0404: What absorbs me

So let me tell you about this.

This past weekend was a weird one for me. It's typical of my current inconsistency that I'm just now getting around to writing about it. Strange how not a post goes by that I don't remark on my own lack of posting. I've turned into a damn broken record. Man, there's gotta be a more 21st century equivalent to that saying, and yet "Broken MP3" doesn't make any damn sense. Things don't repeat the way they used to. Anyway, maybe I'm just too easily distracted.

Once a summer since I started at U of T, I get invited to a party where I only know the person throwing it. In 2008, I trekked out to the Beaches to see my friend Jasmin and eat sushi. In 2009, it was a much closer event, Alyssa's birthday. This year it was Christmas in July with Neabel.

It's weird, how I know Neabel. It's a complicated story that doesn't really make sense. I met her through mutual friends when I was casting the video for Half-Past Eight PM. Somehow years later, when I got no Twitter, I decided to add her on there, and occasionally we share jokes, mainly quotes from the Office. When she came to see the new and improved stage version of Half-Past, we all went out for drinks afterward and I mainly entertained her.

So I wound up with this invitation to her Christmas in July party. And for weeks I was on the fence about going, until the week of I decided that there was not much of a reason not to. Life is boring, I should get out more.

A little before the day of the party, a notice went out that presents were a nice idea, but only things that were made by hand would be accepted. Neabs had noted that she had gone to great lengths to decorate her place. I responded by saying I'd work up some kind of Christmas Poem for her.

Days went by and I didn't have anything. As of that afternoon I was still trying to figure out the cleverest way to twist "The Night Before Christmas" into a summery parody thing. After a few dead ends I decided I was through with that notion, that it was going to be obvious and not that rewarding for me. So I went in another direction and worked up a "Grade 4 Writing Project" story (my new favourite writing style) called "The First Christmas In July," which contains a lot of the humour I might've been able to muster up when I was 10 years old. I liked it, and decided to write more like that from now on.

So while I had the idea in place, I got on a train and wrote in in a notebook on my way over. I finished the last illustration (bad stick figures ahoy!) as the train pulled into Union. I stopped off to pick up alcoholic beverages from the oh-so-convenient LCBO in Union before taking the Subway to Dufferin, the train to Neabel's, and wandering into the place looking dazed. Woo.

I had not yet decided what path the night would take. One of two possibilities. I could stay, sleep on the floor, party all night with these temporary strangers, or leave early, take the last train home, and go back to where it's safe and warm.

As more and more people arrived, I warmed up to the group. I talked with some of Neabs' co-workers, feeling a bit exposed by my less-than-advanced place in life. I read my story, which got an enthusiastic response. I met Neabs' (former?) roommate, whom she'd advised to follow me on twitter, for whatever reason. I was chatted up by one girl, Kristen, on the subject of names, when she managed to recall my full name. I was feeling good. Then I made one wrong turn and the night went to crap.

I wandered into a hallway where some people were discussing the cinnamon challenge. If you've never heard of this activity, feel free to YouTube it. I'll wait.

Anyway, what happened was they were talking about it, and somehow, in my drunken bravado, I accepted an invitation to try. Not for nothing, mind you. There was a money-figure attached. I figured failure was the most likely outcome, but for a shot at forty bucks, I'm willing to put my physical well-being on the line for a possible cash reward. If nothing else, it'd make for an experience I would never have any excuse to repeat.

So, in case you're considering whether to try it for yourself, I advise against it. What ended up happening was the lot of us went out front with a spoonful of cinnamon (and sadly, no water for my benefit) and a camera. So, with a cheers, I popped the spoon in my mouth, and...

Glue. It was at that exact moment I realized exactly what I had gotten myself into. My mouth was stuck. Nothing would go down, nothing wanted to budge. I coughed a little excess powder onto Neabs' sister, and finally ejected the rest onto the grass below. I spent a lot of the rest of the night coughing and expelling fluids over the back balcony, possibly onto vehicles below. Kristen returned to discuss her plans for the night, to stay, but the only thing that was on my mind was getting to safety. I was done. Sad story.

I said my goodbyes (a brief round though they were) and headed out to the bus, which got me to the subway, which got me to the GO station with plenty of time. I got out of the subway station and, throat raw, heard a saxophone player. I chucked a small amount of change in her case and stuck around to hear her play. She thanked me and asked whether I had any requests. I said I wasn't sure what she could play, and she just asked what I liked, so I went simple and said I was a big Beatles fan. So she played a sweet little version of It's Only Love, which is a comparatively minor John composition from Help!, which I think has a nice tune, and though the lyrics are generally unsophisticated, the chorus has a half-decent sentiment, "It's only love, and that is all, but it's so hard loving you." By no means the greatest song ever written, but it has a subtle undercurrent of self-doubt and self-consciousness that was gradually emerging at this point (Help.)

