Well, You Can't Get What You Want, But You Can Get Me, So Let's Set Up And See, 'Cause You Are My Medicine, When You're Close To Me

--"On Melancholy Hill", Gorillaz

My sleep is pretty much messed up these days. There are nights where I simply do not go to bed at all, only to fall asleep at eleven in the morning for a few hours. Some of that can be explained by my sudden urge to work on projects late at night, but even when I used to portray the night owl I could always go to be at four or five and still manage a few hours of sleep before waking up at ten. This whole business of not getting any sleep at all is worrisome. What it tells me is that without a threat of something substantial to do the next morning that my body doesn't feel the need to rest up.

What it tells me is that my body really would rather not sleep than sleep.

I don't know if it's due more to the stress or finally being able to truly burn the midnight oil without having to worry about the consequences. Personally, I think it has more to due with being stressed out about being unemployed, about letting so many people down because of being unemployed (trips and what-not), and about wondering if I'm cut out for the daily if and when I do get back to work. In a way, I think my body is giving voice to what I will never publicly say; that I'm scared about my prospects for the future.

And yet, there's always something that can get me to relax once more and allow some kind of peace so I can sleep the next morning. Whenever I get stressed out like this--say like this morning--I know that I can just call Lucy either right before or right after her morning jog and she'll talk me down off the ledge. Granted, it's not a security blanket I want to lean on quite all the time since I don't want to overstay my welcome.

But that's the thing about security blankets. They don't really need to do all that much. The sense of security stems more from the whole notion that they're there should they by needed. She doesn't everything right for me; she just has to give me the sense that's the way things are.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

My Hands, Don't Wanna Start Again, My Hands, No, They Don't Wanna Understand, My Hands, They Just Shake It, Try To Break Whatever Peace I May Find

--"My Hands", Leona Lewis

Of all the writers I know I'm probably the one who gets the majority of his ideas from other pieces of entertainment rather than current events. Somehow I find it easier to crib ideas from something that has already worked once rather than to crib ideas from something from a more news-related source. Perhaps it's my anti-news media basis, but I just find stories more entertaining that news.

That being said, I never exactly translate what I read or see into its literal doppelganger on the page. My process has always been to take that initial spark of a plot, of a scene, of a vignette and meld it with something personal out of my own life. I don't know if the split is exactly 50/50, but I'd suspect it is rather close to that ratio. Every story I write whether or not I'm writing it as something out of my own life or something with the guise of fiction ends up being something along the lines of a hybrid. That's the way I operate. I mean--I believe that's the way most writers operate. Everybody who has written something resembling a story, biographical or not, manages to contaminate some of his truth with fiction, or vice-versa. There's no story under the sun that doesn't reveal a bit about the author AND a bit about what types of stories he likes. It's the nature of the beast. We're both a product of our lives and the lives of these imaginary others.

I used to try to fool myself into thinking that the stories I wrote were all my ideas, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that with every sentence I write I can recall something similar happening in a movie or novel I read once upon a time. The human experience doesn't change from person to person. The particulars might change, sure, but the underlying motive and results pretty much fall along the same guidelines. That's why I don't really distinguish between sources any more. To me it doesn't matter if something happened to a person I know in real life or a character on Avonlea. The way I see things, all people--imaginary or not--are characters and all stories--whether they happen in public or just on the page--are plots of one sort or another. Now I realize that I'm never going to write anything new, per se. The most I can do is repackage in a way that says something of me and of what I believe. Not only that, but I can produce a work that speaks to people about what I think is an interesting story, what themes I like and what kind of characters I like.

Take, for instance, the story I'm currently working on concurrently with The Carisa Meridian. It's been ruminating in my mind for a few days now. In actuality, though, it's been percolating for almost twenty years now. Ostensibly, the plot of the story will be:

A wiseass twentysomething male "talent" or person born with special abilities, escapes his handlers at a private military company in order to free his much younger brother from a state mental facility, where he is being experimented on. What the guy doesn't know is that his brother is being groomed to be a state-sponsored assassin and that the military company he works for is actually hell-bent on bringing down this program. He escapes with his brother in order to bring him back to his parents on the other side of the country.

