daily mcduck

fantasy fantasy football

i'll be drafting guys i know in other leagues that have fantasy football teams-

the statistical overload will create nanomites and they will hunt and kill mickey mouse.

team logo

enjoy my spaghetti tigers

what follows is simply update.

what follows is the tick tick tick of my days of the last unwritten month.

what follows is inevitably what is eaten first by tigers.

i haven't posted in awhile. i've been busy. 

in late july i cast out the net i had- 

tailored to trap everything in the kingdom-

the long hours of my life spent reweaving it for every next idea, every pretty bird, every fat fish.

it's a ridiculous net now, unsuitable for hunting, reconciled to it's life of preparation, alteration.

it's beautiful and as useless as the stars in the night sky-

but drunk on something, maybe love, maybe the night sky, maybe myself, probably wine-

i cast that sucker in late july. 

and was struck in august with the reminder that stars have zillions of uses,

that nets need only be cast and prey will find them.

suddenly,

i have a business license, i have a business plan, i have to post a poorly formatted hand-markered notice to my front door and give the neighbors a chance to knock down this windmill. i am buying grapes for wine. a lot of grapes, and where they may have slipped between my braille lines alone, they're helpless in bunches.

i have an internship with a reputable and admired winemaker. i'll drive my truck up a mountain twice a week and lug hoses and clean tanks and listen to expertise. i'll ruin a new pair of boots, stain jeans and t-shirts, and get home exhausted.

and,

i have a class, a single viticulture class to attend every tuesday evening. Gabe sits next to me and occasionally frowns a warning that my cartoon notes are becoming to tangental. 

i have a road trip to L.A. to see my brother and drink and draft fantasy football avatars.

i have dentist appointments and chiropractor appointments and an inflatable workout ball at home.

i have a truck to wash. 

i have a floor to sweep.

i have cats to feed.

i have a high-tech calendar, a shade away from the short circuit robot, that wakes me with a list of obligations.

i have been busy picking the prizes from my net.

and when they're chopped and cooking on the stove-

when they're clipped and chirping in their cages-

i'll stitch on another section, designed for a new prey, a star soaked something and cast away again

wolf disco tango charlie

when i was a kid i could draw

i could draw a fly from the sky, such was my talent.

i never thought too far in front of my drawing, 

and my hand never trembled when i held it over my pencil.

now it seems that invisible forces have moved into play and that this once simple whistled skip to grandma's house has become a war-torn strobe-lit wolf disco.

little red, with her basket full of artisan picnic delicasies- all labels winning design awards- was something to draw, something to sit and draw- from the first lines of her buckled shoes to the doe eyes in her head. and with a no-coloring policy in place (to insure my coolness) options and outcomes and pencil hand trembling obstacles were not a problem.

then came the wolves. multimedia and photoshop filters and type, and also the chaotic whispering of the wolf's brain- relevence and purpose and audience and relationship and contemporaries and derivation- and suddenly art wasn't about creating something but about extracting something from it's junk pile of futures.

(i've been hot on time machines for a minute now and maybe this is where i've parked mine?)

and then computers come along and make all futures possible in the blink of a shotgun blast.

BLAM! she's dot matrix-

BLAM! she's posterized-

BLAM! she's skipping rotoscoped over the polygon forest as it scrolls her away from her thoughts and she pauses,

and she stops and looks around the trees- already tangenting to their details- to the shapes of their leaves and the GPS of their moss. 

poor red, even if she skipped backwards to her morning bacon and eggs, she'll have taken the wolf with her.

there's probably two types of people

i've been watching ken burn's documentary about world war 2 and it's making me feel like a worm.

intercut with real footage of blurry shaky war are veterans, now in their 80s, telling astounding stories- 

about how airmen disappear when they die, not like infantrymen who leave behind some sort of remains, 

or about being so certain you'll be executed by your captors in a remote spot of jungle that you toss a dogtag in a passing mass grave to give your family a chance for closure-

the weight and simplicity of these memories are positively filmic. these are the kinds of stories guys like george lucas go all monty burns over, budging in line at the copyright office with hijacked moments of street cred tucked under their arm. harrowing vet's transcripts dramatically broken in a christopher walken cadence dancing like pink elephants on tarantino's doodled restaurant napkins, making him smile, himself visualizing another rolling stone cover.

