to transfer all the exe, bmp, htm, txt, and zip files from the old hard drive to the new one because they're both on the same network!

Was still a headache though.

Got some writing done yesterday, and I think my Morrowind rule could be working. But then, it's only been one day, so we'll see . . .

I have an irrationally good feeling about to-day.

I feel like I might even get something done, like I'll somehow break away from the opium den-like haze of my current Morrowind obsession.

Yes, friends. That's why I haven't posted in a little while. Morrowind. Oh. Morrowind. Morrowind that I played from 4pm Saturday 'til 6am Sunday. Morrowind that I played from 11:30pm Sunday 'til 5am Monday . . .

On Saturday, before starting with Morrowind, I bade myself to type up around 2000 words in my novel in the hopes that all the time I knew I was about to be spending on that game wouldn't make me feel so discusting.

It didn't work. I wrote the words, but I still felt discusting.

I have to find a way to turn this to my advantage . . . I'm thinking I'll impose a rule. True, I've never been very good at acknowledging rules in daily practice, but I'm gonna try this one. It may be my last hope.

And the rule is this:

No Morrowind before 11:30pm, and only if I've gotten some writing done.

But like I said, I have an irrationally good feeling about to-day, so who knows?

So what's Setsuled doing for Valentine's Day? Well, beyond watching the new episode of Farscape, I haven't really got any plans. And I don't intend to make any.

I'm also currently bemoaning the absence of Paint Shop Pro. from this hard drive. I don't think I ever truly realised how integral a part of my life it was. Last night I sat down with paper and pen, all ready to do a page for Doll Merchant, only to remember that without Paint Shop Pro., I wouldn't be able to finish the thing properly. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do.

So I ended up spending last night watching Grave of the Fireflies, which is a good movie, and one which I think the Bush adminstration would do well to watch.

Now I think I'll write stuff . . .

I’m having a hard time even now believing last night was real. I’m having a hard time deciding if it was more like a dream or like a nightmare.

It started on Sunday, I guess, when Trisa and I went to see Rasputina. We got to meet Melora Creagor after the show, which was utterly amazing and I still can’t believe that pictures of Melora Creagor appeared on Trisa’s digital camera for me having simply aimed it and pressed its button.

“That’s a big camera,” remarked Rasputina’s adorable lead singer and mastermind when she saw how awkward I was with the thing.

After pictures, Melora signed a pair of posters for us and invited us to come and see her show in L.A. on Tuesday—which she told us would begin at 11pm.

As we walked away, Trisa and I marvelled at what we had experienced just moments ago—we’d actually chatted with Melora Creagor.

We talked about how cool seemed and . . . well, our fan-glorious conversation continued for hours and followed us to Denny’s for dinner.

Trisa suggested that we go to L.A. on Tuesday to see the show Melora had mentioned.

I immediately had a bad feeling about that. I was really hesitant to agree with the plan, but I couldn’t think of a very good reason to say no, so I grudgingly agreed.

When I saw Trisa again for class on Monday, she asked me again if I was sure I wanted to go on Tuesday. We were in a classroom full of people, so maybe it was in the interest of not causing a scene by arguing about it publicly that I said I was indeed sure. Even though I absolutely wasn’t.

But even later, when we were walking away from class, I couldn’t say no because my reservations about the trip were so vague and elusive.

Well, maybe not completely so.

I’d never really been to L.A. before, and I didn’t exactly relish the idea of blundering about an unfamiliar city at night. But Trisa seemed utterly unconcerned when I mentioned this, so I decided I was probably just being a silly stick in the mud or something.

After I parted with Trisa on Monday night, I went home and found that I was extremely anxious. I needed to relax, calm down, calm my nerves, I realised. I watched half of The Fellowship of the Ring, which helped considerably.

And I thought to myself, “I should really be more adventurous. Do I just wanna sort of sag into a vegetable heap in my room in front of the computer forever and ever?”

“Well,” I answered myself, “Now that the computer can play DVDs, that doesn’t sound bad at all,”

“Oh c’mon!” the other part of me said angrily, “Take life by the horns! Go out there and live you young bastard! You can watch DVDs when you’re old,”

And so, at around 7pm on Tuesday night, after I’d had a normal and sedate dinner at my parents’ house, Trisa and I set out on our journey.

I’d gotten my mp3 CD player working with over 200 mp3s on it the night before, so I had this playing whilst Trisa read Chuck Palahniuk’s new book Choke as the night time I-5 north scrolled beneath us.

One unexpected factor was that it was raining.

This, though, did not become terribly bothersome until we finally entered Los Angeles, where the slick, reflective streets made already difficult to see lines almost invisible to me.

The directions Trisa’d printed out from Yahoo! maps were simple. Unfortunately, the actual route could not have been very much further from simple.

All of my instincts, my savvy, and my dexterity was required to negotiate that hellish network of “intersections” and “streets”.

We came to one intersection that connected I still don’t know how many streets from every conceivable angle except the sane regular ones.

Hundreds of pairs of headlights, sketchily representing cars through the curtains of deluge, streamed past on my left as I sat at the green light, waiting for an opportunity to turn left. It was only when I finally did turn left in front of a furiously honking motorist that Trisa and I realised that I was not allowed to turn left, and that the street I’d turned onto was some strange back alley of who-knows-where.

“Hm. I have no idea where I am,” I said.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry,” Trisa was saying, “I almost got us in an accident . . . !”

Not wanting to dwell on this, I told her, “Don’t worry about, just tell me where to go next,”

In the mad roaming that followed, replete with a number of death-defying, tire squealing left turns and mergings through practically imaginary lanes, Trisa’s printed out map was on rare occasions useful.

Finally I spotted something familiar, something that promised to warm body and soul and before Trisa could protest (and actually even despite her protests) I took it.

A parking a garage.

A sweet, well lit, parking garage for something that looked like it might probably be a mall.

“I need a breather,” I explained to Trisa under no uncertain terms, “Maybe we can study the map or something,”

The place proved blessedly to have a Starbucks, where I was comforted by the familiarity of the universal Starbucks décor and menu. And by the bathroom, which allowed me to pee.

Trisa reluctantly agreed to my idea that we continue on foot, and from that point on I actually rather liked L.A.

We passed a Macy’s larger than any I could have imagined on our way out, walking up a steep hill coating with rain beleaguered snails that crunched beneath our feet (“Feel like fortune cookies!” I said in my best Short Round accent, and then said in my best Harrison Ford, “Those aren’t fortune cookies kid,” The performance was lost on Trisa, sadly).

