June 29th, 2006 by Hoopleton

I believe that you should always keep trying. *Insert tired cliché here* That if you struggle long enough, and push hard enough, you can eventually breakthrough whatever ceiling is keeping you crawling along the floor.

I’ve written three novels. Not one has been published.

When I wrote the first one I remember feeling like it was a race against myself. A marathon of sorts where I had to prove to the world that page fifty was only a state of mind. At the end of three hundred and fifty pages I felt like I had climbed a mountain. Except, of course, the mountain was fictional and at the climax it was destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion.

It took me a solid year to realize that my first attempt at writing was amateurish at best. The depression hit and it took me months to write again.

When I wrote my second novel I remember feeling cautiously optimistic. Massaging every word and sentence to get just the right amount of humor and pain with ever turn of the page. At the end of three hundred and fifty pages I felt like I had finally learned to write. Like I had entered the canon.

It took me four months to realize that I had sacrificed plot for grammar. The depression hit and after a shoebox full of rejection letters it took me months to write again.

When I wrote my third novel I remember feeling like I was an expert wordsmith. I was channeling another world. The voices of my characters spoke to me as clearly as though they were right there in the room with me. At the end of three hundred and fifty pages I felt as though I had a bestseller sitting on my desk.

It took me a month to realize that no one cared about the plot and I didn’t know anyone in the publishing industry well enough to make them interested.

But this time the depression just sort of washed away. I began writing again right away.

Now, I’m on my fourth unpublished novel and I have come to the realization that no matter what happens from here on out, I can’t ever stop writing. It is who I am. It is what I do.

I believe that if you have the passion, you just can’t help but keep on writing. Keep on trying.

Anyway, that’s just what I believe… I feel rather good about it.

June 14th, 2006 by Hoopleton

I saw this image today (see below) of a military flare along side the moon in Afghanistan and I think of all the hatred, stupidity and madness in the world. The beauty and the ugliness. I’ve said it before. Our culture is overextended. It’s broken. It needs repair.

We spend our lives distracted by material possessions. We work in jobs we hate just so we can spend the last few years of our lives remembering all the things that have passed. Things pass in the blink of an eye. I think those of you in my generation know of what I speak. We are among those who don’t to give into growing up. We want responsibility, but on our own terms. Hell, I don’t want to watch my life disappear before I’ve lived it.

The world charges on and the children of the war heroes continue to make things worse rather than better. The bad guys get away with it. Violence and bad temper spread.

It was agreed that Karl Rove, the man behind everything, would not be held responsible for anything. Not the leaking of secret information. Not for playing politics with people’s lives — of course, what else is politics but playing with people’s lives?

Most of the world hates us even more than we originally assumed. A new Pew Research study says that most people in the world see as the United States as the greatest threat to peace. How far we’ve fallen. A friend of mine said to me the other day, “Who the fuck cares about the rest of the world?” Yes, that does sum up American attitudes. We want to stick our noses in everyone else’s business and boy do we hate them for it. If we are the leaders of the “free world,” isn’t it time we started acting less like schoolyard bullies?

And not to get bogged down in this…but remember a time when Presidents talked about freedom and the betterment of all mankind and you actually believed it?

In other news, Bush is in Iraq (flown in secretly of course) to tell the Iraqi people that everything’s fine. EVERYTHING’S FINE! At the same time 40,000 troops have been deployed in Baghdad to restore order, because of course EVERYTHING’S FINE! Liberal Democrats booed Hillary Clinton at an event, mainly because people are starting to figure out that she’s a Clinton. It was discovered that over 1.4 billion dollars in Hurricane Katrina funds and taxpayer money has been mismanaged by the government, much of it going to scammers and money middlemen. Violent crime in the US, according to the FBI rose at the fastest rate in fifteen years. And finally, Daryl Hannah, the actress, was removed from a tree yesterday after protesting the demolition of a garden in Los Angeles — sorry, just had to throw it in.

So that’s the world for today, huh? That’s it. An odd mixture of tragedy and comedy. It keeps spinning and we keep going our own way forward.

I will leave you with this note. Imagine if you were living in Afghanistan and seeing the moon and the flares from the US army. Imagine if you had been born there, probably with no opportunities and no education. What would your priorities be? What would you believe in? Who would you hate?

Still think obsessing over that iPod is the most important thing in the world? Peace for now.

June 1st, 2006 by Hoopleton

We are distracted from ourselves. We have lost touch with what is real.

It’s all the same you see. The words have no meaning anymore because the more information that is dumped on our heads the more we lose sight of what it is to be human. The more truth we learn the farther we get away from it.

What is the end all of being? Of contributing?

Another lame little blog that no one pays attention to. Another perspective when we are drowning in perspective. But where is the truth? Was there ever such a thing?

Somewhere in the bottom of a glass just after the First Great War the artists who had crawled out of the trenches declared art dead. They rejected portraits and landscapes. They had seen the faces in those portraits disfigured. They had seen those landscapes destroyed by tanks and heavy bombs.

We have had no great war, but we have seen the language raped and tattered. Words lose meaning as quickly as they are spoken.

It is time we declare language dead.

They have not done this. We have allowed it. They have not taken over. We have let ourselves down.

Politics and war and hate are just distractions. Those things exist just so people who cannot function in reality have a place to sit. They set the parameters that we follow, just so that they can rule.

I believe we are all good people. We all just want our chance.

This is not a journal. This is not a blog. This is not a place for news or opinions. This is a space where words have meaning. This is a place where a new language will be written.

I’m done with repeating what a million different people have already said. I’m done drowning in the infotainment. I will no longer tout a party line. I will not wave a flag. I will not participate because to be part of this system is death. I will no longer be distracted.

It is time we declare culture dead.

Our technologies eat us up. We are overextended in mind and body and soul. We have to become individuals again. We have to wander. We have to ramble. We have to breathe. And if all that is still too much to ask, then maybe it is time we went somewhere else. Start over. Fix it by tearing it down.

I want to know what’s real again, and I will only write that which gets me closer to my goals.