Meanwhile, the government hires out a bounty hunter to track down the boy and the handlers pick up the scent as well.

Along the way they meet a female talent, outside the system or government, who agree to help them get to their parents in exchange whatever little cash they have left.

In the end they find the boy's talent has manifested already, making him a very dangerous weapon without the maturity to control who it's used upon. By the end of film it isn't exactly clear if the boy would be better off in the mental facility where they can control him (even while they take advantage of him) or with his family, who have no hope of giving him the help he needs, or with the private military company whose only goal is to destroy the weapon to make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

However, in actuality, the whole basis of the movie stems from my stated goal of wanting to remake The Wizard. Wrapping it up in a sci-fi/superhero concept just sounded like a decent idea because, frankly, doing a straight-up remake would work these days. However, I still believe that a story which basically boils down to a hero's journey except with three people could work. It doesn't matter whether if the forces that are chasing them draw their power from their positions of authority over the trio (as it was in the film) or if the forces that are chasing them draw their power from actual powers; the result is the same. It's still going to be about three people searching for some type of answer at the end of the road and, once they get there, they're going to find the answers that they were looking for can't be found that easily. Granted, that theme doesn't have the Nintendo-colored gloss that the movie does, but that's what I've always believed was the heart of the film. To me, as my favorite film, it always had more subtext than people gave it credit for. I can only hope that when I write up my idea it'll possess the selfsame qualities.


And I see diferent shades now
And I, I'm almost never afraid now
but when I think I'll be ok
I am always wrong cause

More than that, I'm hoping to infuse it with a level of dramatic flair that was somewhat lacking in the source. As such, I'm not planning on making it easy on any of the characters. There will be no taking it easy on my characters, no hand-holding, which is just a fancy way of saying that I have no intention of taking it easy on the audience. Whereas The Wizard had as one of its unstated goals to make children and teenagers redefine what exactly constitutes a family as well as take a long hard look at how grief and loss can be overcome, my story is going to reflect more of what I think has been a central journey for me.

Rather than ideas such as family and repairing the bonds of family, I've always wanted to write a story about a person whose whole life just seemed like it's been out of his hands the entire time. Everyone I've ever talked has felt like this at one or another, but I haven't seen too many movies or novels dealing with this conceit. The closest I've ever seen would be movies like The Truman Show and novels like The Tenure Itch, but even then the quest has always been used for comedic effect. It's bothered me that I can't find anything of import dealing with the idea head-on. Rather than complain about it for the next few years, I decided to try and sketch out something more along the lines of Blade Runner, where man's search for control over his own life is translated into a more substantial plot and given the heft that it deserves.

After all, if the stakes don't matter, then you're not really risking anything. And I can't think of anything more risky than trying to gain control over your own fate when the whole world is telling you who or what you're supposed to be and who or what you're not supposed to be. It's not supposed to be an easy quest and you might just find out that you were simply never meant ever to have control over it.

At least that's been my experience.

But, if anything, if there's one thing I learned, it's that you can only hold onto somebody's hand for so long. You can only be lead by the people around you, by the circumstances around you, for so long. Eventually you've got to learn to let go of most, if not all, of the things you were taught to hold dear. You can't ever be sure of who are until you're sure of what you want, and the only way that happens is if you start fresh from square one. Sometimes the journey to discover who you are really does start with walking out of who you used to be and seeing what's left.

It's been a motif of mine that literal journeys can often become symbolic journeys. It's why I take drives up PCH when I'm wrestling with a personal crisis. It's why I usually travel once a year when I'm feeling especially lost. It's also why I somehow associate living somewhere else as being synonymous with some kind of epiphany because doing that would mean letting go of most of the people in my life. And letting go of the people in my life really would mean letting go of most of what makes up the person I am today.

And for now that's not a journey I'm brave enough to take.

