So long and thanks for all the news...

BLOG 9152009

As the last couple of days would indicate I decided to take some time off for my birthday. I thank those of you who sent me notes and e-mails. Nothing like getting really, really middle aged to reassess your priorities. I’ve decided the time I spend blogging is not time wasted, but still time that could be better spent. I have been enjoying poetry so much that I would love to start a habit of writing a daily poem, and I have to add some serious revision to my daily schedule. All that would take would be about an hour a day, and I could make that time by not blogging and pondering facebook quite as much.

So yes, I’m kind of receding, going into hiding until I publish something, then I will blog once more to try and develop and maintain a fan base. For now I don’t think my blogs have been good enough to do anything but deter people from taking my work seriously. This is a fun forum but it is very carefree and laid back and it doesn’t bring the best writing out of me. I would like to pursue paying work with the time I have, even poetry, which does not pay in money, pays in a spiritual sense that blogging can’t live up to.

Thank you for reading to this point, and here’s hoping you will tune back in whenever I get back to this habit, but after some 125 posts I’ve had my fill. Blessed be, and thanks again for your attention. –Adam Roll

The Right Numbers

Yes, I know I got my numbers wrong. That was part of the test. I think the numbers of dead on 9/11 was closer to 3,300. But those were the only numbers anyone was concerned about in my Blog yesterday. My estimate of troop death was also low, and the thought that we could not estimate how many Iraqis died because 16 Saudis attacked the US with box-cutters is also hard to understand. I guess we would be more exact with our estimates if it happened to us.

I’m not bitter, or anti-America. I consider myself a great patriot, but I was taught that before troops are sent into war the government should try exhausting every last hope for peaceful resolution and I am not convinced, nor are most historians now in retrospect, that we followed that golden rule. Instead we have started a Final endless war where any country that has or might have 16 terrorists is a target for a preemptive strike by the US without having to follow any rules of the UN, NATO, or anyone. This scares me because a lot of amazing young people will fight in this endless war, and too many will die or be injured to justify such premises for attack.

I wonder if my ranting has caught government notice. Apparently the use of certain key words and phrases can flag your blogs or e-mails to be picked up and read by big brother. Hello big brother! I hope I have not offended you. I am practicing free speech and I thank you profusely for defending my right to do so.

With that said, I wonder if you could guess how paranoid a paranoid schizophrenic feels when it is generally agreed by historians that we start wars now on bogus premises and faulty information? If we wanted to create more terrorists we could not have planned out a better way to do so. So I am scared in the city, in the plane, in the movie theatre, in the mall, on the bridge, at the capitol, near the memorial next to the pond. I see planes crashing, and bombs falling, or just a lonely suitcase in a subway emitting deadly toxic sprays.

Why is this a problem? Why can’t I ignore these fears like everyone else seems capable of? I’m not sure. Maybe it is because I have a pretty good imagination. Or maybe it is because I saw the solution five years before 9/11. We have to radically and totally love our fellow man, and rise above the work of terrorists, loving our enemy as we love god or ourselves. If this seems radical and you are a Christian: go away. If this seems obvious from whatever faith you profess, I say hello today, and bless you, and I love you. The more of us who can continue to work this epic love, (not like fools, we will still need gallant leaders to serve and protect), and the more we can love each day the better this planet will be. Hatred for any “other” is so ugly and deficient it should have nothing to do with the US. We should fight because we must, not because we want to, for some kind of sick twisted economic goal. But I’ve said too much. Love, love, love. I was never wrong. I just have to elucidate a little further. I’m getting there.

Numbers

There will be a lot of 9/11 blogs, and that is as it should be. The worst tragedy that has taken place in my lifetime, the consequences of which being the second worst tragedy during my lifetime, unless I have those mixed up. We lost 1,300 people on 9/11, and we’ve broken that record with 9,000 some dead Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that is only an estimate. There are few exact records released, I think even W thinks we lost five or six. But you can’t count lives of military when considering the need to go in, occupy a country, bankrupt its infrastructure, and then leave because we never should have been there in the first place.

Yeah, I’m totally confused, but at least I admit it. If you think it all makes sense you are the furthest gone in my opinion. If you don’t remember much about the build up to war in Iraq you are like most people and there’s no shame in having a poor memory, just shame in not feeding that memory news and books about history so you can keep the information in mind. There are a number of books I’d recommend, but what do I know. Just look for 956.704 in your local library and you will find a number of opinions, mostly by journalists and soldiers who have been there, witnessed the action and the consequence. So you won’t have to listen to self appointed authorities like myself, who really have no grounds to comment on a war that I saw filtered through the Internet and television. But I can say that it was hard getting good news on that war. The inability of anyone to estimate just how many Iraqis were killed because 16 Saudi’s hijacking planes with box-cutters is definitely maddening.

