Scenes From A Morning Drive: Part 28 - Blog Rockin' Beats

Hi ho, Hotspur laity! 05 October 2011 up in here. I was walking from my car to the office earlier. I don’t know how good my vision is, really, but there’s that awkwardness of walking down a long parking lot row, and you see someone that you recognize but don’t really know well. You look up at them, and look down, and look up and down again.  You don’t know whether to wave immediately, or wait until you get within hearing range and say hello, or both.  And when I passed this person, she laughed.  I don’t know if she was laughing at me, or at something else, or what. I’m curious. Was it something I was doing? Was my fly open? Did I have toilet paper stuck to my shoe?  I guess I’ll never know. Glad I made her chuckle? Whatever.

There’s a church I pass sometimes if I have to get gas on the way to work, and it has a large lighted sign in front of it.  It looks like it cost a lot of money.  Not to be preachy or anything, but how many people could have been helped by the money from the marquee board? And I think the same thing of the recently immolated so-called Big Butter Jesus down the highway from me about half an hour.  What the hell is this thing for? It cost so much money the first time they built it – as basically a lightning rod covered with flammable material – and now they are rebuilding it, for even more money. Again, why do they even need it? Why aren’t they helping people with that money?

Ostentatious displays of wealth are sickening – but if you play that game ‘what would you do if you won the lottery’ among the things I would do is build a huge house that’s all wired and computerized and modern. Probably located in Florida. And someone else will come along and ask how many people that money would have helped. So am I being hypocritical? But lottery money is for spending, and I would be donating to charity but I’m not a charity. A church is for helping people, unless I’ve grossly misunderstood what a church is for. I really don’t need to know the date, time and temperature that bad.  Certainly not more than someone who is homeless needs a home.

Lots of people have huge interests in things I don’t care about, and they like to talk about them a lot. Like the weather.  Now, I don’t mean bitching about them – that’s some great fun.  I mean talking about the ramifications and parameters of them.  Like the weather. My interest in the weather is basically: is it going to rain, yes/no; am I going to have to shovel anything, yes/no; should I wear a coat, yes/no. Otherwise, I don’t care.  Makes me wonder if there’s anything I talk about that other people don’t care about.  No, wait, it makes me wonder which of the things I talk about are on other people’s Do Not Care lists. I know I’m pretty much the only one who likes Japanese visual kei bands. But music is different. It’s something that you like, a discovery that you make and sometimes get to share.  Weather? That’s something to bitch about.

I don’t know if anyone’s done this – well, I know Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has done it with his blog – but if I collected a bunch of these blog posts into a book. how much editing could I do before I changed the complete content of a blog post? Scott Adams has a blog, and collected them into a book, but I don’t know if he changed anything. Could he have edited anything, made them less jerky, or more jerky? I haven’t ever gone back and verified it (I have the book). I don’t know if that would compromise the integrity (if you can imagine) of my blog posts, but there are some things in a blog that maybe shouldn’t go in a book.  That’s one of the advantages a blog has over a book – a blog can have whatever you want – literally, whatever you want.  I saw a photo gallery of bondage pictures on this very WordPress just yesterday.  But a book, theoretically you have more time to edit, and maybe you should take more time to edit. Like this whole paragraph – should that make it into a book? I don’t know.

Sometimes people stare at me because I’m driving with one hand, and with the other hand I’m holding my… recording device. It’s not like people haven’t seen a recording device before. I’ve started feeling that phenomenon that people on reality shows must feel all the time. Pretty much every time I’m driving, I’m recording something, and when anything happens, I think of it in terms of how to write it down, or if it will be fun to tell people.  You tend to write your life in bits, and eventually the bits catch up to you.  You’ve got to distill thought into written word. I did all sorts of things over the weekend, and I might tell you about some of them, but do I really say anything about myself? I don’t know.I think I broke my mental leg at some point. Pulled a mental muscle. And now I’m kind of thinking with a limp. Is that too much honesty? I don’t know that either.

There’s nothing better than the smell of bacon, and when the leaves change, I love doughnuts.  September is over, and it’s about to be evening. Driving under highway signs, men in green vests stop and pull things out the back of a van. The bridge I’m crossing has things that it goes over, and this other bridge I’m crossing has things that it in turn goes over. Toilet paper in a tree is so animals can wipe – it’s a thoughtful gesture. Don’t clean it. It’s giving back. Isn’t toilet papering a tree like giving a skin graft? Right? Amirite? When a tree’s leaves are red on top and green on bottom, it gives the illusion of being on fire – which is why I’m going to test that theory by lighting this other tree on actual fire.

As I’m driving under another bridge, it’s a fenced in pedestrian bridge. Fenced in so people don’t throw things off, like themselves.  There are huge water towers everywhere. Where’s the place that they add the fluoride, or the mind control drugs? I’ve always wondered. Another things I’ve wondered is why you can’t buy a garage at a garage sale. I mean, the two words literally tell you that you should be able to expect and purchase a garage.  Same thing with a yard sale – I expect to buy a yard. Except I don’t really need three feet. Sometimes when I drive under power lines, I think they must feel more important than women. Power lines have been empowered since the late 1800s, but women have only been empowered for the last 50 years.  I don’t want to make it sound like I hate women, because I don’t. I just hate the things they say and do.  Especially to me.

Speaking of all that whatever-it-was in the above paragraphs, I wrote a story yesterday that might have confused people. It was made of nonsense words, randomly strung together, but it conveyed a general sense of defeat and had a little moral at the end. I meant for it to convey the emotion without directly stating it. For you to read it and feel the despair and sorrow without actually coming right out and saying it. It’s sort of about depression.  Sometimes people are depressed. It seems like everything’s going wrong, they don’t know why, they can’t articulate it well, they aren’t explaining it well, and they don’t realize that you’re waiting for them to explain it. They might not even know they have to.  You might not understand what they’re going through. But you just know something’s wrong, and you just need to be there. That’s all that was.  I figured I’d explain it here, in case people were confused.

And sure, part of it was ‘what can I make up? I’m just going to write something and bust it out and see what happens.’ I mean you should all try this. Like most things, you just start writing and an idea comes along – it’s like that office guy that pops up. Remember that little paper clip? “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like help with that?”  When I write, it’s like that. It seems like something pops up in my head and says “It looks like you’re writing a story. Here’s an idea of what you could mean by this.” And it turns out, I do mean that. I wrote another story with sort of regular words that might be just as confusing. The secret is that the Walrus was Paul… no, wait… think ‘fly’.

Edward Hotspur

…no, I’m not linking to the bondage photo blog…

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