The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
I was going to write something nice about leaving Porto Alegre, but I thought I’d quote Elizabeth Bishop (“One Art”). I can’t talk about selling and donating our stuff in a villanelle.
If anyone wants our accoutrements, let me know, we are donating most, selling a bit, and if it weren’t for carbon emissions having a bonfire of some.
You have until Tuesday. Tick tock.
A little friend wrote the following poem for me:
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=- 855555
A friend of mine from jiu-jitsu in London has been writing about his travels on his website.
http://www.across-then-up.com/
Harry was a hedge fund manager in London until the Great Financial Crisis ™. (But we are pulling out of it, really, we are, just keep shopping as fast as you can…) In direct opposition to jumping out of a lofty Canary Wharf window onto a Landcruiser, he chose to drive across North Africa and Asia on his way around the world.
I don’t usually recommend blogs, I find that most of them have terrible writing. Everyone is just so cheeky and … bloggy. The bloggers (terrible word) think they are clever. Some are clever, but even these are boring. I could give examples, but that would be rude.
Harry’s blog however, is really good. I recommend it. It makes you want to travel, and I’m incredibly jealous of his trip. Well, parts of it, Algeria sounds great, Libya, not so fun. Now he is on his way to Pakistan, which I might fly over and meet him on the other side.
When Harry’ entries show up on my RSS reader, I actually read them, instead of skimming. I don’t know if you get higher prasie than that. Sorry Paul Krugmann.
(And yes, I realize I’m writing about boring blogs — on a blog, tah-dah. The irony doesn’t escape me. At least I challenge people to cage matches.)
My lovely sister-in-law Louisa sent me this.
It had me LOL-ing in the morning.
The gauntlet has been thrown, I hereby challenge Matt Damon to a cage fight.
Matt, don’t pretend you haven’t read this, I’ll say it again, in case you don’t read so good: I challenge you to fight me.
You pick the rules. I prefer a no-holds-barred contest. You pick the location: be it a ring, cage, octagon, or shark filled waters, those are all fine with me, but I prefer something within walking distance of my home.
I eagerly await your response.
Chicken …. bawk bawk bawk.
I am going to try and write 1000 words a day. I need to write and I keep procrastinating, so this way I give my self a tangible goal.
See at the moment, the only writing that I am doing is what I learn at jiu-jitsu and emails to people, but I should probably try to branch out from there.
The goal is to do this from Monday through Friday, like a real job, and to try and take it a bit seriously. That way after a while, I will both a.) get back into practice writing, and b.) have a collection of recent work — some of which will hopefully be decent! But if I can find time on the weekend to write, I certainly won’t hold myself back.
The goal may have to be a bit flexible, because my mileage may vary, but 1k/day is the general idea.
I’m packing to go to Buenos Aires in a few moment, putting some last minute text files on my iPod. But that reminds me, I have a problem with my iPod on airplanes. As soon as the cabin pressurizes, my iPod freezes. I did a cursory search on the Internet and can’t find anyone else with the same problem. The whole device makes this terrible grinding sound and the display stops working. There is a little flashing broken iPod. Then as soon as the cabin pressurizes, when we land thank god, the things starts working again. It is really weird.
I’m gong to Buenos Aires on Sunday with a friend from London. I’m going to be there for a week, eating and site seeing and stuff, and hopefully catching up with some old amigos.
Curious how the Spanish is going to work out now that the Portuguese has eaten up the space in my brain.
I had an MRI on my knee today (another pinche injury, but I think this one is minor). I had heard a lot of complaints from people about how it is noisy and scary to be put in the machine. Truth be told, it was kind of relaxing. I got to lie down and was inserted into a tube. Then the sounds of the machine were kind of musical. A sort of Philip Glass meets Basement Jaxx. The beats were interesting becasue they were in off time, grinding sounds, whirring sounds, clicking sounds and a timer as well. The sounds would overlap and stacking, creating dissonance, etc.
I am going to look for mp3s of MRI machines, and if there aren’t any, then I should create them. It is an medical-industrial symphony. I think it could work on a let of levels.
I just finished “The Grapes of Wrath”, by John Steinbeck (#10). (I think someone once told me that the title was mistranslated in Japanese as “Angy Raisins”) Anyway, the book was awesome, a new favourite and I’m going to write some of my thoughts about it later.
Definitely worth reading and definitely deserving to be in the Modern Library’s list of 100 best novels. It is number 10. I’m still chugging through the list. But I have hit a snag with “Sons and Lovers” (#9). It’s too dull.
I have an idea for a screenplay that would be fun to write, but I don’t have the time… (more on that later).
It is about gasoline tankers, you know the ones:
(They are called different things in different countries.)
Ok, well, here is the story. The “elevator pitch”
“The year is 2050, the price of gasoline is 200 dollars a gallon, a tanker holds 9000 gallons. If you can hijack one, without blowing it up, the total value of the gasoline, minus the truck, $1,8000,000.”
This would be a easy story to write. If you were lazy, you could even do it using “the formula”, well, here it is:
The tanker drivers:
This would be a great story, there is nothing like suspense that could be generate on having to drive a 2 million dollar bomb around.
The bad guys.
You start off thinking they are from the Arabian Peninsula. But in reality they are …. duh duh duh…. white dudes.
People like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney who are hoarding the oil to finance another war to steal more oil to finance another war to steal more oil… ad nauseum.
So the story in three acts, there is an escalation in the number of hijacking of oil tankers, in one of them the black dude dies, latina woman and white dude fall in love, Latina gets kidnapped and then white alcoholic has his epiphany, goes into the belly of the beast and sets everything on fire by driving his truck into something. Bad guys burn. Fade to black.
This is just a rough draft.