I have been listening to a lot of metal lately, primarily from three genres. Most of the time it's Thrash - Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Pantera - followed by lots of Death - Napalm Death, Fear Factory, Cannibal Corpse with some Drone and Doom thrown in - Godflesh/Jesu and Isis, primarily. While listening to this, I've also been reading a lot about metal, particularly the genres obsession with death, genocide, satanism, black magic, vivisection, corpses and so forth.

Is there a value to this beyond camp and shock? I was recently reading an article about Black metal pioneers Mayhem (the poster-boys for the "metal is evil" agenda - these guys burned churches, aggressively advocated anarchy, murdered opposing band members (and each other), and perhaps most amusingly if Heavy Metal Legends are to be believed, made jewelry from the fragments of their singer's skull when he committed suicide by putting a shotgun to his own head.)

Anyway, so the founding member of Mayhem was described as being a complete supporter of totalitarianism. And that struck a chord with me.

Heavy Metal and many of its sub-genres are about experiencing totalitarianism. While listening to metal, one is subsumed by it, surrounded by it, led around by it and encouraged in a live environment to aggressively respond to it by thrashing/head banging/moshing/whathaveyou. It is a rally and the band is the leader and the audience is led along by them. The music is so fast and aggressive and loud that it knocks all other thoughts out of your head - it is what it is - and the band pummels the audience until it submits.

And I love it.

I really don't want to type the following dilution, but, for the sake of self preservation... I'm not advocating totalitarianism, but in this context, a sexual analogy is appropriate. The band is a dominant force that pummels and attacks the audience until a state of submission overwhelms the listener and once the audience gives in and follows the lead of the band, a state of consciousness is achieved akin to the endorphin release from a sexual submission.

Even that isn't all the way there. I don't know what I mean but I know what I feel when I listen to metal. And this is what it is.

Almost halfway through the year with nothing to show for it. But April/May has always been about change for me.

Two years ago: Preparing to move into my current apartment
Four years ago: Just moved into the city
Six years ago: Graduated from college
Eight years ago: Moved out completely on my own for the first time
Ten years ago: Graduated high school
Twelve years ago: Moved to US and A.

Somehow this year seems dull by comparison. Maybe it has been some subconscious anticipation on my part that has been waiting for something dramatic to happen, but of course, accidental temporal patterns are the biggest liars of all, and the longer one stretches the greater the potential for disappointment. A twelve year streak isn't bad.

I miss working on collaborative creative projects. Everything I've been doing lately has been so introverted and I haven't even shown any of it to anyone (and honestly, there isn't much to show) so I feel, like, dead inside or something. Writing sucks. Music sucks. Stifled creatively. Gaming a lot, so I'm pretty happy with the social outlets, but it's not doing much to get me to buckle down and do some real fucking work. Much of this, I think, is because I don't have other people working with me, which always lights a fire under my ass. Or it's a great excuse.

Anyway. Back to stupid job-work. Tick tock tick tock.

I'm driving down a country road shaded by willows and oaks. The brutal summer heat is bearable only thanks to the wind blowing into the open window. Somewhere down the dappled dirt road, there is a house with a covered porch wrapped around the front and sides, where two friends sit on stools, with guitars. I park in the shade of the house and the humidity makes the cotton shirt stick to my back.

Leaning over to grab the beaten up guitar case, I climb out of the car and walk onto the porch. I open the case and take the guitar, taking the pick from where I left it trapped in the strings by the headstock and grab a stool. One of them is telling a joke but I only grab the punchline and it doesn't seem funny but the other guy laughs anyway.

The band leader waits for me to tune up and then starts to hum the bars of the song. I've heard it before but I don't think I know it as well as I should. The melody is like a ghost, a memory of a dream. He slaps his black hand against his leg to spell out the rhythm and I wish I had even a hint of the character his voice carries effortlessly.

I wait for the other guy to begin before playing along with him. Once I get it, he lets me go on my own and begins to trade lines with the band leader. The melody sticks in my mind even though I'm only playing the rhythm, I can't remember where I heard the song, what the words were, who sang them, but it is lovely nevertheless.

A wind picks up over the stream and carries the smell of grass and water over the lawn and a hint of the afternoon sunlight with it as it rolls over the porch but the song is already flying and I barely even feel the sweat evaporating off my skin. The steel strings squeak under my fingers, leaving thick lines in the callouses.

