get busy

Ideas mean nothing; all that counts is sentences. And I mean good ones, ones with light in them. Verses, if you're so inclined: same deal. Either/or, then piling them up. That's it, that's all. Sit down and write one, then another, taking notes on the scenes and the sense of the scenes as they unfurl in your mind. Correction: not taking notes. Making the scenes as they unfurl in our mind. That's what guys like Ernest Hemingway knew, that's in fact how he said to do it, and that's your key. For results, your only possible expectation is a pile of pages for you to re-write. That's it, that's all. Religiously commit to your most serious effort and with any luck the trick will work and someone else will be able to see and feel the dream as you've seen it and felt it. But never mind. Get to it: write the sentences. Every day. There's no other way. I'm sorry, but you're screwed, so at least try have fun.

I'm in a phase now where I'm not even trying to be a writer except for what I'm writing right now. This document is an excuse to write and nothing more. What I hate is when I read an article where the author plays the Disclosure: card. Here's my disclosure: I'm too paranoid (in a non-clinical sense) to really disclose anything. Even to the four or five or six of you reading. And how lame is that?

And so I write about not writing. And how lame is that. Or from behind a beer like now. I think what I better do is make another more anonymous blog and notify people on an individual basis. That brings me to my next point. People who are like, I can't blog about this, it's too juicy, I'll put it in the book, and you'll just have to read it. That's not what's going on here. What's going on here is that this blog is like your vehicle that you never have maintenanced because you don't give a shit; you actually hope it dies; because you really just want a new one, even though you know you can't afford it; and what is going to happen is that you're going to end up riding the bus or worse a bike like the guys who've lost thier licenses.

Today is a beautiful early fall day in the northeastern United States, with a sky as clear as the one on 9/11; this world is yet a strange and passing beautiful one if you're lucky. this planet Earth that human beings are most likely destroying

you can't say this has always been the case. it wasn't so a thousand years ago - technically. as they say. but what was so even as far as back then and as far back as ever there was, truly, was the certainty of human beings now and then destroying each other whether brutally or in subtlety, and so destroying the world one by one. and also the certainty of human beings living, and living well. and also the certainty of [pick any human emotion]

my emotions are of the canine. I just find it easier this way, more clear, better

thoughts like these and also other thoughts of what might be termed the beatiful i.e. love of what is loved and when what is loved is human (and I think dogs and cats at this point too can be admitted to the human race if they're part of your family, because dogs and cats and especially dogs can have the sterling yet fallible character and humans are too amount to the best/worst sort of saints/scum on a daily basis. do you see why I can't write? because I am a fool)

it's good to take a day and to have a day

one other thing that keeps me purporting this document is the 2002 in the archives. and one other reason I have no blog traffic besides me rarely commenting on other blogs or otherwise trying to Fit In is that most of your blogs these days are fairly disposable. including this one.

(but not yours...and you know who you are...)

I got to change the format on this fucking blog to black as black can be because we are truly whistling in the dark here well on second thought fuck it you derivative never said anything original fuck (this is what I yell into the valley of echoes in my dream) I'm poaching from myself here, can you tell? no I'm not yes I am. fuck it, can I get another beer? yes, that I can do

this blog actually ended earlier this year. it dropped me like a bad habit. the problem now is, I can't stop going over to the building where it lives and lurking around outside its door. I think I hear it in there moving around. I think I hear someone in there with it. what I'm telling you is that I suspect this blog is cheating on me, fucking around with someone else. it's "cheating" because when we broke it off it told me that it didn't think it'd be seeing anyone else for a long time. I used to love this blog, but now I regard it with something very close to horror. it told me once a long time ago while we were driving in my vehicle (while we were still together) that it needed some space and that I was being a little "smothery," but I didn't take these words to heart. for months after we ended it it would allow me the benefit of a pity fuck now and then but now I see those for what they were and now look what's happened. I'm standing outside its door listening and I think I just heard someone make a noise in there. I saw the blog walking up the street the other day, pensively reading what looked like a letter. I never should have followed this blog all the way out here, many thousands of miles from my home and my people, but now it's become an obsession and I can't let it go. after that one time it told me if I ever did that again and busted up its room all drunk and in drunken glossolalia it was going to call the cops on me. god help me, I think I'm going to call its bluff this time. I'm out here, drinking Jim Beam direct from an 8 oz. flask which I used my laundry money (my last) to buy and I wonder what would happen if I knocked on this door right now. or called the blog on my cellphone right now while I'm standing out here. I swear to god if I find someone in there with it, I don't know what I'll do but I bet it won't be good. there, I just called it and there's nothing ringing. it's either gotten rid of its phone or unplugged it. Now I just called it on its cellphone which I think I now hear vibrating on the floor. now it's still ringing but the vibrating has stopped. what does that mean? I am right now feeling a terrible pang of conviction, of absolute certainty that that blog is in there right now, naked and in bed with someone not me, and that they're in there waiting quietly until they hear me go away. well, I'm not going away. that's it, I'm knocking. in a minute. what if I scream something. what if I scream right now that I can hear them fucking in there. I don't know how it ever got to this. this blog is driving me crazy. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to continue to stalk it. I hope it does take out a restraining order on me. bring it on, is what I say. If I can't have this blog, then I'm going to scare the shit out of it with disturbing and emotionally abusive behavior. On a daily basis. I'm going to become this blog's worst nightmare; I'm going to make this blog pay for what it's done to me, for what I've become. For real

