Go Ahead and Try Not to Drown

Hey, what is this? Is it - is it a post of some kind? (Come on, man. What are you thinking?)

Mid-September's kind of crashed down on us, hasn't it? Crashed down like what, you ask? Silly readers, now that I've returned from my unannounced furlough, it's time for you to sing and dance - perhaps not too quickly, excessive exuberance can be a killer - but the time for metaphor is later. Perhaps. Yes, later. Let's say that.

So, where the hell have I been? Here, there, everywhere, nowhere. A good armload of meaningless, question-dodging answers - that is to say, I've been struggling with inspiration. It's been a messy summer and I still don't feel like I've fully normalized healthwise yet - now thanks in part to some worries about potential hypertension problems (Methinks it's time to get stricter about exercising more often again now. Let's hope I'm just faltering in the face of hypochondriac tendencies here.) - and otherwise, much of this week and past weekend were consumed by downward plodding toward the end of summer. This plodding entails the dropping of the temperature just enough to ensure the air conditioning isn't on much, which leads to my room - which has poor ventilation and circulation - becoming exceedingly hot, uncomfortable, and all around ovenlike, which can be a real sleep-killer. And of course, with the new TV season starting very soon (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia season six premieres on Thursday! Also, the new season means more of the usual blog fodder, of course.), I need to push myself to start normalizing my sleep cycle a bit more after how much of a mess it's been all summer. (None of this has helped my health, of course. So maybe that should be my primary reason for normalizing my sleep - at least compared to my currently wrecked cycle - as opposed to OH BOY TELEVISION.) Without those little slices of death, the big sleep comes much sooner than later, they say - I've got too much I still need to accomplish before I can let myself get that tired.

At any rate, there's been plenty this summer to write about that I haven't exactly taken advantage of. There was the Gulf of Mexico oil spill back in April, for one, which should have served as more of a wake-up call to the nation to begin reducing fossil fuel consumption and shift our focus to green energy sources. Then there was rampant anti-Mexican bigotry in Arizona, the manufactured Shirley Sherrod scandal thanks to professional liar Andrew Breitbart, and a visible explosion of Islamophobia centered around a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan - just a couple of blocks from ground zero. ("Hallowed ground" in the sense that strip clubs, fast food joints, and the like are A-OK, but a community center is not because after years of implying it now, now many Republicans are openly conflating all Muslims with terrorists.) The usual September 11th (Celebrate Terrormas by buying gifts for your whole family and burning down the household World Trade Center replica TOGETHER! NEVER FORGET.) memorial was marred by open displays of bigotry, and a fixation on Florida pastor Terry Jones's trolling for media attention by planning a Quran burning just to be incendiary and lower the discourse even further. And of course, just yesterday the Democrats in congress folded on repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the face of a John McCain-led Republican party line filibuster. So much has happened in the past few months that's really filled me with overflowing faith in humanity. So, so much. (Ow.)

All that mind-numbing positivity aside, it's time for something different! Sort of. It's September 22nd now. Summer's about to end, and autumn's about to begin. All of you have been beating the war drums for weeks, demanding to know: WHERE THE HELL IS THAT AUGUST SHORT STORY!? There were reminders that I had pledged to post a short story a month on here - even if these short stories have often been delayed into early in the following month - back in February, and I've largely kept to my word. There were also some obscenities in there, but I chose to omit those because this is a fucking family-oriented blog. (You've got a foul mouth.) At any rate, just short of the end of summer, it's finally - finally! - finally time for the long-awaited end of summer ultra-late August short story.

Of course, after this long wait, you're undoubtedly expecting something simultaneously mindblowing, touching, and potentially deeply corrosive - if nothing else, you've always been able to count on my writing to be at least a little corrosive, if only in intent. What are you getting this time? Something even better - I ran out of ideas as we got into late summer, though I wanted to do another somewhat seasonal story as I largely have been all year long, at least in my mind. But after ending spring with death, hitting you with heat with the late-June story in early July, and hitting you with post-apocalyptic firefly sci-fi in early August for the late-July short story, I basically had nothing.

So now you're thinking, "If you've got nothing, why are you even writing this? Why are you wasting my time?" Reasonable questions. Reasonable questions deserve honest answers - they deserve accountability. And I've been predictably irresponsible in following through with achieving my own goals. I'd say addiction to underachieving is some kind of illness, but it's more of a personality thing bundled with excuses. And if I weren't good at making excuses - especially in hopefully becoming a regularly working writer within the next year or two with deadlines and the whole shebang - what kind of writer would I be?

Enough with the digressions. To end summer, you need an appropriately summery theme. What says "summer" more than the beach? Who spends more time on the beach than lifeguards? (Ignore the usual beachgoers, hermit crabs, certain jellyfish, etc.) Wouldn't a semi-allegorical internal monologue by a disgruntled lifeguard suffering some kind of PTSD be the greatest story ever conceived? Of course it would. (If nothing else, it might be kinda original. Kinda.) That's why I wrote this. I wrote it for you. All of you out there looking to bake your brains on itchy, sandy, summer-ending storytelling. You're welcome.

Consider this to be my sort of beginning the "fall season" of Spiral Reverie updates, in a manner of speaking. More productivity, more writing, hopefully some publishing, and continued agent query work lie ahead. Maybe I'll finally get out of here and make it someplace more interesting and inspiring within the next year, too. I'm pretty well past feeling like I could drop dead at this point, so with the autumnal equinox coming up in these next twenty-four hours, I hereby proclaim The Summer of (Anything terrible that starts with the letter S) at a close!

Now click the post title and jump down to the story itself. With all this other rambling as a preface, this one's pretty short - some concepts can only go so far before they risk transforming into something else entirely. This is just another experiment.

Before We All Burn Out

Oh hey there, internet! I almost forgot you existed for a little while there. (This is a baldfaced lie.)

As usual, I got caught up in this last month. Thus, more empty promises for more content and my lowest content month for the year on here. In the last, you shouldn't have any more Julys to dread here - content WILL increase again yet, I swear. Anyway, here's my late July story - late as usual. I was hoping to have it up late last week, before the beginning of August and technically on time for once. That obviously didn't work out.

This one's a little different in that I've spent about four days working on it rather than the usual one or two, and I've invested more time into proofreading and revising, so maybe there'll be some evidence of something more than the first draft that my short stories here usually are. Maybe not. Regardless, dig in. It's time to get strange.

Solstice Poultice

Oh hey, it's early July already. 2010's more than half over. Time sure does have a way of kicking us when we're down.

Yes, I've promised more regular and substantive updates on here this summer. So far, I'm still not delivering. In my defense, I've had some preoccupations lately that I think serve as valid excuse for why I've been so consistently inconsistent in recent months. It all began in early May, of course, when I fell ill for a month. I'm not sick anymore, of course - this is old news. Get on with it. Illness then has pretty much been the catalyst for all kinds of awfulness and unpleasant feelings all summer so far. After beginning the Summer of Sickness in early May - about a month and a half before summer actually began - more problems emerged. Being sick did a number on my stomach and digestive system, and I haven't been able to get back to eating fully normally since then. I've been working on getting past that and improving, but I still have quite a few pounds to gain back - thus began the Summer of Starvation. I've approached levels of weight loss since my illness wherein I've come dangerously close to possibly being hospitalized - something to avoid, considering that I'm uninsured. I literally can't afford medical care. The starvation hit an especially unpleasant turning point last week when I became more consciously aware of just how much weight I've quietly lost in the past near two months just before an unsuccessful trip to the dentist to get a broken filling fixed, having been hit by the third summertime hell whammy in the form of drainage from allergies that morning which, when compounded with the toll starvation has been taking on my system, made me far too physically unstable to get the work I needed done last week. This also isn't helped by the general mental discomfort that can overwhelm me when out of the house - I'm not even all that comfortable with riding in cars in motion at the moment now - after months of barely leaving the neighborhood. I'm getting a sense now of where agoraphobics are coming from, and a sense in general of the mental and emotional stress damage inflicted by months of being cooped up inside the house, rarely leaving the neighborhood, feeling like I could die most of the time. Mindfuckery ahoy. And since the allergy problems suffered prior to the dentist last week, my drainage has only gotten progressively worse, so I'm on a nasal spray and trying to find some effective allergy medication that won't mess me up too much in addition to my usual sinus rinse, in hopes of avoiding continuing to wake up choking on a substance I should be evacuating through my nose or not dealing with at all at this time of the year. On top of that, I've undertaken the overwhelming task of trying to clean up and dust the veritable hurricane that is my bedroom. I would like the Summer of Suffocation not to happen. And after having not felt normal or particularly well for almost two full months now, with all the additional psychological weight that comes with longer term health problems, I really, really want to be back to feeling normal and well by sometime during this month. Health problems have basically derailed everything in my daily life these past couple of months, and I can't afford for this to continue. Thus, my excuse for not posting here as much as I should.

Anyway, I obviously didn't get this end of the month short story up by the end of June as I'd planned to either. Naturally, here it is late. And as previously mentioned, it's now summer as of a couple of weeks ago. As such, you're getting a break from the norm in my end of month short story writing this time in the form of a sequel. After comments left made me think about actually continuing a short story on here for once, I've decided to go ahead and do something different this year in continuing one of these stories - Vernal Eternal - through the rest of the year.

