No wifi for the time being so I'm writing this on my phone. I just spent the last hour reading a journal I started in late summer 2016. I read up until early 2017.

Looking back on it, there was a lot that person (me) didn't know that they didn't know. But I think he was doing his best with what he had and going about things the right way in the moment. 

And I'm sure the same is true of right now.  Which is to say, this isn't even my final form.

I think I'm a lot calmer now than the person who was writing then. He was trying really hard at a job that wasn't working out and had to leave and start a new job that was a lot more intense. He was going through a relationship that fell apart. He didn't make enough money.

It was really really emotional writing.  And I guess I'm not as worried anymore about things that used to stress me out. So that's good.

Word of the Bird #8

Time for Another Adventure in Creative Writing

Today we're responding to a comment from a reader creatively.

2.0 writes:

This post prompted me to check if Tom Oatmeal is still a thing, and he is! He's made many post in the years since I stopped reading his Tumblr. I won't go back though. I will just get sad again. I owe it to myself not to get sad at Tom Oatmeal.

Turns out, unbeknownst to me at the time, that Tom Oatmeal is a long-running tumblr account with blogs written in a style somewhat similar to my post about a guy named Tom who works with oatmeal. That's pretty interesting. How does a coincidence like that occur?

Let's go inside the mind of the writer to found out. Traditionally, western portrayals of entering the brain from outside the body occur through the ear. This is false and misleading. We know from ancient texts and oral tradition that the proper entry to the brain, as practiced by the Ancient Egyptians, is through the nose. So we go in through the nose and through some dark canals and into the brain!

We have to find the snake in here that ripped off the Tom Oatmeal guy and shake it down. Look! There it is. It's a literal snake that's partially submerged in the unconscious. You grab it by the snake-shoulders and slap it around a few times. "You! How could you rip off, Tom Oatmeal. You made me look like a jerk!"

The snake pleads, "No no no! It's a well-known phenomenon called cryptomnesia! You must have heard Tom Oatmeal somewhere and then forgot about it and you mistook the memory for an original thought!"

But it's too late. You have disowned the snake. "Pack your things and go," you say. The snake may be right but what's more important, being right or your pride?

Thanks again for commenting. 

The Oatmeal Tastes like Soap

The last few days the oatmeal has tasted like soap. Maybe the soap that's being used to wash the pot that boils the water is the cause. I drank some of the water out of the pot and it doesn't taste like soap. It must be the oats. Join me now, reader, and the soapmeal will be our launch point into the imaginative layer of reading.

There, look down below the clouds and trees and look through the tops of buildings with your special reading eyes. We can see the oatmeal factory and the oatmeal man, hard at work shaving oatmeal flakes off of an enormous oatmeal log. We see the great oatmeal forests off in the distance. The oatmeal pines are still chopped down by axe and brawn and dragged by a team of mules to the oatmill where they are cut and processed. Oatmeal binds this community together.

Back to the oatmeal man, Tom. Tom uses his planer and takes a mighty shave off the oatmeal log which produces a singular beautiful slim scrap of oatmeal that will be cut up and sent to Kroger in a cardboard tube. And then, having completed this well-practiced maneuver, Tom reaches into his pockets where he has about three to four bars of Dial soap in each pocket. Tom swishes and swashes his hands around to get a good lather going in his deep, specially made soap pockets, He removes his hands from his pockets and gives about two or three good loose shakes to get the excess suds off and goes back to this work. All day long Tom makes elegant strips of oatmeal and engulfs his hands in the sweet embrace of bar soap.

You can only tell people to wash their hands more, thinks Tom. You can't tell someone to wash their hands less. That's not how it works. That's not the world that was promised to me when I decided to be a part of it.

And now my oatmeal tastes like soap.

Running History

I joined the track team in 7th grade after i ran the presidential fitness standard for the mile in gym class. Little did I know, that beating the presidential standard by 6 seconds makes you the second slowest kid on the team.

But it was fun to be on a team and do my first organized sport. Up until then I'd just been in afterschool programs and played in the neighborhood. I improved a lot in one season. My gym class mile was 7:05, my first time trial on the team at the start was 6:41 and my best time by the end was 6:11.

I remember at the end of the season we did some longer runs, like 3 or 4 miles and I was able to keep up with the faster kids who usually were way ahead in races and workouts. Also I remember there was a big invitational at the end of the season and I got to go along and run the 400 because no one really wanted to run it. I remember there was a guy who was faster than me who didn't get picked and I asked the coach about it and the sense I got was that I seemed to care more and was worth keeping around. The 400 itself was awful and beforehand I was too nervous to form any words.

I knew I wasn't good relative to other kids in races but I liked being on the team and doing practice and improving. Anyway, I was told a few years ago that I should write down my running autobiography so I guess this is a rough sketch of a start.

