To Choose The Future To Doubt What is Going On

To choose the future, go to page 55
To doubt what is going on, go to page 31

You neglect your journal, leaving it untouched for weeks.

Erin comes into your room. You heard her coming and she can see that you are at your desk. You're pretty sure this is going to be one of those times where you think it is bullshit she makes such a big deal of being Erin the human instead of Ms Botz, the science teacher. Hell, Ms Botz was already a nickname off of her full-name. It's Ms Botsukowski - but you aren't sure of the spelling. For a second you think maybe Erin is a made-up name.

But that tumbles out of your mind as Ms Botz is wearing her authority glasses. You wonder when you noticed about those purple glasses and how she always wears them when she is telling someone what to do. She is talking to you about your journal and what you have written in it lately. She knows you haven't been writing. You mention that you have been living the future and it slows you down to much to stop in the middle of things. You reject a couple nasty phrases you could say -hoping she'll go away.

You can't figure out what is making you the most upset about this whole thing. She didn't knock. You're increasingly positive that she does the thing with the authority glasses on purpose. And how the fuck does she know you haven't been writing anyways and you realize she has no special purchase on this new world. You decide that she has been leaning heavily on her teacher-student position with everyone from the class.

You still believe everything you all decided in there. And you are grateful that you made it to that science class and for all the support that came out of that. But Ms Botz is obviously having trouble finding spots in the new changing ways. So you know why she hovers, needles, and bosses her way through human contact.

But she is seriously starting to piss you off.


To make a snide comment about her glasses and follow that path towards a confrontation where you belittle her worth ... go to page 45.

To engage in frank, constructive dialog about your journal, whether Ms Botz -Erin -is going to be an equal, and why she has no special rights over your things or your actions because of her status from Before ... go to page 62

To have the discipline and focus of a fart keep writing as much as you have been

To actually be what you are, write the fucking thing. Write any part of any thing. Just get the word down. Let it be true. Keep coming back.

To have the discipline and focus of a fart keep writing as much as you have been.

To read the English translation of the song Bombay by El Guincho keep reading.

English translation of “Bombay” (the song with the coolest music video ever) :

I look at you from above in case everything ends
I want you to remember me as in the beginning
There is something that stops me from seeing where I am going
I don't know what it is that is in front of me

We are no longer children
We learned from the things that happened to us and we are never different
Don’t go to China, there are no curtains there like the ones that kept us hidden from everyone

You walk without a parasol at the edge of the island
That frowns up on me because I didn’t come back
Not everything is my fault
Everything is different and if you don't see it’s because you
Don’t want to see it or you don't want to see me

There was something that could be repeated
You want to make me believe it
But it’s a fairy tale
I haven’t been able to write a line for 200 days
And it doesn't look like it will change now
Listen, I ask you to stay where you can find what you need
But you ask me to stay where you can see me
Or until you tire of looking for me.

El Guincho - Bombay from CANADA on Vimeo.

video Not Safe For American Prudishness. Yes, there are brief clips of topless women, but they're in the artistic context established in the Carl Sagan inspired opening.

give yer gob a go with yer gulliver, yobbo

I just created a google documents spreadsheet where you can get the layout all done and have links to each page of the blog in cells and move them around or just see and shit another way to foster community contribution. you mean this shit is fun to do. You keep leaving things vague with my moronic misunderstanding of some wave writing theory You want to invite people to this blog as co-authors. You think about what it would be like in the we person. if instead of second person it were the we person. what is that, fourth, me plus she is we 1st plus 34d is four?



but that was cheating on this blog with words about this typed else-where - so this is what is in that link above now below

gasp maybe each cell - certainly not each post (see here you are writing with a meta or editorial tag but not a narrative pro

Create Your Own Museum of Adventure.
You are still getting everything organized here
so each row could be a new choice branch or then when ones finished its a column. whatever you'll figure it out as you go
second person, present tense
or I think maybe each numbered row is a narrative thread. And you can hop up and down them.
okay so what does a story need.
characters
story
aims
conflict
setting
adventure

You will be written ocassionally as pages (or blog posts) from 50 to 150 words

You will be written ocassionally as pages (or blog posts) from 50 to 150 words. I am going to invite a small random bunch out of the corpus, "people I think are way cool and think might do this.