One of them begins to sing in an old rough voice, the words of some old church song and I feel like I could hang in this fantasy version of the old south forever, playing a song that I remember from another dream, a dream the color of a faded photograph, and when I look up from the final chord, the sky is that particular, impossible shade of purple and I know that I am in another dream and any moment, I will wake up, and this life will evaporate, like so many day dreams.

I'll be in San Fran from Friday the 18th through Monday the twenty first (thank you, mosephine). If I know anyone in the area and you want to meet for lunch, please let me know and I'll give you my cell!

Otherwise, I'll see you all on the flip side.

Don't look now, but I might have gotten my citizenship papers back! I'm trying not to get too excited but if true, then I'm finally better than all those illegal immigrants assaulting our precious, precious borders and I'm ready to join Lou Dobbs in stopping those cotton pickers dead in their tracks!

Once I get my passport (in 6 to 8 weeks, expedited) I'll be able to roam the world wearing khaki shorts, an obnoxious t-shirt, sun glasses and sneakers with a camera dangling from my neck, grinning foolishly at the quaint customs of the foreigners while taking endearing photographs to share back home over cocktails, and tell everyone I meet how much better Americaland is.

Someone at work asked me if I gained weight.

I want to die.

:-(

I participated in a short-play contest recently, and my submission - a story about two people on a space-ship who are wake up from deep sleep to find the ship depleting oxygen light-years from anywhere - won third place! Which means it'll be put up as part of a weekend long show in New York later this summer, in August. I don't have any more details, but this is exciting enough news to energize the hell out of me.

Of course I'll remind everyone as we near the date of production.

On a related note, I've been developing a Role Playing Game of my own, with a few other friends who are independent game designers and have been blogging about it on their company website. The first two posts are here and here, I'll be posting the third entry probably today or tomorrow.

Also, I'm four chapters into the new book. It's a fairy tale about a princesses who has a fairy guardian and a pet unicorn.

I wrote a book between 2005 and 2006, that I never really tried to sell. I sent it out a bit and then gave up. It sits on my hard drive, and I think about it more than I care to say. Not a day goes by when it doesn't whisper to me and remind me that it's still there, waiting to be shown to the world but I make up an excuse and move on, ignore it for another day, work on something else.

Yesterday, after working for thirteen hours, I drove home around 10:30 and the streets were wet with rain, and empty of traffic. While circling around the neighborhood looking for parking, maybe the quiet music inspired me, maybe it was the rain-soaked night when it seemed like I was the only person left alive - either way, I began to think about my book again.

And I realized, suddenly, making some logical connection with a shocking amount of fear and sadness, that the reason I never sent the book out seriously, is that it isn't a very nice book.

I don't mean it isn't well written (of course I think it is) - but rather the material is so dark and the setting so leached of meaning that I don't think it's meant for anyone but me. When I wrote the book, it was at a time in my life when I was pretty happy - I was getting married, I was just getting used to living in the city - so I don't know where it came out of, but for whatever reason, I plumbed my darkest and blackest fears, and drained them all into this story.

Finally, someone pulled out of a parking spot in front of the park and I pulled into the space and waited for the song on the CD to finish. The windows were streaked with rain and the piano notes hung suspended inside the car, while the bass line rumbled underneath them. Through the wet and refracting glass, I saw the lights of the garden leading up to my building blurred into yellow smears and I shivered in the chill.

The book was all there in the car with me - the depressed girls, the desperate old man, the alien woman, the crippling poverty, the casual indifference, the deep holes of loneliness and alienation, the red smack of terror and the occasional bursts of violence that ripped jagged holes in the story. The rainy skies and the cold autumn winds, the lonely fields full of dead grass and still brackish ponds, the endless miles of asphalt and the gray strip malls. It was all there and a year after I finished the book, I was finally able to look it in the face and understand why I was afraid of it.

It was a window into all of my insecurities and fears, a peek under the skin, an expression of the depression and loneliness I suffered through for years, days spent without speaking a single word to anyone, months under the gray going from work to school to home to sleep for six hours only to wake and do it again five days a week for two years. If I had been rolled up and twisted like a wet rag and the black mess drained out of me was collected in a clear glass and examined - it would be like reading this book.

And like anything this personal, this intimately linked to my experience, this (failed) attempt at self-exorcism, it might be inaccessible to anyone else.

