Below are the 13 most recent journal entries recorded in The MONKEY's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
12:11 am	This day was completely, COMPLETELY out of any projections or predictions. I never thought I'd see the day. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 12th, 2009
7:54 pm	ブ！ 南瓜カービンぐ (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
5:19 pm	Long time. When things start going off the rails in my life, I usually do stuff like this. - - - I fired up the ol' Powerbook on Thursday, feeling discouraged and dejected and dug into my music files. I found installations of Reason, (2.0 which I learned on, and 2.5, which I used to use constantly) and fired the later one up. I hadn't plugged away in Reason since I arranged a few string parts for someone's album almost two years ago. - - - I hadn't composed anything original since...since...well, shit. Since March 2006. Maybe April. - - - On Saturday night, exhausted but not looking to climb into bed, I opened the older Reason installation, curious. Wait. It wasn't my original 2.0 version; it was 3.0. When did I upgrade to THAT?! - - - Thinking really, really hard about it, I dimly recollected upgrading right around the time I first started working on those aforementioned string parts, sometime in December 06/January 07. I hadn't wanted to dive into the new version quite yet, because I was working with some time constraints, so I just stuck to the old version until I had some free time to learn. And then I kinda put music away for awhile. I stopped composing. At all. - - - So. Wow. Reason 3.0. Of course, Propellerheads already released 4.0 sometime in 2007 and are probably due to beta test 5.0 any day now, but still. - - - So I'ma put up some music for you. The first three of these were done in Reason 2.5. I didn't really mix or master any of them. The last one is what I wrote over the past couple of days. There are still a few tweaks I want to make - a few errant notes, an occasional speaker clip, a few phrases that don't line up, and that keyboard solo seems to peter out disagreeably, the last riff by the elec guitar kinda irks me, and I've gotten the comment that "yeah, it sounds like it was a bit Keytar/Casio-ed" - but it's light years ahead of the old stuff. - - - Of course, light years ahead doesn't mean it doesn't still kinda suck. REMEMBER I SAID I WAS FEELING DISCOURAGED AND DEJECTED RIGHT. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
1:23 pm	Rename it "Finite Jest" Another reason I like/liked D.F.W. so much: I think it makes at least an in-good-faith attempt to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, "Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it." I know books like that and they piss me off. - D.F.W., on "Infinite Jest" Salon, 1996 I grabbed my hardcover copies (all 1st editions of course) of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (1997 - the book that got me started on journaling in my "Infamous Blue Notebooks), "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" (1999 - the book that pretty much ruled my brief but satisfying foray into film making, every short film I made I owe completely to this book), and "Oblivion" (2004 - the book that accompanied coast-to-coast as I Tried To Sort Things Out). I'll probably read them. Again, I mean. Given D.F.W.'s constant search of meaning and connection and obsession with naval-gazing and your own realization that you're naval-gazing and then the realization about the realization that you're naval-gazing, ad inf., I really, really wonder what the motherfucker (affectionately) would think about the blogs that are now popping up all over (wexmonkey included), as people talk about their (of course and self-perceived and/or self-constructed, as D.F.W. himself went on about numerous times in his own human explanations/longings) connections to D.F.W. and how he influenced them and how they felt they knew him/he knew them, all fallacy, but maybe not, because we're all human, and we all know, and fuck if the motherfucker wasn't a right about the futility of REALLY trying to know each other and REALLY trying to express the infinite number of little things and thoughts and reactions that make us up every nanosecond, something he illustrated through his asides and his footnotes and his endnotes, not gimmicks, illustrations, but he wasn't completely right, because remember something I said a second ago: we're all human, and we all know. Even when we don't. I still wonder what he would've had to say, though. Go get "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". Start with "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All", on page 83 in the hardcover. (The first two essays are kind of clunkers, but the book REALLY picks up steam with this 3rd entry.) The title essay is also a true, true gem. Probably why the book is named after it, natch. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 13th, 2008
11:25 pm	D.F.W. R.I.P. The author that made me excited to read again, the author that influenced every hackneyed bit of collegiate writing I cobbled together from 1998 onward, the author that introduced me to Frank Conroy, that opened my eyes to Meta-Fiction, that led me to Gass, and Barth, that Image Fiction hack Leyner and countless more, the author that led me drinking too much coffee and mastering run on sentences(not to mention parenthetical asides), the author like whom I even dressed, wrapping bandannas around my head and pulling stray locks of hair down around my ears, the author that I read over and over and bragged about reading (since his monstrous 1996 work "Infinite Jest" was an intimidating 900+ pages of run-on sentences 1, weighing in at over 8 pounds2) and pushed on other people ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"! "Consider the Lobster"! "Broom of the System"!), the author that made me believe, really really really believe, that I could be a writer, that I would be a writer, that I still will be a writer someday, hung himself. What. The. Fuck. No no no no no. 1 plus another 300 or so pages of footnotes, written in extra-small type, all of which helped flesh out the story or talked about drugs or led you on a maddening-or-frustrating-or-delirious tangent that may or may not have mattered to the rest of the book 2 In perilous paperbacka, bitches. a "Perilous paperback" because it's a common enough practice to keep a paperback by your bed, maybe polishing off a chapter or three before bed every night, but woe should you doze off while holding "Infinite Jest" above your face, reading on your back, as 8 lbs even from arm length away is enough to generate a bloody nosei. i Or, sadly, "noses", BECAUSE NO I NEVER LEARN MY LESSON (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 17th, 2008
10:13 am	Malleability of time I have learned that a year is a blink and 30 seconds is an eternity. I have been told the dollar amount of "so long, see ya." Waiting another month to get started on another year don't mean no thing. Don't mean no thing at all. Even eternity moves swiftly sometimes. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
6:52 pm	"Third prize is you're fired. You get the picture? You're laughing now?" Put that coffee down! Coffee's for closers only. You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close shit, you ARE shit, hit the bricks pal and beat it 'cause you are going out! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 11th, 2007
8:21 pm	p.s. There are band-aids, in a criss-cross formation, covering the MONKEY's nipples under the tech-shirt in the last post. Just thought you should know. (Look close.) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 10th, 2007
1:46 pm	26.2 Last week, the MONKEY went to New York City, the city he belongs in/to, and ran in the NYC Marathon It's been a surprisingly short road - although hardly an easy one - to get to a marathon. It's been a surprisingly long (and continuing...?) road - again, not an easy one - to make peace with, to resolve things with, to admit to New York City. In a better writer's hands, a marathon metaphor, with it's drama and effort and exertion and mile after mile after mile would be much less clumsy. Hell, even the running metaphor should be easy. So the MONKEY will leave you with this, instead. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
4:24 pm	28 Yesterday was her birthday, and we spent it putting what remains into carefully labeled, taped-up boxes. The MONKEY let himself in before the others got there, and stared at the hole in the ceiling. He paced for awhile - start with the glassware? start with the books? start with the shoes? - before he decided to open some windows. Then he stared at the hole in the ceiling some more. Work here in the den, under the spectre of The Event? Work in the bedroom, where their lives swirled together in sleep and sex and clothes and dreams? The bathroom, that's the ticket. The MONKEY grabbed a garbage bag and began throwing out half-used deoderant, mostly empty tubes of scrubs, partly filled bottle of lotion. Can't donate those. Can't give those away. Squeezed up toothpaste? Toss it. Open shampoo? Toss it. When the others got there, one of the girls said simply and sagely: "He might want to remember how she smelled." The MONKEY moved onto the kitchen; wrapping glassware suddenly seemed a lot easier to figure out. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
9:34 am	Boot In retrospect, it was probably - certainly? - inappropriate to plant a boot in the back passenger-side door of the car. But we were already in the crosswalk, the MONKEY was in the darkest, solemnest of moods, and the bitch tried to speed through her stoplight so she wouldn't have to wait a few extra seconds for us to cross Brooklyn Ave. The resonant, post-kick "thwunk" sure was satisfying, though. And seeing her middle finger held aloft made the MONKEY grin, knowing that the driver was Wrong and that there was Nothing She Could Do. Was she going to stop and confront the surly, sour, somber MONKEY? At 1:00 a.m.? DOUBTFUL. Then again, that realization stung the MONKEY a bit - there's been a lot of "Nothing We Could Do" being tossed around lately. He probably didn't kick it hard enough to make a dent. He probably only scuffed the car door, if that. Probably. - - - The Vivaldi sonata was easy - the MONKEY has played it for years, and nobody in attendance knew how it was supposed to sound, anyway, allowing the MONKEY to take all sorts of liberties with rhythm and tempo - and the filler "baroque" music was a breeze. Very effective. Somber, elegant, respectful, near regal. De Auld Resting Chair was difficult to keep in tune, possibly because that was the song that mattered the most, since it'll be played by her father in Ireland as well. Everyone said "it was lovely" - lovely was the word used most - and the MONKEY responded with "thank you" or "glad you enjoyed it" or, if it was a more musically inclined person or someone actually conversing and not merely paying a quick compliment in passing, "it was difficult to concentrate" as a way of apologizing for some of the really goofy, out-of-tune notes. Seeing the white haired, kindly Irish priest sing along to Fields of Athenrye was good, though. Like, with a capital G, like, it was Good. (The priest's disinterest in John Lennon's "Imagine" was unsurprising. At least, the MONKEY thinks it was disinterest; it didn't quite look like disapproval, but with the Catholics, who knows? Don't they disapprove of everything?) The MONKEY has had Fields of Athenrye on continuous loop in his head since Monday night. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 4th, 2005
1:43 pm	Honesty Odd how the more you try to be honest with people, all people, all sorts of people, the stronger your honesty muscles get. Before you know it, it's like you don't know your own honesty strength, and you're kicking in doors and knocking down walls and tearing apart car frames with your huge, out of control honest bruteness, unable to reign it in, unable to focus your honesty power, unable to do anything to stop the pure flow of rampant, destructive truth. And, just like your muscles, if you just stop, somehow stop using that honesty, your honesty strength will deplete, will atrophy, and then you can go back to being an unhonest weakling. - - - The MONKEY wonders if people he previously considered stalkers/psychos/out-of-control were really just products of their honesty, prisoners of their own inability to control the strength of their truths. He wonders if truthfulness created Frankenstein-ian monsters. - - - Probably just psychos, though. Current Mood: Honest Current Music: Original Oddstep - Vert (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 4th, 2002
11:16 am	Not that snotty and snarky and righteous are NECESSARILY bad things... The MONKEY: Sorry 'bout that. Where were we? Mandy Lurker: I was agreeing that you aren't as snotty and snarky and righteous in real life as you sometimes seem on LJ. The MONKEY: Now THAT is something worth posting. Mandy Lurker: Okay then. (Comment on this)