Category: Blogging

Posted on

The Mariners Lost Last Night

mariners capI can very much appreciate it if someone is not into sports. In and of themselves, most sports are pointless. They’re just entertainment, one choice in a slew of others—why watch a baseball game when one can watch one of a million TV shows on demand? Or read a book, or go for a walk, or sit in front of the computer and write a novel? And don’t get me started on how much those guys who throw a ball around for a few hours a day get paid. My point is: you’re not into sports? I get it, I accept it.

I used to be the same way, frankly, but for the past 10+ years I’ve lived in a city big enough to support a few major sports organization. And there’s an identity one has, living in a city, and rooting for the home team Not everyone in Seattle roots for the Mariners—we’re a fairly hipster town. But some of us do, and some of us do because we love where we live. Call it civic pride.

But the Mariners lost their second game of the season. No big deal though, right? It’s only game two out of a 162. And they won their first game! Still, if you’re not a sports fan, or if you’re not a baseball fan in particular, or if you don’t follow the Mariners, then you don’t know: already there’s rumblings.

When non baseball-fans think baseball, they think Yankees, maybe Red Sox, they think about the most recent world series winner (the San Francisco Giants). And, for the most part, these are winning teams. I’ll be blunt: they’re winners because they pay for the top talent.

The Mariners, finally, have started paying for top talent. Thanks to a loophole in the MLB profit-sharing rules, they had an extra 190 million to spend on guys like Nelson Cruz and Robinson Cunoe. The talk through all of spring training has been: the Mariners are the team to watch this year.

And that’s saying something, as the Mariners have not been to the playoffs since 2001. Last year, they were literally one-game away from making the playoffs. The very idea that the Mariners could be playing in October is a bit apocalyptic. People who live in Seattle, who have civic pride, who identify with the Mariners—all of us are tired of, but used to, our team losing.

Which is why, despite the season being only 1.2345679 percent complete (that’s the real number- baseball’s all about esoteric stats) we’re all a little anxious at this point. Yes, the Mariners won their first game (thanks in no small part to our Cy Young award-winning pitcher) but we got no production in that game from that new 190 million dollar talent we brought in. And none again last night. Are we doomed?

Another team people think about when they think baseball is the Cubs. The perennial losers. The last time the Cubs were in the world series, the Mariners weren’t even a team yet. Heck, the first MLB team Seattle ever had, the Pilots, wasn’t even a team yet. The Cubs have been to the World Series six times in the last 100 years and lost every time.

Is that to be Seattle’s fate? We lost last night—it’s really hard to think about anything else.

Posted on

Three Songs That Are Important To Me

Writing about music is very difficult. That’s a plain, vague, throw-away kind of sentence, hardly very evocative, and truly representative of most writing about music. Liking, which is to say, judging music is just too subjective. Asking people what kind of music they like is a fairly intimate question: asking them to name their favorite band or song is downright invasive. At least it can seem to be. Responses usually give no real insight into the person being asked. At best, they’ll tell you, “I like all kinds of music.”

Sitting here and writing about three songs that are important to me is going to be tough. Especially since my tastes run to songs without words, so there’s no interpreting what a song “says,” to me. Nor do I attach any kind of significance to life events and the music that accompanied them. (Why not? See above: subjectivity.) Seriously, you’re getting more about me from the fact that I’m writing this at all than you are from what it is I’m actually saying.

Three songs that are important to me, then: Mozart’s ‘Piano Concerto no. 20,’ Tool’s ‘Right in Two,’ and ‘Zombie Harem’ by Daikaiju. I really don’t think I can tell you why they’re important. I just now that I need them to be available to me and they’ve become like old friends, songs I can count on if I need to count on anything at all.

carlsbad sunsetThe Mozart Piano Concerto no. 20 is in D minor, a key for brooding, but an active brooding, a stomping through darkened streets kind of brooding, heavy coat and fog and a frown turned sneer turned snarl. It starts off with the orchestra setting the main tone and theme, and then the piano comes in gentle and quiet, building to a fury and then backing off again. The second movement is like the coming of a storm, building and building and finally crashing down around you, only to calm down at the end and leaving you in sunlight. Sunlight, you see, the third movement, playing in D major, all of the D minor demons exorcised and the world bright once again.

