Busy Little Hive

  Well, I shook that head cold off. Ugh. Body aches and exhaustion was my weekend. The only up side was the mint cookies delivery from the neighbor girl. $14 bucks well spent!

  OK. Back to the writing.

 

  First off, I have discovered that I possess an I/O device that I can’t turn off.

  Sitting at the dinner table last night, I felt like I was drifting over the room in a surreal haze. My mind was struggling with a ghost struggling with demons. Around the table, there were conversations going on. Talk about the winter soccer sign up. Then there was a discussion about some new Hindi spices that we’re using on the beef.

  Do Hindi’s even eat cow?

  While all of that is going on, I’m watching the cars drive by out the front window. Folks walking dogs heavy jackets. Trees thinking about waking from the winter nap.

  Here I am; eating a cow with my family in my house, thinking about how I’m going to stick a technicians’ ghost in a demonic rite taking place in an insane asylum.

  Surreal!

 

- I. K.

Another Heart You Day Come and Gone.

Time for some post-V-day blogging. Lived through another one. Gotta love the card companies and their forced holidays. The kids were fixated on making (multiple) cards for everyone in the house. She got nothing for me. I got nothing for her. Too tired. Not enough time. You know how it goes. We’ve been with each other for 12 anniversaries and two years before that. Been there, done that.

  Also; abandon all hope, ye cyberstalkers who enter here!

  I got nutten fer ya.

  I think I’ve got my first ‘fan’! Here’s the story:

  So I get home and stuck in the front door is a copy of a book titled Killing a Mouse on Sunday. It’s in Spanish, so I can’t read a word. I guess some movie was made of it back in the 60’s. Haven’t been able to find that title, though.

  Haven’t looked too hard for it, either.

  Anyway, now that I’ve got a fan, I feel like I’m being followed.

  Or watched.

  Monitored?

  It’s weird. I feel like I should have a knife on me. No, not a blade. I don’t think I could ever get over cutting someone. Just the thought of doing something like that gives me the willies. Nope. Nada.

  I did cut off a wooden rod from some scrap out in the garage. Drilled a hole and attached a cord. Now I got me a thump stick!

  Heh.

  I’ve been noticing people a lot more recently. I’m starting to feel like my neighbors down the road. We call them ‘the watchers’. Nothing goes on without them seeing it in this neighborhood! It’s a creepy kind of security.

  Anyway; people watching has become a hobby of mine. It started out with watching to see who is watching me. Not many, if any, as it turns out.

   Who does seem to be watching me is this gal named Elana Connelly. I mentioned her in a previous blog.

 Check me out. I’m a blogger.

   OK. Here is my take on her being the force behind my current dream-cycle. I woke up on New Years day with the first dream as a memory. Naturally, I didn’t think too much about it. It was a story that I’m thinking about titling Loosing It. One that I haven’t dreamt of for a while; which means it will be coming back soon. There’s this gal in the dream who is working for… wait for it… Dame Connelly.

   Now, I would like to point out that Connelly is the same Connelly that is in our world. I don’t know how I know it, I just KNOW IT. Once I sat down and looked into her stuff last week, I could see the same patterns of philosophy and the same voice that I hear from her in my dreams. Ultimately, she is a nihilist within a veneer of cultural morality. Does that make her a good person dealing with a devastating core; or a bad person playing a role to get by?

Rites of War is on Paper!

  Elana Connelly. Right now, I’m blaming her for the dreams. More on that later.

  I looked her up the other day. She was the one who had the writing credits for the afore mentioned Text flick. It turns out that she wrote some other books about a frame of mind called Evolutionary Ethics. The idea that she is trying to get out there is that ‘amorality is moral’ verses ‘amorality is a complement to normative ethics’.

  I have no idea what that means. Lots of amoral stuff, apparently.

  Being a good little author, I looked a lot of stuff up and read until my eyes burned and my brain hurt. I took notes. Here is the simplified version of my take on the whole shebang:

  First of all, what does ‘moral’ really mean? I mean, really? There are easy ones, like don’t kill and don’t steal. Then there are grey ones, like listening to a Christian far-right gal talking about gay marriage and a wiccan far-left guy taking about big business.

  With that in mind, I decided to lock into the black-and-white argument. First came the side of ‘amorality is moral’ it sticks to the idea that morals are relative to the situation at hand. You’ve got laws that define that killing and stealing is wrong. But those laws don’t count for the cop who shoots a perp, a soldier who opens up on the enemy, or the home owner defending themselves against a hopped up attacker with an axe. What about finding a $20 on the street? Is that stealing if you pocket it? It isn’t your money. What if you are broke and starving and there sits a hamburger that some dude left on the table to go use the can? What if you are unemployed and going to go home to starving kids; and someone left groceries in the back of their shiny, new pickup?

  This got me thinking about some of the characters that could show up in my book.

  Then comes the side of the argument where ‘amorality is a complement’ in that it is a cause-effect, a consequence, a relationship compass, it sensibly defines contexts of ethical meanings, and is part of family roles. You drink at an office party with your boss, you drive home, you kill a kid on a bike. But you have kids of your own that you are working hard to support. You’ve made sacrifices for those kids of yours. However; the world sees you as ‘that drunk that killed that kid with his car’.

  For me, the argument seems to boil down to one of self-control. Where you draw the line is what defines morality. The guy who drank with his boss could have done a watered-down drink or a few baby sips verses gulping it. Did that guy need to be drinking with his boss in the first place? What kind of place is that guy working for, anyway? Maybe that guy should have found another job.

  See? Self control with a dash of… foresight? Common sense? Flight verses fight? I suppose it boils down to how you are wired.

  Anyway, in Dame Connelly’s work sits all kinds of interesting plot devices and messed up characters to work with. A seed for them, anyway. The question is; where will they end up once I am done with them?

   That brings me to my FIRST dream-based writing; a little ditty that I call Rites of War. After putting the thing down on paper, I’m considering changing the title. I’m also thinking about making this book into an anthology of short stories based on the town I’m dreaming about. Each dream is the same, but different. I’ll be able to better explain once I have a few more written up.

   Hopefully…

Do we leave marks, or add to the ones already here?

Lovecraft.
  I suppose most folks have been exposed to this guy and his ideas in one form or another. Mine came from a movie titled The Text of the Maestro. It was a little indie flick about a pianist who began manipulating his most ardent fans with his music. At first he was the prime suspect when murders began occurring within the homes of folks who had come to his concerts. Then it became a hunt for a parasitic serial killer using the Maestro’s fan base as a buffet line. As I recall, there was a psycho, but they were under the sway of the music as well. Near the end of the film, the pianist had to come to terms that their passion was the murder device, fed by energies beyond the confines of our little blue planet. I remember the final scene’s weirdness, as the camera pulled away from Earth; it was like a P.O.V. shot that yanked us away until Sol was just another star in the sky of a living planet of chaotic… things.
   Well, that’s kind of the way I feel right now.
   A speck in the crosshairs of something else. I don’t know why that film came to mind, but it inspired an idea for a book. Well, not a single story, but a book of short stories. As a lark, I opened this blog the other day (my first!) and last night I began organizing the ideas for the… idea.
  Dreams become letters, letters become books.
  Are books solid dreams?
  More to come later!

I.K.

Getting this thing running.

Hi. I can't see this amounting to much, but I've decided to try a public forum to see if there is anyone else running into the same problem that I've had since the new year.

You see, I've had these reoccurring dreams about a town. Different places, same town. Same folks, different situations. It's like a TV show that my head is making up.

At first, it was cool. A little weird, but cool. On a sliding scale, I had them set at about 50%.

Now the 'weird' slide is increasing and the 'cool' slide is decreasing. The reason for this is that they are still occurring. Nothing new, mind you; just... re-runs.

This blog is one of two things I'm doing to help clear the queue. The other is to write them down as they return. Again.

Well, I'm doing this on break and break is over. Just wanted to have this in place for the weekend's writing plans!

If you are 'out there' too, drop a line and we'll compare notes.

See you this weekend.

-I.K.