Weekends come and go with surprising speed, as usual. I feel like though it was a surprisingly uneventful weekend, but thinking twice about it I’m not so sure. Friday I had handball practice and barely had time to shower before we went out to Hula Bula Bar. Their cocktails are ridiculously strong and large, but surprisingly good even so. We will return. Oh yeah, before that we also went to Big W, bought and stuffed 1100l of beans in Carl’s car. That’s 1.1 cubic meter of beans. They are now in Carl’s enormous bean-bag, currently the most comfy spot in The Pad. I guess I didn’t do much the rest of the weekend. Hung out with Sebastian and finished a 660 page book in 24 hours. Snap.
I might get a job giving handball lessons at schools every once in a while, hopefully a couple times per week. They’re paying really well, 3 hours per week would cover my rent with some to spare. Hustlin’.
I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, because I’m good at it. I’m talking about promising to put up more pictures here, of course. Photographic evidence of my newfound residential splendor is high up on the list and a general upswing in visual representation of the life and times of yours truly is what I strive for.
Something that I am very pleased with, as should you be, is the more consistent flow of creative output that I can share with you. For some reason, it gives me more satisfaction if I publish it here than if I just stick it in some dark corner of my thumb-drive.
I’ve taken Moneybrother back to heart. Actually, I don’t know if I ever truly had a place in my heart for them. Not that I didn’t like them, I’ve always thought that they were great, I just never got as stuck on them as I have now. I remember that one of my sisters listened to Blood Panic a lot when it came out, but I think that I might have been to young and culturally pubescent to realize how good of an album it actually is. I probably shouldn’t go on about how good it is. Just listen to it again. And again.
Magic. Look out for the “Wooh!” that pops up around 2min into the song. One of the best Wooh!’s I’ve ever heard, and you should know that I’m a man who can appreciate a good Wooh!.
Desktop Publishing Assignment: double page spread for Nobody Jeans. I’m fairly pleased with the look, but there might be some tweakage before I hand it in next week.
Another short-story. This time we were to write a 500 word story starting with two sentences from a book we’ve read. I chose The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald). Very good book and yes I’m partly saying it because it’s one of those books you should like as it makes you sound culturally cool and literary knowledgeable. Sort of.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grand-father’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. Never would he have thought that his son would grow up to be the world’s most powerful man.
The people of the Carraway clan have always been diligent people who take pride in a hard days work. Contrary to most families with ties to the high-society of blue-blooded people, there has never existed so much as a streak of snobbery or arrogance in my family. Some might call me a contradiction to this, but their judgement is always clouded by ignorance or sheer jealousy. People have a quite irritating tendency to confuse ambition and determination for big-headedness. I always knew that my destiny was to climb high on the hierarchical ladders of the world. Like a fierce animal I scratched, clawed and bit my way to the top. The only way was up, always higher, faster, and not once would I pause to contemplate my actions or their consequences.
That has not changed. Likely it will never change, as they say – you can’t run away from your destiny. But as I stood looking out over my city, for it truly is My City these days, one in the line of many, I felt a tremendous weariness course through every bone in my body. For a while I could not determine where this came from, an unnerving feeling for a man who controls his body and mind alike with an iron fist. I went through my usual procedure to get into the right state of mind, to focus, a routine that had been with me ever since I started my ascent up the monetary mountain of the world – three deep breaths, pause, two deep breaths, pause, one deep breath and then hold. Not until white dots were dancing behind my closed eyelids did I release. A strange procedure, according to the few select people I on rare occasions had opened up to, all of them now dead or gone somewhere at the end of the world. To me, the suffocation of my brain acted as a wiping clean of my mental slate, allowing me to focus my entire mental capacity into a razor-sharp edge – the blade with which I had conquered the world. I sliced through my emotions, cutting into the core of what defined my being and suddenly the answer was clear.
Thinking back on my life and what the future might hold, I feel no hesitation as I open the door to the balcony and walk out. Making it to the top – that is all there ever was, and I have been here for quite some time now. This world has nothing more to offer me. It’s time to come back down.
We were given two quite entertaining exercises in my Writing For The Media class the other day. The first one was to write a short-story beginning with one of two lines. I chose the line “Lying face down”. The second one was to write a short-story containing the words mushroom, gorgeous, telephone, fur, lost and elephant. We only had about a small amount of time to write each story. I found it really interesting and it’s probably a good way to develop your skills. Enjoy the result.
1.
Lying face down in the gutter, Lucien had no recollection of how, or more importantly why, he had ended up in such an unpleasant situation. A thousand roaring race-cars were doing laps inside his head and the pain made any attempt of digging for memories futile. As he sat up, the image of a woman in bright red, stiletto-heeled shoes flashed before his eyes. Where did she come from? He ignored his throbbing temples and tried to focus on her image again, but it was gone. As if some all-knowing trickster had granted him a small piece of a puzzle, only to rip it away again in the flash of a moment.
Lucien Gardeaux was an incredibly fit man, compliments of spending haf a life-time involved with the ADK. He had been in situations like this before and knew that he could power through the pain, as he always had. Not this time. As he tried to stand, his legs buckled and sent him crashing into the slow-moving flow of excrements and trash that filled the gutter. He examined his legs and found a deep gash that looked to have been caused by a long, thin and very sharp blade.
2.
The very second after he had swallowed the big handful of magic mushrooms, Vince felt a flash of anxiety. He knew that this could never end well. It never had before.
Gray was walking up the familiar stairs to his brother’s apartment. Something wasn’t right, he knew it. He knocked, waited, and after a while opened the door to his brother’s ridiculously extravagant home. The scenery that met his eyes made him want to laugh, cry and call the police at the same time. The usually spotless, gorgeous penthouse had transformed and now looked like it had been redecorated using the intestines of an elephant. Where was his brother? He knew he had a knack for self-destructing every once in a while. It wasn’t surprising considering how the world consistently shat on Vince. As he rummaged through the debris of what was once designer furniture he heard a moan coming from the bathroom. There he was. Sleeping like a baby on the floor, wrapped in a fur carpet that must have qualified as one of the most expensive covers of all time. He had the pieces of a broken telephone receiver in one hand and a DVD case in the other – Lost: Season 3 it read. What a shit show, Gray thought as he picked up his phone to make the dreaded but inevitable call to his mother.
I’ve been busy. Among other things we have been hunting for apartments. And if nothing extraordinary happens, tomorrow we will sign a contract for a killer two story pad in East Perth. I am so excited I don’t know what to do.
For the moment eating porridge with chocolate topping while playing skate 2 seems to be the thing to do.
I’ll get pictures of The Pad (it will from now on be referred to nothing else but The Pad) up here ASAP.