there's probably two types of people. 

this old man in the documentary tells the story of how he was brought to the commander of the japanese POW camp for the crime of putting his hands in his pockets. he had been cold on a march, so he put them in his pockets- that's it. 

a guard saw this, said it was dishonorable, and pulled him out of line for reprimand. the commander, in front of his subordinates and a translator, told the man he would be made an example and put his saber to his throat. 

the old man in the documentary casually points to his throat and talks about the small trickle of blood.

then the commander, via the translator, asks the man if he has any last words-

the soldier, the old man, said:

if you kill me my soul will attach itself to you and haunt you for the rest of your life.

un-believable.

the roulette wheel of possible responses traveling at light speed in my mind- there's no way i land on that one.

that is the rudder that steers a man. that line in it's creativity and succinctness, in it's perfectly passive threat, and translated?

it wasn't thought up. it wasn't preconceived and used for it's advantages.

some of us will only ever write lines that sound as important-

frame them, bracket them with context to embellish their worth-

and some will actually say them 

punched in the nose by death

so i'm reading about time machines for no fucking reason at all when wikipedia starts shoving me around it's four-square court and i end up here--->

on DESTINY 

(which, if it was my wikipedia, would always be a page that recorded and then neatly told the story of the previous wikipedia pages that got you there. it would also open a spammy window immediately after you left it that had a picture of the next window you went to and flashing yellow type exclaming that it could have told you that you were going to go there)

sorry...

-four-square court and i end up here--->

Death speaks: There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, “Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.” The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture,” I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

-W. Somerset Maugham

what an outstanding situation- i mean this whimsical story is obviously meant to illustrate that even with the knowledge of your fate, there's no escaping it- but can you believe the balls on these people?

1- the servant totally is all, just 'lend" me your horse, i'm being chased off to the next town by DEATH. really? "lend" you my horse? how about where are my provisions?

2- and the master just rolls up on DEATH and wants to know what's up with the threatening gesture to his servant. you know it's exactly twists of fate like this story that should give one pause in such matters. a rational course of action would have been to run to the nearest creepy forest and hide, not get in a huff and ride/walk into town. 

3- and then DEATH is all "meow meow meow" no crack on the head with her scythe, not even eerie laughing and a poof of swamp gas? roll over DEATH and i'll tickle yer tummy, tee-hee. 

 

story's bullshit yo

girls with type all over their bodies

it's all about fear of the unknown

it's all about the great novels in your head

it's all about jumping a dune buggy off a sand dune

it's all about the painting of what i just said

menus and playlists and girls with type all over their bodies

before i go snowmobiling i like to have a hot toddy

maps on my phone have replaced the journey

bands with phones have replaced foreigner and journey

someday love will find you

break those chains that bind you

track you to the antarctic 

and burn down your igloo

i wanna burn down your igloo

i wanna burn down your igloo

i wanna dye your igloo with kool-aid 

i wanna dye your igloo with kool-aid

i want your igloo to be berry flavored

i want your igloo

i want your igloo

this is only the first draft of this song

rich text

like a stitched together monstrosity-

tangental thoughts flapping like tentacles-

a body of of blocky bloody insights-

a flashing TV head broadcasting TO DO LISTs-

like all of that rising up out of the mud, spackled with twigs and snails, lurching through the fourth wall and into your living room-

where it's surprisingly small and nonthreatening, like a dry gremlin.

that's where this post is coming from and where its headed to. 

first things first. first things all arriving at the same time like shotgun BBs-

1. green day rocks- everything artfully designed to express balance need squat, crouch, or hide lest it wind up against a wall or out a window.

1. i need a camping power-up. equipment, expertise, time. have truck, will see the ocean, redwoods, vast bewildering canyons and peaks.

1. unearthing photos today included the memory of the digital photos i accidently erased. DAMN. without visual confirmation a lot of my memories seem unrealistic- like, did i fly down that volcano on a pterodactyl on my first date with gabe? seems sketchy.

1. summer has jumped me. it's like, 100 in napa. now if all this heat could please burn away all allergies.

1. what about TUBING? my priorities, i.e. job, money, facebook- have totally pushed their way to the front of the crowd. when tubing calls i will be loading up the credit cards.

1. i've got to go to work! 

jump starting planets and stars

poured over buncha writing.

my writing, old.

my writing, lately.

a friends writing.

initial mental image: tangled earphone wires

explanation of mental image: the feeling of overwhelming love and hate and brilliance and inadequacy all that writing weaves through my soul is exactly how i feel when i pull my tangled earphones from my gymshorts pocket.

on a lesser level, the earphones.

i was going to use just unpacked christmas lights, but that metaphor is currently applied to a different situation.

first, i read the friends writing, which is brilliant and exploding. exploding. 

i was going to revise that. i've noticed the style of my writing, my voice, to be flip, grammatically irreverent, and cutey-pie clever of late and though i do like it- like where it's maybe going- i'm also concerned that my writing is hinting that i'm hiding real feelings behind style- or worse that i'm having style for real feelings.

i decided not to revise it, exploding, because it's truthful. her writing should be what the Large Hadron Collider people are looking at as it's as reasonable an approximation of the big bang as anybody will ever actually understand. 

she just spirals out, the meteors from the last sentence smashing the planets of the next. her thoughts travel faster than anything will ever travel-

Vonnegut aside: a kilgore trout bit in which he asks a volunteer to pick two stars in the sky, look at one and then the other. he asks how long it took, the volunteer says a second. he goes on to explain in the sweetest of ways that human awareness had just travelled a million times the speed of light and that "physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something new and beautiful, which is human awareness"

-and her chaos suggests uncontrolled vulnerability and honesty and desire. 

these are the important chords.

and now these are the chords that tangle my earphones 

my writing used to cover unfathomable distances

i used to just rip earphones up- fuck. them. 

now i'm replacing feelings with what i will consider craft.

my planets and stars are heavy with mud and crud and to set them back in space requires operatic untangling.

my questions are still the same-

what do i have to say?

to whom is what i'm saying valid?

but it seems as if i'm no longer punk rock about problem solving.

i'm studying planets in the mud.

anyway, some thoughts.

snapping turtles, chuck berry, and my ding-a-ling

i really wonder where my marks are falling on all the tests i'm not taking.

how is my brain holding up? after years of flaked and fallen thoughts is it anymore than a loaf of crustless bread? i've just reread one million old journal entries and it's impossible to avoid comparing them to my current output.

"impossible to avoid"... theres a better word for this...

i'm wondering how i'll become smarter without becoming wiser.

i'm wondering why i stifle myself.

i'm wondering when i built this crutch of repetition and what i did with the legs that used to carry me.

i began to play dominos with Gabe, and my first insight regarded how conversationally perfect it was for a game of skill. it was a new game with every turn, the planning was either so small or so pointless as to render the game a sort of background operation. pick up your bones, play, set them down- the rest was drinking and chatting and soaking up sun.

suddenly it seems as though my writing has taken the same pace or tone- it seems that there are only lines, and being that there are only lines, each is dressed like a keira knightly period piece. 

i write like i play dominos.

this is a problem. 

as my writing and my speech are intertwined, and as my words become my direction, it seems i'm choosing to go away from personal relevancy.

i've always thought it a gift that i could graduate from any powerless situation to one of confident and happy security in the absurdity of everything. lately though, i'm aware that i may be spending too much time in this easy place of quips and nonsequitors. 

but is this a problem? really? 

rereading old journals reminds me of the imaginative strolling i've done- reminds me of the reference anchored flights i've fit into the perception of me. i suppose i should just get weird.

more on this tomorrow...

nother poster

ease down on the throttle there ripley-

this poster is a quickie job and frankly i'm not 100% on it.

Gabe suggested a skunk unicorn, maybe next time.