B: The changing face of history

Before much longer it will officially be September 9th, the first day of school.

I feel like I should be having an existential crisis, and I kind of am, but it's the usual boring one.

I attempted to write an entry on Saturday night. I was feeling very bored and alone and I was probably very justified in all those feelings but I couldn't find any interesting way to express them at the time. Ultimately I am a very bored and lonely person. This causes me to overthink things, and my favourite topic to overthink is how crappy my life is. Before long, I'll be back in the classroom dealing with tactile problems like doing readings and writing papers and will have less and less time for circuitous existential quandaries. This can only be a good thing.

I owe myself a lot more focus, which an abundance of free time has enabled me to squander. "Oh, I think I will write a new play wait I also want to be doing a webcomic but I also still do e-feds and comic reviews and that Marten-Sven QC Slashfic isn't going to write itself." Okay, so I made that last one up. I'm sure some very dedicated perverts have already got that genre covered.

So yeah. I was bummed Saturday night. I feel like I have a certain license to spend a certain amount of my life bummed for no real good reason seeing as how my life kinda sucks in general. I mean, I don't hate it, I have no real angst, I'm just not in a good situation. I'm underachieving. Certain friends are having excessive amounts of success with women. (Certain female friends are having excessively pleasant relationships and typically irksome relationship problems that don't really sound like problems. Not you, Manda, you're not reading this anyway. I'll tell you later.)

And I heard about it, because that's what I do. I soak in other peoples' stories because I need to know how things really are for other people, since I am not living it myself, so I can maybe use it for writing. Poetry, I've decided, is the worst artform because it is so mind-numbingly personal, and all things being equal, writing about oneself is boring (SWP is boring.) When you're a poet, and your prime subject is yourself, your life, things you do, your poetry is unimaginative and tedious. Yes, the writer exists in everything he writes, but the autobiographical impulse has led many a writer into bland nothingness. Rayter once said, in a quote that has rung in my ears ever since, "Just because it really happened, doesn't mean it's good writing."

So the answer when people asked whether Half-Past was autobiographical was, of course, "No." Actually, I always said I was Beth, but I was joking/lying. There's not a damn thing in that play that can be said to have actually happened (to me, or probably to anyone else,) and it is almost certainly better for it. Whether or not it is bad writing nonetheless, that's not for me to judge.

Anyway. Sunday night I went over to Cary's. He was in Oakville for a big family thing, and had a very typical "in Oakville, bored" MSN status so I offered my hangout services. He, his brother and I ended up playing Super Mario World for a few hours before Chris ended up going to bed and then Cary and I watched "Half-Ton Dad" and "Half-Ton Teen" on TLC, which prompted a great deal of commentary given that they were advertising The Ultimate Cake-Off in the bottom corner of this show about super-obesity. TLC 1, sense of appropriateness 0.

Anyway, the whole thing made me feel pretty pleased with myself being the scrawny ass I am.

Monday, the new boarder moved in. The show has a new castmember, not that I ever interact with the boarders much, although I want to be friendly. That said, she's a cute 18-year-old girl, and we all know what being friendly implies. Apparently her dad told my mom she was not to have boys over, which amused my mom as she is not a friggin' babysitter. It amused me, because, well, I feel like the fox in the henhouse now.

Today I went down to Sheridan to hang out with Joe, on a whim since I'd left the house for coffee when I realized he might be around and by an astonishing coincidence he was. Meanwhile, I also ran into Steph, Mary Lynn, and Mitro~~*, who was eager to talk WWE and UFC, although he knows even fewer names than I do (We talked abut Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir, and he mythologized a Ken Shamrock/Royce Gracie encounter without knowing Gracie's name.) Joe and I talked about the usual stuff, life, school, work, movies, music/songwriting etc etc. He has a show coming up at a Toronto Starbucks. You should come.

Nothing else interesting happened today. I realized I've lost a lot of my ability at Guitar Hero and have little desire in rebuilding it, except that the Beatles Rock Band game is coming out. So I'll play that.

School tomorrow la la la, keep on rockin'
-Scotto