Except maybe on paper with a story about a boy whose broken out of mental facility by his brother and then taken on a journey by him and a redheaded stranger they meet along the way.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Blue Moon, You Saw Standing Me Alone, Without A Dream In My Heart, Without A Love Of My Own

--"Blue Moon", Ricky Hatton

I've liked the Red Sox since around 1987, ever since I started collecting and trading baseball cards. I don't know if it was the fact that they were perennial underdogs--what with the 87-year curse and all--or because of my supposed past life connection to Boston, but ever since I liked baseball as a sport, I've liked the Boston Red Sox.

Yes, I've liked other sports and other teams at different times in my life. I mean--I still follow the USC Trojans because they're my alma mater. And I still tend to root for the Minnesota Wild simply because they have to got to have the coolest NHL logo I've ever seen. And, yes, in recent years since I started playing fantasy basketball and football I've started to grow attached to the two particular teams from New Orleans, the Hornets and the Saints. But no other team in any other sport has captivated me with their personal history of loving the art of losing so grandly than the Red Sox. No other team has piqued my interest for relishing their proclivity for screwing the pooch than the Sawx.

Until now.


now I'm no longer alone

Ziggy and Zags recently came back from a whirlwind trip through England and they brought with them various tales of hanging out with the locals at a few football matches. They were so taken with the culture and the climate of these sporting events that they started following along with the Premier League in earnest ever since they've been back. In the process co-opted me into following the league myself.

Event though it's been rather difficult to follow on with piddly little coverage of the sport over here in the states, I've found myself motivated to keep up with the results on ESPN and various other sources. At first, I was just watching to make fun of the gals, but somewhere along the way I've started to notice more and more of its charms. And along the way I started to realize I could never call myself a real fan until I had a team to root far. After all, anyone could say they enjoy soccer, but it isn't until you take the last step and actually declare your allegiance that you truly become a fan. In the spirt I've found myself being more and more drawn to one team in particular.

Manchester City Football Club.

As Wikipedia puts it:

City supporters tend to believe that unpredictability is an inherent trait of their team, and label unexpected results "typical City". Events that fans regard as "typical City" include City's being the only reigning English champions ever to be relegated (in 1938), the only team to score and concede over 100 goals in the same season (1957–58), or the more recent example that City were the only team to beat Chelsea in the 2004–05 Premier League, yet in the same season City were knocked out of the FA Cup by Oldham Athletic, a team two divisions lower.

That aesthetic just reminds me of the Red Sox before 2004 when it was almost a religion to note each and every failure at clinching a World Series to whomever would listen. I don't know--something about rooting for a team whose fans love them not only despite their misgivings but also because of them speaks to the romantic in me. I've never been one to root for the established and dominant power in a sport; for me it's much more satisfying to love a team who just can never go all the way than root for a team for whom a championship is all but a foregone conclusion. Not only that, it's much more relaxing to follow a team whose chances of dominance are negligible... and then have them win anyway then to follow a team whose chances are good, only to have them rot it away.

The other thing that drew the romantic eye in me for City is the fact the "official" unofficial chant for the Blues is "Blue Moon." That's a song I've always loved as a representative of the whole doowop genre. It's always been the best example of the "wistful and forlorn" aesthetic I've admired for awhile. However, in the hands of City fans, who bust the song out with gusto, it becomes nothing short of a heroic anthem.

So, who knows, this may be my only season liking the team or I may just continue to follow them for seasons to come. All I know is through it all it gives a warm feeling to me to be part of that following for a team that is as unorthodox as I am. Or as the local fans like to say, "Typical City." LOL

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

--"Rainbows in the Dark", Tilly & The Wall

I've always wanted a cast-iron skillet. Ever since I saw Lucy's mom doing a good portion of her Christmas cooking on one of those I've been forever intrigued its practicality. I mean--for chrissakes, it can go from the stovetop to the oven, and even back again. That's one handy convenience if you're into cooking.

For the longest time I put off buying one because I had plenty of frying pans and plenty of oven dishes to do all my cooking and baking in. I just couldn't bring myself around into putting out the extra expense. In fact, I didn't break down and finally purchase one until last week when I came across one at a decent price and a decent size while I was out grocery shopping. I didn't really want to buy it for myself because I always partially assumed somebody would be getting one for me since I practically tell everyone I know how much I love cast-iron skillet cooking. Also, another small reason was I'm just one of those people if I don't buy something within days of hearing about it, I just never end up buying it.

The main reason I didn't want to buy it for myself has to do with the fact that Breanne's cast-iron skillet has been in existence for four generations and it's still going great. Starting with her great-grandmother it has been passed down from mother to daughter as soon as the younger generation moves out to live on her own, much like their antique mirror. That's over ninety years her skillet has been providing sustenance to that family. I don't know--with something as sturdy as that, it really shouldn't start its legacy with me. That's the kind of heirloom should really have started before me and the kind of heirloom I should have expected to be coming my way very soon.

----

I say this because tomorrow is the anniversary to when my grandma died. Aside from the crappy fact that St. Patrick's Day is pretty much ruined for the rest of my life due to the unfortunate timing, I always get a little melancholy due to the fact that our family doesn't hold very many traditions sacred. Sure, the bulk of my family buys into Catholicism and all its trappings, but as far as family traditions and heirlooms go, we don't possess many at all. There's nothing that really binds one generation to the next; there's no watch that my father got from his father that I'll be getting. There's no mirror for my girl cousins that they're anticipating. If and when I go to the service tomorrow, it will be just like any other family function. We'll gather, we'll pray (well, some of them will anyway), we'll eat, and then we'll go home. Compared to most families, we're not exactly tight with one another--at least from my perspective.

And I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that we've never really established these traditions.

We've never gone on the full-board family reunions. Yes, we've done family trips before, but they were sporadic and almost always devolved into either the Taroc clan going gambling, which doesn't exactly lend itself to much bonding at all. And, yes, mostly there isn't a sense of history passed along from one generation to the next. I barely know anything of the legacy of my family and, with that, I really don't possess an oral history to go along with my understanding of them. I'm not comfortable talking to many of the generation before me mostly because what went on before I was born really doesn't get disseminated all that often and definitely in public. Everything I've learned was through secondhand sources or accidental revelations. There's never been one time I can remember where we kids just sat around and were told stories of the old country or even what our parents were like growing up.

Maybe that's why my grandma's death really hasn't stuck with me or even affected me that much. While she was alive I never got a true sense of who she was. I only knew her as my dad's mom, who could barely speak English to me. Maybe I never saw her as a person. Certainly I never saw her as someone connected to me in any measurable way. Logically she was my grandmother, but emotionally she may as well have been the old lady down the street.

Would this have been solved if we had more of a dialogue going? Perhaps. Is this the kind of failure to communicate that could have been resolved with some kind of heirloom being passed down? Maybe. The part of me that has studied up on oral tradition and the power of symbolism believes that if there'd been an instant where I received such instruction or been shown something concrete of what our family was built upon, I might have taken my family's place in the world more seriously. As it is, I don't even know what I think of my family sometimes. It's like we're just a bunch of people (who aren't even really friends) who gather sometimes but only are really connected in name only. I don't feel the bond with most of my family and I don't see that situation getting any better.

----

That's why I bought the cast-iron skillet because, unlike Breanne's family, I knew that if I didn't start something along the lines of that kind of tradition, then no one would. And, unlike my grandma, when I think about dying, I want to think about someone receiving something of mine that they can tell their kids that I owned once upon a time and so on, and so forth. I don't want to die thinking there's nothing physical out there connecting me to my progeny.

Besides, I'm pretty much counting on the fact that my heirs will still be making grilled swiss and cheddar sandwiches when they're up late at night writing their own blogs. LOL

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

And If You Were Here, You Would Believe, But Would You Suspect, My Emotion Wandering, Yeah

--"If You Were Here", Thompson Twins

Usually in the summer months around, May or June, I'd be planning out my annual trip. As it's an even year this year that would mean setting up plane tickets, hotel reservations, and baseball tickets in Boston as I've taken a trip there in 2005, 2006, and 2008. I was completely intending to make it an bi-annual tradition. In fact, I was going to do something really special this year on account that my good friend Toby is graduating from high school this year. I was going to fly out to Louisville, pick her and her sister up, and we were all going to drive out to Boston to stay for a few days just so I could show them my favorite city in the entire world. Call it a graduation gift, if you will, but to me it would have been a sorely needed grand road trip, something I haven't done in over a decade.

