I'm a failure...

..or at least, I have failed. This month I was planning to participate in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), in an effort to push myself to explore non-poetic avenues. Things were going swimmingly, in spite of an oddly busy month of school/work/preparing for my first semester at Cal, I had a word count of about 13,000, and was planning to kick it up a notch, as I had felt like I was hitting my stride...
   ...Until about ten days ago, when I tried to open the file with my manuscript on it, and could not find the file. Regardless of the circumstances, my book was gone, every single, divinely-inspired word had disappeared. As things happened to fall, I needed to install a new version of Office on my computer, and that was a job that would cost me at least a day,(I had to find the torrent and whatnot). I then looked to see what my new pace needed to be, as I would not be defeated so easily, and discovered it was a healthy 2700+ words, tough but not impossible.
   Alas, I sat down to begin again (three days later, due to the busy month), and I was completely uninspired. Worse, actually, as I was repulsed by the idea of having to retread all the brilliance I spewed during the first ten days at a less leisurely pace. So, here I sit telling you that I quit. Not writing, or even that particular story, I still want to tell it, and I plan to finish it before next November, when I plan to participate again, I'm just admitting that life and November have beaten me this time. But rest assured, that next year, I shall wreak a fiery vengeance, the likes of which they have never seen!!! Though I have no idea how I would attack a month, but in a world where the Jersey Shore "kids" are famous anything's possible.

Entrance

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let go. . . .

                   -Rainer Maria Rilke

Whimper, Pt. 1

The following is a short story I wrote a few months ago. 

I saw a magician end the world once.  That sounds like it’s going to be a weird story to tell, and it kind of is. I should clarify that when I say magician I mean someone who was capable of doing something which defies my knowledge of natural laws. According to him, it was science, but I couldn’t tell the difference. Now, when I say ‘end the world’, the question comes up, “How are you and I here then?” The answer to that is that I didn’t mean apocalyptic, I just meant such a significant change, that no one can say anything is the same. Like, imagine an ice age instead of a giant comet crashing into Earth. So that’s what happened, a scientist started an ice age, metaphorically of course.

                It was about a month ago, and I was walking downtown to get some donuts. I was listening to my iPod in an effort to avoid all the havoc around me, the occasional ramblings of crazy people strewn in the air like so much confetti, the usual hum of a city’s commerce, plus all the visual flotsam of men and women in suits trying to get somewhere warm like mice in a flood. I heard a woman, whom I had dismissed as being schizophrenic or on some terrible drug, singing, “In the city is a great biggening beast, be afraid for when it wakes from sleep.” I heard this because my iPod had stopped playing for some reason. Amid all the havoc I looked down at my iPod and accidentally bumped smack into a guy.

                I apologized profusely, though I could tell I had taken the worst of the hit, he had continued to look at the device he was looking at which I thought must be some new kind of phone. Ordinarily, I would not be prompted to ask questions, but something about the way he stood transfixed to that spot made me curious. It was in stark contrast with the bustling fluid animal of the downtown which surrounded him, and it seemed for a moment, as though he were a skyscraper and all else was a field of grass brushed by the wind. To be clear, it is not that he was an especially handsome man, or that he had any other grand physical characteristic, but that he was possessed of a unique amount of focus.

                I asked him what he was doing, and he answered me thusly: “I am looking for the heart of the city; I believe I have found it”. Slightly perplexed, I told him that the exact middle of the city was somewhere in the city hall, having discovered this fact some years prior on a class trip. “Ah, I see where you are mistaken, you misunderstand me. You see, I am not looking for the center of the city, I was looking for its heart, and I have found it.” At this point, I was too intrigued not to follow up. “It is relatively simple,” he said, still not looking up, “Just as you and I have a muscle which pumps blood through our bodies and keeps us alive, so do cities.” Not willing to believe such a ridiculous statement, I posited a few reasons why he was wrong. “I don’t see why it is so difficult to believe, after all, Rio de Janeiro feels different from San Francisco, which feels different than London, et cetera.” I agreed. “Would it be a stretch then to believe that these are different beings?” I remembered a few things I had read, from Shakespeare to Neil Gaiman, realized that I might see something amazing, and pressed him for more information. “The answer to your earlier questions, and the reason I am here, is that the cities of the Earth have been asleep, this is why they do not respond to us in any way we would understand, though we have felt their nightmares and recorded the deaths of more than a few of them, Carthage, Pompeii, Hiroshima. I and the people I work with are trying to wake them from their sleep, and what better way than to- move to the left please- shock them in the heart?”