2008…The year

89 posts, I really wish it was more. So many things happened this year. I have to say it was much better than 2007. I feel that I have truly grown  as a person this year. However this year has met far too many downs than ups. By that I mean it has been far more trajic than I ever would have hoped it to be…

Let me list the downs for the year…

1. Dad is dead.

2. Didn’t get the job I have dreamt of for so long.

3. Had to move out of one of the best houses I’ve ever lived in.

4. Broke up with a perfectly good girlfriend.

5. Gave up on suing landlord.

6. Amazingly poor luck with Jewish girls.

Ahh…that’s enough. However a few of these things were countered by some good things. Let me list them.

1. Switched departments at work and I am now much more satisfied with where I work.

2. Built my first computer.

3. Grew a beard.

4. Got a Snowboard.

5. Got a BMX bike.

I feel that this year was a year of learning experiences for something leading up to a great payoff of some sort. However I feel like there is so much more to do before I get there. A while back I wrote down the 10 things I had to do before I died. I decided that I should concentrate on one of those things each year. I’ve been thinking about which one of those things I need to dedicate next year to. The answer is that I need to finish my book. The one that I started when I was 15 and just last year decided to re-write. I just need to fucking finish the damn thing and stop worrying about how it will turn out. The truth is that I will hate it. It will be shit when I am done. At least I will have it done. And I will feel some sort of accomplishment. Chances are that I will need to write another book when I am done. Hopefully nothing remotely like a sequel as I will probably hate my self for not finishing my story in the first place.

Anyways… I am going to look back at all of my posts this year and decide whether or not I will continue this blog.

December 26th, Vacation and new starts

Yesterday was Christmas and I got exactly what I asked for. Books on C++ and Flash. Because goddamnit one of these days I need to make a videogame. I started yesterday evening trying to code some stuff out of this book that I got and it turns out that the code they have you write may need to be changed based on the compiler that you are using. The problem is that I have no idea what I need to change to get the fucking thing to run. So after about 4 hours of trying to get this shit to work I pouted in the corner for a while. Then I remembered that I started writing a book over a year ago that I still haven’t finished. I really should get back to it too. At least I have some confidence in my writing ability.

I decided to say fuck it for the time being and wait for my mood to improve. I think my bloodsugar is still way out of wack from this morning. I ate nothing before getting to my mothers house 100 miles a way yesterday morning. When I got there I was fed nothing but chocolate and other sugary crap. I didn’t eat anything substantial until I got home.

Uhg, I’m still agitated though. I suppose that comes with the territory of trying to learn something new on your own though. I shouldn’t give up.

Challenge 11: Write a review of a book that hasn’t been written.

A Review of Pathways:  a ninja’s fate.

This is quite possibly the most disappointing novel about ninjas that I have ever had the displeasure of reading.  So the main character who is stereo typically named Ryo has his village burnt to a crisp at a tender age. Then as he drifts aimlessly though the woods he is adopted by a martial arts master who aids him seeking his revenge. Long story short he becomes a ninja and ends up kicking a ton of ass. My main problem with the book is that it spends too much time on him training in the woods. A nice fast forward with a bit of post shadowing would have been nice. Regardless this is a must burn book because he befriends a dragon as a support character on charisma alone. No fighting, swords and claws clashing just a simple vocal exchange. This equals lame in my world. I require that all dragons mentioned in novel format be in at least one fight scene.

December 16th, The cold / Challenge 10

So it has been apologetically cold the last few days. Even so I have been taking walks every evening to get some food. To me it is another way to quit smoking. I get so fidgety sometimes that I have to get up and walk places. I remember when I was a teenager I lived across two bridges that lead into downtown. If I ever wanted to get into town I really needed a purpose. Also it gave me some time to think really hard about what I wanted to be doing. I crossed those bridges probably a thousand times.

This is where this complex came from I think. I always wanted to just explore my surroundings. Get to know my local terrain. Who knows what random shit I would end up in. I think that was my favorite part about it i was the opportunity to end up somewhere random. This would also explain the need for a BMX bike. And the reason my first two cars were travel vans.