This isn't to say my feelings for the book have changed - I still think it's very good and readable, but I have some objective reference towards it now. And can understand its lack of appeal to others.

The song ended and I shut off the car, took my bag and umbrella, and walked out into the drizzle. By the time I walked into my apartment, I had already begun to feel better, and thought about stories that were not quite so bleak.

My cynicism is something I wear on my sleeve - I'm utterly and completely cynical about the world, about human beings and about society in general. I find it ridiculous to believe that humans have any purpose greater than biological reproduction and self preservation, and born from that genetic thrust, all human endeavors are just as shallow, dumb and meaningless. There is no difference between humans and animals but the amount of surface area our wrinkled brains allow us to have.

But logic lets us move beyond our primitive ancestry. Fine, but Economics and Politics are the worst examples of human institutions. Economics have fed us horrible products and devastated ecology and society for the sake of profit. Politicians are invariably corrupt no matter their ideals, and even if some idealist makes it to office, they're wrapped up in so much red tape that nothing changes.

(Yes, these are absolutes, I don't mean them, except, perhaps, in as much as anyone means anything in poetry which might be the most naked form of communication we have at our disposal, but never use.)

Art is the exception, it has the potential to hint at something that separates us from the animals, but art is only possible because of other, more basic human institutions - people needed society and food and shelter before they could begin scratching drawings into the walls and grunting out stories to each other. So Art feels like a privilege that we've earned on the back of work that we mock through the art, and would never do ourselves.

Yet, things are changing and improving. We care not just for our offspring but each other, because, in this modern day and age of planetwide networks, we see other human beings and interact with them, and stop from making judgments based on some blind concept of a person rather than an actual example of a person.

Institutions, however, are reckless, earning profit with no accountability, and they will bulldoze us all into the gray afterlife of the planet. Politics hand in hand with corporations will only escalate the rate of decay. Planetary death is imminent.

But such concepts are counter-profit, you need people to make money from, and people free enough to spend money in the market, so in that sense, corporations are at least better than political dictatorships which work to eliminate humanness. Corporations work instead, by exploiting humanness - greed, lust, self doubt, self pity and envy all work to their benefits, self image is easily and often targeted by advertising - and by advocating private ownership. Not a molecule of soil nor air left unowned by someone, every square inch of the planet, a commodity owned by a human being, and if you can't afford it, well, tough.

This. Sucks. Make. It. Better.

I wish I knew a way out. When I listen to songs or read books, when I see the natural, effortless, organic beauty of the planet, when I interact with human beings who are beautiful inside and out, I want to believe in some poetry written into this base and rough matter, but on the other side of the coin is the sound of mortar shells falling in crowded streets and butchered people screaming under the blows of machetes and homeless people huddling on the sidwalk as I walk by on my way to the next bar to spend an amount of money on a pleasure meal that would be enough for that man to recover himself, if only he wasn't an alcoholic.

Rather than volunteer to work in a hospital, we sign an e-protest. Rather than donate money to a clinic in Africa, we buy a new pair of shoes. Of course we do. I want my wife and I to be comfortable. To ignore her comfort would be a crime. No human being can withstand the horror without becoming numb or grasping on some pleasant artifact of the present to focus on. So, how then, can I pass judgment on others when I do nothing myself but sign the occasional check? When I buy A|X clothes and Apple products produced by the hands of child labor?

This sort of argument goes around forever. We're bound by economics and politics into a world that seldom has room for any poetry except as a quaint artifact of culture.

I would like to believe that my life wouldn't function without art. I know it can. I would miss it terribly, I would yearn for it constantly, but to go a day without food would be more terrible by far. To sleep just one night in the open without shelter or security would break many of us.

That's when jobs and money and politics and government step in, like the safe, old guards that they are, of basic, brutal living artifacts and say, "You can judge us all you like, but you cannot live without us."

And they're right.

There are small victories we can claim - and that is all any of us can achieve. Buying from smaller retailers, supporting ethical institutions and companies, conserving as much energy as we can, perhaps even living off our own grown materials, or coming together to form a community that can live in a self-sustained way outside of corporate control.

Yet, I cherish civilization, and art, and technology, but the cost is too high.

What, then, is best for us?

That we can support ourselves, we exclude the corporate interest and crimes from our lives, that we connect with our organic roots, perhaps then, we will see poetry in the way of our life - unburdened for once, and released from the blood of torn hands, and the screams of tormented animals, and a planet strip mined until there is nothing left.

