For Tomorrow

"London's so nice back in your seamless rhymes, but we're lost on the Westway. So we hold each other tightly, and hold on for tomorrow."

It's just a waiting game right now. As I said in the piece I wrote the last time Jennifer left, I've been counting the minutes since and the minutes until. Perhaps I should count days or weeks or months, but when you really want something, even the seconds can be painful. In some ways, I feel like every one of those minutes - some 90,000 - was wasted. Probably I shouldn't be thinking like that, but in the long slow hours between work and work, little else seems to capture the imagination. In terms of emotional priorities, whatever it is that we have comes before this life I'm currently living, before even my writing. Everything I do right now is a means to an end.

That end is still some way off, and I'm not even going to pretend I'm not struggling with the idea. I am anything but a patient and motivated person, and this distance is driving me insane.

Still, Time Out. No work for a week. Jennifer for a week. Jennifer for 10,000 minutes. Hold off on the resolutions, on the promises and accompanying hardships. Find the smile that isn't marked 'Customer Service'. It's there somewhere, and I know that tomorrow morning at Heathrow I won't even have to look for it. We can just close the door for a little while and pretend like all the miles and the timezones aren't there. We can be who we're going to be when we work this thing out. And a week from Sunday, when I hear the bell for another round of me versus all the things I hate doing, I know I'll feel up to coming out swinging.

That thing I always say to myself about my writing, that thing about never catching your dreams if you don't chase them, that applies here, too. Even when it's the end of another long day and all I can do is lie on my back aching, staring at the ceiling and counting the minutes since and the minutes until, that teenage mantra holds true. All of these things will come to pass.

For now, though, Time Out. There are 10,000 minutes on the clock, and I don't plan on wasting a single one.

Goonies Never Say Die

"Nobody move, nobody get hurt, they said. Make one wrong move, man, you wake up dead. I exercise my lyrical stylings, and all the while you're dead and gone and forgotten."

Trying to write about my day or my week or my month is no longer an exercise in linear thinking. The way my mind works, the dull, repetitive stuff gets left on the cutting room floor. What remains are snapshots and scenes, memorable moments spliced between lengthy shots of gaudy displays beneath harsh fluorescent bulbs or a boy walking home with his head down and nothing but sheer bloody-mindedness in the rhythm of his footfalls.

These are familiar feelings, and I've already tried to write a novel about them. The sensation I get is that there isn't any one story here, rather fragments of thought and feeling that defy the neat rows of words I use to describe them. If you look into a mirror, you'll find plenty to write about. If you shatter that mirror and then attempt the same exercise, your tale may find a certain lyrical beauty, but the song will lack the coherency that makes people need to know how it ends.

And so on. We've heard this tune before, so let's skip to the next track. If my last two musical needs were the sparse beauty of Morricone and then the smiling, screaming honesty of the Eels, then we need to get to where I've been waking up all this week, with the Transplants' Tall Cans In The Air. Not the most subtle of songs, I'll grant you, but turn the volume on your speakers way up, and you have one of a few songs I've been needing to get me going on bleak post-winter mornings that seem to inhabit some kind of seasonless wasteland. Sure, it's not so cold anymore, but spring has yet to really show its face, and these days seem lacking in character and colour.

Out of bed to Rob Aston's shouty rapping, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and heading for the briefest of showers, enough for hygiene and the purging of dreams I don't even try to remember anymore. Toothpaste, deodorant, hairwax, clothes, namebadge, and gone. Out the door and walking at the bus stop. Head down.

I got to thinking, the other day, about how the films this generation is growing up with just don't stand up to the ones my generation were raised on. That isn't to say that our movies were better, because I appreciate there's a certain amount of rose-tinting on my spectacles, more that the likes of The Goonies have - beyond the periodic we're-so-ironic revival - a certain emotional resonance that is lacking in similar films released in the nineties and naughties. I'm sure a degree of that opinion is massively subjective, but I'm also sure that it's yet another small but valid jab at the steady degradation of all the things that used to make pop culture great.

What's taken us off on this tangent is that one of the things I thought I'd really, really enjoy about working in the Home Entertainment store was the opportunity to a) watch a fuckload of free films, and b) spend large amounts of time each and every week with people who are passionate about the movies. Like-minded people, I hasten to add. The reason I get so wound up about bad flicks in the first place is because of my love affair with good ones. Poor film-making just frustrates me, especially when we all know that they didn't even try.

