Fare thee well, Blogger.

One Free Man is moving to a new server - one I can actually do stuff on. Check it out at http://www.harvardtown.com. This blog will remain for archival purposes only. See you on the other side.

Everyone Alive

Survived a night of wallowing in self-pity and heavy drinking. I don't smell too good and for some reason my left side kind if itches, but it's better than, you know, getting trampled by panicked cheetahs. And seeing as it's Sunday, and seeing as I'll give our Christo-American calender system a go, and seeing as Sunday is the start of the week in such a faith, and seeing as I said I'd write something at least once a week, I'll write something.

So why was I in said state of pity and gluttony? For the past few months, and by that I mean almost half the damn year, I've been getting sued by a creditor. In much the same way as celebrities keep their terminal illnesses hidden from public view, I've kept that hidden from view because, well, that shit is kind of embarrassing. I decided to fight the suit in court and as of yesterday, lost. Shot down. Game over man, game over. What's going to happen? Near as I can tell nothing. NJ protects debtors' property so long as it's under a grand in value and I seriously doubt my half-broken three year old laptop, impressive screen size notwithstanding, is worth that much. Otherwise I have not a single item of value to a collector, which rocks in the scope of the lawsuit but also reminds me how rock-fucking-bottom poor I am.

But for now it's over and I can rest. Key phrase for now.

Getting sued, to follow the analogy, is kind of like having cancer. It's there when you're out drinking with your friends; it's there when you're taking a shower or when you have a cold. When you tell people about it something about you registers as toxic to them. It harkens me back to 1st grade when I was the kid with cooties and everyone avoided me the way a quivering black carpet of ants shys away from a lit blowtorch. Nobody wants to be seen with you when you're the sued kid, and like the less media-friendly types of cancer, there's a ton of guilt and blame that comes along with it. Nobody blames a woman for getting breast cancer, even if she spends a half-hour a week in a tanning bed, but everyone blames you if you get lung cancer. Even if you're a non-smoker and it's from plasmosis inflammation or the fact that you work in a chemical factory. It's sort of weird to think that all of my social interacts for the past... I forgot how many... months have been tainted with this knowledge.


i think of you like p.j. soles

Updates

I know, I know, I have not updated this thing in quite a while, and lots has happened. So lets go through the laundry list, in super-cool bulleted list format!

• I graduated college. I now have a BA in Literature/New Media Studies with a something-point-something-something GPA, and am currently and only somewhat ashamedly enjoying a stay of unemployment.
• I finished a small poetry collection. This, whenever the editor decides to get off his ass, will appear on Richard Stockton Overdrive. For now, it's available from my free webspace here: http://www.geocities.com/arigato455/chapbook/frameHolder.html. Also, provided I can get more space, I'll be uploading video of me reading some poetry in Ocean City. I also read a few at Stockton and they got on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-W9xjHREM. Huge-ass thanks to Scott Oliver for filming both, and while you're at it check out the rest of the kids I read with as well.
• I've applied to MIT.
• I'm back in the South of the Jersey, where broken bits of the known universe come to die. It's massively depressing and lonely and I'm somewhat pissed off about that.
• In light of being unemployed I've decided to pick up an old project again. For now I've decided to make writing my full-time work, and set the goal of writing for 8 hours a day, three days a week. I probably won't stick to it since I have horrible discipline when it comes to being home with no actual schedule, but what the hell, might as well try. I missed national writer's month but am going to attempt the "novel in ninety" trial and see where that gets me. Or, where it doesn't get me, as the case may be.
• Against my better judgement, I'm doing EOF again. I just love those damn kids. ... That wasn't sarcastic, I really do. While "The Program" is bureaucratic as hell and it's upper-management staff are a bit less than competent, I did have fun last summer and got a burst of that ever-so-rare sense of accomplishment.

