A Blithering Literates Life

I just learned that the third Lord of the Rings movie is two hundred minutes long.  That’s something like three hours and twenty minutes of epic sword swinging, horse ridding, ring prompted action.  Anyway, about the moment that I realized the sun had gone down and I’d lost a third of the day staring at a television screen, I looked upon a familiar sight out the nearest window.  It was (and still is) snowing.  It’s pretty amazing.  It may not be all that impressive for most of you to hear that it’s snowing in the dead of winter, but, considering the location (Seattle, WA), it’s very unexpected and not to mention bad for any person with plans to get out and about.  I, personally, have to brave the weather tomorrow to get back to school in Ellensburg and that means going through the snow ladden Snoqualmi Pass.  I’m just hoping that I can make it.

It’s strange to think that a clean brain is a useless brain.  It’s the dapples that give us our five pound spaghetti sponge its function.  These are our memories.  These are our thoughts.  The smattering of little crevasses add surface area, but that’s about all I truly understand other than the little black marks that burn into our grey matter via the fire of our synapses.  Actually, the latter may not be entirely accurate either.  However, I still love the core concept.  I’ve never been much for Mozart and I’ll surly be denied entry to the lofty realms of any heaven.  These are concepts of perfection and, to be perfectly honest, they are all very boring.  Those little imperfections are the true beauty of the universe, not the stark and stale evils and goods that pervade our religions and utopias.

My sister spends umpteenth amounts of time on the computer.  Though she does other things like search for photos of vampiric heart throbs and chat with her “friends” in chat rooms, most of it involves a MySpace window.  I’ll admit, I have a MySpace page all decked out in geeky music and videos that illustrate my personal ridiculousness, but I can’t see spending hours upon ass numbing hours chatting with my friends using the equivlant of a fancy looking email client.  The whole business with making profiles for fictional characters and maintaining them also seems a bit too D&D for me, but then again, it’s all just another method of escape, like writing is for me.  Still, I wish she would give it a rest every once in a while and spend some time with the family.

I didn’t feel my last post was quite up to standard with my usually sharp style of writing.  Ha, ha.  Sorry.  Seriously though, it was crap that I squeezed out and pinched off just before I bolted out the door to go on a “Half-Life 2″ binge at my vandal friends’ house.  I was watching the meaning of life as explained by Monty Python so there wasn’t a lot of thought about the content.  In fact, I think I just copied whatever images I saw in that lovely romp through sketch comedy and social satire.

Anyway, I just felt like I should impart an interesting fact to you all at this ungodly time in the morn.  As it turns out, your brain is most creative just before it shuts down for sleep.  The reason for this is that the logic centers of the brain are the first to shut down and with them out of the way the mind is free from creative restraint and can explore all the quaint and nonsensical aspects of any idea.  Just a fun fact to start your day.

Well, there are a lot of different and diverging opinions.  Some of them involve exploding fat people, fish in a tank, horny Roman Catholics, pretentious Protestants, liver repo-men, the library of congress, vomiting restaurants, buildings smashing other buildings, sex, conversation pie, crude animation, birth, growing up, middle age, the autumn years, death, philosopher waiters, god and sex.  All of these things are from a particular movie that I don’t feel I have to name if you have any… Okay, I’m trying to refrain from chiding my readers so I won’t come up with a clever quip or simile.  Just deal with this randomness.

I consider myself a pretty easy going guy.  There aren’t that many things that I loathe in life, but one of those few eye gougingly frustrating things is putting snow chains on car tires.  You see, it normally doesn’t snow around the Seattle area, but once in a great while a winter comes along that sheets the streets with snow, which is driven over by numerous cars and turned into ice.  This is where the tire chains come in.

The car in question is a tiny little Nissan that’s roomy on the inside, but has wheel wells that an infant would have trouble squeezing their hand into.  It’s a combination of factors that adds up to my severe loathing of this procedure.  It says that it’s supposed to be easy on the box, but that’s a ball faced lie.  First you have to untangle the coiled mess that you pull out of the bag and then sit down in the snow and dampen your pants up, making them uncomfortably cold, then slip the chains out of your sight and around the tire.

Fastening the chains together involves moving the car and even then you might not have them on tight enough to avoid the chains banging on your wheel well with every single rotation.  Taking them off is particularly infuriating for me, partly because I can’t see anything behind the wheel, and so, can’t unhook the simple catch on the cord that holds the chains on, and partly because when I’m wet, cold, and dirty all at once I’d rather get the job done as quick as possible but that won’t happen because when all’s said and done I still have to spend another twenty minutes being damp and pissed to get the other tire chain off.  It may not make sense to you, but it bugs the crap out of me.

