Sunday, October 31, 2010

I apologize in advance for this contemplative trance....



the orginal drawing was inked by Brian Raddatz in 1996?
later, I traced it, modified it, and recolored it
Monday begins the National November Writers Month (aka NaNo) contest whereby; American writers who wish to be tasked with the challenge of writing a fifty thousand-word novel in thirty days, they can be. It is an exercise of self-discipline and in production writing. To complete the task, all one need do is pen an average of 1666.67 words each day. If the average Microsoft word page contains 500 words (single spaced), then all I need to do is create three and one-third pages each day. But since I take one Sabbath day a week, I don’t have thirty days to write this novel. What I have is twenty-six. Thus, my daily tally instead is 1923.1 words, which equals 3.85 pages per day.


...arrg...you're spam on my frying-sword...
I am going to give it a go. Two weeks ago, I was planning a Bukowski-esque story in first person narrative about a man who has flipped burgers for a fast food fifties style vegan drive through restaurant for over a decade. But last Monday, at a Pilot Books prompted write a new scene, from a story I’ve been fashioning since 1988, came into my consciousness.

All this past week, in-between performing as Dylan Thomas at the Dead Poet Slam (and failing to win the hundred-dollar top prize) and a successful improvisational performance at Hollow Earth Radio as well as sending out ten resumes a day in search for administration labor, I sequestered myself away into another world. I apologize to my friends and acquaintances in advance if I happen to ignore you in this contemplative introverted trance.



...grrr going to get you...
  In 2006, before I went to work for Seattle Door & Window as their sole office administrator and bookkeeper, I penned about fifty pages of this story. But after my free time was eaten up by employment, volunteer work, socialization, and exhaustion, my pen ran out of ink. Last year, two months before my place of employment went out of business, I spent two weeks in my characters and I discovered a path to incorporate my studies of obscure esoteric knowledge into this tale.




...I'm a warrior...errr...don't make me angy...
(you won't be here tomorrow if you do)
This story (which the potter is molding on the spinning wheel of mind) is about two warrior mind scientists Enki a genetically engineered hybrid born on earth 12,000 years ago of the Enochian race and his bastard son Brakoog of Barinza born in the Andromeda Galaxy. This idea first manifested itself in a creative writing stream of consciousness exercise when I was a student at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, in September 1988. I am hoping that this time of my life, I will be able to fully give birth to the story. I hope that I will be able to lay lines down that are at least a shadow of the style Dylan Thomas, Charles Bukowski, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and Isaac Asimov had when scrawled out their lines on the page.

Since the interview on Thursday night, I’ve immersed myself so fully into this story that last night I dreamed in character. I only hope that when I turn the key on Monday that the lines will flow out of me like a river of coherent light.


Sunday, October 24, 2010

Slow impossible to get away from fight sequences

 
I got this craving to watch a marathon of the original Star Trek episodes. They used to have them on Sci-Fi channel (and on channel twelve before the Sci-Fi channel came into being), but since I moved to Seattle, I never bothered to wire the outside world into my tv console. I'll I get is a big blue screen unless I turn on the VCR or the DVD player. Which is what I see right now. A big blue screen that followed the conclusion of the first season of Happy Days.

Yesterday, I priced ‘em out (the complete Star Trek collective) on Amazon. I can get all three seasons for a little less than two hundred dollars. I’m going to start pinching my pennies tomorrow.

I miss being a kid and watching the reruns in the after school hours on TV when my folks used to have a set. It was black-n-white with two knobs. The antenna towered thirty feet in the front yard. Ten, twelve, and sometimes-fuzzy six were the only channels that came into focus. Twelve was good for me. I’ve never liked ten and six or PBS and CBS. But twelve excited my imagination with “beam me up’s, phasers on stun, or fly her apart.” (I was in the fifth grade when dad, tired of me watching it all the time, picked up the set and threw it out the back door smashing it on to the ground. Though dramatic dad's action got me out of the house, listening to radio dramas gifted to me by his sister, and eventually reading books, which is something my nieces and nephews, sister and brother-in-law don't seem to know how to do).

....Oh...No...I can't get away...Help...