Back to real writing - none of that bulleted Power Point nonsense. So, politics. Obama, like a bulky caterpillar spinning itself in silk, he has begin his transfer from president-elect to president by selecting his staff and putting his stubby, multiple legs down on various issues, and will soon emerge from his cocoon as a delicate winged Arab killing machine. Weren't expecting that, were you? The recent violence in Gaza has little to do with Israeli/Hamas tensions and everything to do with Obama's transition to power. During the Bush years, Israel had a sweet deal. They could get away with almost anything due to the unwavering support of the US. Now that Bush is out, they want to make sure they can enjoy the same "open mouth, insert wang" policy they enjoyed with Bush with Obama. Attacking schools and getting a bunch of dead kids on the greasy face of the NY Times is one way of doing this - no matter how hardened of a politician you are, dead kids still pull at the heartstrings. If Obama losses Israel and says, "Yo man, go nuts," he'd pass their test, and otherwise, the Holy Land would be in some trouble. In about another two years I can see the Obama fans ending up much like the early Jews: lost in a vast desert looking for a paradise that nobody things exists. And his economic plan is bunk: replacing 4 million jobs doesn't make up for the fact that we've lost 5 million - still a million down. That isn't solving the problem: that's lowering the standard for everyone.

Music: I gave two new bands a try - the media-friendly Rise Against and the gay homeless kids in Leftover Crack. Rise Against reminds me of the trend in just about all entertainment media where one book/game/movie/album tries to be everything at once. Imagine if that was done with cake - Rise Against would be a cake trying to be to many cakes at once. Nobody would want to eat a lemon-cherry-apple-crusty-cheesecake with creme topping, made with Soy Milk, ego-friendly Splenda and having a chocolate gelato center with a Cookiepus face. One of the ruling philosophies of my life is that if it doesn't work with cake, it doesn't work with anything else. Rise Against combines a speedy maybe-it's-metal-maybe-it's-punk sound with lyrics that sound like they're making a statement but are too vague and inapplicable that they can't possibly refer to anything that happens on Planet Earth in The Known Cosmos. The latter, Leftover Crack, is just a loud, occasionally varied, pissed off and mildly articulate punk group, and aside from the singer's lack of variety from anything but gurgled screams, I like it.

Now that I have time I'm going to be updating this more frequently, even if I have nothing to say.

God fucking dammit.

Michael Crichton died today.

Anyone who knows me and has come close to discussing literature with me knows that he is my favorite author.

That aside, I can honestly say that he is a person who I have never met, yet who has impacted my life. My first memory of Crichton was reading Eaters of the Dead in something like 6th grade, and doing a book report on it. I had some trouble with the book itself and my dad had to help me get past some of the words. Even to a 6th grader, Crichton's style was readable. Poetics aside, I think there is some value to a simple, direct style. I made (with the help of my parents of course) a bitching diorama - complete with big clay figures re-enacting the scene where Bulwyf and Ibn mass their troops together to fight the Wendol. It beat the living crap out of the rest of the class who had some shoe boxes covered in construction paper.

I got an F. My teacher told me that I shouldn't be reading about or thinking of such violent things.

From what I read in Crichton's speeches and essays, we shared something about or childhood. People in authority never liked us, and just as he once purposefully plagiarized a George Orwell essay to prove a point, so have I, many times, sacrificed a good grade to mouthing off to a professor or instructor with whom I disagreed. I grew up not trusting teachers in general, and nowadays I find it ironic that I'm on track to becoming one myself. I also think it has something to do with why I'm 25 and still live in a fucking college apartment.

From then on, Crichton became my favorite author. I read everything I could get my hands on, and each time a new book arrived I grabbed it up days after it was on the shelf. I watched his films. I read his essays and watched his interviews. I even followed ER for a few seasons and I don't even fucking like dramas.

I always found my own writing to be very unpoetic. I try to be as objective as possible and leave it up to the reader not to interpret what happens, but what it means and implies. Clarity, I have found, often raises more questions than ambiguity. Leaving something open to interpretation has always seen sort of drab to me. Leaving something open to discussion is far different. That is the little bit of stylistic territory Crichton seems to have forged into for himself.