A lone man walks up the side of the hill. He is armored, armed and leads a horse laden down with supplies. Rope, tools, and leather bags strapped down tightly. The sun is about to set and he is racing to beat the shadows crawling up the rocks. Ahead, stark against the stormy sky, stands the ruined tower he saw four hours ago. In this wasteland between spaces, he could use the shelter no matter how ruined it may seem.

The walls are still standing at least, but it looks like some of the roof has collapsed. From the gaping doorway broken in long ago by a mighty hand, he can see the spiraling stairs hugging the wall and climbing up. No signs of life stir in the gloom, but he leave the horse outside, and draws his sword, pulls his shield from his back and dons his helm before stepping over the debris of the door.

There are only the scattered rocks from the stairs above and some weak light filtering in from the hole in the roof. Spiderwebs lie across the rocks and he drops his guard, slumps, the stiffness of his anxiety loosening in his back when a tiny metal point presses up against his side, in the gap between the links of his sleeve and vest.

A thin voices hisses in his ear, "Friend or foe?"

The fact that he can understand the voice means it is at least human, and he nods, "Friend to any who speak my tongue."

The pressure under his arm lessens and he turns around bringing his guard up again, but the man behind him hanging upside down from the gap in the wall, drop down to the ground, flipping in midair. He is the opposite of the warrior - in black, tight fitting leather that allows for flexibility of movement and stealth. The rogue slides his knives back into their sheaths and buckles them in to prevent any reflection or sound and smirks back.

"Not too many people make it out this way, unless they're after the same thing I am."

The warrior hesitates, his thoughts are still a mess, there are things he knows but is uncertain how or why he knows them. "I'm not sure, something about a name," and then it comes to him, "Goldan..."

"So you are after the Lich, as well." The rogue nods, walking outside carelessly, turning his back to the warrior, "Good. We'll need the help. Best not to leave your animal out - he'll get eaten."

Unable to strike at a defenseless man, the warrior lowers his weapon again. "We?"

"You're not the first nor the second," he laughs, leading the horse back into the tower. A slight chill fills the room and one corner shimmers as if in a haze, and then two people appear where he saw no one before - a woman wrapped in a gray cloak wielding a staff and another warrior in armor and arms, decked in the artifacts of some god.

"We could use your help," the woman says. Something about her presence is disjointed, as if she is here, and not, a body warped by its proximity to magics and the priest puts his hand on her shoulder and mutters a prayer and she seems to center again. "But if you'd rather go on your own, at least share in a meal with us."

The warrior remembers more clearly now, the line of fighters that had come before him to this place and been beaten back or not returned at all. The tomb lying open because the terrible being scuttling within are enough to prevent any incursions, and the Lich sends its unholy creations out against a kingdom that is too weak to do anything but bring down the horrors and pray it will be the last.

It is up to him, and perhaps these three, to do something about it. "A meal sounds fine," he says and removes his helm. The priest smiles and the wizard casts a spell, summoning a fire to light the gloom and give it some color. Outside, night falls and the rogue puts up small bits of cloth to hide the light, to keep them from being spotted by the predators roaming the hills while the warrior digs out some of the dried meat in his bags to add to the meal.

"I haven't seen you before, friend." The priest says, "And I thought I knew most of the renowned warrior in the land - by your arms, I see you have great wealth and skill to wield them."

The warrior pauses for a minute, unable to remember much of his past but he would rather not discuss his own confusion with these strangers, not when all of this feels... right. "I keep to myself," he says instead.

"No," the wizard woman shakes her head, "No, he's not from here, he's a traveler now, going from world to world, changing form as needed, doing what he has spent his whole life doing, he is..."

Something howls in the distance, a sound of a wolf, if it had the lungs of an animal far larger, and blood caught in its throat. The sound pierces the towers and echoes off the wall, lingering for a long moment and there is silence only broken by the snapping wood in the fire.

"What's your name, friend?" The rogue asks, turning the conversation away from the dangerous topic.

The warrior thinks back, and this is something he does know. "Gygax," he says.

--

I wouldn't be who I am without Gary Gygax's work. He died yesterday. Enjoy your retirement, sir. May your sword and spells save the day across the infinite multiverse of dungeons and kingdoms you inspired. The world is a bit less wondrous without you in it.

This week, I finally suffered either a minor injury or just stressed my finger muscles to the point where they're in quite a bit of pain. On Tuesday, I made a breakthrough with my playing while learning Radiohead's Street Spirit. I realized how to keep playing a series of lower register notes ringing while playing a shifting melody with the higher strings. The result is gorgeously dense while being melodic at the same time.

Of course, the downside is in holding the hand cramping chord shapes in place while moving one or two fingers to sound the melodic notes and the string skipping with the right hand. Complicated to say the least, but also physically difficult. At first the first finger on my right hand began to get sore and ache and yesterday my left hand was a bit sore. This morning, I couldn't even play an A-chord with my left hand without wincing a bit in pain. Or any sort of a barre, really.

I'm hoping laying off the practice for a bit will help and maybe some ice packs, but it sucks to be stuck here just as I learned to play one of my favorite songs and am really starting to get a hang of running bass lines with my chord shifts. I'm also worried I might have pulled or injured the muscles since I don't really do any warm-ups or cool-downs, nor am I very good at moving from the typical guitar player way of playing - mostly small movements with small muscles rather than group movements with large muscle groups.

Proper guitar playing depends on pulling the strings into the fretboard with your arm and back, rather than using your knuckles to push them down. Sounds insane, but apparently that's how you avoid the sort of pain I'm in right now.

Not to mention the fact that this could also be a sign of carpel tunnel or some other sort of repeated use muscle injury (because its not like I spend my whole day typing or anything....) Thankfully, as my guitar instructor put it, "Good thing about carpel tunnel is that it's painful but not restrictive of the motions your fingers can make."

Right. Maybe I should've studied the piano instead.

I feel like I've been waiting for something bad to happen to me. So much so that I was talking to Donna about engineering a social accident for myself by deliberately provoking people. Of course such an overt display will generally accomplish nothing. Perhaps I should concentrate instead, on my own work.

So I'm looking for people to read and comment on my writing. I'll probably send one story out every two weeks. It'll be somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 words. You'd be proof readers, and I'm looking for genuine critiques of the material so I can incorporate your feedback and send out the story to markets.

If you're interested, please write me an e-mail, or leave me a comment. I'd be very grateful for your help and will repay in any way that I can to help you with your own projects. Please only reply if you do have the time to read a story and write me a short email telling me what you thought about it, what worked, and what didn't. You don't have to do a full line by line critique or anything, just a short note will be enough for me.

Thanks!

Since starting work on Monday morning and now, I've worked a total of 24 hours. Last night I drank a quarter bottle of scotch and passed out from the stress. Today I got so mad at vitriolic office politics I started getting heart burn. Now, at the end of the day, I'm exhausted again, and just want to go home and pass out. Tomorrow, I have to start work at 7AM to prep for a 3 hour meeting at 9AM.

I've begun to actively fantasize about a day when I walk out of work, get into my car, and drive down I-80 and never come back.

Someone from work asks me out to lunch and I go with them.

There are handsome young men and pretty young women, in expensive suits and dresses, unwrapping silk scarves and smiling perfect smiles from underneath the latest haircuts. My flat gray shirt and ill-fitting pants are bad enough, but my battered shoes make me feel even more embarrassed. I try not to talk too much, self conscious of my voice, my skin, my hair, my posture, my gut, my age.

Everybody talks about their alma mater, many people are from Cornell, and they have that kinship, the familial way of talking the same language that excludes without meaning to. Affluence is abundantly displayed by everyone, not just monetary affluence but cultural and familial. And I try to think that I won't want it, but that'd be a lie.

Imagine a life not yours, and it becomes so easy to victimize my own situations. People free to make their own choices without the weight or burden of a past. Of course it isn't true. But today, at lunch, I felt otherwise very keenly. And when someone in the party receives bad news, it shatters the illusion.

The disparity isn't quite so great, and I might feel inadequate in so many ways, inferior even, perhaps when I experience confusion about racial depression in other minorities, I can just think back to this moment. Of being the only non white person and the feeling of utter alienation, the feeling of ugliness, the feeling of worthlessness, and it wasn't for any action taking by the people who invited me out to lunch with them, but rather, due to a failure of my own sense of self-worth.

Perhaps I should be glad that my child won't bear the stigma as keenly. It should be fair, it should be able to pass for Caucasian, and perhaps, even fail to inherit this racial self-identity. It isn't worth this agony.

