The man without fear
Almost.
Sorta.
Scary things don't scare me, I should say. I don't fear airplane rides, or car accidents, or illness, or alcohol poisoning, or...Draculas. I don't know--what else is there? Most of it, I'm unfazed by. I shrug and say, "Oh well." Because we're all gonna die. And I'd rather die, any day, than live contrary to my whims.
Is that a terrible philosophy? Yeah. But it's what I got, and it...
I'm sure I had a point. Maybe. It seems like I thought I did, when I started writing this. But, backtracking, I sure as hell can't figure out what it might have been.
I'm thinking that I might be parting ways with a certain friend of mine. "Friend," more like.
You know...I just realized something.
Alcohol is my me.
Make sense? If you heard me speak the words, you'd have a better chance. There's complicated inflection in there--too complex for italics. Emboldening or underlining would just confuse matters worse. You know what I've seen done by people? They'll use strikethrough to mean something other than, like, a retraction. Either decoratively (so every word in their picture caption can have some kind of effect), or as an emphasizer along the lines of italics. It's heresy.
Back in high school, in Spanish II with Senorita Tierney, I sat next to this guy named Bucky. He was a funny kid. But he became especially funny under my influence. I'd subtly ( or, sometimes, not-so-subtly) suggest things like...spraying Pam cooking-spray on the stone floors of the hallways, or grinding food into the carpet, or hurling gigantic spitwads at the ceiling. I'd contribute as much as was necessary, on my part, but mostly it was Bucky running the risk of getting in trouble.
What a horrible friend.
Well, now I've got such a friend. In booze. It's no less than I deserve, but I'd prefer not to be taken advantage of like that. Because I'm going to do something stupid. I'm going to get in trouble with the law, or with unscrupulous sorts, or...or Draculas, and I'll look around me for support, someone to back me up, and the only one around'll be unimpeachable, seemingly-innocent Alcohol, sharing none of the responsibility.
I mean, I refuse to take a moral stand against drinking (even irresponsible binge-drinking). And I don't know that I'll decide to not drink anymore or ever again, but...then again, I might. Well, not the "ever again." Because what if it's my duty to make a drunken scene at a wedding, or I get my chance to be ejected from a formal event for being fall-down, stinking drunk?
But casual binge-drinking? I don't think I can justify it anymore.
So long, karaoke.
I picked up an anthology of short-ish horror stories a while ago...several years ago, I guess it was. Almost three. It was at that weird impromptu estate sale thing, where I got the German army coat and the green leather jacket that would've fit me when I was eight or nine. Anyways, there's good, good stuff in there. I read one or two shortly after I bought it for a dollar, and they didn't really resonate at the time (one that I read was "The Bottle-Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson...it was good but also sort of boring and not scary). But, as I said, I picked it up the day before yesterday, and I'm liking it a lot.
Something that I like to do when I'm writing is to make completely obscure references to things that almost no one in the world could catch. Sometimes it's one of my biggest motivating factors to write at all. And it fills me with sense of great satisfaction to do it. I'll be listening to some weird song from years gone by, and I'll slip a line or two into the dialogue, in a completely new context, and then just giggle about it.
Reading these stories is filling me up with things I want to pay oblique homage to. Names, places, phrases...
"Carmilla" by Sheridan Stefanu. That one, especially, but there are others.
A couple of stories I thought were pretty damned awesome (though I don't think either contained any nuggets I intend to secret in anything of mine) are "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory" by Orson Scott Card and "The Professor's Teddy-Bear" by Theodore Sturgeon. The former's "scarier," I suppose, but the latter's very fascinating. That Sturgeon fellow wrote a vampire novel that I intend to acquire at some point, if it's one-tenth as intriguing as the teddy-bear thing. Plus! The Sturgeon fellow...okay, you know the episode of Star Trek with Spock's mating ritual? That was him; he wrote it.
So...there you go.
Sorta.
Scary things don't scare me, I should say. I don't fear airplane rides, or car accidents, or illness, or alcohol poisoning, or...Draculas. I don't know--what else is there? Most of it, I'm unfazed by. I shrug and say, "Oh well." Because we're all gonna die. And I'd rather die, any day, than live contrary to my whims.
Is that a terrible philosophy? Yeah. But it's what I got, and it...
I'm sure I had a point. Maybe. It seems like I thought I did, when I started writing this. But, backtracking, I sure as hell can't figure out what it might have been.
I'm thinking that I might be parting ways with a certain friend of mine. "Friend," more like.
You know...I just realized something.
Alcohol is my me.
Make sense? If you heard me speak the words, you'd have a better chance. There's complicated inflection in there--too complex for italics. Emboldening or underlining would just confuse matters worse. You know what I've seen done by people? They'll use strikethrough to mean something other than, like, a retraction. Either decoratively (so every word in their picture caption can have some kind of effect), or as an emphasizer along the lines of italics. It's heresy.
Back in high school, in Spanish II with Senorita Tierney, I sat next to this guy named Bucky. He was a funny kid. But he became especially funny under my influence. I'd subtly ( or, sometimes, not-so-subtly) suggest things like...spraying Pam cooking-spray on the stone floors of the hallways, or grinding food into the carpet, or hurling gigantic spitwads at the ceiling. I'd contribute as much as was necessary, on my part, but mostly it was Bucky running the risk of getting in trouble.
What a horrible friend.
Well, now I've got such a friend. In booze. It's no less than I deserve, but I'd prefer not to be taken advantage of like that. Because I'm going to do something stupid. I'm going to get in trouble with the law, or with unscrupulous sorts, or...or Draculas, and I'll look around me for support, someone to back me up, and the only one around'll be unimpeachable, seemingly-innocent Alcohol, sharing none of the responsibility.
I mean, I refuse to take a moral stand against drinking (even irresponsible binge-drinking). And I don't know that I'll decide to not drink anymore or ever again, but...then again, I might. Well, not the "ever again." Because what if it's my duty to make a drunken scene at a wedding, or I get my chance to be ejected from a formal event for being fall-down, stinking drunk?
But casual binge-drinking? I don't think I can justify it anymore.
So long, karaoke.
I picked up an anthology of short-ish horror stories a while ago...several years ago, I guess it was. Almost three. It was at that weird impromptu estate sale thing, where I got the German army coat and the green leather jacket that would've fit me when I was eight or nine. Anyways, there's good, good stuff in there. I read one or two shortly after I bought it for a dollar, and they didn't really resonate at the time (one that I read was "The Bottle-Imp" by Robert Louis Stevenson...it was good but also sort of boring and not scary). But, as I said, I picked it up the day before yesterday, and I'm liking it a lot.
Something that I like to do when I'm writing is to make completely obscure references to things that almost no one in the world could catch. Sometimes it's one of my biggest motivating factors to write at all. And it fills me with sense of great satisfaction to do it. I'll be listening to some weird song from years gone by, and I'll slip a line or two into the dialogue, in a completely new context, and then just giggle about it.
Reading these stories is filling me up with things I want to pay oblique homage to. Names, places, phrases...
"Carmilla" by Sheridan Stefanu. That one, especially, but there are others.
A couple of stories I thought were pretty damned awesome (though I don't think either contained any nuggets I intend to secret in anything of mine) are "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory" by Orson Scott Card and "The Professor's Teddy-Bear" by Theodore Sturgeon. The former's "scarier," I suppose, but the latter's very fascinating. That Sturgeon fellow wrote a vampire novel that I intend to acquire at some point, if it's one-tenth as intriguing as the teddy-bear thing. Plus! The Sturgeon fellow...okay, you know the episode of Star Trek with Spock's mating ritual? That was him; he wrote it.
So...there you go.