Hiatus

I've been absent from these threads for some time now, only really getting a few inklings of thought out. My biggest detraction causing this hiatus is my lack of inspiration for writing. The well has dried up and the ink has hardened.

The other factor is that I'm working on a new novel idea an spending less time on my actual computer to keep distractions to a minimum.

So if you've been wondering where I've been this is your answer. I'm away at the moment, looking for new inspirations, and penning new tales in secret.

Move Along

I will not give power to that which does not deserve to be powerful.

Coffee Table Clutter

I've realized I'm bit of a hypocrite. (a bit?)

I don't read the same things that I write. I don't seek out and read poetry. I don't read YA. I don't read fantasy. (All that much)

Yet I hope to be known in the future for my writing. I've written a lot of poetry recently. (If you can really all it poetry). I've been writing two YA novels. (One more so than the other) Yet I don't read or engage in those works on the outside. In fact I tend to steer clear of them. YA especially.

I am a hypocrite. But I can't help it.

Running the Gamut

I believe in parallel universes and I believe that each choice is countered by another similar version of myself in those places. They have died when I have lived, they have succeeded when I have failed and failed when I have succeeded. They have said the right thing at the wrong time and vice versa.

The most recent success that my counterpart has seen is the publishing of a short story and winning up to $3000.

I will continue to attempt to succeed so as to shower my counterparts in lavishments I will never know. Here's to you parallel me, may your future be filled with happiness.

And so on.

As the world turns and my life progresses the more I become attuned to others who lived before me, had love and lost before me, who suffered before me. Who died before me. I feel the same pains and the same pleasures. Have the same worries and distractions. The same doubts and convictions. We repeat and repeat as the sun spits its hot light from its center to our eyes. And this is fine.

I have lived a thousand lives in rapid succession and died a thousand more in repetition. All the sights and sounds of the world have been heard by me. All the thoughts and secrets have been shared by me. I am here in the garden, I am there on the field. I am standing on a balcony on a snowy afternoon in Stuttgart, I am buried in the cemetery behind St. Luke's Cathedral. I'm flying over the Atlantic from Boston to Stockholm. Floating on a wave from Hong Kong to Sydney. There's a breath in my lungs filled with sand from the Sahara. Heat on my head from the humidity in the Amazon. A bite of rhubarb pie in my mouth homemade in Nottingham. A kiss on my cheek from a girl in Lisbon. A hand in my hand on the streets of Moscow. A love in my heart for the people before me. A hate in my soul for the darkness in us all.

Through them I am, through me they are. The connection isn't seen, it is felt. I can feel it in every word I read, every thing I write, every thought I think, every voice I speak. I feel it.

We are one, we are no one. I am everyone, I am no one.

The lives of the past live inside me, and I will live on in the future self.

So it goes.

I finished reading Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut at 5:30 am on a Wednesday morning, some twelve hours after purchasing the short piece. I laughed, I reacted, and was taken in most by his character Billy Pilgrim going on a pilgrimage through his life in time. The anti-war sentiments weren't lost on me completely but it speaks to the difference between 1969 and now, that I'm more intrigued by the science fiction aspects than the actual true war aspects of the story that captivated, infuriated and made move the feet of so many youths in that time of publishing.

The US was in Vietnam, a war no citizen wanted to wage. Had come out of the second great war, filled with atrocities perpetrated by all sides, bar none, which we felt justified in committing for the eradication of Nazism. Were moving forward into a new age of information and technology, where I find myself now. In a world post moon landing, post globalization, post internet boom, post war, post peace, post intellectual highs, and post societal lows, or so we hope.

In reading reviews or critiques of the aforementioned novel I come across words like fear, and guilt and forbidden things. Talk of how certain things can't be written about to protect the soul of society from the ills of its protector. The world I occupy is free from that protection and has become more awake and cynical to the ebb and flow of big governments and the wars we wage, specifically. It makes me wonder what things are too taboo to write about now. What thing in twenty years hence will be wrote about shedding light on this time like Vonnegut does with the bombing of Dresden, Germany, which he was witness to.

We have first hand accounts of the war in Iraq, and Afghanistan. The tallies of civilians killed in Syria and the truth behind the curtain of North Korea. We know the bad things that are being done now, right now, because our information engine spits it at us so frequently we are numb to its affects. In the past time information was kept from us to keep us safe and to keep us ignorant to the truth. Now we are bombarded so often, so ferociously, we can't find an emotion to attach to it all. We move through life with an inherent cynicism towards events. At least compared to the world back in 1969, the year we landed on the moon, the year DHL became a company, the year we got Slaughterhouse Five and the American people first laid their eyes on the horrors brought by that fire bombing.

What novel written now or twenty years hence would excite us or destroy us as this novel is said to have done to the public upon its release? What horror exists now still shrouded in so much shadow we can't even guess at it? What truth lingers undiscovered or untold by a fair few for fear of retaliation from the powers that be?

Perhaps I'm not intelligent enough to venture a guess. For I am just a baby stuck to the tit of information, sucking the day away. My eyes are closed and the world around me spins as the sweet sour milk of "news" fills my bosom with disdain and fear. Perhaps, there is no more hidden truth, none of that like anyway, left to break free to the world. Maybe the veil isn't real, it's imaginary and the true veil is the sea of information, our head bobbing just below the surf, with no attempt to gasp for air.

The timeline will forever be fixed and the events forever repeating as the track goes along. Until we all perish with the sands of time.