Today is the 20th anniversary of my first day in the Marine Corps. If I had stayed in and made Gunnery Sergeant then I could retire today with a pension of $2000 a month.
Totally not worth it.
Not that saying in was an option, I was ready to get out within a year. Even with the long periods of unemployment that I’ve had to put up with I’m better off, financially and physically. I think back about the lifers that I knew back then and how they looked so goddamn old. These guys weren’t even 40 yet and they all looked like grandpas and worn out leather boots.
The Marine Corps taught me the value of freedom, but not the way they advertise.
The inside poop that’s got me down: sub-genre saturation. Picking Up the Ghost started as a manifesto that started as a list of things I didn’t like about Harry Potter. But inverted or not it’s too close to it’s inspiration. “…it’s the misfit teenager who is secretly communicating with a ghost … I’ve seen it all and I’m seeing it often.” Ouch.
Well I’ll keep pushing it as long as I can but I’m also resigning that I might have to get my second novel published before I can get an agent to take a real look at my first. In the meantime I’m going to try writing short fiction pieces. Experiment with forms of speculative fiction. Maybe I’ll get lucky and grab the attention of an agent. I’ve been fleshing out some ideas I had for Alejandro’s Ocean, the time travel game of Lexicon that petered out. And I might try to convert the first issue of Seize Him! into prose.
When life gives you discouraging inside poop, make poop juice.
Wednesday evening I was watching Samurai Champloo, downloading Window 7 Release Client and developing the characters of my next novel when I was reminded of my A B Project limitation. Project A is what I have to do, what makes money, the job. Project B is what I want to do, what satisfies my creative needs, the writing. Ideally someday Project B will become Project A and then I’ll take up restoring antique birdhouses or something, I’ll worry about that if the time comes.
But lately I’ve been thinking about Project C, which has a better chance of becoming the new Project A but has a steep learning curve and start up time. No job lasts forever and it’s better to be prepared, I just don’t want to risk losing Project B.
Google Wave looks like it’s going to replace Google Notebook. And maybe Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and a bunch of other stuff. I figure I’ll be moving a bunch of my own notes and information to Wave; The Board of Debt, The Well, Milazziki, notes for work, etc. Most importantly to the wider world, I think this might be the biggest leap in communications since email.
8pm tonight at the Twigg’s on Park I’ll be participating in So Say We All, a non-fiction, spoken work show. The subject is Seemed like a good idea at the time and since there is nothing in my life that’s worth telling I’ll be talking about a guy I once knew.
Years ago I decided to stop listening to stop crappy music, reading crappy books and seeing crappy movies and while the over all quality of my life has improved because of this the down side has been cultural drift. I sometimes find myself surrounded by people communicating in references to Michael Bay or Stephenie Meyer and I feel lost, like an immigrant, new to this strange land America. But with RiffTrax I can sit through two hour blocks of soul-killing celluloid and keep a finger on the cultural pulse without suffering.
Stone Brewery will be playing the RiffTrax version of Twilight tonight.
With everyone out there all agaga over the new Star Trek movie I thought I’d take the time to point out that the Emperor, while not naked, isn’t dressed as well as he could be. Because Star Trek is what it is for three reasons:
Action the TV show’s broadest point of appeal and the movie’s strongest point. The characters were strong and moved the plot forward and tension stayed high despite a weak villain and at least two gaping plot holes that I won’t spoil in case someone out there hasn’t seen it.
Social Commentary was the TV show’s strongest redeeming quality. Roddenberry used aliens and spaceships to address contemporary social issues that would otherwise never have been allowed on uptight 60s TV networks. And this is where the movie falls flat because Star Trek’s strongest quality is completely missing, unless the message was “Don’t travel back in time out of revenge because it’s not nice”. And there was room. Nero’s story was flat and could have been fleshed out to be more relevant to the human condition.
Maybe in the squeal, that is if they start making Star Trek sequels…
Science Fiction has always been the show’s weak point. Science Fiction doesn’t age within a few short years visions of the future become dated at best. Yes, some cell phones look like communicators but that doesn’t make Roddenberry a predictive genius like Verne or Clark.
The movie doesn’t try to correct the assumptions the show was based on and Star Trek continues to drift from science fiction into space opera. Except on one point. It was subtle and probably unintended but there’s one little vision of the future that the movie probably has right; 100 plus years in the future commercial radio will still be shoving the Beastie Boys in our ears.