Word of the Bird #7

Things That Are Good

-running is going great

-living at camp with my roommates is great

-my bed is great

-making things is great

-listening to marketplace on the drive home is great

-the weather is great

-doing awesome things on the weekends is great

-getting lots of sleep is great

-wearing tie dye all the time is great

yeah, great things are great

job thoughts

I started this google spreadsheet that all of the kids at after school can edit. and the squares are like a grid landscape. I call it birdonia. Here are some screenshots from it.

It grows

these are the good days

since I've started running this Fall it's felt more difficult than I remember running feeling. And not having as many people to run with has also changed things. So I've been building this narrative that I'm a little washed up now or past my prime or on my way towards getting away from running.

But then I stopped pitying myself for a bit and realized that I'm probably in the middle of feeling the best I'll ever feel in running. This is as good as it might get.

this is as good as it might get

Word of the Bird #6

Word of the Bird #5

Word of the Bird #4

October 11

I woke up in a ghostly panic. You know, the way ghosts sometimes appear to be panicking, such was my panic. The ghost sheets were cold, the sheets would be cold if they were somehow also a ghost. From within my ghost room, I could see the ghostly light of the dim grey ghost world outside. What a terrible day. I ghost shuddered and got up to walk across the ghostly floor, all covered in fog and trash amd and the corpses of insects that seep up through the tile like a stupid curse. I ran my hands all over the door to the bathroom to see if I could trip any secret wires that might activate some kind of contraption whereby a mechanical hand would emerge from the ceiling holding a silver platter and atop that a note in handwritten letters saying "you're good enough." But none of that happened. And as I entered the bathroom I turned on the light and the screaming fan howled and I looked at the mirror and saw, to my complete surprise, without any warning or previous indications, that I was a ghost.

How Today is

Watched the 2nd half of the Witch last night on netflix with my roommates.

It was fun. The movie was more interesting than scary.

Had trouble sleeping because lots of thoughts about work and how to do things.

Woke up and played around with a music app to use at after school. Mix it up. Have a little fun.

I need to run soon but don't really want to yet. I think there might be fatigue from last week and the weekend where I didn't rest very much.

Every day is a new one.

Updates from the Kingdom of Birdonia

Long ago, a great land was discovered on a cafeteria door. That land was the Land of Birdonia. And people settled that land and they built many great and wonderful things on it.

Alex and Philip and Gus joined together and built things like an infinite money pit, a droid factory, a navy, barracks for soldiers, and arrows that fling people into space when they step on them. Their alliance was very powerful and everyone thought it was pretty cool.

Mark and Derek were also aligned and they built all kinds of awesome stuff. So much stuff that it cannot all be named. Nor fit on the map. But it is very awesome nonetheless.

McKinzy and Eden also joined forces and they built a garden and had a yachtmansion that was a yacht with a mansion on top of it.

Luke and Kai were a powerful duo who had jetpacks, underground cave systems, and a top secret base underwater that was only reachable by secret entry.

Jane lived in a cabin in the woods.

Zora built a house made of pillows.

Annabelle had a mansion as well.

Davis was only aligned with Gus and he possessed a cloning tank and a factory.

Jasper was aligned with himself and he had a castle and was building an air force.

Samantha also had a castle to herself and Meg made a diving board.

Finally, Cade had a floating mansion and Henry liked to drive around in his tank.

Life was good in the Land of Birdonia. But trouble was on the horizon, soon everything would be turned upside down and great threats would befall the land. Only through working together would the great people of this land be able to save their home and all the cool stuff they made.

Some sentences about snakes and stuff

Your snakes are cold. This Sunday try using your snake basket as your laundry basket. The snakes will appreciate the warmth.

 Snakes are the most considerate creatures. They never touch things with dirty hands. This is because snakes do not possess hands. Rather, they use their muscular stomachs to conquer any terrain.

Putting a feather in one's hat is insufficient to strike fear in the heart of your opponent. Rather, shove a  handful of snakes in your mouth to make people think that you breathe snakes.

Bake off? Snake off.

Why rake the leaves when you could snake the leaves? That's where you put your snake basket underneath the pile of leaves in your yard. The neighbor kids will think twice about jumping in a pile of leaves if they are worried about potentially injuring a basket of snakes in there.

Singular: snake. Plural: snakes. Singular special: snek. Plural special: sneki.

Lovecraft Octobercraft. Herbert West: Reanimator

Last night I listened to approximately the first half of Lovecraft's story, Herbert West: Reanimator. It's kind of similar to Frankenstein except instead of working alone the narrator is a guy who is West's assistant as he goes around getting in all kinds of wacky hi-jinks trying to animate the dead.

