my neuroses is getting the best of me

I’m sitting at my computer too scared to write. Nervous that whatever dribble I manage to squeeze out of my mind’s eye won’t be good enough. I’ve been reading memoirs of famous writers and watching movies about rock star journalists and wondering if my life could ever be like that. I didn’t start writing stories as soon as I could pick up pen; I wasn’t that lonely kid who sat at the back of the class all day long with his nose buried in imaginative pages of some live I wish was my own. I was normal. Compared to most of my friends I was successful, I was well read; but in the grand scheme of wannabe famous writers I was nowhere close. I choose to write. I didn’t have a passion for it. I was just good at it. When I was in grade seven my dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I had nothing, so he asked what I was good at, what I liked in school. I replied that essays were the best part – they were easy, they came naturally. I still remember the way the living room smelt at that moment. The way the leather couch, layered with pubescent cookie crumbs and spilled apple juice, felt beneath me. My dad was doing his ironing in front of the Sunday football game he faked interest in. He asked me if wanted to be writer and I said I did. Some years later in while I was in college my dad was trying to get his book published. He’d ben working on for as long as I can remember. A professor friend of his told him that if he was half the writer his son was he should have no problem. When he recounted this story to me over the telephone I got that same feeling of jubilation as I did that first day in my living room when I chose to write. That is the thing about writing. I can’t separate myself from it. People have these delusions that writing is some sort of pure passion; that I do it for it for it’s own sake. This is disingenuous if not a all out lie. Every word that I write I want someone to read. I don’t do because it makes me feel good; I write because want people to listen to me, I want them to congratulate me a on a job well done. Kant was completely full of shit. There is no separating myself, there is no pure intention. If I save a kid from drowning there is at least part of me that did it because people would think I was nice guy. If I write it’s because I want people to think that I am smart and witty. I want to be smart and witty. And the more I write the witter and the smarter I seem to get so keep going. For no reason at all I start writing, imagining that one day when I’m famous cultural junkies and literary historians will scour my folded napkins, scribbled notebooks, and worn out hardrives for an original Charles Hamilton. The unpublished early works. Pretentious I know, but that is half of what writing is I think. Imagining yourself as somebody else, pretending to be somebody else. Pretending that people will actually care about what you think. You have to have the guts to think that you are worth the ink your words are printed in. If your lucky, maybe they will be.

Thank God for Malcom Gladwell

Ever since I decided I wanted to be a writer I've had this angst about writing. It is an angst I presume is common to most young artists: am I actually any good? Will anyone ever actually read my stuff? Of course, these are the usual predictably vain questions common of youth -- especially those narcissistic youth who believe that people should care about what they say. My minor successes in writing -- and I mean minor -- had quelled such thoughts for a brief period of time. I somehow imagined that the transition from editor of my university newspaper to writing for the Walrus Magazine would be a simple one. My naivete would have me believe that life would somehow happen; that one day I would simply wake up with a best selling novel or a byline on the front page of the New York Times. Instead I woke up at age 23 with no writing job, no degree, and nothing but a hard drive full of unfinished stories. T.S. Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at 23. Mozart was like nine when he started composing symphonies. Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin, and Morrison all died at 27. Could I ever accomplish this feat? At the rate I'm going, I'll be lucky to have a short story or a decent article published by the time I'm 40.
As I'm going over this in my head -- lamenting the passing of my youth and admonishing myself for failing to become a child prodigy -- my idle, my saviour, Malcom Gladwell tells me it is all alright. In an October 20th article for the New Yorker called "Late Bloomers" Gladwell single handedly puts to rest any fears about growing old (www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell).
"On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all," writes Gladwell. "Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith."

Thanks buddy. Now I can sleep at night knowing that just because I am as of yet a failure there is still hope for me.

rough sketches: Breaking Up With My Best Friend

Of all the differing social bonds we human beings develop no one is as perplexing or peculiar as the best friend. Acquaintances are easy. Those people you meet outside smoking or at parties and out of sheer desire to fill the emptiness start a conversation with. You never have to call them or write them emails. As the expression goes, you literally just see them around. Those are the kind of friendships that work best for me. Don’t get me wrong. I, like any other soul possessing bipedal I despise those “So what are you up to these days?” conversations. But after years of mindless socializing outside of scummy rock bars I know how to avoid them. I fancy myself pretty good at making small talk interesting. That is if I decide to talk at all. With these friends, there is no break-up phase. Eventually you just don’t see them around any more. Occasionally you might think about where they might have gone and inquire as to their whereabouts with other smoker buddies, but that’s about the extent of it.
Contrary to what the countless teen angst love ballads and perhaps even your own personal experience might tell you, ending a sexual relationship is also pretty easy. Sure it might hurt like hell, and sure it might feel like your heart is being rung out like a dishrag and sure you might actually contemplate never leaving your bed again, but at least these endings are well defined. You either hate her for the rest of your life or you lump her in with the other acquaintances, allowing her extended hugs and hesitated glances when you haven’t seen each other in while. At my age, I’ve done it enough and I know exactly how to deal with it. This is after all what traditionally comes to mind when we think of the word “break-up.”
I’ve ended best friendships before, but never like this one. There was Julie in kindergarten who I proceeded to talk about for about a week after I was put into French-emersion. Then there was Brendan whose dad got a job as the only gynecologist in some small town out west the summer before we were going into high school. Naturally, his dad had to take the job and my best friend with him. There was Jordan who I was a best friend for few pubescent months in grade school before deciding his obsession with stuffed animals wasn’t really my thing. I was more into action figures, and to prove it we had a real live fistfight in front of the whole class at recess. Those were the days. When friendships were simple and meaningless enough that they could be ended by physical violence. I had other best friendships that fell apart in the more obvious ways. Pete going to a different high school. Lane fucking my girlfriend and me not talking to either of them till this day. Drew and I simply drifting apart. That was the way they are supposed to end. That was natural. With Ryan, it was wholly synthetic.
He phoned me one day while I was on campus and asked if we could go for coffee. This in and of itself was unusual. Coffee was something we did with old girlfriends who wanted to catch up. In would have been more natural for him to suggest that we go catch a movie or go to my house and get stoned. In retrospect, I am glad I was completely sober for this conversation.
“Sure man. That sounds like fun,” I mumbled reluctantly, knowing that if I knew Ryan this was going to be anything but fun. Ryan wasn’t a homosexual, but he was, to say the very least, dramatic. Not that I am classifying the entire gay population as dramatic, or whinny, but it seemed to me that a predisposition towards pseudo masculinity that informed most of my male relationships was a deterrent against any conversation about the future of our friendship. Manly men – due at least in part to their reluctance to show any emotion – wouldn’t have the breaking up with your best friend moment I was about to experience.
After my last class, I met Ryan at the coffee shop. He had a coffee waiting for me – a sort of peace offering. It was black the way I liked it. “So man, what’s up?” I asked, breaking the thick cloud of unasserted tension. “You got any smokes? I lost my pack.”
“I quit.” Ryan was the kind of guy who loved smoking, a spokesperson for the coolness and jazz that preceded lung cancer. When we lived together, he used to sit there watching cartoons and chain smoke until the apartment air was blue. This annoyed me to no end. The cartoons I think more than the smoking. “Why don’t watch something productive?” I used to think to myself. “How is this stuff even funny? How is it even stimulating” Shows like the Simpsons and South Park I could get behind – they were after all brilliant satire. But he watched them all –Family Guy, American Dad, King of the Hill, Spung-Bob Squarepants. The poster child for a generation of pubescent adults hooked on bad toilet humour and obscure cultural references none of us understood. The worst part is he rarely laughed. It, like many of his other habits was depressing.
“Oh.” I said blankly. “Good for you. I guess now that you quit smoking and I don't get high anymore we don't have that much in common." Although it was obvious by the tone of my voice that I was kidding, this was a mistake. I was making things worse. He was avoiding eye contact. I had nothing. “So I’m reading this really cool article right now about how animals have sophisticated language, which is crazy because we used to think that language was the thing that separated us from animals….” I couldn’t remember the details. I was just filling dead air.
“That’s my problem with you,” he said, obviously unimpressed with my weak attempts at small talk, “all you ever talk about is what you are doing, what books you reading, what movies you’ve seen lately.” The outburst caught me off guard. He turned his head to look at me and gave one of those looks that contained a million different meanings. I envied the smaller, dumber, non-linguistic inclined species. For them life was simple. They didn’t have to explain to their immature friends why their friendship had eroded over the years. They didn’t have to explain anything to anybody.
“Jesus man, what’s with the hostility?” Ever since I’d got back from a summer of planting trees up north, Ryan had been pissed at me. I’d moved out of the apartment we had lived in together. I’d found some new people to hang out with – the kind of people who enjoyed listening to music and having conversations instead of playing endless hours of Xbox. It would be a stretch to say I was happier, but at least I felt like I was getting somewhere.
In my first few years of college I really liked Ryan. We had been friends in high school, part of a larger more homogeneous group of stoner kids who despised sports, jocks, who no longer rode our skateboards and spent most of our time smoking across the street. But after everyone else either moved away or didn’t continue on to university it was Ryan and I who seemed to have similar interests. We liked rock concerts, smoking pot, downloading porn, and going occasionally going to class. But after two years of coming home, getting stoned watching Ryan play online football matches in underwear, I was getting bored. He had no ambition. He wasn’t going anywhere. I wanted to move on. I was beginning to sound like a needy girlfriend. But then again, he was the one breaking up with me.
After contemplating for a moment my rather canned response to his accusation, he said it. “I can’t do this anymore. We’re through.” For a moment my heart skipped a beat and I felt the corners of my eyes swell up. It was as if my body was concocting some sort of automatic response to those words, which many times in my life ruined me for months.
“Your breaking up with me?” I managed to choke out. I was in state of disbelieve. Not that we weren’t going to be best friends anymore – that fact had apparent to me for months – but that he was actually saying this out loud instead of letting our friendship take its natural course and die the usual slow, harmless death.
“If you call deleting our bff status on Facebook and taking you off of speed dial and never calling you about my girl shit or posting funny videos for you online, then yes I am breaking up with you.”
Whether or not such a Facebook application existed was a mystery to me, but I think I got the point. It was odd though. Unlike a normal break-up – the kind that are defined by heartache, and picture burning, and months of convincing yourself you still love her – our relationship was never defined. The word “love” was never an issue. We were best friends mainly because of circumstance and proximity. The only time we ever really admitted we were best friends was when Ryan was getting dumped and in a moment of sentimentality I told him “I here for you man. I mean common, I’m your best friend.” If this had been a relationship – if I had known beforehand that breaking-up was an option – I would have done it months ago.
He got up to walk away and I was left there alone with my black coffee. The last thing my best friend of two years would say to me was “I am breaking up you.” It was almost too perfect, too poetic. I was speechless. Mainly because with Ryan gone I had no one to talk to and sitting alone talking to myself in the coffee shop like a crazy person was no way to make a new best friend.

French Impose New Copyright Law

Another blow in the battle for a free Internet has been dealt -- this time by the Sarkozy and the French government. The BBC reports that the government plans to shut down internet connections and IP addresses of music and movie pirates all over France in an attempt to quell what it sees as a growing tide of piracy. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7706014.stm. At least they are not suing children and single mothers, but cutting off people's internet is an infringement on their digital rights. This is not going to go over well. Trust me. Just look at this other BBC article on the same webpage about "innocent" -- that is non-piraters -- being caught in a similar crack down by gaming companies. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7697898.stm

Truth isn't stranger than fiction

. I've been listening to David Sedaris's new book on my iPod as I ride my bike to school, to yoga, to the grocery store, and most often the coffee shop. If he has taught me anything it is that life should be embellished. As a journalist I was taught not to lie. And for good reason. Of course, to say that I don't embellish would itself be a lie. I try to make stories that on their own would be boring into something interesting. To do that I tell white lies. I make it seem like student politics are really interesting, or that the latest internet application really is going to change the world. I make it seem like the opposing forces on either side of a particular debate really hate each other, directing their quotes as attacks on each other when in fact neither of them think much about the other. I create artificial narratives so that people will care. These are lies in the most modest sense of the word. To assume that the world of writing is "lie free" or "always truthful" is a misconception. While writing his famous pastoral, Walden, Thoreau was playing the part of a liar. He did live in an old rickety cabin near Walden pond. He did see ants creating a life for themselves, and witness the constant creep of the urbanization that threatened his little paradise. But to say he was roughing it is an exaggeration. Emerson's mother did his laundry and fed him on a regular basis. He frequented the town to visit his friends and talk over drinks of whiskey at the local pub. Just because he wasn't actually "roughing it" as the book proclaims, does that make it any less important? His story is one of the most beloved pastoral masterpieces of the last century and it came because Henry was willing to embellish, to lie. Thoreau seems to thrown out the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. In many ways it is the other way around. We can learn more about life by lying our way through it.
So when I sit down every night, saturated with the days events and Sedaris's voice running through my head I am inclined to embellish, to lie my way through my writing. None of freinds will hang out with me ever since I quit smoking pot, because really that is all we ever had in common. I find myself searching porn sites late at night trying to find girls that resemble my ex-girlfriend. I have pages and pages of unpublished stories that no one will ever read, exept maybe if I become famous and some archivist digs through all my old hard drives. These aren't whole truths; but they are not flat out lies either. They're somewhere in between. Artistic embellishments we will call them.
To assume that we grab ideas ideas out of thin air, that our creative minds are so powerful that they are able to conjure up brilliantly thought out realities is absurd. Even the most fantastical of stories have their routes in fact, and most often contain elements of the biographical. Sedaris and Thoreau are great examples. By telling half-truths they reveal something about the world previously undiscovered. Their friends and perhaps the greater public might hate them for lying, or even more likely for revealing the truth. I can't remember the quotation exactly and I can't seem to find in my desk anywhere, but I think Jane Smiley once said something to effect "good writers won't have any friends." The underlying principle being that good writing should reveal uncomfortable truths about the world, and the people around you. In a round about way, it should reveal the truth through lying.

life's all in the details

It's too late at night now to write anything academic, so I'm taking a break from my usual intellectual masturbation to write this. I can't spell very well. For the first time in my adult life I had to write something by hand I figured that out. I am probably a way slower typist because I have to go back and fix all those words with squiggly red lines underneath. I tell myself that it's because I think in concepts not words. I have no need to pay attention the details when only the broad concepts matter. Then I start to think -- mostly in my late night melancholic states -- that the details are all that matter.
Just because Kennedy got shot we forget that he cheated the 1960 election. He had dead people voting for him for in Illinois and Texas. Nixon should have won. In the history books these are just the details. Imagine for a moment if those details had turned out different. Imagine the American identity without the assassination of Kennedy as a cultural touchstone. Imagine if we never saw that video growing up as kids. Would Bobby have been shot? Would 9/11 of happened? Okay, now I'm just being melodramatic. That whole Butterfly Affect thing doesn't really make sense anyway. The whole thing is predicated on time travel, which for the most part doesn't even work in science fiction. I mean you can travel through time; we do it everyday. But time doesn't exist as linear -- that is, it isn't some river that we can travel down. Time and space are connected as a whole. My friend claims she time traveled once. It was in a blue Toyota Corolla. Her professor had made some off hand remark about cars being like time-travel machines and she hadn't really thought anything of it until once day when she was waiting for the bus and this blue Corolla picked her up. She got to school twenty minutes before she normally did when she was taking the bus. "Holy shit!" she thought to herself, "cars are time travel machines!"
I always liked that story. I'm twenty three years old and that the only time in my life that time travel made sense. It didn't make sense in Terminator 2, or in the last season of Heroes. Remember that girl that Peter just leaves in the future? If Peter prevented that terrible future from happening, if that future no longer exists, where the hell did she go? Here we go again with the details. Maybe that's why I stopped paying attention. Not enough of them make sense. Sometimes non of them do. Like why do I talk to myself out loud late at night? Or why must I always be narrating my own thoughts when I get up from the couch to grab a glass of water? Why are all my drunk friends calling me 4am? These are things I just can't seem to wrap my head around. Details.