We reached Santa Monica Blvd where this place—the Troubadour—was located. We walked half a mile before we finally found it.

And discovered that the show was sold out.

For some reason, this didn’t really bother me. For some reason, I felt like giggling maniacally, but I didn’t, mainly because Trisa looked horribly upset.

We sat down together on a cushioned bench because the heavy soled boots she was wearing had been slowly pulverising her feet.

After a few moments, I convinced her to join me for dinner.

We wandered in the opposite direction on Santa Monica until we came to a little Italian place where I discovered, to my amazement, that I was still full from eating dinner at my parents’. It had been, after all, only about three hours since I’d eaten, which was mind boggling to think about.

On the walk back to the car, Trisa said to me, “I bet last night you didn’t think you be right here by this time,”

I thought about it a moment, and said, “Actually. I pretty much did,”

On the road back, my mp3 player seemed to play mostly recordings of Jack Kerouac reading, which seemed very appropriate, hearing his voice cutting through the long dark, rainy road south.

Dreamt I was driving lost in the middle-of-no-where beautiful countryside. Lush forests and brilliant green hills and little dirt roads through the trees that were so thick and tall you couldn't see far around most turns.

I came across a combination Inn/Barnes & Noble/coffee shop--not Starbucks, but a place decorated with a lot of gorgeous translucent, glimmering emerald material. I desperately wanted a coffee, so I went inside.

The coffee shop was loaded with frantic people ordering from the bar, the scene reminiscent of what one would imagine Wall Street looked like when the stock market crashed--complete with period costumes.

Working the bar was just one cute, chubby Japanese woman wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt tied at the middle. She speedily took everyone's orders and brought them their coffees. That is, until I got to the bar. At that point she took out a microphone and began singing.

The songs were cheerful and energetic. I don't remember any of the lyrics. The crowd seemed very pleased.

When she finished her set, she began answering questions from the audience.

She revealed that she was probably going to start working in the quarry, to prove she was as tough as any man. When a guy somewhere to the right yelled out in protest, that she oughtn't endanger herself rashly, she ignored him.

Pointing another guy in the crowd, she informed him that he had a little food on his face by gesturing at her own face.

I then realised that she had chocolate all over her face, as though she'd been stuffing herself with chocolate chip cookies. I wondered why I hadn't noticed this before.

I called out her name, and when she looked at me, I silently drew circles around my own mouth until she got the idea.

I . . . went with Trisa and saw Rasputina this evening. It was a really great show and I got to meet Melora Creagor, and she was really sweet . . .

But I can't think about it right now. Because every last piece of me is still in an utter numb, awesome, drenching, electricuting depression having just discovered a few moments ago that, with the exception of certain Windows system files, every .bmp, .txt, .htm, .zip, and .exe file on the computer was deleted while I was away.

The scope of this is so huge that I can barely comprehend it myself. txt files that contained hundreds of poems and letters and e-mails I've received and written, bmps of drawings I did years ago that are irreplacable, exe files for programmes I'll never be able to get again . . . zip files containing . . . oh gods, my mind shrinks from pondering it.

My only consolation is that doc files were miraculously preserved from this hellfire, so my novels and novellas and short stories are all in tact.

But I've lost a lot this night . . .

I think I shall crawl into bed now and not emerge for a very long time.

Powerfully tired at the moment. But no matter how tired I ever get, I can never ever get to sleep between 1am and 3am.

Such is the creature that I am.

To-night I found myself wishing that I knew more people who were into art for art's sake. People who pick up a book or go see a movie or buy a CD because they're looking for something great, some new way of looking at things, another go at reflecting the human being. People who can be open to art without needing to have it couched within specific stylistic parameters.

I know . . . it's probably not fair to expect that from everybody. I'd simply like to find more people like that to just hang out with.

...

I'm going with Trisa to-morrow to see Rasputina. It should be a great deal of fun--I've loved that band for quite a long time, ever since I first stumbled across their website . . . five or six years ago.

I'm sure I'd be a lot more excited if I wasn't so droopingly sleepy. Maybe I can at least try to sleep now . . .

Can you guess who this is?



Bonus points if you can tell what's different about him.

I'm feeling a little disoriented at the moment.

The past few days I feel like I've been running all over the place at breakneck speed. For two days, I've had need to wake up early and get going immediately. And to stay out all day doing a series of unrelated things . . . Oh gods. I just realised I haven't had a shower in three days, and I'm probably not gonna get one to-morrow.

Y'know, I need to learn how to manage my time better.

Finally got the oil change I needed yesterday. It took three arns--excuse me, hours--but it got done. I spent most of that time writing in a McDonalds.

In fact, I've noticed that to be a trend for the last couple days--waiting. And either reading or writing whilst I'm waiting, as it's been the only time I've had to do either.

And actually, I got a lot of writing done on Thursday--a whole chapter and a half on that one day alone. Which was pretty nice, true.

Now I think I'll go do some Other Things before I fall unconscious.

I'm betting that I shall be able to sleep no more than three hours. Considering that I don't have a job, that's pretty inexcusable.

. . . and oh look! I've got Jury Duty!

Beginning to suspect that I'm just not built to sleep at night anymore . . . I've spent the past couple hours having a go at it, but no luck.

I even got up early on Wednesday, with the hopes that I'd be just extra tired enough.

And, sure, when I crawled into bed, my body felt satisfyingly leaden. Yet even so, within a short space of time I was lying on my back, my arms stretched upward, compulsively making weird energetic gestures at the ceiling.

I have to get up at 11am to-morrow, no matter what time I actually get to sleep.

And here it is, 4am already . . . well. I think I'll try it again now. Wish me luck!

Once more into the void . . . (I hope).

I had a lot of plans for Tuesday that just didn't happen because Tuesday was too quick for me.

I first woke up at around 10:30am because Trisa'd paged me, leaving a voice mail, asking me to call her back if I wanted to have lunch with her.

After ringing her six times, I finally gave up and went back to bed. I was still very, very sleepy, but couldn't sleep for a couple hours due to a leaf blower just outside my window. When I did finally get back to sleep, I didn't wake up again until around 5pm.

I had intended to get an oil change on Tuesday, and meant to go for that first thing.

But, naturally, there were a number of things that had to be done before the "first thing" . . .

There was breakfast, which I ate while my aunt and grandmother ate dinner at the same table. The meal concluded at around 5:40pm.

I then decided to shave, having not shaved for about three days. Finished that at around 6:10pm.

