Writer’s bloc

I made some progress last night working on the rough outline for a story I’ve been stuck on for months. It felt really good to experience an uninterrupted flow of ideas again, writing and rewriting, linking unrelated thoughts into something larger, instead of just spending 90% of the time “looking for inspiration,” i.e. flipping through old books or scrolling random tumblrs.

A while back, I read an article that described Murakami’s habit of writing every day soon after he woke up. He talked about how it was important to have the routine down, to actually sit there at his desk for the minimum two hours each day, even if he didn’t spend the entire stretch actually writing. That really stuck with me, because back then I’d usually just sit around online waiting for inspiration to strike, something I now see as an incredible waste of time and (possibly) talent.

As useful a resource as the Internet can be, there are periods when it’s more of a distraction than anything else. A *ping* lets you know you’ve just received another e-mail. You click back to your Facebook page to see who commented on what. Sometimes it helps to get up from my desk, grab a notebook, and go somewhere else. Anywhere.

I think it’s time to do more of my writing away from this computer screen and its distractions. A pen and a pad, a flat surface, maybe a cup of coffee — more than this, what do you need? Well, maybe some music. Ideally something without lyrics. I’ve had that Dam-Funk album, Toeachizown, on repeat lately. There’s also the Samiyam remix of Shigeto’s “And We Gonna.” Alright. Time to get started.

After I check my Facebook.

On the bus

I remember riding the bus to work back in Tallahassee, sitting next to all sorts of strange people every day. Needing a car wasn’t something that often crossed my mind.

One day, my friend Josh and I were at the transit station waiting inside one of the buses that would take us to the mall or somewhere. Just outside the bus, there was a commotion, a bunch of people standing around looking at the ground, everybody talking. Through the gaps in the crowd I could see a man on the ground. He was old and grey, wearing tattered clothes. He wasn’t moving. Immediately, Josh started drawing the man’s form into a sketchbook as different parts of him were revealed by the movement of the onlookers. And I was writing quickly too, describing the scene in my little notebook. Before long, some emergency responders came and took control. The crowd evaporated and we overheard somebody say that the old man was alive and breathing. For a while, I remember, Josh and I thought the man could have been dead. It was a relief to find that we hadn’t been drawing and writing about somebody’s husband or father who died outside our stupid bus to the mall.

Back to (un)reality

Well, hello there. Hard to believe it’s been almost a year since leaving my editing job. Eesh. The intervening months have been both incredibly exciting and intensely boring, and a lot has happened.

• I visited Tokyo for nine days in January, to spend some time with my brother, his new wife, and their baby, and to get away from the routine of life on an island. It was absolutely brilliant! Every single day of the trip was new and exhilarating, and I have solid plans to move there to live and work as soon as I can make it happen.
• I began writing for a local men’s magazine called Uno. It’s been quite fun — I work with people I’ve known for years and I get to work on interesting projects (one of the first was a story detailing the aforementioned Japan trip).
• My brother brought his family over to Guam, twice in the span of a few months. Most of our family still hadn’t seen the new baby, and everybody just about shat themselves.
• I turned 25. When the hell did I get so old? My friends took me out to a little Italian restaurant downtown — Gabriel’s, one of my favorite restaurants in Guam — and we later met up for drinks and debauchery.

Lots of other stuff happened, too, but those are the main things off the top of my head. I’ll try to keep this little blog from gathering dust from now on, and I look forward to posting some new pictures and video in the coming days and weeks. Stick around

In which the higher classes lived by the water and controlled the seas

The worker bee has flown away. I quit my editing job Tuesday.

It was kind of scary going to work that day anticipating the bad reactions and finger-wagging, but it felt so good to walk out of that goddamn stuffy newsroom knowing I wouldn’t have to come back in the next day and continue faking and fucking around. Now the question is what to do with all this free time I’ve been talking about for so long.

Hopefully more art, more writing, more time with loved ones. More Marky Mark, more Funky Bunch.

Josh: “What happened to us?”
Me: ”We got old over the last 25 years.”
Josh:”How?”
Me: “Happens to everybody.”

Trans-Atlantic translation machines

I’m really bad with these things, as you can see. Allow me to try harder. Or hardly at all.

On my desk:
- phone number from a former writer at the paper (we were supposed to hang out, nope never did)
- expensive watch (worn about 5 times in as many months)
- notes on scraps of paper about how much i hate waiting in lines at the bank (“These complete idiots, they can think only in terms of Hawaii or ‘the mainland.’ And, here, every woman is a whore. Every pair of legs is spread or spreading; their knees never, ever touch.”) Cheerful
- bills, bills, (unpaid) bills
- joke-gift condoms from a waitress. Hee-larious

Hopefully there’s a video upload in our near future.

The King of the Best

In which some friends get together and hang out in a little studio in Sinajana. They attempt to film a chase scene for a 60s Italian movie set in Jamaica, which is in France.

It was tough deciding what to include in this clip. In the end I just chose the funny/random bits. Some time soon Royce may assemble something neat out of our large mess of recordings.

Bloopers? Behind the scenes? Bunkum and balderdash!

Between a rock and a hard place

“Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave.”

This weekend was good fun. Getting high and watching the tides of Umatac Bay, driving over to McKraut’s for a giant bratwurst with basil bread. Too bad I didn’t think to bring the camera.

But now it’s back to work. The cog will keep spinning until its teeth are worn smooth. The industrious machine goes on humming.

I still haven’t gotten around to watching my friend Matt’s copy of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Will I see the movie before he asks me to return it? Time is running out.

Also. I just read “Scylla,” from Terrence Holt’s In the Valley of the Kings, and damn. I loved it. Looking forward to reading the rest of the stories.