Scott's Open Journal

I have learned how to roll cigarettes. I don’t plan to smoke them, I’ve tossed most of them away, but I’ve learned the skill. Learning skills is fun.

I’m reading a book where the main characters are often rolling cigarettes on horseback. It seems to be their only consistent meal. Also, I’m going to Buenos Aires again soon and the people who smoke there roll their own cigarettes. Sometimes that is also their only consistent meal.

So I’ve learned how to roll. It took a few tries, but I got it. The key is to cover the tobacco with the side of the paper closest to you, and then tightly roll the glue side over.

I’m still a little messy. I have to clean my table of the little strains of tobacco when I’m done. They don’t look so great but they burn slowly and keep their cherry.

Jon Lovitz has a hard opinion on Chris Farley. He says Farley didn’t want to quit. He went to rehab thirteen times. He was having fun. He thought he was invincible. People try to romanticize it, Lovitz said. But it’s simpler than that.

Things are often simpler than we would like to admit.

I lost a day yesterday – oh well. It looks like I’ll lose a day here too. There’s no such thing as every day.

In about a month I’ll be back in Buenos Aires again. So the month of March is for my friends in Detroit.

That means seeing music I know I’ll miss. I saw Ryan Dillaha last night and Alison Lewis has a show this March.

That means taking full advantage of SCOTTCast in person, my friends Ian and David. Ian and I are going to Astronomicon with full press passes next weekend, which should be very interesting since just today Kevin Smith announced a huge sobriety kick giving up weed, in a very somber manner. He will be one of the people we try to interview.

That also means spending quality time with my cat, who is my primary concern when I do these travel things, although I’m sure he appreciates the house sitter’s company more than mine at times.

All this while saving money, focusing on my health, learning as much Spanish as possible, and lining up some business I can work on while I’m away.

Time goes by so fast, and it never comes back. Live it up.

We have robots that lie now, but what is a lie? A lie is a known untruth, usually told to make the person, or robot, that is lying sound good.

It’s easier to say than to do, after all.

The anatomy of the ChatGPT/Bing lying is fairly simple. These tools have studied trillions of pieces of text from around the world (without much regard to whether these pieces of text are accurate) and they use mathematical probability to figure out what to say next, given any amount of text.

It’s a lot like a normal flesh and blood lie. You’re asked by your friend or your lover or your boss for something, and you take what you think they want to hear and you say it.

What is more difficult, much more difficult, is telling the truth.

The truth is elusive. It’s hard to nail down. You could try your hardest but, given the limits of language, the situation, and your emotions, still fail, and still lie.

The truth is unsatisfying. It sits there like a boulder. It’s hard and not pretty and won’t give in to force.

And the truth is often destructive. Most things that are real are destructive. The truth points to the chaos of the universe and highlights it. It says, here is a problem, without a solution. The truth is a matter for the present.

Predicting the future is never true, after all, it can only be well-intentioned, like a lie.

I almost didn’t get to the post today.

In fact, it’s an hour and change past midnight on the day after, but my days typically end around four in the morning the next day anyway.

I have been fighting this circadian tendency since I was in college, so as soon as I could elect not to be a morning person, I did, historically. A part of me thinks I should just accept myself as a late night person but a part of me also thinks that I stay up late as a way to steal time for myself, as if delaying sleep somehow delays tomorrow, even as tomorrow shines through the window at the end of my longest nights.

And really, I’m not expected in the morning often. When I have morning appointments I become a diurnal creature, waking for the morning then sleeping through the day and still waking up to have my night.

One of my favorite Lady Gaga songs is Marry The Night. I loved it so much that it inspired a poem a few years ago, a poem about the people I’ve met in Detroit, a kind of rite of passage I’ve seen this odd collection of thirty-somethings stumble through.

So I think to honor the night, and the last post of this week, I’ll end it by publishing the poem here.

I married the night, or rather
We did.  Fists clenched. Pleather and
Cigarettes outside speaking
Mindless drivel. We were
The ones who fooled each other; but
Then again,
What’s real, anyway?
That’s not it. That’s not it. 
A mild opinion laid down like gospel.
An ornamental aside.
What’s this difference between us? 
We hang our jackets up at home.
We shove them back into some crowded closet. We quit smoking and
Learn to cook. We hum a tune sung long
Ago, stowed away deep
In our DNA like a film score, and the
Thin lines make art out of the
Dishwashing.