Decided I'd better check my e-mail and found that I had exactly 100 e-mails. Then I decided I wouldn't reply to any of them to-day, figuring it'd be best to let them percolate or something.

Found that a number of my messages had been replied to on Caitlín R. Kiernan's message board and replied to most of them . . .

. . . and by the time I was done with computer dealings, it was 7pm. And since I knew I wanted to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer at 8pm, I dully admitted defeat, decided I'd get the oil change on Wednesday, and instead used the hour gap to go out and buy a latte and a Morrissey CD.

Oh well. So much for my commitments to myself.

It was one of the best Buffy episodes I've seen in a while though, so at least I didn't feel cheated.

After that, I did a page for Doll Merchant, ate lunch and/or dinner, and am now about to work on my novel until sleep comes . . .

Well here I am again, having once again desired to go to sleep earlier and having once again . . . not.

And why not? Because I'm silly I guess.

It's true, I did have an especially large quantity of coffee to-day. But I, er . . . what was I saying?

I'm feeling really disjointed right now. Where was I going? Who knows? I guess from here I'll just start talking about what a good day I had . . .

What a good day I had! I met this really cool person named Mary with whom I've a lot of tastes in common.

I wrote a bad poem on purpose, and I got to buy Trisa dinner and pay her back for the Tori Amos ticket she bought me.

I gotta be honest with you, I'm feeling a little dopey right now. Really loopy.

Before class, I got real comfortable, sitting on a bench, reading The Brothers Karamazov. In fact, that's it! That's the reason--Dostoevsky's the one responsible for my goofy mood!

Ah, jeez. Maybe it's just because my body's plain exasperated at my inconstant sleeping demands.

Very well, me. I shall go to sleep now. But I can't promise you I won't do twenty things first--ha!

I am so sleepy. I really ought to go back to sleep, but I don't go back to sleep because I get to thinking about all the things I can get done to-day if I continue to stay awake.

I went to sleep at 6am so I really technically oughtn't stay up . . . I wanted to actually even go to bed earlier than 6am but I didn't--due to a combination of the fact that I just remembered I needed to complete a school assignment (I got to make a flyer for the school student creative writing/art journal for which I'm part of the editorial staff this semester) and the fact that I suddenly had an incredibly strong urge to make Chiana desktop schemes. I spent about an hour digging around the web for big, good quality Chiana pictures . . .

Maybe I shall go back to sleep . . . it'd only be healthy, after all.

I woke up at about 9am and I felt like I when I turned on the computer I was going to see something upsetting.

But I didn't expect to read about the Columbia . . .

I don't really think about NASA very much. Although I've always been interested in the idea space travel. One of the places I most fondly imagine as being my future place of residence is a space station or a space craft that never enters earth's atmosphere.

It's always been a dream for me that's very removed from reality. Maybe that's why I don't think as much about the people actually trying to make it a reality.

That there are people out there whose objectives in life are things like expanding what the human race is, things like helping this species grow into something better . . . It's actually something that gives me hope.

I hope that these people did not lose their lives in a fruitless endeavour. I hope their dream continues to grow . . .

A few minutes ago, I discovered Lucky the cat sitting in the kitchen sink, drinking from a metal pan filled with soapy water. Realising that it would probably make him sick, I gently made it clear to him that he wasn’t to continue drinking from this cache he had found.

It took me a few moments to realise why Lucky was choosing to drink from this pan rather than from his own water dish upstairs.

In fact, I found the cats’ water dish to be completely full—it looked as if no cat had drank from it all day.

The reason; all three cats are accustomed to drinking from Hershey the dog’s water dish, which has gone with Hershey and my aunt to my aunt’s mother’s house in Arizona. For four days.

I’m really not sure how to resolve this situation. I welcome suggestions . . .

My grandmother forbids the cats from using any people dishes (although I did, just a moment ago, fill such a bowl with water and hold it up to Lucky’s face until he had his fill). And I can’t think of where I might find an alternate container this evening that I can place in the spot where Hershey’s bowl is usually found.

I could move the cats’ actual dish downstairs, except I’m not wholly sure that Olivia the cat doesn’t use it upstairs since she hates coming downstairs.

It’s a complex dilemma. And I want only to sleep.

To-morrow, I guess I’ll buy another water dish . . .

Writing a character in my novel now that I created in Junior High. He was the main character in the first novella I completed in High School--I should say my first real concerted work of fiction I completed all on my own, for myself.

That novella's got a lot of flaws. I certainly wouldn't try to sell it, and I'd probably only let someone I really trust read it, but I've never stopped liking the character, and for all of that novella's flaws, I never felt like he did anything wrong, as a character.

The problem I have with that novella has mainly to do with its other characters, who I felt were a bit flat, and the story's frenetic--in a bad way--pace.

I've improved, I'm happy to say. Some might disagree. But I pretty strongly feel that I've a more natural narrative voice and that my characters seem more complex . . .

Anyway. This character.

It's weird writing him again, mostly because it feels so easy. Like putting on an old outfit and finding it fits perfectly. I wonder if a part of our brain is hardwired with a character, once we've spent enough time with him or her?

Tim bought Glamdring.

When I dropped by his house this evening, Tim, positively glowing, showed me his recent acquisition--an exact replica of Gandalf's sword, Glamdring, as seen in the movies.

Tim's purchased a number of swords but Glamdring is by far the finest of his collection, and not merely for its aesthetic and legendary value--the thing's expertly made, and full tang. The blade and hilt--all the way to the pommel--are all one piece of solid steel, wrapped in a leather grip at the handle. When he let me hold it, I felt like I was holding Gandalf's sword. I mean, it's it. I was awed.

So what was I doing at Tim's anyway, when I was supposed to be in class?

Well, at about an hour and a half through the English Composition class I'd just started to-day, I decided to drop it.

There're a couple reasons for this decision, but the primary one is this:

The teacher was the sort of teacher who fervently believes that the students are better off working together in groups.

Gods I hate that. Why can't I get more teachers who'll just blessedly lecture? What is this fixation with, "Okay, class, now get into groups of four and discuss," or, "cooperate,"

I don't wanna discuss! Most of my fellow students are clueless about what the teacher's saying--that's why they're students for the gods' sakes.

And I certainly don't wanna cooperate. I am not a team player. There is no "I" in "team", which is why "I" am not part of a "team".

All I want to do in class is to fucking listen and learn. Of course, it's probably due to the average student's inability to do either in a non-obnoxious, gossipy, feral format that has given rise to the average teacher's tendency to employ these irritating methods.

