Teel McClanahan

Another night. It feels later than it is. Not as late as recent nights, but a long day ahead of me tomorrow. I better go turn on my blanket… okay. That’ll be warm by the time I finish the post.

How about this late-night posting all the time? It’s when I have available. The end of the day, Heath’s gone to bed, I’m getting too tired to do anything productive, but I’m still awake enough to ramble… I guess you get what you get.

Not that anyone will read these posts. A month’s worth of posts appearing all at once? Who would bother? Maybe Iain, to see where all the words came from, but … with all the web work and school work he’s been doing lately, he may not read it either. Who knows.

Anyway, tomorrow, I have to wake up in the morning and … stay awake all day. Going to Phoenix, doing the birthday lunch with Angela, leaving Heath with April to get a haircut, shopping for power tools and abrasives and maps and I don’t know what else, picking Heath up and going back across town to drop Heath off, then going shopping for other hardware, perhaps some epoxy, and then some groceries. I don’t know what else will go on, but then the drive home. I had a few things on my list, I don’t know if I’ll be able to pick them up. Mostly pens, paper, simple stuff. Maybe we’ll stop by an officemax or such. Maybe we won’t. I don’t know.

…

I don’t know what to post about.

I want to say a little about the presidential race, but I don’t have much positive to say about it. Which unfortunately has been how Bush and Kerry have been doing things, too. Bush has been attacking Kerry from his first speech and exploiting national tragedies from his first ad. Kerry has also begun trash-talking (though I saw the clip and that he was actually speaking about Bush was not clear to me) himself. I don’t want to see Bush stay in office; I didn’t like his actions and lies before, and now he’s just being a dick. I don’t particularly want to see Kerry in office, either. I hear big talk about the importance of voting, vote early, vote often, get out and register to vote, but if no one worth voting for is willing to step up, what’s the point? I don’t want to choose the candidate I think will do the least harm, I want to choose the candidate I think will do the most good, and it’s ridiculous the sort of candidates we’re faced with year in and year out. The sort of people who would be willing to run for office, the sort of people who are capable of being “successful” at politiking are not the sort of people I want running MY country. I support term limits. In fact, if we could move entirely from a Republic to a Democracy successfuly, I would stand behind that entirely. The entire system right now is just silly.

Gah.

I want to get some cleaning up done around here. While Heath is gone, perhaps I can get ahead on a few things I’ve been falling behind on. Cleaning, which should lead to writing, too. And I’m not nearly as far on my coffee table as I’d like to be. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, either, after the coffee table. Heath has been working on a lamp with/for me. It needed a metal base/body welded together and shaped before I could get to my part of it’s design. Which I can’t really start on until Saturday, I guess, and which looks like it make take several days or weeks to complete. This piece is … perhaps less likely to sell right away, though more … more a product of my creative mind than natural form wood furniture.

My mind is wandering, I should be sleeping, I’ve got to get up in the morning. I bet that’s what it seems like I always post about, these days. Sleeping, being tired, what I’m supposed to be doing the next day, days, weeks… Is this what I’ve got left?

I could post about being single. I am still single. I could moan on and on about the trouble I’ve had in relationships, in trying to find relationships, in the years since anyone has done anything but reject me as anything more than a friend. I could write new, bad poetry about the pain and lonliness of my life. But do you want to read that? Does that draw you in, or drive you away?

I could post about every trivial detail of my life, what I ate at every meal, how every step of every day turned out, every web site I visit, every thought I have. I could describe in detail every branch I picked up and loaded onto the truck and trailer as my father trimmed the third apple tree, each scratch and bump and complaint from my brother. I could write every day about each little cough and pain and problem by grandparents are having, about going downhill and appearing to recover and getting worse again and how even returning to a sub-standard level seems like a good day sometimes. I could certainly write a lot about every little communication problem I have with my father and the stress and difficulties it brings to so many easy things around here.

But do you want to read all the boring details? Do you need a play-by-play of a couple hours of manual labor? Do you want to suffer through the slow death of people you’ve never met? Don’t you have enough trouble communicating with your own parents?

Is there anything about my life you might want to read?

Is your interest why I post here?

Or do I post for myself?

