inherently different

Archive for February, 2008

Today is Chuck Palahniuk’s birthday. Chuck is one of my favorite authors, not only because of his unique writing skill, but he has this uncanny ability to see through the bullshit and show you things as they are, not as people wish they were.

The author of Fight Club was born on this day in 1962, which means he is exactly 4 years older than me. If I was the type to be envious, I would be envious of Chuck and the level of work he has published in a relatively short period of time. His latest book to be turned into a movie, Choke, looks like it might be just as good as Fight Club and if the book is any indication, whatever you thought about Fight Club, you will find in spades with Choke.

I read Choke a few years ago and it changed my view of what contemporary fiction can be. If you like fiction, you owe it to yourself to explore Chuck’s world.

Join me in wishing Chuckie P a happy 46th.

Stephen King has been allotted more shelf space in my personal library than any other author. More than Charles Bukowski, more than Richard Matheson, more than Douglas Adams, hell more than all these authors combined.

I know that a great many critics think Stephen King’s work is crap. Steven King is aware that many critics believe his work is crap… like Stephen himself, I don’t give two shits. I truly believe he is not only one of the most productive and creative American writers of the last 50 years, but also one of the most inspiring.

My gf picked up two new (at least to me) King books for me a few days ago and I really am enjoying Blaze. It was written before Carrie, locked away in a trunk apparently and only recently released from captivity. I’m glad he chose to publish this book and I am sure millions of his fans agree.

And the number ONE weird thing about me (continuing the post detailing 7 weird things about me):

The human hand has 27 bones counting the bones in the wrist (there are 8 of those). Not counting the wrist, I have broken 17 of the remaining 19 bones in each hand. I have broken some of them playing street hockey, some fighting, some getting things slammed on them, and having my hand shoot through a car window during an accident.

Many times I was completely unaware that something had broken until either someone pointed out that there was something terribly wrong with my hand or I felt a sandy, grinding between bones. Once, my thumb got pushed out so that the bone stuck out of the back of my hand… I noticed that because my hand felt wet. It wasn’t water.

As a result, my fingers jut off in random directions and I cannot wear rings. My fingers constantly twitch too, especially when I am sleeping.

Despite this, I can still touch type around 120 words per minute.

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about one of my favorite topics, me. It seems that while this blog shares insight into who I am and what I believe, it does little to dispel the rumor that I was raised by wolves and ate my siblings upon exiting the womb. I’ve never been a proponent of making up what you don’t know as fact, but telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth can be boring. On occasion I like to let loose a nice, interesting, but wholly made up story.

Of course, I always let people in on the fiction. I don’t like telling tales that can be mistaken for fact. So in the interest of being forthright, lately I haven’t given this blog the attention it deserves and the reasons have been detailed from time to time. They have varied from too much work (slightly true), to too little inspiration (slightly more true). Now you can add confused to the mix.

I have been struggling with how much I should really write here. My GF reads this blog and while she and I share all our thoughts with each other, some of my more… um… colorful ideas tend to make her question her decision to abscond from the mainland for the sunny shores of Maui.

The thing is… if I can’t be myself here, I am only lying to myself about what this blog truly is. So, with that in mind I will attempt to write daily again and not second guess whether or not you are ready to read what I have to write. I think most of you are intelligent people willing and capable of self-censoring your intake… read what you like, ignore the rest.

Going forward, anything that is simply me practicing creative writing will be clearly marked. I don’t do this because I believe you are incapable of discerning truth from fiction, but to insure that I can simply write what comes to mind. This should increase my blog output ten fold because some of the thoughts that cross the vast expanse of my mind are not without passing interest to those of you who are attracted to my ridiculous mutterings.

               OVER BLACK WE SEE OPENING CREDITS

                                                          FADE IN:

INT. OFFICE - EARLY MORNING

A MAN sits typing on his keyboard. The light from the overhead lamp
flickers as if it could wink out at any moment.

It does not.

He stops to read what he has written and looks disgusted.
He hits the DELETE key repeatedly.

THE MAN

Christ on a fucking cracker. Can
this get anymore tedious? Ok, time
for a change.
The Man hits a few more keys and the words DELETE ENTIRE BLOG
flash on his screen.He hits the key.

                THE MAN

Come thursday. There will be daily
content. It will be different.
Inherently Different.

I am a procrastinator. Writing that, I should really also imply that I am a procrastinator like Pol Pot was a mass murderer, which is to say, if I am going to do something, I go all out.

See, a while back, I was tagged by Nina to do something or other… I believe it was to write down Seven Weird Things about me. Thing is, after reading that she had tagged me, I simply ignored it. Much like I ignored an ingrown toenail until it got infected and I came within a hair’s breadth of having that particular toe amputated. For days, my one prevailing thought, aside from wondering if my toe would survive, was, “Should I just pick a nickname now? Like Ed Nine Toes?” In the end though, the toe survived and all the time I spent trying to come up with a good nickname was just so much wasted energy.

I will be honest. I rarely participate in internet memes or tests or forwards on my blog. Mostly because I think they are cheap tricks to hide a lack of imagination. While this may be true, the alternative is to go weeks without a post. Ahem…

So, I find myself putting together a post about seven weird things about me. Funny thing though… as I started to write down these seven weird things, I realized that many of them are not news. I mean, they are things that I have written about before and doubt that even if you never read them prior to this post, you probably won’t be surprised to find them out.