I've gotten to the point where I can kinna tolerate it. I'll work in a group now and then, fine.

But this teacher actually wanted to assign everyone a partner for the whole semester with whom we're required to work with on the final project.

No thank you. I can take this class just as easily next semester. With a different teacher.

I feel soggy.

Too much to eat I suspect . . .

I haven't done much of anything in the past forty-eight hours. Disgraceful, huh?

I went with Trisa to a Starbucks last night that I've never been to and that head the old machine! That's right--real espresso!

I guess part of the reason I've been so unproductive is I actually got caught up in a computer game. But Gods, you'll have to forgive me because it's been so long!

All right. I will get down to business to-night!

I went to see my friend Marty to-day--Marty is an English teacher at Santana High School.

Marty wasn't there, but I overheard an interesting conversation while I was waiting for him.

Near the school's entrance, a hall monitor/security type person was talking to a teenage boy on a small bicycle.

"Yeah, I was expelled from Rio Seco [another high school]," said the bicyclist.

"Why?" asked the Hall Monitor.

"Ah . . . I threw a desk at a teacher," the kid laughed, then explained, "Well this teacher was always sitting on people and getting away with it--she was like 400 pounds. All the faculty knew and didn't care. Anyway, she was sayin' she was gonna sit on me, and I got kind of pissed off. So I picked up a desk and threw it at her,"

Possibly the strangest conversation I've ever overheard.

...

Got going again on my novel on Monday. I wrote an outline for part seven and finished chapter 60.

I kinna re-organised the whole game plan, but not by much. It occurred to me that I'm prolly gonna wanna edit part 3 down to a much smaller size as it's disproportionately huge . . .

I started class to-day too--The Acorn Review. The class is basically the editorial staff of a school publication of student short stories, plays, artwork, and poetry. I thought it would be a useful experience. And I do enjoy being a critic.

After class, Trisa bought me dinner at Denny's, which was terribly nice of her.

The day was just plain good.

Dinna manage to sleep through the fucking Super Bowl.

Gods I hate football. I hate it so much. Maybe too much.

I've been feeling pretty ucky for the past week. I think I need to realign myself. I sense the best way to do this would just be to get back to work on my novel. It's been a couple days . . .

I'm having one of those phases where everything I say or write feels to me like exactly the wrong thing.

Now what kind of attitude is that? I need to relax and I need to above all stop being so fucking self-conscious . . . I need to just immerse myself in what I'm trying to make.

I've gotta stop worrying about worth and think more about . . . trivial things.

Just uploaded a new page for Doll Merchant.

Saturday gave me a lot of reasons to be pissed off.

Yet for some reason I was pretty cool all day.

One thing I'm really sorry about, though, is I've not gotten much writing done in the past couple days . . . I gotta stop goofing off . . .

I finished reading Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre. Really, really good. After finishing it, I ate dinner, thinking about it a bit. I decided it was a very existential tale, and then a moment later I said to myself, "Well duh, it's Sartre!"

Now, if you will excuse me, I think I am about to happily sleep through the Super Bowl.

My heart hurts a great deal, and it's been hurting a great deal for several hours now.

I have only one theory as to why.

About two hours after I woke up, I went to the mall. I went to one of the pretzel places because I had a craving for the Cin-ful Cinnamon pretzel I'd been given a bite off from the Sample Girl standing in front of the store a few days earlier.

To-day, I threaded my way through a conglomeration of strollers and their ponderous parents to the counter where I was asked by a pretty young woman, "Hello sir, how're you to-day?"

"Good. How're you?"

Her default smile faltered and her eyebrows creased a little, "Wh . . . what did you say?" she sounded like I'd called her something really vile.

"I said, 'I'm good. How're you?',"

"Oh . . ." the smile returned.

Now, this pretzel she gave me had . . . I would say just enough cinnamon sprinkled on it to, if scraped off, fill a large thermos. I say that in jest but . . . thinking back now, I'm pretty sure that's actually a rather literal estimation.

I still have cinnamon under my fingernails. Honestly, it was worse than sand on a beach.

I think it's the cause of my headache.

The headache's the cause of me feeling pretty crappy right now.

...

On the bright side of things, the new episode of Farscape was really good.

And I did a new page for Doll Merchant

So . . . tired . . .

Calculating in my head . . . I believe I can have gotten no more than three hours of sleep in the past fifty or so hours.

I hate that.

Because I really, really like sleep. Contrary to some beliefs, I am not an insomniac. Merely a fellow who doesn't sleep during the night. But during the day--ha! Look out Morpheus because the Dreaming is my oyster!

I was granted very little sleep on Thursday. Meaning I'm hitting the sack now, as early as 4am.

It's worse because I've felt very unproductive all day. In fact, it's even worse than that because I was actually rather, in truth, productive. I just dinna feel like I was being productive.

I got two more sections of web site up to-day--looking over to your right, you might notice the new Doll Merchant and Links sections.

Doll Merchant is a goofy little sort of serial doodle I've been doing for a few months. I created it mainly for those times when I was feeling like I couldn't possibly do anything with the night requiring me to do more than lay on my ass. I put out only one page of Doll Merchant at a time, and each page is only six panels.

So when I'm feeling all useless, I can almost always con myself into working by saying, "Oh come on. It's just six measly panels . . ." and since the artwork in Doll Merchant is kinna willfully rough, it's easy work. But it often acts as a springboard into getting some more serious work done.

And really, I'm rather happy with Doll Merchant so far . . . although I have no idea where the story's going.

I'm gonna see Ziggy Stardust at the cinema on Saturday! Yay!!!

I think I've contracted a bit too much energy this evening. Maybe it's just for having gotten some real espresso at a Starbucks I didn't even know until this evening uses the old (better) machine. And it happens to be one of my favourite Starbucks to write at.

Didn't get as much done to-night thanks to Hershey the dog, whom we've barricaded in the kitchen so's he won't throw up on the carpet anymore. He gets pretty lonely I guess because he kept crying whenever I left him alone. I finally sat out there with him for awhile, reading Sartre until he went to sleep . . . and I quietly slipped back into here.

I have to get up horrendously early (11am!) so I'd better cut this off here . . .

Ciao!

Hm. My latest post appears now . . . only it appears multiple times. Oh well. I should just be happy this thing's working again . . .

At around 6:30pm on Tuesday night, I decided to pop over to Starbucks before it was time for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to start.

While I was getting out of my car, I received a voice mail. It was Ted, my biological father, informing me that there had been a death in the family.

