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30DIC Day 16: We Have No Idea

You guys! Know what today is?? Allow my man to let you know...

And I'm not sayin' I'm gonna celebrate, because I've done something. OMG what have I done?? I finally decided to sign up for "a very Wodehouse challenge" , which I'd been kinda sorta wanting to do for awhile and missed out on it last time by like three minutes (no joke), and I'm not nearly doin' enough this month after not really doin' much for real the last six months . So yesterday I got my tasks...and yeah, I get that Wodehouse is supposed to take you out of your comfort zone, so by no means should this be considered complaining, because I'm game and willing to do what I have to do...but I got basically the "horror challenge".

If you've been with me here for any length of time, you'll probably note that I've never, for as long as you've known me, expressed any sort of interest in that particular genre. And you would be correct, whether you've known me for two months, five years, or since the moment I first joined Stories.com back in the days of dial-up modems. Horror! Oh, the horror!   I used to joke around to myself that maybe it'd be fun to try and write some horror, and then I'd kinda chuckle and go back to my lazy river with my granola and my notebook and write more poetry for the hippies . But now? This is like, real. I feel like a football player who goes on some reality dancing program for the teevee only he's out of shape and has also lost a leg at the knee. I have zero clue how to even go about it. I can barely shit out a poem some days. Hell, I'm lucky if I can answer a stranger's question sometimes with a complete sentence.

And on top of that, one of the challenges is to write Product Reviews. Know how many of those I've written in the almost 16 years I've been coming to WDC? Zero. Know how many different horror products I've consumed in that same time frame? Very close to zero. Know what I learned today? When you have to write a 666-character count review in the PR function of "Create New Item", there's no actual character count listed. I wrote three today (one for a book that's sorta horror I guess, and two for really totally violent, over-the-top gangsta rap cds), and I basically estimated. Not having done something before + guessing at the particulars = probable failure . But hey, I'm doing something different I guess. Challenging myself, or something. And I think I can do it. I've got two weeks...we'll see.

I also poem'd a bit today as well, cuz NaNoKit and Cinn and I forget who else at this point are trying to do 100 poems in a hundred days and like I mentioned earlier, today was kinda that day where I could barely shit something out. It wasn't good (like I always say), and it's #22 in the "Also Mutants"  collection, "Given The World" ...a cheesy little fictional romance piece about a happy couple being happy in their happy place like happy couples are, or some happy horseshit.

And of course because I'm never satisfied (y'all should know this by now), I had to come up with something else (#23), so I did, and it's better but I know it might need a tweaking or two later on. And like everything else I kinda sorta like it's got some strong lines and it's a little angry/cynical, which is fine by me. If you read it be gentle with it (but stomp all over the other one; I won't mind cuz it's kinda lame ).

We Have No Idea

We're gonna die from the inside.

Each letter in the chemical is toxic;
we're growing alphabets and ingesting sentences
that would doom lesser species.
But what are we supposed to hate?
More and more and more?
I don't win for getting to breathe
the same air that blows the bees
and the government wants to tax
with pollutants and bombs and
a myriad of complex neurotransmissions
meant to stem diseases at the cost
of newer, unnamed ones. And
if you think that's a mouthful
don't hold your breath;
just because it sounds important,
that doesn't make it right.
We're gonna die from the inside
         anyway,
just so we're clear,
but it's everything on the
         everything on the outside
that starts our processional process.

Just so we're clear.

         "We Have No Idea"  from "Also Mutants" .

Here's a fun fact about me: whenever I see someone wearing a gas mask of any kind, I always think of this song...because for the longest time, I thought "glass pack" was some form of war-grade gas mask that people put on to avoid fumes from chemical weapons. I believed this well into adulthood. Probably up until about thirty minutes ago .

"The Wake-Up Bomb"   -R.E.M.

"Practice my T-Rex moves and make the scene.
Carry my dead, bored, been there, done that, anything."

So, y'all know I love me some Twitter more than just about all other forms of social media combined, right? Even though "New Twitter" kinda sucks, @fivesixer   is still the same...and anyway, so Amazon I guess bought Whole Foods today, which I've never been in but I hear either really great things or really terrible things about it depending on who you're speaking to, and who cares because thankfully Twitter showed up   to tell us all about it and how the sale made them feel. And I mean, ok cool, there's a local indie organic shop in town here that I like to go to once in awhile because it's close and healthy and whatever, but I'm kinda not down with payin' ridiculous money   for veggies that haven't been sprayed with a metric fuck-ton of chemicals or animals that weren't hopped up on crystal meth before being ground up into nuggets. It's kinda hard sometimes choosing a side. I kinda thought by 2017 we'd be eating everything in pillform by now anyway, which is a bit of a letdown that it's not happening. I guess I didn't have "organic chain stores owned by giant internet companies" on my 2017 bingo card.

OMG, remember Choose Your Own Adventure books, from when you were a kid? I loved them!! They were these paperbacks that would give you the option to flip to certain pages of the book to move along with the story, and there were different things you could do and multiple endings and stuff...you could have like five different ways of reading the same book (give or take, depending on the title). Anyway, some masterful genius has decided to map out the books   to show how the books are structured. Maybe that takes a little bit of the fun out of reading them, and trying to figure out how many different ways they can go, but it's still pretty neat. I may need to see if my library has a copy of Inside UFO 54-40 or Mystery of the Maya just for old times' sake .

*cargray* And finally, a feel-good story from my hometown getting some love nationwide. A Buffalo man brought his truck into a collision shop this week because racist vandals spray-painted the n-word all over it. The guys at the shop dropped everything and immediately began working collectively on cleaning it off, and the owner didn't charge him   for any of the work done. Further proof that there are still some decent people left in the world.

Alright you fine-ass people out there...I'm gonna get outta here cuz I got things to do and read and figure out, hopefully before the weekend's up. And speaking of the weekend, may you all have fantastic ones. Peace, make an ugly mess, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!