When I have a lot of work to do that I put off because I woke up with a headache again and put myself back to bed on three ibuprofen pills and a cold cloth to the forehead, when I eventually wake up and have a coffee, usually deep into the afternoon, I like to read The Marginalian. It might be the only blog in the world that’s done right.

It’s run by an incredibly well-read person who has a gift of both excerpting salient concepts from a wide variety of literature and connecting these notions together. She almost disappears into the work but once you read enough of it you get a good head on who she is by what she has read.

I highly suggest following, subscribing, or just binging the hell out the website.

The littlest things will keep you going farther than you’ve ever thought possible. When you come across these things, remember them, but most importantly, remember their power. And expect them again.

A few things I’ve learned this week:

• Rewriting a novel on the strength of allergy medication and melatonin does not produce good prose
• While many sounds in Spanish seem the same, they are not. Almost every sound is different.
• You can delude yourself for months or even years and then, with nothing more than an hour’s reflection, completely change your mind
• If you hate running or working out, do as little as possible, but you should still do it. Hating it is just a symptom of over-training. If you work only as much as you like, you’ll keep doing it. It’s long-term adaptation that matters not your routine or your ego.
• Reach out to people you think wouldn’t care for you reaching out. Not even old friends, just people. They’ll be friendlier than you think.

When it hurts, whether in my heart or body, my mind focuses there. Relentlessly.

This focus doesn’t produce much, but rather distracts me. There’s a lot I have to do without thinking of my own hurt. I have work to do. I have to take care of my body.

So the temptation is to numb it. This is fine for some things. Aches, or little annoyances. But numbing anything greater takes your mind with it, and your body.

Life aches. When I was very young and my bones were growing it hurt and there was nothing that could be done. Although I remember my mother rubbing my shins until I fell asleep.

And lately I’ve had friends who can make a whole night pass by with light conversation.

If you live alone long enough you begin to see it. There are connections like nerves between people. To be alone is to have those nerve endings frayed and in the open, in the cold or the heat, brushing against hard unforgiving things.

When you get back with people those frayed ends find connection, and it feels like healing. It feels like falling asleep, back through a dream and into a bright morning.

I am far too tired to come up with anything incredibly insightful this morning. But here I am!

I couldn’t sleep last night because those spring allergies got to me. So I took a combo of melatonin / pseudoephedrine. The melatonin made me drowsy, but the pseudoephedrine kept me awake.

Hey, if this is my big experiment with uppers and downers, then I’ll be fine.

I did manage to sit down at my writing desk for an hour, in that weird headspace. I looked over my novel-in-progress. I puzzled over the voice of the piece. It’s something akin to a knock-off Nick Carraway at the moment, which feels anachronistic at best. Though there’s a freedom in the way Fitzgerald wrote Carraway that I want to bring to my book – the freedom to tell something as I want it to come across, rather than show as some omniscient narrator.

I know. It’s a writing class no-no to prioritize ‘telling.’ And for a good reason. When you first start writing, you often do it in the mode of ‘telling a story’ as you would in a simple conversation. This happened, then this happened. Any comments? It’s a deliberately stripped down affair to make room for conversation, which should be the goal of any reasonable social person.

But in creative writing, the writer has a lot more time and attention, if they earn it. And showing the glint of moonlight on broken glass is prettier than saying a window was shattered. Saying things in a pretty way earns attention and gets your piece read.

So why am I trying the ‘telling’ way? The first-person filtered through an incredibly biased personality, relating a story that isn’t his own, but that of the time around him, and particular people?

For me, there’s two hidden dimensions at play. One – the narrator’s bias becomes an implied character. And two – the person the narrator is talking to also becomes this hidden character.

Last night, at least in my weird allergy-medication haze, looking at the first person draft and trying to figure out who my character was talking to totally changed the tone and gave me somewhat of a guideline to make the piece more uniform. A ruler’s edge, of sorts.

So there we go. Don’t write into the wind. Write to someone. Emphasis on one.