It’s a journal, right? Online journal, sure, but a journal nonetheless.

Sometimes, especially when I’m looking for feedback or trying to solicit sales of one of my creative ventures, I feel as though it were actually a private, hand-written journal that is perhaps locked safely away from prying eyes. Because I get nothing. No responses, no sales, no way of knowing I’m doing anything more than writing for myself.

Which perhaps is part of why I’m posting this entire month’s worth of posts in “secret”. To remind myself that it’s about me. To remind myself that no one else gives a rat’s ass. To remind myself that whether I make these posts “public” or not, all I get is SPAM comments and a few lurkers. MoveableType is doing a test of their 3.0 system, and reading through the qualifications I saw that one of their requirements is that participating blogs have “active commenting communities.” Ten comments a day across 35 blogs does not an active community make. Ten comments a day from 1000 to 1500 visitors a day is actually pretty sad. But what I need to realize is that this site, Modern Evil, FYTH, all of it, it’s not meant to be a business, it’s not much more than a construct for my own enjoyment. At first supported just by one good friend and now supported more by him and his friends than me or anyone, as far as constant content is concerned.

I don’t even know what I think I want from this site anymore, really. I’m becoming disheartened. It started around the time I noticed I was getting bored with the posts on my own site and had to program a way to avoid the worst of them. Worst … because they are the least interesting to me, the least like what I want my site to be like or about. PP, BBB, click, click, gone. I don’t want to run a cutsie site or a political site. Alison’s Poetry, that’s a treasure. I wish I had more original poetry on the site all the time. Any outlet of creative talent is wonderful. Daily Doodles, comics, well-written prose, whatever. Probably, if I read my own posts, I wouldn’t like them either. Too self-indulgent, I might say. Too scatterbrained, too much … something, nothing, I don’t know. But I don’t have to read my own posts to post them. I hardly know what I’ve said here.

My eyes are burning, my mind is shutting down, I should stop. This is getting silly.

Good night.

Perhaps I’ll know what the site is here for tomorrow. or by the end of the month.

Good night.

Well, here I am again, making a late-night post. Later than I should really be up, I suppose, but … here I am. I just turned my electric blanket on, so I’m waiting for it to warm up before I climb under the covers. I figure I’ll type for about twenty minutes and then … try to sleep.

Friday we’re supposed to be up and around and on the road before 9:30AM. Now, today I got up at around 8AM, so I know that’s possible. I also know that I feel pretty awful, like the whole day was spent recovering from not sleeping enough. I don’t know if other people get it, but in addition to burning eyes and some loss of accuracy, I get an awful metallic taste in my mouth when I don’t get enough sleep. And then there was the intense, acute upper back pain. That sucked. Around 1:30 the back pain got to be too much, so I took a second handful or pills and after a few minutes resolved to lay down flat on my bed until they kicked in. And them proceeded to sleep until supper time, around 3 hours later. But when I woke up, my back was in reasonably good condition.

Anyway, let’s see how I did on my list of things to do today, from yesterday:

Wake up,
do exercize,
eat breakfast,
start my laundry,
trim trees,
check the mail,
take Don Quixote back to the library, unread,
re-drill my holes,
eat lunch,
dry first laundry,
start more laundry,
trim trees more,
maybe work on the mobile some,
(if available) play video game/watch movies,
dry second laundry,
eat supper,
program exercize webpage,
make another long post,
fold & put away all laundry,
research bible study topics,
…

Though not in that order, so much. Oh, and other things happened. Like, the washing machine broke down in the middle of my second load, so late in the day I took it down to the local laundromat to run it through a wash cycle to get it rinsed out well, then brought it home to dry it. And I didn’t get to the second round of tree-trimming, because of the sleeping. And I re-drilled my holes after supper, while my laundry was drying. And while I received all three Netflix DVDs and have watched them entirely, I’m going to spend some more time with one of them before I send it back. I tried getting a good copy of it made while watching the others, but … ran into problems. Anyway, I’m testing something with Zoe’s copy of Alien4, and if that works, I should be able to get the Netflix DVD copied before the last mail truck tomorrow, and we can keep up a rapid pace on the turnaround. For the record:

Netflix progress:

1. Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, Sent 124.1, In 131.1
2. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Sent 124.1, In 131.1, Out 132.1
3. Lost In La Mancha, Sent 124.1, In 131.1, Out 132.1

In the future, I will abbreviate Sent, In, Out, and Received to S, I, O, & R, and after the first time each title appears, will abbreviate to the numbers, ie, if The Meaning of Life shows up as received by Netflix on 134.1, you would see this:

2. S124.1, I131.1, O132.1, R134.1

Which may not mean much to you at first glance, but which is pretty easily used to track times spent at each step of each disc. So that when I get to 500 discs, like I said before, I can put together spreadsheets pretty quickly. Hey. I may change it. You’ll know.

What else? For those of you who don’t know, the movie Lost In La Mancha is a documentary about the failure of Terry Gilliam and crew to produce a movie based on the book I couldn’t get through and returned to the library today, Don Quixote. I’ll try to read that book again in a few years. I’m too all over the place to get through it right now, but I do want to get through it.

But I did get to read the first 30 pages of The Hours while waiting for my laundry at the laundromat. So that’s good. And I’ll be reading Life of Pi after that. And … I don’t know what else. I’ve bought a lot of used books recently, at great rates, and I need to figure out how to prioritize them. I’m thinking of reading Farenheit 451 and 1984 soon; I’ve never read them before, and realize that this is me missing out on an important and shared chunk of popular culture. Oh, and then some Grisham and Ludlum.

What else? It looks like it’s over with for now, but the other night I was watching Comedy Central and at precisely 1AM, it (and all other Viacom channels, ie: about 40% of the channels I care about) went off the air, replaced by a message from Dish Network that they weren’t willing to pay Viacom’s increased rates. They recommended that I call Viacom and plead that they “be reasonable” and not ask for so much money. Except, well… let me put this another way. A week ago, before we got local (network) channels added to my lineup, Viacom channels represented 60% of all the channels I cared about on the lineup. 60 Channels, they could drop 50 of them and not reduce my experience, they drop 5 or 6 of the right ones and cripple my interest in their service. I’ve longed for a long time to be able to select, on a channel by channel basis, what I’m paying for in a cable lineup. Comedy Central, MTV (and friends), SciFi, Cartoon Network, and network TV are just about all I care to watch. Ever. Sometimes, rarely, a little CNN Headline News, but those other 10 “news” channels I have are just … a waste. I get more news in half an hour of The Daily Show than if I watched raw CNN all day long. I can tolerate CNN Headline News a bit because I can watch 12 minutes of it once a week and not miss a single important story. The rest of the time, they’re just repeating and filling.

Anyway, due to a price dispute between Dish Network and Viacom, my favorite channels disappeared and Dish Network wanted me to harass Viacom. Except I wanted to call and harass Dish Network, and to call Viacom and recommend that they ask for more money, in response to Dish Network’s bad behaviour. It’s like they don’t get it. In fact, considering how quickly the channels are back on the air, I suspect (or is that hope?) that Dish Network had such a negative response to pulling the channels that they bowed to Viacom’s demands. If all the sports channels move into a ‘pay’ tier and a few value-less channels disappear entirely, no problem. Eventually, hopefully, the networks will get upgraded to the point where I can choose channel by channel. Here I go, looking forward to further segmentation of the markets…

And I’ve also decided that I’ve typed too long here. I’m getting thick in the head and I’ve got to lie down again. I’ll be back tomorrow night to post, and then Friday… Friday I shall be dragged up and down and all around the countryside, doing the things that other people want to do. But I’ll be able to wish Angela a happy birthday in person, I may be able to buy a nice map or two, and perhaps yet another motorized abrasive tool. We’ll see how things go, and how I feel on Saturday.

Perhaps I’ll get to programming that exercizes page next week. I certainly didn’t exercize today. Well, unless you consider climbing around in and pruning trees exercize or carrying things from the mobile to the warehouse exercize. Perhaps I’ll exercize tomorrow. Between the tree trimming and everything else, I may be able to squeeze it in. Of course, I’ll have to do the full set instead of the split set, to make up for missing today. But that’s okay, because I was scheduled not to exercize on Friday anyway.

Did I say I was going to sleep?

I’m going to sleep.

