This Blog is Dead.

Wow, no posts for half a year? I’m killing my blog right now. Today I’m mired in failure and self loathing. Time to go be a monk and raise vegetables. The writer hand is broken. Oh, if I change my mind and happen to remember my password perhaps a resurrection will come upon this blog. If not, peace out!

Penguins and Antelopes: Human Sexuality Explained

The unexpected visit from my buddy, Dinh, Monday has made me feel the need to solidify my theory on penguins and antelopes. I wish she could’ve passed through Phoenix on happier terms, but I’ll just say we both needed a drink. So, on the second round of ginger margaritas when the married friend turns the conversation to why are you still single, I mentioned that I am a penguin. Immediately I received the ubiquitous WTF. Here’s the theory. Everybody is divided into two groups: penguins and antelopes, technically there are antelopes/wildebeests. Most people are wildebeests. Wildebeests are plentiful, average looking, you really can’t tell one from another and that’s how they like it. They mate in seasons, fall in and out of love rather easily or painfully, mates get lost or change by mood, are shot by hunters or eaten by lions/hippos/gators, etc. In the end it doesn’t matter because the next season has potential for love yet again. Other Antelopes behave just like wildebeests but they’re prettier and therefore rare but not as rare as penguins. Penguins fall in love once and fall hard. If a mate gets lost or drowned or hit by an iceberg that’s all she wrote. The surviving half of that penguin couple just goes off telling stories about his/her lost love until they go to penguin heaven. I am a penguin gosh darn it. That’s all.

Who’da thunk it?

Well, I’m still on the good news high from the notification that my story “White Out” is a finalist for the Indiana Review fiction prize this year. Validation of this kind is a sweet sweet thing. It makes the dozens of rejections I’ve gotten this year far less crushing. On this good Veteran’s Day I think I’ll watch Turner Classic movie channel until I pass out. After that I may attempt world domination or wash another load of clothes, equally valuable.

The People of Paper vs. Light Boxes/Rant on Racism

Why does the act of blogging feel like I’m picking my bones off the floor and trying to put them together on a table and my head is always hooked to my ass for some reason? Speaking of Light Boxes, I’m half way through Shane Jones’ novella about a fable like town at war with a Godlike figure called February that is snatching up kids and perpetuating winter in some really pretty ways. The controversy of sorts involves Jones’ blatant plagiarism of Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper, which is far more complex not to mention gorgeous. Jones has a town declare war on February after Plascencia’s protagonist declares war on Saturn. Jones’ character obsesses over mint after Plascencia dabbled in limes. C’mon people. I like them both. I do. I’m just saying. My issue is that Jones’ book is getting all this hype and published through Penguin despite the obvious lack of originality. In an interview with Nashville Review Plascencia expounds much better than I can on his trouble getting People of Paper published at all in addition to the quarrel with Jones. Sure we can say, nothing is really new exactly. Authors borrow from one another all the time. We can say it’s inspiration. We can also say Mary Poppins is super annoying. Does that solve the racist undercurrent in the tiff between these two authors, these two books, the publishing industry as a whole? Nope. I have to leave it there before I say something embarrassing hahaha.

Oh, teaching is going pretty well lately. I’ll say no more so as not to jinx it.

Tonight: White wine on sale for $6.99 plus $2.00 off if you buy with chicken. I bought chicken.

Back on the Grind

Oh gosh. The pressure. The fall semester of teaching is about to start, so naturally I dreamt that a student assaulted me in the class via asphyxiation. I have since been diagnosed by my facebook friends as nervous, paranoid, sexually repressed, and ummm kinky. The best choice is probably to think about when vacation starts instead and of course booze.

I must cheat on my precious tequila this weekend and go the vodka route. Stoli Elit has come to me from the breath of the liquor pixies.

My Amazon order has also come to me, including my new copy of Great Short Short Stories: Quick Reads by Great Writers. I know I know I’m supposed to boycott Amazon and only shop at independents, but mine is 45 minutes away! and they aren’t that well stocked. My new mid-year’s resolution is to read a new short story every day…FOREVER! What better way to get in the habit than really short stories. I’m going to begin with Kafka’s “A Country Doctor.” I always judge a story by its first and last line before I actually read it. This is Kafka’s first and last:

“I was in a most awkward predicament….Having obeyed the false ringing of the night bell just once—the mistake can never be rectified.”

