So this week I got the news that a friend of mine would be personifying cowardice by deleting his myspace account and activating his facebook. Unfortunately this man, desperately fleeing from a failed relationship, happens to be my best friend, so I reactivated my account as well. I should stop bashing him, because it could be good for me as well. I have a favouritism of myspace, yet I've only ever used the service for the past 4 years as a means to force vulgar internet fads and comments on people who either aren't online on AIM or don't like to use their email. I've got less than 10 friends and I'm already getting more action than most of that time. Fucking sigh...

Another excuse to avoid the fleshy kind of people came when I discovered goodreads in my foolishly planned 2 hour period between classes. I'm sure it's nowhere near new--it's incredibly developed! It's a site where you can post reviews on books, read other people's reviews, mindlessly indulge on trivia of books you've probably never read, slam your palm into your forehead when you see the global ratings of some books, and share quotes from various authors--although not from their prose/poetry, oddly; people like to be told how to live after all. I'm sure there's actually some kind of person-to-person interaction at some point, but golly I'm having fun just finally having a place to pontificate about how overrated Twilight and Harry Potter are while I suckle on Oscar Wilde's flamboyant moobs... For some reason I have a feeling that statement will be taken more seriously, or perhaps just more disturbingly, than I intended.

But seriously, their database is huge. For example, I was going to put in a quote from Goethe's Faust and, as I clicked to search for the title, there were dozens of titles from Goethe's letters and plays and just all variety of literary accomplishments. I'd recommend it to anyone who casually or seriously enjoys literature. Even though there are people who have fifteen of my lifetimes worth of books read, it was uplifting to discover that I'm not as illiterate as I'd thought.

I'll try to get some more updating done after I finish the busy work that my classes have me doing. Until then, here I am on goodreads [link] and if you have a facebook, just do a search for Doug Schmierer, because I have no clue how to link a facebook

Have you ever drank coffee for several days in a row? I always used to think of coffee as being little more than soda for adults--because everyone knows adults lothe sugar unless it's poured by the basin of a teaspoon. I used to even drink mountain dew in the morning as if preparation for the ritual. Of course I later learned why a lover once frowned at this when I shared mouths with another dew drinker. Now I get jealously protective of my breath if I haven't flossed after indulging in the liquid stank.

Anyway, I've been drinking coffee for quite some time now. I should say that it's not the coffee that I'm addicted to, it's more the coffee shops. I can't really focus at home. If it's anything requiring real ingenuity or creativity, the familiarity of home gets to me, like I can't turn off the memory engine of my brain. As I said, Ishould say it's not the coffee I'm addicted to, but of course my body would disagree.

I never knew caffeine to be so demanding a drug. Sometimes, when I sleep in, my body has already decided to punish me for missing caffeine when I wake, which means a migraine caused by the increased levels of adenosine causing blood in the head to swell. This comes complete with nausea and even some tinkering of the emotions. Then, because the body can't just be told to stop, even when there's caffeine on the way, another unsavoury reaction happens when you've tried in vain to get the caffeine in your system that will stop your headache. The blood vessels slowly shrink and begin redistributing with the help of caffeine, but now there's the matter of increased adenosine coexisting with caffeine so that it feels like a caffeine overdose. The muscles tighten, the nerves twitch with restlessness, and sometimes the result is that you traded a headache for muscle aches.

Maybe there's a metaphor in this, or maybe I'm reluctant and so I'm delaying the admission. My true feeling of restlessness right now is a fear of stagnancy. I have never really needed a reason to run from complacency; when I was younger, I used to always try to make myself the best possible person to be loved. That's all I really cared about: falling in love with a Jasmine, an Ariel, or any princess incarnation, really, because I would be the rightful prince. But I guess at some point I had to realize nobody is that simple--I wasn't even that simple, much as it sucked to admit.

Competition kept me going. With my divine ambition gone I wanted merely a noble one to replace it, or even a great one. I wanted to beat my old self for being so disappointing--discardable. That's why I started writing again. Before leaving for New York for my culinary degree, my mom said to me that my move didn't make sense, she said that I used to love writing so much, I think she used to imagine I'd be a journalist like her father. I don't know when I thought I would be satisfied--or, I guess I should say I knew there would be no satisfying me because of the standard I set. I wanted to hear something that would never be admitted. God I wanted so bad to have every one of the devastating moments in my mind. Mostly revenge.

But here I am again. The desires for which I wrote aren't gone or finished in any way, (they were unattainable, remember?) however people are becoming worried about me. Hell, I'm becoming worried for me. And I shouldn't do myself the injustice to say I wrote only for revenge. My style is inspired by the same majesty and power of word that I hope to revive or else sustain within literarystasis for someone else.

