I haven't talked to the first person I'm supposed to interview...well, that's not entirely true. I talked to one fella who was gonna text me a contact number for another person that would arrange for me to talk with the people I'm supposed to be interviewing.
It's not uncommon for folks to be under the mistaken impression that this is my job...that it pays that kinda bread. They'll invite me to "come on by Tuesdee mornin'...we'll talk."
"Are we gonna talk about you hiring me because the only way I can come see you on Tuesday morning is if I quit my actual job?"
Maybe it's flattering for people to think that the magazines bigger than it actually is. Don't get me wrong I love the magazine and I'm compensated fairly for my time but, it's not Sports Illustrated.
Never mind that while I can breath through my nose again...I still feel like I've got a horrible hangover...a screaming dehydration headache hangover...a Subway Lounge hangover.
Anyway...same as last time...7:05 pm (Central Time Zone), 0 words.
5:15pm (CTZ), 0 words.
What? I'm strugglin' a little bit. It's not like I just wasted the last 15 minutes watching Tanya Tucker videos on the youtube...
or whatever.
I've got a plan and I'm workin' it.
5:36pm (CTZ), 8 words.
And yes I did just follow a link to a site called the scientific psychic...they promised figures on annual sports injuries. What?
5:50pm (CTZ), 8 words.
There were more words in the text I just sent Martha demanding that she try the bread pudding I brought home today than there are in my article.
I love bread pudding...to an extent that would be embarrassing if I had the capacity to be embarrassed.
6:36pm (CTZ), 45 words.
The subject of the last sentence I wrote is a Martian...we'll see if it stays.
7:09 (CTZ), 51 words.
The fact that Freebird has become a kinda punchline in rocknroll is an injustice.
7:25 (CTZ), June 15, 86 words...
and 10 minutes wasted on Jay Z videos. Jigga WHAAAAT?
8:36 (CTZ), 89 words.
This is what I should be writing about anyway...
I hope our readers understand that there is a time coming in the near future, after a series of team previews, when you will have to choose an SEC team to root for in the Fall...it's mandatory.
9:25 (CTZ), June 16th, 95 words.
Watching the Open Championship online (I could be watching it on the couch if not for this blasted chore...could be playing at my own club too. That's right resolution watchers...you read right). The announcer just made a reference to Are-Kansas...and was quickly corrected by his colleague. Though I don't think that pronunciation is completely unheard of. Lucas Glover's a good'n by the way...he will dominate.
CSA! CSA! CSA!
9:32 (CTZ), 93 words.
Y'all need to watch out for Bubba too.
10:05 (CTZ), 95 words.
They've just discussed Ricky Fowler as a potential rival for Rory...unless it's a contest for the most ridiculous looking person in sports, I don't think Ricky ready for all that.
11:08 (CTZ), 210 words.
Progress but, there's a tv hanging on the wall in this coffee shop and it is now airing an old Tarzan movie. Turn out the lights..the parties over. This whole enterprise is doomed.
11:18 (CTZ, 245 words.
Now Seergay's [sic] here. This is hopeless. Seergay is a professor at a local university and he's from Russia. Great fella...friendly and cheerful. He's busy talking up the young lady behind the counter right now...so his distraction for me is not deliberate. It's his freakin outfit! I've gone cross-eyed. He's wearing a sweat stained orange T-shirt (heat index hasn't been below 100 for days), red and black plaid shorts, an elaborate fanny pack and argyle socks...d*** it MAN WHY?.....Why?
6:03 (CTZ), 314 words.
Took a break...who is it that could maintain this level of intense focus without a break?
6:46 (CTZ), 316 words.
How am I supposed to work when I've miraculously found a good Gator video on the youtube (great football team, awful youtube fans). I don't own the audio by the way ...but I'm interested if it's for sale.
9:16 (CTZ), June 17th, 435 words.
Moving along but with Phil moving up the leader board...it's touch and go at best.
Just heard the unmistakable non-accent accent of a midwesterner yelling..."IN THE HOLE." Cretin.
1:00 (CTZ), 688.
I guess the intensity of my struggles have proved to be too much for some readers...blog activity has come to a screeching halt.
Good for Clarke. Good dood.
7:48pm (CTZ), DONE.
It's out of my hands now. Thank cupcakes. That was the most tedious writing chore I've had since I took a Human Evolution course in my last semester at Millsaps.
