The Sock-Monkey As Alone

 I have been trying to quit smoking for months, and I always find myself after several days downstairs going through ashtrays looking for smokeable butts. I have been during this same period trying to increase my output as a writer of fiction.    The strange amount of growth I feel I have gone through over this alternating of self-improvement and caving into self-destruction is surprising, even if I still have all the same flaws.    I am tired of my sexist fantasies and am trying to make more involved characters. I am tired of smoking but still, without logic, reason, or enjoyment find myself doing things I did when I didn't have a home.     And today of all days I decided to write a blog post. Not having a purpose other than my masochist self-abusive honesty to guide my typing fingers.       So I will close this trainwreck by answering a question I asked in a blog from last year. Question: is ok to fall in love with another man's pump and dump? Answer: if she is will to

Been thinking a bunch about the role of the artist in relationship to politics lately. The main positive of getting involved in politics is that if you are an artist is sometimes you can write something that inspires someone to act on a conviction but sadly in my own experience you can not change there belief. It also does not help that people confuse celebrities for an artist, but I digress.    Which removes a lot of the responsibility from the artist, since mostly you are preaching to the quire, or in the very the least your congregation (now is the time for your cold laughter).  The saddest thing of all in our culture is when the ambiguity of art is written off by a conviction that painfully rears it's head or removes any doubt as to how racist or sexist your peers can be.    Example if you hate mad max fury road because you believe it is "feminist propaganda!" then you are probably a misogynist, or at the very least a sexist. If however, you don't care for t

So youthful ambition told me stop! Taking my time to the devil's fee, My literary soda pop.... So whatever happened to me? Rhyme and meter just a prop, the vessel carries me to be free. An ocean in every teardrop. Swimming in waters of the sea that editors tell me to crop. My hope that you will believe your home when you close shop. There is nothing left to grieve but the fables of Aesop. The meaning cannot retrieve gooey poetry in mainstream glop.

    Part one: the prelude to a ghost.                                   I It was early summer in the late afternoon.  Liam was visiting the father who had done the best he could to avoid the child. His grandmother left him having died of cancer earlier in the year and in the child's eyes she had abandoned him there with her son.  No one understood Liam's father not even Jack (Liam's father's name, or at least what he insisted his son call him.) and that terrified the child.     Without much to go on Jack said "So here are the rules, one, you cannot close any of the doors in this house. Two, you may not open any of the doors in this house that is already closed.  If you do either of these things, I will light your ass up, understood?" Liam nodded slowly and thought without out trying to give any of his feelings away "Shit this is going to be a long summer." But he had not done his job well enough for his father stared at him long and hard before say

                      I The noise becomes a comfort. Fear of one more feeling felt. With a desire to avert tripping the alarm bells.                     II Justice (as is its enemy desire) is only the ally. Leaving the one, I want to be, for it's the dogma of goodbye.                     III The value of my libido, a cigar that is out of luck. Drowning in a tuxedo, it's one more meaningless fuck.

 Well, all I know is what I like, and what I love is Faulkner, Pynchon and Jim Dodge. My three favorite writers, with Cormac McCarthy being a close fourth.     Not sure what they have in common other than being American-white-males but it makes me uncomfortable. Most of my literary education was by way of Harold Bloom books so that might explain it. I love magical realism and Latin American authors in general specifically Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Find women writers brilliant like Katherine Dunn and KJ Bishop. And have a fascination with African and Japanese literature. My favorites remain Faulkner, Pynchon and Jim Dodge. I don't know Why I feel the need to borderline apologize for it, other than emphasizing that I am not saying they are the best only my favorites.    My three favorite novels in order are Stone Junction, Gravity's Rainbow and As I Lay Dying. One a metaphysical pulp, another a psychedelic fairy tale, and the last a southern gothic romance

                 I Anything, or nothing, the spider with many eyes. "What was mine was loving." I heard her start to sigh.                  II The fly caught inside the web. Legs dancing on a cocoon. Was it better left unsaid (finger print's inside the womb).                  III In the shadow of the wax, there was a flicker and glow. She feeds off of the sack where the spiders are to grow!