Just before four in the morning, I lean back into my chair and it creaks making an obnoxiously loud sound for this late hour. The scripts are running, the models continue to build, and I close my eyes. Tiredness washes over me, the muscles in the small of my back are throbbing and my throat feels parched even though I just drank some water.

R.E.M. is playing over my headphones, old songs that I like, that I remember, old songs that transport me to a room with wood paneling where the window looked over thick woods, where I listened to these songs and watched the deer drift in and out of the mist and the snow.

A day ago, while cleaning my office, I came across an old, plastic binder with an outrageous cover - seals on an iceberg under a sci-fi sky - and I know what's inside. Pieces of paper and a leather covered book, a small handful of letters and a few photographs. They smell like parched earth and dust. I read the words inside the diary, the folded pieces of paper, and there is no difference in the ache, the embarrassing vulnerability, the desperate yearning from across a gap of fourteen years.

I'm still that clumsy, awkward, desperate boy. You might think years make a difference but genes are a hard thing to fight and this just confirms my suspicions further regarding predestination forced by our neural chemistry. Ah, well. Close the book, lock the ugly cover with the Velcro tab and put it in the box, away from sight again for a few years.

Back in my office, in the dark, with music leaking out of my headphones, I think even a year ago, two years ago, I would be writing, up at four in the morning, listening to music that transports me, and putting down words that spell out places and people that are contained in my head. I miss it so much, but every time I sit down to write, the words spell hollow and empty in my mouth.

The three shell windows are counting down slowly as they have for hours. One at 25%, another at 82% and the last having just finished, elapsed time 4:25:07. The white cursor winks from the black console. I wait a few more minutes, the way the process works, once the models hit 25%, the other 75% is just writing out the file details, so that goes every quickly, all the indexing has finished at this point.

The words come over the headphones along with those two reverb-laden chords and that hypnotic bass riff, "I don't sleep, I dream." Fourteen years ago, in the spring of my Senior year, while editing the school literary magazine, I wrote a story about a boy living with his mother at the edge of the sea, and one day, walking along the beach finds an empty and burned out house and within it, one preserved room where a girl poisoned long ago talks with him. (Some small part of my mind wonders if a couple of those magazines are still in that old, ugly folder - I didn't remember seeing them on Sunday night.) When the faculty adviser approved the story for the magazine, I put those words at the beginning, with the header. I don't sleep, I dream. Because the story was like a dream manifested into reality for me, the first time I wrote something that meant a whole lot to me. The first time I wrote a story and sat back, and saw something more than I intended, when the alchemy of words created a transcendent experience. I can't remember the last time I felt that way.

I can never find enough words to express just what I feel. The weight of personal experience is so great, the well of emotion so deep, so many details roll up to mean just one word that it all seems like an exercise in futility to even try.

The songs fades out to nothing, and I pull the headphones away from my head, put them down. I don't want drag myself over the years again. The shells are all at 100%. I bring up the application, load the models, and everything seems fine.

The only light in the house still on is in the foyer leading to the bedroom and I see Donna walking towards me, mostly asleep. "Come to bed," she says annoyed and sleepy at once. I could linger here for a bit more, and if it wasn't this desperately late, maybe I could even try to write something, or at least read an old story. But I just nod instead and a minute later, I log out and follow her to bed, falling asleep slowly.

If I dreamed that night, I didn't remember on waking.

When I listen to music lately, I want to play along. My coworker is playing some weird Eastern European folk music with lots of melody and a chorus of singers and I want to strum my guitar along. Any day I don't get to play music is making me upset. I look forward to my lessons with an anticipation that I can't explain.

As I've begun to work on my callouses - to make them permanent this time, instead of the come-and-go callouses I've had up till now - the playing has gotten a bit more painful but it's worth it. Even as I type this, I'm aware of the small bumps on the tips of my left hand and I wish I was home, pressing them against my steel string acoustic.

To be able to hear folk songs, and be able to play them, if not well, then recognizably, within minutes, feels like such a liberation. My muscle memory grows slower than my intellectual memory. I can count out scales and modes in my mind but memorizing them with my fingers takes a bit longer, remembering lines of melody without having to think about it takes a bit longer.

Training your little finger to develop independently from your fourth finger is very difficult, but as I do my exercises, as I stretch and flex and press down with it and feel its growing independence, it feel like an achievement.

In the meantime, the callouses grow. They might tear on the strings, and bleed, but they'll grow back.

