Number Fifty. Also: Friday!

Managing the schedule seems to be the theme of my return to the States. I'm trying to coordinate my return to Italy, double timed, while also trying to hang out with friends and shop for Christmas gifts. (Hint: I haven't shopped for Christmas gifts yet.)

I would say it's hard to take some time out and look back, but it's not. Slowing down is the easy part. Speeding up again is what's hard. I started this blog on the idea that I'd hammer out my commitments and figure out the schedule later and so far, it's worked. I mean, more followers would be nice, but my place is not to bemoan how few people have this thing on their Google Reader or whatever. My place is to write interesting things, on time, and according to a schedule. I've done that and there's been fifty so far, three a week, usually on time.

I might have cheated with the night I went to the Bane gig and came back (posted at about 3 a.m. Rome time), but I would like to think everybody cheats at some point. Also: With the exception of Emmy's update (former Overkill writers get together to jam on one of my main riffs in Overkill is a great feeling), this has been a pretty solitary project. Which, again, I'm not complaining. I could use a chorus of other voices, for sure, but that, at least for three months, this has been a success. Whether I can keep it going for a year or not is, oddly enough, up to me and no one else.

Which isn't as scary as I thought it would be. But it's another thing on the schedule to manage. I was re-reading my diary from, God, 30ish months ago now and one of the things I knew I had trouble with and didn't do was sticking to a schedule and doing work/writing in advance of a deadline and not right before. The problem, as any procrastinator knows, is not that procrastination doesn't work, but that it does. There is a spark borne of terror and it is a more reliable spark (or at least one that's easier to start) than the spark of sitting down a week or so out and trying to bite off a little chunk of the project.

I can look at today, though, and say, honestly, that I have kept a schedule for three months. It's not epic or earth-shattering. No presses ought to be held, but the next goal is clear: 100.

(Well, 51 is the more immediate goal. To 51!)





Why Barlights by fun.? Because I like the song and I'm going drinking with my friends for the first time since I've been back in...huh...less than an hour and a half. (I'm not even home!) Better get going then. Ta!

On the Bird in the Cage.

Sometimes the best weekends are the boring ones where nothing happens and there's little, consequently, to write about. So here's things.

Last post's title, A View of Something Beautiful, is a direct Crime In Stereo lyric from one of my favorite songs of theirs, from one of my favorite records, The Troubled Stateside. The song it comes from is called Bicycles For Afghanistan, and is not political at all, surprisingly. It's about the literally, the amazing moments of being on tour and how you want it never to end, but also the distance between the performer and the family but also between members of the band. It's like every tour song in that it expresses highs and lows, but unlike every tour song in the fact that it mentions balance sheets and doesn't mention a girlfriend. The last line, to that effect, is usually hysterically shouted by the crowd: This is not a lonely soul!

The full context of the lyric is below.

So I wanted goals, saw all I needed was:

-a home with a view of something beautiful
-a woman that I trusted,
-the friends that I grew up with

But it was asking too much for just us to pray things stay in exactly the same way.

Oh: While I'm here, Gaga's meat dress seems less cruelty enhancing and more simply absurd. I got nothin'.

I finished something up for a magazine and I tried to explain to a fellow writer that I don't finish the pieces, I abandon them. There's always something else to take another look at or another sentence that I could always tighten up a little more, and that gigantic deadline of tomorrow (errrr, today, when this is posted) is the best way for me to leave a column/introduction/whatever in a way that I feel comfortable sending it in to be published.

The schedule is not some terrible invention meant to rob creatives of their freedom, but instead, to make sure the motherfucker is ever finished. Think of it like this: When you have thirteen years to work on a game, you don't get Deus Ex, you get Duke Nukem Forever, which looks like it's only going to be published now because it was going to fucking die and have a toxic half-life as a part of a lawsuit until a good friend to both parties stepped in and gave the 3D Realms team a manageable, but fuck all deadline with the only stated goal being shipping the product.

As for what this means to me, well, I've done my best writing under a deadline. I've done some of my worst when I haven't. The reverse is also true, but, since high school, I've written for publication with the understanding time is an extremely limited resource, second only to vespane gas word count. The fact that we didn't stick to the schedule and let ourselves get a little precious with our material was one of the things that sunk Eleven Names and letting the schedule dictate publication, while bad from a creative perspective has lead to the last this blog getting updated consistently this month and gotten me started on 2666, a book I'm devouring and only 1/3rd finished with want to go back and re-read when I'm done.

Apropos of something, of course, this praising of the deadline comes as I'm the closest I've ever been to missing one for this website. (And it will be backdated roughly 1 a.m., but don't worry, that's just so it gets published when I think it should and not according to some mystical inbetween time that only the Blogger server seems to be aware of.) But there's something, the schedule keeps me honest and will keep content coming. The schedule precludes me from becoming too precious with my updates, that I might be able to get away with not publishing an idea for a couple days, but nothing more reliably than that.

In other words: The beast has to be fed. Thank God.



Oh! The new video from Japan's Envy comes out. I don't understand a word of it, but it's pretty, kinda slow at the start and intense, like the record the track comes from. Enjoy.