Good night.

I’m not posting enough here lately, I think. I’m only up to around 5k words for the month, and it’s already over a week in. At this rate I’ll only make it to around … 20k words? Heck, that should be fine, right? I don’t need to be too much faster than this to make 20k. Of course, Iain may actually be stepping up on the pace this month and may make it to 25k or more. What then? Second place, even with my surprize posts? That wouldn’t be satisfactory.

I know that it’s just after 3 now and that if I begin to post this, it will be 4 or later when I finally even approach the bed, but … I don’t want to fall behind on my word count. Lord knows I haven’t been getting any good writing done apart from the blog. Lots of coding and constructing website pages and all that rot, but no fiction. A little transcription of old fiction, but nothing new. Which reminds me, I plan to make the first Man With The Coat story available for free, to try to entice people to read the other ones. Soon. In fact, as soon as I have the last one, “A Bun In The Oven” or “What Time Is It?” transcribed and online, I’ll get the full text of the first one in the body of the post and available for free, and re-dated so that it floats to the top, perhaps with a list of links to the individual stories.

I don’t know why people don’t buy them. Modern Evil has been getting 1000 to 1500 unique visits every day this month, but none of them have bought any of the BitPass content. Is it because they don’t have BitPass accounts? They’re easy to sign up for. Is it because the mental transaction cost is too high? Because they don’t know what they’re getting for their money? I don’t understand. I don’t know how to fix it, either. If it was just the mental transaction cost, why not buy the novel, Lost and Not Found, or better yet, the novel plus the online content? Perhaps the sort of people who like reading the website don’t think they’re the sort of people who would like my fiction.

Except that I’m the same writer on both projects, so if they like one, they probably also like the other.

I don’t know.

Anyway, I’m trying to write quickly here. It is cooling off, and I don’t want to get too cold before I go to bed. No need for a fire tonight, it’s been pretty warm, but it certainly does cool off before the dawn. They say the temperatures are supposed to drop way off after tomorrow night. We’ll see. Usually they don’t know what they’re talking about.

I’ve been doing a lot of tree-pruning yesterday and today. And will certainly do more tomorrow. This is an activity that, as I mentioned yesterday, I find quite taxing. It is quite stressful for me to be above the ground without sure support, moreso on the ladder than in the tree’s branches, and there is only so much of it I can take. But it must be done. With the temperatures this warm, the trees are bound to ‘wake up’ soon, and then it will be too late. Once the sap starts running, I guess, you have to stop pruning. So we’re (most of) one tree down, one tree about half-done, and one just started. The other three apple trees we removed over the winter, so do not need pruning, but it is still quite a job, and takes priority over others.

That is, it takes priority over disassembling the mobile, over constructing the ramp, path, and boardwalk for the little stores, over furniture construction, all of it. Though we will take some “time off” pruning tomorrow afternoon to go haul around some firewood, as far as I know, that’s what tomorrow will be; pruning.

And I don’t know about Thursday, but Friday we’re going down to Phoenix. Heath will be staying, going on a weekend retreat with the church he went to down there, and then remaining for a couple of days. Father and I will be returning to Pine that night. Friday is Angela’s birthday, you see, so instead of just Heath and I going to the valley, so I have a chance to do anything on my own, father must come with us to celebrate with Angela. But then he must return. And I’m welcome to drive back down to Phoenix after he comes back to Pine if I like, but … gosh. Maybe another day. How about next Wednesday, when Heath is supposed to be coming home? No, that won’t do, dad has some things he needs to pick up/do in the valley, so he’s going down on Wednesday to pick Heath up. Huh. Well, I guess that’s not going to happen. Maybe another time. I’ve got to get some things back to Zoe before too long, I’ve got some shopping to do, little stuff mostly, and I’d like to try to say hi to Iain at some point. I’ll see what works for different people and just plan to go down at some point that’s convenient for everyone else, for my friends and my father and then if it works for then, see if it works for me too.

Sigh.

Am I whinging? Sorry.

I suppose I’m whinging that plans that other people had made for me have been … changed because of the whims of … other people … I have very little control. Perhaps that’s the rub.

