Sunday, June 22, 2008

title working

I did two day shifts in a row. I am never doing day shifts again. They are stressful. Too many people. One shift resulted in TMJ pain the next morning.

Yesterday, a seven foot tall woman dropped a bottle of Vitamin Water on the floor and it spilled out. I think she was drinking it at the time. She was seven feet. Seven foot tall women are very thirsty. They cannot wait until they purchase their beverages before drinking them.

The seven foot tall woman bought another bottle of Vitamin Water. She left the half empty bottle that she spilled on the counter. It is not worth arguing with a seven foot tall woman about paying for a drink that she spilled. She is seven feet tall.

She might have been a sasquatch who had shaved her entire body. She was overweight. She would have been morbidly obese if she was five foot ten, but she was seven feet, so her body fit her height.

My roommate picked me up after work. I told him about the sasquatch. He joked about how I was being sexist because I wouldn't call a man a sasquatch. I told him I would definitely call a man a sasquatch, but that the only seven foot tall men who I see at work look like basketball players.

The sasquatch was kind of cute. I would have been sexually attracted to her if I had a sexual fetish for seven foot tall women, but I do not have a sexual fetish for seven foot tall women. This is too bad. She was dressed for a night out on the town. I probably could have gotten her phone number.

I think I have a phobia about getting crushed beneath the weight of seven foot tall women, although I did not realize this until I typed this sentence.

I once had a sexual fetish for female-ish hermaphrodites. Chicks with dicks, I guess.

I developed this sexual fetish after James (of An Interview with James fame) gave me the link to a porn website. A porn website that had some very interesting pictures. They were female celebrity nudes. Most of them were fake. Some of them were real. The guy who owned the website made the female celebrity's skin green with photoshop. The guy who owned the website made the green, nude female celebrities have penises with his photoshop program.

A sexual fetish that combines she hulk, nude celebrities, and chicks with dicks is the greatest sexual fetish ever.

I tried out the chicks with dicks aspect of it. I failed. It only lasted for about an hour. It ended after I realized that I didn't know any hermaphrodites. After I couldn't find any chicks with dick porn on the internet besides male-to-female transsexuals who hadn't gone all the way yet.

I find transexuals kind of creepy. I have a few friends who are transexuals. I have not spoken to them in a while. I do not find them creepy. I think this is because I knew them before they started to become what would have been creepy to me if they were strangers.

Transvestites are neato. Transvestites are not creepy. It makes me happy when an old man in a dress and says something to me in a really deep voice.

I have the week off from work. It started today. My writing program started. The class-like things don't start until tomorrow.

I went to register for the program at a building on campus. That took a second. I was handed a folder. Many hours later, I stood in front of a bookstore in town, waiting to be picked up by my roommate. I looked at the books in the window. One of the books was written by the woman who registered me.

The folder contained a list of people who were participating in the program. I didn't recognize any of the names. It would have been nice if I had recognized some of the names. Then I would have had an excuse to introduce myself to those particular writers. I googled a few of the names of people from my workshop after I went home. The search results mostly came up with Facebook profiles. The writers that own these names appear to be unpublished, not that there's anything wrong with that.

There were a few program participants hanging out and talking in the building where I went to get registered. I left after registration, because I am socially awkward. Meeting new people makes me feel very uncomfortable. I wish I was not this way. After a person is no longer a new person to me, I will sometimes feel comfortable in their presence.

I went off to the campus center to read. I could have read in the building where they were doing registrations, but that would have made me feel even more awkward and uncomfortable. It was nice reading alone in the campus center. I don't think I've been there since 2001. I urinated in my favorite bathroom on campus. It is in the basement of the campus center. I like it because it is very solitary and few people use it. I don't think I've urinated in my favorite bathroom in UMASS since 2001.

I was reading Stephen King's The Wastelands, which is the third book in his Dark Tower series. I like it, but not as much as the first book. It is much better than the second book, which is pretty terrible for the first 250 pages. The first book is nice because it does not read like Stephen King wrote it. The second book is not nice because it returns to his usual style. Stephen King describes his style as the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries. I really like this description. It is accurate. I think Stephen King is probably a really nice person.

My co-worker describes Stephen King's prose as bland. This is accurate too.