It seems I’ve spent my whole life wanting to travel but just ended up staying in one spot this whole time.

Challenge 10: Write a letter to an extra-terrestrial

Dear Alien,

How the fuck are you. I’ll have you know that I have very little faith in mankind so if you want my opinion I suggest you ask someone else. I am a 25 year old male human that resides in the upper northwestern corner of the smaller chunk of continents. I have a few questions?

1. Can you guys travel faster than the speed of light? If so does it do anything weird like make you age faster or make you flip dimensions or something?

2. How many evolutionary cycles did it take before you became the dominant race to get as far as you did? Or did you have some help budging your interstellar goop into rational thought.

3. Will television, one of the most acclaimed communication advances in human history, paradoxically be the downfall of our (relatively) civilized intelligent society?

Well?

I’m sure you really feel like answering questions. So I’ve been getting really bored with my surroundings and want to do some traveling. Problem is I don’t really feel prepared to do it. I suppose I should just give it a go and use some common sense. I’m sure that’s how you managed to jet across millions of light years of empty space to end up making contact with our dumb asses. I mean gas prices are low enough right now that I could save up for a road trip or something. I really liked coachella in 2004. I bet your race doesn’t even acknowledge the kind of economy we have in place. I doubt you would have made it here on a profit driven ambition.

Whatever…

I would write more but I have some brain cells to occupy in the game I just downloaded.

December 15th, One of the sadest days / Challenge 9

So after a week of texting this girl that I met last Saturday, her and I we’re going to hang out but Fridays traffic was horrible. So I had to skip out on that and go drink fourties instead. That was a big mistake because I forgot how shitty you feel after drinking crappy beer all night. Oh well, never again…not even as a joke.

The next morning I drove out to see my mother because I bought some stuff for her co-workers for Christmas. She had an awful toothache but at least I got a chance to see her. I vaguely remember asking this girl if she would come fly a kite with me at gasworks. It had been so long since I had done that and I knew no one would be there because of how cold it is. She text me back asking if I was still gonna fly kites. I replied yes and was promptly on my way back to Seattle.

I picked her up and I went and bought a kite. I flew it for a while until I got too cold. All the while I was just talking to her. It was kinda like a date only I never really intended it to be one. Besides she kept telling me she was a lesbian anyways. After that I got some soup and went to her apartment as we were on our way to see a burlesque show. None of this really describes what was going on the whole time we were hanging out. It was so awkward because I really liked this girl and it seemed she was into me also. Something wasn’t clicking though and I really didn’t know what it was.

That was until later when we missed the burlesque show and decided we should just go to my place and watch a movie. It started to snow when I thought it would be a good idea to go for a walk and enjoy it.I ordered a pizza from this place a few blocks a way and we walked to go pick it up. I though tit was kinda weird that this girl had only been in snow a handful of times as she had just moved from someplace warmer. I’m fairly used to it by now.

Anyways, things went ok and I thought we would hook up but then she told me something awful about her. At that point I realized that nothing good would come from us hooking up so we had an odd conversation and I took her home. Amazingly vague I know but when arn’t I vague. Seriously…

So today I thought about my ideal girlfriend and what on earth she would have to be into to captivate me. I think I’m destined to be alone throughout my years and I will only get more and more lonely as they go on. I found that loneliness is only medicated though writing for me and that given enough time I will create great works in place of children the children I will never produce.

Challenge 9: Write a letter to a child you don’t have.

Dear Spawn of me:

Let me be honest and uncaring with you for a moment. Never in my days did I imagine that I would be a responsible enough person to reproduce and care for another person. In fact, I have a lot of trouble embracing the family mentality as a whole. How you came about is impossible through my rational thoughts. However, here you stand reading this to yourself, probably amongst a wave of sadness and/or rage that cannot be expressed.

It seems that the only possibility of you coming into existence is by either pure recklessness followed by a sudden lack of selfishness or by some form futuristic sabotage that I simply refuse to conjure. Whatever the reason for your existence may be the only feeling I think that you would have towards me is utter hatred. Anything else would be some sort of genetic longing for parental connection that just isn’t and will never be there. I would make an awful parent and to take on the roll now would be treacherous for both of us.