Hmmmm…there is some interest there. I personally enjoy a more ferocious prose, but we can’t all be Toni Morrison or Donald Barthelme. Thank the liquor pixies for that.

Ha the next story is by Rudyard Kipling titled “Wee Willie Winkie ‘An officer and a gentleman’”, you know I will be disappointed if it turns out to not be gay porn. Kipling did write the Jungle Book, so the gay porn isn’t totally out of the question.  I’ll be back soon!!!

Kill the Hero and Middle Aged Charlie Brown

Gosh, I didn’t realize it’s been so long since I did the blog thing. I’m at the Voices workshop for writers of color in San Francisco.  It’s been slow going this time around. People are kind of quiet and stick to themselves.  This will probably be my last time around. Maybe.  Side note: San Francisco is effing weird.  I’ve been walking around Haight street and I’m not exactly in awe of the grunge and drug paraphernalia mainly because all the liquor available is beer and wine.  I’m so depressed. 

Oh, in the actual workshop, we’ve been going over some basics.  Let me get my notes and summarize the lectures…Here we go.

Day 1 – What you intend to create in a story is not always what you end up with, and that is OK. Even though you may intend to make a perfect circle, you may end up with Charlie Brown’s head that is a little droopy from age and damaged expectations.

Day 2 – If you have a literary hero, you have to slay them. Until you read your master’s work and identify the flaws, you’ll always copy those errors. Find the imperfections in author’s you think are great in order to overcome their limitations and your own.

So far things are going OK. Dude played a song during his lecture. I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

The Oily Pelican Cocktail!! Yummo

My body has been invaded by invisible creatures that seek the utter collapse of my lungs and nasal cavities for their wicked, wicked adventures.  That said I’m consuming cable news programs at a higher than normal rate.  PBS just tried to sell me a $60 coffee mug.  Not-for-profit my ass.  It wasn’t even the most awesome coffee mug.  I’d pay $60 for an awesome coffee mug, if the purchase was prefaced with consumption of a bottle of NyQuil.  But a mediocre coffee mug? At least try people. 

Oh, the cable news.  Well, on the Rachel Maddow Show there was mention of booze.  My attention she had.  Turns out there is a town in the Gulf of Mexico that is has a bar selling jello shooters called Tar Balls.  Gasp from wonder and disgust is appropriate. 

The recipe is as follows:

1.5 cups of smoking hot water

1.5 packets of grape jello

4 oz. of jagermeister (not my fav)

mix and pour into little plastic cups, cap, and chill

Now, this makes me think that all controversial potentially catastrophic events in recent history need to be solidified, ramified, petrified, sorry it’s the cold medicine.  Oh, these events all need to be commemorated with cocktails.  So here are a few suggestions:

Illegal Immigration gets two drinks:

1. Amnesty

2 oz. of tequila

2 oz. of triple sec

a splash of corona

2. Show Me Your Papers

Mix Amnesty with a little rubbing alcohol.

To honor the gulf crude spill how about this:

-The Oily Pelican

1 cup apple juice

2 oz. motor oil

Enjoy!

Quantum Physics and Wild Wild Sex

See I’m writing this story called “String Theory” at the moment.  I haven’t actually written more than two pages, but I’ve thought about it a great deal and read some books.  String theory is an element of quantum physics that I’m not at all remotely in my most imaginative fantasies qualified to talk about.  Still, let me explain it as best I can in preparation for converting this into a story with characters and emotional significance and junk. 

The universe as we know it is best understood through Einstein’s theory of relativity.  This theory deals with everything very, very big like the stars and planets and gravity and you and me and that guy over there and his sinister looking parakeet.  Quantum theory on the other hand deals with everything very, very small like atoms and the things even smaller than atoms like protons, neutrons, and electrons and the things even smaller than that, which we will (if our technology continues to have the limits it does) never ever see.  The problem with these two theories is they don’t make sense with one another.  The math is ugly and clumsy and doesn’t gel.  It’s like trying to get some ethereal deity to live in the world of primates.  An angel and a gorilla can’t quite stay in the same room let alone have a meaningful conversation.  The equations of relativity don’t work with the equations of quantum mechanics because the results keep adding up to infinity, not just infinity by itself but infinity plus itself times itself.  So while these infinities are banging away at each other no clarity and understanding of the universe can be known unless there is something more finite at the ends of each theory. 

