How to Travel through Time (Seriously)

I'm gonna be honest with all'yall's: I learned how to travel through time. No joke here, folks; I can do it, and so can you! For the low-low price of 14.99 you (yes, you!) can become a time traveler!


All you need is a notebook or a computer of some kind, and the ability to type. You write whatever the hell you want to, forget about it for two years, then rediscover it. Boom! You are brought back to two years ago, instantly!


It's that easy, people! (please send cash; my bank is out of state, so I can't deposit checks)




Seriously, though, I have been writing a novella for the past two years now, and I'm at about two-thirds done with it right now. Being such a long production period (give me a break, people; I also was working full time!), the story got a little detached, disjointed, convoluted, and messy. So, at the sixty-percent point of the thing, I am at a point at which I have to determine what the hell it's about. Therefore, I have to revise.


A


LOT


A(LOT)


And that means that I get to read something I wrote two years ago.


It's a weird experience. You encounter a different, older version of yourself. Being a work of fiction, my experience was not the same as if it had been a revision or rereading of a journal or something (one can only imagine what kinda mind-job THAT would be!). However, it's still jarring, to encounter old work. Part of you loves it because you remember all the hard work you put into it, and you can see all the things you were trying to make it be (awkward sentence, that, but whatever).


But, that ends up being a small part of you (or well, me, for sure).


The majority of my experience is disgust. I see everything that it tried to be, and in that I see everywhere it failed. I see how it explored directions of storytelling, description, and technique. But those directions ended up dead-ends that go nowhere and do nothing but waste pages and distract readers. It was prominent in the first chapter, so I'll forgive old me, but no, those parts must be eradicated like gangrenous tissue (nice metaphor).


But not only do you see wasted space, but as you go through the process of actually revising, rewriting, and cutting, you see that a lot of it is useless and pointless. Not inherently evil, no, but it really makes yer work and efforts feel utterly without meaning or purpose.


Yaaaaaay for wasted time?


You make something, you love it, you forget about it, you try to kill it, and whatever survives is worth keeping. Therein you find your story; therein you find the essence of revision.


Click the ads, or I'll revise you

Wheelman

Today I got to deliver a car!

My brother was borrowing a car for his stay in Wisco, and as he is leaving today, he had to return the car to its original owner (may aunt Connie). So, I took a ride from my dad down to Oconomowoc to take the car and then drive it to Connie.

Gotta say, for some reason, being a wheelman has a certain appeal to me. Not sure why. I don't think it's related to the Driver videogames, or Vanishing Point. But there's something about it, even driving safely through the countryside (not at all like in a movie... well, not like in an interesting movie). Although I do love the idea of having to drive a classic muscle car across the country in a narrow band of time, dueling other drivers and dodging the police across salt flats... but come on; I'm driving a Cavalier! You can tell the door is plastic. There's no cruise control. The windows are hand-cranks, and I expect that it came standard with the engine light on. Still, fun fun!

Anyway, this is a short post to get swinging again; more to come! (click ads!)

Rules to Live by: The Mind Killer

With my last post, there was a fair amount of discussion about the dangers of riding at night. Rightly so, of course, because there's a lot of quickly moving steel that weights more than me and is far sharper than I shall ever be, and yet there I go, going dangerously fast around said mobile steel (cars, to the layperson). So I put on a helmet and wear plenty of very bright lights to ensure my own safety. I clothe myself in light and keep my head on a swivel. I do all the smart and reasonable things I can to minimize my own risk, to keep myself as safe as possible and to make my safety about my performance and behavior. But nonetheless, there, under my helmet and in the back of my mind, is that little burning doubt that I'm wrong and I forgot something and I can't handle my own safety.

That's the ember ember of fear.

Because fear is well described as a fire. It destroys and maddens, inspires foolishness and doubt. Fire and fear both spread, and leap from person to person.  If left unchecked, it can reduce entire countries to charred ruin. And yet, both fear and fire can be kept in check, and when they're little more than tongues, they're soft and gentle, easily manipulated.

The best part, the absolutely most fascinating part about fear and fire is that they are products of invention and reason. With this world in which we live, there is much to fear (I need not list examples here; you know your fears better than I), and it is through our reasoning faculties that we develop and keep our fears. And, in a wonderful example of life's ironies, the fears, begotten by reason, attack their birth-parents and seek to drive us to madness. I say "madness" because it has an epic feel to it (seriously, just shout out MADNESS once in a while -- it's fun!), but really, you experience a little madness whenever fear let's loose on you. I mean, there's no way -- none! -- that there's a creepy half-human with disjointed limbs crawling around on the walls of my mom's house, watching me.

