dreams

i remember dreams as real as needles in my skin. i remember dreams i had when i was five years old living in the mountains of new mexico. i can't tell the difference between the real of purple mountain sunsets and the false of escaping an orange muppet monster through the back alleys of hong kong.

last night i dreamed about a beautiful girl wandering through gorgeous oil paintings. recurring themes of beauty and the beast, alice in wonderland, and st. george and the dragon appeared in every painted room. the walls were thick brush-strokes of purple and gauzy gray, but they were as solid as stone.

this labyrinth was not a maze, exactly, full of dead ends and dropoffs. it was a cluster of painted rooms and the way through was to solve a little puzzle in the paintings.

then, at the center of the maze, her minotaur was mostly a man. he had pale skin, small black horns, and an elegant robe. he had jewelry.

he reached out for her with a broken kind of love, all torment and pain disguised as destiny.

she said, "You have no power over me." The world came crashing down.

I woke up.

Was I the elegant minotaur? was I the beautiful girl? i was neither. i was both.

art feeds your dreams. 1/3 of your life is spent asleep. ingesting art will feed your dreams, and make landscapes and stories that no other soul can tell.

people you haven't seen in a very long time, and didn't know very well when you did know them

i still live in the same area as my alma mater. today, someone i went to high school with sat next to me at mass with what appeared to be her husband.

she certainly seemed nice enough in high school, though her preferred friends probably could not have quoted yoda, and probably have not spent all of spring break reading "shogun" by james clavell. however, i certainly thought well enough of her to remember her after ten years with vague well-wishes.

i didn't really say anything to her in high school. she didn't say anything to me now. I didn't say anything to her now.

what are we supposed to say?

"hello, we went to high school together, and these few words we are about to say politely are perhaps the most we've ever spoken to each other at one time."

how strange that we mortals remain forever in high school, measuring our lives by the glory we bring to reunions. these are pictures of my children. this is my car. let me tell you about my breathtaking job.

why here?

we spent a good seven minutes complaining about the stupidity and mismanagement of the city of arlington.

then, the good doctor talked about his work in hospice care.

confused, i asked for clarification.
"why arlington?"
"what do you mean?"
"you can do hospice anywhere. why arlington?"
"i don't just do arlington. i branch out into fort worth, too."
"no, but i mean... why do you choose to live here instead of oklahoma or austin or africa?"
"my wife works for qwest diagnostics here in town. she's a technician."

why do people live where they do? it's like people don't choose where they live.

if you could live anywhere, where would you live? if you don't live there, why not?

why do we wait for retirement to live the places we actually want to live?

i'm buying plane tickets in the morning, and i don't understand the kind of people who get up, go to work, and accept where they are as where they must always be.

it's a big world, after all, and you only need such a small piece of it to make your home.

the snowstorms of seattle

i'm having two snow days in a row, even though i'm in texas.

my editor is in seattle, and he got snowed in. his kids rejoiced. he and i had to reschedule for monday.

yes, even texans get their snow days, sometimes.

i spent all day looking for modern vampire anthologies. couldn't find any good-looking ones published after 2000. at least, not the kind of vampire anthology i'm seeking.

if anyone knows a good modern vampire short story anthology, or at least a horror anthology that is heroin-addicted-child-killing-vampire friendly please let me know. i'm trying to find a secondary market for a short story that i believe merits wider readership than the one journal in which it was published.

Strunk & White, Alright vs All Right

Strunk & White's immortal classic of clear writing, "The Elements of Style", was composed and published in 1919. Even today, editors and authors use this tiny, little book as a definitive source.

However, the book was published in 1919, ad things have changed since. One specific thing has changed: "Alright".

In 1919, "Alright" was not a recognized word. It was a common misspelling of "All Correct", which is no longer a synonym.

Today "Alright" is a synonym of "Okay". "Are you okay?" = "Are you alright?". "Are you all correct?" is not correct.

However, because we hang on to this little book and use it as a guide for modern...

i interrupt this rant to announce that a tiny ant has crawled across my screen. i do not know where this ant hopped aboard my laptop. i do know, that the poor thing will likely never return home before it starves to death somewhere in the guts of my little machine.

i've completely lost my train of thought because i'm seeing scent trails an pheromones all over my computer. ants leave scent trails. they communicate with smell.

someday, when we meet an alien race with insectile similarities, they might hand us their holy book in a vial. we'll open the jar, and see nothing. we'll sniff the air inside and say, "it smells like cheese and feet."

hopefully such a scent will be considered a complement lest we begin an intergalactic incident.

where people don't read

walking home the other night, i stopped at a sports bar because it was open and i was hungry and the ihop was a mile away. i ordered my plain vegetarian version of the awful things they had on their menu. i hada copy of grace paley's "enormous changes at the last minute" which i read until the food arrived.

it occurred to me, when i looked up to eat, that i was the only person in the room reading anything at all.

people didn't read the menus. they knew what to order. people didn't read each other's sarcastic t-shirts: these were just excuses to ogle someone's chest. people didn't read the label of their bottles of beer; they peeled the labels off and left them rolled up like scrolls on their empty plates.

i ate. i paid. i finished my single beer. i put my book away. i left.

i have not returned to that place where people don't read.

hey

is gigantic bigger than giant because gigantic is a larger word, with "giant" inside of it (GI-g-ANT-ic)?

i'm too tired

I'm off until Tuesday.