West starts his experiments in college but falls out of favor with professors when he insists that he needs human corpses to experiment and he needs them to be fresh. I cannot overstate how many times the word fresh is used.

West and his friend sneak around and dig up bodies and try to bring them back to life with this special serum that West injects in them. And then the first one they try, they think it doesn't work but then later it probably did and now there's a zombie roaming around probably trying to kill them.

Also West reanimates this one professor who never liked his experiments and the professor became a hero after a typhoid plague struck the town but then the professor died and then he became a monster.

This story is pretty spooky but it's not really a classic psycho-mystical subconscious Lovecraft story. It's more like a gritty-grim tale of these two guys digging up dead bodies, running from the law, running from the dead bodies they dig up, waking up and getting on their grind every day. This is the working man's Lovecraft. Tom Hanks would have a role in the movie version.

I'm going to listen to the second half tonight and report back in the morning. The creepiest parts of this story are when West and the narrator feel the fear of their reanimated corpses potentially lurking. But what makes a good lovecraft story is when the turn happens, and this little trickle of weirdness and these emerging patterns finally crescendo into this enormous gaping maw of cosmic horror and chaos and evil. It's like In the Hall of the Mountain King. Go listen to that. It's like 2 minutes long. To get a sense of the increase in magnitude.

Anyway, so far this story doesn't really seem to do that. West is just a creepy guy doing creepy guy stuff.

Planning This Week's Word of the Bird

We're going to have a breaking news story. About Trucks.

We're going to have a list article. Best Ways to Use....

We're going to have a profile on someone. Someone Famous.

We're going to have a story article...like a narrative. About...Pizza Cat.

We're going to have an after school tip. Brushing Your Teeth.

We're going to have a nose review.

We're going to have a public service announcement.

Happy Spookaween

For october I wanted to do an audio book club/review of some hp lovecraft stories. I got into listening to them last year after I listened to Peter Draws read The Color Out of Space.

Tonight I'm listening to The Horror From the Middle Span. It's about this guy with a weird uncle who dies and the nephew goes to live in his house. I'll summarize it more in the morning. Update to follow.

The Horror From the Middle Span

as remembered by Andy

Ambrose Bishop goes to this skunky part of Massachusetts because his uncle Septimus Prime is believed dead. Septimus was, by all accounts, a total spooklord and a weird guy in a shop gets all creeped out when Ambrose shows up and tries to buy some stuff.

Ambrose thinks his uncle's house is pretty cool. It has a cupola. Ambrose knows that Septimus was super smart and that's probably why Septimus was mistrusted by the ignorant, idiotic locals. It's very important that we continue to repeat just how stupid everyone is around here. Anyway, Septimus's house is old and spooky and covered in mildew and books and pentagrams and stuff. Ambrose isn't sure what to make of the pentagrams because he knows that his uncle was a man of logic and science and not superstition like these disgusting yokels and bumpkins all around.

Ambrose finds a spooky cellar below the house and below that is a spooky hallway and below that is a spooky sanctum with an altar in it and there is even another trap door that leads to lower than the sanctum but Ambrose doesn't open that door.

Ambrose is like, oh man, this is weird. He goes for a walk and he sees a spooky collapsed bridge. But there's one part in the middle that is not only still standing but has been strengthened recently. It's the middle span of the bridge. At this point the reader knows that this is where the horror was/is. The general path that all Lovecraft stories of this kind tend to take is that some creepy guy, Septimus, was working on some sort of dark magic in secret and it turned him super creepy and then it gets out of control and he dies but not before freaking everybody out and going bonkers. 

We learn from some lettters that Ambrose reads that Septimus was in communication with all the other spooklords of the world, including Wilbur Weightly, who is the star of another story that I cannot remember the name of right now. Wilbur is a creep-o beep-o and his story is pretty similar to this one.

Anyway, Ambrose is slowly learning all this and getting freaked out so he keeps going down to the cellar because his horror and curiosity draw him in and then it turns out Septimus is still alive and he was probably abducting people to use for blood sacrifices and be immortal and junk.

Oh yeah, Ambrose finds some bones and he's like "oh cool, bones!". He finds the bones over by the middle span after a big flood. And he takes the bones and puts them in his spook cellar. Later he eats some lunch and then goes back to play skeleton with his bones but the bones are missing! surprise. Uncle Septimus is back now because he was either the bones or he was a thing that ate the bones to come back to life. Ambrose passes out when he sees his uncle and the uncle disappears for a while.

People from the town start to go missing and everyone is like "oh my gosh, this happened the last time Septimus Bishop was all weird and now his nephew is here and it's happening again!" And Ambrose is scared. And the townsfolk show up at his house and they burn it down and presumably the Uncle and Ambrose get sealed away in that bridge from earlier.

the end.