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What is your favorite camelid? Mine is the guanaco.

Really, I don’t know what it means, but I seem to spend so much metaphor time lost at sea, in thick fog, a whirlpool, in strange waters. I’ve never been in strange waters. Aside from half a dozen trips on the ferry near Galveston and one cruise in Lake Michigan, I’ve never been in a boat. I don’t even read a noticeable amount of nautical fiction.

Nevertheless I came here this evening to tell you about my sea voyages. My gyre has been widening recently. Though–and this is a complicated thing, so don’t hold me to it absolutely–I have plenty (Isn’t this a good word, plenty? Such a lovely sound. How often do you stop to appreciate it? Good solid Latin. Plenus, Plenary. I think it would sound better without the of that follows. Is there a linguistic term to distinguish words like plenty, which need an of, and, say, many? They can’t be different parts of speech, can they? Don’t tell me that plenty is a noun here.) of reasons to be (and I am on many (plenty) levels) stressed and unhappy with all of the whatnot, a feeling has been developing (This passive voice is so on purpose. I have to tell you sometime about passive vs. active voice and other languages.) that Built to Spill may have been wrong when they said that you said that etc.

I have been learning Japanese. I was learning Japanese earlier, and I sort of slowed down. Why I am learning Japanese is another thing I should tell you about, but the high-proof version is that it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I picked this thing to be my follow-through-for-once thing, to prove I can do it (also, Japanese is (though sadly the Japanese are not always) awesome, it turns out, but that had nothing to do with the decision). That started in early January, and I got–not exactly stalled, because at most (and this is a big victory for my sorry slacker self) three days in a row have gone by that I didn’t spend at least an hour doing something in Japanese. Language tapes (really CDs/mp3s now of course), movies or TV shows, music, audiobooks (audiobook, singular, actually, the first Harry Potter (I would tell you that I finally read that Harry Potter book all you kids have been talking about, but so has everyone else, and the only interesting thing I have to say is: Cut that first fucking chapter! (Those of you who know how chary I am of exclamation points will appreciate my degree of emphasis here.) It contributes absolutely nothing to the book, plot or character-wise (the Dursleys have no character), and reads like a tin-eared, housebound Roald Dahl. Shit, I lost track of where I was with my parentheses. Really, I haven’t had that much whiskey. Also, did I have a point? Christ, that first chapter is so bad.

Right! I am learning Japanese, and lately I have gone back to actively fucking learning it with Mr Heisig, and know like 300 of the 2100 standard high-school-graduate kanji, and could totally politely enter your house and give you some chocolate cake and whatnot. I am also, shockingly, writing again (as you may have noticed), not exactly often, but oftener, which is the fault of (as far as i can tell) of Alison, (who is now writing actually often, and lately doing so about things that tap on the beaker of my supersaturated subconscious), Rabi (who has been writing about some things I wish I’d managed to write about when I was dealing with thinner versions of them), and Elyse Sewell (who was on TV or something? but managed to escape with her awesome intact). I recently wrote a song. It’s shitty, but it is an actual song, with a chord progression I did not steal from the Cure and even a TS Eliot reference or two (see: shitty). Earlier this evening when I was guitaring (the guitars sit next to the computer, and it is sometimes impossible not to pick them up and pluck a bit, but it’s not actually playing), I actually wrote a melody. It seems to be for the themesong of a Gummi Bears clone. I’ve been doing a lot of database stuff at work. On the whole, I am thinking more about difficult things, technical, cultural, and personal.

I was busy watching Ken Burns’ (Jesus, that man must have had his sense of humor surgically extracted) take on Mark Twain (Jesus, that man is funny.) when this–well, not aam at least a bit sentence more of an image–popped into my head: Lately I have been lost in much wi(l)der seas, but they are also more pleasant (this is still actually all I’ve said; I’m just a very slow typist). Maybe it’s just my brain working again, but there’s been an odd upswell (Seriously, always the fucking sea. maybe I need to Harvard-Yale me up a ship all Melville-style) of hope. I don’t think I could feel less responsible, so it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly is going on, but I think it’s good.

Some things are clear. I need to go back to school (for what remains unclear). I am tired of being landlocked. I made you a CD: Here Comes the Ocean.

Filed by shaun at August 30th, 2008 under indifferenthonest