#tyler weaver

[tylerweaver]

Thy Purpose, O Plastic Flying Squirrel

Status: Left-of-center on the chipseal highway to comatose, view from the window punctuated by fleeting moments of wakefulness and hunger.

Sitting, no, standing, rather, in front of me, is Bobby Elvis, my plastic flying squirrel named, yes, for Mark Boone Jr’s character on SONS OF ANARCHY. We were brought together through the magic of shared boredom at Pat Catan’s; I realized then, staring at his glassy eyes, that I had to bring him home.  I needed a new desk friend and he needed purpose.

That purpose was revealed to be holding the rubber band which I put around my wrist at the start of each writing session. When un-sanctioned distraction strikes, I snap my wrist to bring myself back to the present, to the work at hand, to associate unsanctioned distraction with the pain of the snap–much as I did with the rubber band when I quit smoking–to return to work and Bobby Elvis’s glassy-eyed, unimpressed stare.

I once made him a hat out of a flourescent orange Post-It note but the location of said hat remains a mystery.

1233PM: the 500+ are written, the feral beast sated for another day.

Today’s music:  The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, MOSQUITO (2013); Leon Bridges, COMING HOME (2015); Sigur Rós, ( ) (2002).

Until tomorrow,

(TW) 07 July 2016

[tylerweaver]

Feeding the Feral Beast with Grilled Pineapple

A return, more or less. Now playing: Mitski, PUBERTY 2 (2016). Status: recovering from the great family gathering of 02 July: eight pounds of hamburger, 32 hot dogs, and a three-week, self-inflicted, intensive training course on how to grill, most of it spent figuring out that the temperature dials were counterintuitive. Also, grilled pineapple and homemade teriyaki sauce; still in a haze after finishing David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST, of which I haven't formed an opinion beyond pride at conquering its labyrinthine vastness; followed it with a chaser of Virginia Woolf's sublime TO THE LIGHTHOUSE and now, Cormac McCarthy's CHILD OF GOD interspersed with staggered readings of Walt Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS and a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays to subscribe to Ray Bradbury's suggested literary diet of poetry and essays (HOW TO KEEP AND FEED A MUSE from his brilliant ZEN AND THE ART OF WRITING) every day. Ready to return to these Informalities, but with a noteable change: they will now be written not in a head-thrashing, bleary-eyed 20-minute burst at the beginning of the day's writing session, but throughout the session, as my brain flits back and forth between the feral beast's demand of 500+ words a day of varying quality to these pieces of a first-draft nature in the hopes that someway, somehow, they, The Informalities, will be of more utility in feeding the feral beast than the previous iteration of time-centric "creation of original content" for dispersal across a variety of digital embassies. I'm not holding my breath, but anyhow. Now playing: Gin Wigmore, BLOOD TO BONE (2015) Finished the first season of MR. ROBOT last night: want to love it more than I did but its sleeve was an oversaturated confluence of influences. That's not to say it doesn't work: it does, beautifully, even, in some cases–I solemnly confess to a smile when the piano version of The Pixies' WHERE IS MY MIND played–but in total, MR. ROBOT left me cold, in spite of some sterling performances and an engaging collection of remixed twists and turns (the show, in fact, may be an excellent case study in remix culture). My wife and I both agreed that while we will watch the next season when it arrives on Amazon, we won't be counting down the days until it arrives in what amounts to syndicated streaming form, a la ORPHAN BLACK. I miss Clone Club. 1243PM: The 500 have been written; the feral beast is sated for another day. Until tomorrow. (TW) 06 July 2016

[tylerweaver]

Extinguished, Again

The hope that this will be the last time, extinguished, again.

Another day, another failed Congressional effort-in-name-only at gun control, at the prevention--no matter how small an effort, how incremental, it may have been--of more tragedies like Orlando, like Charleston, like Sandy Hook.

And so the cancer remains untreated, spreading unchecked through our culture, until the next last time.

I want to have more to say but right now I don't.

(TW) 21 June 2016

[tylerweaver]

Useless Coffee; Drunken Squirrels

The morning hums its song of air conditioners and of 18-wheelers, of the exhalations of sleeping dogs and of the mischievous pitter-patter of squirrels drunk with glee that their nemeses are sleeping. I sit here, as is typical of Mondays--Tuesdays, ad infinitum--bleary-eyed and staring into this screen, coffee useless, the words not appearing; such is the point of this discipline, to accept that there will be days like this while inculcating a habit of accountability in public as a counterbalance to this midwestern work-Hikikimori. Happy Monday.

P.S. Go Cavs - that was a spectacular victory. 