I am neither hawk nor dove, but I am tired of feeling like a sheep. I wait not for the mythic good shepherd to return and lead us to a hundred year war. I am a sheep with an interest in becoming a goat, or more a ram, living my life going head to head with the others just like me. Butting heads with sheep seems undignified.

So now that I have thrown around a couple metaphors and revealed myself to be nothing better than a rabble rouser, let me conclude that I wish I could have served in this war. I believe if not for my disability I would have. That’s easy to say, but coming from a military family and flat out of cash after my college was paid, I think I could easily have gone to fight the good fight. Because you don’t make the decisions when your country goes to war, you serve because if you don’t serve someone else will have to, and you will meet other warriors who need you to watch their back. That’s all I understand about war, and it’s not enough. Sun Tzu is largely overrated. If you want to read about war, check out the Iliad. Ripping good poem.

A friend on September 11, 2001 said as we worked together the same day, that he wished Superman was real. There are a lot of myths I would like to be real, but he picked a cool one. I’d go for brave Achilles. Blessed be.

I don't wanna go down to the basement...

The poetry is continuing apace. It takes most of my attention and I’m having a harder time thinking about anything else during the mornings. Once I finish my 100 lines, I can barely add two simple thoughts together. But maybe this would peak your interest: I frequently don’t think I’m alone in this house.

Yes, the classic horror movie scenario is to wait around until I get killed or run screaming to the neighbors, call the police, and have them find nothing wrong as there is some kind of supernatural explanation for the sounds. Either way I call wolf one too many times and the boogey man comes after me, killing me at his leisure with all kinds of wonderful torture and yelling and screaming.

In real life the options for a schizophrenic are a little more limited. Did I hear that? Is a question I cannot be entirely sure of answering properly. Also, why would they be hanging out in the basement if they were here anyway? It is a good question why boogey men prefer basements. I’d take the attic myself. Other questions include: why don’t they come after me quickly? why am I not dead yet? and why would anyone want to kill some crazy person who’s afterlife is sure to be better than his mortal life spent wondering about strange noises in the house.

This all satiates my need to think it through, but when I do go downstairs I will be carrying a baseball bat length of maple, ready to bash in the heads of whoever might show up like crazy Joaquin Phoenix in “Signs.” (Swing away at the alien, remember? Why a star spanning race could be defeated with some H2O and a baseball bat I do not know, but it makes me feel safe).

The alternatives are also interesting. Perhaps these are government men interested in safe guarding me from other government men as they wait to see what kind of apocalyptic predictions I make on my blog because they have found out that I am always correct. Or, this is a fun one, maybe they are just a bunch of Christians trying to prank me for the rest of my life, driving me crazy because I have no use for their church. I’ve even wondered if the game is so simple that pranksters win prizes on a television reality show just by sneaking into the house. One way or another, I hope I don’t meet a Bourne style martial arts expert when I swing my bat, losing teeth and breaking bones seems too extreme a reaction against my need to protect myself but what can I say, anything is possible. (Except perhaps the alien part, I mean really, they’d be here by now if they could get here, we are a very entertaining species of life if nothing more honorable than that…)

So I’ll see you here tomorrow, or if I don’t, check the news, there could be some cool story about what happened in little Dover DE to some crazy guy flailing around with a maple log. Rhymes with blog. Blessed be.

Short Blog 1

I have to keep this one short, unfortunately I am feeling a good bit under the weather. I have been up and writing poetry for about two and a half hours now and I don’t think it was a good idea to mess with my sleep schedule again. Either that or I just have a normal bug that I want to get rid of before I go to my Aunt’s house not this weekend but the one following.

The poem is coming along well. I still need to do a lot of revisions on the first section so I printed it out and became ready. There is too much interior rhyme for my taste, I just can’t seem to help but think in rhyme when I write poetry but Homer’s verse was classically unrhymed. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a publisher for this but the nice thing is seeing that it won’t take me forever to write. Prose is much more exhausting, which is really the inverse of what people suppose. Hard to understand even for me.

So how do I feel sick? I have chills and I’m drenched in a cold sweat, other than that I’m just fine. Maybe I’m having some kind of strange reaction to sleeping at such odd hours. I can’t find a schedule that I like but this is pretty damn good waking up and getting all my work done before most people even think about getting their buts out of bed.

I’m thinking about instating a second work time in the evenings when I have tons of coffee in me. I’d like to work instead of sleep, but it’s hard to know whether or not I’d be fresh enough. No real way to tell but to experiment.

For now I just hope I don’t feel any worse, and I thank you for putting up with a short pointless blog. Blessed be.

Begin Again

The big news this morning is not such big news to most but it means a lot to me. Having finished the first revision of my latest novel I needed to come up with a project to allow the novel to sit for a few weeks, so I can come back to the novel with fresh eyes. I thought about this long and hard and came up with the very nice idea of doing another long poem.

It has been months since I have written poetry of any kind, but I really like long form poetry because it feels like there is a story in addition to the deep thoughts and music of short form poetry. To this end I have come up with a list of the 13 major long form poems that I feel like as a writer I must respond to in the course of my life. I am on the third project now, tackling Homer, a good place to start really as the Iliad is the oldest poem, perhaps showing ties back to 2000 B.C.E. It is usually agreed that the Greek alphabet was used to write down the Iliad and the Odyssey at around 700 B.C.E., but having such a long life as an oral performance piece gives it a strange type of precedence, because it signifies the transition between oral and written poetry.

I won’t go into my idea for what to say about the Iliad in great detail. For one I don’t think it would be of that much interest to most people, because I am going to write in Homeric meter, and as most people admit when pressed they don’t really like poetry because it makes them work too hard and we are a culture that likes to be entertained effortlessly. I’m just happy when someone can stop watching television long enough to catch a beach book a month, but I‘m a little cynical, as I try to become a novelist in a world increasingly dominated by visual media.

In the second place I also think this idea is good enough to steal, not that any of you fearless readers would attempt such a thing, but this is a totally public forum, who knows who comes and goes looking at these little windows of my life? Yes, I am paranoid, and most likely it is not necessary, but such is life with schizophrenia.

Fortunately I don’t think there’s a lot of money in this idea for anyone, unless they make a movie about it which would be par for the course but really piss me off. Most artists seem to prefer the Odyssey better anyway, why I don’t know, I think it is important to start at the beginning and that means the Iliad for me. It matters that our poetry begins with War and will most likely end in war. Perhaps the survivors of WWIII pass on oral long poems from ear to ear, before they are all wiped out, 2000 years from now. I know, sad image, but I think it’s optimistic to give us 2000 more years. More on nihilism later…for today blessed be.

Worst Nightmares Ever

Just as I was becoming sure that coffee at night had no negative effects on me I experienced the most harrowing night of sleep I have been through in a very long time. I am not sure what it was that set off the nightmare’s, but I know they were some of the worst ever, and I want to do whatever I can to keep them from happening again.

For one thing I dreamed that I could clearly smell cherry pipe tobacco coming from the backyard through the window my bed is right next to. I have a problem with smells, since my last hospitalization I have believed that unidentified smoke smells linger to convince people that they are under surveillance or that there time is almost up when it comes to whatever problem they were meant to solve.

Then a landslide of terrifying theories began. I was sure the smoker was inside the house, I couldn’t escape and he was right next to my bed. Then I thought I was back at our old Connecticut home where bikers pulled through the backyard revving their engines and laughing at my terror. Soon I had a series of dreams where I was sleeping in a sink with a blanket over the top to hide that I was there at all. I can see none of these sounding very scary without some embellishment on my part, but they were bad and I’m more interested in what might have caused them than rehashing them in all their detail.

Because I didn’t watch a scary movie yesterday, not even any television in the course of the day. I am reading books that are not scary in any way, including an incredibly harmless collection of Spider Man comic books. I guess the only things that I fear anymore are very real. Like why won’t the people tell me what happened. I know there is more to the story of my last hospitalization, and it’s been driving me nuts for over four and a half years. But there’s no finding out anymore. Even I know I don’t really want to know, if I did I could seek the truth with much greater effort than I am now.

Maybe it’s out of fear that my next long poem about Iraq is going to piss people off and they will come for me. My long poems seem to have that effect on people. It would be nice if I just wrote about cute puppies and warm sunshine but I am much more entranced by war, strife, alienation, and reconciliation. It is going to be fun to write so I don’t know why that would cause me any serious problems.

My last thought is that there doesn’t have to be a reason to have bad dreams. Especially not for me because I am schizophrenic. I have bad dreams like thunderstorms, appearing out of nowhere when the weather conditions are right, and flashing deadly thoughts like lightning while bellowing their tales of conflict and warfare. It would be nice if I could seek shelter as easily as I do from real rain, but metaphorically a cloud hovers over my head and follows me, even into bed. Thank you for listening to me, blessed be.