I had listened to this voice mail through the nearest pay phone to the Starbucks, which had been on the other side of the trolley tracks. Dodging an oncoming trolley on my way back, I tried to analyse the situation.

What could it mean, that he refrained from telling me who had died? I decided that it probably meant my grandmother Ruby Dean, who’s Ted’s mother, and who sends me money to help pay for my school and basic needs, had passed away.

She’s always been very generous to me and as I got back in my car, I thought to myself how horrible it would be if she was dead. But, I also reminded myself, I didn’t actually know if it was her. Any relative Ted would have mentioned would most likely be one of my relatives in Tennessee, of which there are roughly a thousand.

I didn’t have Ted’s number with me—unable to call him back, I elected to simply drive to his house to find out who had died.

As I went along, I slowly grew more anxious, and became more filled with dread. I thought about how I had just registered for classes a few hours earlier, and about how I would probably need to drop them so that I would be able to attend the funeral in Tennessee. I thought, I admit, about how I wouldn’t be able to pay for classes, or nearly anything anymore, if my grandmother was dead. I wondered if I had ever properly expressed to her how grateful I was that she has effectively enabled me to go to school and work on my novel without also being forced to carry a job to financially support myself—that she did this even though I’ve only seen her on rare, sporadic occasions throughout my life.

I kind of clung to the Smiths album I was listening to as I began contemplating how horrible it is that people die so visibly unfulfilled.

As Death of a Disco Dancer was reaching its somewhat oppressive instrumental climax, I pulled up to the curb outside Ted’s house.

As it turned out, the message was about an aunt I barely knew who had actually been dead for four or five months, and I had already known about it.

I left there at around 7:30pm, very agreeably listening to Girlfriend in a Coma.

I reached home at 7:56pm, in time for Buffy.

I got too many things for free on Monday--this sews suspicion in a heart like mine.

First I got batteries from Tim for free when I went into his RadioShack. He says they write them off, but it still felt strange. Not to mention he paid me back for lending him eight dollars the other day--so I essentially walked into RadioShack, grabbed some batteries, took money from the cashier, and left.

Sure, I'm grateful. But I'm so psychologically peculiar that it had me quaking in my shoes.

Later in the evening, the girl at Starbucks refused to take money for the grande latte I ordered. And, no exaggeration, I practically begged her to take my money.

The only thing I ended up paying for on Monday was that stomach ache inducing veggie tempura. Perhaps that was my penance.

...

I'm also currently feeling slightly guilty for offering on Poppy Z Brite's message board some biting criticism of Anne Rice. I looked at Rice's site afterwards and learned that her husband died last month.

I still stand by what I said. But I felt bad--I prolly wouldn't if it weren't for the fact that I really do like some of Rice's older stuff.

Oh well. "That's the way the teeth gnashes" as William Burroughs once wrote.

I dreamt that Trisa and I were Somewhere staying in the same hotel room. For some reason, the room did not have any lamps and this really upset both of us.

So after Trisa had gone to sleep, I decided to make one. I did this by opening an invisible door to another dimension and simply pulling a lamp through. I set it on the little table between mine and Trisa's beds. I turned it on, and began to write for a little while--I wrote in what appeared to be the exact same little black journal book I've been using lately for my novel. I'm pretty sure I was working on my novel too, and am kinna sorry I can't remember what I wrote. Wouldn't that be cool if I could say that about my novel when it's finished? "Parts of this were written in the land of dreams!"

To-day I've so far gotten a bad stomach ache from some veggie tempura I got at the mall.

Now I'm feeling productive! So now I shall write!

I saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to-day with Trisa and I ruled that it was almost as good as Clash of the Titans.

Seriously, it wasn't bad. Chris Columbus made a bunch of miscalculations of course, but the fact that he's so timid with any sort of "identifiable style" as my friend Marty put it, at least made it so that the screenplay pretty much stood out from it.

The biggest miscalculation, I feel, was the need to make the ending feel Super Completely Grandiose. The most enjoyable part of the story was just this idea of the kids having a cool little series of adventures in their school. It's as if Chris Columbus was trying to take something that was like a fun detective or Uncle Scrooge serial and turn it into an opera.

I am extremely tired now for having gotten up early again so I think I shall now sleep.

Good night.

My good deed for the day--cooling a serious conflict between a cat and a dog, allowing the cat to reach the water he had apparently been wanting for quite some time.

Didn't do very much else. I talked to Cryptess on ICQ for a very long time, and in the evening, I finally got a game to work on this computer. Ah, it's been so long! That instinct in me has not died--I still sit back from whatever I'm working on, now and then, filled with the instinctive urge to cool my jets in some fetching game.

The game I installed is Fallout 2, which I got in a package with its predecessor (Fallout) for merely ten dollars. And I've heard good things about it.

Still . . . it'll never be Morrowind . . .

sigh.

Once again, I saw the sun--an hour earlier too.

I was made to remember what a bright and annoyingly warm thing the sun is. I gained a new appreciation for my customary sleeping schedule.

I went to see The Two Towers for the forth time, and greatly enjoyed it, despite feeling like I was probably going to fall asleep at any moment.

When I got home, I found that my aunt had gotten me some old books at an estate sale. Books by Ogden Nash, Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. Somerset Maugham, and Alexander Dumas. I haven't read any of these authors, but it's neat having books this old--the Nash was printed in 1944 and the Maugham in 1915. Unfortunately, there's no year listed in the Dumas or Hawthorne, but both look extremely old and I can easily picture this copy of Dumas's The Black Tulip on a shelf in an average Victorian home.

Also when I got in, I found my aunt reading some of my novel. She seems generally to be enjoying it. The closest thing to a criticism she gave me was, "It's kind of wordy,"

I asked if she meant that in a bad way. Her reply was kind of incoherent.

"Are you saying there's something wrong with my language?" I asked--bear in mind here that my aunt's a former high school English teacher.

"No," she said, "It's just . . . wordy,"

I frowned and thought hard about that. Finally I was forced to say, "I don't understand . . ."

Here my grandmother, who's never read any of my writing, interjected, "She means you use a lot more words than you need to, that you could say the same thing with a lot less,"

"So it is my language,"

"Oh!" said my aunt, "I thought you meant language like 'foul language'. I can tell you what I like--I like your characterisation very much . . ."

But I was still kind of bothered. I explained that I try to be as succinct as possible. I have a lot of exposition that simply has to be there since my novel takes place entirely in another universe.