But with my unemployment situation it doesn't look likely that I'll actually be able to get away this year. It's a wicked shame because I was really looking forward to this trip, not only to see dw again, but to be able to show yet another couple of my friends somewhere where I truly feel like myself in.

It's more than that, though. People tend to regard trips as excursions to new and wonderful places. I too have been accused of flaunting my sojourns (especially to ballparks and restaurants around the country) as weapons to rub my local friends' noses in. Every time I come back, I relate stories of what it's like seeing this so-and-so team play or what kind of food the other half of the country eats. In general, I tend to repeatedly bring up the fact that I've been to just so many cities as compared to most of the people I know. This is unintentional, of course. To me it's more about relating what all happened while I was away and the main way I relate to any city is how their people are like. And to me the best two places to see that are in their stadiums and in their restaurants/local hangouts.

Yet what most people don't realize is that most of the time I don't take my trips to go somewhere new; I take most of these trips to get away from something old. That's the reason I don't fly very often with people on trips and why most of the time, if I'm hooking up with friends, it's always with friends in whatever city I'm flying into. Hell, it's probably the main reason why I make friends with people all over the country, just to have an excuse to fly to new cities. Most of the time I can't imagine myself going on with the people I know here, the people I see everyday. I mean--I like them and all, but the purpose of a vacation is to get away from your everyday experience, and that means getting away from the friends and family you see everyday. Brandy put it best when she said that probably the only person I'd actually like to get away with would be my girlfriend or wife... and even that she wasn't sure of.

It's telling that a close friend of mine doesn't believe I'd ask my girlfriend/wife to accompany me. However, it's kind of true. I'm the type of person who has a low threshold for being comfortable in one place too long. Moreover, I get very frustrated having to deal with the same people with day after day. That's why going on holiday really is a kill-two-birds kind of proposition.

Not only do I get away from the same sets of four walls I see everyday.

But I also get away from the same fourteen people I tend to hang out with everyday.

Except this year. This year's going to suck. LOL

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

Oh, Mirror In The Sky, What Is Love? Can The Child Within My Heart, Rise Above? Can I Sail Through The Changing Ocean Tides?

--"Landslide", Fleetwood Mac

A lot of topics exist of which I don't claim to be an expert. Whether through sheer apathy or merely a sense of complete befuddlement I know there are a lot of topics which I don't feel qualified to expound upon here or anywhere. It just never made sense to me to contribute my thoughts on a subject, aside from regurgitating straight facts, when they would be incomplete. It'd be just like trying to drive a car to Georgia from California when you only have a half of a tank left.

However, one topic I've always felt quite comfortable discussing is that of relationships between two people. It's not because I consider myself an expert on the subject as a whole. I'm quite confident there's still more I have to learn about the human heart. It's merely that I believe I've seen and experienced a heck of whole lot of scenarios for me to weigh in with my own stories and apply them to most, if not all, of the problems that arise when dealing with such an elusive subject. I may not have all the answers, but I think I can provide a somewhat informed opinion to people I know who may be in need of assistance. I may not have an overwhelming pool of acquaintances to sample from, but that sentiment seems to be the general consensus around these parts.

So you can forgive me if I take the time tonight to work through a conundrum about love that I've been seeing creep again and again in recent memory.

Basically, it's begin to itch at me the way people can love each other at all. I mean--I'm not talking about the way families love each other because that's something instinctual and primal. I'm talking about the way people fall in (and out) of love with another on an almost day-to-day basis. I've had a lot of friends who run the gamut of being serial daters, people who have a new boyfriend or girlfriend week to week, to people who have only been with two or three people for their entire lives. And yet it still befuddles me upon occasion the way the process works at all. Why do people fall in love with one another? Why do people jump so fearlessly into a proposition that ninety percent of the time ends in utter catastrophe? Sometimes I just don't see the motivation in putting oneself into a position where one can be utterly devastated time and time again. It's like walking into the ocean and daring the waves to knock you over one more time.