Tool is a band from Los Angeles, and have been around for 20+ years. This is a band that defies description: call them “prog rock,” and the hard-rock fans shake their head, call them “hard rock”; and the math boys curl their upper lips. ‘Right in Two’ starts with just guitars and bass playing stunted arpeggios, in 3/4 time. 3/4 develop into 11/4, and as the song progresses, as the drums come in, the time signature continues to evolve. The song gets more complex, layers instrumentation on top of more time changes, until a final rush of tightly controlled fury. This is one of my favorite songs to listen to when I’m running.

Daikaiju is a surf-guitar band out of Huntsville Alabama. This is the new generation of surf-guitar, the hard-rock kind that takes the old reverb, cranks it way up, and runs around the stage, getting fans tangled up in the guitar cords. (That’s both an aural metaphor and literal description: their stage antics are as wild and crazy as their guitar licks). For all its craziness, ‘Zombie Harem’ more or less follows a kind of minuet format. Riff A, development, Riff B, repeat; middle section; repeat Riff A and B. As simple as it is, it nevertheless fills you up. It’s all energy. It’s sweat and thirst; you can’t help but play air guitar along with it. Which I do, pretty much everytime, even if I’m out running and it comes on my iPod, even if I’m three miles overdo for a stop—I have to run even faster when it comes on.

~~~

As writing exercises go, let me say this: I wrote way more than I thought I would, here. And I feel like I wrote hardly anything at all. Ah well. At least I’m writing. Maybe that’s a take-away here: if music is just good because it simply is, then writing can just be as well.

Posted on

Nothing Much to Do in Hawaii

You stop the car and the Hawaii heat comes back because there’s no more driving breeze. You can feel it in your bones. Even if you’re only in your (early!) forties, you can see why old people move to places like Miami and Arizona. Why not Hawaii? The long flight? The disappointingly drab view from the airplane window when the plane is landing? Waiting in line for what seems like hours at the car rental place? The really bad radio stations, driving around the edge of Kuia, from airport to vacation rental?

outdoor-showerEverything is bright, so bright you don’t notice the out-door shower. Later in the week you’ll take Instagram photos from inside that shower, of the nearby flowers and distant mountains. But for now you just want to haul your bags inside and have a beer. The house is green. Not a real-estate, easy-to-sell green, but an almost garish green. Three years later, writing down a description of the place for a writing-course blog entry, you’ll think: monopoly house green.

It’s not a big house, but it’s big enough. A back door leading into the kitchen. A rickety table, something from the seventies. Well trod linoleum. A squat fridge; your fridge at home is an enormous, brushed-stainless-steel behemoth, but this one’s short enough to see the top, where you can set your bag of groceries. Some sweet onion potato chips, a few cans of spam, more than one six-pack. 11 of 12 bottles go into the fridge; the other goes in your hand.

The kitchen window with the view of the beach a few blocks away. The next room, a sitting area, large, overstuffed couches that would be miserable in this heat. Because it’s stifling in here. You glance at one bedroom with its tiny bed. Pass the cramped bathroom. Step outside onto the porch, two rocking chairs, a card table, more view of beach.

And then the breeze arrives, gentle, like it wants to ask you a question. You sit down in one of the rocking chairs, open the beer, and drain half of it. You ask yourself, where else would you want to be right now? You’re not even sure if any other place on earth exists right now.

The breeze moves around, makes the grass in front of the green house wave, plays in the distant palm trees. The sun’s getting ready to think about setting, but content for the moment to loll in the sky. Deep blue, probably goes on forever.

You notice your beer is empty, so you stand up. Notice how the screen door creeks when you open it. The floorboards, too, as you walk into the kitchen. Grab another beer. This house is starting to feel like your threadbare Hawaiian shirt (had it for 10 years) and your easy-fit cargo shorts. Where did your shoes go? Nevermind. Grab a book from the shelf of vacation-left-behinds next to the door. Something with guns and intrigue and romance. Stuff you don’t really have in your life.

