September 1st, 2009 by Neal

Welcome to 1996. I’ve just gotten my first CD player, and I spend most of my weekends when I should be getting ready for school on Monday listening to 120 Minutes, with Matt Pinfield, learning all there is to know about my generation of music.

Then this little piece of shit country sounding band comes on, sounds a little like the Gin Blossoms, but with a little more ass kicking, and more importantly, a reference to Jean-Luc Picard:

Then, one day, looking around Tower Records, I find the album for six fucking bucks. Score. Enter another of my favorite songs of all time. The lyrics are pretty key in most of their songs to the appeal:

Cut to today, six or eight albums later, and a new name (Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers), and we have one Neal, surprised that they’re a relatively obscure band while shit like Lady Gaga pervades.

In other words, if you don’t pick up an album by either The Refreshments or Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, I fear you will never be inspired by any muse ever again. Plus, you’ll get gonorrhea.

So do. Here’s one more reason why, and probably the best way I can express how inadequate I often feel in the face of telling Kristen I love her:

Or, for those of you less romantic, more into awesome lyrics. This is effectively Bitch’s Theme, if there’s ever a Hal movie:

June 4th, 2009 by Neal

            So I walk into the bar. That’s the punchline.

            “Yates.”

            “Taylor.”

            “How are things?”

            “There are two giant ignorant Mormon skullfucker assholes out back with a gun who want me dead. They can fight, and they’re wearing ties.”

            “And what did you say to them to make them want to kill you?”

            “I asked them how many wives it takes to screw in a light bulb, and they responded that the church no longer formally condones polygamy since 1904.”

            “Rough.”

            “Yeah. Is it happy hour?”

            “Just about.”

May 14th, 2009 by Neal

I just played As Tears Go By on Christie Lee. It’s the first time I’ve used my acoustic guitar in over seven months.

I fucking wept.

March 16th, 2009 by Neal

All right, kids! Time to touch upon religion again! It’s been four novels since I touched upon it, and I do so gingerly, and in an ancillary fashion, but nonetheless, I am challenging myself to learn about a religion I know next to nothing about beyond the Book of Mormon, which bored hell out of me.

I am looking, in earnest, to learn a lot about the Mormon religion and its heirarchial structure and, in specific, the details of plural marriage in the eyes of “God” and the eyes of the people who abuse it.

Not in that “Big Love” everything is gonna be okay kind of way, but in the “Big Love” creepy guy with fifty wives who rapes little girls and wants to ruin your day if you pry kind of way.

It’s not a smear, it’s not an attack, it’s actually a two-sided coin. I’m going in several directions, which I don’t want to reveal here because of the story contamination it’d provide. But I have two options:

1) Read a bunch of stuff that’s dry until I find stuff on my own, which’ll take a while (though I’m willing to do this), or hopefully:

2) One of you has had a great deal of experience with Mormon life or at least has knowlege of the structure that you can thereby put in a framework for me to research.

At stake is an acknowledgement and at very least a dinner from me if I can get to you. It’s not the focus of my novel, but I want to get it right.

I am also tentatively labelling the new novel’s title as “Blue Collar Slut.” I like it, though it’s probably not the final title, it’s just the phrase that’s stuck in my head as I start, and I wanted to label the new “in progress” gizmo thing Sion has worked up for me (more on that soon).

I’m 4,400 words in and kicking.

March 14th, 2009 by Neal

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! CHRISTIANS OF ALL STRIPES! FINE CAPITALISTS!

The time has come, where we, the intelligent, shall no longer deign to support the rabble! For WE are the intellectual elite! WE are the stuff that dreams are made of!

Following this post, I, along with my fellow intellectuals, will be leaving this country for a secret base in the mid-west, where we will develop PROJECT-X!

All hail the almighty dollar! We are GOING GALT! For TOO LONG we have put our support into that mongrel dog, the artist, the mother, the out-of-work person with a chemical addiction! They are scum, and do not warrant our attention or treasure!

We are AMERICANS, by god, and as uniquely American as we can be, because we are supporting capitalism by moving somewhere to start a commune! We are uniquely American, because we can run a factory that needs workers WITHOUT THE WORKERS! We are totally American, because the figurehead of our movement, that of good Christian men everywhere (and I do mean men, ladies, though we will deign to rape you if your name is Dagny, because that name is fucking HAWT!), is so Christian that she in fact DOES NOT NEED GOD! She is the most Republican atheist on the face of this planet! Her god is the dollar, and PRAISE BE!

Some might say this is contradictory! Ignore them! They are part of the rabble, and obviously not sophisticated enough to keep up with the likes of I or Glenn Beck!

Instead TAKE UP YOUR FURS! LIFT UP YOUR HEDGE FUND! BURN THE YOKE OF YOUR MARGINAL TAX RATE THAT DOES NOT IMPACT YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING!

Are you with me?

I SAID ARE YOU WITH ME?

February 26th, 2009 by Neal

TIMBER! Get it? No? You will by the end of the post, I hope.

A point of my book about ninjas is that existentialism is stupid. The idea that we can reduce arguments to the point of absurdity by questioning the constinuent elements of the question bother me. Yes, when I ask the question “What is god?” we must first define or have understood the words “what” and “Is” and “God” but too often, I find the existentialists I encounter use it as a way to avoid the question, “What is god?” by ignoring the question and muddying the waters.

To that end, I am pissed, because I cannot draw a metaphor. There is a man, alone, in a room full of people he calls his associates, and I want to make the “If A Tree Falls in the Forrest” gag. The idea being, the intention of the question is to ask what a thing means when humans aren’t there to experience it, but I want to poke at, “Does a thing mean something if many people experience it, but there’s no point to it?”

But I know it would fall by the wayside, because people are so damned religious, and the subject/object paradigm is so enmeshed in our damned society that even without knowing why, if I were to do that, they would think something wrong.

We are convinced we are special as entities, and thereby religion is a fine thing for us. We want to feel better than what we are, so we say, “Yes, we will live forever!” even though our existence is finite. To that end, I’ve “lost” the tree in the forrest argument many times to someone who will not acknowledge that if a tree falls in the forrest, and no human is around to perceive it, YES, it still makes a fucking sound. We just weren’t there to hear it. The idea that without US, or without the implied ME, things do not happen, it just baffles me, even though I’m the most arrogant son of a bitch in the world because everybody loves me. He chortled.

At any rate, I see it as the center of the universe argument, its kin.

For all we fucking know, there are people in the future looking back on that forrest. For all we know, there are alien telescopes in space watching that tree’s every fucking move, and that tree is their version of Jesus or Buddha. For all we know, there’s an old hermit no one ever loved or listened to in that forrest who saw that tree fall, and when he dies having told no one of that tree falling, it’s only not heard because we were too dumb to listen.

To pragmatically accept the idea that NO ONE heard it, and no one possibly could, begs the question of how we were even aware of it to ask the question in the first place, and contradicts itself.

In other words, fuck existentialists. Give me a devil’s advocate first any day.

But beyond that, I have completed all but the clerical work on the novel. I will read it one more time tomorrow, and probably find one or two errors, but otherwise… my tree is downed. Do you care to hear it?