Book 2 gets pretty interesting after the first 250 pages, but the writing still reads as if Stephen King wrote it. Books should not take 250 pages to get interesting. Books should be interesting from the first sentence. Especially the first sentence. I don't know why I read 250 pages of crap.

And the majority of the second book takes place in our world/reality. Our world is dull. I like the alternate world that Stephen King has created for this series.

Book 3 is interesting from the first page, but it still reads like Stephen King wrote it. I think I'm ok with this. Most of it takes place in the world of The Dark Tower. And even the scenes that take place in our reality are interesting.

I am feeling a little nauseous all of a sudden.

After reading in the campus center for a couple of hours, I went back to the place where they had the registrations. This is also the place where they were also having our welcome dinner. The food was very good. I sat with four men of various ages. They seemed very literary fiction-esque. I felt like an outsider since I don't have a clue how to describe myself and my writing. One of the men of various ages said something like, "It is really hard to get published." I did not mention that I have a published novel (Amazon sales rank 1,013,321!). That would have felt like bragging.

I received a Myspace message the other day that made me feel a little better about that horrendous sales rank. It said that my novella, Cheesequake Smash-up--from The Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue)--, was one of the funniest things that she had ever read. This made me feel good about myself.

We went to a reading after dinner. Poetry and prose. I really liked Lydia Davis' stuff, although I often found my attention wandering. I usually experience this problem when I'm trying to listen to a reading. There is something wrong with my attention span. I think this is less of a problem when the author is "performing" rather than reading. Work that is read out loud is usually pretty boring delivery-wise rather than content-wise. I try to "perform" whenever I do a reading, which is very infrequently. But I read the story off paper rather than memorize, so it is not as good as it should be.

Carlton Mellick is the greatest reader that I have ever seen, but he is not a reader. He is a performer. He didn't read a story the one time that I saw him. He did a performance. Sort of a one-man play. I have done things like this also for readings, but they come off as looking really stupid because I'm reading them off paper since I can't memorize things.

I really liked Lydia Davis' short sentences.

My friend sat behind me. He has a glass eye. I did not expect him to be there. I was surprised. He was there because his girlfriend likes Lydia Davis. She interviewed her recently for our local alternative weekly newspaper.

He is not really my friend. More like an acquittance who I am very fond of. We do not communicate unless I run into him out of the blue.

Mike Young was also there. I talked to him. I started debating whether I should go to the reading that he put together that's happening in Boston tomorrow or if I should go to the reading that is part of my writing program. This is the first time I have been torn between two readings.

Mike Young started smiling and looking like a maniac. I asked him what was wrong with him. He said something like, "You will find out later."

I guessed that he was sitting next to his professor who was doing the reading for my writing program at the same time as Mike Young's reading. I was correct. His professor looks very young. Maybe around my age.

I just checked. He was born in 1971. He looks very young for being born in 1971.

I read his first novel a very long time ago. I liked it, but I don't remember very much about it. I was surprised when I heard that he was teaching at UMASS.

I feel weird about typing his name since we are living in the age of google alerts and blog searches. I don't know why I feel weird about typing it. I want to be his student for longer than an hour and a half, I guess. I will be his student for an hour and a half this week. It is for a class that happens only once. Still, I don't know why I feel weird about typing his name. I'll probably go to his reading tomorrow because I hate traveling.

It would take me an hour to walk to his reading from my apartment, but I will probably already be on campus beforehand.

It took me about an hour to write this blog entry.

2 comments:

Josh Maday said...

i will probably get in trouble for this somehow someday, but, man, customers are the most ignorant breed of beings on the planet. i'm sorry, but being a customer somehow short circuits something in the brain that makes a person totally unfit for life. suddenly one knows everything, one deserves everything, one is ready to demand everything, and give it with a smile.

okay i'm going to stop there, because i could go for a long time. i've got lots of anti-customer stamina. when i think of customers as a species, that is when i think, this is why civilization will collapse, this is why we will not survive any hiccup in the system, let alone something big.

dude, you are going to get mad hits on your blog for using the phrase "chick with dicks" and "girls with penises". i mentioned once on my blog that in henry darger's world girls have penises, and i get at least three or four people a week searching for "girls with penises". words like transvestites and transexuals will work well, too.

which reading are you going to?

Bradley Sands said...

I have readings every night this week: http://www.umass.edu/juniperinstitute/schedule.html