But you’ve got that beer, that breeze, that rocking chair. That’s really all you need. All you want, too. So turn to page one. You’re going to be here for a while.

Posted on

Freewriting Exercise

1:08 PM. Here it is day one of this writing course thing and I’ve already failed. Instead of free writing for twenty minutes, I wrote a thousand words about my first Crossfit experience. Oh well. Maybe I’ll clean it up and publish it later. For now, I guess I get to start over.

Free writing. I dunno. It’s not my thing? I don’t like this much self-reflection? So write something else then? Once upon a time there was a prince who lived in a great big castle, named Steve. The castle was named Steve, not the prince. Princes are rarely called Steve. Castles are also rarely called Steve too, but this one was.

Ugh, barf. Here’s the thing I know about why I’m no free writer—I have made more typos than usual. I make a lot of typos, I know, but I feel like I’ve hit backspace as much as I’ve hit space bar in the last few minutes.

I guess this is supposed to be a habit-making thing. If I can spend twenty minutes physically sitting in front of a physical keyboard and physically tap my physical fingers on the physical keys, then surely I can do that when the doing of that has another purpose. Feels like sitting on a bed and spinning my legs in the air so that I can run to the grocery store the next day.

1:13 PM Five minutes done, a quarter of the way there. Yippee Skippy. Speaking of grocery stores, and Skippy: we’re a Jif household. This is important. Long nights sitting on front the computer screen, browsing Reddit and eating peanut butter right out of the jar. Can’t do that with Skippy. Long nights fighting whatever the opposite of insomnia is. But not fatigue. Wanting to be an insomniac. Because then I could get things done.

As it is I get things done in the morning, before the wife wakes up. She’s a nine-hour-a-night-er, and I’m a 7.5-er, but I’m also an always-up-at-5-am-er. No good reason for it. Ugh, me me me. Let’s talk about something else. In two minutes we’ll talk about something else. I mean, I will. I mean write, not talk. About something else. Castle Steve. It’s the only castle in all of France made of wood! Yep, The Prince of Castle Steve is French. I’ve been to France. Twice. Paris twice, as well as parts of not-Paris. But mostly Paris.

It’s not as bad as people say. Parisians are no more rude than anybody anywhere are if you don’t come at them with entitlement and attitude.

1:18 PM Halfway done. This is a chore. I guess that’s the point. The Prince of Castle Steve doesn’t do chores. He doesn’t have to, of course, and even if he did have to do chores, he wouldn’t. Cause what’s the point? It’s not like the Princess of, um, what’s another word for Castle? Palace. Yes. It’s not like the Princess of Palace Cynthia is going to like him more or less than she already does or doesn’t just because he does or doesn’t do chores. Like, what’s he going to do, anyway? Fold clothes? He’s the freakin’ Prince of Castle Steve! He doesn’t know even know where the Laundry Room is!

I mean Royal Laundry room! Just now I went back and added “Royal” in front of “Laundry Room” and then I decided that since I’m free writing I shouldn’t edit, so I went back and un-edited my edit. And I’m pretty sure un-editing is still editing. Two wrongs, making a right. No one has to know. Except for me, who wrote this, who is writing this, and you, the unfortunate idiot who decided to read this screed. Back to TPoCS? Sure. In a minute. Cause that will be the 75% mark. Speaking of editing, am I allowed to go back and correct the typos I’m not catching on the fly? Well of course I am. Who’s going to stop me or punish me or tell me I am doing things wrong? I’m a 43 years-old-man, I’m not going to listen to anyone!

1:23. TPoCS doesn’t do chores, and truth be told, hasn’t ever met TPoPC, or even know if she exists. Nor does she know about him. Also, she does chores. No because she has to, but because we live in a sexist world and women always ended up suffering one way or another, especially in made-up worlds created by men. Which reminds me of something.

I have this memory of a few scenes from a movie where this nerdy type guy (Jeff Bridges) is at a formal party (tuxedos) and tells his friends that if his ex (Elle McPherson) arrives, not to let him go home with her, because she will just use him for sex. And of course she shows up, he leaves with her, and the next morning she is getting dressed and he asks if he can call her and she says, what would be the point of that?

