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.)
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 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.