Now that I've conjured up a strange image of a singing backbone, or at least of a song about a backbone, potentially one that is singing, I won't take long to come to the point -- unlike most of my other blog posts.

As I suggest on my Ocean's Edge page, often it's useful to search for certain key words in your work and try to replace them with more descriptive phrases. I single out the term 'something' as an example. But it's also important to try to pin down your pet words, your go-to words, your bosom buddies of diction.

I hummed, figuring that certainly this absurd number of 'the's were due to the free-flowing nature of the piece. I was just sprinkling words everywhere, a dash here, a jigger there. It was a crazy time. I can't be blamed for anything I may or may not have done. Surely, my more polished and uppity novel, Raw Flesh in the Rising would have much fewer.

In Raw Flesh in the Rising, at a 113,604 words, I find 10,396 instances of 'the.' That's just under 10% of my words. The 'the' quotient is high.

I know that I'm catching all the similar words like 'there' and 'their' and 'they're,' but it seems to me it's all the same family -- cousins and brothers, and that strange cousin, 'other.'

And, in truth, I don't know if it means anything. More than likely: Absolutely Not. I Am Just Rambling. 

But, if anything, it does impart the rather large importance of such a little word. It's the opening act for most nouns, warming up the audience.

In general, it's fun to dig into a familiar piece and see it from another angle.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've had this conversation MULTIPLE times. You get much more honest feedback from callous people and strangers than friends. Anyway, this amuses me GREATLY. Ironically: well written.

Originally, I had intended this post to go in a different direction, but once underway, it essentially ran on a parallel track to my previous entries about leaving the house and having large and melodious thoughts descend upon me.

I guess it's all the trees around here.

All week I've been editing and writing, writing and editing. After a few days, the mental body is bled white of attention and needs repose, inaction.

So, as usual, I concocted an excuse and hopped in the car. It was more about driving on a sunny Saturday afternoon listening to the Pixies loudly than about shopping.

See HERE for the excuse -- holy horsepills.  I'm keeping them as noseplugs.

Hopefully the same company doesn't manufacture suppositories.

My town is small, and it didn't take me long to get where I was going. Never even got to Monkey Gone to Heaven.

At the bookstore, after having been browsing for only a few minutes, I looked up and thought, What the 'colourful colloquialism' am I doing?

At home, I edit books all week. Then, when I have the time, I write for myself. After that I flirt with twitter and bat my eyelashes at people in writing forums, visit Goodreads, write emails.... Words and books. Books and words. Editing and writing. Writing and editing. Paper dolls of ideas hooked together page to page.

Then when I need to get away from it all, I go to the expletive bookstore....

Up one rabbit hole and down another.

So I got out of there and went to another bookstore.

I went to the grocery store.  A woman pulled up by the entrance and, without getting out of her big truck, asked me if I knew what time the store closed.  I walked over and checked the time on the door for her. Had she been waiting for someone to come along so she could drive up?

The avacados in the grocery store were actually not rotten unlike the store downtown where fruit flies flitter nonchalantly around the bin. My people are not known for their great love of strange fruits and vegetables. But roll a potato through a crowded room and watch as fights break out.

Strolling near the frozen meats, I decided that I was now old.  I had a new benchmark for comparison.

With school having started, there's many young people around, and I can no longer distinguish between kids of college age and kids in junior high. Sometimes when I go out for gentlemanly libations and get dragged to sports bars and dance clubs, I think the young folk I see with their beers and umbrella drinks would look more appropriate holding Pokemons and Barbies.

I passed a blonde girl of perhaps eighteen, shopping with her cell phone to her ear. I thought, Typical.

Bear with me. I'm building to some semblance of a point.

In line for the express cashier, the line wasn't moving, very expressly not moving. A kerfuffle was afoot about the price of an item. Calls were being made for the secret knowledge of special grocery sages, the cashier's face a tapestry of ignorance and apology.

I drifted back and forth to find an express-er cashier, and finding none, floated back to the line I'd left to find two young gentlemen had supplanted my place in line. Fine. That's fine. I left. All is fair.

I couldn't tell how old those guys were either, but for one of them, at least, I could tell his future.

In five years time, young man, you shall become bloated with beer, sodas, and bad eating habits. To hide your baby face -- like the baby head from Toy Story with the crab legs and cyborg eye -- atop your man's body -- and really he did look like he'd attached the Gerber Baby's head to a grown man's body, I can't emphasize that enough -- you will grow a goatee, and wear a silver chain around your neck as a sign of your ascension into manhood. You will then wear your shirt-neck open so everybody may gaze upon it and marvel.

So it is written....

Then an employee was ahead of me in line, apparently taking her break, and joking with our cashier, lingering for laughter. 

Then the same girl who had been talking on her cell phone five minutes earlier got in line behind me, still talking on her cell phone. And I thought, Typical.

I found I was a little mad at the cashiers and their fraternizing, and at the girl behind me talking on her phone. Why can't you take that thing away from your head for five minutes?

And then, for the second time, I thought, What the 'colourful colloquialism' am I doing?

Firstly, I was vexing towards this girl on her cell phone. Meanwhile, the entire day I'd been slicing snapshots out of life, mentally saving them, sifting and sorting them, and adding clever captioning and dialogue, meaning to feed them to twitter or blogs or forums -- or merely to the moving scrapbook that is any piece of literature.

In fact, I couldn't go twelve seconds -- to choose an arbitrary number -- without picking up people by their lapels, shaking them to see if any interesting words would fall out, and placing them gently into my artistic picnic basket for later.

For you tech geeks, think of that as my rudimentary meatspace sandbox. Human 1.0.

Though I was not physically connected to my vices and devices, I nonetheless was carrying them with me. My proclivities had become as much as part of the functionality of the software as the actual written code.

Annoying girl with the cell phone, you and I are one.

Secondly, I had ire for the people ahead of me in line, as if they didn't have enough problems with having to wear beige uniforms all day.

I guess, almost as a bi-product of my first point: with technology, we're used to being able to control our worlds -- or at least the perception of our worlds -- in ways we were never able before. This applies doubly for those heavily invested in social media.

If I want to be amused, if I want to be maudlin, if I want ... anything -- or if I want the things that bother me -- politicians, rocks stars, advertisements -- if I want them to cease, I can make them stop existing in my immediate cone of attention.

Going out in the world, this no longer applies, and frustration is the response that gets triggered when immediacy is not allowed. One has to actually put up with what is happening in the functional, physical world of interacting people made of squishy bits, teeth, bones, and toenails.

Take a deep breath there.

Often, I think brains need enemas, or at least an accessible and safe RESET button.

I let the cell phone girl continue her so-very-important conversation. I laughed along with the socially apt cashier. This new-model monkey then went home to dinner.

It must have been difficult for a genius of Tesla's calibre to live in the latter half of the 1800s, when scientific quackery was rampant.  Electricity -- and pretty much any form of new-fangled thingamajiggery -- came to be peddled by the worst charlatans to a poorly educated public for every sort of miracle cure.

Take any sort of device, add ELECTRIC to the name, and VOILA -- snake oil.

Personally, I'm glad we live in an enlightened age.  Just this morning I arranged for a Nigerian Prince to forward me some money so I could pay for the penis enlargement pills that an Assertifed Doktor of Medicinal Stuff sent specifically to my 'Electronic Commerce' email.

Some people are marvelous. Never even had to leave the house. I could keep working at home.

This train of thought sponsored by The Oatmeal's article on Nikolai Tesla, to be found HERE, or even at this link:  http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

Beginning when I watched the Simpson's episode in which Homer is obsessed -- and might I add, a little bit titillated -- by the douchebaggery of Thomas Edison.

THIS, of course, I now realize, would be much more preferable. Also, more hilarious.

A bit of a continuation for Doesn’t Get Out Much ...

... born of brief reliefs from the heat as the fan panders by, energy spurts of teeth-rotting tea in dark-roomed afternoons, of lots of eye rhyme and incandescent slurs against the neighbor children doing their devil-worship beneath my window.

I believe I am jealous of the technical prowess of the latest writer I’ve discovered, slapping back the only way I know how -- by eating chocolate and typing.

That'll learn 'em.

A bit of background and then thoughts on the clichés of writing, maybe art. Though there are many, I’ll stick to the applicable -- with many asides, as much meat stocked on the perimeter of the plate as the middle.

As stated in my previous Doesn’t Get Out Much, I work from home. People give me their apple slices of life; I chew them over and regurgitate. We call that freelance copy-editing.

When I’m done editing for the day, I meander to the edge of the white space at the bottom of this page -- and every page like it -- and hang from the last loops and whorls of the a's and q's, the rare bottom bars of the z's, stretching them down as far as I can.

I’ve been remarkably successful at this of late, discovering how much easier it is to unroll a regular story of woes than a literary work with themes. It goes quickly.

I work as much as I can. Forget the sunlight, I have my monitor's pale glow; scritching on paper for the wind in the trees; a nice earth-tone beige colour, my desk. At heart, it makes me happy.

Yet I know it’s not healthy. It's more a life for a pupa than a person. 

... being an all-encompassed creature inside your artistic cocoon is almost what a writer has to be these days. One cannot just write. It’s not as simple as that. One has to make content, writing’s slut cousin.

Flirt with twitter. Sidle up to forum users and slip them my room card. Share contacts, measurements -- you show me yours I’ll show you mine. Play footsy with my emails. Freshen up in Photoshop. Try to smell nice for Google Analytics.

Content.

This is the puzzling cycle of pablum prescribed to fledgling writers these days. More-experienced writers, perhaps as a joke, slip them a piece of paper with instructions: ‘How to be a writer: Step One: make content. Step Two: Rejoice in the success of your content.'

Unfortunately, the majority of content makers misconstrue these instructions as Outdo even the most vexing spambots in the proliferation of your content! Really belt it out there! Loud and proud!

Usually, the recipients of a content-maker’s devotions to his promotions are other content-makers, which then leads to reciprocation, and escalation, until it’s all stirring together in a whirligig of droning voices and canned laughter, like the soundtrack to an old Hitchcock movie.

Any reader who accidentally gets sucked into the maelstrom swears never to go anywhere near it ever again….

Back to the cliché of the created world seeming more real than the real world.

Actually, I’m going to go with the ungrammatical word, ‘realer,’ here. Because it’s not my supposition that the real world seems irreal to the artist. It’s that the created world seems real-er.

Walking back from the store, not allowing myself to accept the cliché that a construct of my mind could seem realer than what I was actually seeing, perhaps I laughed a little too quickly. Often, I aim for the median course when the sacrifice of aiming high without a safety net (Being in the arts, actually doing art) gets to feel costly on a relatable level (No money, aging without palpable success).

Because, not long after, I had a very interesting moment.

It was but a pip, a tenth of a second. Crossing the road, I looked down the street. The row houses were colourful and interesting, every postcard of Newfoundland that’s not a whale or a puffin exemplified.  I saw them lined up like drunken friends leaning against one another, and I recreated them.

None of this will I ever do with the real houses.

In that moment, the houses I had created with my snapshot were realer for me than the houses that existed in the world.

I don’t know who lives in the real houses, but if I want a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses to live in my created snapshot house, until I actually go and ring the doorbell for myself and the real-life tenants answer the door to become a part of my external reality, that’s who lives there.

Similarly, the landscapes I've created recently with my shut-in literary splurging -- and which consume most of my mental idling -- have this sort of invaded property about them. I can concoct histories for every stone, consecrate closets and cupboards with meaning, switch the semblance of rooms in an instant.

The people that inhabit them, I can crawl inside their ears if I want, or tell you what they had for breakfast.

When they were nine.

I have no external wireframe for the reality houses, but possess a solid blueprint of the fantasy down to a cellular level. The created is realer than the blank.


Most clichés are true to some extent. Applicable to real life. Many of them, we reject only because past popular movements have denounced them. That doesn’t make them false.

The irony is, I'm denying my own perceptions because I’m adhering to a structure of behavior that our current culture says is preferable ...

... when, as people, we make the constructs of our heads realer to us than what we see in the world all the time.

Ask any daydreamer. Any political idealist. Any naïve mother. Ask any racist.

I’m just making a home inside mine, and inviting people over for popcorn.