(TW) 20 June 2016

[tylerweaver]

INFINITE JEST, so far

Happy Friday.

Nearing the 700-page point in my inaugural read of David Foster Wallace’s INFINITE JEST. This, after it had rested on my physical to-read pile for a few months and my mental for a few years, waiting for the right moment of consumption. I tend to read two to three “large” (in scope, in page count, in difficulty, in reputation) books per year, strategically interspersed with my usual diet of 50+/- shorter novels (read: less than a thousand pages) during the course of a year: 2015 was the year of Mailer’s EXECUTIONER’S SONG, Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE, and Joyce’s ULYSSES; 2016, so far, has been given to Pynchon’s AGAINST THE DAY, and now, INFINITE JEST.

That I finished–and loved–AGAINST THE DAY was a help in acclimating myself to INFINITE JEST’s warp-speed convulsions of narrative.

While I’m not certain that I like INFINITE JEST in what I had considered my traditional sense of liking a book, I do find it to be compulsively readable, rarely a chore, a feat of no small import given its colossal reputation.  My initial, gut reactions (yes, gut, even after 700 pages): I’m gravitating towards the AA halfway house characters more than the tennis academy; my favorite moments of delightful oddity are the Steeply/Marathe discourse on the cliffside; my ambivalence–though certainly not antipathy–towards the tennis academy sections is nothing outside of my normal word-palate: I tend to bristle at any setting involving academic institutions–while I love Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY, the setting was a massive impediment to my eventual adoration.

20 minutes are up. Work awaits.

(TW) 17 June 2016

[tylerweaver]

Distraction

It's finally raining which means I won't have to water plants tonight.

In the precipice between the last written word and the next unknown word is the unholy demon distraction. It takes any number of shapes and forms: the shiny, sparkly new, the latest news article about the latest atrocity designed to anesthetize us to the suck, or the need to check in and see what imaginary, digital people are saying about the latest atrocity of the suck; the desire to be connected to the world, to distrust our own thoughts, in the midst of a craft that requires solitude and thought.

Two types of distraction: those which we create for ourselves, and those which others put upon us. To use running as a metaphor, the former is when we stop along the roadside to "catch our breath"; the latter is when we stop along the roadside because of oncoming traffic in both directions and a humanistic urge to avoid head-on collisions and death. The former is our own desire to escape from the discomfort of digging deep into ourselves, the latter is from others on their own path choosing their time of intersection with ours.

Both are dependent on our reaction to them.

That's all I have this morning. I vowed to not write about not having anything to write about, so the above is what you get. Such is the discipline.

Happy Thursday.

(TW) 16 June 2016

[tylerweaver]

Of Balloons and Mailboxes

On the backroads of my little slice of Midwestern normalcy,  there hang from splintering mailbox posts balloons in varying stages of deflation and decay, detritus from the bevy of graduation parties that brought tent rental businesses their yearly opportunity to have their books in the black.

As they signify the end of tent season, the decaying balloons also signify the slippage into the forgetful ether of well-intentioned advice bestowed in cards and while retrieving seconds of dry pulled-pork sandwiches and cheesy potatoes upon the college bound: you can do it, oh the places you’ll go, drink a glass of water between alcoholic beverages, I remember my first day, I remember when you were only, and so on and so forth.

I attended my own graduation party all those years ago for ten minutes before slipping out for parts unremembered but, had I stayed, there would have been one piece of advice I would have given myself, echoing a pearl of wisdom from Stanley Kubrick: the world is indifferent, and it’s your choice whether to let that knowledge destroy you or free you.

I spent much of my twenties falling victim to the former, my thirties trying to embrace the latter while avoiding the pulled-pork sandwiches.

(TW) 15 June 2016

[tylerweaver]

The Right Words

I want to find the right words.

Each act of senseless violence renders me speechless, unable to share, to express, my feelings of it. Can only watch in a haze of disbelief and sadness and anger in the knowledge that the latest hateful act of cruelty and inhumanity won't be the last, that the hope that this could be the last will inevitably be crushed under the bitter truth that the lives, safety, and rights of every human being on the planet lie in the bloodied hands of institutions overrun with amoral, cowardly persons so corrupted by the monetary desire to hold and expand their narcissistic lust for spotlight and influence that they will endlessly kowtow to the pervasive influence of a special interest whose waking and dreaming hours are spent in their own hopes, that each act of senseless and hate-fueled violence wrought by their weapons of destruction, murder, and hate will anesthetize a weary populace to the next act of senselessness and perpetuate the cycle of amoral, horrific, cynical power-lust anew.

I want to find the right words, but I don’t know what they are.

(TW) 14 June 2016