I’ve been scouring used shops for episodes. Yesterday I found: A Piece of the Action, Mirror-Mirror, Metamorphosis, Mudd’s Women, and the Enemy Within. The episodes I really want to see are these: City on the Edge of Forever, Naked Time, Space Seed, Miri, Shore Leave, Tomorrow is Yesterday, A Taste of Armageddon, the Alternative Factor, the Doomsday machine, Patterns of Force, the Enterprise Incident, Let that be Your Last Battlefield, All Our Yesterdays, For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky, Spock’s Brain, Assignment Earth, and the Arena.

I especially want to see the Arena. This is the episode where Captain Kirk and that guy in the green rubber lizard suit were transported to a deserted planet by a superior intelligence to duke it out to the death. The fighting is classic. Slow. And comical. Kirk eventually wins by making black powder and fashioning a cannon out of bamboo.

It even came with three different alien landscapes

To this date, I have not seen any piece of fiction on TV or movies that can even compare to the original Star Trek. I wonder how much of it has to due with the way in which it captured my attention when I was a boy playing with the action figures spinning them around in the transporter room adjacent to the bridge. Finding a new alien landscapes each day in the back bathroom on the farm. (I always wanted a tricorder and the communicator walkie-talkies). I Spent those hours with my people, locking out the realities of the world I didn’t want to face like mowing the lawn, or making the bed, or milking the goats, or mucking out stalls, or splitting and stacking firewood, or tending to my mother sick with a bad back, or waiting for my father to come home from the mill (the family business) after a fourteen hour workday.


I had this set up


Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Live Jo Scrabble Boner Punns

 
On Saturday October 16, 2010, Ahmed and Bill convened for another scrabble battle to the end of the tiles in the velvet bag. Victoria from the very first match was going to come, but she decided that sleeping in was far more fun. "A fun in the bun is a dilatant pun," said the cat in the hat jumping off the page into the shade from the sun of the bum.

Again Bill lost to Ahmed’s cunning word play. Bill didn’t play smart instead he played interesting words like “boner, tao, zone, moves, roost, and flaw.” Often his plays opened the board up for two and three letter words that scored massively high points. Bill played for the poetry and Ahmed played for the win. The final score was 322 to Bill’s measly 257.

After which, they furiously scribbled for five minutes to compose two live jo scrabble boner puns out of these words pictured on the gridling playing field below.




The words played in order of their placement were: gum, punn (defined as to hit, strike, or punch), zone, zoned, dee, page, am, yell, ey, boners, map, za, op, bo, tao, ad, do, boo, flaw, book, key, er, yo, roost, win, hut, wind, did, quad, rise, eh, fir, deer, fir, move, cove, moves, rush, cat, ra, it, rant, jo/jo, axe, at, vex, live, wine, we, gel, el, li, tint.



Bill’s Brilliant Bone-idle Poem:

Page gummed another pun
Gel li boat
at-a-rant-it

“Yo Cat,” Page said,
“We vex, the tint of how za-boner moves.”

Jo moves too
Ranting winds rush
a quad sun rise
a quad wine hut
a quad axe did
a quad live boo's

Page read this book once said Jo
about the Tao of Roost where
Cat zoned the map
in a hut about a flaw at the cove
a fir rises, a deer, a key, a do
Za Boner yells,
“Li el er op you ey”
A gum zone punn
ad the Tao of Roost


Ahmed’s Live Jo Poem

jo live
live jo, roost win
rise jo
live wind rise wind
gel jo tint
gel jo
rise jo boners roost
wind jo wine jo rise

we fir deer
we move quad we
move li dee li
move jo cove jo roost
rise
tao moves coves jo
hut rise roost jo
rush jo wind axe dee
ey yo jo roost
er fir boner jo
roost jo live
boo bo flaw ra jo
bo boo jo
rant, jo rise
do jo
gel jo, quad
wine tint wine yell
rant jo rise jo roost yell

we did do
we did li
we did rise
we did ro
we did live
we did wine
we did rise
we did roost
we did roost
we did yo
we did
win jo, live

vex not axe not ad not
punn not flaw not rise
move boats move maps move roosts
deer jo
deer jo





The wait staff was very prompt in filling our mugs with jo



Here are the words again in case you want to try a poem
 

Monday, October 18, 2010

Regarding The Interview That Went Awry

 
This morning at ten, the Director of Admissions Services / Personnel & Facilities Director promptly called. She started the conversation with, "Before we begin, I want you to know that I think we found a better candidate than you [simply because she is bilingual]. I am going to be interviewing her this afternoon, but I'd like to ask you if you'd still like to go through with the interview?" I replied by saying something to the effect of you need to do what you think is best for your organization.

