hollis

Great, actually. Thanks for asking. I’m just working a lot. But not too much, I’ve actually got a pretty sweet gig. But no matter how sweet the gig, if it’s not what you want to do it’s not going to feel sweet on a day-to-day basis. But I had the day off today, so yeah, pretty sweet.

My writing is also going well. I actually had a dream a few nights ago that unfolded like a movie. This was after the dream that I thought was real and led to me waking up in the middle of the night and getting mad at my wife over nothing. Oh, and it was before the dream in which i was framed for a crime I didn’t commit. Anyway, the middle dream was so perfect and so vivid even after I woke up, that I wrote it all down. And now I am writing it. It’s actually quite compelling. Not even a bit crazy like my other dreams. That night was like a dream sandwich, with the good stuff hidden between two pieces of carbohydrate-filled nonsense.

I’m riding my new bicycle a lot too. Rode it all the way to the Han river and back a week ago. That’s like 45 kilometers. I hurt in places I didn’t know I had the next day. And the day after that I discovered even more pulled muscles.

So life is pretty good now. I’ve been writing all day. Planning future books. Putting the finishing touches on a business proposal that will either a) make me rich or b) never see the light of day. And drinking sangria. Lots of sangria. What can I do? I ran out of absinthe last week.

Subways are more strange human life, humid smells, and uncomfortable shifting of weight than empty space. And though I’m deep underground when I want to have wind above. And when I’m sandwiched and crammed and packed against the doors. Even though I didn’t sleep enough. Though I won’t be home for another 12 hours, I do my best to always, always be happy. For I am terribly lucky in my life. Terribly, horribly happy.

77 days ago / Tagged: Diary 0 0

He glazed over at the thought of an escape to the mountains. Just one day would be enough to enjoy the snowy hills. He looked out the window as he told me couldn’t go. It was funny. The weather outside had warmed but he’d been talking so long that his coffee was long cold.

Icarus scraping the skies so tall,
The higher he climbs the lower he falls.

79 days ago / Tagged: Daily 0 0

“And then I will get a First Class Honors degree and I will become a scientist.

And I know I can do this because I went to London, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.”

When I got to the end of the book and read these last words, they caught my breath (which is a metaphor, which is a phrase that means something else than what the words mean literally. And ‘catch your breath’ means to surprise make you feel emotional). They may seem simple to a person who had never read this book, and thus never been introduced to its protagonist.

The protagonist is named Christopher John Francis Boone. He knows all the capitals in all the world and he knows every prime number up to 7,057 and he has a pet rat named Toby. He goes to a special needs school, though he doesn’t think that he has any more special needs than anyone else.

When Christopher discovers Mrs. Shears poodle (not the small kind of poodle but the big kind) dead with a fork through it (a garden fork, not the kind you eat with), he decides that he will solve the case like his favorite detective. Christopher’s favorite detective is Sherlock Holmes because he thinks logically and doesn’t believe in supernatural things that aren’t real. Each step in his investigation leads him further and further out of his comfort zone. Christopher doesn’t like to be touched and he doesn’t like being in small places with lots of people and he hates the colors yellow and brown. But he has to go to London and he has to talk to strangers and he has to be stuck on a train with lots of strangers and go to bathrooms where other people have pooed. And going to new places and talking to strangers who might want to do sex with you are dangerous things for any child. But Christopher has autism and that is why he goes to a special needs school. But Christopher isn’t stupid and he will take his Math A-Levels and he will get an A because Christopher is very smart.

And if you follow Christopher (but not too closely because he doesn’t like being close to strangers and he keeps a swiss army knife in his pocket that has a saw attachment that can cut off a man’s finger) then maybe you will see the world through his eyes. Like Mark Haddon has done. And Christopher would probably like Mark Haddon if he could meet him, but he doesn’t like all authors. For example, he likes Sherlock Holmes, but not Conan Doyle, because Conan Doyle believed in fairies and supernatural beings. And Christopher wouldn’t like you at first because you are a stranger, but maybe you could like him more if you read this book and understood him more.