We're sitting at dinner, my brother across from me and Dad next to me. My Mom is in the kitchen, finishing up dinner. "Did you hear about that bombing in the mosque in Pakistan, the one on Baqrid?"

"Yeah," Dad nods, helping himself to the fried fish with the red, burnt skin.

"We don't know anybody there, do we? In northern Pakistan?"

He shakes his head, thinking for a second. "No, I think all of your aunt's family is in Karachi, now."

"Where the militants put a gun to her head and stole her jewels after her mother's funeral." The words sound ridiculous in my mouth. "Why don't they all just come here or move to India?"

"They're all so old, son." He picks at a bone in his teeth. "They can't leave now."

My brother is eating the chicken with a distracted look on his face, ignoring our conversation, but his leg is moving up and down, bouncing without ever leaving the ground. I take a long breath and bite into the fish. It's crunchy on the outside but past the skin, it turns white and fluffy, but retains the flavor from the very spicy skin.

"Did anyone take credit for the bombing?"

"Well, that minister was there at the mosque. They were after him."

I frown in confusion, wiping the hot taste from my lips. "No, I mean, the militants - who did the bombing? Didn't they kill like, fifty people?"

Dad reaches for more food. "They were after the minister, son."

Finally I get it and I start to laugh helplessly. Mom comes back from the kitchen. "I can't believe you're blaming him for the bombing."

"Blaming who?" Mom's voice is sharp, she hates it when we talk about politics.

Dad smiles at me, as if saddened by my lack of understanding. "It's his fault for being there, he was using the people like a shield."

I can't believe I have to spell it out like this. "But Dad - someone else killed fifty people in a mosque."

Across the table from me, my brother stands up, pushing his plate away. "Is this why you come here? To make yourself feel superior?"

Mom puts her hand on his shoulder, tells him to calm down, but he pulls free and walks up to his room and slams his door shut.

Doesn't feel like it when I'm at work stressing about data elements and a failed overnight model build so I'm scrambling to find solutions.

Still, the day is young, and I should be out of here around one-ish, enough time to go pick up last minute presents for the In-Laws and stand in line for an hour amids the rush. I do enjoy the last minute rush, for some reason, it means Christmas to me. I suppose, that's the ultimate statement of commercialism - when I don't think of dinner or family or friends, but shopping in an overcrowded store.

I always feel like I'm playing catchup at the end of the year, as if all the year's expectations are to be finished in the next seven days, but that's impossible, of course, and with Christmas in the middle of the week, it doesn't feel like anything at all. I like the Thursday through Sunday long stretch of Thanksgiving best. There's enough time to digest and kick back and experience the holiday.

Already the new year is tempting me with a new start. More work, more projects, more expectations but I hope - I really, really hope - that I've been able to scale back my expectations and given up dreams of any success outside of my vocation. Shift my priorities from "making it" as a creative type and just enjoying it as a hobby. Leave myself time and space to enjoy this stuff again rather than slave over it for the sake of some audience that doesn't exist. If anything, I'd like to stick to that, one thing through this year.

Donna and I had dinner with Dillon on Friday and I miss that little Cuban. Plans were made to visit Chicago just for the sake of his homosexual majesty.

Oh, and I got new glasses this weekend. They're frameless and very suave, so I feel like an impostor wearing them, like I'm pretending to be a hipster. I can't believe I'm such a fucking yuppie. Also, I need to stop listening to Slowdive, This Mortal Coil, Engineers and My Bloody Valentine continuously. All this dreamy shoegazer music is making me feel like I'm permanently stoned.

But a few more bands in their vein can't hurt. Any recommendations?

This movie would have been perfect without Richard Gere.

See, he's immersed in a segment of the movie where the Dillon character has retreated from society into a back-woods western town and he's like (is?) Billy the Kid and the town is called Riddle, and is populated with all these gorgeously decorated kids and people wearing wonderful costumes and there's this rich texture and popping colors everywhere and the accents are immersive and mother fucker Richard Gere is like, "Hi, I'm Richard Gere. Someone gave me these pages with words on them so I'm going to say them aloud. I'm still playing Richard Gere so I'm really confused about what's going on. My dog's missing, that's what this scene is about, right?" And he can't ride a horse. The horse looked like he wanted to toss him off the whole goddamned scene. Fuck Richard Gere in his tight little fuckhole anus without a drop of lube. You haven't heard the phrase, "Profoundly missed the fucking point" more accurately applied to anything more than Richard Gere in this film. I mean seriously, he's surrounded by this rich theater and he's like, "Hi, I'm Richard Gere."