However, we chatted about writing and poetry, because she noticed from my cover letter that I was a skilled writer. She even said that she had never in all her years of employment read cover letter that was as well crafted as the one I sent BGU last Friday afternoon. I have decided to post it here since I spent twelve hours crafting it:


I am interested in applying to Bakke Graduate University for employment as an office assistant and receptionist. I possess a plethora of talents ranging from attention to detail, to numerical accuracy, to tenacity, to verbal/written creativity, to reliability, to organization, and to interpersonal relationship skills that could be utilized to further Bakke’s mission for positive change in our world. And this is the crux of why this position fascinates me.

Most of the tasks/duties I have been employed to perform utilize one of my strongest gifts: the ability to track details. In my last position, I worked as AR/AP bookkeeper for a (no longer extant) door and window company. I also have experience as a receptionist and office/admin assistant for a mental health agency and for a Podiatrist. A year ago, I finished a three-year commitment to a charity where I donated about twenty hours of my time each month as their treasurer. Further, I have experience working in academic settings as a substitute instructional assistant in seven Yamhill County school districts and at Linfield College where I worked three semesters as a teacher’s assistant in the Physics department. The most interesting job I did at the college was watching lead acid batteries charge and discharge while tracking and recording, at precisely prescribed time intervals, the amperage and the temperature of the subject.

It is important, as you know, for any front office person to have an enjoyable gracious voice answering and redirecting caller’s inquiries. Well, I happen to have such a voice (or so, I have been told). As an illustration of the timbre, I sang tenor for four years in a Gospel Choir. Another important detail for your consideration is that I live less than one mile away from your office and thus, there are no transportation issues that would prevent me from arriving at/before the appointed time (even during the most arduous of weather conditions). Another gift that I developed is the ability to organize an idea into a tangible working mechanism. For example, in my life outside of employment, I organized two different writers groups one dedicated to the craft and the other to the seeds of an individual’s creative voice.

In summation, I’m an experienced administration person who can produce consistent high quality work both in front and back office settings. Lastly, the most intriguing aspect of this position is, that it exists in an academic setting. I have dedicated much of my life to the pursuit of knowledge. And I would very much be impassioned to become a part of that process for others in the capacity that I can best serve.

 
At the end of the conversation she wished me well and that I can find a place of employment that will appreciate all of my talents or that will be a glove that I can fit into. But of course the unasked question cruising through my mind was, what if there is no such place for me?

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Sunday Afternoon Comming to Terms with Badly Laid Lines

 
Tomorrow, Monday morning, I have job interview at an Evangelical Graduate school located downtown. I’m way more scared than I have been for the other three job interviews I've had this year. Probably what compounds this fear is the fact that Employment Security has cut me off and cast me out of the Garden of Eden for a mistake I made at the bottom of this month. I committed a sin and I didn’t provide them with a confession they liked so they found me guilty of being a slime ball. The day I opened the verdict, I spent twelve hours writing a cover letter for this front office position I would not have applied for if I hadn’t been cut off. The posting itself had it’s own intangible energy that I somehow picked up on through the Internet. Even though I am scared of this place, I wouldn’t turn down a job offer or the challenge to process through a new environment and the possible poems that could come out of the encounter. A few good poems came out of me when I was a student at George Fox University (where I completed eighteen graduate courses in Theological Studies). Like this one for example in an unusual format for me on mythological creatures and archetypal personalities:
 
 
The sea disappears
as her eyes dilate
shimmering reflections
gaze back
Moving inside
Logos flees
awaking Enkidu
fingers twined overhead
contorted against the bed
clawing
speaking
forgotten tongues
wrestling as Luna ascends
above the great Earth Mother
Mars, Eros, Agape, Venus fuse into one reality
fires of the deep
pulse and flow
the unnamed one breathes new life
into the fertility
of soil
 
 
Today, I went to the park to bask in the sun. Then I tired of trying to read a novel (my attention span has been completely ruined by watching movies at home and surfing through Internet pages), I wandered over to Elliott Bay Books. I sat down with a book of poems and thumbed through all seventy pages. The author was/is forest fire hot, but her poems were kind-of not. There were a few in between the sheets that were good, but not as good as that “I’m from Cuntistan” poem I heard her slam six years ago. “Cuntistan,” according to the poem, is a Middle Eastern country for “my mother’s cunt.” The version in this book seemed to be a horrible facsimile of what I remembered it to be. Maybe, the poem was just more exciting when I heard it back then slammed at the CHAC.