So I had this vision in my head of being part of a group of diverse people that liked and disliked different films and could talk/debate/argue about them all day long, should business be especially slow. Sadly, the reality is that there's me and then there's the rest of the staff, and the only place we seem to be able to reach any kind of compromise is when it comes to foreign language films. This is great for a few minutes of discussion about the latest in what is becoming a very long line of brutal horror and action films out of Japan and China, but somewhat depressing when I wonder aloud what might happen if two white guys dressed up as black women complete with stereotypical dialogue and mannerisms and called it comedy only to find everybody staring at me for several seconds of awkward silence before returning to what they were doing.

The other thing is that I'm working for a huge, multinational company now. In the past, my employers have largely been of the independent variety. They weren't fly-by-night operations (with a few notable exceptions), by any stretch of the imagination, but they didn't have this humourless push towards sales, sales, sales, and they didn't treat their customers and employees like cattle. The Home Entertainment people don't quite do that either, but believe me, they aren't far off. Everything is an acronym or a catchphrase or a five-step process, designed to streamline and standardise and just generally drain any life and character out of the whole operation. And the scary thing is, it really works. If this particular company were a person, they'd bleed money. Of course, they'd also be a wall-eyed automaton, but when you're rich, shit like that doesn't matter.

No, I'm not surprised. I'm not that naive. It's just that working in that environment occasionally brings me close to moments of genuine despair at how completely crap the human race can be. And maybe they don't mean all that much, these things we're fed as we grow up, but I find myself thinking of the next generation of Customer Service Representatives, ten or fifteen years down the line, and it scares me a little that they won't have something as completely stupid as "Sloth loves Chunk" to give them a little inner smile and carry them through another few minutes of their streamlined, standardised, homogenised day. No, where I keep The Goonies and Back To The Future and Ghostbusters and Gremlins, they'll have some generic television advert of a movie that only smiles because they wouldn't buy the products otherwise.

Excuse my cynicism, but some days it seems that the future is simply the past presented as part of a bundle deal. Buy these pre-owned sentiments, and we'll throw in a bunch of flashing lights and a lobotomy free of charge.

Whoops. That was kind of a heavy statement to be making at this time of the morning, especially when all I was going to do was talk about my week, make some minor points about the tangential nature of my idle thought processes, and maybe evoke a little nostalgia. Instead, I dragged you through more of this scary Welcome To Forever Stuff. So, just to set the karmic scales to rights, I'd like you all to do something for me. Prepare your best squeaky, wheedling voice, and say the following line:

"C'mon, Mikey, give me a lickery kiss!"

There. Doesn't that feel better?

Existential Wobble

"I'm lying in my bed, the blanket is warm, this body will never be safe from harm. Still feel your hair, black ribbons of coal, touch my skin to keep me whole."

Tired. Fifty-one Home Entertainment hours in six days. Still, it's definitely helping me adjust to life back in the real world, and that can only be a good thing. The pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow is that I now have two-and-a-half days to do with as I wish, and I wish to party. To that end, tomorrow is going to be spent sorting out various practical concerns, whilst Friday night will be dedicated to the great god Alcohol and his many friends. I am passing Go, and I fully intend to collect my £200.

Other benefits? Well, the Home Entertainment People aren't completely evil. As well as many free rentals, I also get a 20% discount on pretty much everything, and the fact that it's sale-time in the HE world means that I can and did buy the special editions of The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Die Hard, along with The Goonies (how could I resist?), for a grand total of less than fifteen of your English pounds. A bargain? I think so. I could get into the film-reviewing again at this point, but I'm not going to. Suffice to say that - for various reasons - these are three more flicks that would find their way onto my all-time list.

But back to my week, which has been lengthy and draining and strangely emotional. As I'm sure you could tell from my posts of the 3rd and the 7th, I've had mixed feelings about both the blog and my writing in general recently. Regardless of the fact that pretty much everybody hates their job and yadda yadda blah blah, the transition back into work has been a tough one for me. To be honest, there have been times since I took the job that I've been on the brink of walking out the door in that way I'm so good at. Between Transatlantic relationships, the first real writer's block I've ever experienced, attempting to make some major changes to my lifestyle, and hauling my sorry arse back into a full-time job having spent nearly four months sitting at home procrastinating, I don't mind saying that I've definitely taken the time to feel a bit sorry for myself. Which is okay, so long as I don't start taking it too seriously.

