good advice

The best way to prepare for a Big Shift is to cultivate mental and emotional states that ripen us to be ready for anything:

* a commitment to not getting lost inside our own heads;

* a strategy to avoid being enthralled with the hypnotic lure of painful emotions, past events, and worries about the future;

* a trust in empirical evidence over our time-worn beliefs and old habits;

* a talent for turning up our curiosity full blast and tuning in to the raw truth of every moment with our beginner's mind fully engaged;

* and an eagerness to dwell gracefully in the midst of all the interesting questions that tease and teach us.

Everything I just described also happens to be an excellent way to prime yourself for a chronic, low-grade, always-on, simmering-at-low-heat brand of ecstasy -- a state of being more-or-less permanently in the Tao, in the groove, in the zone.

So how does a writer develop voice? I don’t know exactly, but I think it has something to do with being as genuine as you can be in a given moment. It’s like having a conversation with your truest self. And you’re really listening. And you write it down.
from http://bit.ly/caS2oS

this is my life these days

good food. good writing. occasionally combining the two.

creepy new excerpt from my novel

I have brought it to this point. This love point, where she is experiencing that thing that the commoners think they’ve achieved, like a pinnacle, the place where now they begin to contemplate the possibility of ever-higher peaks, partnership for all of eternity. Good for them.
For me, this is the beginning of the end. What I must do now is prepare everything for the break-up, so as to ensure a more beautiful, a more meaningful, a more complete work of art.
But meanwhile, I am not so unlike a man – if anything I am so much more so than most – that I cannot enjoy the spoils of this surrender. There is a cooing fruitbasket of earthly delights lying across my lap holding a basin of spirits to my lips, fanning me with humid, airey affection.
Yes, please. And I feel the fire in my belly and this time, like an AA having a drink for New Years, like a vegetarian dutifully doing turkey on Thanksgiving, like smoking because some devastation justifies the peace of a poisoned inhalation, I do not push it away.
“Look, I’ll do it for you,” I say, putting my hand around the thick, grooved bottleneck and she reaches upwards and over, running her own along my cheek like butter melding into bristle.
Yes, please. This is fun. Really. Even those gnawed little fingertips look like a bowlful of cherries tonight. Just for tonight.
“I’ve been waiting for tonight,” I allow myself to tell her.
“Really?” she coos. “I thought you were hinting at wanting this.” She looks so pleased with herself, the flushed security in the temporary surety that her charms have gotten her what she wanted. “I feel like we’re a J.Lo song right now,” she giggles, trilling Waiting for tonight, oh, oh, oh, oh in a little falsetto.
It’s ok to add a smear of cheesy hot pink to the canvas, just now. Black slashes will layer and obscure it soon enough.
It’s a process.
And there’s nothing more fulfilling in intelligent conversation than a double-meaning that your victim can recall later, in stupefied wonder and reluctant admiration at your own structured, sculpting genius.
Women don’t want to admit it but they want a half-devil. Oh Jolene, you’re welcome, Jolene. You will remember this forever, your own drama, your own romantic epic fall from grace that most can only watch or imagine, sitting snug and monotonous in a broken-springs couch behind a screen of cowardly voyeurism.
You deserve so much more, so much more my adventurous, dumpster-flipping, nail-biting sweet Joleen, so much more and that is why I’m taking the time to give this to you.
Do you know how fucking cool you’re gonna be after this?

i have so much to do.

which is why i'm taking the time to read up on 'how to create the perfect messy side bun' right now.

but when i'm done procrastinating, of note for novel:

-i need a street, gypsy character; hooded harlequin: idealist but desperate, flimsily brilliant.

-i need a charming user villain: so full of entertaining creativity he gets away with being a narcissist sociopath.

- i need jolene character's background to be sufficiently planned prior, to accomplish an organic depiction of transition from creepy controlled certainty to wide-eyed, desperate uncertainty. EVERYTHING taken away. Make the reader feel it, make the reader care.

ok things iz hectic

so i'm gonna just start posting things here to remember to write about as soon as my job ends and i begin to write fulltime.

- the hare krishna egg-throwing, cross-dressing venice beach day.
- the tranny-living-at-my-house saga

it's happening.

also ... this is a pretty good pic of janis joplin, huh?

poem

oh sethy-poo, how i miss you
in your cigarette-skinny slacks
and moroseness masking something else.

your dark shock of hair, that pale, pensive mouth
like a neil gaiman sketch-of-a-joke
on the robots thronging rodeo drive

your blood-red heart dripping water
within a charcoal ribcage
i hope you wring it out to dry on your drums.

these lyrics pretty much sum up the entire drive behind 'hipster / diary of a seducer' the novel i'm currently completing:

Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid
I remember that time that you told me, you said
Love is touching souls
Surely you touched mine
Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time

Oh you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you darling
Still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet

I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your life
She knew your devils and your deeds
And she said
Go to him, stay with him if you can
But be prepared to bleed

Oh but you are in my blood you're my holy wine
You're so bitter, bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you darling
Still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet
-joni mitchell 'case of you'

once again, all together now ...

"the man who knows something knows that he knows nothing at all."

this is what it feels like in my brain right now. uncluttered texturized delicious quirk. to a soundtrack of Eric Satie. literally. pandora is playing his station while i'm at my office late on a saturday night, creating the next steps for my new tv pilot. i've been planning it for 3 months, and i'm getting ever-closer to the fun part. writing.
anyway, isn't this picture something? it froze me in my visual-aid-hunt tracks.
(thanks http://bit.ly/b59lDe)

I am Feeling Very Inspired Lately

he told me it was written on inspiration of watching horses pulling a hearse in new orleans. this is a new remix.

and the latest videos for one of my favorite tracks of his: