Daily Post 9: I’m in love btw

Midday post ho!

So today, it’s time for the WEEKEND UPDATE!

I’m madly in love with a girl named “Fred”. (there’s an obscure theater joke in there)

Have I told you guys that? Have been for months, I could gush about her for hours, but you’d start to hate me. She’s fantastic. She’s beautiful, she funny, and she makes me want to be a better man.

Part of all of my efforts to be a better person are about me. And part of them are about the people I love… There’s also a tiny part of it that’s about the people who hate me. I want them to drink in my six pack and drunk text me their confessions of adoration to which I’ll reply, “sorry, darling, but I’m taken.”

Not really. I’m not that narcissistic. I pretend to be.

But on a similar note, self-love is important in many aspects of life. If I didn’t love myself I wouldn’t want to push myself to be better. If I didn’t love myself I wouldn’t know how to treat “Fred” with love.

I have to like myself. Love myself even. I’m stuck with me after all.

Daily Post 8: A Better Bed Time

I need to find a way to get to sleep. I need to find a way to write in the day time. While I’ve managed to keep blogging everyday, strange injuries are preventing me from working out the way I want to and sleeping as well as I would otherwise.

If I could go to bed at 11 and do all my midnight business at 4am… I think I’d’ve conquered the world by now.

My language learning pursuits have slipped a little, too.

I’m a little saddened by all the things I’ve had to put on hiatus today, but one setback doesn’t have to mean the end of a good thing. I’ll call it forced R&R and get back to work at a less maddening pace soon. Molding yourself into the person you want to be is possible. It just takes will power.

Poetry: Inspiration

“Finding new inspiration for poetry is hard. that is all.”

– A poem by George Coker

Daily Post 7: The Aussies

So my last post just vanished, I posted it from my phone this morning and I don’t know where it went.

…anyway

This morning I woke up this morning in a hostel with some Australian guys.

As part of my self-improvement project, I decided to pick up an old habit of mine I like to call, “Mini-adventures”. Mini adventures are where if the opportunity to try something new or do something I normally wouldn’t or even revisit something I haven’t in years comes up, I give it a try. Sometimes I learn a new song, sometimes I go for a walk, sometimes I try KFC chicken thinking, “It can’t be as bad as it was 5 years ago”

SPOILER ALERT: It’s still terrible.

So, when the opportunity came to meet my friend Camila’s new boyfriend and all his mates for a Giants game and some drinks I was like… “well, fuck yeah.”

I learned a bunch of stuff about Aussies, had some fantastic times. Some great moments I may never remember with people I won’t soon forget.

If you get the chance to party with some Aussies, just do it.

 

Tonight… we go dancing.

Daily Post 6: Tripping

Hey guys,

I didn’t run today. I rode my bike somewhere twice because I forgot the key however, so I think it makes up for that.

Speaking of biking… cars are fucking horrifying. As a driver, I know just how much you hate not knowing if I’ll fall in front of you and cause you to commit manslaughter, which in turn infuriates you and makes you want to commit murder.

You want to run me over. I know you do. I’ve been you. Tomorrow when I can drive I will be you. You want to run me down and I’ve accepted it. Please don’t. People care about me, or so I like to think.

today I did not do any of my planned structured work outs or study languages. I had a job interview and it was over in seconds because I would rather see the love of my life than work for Best Buy. It sucks. I almost didn’t do this post because I felt I had nothing good to report. But like I said earlier, not finishing the run doesn’t mean you quit trying that trail. I have something to achieve. I’ll get there. I just have to stay on the path.

I did however make an artistic change to a project, get out of the house to hear some poetry live, and finish this damn post. Good for my soul.

Always look on the bright side. Take pleasure in the little things

Poetry: …Parte tres

So guys..

I went to the open mic. It was… ok. I only stayed for about an hour and then left to go watch TV with the friend I dragged along. Most of the poets we heard in that time were… strange.

Don’t get me wrong, I love strange and poets are a kooky bunch… But some of these guys just felt out of touch. Some tried too hard to conjure imagery, one had a need to be liked, another was just plain dull.

Granted I heard some fantastic stand-up style humor and a few witty observations… but I must say that I wasn’t the only guy there to nod off a bit and one of the performers(who wasn’t very great anyway) got off the stage and started checking his email while the next(much better) guy went.

The experience has made me realize 3 things:

1. Want to write better poetry.

2. The problem I had with poetry, is that it is too often inaccessible to those who aren’t poets themselves.

3. A lot of bad poets, like a lot of bad actors, perform masturbatory acts that mutilate the beauty of the work they could be doing.

I saw a lot of verbose bullshit that, instead of conjuring imagery that evoked anything, just made me scratch my head wondering if there was a reason to be saying anything at all. I heard people stroking themselves, thinking they were sounding intelligent, all the while offering nothing even remotely mentally stimulating.

Where are the seeds that sprouted into inspiration this young man’s mind oh so many years ago? Contemplating the transience of existence in “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and the extended metaphor of life’s difficulties in “Mother to Son.”

What happened to clever limericks like Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse”?

The hookingly eloquent, intuitive nonsense like “Jabberwocky”?

Since everyone I listed is dead, I’m adding Sherman Alexie. “Fire as verb and noun” is amazing. If you’ve never read it, do it. The man has been published for a reason.

I’m issuing a challenge to artists, to really make art.

Poetry: PARTE DOS!

So, after bitching about how poetry is a shitty medium for reaching lots of people, I realized that I should probably go support my creative writer brethren.

Tonight, I’m going to an open mike event in San Francisco on Hayes and Cole at the Sacred Grounds Cafe at 7:30pm. It’s all spoken word and I don’t know if anyone who’s reading this will actually show up, but I’ve been once before and the quality of the work was fantastic. There was some audience participation and I think you can even get up and present if you’ve brought something to share. It’s a great place to test out spoken word.

Who knows, I might even get up there.

Daily Post 5: Dreaming of daily post 365

Hey Readers,

Only 360 day until I can say that I’ve been doing this for a year straight… I’m wondering what I’ll be saying… Who I’ll be as a person. Where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing. I’m wondering what I’ll look like.

I had a personal realization that as you get older, what’s supposed to have been accomplished by next year starts to become less and less clear. For me, as it does., it also becomes less and less comfortable to consider what I’m doing. I’m worried about goals that I want to achieve and wondering if I’ve set the bar too high for myself. I’m wondering about whether or not I could be doing more and if I set the bar too low. I’m also afraid that complacency with my own comfort now and a lack of guidance will hinder my growth.

As it stands, what I really want to do is heal the world. Sounds kind of silly, but it’s been my deepest desire since I was old enough to think about what I want to do. And while the path that I’m on gets less and less clear as I try to do my own thing, I’ve come presently to the realization that it’s actually the only way to blaze a trail. I can have role models who have tried similar things but at the end of the day I have to find my own way if I really want to be the person I’ve always envisioned I could be. That probably means a little bit more discipline(a hell of a lot actually) and it definitely means “doing.”

If you really want to do anything, you have “to do” I guess.

Poetry

I used to write a lot of poetry. I don’t do it as much anymore. It’s possibly because I’m happier, possibly because I’m busier, and possibly because I’m too lazy to write poetry.

Poetry itself is a strange medium. You can say any number of things in any number of ways… and what exactly counts as poetry is really up to the person reading it. I find poetry in any well crafted bit of language that is intended to be art whether it’s a collage of newspaper clippings, a sonnet, an epic, or two quotes of a politician juxtaposed to show his morals decaying as his assets grow.

I love it.

There are two problems for me however:

The first problem is that the things that drive me to write it are few and far between these days. Not that I don’t find myself outraged at the state of the world or that I don’t love my girlfriend so much that my heart feels the need to express it in verse(because my love of women just gives me that high). I just don’t actually feel driven to say anything about it for the benefit of others.

Which actually leads to the second problem. I simply don’t know where the audience is.

Sure I could go find them, but re-adding poetry to my ever growing list of hobbies as something I care about being good at leads me to wonder if I should actually make a point of trying to publish. I when I do write poetry, I either care so much I want to world to see it, or I give up on caring doubting the world ever will. I just feel I ought to pick a different medium.
I’d love some comments on people’s thoughts about poetry.

Daily Post 4: What did I say?

First two posts started off with a bang. I don’t have that many followers but I managed to acquire more in two posts that I had in my entire history of blogging prior.

 

Right now, I’m wondering what it was exactly that I said to make people want to read what I would have to say later.

It’s not so much that I need to build some massive following. I’m just really curious what it was that made people interested in what I had to say.

Was it my strange sense of humor? Was it the earnest confessions of how I’m on another half-baked attempt to improve myself? Is it something in my writing that people identified with?

Was it simply the promise of more to come?

Are you waiting for me to fail?

0.0

 

Regardless, I’m curious what made you all come here in the first place. Then what made you feel like you’d want to come back. Feel free to tip me off in the comments