Stuff I Need to FECKIN' Write

(Note on 1/17/04: This is a humorous entry, since I can't remember most of what this is talking about!)

The Richard Brautigan Bibliomancy deal.

The dream I had last night (nightmare where I am a man quilting and visited by DEATH) only make it a woman sewing a coat...

Working in bookstore piece (block-o-fiction.)

Henry and June resume piece (don't use real names.)

My online history (short & uneventful though it may be.)

Find that feckin' Sleeping Beauty poem and work in Disney Princess.

Courtney Love on being blonde.

Punk remembrance of Sleeping Lady Cafe.

Read that FECKIN' book and review it...

Please, get OFF YOUR ASS and feckin' do this...

(I am actually going to try to remember some of this and do it...)

Frickin' Coffee!

So here I am at one in the morning, when I should be sleeping. I hate having an on-again, off-again relationship with caffeine, it really sucks. Of course I have gotten a lot of good internet reading done, but today I had to deal with that coffee withdrawal/hangover thing that makes me feel like sleeping all day. If we could just abolish sleeping, I wouldn't feel like such a loser.

And in other news: I pissed off a famous author today! He was dissing new age metaphysics and blathering on about Sid & Nancy like he knew about the inside of a real punk rock club, so he got on my nerves.

It was Christopher Locke, one of the guys that wrote Cluetrain Manifesto. Now, Cluetrain Manifesto is actually a pretty good book, but after checking out the guy's weblog (which will not get a plug here, I'm a bitch, deal with it) I got the impression that the total was worth more than the sum of its parts. Like these guys were maybe a bunch of IT hacks that got pissed off one day.

As a New Ager myself (sometimes I call myself an occultist, other times New Ager, it matters not to me) I get a little irked when I see people taking cheap potshots at people's belief systems in an obvious attempt to make themselves look like quite a smartypants indeed. Like pasting a mock ad for Body & Soul magazine, with a blurb underneath it that reads "Get Fucked in a romantic Aegean monastery!" Or quite a saucy little sarcastic headlines that read "WOW! GIANT New Age Wholesale Directory!" or, "If I Laugh at This, Does it Make Me Homophobic?" over simply a picture of a book on gay wiccanism.

Do I also believe that there is a huge amount of crass commercialism in the New Age world? Yes, definately, and that is unfortunate.

But the problem I have with you, Mr. Locke, and your suck-ass weblog, is this: for the words "New Age", substitute "Moslem" or "Jewish" or "Black" or "Gay", and maybe you'll start to see my point.

So I wrote this in an email to him:

We get it, you think new age metaphysics is bullshit.

You also string together pop-culture twaddle in an attempt to sound poetic.

But while you're busy being so self-congratulatory and self-referential, you seem to have forgotten your own Manifesto: #3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

He writes back to me:

Huh?

I'm interested in what you say here, though I suspect there's more to it. What has you so pissed off? Is it my attitude toward "new age metaphysics"? You did get that part right. I'm writing a book about it-- hope to post a little something to my blog later today that will be not as cryptic as the usual.

But like it or not, that *is* my human voice. If you don't recognize it as such, then one of us has a problem. Eh? Either that or people are way more different than advertised. I think the latter is probably closer to the truth. If there's a truth to get closer to, that is.

Thanks for writing. Say more.

chris

Well, chris, you make me want to ball up my fist and scream "Dooohhh" like Homer Simpson. I will not give you anything to go on further for your crappy little book so you can cash in on your petty prejudices, but I will say more here. Your ham-fisted attempt to make me look dumb by saying that I didn't recognize your human voice means that YOU are the one with the big problem.

Hipper than thou intellectualism sucks! You are unacceptable and need to be bitch-slapped!

That's enough air-time for him I guess.

Hi Everyone!

Writers are people that live on the cutting edge, like rock stars.

They work in a solitary environment. They can be in their own little world, even in the middle of a crowd. They are watchers who observe and record, but never interfere. They are part of the lunatic fringe, having the ability to know strange, interesting people and do strange, interesting things. They are at home with artists and academes, having the ability to hold court amongst the talented.

They are tied to ancient traditions of storytelling and bardic shamanism, with the ability to weave magic spells with words. Ordinary rules don't apply to them. They don't have to have clean rooms, balanced checkbooks, or soul-killing day jobs. They are like the Gods.

I'd get more writing done if I didn't have to live with my parents. I'd get more writing done if I had a clean room. I'd get more writing done if I didn't have a soul-killing job. I'd get more writing done if I didn't feel so crappy all the time.

I'd get more writing done if I didn't watch so damn much TV. I'd get more writing done if i could return to that perfect inner landscape I once knew (ah, Hermworld, your songs echo in my heart.)