Me and a friend have decided to do a NaNoWriMo this month (normally it happens in november, but since its summer we've got enough time to do it this month). 50,000 words is the target to reach by 31st of July. I'll be posting my daily chunks here.

1667

Hello hello hello, start again.

This was how I felt. When I woke up stark bollock naked, faceward towards the night morning sky at 4 am, on a cold pebbled street, with a scraped knee. Scraped knee with no recollection of how it got scraped.

I am not a heavy drinker, though it is true that I drink heavily on occasion. And to those of you who share my wild style life style, you will understand that it's not unusual to find myself after a night of indulgence in an unfamiliar place, often with no memory of how I got there. This is routine to me. But yet I was still startled this particular morning. I am used to finding myself in perhaps, a fine young ladies apartment, or if I am not so lucky, a street corner or a prison cell. I am aware that dirty thieves will take from the vulnerable and sleepy, so waking without certain objects I had the night before is normal to me, but have I never lost quite so much as I have this time. Very odd it is, to be completely stripped of the objects you love, even the ones that clad your body.
   I lay there for a while, slowly feeling the cold get to my topside. My back felt numb, it must have been in a battle of temperature with the stones all night. I stayed still in my sleeping position, mainly because I knew movement intensify the cold even more. So I lay, and closed my lids, and tried to remember how I got here. The blackness enveloped my senses, an utter abyss it was. It was time I needed help, so I called upon the assistance of my mindkick: Manuel. A small hatch swung open in the abyss, and out stepped his small ephemeral form. He stood awkwardly behind my eyes, leaning on one hip. He grinned wide, those perfect teeth of his, the only perfect thing about him. He asked "What mystery do we solve today, sir?"
   "A most perplexing one" I replied, my booming voice filling his head. "One we never tire of solving".
   "You mean the mystery of How The Fuck Did I Get Here?", he said with a sense of familiarity and exasperation.
   "Quite so," I said, "But this is a particularly severe case, my friend, just take a look."
   He motioned a look and said "Ah well, I see what you mean." He extended one gnarled finger scratched his bald young head with it. "Well, lets take the normal route," he said with some faux authority, "what was your last memory before you woke up here?"
    I thought. The image of getting into my bed at the end of a perfectly normal tuesday, came suddenly to my vision. Manuel nodded in the way of someone looking over my shoulder at a television set.
   "Interesting," he murmured, "Perhaps you were abducted, from your bed, to this street we see now."
   I thought about this. "No," I said finally, "what would be the motive? I own little of any wealth, no rich relatives to demand the ransom, what could they possibly get from kidnapping me?"
   "Perhaps their desires are of a sexual nature," said Manuel.
   "It is true that I am a handsome young man, the object of many lusts, but perverts never cover their tracks. I would be able to feel their mark."
   Manuel was at a loss, for the first time in all the years I knew him.
   "Well I guess I can't help you, dear friend", he said.
   And with that he opened up the hatch, and left the abyss. I opened my eyes.
   The light was different now. The streetlamps waned themselves into atrophy at the sensing of the morning sun, and so orange had left to be replaced by dull purple. I squinted.
   After a few minutes, I heard the rush of un-oiled wheels. Creaking at me from left, coupled with hurried footsteps, cheap shoes on a cheap sidewalk. A man leant over me, with an expression of interest and fear. He gave me his hand and I took it. He lifted me up and my cold frail body finally shifted. The cold hit me like a cannon ball in the gut, but I could not show my pain. Must maintain my dignity in eyes of my saviour.
   Though a strange saviour he was. I could tell he was a salesman, from the over decorated tie, blond unthreatening hair cut, broad smile with the edges taken off and the little name tag: "Marcus". He appeared pleased to see me, as they always do, but there was an expression of deep fatigue in his eyes. The un-oiled wheels came from a small cart he carried behind him, laden with pillows, all covered in brightly coloured tags.
    "Hi there, naked consumer!" he said.
   "Good morning Marcus!" I said. It is important when talking with these people that you speak their language. Go along with the script that they learnt on the 2 day sales course, because if you do any thing out of the ordinary they will panic, and their attempts to sell you something will be even more desperate.
   "Good morning! Sleepworks© have just introduced their new line of iPillowsâ,,¢, would you be interested in purchasing one for you or your life partner?"
   "Hmm, interesting. Tell me more about these pillows." The cold was really getting to me at this point, I had to find a way to get out of this conversation
   "I will indeed! Now, tell me, have you ever wanted to listen to music while you go to sleep?"
   "Why, yes I have". I hadn't.
   "But doesn't the headphone cable get all tangled up, and when you wake up in the morning your Mp3 player is out of battery?"
   "Yeah!"
   "Well then the new iPillowâ,,¢ is just for you!" He took one out of the cart and presented it to me, his perfect teeth glistening in the morning sun. "You simply put your Mp3 player in the slot here, choose your playlist and the time when you when you want it to stop, and then the in built speakers will gently lull you to sleep! Neat huh?
   "Yeah it sure is" Christ, I'm fucking freezing. I don't need this now. "How much is it?"
   "Well, as my first customer, I'll give you a special discount. Nineteen pounds ninety nine."
   "That's a very good offer, but I'm afraid I..."
   I looked around. I was in what appeared to be an outdoor shopping complex, chain stores everywhere. It dawned on me that soon these shops would open up and the place would be filled with idle wanderers looking for a good deal. Not good for me in my current state. Police would barge in. Questions would be asked. I don't need that. I couldn't waste time talking to this oaf, so I took my sure fire route of escape.
   "Is this the life you imagined?" I said, looking him straight in the eye. A corner of him flickered.
   "Erm, the product also comes with a 1 year guarantee-"
   "Answer the question" I said. I thought for a moment about what a strange image this must be.
   "Err, um, W-would you like to sample it right n-now?" He was crumbling.
   "No, I want you to answer my question"
   "Then yes! This is how I imagined my life would be! Is that such a bad thing? I am happy with my absurdity, and the pathetic nature of my existence. I wouldn't have it any other way. What about you, are you happy with what you're doing right now, standing naked right here, talking to me? Because I am. I just wish I could sleep."

sunday breaks free to the fun of the gun, aint it fun to shoot a nigger? sleep now and I'm tired I tried eating that balanced diet of wheat meat fruit veg but its too good for me it feels wrong, feed a baby poison all its life it will take nothing else. i don't REALLY feel that way about people of african ancestry but I can't help but avoid their gaze when they walk my way. its just not the usual. i'm too scientific and functional to believe in a god, i just can't get that feeling that I used to when I was young. reading a book isn't going to help, if anything it will detract away from it. goody goody jam frog, ribbit me up i am your own vomit of mediated imagery. perhaps theres more to me than there really is. maybe everybody is born with the chance to be a great genius, maybe its societies fault. yeah blame society, thats easy, no ever thanks society, like no-one ever blames god. 1667, that's the important number. tomorrow it will be different but today i just gotta get to that. its a race of vowels and consonants, and the latter is winning. Win win win. nobody wants to be average but most people are. this monologue is quite similar to one in Jpod by Douglas Coupland. Perhaps I should mix it up a bit, but it's so difficult to be me, if I even know what that is. self reference is easy. self reference reference is even easier. Lets get freaky with words you cumudgeon on a self lathered plate of peas, butter my gasket and sink the soap bottom.
   Fly be birding off a leaf
   towards ol' father sun
   creator of all life
   that takes itself way
   back to the doctors strong firm hand
I used to write beautiful poetry without even thinking about it. If you something great, its great. If you do something great without thinking about it's even better. I'd like genius to come out of my arsehole, working at it will dilute it. Genius is born, not bred. Bread is not genius, though many a genius has eaten bread. Just four more words.

3334

click the image above to go to the imdb page if you're don't know this fucked up amazing film. Anyone seen it, or is familiar with David Lynch's movies?

I thought I'd start a personal sketchbook thread, as I don't wanna fill up the forum with lots of individual bits and pieces. Don't worry, this won't be like a depository of daily doodles that take me 5 minutes, more like edited highlights of stuff I've worked hard on and would value comments and criticisms of it.

Early days at the moment so heres a few of my favourites from my sketchbook so far. More new stuff soon.

A wee ditty I made. 5's loved.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/444864

Quite recently I was asked by the Strawberry Fair Music Festival, to design them an official T-Shirt to sell at their Merch and Info stalls. And, being the young designer desperate for experience that I am I took up the offer. Their idea was that I design a shirt that represented the many attributes of the festival (Music, film, enviroment, etc). So I had the idea of having lots of different strawberries all with images on them that symbolized these things. And so, after a lot of back-and-forth with the Strawberry Fair people, we got to the finished design.



Now you've probably worked out where this is headed by now. Sneaky ol' Beasty just couldn't resist popping our good friend StrawberryClock in there, I mean, with a design brief like that they're practically asking for it. Heres a close up if you couldn't find it in the above image:



I'd like to note at this point that this festival is immensely popular in my bourough, and gets a regular turn out of thousands of people every year. Loads of people were wearing it and since then I frequently see people in it around town as well, all unknowing that they are secretly assisting the clock crews invasion of reality.

Been doing a lot of figurative stuff recently, decided throw a bit of abstract into the mix. I'm quite proud of it.

A while ago, someone asked me to give them an example of a time in my life where I had felt an incredibly strong emotion. And to my surprise, I couldn't think of anything. The more I looked retrospectively at my life, the more neutral and uneventful it seemed. Even in momentous events in my life, when I review the memories of the supposedly strong emotions I felt and they always seemed "Okay" or "Passable"

Now it could just be that strong emotion can only be felt "in the moment". But there have been many times in my life where I could have felt a strong emotion, but there was something blocking me. A few summers ago, I visited the grand canyon with my family. My mum who's pretty "spiritual" and a massive nature junky was very clearly getting a whole lot out of the experience, fawning constantly about how amazing it was. Meanwhile, I stood on the sidelines, completely dry of any great feeling. When she asked me what I thought about it afterwards I had to lie about how it was an incredible life-changing experience or what have you.

Despite all this, there are some things that do incur great highs in me. I'm a massive film buff, and after seeing a great film at the cinema I feel charged, and energized, full of creativity and passion for life, and I don't get this feeling from anything else. I felt so much better after seeing my now-favourite film in the cinema for the first time, than seeing my favourite band live in concert (another instance where I was self-pressurized into pretending to enjoy the experience). Realizing this, I've come to terms with what I believe is the reason why I experience things in the rather lame and boring manner that I do.

In my childhood (and I'm sure the same is true for most members of my generation and a few subsequent ones before that), things like films and TV were always readily available. I used to watch about 2-3 films a day, plus maybe two hours of TV, and a storytape at bed time. So most of my childhood stimulus came from these sources, rather than from playing outside and exploring which is what my mothers generation would have mostly done as children. My theory is that, because I was subjected to so much material that is representative of real life, I was trained to only feel emotion through this screen of representation, rather than my mothers generation who would get it straight from the source.

I compared this hypothesis* to the way I seem to look at the world in my day to day activities, and it definitely matched up. When I walk through the countryside, and I come across a particularly striking sight or image, I can't help but think of it in terms of a camera angle or film shot. It's very difficult for me to completely surrender myself to an experience. According to my natural interpretation of the world, reality is a pale imitation of film, rather than the other way around.

This could just be me, but I posted this to see if theres anyone else who was born in a similar time as me (early nineties) who can identify with this. Discussion, comments, criticism, blah blah blah.

*Much appreciated, Albino.

I've been searching around for while, trying to find a definitive idea of what art actually is. I've come across many theories (something you'd want in your lounge, something that provokes a response, anything that you call "art" to name a few). But the one that's made the most sense to me came from Scott McCloud's book "Understanding Comics" (a fantastic read, I recommend to anyone). It goes like this:

Art, is anything that does NOT stem from the two basic primal instincts of mankind: Survival and Reproduction.

He puts forth the hypothetical situation of a bunch of bored caveman sitting around with simply nothing to do. They've eaten, they've fucked, and nothing is threatening their safety. So what do they do? Art. One taps a beat on rock because the noise pleases him. Another kicks up the dirt in frustration after losing a fight. Another who's in pain from a headache draws jagged lines in the dirt, when yesterday her lines were smooth and wavy, an early form of expressionism. Art comes out of the simple human fact that we can't spend all our time eating (survival) and having sex (reproduction). McCloud claims that it is these displacement activities that have developed into the modern forms of art we see everywhere from Michelangelo to idle table-drumming or doodling.

I was interested by this idea and wanted to look at it from a Darwinian point of view. Humans have developed to such a point that we have evolved the third "Art" instinct. And it has very clear uses. It allows us to create our own mental and physical stimulus, that otherwise would have come from external sources. It works as an outlet for our emotions. And probably most importantly, it has taught us to experiment. Fire was probably discovered by some early man idly rubbing two sticks together, which suddenly set alight. So in that sense the Sciences came from the same basic instinct as the Fine Arts.

Because of this Art instinct, mankind has managed to grow beyond the normal passive evolution that governs all other forms of life on earth. 2000 years is minute amount of evolutionary time, and its true that our physical bodies may be no different from those thousands of years ago. But our minds and our lives are astonishingly different. This kind of intellectual development could not have happened as swiftly as it has through simple genetic PASSIVE evolution. It is the Art instinct that has allowed us to consciously take hold of our development and begin the ACTIVE evolution of our species. The man who discovered fire for instance, would have consciously passed on the information to his children, and in this passing, the information would have changed through misinterpretation, much like genetic variation in passive evolution. The information would keep on going, and bad ideas would be rejected through conscious (not natural) selection. I believe this is how we as a species have some so far in such a short amount of time. All through the wonderful thing that is boredom.

Apologies for the rather long winded post. Share your views, alternate theories, comments, criticisms, you know the drill.