book I read
My brother is currently, I believe, in Baltimore, hobnobbing with various other nerds of his particular stripe; while I was first disturbed that he felt it necessary to travel hundreds of miles to converse with large men with lackadaisical attitudes towards shaving and "secret" stashes of animated pornography in which girls in schoolgirl outfits with freakishly large breasts and excessive amounts of...fluids get it on, I'm starting to think it might not be such a bad idea. First of all, he's taking a camera to snap photos of the freaks in costumes. Second of all, he might "snap out of it", so to speak, and move on to other, more adult concerns. It's starting to freak me out, how immature he is. Was I that immature at that age? I sure hope not. And if I was, why weren't more people slapping me and saying "get laid" and/or "grow up"?

Have you ever noticed that some people seem to fall into and out of sexual relationships with the frequency of a fly jumping from entree to entree at a summer picnic? And do you also notice that some of these people are not in any way attractive? And they don't have much of a personality to speak of? I certainly knew some people in high school who were most likely swimming in venereal disease. To quote Roast Beef from my favorite comic, Achewood, if gonorrhea were piano these guys would be considered bold and unpredictable new talents.

I've got several grad schools in mind. The problem is I just don't think I've written anything good enough to be accepted. I haven't reached that level yet, and the deadlines are coming up quick. But you can't just pull things out of your ass at the last second when it comes to writing. I know that everything I write makes me better and everything I read makes me better. I read incessantly--42 novels so far this year by my count. And I write incessantly, most of which I throw out because it, well, sucks. A lot of what I write sucks...but now I can recognize that it sucks, and I'm halfway there in figuring out how to recognize how it sucks. However, I can't yet make it not suck. It gets very, very frustrating when the mind can recognize that something needs to be changed but can't yet determine how to change it. But nothing is easy; it's all hard work. If you want to achieve something it requires hard work. This is the first time I've really ever had a specific goal in my life, ever.

I was unmotivated in high school, because high school is not designed to engender motivation. It's a dead zone, mathematically seperated into parts, fifty minutes to a period, 8 periods to a day, with a break for lunch. They yank you in and four years later they squeeze you out. It was all my own fault, mostly. I was not interested in the things high school wanted to teach me. I was doing things like watching David Lynch films and reading Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs novels. I was interested in anything that was odd. The moment something became popular I scorned it. Not a recipe for popularity, that's for sure.

I desperately, desperately want to get into the Iowa Writers Workshop. That's what I want. I don't care that nothing is guaranteed afterward. Nothing is ever guaranteed. I may write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. I may never publish a single thing in my life. Who knows. I just want to get in. I want to be around people who have the same desires and interests vis-a-vis writing that I do. The English majors here are not serious about it. They've read too much Hunter S. Thompson, who as great a writer as he was had some fairly odious ideas, and think that drugs and calculated eccentricity itself is enough to start a writing career. It's not. There must be talent under it. I'm not saying I have talent. If I have any, so far it's shown itself to be minor. I've gotten second place in the campus writing contest twice in a row. The first time it was probably justified. The second time it was utter bullshit.

It's all about the manuscript, it's all about the manuscript. Three stories.