"Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, 'Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?' Then a voice comes to me and says, 'We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand-word essay.'" - Charles Schulz
Dear Internauts,
Another year riding around the sun, and I feel much the same as I did last time.
I've decided to spend the rest of the month working on finishing a timeline for the events of my graphic novel, Ghosts of Domus. Instead of putting out one completed (written, drawn, colored, and lettered) chapter at a time, I aim to make sure the story is a more complete whole first. This way, I can spend NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. November) writing the script out for the entire story. If you're curious, I use the comic book script format of the free software Celtx for my scripts. I picked it up for a screenwriting class back in college and find that it's fairly simple to use and intuitive (even if my own typing can sometimes be a bit quick jumping from section to section).
Here's a picture of a wolf pup I drew after finding an old black marker in my backpack:
I recently saw Blade Runner 2049 and Marshall, both of which I'd highly recommend.
My mom's parents, in moving out of their house in NJ, gave me an old banjo. I don't know much about the instrument, so I picked up a book about it from the library. It's interesting at least, but the physical state of the instrument itself is something I want to get checked out by someone more knowledgeable before I go too hard with it. The tuning of the strings is very tight in the way that feels like if I mess with it too much something is gonna snap. Who knows when last it was played. Still, it's kinda fascinating as some aspects (the open G tuning for instance) seem so straightforward, while so many other aspects of a Banjo are so idiosyncratic (like the high g string at the top, tuned from about halfway along the neck). Maybe if I can figure some of this out you'll get to hear some super simple beginner banjo parts on future tracks.
Been having some tooth trouble. My experiences with dentists as a kid were abominable. Seemed like no matter what I did, it was always wrong. Between that and some rude dentists whose method of joking around was making fun of me, the already anxiety-producing idea of a strange, masked figure with sharp, spinning instruments of torture digging around my mouth is not something I look forward to. I've been trying to avoid it for a long time, and not just because without dental insurance it was cost prohibitive.
If something is tied to negative emotions early on in life, it only becomes more difficult to mentally force one self to deal with them later. Sometimes we think that's not the case because of fears or issues we've overcome, but overcoming them has tied them to a positive step in our mental development. Thus, I can ride escalators like anybody these days, because my negative feelings are counteracted by the positive experience of having done so without issue in the past. However, if there is a continual negative experience, it can be ridiculously hard to justify going back to the source of pain. And then of course, there's traumatic shifts in experience which can take once positive situations or locations and turn them grim and fearful.
Trauma, after all, reshapes brain physiology.
I've heard it said that birth must be one of the most traumatic experiences of life. Makes me wonder what my brain was like before I was born. Probably not too interesting, though. If nothing else, the troubled brain is far more fascinating. Not that I believe in tabula rasa or whatever.
Anyway, that's all I've got for tonight. (yes, there are a bazillion things I could say about current events and politics, but honestly I don't think I've anything of worth to add to the conversation. If you haven't yet, I would suggest checking out Amy Siskind's weekly list for a rundown of this mad, mad world's goings on...or at least the local politics version)
Thanks for reading,
Odist
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