..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Thursday, September 21, 2006

"The dog barks but still the caravan passes by."
-old Arab saying


whoa. it's been awhile hasn't it? i finally feel like staying up late enough to type something on here. been busy as shit lately. grad school started up, and here's proof that i walked my ass off the first week trying to figure out where everything was. luckily, i'd watched enough of a certain television show back in the day to know just what to do in that situation. only missed one or two steps.

classes are good so far. trying to talk one professor into letting me turn in a story twice as long as the page limit for a writing workshop. i don't have anything shorter and i hate having to wait for my turn to come around again for my classmates to read the second half of something. this always happened in undergrad, too. everyone would be stretching their fonts and widening their margins to try to get enough pages, while i was always doing the opposite. whatever i turned in was on both sides of the paper, tiny single-spaced text, with a margin about the width of a mosquito. and it would be about 10 pages too many anyway, and i could tell that no one read the damn thing because they were mad that it was so long. anyhow, i'll turn in half if i half to, but i get the feeling that this group might actually like the story and wouldn't mind the extra reading. it's a new story that i'll post here after i clean it up. about a 50 pager. lots of driving and fake movie quotes and fake action movie titles. Name of the story (and also of a nonexistent buddy/cop thriller in the story) is "Calling All Eunichs!" it's a direct sequel to "Flies on Shit," and even though no one will believe me because i said this about "Flies on Shit"...it's the best thing i've done.

oh yeah! speaking of, i actually felt like a real writer, i mean, "author" for a whole evening! i had to do a reading in front of a bar load of people as part of my graduate school requirments (aka "hazing") and, in spite of dreading it for a week, and trying to think of ways to get out of it, it went extremely well. i read my story Swatter (simply because it was the shortest, recent thing i had) and the crowd really seemed to like it. i got lots of applause and laughs, and when it was done, there were even some strangers coming up to me and introducing themselves and saying how much they enjoyed it. they seemed to think i was this established literary type. suckers! little did they know that about five hours earlier i was crushing 10 fig bars into a ball to munch on while watching "Big Trouble in Little China."

and, you know what? i was all worried that this particular story wouldn't go over well at all. hell, if i'd have known this story was so entertaining to a crowd of strangers, i'd have tried to write more stories where a guy punches a girl in the face through a screen door in the last scene!

and one really good thing from it all is, because i read that story out loud for the first time, i found all sorts of things to change and fix, and now it's a little longer, of course! actually, during the reading, i changed stuff as i went along because i could tell, right before i would read a sentence into the microphone, that the line wasn't going to work, and i'd quickly change it. now, if i could read all my crap out loud to an audience and quickly revise that stuff at the same time, i might have stumbled on to the most quick and effective form of revising yet. so, yeah. that went great. i was in a really good mood for like 72 hours. i'd even do it again without dreading it so much...if i had another short story short enough.

also met this Chuck Kinder guy at Pitt that everyone gets all excited about. apparently he's the guy that Chabon based the "Grady Tripp" character in "Wonder Boys" on. this is the book that supposedly gets thrown in the river at the end of that movie. i'm still partial to the scene when Garp fights Bonkers for the pages of his story. i've also been told that Kinder's book is actually about him and Raymond Carver's shenanigans throughout the 70s. i wasn't sure i'd cross paths with him so quickly, but first i had a lively western discussion with him on the email, and then i went to a party last weekend at his house. at about 3am i ended up in his living room where he was holding court with about 10 swooning female grad students and he jumped up and started drunkenly pulling an invisible gun and telling me he was "ready for me this time!" and we talked westerns again. and the guy knows his westerns. appreciates "Dead Man" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" and "Once Upon a Time in the West." i ended up giving him a copy of the soundtrack to the western script i'm working on (almost done) and he seemed genuinely excited about it (most people just brought alcohol to the party) but i'm really looking forward to his class next semester, and a meeting with him Sunday about working on Pitts' literary journal, Nidus. that'll do for now, even if i don't get to drive around with him and a dead dog in his trunk.

oh yeah, i also have a "women in film" class that is going to be very easy and a lot of fun. and there's about five little old ladies that sit in the corner and chatter away all excited to be in school, and i like listening to them. and i can't wait to hear what they say about some of the crazier movies on our list. we already watched "Strange Days," that cheesy James Cameron-lite movie from the 80s (because it's supposed to have strong women leads? uh, right), and even though it's a hard-R rating, the little old ladies were joking around about it when it was over. i'm honestly more interested in what these little old ladies are going to say about "Alien" (sweet!) or "Marnie" than what the cute young idiots in the back row are thinking. and the professor was assigning everyone a movie to do a presentation on the other day, and i ended up with......"Alien!" how about that shit?! i had to hide my Alien keychain under my desk as i faked a sigh and was like, "yeah, i guess i can do that movie for my presentation. sure hope i can rent it somewhere." meanwhile i can't decide which of the THREE version i own to actually do the presentation on. if anyone around here knows me just a little (fingers about an inch apart) they'd realize that assigning me the movie "Alien" is kind of like "forcing" a dog to bark at a passing car.

last two radio shows went well. thanks to whoever listened online. the locals don't seem to be calling as much. maybe it's goes with the phases of the moon. that reminds me, sorry the days got screwed up Aza. i definitley could have used some more sober listeners. i mean more, sober listeners.

i had an incident at Subway two days ago, and i was going to sum it up here real fast. But since i almost had another one today, i guess i'll have to start "The Subway Chronicles" instead. coming soon. i'll post it this weekend. it's a good story, and a true story. full of anger and racial tension and white-chip macadamia nut cookies.

what else? oh yeah. i finally got a new car. two transmissions later, i finally got rid of the Cavalier that had been mercilessly beaten into submission by these lovely green hills. i always wanted a black car and now that i have one, i have to wash it all the time, dammit. and, as you can see, it sure doesn't help when, every time i go to Toledo, i keep driving through massive clouds of mayflies twice as big as my car and only slightly smaller than my balls.

::: david - 3:10 AM [+] :::
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