Yet, somehow, that thought pops into my head when I turn out the lights.

I had a friend who was convinced her apartment was haunted, one night. Like, a bad haunting with her laptop being tossed around the room, and such. She was utterly convinced that her let was grabbed by something cold and inhuman. I myself am certain that everybody on the face of the earth is possessed whenever I wake up at two in the morning. Without a doubt, I will believe that there is a ghost or something taking control of your body, should I see you during the witching hour, as it's called.

Fear, we see, attacks reason, as I said before. But what, then, do we do? Do we allow fear to destroy our reasoning faculties until it passes by an outside force (wait until sunrise)? That works, but I don't like putting my future in anyone's hands but mine, even the sun's.

What I do prefer, however, is to attack fear itself. I meet it on its battleground of choice, and defeat it at its very best. When I was afraid of the dark, I would turn out the lights and close my eyes. I would drown myself in darkness and feel it sink in around me. Panic and fear would rise along my spine, and I could feel its shake enter my nervous system. I would think about the most horrible things that could possibly be looking at me in the darkness, imagine things more nightmarish than any I had ever seen before; I would taunt my fear and outdo its own creation! I would declare that I will not fear that darkness or any other, and that when I opened my eyes, there would be darkness there, and nothing more. That moment before I reopened my eyes was a precipice of reality. It was that edge of reason in which I would determine the world in which I lived. If I kept my eyes closed, the world was a product of my imagination and subject to its bending will. If, however, I managed to open my eyes, it was on the faith that my imagination was limited, wrong, and controllable like a flame. I opened my eyes on the faith that reason will prevail, and the world has rules where my mind does not.

Of course, I would open my eyes and each time the world was fine, boring, and dark. But not unreasonable.

What's fun, though, is that if my imagined sensation were true and if there were a hairless werewolf there in the darkness ahead of me, it would be quite unreasonable to act as if he weren't there. And so, in another irony of life, I had to act unreasonably to defeat fear, which attacks reason.

Consider my cycling. I am afraid of getting mangled in a car wreck and left for dead. I am absolutely afraid of that happening. However, I have to overcome that fear, and to do so, I have to ride my bike around cars and effectively behave unreasonably (I ride safely, I really do!).

Yeah, that's right: defeat fear, a product of unreason, by behaving unreasonably. Suck it, reality! That's the rule to live by: don't fear, not anything.

** I was going for a new tone with this post, hope it was fun to hear something closer to professionalism! Click ads or die! (that's not a threat, I'm just saying: click ads, peoples)

Night Rider

I have a new favorite cycling memory! For those of you (both of you) who don't remember, this blog used to be under a different name and focus. Actually, it had focus, and a specific subject matter: cycling (riding bikes, to the layperson). I was just getting into cycling, and had just moved to a new town, so I combined the two into one adventurous blog: Crash Cycling. It was fun, but it went the way of so many things I do: it got lost somewhere in the attic.

But I still ride!
And I still like it!
So that stuck with me, even if the blog had fallen into disrepair and ended up getting re-launched. But, an earlier article I wrote therein was about cycling at night. I won't just push my old entries, though, I only want to share that surprise I found in myself that I wanna write about it again!

This time, however, instead of riding around a minute little town with not much more than a cellphone light, I raced through downtown Green Bay (shut up -- it has a downtown!) with proper equipment. Okay, cellphone light was an intense exaggeration, but the light I had didn't do much except inspire faith-based riding through the dark. As in, I couldn't see much. Since then I had gotten a really kickass light that inspires safety.

That's my fun way of saying I rode real frickin fast down well-lit night roads!

It was a blast! It reminded me of mountain biking, in which I have minimal path-finding abilities and have to have a good grip because I can't see where the hell i'm gonna go any given moment. Like that, but WAY faster! Riding in the dark added a nice level of difficulty to my ride, and really upped the intensity of the experience. The world's really a different place at night; the cooler air is lighter in the lungs, and light is a manufactured rarity in fresher tones than what you're used to. I highly recommend trying it out for yourself. Just make sure you get a really bright and broad light in front, and a blinking red in back. People will avoid you, don't worry. You just need to make sure that they SEE you so they can avoid you. Savvy?

I think I'll leave the post like this; let it be a shorter, lighter one. Just click the ads like y'all's do.

Life by Code: Belief

I think everybody needs a code. Like, one to live by, not a sequence of numbers and letters that allows them to operate (God knows we don't need any more of those!). To a certain extent, we all have rules we follow, ingrained in each of us through a variety of means. But, like everything else we do unconsciously, when we bring it into our own awareness and try to truly understand and perfect our rules they become something different, and we with them. The rules become a Code (give that a capital "c"!) and we become People of a Code (almost epic, no?).

I believe in living by a Code, and one of the first fundamental codes by which I live is that belief, without practice, is dead.

What I mean by that is it's what we do, our actions, our practice that ultimately indicates who we are as people. It is all fine to say you believe in something, but if you do not act as though such belief is true, then what's the point of believing it?

Really.
Believe there's a Minnesota?
Cool.
Actually act as though Minnesota exists in the world?
Cool; that's belief.
Act as though Minnesota doesn't exist? Be bemused whenever something comes from Minnesota, or they show up in the news? Refuse that you can actually go there?
It's not practical; it might as well not be there. And that's not belief, but it's a way of thinking we often engage ourselves in modern society.

Here's an illustration: say you believe in the evolution. As in, species evolved from earlier ancestors over the course of eons and eons. Okay, now how do you practice it? That's actually pretty simple, although there are two answers that come to mind immediately. First is, you just live your life and boom, you're participating in and practicing evolution along with the rest of humanity like gravity. Yaaaay we won; let's coast. Second is, you breed. You actually try to propagate the species and your own genetic pattern because, frankly, we're kickass at this whole evolution thing. We may not have bacteria beaten, but rabbits? Hells yeah.

Now the first practical scenario is the one that ultimately the high majority of people practice, in my encounters and investigations. It's light-handed, hardly offends people, doesn't require any work, and it requires only fundamental understanding of the concept. People say "Sure, all species and life as we know it gradually changed over many eons  to become what they are today. Now gimme my coffee!" It's convenient, but that's not practice, which means that's not belief: that's acknowledgement. If that were Minnesota, you would say it's there, but you wouldn't go, and why go there, why say you believe in Minnesota at all? It's a space that does nothing but exist.

So, the second scenario of practice is a LOT more active! You're actually participating in the evolutionary process (you actually visit Minnesota!). The catch with that, though, is that we've done it before as people; we've actively engaged ourselves in evolution. Basically, if you get a bunch of people together, and they say they're the best, they say their genes are the best, you get big problems. Do you want me to drop a Nazi bomb? It's pretty obvious that their ideas were inspired or based on (or unrightfully justified by, most accurately) evolutionary biology.

 So, while we say that evolution and Minnesota exist, and are as real as gravity, we ourselves cannot employ evolutionary thought processes as a society, and we cannot actually go to Minnesota. Or we'll be branded Nazis... Minnesota Nazis.

So next time you find yourself making a stand in who you are and what you believe -- whatever it may be -- ask yourself if you really do believe it, ask yourself if you practice it, if it's REAL to you and you live it. If you do, then yeah, you believe it, but if you don't, find out what you believe and stand by it. Allow your actions to shape who you are. Start by clicking ads.

The Wicker Man

Last night, I watched Nicholas Cage's biopic, The Wicker Man. It's about his life after film, in which he entered law enforcement, struggled with depression for vague reasons, and reconnected with his estranged wife and daughter. Really, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Cage was his usual subtle self, enunciating his lines with an evocative clarity, and really bringing his character (himself) to life like never before.

Well, it's Nicholas Cage, so, you can imagine the quality of acting he puts into a work that's based on his own life experiences.

It interestingly enough doesn't give much backstory to Cage's departure from Hollywood, but we catch on quickly as he has moved on to be a highway patrolman in northern California. It did not explain why exactly he decided to go into law enforcement from film, which would be an essential part of a biopic, and really the most exciting part of his life. Think of it: an actor adjusting from action movies like ConAir and The Rock to the real-life drudgery of law enforcement. There's an exciting drama; adjusting to slowing down and living a new life.

Perhaps that's why he gets depressed early on? He does (more or less) witness a graphic death on the road, but it seems to have little impact on him, other than giving him something dramatic to think about for a while. But really, you can tell, it's the boredom of daily office routine and having only work-friends that hits him hardest and sends him spiraling into depression. That's going along with the essential drama here, of a guy who lived in Hollywood and had to settle down in northern Cali at a job that he thought would be exciting, but wasn't. EXACTLY! That's it! he's bored, and when he does finally encounter something interesting (mom and daughter dying in a fiery wreck), it gives him the itch for action again!

So then, get this, his ex sends him a letter saying "Hey, come to this non-creepy place (that's TOTALLY creepy) and find my daughter, who isn't yours (she's yours, you'll see it coming), and I'll totally give you some excitement." Okay, she doesn't say that last part, but it's IMPLIED, big time!

And of course, he goes, because he's gotta get his rock and roll on.

The rest of his life story gets a little fuzzy at this point. He befriends all the women on the island immediately, because he's just so damn charming (he's Nicholas Cage). He finds a girl who looks like the missing/dead/not really dead at all (gasp!) girl, but isn't. Gets stung by a LOT of bees for little to no reason. Hallucinates about dead people who aren't actually dead. Gets burned alive at one point. Gets stung by MORE bees. Turns into a bear and punches a woman.

Then his life actually got interesting: turns out, he was a robot sent from the future to save his daughter's life from another time-travelling robot. He ultimately has a showdown in a smelting plant (or something; they were unclear on what exactly it was), in which he says "bye" to the other future robot (which is all liquidy) by shooting him/her into a boiling vat of lava. His gives Edward Furlong a thumbs-up and says "I know now why you cry" as Eddy lowers him down into the very lava that killed the T-1000.

And yay, the future is saved, thanks to Nicholas Cage! All in all, the first half of the movie was lame, but it picked up once it turned out he was a robot. You should rent it, and watch it with Rifftrax.

Click the ads; I'm out!

Writing Metaphors (as in, metaphors of writing [or rather, one metaphor for writing])

The most intimidating thing in the world is a blank page. Seriously, just open up a word document and take a gander. You'll see absolutely nothing (except the empty white). This on its own certainly isn't all that frightening a sight, but when you have to fill it... ahhhh, yes, therein lies the terror. It is the darkness (an ironic darkness because the page is so bright) that looks back at you. Or doesn't; this darkness fills with whatever you want it to contain, but it also can remain completely void (void isn't right, though; it suggests an absence while this scenario the page is utterly blank: neither having substance nor lacking substance).


A blank page is like looking into a mirror and not seeing anything. Or worse, it's like looking into a mirror, moving and shouting, but your reflection merely stands still, looking back at you. God, that's a creepy image! Was the reflection smirking at you, too? And looking right behind you? Oh, man! And then, the reflection just walks the F away! Leaving you standing there, in the bathroom, alone! Which then leaves you to wonder if there was anything in the mirror in the first place, and if so, what was it? That, ladies and gentlemen, is a blank page.


So now that we know what that is, what would that make writing? Easy: solitary confinement with that messed-up mirror.


You're trapped in a room with absolutely nothing in it except for you and the mirror. The only thing you can do is look at that mirror, and try to control whatever it is inside of it. You have to keep it from walking away, but you can't let it petrify either. So, you dance. You dance with your own damn reflection. It's okay; you're alone, so it's not that weird.


But while you're dancing with your image, there, alone in solitary confinement, you also keep track of your steps. You record them, you make them better (more engaging for the mirror's image), and you make them easier for you to take, as well. So you dance for your time in solitary, you lose track of how long you've been in there, but one day, the dance is complete. Complete from beginning to end, and you love taking every step of it, and to you it is this absolutely beautiful and wonderful thing. The only thing that it needs, at this point, is for another real human being to experience it. See, you can dance on your own all you want, but it's boring, and it doesn't make much sense, and when you create or even just find something that's truly wonderful, you have to share it to experience it in its fullness.


So one day, when the guard shovels your food into the slot, you ask him if he would like to see your dance. He says “Sure” but then immediately walks away. Next day, same guard, same question, and you ask why he didn't watch yesterday. He says he thought it was more of a general question, like, “Do you enjoy cake.” I mean, who would say no to that? But really, “sure” means “no.” So next day, different guard, you ask her to see your dance, and he says sure, and this time he peeks in through the slot. So you dance! Perfectly according to your steps, you dance, and she is fascinated by it! When you're tired, sweaty, and spent at the end, you ask him what he thinks. “It was good,” is all he says. So you ask him about specific parts of the dance, parts you loved and parts that were extra difficult, and parts that still felt awkward. “It was all good,” is all he says. And then he leaves. You've spent six months in solitary confinement with a mirror and your own footsteps and the absolute pinnacle of your accolades and success was “It was good.”


So you copy your steps, remember them, and get the mirror out again to start a new dance that will maybe make others see and feel the magic of dance (by which I mean writing)!


In general, I don't like writing about writing. It seems too convoluted and shortsighted a process. But, I do LOVE riding metaphors to the grave! Click on the ads like a simile nosing baited cheese!