"If there's anything extraneous in the exposition," I said, "it's there because I'm trying to make the information flow better with everything else . . ."

They didn't respond to this. I find that people are usually only willing to go so far with criticisms, generally they prefer being polite to me to being useful to me.

I guess I was comforted a bit by the thought that J.R.R. Tolkien's works are full of exposition, and no one seems to seriously hold it against him.

But then I read over the part of my novel that my aunt had just read and decided that she was just plain utterly wrong. So phooey!

I actually saw daylight on Wednesday, thanks to my pager waking me up, vibrating across my desk, making noises at me like a killer whale giving a raspberry.

So I arose at the bright and early hour of 12pm. I soon discovered that Hershey the Dog was indeed sick and had puked a couple of times whilst we slept.

In fact, he's more than sick. My aunt took him to the emergency room whereupon she learned that Hershey has about two weeks to live. I believe it, too, listening to his high pitched hacking coughs even now.

I feel pretty bad--I've only known him for a few months but he seems really sweet. And my aunt's certainly attached to him.

All day I drove about as if I was seeing life through dusty cellophane. Was not feeling particularly motivated, feeling more along the lines of bleak and gloomy. Thinking about how afraid people are of meaning, and how I can't much blame them as the truth behind things seems like it's mostly pretty negative, whether it's what the leader of North Korea can actually pull off or the ultimately small pale nature of the goals towards which we're all moving towards.

One of those days, I guess, where everything feels really phoney. I didn't find solace from that pervasive gloom until I got to watching Blue Velvet again. And even though it made me feel guileless and a bit naive, Sandy's Robin Dream scene did something towards cheering me up a bit.

I also watched Eat Drink Man Woman with my aunt and wished China wasn't guilty of a number of human rights violations so I could go and live in that beautiful scenery.

Well I've just stepped in a big puddle of dog piss.

I felt a little oddly dispirited all day and I suppose this was the perfect capper. I think Hershey the Dog is sick--he's usually so good about keeping himself under control.

He now lays, head down, near the front door, looking distinctly ashamed.

To-day I did, as planned, go to a coffee place with the intention of writing but the place was so fucking crowded. Absolutely no seats. So I took my writing and my coffee home.

Oh, and as you might have noticed, some of my writing is now available for perusal--click on the link marked Fiction in the little box on the right.

Comments would be appreciated if any of you have the time . . .

...

I've decided to read H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath, and I'm about eight pages into it.

Although it is full of ominous, disturbing, and classically alien imagery word crafting, I'm finding it oddly comforting this evening. That, and Tori Amos's From the Choirgirl Hotel are very peculiarly lifting my spirits.

Choirgirl is perhaps my favourite Tori album (although I wouldn't stake my life on it as very often Pele and Under the Pink are my favourites). I was a little dismayed that Tori mysteriously chose not to play a single song off the album on either of the last two occasions she played here in San Diego.

I guess she probably has her reasons though . . .

Now I'd better go make myself feel useful.

I was watching Trigger Happy TV and not laughing, which is odd as that show normally makes me laugh, when I saw Jennifer Polinsky.

This is the girl I mentioned seeing in a dream a few nights ago, incarcerated in a Buick.

Well, now I've just seen her in a commercial for Girls Show 'N Low.

Show 'N Low, it seems, is a sort of travelling car show, and Girls Show 'N Low is a combination of a Girls Gone Wild and video of cars at the show. If you should happen to see the commercial, Jennifer--or the girl I believe to be Jennifer (perhaps it's merely someone who looks exactly like her)--is the dark haired one happily slapping her bare thigh.

She looked happy so I suppose I needn't worry.

To-day I also finally got to see the first episode of Farscape. What an incredible show. How have I not noticed it for four years?

I purchased the Best of the First Season DVD collection to-day and I'm very happy I did.

I got it at the mall where I realised that I haven't really been going out very much lately. And when I do, it's to travel to distant malls for distinctly vacation-ish excursions.

I've decided that to-morrow I shall go to some non-regular coffee place and write.

I'm feeling a little melancholy right now for just having watched the Siskel and Ebert episode of The Critic.

I miss Siskel so much. He was the only movie critic I liked.

I was pleased that the special edition of Blue Velvet I purchased a copy of recently included the original Siskel and Ebert review of the film. Siskel liked it, Ebert didn't.

Gene Siskel, you're still a hero.

I've so far only watched the first half of my new copy of Blue Velvet (I'm vaguely ashamed of this as for some reason I get the feeling that David Lynch is the sort of director who prefers his movies to be seen in their entirety in just one go. I'm not sure what gives me that impression--maybe it's that there're no chapter selections on the Mulholland Drive DVD).

It was the first time in a while I've really been able to enjoy Blue Velvet. Having watched it 300 billion times since high school, I've gotten to the point where I will watch the movie only under very specific circumstances--that is, when there is little or (preferably) no noise coming from anywhere but the TV. I will watch it only when there are absolutely no distractions.

This is why I only watched half the film, even though I was really very into it.

My sensitivity to extraneous noise whilst I'm trying to watch a movie is nothing short of fanatical. I'm of the belief that the entire experience of certain movies can be altered just by the sound of a door closing somewhere else in the house.

Aren't you glad you don't live with me?

...

There're about . . . fifty things I planned to do this evening. But I'm feeling so tired that I'm wondering what, if any of it, I'll end up doing.

I only wrote three pages so far to-day so maybe I'll just concentrate on bringing myself up to my requisite ten.

Then I'll decide what book to read next, having just finished Caitlín R Kiernan's Silk--which was, by the way, an incredible book.

It puts you right in the midst of a bunch of interesting people you fall in love with. The wonderful sort of emersion in a group of captivating creatures that puts me in the mind of Jack Kerouac (although I see most reviews of the book tend to describe this feeling as being more Ernest Hemmingway-ish). And it's also a horror novel of the supernatural. The best sort of supernatural horror, where the horrible thing isn't horrible because it's got claws and slime, but because it's something having to do with us at disturbingly intimate levels. Manifestations of how we can be hurt.

Brilliant stuff.

I've got cat saliva all over my sleeve!

This is what comes of having a cat nibbling and licking at it.

Beyond that, nothing much interesting happened to-day. I really ought to have gotten a lot more work done but I felt very sluggish all day. I watched Tim putting his computer back together whilst he was watching that thing most people in this country call football but what I think of as High Idiocy.

It's disgustingly expensive and it's boring. It needs to be gotten rid of.

I spent the time, waiting for Tim to reconstruct his machine, to think of ways in which football can be improved.