In any event.. for better or worse, here they are…

7. I am a huge fan of Electric Light Orchestra, more commonly known as ELO.

In June of 1971, when I was five, my family moved to the United States. I didn’t speak a word of English and I had roughly three months to learn enough of this foreign language to function in Elementary school come September. (For those of you keeping score, that means that English is my second language. How does that make some of you gringos feel?) One way I managed to immerse myself into the culture and the language was listening to radio broadcasts on KCBQ, the local Top 40 station. Aside from the DJ’s and commercials, the music (and learning to sing along) taught me to speak English by osmosis. One of the bands that was on heavy rotation happened to be Electric Light Orchestra. As I grew older, and my knowledge of the language and culture grew, the one constant was ELO. In those early years, ELO provided the soundtrack to my experiences.

To this day, when I listen to an ELO song, the memories that bubble to the surface are powerful and hard to ignore. While some of those experiences weren’t happy, the music still brings a smile to my face 36 years later.

6. I don’t like people.

Yes, probably not hard to figure out. I am anti-social by nature, but when forced to interact with an idiot, I can be inhuman. Most people disappoint me, but all people bore me. Some exceptions include my gf, my father, and some children.

5. I take enormous pleasure from watching people run into glass doors.

Short of watching someone who has careened headlong into a glass door be decapitated by broken glass, few things can make laugh as hard and long as watching people run into glass doors.

4. Clowns make me uncomfortable.

I am unsure how this began. I don’t recall ever being frightened by a clown at an early age, but there it is. Stephen King’s IT is still one of the scariest books I have ever read and Killer Klowns From Outer Space is still one of the most disconcerting films I have ever watched.

3. I believe that religion is the one thing that has prevented man from transcending our primitive natures (also read as abolishing war, racism, hunger, & disease).

Truth be told, religion has killed more people than it has saved. Count me out.

2. My self-preservation instinct borders on non-existent.

I have done things that should have killed me, but for some reason, I have failed miserably. Not to say that I want to die, quite the contrary. It is just that I am not afraid of dying. I am aware of my mortality, but I just don’t really give a shit. If I contracted some terminal disease, I wouldn’t really bat an eyelash. We have a finite number of years and I can die right this moment and KNOW that I have done the most with what I was given. I am happy, content, and self aware enough to know that life is what you make of it.

And the number one weird thing about me…

will have to wait for another day…

“Karma,” a wise man once said, “is a bitch!” Clearly this pundit was a fan of football as this past season has clearly illustrated. In case you were oblivious, this past season saw one team come within a hair’s breadth of finishing the season without a win as well as one team come even closer to running the table with a 19-0 record.

My last post showed how much I love one team… If I had it in me, I would have followed up that post with a long explanation about how the New England Patriots are possibly the worst representation of sports excellence. In that non-existent post, I would have explained how the organization puts such an emphasis on winning, that they have gone to great lengths to insure an advantage… going so far as taping opposing teams practices before games. For those keeping score at home, thats called cheating if you are a fan of any of the other 31 teams in the NFL.

As the Patriots won each game, one had to wonder if they were still cheating… if their desire to achieve football immortality by running the table on an entire football season had somehow blinded them to winning with both class and dignity. As each game unfolded, the entire sports world saw not a team firing on all cylinders, but one that did anything to win and humiliate opponents as completely as possible. Of course, their fans loved it and they began to attack opposing team’s websites with an aggressive flavor of smack talking that just begged for some kind of cosmic retaliation.

When San Diego lost to the New England Patriots, I realized one thing. Sometimes everything works the way it does for very specific reasons. The loss to the Patriots set up possibly one of the most lop sided super bowl lines ever and with that, the god’s of football restored my faith in fate.

With the Giants, 12 point underdogs, beating the Patriots, the cosmos is once again in balance. Equilibrium has been reached at last. To real football fans, it is akin to Darth Vader getting his come-uppance in Return of the Jedi… it is like Rocky beating Apollo Creed in Rocky II… like Billy Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes Tennis match… something that for all intent and purpose shouldn’t happen… but it does.

New England was once that underdog, but through a series of poor judgments by their coaching staff, and by the outright douchery of their fanbase, became one of the most reviled sports franchises in the modern era. The team EVERYONE loves to hate, taking that particular label away from the New York Yankees.

I think the Patriots are a talented team. They probably didn’t need to cheat to win 18 games this season, but the fact that they did lessens their accomplishment in my opinion. The fact that they lost when it mattered most, in the super bowl, lessens their accomplishment even more. But for me, the one thing that completely destroys any sense of value from what they have accomplished is the ass-hattery displayed by the Patriot fans who showed the world how to be classless while enjoying a special season.

The Patriots lost one of the biggest games of the decade… and worst, lost to a team that was discounted as an also ran all season and deemed unworthy to face the mighty Patriots in the big game. The loss is humiliating to the team I am sure, but it is probably even more painful for the Patriot faithful… and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving collection of sports fans.

Thank you New York… we have reached equilibrium.