Fuck you, Richard Gere. I hope you choke on a sewer rat and die in a horrible subway accident.

The reason his segment pissed me off so much is because it was absolutely necessary for the film to be complete. There are all these aspects of Dillon and the film follows them and interweaves them and tries to see what would've happened if Bob became a preacher after he was tired of the activist thing, what if he'd been an actor, all machismo, with a wife and daughters he couldn't cope with, what if his life had been all about this vitriolic relationship with the press and his audience, what if he'd been an outlaw on the run but in love with music and the Dust Bowl era, as a young child enamored with the world or as an adult, reclusive and hiding from it.

The sequences hurtle forward together, and the film isn't cut like a color bar, more like a marbled slice of beef.

The black child traveling the country in boxcars calling himself Woody Guthrie is beautiful and evocative and rich in color, gold and green, and the actor portraying the child is terrific beyond belief. Christian Bale as Jack Rollins is shy, and authentically uncomfortable in his skin  as early activist Dillon and I'm surprised by the sensitivity of his performance. As always, he shocks with his chameleon ability to adapt to a role - both as the folk singer and Father Jack the preacher later in his life (his is the only Dillon we see twice.) The early segments shot in black and white are reminiscent of a sixties documentary and Bale looks like he's on a newsreel half the time with a washed out film strip.

Heath Ledger as the brutally male Robbie Clark (there's no other way to put it) version of Dillon as an internationally famous actor is extremely affecting because it's a love story that's told backwards and shot through a very romantic lens that turns into marriage and children and infidelity and his life slowly starts to decay.

Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, Dillon in London, having gone Electric and every concert is a war zone with his audience when they stand up in the balcony and call him Judas and then riot the stage, when a woman stands outside the venue and lights herself on fire, when the BBC tries to conduct a character-assassination, when a fan dressed as a waiter tries to stab him in his hotel room and through it all, Jude takes some more amphetamines and goes on stage, goes on interviews, turns the camera around on the interviewers and exposes them in turn, gives the Beatles pot and hangs out with Allen Ginsberg (a remarkably restrained and effective David Cross). The lighting is luminiscent black and white, and there is a party scene that is more trippy than many deliberate attempts at psychadelia. This is the best segment but that's a best among equals sort of thing. Except for Richard Gere, of course.

And we haven't talked about the music, yet. Which are any number of rich, evocative covers of the originals and permeate the whole film with such a soundtrack that I'm looking to pick it up right away.

This is a remarkable and beautiful and evocative film in spite of fucking Richard Gere. Watch it on the big screen if you get a chance.

Sometimes, a story comes, fully formed in my head, from beginning to end, I know what the point is, and even if I'm not absolutely certain of the ending, I'll find it by the time I get there. These are the good stories, that I can bang out in a week or two, a month at most, and a draft or two later, they're scrubbed and ready.

Most other stories take a lot more work.

There's a seed of an idea that needs a lot of care to grow into a story. So is the case with the story I'm drafting now. It started out about a man returning to his grandparents house in Cape Cod and getting involved with a green-eyed woman. It also involved them finding something that lived in the attic, and something that was underneath the house.

So I wrote the story back in 2005, and it was about 12,000 words long and there was too much exposition and melodrama, so I let it lie for a while, and I was writing a book at the time anyway, so I didn't get to drafting it till much later.

The second draft was mostly to leave it intact but clean up the text some. It was a little bit better, but still clumsy. I let it lie and percolate some more, and it went through a third draft where I cut a scene with a lot of exposition but the language still wasn't sitting well with me, so I left it, thought maybe it was just a bad idea, and worked on other things.

Recently, going through my manuscripts, I found this and read it, and realized, somewhere, I'd dropped about 4,000 words and never replaced their content anywhere else. I also realized there was a scene there that could be completely amputated (a scene I like very much) and perhaps a much more ambiguous ending than the one I have in place now. But it changes the scope of the story. Am I willing to do that?

Yes. I think I have to, for the sake of salvaging this story and making it better than it is now, and better than it was when I first wrote it. This is one of the reasons I worry about when showing my material in draft form to people - when I return to see my stories in a working stage, sometimes I'm embarrassed by the state I find them in.

In this case, it took two years for a story to start clicking. And I'm okay with that.