Later, after I got sick of this punk playing pop music on his iPod loud enough for everybody in the store to enjoy, I got up and relocated myself to another part of the store away from the comfy chairs, away from the good looking girl in silky black dress sitting next to me (whom I wished was on me) reading graphic novels, and away from the poetry section. I felt like an old man shouting at children to get off his lawn and turn off their g--dam music. Of course, I’ll be that funky old man sitting on his porch listening to the glory days of Slayer, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC. Eventually, it is going to happen and I’ll be like my younger friend Kirk (who is going to be a father in a few weeks) telling people to stop making out in grocery stores.

I moseyed into the autobiographical section and flipped through a memoir written (or ghost written) by Richard Chamberlain. His book had a short section on the Thornbirds the only romance film I like, but only because it was the last miniseries I saw with my grandmother before she passed away and also because it has enough Shakespearean tragedy to keep my attention. Well, anyhow his book was crap in the way the lines laid down on the page. The only book I looked at this week that I enjoyed how the lines drew out images was Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems. In the past decade, I’ve already worn out two copies of this book and the one I have now is falling apart at the seams. How is it that these famous people can publish crap and good writers get delegated to the fuck you rejection notes? And you wonder why I haven't submitted my work to be thrown into the trash.

That quasi-essay cover letter I penned for that low pay office job was a better piece of writing than that Chamberlain book I thumbed open today. Hell, even that manual on QuickBooks Pro 2010, I looked at for my dad, had laid down lines I could salivate on even though they were completely unenticing.


Well, that's all for today. Tomorrow, after the interview I have another scrabble poetry post to unscramble from my mind....

Monday, October 11, 2010

More Ogre Butt Scrabble Poetry

 
 
the end is near

On Saturday, October 9, Nishant, Ahmed, and myself met at the Racer Café for another match of Scrabble Poetry. It would have been nice to see the others who attended two weeks ago, but I guess they couldn't arise out of their beds.

The most difficult component of this exercise is the on-the-spot composition. It's really easy to pen shitty (or in the spirit of the exercise Ogre Butt) poems from the pool of words available. (I wanted to name this post Canine Fart Vest, but I was over ruled or was it another post? Ahh...It doesn't matter anyway. A name, that is)

In one of my many past life's, I lived in McMinnville where I used to play a weekly game with Amber (who was/is a painter, sparkplug, and now has a son nearly one year old). Then afterwhich I would try to fashion something creative from the words generated, but I was never successful.

Nishant

The game on the other hand was great even though I lost. Again. I tiled down some good words though like Diva, Butt, Slick, Hears, Fart, and Time.

The endgame gambit was a photo finish between Nishant and Ahmed. The final scores were Nishant 189, Ahmed 187, and me 151. Ahmed was pissed. There were lots of name callings, fuckers and shitheads shouted after each brilliant play or block. I did however, accomplish a thirty-nine-point play, which was the highest for the game on a double word score plot with Za and Zap! Hopefully, next week I will win and hopefully, someday, I will compose a stunning scrabble poem…

The words in the order played: bey, but, vest, vow, now, hind, new, ow, you oh, dine, axe, ad, diva, equal, de, ya, butt, time, timer, jeer, tar, it, ma, er, za, zap, depict, her, here, dog, ogre, depicts, sir, bin, in, mat, here, ten, hears, slick, slicks, arise, pom, do, em, fart, vows, sill.







Nishant’s “Quick Orgy”

[The] diva dog farts
[the] ogre hears
you jeer

Sir in vest dines
Ten butts arise
New slicks tar
Timer zaps


Ahmed’s Poem: “Ahmed De Em”

ye bey arise
vest now
ye sir dine
tar, vow
ye ogre ye ogre
fart za fart, ow

ye diva zap
tar jeer
ye dog depict vows
ye poms jeer time
ye its em dee
dee em
dee em


Ahmed Positioning Himself for a Play
 Arise Bey

a bey a vest
a dog an ogre
arose
hinds do dine
divas do time

slicks fart ow
butts depict vow
now bey
now bey zap tar jeer
arise

pom do pom do new
dee em
new dee em

axe mat equals ten
now but time
now but time


Lastly here’s my Junker:

Arise Butt Slicks
Za-ow-diva
Sir Bey hears

Arise Butt Slicks
Here timer zaps
Vows diva-tar

Arise Butt Slicks


I edited it a little
New hind vest
Orge dog jeer

Arise Butt Slicks
Pom de dine
Depicts sir fart

Arise Butt Slicks
Now vows you
Ad ten here








Good sportsmenship



















Nishant says,"if you think your so hot, you try it!"

