Thursday, December 22, 2011

I Whine, and Then Talk About the Future of Journals Wilson



So. With the end of the year arriving soon I've been assessing just exactly how much this year has, for me, sucked cyst covered donkey dicks. For the record; the CCDDsucking level has been significantly higher than that of any other year I have personally suffered through. I don't want this blog to turn into a blog of bitching about personal shit, I have a personal journal for that and I feel like most people don't want to hear about it. The internet is kind of infested with that anyhow. But this year fucking sucked onthat donkey cock like its ungrateful urethra was full of liquid gold. At least for the most part.


But I've learned something important from all of this. Or at least cemented some things for me. The best of intentions mean very, very little. Hell, the best of actions can weigh just as much. Inside, I'm someone with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and learning, I know what I want to do with my life, and I want to treat everyone close to me with all of the respect, caring and love I feel I deserve, and I want to be as objective and skeptical as humanly possible. I've tried my hardest to let my internalization guide my actions to the best of my ability. However, that shit hits a fucking
adamantium wall in the face of the strong opposition of apathy, selfishness, and insanity. 2011 was highlighted by outright abuse for most of the year. Then when college started up, some good old fashioned individually driven but non-individualized education astonishingly beneath my level...just heartbreak after heartbreak, it all chipped away at me. I was constantly anxious and depressed, my self-confidence real damn low. I don't know... People tell me I don't act introverted and unsure of myself, and a lot of people don't believe me when I have told them even before all of this, but I really, really am. Always been.

I guess it just don't show all the time. But anyone can just ask certain English teachers I have had over the years and they'll tell you I'm way too hard on myself and stuff. It helps with arguments and writing, to be constantly wracked with dissent in my head, and I never want to lose that, but at times it can be debilitating. So when I tell you this was a low point for me, especially when fall came around, I hope you appreciate the import of that. I couldn't write most of the time. When I did I couldn't get over how much I hated it and how awful I thought it was. And after I had only recently discovered that this lifestyle is how I want to guide my
existence, I felt unfulfilled and lost. I had to have a significant amount of individual drive to do a lot of work on things that were waaaaaay below my level. Shit. Most of it was below my level before I entered fucking middle school. I felt like I was in pre-sophomore year Max's life again (Pre-Hasebrook/Yant), where the teachers are all: "I can tell you're a very bright young man, but why aren't you putting in the effort needed to get your work done?"


All of the internalized shit that guided me began to be questioned and eroded. I didn't feel like I could be a writer, that I was a good writer, or anything. And then people were telling me that I'd get used to it, first year is always the hardest, yadda. The prospect of me getting used to this, and essentially stunting my
growth as a learner and writer, was not one that filled me with heel-clicking sunshine. The time not spent worrying and anxious and sad, was full of a lot of me desperately trying to find things that could make me happy, or just distract me, and most of the time there was nothing. That was the dumps I was in as the year became closer to the ending than the beginning.


So with that icky personal mess behind us, well, behind this paragraph anyway... If anyone really wants to know more about anything I'm not one to be hesitating on answering were you to ask. But let us get to what matters, or how this is effecting this blog, writing, and the frequency that I will be writing on it. I'm taking a quarter off from school to write. I'm hoping to get at least one or two things sent out for publication. Getting one out wouldn't be too hard. Doing little one offs and essays on here once a week shouldn't be any harder.


I apologize to anyone I annoyed with my bitching. Everything just sucks and has sucked for quite some time, and please appreciate the difficulty for me to do this. I thank everyone who helped me get through this nonsense, both those who should know who they are and those who do not. Hell, thanks to the people who will help me in the
future continue to get through this, I don't discriminate against actions that haven't been taken yet. I offer nothing but hopes for pain and retribution to everyone who made it worse. Oh, you assholes deserve much more than that, but I'm in a jolly mood what with Christmas and all. Reaping the crops raised from the seeds you have sewn would be a nice Christmas gift though. It's never too late to make a very dangerous enemy less vengeful! Isn't that what Christmas is all about? 'Tis the fucking season, you scum.

Friday, December 16, 2011

(1949-2011)

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. One of the greatest writers and thinkers to ever live.
I regret that there is no hell. I could still hold on to that dream of one day meeting old Hitch and sitting down with him for a chat by the fire and perhaps a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, if I could smuggle it in with me.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Max on Musics: Saturday, 2:43 PM (The Death of a Dreamer), By Logan Whitehurst and the Junior Science Club

If you're not up to date with this, I'm singing songs and I'm writing about said songs I sing. Here's the first one:

http://journalswilson.blogspot.com/2011/10/i-can-i-will-i-do-max-on-musics.html

I also wrote about the writer of this song here:


Today in Max on Musics, I present to you IN GLORIOUS LO-FI: Saturday, 2:43 PM or The Death of a Dreamer, by Logan Whitehurst and the Junior Science Club. Follow the link below, please!



INSTRUCTIONS: Don't click anything that says download except for the blue text in the yellow box that says: Download File 4.37 MB. NOT the green thing that says download now, and not the blue button that says download, or anything else that says download. Just the blue text in the yellow box. I'm sorry for the not so user friendly shit, once I find a better way to file host I'll do that. If anyone has problems downloading, just let me know!


