By chance, this blog entry marks the 100th time I've written and posted a time-stamped thing on this Google-owned software app. Numbers in action. Ten times ten fingers. Five times my fingers and toes. I drink a glass of Chambourcin in mock celebration. Drained. Done.
In 1985, I wondered what would relieve my daily boredom. In the small bookstore on the main campus of Walters State Community College in Morristown, Tennessee, I found a slim volume of poetry, titled, if I remember correctly, "Bars, Babes, and Boo-Boos," written by an instructor / professor at the college.
I can almost picture the author's name. I met him once or twice.
He might even have served on the committee that issued the Outstanding Student Award in the discipline of Creative Writing to me. I don't know.
The typewritten pages of his poetry and his stark scenery of searching out overnight companions at old watering holes inspired me to self-publish my early work on photocopying machines ("Of Friends, Neighbors, Lovers and Miscellaneous Passers-By" in Knoxville in 1992, using the photocopier in the little office I usually sat in alone, supposedly analyzing sewer flow data but often working late night hours on my writing, instead).
Neither one of us found fame but did we seek it?
We uncorked silence and let it flow between the spaces. Intoxicated with self-satisfaction. Aah!
Tomorrow marks the first day I'm to teach college-age kids. Hmmph. I'm taking the easy path. I know that now. Hiding in my parents'/family's vocational shadows. Destiny? Cheating myself? I don't know.
Need to mention Eimear in other parts of "The Mind's Aye." At the beginning - foresight? Hindsight - at the end? The end - mais oui! D'accord!
In reference to my last blog entry to build my next story:
- When would the local/committee censorship, self-policing policies of one nation slip into the night and create a Chinafication of the West? Has it already happened?
- Have we morphed from free-market capitalism as birth twin of a democratic republic to centralized capitalism as conjoined twin of a socialized republic?
- Has the West become little brother to the Middle East and East Asia?
- Will restrictive Eastern governments absorb Western practices and turn freedom of speech into a pure pacification tool, as long as speech leads to improvements to society in the form of marketable ideas, goods and services (including ones that seem to diss society but breastfeed the innocent minds and hearts of well-meaning infantile dissidents) - with art and product advertising being the purest form of pacification?
- How will this be reflected in decentralized Internet marketing campaigns for pacifying isolated subcultures?
- What about Latin American gangs? Russian conglomerates? In other words, how to build a better society off the strength of the underground economy?
- Legalize illegality?
- How do those of us who walk both sides of the street put our self-destructive habits to good use while keeping the goody two shoes blissfully unaware of what we're doing, not turning purely self-destructive people into happy zombies but simply tools for which all of society can prosper?
- Is violence really an inherent part of the system?
Quick! Where's a calendar? What year is it? 2009? Somebody slap me. Please.
I just dreamed it was 1984 all over again.
Wait! It is!
Kevin, I think we misunderstood our musings that mushroomed out of control - everything DOES go in a circle. A very vicious one, too! But this time you've got five mouths to feed. I only ever had to feed me. At least we both stayed under the radar while we read people's faces and stoked their egos. No crime against that, is there? If they only knew...hehe
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