The other day I broke down and cried.  This doesn't happen to me very often, but the sobs were big and shuddery and my tears were many.  Now why would a grown boy like me give in to such weeping?  If I needed to cry, surely stoic rolling tears would suffice for someone of my age.  But alas, such were my straits that full-on crying was the mandate, handed down by whatever emotional control center.  The characteristics of these straits it is my intent to limn.

I've been writing since I was ten or before.  When I was around fourteen I stepped it up a notch, in terms of production, and wrote a whole bunch of crazy inventive short stories about aliens and whatnot.  After a while I started writing some really involuted stuff about the nature of experience, hyper-refracted micro-narratives plumbing nuanced averageness for salience via multi-tentacled immersion in normal form, and, more than that, a roving telling.  Most of this sort of writing sounded like that last sentence, and included phrasing that required readers to sort of guess what I meant.  None of this particularly matters, I suppose.  Let us say for the present that my writing abilities advanced, took various turns, some of them, these turns, decidedly derivative (but necessary), such as my investigation into involutive tactics and postmodern aesthetics, and others of these turns were more wholesome (and necessary), such as a rededication to the simplicity in telling stories while not eschewing a commitment to bringing depth to bear.  So, yes, no problems so far.  Except that at the tail end of my goofy monster stories, at the brink of my plunge into stories that used spiritual iconography, bleary phenomenology, and were essentially attempts at representing a psuedonarrative "integral", my "audience", which was always more of a hypothetical projection than a pulsing mass, shifted from people who non-reflexively imbibe reruns of the OC to people who hyper-reflexively imbibe reruns of Deadwood, or something.  To put it in more pinpointed terms, if you look at written art as a love letter aimed at one particular person, that person, for me, for whom I was writing my letter of art, would have changed from Rachel Bilson to Diane Hamilton*.  And for a while this worked out perfectly, it really did.  It set me on a trajectory that sort of semi-culminated in the creation of a short story collection that I am very, very happy with.  But ultimately that's not what I want, to be pointed at DH.  Because Diane Hamilton doesn't need me to write her a story.  It's Rachel Bilson (used here, Rachel Bilson is, as like a metaphor or something) who would get the most out of these two-handed eyes of mine**, these perspectives that talk about ways to more directly engage life, that talk about ways to attain the basic things the soul desires without siphoning self into unneeded defensive structures, and stuff like that only more clear.  But the way I express these types of things, I express them in ways the Diane Hamilton metaphor is more equipped to receive than the Rachel Bilson metaphor, and I express them mostly thru voice thru narrative as opposed to thru narrative, and the Rachel Bilson metaphor needs things to be narratively outlined, and has no patience, does the Rachel Bilson metaphor, for, well, writings like this, that are mostly about voice thru content.

Now, if none of that made sense, and doesn't go any way towards explaining to you why I cried for five or ten minutes straight into my blanket, because I did do that, I really did, then let me put it to you another way.  All I've ever wanted to do is write a book that really gets people, the way the OC, for instance, really gets me.  Something that emotionally opens and frees folks, and subtly endows them as they read with a motive strategy for reemerging into their daily existences with a very liquid post-irony.  And it might seem selfish or petty but I've always wanted my own family, at least my family, and perhaps the mainstream they seem to represent, to be genuinely moved by my writing.  But the majority of my family doesn't read what I write.  And while I'm not regretful of the writing I've done so far, when I tried altering my love letter so it was aimed back at Rachel Bilson, so perhaps my family could think of me as less of a bum, and perhaps I could reach more people, I couldn't get a single word out.  I can see what I want, I can see who I want to affect, but I can't do it.

*- Incidentally, I subscribe to this love-letter theory of art, at least as much as I can, and this little blog is aimed at Eric G. and Happiness for reasons I don't understand.

**- This eyes-have-hands deal I encountered first, and am assuming is the inspired work of, Dan Allison.

The Flames!  Ah yes.  So so many reasons why cheering them on is fun, is more than fun.  Can we all agree that if we sat a single celebrating fan down and asked him a question—if his true reason for exuberant behavior was that a group of young to middle-aged men with odd leather-and-metal shoes glided adriotly over frozen water and directed a rubber avatar into mesh at the behest of numerous other middle-aged men in clashing colors—he would answer, "No.  It is because I now have an excuse to glory in this city, in these people, in the fact that we are here in this same geological location and are making our way, somewhat together."  I suppose we can't agree on that, because that would be a rare fan, but maybe he'd be deeply exuding it or something.  Or maybe not.  In either case, it's good to have a reason to grit the teeth and clench the fist and drop the jaw and hug the neighbor.  Always good.

Perhaps this letter to the author of Spin sums it all up for me:

Dear Robert Charles Wilson,

I recently finished reading your novel, Spin.  I totally loved it.  I am recommending it to all of my friends.  I'm twenty, Canadian, and a writer too.  I'd like to say what I liked about your novel.  I'm assuming this sort of feedback is not unwelcome, else I'd not be sending this.

I'm sure you know how good your book is, are aware of its internal consistency, welcomely "real" characters, its super-awesome overarching idea (particularly permeable, is the Spin, to further speculative discussion, i.e. what would you do, do you agree this is how folks would react, et al).  But to me what makes your book great, if you can excuse the presumption of such adjectival ascription, is the multiplicity of perspectives you bring to bear on this speculated future.  The moving parts that comprise humanity seem never, by your channeled perception, reduced or occluded or poorly juggled, even when elasticized and catapulted into this Spin-hypothesis.  What allowed me to relax into your story was your own evident care at providing a sort of integrated speculation, covering not just the science of your future or the techno-economic base of your future societies, but the ways, for instance, this techno-economic base interacted with the individual belief structures of your characters, or with international politics, or with city infrastructure, and others.  It's kind of hard for me to articulate this respect you demonstrated for an active plurality—failing blessedly to eschew a projection of the evolution of religion and food and transport, and others, along with your projection of physical phenomena—but recognizing such respect, yours for a synthesized plurality, lent an almost visceral credence or plausibility to the Spin-scenario, and for that I thank you.

Now perhaps that all sounds vaguely bullshitty and excessive, but I wanted to make sure you realized that your accenting and accounting of human contingency spreads across many memes.  When human contingency is represented via an impossible-to-ignore scenario (like it should be right now by Global Warming), all human practices ought to be contaminated or adulterated (sans- pejorative tenor) by this sense of contingency, and I think it was that widescale dispersal of affect, where every field of knowledge and practice was contaminated (or not!) by its own dubious link to humanity's inherent contingency, that you represented so well, and was so exciting to me. 

The questions of what the human race is here to do, how it might align with something larger than itself before it, the species, goes extinct, and how the wee practices of human life, like writing, contribute to that alignment or non-alignment, are some of the biggest and coolest questions we have, I think, going for us, as a species, right at the moment.  You do a terrific job.

Contingently yours,
Brian David Vass

The door is open. There is a dog on my lap. The dog is sick. So sick that she has become needy to unbearable proportion, while her stink, originating from rotten teeth and a baseball-sized glut of mucus throbbing in her mid-section, has escalated similarly. The door is open. It ought to be closed, as no good written thing comes from an unsealed domain. I can feel a motorlike growl in the pit of her, the dog's, airways, rumbling feral against my stomach. Yet my stomach is the only locale in all this world that she, the dog, will content herself, for now, to be. It is something of a torture, but to dislodge her from this her only source of comfort, my belly, would be equally tortuous and distracting. Compounding this otherwise simple matter of accommodating a dog's dying-seeming throes, is the not small fact that it is my day off, and this rite of accommodation is as challenging or worse than swimming in cooperate waters, challenges from which I hoped to ascertain reprieve. Here again this fucking evidence of clog, the dog's, gravelly and chambered, non-meek in its remanded state, and her, the dog's, only outlet to choke futilely. The door is open.

Here and here.

This stuff really breaks my back, to put it cleanly.  I think there are three nice ways (and a lot more not nice (and nice) ways) to contextualize human effort:

a—to improve our species' present condition
b—to create artifacts, be they lived lives or written works or muzak, toward lasting speciesal relevance, ultimately in service of the species
c—to align or misalign oneself with something larger than the species

And this ethanol fuel stuff is like a rhino in a book store, effectively neutralizing such nice human efforts.

Do you think it's possible to make sense of dreams as they fade and phosphoresce and grow waxy tumors in the meddling light of a mind that cannot be said to be awakening, merely formalizing, consolidating its more tangible functions by rite and wont of its host? And if all of your friends appear in a dream, to what degree is it beneficial, granting them ontology, even agency, deemed by your formal mind as incorruptible by the pronged engine, that informal mind, that images them? Or is post-dream interpretive leverage found in assimilating the talking bodies of your oneiric assembly as avatars of your subconscious, symbols culled from the substrate of your attentional government, signs whose referents roost in your chest or in space; signs delivering signs of times that need altering, modes that need augmenting, swallowed memes that need to be thrown up? But what then of the knowledge you slept without, thick now with mood in the foamy light of cognizance's morning? Where were these thoughts, new in feel at least, original? Would it comfort you to think of life as a subtle play of bodies within bodies, where the dream-soma of a friend, in its overzealous vibrance, comes to rest and toy in your body, where it, the friend's dream-body, leaves footprints, footprints that grow horns? Is it easier to think the mollified or choleric visages floating ever short of tactility in your closed-eye trances are products of something metaphorically residual, a leftover imprint of karma, like dirt on your sleeve only sexier, forming psycho-consensual knots that are undone by the effort of two or more? That dream-Jennifer could be real-Jennifer, only a borrowed piece of the real her, stolen and remanded to a heavily skinned gravy of unsolved sociality, where later fissures at the bubbling surface will appear by rite and wont of the gravy's host, and his or her dreaming; is this a lighter load? But what of the mysterious strangers, the transplanetary adventures? Surely this delicate residue of personal essences cannot extend beyond planets? Is it possible to know her ways, the ways of the visitor? Is it cheap to think of the visitor-to-dreams as an unclaimed branch of your self, or is it, conversely, remedial to narcissism to parse a visitation this way? Do you think it's possible to make sense of dreams as they fade and phosphoresce and grow waxy tumors in the meddling light of a mind that cannot be said to be awakening? If it were possible, we might be redeemed.

From one human to another
We who are too used to hearing loudness denote anger
We for whom the weirdness of birth is casual, and intravenous
We of the post-competitive age
We of compulsive worship, of little faith
We who have lost the still small voice
We who have found again the still small voice of bigger-than-I
We who hunger skin
We who claim meaning beyond skin
We for whom animalness is not unclaimed
O Rachel Bilson
Won't you harken unto me?
LOL
From one human to another