Tag: writing

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Dream Journal

this should be about rats (but isn’t)

For better or worse, I forgot my dream. I really feel like I could have tried harder, like I almost got it several times. I’m sure that it had something to do with rats. I kept seeing rat images and getting cued up, but nothing came.

It’s odd, because I just fixed this damn dreamkeeper page to work again (you know that’s how I write these dreams everyday, right?) And usually, when I put that much effort in, I’m much better at tuning in. Honestly, it’s part of the practice at this point. Fix the website; use the website more. Not today though.

To be fair, I discovered the thing was broken in new and different ways right after getting up. Seems my fix overwrote a lot of work I had already done. Figures.

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Dream Journal

Bank Visit and Cold Pelo, Cards Console Error

I’m somewhere inside a single story building with different compartments or stores. It’s kind of feels 1970s with the many odd 45° walls and it’s unusually tall, flat ceiling. I enter the wide double doors of a bank, where I need to do some research or perhaps fetch something.

A couple of miscreant bank workers near the front (the room is mostly rows of desks) spot me and try to invalidate my fresh papers — before I’ve even started. I understand this is because they assume whatever I’m reporting will negatively affect one of the bank’s performance metrics. They underhandedly want to game the statistics.

I store the bankers boxes which will be mine, including a smaller one that’s an art kit, under a built-in desk in a corner wall (like the one where I lived in La Paz). I pass by again later and the corner is weirdly cold, as if it were underwater and was recently flooded with a frigid, sluggish injection of water. As I investigate, I find a jar containing a small black-and-yellow gecko-like creature, a type of amphibian called a pelo. It’s been sealed and is motionless surrounded by the front of cold water. My wife says she sealed it up because it was misbehaving, and I’ll have to explain to her that you can’t seal something like that up as it can’t breathe like that.

I’m testing my app in-person on a console. It misidentifies one of my cards as having a syntax problem — there’s text on it containing “cards Cards Cards cArds” etc, which maybe can flex with the name of the cards database? But that shouldn’t be so. I’m reading the actual error message from the console and that’s what wakes me up!

The surprising thing is, I don’t think this incident followed standard rules for text in dreams. I feel like I was actually holding and evaluating a block of text instead of it being rewritten whenever I looked away. The “buffer” was large enough that it was like reading real text. Real enough that it overloaded… something, and woke me up I suppose.

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Dream Journal

Pick Up and Drop Off

I watch letters change on paper, morphing/fading from “will” to “was”. This seems a parallel to the Wikipedia phenomenon of people altering a person’s page to past tense when they die. I can’t be sure how, but this has to do with a boyfriend of Dara V.

Along the back fence of my childhood home I walk along the top of the narrow brick wall. There didn’t used to be buildings there when I was growing up, but now some neighbors have put their chairs on the balcony as close as they can to our yard, so they directly see everything. I find myself not only annoyed, but feeling this is unjust somehow.

Near the corner of the back fence I stand with a goth girl waiting for her ride. A car speeds past us at the stop and swerves head-on into a tree. It’s shocking to see this happen in person. I actually wonder now if I somehow slept through a traffic accident outside my window and integrated that into the narrative…

Later I’m dropping off a women at a grand yet modern palace, many stories tall with underground car access. This place exists in many timelines, yet it’s a good place in any timeline to be a woman. It’s agreed that her name here will be “Christina”. On the map this place is marked as… I can’t recall; it seems this detail was overwritten. But it’s something to do with deadly subterfuge or sabotage. Not that she herself will do any killing, but she may be the cause of their death.

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Dream Journal

Endless Sentences

A recurring game where you have to write a sentence. The sentence becomes your reality, your fate. There’s an unavoidable karma to this, no matter what you choose (and you have to write *something*) there will be some negative consequence, some necessary lesson. This feels like limbo or purgatory in retrospect, but in the dream it’s presented as hell.

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Dream Journal

Coruscating Code

I’m working with a text editor, learning complicated commands. Thrilled that now I can make my AI model analyze stuff for me from different perspectives — *Brute Force!* The text is a big, complicated block that I’ve generated over iterations, parts of which contain mathematical characters. Sometimes, it seems to waver or throb with the energy inside it, coruscating. I started from a different file, a small base that was just a single character. I feel like I’ll need to hide this method from others because of some ethical aspects they wouldn’t approve of. What those are is unspecified.

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Dream Journal

Tonantzin

In a hammock on my birthday in my old hometown backyard, thinking of writing some younger girl I know around there. Might be advice, romance, inquiry, I can’t recall.

I find a mummified rat while cleaning one of our tents there on the backyard lawn. I recognize him from some wildies that we almost, but quite adopted a few years back — they bred too fast. Parts of his fur are perfectly intact. I accidentally drop his body in a glass of water (during my wakeup phase actually) and I’m a bit sad and frustrated to think that his nice smooth fur, even when dried, will never look sleek again.

Tonantzin is a word stuck in my head from somewhere in the dream. Could even be the little rat fella’s name, for all I know…

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Dream Journal

Drafting Letter to Old Man

Older man, sitting in an office filled with memorabilia, showing a patch which says "Cult Leader". The man is John Waters (or at least it was, before someone replaced his face with Walt Disney's).
photo credit to Tom Atwood: original photo of John Waters, from the book "Kings and Queens in Their Castles".

Writing a letter to an old man regarding a recent experience. Maybe our trip to Mexico. As I’m editing I’m figuring out what I want and should be saying. There’s an opener which references the controversial incident obliquely — possibly rather too clever — and I try to dance around insulting the other actors involved, the greater context, or really spelling things out. I need to avoid giving the impression of a promise, or an admission of guilt. But I want to seem like the good guy. This is a creative way of cleaning up from overly-complicated events.

This is becoming a bit meta to me, the person who dreamt it and the person who’s writing it. Perhaps it seems that way to you too, dear reader. That may be because the way it’s being written appears to be auto-descriptive. Best I can give my own analysis. Take it with a grain of salt, though.

The old man was kind of a Walt Disney or John Waters type. But his moustache was not important.

Categories
Glot

This Keyboard I Got

I’ve been thinking about it.

I don’t really write too often. I enjoy writing, and always have. It’s a pleasure to create and speak and I attest (as someone who enjoys the sound of their own voice very much) that I enjoy talking as such.

But I don’t. And why is that? Writing written off by minutiae. I want to read more about this thing. The laundry needs hanging. I have to work tomorrow morning. When was the last time we ate out? I should clean up the room. I want to wait until I finish the other website I’m designing. There’s a backlog of pictures to upload. I need to do X before Y because Y is not as immediate as X, although Y is a long-term goal so I’ll still feel bad and want to.

I don’t know why I don’t write as often. I guess that I don’t identify as “a writer” much anymore, because I do so many other things. But I still write. As said before and better, by others, it fills all the little gaps in one’s daily existence. It rests in small spaces between cracks in the sidewalk, tiny green life poking through the sidewalk, not defiant, just pleasantly and idly existing. I may not write like a madman, fifty-thousand soldiers strong, but I write.

Today I write anew. Today I found a keyboard in the basement of my place of work, and I took it home and it is magnificent. It is a vintage IBM Model M keyboard with bucking spring design; the keys are pressed, they give resistance, and then they *click* and the moment they click the character is registered. There is no latency. There is no softness. It is a machine and it is mechanical. It’s called force-feedback, and it is totally neat. It is a different feeling, one I’d never expect. I’ve typed this whole thing with nary a typing error to speak. Amazing.

And now I am reading the Wikipedia entry on the Model M and I notice something… this is the keyboard of my childhood. The very keys I used to play “Ernie’s Big Splash” when I was 6, are the keys I now use to blog about not blogging. Incidentally, the former still seems more fun. Incidentally, I still don’t like the word “blog.” And now I remember that I used to write on that thing all the time, back when computers had the one font and the one size, text white on blue, and what-you-saw wasn’t what-you-got cause that was set on the printer itself. A matrix of dots made the things you wrote magically appear, and then they could go on the fridge or something.

All of this does beg the question, though… if something as simple (if sensory) as clicky-typing can cause me to reflect on my writing and gain understanding of why I might do it or not do it, and write this much about writing, aren’t I preoccupied with it enough to put a little more effort into it?

I refuse to make a resolution. How bout a to-do item instead?

To-do: write more. Clicky keys nice.

Categories
Glot

Writing of Dreaming

I had a dream last night, and I had to write it down. It’s sort of complicated. What was weird was it’s dream-within-a-dream recursion, a fake-world created entirely by those inhabiting it, who journey there from the real world, which itself may not be real. Or is it? Teasing logic like that permeated the whole thing, and I only barely understood it myself.

There was dinosaur wrestling. And pet tigers. I should speak about that. I dream things like that a lot. Rarely does it make sense, but it made a lot of sense last night. I wrote four pages this morning, and in the process I figured out how to write the story—I think. I’ve never written a choose-your-own-adventure story of any length, and I think I wrote the last one when I was four. I wouldn’t know where to start. I suppose I could start at the beginning.

It’s harder than it sounds.

Categories
Glot

A Non-Novel Experience

I’m sad, because there’s not a chance in hell for me to accomplish something I wanted to do. Mostly we all know what that is, it being November 30th and all. Yeah. I don’t have a book, and so for the second year running I have failed at National Novel writing month. I don’t have even close to the 25,000 that I scaled back to. I have about an eighth of that. The question I kept being asked during November, and which I find myself asking even now, is why? Why do I want to write a book in the first place?

Well, I didn’t, dummy. That’s the whole point of putting it on a blog, is that it’s not a book. It’s just a steady output. It’s a constant stream of writing, that, while perhaps over-effluent at times and perhaps a tad indulgently repetitive, et cetera, et cetera, it’s writing. And I remember enjoying writing.

I remember that when I was in eighth grade I joined “Writer’s Circle.” It was a bunch of geeks who got together every Friday… in a circle… and read stuff they had written. It’s how I met one of my best friends, Lauren. It’s when I wrote my first full-length story, and where I got some of these weird ideas in my head that still stick around there even though they’ve never been justified—like that one shouldn’t repeat nouns, adjectives, or non-common verbs within a 1-page radius, and that the sentence structure should alternate. Like this. Short, long, short, long, personal, non-personal, object-based, perceptive, non-personal, personal, et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. And it’s where the very beginnings of what I now generally think of as “flair” started: little stylistic, randomly emergent oddities that occur as the writing turns in on itself. Like this one. It brought about my writer’s philosophy, so to speak.

This experiment was just something to try to walk further down that path. Like the fair-weather flagellant that I am, most likely I’ll come back next year with high hopes. I’ll do the same thing. I’ll make compromises and I might not meet them. Probably won’t. And I’ll make the same apologies to myself. I might start in October just to cheat, like some I know who actually made it… I’m looking at you, Miss 60,000. I’ll do it all over. I’m not that sad about it, anymore. Better to have dreams and not attain them then to not have dreams at all.