You see? That’s like a male fantasy wrapped up tight in a swaddle of misogyny. I bring it up because I want to look up that movie and see if it was directed by Woody Allen. Because all of his movies are misogynistic. Woody Allen would totally want to produce that story of TPoCS and TPoPC, star-crossed lovers who have never met and never will.

Those chores TPoPC does? I don’t know. It’s 1:28. I get to be done now.

P.S. The Mirror Has Two Faces, directed by Barbara Streisand! Boy, was I wrong! Written by some French dudes though, so there’s that.

Posted on

Area Man Decides Witty Blog Makes Up for Mediocrity In Every Other Endeavor

Postaday for January 12th: Audience of One. Picture the one person in the world you really wish were reading your blog. Write her or him a letter.

Dear Cole Bolton, editor of The Onion:

I am Bukkhead, long-time blogger. Long-time refers to the days between the first time I blogged and now, although little can be said for the years in between. A few posts here and there. Mostly book reviews—some of which got liked by people on Goodreads!

I’ve recently undertaken a huge endeavor, to write on my blog everyday. And I mean every day. In fact, I’m going to go back and post blog entries for every day of the year so far— this post, for example, dated January 12th, was actually written on May 6th!

I’m not very good at most things. Mediocre is the best way to describe me. Not incompetent, to be sure, but mediocre. I’ve tried my hand at stand-up comedy, playing acoustic guitar, writing movie reviews, collectible card games, learning French, photography, running, biking, cross-fit… I could go on, but as a mediocre person, going on would probably require too much effort.

I’m mediocre in other walks of life as well. I’m a mediocre husband, although my wife is fairly self-sufficient, so that’s okay. I usually get birthday cards and anniversary cards to people in my family a few days late. At my job, I do a little bit more than the bare minimum (I’m writing this while half-listening to a conference call).

But when it comes to writing, I’d like to think: I got this. I know how to string words together. I can write about anything, in any tone, as many words as you want. (Assuming you’d never want more than a thousand words or so. That’s how long it takes me to get through a cup of coffee, and my wife doesn’t like me to drink too many of those).

I don’t know if you ever look to free-lancers for material, but let me assure you: I’m no free-lancer. I’m not writing things in the hopes that you’ll see them and want to put them in your paper. No, I’m more of a mercenary type. Pen-for-hire. I’m hoping you’ll read this blog now and again, and then one day, when you realize “Oh snap, we need three hundred words about standing in line to buy an Apple Watch,” you’ll think of me.

“Get me that self-deprecating guy who talks about 7-11’s frozen burritos all the time,” you’ll say. To yourself. Because you’re the only one who reads this nonsense. And you know I’ll work cheap.

Posted on

I Don’t Have To Write Anything If I Don’t Want To

January 3rd: No Prompt?

There does not appear to be a prompt for January 3rd. How does that make you feel?

Today is the 5th of May, and I am trying to catch up on a 4 months of missed daily prompts. This is a Herculean task. There’s no way I will accomplish it. No way I’m going to write something for 124 missed days.

It’ll take weeks, and even if I had started Postaday on January 1st, I would have lost interest before weeks had passed. This is a stupid idea. And no one going to read any of this, ever. Especially not me!

I’ve gone to the Postaday website and copied a whole bunch of prompts, but this one, for the 3rd, is missing. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was never there or if it was and got deleted by accident. I could do some sleuthing, read the blog entries of people who HAVE been doing Postaday since January 1st, see if they wrote something on the 3rd. In fact, maybe I will. Maybe I will once I’ve written the other 123 back entries.

I’ve bitten off WAY more than I can chew. This is ludicrous. I never finish ANYTHING. Okay, fine, I DID finish the Blogging University April class. But that was ONE entry per day, and nothing on weekends. I actually have it in my head that I’m going towrite SEVEN per day until I catch up!

