Can't sleep

I woke up half-an hour ago thinking about drugs. I watched "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" last night. I think that's one of the only movies that's ever left me feeling hung over. I figured since I can't sleep, I may as well come make a post. Maybe I'll be so boring that I'll put myself back to sleep. I found myself thinking more about my pet online news project, too. I haven't really moved forward with it at all. I've kind of built the outline, but haven't started using it yet. I guess I've been kind of holding off from making any kind of committment to journalism again. I really like going out into the world and figuring out what's going on, then sharing tha news with other folks, but I also like not being in the belly of any of the numerous political monsters that roam the boreal forests. On the other hand, that would be a way of making blogging my job, which is also something I've been giving more thought to recently. I'm even considering signing up for Google's Ad Words. Except that I find that fairly annoying on other people's blogs, or at best, I ignore them. But I could potentially make money with them... So that's the spiral my head is in this early morning. If I could work on The Sun and build a decent site that has a good collection of news, and bring readership up to maybe five hundred or a thousand people a month, I could start selling ads. If I could sell 20 ads for a hundred bucks a month each, I could seriously make that my job. And qualify for food stamps, too. What a deal. So I guess the thing to do is hang this up, go work on The Sun a little, then get my sorry rump back into bed so I'm ready to move fire wood in six hours. Speaking of which, if any of you feel like coming over to play with pieces of oak, this is hereby your official invitation. We'll have soup and cornbread around 1 p.m. or so.

Gaaaaah!

Warning: This is purely a vent with no good reason to exist other than making me feel better. Proceed at your own risk. Both the wife and I have had one heck of a day at work. I was doing well, but then this afternoon, got swamped by a rogue wave of blah. Then buffeted by a typhoon of who gives a rip. Meanwhile, the wife was busy doing everyone's work except hers. Fixing the proofreader's pages for him. Dealing with the fact that she's a graphic designer working for a company that expects her to do her job with a beige Mac G3 running photoshop 5, Acrobat 4, and Quark 4.1, if you can believe that. Nothing like working with goods that are between four and seven generations old. Fer cryin' out loud.

Testing

Test one, one, one. Test. Test! Test. Two (This, I just happen to know, is the resonant frequency of CJ's floor, and is about 20% under C under middle C. The things you do when at a friend's house for dinner...) Two! So a priest, a rabbi and a duck walk into a bar...

Correct me if I'm wrong

...but if you (hypothetically speaking, since I'm sure the majority of what little audience I hypothetically have would rather find themselves with their hypothetical pants around their hypothetical ankles in the middle of Ashland's hypothetical Main Street on a Friday night when drunken teenagers are scooping the hypothetical loop, then actively put themselves in such a hypotheical position) are calling for peace and social justice for all, can you espouse a view that could potentially (hypothetically, even) leave someone behind and still look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, when some parts of you are flattened from sleep, and others are more bristly from the same, and think, "Gee, I'm a really good, solid person," while swilling organic orange juice picked by immigrant lesbian latinos who are not only paid a fair living wage, but are also offered the chance to marry the partner of their choice, not because it's a political statement, but because it's the right thing to do, while wiping the sleep from your eyes with the backs of your hairy knuckles while the one person you left behind with your ultra-liberal, socialist manifesto-cum-political-agenda-cum-the-man-in-a-red-beret-keeping-me-down is trying to huddle a little closer to the fifty-five gallon barrel that holds the glowing embers of her child's cradle because that's all she has to keep her warm on this frosty November-in-Wisconsin morning because while you were out busy trying to make sure everyone is feeling good about the signs and buttons and slogans you and your longhair friends made last night, you forgot to reach out to your neighbor who was falling through society's cracks; it only would have taken something so small, so simple, you never would have noticed it — a smile, a handshake, a word of encouragement &mdash but no, not for you because you were too busy, too wrapped up in your own ideals of smiling people who actually know about the world, not to mention who give a rat's ass, to reach out to help someone right in front of you, to practice what you preach, to do the right thing? I think not.

Update:

Notice that the above monograph is actually a single more-or-less gramatically correct sentence. Booyah.

Living in the twighlight zone

I have an old man and his partly naked son dancing with a fifty-foot silver snake on my roof. So there.

I have unleashed a hydra

Remember all those monster movies where the giant ______________ (fill in the blank) wades out of the ocean | sea | lagoon | sewer (choose one) and uses its firey breath | bulging, scaly muscles | incredible sense of interior decorating (again, choose one) to create massive devastation on the coast of Japan | Japan | Japan (I dare you!)? I'm kind of like that, except that Tokyo's safe crushed by my massive claws this week. I have created a multiheaded, self-aware blogomonster. It started innocently enough. I thought, hmmmm, I've heard a lot about blogs, so maybe I should make my own. So I did. That was pretty easy. So I made one for the kid. That was easy, too. So I cajoled my wife into making one, too. And a friend, who in turn got her boyfriend to make one (though he almost never posts anything), and one of her friends also started (though he writes even less than the boyfriend), and now one of his friends has (sort of) started a blog, too. This is my gift to the local community: I'm like the jerk that goes to Kenya for a week and comes back with ebola. Except that the gestation period is different. But if you spend too much time with blogs, you can pretty much count on your brains liquifying and running out your nose while your eyes cross and collapse back into your empty skull cavity. I figure being a viral contagion vector is really the least I could do for my community.

In other news...

I've passed the 500 viewers mark on the ol' blog. Too bad I can't pass the bubly as well, eh, old chap?

On creativity, for CJ

This here's for my bud, CJ, who's fightin' the artist's fight. Follow the link first, then come back and read. It'll be worth your time. Really. Yo, CJ. I reckon creativity isn't about drama or having your life in the toilet. See, that'd be reactive, and all the really great, creative things in the world are, almost by definition, proactive. Look at it this way: you always hear about a really great movie, but how often you hear about a really great movie review? I think that creativity can certainly tap into strong emotions (and what's stronger than chaos, the bedrock of the universe?), but that's kind of like beginning meditation. What I really want to get to is the advanced meditation kind of creativity where I've practiced my craft (whichever one I finally choose) enough that it's not about sitting down to do it, it's not about the words or the instrument or the brush. It's about diving into the depths of my soul and bringing back a streaming, muddy fistful of universe to share with my buddies. I guess I have a little recipie for creativity that's a little like sourdough starter (in that once you get it going, if you're a little careful, you'll never run out) that goes like this: Combine a few bushels of practice with an armful of love and a dollop of respect. Prod gently. Let sit over night. Repeat. Feeds as many as can wrap their minds about it. Best served chilled, with fire and passion. Dig it, CJ. See you for dinner!

Lighten yer load

And no, I'm not talking about a personal encounter with a porcelain goddess. I'm talking about news agregators. OK, Billy-Joebob, get out of the tree. They ain't that kind-a gator. I don't know about you all, but I've got a bunch of Web sites that I like to follow pretty closely. Rather than surfing to each one individually, then hunting for new stuff, I subscribe to their syndication feeds. Here's an easy, step-by-step way to do it so your feeds are gathered online and available to you no matter where you go (Except fer Moquah. They don't got no stinkin' Internet out there. You want news in Moquah, you go over to Old Man Sorensen's place across the way. 'Can't miss it.):

• Go to bloglines.com and sign up.
• Click the "my feeds" tab at the top of the page.
• Click the "Add" button.
• Enter "beest.blogspot.com" in the the "Blog of Feed URL" blank.
• Click "subscribe."
• Enjoy my rants and raves for years to come. Sucker.

My poor, aching wrists

You're welcome, Northland College. My sacrifice is your gain. While I've been sitting staring at the computer screen almost unblinkingly for the last two days, moving information from a gigantic PDF into a somewhat more useable, certainly more linked up Web directory, my wrists have slowly deteriorated back into carpal tunnel land as my eyes have been busy gathering an unhealthy dose of projected radiation while fighting between screen lighting and glare from the windows in my lovely office. How's that for a big, pissed off sentence? In an ethical world, would I have to sacrifice my physical (yes, and mental, too) health to make a buck to pay bills so I can afford to eat enough food to sustain me while I pump gas into my mobile atmospheric heater that takes me back to my office so I can make another buck? Stupid vicious cycles. I suppose that's what I get, squandering my undergraduate education on something that makes me happy (or frustrated, or challenged, but definitely not bored) instead of something that makes me money. I'm trying to find balance (which, had I found it by about 8 p.m. Monday evening, would have helped me avoid getting kicked in the head in taijutsu class) in the world. I know that if I could choose to do anything, I'd write fiction. And I can choose to do anything. But I don't write fiction. It's scary as all get-out to follow my dreams. One of the last times I did that, I wound up paying $25.32 for a stainless steel bolt. Of course, another time I followed a dream, I wound up with a wife. So I guess I'm batting .500. But still, scary, paranoid, pessimistic, procrastination, and dishes all come home to roost whenever I think about it. I've tried telling myself that if I write two pages a day, that's a rough draft in six months. It sounds really good. Pretty easy, though with just enough commitment involved to keep out most of the riff-raff. Oh wait. That's me. Dang it. So I try to get myself psyched up by reading some science fiction. That's good. I like that, too. So much, in fact, that I go get another book after the first one, then surf to some authors' sites, then take a look at some organizations composed mostly of people like me (since I could be the poster child, shouldn't I get a free membership?) who would love to have written a great book. Or even a mediocre book, for that matter. Notice I'm still not writing. Just thought I'd point that out. Call me Captain Obvious. Or go to the Website. I dare you. (Parental warning: the Captain Obvious website [notice the lack of link] is not for young people, or old people, or people who are easily offended, or people who can read, and certainly not for the illiterate. In fact, I recomend you stay away, but since I can't reach through the Internet to slap your mouse hand if you try to Google it, you'll just have to be responsible for your clicks. And if you go to Captain Obvious, don't come back cryin' to me. I'll just point and laugh like Nelson. Finally, don't even think I have anything to do with the Captain Obvious Website. I don't. So there.) So here I am. Writing. But not science fiction. That's OK. I'm going to let my inner New-Age liberal wiener come out and frolic in the dandelions for a moment and give the rest of me a hug, a pat on the back, and tell the rest of me that it's OK; at least I'm thinking about writing scifi and am actually writing, so that's more than half the whole ball of wax, there. My inner New-Age liberal wiener better be careful my inner right-wing, gun-toting nutjob doesn't hear about this.