There's fewer well paid gigs in writing than there are ex-wives of Hugh Hefner - and, of those bunnies that do make it to the alter and walk away with an Easter Egg, one can't help but speculate about the hollowness they must feel inside, as well as the costly health implications of the Myxomatosis they inevitably go on to develop.
ReplyDeleteBreaking Bad is awesome BTW.
Writers...ah it sounds so romantic...are always going on about their process...the procrastination, the necessity of pressure, the crushing need for any distraction, and bah.
ReplyDeleteHere it is...the bad part is I'm only slightly more interested in this topic than I am in baseball the topic of the previous article...and I'm feeling a disturbing lack of motivation.
Breaking Bad is awesome.
Writing sometimes involves learning to hate yourself more than others will, or can, hate you - and then still turning in copy.
ReplyDelete... and hate is so close to narcissism.
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/IYzlVDlE72w
So ironic in retrospect.
One thing we can be certain of...the copy will be turned in.
ReplyDeleteI'm just dreading the next 36 hours.
Crack is cheap...Crack is wack.
ReplyDeleteWords, words words - as the sock-puppet Hamlet said through the words of the great Bard; to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? Before the copy deadline.
ReplyDeleteGotta take a crack at it.
Bread pudding is almost as disgusting as grits-made-with-milk (cream-of-wheat?). Almost.
ReplyDeleteThat's all you need to know right there about the tastes and habits of Dr. Allan.
ReplyDeleteGreat philosopher and Planter...completely and utterly lost in every other regard.
When are you coming to see me?
My dread is beginning to take on Shakespherian proportions.
ReplyDeleteHe also has impeccable taste in wives...maybe he used it all up in that endeavor...like he did with his luck.
ReplyDeleteI'm still holding out for the one special one, or a bunch of three or four average ones. Never let it it be said that I'm fussy.
ReplyDeleteMaybe would should add a matchmaking element to Flimsy Cups...Make it one of our second half resolutions to find Nat a couple of honies.
ReplyDeleteIn case, you might want to drop the flimsy cups for D-cups ...
ReplyDelete... it's perhaps telling that I read "honies" for "hornies".
Shame on me.
http://youtu.be/pk9mmto2Cdw
I'm a sucker for bread & butter pudding & cinnamon.
ReplyDeleteI would have figured you for a leg man Nat...maybe you're just a man that knows when a jokes to good to pass up.
ReplyDeleteBread Pudding ROCKS...the good doctor has tastebuds that are suspiciously un-Southern. He does have a very good Mint Julep recipe though.
Post another link to Michael McDonald at the risk of a permaban.
ReplyDelete:)
HAHA! Fair enough, I'd drunk third of a bottle of vodka by that point while watching the first season of the X Files and have no idea where I was going with that. Spooky, almost.
ReplyDeleteGetting total recall now. I digressed - at one point in the late evening - to youtube Kenny Loggins after earlier the in day at work, when there was there was a bit of a t*ts-up, I started singing "highway to the DANGER ZONE" and no one got the Top Gun reference (most of the staff are at least a decade younger than me). Top Gun is by far one of the funniest movies ever made. Anyway I found a duet Kenny did with Michael McDonald, which lead me youtubing the latter and, somehow, though it was important that I post a link here. And that's my story your honor. It doesn't make a right lot of sense, but if you spare me the electric chair, I promise never to let this happen again.
ReplyDeleteI defy you not to find this hilarious.
http://youtu.be/siwpn14IE7E
Quentin Tarantino taking on Top Gun (*strong language*)
http://youtu.be/vyN8VN4BSzM
Doesn't it all make sense now?
Breaking bad is a great show, while you are eating bread pudding.
ReplyDeleteWho you gonna back Mazes? Finally get involved with a winner.
ReplyDeleteAllan #4 is finished and ready to photographed...just trying to straighten out an issue with the camera.
ReplyDeleteGreat new season opener to Breaking Bad, but I wonder how far they can keep going with the present trajectory where things just keep getting ratcheted up. The line for Mr White was crossed long ago - more recently his wife has joined him crossing that Rubicon - and it seems hard to see how they will claw it back, morally speaking; try make amends, etc. It's becoming a survival race and, apparently, too late for reverse gears. The only way out, I can see, is that take down a major element of the drug cartel when the window of opportunity opens up for them. Interesting to note Vince Gilligan, the creator of "Breaking Bad," is a former writer on "X-Files", a series that started strong and then faded into self-parody. I hope the same doesn't happen with Breaking Bad.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of legs, as you were earlier:
ReplyDeleteVan Halen - and this is a great Eddie riff - but they have done so much to undo the genuine moments of greatness they did actually achieve. Talent squandered.
http://youtu.be/0jPLXF-lWOQ
ZZ Top - close to being a great tune, but just a bit too pop for me; they never really made up their mind what kind of band they wanted to be:
http://youtu.be/fo8fWrW_QdM
Me and Martha discussed that possibility while watching the third season...at some point you have to let a story like that breath because it starts with such an outrageous premise.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they can handle it better than the folks at Dexter.
VanHalen was likewise doomed from the beginning.
ZZ Top had already done more for the ears than a thousand other bands by the time they decided to completely cash it in...I don't begrudge 'em a dime of it.
Just read the last line of your post about the evolution course - an interesting subject, though, as with most subject matters, tedious to the nth degree in the wrong hands. What seems to have been lost in the "science versus religion" debate is the more interesting issue of: what constitutes science?
ReplyDeleteEvolution is often touted as a "scientific theory" on the grounds of empirical evidential support - fossil records and so forth - which seem to corroborate the idea of "change to adapt to survive". This teleological process is usually portrayed as taking long, slow stretches of time through generation after generation of natural selection.
I don't dispute that this is not only a successful theory, but it is one that has a lot of evidential support. However, there are gaps in it - huge - gaps. And while I'm not offering a defence of theology over science, I want, instead, to briefly examine how we are to understand "evolutionary theory" as being entirely scientific with respect to human being(s) (in the existential sense rather than the zoological classification).
Without recalling the niceties of argumentation, since it is well over a decade since I studied the subject - and slightly at that - I do recall an argument dubbed "God of the Gaps" which suggests that, while not denying some truth to evolutionary theory, points out certain holes - or "gaps" in it. For example, consciousness; more precisely, the self-awareness that gave rise to civilisations: society: the so-called "evolution of self-awareness". In terms of geological time, its ascent was remarkably rapid; though, perhaps, its manifestation is useful with regard to survival, it is somewhat difficult to explain that in purely genetic terms as it involves the propagation, not of genetic information per se, but ideas - concepts - not tangible things. In short the "evolution of ideas" is faster than that of "purely biological (physical) processes". Hence, there is an explanatory gap in the theory: the "leap" between slow change in the "plant and animal" world and rapid progress in humans (human society).
Evolutionary theory is often reduced to twee sound bites such as "survival of the fittest"; however, these are not laws in the same manner as those of physics, which are said to be "universal and without exception". Indeed, it is hard to peg down evolution in these strict law-like ways - predictively speaking - can we say with any certainly how species alive today will go on to adapt; are we not more focused on how many species face certain extinction because they are unable to "acclimatise" to the rapid changes we have made to the world? And, is there not a question mark as to how we, ourselves, will adapt to survive in this world that we have "created"?
Just some thumb-nail thoughts.
Real rapid drop-off after season two of Dexter.
Opps - failed to explain that "God of the Gaps" is supposed to imply that God "steps in" - intervenes in - the evolutionary process to change and accelerate its "form and direction", but my point doesn't rest on divine intervention in human evolution, rather the inadequacies of evolutionary theory - its "explanatory gaps".
ReplyDeleteYeah, I kinda fluffed it a bit in the rush to post and go to bed.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't fluff it...you brought it.
ReplyDeleteJust like you're bringin' it with that picture.
This is my problem, and to my mind it's a near insurmountable one, with the theory of human evolution. You don't have to be a Christian or even religious to take this view. What did Chomsky decide on...a Malevolent God. Oh Joy.
Adam and I have had a running ascussion about this very thing goin' on four years now (speaking of my dear friend...does anybody have to number to interpol?).
The class was one of the most boring episodes of my life. Part of it was me. Talking about science is mind numbing to me. Part of it was the make up of the class...lots of Business students and Humanities types...none of us cared one way or the other.
I've got a post in me somewhere. This weeks has been the pits...nothing big or interesting either. Just a series of small misfortunes.
Off to Donuts then work.
I was struggling to remember last night one thinker, among a growing band, who proposes a radical reworking of the evolutionary theory; his name is Stuart Kauffman and here is a short introduction and interview:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0805/S00052.htm
Just skimmed it. I'm about five minutes from hitting the road home...finally.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely interested in this.