Archives.
02.03.02 - 05.25.02.
05.26.02 - 09.14.02.
09.15.02 - 12.21.02.

LUDIC LOG

She is sitting before her battered old Powerbook at 2:43 in the morning on what used to be a Monday. She has a cup of Morning Thunder herbal tea in her right hand, and she is writing about writing.

Specifically, she is writing about having nothing to write about: that psychological condition known to those who have never had it as "writer's block". She has been sitting under the Damoclesean sword of a Wednesday morning deadline for six hours now, utterly incapable of writing a single sentence that vaults past the category of "utter shit". So now, in the great tradition of all writers since the invention of written language who can't think of anything original to say, she is writing about how much it sucks to not be able to think of anything to write about.

She has written five incindierally crappy paragraphs so far about the sort of garbage one cranks out when one can't think of anything remotely clever to say; the paragraphs themselves are so completely devoid of cleverness that they make the point rather convincingly, and writing any more on the topic would simply be overkill. She has also come to the saddening realization that a writer writing about not being able to write about anything except not being able to write comes so dangerously close to solipsism that she might as well just throw in the towel and go masturbate.

And so here she sits, listening to the first of the early-morning emergency vehicles wail past, gulping down caffeine-charged Brazilian maté, and feeling herself mentally tally up the number of words that have ended up falling victim to the delete key so far today.

She is employed (in a somewhat loose application of the term) by the Los Angeles Weekly for the purpose of writing what start out as being concert reviews and articles about local bands. These "reviews" cause great distress to her editors, not only because of her lack of concern for traditional spelling and punctuation, but also because of her blasé indifference towards the supremacy of the deadline. However, there is no denying -- at least she never denied it-- that her work is insightful, funny, and most importantly (from her editor's point of view, at least) popular. She has a growing fan base of slavering Angelino scenemakers; she has just been granted more column space, a feeble and long-overdue pay raise, and an e-mail account she has no intention of ever using, knowing as she does the kind of hapless squeakers who write letters to newspaper critics. She is comfortable with her growing fame largely because no one knows who she really is; a cream-clean social calendar and a weak but useful pseudonym allow her to reap the rewards of anonymous popularity.

However, on this night, all her skill at avoiding detection has done her no more good than if she were standing in a police lineup with half a dozen Sherpas. Her muse has taken a weekender to Tijuana and the only thing she can think to write about that she doesn't find unbelievably dull is the time she went to the senior prom by herself and one of the football losers said she had a fat ass and she hit him atop the crown with the silver punch server, and she isn't quite prepared to give the pseudohip legions of the City of Angels quite that close a peek into her psyche.

The worst thing about not being able to write, she thinks as she sits there not writing, is that it makes a lot of writers go all reflective and self-doubting. She is not one of those moony self-pitying types who constantly bemoans her horrifying lack of talent or wonders if she's just a hack who's only kidding herself; she has known since the young old days of Ticonderoga pencils and big brown-and-green pulp paper tablets that she was a damn good writer, and has never once doubted that she'd be able to make a good living doing what she loves. Tonight's celebration of unproductiveness, though, started out mildly, but someone brought some homemade grain alcohol, and now the partygoers are digging away at the less tuff regions of her psyche with pickaxes.

An hour and a half later, with the sun beginning to smear light across the thankless face of Los Angeles, four more nails in her coffin, two trips to the bathroom to recycle her tea, a total of 17 typed words (6 of which are misspelled), and a fist print on her left cheek, she finally makes the determination that nothing of value will be written today. She has had to fight a valiant struggle to fend off the pitfalls of Fake Writing -- that particularly self-deceptive style of avoiding work that says if you're typing something you're writing something -- to no avail. She is self-aware to a fault, and where most writers, to bolster their frail self-confidence, would go ahead with updating some old piece and dropping in a few hip references to make it seem fresh, she unconditionally surrenders to the tyrant subconscious and unceremoniously shuts off the laptop, allowing herself the smallest hope that at the very least her muse will either drop her a postcard or wire her for money over the next few days.

Since she can't write on her own tonight, and has nowhere to go when today blatantly becomes tomorrow, she makes a bold decision. She will get extremely drunk, stopping just short of "stinking" (she tries to avoid doing anything that will make her stink). This is not a decision she makes easily; she has never been much of a drinker, despite her constant proximity to bars, musicians, and journalists in various permutations. She has been drunk only once in her life, on the day of her brother's bar mitzvah, and it led to a mistake in the pool shed of the Crooked Hills Country Club with another young celebratant which brought her into familial disrepute for some weeks afterward. So when she ambles to the pantry to fetch the bottle of cheap Scotch left here by a drunken junior editor, when she totters to the cupboard to retrieve the giant novelty shot glass that says "Visit Nevada" on the side and "Made in Taiwan" on the bottom that her brother purchased at a Stuckey's on Interstate 15, when she trots to the refrigerator to claim the 8 remaining cans from a suitcase of Keystone bought fresh last weekend for the benefit of visiting friends, it is not merely the whim of a decadent rock journalist used to such extravagance; call it a Great Experiment.

She has always been nagged with a certain sorry curiosity to see what would happen if she were to write snockered. Many of her literary icons, after all, were famous for excess: Hemingway; F. and Zelda; Billy Burroughs hopped up on horse; Phil Dick eyedropping speed and Lenny Bruce cooked to the gills; even as august a personage as Ann Manguson was known to be a bit blotto when she clicked on her Wang. And so will she become gravely intoxicated, refire the Powerbook, and see what leaks out. It could not, reasons she, be too much worse than what she's already written tonight.

She could not, of, course, be more wrong.

After three shot-and-a-beers (well beyond her normal limit), she finds herself still having written nothing; this does not overly concern her, though, as she has just discovered some of her old columns in the back of an ancient file folder. She rarely reads her own stuff after writing it; she already knows what it says and doesn't want to get too analytical. But how foolish she has been! She is wowed, no, FLOORED, at how clever these pieces are, and is reduced to nearly painful tears chortling at their wit, verve, and incisiveness. By the fifth s&ab, she has moved on to actually reading the pieces aloud (sometimes in a variety of cunning vocal impersonations) to her pet python Welles, who is not quite so prone as she to break out into hysterical giggles every third sentence.

By the sixth round, she dimly recalls that she was meant to be writing something at this point, and decides to turn on the laptop and open her purloined copy of Word. In the 18 minutes this takes, she begins receiving messages from her stomach that it wishes to expand its lebensraum by a fairly significant degree. Before any writing can be done, therefore, she must take steps to head off this imminent catastrophe.

She tries to remember Ask-Heloise home remedies for encroaching regurgitation, and the word "hangover" drifts unconnectedly through her mind. She recalls one cure: it incorporates, somehow, soda crackers. She does not recall exactly what a soda cracker is, unfortunately, so she eats four saltines. Suddenly a new phrase wafts across her brain pan: "hair of the dog that bit you". A phrase with synchronicitous repercussions, full of portent. The stumbling block: she cannot remember whether it keeps you from vomiting, or makes you feel better once you do. Still: down the hatch. One beer remaining, but still enough Glen Cleveland for a good many shots. The feeling that her delicious fast food dinner will be making a special return engagement continues to hound her, just as another timely cure suggests itself: the intensive consumption of Pepto-Bismol. As it turns out, however, this is precisely the wrong thing to do.

The precise details of the rest of the morning are better imagined than described; in rapid succession come (a) vows to never let this happen again; (b) a profound feeling of dizziness, vertigo, and guilt; (c) the realization of what a hack cliché " I vow I will never let this happen again" is; (d) an intense and inexplicable urge to listen to the Bee Gees; and (4) the dim memory that she was engaging in this shameful degradation of mind and body for the purpose of gauging its effect on her prose style. She makes a noble attempt at opening Microsoft Word, an attempt complicated by the fact that she has already done so, and sits back, taking a moment to regain her tenuous sense of balance, ready to drunkenly assault her muse and see what she can beat out of it. Her fingers, not yet slowed enough by the juice to forget years of comfortable congress with the machine, fly across the keys; and the corner of her brain where the fire always burns opens itself up for inspection.

i WENt rto dsee a show by the New Wl, electirdcc Undeground, no Groundwell the other night at and i mean; well. Swell, well well. Thats ' good.O

The New Eleictric Groundswelel showe was too: XXX too long, too loud,. i have to go tho the bathroo,m
A

New Electiric Gorundsell 's show a the (i forgot where is it was) (Becsause iwt it was , no nwver mind) placie i saw them at wasa just too. Too lous loud, too long, l too many people, dtoo too

and another thimng., toommy hinckel, i do nm't have a fatt ass! wll maybe is its alittle fat but i at least do not have a fat head a fat wllet anbd Ulysses>.?
whjat was it that carl junmg said? you are a fuck! XXXXXXXXXX you jock! where are you today mr.s stupid moosehead dumb neck tommy hinckel? Youare probably pumping slurpees in on the nigte shift ata a711 some and another thing!
RE

k 58g................................................................