it's not worth saying until it's worth saying in disguise

head cold but will still drink beer fresh back from a notable sink of humanity

I realize now that what I should be reading or at least investigating are works by authors in the cyberpunk/postcyberpunk genres of science fiction; why, anyone reading a lot of what I've written here might deduce that, hey, here's a guy not so nimbly wheedling along wholly oblivious to the vast and emerging bibliography of speculative fiction. I wouldn't say I've been wholly oblivious but by no means either have I delved deep. And you know and I know that the obvious book to start with is William Gibson's Neuromancer (how lame to admit that I haven't even read even that seminal title) and subsequent Sprawl trilogy. (Jules turns to Mr. Brand Spankin New and says, OK, but you are aware that there is an invention called "the Internet," and that on this invention are things called "sites" that people go to to learn about things, right?) Then again, for my purposes, it's probably (although probably not really) enough to delve through the Wikipedia entries for the aforementioned terms and titles (as I've been doing today), while checking out the associated embedded links for terms including posthuman, transhumanism, mind transfer, etc.

Not that it matters, but I'm disturbingly low-tech when it comes to getting all excited about (or even adequately comprehending) certain systems, technologies, gadgets, etc. I'm also fundamentally apathetic toward any subject involving math, logic, hard science, elaborately explicated philosophies, etc. Ergo (and I'm not proud of this), fictional worlds involving a level of detail and complexity as can be found in, say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or (I imagine) something like Stephen R. Donaldson's the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, have always uniformly bored the crap out of me. I didn't even finish The Hobbit. I always figured all such crap must have bored the crap out of guys like Ray Carver too, and, you know, look where it got him                (could that be less funny?)

Who the FFFF cares. All I might have going for me in this brave new world is a seriously dirty mind.

Last night in a maze of honest physical exhaustion and beer buzz it occurred to me that

maybe what this blog should be all about is cranking out daily windbaggardly commentary and opinionated aghast exposition re: the evidently perpetually incipient and insidious corruption of the evidently perpetually incumbent U.S. governmental regime, sadistically manipulative mass media machine, diabolically troubled not to say defenestrated sociopolitical condition, and then I wind up by sizing up and prizing up the tenets of me own devoutly what I'm gonna term because I saw it termed thusly on another blog just like mine, my own private cybercolloquiagism of of neo-progressive tenet and structure of god damned righteous beliefs rah RAH!! (again, I joke…a real laugh riot, haarnh?)

No, what occurred to me and it was in a hazy dazy sort of walking outdoors with a beer mindset but the thought involved: this blog being herewith held by me as sort of a serious non-consideration vis a vis my new idea which is - what they like to call pre-writing essentially being the mother of all decent writing anyway - that into this endeavor is where I should really be dumping the better part of my written efforts since it's basically the only game in town for me anyway at this point (by which I mean a point of alternating frustration, rage, despair, and abject fear of wasting it all.) Eventually if you just let it, er, alt/go/flow and if you know what you're doing (or are anyway at least trying to keep in mind what you should be doing in terms of technique) the writing slips over into something like credible fiction and then it's all just a matter of capturing that momentum for later revision. and re-shaping and putting back together. I'm pretty reluctant to explicate ideas of process for fear of jinxing them but it nonetheless strikes me that the method I personally have been seeking in terms of maintaining a sustainable habit of writing has been pretty much sitting here staring me in the face or more accurately ringing in my head all day and night long and WTF that means is something only I can know and/or feel and am often loath to bring to terms which of course is the core of the dilemma but suffice to say when broken down it basically involves periods of nearly non-stop typing, eventually shaking out into a loose hierarchy of files whereby actual finished work is eventually extracted