Why? Is there a part of me that wants to punish me for bad behavior? Like when a dad catches his son sneaking a cigarette, and makes him smoke the whole pack? Am I trying to humiliate myself? Do I need hit the bottom so I can rebuild myself as a writer?

Maybe. I want to write this stupid book, the one I’ll probably mention again and again, the spy novel with the robot assassin. Am I encumbering myself with this stupidly impossible endeavor to avoid admitting I can’t write novels, I just can’t, give Stephen Hawking a pole-vaulters pole and he’ll do better than I do at novel writing?

How does it make me FEEL that there’s no prompt for today? I don’t know, relieved, I guess, that I don’t have to write anything if I don’t want to.

Posted on

I Have Changed The Skies Forever

Postaday for January 2nd: Be the Change

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?

I want the world to read more. And that’s it. I could probably volunteer for some literacy program, or donate funds to some book drive, or research and support politicians who’s foreign policies include humanitarian efforts to improve education worldwide But I’m lazy.

Or arrogant or conceited or megalomaniacal. Or whatever. I mean, I want people to read what I write. And laud me with praise. And ask me where my genius comes from. And throw flowers at my feet. Roses. Thorns and all. Gobs of them. Piles and piles. Florists profits skyrocket. Band-Aid stock through the roof cause of all the scratches I get. From the thorns on the roses thrown at me. Gorgeous women and heads-of-state gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair out in a frenzy as they try to throw more roses.

But there aren’t enough. A black market rose-industry pops up. People start selling other flowers as fake roses. Or make them out of felt and paper. One enterprising young man makes a mint selling roses he made out of aluminum foil. The aluminum foil market goes belly up. People can’t cover their casseroles anymore. Casseroel stocks plummet. Casserole corporation CEOs commit suicide in droves. Good riddance. Their spouses (mostly wives, a few husbands) wither and develop alcohol problems. The go to AA, meet some one nice. Most of them are nice. One of them is not nice.

He’s a spy. He’s been watching Scandal too much. Thinks he’s seducing a court stenographer. Is actually seducing the widow of the CEO of Tuna Suprisicon, who killed himself with a shillelagh. How does one even do that. Just because the government of Burmese put in an order for 10,000 units and the CEO was so thrilled he invested half of fiscal 2016’s profits in R&D. But that damn kid and his damn aluminum foil roses bought up all the stock! Just so the Daughters of the American Revolution Auxiliary club could get two hundred thousand dozen fake metal roses to throw at my feet!

Newspapers are writing about these piles and piles of roses— and people are reading the papers. Bloggists are blogging about the Rose Mountain at Bukkhead’s Feet Meme, tweeting and Pintersting and Tumblring— and people are reading. C students are becoming A students from all the reading, the improved critical thinking skills that frequent reading brings.

Terrible human beings who hardly read at all are reading more often, craving new sources for reading material, eschewing their one-newspaper-town’s only rag, discovering alternate points of view and abandoning their skin-deep racism and sexism and homophobia. They start voting with their hearts and not their yellow spines. Good women and men get elected. Campaign finance fraud is a thing of the past. Trillion dollar corporations with no PACs to dump their money into decided to dump money into libraries for the tax right-off.

Libraries grow to the size of super-malls. Teenagers hang out there. They tease the trailer-park trash for reading Dan Brown. The trailer park trash read books by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and find peaceful ways to show the rich kids the evil of being too judgmental. They sing songs together in the food courts. They pool their resources to buy more roses to throw at my feet.

The rose things starts to become a problem. I can’t write, there’s so many roses. In my office, choking up my hallways, I can’t even get to the bathroom, which means I’m forced to reduce my seven Mountain-Dews a day diet to three or four. I grow weak from a lack of caffeine. I don’t write as much. I’m not read as much. The thrill is gone. I spend more time with my wife. We go on vacations. Barren places where there’s no vegetation.