And I'm diehard romantic idealist too! It's just sometimes, when I'm having a bad day or I read something new, I start looking at how really flawed people can be (myself included). I'm all looking for the bright side of love--I love being in love--but eventually there always comes a point where the little annoyances, the little letdowns, the little earthquakes that rock any relationship simply cannot be ignored. The truth of the matter is even the people who love you the most, the people into whom you've placed the most trust, are going to crush your soul every so often. It's inevitable. All those times where you have your unyielding trust placed into them only to have it broken, those times don't ever fully get forgotten. Happy memories linger too, but not in the same fashion that the bad memories linger. It's the same way you hardly remember when your life is completely in order as opposed to when your life has swung completely into the chaos side of the gauge. People just hold onto the stink far longer than the sweet smell of success simply because they're used more to the latter than the former. People are just not used to experiencing the complete bliss that life can bring as opposed to the upheaval it produces. It's why the good times are so often rare and need to be cherished, because it's harder to lift yourselves up to heaven than it is to stay mired in the muck.

Even the best of people with the best of intentions towards you are going to fuck you up sometime. I know. I've been there.

That's the rub. In most situations where one fails so often and succeeds so rarely, one would be prone to forego all the suffering. It's the nature of things, if you're not successful at something over a prolonged period of time it usually foreshadows the realization that you'll never be good at it. It's usually a sign pointing out that you need to surrender any ambition of accomplishing your task as quickly as possible lest you drive yourself mad with the frustration. I mean--of any process, I believe believing in love, keeping love, or even staying positive about the subject is an entirely hopeless cause. You have so little control over the outcome if you really think about and it almost always controls every fiber of your being while you're under it's spell that it doesn't seem a fair bargain at all. You putting yourself at such a high risk for such a small shot at a reward that you can't be sure is even worth it. What's the point of it all?

Yeah, for the most part, I would rather have love in my life than not, but for the most part I don't understand why inevitably we all fall into this pattern of self-defeat. For me I believe I've been more in love with the idea of love than been all that sold on the actual state of being. It's easy to fall for the hearts and flowers, the nights spent talking on the beach about shared hopes, the days spent in bed wrapped up in the covers with one's lover with no intentions of ever getting out, &c... It's harder to see all the weeks spent in agony wondering where you really stand with this other person. It's harder to explain how one person can bring you to the edge of tears only moments after bringing the most delirious of smiles to your face. It's harder to comprehend how you can stand to be in love with someone when it's painfully obvious that they are not in love with you with the constancy and the quality with which you feel you deserve. It's harder to understand how you can feel so lonely sitting next to someone you claim to be so close to.

I don't question the joy love can bring to your life. I question the price that it exacts upon your sanity and well-being. It's like you make this blind bit for something you've been told is priceless and necessary, but nobody can explain what it is you're exactly getting or when you'll be able to see all of it or even what it's going to take to fully pay for its upkeep. And you keep bidding more and more on it even while more and more of it remains hidden. And we all do it, we all play into the process because we don't know how to live with the alternative. We know that we're unhappy on our own, but we have no guarantees that we'll be any better if we strive for this thing called love, if we assert ourselves to find our own version of a soulmate.

If anything, I believe that's the main benefit of holding out for love. It's the idea that love gives us hope for our lives. It gives us some validation that we're doing something right. I mean--after all, if somebody deigns to spend their affections on us then we must be doing something right, right? If somebody can stand to hold, kiss, hug, fuck, wait, come, stay, play, and live with us then we can't be bad people, right? Holding out that belief that there's somebody out there who will come along and see through the shell of a persona we wear down to the core of our character and still smile gives us the incentive to still be looking. If we didn't have this hope all we'd be left with is the understanding that we are flawed and that our flaws prevent us entirely from ever achieving happiness.