it's easily what I could be doing all the time because this is approximately what I've kindly trained myself to do in composing civilian writing projects for me day job by which I mean to say my one and only job because I almost never write at home these days which is a tough admission for an often aimlessly angry, sporadically lazy, quasi-alcoholic creep who really wants to have written to be making, but there it is

so, to summarize: what it comes down to is writing three to five pages a day about the lepers in my head. and with that I leave you, signing off from the big underwater deafmute navel gazing gazeatron that is this here URL, whyever not?

 (and though I don't care much for U2 I always loved that song)

 <I hate what I've written here></I hate what I've written here>

Habit, routine. The momentum of habits. The momentum of personal routines. Territorial beings caught in the tidewater, the current rush, of mental and corporeal routines.

Endeavor then to perpetually initiate a kinetic and tangible shifting from static mental into the concrete physical, activity, actualizing, cutting through the currents, the tidewater, the slipstream; your mind is the rudder, your soul the propeller, or is it truly the moon and sun that controls these rhythms?

***

On a crowded afternoon, in the street, I cried out to whomever might listen, What language is spoken here? A man lying bleeding near the edge of a curb screamed, throat in tatters, Pisces!

***

Why is dream imagery, i.e. internal emotional imagery derived from one's own subconscious, e.g. necessarily informed by a personal history and present cast of subjectively intimate nightmares, fantasies, abhorrencies, desires…why is this so crucial? Because the images, regardless of subliminal origin, come from your interior spaces, places deep within your hull where the ballast is your uh what we essentially like to call your souuuuuuuuuuul

Yesterday, couldn't get it done. Couldn't get writing done in the face of little personal necessary and domestic impediments. Had to walk the dog, that also for exercise, left work too late yesterday anyway, frankly, considering what time I had arrived. Then that damn old and compromised laptop takes so loooooooong to turn on, I'm not talking for online, I'm talking for ON, for typing purposes. I need a new computer, for explicit personal use, whatever. Yesterday upon home arrival, pent up in the head, I was. Head ablaze inside. I need to write fast. Big deal, this always happens, the feeling will fade, NO, need to let it not fade, need to not waver. Be a patient mental patient. Padded room, unwavering synapsoglossolalia. Fuck. Silly, with nothing to show for it today. Except, here. With some aplomb. That's something. Anyway, yesterday, really wanted to write, psyched self out of it. Waiting for slow PC, decided to empty dishwasher, opened a Coors Light bottle to accompany this task. Needed to be online because figured if do write will just do so in body of an email and send to self to work on later. Knew just the same would be any minute into suppertime domestic stuff. As happened directly. No big deal, drink another beer, and so on into the evening. Instead of writing, I took the bedroom A/C unit out and lugged it down to the basement as we are thankfully and luckily into the cool cool coooooool weather. While downstairs, took the opportunity to fire up the downstairs PC and at least move me MottC_salvaged_work file from gmail to desktop. Didn't go online too too long however as virus protection has expired and need to renew soon but don't want to charge it, nope. Hey man, I don't need your Internets, yeah, right, fuck it

Then I was 3-4 beers in and feeling not so apt to write. I could have used a cigarette but …NO MORE. Decided to read, which I figure to be just as important as writing at my stage of the game, by which I mean a stage foreshortened, reduced, retarded. No. NO. Anyway, I read "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" by Flannery O'Connor, then started "The River" by FO again, from Collected Stories. Good move. Got me thinking about "influences," the writers I've instinctively and habitually and always turned to over the last 12 – 15 years whose work has appealed to me as the way to do it. The list needs conscious expansion, but as it stands, includes: Hemingway. Steinbeck. Flannery O'Connor. Cormac McCarthy. Andre Dubus. Stephen King. John Irving. Raymond Carver. John Updike. Bukowski. Kafka. Faulkner…? I need to read more, more widely. MFA people must certainly laugh at me all day and night long up in they campuses and I don't care. I'm past the point of lying about shit. I'm way out of MFA range now and could never go back….would never go back….

