Well, it won't be called "The Filth and the Fury."

Because I just remembered that was the name of a Sex Pistols documentary I saw once.

I'd like to start with a poem.

"Sometimes I want to write, and have nothing to say;
but I'll write something anyway."

It's really obvious I wrote banging poetry in high school, isn't it?

How was everyone's holiday? I'm not much for Halloween, and never really got a solid opportunity to go shopping for the little things I needed to put together my Day of the Dead Scott Pilgrim costume [that's from volume 5, y'all]. Which was fine, even if I had managed to finish it off, I don't think I had any reason to wear it. There was supposed to be a party on Saturday night, but it was a couple hours away from me, and I didn't hear from anyone about it, so I'm not even sure if it went down. I expect my Facebook feed will let me know in the next couple of days.

Saturday was fairly busy anyway -- in my previous post I mentioned an older piece of work I wanted to put together for the blog, like that Trendsetter excerpt I wound up putting up last week. So I resolved to dig that up, transcribe it to a Word file, and fix what would, no doubt, be the multitude of errors present on something I'd probably scribbled out while half awake. I found it at the bottom of a pile of old, slightly moldy [whoops] legal pads, whose cheap binding had sort of... melded together into a kind of super notebook. That refused to open without a straight razor.

Not that I was about to let that stop me.

What I remembered from writing the piece previously was that it was a fairly simple bit of back and forth dialogue between a stripper and one of her customers. I wish I could say it was some clever conceit, thought up because I was getting sick of the whole Sopranos-esque "talking to the shrink" thing [popular and lazy!] and wanted to put a different spin on it, but I doubt seriously that was my intent. More likely, I think I'd had the idea for a long time before it even got down on paper, going at least as far back as the Hollywood Writer's Strike, maybe just before the Oscars, when I'd purchased Diablo Cody's autobiography as a show of literary solidarity. Plus, Juno was interesting to me, and I was curious about the kind of person who'd written it.

What I found was more or less what I remembered, but with one caveat -- there were a lot more scene descriptions than I recalled putting in it. Actually, that's misleading, since if you actually looked at the page, most people would only see minimal notes around the dialogue that wouldn't seem of any great importance. But two years ago I had less free time, and trusted myself a lot more, and each of these little tics and weird notes I recognized as a kind of subliminal shorthand I used to work in. The idea being that I would see a mention of this thing, or that, coupled with what the characters on the page were saying, and it would act as a kind of cue, something that would remind me of what I meant and make me go "oh, yeah -- this means that, and needs to be that, and this is happening in the background here."

It was a flawed system that I don't really use nowadays, especially since I'd sometimes miss my own cues, and end up scratching my head as to why I'd scrawled the word "Godard" after a particularly long chunk of monologue. And if there's anyone who I'm not trying to out-clever, it's myself. At least, I don't think.

Saturday night eventually turned into Sunday morning/day, and I was still pretty hard at work on something that I'd abandoned originally because "no artist would ever want to draw it -- nobody would ever want to film it." And the script I ended up turning it into just doesn't translate well to being posted here... even though I said I was going to do that, and the general feeling that no one's ever going to want to do anything with this also makes me want to put it somewhere, so that someone might enjoy it. So I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do.

The piece is also still a little light [re: not finished yet], but it's also fairly distracting subject matter, so I opted to give myself a break. Especially since I wanted to enjoy "The Walking Dead" premiere on Sunday night. But that's done [and awesome], and after voting tomorrow and running a few errands, I'll more than likely get back to looking at it. The promised Wednesday post might not be happening anymore, though. Maybe later in the week if I can figure out some sort of artful way to put something like that on here.

Speaking of last week's story, I've been getting a few visitors from JM Strother's Mad Utopia. "Not the First Conversation They Shouldn't of Had" has shown up on the #fridayflash master list as a romance [I don't disagree... I just get a laugh from associating that word with myself]. I owe this entirely to one of my best friends and most talented peers, John Wiswell -- #fridayflash is one of his passions, something he's heavily involved in, and told me that he'd be putting it up there. I can't even begin to thank you for all the support, John. But I can say thank you. Sincerely, thank you.

And if you're just finding the blog, and only looking for fiction, check out the handful posts labeled "Method and Madness." Those will likely be right up your alley.

Another neat, Twitter-related thing. My friend Glen recently did [and sold] a Halloween-themed piece of artwork featuring local newscasters Tim Irr and Tony Cavalier. After posting it on Twitter, I got an almost immediate response from Irr, praising the work, and saying he wished he could have bought it himself. Big congratulations to Glen.

Also over the weekend was the big "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" hosted by the Daily Show and the Colbert Report in Washington, DC. I think I was pretty well in full-on writing mode while it was going on [or possibly sleeping... things are hazy], so I haven't seen or heard much of the rally itself, save of course for the award given to the recently-blogged-about Mick Foley, for his work with the RAINN organization [just... amazing, and well deserved. Kind of great how the heel wrestler who used to scare the hell out of me as a kid is such an honest, nice guy]. But there's been a lot talk, and debate, and I've spent a minute here, and minute there reading various things about the rally, and thought I might share a few of the most interesting [and different] takes on the event: Lucid Despair's "The Rally to Restore Visibility" and Tiger Beatdown's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rally." Found these particularly interesting because they're not coming directly from media outlets, nor are they from what most would consider the bread and butter for the Daily Show crew. A warning though, to the few of you who might get a little worked up about someone looking at the rally critically -- both articles are a little contentious.

Oft-linked and very much enjoyed blogger Hannah Miet also attended, and live tweeted from the event all day. I'd suggest going through her archives for some of the high points -- when I would come up for air occasionally, they brought me a great deal of joy.

Finally, everyone, if you vote, if you can vote, vote tomorrow [I guess, technically, today]. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am not one of those people who think not voting somehow robs you of certain rights, even if those are just the rights to bitch about the way things turn out, and I've even skipped an election once since I've been able to vote because up and down the ballot I could easily call all the winners. But this election, at least in my area, isn't one of those.

Me, personally, I'm tossing on my best revolution flannel come sun up and heading out to try and put a wooden stake through the heart of the mad-corporate, almost imperialistic John Raese's bid for Robert C. Byrd's now vacant senate seat. Because as far as I'm concerned, if you're going to even try to follow someone with Byrd's record of public service, you might actually want to get a person whose interest is serving the public.

That's all I'll say. I've been trying to keep the political junkie side of myself under control lately, mostly because it seemed like some kind of sign that my schedule only freed up for that kind of thing mere days before the election. Still a little superstition in me, I guess.

To paraphrase William Trevor: "pass for mad, and be at peace."