This is a choose your own adventure.

No, this is a create your own adventure.

50-150 words - if you go over 150, just pick a number after what you would then go back and number your first page. or give yourself two choices, you can then right to another choice page, an end page, a rejoin the story page, a you're dead and this adventure is seriously over page (I might want to look at that but if you want that cool.

and there are beginnings under the tag beginnings and choice pages with tag choice.

So, I'm using a version of the wave method of writing for NaNoWriMo here. The specific version is molded by my hazy memory of something that was not properly explained to me and I didn't really get at the time beyond incorporating some of the talk or what it seemed like she did with it.

And it is a metaphorical wave method. There are these bits - some even of other things - but part of what the soul memory and community feelings that are represented by the various stories of other times and places you in various guises - and so these make up part of the museum of adventures - It is an attempt at creating in non-Gonzo format a more-Gonzo than I've ever seen printed account from the account of you. A you written by an author (a community can be an author) me and three people thinking of helping.

So. you can

but it is a choose your own adventure so there is adventure and it is you doing the adventuring. Second person, present tense.

oh and we need character pages. You can email me or call me or come see me or I'll stop by. It may take till the end of the month for me to organize this shit and explain what I want you to do:
write 50 to 150 words of an adventure starting with the main on which is that you woke up one morning and everyone was gone - just gone - you didn't even notice right away.

And then it turned out that it was only most people who had disappeared without warning, notice, or explanation. And you are about 16 when this starts and you walk to your high school and you end up after many realizations and choices (or few) you end up going to your 3rd period science class. You are Tracey Fletcher and for no good reason that is ever explained -likewise there is no explanation given for what happened to everyone. For me that isn't meant to really be a focus. Like Lost kept pretending that it was all going to end up making sense. fuck shit. never mind.

"Now, Nick, you don't swear like that when you talk ... why do you swear so much in your writing" "I don't know and I swear less when I am around you than when I am in other situations."


So you just

get bits of plot down. Even sentences even phrases. Those are legit posts here.

Or you can do choices as comments as regular comments

ok so

Songs about Birds

Songs about birds

from Bitch tapes



Then there is my
13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird playlist based on Wallace Stevens's poem 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. where each of the 13 songs corresponds to the 13 stanzas which evoke 13 Ways of looking at a blackbird in an amazing way.



I've changed this mix more than any I've ever made and all the songs are meant 10 be 2009 releases (the album Sea Sew by Lisa Hannigan came out in 09 in the US but the single I Don't Know came out in 08 in the UK but it fit so perfect. Same reason for Wilco's Bull Black Nova which has no video except shitty fan at concert vids or the album track with album cover.

There wasn't a video for Bill Callahan aka smog's Too Many Birds In One Tree.

I can add other mixes about birds and please send yours to me.

Gilgamesh

Please Father, do something quickly before the people overwhelm heaven with their heart-rending cries.

30.5 degrees Centipede

It is 93 degrees F, 30.5 Celsius, higher than the predicted high today. Much hotter than most November afternoons. There is a huge mass of air swooping down from the high desert to the ocean. It must squeeze through mountain ranges whipping into ferocious gusts.

Mostly it is just physics, with the higher altitude air being much less dense, it has far fewer molecules per bit of area. As the air descends the air moves into much more pressure as it reaches 0 ft above sea level.

With the winds and the pressure and something to do with ions, the air soaks up moisture. Water is ripped through your skin into the drying air. Water is sucked out of plants and trees and every living thing making fire dangers much worse.

These are the devil winds, the bitch winds, the santa anas.

It is the first of this year and it is the time when assault and divorce rates spike and termites colonies swarm out with ridiculous wings trying to end up someplace they can burrow themselves into.

Existing now, here, anywhere around, you are in conditions ripe for crankiness

You show an interest in the Citizen Guide to the Galaxy - page whatever

You have tried to strain credulity by avoiding the self-evident otherness of the object. But how great the fit. And the feeling of the fit fitting.

Through various data transfer networks / or paper or all sorts of different things as you have grappled with as you have tried to retain and style the

it is like the hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy, "sort of an electronic book" "haphazardly updated over the sub-ether net.