Maybe that's all love is, standing in the face of somebody and seeing that they're composed of equal parts sunshine and sadness, and still accepting them in. Everyday we're surrounded with people that constantly point out our inadequacies and everyday we're just as cruel to the majority of people in our lives. Maybe we don't go out and stomp on sleeping children or set fire to hospitals. But I think the difference between what we could be doing to help other people and what we actually end up doing with our days can be considered a form of cruelty. Maybe all love is a respite from the cold world which we live in. And, yes, it's fucked up and imperfect. And, yes, being in love means painting a target on yourself and handing somebody else a dozen knives. And, yes, more often than not all you end up with is a dozen wounds to the head, heart, and spirt. But sometimes what you end up with is the one person (or the couple of people I believe) who use those knives to actually cut you down from the ties that life tends to bind you up with. Sure, the price of love often is the extrication of your soul and, sure, you don't ever come fully to the realization that love might be worth that exact sum.

But, honestly, what other cause is noble enough to spend your time and energy on? Something or somebody that has no chance of making you happy, or something or someone that offers that hope to you? And, yes, people are going to abuse your trust in them and people are going to lie to your face and let you down, but sometimes these same people are going to be the ones who help you back up unto your feet when the world's knocked you down. Sometimes you're going to see the flaws in someone and ask yourself if they're really worth it, but other times you're going to see these same flaws and honestly go, "I can live with that." Because being in love doesn't mean you have to put up with somebody's bullshit time and time again. It just means recognizing that there is going to be bullshit and, like it or not, you're going to have to be the one cleaning it up sometime... just like it mean somebody's going have to clean up after you as well.

We're not perfect and love isn't perfect, but on the whole there's something to be said about having something beautiful and cracked at the same time in your life because you want to and not because it's forced upon you. Love is a choice and you can only fail if you never put yourself in a position to make that choice.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

I Don't Care How It Happened, Always Have Time For An Old Friend, I Just Have To Know You're Coming Back Again

--"Days", Sambassadeur

I washed my wolf blanket for the first time in like four months. Most people don't even know why I would bother. It's very rough to the skin--almost to the point where it causes rashes if I don't interlay a lighter blanket beneath it. It's an odd color--all white with a pack of wolves pattern yet with pink splotches for the skyline. Lastly, I have a perfectly adequate comforter that does the same job of holding back the chill on those especially cold nights. Yes, there is the fact it has wolves on it, but even that isn't enough of a reason for me to have retained it this long, especially given its altogether unpleasant properties.

Why do I keep it?

Because it was a parting gift from Toby and the whole Frisson family.

Sometimes I find it odd that sentimental reasons are enough for me to hold onto object that are otherwise worthless to me. I seem to fall into the pattern of keeping for far too long things that have outlived their usefulness. From ticket stubs and receipts to shirts that no longer fit me or have holes in them--I can be a bit of a pack rat when it comes to nostalgia. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I never like to take pictures of myself. It just doesn't fully capture a moment the way actually having something from that day does. Because of that I'll hold onto pieces of nothing that can jump start memories only for me.

And that blanket is one of them. In much the same way I like to give Mah Jong sets out to my friends when I travel halfway across the country to visit them, so too is it that I like come away with the reminders of the people and places I've gone out to. My mom a long time ago told me it's always advantageous to leave a mah jong set because every time they pull it out to play, they'll always have the story of when it was given to them and who gave it to them. More than that, every time I go over to someplace where I've left a set I can always request to play it with them. It's an easy ice-breaker. It's also something that serves an opening to come back. Rather than have to hint that I want to come for a visit again, it's rather innocuous to joke about playing another game of Mah-Jong with somebody--almost as if they're keeping a spot at the table open for me.

That's the way I feel about this blanket. I don't think about how unpleasant it can be at times. All I think about is how awesome it was to share it with Toby and her sister that one day we were just sitting watching movies together. And I think about how awesome it was that they let me have it on the day I was supposed to leave Kentucky. And, most of all, I like to think how it really wasn't my blanket, but I'm merely saving it for them if and when they decide to come visit me in California.

In that sense, it's less of a memento and more of a standing invitation for an altogether overdue get-together--wolves beneath a pink sky and all.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers

If This Is The Last Dance, This Is The Last Dance, Then Save It For Me, Baby

--"Last Dance", The Raveonettes

My brother gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood for Christmas. It's taken me awhile, but I've finally gotten around to reading it and it's turning out to be one of the best reads in the last year or so. I don't know--for the last few years I've gotten into the habit of reading nothing but series. The Dresden Files, The Myron Bolitar Novels, &c...--I've been on a steady diet of characters I can come back to time and time again. However, now I'm rediscovering what it's like to jump into a set of characters' lives for a brief time in their life, only to be forced to jump back out again a few hundred pages later.

According to Wikipedia:

Norwegian Wood is a 1987 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The novel is a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality. The story's protagonist and narrator is Toru Watanabe, who looks back on his days as a freshman university student living in Tokyo. Through Toru's reminiscences we see him develop relationships with two very different women — the beautiful yet emotionally troubled Naoko, and the outgoing, lively Midori.

and basically that's what it's about. More than the brief description of its plot, I'm finding it a truly great character study in one of my favorite themes, that of unrequited love. You see, so far, Naoko is turning out to be one of the most detailed embodiments of the fragility of the human psyche. More importantly, she's reminding a great deal of my central character in the story I'm trying to write, The Carisa Meridian. Like him, Naoko is introduced as having been in love in her youth. She is described as having been in love with Toru's childhood best friend, Kizuki. Like my main character, Naoko's world is turned upside-down when this great love of her life dies. In her case, Kizuki commits suicide, which is all the more traumatic. And like my main character, a good deal of her struggles stems from the fact she's not entirely sure she can ever love anyone else the way she loved this first and only relationship she's ever had.

A good deal of me is rather jealous of the fact someone can take the same basic themes I'm writing and craft something infinitely more sublime and haunting with it. It's not often that I enjoy seeing someone succeed so brilliantly at something I find challenging. But I can't deny the fact that the novel is just a great work of art. I have no choice but to put aside my petty jealousy since it's patently obviously this, with a few tweaks, is basically the novel I want to write myself.

I don't know what it is about novels where the main characters are always haunted by a former flame, which complicates their present relationships, but that always seems to be the kind of stories I'm drawn to. Before She Met Me by Julia Barnes is one of my favorite books ever. It deals with a guy whose so haunted by this great love of his that he tracks down each and every single relationship she had before meeting him. High Fidelity, a favorite of both me and Breanne, deals entirely with someone whose past relationships set up a vicious cycle of never being happy with someone as they are and, instead, comparing them to some mythical scale of perfection. Maybe it's just my love of stories that center around someone "wistful and forlorn" for a better time, a better place, a better person, but I can't get enough of people who can't seem to be happy because they can't ever recapture that moment when they used to be happy.

What I like about Norwegian Wood is that, unlike my book, the central character isn't the disaffected one. Rather the novel is told from the viewpoint of the one who's willing to love her, but can't seem to break through. It's as if Tierney from my book was writing the same story. It's illuminating, at least for me, to see it from the other side of a relationship that is so tough to characterize. I mean--I always thought if one were to tell this type of story that the only way to do it would be to tell it from the viewpoint of the individual doing the shutting out rather than the person being shut out, but now I see there's a lot to be mined from seeing it from the person whose most often the quiet one. I can now see the difficulty in loving someone that much and being compelled to stand by him or her in stoic silence. Toru can't leave Naoko any more than Tierney can leave the protagonist of my book. It doesn't matter how much it hurts him, it doesn't matter how much it kills him inside; you can't choose who you fall in love with any more than you can choose to walk away from that person when they've done nothing wrong to you.


I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me...

I don't know how the story will end since I'm only halfway through. I'd like to see Toru end up with Naoko, despite her hang-ups, because it's the ending that I have planned for my own novel. Yes, it's hard being in love with someone who's still in love with somebody that once lost, but it would satisfy my own curiosity to see if such an ending can be pulled off eloquently enough to be believable. Or maybe it's just the romantic in me that would like to see Toru happy after being put through the emotional wringer for so long. Admittedly, it doesn't look good for him since the way the novel's framed as him looking back twenty years prior (just like my novel, by the way), but I'm still holding out hope.

Two people that in love deserve to be together, despite how great their being apart makes the story.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers