Number 7:
Saying “Goodbye” is the most painful way of solving a problem.
The Konietzky Strain
Number 7:
Saying “Goodbye” is the most painful way of solving a problem.
Number 6:
The Human species are simply bags of meat doing the best that we can with what we have.
Number 5:
Life turns on a dime. Any of us could be rich, poor, or dead tomorrow.
Number 4:
Things happen for a reason, but do we like the reason? RARELY.
Number 3:
Women are better at keeping secrets, but Men are more confortable with them.
We live in strange times.
We also live in strange places; each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glace out into this bewildering complexity of infinte recursion and say things like, “Oh, Hello Ed! Nice tan. How’s Carol?” involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscience entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble.
So give you kid a break, OK?
- Practical Parenting in a Fractally Demented Universe
Number 2:
If someone goes to the trouble of printing something on a t-shirt then it is almost definitely not a 100% untrue, which is to say that it is more than likely fairly definitely not altogether false.
Number 1:
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Pulitzer Prize-winner and Nobel laureate with six tips on writing. These were pulled from his interview it the 1975 issue of The Paris Review.
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
Steinbeck also issued a thoughtful disclaimer to all such writing advice:
“If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.”
This post came to me as I sprayed a pile of shaving creme into my hand in the shower. I turned 40 in August and as I look back, I realized how certain things carve the way we are. I whispered to myself “This means something” as I formed the shaving creme into a version of Devils Tower before smearing it on my face and head to shave. It struck me as funny, realizing the weird things that make up what is the 40 year old being of ME. The weird facts, film references, and past experiences from friends, family, games, books, music, etc.
I sit here writting this now listening to “The Green Album” recently released by the Muppets.
After looking down from the top of the hill, as my friends call it. Allow me to share my philosophy of Human Beings. It can be summed up with just four little words… I like good people. Despite my cynical dark look on the world, I think we are all good people. We just disagree in a very hostile way about the details. I have no tolerance for the “If you disagree with me, you are evil” sort of thinking. Those kinds of folks, can fuck right off. ;)
I have more friends now that when I was younger, and a majority of those are “Web/Internet” friends. I do have my closer friends that are local, but I keep in touch with many friends that I am close to even though I have never met them in “Meatspace”. I would love to have the money to one day at least visit some of my web friends… Molly’s Jim, Molly, Jim, Ang, Scott, Randy, Brian, Veronica, and many many more. Maybe once I invent the damn flying cars I was promised as a child, and become outrageously weathly I can do it… one can dream. I have seen this weird and twisted world go from Sony Walkmans and Trapper Keepers, to iPods and iPads. ;) Sometimes I feel old… when I would rather play a game of Ultima IV rather than the newest Deus Ex game. Some of you out there will know what I am talking about, most will not… Minecraft anyone. :)
I finish this post while listening to the new Weird Al album… yeah, to me they are still fricking albums. I leave you with an amazing quote from Patton Oswalt, as truer words have never been spoken… at least not from another geek. I love my geek brothers and sisters… LIVE LONG & PROSPER!!!
“It took me until my 40s to realize it: There’s no destination. There’s no getting anywhere. There’s just the going. The key to life is to make the going really fun. Because people that are like, “If I just get to this, then boom!” And then they get there and there’s this dawning of an afterwards. Whereas I’m just always in the going. And it’s not a frantic going like, “I gotta keep going or I’m gonna go nuts!” I can not do anything for weeks or months if I need to and just sit and read books or watch movies. I’m just as fine consuming and absorbing new art as I am trying to make it. But it’s all in the going.”