The Australian outback. The sky’s a funny color. An alien lands there. He (yes he, not it) tells me the sky’s a funny color because the earth’s tilted. All those roses. I’ve literally changed the world. Now his alien buddies don’t want to destroy it anymore. I have saved the earth. I have changed the skies forever.

Posted on

I’m Pretty Much Making This Up As I Go Along

Postaday for January 1st: New Skin

If you could spend the next year as someone radically different from the current “you” — a member of a different species, someone from a different gender or generation, etc. — who would you choose to be?

If I could spend time as anyone else, it would be as Lancaster, the evil robot assassin hell-bent on killing every secret agent in the world.

Why is killing all these agents? What’s his end-game? What happens if he succeeds? And why does he choose to kill them in such elaborate and increasingly ridiculous ways? Is killing agents really his main goal, or is there some greater purpose to his scheme?

I need to know, because I invented him, and I have no idea what he’s doing. He’s the main antagonist in my terrible spy novel, A Football Makes a Lousy Briefcase. Note: terrible is a subgenre of the spy novel genre. This is supposed to be terrible. I have whole sections called Deus Ex Machina. It’s a play on words, see, since Lancaster is a machine and all.

Lancaster is an AI based on a program that was built to test agents in the field. But things got out of control. I don’t want to reveal too much, even though I’ll probably never actually finish the novel… and even if I did I wouldn’t bother editing it… and if I somehow edited it I certainly wouldn’t get it published… and if I accidentally published it I just don’t see anyone buying it, much less reading it (not unlike the novel I published A Night Without Sunshine and my collection of short stories Still Life With Zombie).

But nevermind all that. The point is, I need to get inside Lancaster’s metal head and figure out what’s going on. It’s the principal of the thing. I’m struggling with the main plot line of the novel as it is, and if I can just figure out where this is going, maybe I can figure out a way to stop him.

What’s great about Lancaster is I could spend a whole year being him, and not really mess anything up, since he clones himself regularly so that he can personally conduct “exams” on agents in order to kill them. I don’t have to “be Lancaster” to be Lancaster.

And a year should be just the right amount of time. Lancaster once posed as coffee machine at a cheap motel in Reno just to get access to an ATF agent who had stolen a thumb drive from a CISEN operative. (I actually haven’t written that chapter yet, but, gosh, it’s a good idea and I’m totally going to use it.)

CISEN, by the way, is the acronym for Mexico’s intelligence agency. I just found that on Wikipedia, since I’m pretty much making this up as I go along.

Posted on

So Much Blogging

Quickly: Had a job for twelve years, got laid off, got another job. Joggle. We make a free brain train gaming for your iPad. Go download it right now. I am the Community Manager, in charge of keeping an eye on Google Adwords, curating scholarly articles about the brain, helping with in-game and website ad copy, etc. There’s six of us. Every download we get, it looks like I’m contributing. SO GO DOWNLOAD IT. And tell your friends. Tell all of them.

But now: blogging. It all started when I started this job and was told we would be blogging. So I began writing some bits and pieces about the brain. Turns out our blog is going in a different direction. So I created a quickie Blogspot account and posted them there. It’s called The Great Brain Robbery.

Get this: one hundred page views the first weekend. I was immediately addicted. I have no idea if those page views are meaningful or not, don’t care. I started posting twice a day. Then I read that more than once a day and people won’t read it. So now I’m down to once a day.

Meanwhile, I published a book and decided to blog to support that, too. Zombie For Life is the blog that supports Still Life, With Zombie, a collection of short stories. Buy it today. But some for your friends.

And finally, there’s ‘Other,’ which was my “original” blogspot/blogger blog, back in the day when a lot of friends where blogging and I wanted to be on the same platform as them. That blog has also become a daily thing, too, a place to sort of dump my thoughts about taking the bus and working in an office and just getting over 12 years of working from home.