For one thing, the players should have medieval weapons. The game should be played on ice, and everyone should wear hazardous, spike covered armour. The coaches should have complete rights over the players' bodies, enabling them to carry out any torture they like upon the players who've been a disappointment.

The jerseys the players wear should have remote controlled pigmentations--so that someone up in a control booth can switch any players team, right in the middle of the game. There'd be a couple safe zones that would block the radio signal.

Occasionally, the lights will begin to strobe and music shall begin to play. Any player that does not instantly drop whatever he or she is doing to begin dancing shall instantly be called "out", no matter how injured he or she is.

And of course, there'd be obstacles, to make it hard.

I've just eaten breakfast food . . . for breakfast!

It's quite a concept for me, and yes I do know it's after 5pm.

I was incredibly, overpoweringly hungry when I found the raison bagels in the kitchen. Looking at them, I realised that they would go terrifically well with coffee, so I started a pot.

Bagel and coffee. Breakfast!

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any cream cheese and substituted American cheese, so even though I started out powerfully hungry, by the time I'd eaten half the bagel, I was utterly full.

Coffee's good though.

I've been spending the past several hours going through some of my older short stories, trying to decide which ones, if any, I want to include on my new web site.

I'm noticing a lot of things in them that're really pissing me off and making me question my abilities. I mean, sure, most of what I'm going through was written a very long time ago. Much of it comes from when I was in high school, so naturally I should expect my skills to be a bit rougher. But I was having this weird moment where I was wondering if I have gotten better at writing or if I've simply gotten different opinions about writing. Maybe I'm actually not as good as I used to be.

I know for a fact that I'm a guy who is quite susceptible to delusion. Am I really doing what I am "meant" to be doing?

That question resounds in my head, even though there's a large rational part of me that says it's a silly question. I know that writing seems to fulfil me in ways greater, and in ways more generally permeating of my me, than anything else. Why the fuck should I care if I'm "meant" for it if being "meant" for it means anything other than that feeling?

I guess it's all I have to go on in any case . . .

In his blog recently, Neil Gaiman quoted Kate Bush as saying, "Be kind to your mistakes," which seemed like a very good philosophy to me. So as I'm looking at my old works, I'm trying to just see whether I think the ideas are good.

I suppose, in the end, I think some of them are fun reads. Which, if it's not merely the due to the distortion of my perspective, is quite good, all things considered.

So I think I shall now officially stop entertaining self-doubt, at least for half a moment.

...

Also in Neil Gaiman's journal was a link to an essay by Ursula K. LeGuin addressing a lot of things about writing, one of which was the classic idea that a writer needs to write about what he or she knows. This rule, says LeGuin, after mentioning a number of the fantastical things she's written about, is fine, except that it wants a better definition of "know".

For some reason, I started thinking about scenes in her books where characters have to deal with the death of a comrade. Like each and every other droplet of LeGuin's writing, these scenes are always brilliant, and always affect me with genuine and appropriate feeling.

Although I know very little of LeGuin's life, she's lived long enough that one can assume that she has, at one time or another, had to deal with the death of a loved one, or at the very least, someone she's personally acquainted with.

I started to wonder if I, having never actually had the experience of someone close to me dying, can truly justify writing about death as much as I do (see, I told you the self-doubt'd only be gone half a moment).

Am I guilty of escapism, dwelling on subject matter that I couldn't possibly know about--in effect, creating pure delusion from the barest abstract concept of something real?

I know I'm always very emotional when I'm writing such scenes. I generally concentrate on . . . the idea that the world's irrevocably changed . . . the helplessness one feels about it . . . the frighteningly imposing reality of so suddenly being utterly severed from contact with someone . . . and the horrible feeling that comes with knowing that a loved one is experiencing great pain, or has experienced great pain, and it's too late to do anything about it.

I guess these are concepts that I may have been made familiar with through my life experiences in different ways. Perhaps I use death as a device to explore these concepts, rather than using the concepts as devices to explore death? Maybe I'm just stirring the big soup of related human experience, and the relevance of which end the stick's grabbed at is arbitrary . . .

Sometimes I'm frustrated by Microsoft Word and the mysteries of my own actions. These two things can make it quite difficult for me to follow my own trail when I need to, especially when they are working in tandem.

I wanted a certain picture for a web site I was working on. A picture I'd made for a certain Word document.

The problem is that the picture does not seem to be showing itself on the hard drive, even though it still loads up on the Word document. But Word will not tell me where the picture's coming from.

I can see what I want, right in front of me. But I can't have it.

I am the human struggle.

...

I did not get to sleep early. I finally shut off the light at 6am and stared wide eyed up at the ceiling, feeling frustratingly giddy (I've been too giddy lately, I don't know why).

I did wake up early, at around 10:30am. And now it's just past 4am, and I think I might actually be able to go to sleep in merely a few moments.

I got my desired amount of writing done to-day, so I feel basically good.

Okay! I've decided that to-night, I shall go to bed earlier! Earlier--as in soon!

Wrote something like six and a half pages to-day before I was interrupted. I plan to make it up to my self by writing twice as many pages to-morrow.

I know, I know. Yes, there is that little voice inside me saying, You've already failed, Sets. This is not gonna work.

To this voice I say . . . I say . . . "Oh, walk away you silly thing,"

A big part of keeping your inner daemons and/or ghostly functionaries of practicality under control, in my opinion, is a good, commanding tone with harsh, uncompromising words. Yah.

I was cut short to-day simply because life does not approve of any particularly tight plans I make. I had planned to awaken at 3pm or so, go to my mother's house for "dinner" (read "breakfast"), go to Starbucks or someplace else serving good coffee, write, and then meet up with Magious to go to an electronics store called Fry's (a place I used to like a lot more back when its massive, warehouse interior was but sparsely lit by a smattering of little white bulbs, turning the aisles of bright boxed software and the mysterious tiny complicated and dusty textures of hardware into a crazy dream-like labyrinth, hiding somewhere in its depths a little cafeteria selling forty year-old doughnuts and smoothies like something Harold Ramis would want Bill Murray to get a sample of. The place was great back then, but oh no. Average computer consumer apparently needs things well lit).

Instead, although I thought I was gonna be late because my grandmother stopped me to eat a pumpkin bagel, I managed to get to my mother's early, and I got the above mentioned six and a half pages finished before being summoned to the dinner table.

From there, I did go to Starbucks where I did fully intend to write some more. I would have, only I inadvertently wandered into the Wandering Realm of Hyper Friendliness and I got spooked.

