Everything New

The give and take of new clothes. The fresh lines of new pants, bending and twisting to mold to your body. The tautness of new socks, comfortably clinging to your ankle as they still retain their factory-woven tension. The crisp utility of new boxers, as if you are being draped over and not confined. The seduction of a hot shower and fresh soap from your favorite store. The unavoidable reminder that it is the simple things that make life shine in the routine moments. You come out of a long weekend where you haven't shaved, you barely moved from a computer screen (whether playing Warcraft, your new addiction, or writing 5,000 words in 60 hours), barely aware of the destruction in Java or the growing truth that the military you pay for with your taxes slaughtered Iraqi civilians in cold blood. There's little you can do these days, but the freshness of the new skin gives you some arousal, some strength to drag yourself out of your long weekend and figure out how you remain human. You wonder just what you can do, after five long years of jackals in suits coming on TV and lying to you about war and society and Jesus. All you know is that it's sunny today and you have new clothes that feel like a cooling breeze on your skin. You are in a holding pattern. You are reshuffling your deck. But at least you look sharp, and these new threads signal a potential in you, as if you are emerging into something else, something were you have a sense of control and destiny. You are desperate to shed your old ways. You have taken the long weekend to distract yourself, only to sneak up on the demons which cause you much suffering, a long razor moving slowly across your soul. You've grown tired of their antics and you know you must be making progress, changing the way you think, because it hurts so much inside. You feel a shift taking place, a war waging when you close your eyes, and the victory would mean a way to be happy and be more functional. Summer's here, and it's a time to shine, and maybe you need to take a cue from that.

Today's One Word: Justice

You can't admit that this is something fair going on when the powerful are evil and the opposition is nowhere to be found. You don't want to quote Yeats, about how the just lack the conviction to rise, but sometimes it's painfully right.

Today's Word: Petal

the flowers bloomed inside the plastic case, which was a hollowed out computer from an age when there was still cheap power. Now, it was a gutted corpse, replaced with viable soil and given seeds so something could bloom.

Hadn't done one of these in a while. Feels painful and rusty, but liberating in a without-brakes sort of way. I need it. I need to break up my blocks in my head. I need to write more freely.

Taking a few days off due to Memorial Day here in the states. Will try to resume this blog as a living, breathing things instead of a beast I rarely shock to life. I'm a negligent blogfather these days.

83

Today, my wife and I have been married for one month shy of seven years. It's strange, a good strange akin to relaxy-spongey bliss of waking up thinking its Friday only to remember it's Saturday so you can sleep in, to realize that it's been about 30 days from being married for seven years, and yet you can't feel any of that mileage. While any relationship requires some work, some on-the-fly maintenance to keep going in a happy direction, I can't help but be amazed that the seven years has gone by so rapidly, so easily. I know if I think about I could recall harder times, gloomier moments, fights and things I shouldn't have said, but the grand mosaic suggests something else. To me, it says I made the right choice saying 'yes' 83 months ago, and that I'm lucky to have found my love. She helps me understand the world, and myself, better. I love her.

Happy 83 months, my love.

Press A to Start

Two posts in one day. I must be a madman.

Okay, I can take the wraps off some news.

I got the greenlight this afternoon that I will be the co-creator and contributing writer to a video game blog for the newspaper where I work.

It's been something that's been in the works for about two months, mostly in the "hey, you know what would be a good idea" mode of a couple guys just sitting around and b.s.-ing each other about trying to figure out how to have fun on company time. After we stopped laughing and thought about it, having us write about the video game industry as both players and cub reporters started to make sense. Too much sense. My new partner had been writing small game reviews for a year before we came up with this idea. Yours truly had been scanning the Web, dropping gossip and news to my cohort. Over time, our interest grew from "That game was awesome. Especially that one part with the chain saw and the flaming kitten" to "Man, I wonder if Nintendo's new handheld means the end of the Game Boy, and what's going to happen to Sony's handheld after Wal-Mart and several Hollywood studios just rejected the UMD format." In short, we schooled ourselves in PR speak, in reading quarterly reports, in sifting through the manic, juvenile postings of gaming fanboys to decipher the streetsense of what was working in the marketplace. We have been watched over by one of our business writers...he a sensei or our young grasshopper. After we rode as virtual wingmen to his E3 coverage, something tapped us on the shoulder, whispering tones of graduation to the next level. A week ago, my cohort and I looked at each other and said, "so, when do we start this thing?" It was a question of benign frustration. We were getting aggressive, and with a change in the management, we struck when our new boss was disoriented enough to say "Sure, fine" in that parental tone of "I don't care what you do, just don't burn the garage down."

We hope to get everything up and running in a week or two, just in time for coverage of a video game exhibit coming to a major Seattle museum. I'll let you know about it when I know something.

My mom asked if I would be getting paid extra for this. And after a second, I realized I wasn't. At least I was still proud of me. I'll be doing something more than data entry. I have no idea where this is going to go, but it's that whole "writing about what you love" thing. Can't be all bad.

So, there you go.

No, really. I have a blog

Sorry for the dead air for the past several days. Just a case of blogger's block (writer's blogk?) mixed with a busy life in meatspace. Living, writing, eating, sleeping, commuting. That's been about it lately, so I suppose that's why I haven't written here when I'm churning out more than a 1,000 words a night on the novel. There's more, stemming from an opportunity paralysis after sticking my head in an E3 porthole as well as the current eavesdropping scandal in this country. So much to write about, so unsure on how to say it. For the past couple weeks, I've been overwhelmed, and blogtalk was the first thing to the sidelines.

I'll try to write more later. Just wanted to say I didn't forget about this place, or anyone who drops by.