Monday, January 05, 2004

I made it back to Olympia, via Chicago. Weird feeling which it turns out I shared with just about everybody: A feeling of homecoming on both my leaving Olympia and my return.

So I'm back in my old room, sans roommate and a bed. My books/CDs were in disarray, and I spent some time putting it all back in order in true neurotic geekboy fashion. I think I used to have a copy of The Stranger, but maybe not. And I thought that I had Jeff Mangum's Live At Jittery Joe's returned to me, but again I'm unsure.

Threw MyTunes on my laptop. It's a great program, it allows you to download stuff off the network you get on iTunes onto your computer, where you can do with it what you will. I got Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2, Exile In Guyville, the Menomena record, The Unicorns album, some Sufjan Stevens outtakes, the last Cat Power record, Shrink by The Notwist, the Wrens' Secaucus, and some other stuff. I don't want to catalog every piece of new music that comes into my possession, but I mention all this just to prove that this is a fucking amazing application. It allows for music to spread like a virus. It's like an STD that gets spread amongst straight dudes, singles and the sexless- the demographic that seems to care about music more than anyone else, or at least the obscure electronic indie bands that I favor.

I brought back two things I had mentioned to people as something I should show them- my children's book done for my creative writing class and my Chlamydia comic thing I did for kicks. It doesn't hold up in a context of preservation, I'm thinking. They worked as things I crapped out, but me bringing them to the attention of people after the fact seems to imply some quality that they don't possess. Either that or I've changed since high school. I don't know.

Speaking of my writing not holding up- There's this short story I started writing after I got kicked out. Progress has gone slowly. The problem that I've created for myself is this- I'm telling the story in the present tense, stream-of-consciousness, but the story's ending takes place three days from the story's beginning. This fucks up the pacing royally. Even though I am not one for descriptions, keep in mind that this is something which would need a lot of time spent on unimportant things for the whole stream-of-consciousness/present-tense thing to work. The last sentence I wrote in the story is either brilliant or a cop-out, I don't even know yet. This thing's choking itself. It seems like the next scene for me to write involves drinking heavily, not sure how I'm going to work that out with the narration. A Burroughs style drug-state depiction using cut-up of the sentences wouldn't work, due to the nature of alcohol. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. It's a pretty good story almost. I don't know what I'll think of it a year from now. I'll probably still be trying to finish it. What a fucking terrifying thought.

Here's the thought which almost gives me hope- maybe I'm looking at my older work with such disgust because I'm a better writer now than I was then? Is that more or less believable than the idea that everything I write fucking sucks ass and I just like the new stuff because it's new, and it has that feeling of freshness?

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