On the way home, I read a comic I'd thoughtfully brought along for the ride. After I got home, my voice was like an octave deeper into the next afternoon.

It's been a busy few days. After work Monday, Eric and I went to see Inception (great) and then Tuesday was the release of Scott Pilgrim volume 6.

I need to write. I have a lot of work to do. It's a wreck in here.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

0303: I was really always this

Feels like ages since I blogged so regularly that I didn't feel the need to comment on the span of time between entries, but here we are.

It's been a very busy week. I slept in through my alarm Friday morning and got to work a half hour late. I was on track to have a pretty frustrating day when at about noon the ceiling started to drip, and the store ended up flooding.

During some maintenance to the upstairs store, someone had busted the sprinkler pipe. The store was closed for the rest of the day. Until the ceiling tiles started coming down, Jeff the receiver guy and I tried frantically to move product out from the path of the water, before figuring "fuck it." (Most of what we moved ended up in good shape.)

It's one of those things you've just gotta laugh at, by that point. I usually take minor inconveniences badly, but such absurdly big big ones just amuse the piss out of me, because what else are you gonna do? After the cleanup crew showed up and cleared the largest pools, we spent the rest of the afternoon drying up product. I had to go in at 7 AM to get things set up to open on time that day, with Andrea and Karen. It went pretty well. The kicker was all that alphabetization we ha just done a few days earlier. Sigh.

Beyond that, the weekend was uneventful. Eric ended up going to see friends and I had a night to myself for the first time in months. The sickening thing is how lonely and bored I got. I didn't know what to do with myself, since by now I've forgotten what having all that freedom meant.

I was supposed to see Chantelle's band play Sunday night, but my ride (Andrea) fell through, which is a shame, but what are ya gonna do. I've also been trying to wrangle Cait and manage to get out to Toronto Friday night for Christmas in July at Neabel's. Suddenly I'm all social.

And that about sums it up. I could go on, I could've unpacked all those stories, but I'm tired and just wanted to get it all out there. I should write more. Not SWP, per se, but get back to my projects at least.

The other thing is, I mostly got my course schedule anxiety worked out, and have a load I can pretty much handle/tolerate/will allow me to graduate. Things could be better, but it's all worked out about as well as could be expected, considering the rocky, frustrating start I had.

I've got other stuff to work on. It's a decent problem to have, to want to be wherever you're wanted.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

0202: Clear-eyed and able

The prophetic words of Jack Kerouac linger in my ears, 5 years later: "If I do nothing/ nothing does."

Those lines are the closing words of "Mexican Loneliness," which is the first poem that really convinced me poetry could be cool. As much as you would expect me to excel in Writer's Craft, I always did languish. At the time I just didn't have it in me to expose my inner-writer to the world. I was writing shitty poetry and crappy, insignificant stories.

Growth is important. That was the first of many growing moments for me as a writer/person. Definitely not the last. There was an initial burst of creativity after reading that piece, and then I spent about 2 and a half years growing into it before finally writing my first poem that I'd say was good, in 2007. The Kerouac poem also loomed large over my short stories, which have followed their own growth cycle. I've been working on these stories since 2005, and I'm still not sure whether I've written any really good ones, although they keep getting better.

I've been tinkering since 2005, yes, although any work I did before 2009 could be considered irrelevant in the light of another revelatory moment in Kuhn's short story class last summer. It wasn't the first time I'd read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," but it was the most impactful. Perhaps "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" was a bigger influence. Shut just started getting clearer for me, and I've been tweaking and refining ever since. I have two surviving drafts from before then that I intend to revive wholesale, and a bunch of others I totally ditched.

I tend to work on them in isolation. I do my best to let them create a context for themselves, but I am wary of over-repeated and over-explaining elements that are dealt with elsewhere. Whether it'll all make sense when put together, I have yet to be certain. This isn't even about them.

No, as I've been building up my cache of stories (ones few people will likely read) I've been neglecting my slightly more pressing concern: the stage.

It was just a little over a year ago now that I was coming down off the incomparable high of my first true stage production and preparing for its follow-up. The first play I churned out didn't work the way I'd hoped (not that I've scrapped the idea, I'm keeping it up my sleeve.) It was a few months before I really came up with a good alternative, and even that, again, had a shitty start. The difference was, I was more capable of seeing how to fix the problems with that one, rolled up my sleeves and got to it. As of December, I had a pretty decent working draft.

Time goes by, and you begin to second-guess yourself (this, incidentally, applies to everything about my life far beyond writing.) I was in fact working on a major revision of the play when Cary revealed we wouldn't be doing EAS this year. This kinda hurt my motivation and I just dropped it in favour of those stories I'd been putting off even longer, now that I had creative energy and focus to spare. It generally worked out and for the last 5 months, I've been fairly pleased with my output. But.

With everything going on in my life, everything's sort of gone on on hold. And I say "everything going on" and it implies I've a busy, exciting guy, when the truth is just that I have a garden of distractions and irritations to contend with. This week I've been working extra hours because we decided to rearrange the store, so I got to do some wonderfully repetitive tasking while sales probably plummeted. It was actually kinda fun. But anyway.

Tonight I was doing my usual "sitting at the computer doing absolutely nothing" shtick when, as it occasionally does, it occurred to me that I could be writing? But what? But WHAT? If you've been reading this entry, you should be able to guess, because even if I was a shitty writer (and I don't believe I am) I'm at least capable of building to a proper conclusion.

So I did what I've been intending to do but putting off for months -- fucking scrapped the earlier draft. That's not true, it still exists and will largely be incorporated into the new draft. But whereas previous drafts were written by grafting new dialogue into the established framework, I started a new document and will be wiring it together without as much allegiance to those old lines, so as to encourage myself to do better. So far it's worked. I've got a couple of newly-written pages that cuts down on a fairly lengthy opening scene that probably wouldn't garner as many laughs as I'd hoped. I only got about 4 pages in before losing steam, but it's important to dip one's toes in. I intend to keep going back, rather than return to procrastination, and eventually rebuild this play. Many of the jokes are strong, and most of the characters have gotten quite sharp. But hey, it took 6 years for Half-Past to get to its ultimate form, so getting this one into shape in just a year would be a good feat.

Anyway, it was good to do this, since issues pertaining to my course selection for next year have gotten me a bit wound up. I need to straighten this shit out. After all, if I do nothing, nothing does.

See what I did there?

I'm a writer, sometimes.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

0101: Every little piece of it

Hard to believe, but there was once a time when there was so little lag between entries that merely describing the events of my day sufficed. I've often reminisced about those days of White Oaks and Sheridan when it was as simple as coming home after a long day of school and venting whatever shit had managed to accumulate in the previous 24-48 hours. I thought my posting rate would never slow down, but now I must accept that it inevitably has.

As usual, I blame Twitter. And while my life is as uninteresting as ever, I'm less and less inclined to go on at length about it. Of course, if you think this means I'm calling it off and ending this (rather juvenile) practice, well, you don't know me. Baby I can bullshit on the Internet all decade if need be.

I'm not as wound up as I was last week about Eric, and about life in general, although that doesn't mean I won't be again. These things tend to come and go in waves. I'm finding my balance. A friend of mine -- whom I know only through the internet -- suggested I should get out more, because I guess she's under the assumption that whenever I'm not at work I'm on the computer.

There's some truth to this. Not entirely, but it's hard to deny I've embraced shut-in-ism, and have therefore been the source of my own angst for a lot of this summer. It certainly wasn't, going to be as epic as last year. With friends as far as Toronto and Guelph and France and Hong Kong, work tying me to certain duties of time and space, I'm not getting out as much as I probably could. I could be doing it better.

But it's not like I'm trapped. I very seriously considered going to Guelph to see Robyn this week. I hung out with Vasa this past Wednesday -- she's going to Serbia for a dig (so that's another friend going out of bounds this summer, not to mention another friend whose life is indescribably more interesting than mine.) Marti and I have been grappling with the specifics of a hangout for weeks. I have my annual obligatory "Party where I don't know anybody" coming up. I don't know how I manage to get myself into these situations, but they tend to be awesome.

A few years ago, for instance, I was at Jazmin's, and she knows a lot of really eclectic people. I remember getting a lift back to Union station with a dude and a random Afro-British lady, who joined me in debating the virtues of the Ang Lee Hulk movie, among other superhero films. If I hadn't been so exhausted, I might've pursued. Ah, life! You never know who you're going to meet.

My point is, there's a balance, and I'm reaching it. It's only a matter of time before I have to go back to the old routine - or some variation thereof anyhow.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto