We're not there yet.

Procrastination is: finding a reason to clean your ashtray at midnight when you still have pages to go.

I am well aware that this is not a good poem.

I've never been one for verse.
I can read the words
And feel its breath on my lips
But simple appreciation is my curse.
My pulpy anvil and inky hammer exist
Today for utility
To wright thoughts and ideas
And words unfit to be kissed.
No art will trail from these midnight lines.
No singularity, concise and tact
Will be birthed on this page.
Instead it might only rhyme.

Perhaps, I'll learn in time.

Is bibliographic a word?

It's probably what I'm most excited for concerning my impending move. My parents call it the Library. It's our upstairs living room and my father has been working building those shelves for most of my life while they've both been filling them for much longer. Dad put up the ladders last summer. The crown molding was just finished last week. It's really nice despite the ancient couch and vestigial OSU themed linoleum left over from when it used to be a kitchen for a duplex. There's an Art History section, language section, fiction as well as non-fiction sections, and the baseball section. Maybe I'll finally have time to catalog it all in MS Access.

There is another half of the wall on the left side of the picture that you can't see plus another half of the wall next to the doorway I was standing in. Pardon my clunky image stitching. Until someone realizes that people on PC's need good photo editing it'll have to do.

Sitting on a Bench Outside

My coffee had grown cool. The night was still and for the moment I felt like the only person left in the world. Across the street a little light blinked slowly in the window of a car. the little sedan is snoring I thought bemusedly to myself.

There was a silent snap as my previous cigarette burned itself out in the ashtray and a crack, sizzle, fshh.. as I lit the next and inhaled deeply.

It doesn't make any sense, I thought, my mind back to the matter at hand. I took another swig of coffee. it was cold enough to be enjoyable again. Was it the second night or the twenty-second? I couldn't tell anymore. The clock stopped saying the time long ago. the crickets still chirped but really i wasn't sure if I believed in them anymore.

Putting my feet back on the cold concrete, I stood up from my chair. I grabbed the box of Camels, my lighter, and my mug with the stars on it. I opened the door and silently stepped inside. Gracie hopped down from the window where she had been watching me and climbed the sofa next to the door.

"Mrow?" she said.

"Hi there." I replied and I snuffed my cigarette in the ashtray next to the lamp. I climbed the stairs to my room and quietly undressed and slipped under the down quilt. I reached over and set the alarm for 8... again. "It doesn't hurt to hope, right Gracie?" I asked. She sat silent and knowing. I knew, too, when I woke it would still be dark. Still be 3 A.M. There would be ten smokes in the box again and this page would still be blank.

From a page titled "8/25: First Class of Robert Pope"

There's a certain intricacy in the act of writing that you, the reader, simply cannon grasp. I am here at my desk, looking at a sheet of white real estate, undeveloped, waiting to be born between the rolls of rubber. There are only a few lines now and I cannon in good conscience speculate on what might be wrought by the slamming, literate anvil in the ones that follow, if they do at all.

Yes I am here, my mind as naked as yours, existing in blissful ignorance of what may be in the coming lines, or pages, or volumes. Of course this is my now and your now may, no, will be very different than mine. In time, your now will become my now and the combined our now will leave the ignorance of the not-yet stamped ink (if indeed it is still ink in our now) solely upon you. Unless your now is currently my now and you are reading over my shoulder. Are you there?

If I am indeed as alone as I believe, then my task is to be here, tap-tapping out a line that I can throw to you in hope you will hoist my anticipation to yourself. I am a time traveler and this typewriter is my time machine.

The news at 11

Everything has been imported. It was much easier than I expected. Read the stories below.

I'm utterly convinced...

that this is, in fact, the correct way to go.

* * *

I did the self-built, pay-for-host blog back in high school and up into my freshman year. These were the last days before the great social networking revolution (hereto: GSNR) and it was a unique thing to have your own staked out claim on the web.
It was a good site. I had flash and iframes and my own graphics. The best part was that I coded it, not some program that just took my preferences and generated a page. I worked on that site for hours, coding into the night, making a frame sit just right, learning new work-arounds for browser non-standardization. Then as soon as the first version launched I began work on version 2.0, and again for 3. But I had fewer responsibilities then and that's just far too much work to do now. Working and trying to have a social life and have time for sleep kinda eat up most of my time. Any time I do get is spent writing.

* * *

I got a myspace back when I only knew two or three other people that had one. And even then, I only kinda knew them. Now, we live in a world where people used to give out their myspace url's instead of their digits. Shit's crazy.
At first the concept of a prefab space just for me was enticing. But over time it became stagnant so I left. Then people started figuring out how to splice code into the page and it got a interesting again. This was the GSNR big bang. I could wash the sterility off myspace and replace it with something a little more... different. And it was still kinda easy. And people started noticing.
Once I got the appearence set I started writing a blog. (This is where my initial interest in writing came from, methinks.)
The blog feature was a large portion of the user interface in the early versions of myspace and a user couldn't just ignore it. I didn't really know what to use for content so I just wrote what I knew. Me. It was simple and introspective. More of a journal or diary than anything else. But it was boring. People were interested in posting on the wall anyway. So I never really used it much.

* * *

Around this time I had an aquaintence at another nearby university and she mentioned something about Facebook. Check that, thefacebook.com. Old school facebook. What a great thing! It was perfect for staying in touch with old high school friends in college far away or back home. But you couldn't really do much with it. It actually became refreshing when myspace got out of hand and became nearly impossible to navigate without insane musical spasms and visually assaulting graphics coming out of your browser.
Then facebook got a big head. Everyone could come aboard and they could customize it, not much but in little ways. and then facebook got clunky. The blog funtionality became buried and hardly anyone used it. It was treated more like a directory with a comment box. But it's the social networking site. There are no others.

* * *

I had both a wordpress and a tumblr. They were true ready-made blogs that focused on content. It was exactly what I wanted, but you just can't see them. Hardly anyone's heard of wordpress anymore and even fewer know what tumblr is.
Blogger has been around forever and most interesting pre-fab blogs I read are blogspot sites. So this is my current direction. If I want to be an interesting writer and have a simple web presence it should be here.

* * *

So, I'm going to import the good stuff from the other places to here. Stay tuned.