Put flatly, Crichton is the reason I began writing - specifically fiction. I ask a question and, like myth-makers of three thousand years ago, dream up an answer. I can only hope that there is a place for me somewhere out there among all of those real writers in the world.

Beyond that I don't really know what to say. I'm still in shock I suppose. With the death of another of my heroes, George Carlin, the election, and my graduating from college, there seems to be a strange sense of finality in the air. Like, this is it. I don't really know what it is, but it's coming. And soon. And if there was one thing that I took away from Crichton, it is that the world is an ever-changing place, and it is okay to be okay with that. Things change, and that is the way it is. Change is natural and normal, not something to be afraid of, as so many people are. Change causes us to re-evaluate our positions, re-adjust our methods, and ultimately to grow. With that in mind, maybe this ominous, looming it isn't such a bad thing after all.

If I could say one thing: at the very least, Crichton kept a socially awkward kid from New Jersey's imagination alive. I can only hope to achieve that. Thank you.

Admittance

Local political debates are always fun. I stayed at the one hosted here at my college for about five minutes - long enough to see the Green Party candidate get thrown out. Good to see the open forum American democratic system at work.

Anyhow.

Admitting you are an M. Night Shyamalan fan to anyone who considers themselves movie-savvy is a bit like admitting you're gay to your absurdly Republican, right-wing, Christian mother, or telling your black girlfriend that you recently decided to become a white supremacist. It doesn't fly. He is one of a collection of public figures who, to borrow the title of an Offspring song, is cool to hate. Shyamalan has joined the ranks of Rob Smith of The Cure and countless others who everyone likes to aim at when they make another movie or release another album.

My interpretation behind such uninhibited dislike is that, despite the fact that lightning never strikes the same place twice, the viewing public seems to affix the task to whoever makes it strike in the first place. The Sixth Sense was great; however, whatever film comes after it (in his case, Unbreakable) is by and large expected to be The Sixth Sense. While it seems that M. Night, and countless others, are intelligent enough to understand that, short of becoming Ahamenatuku*, The Rain God, himself, the task of making movie lightning hit the same target twice in a row is impossible. The catch 22 they inevitably fall into is that "fans" of the first movie don't actually want a new film: they simply want to sit in the dark and watch The Sixth Sense over and over again, and crank on the flamethrowers so hard IMDB's corporate headquarters might burn to the ground when the next film doesn't measure up to the first.

Fine for them: not for someone who, say, actually wants a fucking career.

Which brings me to The Happening. M. Night's latest movie, in a word, was a total dissapointment. Okay, two words, one noun. The acting was campy - I couldn't really figure out of he was aiming for that fifties horror film campy - but it did not work. Plus, far too much emphasis was placed on the fact that it was his first R-rated movie. Some of the suicide scenes were pretty creepy, but a majority was a little to hokey to believe. For example, in the opening, a girl comments that people were clawing at themselves. It makes sense if one's brain is being eaten apart by plant chemicals. Never do we actually see a person actually clawing at themselves. Instead, the chemical doesn't so much induce self-destructive behavior, so much as it makes people think of creative ways to injure themselves. It was a stretch.

The centerpiece to Shyamalan's movies is always the twist. But there really wasn't a twist. The explanation of the Thirty-Seconds-To-Kill-Yourself drug is given in the first five minutes of the film - obviously. Attempts to mislabel it as a terrorist attack are so thin and full of holes that it does not do justice to his normal skill in covering his movies in thick layers of Mystery Cream. Plus, Mark Whalberg? Come right the fuck on.

Admittedly, I'm a fan of M. Night's movies, and my hope is that this film is a fluke - a shock-jock fluke to show that the director is capable of appealing to the bloodlust of modern teenage audiences.

Since they're the only demographic that can actually afford a movie anymore.

*Not an actual God.