First, the girl behind the register greeted me by name, turning the name into an exclamation. Then the guy behind the register chatted with me happily and incoherently as he rung me up and I nodded and smiled where I thought it was probably appropriate.

As I was going out the door, a teenage-looking boy with his arm in a sling stopped me and said, "Hey, where'd you get that fedora?"

I always have my automated-reply-to-questions-about-my-hat ready, so I said, "At a place in Horton Plaza that closed down, but I believe it actually moved to--"

"The Village Hat Shop?" he interrupted.

I blinked, "Y-yeah!"

"I collect fedoras," he explained as we were walking away from each other, "Yours is beautiful, like Cagney or something,"

"Well, thanks," I said, flattered to the tips of my ears.

I know. It's prolly not normal to be intimidated by eerily friendly people. But I just didn't feel like I was gonna be able to concentrate.

So I left.

You know . . . I don't suppose there's really any reason not get some writing done now. It's not like I really meant to go to sleep so early . . .

7 am and I still can't sleep.

Last night it wasn't until 6am, and before that 5am. I suppose I can take comfort in the fact the I shall inevitably come all the way back around to my "regular" hours, like some kind of Magellan of the slumber seas.

I meant to get a lot of writing done to-day (Tuesday I mean). And I didn't.

Damnit, to-morrow. To-morrow!

In Caitlín Kiernan's journal, she mentions keeping herself to a 1000 words a day regimen. I think that's a very good idea. Only, I write everything in notebooks before typing up so . . . er . . . I think I'll try for at least . . . ten pages. Yeah, that should do.

I may see the end of my novel yet!

Fuck, is it ever windy outside! I don't think I've ever seen it so windy around here.

It's making the whole house creak and moan like an old sea vessel and the motion sensors on the front porch keep turning the light on as a big plant keeps swing in front of it erratically. I got up to take a look at what was making all the noise and I almost thought the big silly plant was Swamp Thing or a very sinister burglar.

It's sinister to rob a house dressed as Swamp Thing, okay?

I suppose I ought to go eat some apple pie and ice cream now. I can hear Hershey the dog coughing upstairs . . .

Currently finishing a black cherry root beer . . . and it was very good.

I dreamt last night that a girl I used to know named Jennifer Polinsky was arrested for something or other, and sentenced to solitary confinement in an old rusty Buick in someone's garage.

I came by to visit her one day and she said a lot of very silly things to me that I don't remember. Some guy was calling her from the kitchen.

The night before, I dreamt that I met Hugo Weaving and that I kept calling him Elrond, until finally I sportingly smiled and said, "No worries. I know your name is really Peter--er, I mean Hugo!"

I felt really, really embarrassed.

To-day I finished the first draft Part five or six of my novel, and I feel very good about it, even though I don't know whether it is, in fact, Part five or six.

All this confusion comes from the fact that I originally wanted Part five to be two separate, not physically related story lines. I was to alternate from chapter to chapter between the two.

However, the other day I read through my would be Part 5 for the first time and found this format to be a little offputtingly schizophrenic as I found myself, as a reader, becoming too involved with what was going on in the previous chapter to allow myself to be re-submerged in the other storyline. So I divided this 5 into two parts, and I’ve not really decided which shall be which. In any case, I’ve now finished the first draft of both, so once typed up, it should be presumably easier to decide. I hope.

On Saturday night, Trisa and I went to see Gangs of New York. An incredible movie, and I was mystified, awed, and generally bowled over by Daniel Day-Lewis, who just was Billy the Butcher. I was thinking about how the guy’s just a vessel for these characters or something. Spooky and just great. For me, he has all the mystery and majesty of an elusive forest sprite from ancient mythology.

Before going to the movies, before meeting up with Trisa, I did something fairly unwise.

The bank was closed, and all I had in my wallet was a hundred dollar bill and a check for a hundred fifty. I figured I prolly couldn’t pay for movie tickets with either.

So I stopped at Barnes & Noble on the way to Trisa’s and bought fifty-four dollars worth of books. Unwise, not only considering that I’ve a billion books to read already, but also because when Trisa and I were in another Barnes and Noble later in the evening, just before the movie, I found her dreaming over a seventy dollar anatomy book she’d wanted for Xmas but dinna get.

Rats I thought, Rats,.

I can hardly even recall what I bought . . . let’s see . . .

I got exterminator! by William S. Burroughs, Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite, and a great big weird twenty dollar Jack Kerouac book.

. . . yes. Just four books amounted to fifty-four dollars. The prices of books are fucking ridiculous.

I’m pretty tired. And I haven’t gotten nearly as much work done as I had intended for the day.

Certainly not as much work as I got done on Thursday night/Friday morning, when I went five hours straight, Getting Things Done whilst listening to the eighty dollars worth of Tom Waits albums I’d purchased on Thursday. That was money quite well spent.

Uck. It’s not even 4am yet and already I’m tired. What on earth is wrong with me anyway? I guess I’ll go to bed and read awhile--something else I dinna do to-day that I’ve a lot of to do. I’m currently about a third of the way through Caitlín R Kiernan’s Silk, which is wonderfully involving for the naturalness of the vision Kiernan puts on. Not to mention the fact that most of the main attractive characters share my taste in music almost identically.

Aside from Silk I also have three or four seductive stacks comprised of Edgar Allan Poe, Ursula K. LeGuin, Raymond Chandler, Arther Conan Doyle, Poppy Z Brite, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Marquis de Sade, H.P. Lovecraft, Angela Carter, and Jean Paul Sartre, just to name a few.

What I need is another day like the one where a cat jumped on me and prevented me from moving for twelve or so hours and I managed to read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle in it’s entirety.

So. If I wasn’t working to-day . . . and I wasn’t reading . . . what was I doing?

Well I watched Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures for one thing. What an incredible movie. A fantastic movie. (I love how Pauline said, “fantastic”).

Hm. Just had a strange moment there where I utterly forgot where the left parenthesis was on the keyboard . . . er . . . too much root beer . . .

Anyway, ‘twas my first time seeing the movie in two or three years, ever since I donated my tape copy to an abstract and hopeless cause. And my first time ever seeing it in widescreen, which improved the thing tremendously.

I also bought coffee to-day . . .

Well. Looks like I may or may not have this thing how I want it. Time will tell on it I suppose . . . and anyway, I'm feeling pessimistic.

This thing's really very confusing. Or maybe I just want too much from it. Anyway . . . this is my journal, whatever it says. . . . Halloa.