The only curiosity is that what your habits and hobbies have become and how similar they are to my own. I would expect that you would become my exact opposite doppelganger and that our common interest would be few. Your upbringing can only go into two extremes. I predict that you would become the attentive student making the most of your education all the while creating sensible decisions about your future then fulfilling them. If not, do that as it is the best advice I can give you right now other that to never have children.

Have a nice life as you should forget that you ever had a father. He does not care for you and will never have the capacity to anytime soon.

P

December 11th, When did everyone turn into nice cushy puffballs.

I see stuff like this and I really just want to scream into the sky. Go back to the 80’s for a minute and watch robocop or predator or something for a moment. That shit would have never flown back then. Back then we had Michal fucking Jackson. Regardless of his blatent insanaty nowadays he was a fucking popstar badass. The most intangible human being ever.

Whatever…this is why I choose not to pay attention to mainstream society anymore. I get pissed and loose faith in the greater chunk of mankind as it makes me believe that everyone is a marshmallow. But in my day to day experiences I realize that we are not total morons. It is just the general mass of us that are. If you simply refuse to act as one of them you are free to think and live any way you please. There are no obligations to watch a certain show or to vote on whomever everyone else has decided is badass enough to rule the free world or to get the newest phone or repeat the latest slang or know the intimate details of some fashion person that has absolutely no effect on the outcome of your personal life on a daily basis. Fuck all of that.

Let me tell you how much I hate television.

So back in 2001 I had some problems. In the midst of these problems I canceled my cable because I couldn’t afford it every month and it was the most expendable thing I had at the time. After a while I didn’t miss it anymore. That and I really had no time to watch television because I was working two jobs as well as fending off some legal troubles. Really my only connection to the mainstream world was the newspaper that I was working for at the time. So anyway, after a while I moved back in with my mother to get my head straight again. She would watch the news everyday at 6:30 while for most of the day I would be in my room playing X-box or sleeping due to me having a night job. During that time all I watched regularly was Conan O’brian who is a great comedian when he does his own thing. Its weird and spontaneous and has nothing to do with what is going on in the world, It truly is at times original comedy. But when he has to make jokes about whats in the news they almost always suck.

From there I lived in a house with a bunch of gamers who could give two flying fucks about what was on TV until they got girlfriends who introduced them to their favorite show. At that time we were playing video games all of the time anyways. It was like the natural intellectual move from TV to Video Games anyways right? So the same thing happened to me eventually. I moved in with a girl who loves her TV. We had a TV in our room facing our bed that we would watch all of the damn time. This is where I realized how much of a communication distortion field TV is. I would try to have a normal conversation except to have it interrupted by something phenomenal on TV. Eventually all of the basis of our conversations were pulled from what we had seen on TV. It was kind of a sad existence.

I could go on and on about how much TV is getting in the way of people having rationally though out communication but I won’t because there is a greater trump card to to that argument…Religion. However, I will say that now that I have lived without television for the last two years I have become incredibly out of touch. People tell me about shit that is common knowledge to them that I have never heard of. I am so ok with this. I never get in anyone’s  face about it either when they want to talk about a show. I love to listen to them tell me what is happening in the world of television so I know what I’m missing out on. That way I know I have not wasted my time with shit I don’t care about. Also I get to hear someone tell me a story in a way. When they are done telling me about the coolest whatever it is they saw, I just say, “Cool, right on.”.

I think I’ve chosen my pathway of laziness. That is video games and the wonderment of the Internet. That’s all I really want at the moment. Sometimes I want to go on long stretches of time where I don’t go on to the Internet and I never play a video game. Say for like an entire year. I go do something totally worthwhile for that entire year. Unfortunately, my ambitions are tilted to strongly in a different direction entirely. But somehow I think that I had a different destiny. One that involved me being good at school and changing the world with my amazing brain. Who knows…there is still time.