And in some of the more relaxed civilizations on the outer left arm of the galaxy (like Earth at coordinates ZZ9 plural Z alpha)

all entities whose lifespans originate in any of the plural zones, you risk death by going through hyperspace and should choose not to do so ... please do not eat this ticket

I have another blog post that gets at what I was meaning to say there but didn't

On Becoming Lost

On Becoming Lost

One purpose of a hiking guide is to present information in such a manner that people do not become lost. Hiking isn't like riding a horse or a bicycle. If one is lost while riding a horse just relax, maybe even close your eyes and let the reins go slack -the horse often knows the way home. Having spent some time on a bike I suspect that bikers don't mind being lost -it's just another experience -and everything will be O.K. Hikers, however, can become concerned if lost and a vague sense of apprehension sets in -in rare instances panic.

Stop, sit down, and gain control of your thinking. Resist the temptation of thrashing around hoping for a miracle. Mark the spot with something you can recognize, then retrace your route to the last known spot where your location is certain. Keep your daypack with you at all times. You can try yelling then listen. Some people carry a whistle, three strong blasts could catch someone's attention. Look at your map and orient it using your compass. Many of us believe in carrying the "Eleven essentials." Map and compass is on that list. Following an unknown stream downhill is not always a good idea. Some of our streams are difficult.

I've spent my share of time looking for lost trails and am of the belief that only the lone hiker is in serious danger. Groups of two or more can become lost but the mutual support of others with whom to share responsibility and ideas is a great comfort.


page 63

dire wolves encouraged by the foresight and generosity of a dwarf pronghorn

aware of word origins to some extent:

Call it courage (Armstrong Sperry)
He is being worked on in the Page Museum laboratory.
We work 7 days a week with 5 paid staff & a number of volunteers.
Chester Stock, PhD Paleontologist January 28 1842 - December 7, 1950
Who, encouraged by the foresight and generosity of G. Allan Hancock, Inspive his many co-workers in developing and preserving the treasures of Rancho La Brea.

The Palliser Novels, The Barsetshire Novels Anthony Trollope
Gardner - Guitar World, Martel - Ralphs, Poinsettia, La Brea - Ross Happy Ending.
pattern of blaming other people. grief. being good pressure.
Use it in a positive way for other situations.
Still more of the baby mastodon we've been finding recently
A skull from a giant sloth (Like the statues to your left.)

Q: Have You Found Anything Today? A: Yes!
The Latest in Box 14's Herbivore News
Recent Fossil Finds Include:
- A tooth from one of our more uncommon herbivores, an extinct dwarf pronghorn
- A lower leg bone from an adult ancient horse
- A piece of jaw, still with teeth, from a young bison.

"I don't believe I ever said that but if I did, I was speaking metaphorically."
I know you want to hear this. Just not yet. You will start wanting to know at some point. It is bad though.

page 3

Very quickly you fall back asleep and experience a fitfully intense dream. There is very little discernible of your situation in this dream that you won't really remember. Even while asleep, part of you remembers the phrase you heard recently that you ruminate over, "privileged access" is the short version and the one that speaks itself the loudest in your head. You also know, "privileged access to yourself."

Someone didn't believe that people have privileged access to themselves despite what most people believe. You don't know that it was Errol Morris quoted by Chuck Klosterman. You never knew that.


to follow the dream the way it comes at you, go to page 5. to dig deep into the true echo memories that underlie the dream go to page 13.

formatting

one idea is to just write and not worry so much about the format. the other was to get one of the official books and copy one of their formats verbatim. here is a picture from a site that has detailed explanations of the plots and the layout of choices going one or another place



anyways, I think that the entries with labels other than narrative proper should probably count towards the end word count. of course there is silliness here with a blog and not a word processor. I did edit a bit page one. I don't know about details for maybe a thing where there are edits done. I am adding another page from that website which I am stealing too much from. The domain is samizdat and it is dot cc so that makes me seem they are cool with shit. I don't know.


I have this feeling of wanting to take advantage of this. And for me the way that a story is told or the way that I would choose to make things go forward.

