005: Another way out

Sometimes, man, I get bummed out.

This blog, once so lively, whether I was in a good mood or not, is now a haunted, lonely place. I often thing it's time for me to, in the words of Pavement, quarantine the past, leave SWP behind with school. There are so many gaps in it now that it's not really the record of my existence it once was. Things change.

I'm sitting here in my basement, where 99% of these 1307 posts have been written. I wonder if I'll get out of here ever and join the real world. There's silence, except for the space heater and, of course, the sound of my own fingertips smacking the keyboard. I'm not even listening to music. Eric was here until about 8, visiting since Tuesday, so get some stuff done. I've been writing all day. I wrote over a thousand words for a prose piece I'm working on. Good progress. I wrote a review for two CDs in one (Weezer's Hurley & Death to False Metal, which I got from work for free several months ago.) Now it's not even 11, I'm tired of playing Minesweeper over and over, so I thought that while I had the mindset, I'd write another blog post.

That's the thing. No matter what it was, I've always written. That's what separates me from a lot of my friends who would write, who get ideas, who have thoughts. They don't push themselves, they don't make it a part of their routine the way I do. Man, it was early on in this blog that Ana challenged me to write a screenplay as fast as I could for a hundred bucks -- still my highest-paying writing gig. I was only 17 goddamned years old at the time.

Tuesday morning, I was coming out of the subway at Museum and ran into Cary coming the opposite direction. It was funny, because while we were just outside his law school building, I never go that way. I'd only gotten off at Museum because I'd intended to get lunch near there. So we got a cup of coffee and caught up on the usual topics.

The main topic of conversation with Cary is some combination of girls, writing, (specifically Half-Past but more generally whatever I write) and copyright law. He gave me an idea, that I should write eBooks that can be sold on Amazon. Brilliant. So simple. Why didn't I think of that sooner?

The main obstacle is this: for a while now I've been working on myself as "serious" writer. If I was going to put time and energy into writing something it was going to have substance. The problem with this is sort of that I knew that if I wrote all that, then put it on the internet, nobody at all would take interest in it. It would drop off, and my work would be done. I have one or two big books in me, and if I just chuck them into the eBook store, that would be it. Time to go work in an office.

And so it is with this in mind that I begin what I am calling the "vampire porn" phase of my career. A few weeks ago, I was talking to Kris for the first time in a long while, and we began rolling around ideas like we often do. I mentioned my theory that if I wanted to just be in it for the money, I'd do a vampire porn comic and get donations. It sounds cynical, but since there's a market for it, you can't argue with the logic, assuming I do a good job writing it. Before long we were talking about characters and concepts, as we always do.

We've been having these same conversations since I was 12 or 13 years old, and we were hanging out in his room reading X-Men. My God. We've tried to get so many projects off the ground, and after he moved to Detroit, I gave up on the idea of us ever being collaborators. Suddenly it's like we're teenagers again and I'm sitting on his bed in Palmerston going "What if the character does this? How about if the girl says that?" It's fortuitous that I have this idea in my head while I'm considering cashing in via the e-books, I'll admit I'm wary: I don't want to pursue this particular idea without Kris' involvement. I owe him that much, even if I just end up writing prose stories and asking him for illustrations or at any rate his input.

For now then, I've got a few other quick and dirty ideas I might be able to peddle for a small sum. It isn't like I believe this will be a real moneymaking venture, but it's a free service, so it's no risk-whatever reward. So it's spurred on a fair bit of activity, in addition to whatever else I was getting at.

Anyway, I've been drinking, this post has been sitting for like an hour, I'm pretty tired, so I might as well call it a night. Productive day... I could use more like it.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

004: Hungry Brains

Fascinating. I've never gone a month without blogging here before. I've thought about it often (every single fucking post I make nowadays needs to make this observation.) and wondered if maybe I'm done with SWP. I share tons of minute (That's my-newt, not min-ut) thoughts on Twitter, and even on Tumblr, which has recently been "my thing," where I post both blogs and actual writing. But I never write full-out soul pouring blogs on there. Sometimes I make a small statement or tell an anecdote and get some response (which was never really the goal of SWP anyway... well sometimes, but I've always done better under the impression nobody actually would read it.)

February 2011 has actually been the kind of month I would have written several notable blog entries, if I'd been up for it. It began with a night out that was supposed to involve going to Neabel and Kate's for Kate's birthday -- really I just wanted to go to the predrink and split afterward when they headed out for a bar, because I had to go to work the next day. But as Kate is now officially my friend (on Facebook and everything) I decided to make the effort.

The problem was mine: I had neglected to get proper directions before heading out, and I didn't have Kate's cell number, so I texted Neabel. She was unresponsive. So I had gotten myself stranded out in Toronto with no itinerary, having basically written off the notion of going to Kate's party. I was wandering the LCBO (mainly to get out of the cold, it was the midst of a pretty thick snowfall) texting anyone I knew in Toronto to see if they were as desperate for company as I was. What's worse, just the night before, I was supposed to meet up with Chantelle and Ryann for drinks, and they stood me up due to poor organization skills. That one wasn't really my fault the same way the Kate one was, but no matter the case, I was feeling like ass two nights in a row.

My saviour was Cary, who responded to my text while I was browsing the Yonge & dundas HMV (felt nice just to browse as a customer, being one of the only signs of life in their rock/pop section on a quiet Saturday night.) He was getting back to the city after helping his aunt move, so he had nothing going on. Sweet. The night was looking up. He told me to meet him at his place around 9:30. On the subway ride over I engaged in a little subway limbo, which was novel. The night was really looking up, and I returned to myself after devolving into a pathetic mass earlier in the night.

We ended up watching Taken, and then a documentary on Yellowstone, and I stayed later than I'd probably intended to, but caught the last train back since, again, I had to work. The fact that I was able to turn the course of the night around made me feel flat-out good, but I still had a chip on my shoulder. I went into work feeling mad about the thing with Chantelle, but she apologized profusely, making it hard for me to fixate too long.

The next few weeks had their ups and downs. On the day after Valentine's Day, my friend robin from Anthro turned to me and informed me that her ex-boyfriend had invited her to a concert (like, that very minute) and whether she should go. She pointed out that she had turned his name to "DO NOT CALL" in her address book, which seemed like a bad sign, but even as I warned against backslides, she went. I was a bit deflated about this, as not having much of a love life of my own means I put a lot of stock in others'. The next day, we went out for pizza -- our first real hangout as friends, actually -- and she elaborated to me his importance to her life. He'd seen her through family troubles (which were ongoing) and was her best friend and all that, and hey, it's hard not to understand that. It wasn't some sleazy guy she needed to get away from -- they just broke up because of those pesky personal problems that sometimes drive people apart. So I get that.

There were a lot of other things we talked about, from music and TV to sex ed. This random girl I met just because we happened to be sitting beside each other in tutorial turned out to be someone I could really relate to. I even told her the cinnamon story (from this past July.) I'm a good magnet for people.

Reading week was looking lame. I didn't know much what to do with my free time -- I didn't even work Monday night because of family day -- and all my attempts to write were for shit. On the Wednesday, Shane had invited a bunch of us out to Toronto to a place called Snakes and Lattes for a Murder Mystery. I wasn't sure I'd be going, who would be there, or if it would turn out lame, but I figured I was desperate for human interaction and if things were a bust I could -- a, leave early, or b, convince them to play other games. Snakes and Lattes is a cafe/bar/thing full of board games, and when I got there, they were already in the middle of something, waiting for us late arrivals (at 9:30 for the 9:00 event, I was not the last to show.)

It ended up being a fucking hilarious night, as we all dove into our characters, dicked around with our backstories, made sexual innuendo, heckled, etc etc. There was one girl I'd known from my Post-WWII Modern Drama class, and she was way into her role (as was her friend, with whom she split the role, pretending to be her Robot buddy "Vortex") and basically egged us all on.

Beyond that, uh, I've just been trying to keep the music blog going, worrying about spreading myself thin and neglecting my school work. I realized I had a paper due on the Monday after reading week but I procrastinated hardcore until 11:00 the night before (hey, the Oscars were on... okay, I have no excuse.) It was only 6 pages, and I bragged to the Twitterverse that I could "crap out 6 pages before breakfast." The truth is, it wasn't going to be my best work, and I proceeded with an incredibly elementary reading of Barthes' Rhetoric of the Image and La Jetee. I think it deserves a 65 or so, but it'll probably get more because it always seems to be the way (except when I bottom out, like I did in second year 20th Century American Lit.) I finished up the last two pages the day of, but by then I was burned out and repeating myself. Aurgh.

School.

there's one last thing I need to say, which is that I found out in February that I won't have the necessary credits to graduate, so I'm stuck for another 1.5 credits, which I hope to make up over the summer. Needless to say, this is a drag.

We'll see how it turns out.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto