The Good the Bad and the Ugly

So, been a little while.  Oops on my part.  I think blogging is quite hard.  But I am attempting to establish rhythm and order to my life, and this should be part of it. I am attempting to have titles, believe it or not, that mirror or prelude my body posts.

So, lets start with the Good.  I'll be honest as we start the Good, the Good is on the shorter side this week.  I've got more chalked up in the other categories, but I guess the main Good is that I have found a residence. A decent place with tiles and carpet, a commode that does not bring the body's waste too close to its most cleansing of rituals, and quite the bedroom.  It has been some time since I've had a house.  A place, a space, a sacred area of love and devotion.  Four walls and a ceiling, just a little bit of what modern humanity can provide for you.  The college house was great but gross, got old a little too quickly for my tastes, and I left feeling like I tore myself from a great tree and plunged into dense jungle brush  below.  I think I was some sort of green camouflaged lizard that had tongue issues, and so I was feeling a little skittish under all those jaguar paws and what not.

But I did do the university slum, a couple of them actually, and learned what it meant to create a place with many people.  It can be frustrating sometimes, but for the most part I just laid back and tried not to care.  Usability was key.  Now, when it came to my own room,  I cared a great deal.  Certain posters have remained above my head while I slept since I was about 15 (can you say naked Led Zeppelin angel reaching towards heaven with no penis!?). Certain furniture has crept into my life slowly but surely; now all of it sits in my parent's garage, wanting release from exile. The space I cultivated for myself was the most artistic expression I got (besides words and music).  I like low beds and large walls.  I need more bookcases.  My Orange amp needs to bask in awesomeness while my pedals glow in the dark under the moon.  Ambience.  Ah.

I say all of this because the space you live in is the space you write in.  At least for me.  I find the coffee shop experience theoretically contemplative and bourgeois, sitting with your cold soul and a warm cup watching the daily folk go about their scrawny lives, but when it comes down to it I would blast Pandora and add people on Facebook.  A storefront distracts me, and so my home, in exchange, has always been the place that I write.  And I usually need silence.  Space and silence and some sort of peace so that my train of thought can flow.  Makes sense, right?

And now I will be, in a short couple days, creating a new space with a special person, and I am excited to view my surroundings once they are furnished.  Will I write on the couch?  Will there be a couch?  Will I write from a yoga pad staring at a tapestry or in my bed propped on a pillow (which is currently where I am writing btw)?  I am beside myself with interest (very bored you see..) to examine my new writing quarters.  I wonder if Picard dug his captain's office for his captain's log. Got to look into that.


The Bad.  So that was the Good, and it was pretty good overall and is something to look forward to.  The Bad is that this blog was supposed to be about how I wish I could write, but instead I spend all my hours wilting away serving coffee or roast pork or selling some pre-ripped jeans to teenagers.  Turns out it takes some time to be allowed to do any of those activities for money, and so I am unemployed.  You would think this would be in the Good because it means I have finished a novel or submitted something to Random House or finally have time for that book-tour, but I have just watched an incredible amount of T.V.   Read a bit too.

I don't know why I am so lazy about writing.  Sometimes the juice is there, and I pound out great stuff, and then other times I'm all dried up, spent, needing warm blankets and closed eyes. These are all sad excuses and thus in the Bad category; I really got to get my shiz together. The purpose of the blog was to train these dexterous fingers to write even when the heart and mind are lagging, and so I must must persevere! But I have been writing more, overall, and that is good.

One thing I've done with my free time is to build a garden with my girlfriend.  I always thought this was a romantic rustic sort of thing to do, and it was.  We dug earth and planted seeds and got on our hands and knees.  The earth is cool to the touch in the shade and does, indeed, make you feel at home.  I realized that people do this every day and the odd thing about wanting to be a writer, for me anyway, is realizing that anything I might write about (unless it's really quite odd) is something someone does every day.  They don't consider it a big deal.  They don't necessarily feel as if they are prophetic.  But when I considered tilling the land under the sun it always seemed so epic.  So much something that teaches the main character about the follies of life and how to continue towards happiness regardless.  Anyway, it made me want to read Steinbeck and figure out the different names for dirt.

I was wrong.  The Good was bigger than the Bad.  And now the Ugly.  I've got some sort of rash. Big looking insect bites on my legs.  After weeks of scrutiny, my girlfriend's brother claimed they were more like poison oak, and then wham bam four days ago I've got tiny pointed spots on my arms hands chest back belly ugh ugh ugh.  They say it should itch like the dickens and it does sometimes, but overall I just feel like I'm turning into a lizard.  Which is not the best feeling.  I don't want to be cold-blooded, that can't be good for my chi.  I'm getting it checked out by a medical professional, but all of this makes me think that Kafka had some crazy skin problems right around the time he wrote The Metamorphosis.

I've got to run actually. Kovorkian in fifteen.  I do like sharing parts of my life on the interweb. Makes me feel as if I'm contributing to a society that aliens will dig up millions of years in the future.  Hello! This is English! I am a humanoid!  Did I ever write a book? Why did we die?!?!

Peace.

p.s. I've never seen the Good the Bad and the Ugly, maybe I should watch things before I pirate their names.  Happy hunting.