NOVEMBERZOVER

I just submitted my final word count to the NaNoWriMo site. At 40,041 words, I squeaked in juuuuust this side of...10,000 words short of winning. Partly this is due to two major periods of slacking off during the course of the month, but it's (honestly!) more due to the fact that the story I was writing just wound itself up and finished right at the 40,000 word mark. If I had gotten to this point on the 24th, when I would have if I had kept to schedule, I honestly wouldn't have known what to do for the remainder of the month. The story is just done, and no amount of aiming for 50,000 words would have changed that.

And goofy as it sounds, I feel like I won. I accomplished a hell of a lot more than I expected to. At the beginning of the month I honestly expected myself to give up by the one-week point. Instead, I never gave up, even at my laziest, even as I fell dramatically, irreparably behind. I kept trying. And I succeeded: I finished what is now by far the longest work of fiction I have ever written. And while it's awful in a lot of ways, I think there's stuff worth salvaging in there. I surprised myself especially today and yesterday with the beauty of the imagery I was coming up with (it also quite frankly surprised me when I realized that the novel was going to end on a fairly hopeful note; I didn't think I had that in me).

So: I'm goddamn proud of myself. Thanks, NaNoWriMo, for forcing me to do all this. I don't know where I'm going next, but hopefully I can keep up the writing habit. Probably not as intensively as in November, but to some degree.

As for bloggy pursuits, I do have a blogject I want to get started on, and even aside from that I'll probably be popping in here a bit more frequently than I have been to make all those witty observations that keep you coming back for more. Ha ha! Just kidding! If you could see my google analytics page, you'd know that you quite literally do not exist! Anyway, that's all. Carry on.

If I were making a Buffy Sainte-Marie best of compilation...

...it would most likely include anywhere from one to three songs from each of her first five albums, maybe four songs total from her career after 1970, and the entirety of Illuminations. If you haven't heard that album yet, fix that problem you have.

Looking over my list of albums I have that came out in its year (yes, I keep lists of my albums by year), I have no problem naming it by far the best of all of them. And we're not talking, say, 1987 here. This is 1969. I have over seventy albums from 1969. It's the year of The Beatles' Abbey Road, Can's Monster Movie, Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Fairport Convention's Unhalfbricking, Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul, John & Yoko's Life With the Lions, Nico's The Marble Index, Pharoah Sanders' Karma, Silver Apples' Contact, Skip Spence's Oar, Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis, the full version of Stockhausen's Hymnen, The Stooges, The Velvet Underground's self-titled, two great Scott Walker albums, and Marva Whitney's It's My Thing, and if I had to I'd give them all up in order to keep Illuminations.

This thought just struck me with urgency for some reason on the verge of going to bed. I hopefully will elaborate later, but if anyone in the dire position of not having heard this album stumbles across this post, for the love of god, listen to Illuminations as soon as possible.

Despicable

I'm pretty sure that if Martin Luther King, Jr. had known that, forty-one years after he died, his words would be quoted alongside those of such other fighters for human dignity and equality as Sam Walton and B.C. Forbes in inspirational speeches given by corporate managers to their wage slaves, he probably would have inserted really vulgar words into everything he said. Anyway, when are they going to start quoting lines like "A riot is the language of the unheard" or, even better, when are they going to break out the Malcolm X quotebook?

The radio redeems itself

My "local" top 40 radio station just broadcast a Veteran's Day-themed station identification where that vaguely sinister radio-announcer-guy voice said "92 PRO FM supports our troops all around the world. Thank you."

Looking beyond the surface inanity of this, I find two things of value:

1. They acknowledge that we have troops all over the fucking world. Maybe--just maybe--one person will say, "Do we really have troops all around the world? Why would that be?" And that one person is a victory. Of course, that one person is probably 100% imaginary, but I can dream, can't I?

2. The "Thank you" sounded really sarcastic. Which of course it should be.

Everything is terrible

I just heard a commercial on the radio with a HYSTERICAL WOMAN FREAKING OUT because her son should go to college RIGHT NOW but she HEARD he's talking to a recruiter, and then her jocularly sensible husband sets her straight--actually, what HE the son is doing makes a LOT OF SENSE! He's joining the NATIONAL GUARD! And then the WOMAN, who has NO HEAD FOR FIGURES, starts FREAKING OUT ABOUT HOW ARE THEY GOING TO PAY FOR ALL THIS, and the smart sensible (condescendingly chuckling) husband SETS HER STRAIGHT ABOUT THAT TOO.

Ha ha ha! Women are stupid and your sons should want to kill people right out of high school!

In other sad news, the new Amerie album is a huge letdown. The best few songs are stale retreads of her older, greater work, and the rest sound like they're jockeying for position in the bottom half of AT40.

I should check my spam filter more often

From: dr.dave
Subject: your marks
Body: obama died of heart stroke

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month starts today. I'm giving it a shot this year. I don't know if that means that my already meager blog offerings (blofferings) will dry up even farther or if procrastination will push me to post more, but it seems like it'll certainly have an impact on my bloggy activities (blogtivities*), and I know that all of my fans are just drooling for an update on those, so...I oblige (bloguesse oblige).

Oh, and if you want to follow my NaNoWriMo word count and place bets on when I become a quitter, here's the link to my profile.

*Blactivities sounds racialismical.