***

Intelligence by which I mean the mental faculty involved in perceiving what is  subjectively essential seemingly wanes and waxes like the lunar phases. This need not be so; unwavering persistence of attention equals mental toughness i.e. focus.

Rambling Blues  you are my unequivocal self-preservative agent sub rosa….be all that you can be; muthafuckas, be your own deus ex machina

 

 

I remember it being said to me once by a creative writing instructor who shall remain unnamed because I'm kindly and cringingly embarrassed that earlier this year I actually sent him an email kind of sort of and obsequiously and toadyishly alerting him to Mott Cromby i.e. my weirdly still persistent writing activity, this back in March when I was all excited about that fable surrounding Jacob Beizart etc. buried back in this blog's archives. Impulsive move, ridiculous move, this note, this consideration, such is my intermittent and pathetic craving for some kind any kind of slim encouragement after many years of dogged and self-defeating writing behaviors; anyway I hope now somehow this jejune communiqué, this adolescent dispatch somehow mercifully eluded this dude's attention since it was an evidently (devoutly hoped) moldy university email address I sent it to, I think an old one yes or else I think the dude was on some kind of hiatus or academic sabbatical; regardless, and to the point: his line to me in terms of writing advice way back in Indiana days of yore was something akin to recognizing your weaknesses and turning them into strengths. Which to me, considering my case, must certainly mean subverting or subjugating or countermining or counteracting or refracting or recasting or reforging or in any event excogitating my obsessive compulsive proclivity toward anxiety nervosa neurosis into what? Sentences badly imitative of baaaaaaaad Jack Kerouacesqueatureizzleidolatry?????? Fuck it. I too was born in Lowell motherfuckin Massachusetts by the muddy banks of the Merrimack, a name believed to have been adopted by early European settlers from the Native America Merruasquamack,  meaning swift water place.

 

 

what I mean to say of course is that Mott Cromby comes honestly by his self-predilection as a half-assed wannabe Beat progenitor. That's my story and I'm sticking by it

 

 

If I could hold on to just one thought
For long enough to know
Why my mind is moving so fast
And the conversation is slow.

Burn off all the fog
And let the sun through to the snow;
Let me see your face again
Before I have to go.

I have seen you in the movies
And in those magazines at night;
I saw you on the barstool when
You held that glass so tight.

And I saw you in my nightmares,
But I'll see you in my dreams.
And I might live a thousand years
Before I know what that means.

Once there was a friend of mine
Who died a thousand deaths;
His life was filled with parasites
And countless idle threats.

He trusted in a woman
And on her he made his bets;
Once there was a friend of mine
Who died a thousand deaths.

 -- Neil Young, "Barstool Blues"

 

Mercygraft of course being a ruse brought in as a catalyst to shock shake shuffle my ability to write anything

Yesterday sitting at the dining room table while drinking a few beers (a Mich Light can and a Coors Light bottle and a Sam Adams Oktoberfest bottle) and with a football game playing quietly and mainly ignored on the TV in the kitchen and with Jackson my black German Shepherd dog sprawled on the wood floor on his green dog bed just to my left I sat at the IBM laptop PC (at only 256MB so slooooow to boot up) and went through every page of this blog via its archives, copying and pasting out the bits and chunks and fits and starts and sketches of narrative. (Tent Trailer and They Know Me Everywhere and Jacob Beizart and others. I'd link to them but the hell with it) anyway I pasted them into Word files, the job now of course being to go back, flesh them out, develop them further, finish them

why bother to relate all this in this manner. I don't know. I feel awkward telling it. this blog has over the past few years been kind of a put on, kind of a tribute to just how juvenile I can be, trying to convince myself that I'm cool, so maybe I'm just trying to push it more toward something more of a bullshit exemption zone and a daily excuse to get started writing

note to self: what might work is to use Page 313 to capture random phrases and bits of imagery and character sketches and whatnot. like I did on this blog at the first part of this year.

the real key however is to do the real writing offline so that I might develop it in a secure environment. maybe post an excerpt or two here and there, somewhere in here.

