I Don’t Remember

And now to cap off a night whose productivity was so low it cannot even be measured, I leave you with some writings I did over break with my Mom and some of her friends.

“I Don’t Remember” 3/20/06
How many times have those words passed from my lips? I don’t remember exactly, surely thousands. My Kimberly reassured me, told me not to worry, that she’d remember for me. The hours she spent copying, transcribing each word — well, most words… leaving out the worst, and the best — each day of those early days, each moment, each throb of the heart as it sputtered to life, the fumes of yesterday still pungent, unburned, waiting to explode in a new direction. I lay on my thin mattress, the knotted boards below pressing up through the foam, my sweetheart’s three latest letters in hand. I’d open one, read it through, drink in every word no matter how it made me hurt, or sigh — wince or blush. Give away emotion under that veneer of everything’s bueno. Todo bien. Each letter holding an entry from her journal. Her place of venting, rushing, bubbling, open and closeness. Her memories open to me — flowing across the thousand miles between us. The thousand miles between today and those days only months, years ago when it all began. “I don’t remember,” I could no longer speak those words. She had given me hers. My own memories now sketches where they had been only white-blackness, a swirling soup of places, words, memes… blended and blurred and fused into a chaotic oblivion.

Movie

Completely unrelated, but I was cruising around the blogs and found a link to some other site, where a writer had just posted a great review of the upcoming film, V for Vendetta. It sounds like it could be quite intriguing, and suffice it to say he gave it an “A”.

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Stranger Sketches – 3/12 9:19 pm

Alright, I didn’t write a disclaimer for any of my other posts, and I don’t plan to write one now… but let me just say that writing these was HAARRRRRRD! Usually I can just write through my “inner-critic”, but with the person whom I was describing sitting right there in front of me, every second I was reminded of just how inadequate my portrayals were… which was not coooool…

Well, here’s a random one that is at least postable. Some of them just get mean…

He might be my age, maybe a bit younger. He’s sitting with freshman, so it would make sense. He eats his bacon with his hands, tearing off the fat first. His hair is brown, and short. His eyebrows define his face; they look like two dark hairy caterpillars — the kind that give you a nasty rash when you touch them. He is nondescript. His cowlicks make his head look vaguely square-like.

I just read Megan’s study, and it really freed me up, I had been thinking in the wrong place when working on these before… I’ll still post some of my other ones (maybe), and try again tomorrow or later tonight (to write some more)…

In Class Incoherence – 3/12 9:08pm

I think this was the result of that exercise where we had to choose famous people, and then people close to us… and write a story with them both. Written in-class on 3/7. The handwriting contains lots of information lost in the blog-version, but just use your imagination… Perhaps I’ll do some scanning later… (hah)

Yeah… don’t ask 🙂

Blah Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blahd buddha bagabout a borta aorta abort aortasseacov(?) blah blah Michaela is my sista she is small. But not small and she is like Ludvig von Bismark because she unified Germany like the great Teutonic rocker we know her to be. Her feats are famous — I hear and know all about them. I read the symbols on the wall. Yet do I know her? who was that Wilhelm, or Ludvig — Blah Blah (dissolves into gibberish)

Yeah…

Creative Nonfiction Scene – Untitled (Costa Rica)

The wind; my throat choked, try to let it all out; trapped inside myself. The wind on my face feels fine, and the city below blinks up at me. The road is rutted, but we fly — the old Land Rover roaring up the mountain, bed and cabin full. We surge forward, each shift — or is it just some gas, throw us forward a little, in unison. One of my uncles — or is he just their friend, well, he holds a rifle. The old-fashioned kind, like from World War II. I’m told it was his father’s, and he grips it tightly, his eyes twinkling and his face bittersweet. He points the gun up, and shoots into the night sky. I hear nothing but the rumble of passing time. The farmland rolls past, now on both sides as we leave behind what we call our village. We leave behind the humble houses with open kitchens; here no-one lives but the cows and some horses, startled by our approach. My uncle Eduardo, the hustband of my father’s sister, we call him lagarto; that means Crocodile. They say it’s because he looks like one. His face is warm and wrinkled with smiles, his skin has been tanned by the fields and sun and rain and mosquitos. He turns his face to the sky, arms spread wide, and lets out a yell, a whoop, full of all the freedom of the night sky. The pain in his hands, gnarled at only 30 years from working coffee. He yells for his lost daughter, her face gazing up from their photoalbum, flanked by a clipping of her hair. I can’t help but shiver when they show me. He yells for his lost niece, she would have been my sister.

Digital Story – 7:07pm (damn broken dates!)

My Digital Story is FINISHED at last! (for now)

I’m posting it over at the Internet Archive, a haven for open-source media of all shapes and sizes.
Head on over and have a look-see… be sure to leave your thoughts and reactions here!
Alex’s Digital Story

(You can also watch it right here)

I’m going to try out ccPublisher to post it… check it out

What is it?
CC Publisher is a tool that does two things: it will help you tag your audio and video files with information about your license and it allows you to upload Creative Commons-licensed audio and video works to the Internet Archive for free hosting. You also have the option of publishing the licensed and tagged audio works on your own site.

So, the story itself…
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License.

Acknowledgements:
Thank you so much to the following individuals for providing your works for free on the internet with creativity-friendly licenses… Without you this project would have been impossible!

Photos:
the following flickr.com users:
Laughing Squid
Chubby Bat
Grant Neufeld
Cobalt Femme
bjortklingd

Sound Effects: the following freesoundproject.com users:
NoiseCollector
dropthedyle
schluppipuppie

Music: http://derekaudette.ottawaarts.com/music.php

Digital Story v4.1

Digital Story v4.1 Sunday 1:32 pm (since the dates on this cursed blog are so messed up)
I have my Dad’s hands, hands that love to touch and create and build
and rampage.

I lie on the living room floor, legos spread out before me:
a sea of plastic possibilites. I hear their call

I feel it in my hands which seem to move of their own accord: searching, grasping, fitting.

My elbows burn as they sink deeper into the carpet. I feel I have it, this love, this need
to build
order from chaos.
to create. Or at least to try.
Then,
My hands fail, the pieces fly,
I feel the rage come to a boil, screaming through my veins.
I see myself from a distance, knuckles white as bone as they clutch what are now only remnants,
as they macerate.
And my dreams skitter across the room.

Digital Story v4: My destruction

Digital Story v4
I have my Dad’s hands, hands that love to touch and create and build
and rampage.

I lay on the living room floor, legos spread out before me:
a sea of plastic possibilites. I hear their call

I feel it in my hands which seem to move of their own accord: searching, grasping, fitting.

My elbows burn as they sink deeper into the carpet. I feel I have it, this love, this need
to build
order from chaos.
to create. Or at least to try.
Then,
My hands fail, the pieces fly,
I feel the rage, the boiling blood and steam
I see it as though from a distance, my knuckles white as bone as they clutch what are now only remnants,
as they macerate.
And my dreams skitter across the room.

TIBET LECTURE

DIGITAL STORY to be CONTINUED after this lecture at RAJ on TIBET ECONOMICS…. NOW!
(Friday at 4:28 pm)

I will return.