Release date for LAST DRAGON is April, 2008. I've got much to do before then, some of which must be done right now.

I'll be back Tuesday.

not the worst rejection i've ever gotten.

"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news so soon after the holidays, but unfortunately this grouping of poems isn’t right for ***. Please don't be discouraged -- with so many poems coming in, the decisions of what to take to pass on are difficult, and often very subjective. Many -- perhaps most -- of the poems we publish are from poets who've missed the cut in the past. We don't solicit work, so submissions truly are our lifeblood. We love to read them, so please keep submitting as more poems are ready."

we must celebrate our defeats. i toast you with my coffee mug, anonymous editor, for your swift and polite response.

bad things happen to good video games

in writing a dense, fantasy urban environment i research various other venues to "see" how different art forms deal with the surreality of human space.

one of those venues is the video game franchise "Knights of the Old Republic".

firstly, i agree with many who claim that the video games are better stories and more human than episodes I, II, and III.

also -- and this is vital -- the second game of the property had the potential to be the greatest video game story since planescape:torment. alas, it was not meant to be. the force was not with us. for deadlines emerged that truncated development. up until the reunification of the Jedi council when the Jedi Exile confronts the lost masters in the ruins of Dantooine this game is unforgettable "Art" with a capital "A".

in the beginning, awakening in a kolto tank in an empty mining facility, and attempting to discover what happened to all the miners before the assassins get there and the subsequent events as the Exile escapes from the facility alive... this is haunting like a horror film.

the recurring themes of exile and betrayal across all the characters and events unifies the otherwise divergent plots and situations.

then, when kreia leads the exile to the ruins of Dantooine, and leans into the dead tree with the perfect cinematography and music i got chills. beautiful. just beautiful. this point in time is like the end of the game, sadly.

after that moment, a series of major plot holes and confusions result.

how dare they place some christmas deadline ahead of what could have been such greatness.

making the christmas deadline moved a few more units, perhaps. crafting a lasting work of art would have maintained the movement of units long after the technology made the mechanics obsolete.

planescape:torment had a very long tail.

heed my words, video game makers: your art form is on the brink of greatness, awaiting only the rise of a bach or a shakespeare or a hitchcock.

you are so close. don't do something like this again, lest someone else come along and bear the mantle of greatness in your steed.

"Control! Control! You must learn control!" - Yoda

writing professionally is like standing under a giant water-wheel and trying to push the thing in the other direction with your jedi "force".

it's a slow, frustrating process, and requires zen-like calm on the brink of irrecoverable ruin.

i'm ruined, but i'm calm and i'm working. i'm moving the wheel against the waves a little bit faster every day. someday, pushing the wheel will be so strong that the water in the river will change direction.

focus.


don't call me sisyphus. that myth has been mined enough in adumbrating the arts, i think.

hope in unexpected places

I’m at this café and every single person that walks past is just horrendous – like they belong in some macabre sideshow of all the strange outliers of the cultural detritus red state of America – everyone is just so weird and grotesque: parodies of their own selves…

Except this middle aged Hindi man, with a very white daughter. She’s a living doll, reading a book and bored and calling her Mom. Her daddy (a step-father) is a soft-spoken man, and clearly comfortable in the role of father. It’s the only thing I’ve seen all night, all day, in days and days, that gives me Hope with a capitol “H”.

The girl, tired of reading, wraps her blue jacket around her like a blanket, and curls up like a cat in the cafe chair to sleep. Her step-father looks up from his magazines.

"Little one, what are you doing?"

"Lying down."

"Oh."

walking at night

i walked home from starbucks at 9:45 pm for two miles, up two hills and down some very dark roads.

i held in my pocket my car keys like spiked knuckles. i watched the shadows that the streetlights gave me. i had visions of a darkness slipping out from between fences and wrapping around me.

mostly, all i saw were headlights from the cars driving here and then away and away. i saw a stray yellow dog jogging into a park.

i was thinking, at the time, how more pedestrians would make such a thing safer -- if people got out of their cars and walked places regularly.

then, i figured that no one would. i was walking around with my hands wrapped around a weapon in my pocket -- if even only my keys -- and i'm a big man with a dark hood over my head trying to give off that street vibe that says "don't f*** wi' me".

so all these people that should be out walking are going to see me, and hop in their cars.

robo rally the year away

at a new years party with friends, we played a game called robo rally.

much like risk, the game would have improved exponentially if it included the computational assistance of tequila.

i cannot help but wonder if kasparov plays different drunk. the immortal chessmaster, drinking at each captured piece, does not lose his edge, i suspect. i think his famous aggression expands. i think he places the lost piece on his tongue when he takes the shot, swallowing the pawns and knights and sharp bishops. the jagged crown of the queen made little cuts down his throat when he swallowed it. the tequila burned worse down his esophagus.

the internist, with a puzzled look on his face, asks kasparov why he swallowed the pieces he lost.

kasparov says that he couldn't very well let his opponent swallow the piece, right?

fortunately, robo rally has small pieces, mostly plastic. upon an intoxicated defeat, pipes neither meat nor metal would clog.