What I needed, when I wrote the 'Hateful Little Word...' post, was for somebody to say something other than "you're very talented, you'll do fine" etc etc. In all seriousness, I don't need anybody to tell me that I'm talented. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that has a higher opinion of my "talent" than I do. To a certain extent, that comes with the territory. If I didn't have the confidence, why the fuck would I bother trying? No, what I needed was a "shut the fuck up and get on with it, you're giving me a fucking headache." That was pretty much exactly what I got, so thank you to all concerned. You know who you are, and it's appreciated.

On the subject, it's been a busy few weeks as far as correspondence goes. Before I'd even thought about writing something following the death of Hunter S. Thompson, there was a deluge of e-mails from people wanting an epitaph or a tribute or...something. I don't know that what I eventually fired off will ever be included amongst my finest works, but I hope it did what it was supposed to do.

The second big mail day came when I was foolish enough to request abusive assistance in the writing of my second novel. Amongst the many finely-worded missives I received, I sensed a common theme of folks actually being bothered about me finishing this thing. In between falling about at some of the inventive threats (If I don't deliver some 60,000 words by the end of May, you can expect to see me sued, kicked to death, and then set on fire by cannibalistic dwarfs), I was both touched and motivated by that. Again, the relevant thanks are duly delivered.

Lastly, there was the response to the pity-post, which served mainly to make me stop worrying that I could write whatever I wanted here and everyone would still say I was awesome. It's nice to know I can count on a slap when I need one.

Anyway, this particular existential wobble came to a head a couple of days ago, when I got back from work and found that Jenn had sent me a mix CD. I dragged myself up the stairs to the Darkened Room, opened the case, and proceeded to get a little choked up at the short note I found inside. Feeling more than a little exhausted and on the brink of tears anyway, I was perfectly poised to notice the way the light caught the recorded side of the disc, revealing a thumbprint she'd left smeared along the edge, a thumbprint that had somehow survived all that time and distance. I couldn't help but touch it, couldn't help allowing myself to cry at a facsimile of the contact I was really craving. In those few moments, the misery and frustration was almost overwhelming. Writing, working, changing - all of those things seemed like more than I was capable of. I wanted to regress, to lie down and turn out the lights and live inside my head for a while, shutting it all out save for the music.

So that's what I did. And an hour or so later, I got up, switched on the computer, and started writing. That night and the one that followed produced the first chapter of Welcome To Forever, entitled The Mix-Tape Man. It's only a beginning, and it's only just nosing over the five-thousand word mark, but suddenly I'm feeling these stories again, and suddenly I'm getting antsy at work because I'm nobody's CSR. What I am is a boy with monsters in his head and a world in each fingertip.

And I'm coming to get you.

Multiple Spontaneous Empathetic Human Combustion

"No stop signs, speed limit, nobody's gonna slow me down. Like a wheel, gonna spin it, nobody's gonna mess me round."

FADE INTO...
INT. JOSH HARTNETT'S HOUSE - JOSH HARTNETT'S BEDROOM - EARLY MORNING.
Hollywood superstar JOSH HARTNETT stirs from a refreshing and energising sleep. His room is as you'd imagine if you were of a cynical or even hateful mindset; silk sheets, posters of himself on the walls, and a mirror set into the ceiling above his bed. As he emerges from the blankets and goes across to the window, we see a cabinet obviously set aside for awards. It is empty except for a single plastic trophy in the shape of a heart. The inscription reads "Shallow Teens Magazine Hunk Of The Month - July 2001".

CUT TO...
EXT. LYNCHIAN HOLLYWOOD NEIGHBOURHOOD - EARLY MORNING.
Picket fences and perfect lawns and four door saloons, a paperboy wearing his cap back-to-front and smiling in the early morning sunshine, birds singing and the rhythmic chittering of sprinklers. All is terrifyingly perfect in the Lynchian Hollywood Neighbourhood...

...until the morning's peace is shattered by the roar of a motorcycle engine. Except that this is a motorcycle engine in the same way that Godzilla is a lizard. The bike it belongs to bursts into the picture trailing black smoke, unseen speakers pumping out AC/DC's Highway To Hell. Its RIDER is clad from head to toe in black, face hidden behind a tinted visor.

CUT TO...
INT. JOSH HARTNETT'S HOUSE - JOSH HARTNETT'S BEDROOM - EARLY MORNING.
A tic of annoyance flickers in young JOSH's cheek as we hear the engine and the guitars in the distance, the din growing steadily louder. He frowns.

