No One I'd Rather Be But Now

I tend to veer from being personal in this thing. Once you've accumulated enough words in a basket, some of the words tend to fall over themselves and you're unsure what to do with too much. You're unsure who will trip into your little place that is private enough to be a keepsake for strangers but public enough to reveal your hand to those you don't want to reveal your hand to.

This past weekend I've gotten: kicked out of a bar in the most functional state of mind I've ever been in while getting kicked out of a bar, blew it with a pretty girl, almost got into a fight because of another idiot woman and was propositioned for a gay threesome by some belligerent Mexican dude who obviously has enough issues to fill a psychiatrist's notepad. I'm single, broke, doggedly trying to do the right thing, patiently killing my brain cells and fucking motivated.

I've got the balancing act down pat, I'm not looking down and I'm not looking back.

"A man's errors are portals to his discovery." James Joyce, Ulysses

I've had my heart broken, my will questioned, my conscience scrutinized and my love filled to the brim so high that you'd imagine they'd start outsourcing it to India.

When I wake up, it's a success. It's a success to have things to do, to have people to see, to know that my actions are predicated and accountable to me. It's a success to have an awareness of the world around you and that its minor little victories can make you smile and the immediate schadenfreude of cautionary tales are just that, moral lessons for a uncertain future; a future that is realistic. An awareness of caring and concern and a knowledge of what is wrong/right, but at the same time a peace of mind where not giving a fuck is idealized/realized so much you don't have to tell yourself you don't give a fuck for emphasis. Because you just know.

In less than 8 months I will be 30 years old. I look at the older days fondly and sometimes embarrasingly. I look at them with the knowledge that they were Old Testaments in a 6-billion-strong sea of chapters of old testaments and we are all in this together. I wake up, with the looming fear of "being somebody" behind my shoulder and when I look at the ceiling and hit the snooze button I know that my best days (so far) where worth every feeling in the spectrum (devastatingly depressed to cloud nine). What's more important is that my bestest days are still ahead of me, filled with everything that was there before, but with a knowledge that only suffering and love and ecstacy can temper.

Times are tough, but so am I.

mise en scene, pt. 2

You are what you wanted to be. You wanted to be nice, and be able to enjoy life and live a little a dangerously. You had no care if you got a shitty office job or not. You would meet new people and you would still talk to your friends in high school without being stuck in high school. Everything else that made you worry or upset or be sad or paralyzed you, all of that was based out of necessity. Necessity to live, necessity to survive; food, shelter, etc. You were stupid and romantic and now you're less stupid and less romantic but you're still both. The expectations of what you should be did not correlate with what you wanted to be, this is what it wrought. This is it.

Wall Street Journal Article re: The slush pile

The Death of the Slush Pile

Excerpt:

As writers try to find an agent—a feat harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs—the slush pile has been transferred from the floor of the editor's office to the attaché cases of representatives who can broker introductions to publishing, TV and film executives. The result is a shift in taste-making power onto such agents, managers and attorneys. Theirs are now often the first eyes to make a call on what material will land on bookshelves, television sets and movie screen.
Still, discoveries do happen at agencies, including the biggest publishing franchise since "Harry Potter"—even though it basically took a mistake to come together. In 2003, an unknown writer named Stephenie Meyer sent a letter to the Writers House agency asking if someone might be interested in reading a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires. The letter should have been thrown out: an assistant whose job, in part, was to weed through the more than 100 such letters each month, didn't realize that agents mostly expected young adult fiction to weigh in at 40,000 to 60,000 words. She contacted Ms. Meyer and ultimately asked that she send her manuscript.