LYRICS:
The sun is very bright today

And still the clouds are big and gray

I wonder why that makes me think of you

The light that lands upon your face

Is from the depths of outer space

A billion years from Western Avenue

CHORUS:

My emotional survival

Depends on your arrival

Right hand on the Bible

Do you solemnly swear

That you'll keep our agreement

And meet me on the pavement

And come to my apartment

At the top of the stairs

I'll sing a little breakup song

Until I see you come along

Or maybe I will write that song for you

And then a circuit in my brain

Will explode, and there you'll be again

And we can count the craters on the moon

CHORUS

A sudden connection

A flying sensation

A little celebration

As I crumble to the ground

A painful situation

Followed by the realization

That there's a somber congregation

Standing all around

You're there among the fading crowd

I smile and then I sing aloud

'Goodbye, Goodbye' is all I have to say

It seems as though I should have known

But then I never would have flown

It doesn't seem too high a price to pay

Although I may be dying

My body may be lying

Taxis may be crying

In a chorus of cars

Reality receding

My heart no longer beating

My life will not be fleeting

When I'm out among the stars

One of my personal favorite Logan Whitehurst songs, and the ballad closing one of his finest albums: Earth Is Big. He really set the token pretty Junior Science Club ballad bar high with this one, but topped it several times before he left us way too soon in 2006. The last few lines in this song are especially exquisite. They show that this guy was not just a master of damn near every instrument he put in his hands, including the drums, accordion, concertina and the lobster, but also of writing.

To me this song is a part of several songs Logan wrote as lamentations on dying. There are about five others that I can think of off the top of my head, but all of them were written long before he was diagnosed with brain cancer, and are definitely closer to the aforementioned "crying" Logan songs, than the "laughing" ones. The omnipresence of death in the creative mind is not something I'm unfamiliar with. So much of that understanding informs so much of my everyday life and philosophy, and hopefully I'll cover that in my Max on Music's on Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel... but I'm getting ahead of myself. It's definitely something that I connect with personally.

The foreshadowing of Logan's untimely death by his own music is something I'd like to cover in more detail, but just the parallels between this one song and his life are chilling. The fact that this song illustrates so poetically exactly what it says in the title; the death of a dreamer, in a very painful, sudden way, unexpected but accepting in a sense, especially towards the end. Like a visit from an old friend you haven't seen since you were a kid. That fear of your impending death you first felt in the middle of the night in your room alone, returning every once in a while throughout your life, moving towards the background and then coming back the minute it left your mind.

To me the narrator seems to be like this upon realizing death is fast approaching: ...Oh shit. I guess this is it. Fuck. Oh well. At least the black will take me in soon... But in a much more poetic way. Returning back to non-existance with a smile.

If only Logan had been so lucky to not have suffered and deal with his mortality in a much heavier sense before months left turned to weeks left. The guy who introduced me to Logan's music said that if anyone deserved to live to be a hundred it was Logan, and I can't find myself arguing with that. But at the least he didn't deserve to go the way he did. Being diagnosed with brain cancer, being told that it's in recession and building your life back up before you're told its come back and you're going to die within the year.

Yeah, I know this is a downer, and yeah, you might not want to read the un-fun Logan stuff if you're not in the mood for that, but the guy had so many songs that were just pure, uncut fun. Hopefully before I return to this note I'll get to some of that stuff, but to not cover some of the guy's best music would be blasphemy. I think next I'm going to do a quick biography of Logan and his music with some recommendations and then do one of his quirky, fun songs to break up the sad.

I might also do a re-edit of this post, some of it was rushed and delayed, but I hope you all got the idea.

-And because the original version is way, way better than mine (no duh), here is a linkypoo to that and also a massive archive of most of Logan's music:




Also, now that winter break is here I'm finally writing as much as I want to. I'm trying to get stuff done, primarily Ram's Head, before moving onto hardcore book making on this... but I just got done developing this real cool twist to Detective Antipathy that I'm pretty excited about. The people I've told about it have been pretty blown away mouths agape and whatnot, which is nice because for a while I was kind of down and thinking that it was a dumb idea and maybe scrapping the whole thing...... But yeah. You sons a bitches won't know what hit you. I can't wait for me to get a chance at having people read this baby.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Max in Kindergarten

I found this in my basement:


The foreshadowing is frankly, a little creepy. I have two apple cores on my night stand right now (fuji), and I've been actually training for a Super Mario Bros. speed run contest this coming saturday:

I still love that game so much. So magic. I just appreciate it on a much deeper level now... And I can actually beat it. And I might win money for that. Which seriously is a childhood dream come true.

And of course the obvious "I want to learn how to make books" thing is a major 'woah' factor of course.

But I was just thinking about kindergarten because of this. My teacher told my parents that I had a dry sense of humor, which you don't really see in many kids that age. It's weird, I never wondered when I developed that kind of dry/dark sense of humor. Now I guess I've just always been like that.

I also had two girlfriends in kindergarten. AT THE SAME TIME. It was indeed a simpler time. Or as my friend Cait puts it: "that time I tricked four year olds into polygamy." Which is of course not the case. There is no way they were four years old. I don't think you can even get into kindergarten if you're four years old. That's ridiculous.

But yeah. I just wanted to write this out so I wouldn't have to think about the English101 paper I have to write that I don't want to write. Shit. Looks like I have to do that now. Then a few more things I don't want to do. Then winter break! Which will be awesome! Then more stuff I don't want to do, perhaps interspersed with a few select things that I do want to do! Then death! Yaaaayyy!