CUT TO...
POV JOSH - EARLY MORNING.
JOSH's hand reaches out and brushes back the nets. We see the motorcycle turning into the street and cruising slowly closer until it's directly outside the house. The RIDER cuts the engine and we clearly hear Bon Scott scream "Hey mama, look at me! I'm on my way to the promised land," as the RIDER steps off the motorcycle and stands facing us. With no apparent urgency, the RIDER then takes the rucksack from his back and places several large metal parts on the pavement. As we watch, he assembles them into what looks like a large tube of some kind. The RIDER picks the tube up and turns away, reaching into the bag for something we cannot see as his activity is now obscured by his body.

CUT TO...
INT. JOSH HARTNETT'S HOUSE - JOSH HARTNETT'S BEDROOM - EARLY MORNING.
JOSH leans further out of the window, clearly curious.

JOSH: Hey, dude. What the hell are you doing?

CUT TO...
POV JOSH - EARLY MORNING.
The RIDER turns around and we see that the tube is in fact a rocket laucher. It is loaded and aimed directly at us. The RIDER lifts his visor to speak. We still can't see his face clearly.

RIDER: This is for Wicker Park, you fucking demon.

CUT TO...
INT. JOSH HARTNETT'S HOUSE - JOSH HARTNETT'S BEDROOM - EARLY MORNING.
Almost paralysed with fear, JOSH takes a couple of steps back from the window, stumbling over his own feet. He gropes blindly for support and pulls the award cabinet towards him. It crashes to the floor, sending his single award rolling across the carpet.

JOSH: God, no...

CUT TO...
EXT. JOSH HARTNETT'S HOUSE - EARLY MORNING.
The RIDER's gloved finger pulls the trigger and a rocket whooshes from the tube, heading straight for where we can see JOSH's swaying silhouette. It shatters the window and then the entire house explodes in spectacular fashion.

CUT TO...
EXPLOSION MONTAGE - VARIOUS LOCATIONS - VARIOUS TIMES.
Rapid cuts between the kind of people that read celebrity magazines, have pictures of soulless, lantern-jawed 'actors' on their walls, and think 40 Days And 40 Nights is a quality movie. They all explode in rapid succession. It is, in fact, the first and last occurence of an inexplicable phenomenon known as Multiple Spontaneous Empathetic Human Combustion. Everybody that has ever liked Josh Hartnett is reduced to ashes in a matter of moments. It is awesome.

CUT TO...
EXT. AN INTERSECTION SOMEWHERE ELSE IN HOLLYWOOD - EARLY MORNING.
Hollywood superstar Freddie Prinze Jr. is crossing the street. He is whistling to himself. Suddenly, an articulated lorry smashes him to pieces. Some nearby people cheer. It has nothing to do with anything, but it rocks your world anyway.

CUT TO...
EXT. JOSH HARTNETT'S HOUSE - EARLY MORNING.
The RIDER calmly takes the rocket launcher apart and puts the component parts back into his rucksack. He shoulders the bag and climbs back onto his bike. The RIDER then kicks the engine into life, looking over at the smouldering remains of JOSH HARTNETT's house. He nods once, and then drives away.

THE END.

A Hateful Little Word Called Compromise

"If you close the door, the night could last forever. Keep the sunshine out, and say hello to never. All the people are dancing and they're having such fun, I wish it could happen to me. But if you close the door, I'd never have to see the day again."

At the Home Entertainment Store, they play trailers for recent and future releases on a loop. Approximately every twelve minutes, it starts again. I am now well positioned to tell you for a fact that a group of people forced to hear trailers for dull and samey British crime flicks day after day after endless, godforsaken day will - eventually - start greeting customers with the line, "Welcome to the Layer Cake, son."

On top of this, the music from a certain advert featuring a certain skateboarding tortoise will be the first thing that comes into their minds each and every morning they wake up. Sometimes they will sing it, unaware of the thin strings of drool that hang from their slack lower lips, nor of the terror their blank stares strike deep in the hearts of the customers.

But this is how the Home Entertainment Store does business, and who am I to argue with policies that have me reeling off our many bundle deals in a bored monotone or answering the phone with a script that contains twenty-one words fired off at such a breakneck pace that the usual customer response is, "eh?" Nobody, that's who. Yup, it's back to being a cog in the big bad corporate machine. Sad but true.