Ok, for me, I wouldn't learn a story in a straight narrative. I enjoy the side details and ok side details is wrong - parts that speak truth in giving a window into what it was actually like to experience the thing.


so much of history is completely misunderstood by the people doing it at a time. That is a bit silly sounding because I don't really fall into the camp of people are wrong about their motivations for shit (Marx vs Feurbach on people's experience of religion in their lives) but that say, Robert McNamara really thought that the Viet Nam War was about communism and still does not understand that they were fighting an anti-imperialist freedom struggle

you get this weight of the past. and that is a big part of the themes I want

more an overview

in the choose your own adventure style,

you are a sixteen year old Tracey Fletcher who wakes up one morning to find most people gone. Over time it transpires that there are a number of people remaining. but it is less than a percent of all people. I just told Elise about the rest. it is this extendid daydream I had all through like junior-high-high-school a little bit into college
but so like there will be like a group of you in whatever neghborhood and you'll be it as far as society is concerned - not totally

and at first there are all sorts of cool things like driving cars that you don't have to buy to stores with bunches of stuff.

but then there are problems because like you have to sort of rebuild parts of society and graft other things onto existing infrastructure

and so there is refrigeration, getting new food becomes more of a long term issue

My original hope is to have it be a generic city type neghborhood/ american suburb but more like a suburban city if it is that where there is enough of a center

I hope to solicit collaborations on certain lines of the choose your own adventure style. like you could do a 80-180 word page continuing on or making a new choice or some people/persons could control a longer area/span.

so then there are other tribes that come in and there are varying levels of morals

I'm trying to stick away from apocalyptic stuff - funny yeah - but stearing away from thunderdome style stuff at least for the first third which is more about you - a not specified whether male or female Tracey

and you go to your high school for the main thread of the choices and so there is learning and books and a sense of community as the you becomes more adept at applied knowledge, practical math and physics and engineering. (try maybe not to have just some "computer whiz who can just do anything by tapping at any computer screen.)

And it is in a while about the possibilities of industrial society on top of agrarian society but without all of the institution-driven forces on top of you you begin to regain your agency and feel your power and limitations as an individual, as a part of humanity and as a society as a whole with tribes and communities and an attempt for localization to win out - even as there are presumably wars and people arguing to be in charge. you miss a deal of that going on on other continents and news travels slowly at the speed of a human traveling.

and the limits of going beyond what you have been socialized to think and feel and value when given the freedom for new social relationships and situations

It is super fucking juicy and there are many different possible avenues of inquiry - which I think dovetails into the choose your own adventure bit.

No zombies - at least - it isn't mainly a zombie thing. the people just disappeared and there isn't a good explanation for it - and while some may be clinging to that past and some may wall themselves away in religious asceticism the main thrust is of a communnity with you in it trying to formulate a way to live, a way to live rightly, and a way to live with quality of life. the how when and where phases ; how do we eat, why do we eat, where shall we have lunch , survival, inquiry, sophistication

k

will use google docs - prob a spreadsheet too.

the start page 1

You wake up and it is dark and quiet. This is the seventh time that you have woken up this morning. As you settle upon being awake you are dimly aware of having gone back to sleep twice.

The first time you were sweaty and had just had -not a bad but- an intense dream. The second time was about twenty minutes before your alarm and you thought about getting up in order to get a long shower to deal with your extra sweat that you felt all sticky.

You fell back asleep and now you begin to panic because you feel the alarm should have happened already. You check and this is true. Also, why isn't there more noise going on. It should be lighter. You feel unsure.

To get straight out of bed and into the shower go to page 2. To stay in bed and let haziness return go to page 3.

WIth Apologies to the Real People

Choose Your Own Muffled Rumble

You are Tracey Blair


with Jonathon Fletcher
and Sinclair Lewis
and Dorothy Magee
and Elwayn Blair
and Alexander Blair
and Eric Blair
and William Blair
and Amary.


a tortuos affair of the mind

allowed to play out upon the backdrop of a fantastic novel.

more of a journey
and a shared day dream

choosing which way to go

Trying to hit up NaNoRiMo

and going to get choose your own adventure books to plot out which pages go where and what are the routes to what ends
with a view towards if collaborators are willing to write a page or more on certain limbs.

I don't know how much of a sketch to get out here tonight. It is just 1:18 am PST here on November 1 2010. I decided that this month is a gift from whatever god is and there are opportunities to use this time.

So I am going to try and dive into this. And also possibly dally.
daily