(I find it hard exposing these dull thoughts here in such dullardly fashion but fuck it. but wouldn't you know after all this now I'm starting to feel like wishing to really bust out some lines about the pink gold glow of the brightening sky this morning walking down in the chilly morning the slope of long private driveway of the rehabilitation center where the sky opens up, walking past the 19th century post lanterns which I said reminded me of some old park like in Paris [I was thinking of A Moveable Feast] and J. said that they reminder her of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, which I thought was great)

Mercygraft:

and this is easy cheese. Cromby's problem is that he has a hard time distinguishing his emotional problems from his emotional abilities. the kid is easily distracted. six months whirls past him like bats whirling overhead in summer twilight, look, there they go

I had to put my boot to his ass as he slept in bed this morning. think in pictures I yelled. type first, think later, I implored him.

mental backwash, mental backwaters. he's gone back to phobic. compulsive fear. I'm like, put it in the work. forget about yesterday

This is a good room here. Wide open and empty. A man could fill it up. Fuck, Cromby, take another beer, but then write it

John Loane:

The day Cromby kicked me out of his apartment, I didn't know what to do. But I had an idea. You see, I'd nipped his ATM card out of his wallet while he was passed out earlier that morning. And I knew the PIN number because I'd watched him punch it many, many times. Cromby aint the most perspicacious drunk, you know. You wanna kick me out on the street, Cromb? So I figured: fuck him. And walked up to the bank on Seneca Ave. and withdrew $600, as much as I could. Then I said, I should go get me a bus ticket and hie my ass out of here before he gets wise. And that's exactly what I did. I decided to head south.

Mercygraft:

the jejune ramblings of an anxious, neurotic dude. he should've turned this bitch over to me long ago. well now.

Cromby needs to lose a little weight in more ways than one. his brain is overcrowded like a mediocre ballroom in a mediocre city. bad air, mediocre air, and it's all in his head. Cromby you could say has been on a bit of a losing streak. That's where I come in. Because, you know, I've always been there, but he aint always been so good about calling for my assistance.

Cromby won't tell you but I might about some of them bitter days in New York. The air in the fall there was gray and kind. He could never deny that the East River to him always felt like home and the hardscrabble pavement running all along the north Brooklyn waterfront like his skin. The day he sold his Marshall amp with 2 twin 12-inch speakers for less than half what he paid for it new. I think he got $350 back. It went for rent, beer, and food. That was a different New York, but to Cromby it'll always be a soulwrecker. He don't need to ever go back. He says if he writes about it he aint gonna call it New York. One component of what he wants to do is to change all the names to protect the guilty: himself

Cromby don't know if he's a hell of a lot of fun anymore. He has a laugh at the way he used to fetishize drinking and rambling poor and desperate through the streets and bars like that was credibility, like that was poetry. What it was was a waste of time and money. And yet he's tipping a beer right now. Beer is empty calories and so is the past. Cooler times is coming though and then too maybe he can draw himself out like wine.

Cromby's weak unsure of himself and scared he's wasting all his days, but I aint like that. I'll tell you fuckers straight: I come from the road, and for the road I'm bound.

Now listen:

thought about it everyday even though it did him no good and indeed served only to drain his and the day's good feeling

*

the auditory and pixillated forms of media fomenting a never-ending blizzard and tsunami of base human stupidity, ignorance, bigotry, bullshit, and hypocrisy, American-style. And you are the prey. In mindless seeming perpetuity and all according to a certain plan: more power more wealth more control for your rulers, more more more for your rulers. Your rulers.

*

what to do? can't ignore, can't deny, can't convince anyone around here of anything either these days really since rational argument long ago left the building and opinions being like assholes, etc.

only thing you might do is try to tell it in a different way so that people might see it first and foremost but also in a way that might cause them to feel something moral or decent. that of course is the power of any kind of narrative art: the ability to move an audience toward a certain singularity of human emotion

the non-plussinator

had a secret invisible surgery performed in

a. an unmarked van
b. another dimension separate from earthly reality
c. absentia

whereby to

a. remove
b. enhance
c. jar
d. euthanize
e. identify

his

a. imagination
b. conscience
c. perspicacity
d. next drink

this blog is so done

you're typing in cube. could be worse. you've yet to accomplish much. meanwhile, there's
creatures like him and him out there walking the Earth.
there's a lot going on out there. (always has been.)
some people are minding it.
others, eating shit. others, in between. what a
mindfuck. it only counts later
if it's written down though is what I'm
feeling. sorry, I
can't help
it. I'm an
idiot

Mind paralysis denied in
backyard symposium

as the running dog
ropes his long muscles skyward

unto air and gravity.

A certain quality of September light
starting today around 4 p.m. means

blue and gold and red
my heart, my soul, my head.

Mine every dream and hold.
Mine and hold.

Mind,
hold.