Aah, the small victories – Victories none the less

Got up with my alarm today, 6:30 am. First time I’ve done that in more than a month. I feel good. Not about the getting up early, but about the being able to get up at all.

Not much, but it is cause for celebration.

Oh Yeah!

Read Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive) again this week.

Why isn’t the future here yet. It’s pretty fucking late. Or to quote Erik, “It’s 2002, where’s my god damn flying car? You promised us flying cars!”

Really, all I want in life is to be a William Gibson character. Is that so much to ask? I want the microsofts and the biosofts and the augmentation and the mirrored freakin shades and all that. Wake me up in fifty years when it’s not.

Oh, has anyone seen the documentary about him, No Maps for these Territories. Good? Bad? eh? Huh? If Cinefile or Vidiots have it I’m gonna rent it this week…

I know you’re not ready for some football, I mean, c’mon, none of you are jocks.

Okee, ‘SC beat UCLA.
We’re 7th in the country.
We play (#8) Notre Dame next week.
UCLA plays the #3 team Wash. State.
We haven’t beaten ND and UCLA in the same year in twenty years…
If we beat ND, and we’re in a major bowl.
UCLA beats Washington State, (and we beat ND) we’re division champs, and in the Rose Bowl.
I think most people here think more highly of that than whatever the random championship of the year is – be it the Heinrich Bowl or the Midnite Bowl or the Toilet Bowl or whatever. So needless to say, next Saturday will be an interesting football day.

I don’t even really care about football, let alone amateur football, or for that matter this school, and correspondingly even less about this school’s amateur football.

But dammit, after two years of giving a shit about them, then two years of wishing them well even though I wasn’t a fan; and all that time them being wretched, I’d at least like for them to win something before I get out of here…

Main attraction of all this is that it’ll be great if they do really well the year AFTER my old roommate graduated, because he was so goddamn into them, and they never did anything right when he was here.

And Here it Begins – unedited.

Chapter 1
Does it look pretty? Does it sound pretty? Does it make you look pretty? If those things are priorities, you’re probably a ditelettante whom no one should take seriously. Sure, it’s good to surround yourself with beautiful things, but I think beauty is a lie. That’s not to say I don’t like it, but beauty is an escape. When I look out the window, lemme tell you, staring at the amber and purple glow rising up from the City of Angels, I don’t see no beauty, massa. This place is shit, a gilded turd. You need Beauty’s escape pretty often. But live for it and something will rip out your fucking soul. Anything that looks good here has been rebuilt within the last five years. I’ve been here five years, and most of the pretty shit, I can tell you, has been renovated in that time. My occupation here is older than that most recent gilding. And I’ve been here comparatively long. There are droves of people who come to live and are gone – moved back to ________ or dead within a year. I’ve met many. I’m still alive, does that make me strong in some way? Probably just lucky.

The Forewarned

She said “Write, you fool!” and I thought “What the hell, why not.” But I have a bit of a problem. Fictions are fantasies, and realities are so boring. Anytime someone tries to pass of a story that can keep you entertained as reality, or a life story, etc, they’re lying. The realities worth telling are in sealed or highly redacted files. The protagonists go away: bought out or “taken out” or driven insane.
This is the nature of engaging and meaningful stories: they reveal something greater and deeper about the power structures that control you (be they political, corporate, academic, romantic, artistic, or other) and thus are dangerous to someone. Someone with more power than you stands to lose something if the story is heard.
There’s someone out there who would take the story as inspiration, some postmodern Robin Hood, some silly Raskolnikov, and then those people with the purse strings find some dissent to their order. To allow us to tell stories is to allow us to speak against them. Nobody wants to hear the story of Goliath beating David. The cynics (like the hero of this story) have a saying that every joke has to be at someone’s expense. And it’s commonly accepted that every story has to have a tension.
To create tension, there has to be a bad guy. So who’s the bad guy? The big guy? Is Goliath the hero? Are they gonna let you other little men and women out there hear the stories of the ones who’ve beaten them in the past? Under wraps my friends. That’s where they keep the stories worth telling. The power of storytelling is mighty, indeed.

That’s why, with the help and prodding of a little pixie yelling from at my shoulder, I think I might have a story worth telling.

I wanna start some shit.

52864

if I’m ever published, the intro to my book won’t be the foreward. it’ll be the forewarned.

52648

I saw a book called “Affirmations for the Artist” at the Fine Arts library today.

Imagine checking that out. “The librarian told me I have two weeks to change my life.”

thisisfuckingawesome!!! stolen from swisscheesed.

and I thought “Duane” was a “distinctive” name.

http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/

amen

http://www.smallstoriesonline.com/Comics/ValentinesDay/ValentinesDay.htm

in other news, anyone who wants to, call or drop an email in the next couple days. I think it’d help me out some, I need to hear your beautiful voices and could use a little support right now. And even more, I’d really like to reconnect with everyone. So light up that switchboard. and if you get my machine, leave your # even if you know I have it.

take care, everyone.

Phoenix Castillo-Esparza

we’ll miss you.