H: Reading Material

February fades, tilting toward Spring. What have I been doing all this time?

Writing futilely, writing productively, reading, working, watching Lost, seeing friends. Having ideas, being stuck inside myself. Trying to reach Greece in my dreams.

Every now and again I feel like Max is still around. That sick smell that accompanied his presence in his last months lingers, if not in our house then definitely in my mind. I can recall, with great ease, for now, the lazy rhythm of his paws descending stairs, and the trying clicking of his attempts to get back up. Sometimes, when I pass through the living room late at night I feel like I should turn on the lights and check for poop, or when I get up in the morning I glance over in the direction of where he'd parked himself for his last lap.

I'll never forget him because of how much he annoyed me, long before he was immobile but well after he had lost his sight. The way he would pace anxiously back and forth in the basement, uncertain what he was looking for, bumping his nose into everything and stumbling often. He had a knack for getting trapped in the corners of my junkpiles or under my desk/chair. After a while, I developed a knack for coaxing him back up the stairs. Those are things that stay with you. Also: and he had long since given up on this by the end, but his fiery rifle-like bark at any stranger at our door.

Having been liberated, against my will, from the pressing concern of my second play, I am free to pursue other projects. It isn't that I don't want to finish it: quite the opposite. But in the process of writing, one sometimes gets a yen for other projects. The only thing that keeps a writer on task, especially a larger project, sometimes is the promise of a reward at the end. A payment, or some determined destination. You write with more dedication when you know what is to become of it. I wrote Summer at Sixteen in about 10 days, knowing that upon completion, I'd be paid a hundred bucks. It wasn't a great screenplay, but it didn't totally suck, and it was 110 pages or so.

So now I'm just scattering my creative energies, seeing what happens. I already re-wrote Insomniac, knowing it still has a ways to go. I wrote another story I'm proud of in concept if not totally satisfied in execution. I've got others I feel I must rebuild from the ground up, others that need mere restoration. Re-writing everything. Who'd have thought the kid who once said "If it came out that way the first time, it was meant to be that way," would be so fixated on rewrites? I've learned, in the years since, I'm not Kerouac. It's a lesson a lot of people ought to learn. I'm not Kerouac or anybody else. It's like a ridiculous kid's show message: be the best me I can be.

Today was an understandably uneventful day at work. It was already a fairly quiet day, and then business plunged off a cliff at 3 when the hockey game started. Periodically one of us would go out to the Olympic lounge (the center court of the mall) to check the score. We got out just in time for me to get to the lounge catch the end of the third period when the American team snagged a last-minute goal to send the game into overtime. I walked home in a hurry and got in the door in time to catch the game-winning goal for my country, which was a great way for us to win our record-breaking Olympics and feel some serious national pride.

I need to time manage. Whenever I have time, I just try to level myself out and forget that I have a certain number of papers due in the near future (at least count that certain number was three.)

I'm going to cut myself off there. Like much of my life, this thread is going nowhere special, and is taking a long while to get there. My hope for March is that I find a way to properly express myself. Yeesh. So many posts in this month were start-and-stop affairs.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto