:hug:

We need to get together and get drunk and whine at each other for a few hours.

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Man, you salty dog. MAN. I know this is gonna be tougher to see from the eye of the misery-storm, but I just read your last three posts in reverse order and they were fucking great. You know what you've got here? You've got a kick ass start to a novel. I'm not kidding, it has the immediate hook, then it keeps you interested, and it's perched right on the edge of when massive changes will theoretically take place in our protagonists life. I swear, it's gold.

Even the literary conceit on the book being in the form of the blog is, with extreme care, possibly a cool thing. Done poorly it would seriously date the work and make everybody embarassed to read it, but done well, I think it could be cool. Reading the first three entries in reverse order worked so well that it could become a deliberate part of the story's style -- at crucial points in the story it could jump back to a blog entry from months or years before, illuminating something important, and then you could use the tried-but-true ending of the last entry being an old one where the prog was fulfilled and happy. Hopefully mirroring the new place he's carved for himself, but if you want to be depressing it could be the negative image of how his current life has spiraled into shit.

If life has taught me one thing, it's that writing a book is not a soft option. I'm still beating my own brains out trying to get one of mine into a publishable form. But I had to lay this idea on you, because after I read those last three posts I wanted to read more. I was into it. You've always had one of the better livejournals on my list, but being steeped in misery has elevated your game.

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And if you need a general theme to keep things on track, there's nothing better than the utter discrediting and destruction of that trite "time heals all wounds" bullshit. Going out and making your mark on the world, altering your environment and shaping reality to your will, that heals wounds. Time just makes you motherfucking old.

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Dammit, McNally. You need to be close enough to go get fucking drunk with. And that's all there is to that.

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Man, I'm digging deeper into the archives and it just keeps getting better and better. I bet you thought you got a bunch of responses, but it's just me over and over again. I got two words for you: Allegorical Autobiography. That's my guiding concept behind a book I'm writing about a guy from small-town Japan who moves to Tokyo and becomes a crazy-ass mohawked punk. It's great, I can take things that happen to me, explode them by 500%, and have one roller-coater ride of a novel. Straight biography, boring. Fake biography, that's where it's at.

I've also gotten on this kick where I've decided that fiction is more important than history. It helps embiggen my concept of what I'm actually doing here. I'm not just telling a story. I'm guiding the future, man. It goes hand in hand with my other theory, that pop culture is the only culture. Put them together, and suddenly an amusing story becomes the agent with which to embiggen mankind. For awhile, before some new pop culture wipes it out. But I'm cool with that.

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Jesus, I used "embiggen" twice. I realize it's a perfectly cromulent word, but fuck. As for getting drunk, once my year lease runs out on my apartment, the world's my oyster. Couch surfing for a month was a blast this summer. For me, not so much for my hosts. But I'm definitely planning to continue my random hobo travels, unless I get a tied down with a girlfriend. But apparently I'm not as smooth as Zornog. Jesus.

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I noticed the double-embiggen. Also, I wince to tell you that "cromulent" is just no longer cromulent. I've seen it used in far too many livejournals as "clever and fresh" now; it occupies the same lexiconic geography as "def" after that once-proud word showed up in the 1984-ish edition of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. (MTV actually had a party for it, as I recall. "To the death of def - long live def.")

We still should get drunk, though.

In only-tangentially-related news, I've been wishing desperately there were some sort of Fight-Club-esque place you could go when you really needed to just get in a meaningless brawl, one you could walk into, and walk away from, and know you could just HURT and BE hurt without everything being all dire and consequential and all these lasting angsty feelings about it. You know?

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My outlet of choice are punk shows, and their peripherally associated sub-subcultures. They were few and far between in Fredericton, much more prevalent in Vancouver. There are a lot of kids there, and at a mere 25 I tend to feel old, but the trick is that the kids don't go near the pit. They're too damn wuss. So it's only berserker youth and older guys in there, and it's great fun. There's one local punk writer named Chris Walter who's 44, and still goes to all the shows. It really doesn't matter how old a person is or how they dress: Once you get in the pit with them, punks are extraordinarily accepting.

