a goal set, a goal not reached

Unfortunately I have established a trend of making many many "goals" and then failing to acheive most of them. This can be from "I won't buy any records for the next couple weeks" to "I'll finish this piece of work today" to "I'll ask that girl out on a date next time I see her." Invariably I don't really have any excuse for not accomplishing said goals due to being sidetracked by you-know "checking the internet" and "wasting time." ho-hum, so it goes. In some hard-boiled novel I've read there is a discussion about not keeping promises to oneself and goes to say that it is much much worse to not keep a promise to yourself than to not keep a promise to someone else. If you see someone who as said "i'm quitting smoking" and than fails in their attempt they are a broken man (in some way) and have little hope of ever really accomplishing anything because they'll never be able to keep a promise to themself ever again. Hard-boiled novels really don't mince words when it comes to moralistic black&white, so the protagonists can fail miserably or lose a lot to keep some arcane code, so this story can be taken with a grain of salt, but there's still a nugget of something there. So do my various failed personal commitments make me a failed person, no, not quite, but i would like to get more done.

One small goal I do hope to keep is to work on my writing. This blog being a manifestation or realization of that desire. If every couple of days I can write a couple paragraphs about some odd subject here or there it'll equal practice writing. and hopefully my writing will improve. And from there the sky's the limit.

This will also be my last post addressing my failings. it's not meta, it's crap.

D, D & D and other failed attempts

My conceptual stack of things to do is littered with many failed attempts to write music criticism. Being a big music fan, spending a fair chunk of my disposable income on music and arguably having more knowledge of music than anything else I may be paid to do I've always imagined trying to get down some of my opinions/thoughts on music down on paper. It wasn't also limited to a music zine, I thought about writing about explotation movies or mid-century hard-boiled fiction or any of my other strong cultural fixations. The thinking that maybe other people would be interested too. But alas it's never really come together. From the proposed zine Q** in college, the one-page gore zine from K**'s, the one-page zine DD&D from a couple years ago and other failed attempts and invitations to write about music: g*****/***'s Swell Maps piece, something for Loy's diskhorse. None of it has really ever come together. And these writing ideas only add to the pile of concepts thought-up but never realized: the asshole/toilet pics, the teenage fake band, the rubik's cube solver zine, various screen print ideas, etc. etc. etc. oh well.

maybe here on FFV I can drop a little bit of the logic I've been saving up all these years and spill some crap about this and that crap. Maybe, Maybe.

Getting Old

Almost as silly as 20 yr old Edwyin Collins singing about wanting to "be young again" sometimes I feel almost unfortuantely old. Not in the sense that I'm old because the age I am, but more because I feel like I'm older than my peers. Being 27 won't qualify me for AARP or anything, but it significantly older than my 19 yr old roommate or my other recent college graduate friends. Adding to the proble is my feeling that not only am I old, but I am neither "acting my age" or "keeping my youth". That is I feel like I'm enjoying some nether-age where I don't feel comfortable about talking about purchasing homes and marriage and am also more than frustrated with social squabbling and partying of early 20's.

And since I've tried to take on some of the supposed responsabilities of adulthood (career path, etc.) the past couple years I've felt more and more embattled. It's probably only with fogged hindsight that I claim I'm more frustrated now with my choices and plans than I was four years ago, but it sure feels like it. Worries about money/sex/future seem so much more prominent in my daily thought process than earlier in my life when falsely imagine I didn't worry about those things at all. This whole mid-20's thing has me thinking and it all reminds me of the well-known description of the record industry written by Steve Albini. His key metaphor being that signing to a major label is the same as being asked to swim across a lake of raw sewage to reach the other side without any rewards. Mid-20's, or life in general, seems the same but instead of selling-out being the shit swim, not selling out is the hard path to take and with no reward. There's no prize for being a righteous dude and it's no easier unless your self-rightousness becomes it's own reward. And selling-out, giving-up, taking the path most taken doesn't improve things much either, it's still a struggle and you can't even bank on being self-righteous.
So it's a lose - lose proposition. The only benefit of being righteous is maybe that your eyes are more open, but then you get fucked, die, etc. and what was it worth. not much.

Zelda

My family never owned a nintendo, our mother nixed it. We did have a much-loved Atari 2600 and I don't think you could find anyone better at KABOOM or Keystone Kapers, Atari-knockoff activision titles that we got from our neighbors well past the Atari prime period. Me and my siblings also never really pined for a Nintendo having other things occupying our time.

That said I did have several chances to play Nintendo games: whether at our cousin's house in San Diego during summer vacation or at friend's houses. I learned fairly quickly that mastering Nintendo games (or any video games) requires one thing over all else: lots of time on the game. Therefore trying to compete against kids who owned machines and played all the time proved to be a much one-sided affair (not in my favor) and NO FUN AT ALL. To partially combat this machine-less imposed ineptitude I early decided to focus any game time I had on one game. In arcades meant focusing on Street Fighter II (esp. Ryu) and classic Star Wars and no Mortal Kombat. And for Nintendo this meant focusing all my time on the Legend of Zelda at the exclusino of Baseball Stars or Super Mario Bros or whatever hot new game of the month was. This tactic was effective because then when ever I played Zelda I knew I could pick up enough gametime to know some secrets and hold my own gameplay-wise.

It was also a good strategy because the Legend of Zelda IS THE BEST VIDEO GAME EVER PRODUCED. EMINENTLY REPLAYABLE AND CHALLENGING, and set me upon a life long quest to play all the Zelda games. Of the handfull of video games that I have committed more than ten hours two, five of them have been Zelda titles. Of the five video games I have purchased, three of them have been Zelda titles. The only gaming system I own (post-youthful Atari 2600) was the original NES and I only own two games for it: the Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: the Adventure of Link. It has not, though led me into an internet fandom where I actually interact with other Zelda fans, it is a solitary pursuit, and it has also not been an obsesive pursuit that defines any large aspect of my self-identity. But it is a fun time and a way for me to kill time on the video games.

Soon I'll finish Wind Waker.