That’s a lot of writing. what about good old fashioned Bukkhead? Yeah, I know, I know. sad and abandoned for a while, just a repository for book reviews and the odd short story. Tell you what, NaNoWriMo is happening right now, so  maybe I can discuss that now and again. Maybe. I mean:

That’s 3476 words today.

Posted on

The State of the Jason

Going to start the new year the same way I did 366 days ago with an attempt to write every day. That attempt failed, although I think I made it as far as March or so. I do recall being desperate to find a good wifi connection when I was in Puerto Rico so I could submit my “words” to 750words.com. So I made it last three months, I think. That’s not bad- I mean, to do at least that, I still have to start today. So here goes.

94 words down. And now 99. 100. Damn, this is easy.

I’ve been trying to prepare for this– during the week break last week I went to Starbucks and the library and other places with free wifi, and my new Chromebook, and did lots of writing. You know, to sort of have a buffer ready so that publishing could be consistent if output wasn’t always a daily accomplishment. Because, you know, simply stabbing at the keyboard for half an hour doesn’t mean what’s being written is worth reading. Like this for example.

186 words. 188. Flying along.

The plan is to write fiction, write opinion pieces, write about running, write some book reviews. The book reviews are the easiest and the hardest. Hard because what does one say about a book. Easy because I read all the time. I mean I want to read all the time. I mean I want to want to read all the time, and I want it to be that I read all the time. There you go, that’s what I meant to say.

The running writing is tough because there’s not much to say except I love it I love it I love it. Hard to write what I know will only be barely interesting to other runners…. I mean it will only be barely interesting, and in that, only to other runners, not that it would be, to others runners, only barely interesting. You see what I’m up against here, this writing thing? I can’t even make sense to myself. Sheesh. 353 words now.

And opinion pieces– home skillet please. I have opinions, to be sure, but how does one make them topical? Or interesting to other people? That’s what I’m up against, with all of these, that truly stupid compulsion to be interesting to readers, except that means walking the fine line between preaching to the choir and saying something convincing. It’s next to impossible.

And honestly it’s not an endeavored to be labored over too strenuously. One should just write for writing’s sake. One does not run only races, and one may try to train on every run, but will get benefits from a run that’s just a run for run’s sake. And since my goal is to write every day, it doesn’t matter if no one ever reads it. In fact, on most does, no one should. So I should just stab at the keys and if a little structure to get things going helps, so be it.

I’ll write about running, I’ll write silly stories, I will write about my opinion. For example: we just watched a movie, called Abducted, I think, starring Taylor Lautner. Not sure if I am getting the name of the movie correct or even the spelling of his name. It was truly bad. He had his shirt off within the first few minutes. Is that why they called it “Ab”ducted? Maybe. It was mentioned to us by a friend of a friend at a new year’s eve party, and at the time we were excited to make new friends. Now I’m not so sure.

Then again, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to stop being a prick about what people like, to not only accept, to embrace, to humble myself before people’s likes. Not just their passions, but the incidental things they enjoy. So maybe this was serendipity, seeing this terrible, terrible moved, a chance to practice this resolution. I’ll have to give it a go when next we see that person.

But, just between you and me, the movie was so bad it wasn’t even so bad it was good. It wasn’t beyond bad, just bad. 709 words written so far, 714, less than 50 to go, and now less than 30.

I guess I could apply this idea to myself, to quite being so judgmental of my one desire to write, of the potential output and it’s lack of readability or value, and just, as I said, do it. Like Nike wants me to. Which reminds me of running– I didn’t run today. 2013 is off to an awful start. 783 words, now. One day down, 364 to go.