I've been disappeared this last month as I search for something. I guess you could even say I've been searching for it longer than that. This thing I can compare to the sense of urgency which the restaurant industry uses, but it needs be more than a sense and it needs to be an urgency foremost. An urgency to act. More than that, even, a lust for activity. The thing I don't like about this is that it feels like I'm trying to find a reason to live. But if stagnancy is as morbid as I feel, I suppose the exchange is appropriate. It is a bad omen, then, that friend nor family understand a word of my work.


You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never
Rises from the soul, and sways
The heart of every single hearer,
With deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,
Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,
Blowing on a miserable fire,
Made from your heap of dying ash.
Let apes and children praise your art,
If their admiration’s to your taste,
But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,
Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

This will be the shortest journal ever, but the best as well. [link]
It has the girl who played Wendy in Peter Pan as Sibyl Vane and Stardust's Dunstan plays Dorian Gray! From the trailer I've seen, it doesn't look like they try for a verbatim rendition, but my god they do the aesthetic movement justice. Beautiful people surrounded by beautiful colours and amazing lighting...
/swoon

Oh what shall I choose among the transitive topics floating about these, the passing days of quotable qualia... which best represents my state of mind right now? You can probably guess I chose psychosis.

Have you ever had deja vu? ever tell a story to friends or family only to hear, "dude, that wasn't how it happened," in response? Cognitive lapses or errors in memory layering are not uncommon in healthy brains. Have you ever feared, or noticed, something more severe than simple forgetfulness? Like, say, if the memories you have with someone had been perceived twice but kept only the latest modal residue.

Imagine that, once, these memories were perceived in the present tense. You know you can trust the present tense--you can look around you at any calm enough moment and, for a period of some ten seconds, you can sample of every sense; you may breathe in scent, you may observe the detail of every thing natural and temporarily naturalized--you can taste what you choose no matter how disgusting or poisonous (though that would make recollection a little difficult.) Most importantly, you can remember how you feel at that moment, even if you can't put a name to it. Ever smelled something like a shirt your mother hasn't worn in years and remember smelling that same shirt with that same laundry detergent and motherly scent and then feeling, suddenly, maybe only momentarily, the same security and humbled love you felt when last you smelled that shirt?

But, let's move back an example. Imagine that, for the second time of perceiving this person's memory, it had been rewritten. Unconsciously, some time throughout the years, you had taken a moment to recall a memory--the memory of a distant lover, to stick with the first example because I don't want to taint the memory of my mommy's sweatshirt! Suppose you were angry one day, and something reminded you of something your old lover used to do; or worse, imagine you were frustrated at a failed relationship and recalled this ex to think how she would have handled this better or this would be better if she were here and bam. Instant deification. Well, I suppose you'd have to be a mindless romantic, reserving that section of your mind where some people place their gods or their worldly ambitions for finding love, but perhaps those people are not so different? do they not get fixated with fanatacism or, in the low of this bipolar relationship, the extreme lethargy of being failed?

The point is, what was once a standard relationship between you and a memory of this person has taken from everything you wanted it to be, and suddenly life you recall life as once being different. You used to be witty, or at least your wit came so much easier. You could juggle your endeavours with one hand because that person was part of your life; you could ___insert miracle here___, because that person was part of your life. But, if you were popping out miracles like sangria jello shooters from your belly button, wouldn't that person have stayed with you? Ah, reality. Ah, reason.

Here's the pointed point: can you trust your own mind? What if you couldn't take every memory for granted and couldn't rely on your own intuitions or your own judgements because the mind you harbour has, at any time, changed the modal imbuement of your past? What if it you lie in bed one morning and think about the girl at Starbucks for whom you wrote a poem: how she could lie beside you right there and you would both trade your flirts before kissing--the different scenarios in which you could flirt before that kiss. You imagine going out with her, and imagine what you would say outside the restaurant afterwards to steal more time with her, getting closer to intimacy. Your eyes are closed the entire time, and you shake out of the trance as though waking. It feels like memory, not imagination.

That represents what I feel right now, and what I fear. My nerves are pricked to the point of oversensitivity and are put on a crawl across the desert of fiery anxiety. The project I've been working on for the past three years, although it still awaits the approval of one of my editors and will still receive my OCD tinkering to the moment until I receive response, is finished. It has gone through about six solid revisions and, beyond that, an uncountable amount of touch ups and singular chapter rewrites. And, even though it would be nowhere near what it is right now without the help of friends--very good, loved friends to whom I owe more than just their best approaches of professionalism--I at uneased. I have doubts, and those doubts have turned to my friends. What if they are talking from their critical mouth but have mixed suit with their friendly tongue?

