Crick

I woke up this morning with a curious and intense pain in my neck-- it was distending, and it spread all around my back and my head. When I focused on it, I could feel one point in particular that was white hot. As the morning went on, my traps and my neck tightened back into their normal state of painful constriction, but I am left wondering about that little spot. It's funny how old injuries can live on in our bodies, and the only way we deal with them is to build a nest of constriction and desensitized mass around the area.

I wonder how much emotional trauma gets stuffed into a little bundle of dead tissue and left to rot?

So, about.com has accepted me into "prep" for their Taoism page. Prep is a seventeen day course where you build an about.com site, while submitting articles so they can review your content. The templates are easy to follow, and I have done pretty well so far... I'm pulling pretty hard, because, Frankly, I NEED the money. Starting guides make 725.00 a month, and that would pay about two thirds of our bills. As your hit count grows, you make more, but you will never make less than that. Sweet.

Life has been hard, lately. So it goes.

If any women are reading this page (which I sincerely doubt, at this point), I need you to understand something: Men, and human beings in general, ARE NOT PERFECT. We forget to do things. We occasionally leave hair on the floor when we sweep. We rarely are able to find the optimum balance between being a GUY guy (where we can do carpentry, rough you up in a good way, and command a real sense of authority), and being sensitive, egalitarian, and modern.

Let me tell you a secret: I don't have the same capacity for emotion as you do. I'm one of a small handful of things at any given time: Happy, Angry, Horny, Annoyed, Sad, Neutral.

You, on the other hand, can have intricate shades of emotion layered on top of one another... For example, you feel wistful, sad, and fat, with an undercurrant of resentfulness tempered with a shade of guilt.

So, please, women out there, understand something: We men just want to be happy, horny, or neutral. Despite what you might think, it is relatively easy to please us. You, on the other hand, are an enigma. So don't blame us when we fuck it all up.

Death and Rebirth

I haven't written in this blog for almost two months. Not unusual for me in the slightest, but it is, in fact, long enough for a blog to die and be completely forgotten. I would be amazed if the three people who read this thing had stopped peeking at it long ago. So, I shook my readers free, and now I'm ready to write again. Go figure.

Not that I haven't been writing. I have 219 pages in Third Eye now, and I am a couple days writing away from hitting the fifty thousand word mark, which officially puts the book at novel length. By my reckoning, I have about 120 pages or so to go, and yes, I do measure the length of the story that way. I don't know if it is good or bad anymore, but goddamnit, I WILL finish it. I never finish anything, and I am determined to break that habit.

School is almost over. I am in an interesting nether region where I literally have no idea what I plan to do afterwords. I would love to get hired into someone else's medical office, but as hip as Ithaca is, that just doesn't appear to be a very easy arrangement to set up. So I am left with two options: One is to pick a location and set up shop. It would take about 1500.00 in start up for supplies, plus first month, last month, and security deposit on the space. Insurance would be about 125.00 a month.

The thing is, that scares me. It scares me because I have had two business fail in my meager experience, and it always boiled down to the same reason: Just because you build it, it doesn't mean they're gonna come. Ray Liotta was a lying douchebag.

Anyway, the other option is to immediately start the Doctor of Chiropractic program. Go back to school for another four years. Rack up almost a quarter million dollars in loan debt. THEN, go out and try to start a business.

The jury is still out, folks.

Here are some books I've read in the past couple months:

Carrie by Stephen King. It was interesting to read his first book. It was clunky and short, but you can still see that almost addictive quality in it. Despite being his worst book (in my opinion), it was still a page-turner.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahnuik. Fun. Too cool for school. This guy gets compared to Kurt Vonnegut a lot, and I can sort of see why.

Blink by Malcom someone or another. I actually listened to this one in the car. It was a non-academic but still pretty rigorous look at rapid cognition, the decisions you make intuitively. Completely fascinating, and definitely worth reading.

The Omnivore's Dillemma. Four meals traced back to their roots. This guy is a good writer. Made me interested in corn.

Four Seasons by Stephen King. This is that collection of novellas that has Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, Stand by Me, and some other story in it. One of his best. Great. Just great.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Of course we all read everything by Kurt V. while we were in highschool, and there was a reason why: It was good enough to hold our attention when all we could think about was our penises (or vagina's) and using drugs. That's some good writing, then.

I am going to try to write more in this thing, though one thing I've always loved about keeping journals was that I could see a spread through the years. I've never been daily about anything; I tend to do things in waves. That can make for an interesting Saturday afternoon, when I am able to read through one journal that has twelve years of history behind it.