It's time I came out officially: I am an atheist. Full on, full bore none of this moderated agnostic nail-chewing indecision for me anymore and no more pretending to be on the fence so people won't witness to me.

It is important to understand that I am not an atheist because of some failing in Christianity or the other world religions (though there are many such failings) but because of something far more basic. There are two fundamental questions when dealing with religion and your personal religiousness and only one of them gets talked about, in my experience, in modern American life.

Continue reading "A1: It Begins" »

kenyl74: ...or my philosophy class last night, where the prof decided it'd be fun to make me read pages and pages of a handout aloud. [...] I think he just likes to torment me and prevent even the idea of the possibility of sleep.  Or daydreaming.

italisizy: Mmm... daydreaming... I get so much less daydreaming done now that I'm not in college. Stupid life.

Me: Or did Sabrina slip in under the radar at the last minute?

Kendall: i don't know how much of a love story i'm up for

Me: How about something like "Mean Girls" then?

Kendall: i just watched that fairly recently

Me: Hm... Alright, after this, I'm out: how about "The Replacements"?

Kendall:
I've never seen it and don't own it. Sorry.

Me: Man. Gene Hackman + Keanu Reeves? Movie Magic.
The problem is that everything is either a) a love story, b) terribly depressing or c) both.
High Fidelity is almost not a love story.
Except that it's entirely about girls.
Damn.
Stupid life.

Kendall: i've noticed that
and i concur about life

(five minutes and 15 movies later)

Me: You could always watch "Swingers." It could remind you how you're so money and you don't even know it.

//

That's a long way to go for a "Swingers" joke/quote, but I think it was worth it.

italisizy:
Speaking of: is it just me, or is birth control too good an idea for us to let it be fucked up by morons?
I was thinking about it the other day, and, of the top five ideas of mankind, all-time, no-holds barred, one of them is condoms and the other one is the pill (and its descendants, so to speak).
Like 1) Speech. 2) Condoms. 3) Writing. 4) The Pill. 5) Televsion.
That's right, I ranked the pill above TV.
Also, speech wasn't a human idea, it's ingrained in our brains.
Alright, so that moves Condoms up to number one.
That's right, condoms are the number one best idea ever.
1) Condoms. 2) Writing. 3) The Pill. 4) Television. 5) The Microwave. 6) The Internet.
That's human achievement right there.

Sir Turley:
wow
you've gone mad

italisizy:
I am. Because you know what's a good idea?
Reproductive planning.
There, I said it.

Sir Turley
I meant the crazy kind of mad
because Air Conditioning is way more important than the microwave

italisizy
Well, I figured you'd say that and I figured I would agree.

Sir Turley:
I like that you put Condoms above the alphabet

italisizy:
Because what use is an alphabet if everytime you bang when your wife/cave-panion isn't pregnant you get another little monster to hunt/gather for.
Don't get me wrong, writing's a great idea.
It finished second all time for good reason.

Sir Turley:
right below plastic that goes over your penis

italisizy:
Hey, originally it was rabbit intestine.
And that was still a good idea.
A gross idea.
But a good idea.

...

Sir Turley:
pornography is a much needed substitute, but also not a good one

italisizy:
That's true.

Sir Turley:
but what can you do really

italisizy:
Porn could easily come in at number five or six, but I have a feeling women would disagree with that assessment.

Sir Turley:
almost universally probably

//

So what do you think? Have I gone mad, or is wrapping up your wang a good idea?

Turns out, not all Brads are self-centered prick assholes. C.f. Brad Biggers, a (soon to be) former Youth Minister, 36, liberal, freethinking, training-to-be-a-Social-Studies-Teacher, cool guy who happened to be in my car on the way to teacher training when I got in my accident yesterday morning. (See how I buried the lede there? Tricky, I know.) Anyway, it was single-car, no injury accident and Brad was cool up and down left and right about the whole thing, which really invalidates our previous Brad-generalization based on all the other Brads we've ever met.

So, to conclude, 1) I'm sore, sure, but it's day two and day two is always the day you're sore. 2) Not all Brads suck. Some, it turns out, are pretty cool. 3) it was rainy and I hydroplaned. TO THE EXTREME. 4) I don't need everyone to chime in with a 'well I'm glad everybody's ok!'--we got enough of that when we finally got to class--but a "Hey, way to find a cool Brad" or two would be acceptable. Seriously.

You're all fans of me, my blog; I know, it's great, right?

But this is not my thing. Sure, bringing you tidbits and halfassed commentary is great and all (and Lars and I are cooking up a way to make it greater), but if I had my choice of what to do and what to write, this wouldn't be it.