Later, Teel. Later. Your lamps are in the store, your next lamp will be done soon enough, and the table not too, too long after that. (Assuming dad doesn’t hold up doing the top for too long.) Once the money starts coming in, that will be a good thing. If the money comes in in excess of what you need to pay your pre-existing bills, that’s a very good thing, and it is at that point that you can even begin to consider trying to make your own plans. See, if you have the money to pay your bills AND for gas to go to the valley, or somewhere else, and for whatever other expenses you incur (food, lodging), then you can do whatever you want. Of course, you have to remember to balance spending like that with savings for the other things you want to do, like go to conventions and promote your novel(s). If your work does sell well, and if you properly manage your income and your expenses and your savings, then yes, you can go to the valley when you like, or take off to other strange places on a whim, but not before then. Be patient. Be mature. Do what you need to do, and things will work out fine.

…

See, a little talking to myself, and my head gets on a little straighter. Nothing to worry about. So I don’t get to spend any personal time in Phoenix, so what? So I can’t afford to just ‘take off’ on a whim and visit some distant locale. What’s so odd about that? What’s to get upset about? I’ll have those opportunities in the future. I just need to stay present and aware of the bigger picture, and everything will be fine in the end.

Right?

In the end?

I’m slowing down. My typing is slowing down. I’m getting cold, I’m getting tired, I’ve got to get up in the morning. In the morning. That is, before noon. Preferably, much before noon. I don’t care if I don’t get enough sleep, if I’ll be tired all day. I’m not doing anything critical tomorrow, no detail work. Perhaps a bit of sanding, if I find the time and will. Perhaps re-drilling a hole that got filled with glue-foam, if I have time and feel up to it. But I don’t need much sleep. Tomorrow (today) is what? 131.1? First day of a new week? I absolutely must do my exercizes tomorrow. Chest, lats, shoulders, calves, abs, back. Shoulders balance calves, right? They’re on opposite ends of the body, anyway. Whatever. I’ll get my workout info online soon enough. I’ve almost visualized the format (and the back-end) that I want to use for that.

Did I mention I’ve been using excel lately, to make up an exercize calendar? It’s a beautiful thing. Little boxes for alternating and cyclical exercizes, boxes for reps and resistance on each set, boxes to track hours slept and hours spent working on furniture, and when I’ve showered. Laid out on my calendar, but with your calendar’s dates right there, too. All very nice looking. I wish it had more data in it; I’ve been pretty lazy lately. I need to step it up.

What else, tomorrow?

Wake up,
do exercize,
eat breakfast,
start my laundry,
trim trees,
check the mail,
take Don Quixote back to the library, unread,
re-drill my holes,
eat lunch,
dry first laundry,
start more laundry,
trim trees more,
maybe work on the mobile some,
(if available) play video game/watch movies,
dry second laundry,
eat supper,
program exercize webpage,
make another long post,
fold & put away all laundry,
research bible study topics,
…

I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head. Wait, no. Go to the library. (Adding it.) I just can’t seem to get my head properly into whatever space it needs to be in to read Don Quixote. Perhaps late in life will be better. Heck, perhaps next month would be better. Something just wasn’t working. I almost forgot my laundry, too, but remembered it before I got to the end. Heck, I’ve been forgetting my laundry for nearly a week.

I better write that list down somewhere I can see it, or it won’t come close to getting done. … Okay, it’s in one of the little books I carry around with me all day.

Which reminds me, I made a whole list of things to look up online while I was at bible study tonight. Some easy, some hard. I’ll start on that tomorrow, too, I suppose, if I have time. (Adds it to both lists.) And that’s all I’m going to add to the list for right now. I’m going to bed. I spent the hour I expected here, but I’m not prepared to spend another. Sleep. Then wake. As early as possible.

I’m thinking of trying to train my body on four hours’ sleep. Anyone want to help? Here’s how: Call me at 8AM and have an engaging conversation with me for at least 2-3 minutes. It doesn’t take much out of your day, but it gets my brain turned on and could add hours to my day. If you want my number and don’t have it, email me. If you want my email address and don’t have it, put my name in front of the domain of this site. If you can’t work that out… uhh.. you might not be able to engage my mind in the morning anyway. Sigh. Now, on to bed.

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

-Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)