Look forward to the third part in September, and the conclusion in December! Now click the post title here to jump to the story. I'll post some more soon. Let's all hope my body stops attacking itself and lets me eat, sleep, and breathe normally soon. The only health highlights as of late by contrast have been going swimming a couple of times for the first time in a decade-plus a few days ago and getting some sorely needed Vitamin D from sunlight and full-body exercise in the process, while somehow not getting reduced to a pile of ashes or turned into beef jerky in the direct sunlight. Of course, now I'm enjoying my whole body feeling like it's made of rubber, which should last for a week or so. The moral of my story - not the story after the jump, but my own personal one - is that being a sickly person isn't much fun, and I'm at least partially to blame for all of it.

E3 2010 Day Two: Kid in a Candy Store

Alright, so it's over a week later, and I've had plenty of time to go back from temporarily being eight-years-old again with video gaming glee to being my usual Mr. Stoic self that you know, love, and fear losing in my rare bouts of manic nerd-joy. Don't worry, consistently inconsistent though I may be, I still keep myself pretty well chained to the stone of sanity in this hurricane, life.


That said, it's time to finally finish the rest of my E3 coverage here and finally get it posted and over with.Most of the focus goes to Nintendo, which revived multiple classic franchises against expectations, brought a strong Wii lineup to the table, a smaller name but still strong DS one, and then blew minds with the unveil of the DS's successor - the 3DS. There'll also be some more third party and industry narrative talk, and then a brief look at Sony's conference, which was as embarrassingly lackluster as Microsoft's last Monday. With the contents within, I wrap my E3 2010 coverage and commentary and get back to my usual stuff - and there's good stuff coming to make up my excessive video game babble to the rest of you. Yes, it's actually in the works.

I Feel... Happy...

Just a short little follow-up blurb. Just finished the Nintendo conference at E3. I'll write about it tonight, but oh god. I didn't think Nintendo could make me any happier as a gamer, but then... all this... the ENTIRE CONFERENCE left me emotionally drained. I want to cry tears of joy right now, and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't exactly emote that much to begin with. Sweet Jesus.

The upcoming Wii and DS lineups and 3DS make me so unbelievably happy to have spent so much of my life on this hobby, it just makes me want to sing in the streets. And I'm not even being sarcastic here, that's the really weird thing. AAHHHHH!

There, that's your rare, weird, out of character blog post from me. I'm gonna be poor forever. Nintendo has the future of gaming down. Sony and Microsoft? Criminy. They have NOTHING on what Nintendo's doing now.

E3 2010 Day One: Please Pretend We're Nintendo

Guess what, internet? It's Christmas for video gamers - that glorious season in which each hardware-producer's fanatics (Primarily Sony and Microsoft) come out of the clockwork to deride the competition (Primarily Nintendo) and the whole of the world loses a few thousand IQ points collectively.

Yes, that's right, it's E3 again. Time for me to ramble on about all things related to the video game industry, its politics, and its neverending problems with consumers - namely that the video game market doesn't buy what the industry wants them to and instead makes its own choices - in a droning, brain-drilling fashion. I'm sure I'll be repeating and re-discussing many things I've already written about the past several years since I began this blog, with a good 2-3 posts covering the Electronics Entertainment Expo every year. But as the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same - the more Nintendo pioneers and grows the market, the angrier the competition gets and the more suicidal the third party developers and publishers make their trajectory.

Doesn't that just sound like a pound and a half of brain tumors - er, fun? Well, anyway, after the jump, I'll be discussing the state of things and unveilings of the past 24 hours. There'll be another post or two on the subject this week, plus at least one or two on other things - if only one, then another next week to give those of you who have no interest in or stomach for this painfully nerdy subject something to look forward to.

One-Note

So, addicted as you all are to my monthly short stories, I'm sure you've been wondering what happened to my end of May story. Here it is at last, a week into June. It's taken me a little while to get back into writing as much as I've wanted to, having spent nearly a full month dealing with illness. In the least, I can now report that I'm mostly better and starting to eat somewhat normally now. Progress is progress.

I've got a lot to do this month between needing to find a bunch of agents to get another 5-6 queries out, another short story here later this month (ON TIME), and ideally a decent short story submitted to a publication, since if I'm going to find representation, I probably need to focus on building my portfolio of published work beyond the one story and growing body of self-published little experimental stories here on this very amateur-looking blog. My usual E3 video game babbling is coming up next week, too, so I'll try to put together some non-gaming material to make that up to those of you reading who aren't interested in that topic. At any rate, following a month of illness, get ready to enjoy my warm, fuzzy first written work in nearly a month! (You always write about cheery things after long term illness.)