“I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar.” -- Jim Woodring I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrificed a lot of things in my life in order to keep that sense of things being unfamiliar. Jim Woodring Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/jim_woodring I'm not a freak. I'm not really crazy or anything. I don't think I'm really abnormal. It's just, like anybody else, I have interests I cultivate, and one of my interests is not getting too used to things. I've sacrifice

                            1 All across the midnight sky, fireworks bloom like sprinkles on a cupcake. A cobweb on the chandelier and the neon sprinklers weren't alone, the anarchist airship the royal Marie Antoinette was its northern star.    Leisurely with engine's cut, drifting those July wind's, that were alway's nostalgic. It's captain and her ladies-hands held- leaning over the bow. Eye's speckled with the duck tape light of the city below, in all it's modern power a speckled piece of coral.     It wasn't an independence day. And the skyscrapers and slum's were empty from the skies. Nuclear in her mind, however, was that slow descending bomb, the winds didn't disturb it, parachuting down with its blades slowing its descent through the sky. It was a dreamy kind of fall, that forced meditation like a campfire.    She remembered watching the propeller blade's fall from the tree's a spinster's cyclone delivering,

 "This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."   - Morpheus    So love it or hate it I think most of us can agree that simulation theory is fun to chew on. And the Matrix is the best popular example of it. So that is what I am going to ramble about today.  The movie (at least the first one ) is a great popcorn movie. Though I will say personally, I prefer the Animatrix for its diversity and sometimes depth. But the first matrix is the one that most people are familiar with. The chosen one and his kung-fu VS a system that has enslaved humanity into nothing more than batteries that is its narrative. He scraps against the odds beating the agents than threatens his universes equivalent of god...sounds like a righteous power fantasy to me, no? Well, that is ho

"To be first in the soil, which erupts in the coil, of trees veins and grasses all brought to a boil. Wait, it's different somehow, cause this land isn't mine, and my brain has been freed, I'm not thinking in... poetry stuff."  - the Maxx     When I was a kid I saw the Maxx, my uncle had taped the whole show but the ending of the last episode because he had the timer set wrong on the VHS player. But the show blew me away, broadened my feeble child mind and ruined me to society, apparently at least. You see, the show is about a mentally ill middle-aged guy who idealizes his caseworker and thinks he is a superhero, sound familiar? That is what I thought when my little brother pointed it out to me. The show and comic that it is based on gets typically ripped a new one because of there freshmen year psychology token deconstructions of the charecters, but it makes some good points. I have read the whole comic but found it's desire to make the magic real (spoiler

"The history of the world, as it is writen and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man’s intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one. And so, for instance, the tradition of the seven wonders of the world has always had associated with it the rumor that there was another, an eight wonder of the world, and concerning this eighth wonder there were various, perhaps contradictory, statements made, the vagueness of which was explained by the obscurity of ancient times." - Franz Kafka      I love King Kong, let's get that out of the way. It may be my favorite movie of all time, at least the original 1933 RKO King Kong. To me, Willis o' Brien's animation on the film created film's equivalent of Hamlet to the medium it was executed in. The way the gorilla in the film is the most sympathetic monster ever created. Now you may write this off as pretentious hyperbole, but there is something about the creati

                                                                                                       Go and catch a falling star,                                               Get with child a mandrake root,                                              Tell me where all past years are,                                                Or who cleft the devil's foot,                                           Teach me to hear mermaids singing,                                               Or to keep off envy's stinging,                                                     And find                                                           What wind                                            Serves to advance an honest mind.    Long ago, When I was young, I read Neil Gaiman's Stardust. And decided that I wanted to be a writer. Not because I thought that I would be good at it, but because I wanted to tell the stories in my head. And was amazed that there were p

   Two posts in one day!?! ...I know right. But in all honesty, I am up whether I do something or not. And that is the same boat we are all in. Wondering if we should pull a bed in like John Lennon or reach out and try to do more than just not cause further damage.  I am a firm believer in the idea that I would rather regret something I did than something I didn't do. It could be because my anxiety was so intense that I spent the first third of my life thinking about all the things I wish I were doing.  That I have spent the last four years pushing myself out of my comfort zone so that I may actually live.  And it has been better, regrets and all. I wish I had more talent or took better care of my physical health, rather than focusing on my mind for so long. I am content, however, feeling that one day when I die, I will be able to think to myself "this fucking sucks, but it is o.k."      I have been chiseling away at my book for the last couple of days and hope that

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”                                     - Stephen King  So somehow I Messed up the font size. But I just wanted to say, that I now have more respect for Stephen King then I had before. I tried to get past the dreaded writer's block by force of will and learned the hard way how uphill that battle can be.    Long story short (and yes that is appropriate...) I wrote a short story called "red as riding hood..." and then got called a douchebag and told that my writing was cringe-worthy and that I should be embarrassed by my attempts at being creative. Too me this had little to do with the story, but the point was taken. I am a writer who does not make claims to quality. I am often guilty of not letting my work speak for itself but reducing it to the context of "this is made by someone with a mental illness." For that, I will apologize, but I refuse to quit. Just as I am uninspire