I know, I know. It's no big deal. Almost everybody works, and almost all of that almost everybody has a degree of loathing for their job. Maybe the three month break has given me a perspective I wouldn't otherwise have had. Work - like a bad smell - doesn't seem quite so monstrous when you're used to it. Give me a couple more months and I probably won't be mentioning the Home Entertainment Store at all. For now, though, it's looking like the main subject.

Again I'm reminded of being fourteen and fifteen years old, this time remembering all the solemn vows N and I made, promises that we would not be 9-5 office clones, that we would chase our dreams wherever they led us, never giving in and selling out to The Man...

I miss being that age. Not that it was tons of fun or anything; I just miss the confidence that naivety gave me. The prime years of puberty are really the last time you can feel genuinely rebellious. After that, all revolts come with a disclaimer attached. You can still chase your dreams, but not without getting acquainted with a hateful little word called compromise.

It's hard. There it is, I said it. This is officially a pity-post. I am aware that I am not a starving orphan, that I still have my limbs and my sight, that I live in a country that hasn't been torn apart by some senseless war. Nonetheless, some days are a bitch to get through lately. I'm tired and uninspired, my back and my feet and my head ache, I'm having trouble sleeping again. The old me keeps trying to convince the post-resolution me that just one night of throwing back bourbon and chain-smoking Marlboros would be good for the soul, would give me the boost I need to climb up the far side of this grey mood. I know that's not true, but I won't lie and say it's not tempting. Every day I wake up and wonder if it's an anniversary of some event in my life, if there's history to be celebrated or sorrows to be drowned. And every time it isn't, my heart feels heavy with the effort of getting my head down and ploughing through another of these monotonous, meaningless days.

At this point, I may as well admit that I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about what I want from my life. When I wrote that piece about Hunter S. Thompson, a fairly large part of me was considering it the final entry on this blog, maybe even the last gasp of the teenage dreams all my friends left behind so long ago. I'm honestly tired of hurting myself for the sake of art or fiction or whatever the hell you want to call it. I've been putting as much of myself as I always have into my work, but somehow it feels like I'm getting nothing back. If you're talking about word-count, I can write just as much as I always could. What's missing is that sense of...release...satisfaction...achievement...I don't know. The words don't seem to fit.

In the end, this might just be a transitional thing. I'm normally pretty good at analysing myself, but on this occasion I find myself at a loss. I know exactly what's in my future and I know I want that future very badly. I wouldn't be making the sacrifices I'm making if I had doubts. What's troubling me is the thought that the - for lack of a better term - 'Darkened Room' Michael will be somehow erased or lessened by all this. Because I miss being drunk and dazed and watching the sun come up through eyes that have to squint even against that most gradual of illuminations. I miss waking up to darkness and switching on the computer, knowing I'll be uninhibited enough in a few hours that I wouldn't care about word limits and grammatical errors and sentence structure. I miss feeling miserable and angry as fuck and sure that I'd be dead by forty.

I'm just - as fucking dumb as this sounds - scared that everything will work out, and that a part of me that's been my only crutch for however long it's been now will just die, and that I won't be able to write anymore because I'll be holding a gun that's no longer loaded.

Dear Fucking Diary

"I do not envy you the headache you will have when you awake. But for now, rest well and dream of large women."

Well now, it's been a while since we've had one of these entries. Yes, it's 2:34am and I'm officially bored clean out of my restless mind. Today was my day off, and it's fair to say that I have now wasted it. I dragged myself out of bed just after one for an expedition to the Post Office, where I collected a couple of CDs I'd ordered from America and paid the outrageous customs fee with a grimace and victory in the battle to stop myself from spitting on the glass that separated me from the Post Office Man. I then returned home and watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse...

- Capsule Review: Milla Jovovich and a whole bunch of people you've never heard of do battle against undead hordes that behave differently than they did in the original film. There is no explanation for this. The movie is basically an inexcusable exercise in style over substance, and having watched The Bride do battle with the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill just a couple of nights back, I feel that describing the action sequences as sub-Matrix dross filmed by people who really do feel that things are more convincing in blurry slow-motion is perfectly reasonable. The script was woeful, the acting painfully mediocre, and the last twenty minutes made less sense than that bit when the dwarf talks backwards in Twin Peaks. I give this film headache out of ten.

To get over the pain in my skull, I lay in the dark for a while, listening to sinister Italian prog-rock from the seventies. Then I ate a whole chicken pie. Then I watched The Princess Bride...

