skinnynonblackcladdink

i have fast food for dinner, listen to updharmadown or Tom Waits turned as high up as i can bear as i ride the trains to wherever, walk along the streets gazing at the crows and crow-kin and Cobbies (and one shiny black Oriental) who only occasionally bother to gaze back at me, talk to myself, talk to myself incessantly; constantly in-turned, as if i were distancing myself from this place, convincing myself i will never be at home here.

in truth, i’ve never been at home anywhere, never felt comfortable even in my own skin. it always itches in inconvenient places, so that i have to rub my thigh against a protruding bolt under my desk, stick a pen in my shoe, twist embarrassingly against the back of my chair hoping no one will notice. hairs and epithelials coat the sheets of my rented bed, dry motes that cling to the pillows and the tiles, unable to hover, to define the beams of sunlight that, my window being poised at an odd point of the compass i’ve never been able to determine, have never thought it worth slanting in to dazzle the room’s furnishings, dance with the motes in that mundane poetry of gold and dust.

when i tell myself why i’m here, i can only tell myself one thing. 'Take the money and run' a good friend of mine told me repeatedly before i left for this place, enough to believe that was as good a way to go as any. and i suppose it is. only today i realize that’s exactly why i’ll never like it here, no matter how comfortable i tell myself i am now. no matter how important it is for me to get this done right.

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and now, just because you asked:




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i've been sporadically watching this show called Happily Ever After (with a wiki here) and i can't help but think to myself no matter how camp or cheezy it gets, how apparently random and chaotic and contrived the plot can be, how ridiculous the special effects (which the show never quite relies on to the point of being a handicap anyway), this is how it should be done: proper myth grown into the modern world, with a genuine (if cheap) sense of humor woven together for mainstream consumption.

the recent fare of similar fantasy shows back home did what they could, or thought they did, but could never do it properly because they were recreating substance from borrowed myths, and manufactured ones at that (Middle Earth may seem mythical to some people, but it's still a deliberate reconstruction of something bigger than it could ever be); the fit never worked; the effect was always either disinheriting or disingenuous or both. it wasn't just camp: it was borrowed camp, pirated camp; never a shred of truly original imagination.

worse: they took themselves seriously; seriously enough to think they were doing something truly groundbreaking and innovative; too full of themselves to see how flat on their faces they had fallen.

worst of all: everyone gobbled it up; television defines modern cultures, some more than others; what does any of that say about ours?

i should talk: American Idol now forms part of my regular diet.

and, among others: The Office (that's the one with Steve Carell, and--i have to say it--the adorably plain or plainly adorable Jenna Fischer; i'd love to see the UK version, but they haven't got it here), and, even better, the quietly hilarious The Robinsons (2005, from BBC, starring the inimitable Martin Freeman of The Hitchhiker's Guide, who i see on IMDB also happens to be in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz). (that's odd; i seem to remember the Working Title Films site being much cooler than that, a bit more flash. oh well.)

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i can't stop 'writing', or at least thinking about what i'm writing--only a few of the words manage to make it onto the computer screen at any one time, if any at all--but i can't seem to move forward with any of the things i'm doing at the moment either. i'm tired of my own words even when i can't get them out of my head--am unsure, even, if i would want to if i could--but it's gotten in the way of things such that i can't even enjoy a good book; couldn't tell if it's any good even when i'm caught up in it. hence the retreat into television, the easiest, most fatal resort for the disenchanted, disenfranchised, or otherwise dissed.

a friend of mine helped me see part of the problem a few days ago, helping me with a piece i apparently couldn't get to work: i'm not the writer i had wanted to be when i started; i am not a 'storyteller'; none of the things i've done are proper stories. they are nonstories, games of language that only just resemble narratives enough to be utterly useless both ways, because the gameplay isn't all that interesting either.

so what am i doing here?