MisterNihil.com
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30.11.02OK, so brace yerself, but we had a seriously relaxed and subdued Thanksgiving. I cooked, everybody ate, everybody was in pretty much high spirits. It was all good. This from us, with a history of ugliness at these things. It actually gives me hope for Christmas, although I'm not gonna be there for it. I fully intend to be workin', as that's where I'm scheduled to be. whoopee. Posted at 11:25 PM - - - - - - - 26.11.02Piss. Now I have to introduce subplots. They'll make the book longer, but they also will make me have to write more. That's what I get for listening to people with good ideas. The problem with writing is that it is actually work, masquerading as fun. That's OK, though. At least I'll be closer to finishing the novel. But, man, that's a lot of work. New character. Anybody wanna volunteer? Maybe it'll be a dog. If you have ideas, you can post 'em as 'comments' here. Posted at 3:56 PM - - - - - - - 25.11.02Wow. I'm not the only one who thinks George is A Clever Monkey. Posted at 10:00 PM - - - - - - - 24.11.02Tonight, the coffee shop where Flash and I played our first open mic is closing. Toshi and I met Flash and his Other, and played "Bigger Than You" one last time. It was the first song we ever played there, at our first ever open-mic. It was a sad and maudlin event, with a keg and a wee bit of illegal substance use. Toshi & I abstained from both, and Flash managed to avoid the proper illicit stuff. There were children present in that environment, and I was afraid of the cops showing up suddenly (the station is actually in the same strip mall. There's just a convenience store between that shop & Busted). Flash thinks that once the new Ruta Maya is open a little further along Congress, that these same people will wind up migrating over there. On the kinda plus side, I got a lamp cheap. I feel bad, though, like a scavenger. I hope it helped pay off the debts from the shop. I did my part when it was open, always getting stuff to drink there when I showed up for open mic, and we pretty much always did what we could to draw a crowd. I don't know. It's over. It was a sad, sad crappiness. The novel is going OK, but I don't think it'll be done by December. I'm also not sure it'll be 50K when it's done. It feels a little more like a sort of novella thing. It's OK. I'll follow it until the story stops. It's how I do, I guess. 600 seconds is going OK, but we often, it seems, don't have time to write on it. I know I'm usually absolutely drained after writing all day, and if I write in the morning I get into that 'ten minutes and No More' mode, which puts me off for writing 2thousand words later on. Oh well. Maybe I'll bug SpyderellaSherbie into making a new forum. 2000 words? I don't know. On and On. Posted at 11:25 PM - - - - - - - 23.11.02I spent last night talking to people who do/administrate/work for this. Keen stuff. Posted at 11:31 AM - - - - - - - 22.11.02Early breakfast with Toshi, and MC 900 FT Jesus all morning. It's alright. Toshi had to go back to Dallas to visit family, so I'm alone all weeknd, sorta more or less, but I got 2000 words written last night and I plan to get 2000 more written tonight, and so on. Keeno. Posted at 9:15 AM - - - - - - - 20.11.02When? Did I stop paying attention? Nope. Not me. Slowly, slowly, he crawled up to 8000 words. Holy Crap in a Basket. Posted at 10:27 PM There's a meeting of fellow Nanos at Mojo's tomorrow. I should go. Posted at 12:35 PM - - - - - - - 18.11.02IfAaMsStOiTnIgRiEsDnRoItGwHiTsNeO!W Posted at 3:36 PM - - - - - - - 15.11.02Flu Shots at work is a weird thing. Yo. Posted at 12:50 PM "Less Finite" is just a way to say "bigger" without sounding like you are. Saying "a less finite market" sounds like you mean something other than moving to where the money is, because there is a social stigma against admitting that you are a capitalist, particularly where art is concerned. Posted at 8:40 AM - - - - - - - 14.11.02It's hard to get time to write when I haveta work all the damned time. Maybe I can write for a minute this weekend. I've been sitting at 6 thousand words for almost a week, and I need to get around to getting my characters out of their stupid pickle. Hee hee. I like that word, pickle. Work. Who knew? Posted at 10:23 AM We all knew it was true. It took this guy to say it. My union's gonna haveta give him a call. Posted at 12:21 AM - - - - - - - 11.11.02I finally went ahead and decided to sign up for AIM. MisterNihil is taken. So is MisterGibbs. So is MisterNihilGibbs. Somebody out there IS me. Yuck. Posted at 11:58 AM - - - - - - - 9.11.02I should own a picture of me that is on my computer. Go Go Gadget Scanner! Posted at 11:49 PM Kitty party went great. I gotta say. Not everybody dressed up, exactly, but enough people came with enough enthusiasm for a wonderful time to be had by all. That's my take on it, anyway. Oh, yeah. I decided that my novel thing was taking up too much space on this page, just in general, so I decided to go ahead and put it on another. The part here is here, in that you can search it out or whatever. The rest of it'll be on this other page as I get it written and a tiny bit edited. This page really isn't for that kinda stuff. This one is. Posted at 11:48 PM - - - - - - - 8.11.02Hee hee. Kitties all weekend. Huh. Posted at 1:49 PM It's not too late to join. You can still do it. I haven't lost hope, and look how I'm doing. Posted at 1:04 PM mMan I'm sick of this. I need to write for a couple of weeks. Posted at 12:38 PM - - - - - - - 6.11.02OK, check this out: There's this book, "Blood Electric," by Kenji Siratori. It's a cybepunkepicbook, full of artiness and cyberpunkiness. Here's a review. Read that before you go on. Or, read this one. Point is, there's this book. According to Booksinprint.com, the book has 320 pages. Notice, according to amazon, it's got 224. That's 'cause somebody at Amazon opened the book and looked at the actual page number on the actual last page, which is 224. There are 224 pages in the book (I looked, They're numbered right. There aren't 100 hidden pages or anything, misnumbered, scared and alone. It starts numbering on the inside of the front jacket, and stops on the inside of the back). I just heard from the publisher. That's intentional. The 320 page thing was an estimate 6 months before the book was published. Here's a sample, just to give you an idea of why we were unsure: From Page 72: The chaos pheromone of the reproduction area/digital vamp that the machinative angel who fecundates the spasm to the maching mechanism that lubricates GAIA hyperlinks to slit artery of the true sun/the chromosome of an artificial assassin evolves//I record the sin-tainted slit ruin machine of the ToKAE discharge/the empire of the Cadaver City::the crimson slit skin tissue of the ovarium::ADAM Doll that soul-machine resuscitated was cursed::<< fracture >> the body modes of drag embryo are inoculated by artery::I torture tongues with genetic pincers like the film at the end of the century::Dragnet of the earth::Body of an assassin is transplanted in the desert::/ (check the mouseover) You see my confusion. That's actually a particularly lucid passage, compared to most of the book. The punctuation is all directly out of the book. I'm just sayin' is all. Posted at 1:10 PM - - - - - - - 5.11.02When I had made up my mind to leave, finally, I had to tie up the loose ends. This meant saying goodbye to my friends, and ditching my then-longtime girlfriend without letting her know where I'd be, that I didn't plan to come back, or that she wasn't welcome to come with me. It actually turned out not to be as hard as I'd been afriad. My friends were the easiest. Most of them had been telling me so get out of town since the beginning of hign school, and they expected me to. One of them, Franklin, left the year before, and moved up to Lincoln, Nebraska. I figured that'd be as good a place as any to start a trip, so I'd head up north. The last I heard from Franklin, he was living by himself and taking classes at Southeast Community College and doing some kind of administrative work at Goodyear. Posted at 4:44 PM I bounced a ball ten times, and waited for a resonse. When none came, I scooted across the room and tried again. Posted at 4:38 PM When I left Anderson County for greener pastures, I decided it was the last time I'd ever see any of the places I grew up. I never liked them as a child, and I still don’t think I’ll like them as an adult.I’ve never been back, although I’ve never really gone far for very long. My Hight School friends say the place drags you back, but I just think I owe it all to a lack of ambition. I grew up needing nothing, wanting everything, with no effective way to get from one to the other. Anderson County is far from everything with the lowest population density in the state and nothing to do but subsist and dream. Nobody told me about the latter activity so I spent most of my childhood bored. Some people manage to have a dream. I only managed to have ample time to do so. I wanted out, and where never mattered much. When I finished high school, I set off without telling anyone where or why. In school I worked hard enough to get by with a near-perfect record. They told me I had the grades to get into any public university in the state. I had a car and I had the skills one needs to do almost any kind of unskilled labour around. At the age of 18, that was all I thought I’d need for the first half of my life, and the second half was far enough away I didn’t need to think about it. My car was a second-hand old person's car. Say whatever you want, it was a fine enough car for me. You could drive all day and night, and never get that Car Ass that most of them so amply and happily provide. It’s a big, broad thing with a back seat you can sleep in if you don’t have company, and the cloth seats happily give up pretty much any stink they take in without too much vacuuming. It’s everything a high school kid with no ambition wants. I got it because the last owner died or had to go to a convalescent home or just couldn’t drive it any more. I don’t actually remember any more. She never had anything in it. There was a garbage bag lining in the trunk with traces of potting soil on it, and a tiny note-pad in the front with no pages writtin on or ripped out. The note pad had a picture of a dacshund on one side and a downright creepy little girl on the other. She was very round about the face and hads; she passed up the little-kid-roundness, and snuck up and bushwacked bulbous. I kept the notebook wedged between the front seats so I wouldn’t have to look at it, and kept a driving atlas on top of it so I could be sure. That was as personalized as she ever let that car get, aside from the old insurance information in the glove compartment. I started there, and made it mine. I put flame-design floor mats, steering wheel cover and mud flaps on the car, and fitted it out with an antenna ball with a red devil face. I got a friend of mine to paint little flames on the front fenders. When I was done, it was the silliest thing my parents would ever admit to seeing. Posted at 10:26 AM - - - - - - - 4.11.02OK, I'm not really movin' to Iowa, Homeland of My Mother, but I do often feel embberrassedd to be a Texan (Yay Spelling!). It's often hard for me to believe that I'm actually from the state that The Head Bozo says he's from. Golly. Political opinions on my sleeve. Election time does that. Posted at 2:52 PM I saw a couple on the corner of I-35 and William Cannon, standing under an umbrella. I expected the sign they were carrying to say something along the lines of "support our local softball group." It said "Homeless, Laid Off, Need Help." They looked like normal people, like me. I didn't know what to think. Posted at 1:32 PM - - - - - - - 3.11.02The prexident has almost convinced me to defect to Iowa. The Stupid attack ads on TV have convinced me the rest of the way. The fact that there's NOTHING ON BUT ADS FOR MORONS I ALREADY DIDN'T VOTE FOR is really cinching the deal. I'm movin' north where there's no TV anyway, and there's snow to keep Bush away. Grrrr. Posted at 10:06 PM It's been a long day. Our President is "stumping," which means not doing his job. Huh. How 'bout that. He gets a new job (He can declare war without Congress' OK. Oops.) and he takes a month off work. Wish I could do that. Posted at 10:05 PM "The besht canidate fer tha feacher is the nex Uninid shtate senator,.." -George W Bush Posted at 10:04 PM I signed up. Posted at 10:02 PM Y'ever just wake up and feel whiny? I don't either. Um. Posted at 9:42 PM - - - - - - - 1.11.02By the way, I admit there may be a little bitterness to that post. I'll admit that I don't like WholeFoods trying to put the company I work for out of business. That's a lot of why I feel that it's wrong to take anything from Whole Foods if you're scared of corporate greed. They signed the lease for Borders to move in across the street from Bookpeople (and from Waterloo records). They decide who moves into that building, and they decided it should be Borders. I'm not saying money changed hands there, and I'm not sayin' it didn't, but what I am saying, for absolutely certain, is that this is an international chain bringing in another international chain to compete with local independants across the street. Not down the block, not half-a-mile-away, but across the street. I'd be able to throw rocks at Borders from my desk. Let me just say, I don't like Starbucks either, because Starbucks, like Whole Foods, is making moves to drive out local independant business. They've moved in across from two local shops downtown (Little City and the HideOut), which puts them in direct competition with these two nifty local spots. So anyway. I'm just venting. Back to work. Posted at 12:07 PM OK, so KOOP won't take money from Starbucks for their fund drive because Starbucks is corporate and scary and pushing out the little guy, etc. They don't want money from scary corps like (I'm not making this up) Dell because of the creepy killing-the-little-guy-ness. I say whatever, I don't care, that's what they want to do, that's OK. They've struck a deal with Whole Foods in which they take money and services from them. But wait, isn't Whole Foods an international chain? Yes, they started in Austin, but so did Dell, and Starbucks started in Seattle, which is of course the Evil Empire capital of the world. But wait, you say, Whole Foods is bringing a quality product to people all over the world who wouldn't have had one otherwise. Sure, but then how do you explain the fact that before Starbucks nobody knew what a Mocha Latte was, or how they liked their Cappuccinos or what in the hell was that black icky stuff that looks like coffee but you keep calling something like 'esprexio?' And then I have to point out that Dell has put out a product specifically so lower-GNP countries can have access to decent computers in bulk (albeit with fewer options) so that these countries can begin to catch up with the tech revolution that keeps happening even though it does so subtly. A counter arguement: But Dell and Starbucks do it for profit. They're all about the money. To which I reply, Sure. And Whole Foods is now not-for-profit, and actually are a front for Mother Theresa since she faked her own death to help more people in need. People make money on Whole Foods. They rent the third floor of the building I am sitting in right this minute, and the people in the Executive and Corporate (see those words. They aren't there by accident) offices there aren't poor. I'm just sayin'. So, it doesn't bug me that KOOP decided not to take corporate money. It doesn't even bug me that they think that it's OK to bitch about not having a budget when you're too good for local money. What bugs me is blinding yourself to the fact that Whole Foods is a business and that just because they cater to you does not mean they share your views. That's all. Posted at 11:40 AM Crap! I'm out of actual work, so I'll have to do some busywork. That's OK. Today's short-day anyway. I got here before 8, so I can leave early. Hu Rah. Posted at 9:20 AM - - - - - - - | All material copyright 2002-2003 Ben Gibbs. | |||||||||