- Capsule Review: Hahahahahahahaha...hehehehehehehehe...awesome. I will NEVER have seen this film enough times.

After that, I got on the computer and fooled around with incidental music, various chunks of dialogue, themes from children's TV shows, and some choice cuts from the likes of David Holmes, Fluke, Groove Armada, and...uh...Prefab Sprout. This aural fuckery will result in a present for somebody, so I can't say anything else about it.

Then I wrote e-mails to N (Theme: Meh. Everything sucks) and Jennifer (Theme: Waaaaaah...I miss you).

And here I am, sitting comfortably at my computer with absolutely nothing of any value to offer my readership. It was typing or masturbation, and while in many ways the two are similar, I chose typing because it's less strenuous and not as messy.

I really should have written something today. Something potentially interesting, I mean. Seriously, other than reworking a short called Aria for Clean Sheets, I still haven't written anything of note in 2005. Even that dumb zombie piece is sitting on my hard drive in the form of two paragraphs describing a grizzled old man with a shotgun sitting in some kind of lookout. At night. Christ, maybe I should change him into Milla Jovovich and have him leap out and do a bunch of bullet-time somersaults into a horde of CGI hench-zombies. Yeah, Resident Evil: [Insert B-Movie Noun Here], by Michael O'Mahony. I could make millions and then, I don't know, buy a big fucking car or something. Yay.

There's no sense of urgency, and maybe that's my problem. My wandering mind has found its way back to the whole Welcome To Forever concept the last few weeks. I really do have plenty of good ideas I think will work in the context of these stories and the way they're linked. I just can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to actually get the ball rolling. I can't seem to see it as something immediate, something now. It's just one more thing.

Motivation. Yeah, now we're cooking with gas (I have always, ALWAYS wanted to type that). I am the least motivated person you are ever likely to meet. If not doing something means people I love will die horribly, then I might think about maybe getting out of bed and sketching some kind of vague outline that may, someday, become a plan. Mostly, though, if my current situation isn't all that painful (and more importantly, if my current situation means I'm being left alone), then leaving things as they are tends to be my preferred option. I have always been that way. I was one of the smartest kids in my year at school, yet my coursework marks were always horrible. It was only in exams that I fulfilled my potential. When the pressure was on, I got some educational arse-kicking done. I aced my GCSE English exam so comprehensively that - even without ANY COURSEWORK AT ALL (I had 25% knocked off my overall grade and my mum had to pay for me to enter the exam) - I walked away with a B. The problem was not that I couldn't do it. It was that I didn't.

Same thing here. I'm not insecure about writing a novel. There's nothing frightening about it. I'm perfectly confident that I could write a rip-roaring bastard of a story that would tear your still-beating heart out of your chest and make you view the world in a completely different way (slight exaggeration). But I don't. And sitting here, typing this out and frowning at the utter lack of logic in what I'm saying, I find myself at a loss as to why.

"Gee," you're thinking. "I wonder why a guy whose thoughts run on a such a squeaky hamster wheel of pointless procrastination gets insomnia. Just write the fucking book already, I'm getting old reading your mental vomiting, and tearing my heart out of my chest with your amazing tales of whatever won't do either of us much good if the sheer monotony of your whining slows it to the point where I keel over and quietly expire."

And you're right. I guess there are no deep-seated psychological reasons for this lack of progress. I guess I'm just a fat, lazy bastard.

So here's the plan. I've got to try something new because those resolutions I made a couple of months back are being held up by this shit. I've got to come up with a schedule or a routine or something that will put me in front of this computer on a regular basis with the idea being to not post my random mutterings here or at various forums, to not write strange e-mails to my friends because it makes me giggle when they freak out, and to not look at porn. I've got to be sitting down for at least a couple of hours every day I have them spare and working at putting together the idea that's been ping-ponging around my head for more than a year now. So...

New resolution: First draft of Welcome To Forever before the end of May. That's almost three months, which should be more than enough time. As my readership and witnesses to this fresh vow, I expect you to remind, badger, and abuse me as we get closer to the deadline. Okay, I don't expect it, but I am asking you if you could. It would help. I don't have anybody here to ask me just why the fuck I'm sitting around watching films I've seen before when I could be working on something nobody has seen before. So do it for me, and if you have any kind of interest in seeing me get to the end of this thing, do it for yourself.

There. From boredom to analysis to a plan of action. I knew this blog would come in handy one day.