Author: xeyeti

Election Day

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It’s Tuesday, November 8, 2016.  Election Day.  Today, we elect a new president, some senators, all the members of the House of Representatives, and various state and local officials.

Regardless of your political affiliation, I hope you get out there and exercise your fundamental civic right.  People fought and died for this right, so make sure you’ve carefully considered the candidates and ballot measures before you.

No matter how the election turns out, we’ve still got to live with each other tomorrow and the day after that.  Don’t let your political position interfere with your ability to maintain a relationship with your loved ones or your coworkers or such.  I have lots of friends and family with whom I disagree, politically, but I still love ’em.

(Even if they’re wrong)

Tuesdays

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Another short vignette from a few years ago that I thought you all might enjoy.

—

“God, today fucking sucks,” Walter said, collapsing into his chair at the cafeteria table like the fall of empires.

Molly sat silently for a moment, expecting Walter to elaborate.  Clearly, he wanted to say more.  You could see it in his face.  And though she was curious, she would not give him the satisfaction of asking why.

“Why?” she finally said, despite herself.

“It’s Tuesday, Molly,” Walter replied, as though the answer were self-evident.

Molly pondered this for a moment, probing the statement’s depths and finding them unfathomable.

“Okay, I’ll bite.  Is it this particular Tuesday that sucks, or Tuesdays in general?” she asked.

“Tuesday,” Walter said, with the air of someone about to impart great wisdom, “is the worst day of the week.”

“That seems…well, that just doesn’t make any sense,” Molly said, frowning.

“It’s quite simple,” Walter replied, wagging a finger at her.  “Mondays, for all of their horror and frustration, are really not to be feared.  Most folks are still too hung over from the weekend to really notice Monday is even happening.  We have the afterglow of the weekend to keep us warm on a dreary Monday.”

“I’m not entirely sure I agree with that, but I’ll give it to you for the sake of argument,” Molly said doubtfully.  “What about Wednesday?”

“Wednesday is New Comic Day,” Walter replied bluntly, as though no one could possibly not know that.  “Thursday, of course, is the day before Friday.  There’s anticipation.  There’s light at the end of the tunnel.  There’s hope.”

“And Friday, of course, is Friday,” Molly finished for him.

“Of course,” Walter said.  “Which leaves only Tuesday, that poor, misbegotten naïf with nothing to recommend it.  Think of it.  Every other day has at least something happening.  Tuesday is the week’s equivalent of an hour spent in a doctor’s waiting room.”

Molly considered Walter’s assertion.  “I still maintain Monday is pretty horrible,” she said tentatively.

“Oh, I’m so sick of everyone going on about Monday!” Walter cried, rising to his feet and startling people around them.  Molly scrabbled at his arm, trying to drag him back down into his chair and mentally willing everyone in the cafeteria to look the other way.  Walter returned to his seat without appearing to notice.  “Monday is a much-maligned day, I tell you, a day with much to be joyful about!  Why, it gives you the opportunity to reconnect with comrades, to discuss the events of the weekend and dissect them with excruciating detail among friends and confidants.  Monday is the chance to strut back into your place of work or what-have-you and proclaim, loudly, ‘I got laid on Saturday, even with this haircut!’  Monday is the weekend’s not-quite-sober victory lap.”

Molly’s brow furrowed, her left eyebrow arching in barely-sustained suspension of disbelief.  “Okay, so let’s say Tuesdays are as bad as you say,” she began.  “For the sake of argument, we’ll go with that.  If your big problem with Tuesday is that it’s got nothing to it, why not give Tuesday some deeper personal meaning?  Why does it have to be the ennui of the work week?”

Walter gave Molly a look of mixed sadness and condescension.  “Molly, my dear, dear Molly, it does not work that way,” he said pityingly.  “One cannot simply ascribe any old meaning to a day and expect it to stick.  Reality is not so easily convinced.

“Let us say I were to, as you put it, ‘give Tuesday a deeper personal meaning.’  What then?  Will everyone else take up the change?  Will Tuesday become a personal day for the whole world?  And if it does, how do we benefit?  No, Tuesday must remain as it is, unloved and unfulfilling.  It provides the context for the rest of the week, and nothing more.”  He sighed as a Byronic poet might, gazing off longingly into the middle distance.  Or possibly he was staring at the pudding, Molly couldn’t be sure.

“Whatever,” Molly replied, giving up on the conversation and gathering her empty lunch things onto her tray.  “I’m off for Physics.  You coming?”

“What’s the point?” Walter asked somberly.  “It’s Tuesday.”

“Well, we’ve got that test today…” Molly said.

“Oh, right,” Walter said, his eyes suddenly refocusing.  “Off we go, then.”

The Invisible Crown Cover Reveal Participants Wanted — royaljamespublishing.com

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We are looking for some amazing bloggers again to participate in an upcoming cover reveal. It’s for the amazing novel, The Invisible Crown by Charlie Cottrell. The date for the cover reveal is on November 11, 2016. Join now! Send us an email to royaljamespublishing@gmail.com or click here to join our blog tour email list. Thanks! About The Invisible […]

via The Invisible Crown Cover Reveal Participants Wanted — royaljamespublishing.com

#inktober Megapost

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I love to draw (as anyone who follows the webcomic knows full-well), and I decided it’d be fun to do the #inktober thing for October: a drawing a day, in ink.  Some of them were pencil drawings that I then inked with a variety of pens (some were brush pens, some were Prismacolor markers, and several were done with an ultra-fine Sharpie and a regular Sharpie for a bold outline).  Others were done, start to finish, with regular ol’ ballpoint pen.  Here’s all 31 inky drawings for your enjoyment!

Halloween Playlist

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Are you like me, and find yourself wanting to enjoy Halloween but struggling because of a dearth of decent songs associated with the holiday?  I mean, in terms of inspiring music, it’s not Christmas, that’s for sure.  I just find that I can’t stand listening to the Monster Mash and the Addams Family theme and the Munsters theme again and again on repeat this year.  I need some actual, non-novelty music.

And we’re in luck!  There are actually plenty of real, pretty awesome songs that have a stealth-Halloween theme to them.  Here’s a selection of some of my favorites.

1. The Eagles, “Witchy Woman”: Sure, it’s easy to rag on the Eagles as being the dad-est of Dad Rock, but they did some fun songs.  This one carries the witch metaphor throughout pretty strongly, and fits right in with our “real song but Halloween-y” theme.

2. Creedence Clearwater Revival, “I Put a Spell on You”: Yeah, I know, the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins version is probably better, and certainly more Halloween-y, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to include a CCR song on a playlist.

3. The Beatles, “Devil in Her Heart”: Not even a little bit of the right tone, barely even mentions anything Halloween-related (the titular devil in her heart, which is more metaphorical than actual), but it’s the Beatles, and it’s my playlist, so nyah.

4. Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”: There was a 0% chance I wasn’t going to include this.  An obvious but classic choice.

5. Tom Petty, “Zombie Zoo”: “Sometimes you’re so impulsive/You shaved off all your hair/You look like Boris Karloff/But you don’t even care” is probably the best line in any song ever, and I will fight you if you say otherwise.

6. Josh Ritter, “The Curse”: A love song about a mummy told as sincerely as this is proof this world is sometimes better than we deserve.

7. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Red Right Hand”: Honestly, you could just put a Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album on for Halloween it’d be fine.  If I have to go with one song, though, this is the one.  The Pete Yorn version from the first Hellboy movie isn’t half-bad, either.

8. Jeremy Messersmith, “Ghost”: A haunting beautiful (get it?) song about disappearing out of someone’s life.

9. The Flaming Lips, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part 1”: War of the Worlds, if it was fought between a Japanese pop singer who knows karate and giant pink robots that want to eat people.

10. The White Stripes, “Walking with a Ghost”: I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one.  I just wanted another song about ghosts on here.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

My Story

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While I attempt to dig myself out of my depressive funk, enjoy this thing I wrote years ago that I re-read the other day and didn’t hate.

—

When I write my story, there will be no hero.  There will be no happy ending.

There will be an infinite sadness, a streak of pain painted across the night sky, an arc of red against a field of black.

There will be blood, and a wailing, and a gnashing of teeth.

And ponies.  There will probably be ponies.

* * *

My main character will not be a white male.  No, my protagonist won’t even be human, or sentient, or recognizable as a character.  It’ll be a bacterium, or a fugus, perhaps a particularly plucky protozoa.

There won’t be a determined, independent woman in the story, either.  No humans at all, except maybe as the setting.  Or the antagonist.  We’re pretty antagonistic towards every other living thing in existence, it seems, so we’d make pretty damn convincing antagonists.

* * *

I don’t really think I’ll have a theme, or follow much in the way of writing conventions.  Everyone’s done pretty much everything you can with stories that make sense, that follow narrative structure.  Hell, everything’s been done with stories that don’t follow narrative structure.  I’ve read Joyce and Bely, I know all about that whole stream of consciousness nonsense.

My story will be told through pheromones and suggestive twitches of flagella.

* * *

It won’t be a long story.  There’s no need to go on for thousands and thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words stacking up like bricks in a wall or CDs on a club kid’s nightstand.  There may only be a single word to my magnum opus.  It’ll be a word that rolls over the tongue, one that lolls about in the mouth, coating everything in a thin film.  Something like “lugubrious,” or “gibbous,” or possibly “sumptuous.”

Or maybe it will just be a description of some hardcore bestiality for a thousand pages.  I’m not set on anything just yet.

