Today's Word: Trend

The circle of life with inanimate objects, making the created and invented live and die in order to make us feel less scared, that everything ends.

Hello. Been offline for a few days after the Great and Almighty Push to submit for contest. And how rude of me. This is the contest I've been referring to, that mistress that makes me cheat on my wife and the rest of my existence. Although, before it was all done, my wife did a remarkable job helping me edit and put everything all together. She and I took a 24-page draft and lean it down to a mean 17 pages, although with melting a bulky five-page synopsis down to just over three. Saturday, I wrapped up everything in an envelope, checked the contents about 3.4 million times and got it to the post office, affixed it with the Saturday post mark (deadline was today, but I'm not chancing it), and walked out with the lead weight vanishing from my chest and shoulders.

Spent the three-day weekend gaming and slowly having my brain turn to mush, only getting my recommended daily literary hit from compendiums of "Y:The Last Man" and "The Walking Dead." Last night, my wife poked me back into writing mode, and I sat, writing a lot of stuff about Divine (the ongoing graphic novel series I'm working on). Kept away from the Web, and I only learned yesterday that Hunter S. Thompson is now filing his gonzo reports from the Great Beyond after shooting himself fatally. Reading the tributes online, I'm relegated with by-stander status. I arrived too late to the party to understand Thompson's impact on the scene of Journalism. I was caught, deer-in-headlight fashion, by the bedazzling sound/wordage of Tom Wolfe more than that three-day-bender verb assault of Thompson, and I suppose it's my loss I didn't appreciate him when he was still around. Cursor (at right) has a couple great links on the late writer, including his eerily prescient last column for ESPN about using shotguns for golf. For me, for someone who never got on the Hunter bandwagon, I suppose I'm more a freeway-accident gawker, looking at the scene and wondering why. Hunter was a power writer, full of rage and honesty, and why he would snuff himself is sadly the real story, something that will unbury itself from the horrible lede soon enough.

In other, less-important news, I'm getting bored with video games (A bit of a switch after my Feb. 14 post, practically gushing for a new Diablo game). I'll probably write more later, but this weekend I was getting set to sell my collection of games and just stick to playing whatever I rent from Gamefly. I can't put my finger on all of it, but I'm getting a little tired of simulations, especially when I'm getting in tune with my own internal reality generator called Writing. I recently pruned a lot of games (including the more violent horror/shooter ones) from my Gamefly rental list. Don't get me wrong, I like the recreational pixel fest, but I'm not the avid gamer I was, say, five years ago.

As Mick sang, what a drag it is getting old.