After Dark

Changed the name and layout of that other blog. Take a look and tell me what you think, here or there, doesn't matter.

I totally love that picture. Makes me laugh every time.

I'm just curious, for those of you who stop by to check this blog every once in a while to see whether or not I've written anything. Have you actually checked the link to go over to my other site?

The reason I ask is because I'm debating whether or not I should post my entries for my composition blog up here as well, for people to read, or if it would be redundant to have this material in two places at once.

Let me know what you think, if, indeed, there's anybody still out there.

What? How is it possible that I can declare hiatus on a project that I frequently ignore simply because I don't feel like working on it?

Well, I'll tell you!

See, the reason why I'm declaring this an official hiatus from this blog is because my online writing is currently going into my other project, which is a writer's blog for my university composition class. The reason why I'm telling you this is because I'm posting a lot on that site (I get graded for it, which proves that I can commit to just about anything given the proper incentive!).

If you'd like to check it out just to get a taste of more of my random, vague, incoherent thoughts, head over to Matt's Exciting Placeholder Blog Title! and have a read. I can't promise that what you'll find will be any different than what I post here, or even any good, for that matter, but at least it's getting updated five days a week.

-Matt

So, as I have been whining about on Twitter the last few days (which is ironic, considering my problem), my laptop is slowly dying. It still -sort- of works right now, but not well enough that it's usable so it's pretty much remained powered off, a relic of a better era, an artifact from a time when I had mobile computing power. A bygone age... at least until I shell out the money to fix it in a few weeks.

Because I firmly believe that every tragedy is really just an opportunity to procure a fancy new gadget for myself (seriously, the next funeral I go to = Zune HD, because damn it, I'm going to be grieving!) so while I will be fixing the laptop somewhere down the road (having it fixed, rather) I decided now was a good time to invest in a proper desktop, since I've essentially used the laptop for everything during the past, uh, almost six years and it was really starting to show its age.

The original plan was to just replace the laptop, but since my computer tech guy (yeah, I have my own tech guy, because damn it Jim, I'm a writer, not an engineer) recommended I could get more machine for my money and still repair the original laptop which doesn't need to be as powerful since it won't be my main machine, I decided that was a good idea.

So, sometime next week, I'll be receiving a new PC. Which makes me very happy when I think about it. Until then, though, I'm miserable. Well, not really. I've got books I can read. And I need to write a paper. Which is going to be difficult without a computer. Sentence fragments are fun!

You know what's weird?

Sometimes, I go for weeks at a time without blogging or tweeting or communicating online in any meaningful way (not to say that my blog and my twitter are meaningful!) and then sometimes, there's nothing I want to do except blog and tweet, but when I feel that way, I worry that it will look strange that I'll have a three week gap and then a day where I posted five times in under an hour.

Just one of the many little things I do that make me pretty sure I'm secretly neurotic.

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

~W. S. Merwin

This is a little amusing, and the only thing I can think about that's worth writing that does not relate to the tragic demise of my laptop.

So, I've got this English class, yeah? You know, makes sense, I'm a Creative Writing major and all, I write in English, and so on. Well, in the interest of encouraging all of us student-types to write more, we're required to start a blog and write at least 500 words each day.

On the one hand, I relish the idea because I always want to be more consistent in my writing.

On the other hand, I can only look back at the sporadic efforts made on this blog and silently weep in anticipation of the coming horror.

So, for some reason, I've been thinking a lot about a story idea that I just can't seem to get out of my head. It's basically about a fallen angel who happens to be possessing a private investigator. I'm not sure if they're partners, or if the angel's the one in charge.

Hmm. That actually sounds sort of cool. Maybe I'll let this one develop a bit?

Sometimes, you come home and somebody asks you how the day was, or you reflect to yourself. Sometimes, you have a great day, and sometimes it was a shitty one. But even when you say, "yeah, today was fucking miserable" it wasn't really because sure, the customers were bitches and you made four hundred different retarded mistakes solely due to the fact that the alignment of the planets or whatever shit was throwing your life's energy out of whack.

And then sometimes, you have a really, really, truly bad day. The kind of day that has you racing out of work half an hour early because you get the kind of call that starts with somebody crying, and ends with you racing to your car, adrenaline spiking, hands shaking, because now you get to reflect on what a bad day really is, all the way to the hospital.

I'm not quite sure if it's worse having to go to the hospital yourself, or having to go there because somebody close to you needs to. That could be because I haven't ever really had to go to a hospital for anything serious in my life; I'm always there for somebody else. Maybe I'll know for certain when it's my turn.

Perhaps you'll forgive me, and understand, if I humbly submit that I hope I never have to find out.

I don't want to talk about the details in a public space like this. Nobody died, or will die, at least in the near future. I mean, I guess if we're going to be literal here, I should say that nobody died today, because we all will, eventually. It's just a question of when.

So, yeah, that was my day.

This is one of those posts where I write because I feel like writing, not because I actually have something to say. I'm not quite sure why I bother to make these public; they're essentially a warm-up that I do, sort of like writing calisthenics, before I tackle my novel manuscript or a short story... just a way to get my fingers moving and my voice working and everything flowing especially since it's been a little while since I got any work done.

That still doesn't explain why I feel the need to share this utterly mundane and uninteresting rambling with you. I imagine if I thought about it long enough, I could ascribe some nonsensical reason to the behavior; off the top of my head, I'm going to go with pure narcissism, which is the fuel for about fifty percent of the Internet's content, anyway. Seriously, stop and think about it for a moment. Think about everything that you've placed on the Internet, all of the content that you've created. Not content that you've consumed, not things you've perused or enjoyed, but things that you've actually inserted into the greater series of tubes that is the Intertron. How much of it are pictures of you or the people around you? How much of your written material is dialogue about your life, shared with your friends? Perhaps I should ask this question a different; of everything that you've ever put up online, public or private, for whatever reason, how much of it is not about you?

This is not to imply that such a perspective is wrong. The reality is that this is a tool for facilitating communication between people. It's not a repository for artistic endeavor, any more than my phone is meant to be. But it never fails to amuse me (and I'm just as guilty of this as any individual) that so much of our social cyber-construction is built to carve little niches of ourselves, to put as much or as little of ourselves out there in the digital world. If you think about it, we're all vying for a little quasi-immortality (a phrase, incidentally, that amuses as much as "most unique"). Long after you've moved on, there are relics of your history floating around on the Internet, buried just below the surface, waiting to be unearthed with a little digging. These bits of data, these pieces left in the wake of your interest long after you've moved on will remain forever, as long as there exists a server to hold them. And it's always interesting to see how your little relics and artifacts can reappear, sometimes when you don't even expect it (and sometimes that's not a good thing).

For example, back when I was developing fledgling html skills, I made a series of websites on various free services, starting at a place called Express Pages before moving to Fortune City to Geocities and eventually, to Angelfire. At least one of those Angelfire pages is still up and active, because apparently, it's considered the primary resource for information on the drow god Vhaeraun on Wikipedia. Seriously, click the link and scroll down to the external links: "Citadel of the Mask Lord" was a website I put up years and years ago and then promptly forgot about. I'm not the one that found it and cited it for Wikipedia; I've actually never submitted anything to Wikipedia, ever, which rolls into the whole thing about all of my content online being about me.

Just something to think about.