2004-07-20 
 

onward and upward

In a recent post I was kvetching about Netscape's gremlins snatching a long rant from under my nose and blah, blah, blah. I know there's code under here somewhere, but Blogger's made it even easier to not think about it by giving me this very user friendly interface. (which you can't see, but it's all very Wordpad up in my menu bar.)

No more figuring out what the correct character replacement for "<" or ">" is. Everything changes.

In other news, I discovered a title today. I can't tell you what it is, because in my own personal cosmology giving away titles before they're ready kills stories. This is a story I don't want to kill. It's been brewing in my head for quite some time now and I'm hoping it comes out in one piece. As if it were a cake that's liable to get stuck in the pan. I hate it when that happens. So hard to frost.

This again probably means nothing to y'all, but I did discover something else today that I can share. Sometimes it's good thing to be stuck on public transportation without access to a notebook to write stuff down in. It forces you to keep it all in your head and whole chapters fall into place in the time it may've taken to find a pen and get a sentence down had you been elsewhere.

In other news:

There's a story I've been telling myself for quite some time now, and I've gotten quite good at it. It's the story of my life.

You might think that your own life story would be an easy one to tell, but try it someday. What actually happened yesterday becomes too easily veiled by all the moments inbetween. Each one a single translucent sheaf thinner than the finest silk, but by the time you try and reach through to 100 yesterdays ago, the veil has become a solid and impenetrable wall. It's easy to think that you only need to concentrate on the big events, but it's often the smaller moments that end up affecting us most deeply while the events that memory tells us were all important can easily trail off into inconsequence.

Whether you find yourself weaving in and out of anecdotes like a toddler who's only just learning to walk, or leaping back and forth between topics like a crack-head who's just had a smoke really depends on your energy level at the time, but weave and leap you will.

Anyway, they say everyone has a story somewhere inside of them, and this is mine. It starts just outside TS 1.

I had just stomped out one last cigarette before walking into the main terminal. This was shortly before breaking the habit became mandatory again due to unforseen interactions between the fake shmoke and Mincom technology. True, they couldn't actually kill you anymore and were no more physically addictive than bubblegum, but I jumped on the fad when it started back in the 30s and found myself loath to give it up when it changed back from fad to fringe. It should've been easy. Another RubberDog(tm) to store up in the attic until the inevitable recraze hits. The thing is, I found the actual act of smoking to be a calming one. The deep inhalation on the first fag of the day, the quiet moments to myself, the secret camaraderie between the few smokers left. I kept at it along with what trackers let us know was 7.2% of the population and had soon had memorized the few locations where smoking was still permitted. (Even though they were safe and smokeless, the XYZ crowd that was running the country refused to repeal any of the archaic laws. Turns out this was a good thing, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here.)

See what I mean about weaving? I've told myself this story every day for the past two years and still wind up going off on tangents.

So I'm outside TS 1.

Labels: blogging, dose of mikey, writing

* posted by me at 12:35 AM

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