the zeppelin of burning dreams

I've never exactly learned how to fix my life completely. And hey, you can't really blame me for the half-hearted attempts. Its like I'm just sitting here, and hey, presto, good ole God decides to let another crisis fall on my lap just like that.

I'm not blaming the big guy, but sometimes you'd really want to have a little slack in the way things happen, eh? (hint hint, big guy)

Oh, I don't have anything major happening right now. If you can trust the rudimentary schedule I've built for myself (concerning the way shit happens in my life) this is what you'd call the lull before the storm. You're just waiting for something to happen, but you can see signs about you that something big is going to hit you soon enough. The last time this happened was a couple of months ago.

The big one's coming. Yep, I can feel it.

Here's where people gripe about how tough life has been, how hellish the past few days / weeks / months / or god forbid, years have been. Here's how people spell out, for the satisfaction of readers.

This is where I think I will change the trend, and focus instead on what trouble I've had today.

And since it is only twelve noon, I discover that I haven't had much. Except for this really intense pain at the ridge between my shoulderblades. Muscular, not skeletal (thank god). I slept awkwardly last night since my two cats Zardos and Kitten took strategic positions on the bed that had me contorting my body into an S curve just to keep from disrupting the felines.

But there. There're signs all over the place. Something big's brewing. It'll hit me with the impact of a Boeing 747 on speed, and when it happens, it'll be all I can do to hold on. And the funny thing is, sometimes I can't help but wait for it to happen. Big things interest me, and I'm always one for a challenge. The system I follow is:

1. think about it
2. rethink it
3. do it
4. correct mistakes if you can
5. learn from mistakes that cannot be rectified
6. do not regret anything, and carry on.

which is a precarious system since it is in a continually learn - relearn cycle. There's not much room for preparation, but I think this is where this system interests me the most: you compensate with only what you have on hand.

It's the challenge of the century. It's the growth pattern that forces you to build up on the main characteristic of you which is you. You don't have that calculator, you don't have that computer. It's just you, you, you without any obstruction, without any aid.

Now the trick with the knife is (so to speak) how to use it without breaking the blade.

And that, ladies and gentlepeeps, is where the trick is the hardest.

I'll eventually pull a rabbit out of the hat.

I've finally updated the Zeppelin of Burning Dreams story that I'm supposed to be finishing (for this blog and otherwise).

Well, maybe update is too strong a word. Try rewritten. I had to redo the whole first part, which basically introduces the Zeppelin and its function. The second part . . . needs a bigger redo. Hell, it needs a total rehash, since the whole dream-pantheon angle just isn't happening.

Expect the redo within the next few weeks. I promise. Meanwhile:

 

Part I: Memory

 

for those of you who haven't read the first part of the Zeppelin. There's actually a link over at the sideboard, but I don't think people actually use sideboards anymore, so the direct link's up there for ya.

In other news, I'm finishing the script for ten short comic strips I'm working on with Revolverroach, which we're planning on calling MEATBOLISM and stars, well, the two of us, mostly. And I'm doing it on a typewriter. Hoo yeah, I'm enjoying myself, and this isn't a sarcastic statement.

Speaking of the typewriter, one of my earlier stories published in this blog (The Joust) has just been through another round of editing, and I'm contemplating on submitting the finished product (written on the typewriter, no less) for publication. Yes, I think it's that good.

And the biggest news of all is that I've made some progress on the book I'm writing.  Yes, after nearly seven months' hiatus.  Levi will be glad to hear of this, since that means I'm nearly a chapter closer to working on this other book of mine that he claims as his 'pet project.'  

As for the previously mentioned book, which I'm planning to call Life In Utero, I could say that some of the plot points have been fleshed out; since I'm writing in this Murakami-style that puts a really big emphasis on mood, I find it easy to write myself into a corner with useless ramblings.  I mean, sure, Murakami rambles on and on in his stories, but they're rambunctios with a point.  It helps the story by slowly doling out information and plot devices (of course, sans all the magic of imagery and language, everything in a story is just plot device after plot device).  I swear, Murakami is a master; you will not believe just how many attempts at a new chapter I've had to dump since I just couldn't get the right paragraphs in.

I'm also thinking of exploring the idea of novellas, as inspired by Patrick Suuskind's The Pigeon and several works by Isaac Asimov.  Two short stories of mine, in fact, are now too full of data to be considered as simple short stories.  Anybody interested in coming up with the cover art?  The themes are mystery and rock n' roll, respectively.  Email me if you've an offer.  But I don't pay much, mind you.  (Hell, I don't think I can even pay at all, haha.  Please don't take me too seriously, at least not until I finish the novellas).

Yay me! (pork)

The kid swallowed the marble on a dare.  He didn't really care about the consequences, or so he told his 'girlfriend' who stood nearby as he popped the 'jolen' into his mouth after assuring himself that the prize - twenty-two pieces of cheese sticks - was real. 

Several of the kids watching him didn't believe that he would do it.  He wasn't one of the outgoing, popular students from first grade who would do cheap tricks just for thrills.  As far as being brave went, this kid was the kind that would deny, insistently, that he'd pilfered a hundred pesos from his mother's handbag to buy a pencilcase-ful of Flat Tops from the mini-mart in front of his house.  In fact, this kid was flat as tea sans honey.  The entire grade school population was shocked when he agreed to take Tubby Pedro Kulambo's dare on, in exchange for a whole shitload of afternoon snacks.

In one of the classrooms moments before the Flat Kid swallowed the marble before half the school's population, Kiko Manahan was watching Leroy the hamster strongman weightlift two small thimbles filled with cement.

"Leroy is a freak of nature," said Kiko to nobody in particular.

This woke up the teacher dozing at one corner of the room.  "Bata, you have no idea what freaks of nature can do.  And by the way, that isn't a very nice thing to say.  If Leroy were truly a freak of nature, there'd be no stopping him from ripping your head off whilst slowly blending the contents of your upper and lower torso into a hardly recognizable mush.  Really, calling anything you don't understand names is unkind, not to mention unbelievably tactless."

Kiko couldn't say a word afterwards.  He watched Leroy finish a set of exercises.  The hamster was about to tackle another set of weights when the door was thrown open.  

Just outside the very same doorway, the hallway was filled with many noisy children, mostly those who had no interest in the Flat Kid's imminent transfiguration.  These kids were busy with quick after-school homework and fast group games such as patintero, monkey-monkey-annabel, piko - this last with an empty thermos bottle and shiny leather shoes - while waiting for the school bus' departure, the fetcher's annoyed call, the familiar honk of the car horn.

These kids were, in fact, loitering.

The principal was an extremely fat man who smoked a lot in his office and none at all outside of his office doorway - yes, he didn't even smoke at home.  He nominally taught math, and ordinarilly taught discipline with the help of a wide metallic ruler he kept hidden down the ass of his trousers.  Ocassionally, he tortured the younger kids by eating gobs and oodles of chocolate in front of a student kept in semi-cryogenic freezing.

When the little boy, a kid hardly high enough to climb up the stairs that it was a wonder he could go to first grade which was mostly on the fourth floor of all the buildings except for the Annex which was a bungalow so that counted it out, ran through the hallway, stirring up a ruckus of buckets and kids and thermos bottles and monitor lizards and pretty much making a grand shebang of an entrance at the room where Leroy the Freak-of-nature Hamster was busy doing ten bicep curl cycles repeated thrice, that the Principal's nose blew hot, eager steam, a quivering which did not escape his fingers which instinctively dug into his trouser pockets to feel the bon-bons he kept there in case of emergency.  He coughed twice, smeared saliva on his lips and strode through the now silenced hallway to the classroom with the purpose of a tomcat in heat.

"Someone took on one of Pedro Kulambo's dares!" shouted the Minikid.  Kiko gasped and ran out of the room, running back to ask where Pedro Kulambo was at this present moment, then scampered off again, this time on all fours so that he could make up for lost time.

The principal forgot all about his bon-bons when he heard Minikid's bellow.  His skin lost all color, eyes reddened to the point that all the blood in his body was concentrated at that one single point of his physiology.  The last time somebody had taken Pedro Kulambo up on a dare, the school had barely managed to squeak through an iron-clad lawsuit by the victim kid's parents (Pedro had force-fed the kid with a goldfish-tarantula-fox puree). 

The dozing teacher was similarly transformed.  "Boss, we'll have to do something," he whispered, his voice drawn and haggard.

"Of - of course we'll do something," stuttered the principal.   "This was what we created the Max Ybañez Insta-Porter for."  He took out a handkerchief and dried the sheet of sweat on his forehead.  "Come on, get closer.  You woudln't want to lose an arm when we teleport."

The teacher, after a moment's hesitation,  strode forward.  "Very well.  We've no time to waste."

In the one second that the principal pressed the instaporter control button on his wristwatch, the hamster Leroy nimbly jumped out of his aquarium cage, landing on both hindpaws lithely as if he had been doing it all his life.  He regarded a surprised Minikid for a moment, then after twitching his whiskers and a bit of eye-squinting for good measure, the hamster flexed all of his muscles and, in the span of the next couple of moments, grw to about fifty times its original size.  Minikid couldn't even scream as the monster hamster's carnivorodentile teeth cleanly bit his head off.  

 

Monster hamsters, weird kids and a fantastic teleportation system carried around by a fat man with a ruler up his ass! What will happen next??  Stay tuned!  - kilawinguwak

Therefore he who concentrates too much on one field is a writer for the moment, brilliant and full of wit but eternally clueless.

 

Eternity is within his grasp, but the body gets in the way of ambrosia's magic touch. 

Last Saturday was a blast for everybody who wasn't part of the Mahasa / Tinola circus act.  If you were either at Powerbooks for the Poetry Nights or at Corik's for the Sige Productions gig, I sure hope you guys enjoyed yourselves.  We sure didn't (we would have if it weren't for isolated incidents that will hereafter remain unmentioned). 

Wow, nearly a week and a half's finished and I haven't even worked on the second part of the Zeppelin yet.  That's how much I love my typewriter.  I hardly leave its side so long as there's sunlight.  Um, yeah it sounds dorky.  Sue me.  The computer's way too distracting for me, though.  I find that my output is doubled when my only distractions are a pack of cigarettes, water, the occasional coffee, and Dream radio (I forget the frequency).  I expect "Joust" to finish within this week. 

Now, there's the question of the essay I'm writing.  Hmm.  The topics are

both of which are in unfinished drafts.  I can't seem to decide which would be more interesting to read AND easier to write at the same time (some thing I have to consider since my research skills are unmentionable). 

MEATBOLISM is put on hold indefinitely, or at least until my artist hauls ass on his end of the bargain.  Which won't be happening anytime soon, the way he's working.  I need a miracle to get him moving once he slows down.

Anybody know of a miracle?