* * *

Ultimately, no one will read my story.  It will exist only in my head, if even there, and only for a short while if at all.  I’m not entirely certain the world is ready for my work of speculative flash fiction featuring an unknowable protagonist and us as the antagonist.  It’s a bit of a stretch, really.

Also, I haven’t found a publisher, and I’m sure as hell not gonna self-publish this mess.

No Depression

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If I’m honest with myself – and, to be honest, I’m often not – my depression has been a problem lately.  It’s left me feeling listless and worthless, which isn’t uncommon for me.

I’ve been like this…well, pretty much always, I guess.  These bouts of lowness, of feeling like I’d be better off not existing, like maybe no one would really notice or mind that much if I wasn’t around.  It’s a terrible way to feel.

The disjointedness.  Feeling like I’m jumping from rock to rock, idea to idea, with no coherent connection between them.  Hopping across stones over a rushing river, or maybe it’s lava.  Not caring enough to look down to find out.  What does it matter, if it’s water or lava?  Falling in would kill me just as dead either way.

Or the emptiness.  The sense that you’ve somehow become hollow inside, waiting to be filled up by something, anything, but nothing is forthcoming.  It’s disheartening.

With the emptiness comes the loneliness, the isolation, the sense of being cut off from everyone.  Like there’s no one I can talk to about it, no one who would understand.

I came to work this morning, more out of habit than anything.  I didn’t want to come in.  I didn’t feel like I could contribute anything worthwhile.  I wanted to call in sick, to be honest.  Call in depressed.  Is that a legitimate reason to be out?  It should be, but it probably wouldn’t look that way from the outside.  Because the truth is, I just don’t feel like being here today.  I don’t feel like being anywhere.

I know it’s all a lie.  Depression is a liar, but a damned persuasive one.  It lies and it lies, it fills your head with falsehoods and emptiness and a smothering blank of despair, and it tells you this is all you are.  All you’re worth.  Depression lies, and I try to lie to myself that I’m okay and that I can handle it.  But the truth is, the honest truth that I don’t share even with myself some times, I can’t handle it.  The depression is always stronger than I am.  Always.  Even if I push it back this time, it will return.  It always comes back.  Things I thought I’d conquered, fears I’d believed I’d overcome, slip back in insidiously, slinking in from the dark corners and making themselves at home as if they’d never left.

I’m not alone.  I’m not.  I’ve got a support group, a good one, one filled with people who love me and whom I love, too.  But right this second, in this place, I don’t feel it.  Depression’s lie – I’m alone – feels so real.  So true.  And then it starts whispering in my ear that this is what I deserve: being alone.  Apart.  Empty.  Depression is a bastard and a liar, an entity made up of all the worst things in your soul, the bits you try to forget or push out of yourself or ignore and hope they’ll go away on their own.  Depression is made up of those, finds more of them to add to itself, builds itself up into this monolithic force that you can’t resist.

I want to be able to end this post on a note of hope.  It’s hard, right now, in the throes of the depression, to even think positively, even though I know this isn’t permanent.  The usual platitude, “This, too, shall pass,” doesn’t feel true at all.

The Bullet Journal

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I am not, by my nature, an organized individual.  At all.  My executive functioning skills are somewhere around those of a tornado-strewn main street the morning after.  In theory, everything I need is somewhere close at hand, but good luck finding it.

So back in January, my wife started me using something called a Bullet Journal.

It’s a pretty simple idea, really: organizing by month, by day, by task.  It’s a glorified to do list, really, but it’s tremendously versatile.  Since I started using it, I get a lot more things done, I’m on top of my job-related tasks and my home tasks, and I’m generally more organized and less stressed.

I’ve tried a lot of organizational schemes over the years: checklists, reminders in my phone, calendars, day planners, agendas…none of them seemed to stick the way the bullet journal has.  Maybe it’s the versatility: I can keep my task lists in there, but also put whatever I want in it (I’ve done set lists, written poems, taken notes for meetings, and all sorts of other stuff in there.  I’ve even doodled on many of the pages).  It’s great being able to see my month at a glance and do a more detailed plan for each individual day.

My journal is color-coded by type of task, I’ve incorporated an increasing series of symbols and cryptic notes to myself that only I understand, and I don’t forget to get things done the way I used to.  I’m comfortable making the claim that this organizational tool actually saved my job last year, helping me stay on top of all the paperwork that comes with being a special education teacher, and it’s keeping me ahead of the curve this year.

I can’t show you the interior of my journal, since it’s very private (and contains information regarding IEPs for my students), but the official bullet journal website that I linked above gives you a great idea of their potential.  If, like me, you struggle with organization and executive function, if you find yourself forgetting to do tasks, or struggling to remember what steps you need to take to complete some assignment or task, the bullet journal may be just what you need.  I’m not shilling for them because of payment or anything; hell, the people who put this thing together don’t know me and don’t need me proselytizing for them, I’m sure.  But I believe in this system and have seen firsthand just how effective and useful it can be.  I definitely recommend it without reservations, and have even gotten a couple of my friends (and a student or two!) to give it a try.

At the end of the day, the bullet journal helps me stay organized and on top of things in my life, and that’s good enough for me.

Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan

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So, here’s a cool thing: Bob Dylan was announced last week as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The prize committee cited Dylan “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

And hey, that’s definitely something I can get behind.  Even when he’s less than great, Dylan can still turn a phrase better than most.  I thought it might be fun to run down a list of some of my favorite Dylan lyrics, in honor of his…um, honor.

Let me ask you one question/Is your money that good?/Can it buy you forgiveness?/Do you think that it should? (Masters of War)

I mean, all of “Masters of War” is classic.  It’s one of those evergreen protest songs that they could play over footage of any war and it would feel pretty appropriate.  There’s a sneer and a condemnation in the words, a drone in the repetitive chord progression that’s relentless and unchanging.  You get the feeling Dylan fucking hates war, has always and will always hate it, and you’ll never be able to convince him it’s justified.

Voices echo/This is what salvation must be like after a while. (Visions of Johanna)

I don’t always necessarily have a lot of deep insight into a particular lyrics.  A lot of his stuff just strikes me in a funny way.  His turn of phrase is always magnificent.  There’s an almost dismissive quality to a lot of what he sings, as though he can’t be bothered to decide if what he’s singing is profound or tremendously absurd.  Maybe it’s both.  I think it’s probably both.

I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver/And I’m reading James Joyce/Some people tell me/I got the Blood of the Lamb in my voice. (I Feel a Change Comin’ On)

Yeah, it’s latter-day Dylan, and it’s sort of a throw-away set-up to get to the payoff about “the Blood of the Lamb in [his] voice.”  But damn if that isn’t the perfect way to describe Dylan’s singing, with that broken-down throat that sounds like he was in a sand-gargling contest with Tom Waits after they both drank a fifth of scotch and smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes each.

Last night I danced with a stranger/But she just reminded me you were the one. (Standing in the Doorway)

Once, many years ago, I spent an entire blogpost dissecting this song (fair warning: I was 23 at the time, so I was pretty damn insufferable about…well, everything, but especially music).  There’s just something so sad and beautiful about this pair of lines, it just kills me every time.

Then she says, “I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me.”/I said, “I would if I could but I don’t do sketches from memory.” (Highlands)

This is the song where I got the name for my webcomic site (it’s also what I called the old blogspot blog back in the day).  It’s a pretty evocative title, and the lines in the song itself are frankly pretty damn funny, when you consider the fact the subject is standing right in front of him when he says he can’t do a sketch from memory.  Another situation where I can’t really tell if it’s brilliant or absurd, so it’s probably both.

I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”/He said, “You’re not Him” (Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream)

No one spins a weird yarn like Dylan.  The surreal imagery, the bizarre characters, the out-of-left-field interactions…it all swirls and twirls like a kaleidoscope stuffed with LSD.  And this particular lyric epitomizes the thing folks seem to forget about Dylan too often: he’s funny as hell.

But the joke was on me/There was nobody even there to bluff/I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough. (Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues)

Easily one of my favorite Dylan songs to play.  It’s a twisted morality play about a place where no one has any kindness in their hearts, and the idea of returning to New York City as a place where things are better or kinder or less indifferent is sad and amazing and bizarre all at once.

You got a lotta nerve/To say you are my friend/When I was down you just stood there grinning. (Positively 4th Street)

The ultimate kiss-off song.  Dylan is full of vitriol and bile, snarling the lyrics to an old flame.  You almost feel bad for the subject of the song.

And I know no one can sing the blues /Like Blind Willie McTell. (Blind Willie McTell)

A simple song with just voice, piano, and an acoustic guitar (played by Mark Knopfler of the Dire Straits), borrowing the tune of the old blues standard “St. James Infirmary” and acting as a history of race relations and slavery in America.  A blues song about the blues.  A lament that one does not fully possess the capability to express what is in the heart.  No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell, but Dylan comes damn close in this song.

They say prayer has the power to heal/So pray for me, mother /In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell /I am trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others /But oh, mother, things ain’t going well. (Ain’t Talkin’)

Dylan famously went through a born-again Christian phase in the late ’70s/early ’80s, and while those albums weren’t the greatest, he’s managed to put the biblical imagery to better and more effective use since then.  This is a perfect example: referencing the power of prayer, the Golden Rule, and the struggle to be who you’re supposed to be.

So, that’s ten of my favorite bits of Dylan lyrics.  What’re your favorites?