I don’t know whether to categorize this as a blurb or a criticism, so I’m slotting it in both categories.  You see, I just watched half of this god awful movie, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and noticed a pattern in the exposition of some crappy and not so crappy movies like “Babylon A.D.” with Vin Diesel as Vin Diesel (because that’s all he ever is) and  “Citizen Kane.”  They start at the end of the story to draw you in, possibly because they are aware that the actual story itself is concentrated drill-in-forehead.  I would almost call it a cop out and a form of sentimental bathos that’s trying to trick us into caring for these characters, or at least snagging our attention in place of a flimsy introduction, but I see potential in showing us the end at the beginning.

Actually, I have seen it work.  “Citizen Kane” didn’t say too much with it’s classic “Rosebud” line, but it was enough to beg the question “Who (or what) is Rosebud?” where as “LitToCholera” gives us the entire end of the movie by showing a guy die and another guy come up to the fresh widow confessing his enduring love for her.  She told him off, which made me laugh a bit, but that was the end.  The whole end.  I really didn’t need the rest of the movie to explain these characters and why they are the way that they are because I already know that ones a dick and two of them were happily married.  I could briefly mention why “Babylon A.D.” was bad, but I didn’t actually see the movie, so I don’t really know the story. Still, I could hazard a guess that it had nothing to do with communication problems and everything to do with Vin Diesel “getting some” in every sense and really, I don’t need to see it because I can see, from the constant advertisements, the crux of my rant.

They (that is, the bastardy producers and advertisers) bank on you going to see the movie out of morbid curiosity by telling you that Vin dies (from the looks of it in a fiery explosion).  At that point, I don’t really care about the character.  To be fair, I don’t think that I would have cared for the character even if they hadn’t mentioned his untimely death in the commercials, but I do feel the whole “ending at the beginning” method of foreshadowing renders most stories moot because there’s nothing to twist at the end or shock me.  He’s gonna die and I know it.  I don’t care how he got there for the most part.  I didn’t even care what “Rosebud” was either, but Citizen Kane was a good movie after it’s foreshadow foe paw, so I let it slide.

Time for me to jump on the popular media band wagon.  It’s truly astonishing what cocker spaniel piddle passes for news these days.  Kanye lip syncing.  A Hilton coming out of her fourth rehab session and then getting smashed at the bar adjacent to the rehab center.  Donald Trump having hot, flabby sex with Rosie Okay I’m sorry I even endeavoured to make up that scenario because now my brain is filled with images that I must later remove with an ice cream scoop.  Anyway, my point is that even made up stories like the one I just scared you and myself with can be broadcast live from news room eight at nine and receive perfect tens in the anals of journalistic artistry.  (And yes, I mean “anals,” not annals, because most of this shit deserves to go back where it came from.)

Sorry, I’m getting worked up and off topic.  What I’m really here to snarl at is the recent story involving G.W. Bush and his attempted assassination by a very angry pair of shoes.  I understand that it’s seen as a heinous insult to throw ones shoes at somebody else and I congratulate Bush on his quick reflexive dodging of both pieces of insulting foot wear, but what I don’t understand is the secret service.

If I was the president, I would fire every dark suited, gun totting, Ray Ban wearing black jack jockey that was on duty that day and fire them (out of a cannon [into the sun]).  Okay, sure.  They checked everyone for lethal devices and didn’t expect the man to throw his own shoes.  I understand how he could have got the first shoe off.  What I don’t understand is why there weren’t three former football scholarship marines on top of the guy before he could scream, take off his other shoe and overhand it at our illustrious president (emphasis on “ill”).  Those bodyguards should have been on top of that guy like high blood pressure on Lewis Black.  Let me just end by saying good job SS (Nazi joke) and congratulations to the maker of ballistic brand shoes:  when you want to huck foot wear at an authority figure, use only the best.  BB Shoes.

I’ve been told by professional writers that there’s no such thing as writers block.  Some of these very same people have also said it’s a very real ailment.  I’ve also heard it told that writers block is associated with physical or even psychological sickness.  The latter makes the best argument in favor the infamous writers block.  It seems plausible that a trauma to your being would effect your ability to write coherently at all.  So, I suppose the argument is settled.  You can have a block of your creativity from trauma of the body and mind.  However, it doesn’t really matter if what you write is any good, as long as you write.  I don’t write well every day - as some of these blog posts can attest to - but the point is I write every day.  Unless I have an ailment that negates my ability to write coherent sentences, manuscript or otherwise, I still can write Q.E.D.

I’m not really snowed in, but it sounds more dramatic than saying, “I’m too lazy to go anywhere in this hoary wonderland.  Oh yes.  I said “hoary” and kudos to those of you who know what that word means or are patient and curious enough to look it up at dictionary.com or some other word zoo.  Anywise, the subject is snow and there is a lot of said subject where I am.  As a matter of fact, as I speak, the sky is lavishing snow like Santa lavishes gifts.  Wait.  How about, the sky is dropping snow more than drawers at a strip joint.  Well, okay.  Not all my similes can be winners, but as long as I can dab a little creative goo from my brain every day, I’m content.