When it was in its earliest developments, I had friends critiquing who I knew would hold back. There was two reasons: one, they wouldn't take it serious because of other obligations; and two, they probably would have thought the encouragement to be a better motivation. I was ok with this, and as the book progressed, I tried to find the middle ground, eventually coming on my last two editors who are very serious in their enjoyment of literature and sympathize the importance of this project to me. They have been with me through at least the two latest drafts, voicing the opinions which guided my hand in the redraft, and they have reached a point where their opinions on what could be changed are only that: opinions. But doubt... no one ever escapes doubt, they only ignore it. If you can think of a verb, that verb has doubt accompanying. I'm scared of what will happen if I've taken any of my friends in a way other than intended, or if I've wronged them into the wrong mood of interpreting, tainting them like an altered memory.

I'm not all that afraid of rejection, I just fear sending out something to respectable agents that has mistakes that make me look like an uneducated or insipid writer, losing their respect and, perhaps, forcing such a realization upon myself.



The answer is that of course you can trust your own mind. Above being mandatory, it's pretty much the only mind you can trust because, regardless of what reality is happening outside of your perception, you are your mind. Dualism, empiricism: call it what you will; whether your mind is the conduit between your body and your soul or if it's all you have, its deductions and inductions are your sensory records, cognitive records, and the only way a human is anything more, at this moment and any moment, than paint on a wall.

Anyway, these are things I think about. I'll get a distant look in my eyes and just sort of stare rudely at a grain in the wood, finding there a small fear of being called crazy if I voiced it.

Ever read a book called Twilight by Stephanie Meyer? Ever seen the movie? It is one of the most popular tales of our age and has been made into a major motion picture which is responsible for, unfortunately, as Harry Potter was before it, interesting millions of people in reading again. Stephanie Meyer is quoted as saying the idea "came to her in a dream" and has a romance "inspired by music of artists like those in her movie."

The Twilight saga is a series of three books following the young romance of a feminine protagonist named Bella Swan and a mysterious boy from her school named Edward Cullen. Bella is a clumsy girl with nothing really out of the ordinary to her and Edward is a vampire with the ability to read minds--all minds, that is, except Bella's; a characteristic which sparked his romantic interest. The plot of the first book involves mostly a feud between two vampire clans: the Cullens and a traveling pack who have been feeding on humans; connecting the vampire and the human plots together as Bella's dad is a Sheriff. Twilight was published in 2005.

The Southern Vampire Mysteries is a series written by Charlaine Harris. The first book, Dead Until Dark, was published in 2001. Dead Until Dark introduces a female protagonist* named Sookie Stackhouse. Sookie is a waitress working at a restaurant in an Earth where vampires have since revealed their presence to the rest of the world, assured that the synthetically produced blood, "True Blood," will provide mortals the peace of mind which will allow their acceptance. Although she goes about her days as any other human, she has the ability to read minds*. One day a vampire named Bill Compton comes into her restaurant and Sookie finds herself enamoured by this man's unique characteristic that she is unable to read his mind*. The plot develops as most mysteries, with several murders happening and a new vampire in town being placed as the prime suspect. Human and vampire plots intertwine constantly as Sookie's brother is being accused of killing someone after their sex tape is released, showing him strangle her and further, when Sookie is exposed to the vampire heirarchy/underground and meets with the vampire sheriff*.

I restrain myself from ranting on Stephanie Meyer only because I hold my own beliefs about plagiarism. I decided from Shakespeare that the best display of an idea deserves the best and fondest of remembrances; I simply couldn't get into the Twilight series or its vampire mythology. Stephanie Meyer never was a good writer, even with borrowed ideas.

If you haven't seen True Blood, I recommend it. Find a place to download it or watch it online. They define the telepathy so much better than the movie, Twilight, did and they don't contradict their fighting or their romance by pulling punches. If you're into vampires, you'll love it. And if you aren't, you might start to be.



"Um, well, bitten by radioactive spider?"
"That's not very creative."...
"no spiders?"
"nope."
"and no radioactivity?"
"none."
"dang."
"kryptonite doesn't bother me either."


Can you turn into a bat?
No. There are those who can change form, but I'm not one of them.
Can you levitate?
No.
Turn invisible?
Sorry.
Well Bill, you don't seem like a very good vampire. What can you do?
I can bring you back to life.