Many of us used to write and no longer do, whether is the English majors among us (Susan, Christina) or the Creative Writing majors (Me, Noah) but I've found that none of us write as much as we used to, whether it's because a lack of time, a lack of inspiration (we've all found, more or less, ways to be comfortable) or what, we just don't do it as much.

And the way we were taught to interact with other writers and get feedback is failing us. The less you wright, the less feedback means. There's no more: "Try this in your next poem," because who knows when the next poem will be, or what it will be about, or what form that idea will demand?

And so if you do ask for help, more often than not the advice you get is more about turning it into a different kind of poem than polishing your specific vision. That vision is yours, it's your responsibility and we can't do anything but offer what we think it might be and ask you if that's right. And you know what? That's time and effort consuming and that's time we could (well, should) be using to practice the craft of writing.

So something needs to be done about that. And I'm going to do it (with your help).

Everyone has ideas, small or large, or half finished fragments of poems that they can't bring to fruition because they're not in writing-shape anymore. And often these ideas themselves are incomplete, lacking ... something. And being unable to elucidate or point to that something can be the most frustrating thing of all.

And there have been times, recently and further back, that I've thought of one of you while trying to pound an idea into shape, whether it's Christina (while I was working on "Huffing") or Noah (because I called you between drafts of "In the Venusberg" and got curious as to what you'd think) or Kyle (because "Mythmaking" has a Kyle-esque quality, I think) and I've been curious what you people would do with that material if I had the stones to set it free and let you hammer away at it.

So that's what I'm going to do. I've set up a wiki where I've released some of my more recent poems (& fragments) into the wild. And I hope you will do just what I alluded to above: rewrite them, pound on them, transmute them and pull phrases or images or ideas from them and rewrite, reshape and transmute those into something entirely different.

And I'd like the opportunity to do the same to your fragments/ideas, et al.

And for you to do the same to other people's work, too.

Just to reiterate: unlike a workshop, I'm not terribly interested in what you have to say about them. I've got my own vision of how I want them to be and your pouding might illuminate it, but I've tried talking about poetry and about poetry and about poetry for the last year and a half and it's simply not working. I'm really interested to see what you pull from these things as being salient. What you keep and what you pitch. What made a poem interesting to you and how that compares or contrasts with the work that you generate, through rewriting or through bringing new work into the wiki.

And to say, if I haven't said it before: I'm not suggesting you give up cannonical-versioning rights to any of your poems or even that you put up for grabs poems or ideas that are close to your heart. Just things that you're interested to see worked on, or think people might like to pull apart.

Anyway, it's time to just cut to the chase and unviel Righting Poemry, that's  http://rightingpoemry.pbwiki.com. It's Righting Poemry because I think the way we've been trying to do it--each on our own, tucked away, trying to have conversations about individual aspects of individual poems--is broken, or, more in line with the metaphor of 'righting,' capsized.

So, go there and read the short introduction and the guide to posting and check out the raw material that I've already posted (and one from Christina, too!). The only rewrite, as of right now, is one I did or Christina's gorgeous "To my always never lover." Check it out. You can really see the differences in style and how they illuminate each other and the aspects of the poem's material itself.

If you'd like to edit/contribute and are confident that you can follow the directions laid out, then contact me by IM or email or phone and I'll give you the password and you can get to work adding, editing and rewriting.

Once again: rightingpoemry.pbwiki.com

Me: Metal.
Now I'm gonna go gay it up by non-ironically enjoying Trading Spaces.

Kendall: HA!
Wow.
At least you can admit that you have a problem.

This is a tiny excerpt from a poem I wrote while living in Tucson called "Scenes." There were four little stanzas like this, each encompassing thier own tiny scene. This is the fourth one, and the only one really worth reading.

a rabbit darts across an empty
street and rustles bushes, twitches,
watches, waits, impossibly
unreadable.

Play with it, would you, with the tiny, tiny form or the fact that it's in present tense or anything else.

More on this later.

It's pre-Democratic National Convention 2000, and the knock on Al Gore is that he's too stiff. Too unlikable. So they get Spike Jonze and a cameraman to follow him around and produce an awesome thirteen minute video.

Why we didn't see this back then is beyond me. Al Gore, it turns out, is awesome. And hilarious. Perhaps the election couldn't've been stolen if we'd seen something like this back then.

//

In news about other stolen elections, as I've long suspected, Rolling Stone now confirms (with boatloads of footnotes) that Ohio was systematically gamed, rigged and electioneered for President Bush in 2004.

You know, I didn't finish reading Al Franken's "The Truth (with Jokes)" because the idea that the President and his cohorts had scared and manipulated the American public into voting for him made me too sad. But maybe they didn't, or, at least, enough of them didn't so it shouldn't've mattered.