I've been drinking a lot of Fanta Cream Soda lately, and it makes me burp a lot, and it makes my heart burn, and it makes my beller [that is, belly] feel whalelike, and it gives me fears of diabetes because its sugar content is enough to leave me dizzy after only a few sips.

As I worry about diabetes so I worry about my recent fictional effort.  Because it almost looks like my shot at post-postmodernism is engendering a license to revisit phallocentrism and a bunch of other hilarious things that postmodernism did its best to debunk.  Hilarious.

But at least my interviews won't look like this:

INTERVIEWER: Those early books like Tarantula and I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac
seem like they're using some of this semiotic slippage of textual transformations to literalize
the notion that identity is unfixed...
[KATHY] ACKER: I honestly did not understand why I was doing what I was doing. I knew I was very angry. I knew I didn't want any centralized meaning... [and] my way to escape that male,
centralized meaning was to keep my interest in writing as purely conceptual as I could. So I
wasn't interested in "saying" anything in my work. The only thing I could use my works to say
is "I don't want to say things!" I couldn't say anything beyond that. I didn't give a damn if one
character was another or not—I couldn't even remember who my characters were! And I
couldn't understand why anyone would read me. I honestly thought I was writing the most
unreadable stuff around.

In the hearts of many video gamers:

There is an Earth.  An Earth awaiting transformation in the year 199X, an Earth enfolded in a Universe whose destiny is bound up in the destiny of a silent protagonist and his four companions, Ness & Company, who must defeat an evil from the future: Giygas—the aching, sensing conglomerate of concealed wickedness, and no less ontologically menacing for that, whose correlate in form is entirely conceptual, and yet visceral and strikingly literal.

And Ness—who is injunctioned to trust to courage, and wisdom, and above all friendship as he quests to defeat Giygas—is indeed the chosen one, but not in the classical sense.  As Ness traverses the globe, navigating dilemmas in an attempt to reunite and reignite, through the collection of resonant melodies, the raw power of the Earth—the raw power of Ness's highest Self, which he has lost or forgotten in growing up—he is not merely representing Ness, but is ever deflecting humbly this role of 'hero', recognizing his destiny as not his own, realizing more fully with every step the meaning of the Earth's words to him: "There will be a time in which all of you in the universe will overlap each other."

And so, when finally he has reconnected with each of his Eight Sanctuaries, has reformed His World, the depth of his realization compels him to acknowledge it is Everyone's World, and it is through this connection he will be able to defeat Giygas, who is also, in a sense, Everyone's World, though perhaps less complete. 

Two avatars of the Universe, linked by a predestiny they'll go on to defy, vivacious in their small stories even as they are apposite to a larger plot, are eventually liberated, one into Fullness, the other into Emptiness, by the united prayers of a careful world.


And in this Earth there is:

...a colony of bi-lingual monkeys living under a desert who have mastered the power of transportation under the tutelage of their leader, Talah Rama, by studying the esoteric side of physical science; the way that truth speaks through space, and space through matter.

...a Stoic Club in a town called Summers whereby you must conjecture (apparently ceaselessly) about matters of absolute irony, self-identification, imprinting your true self on your super-ego, and inner-children, to gain admittance, or, naturally, obtain a code of entry from a stranger.

...a city in clouds, Dalaam, where princes of ancient lineage undergo Mu training, which is, apparently, an excrutiating process of nonattachment, an absolute surrender to the holder of your lineage, and an ultimate rebirth and recomissionment to the feminine earth.

...a sea, containing an august Kraken, whose venerated and vexed form will be vanquished by four heroes, and one sailor, who will throw his slippers at the beast to help out.

...a tribe of Tendas living in a Deep Darkness (not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness), who search for a book, Overcoming Shyness, surely a placebo, or perhaps not, to overcome their shyness and contribute to the liberation of the Earth they belong to.

...and much much more.

[So I guess what I'm really asking is: anyone out there play Earthbound?!]

The voice of the horse forced its mouth to open. Echoes of need soused the pasture. Rarely can you call a horse stupid, but sometimes its neck grows so rigid you could punch it there. Becky might have. She tapped him at least, this chestnut gone stone, but he ignored her, trotting off, and she groaned come on before returning to the house; ducking through the Douglas firs that lipped the property, who cast their shadows of white magic to the kids, of planned planting to the longer-legged.

The screen door slammed behind her, hunching her shoulders with its greedy smack, and she elected to tip-toe henceforward, for a few seconds, to create the illusion that the carelessness of wind and not humanity caused the callous clack of metal on metal. A wasted gesture. Kerry and Amanda were already awake, and seated, and, my heavens, eating.

How's Skip? Kerry asked, holding a fork piled with eggs inches from his mouth, as if it were a pipe and this table a fire and this era that era.

"...the religious life of most men has not, until this day at least, been founded upon hypotheses which, when accurately stated, included a coefficient of probable error."
          -Walter Lippman, A Preface to Morals (1929)

9 AM - Waiting for hay, milling up near the house
10 AM - Still waiting, still milling — going for drinks, kicking shit around
11 AM - They are fed; — the same squabble for positions — one paint is left out, and I have to throw him a pile way the f*ck out of the way
12 PM - Still eating, becoming very lazy and farty
1 PM - Nap time, horses resting one leg, and dropping off as alcoholics drop off on the 4th of July
2 PM - Further nap time, now each horse is taking turns nibbling with the utmost apathy at the remainder of the morning meal and REM-ing it in a full-blown recline
3 PM - Play time; — utilization of the 20 acres is in effect — the paint chases the black, the black chases the appy, the appy chases itself, and there is a lot of bucking and kicking and teeth-at-flesh action
4 PM - Play time has escalated sometime around 01550 and the horses are once again settled.  sporadic folderol ensues, but it's barely notable
5 PM - Drinks and salt are had
6 PM - Horses go back to bed in the lazy evening
7 PM - Hunger starts to creep back in, likely a total phantom
8 PM - Hunger gets stronger, unbeknownst to me, because I'm playing video games
9 PM - Holy sh*t, hungery is at its apparent peak and I overfeed to keep them happy overnight
10PM - Whoops, did I leave the water on?  Horses are munching in a portrait of contentment
11 PM - I can't see out my window, but I am assuming there is a great deal of slow-mo crunching on hi-fi hay going down out there
12 AM - Same deal...
1 AM - ???  Exploration of the pasture, I'm assuming...
2 AM - Horses stay awake, but I am gone...

Try my brother's:

Joseph J Vass's Find Of The Day

(and comment! you'll surprise the hell out of him)

And no, ~C, Joseph J Vass is not me "posing again" ... I've never posed!!!  You get a life.  ;)

I suppose most people just don't finish the sucky ones.  And I tend not to come into contact with them in general.  I fly by the seat of recommendations (for narrow, refined tastes) and, much less these days, the bestselling list (for broader, vulgar tastes), and have never run across a book I didn't like.  But come to think of it, I probably came across many I only read long enough to decide I wouldn't be reading any further.  So anyway, got any, Don't Read lists?

...so rarely does music go unappreciated for the right reasons...

I wish I were the best at everything and had all the money in the world.

Humor becomes the only option
Too reduced to care

I see you seeing the way I promise to do things for you

Empty promises
Drunk Monks
Big beards and knives

There's a moose on the wall
He wants your autograph

Not enough hollywood to spread
over the bread of humanity

Rode horse all day.  My own horse is the best horse alive, naturally.  I cantered him all over this huge pasture, but eventually he got to running away on me, and when I tried to stop him he started bucking, and at about 40 mph I went over his head and landed on my feet.  40 mph.  Over his head.  Landed on feet.  Selah.  This was one of the minor, humorous events.  I also popped him over a three foot log.  Three... foot... log...  Selah.

And then me and my brother and a couple of friends, Mike and Terra, were riding along, and this sixty-two year old fellow, a guy who has been married twice, who took his eighteen-year-old son to a hooker for his birthday, and who is generally bad-assed all the way around, hopped on a horse for the first time in twenty five years only to have it take off at full-speed with him on its back.  Selah(!!!!!).  We all saw him speeding by and my heart sunk.  If I'd have known he was going to attempt it I would have gone and helped him, I would have never left him alone.  To see him get on the horse, because he wanted to come riding with us, but didn't ask for help or get us to stay back with him, and to see him nearly kill himself in the process, was somewhat heart-breaking.  You see, when you've been around horses long enough, you start seeing multiple outcomes manifest right there before your eyes.  While this fellow only cracked a few ribs, I saw him get his unbooted foot stuck in the stirrup, I saw him dragged to death, I saw him turned to pulp beneath the runaway horse's hooves.

Anyway, such is a day of riding horse.

...is my new favourite movie (almost).  "...the perpetual fuzz of disappointment, the tarrying of a payoff, the averting of conventionality, the granite irresolvability, break through to (somehow) light-hearted realism, which is payoff itself."  or something... maybe, would be my first rusty try at a blurb.  Michael Phillips posts a good review:

http://chicago.metromix.com/movies/review/movie-review-rocket-science/164014/content

...it took only a few moments down at the old registry, and a few exchanges of paper, and I will no longer be detained if I attempt to enter a vehicle and drive away, though I ought be detained, as I have no freaking clue how to operate said motor vehicle...