It's more like a parody of violence than an actual brawl. A lot of body checking and random smashing into each other, but people do still get hurt. Namely skinny guys like me. I went to a DOA/SNFU show a couple weeks ago and got a huge sickly bruise on my leg, and could barely bend my knee the next day. Last week I went to a KMFDM show, which wasn't quite the same, but was still cool. I showed up, had a few drinks, got exhausted and sweaty in the pit, got kicked in the jaw by a crowd surfer, smashed my nose against someone's shoulder (but avoided bleeding), then got handed a joint by some random guy during one of the lulls. I don't even smoke, but shit, it was free. The problem with the whole night was that I had to work graveyard at my coffee shop job afterward.

So basically it was the equivalent of getting up in the morning, having a little stretch, getting pounded by ultra loud industrial music for two hours, smoking, drinking and getting kicked in the head, then going to work. Fuck, that was a long night.

In a punk show pit that no one cares if they get hurt, as long as no bones get broken. No one cares if they get shoved around. If you want to get to the front and you have to push your way through people, nobody gives you shit about it. If you just got elbowed in the face and you wanna get out, people part for you like water. Just the removal of physical social etiquette alone is enough to keep me coming back. It's tough to find a good sized pit, because small ones suck and big ones are just a throng of people sardined together, but those happy middles are a great fucking time.

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Yeah, I've been to a few of those, and loved them. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of moshing anymore, at least around here, though - or if there is, it's all REALLY fucking young kids, I totally know what you mean about already feeling old at punk shows at 25. Wait 'til you're 32.

I've really only been in one mosh pit that turned bad. I'm usually one of the bigger guys in a mosh pit if I get in one - I'm not huge, it just seems usually to be smaller, wirier guys. And yeah, it's funny, you nail somebody really fucking good and then they come back for more. "FUCK yeah, that guy just ROCKED me with that forearm in the back!" The one time it turned bad, though, was at this huge outdoor concert, not punk, about... I dunno, seven or eight years ago? There were something like 120,000 people at the show, and there was an enormous mosh pit that was supposedly not supposed to happen but the cops never stopped them, they just sort of whined over the PA in between sets sometimes - this being one of those all-day 20-band types of shows - and anyway, one year I was in there and everything was fine for a while, but then these fucking ENORMOUS, like 250-300 pounds, toothless - like literally missing teeth - mutants started coming in there, and they were just plain out for blood. I had to get the fuck out.

Something like that would be fucking great. I should ask some of the guys around here that I used to go to a few punk shows with if there ARE any venues around here that mosh. None of the ones I went to with them before did, but maybe I was just missing something.

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It took me awhile to key into the good places around here. At first I'd go to these run down, totally scummy, punk-as-fuck places, figuring I'd found my mecca, but everybody would just stand or sit around while the band played. I'd be like, "What are you doing, you fucks? You have spikes coming out of your face, why aren't you moshing!?" Except that I'd express that by quietly drinking a pitcher of beer without saying shit.

I've never been in a real bad pit, but I saw an interview with a guy on Much Music once, at a Warped Tour, who was this huge goon who told the interviewer straight up that he wasn't gonna leave the pit until he broke at least one guy's nose. That's one reason why I was so surprised at how benevolent the violence of a pit is. I figured they were all full of insane nose-breakers.

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On my way to library I thought of something else to post, while I'm raping your comment box. You ever heard that Elliot Smith song "Happiness"? I can play it five times in a row on a good day, being in wallowing pity mode could possibly make it the most powerful song in the universe. Give that bitch a download -- maybe it'll soak up some melancholy and help expedite getting to a point where you can crush puny reality under your mighty heel.

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and help expedite getting to a point where you can crush puny reality under your mighty heel.

That, sir, is a state better expedited by having a crazy-ass Canuck couch-surfer and itinerant writer come crashing into your virtual house after many, many months of absence, brazenly adjust his balls like he lives there, and say something so incredibly fucking uncouth and real that it can't help but smash right through the funk you're in for a while and let you go out in the world and feel kinda dangerous and valid again.

(I did, however, download the song. I will give you impressions of it later.)

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Sounds like Jim needs a Wavefest... one coming up in Charleston...

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I usually just fuck the first thing that walks by...while I wince at guys and their violence, that way is by far more healthy...

Although they don't call me the Tawninator for nothing 'round these parts!

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get a small amount of money -- say 100 or 200$ -- and make a road trip for the fuck of it.

go to some fucking far away town just to buy a book and some coffee.

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[Froederick and Igor are exhuming a dead criminal]

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : What a filthy job.
Igor : Could be worse.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : How?
Igor : Could be raining.
*it starts to rain*

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