Rearrange these words into a poem and scrabble it into a (comment) box below! Thanks!!

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Waltz Cafe: a dance is what's for dinner



9/26/2010
She was so beautiful this evening when I saw her at the dance hall. She glided when she waltzed to rhythms pulsing an inflamed heart.

It was no drunken waltz we danced, but a foxy trot 'cross a heather field. An English gentleman, back straight up proud, on twenty hand tall thoroughbred, chased a red cat up a tree with the help of two baying dogs. She was more elegant than that wild cat or that black sleek horse as she flowered into the symphony like a roaring tide enveloping a hot smooth sandy beach.



Contra Dance 10/8/2010
I danced with a young lady in a green and white dragonfly dress, on a bluff overlooking a rocking sea that blossomed irises, whose milk white moist flesh caressed my palm as a silky soft toasted marshmallow does when it strokes your lips after you pull the charred shell away. I didn’t dare look at her lest her luminous innocence corrupt my lackluster darkness. In the firmness of the frame, her fleshy shoulder blade gave my fingers and palm hand pleasure. Cinderella was never as beautiful as this girl sitting in her own little corner on her own little chair dreaming to be who ever she wished to be while she spun circles out of a contra swing.

I tear my teeth into a dance like it were a succulent slab of prime rib slathered in uncut horseradish or the tender fatty flank and well cooked tendon in a bowl of pho. She is brilliant when she lines her eyes with dark poems and pulls the lashes long with mascara like the way a cleverly placed adverb lengthens an action into a Picasso.

How do you tell person that you love them when you’ve known them for a long time?



Contra Dance at Folk Life 2010


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

9/26/2010
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 





Friday, October 8, 2010

Thursday Night at the Blubird Open Mic

 
I don't have too much to say today. I've been on the dee-el this week. It has been over a month since I did a reading at the Blue Bird. All the usual zoo creatures were there with the addition of three young comics, an old rock-n-roller with his eleven year old daughter who accompanied him on the mouth organ, and a young hobo activist poet from Las Vegas who went by the name of Alexander the Terrible.





Alexander the Terrible


Alexander intrigued me in that he has been earning upwards of seventy dollars a day performing poems on the street for tips. Although, his first poem, I'm ashamed to be a white American sort of rubbed my wrong. I consider myself a native American, because my blood has been here for three-hundred and ninety years. If that don't make me a native not even a fifteen thousand years will, which is longer than those considered Native are claimed to have been here. My daddies father's people were imported into Sweden by the King in the twelfth century from Belgium. His people considered themselves native Swedes long before they immigrated to America in the 1880's.
 
When I was Alexander's age, I used to have the same guilt. I think I lost it somewhere in my late thirty's. The reality is we all belong to this planet. And we all belong to each other. Everyone has been conquered and every people has been a conqueror. Everyone has been a slave and every people has been slavers. No one who has every drawn breath is innocent. And these behaviors go on in the rest of the animal kingdom as well. Conquering even happens on the single cell level too. All life has just cause to hate and plethora of reasons to kill.
  
Enraptured into her cup of coffee by Warren's Song

I suppose I shouldn't have read the poem Out of Context Conversations outside Bauhaus Books with child present.  Where in August I sat out on the street and wrote out every interesting thing people said walking by and sitting sipping capuchinos. I got some pretty raunchy stuff as well as phrases pulled out of context could be interpreted as dirty. The gems I got that evening were of these two foreign men talking about how to prepare dog for dinner and how much more tender puppy was and some young people pretending to kiss and making loud sloppy noises and of a guy complaining about a botched bj.




Comedian #2 Jokes about Retards and how
people name their retarded children Corky


  
Charlie Smarmy read a poem on his best lay



The old Rock-n-Roller Sings


Comedian #3 Jokes about unremarkable stuff
 











Tom Ring reads a poem or two


Chase Evans reads from his 2007 book of poems
How to Live
 











Peter Sings great pop songs while banging out tunes on the piano