Now, I mentioned those very small things like protons and neutrons, and there is believed to be something billions of times smaller inside called quarks, and inside quarks there is thought to be something that is the smallest point of matter that happens to not be a point at all but a vibrating loop of energy called a string.  If a string is the actual smallest of the small then the problem of infinity is somewhat resolved.  The angel and the gorilla can have a baby called the universe as we know it.  Here’s the rub.  The shape of the loops or strings can, gasp, be infinite.  So in some way the theory collapses again.  OK, this isn’t really about wild sex at all, but if you kept reading for that reason, congratulations.  You think like I do.  Good luck with life because you probably need it.

When Giant Lesbian Potatoes Attack!!

A few days ago I finished reading a collection of comic strip episodes by Alison Bechdel called “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For”.  Not too many years ago I read the acclaimed graphic novel by Bechdel, “Fun Home,” which lived up to the promise of the title.  The episodes in the Essential follow the characters, a rambunctious overly political bunch of lesbians (as if there are any other kind), through the past twenty-five years.  The book doubles as an illustration/how to guide for raunchy girl on girl sex and political world history, at least it started off that way.  During the latter years all the angst and zeal are muted by a rather bleak perspective on the relationships between the characters and the general hope for a prosperous the world.  The characters have significantly less sex and the world looks significantly less jovial.  Is that what it means to grow up? If so, that Toys R Us theme song from a couple of decades back comes to mind.  Everything looks rather bleak these days.  Is it really the lack of money everyone has or is it something else?  Oh, but the book isn’t entirely a justification for prozac usage.  There are wine-sputteringly funny moments including the nightmare one of the heroines has involving, yes, a giant lesbian potato (as if there are any other kind). More of that is what the world needs right now.  More random blissful absurdity just for the heluvit.  I’m over the stock market and the tea parties and the terrorism and the volcanos.  I want more giant lesbian potato humor in my day!  Now.

Debbie Downer?

On more than one occasion I have been referred to as a “Debbie Downer,” the SNL ferry captain to the land of gray clouds and random reminders of Malaria, skin cancer, puppy mills, and manatee extinctions.  I haughtily resent that association.  The conversation I had via txt messages with my oldest brother yesterday reminded me of this label.

Don: Hey, D (my nephew) just found out hes gon b perm stationed in san diego. He’s happy

Me: That’s a good gig I’m glad for him.

Don: Yep. D’s new nickname is GOLDEN KING LUCKY BUTTER

Me: Lmao, sounds like a Chinese food menu item

Don: It describes him to a t

Me: Yup let him enjoy it before the world chews off his head and his soul passes through the anal rim of failure and missed opportunities.

Don: OMG I am forwarding that one!!

Me: Ha well it happens to us all.

Don: Yep unfortunately. Hey we swimming in dooky we just keep pushing each other to the top for air.

Me: Lol sick. When I said it there was less nasty involved.

Don: I just want to be clean!!!

Me: Goodluck. Some people are just made like dung beetles. Crap is life. Make it move it eat it accept it.

Don: We are sorry to inform you that you have failed the suicidal hotline employment test.

Me: Lmao! I so would fail that test.

Don: For you every watermelon not sweet all clouds rain piss if I thought like that I would have wrapped my lips around a shotgun barrel long ago lmao!

Me: I’m a realist fool! I notice postitive things but I don’t sit around living in happy fantasyland like some while random people garnish my checks. Your life isn’t the crappiest though. That lizard I shot with the bb gun earlier had a worst day than yours I’m sure.

Don: OMG you shot the lizard nice and toshay guacalote mujer toshay lol

Me: Did you call me a turkey woman?

 

The conversation took an even deeper emotional dive after that.  As a writer, failure is imminent.  Rejection happens blah blah blah.  I’m not supposed to live in denial of the crap storms that hit, and I dont’ think I relish them either.   So there.