What do people think of when they are walking down the street? Are they wondering what they will have for lunch, how they could have forgotten to not to mention that topic to their wife? Are they worried about a job means nothing to them except extra numbers on a bank website at the end of the month? Or a job that they wished they had, even if it was just serving coffee to people with lesser educations? Are people thinking about what life is like on the other side of the world? Can they imagine living in a rooms without a single lightbulb in the Tibetan mountains or herding sheep in Spain? When they plan their dinners in their head because they missed lunch and all they can think about is food, do they actually understand what real hunger is? That desperation to fill your belly with anything?

I don’t know. I’m just walking down the street thinking of people who exist only in my head. They’re the people I get along with best and even then we still have disagreements.

What the world needs isn’t another iPhone or the newest model car. We don’t need to go shopping just because a new season is coming along or because we’re bored. Bored? How can people be bored in this deafening roar of society?

I was walking home, through the park along the Tancheon River in Seoul. The sun was setting and the ducks quacking. Old men rested from their bicycle rides. Snow melted in the shadows where the late winter sun was still unable to reach its long fingers. The grass finally showed hints of green. Dog owners were braving the park again, letting their pets sniff one another. But there were more smartphones and tablets, with their respective owners hunched over as they walked, miraculously missing the black ice and old ladies carrying home groceries. More of these consumers, consuming videos and pop culture. So many wasted moments.

The sun set. The moon rose. But the sun also rises.

-Me

I just finished reading the Kindle Single, “Guns”, by Stephen King. Highly recommended as a sensible take on the gun issue in America.

In a nutshell, King advocates stricter background checks and taking clips that hold more than ten rounds off the market.

He also discussed the case study of Australia, which, after yet another deadly shooting, stopped the sales of assault rifles and automatic shotguns. After a huge government buyback of such weapons by the government, Australia’s gun related violence dropped sixty percent.

I know many gun-advocates will disagree with even this much action, but all I can say is “read the book”. It’s not big (It’s a Kindle Single, after all) and King is no left-wing anti-gun advocate. He admits to owning three guns. His take on this issue is somewhere in the middle, rational, and a compromise both sides should be sensible enough to take.

Began reading Anna Karenina yesterday for my 50 book challenge. It’s no book; it’s a tome. 350,000 words!

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

As a boy born in Mississippi and raised in Alabama, I’m ashamed to say that it has taken me this long to get around to reading this book. I won’t make any excuses, except to say that maybe I wouldn’t have appreciated it until now. For the longest time, especially during my college years in Minnesota when I worked so hard to change my southern accent, I had no respect for the land of my youth. I’d grown up in the country, riding tractors, working outside, and sporting a farmer’s tan.

Now that I look back on the short three decades of my life so far, I can appreciate how lucky I was to have grown up in the south. A kid couldn’t've asked for better family than I had. Every single one of em’. Sure, I had the odd aunt that I loathed, same as Scout, but I grew up proper with the help of the rest, despite adolescence.

Reading this book brought me back to my childhood. To wandering around streams beyond my old neighborhood in Northport, Alabama. To weekends spent with childhood friends in Starkville, Mississippi. From learning to shoot a rifle with my uncle, to learning to drive a tractor with good ol’ M.G., to living in the countryside next to my grandparents, Mimi and Papa. I caught my first catfish when I was only four, learned to drive a stick-shift when I was thirteen, and fancied myself a young MacGyver in my teens.

To Kill a Mockingbird was written long before I was born, but many of its settings still ring true. Racism isn’t as blatant as it used to be, but it lives on. I’ve seen it. Not only in Alabama, but in Africa, in China, in Korea. It’s not a localized problem. However, Harper Lee does such a splendid job of capturing the bewildering differences in how children view people and how adults view the world around them.

I only started wearing glasses in my twenties. I wonder if that’s how it is for all of us. Our vision is crystal clear when we’re young, then everything starts to go foggy around the edges.

How is my life going now?

Diary Entry 4

Diary Entry Day 3

Icarus

Review – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Guns by Stephen King

Anna Karenina, you’ll be the death of me.

Review – To Kill A MockingBird

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