mike the mountain

OK, here’s the deal. I need you to go away for a while.

From here. From the BLOG.

I need you to stop reading. Stop following. Unsubscribe. Delete feed. Forget.

It’s not you. It’s me.

I’ve hit a wall. I just can’t seem to complete an idea. Barely a sentence. I share links and comments and thoughts and updates on Facebook and Twitter, but the immediacy and brevity of those mediums discourages deeper discussion-inspection-reflection.

That last sentence is 176 characters. I couldn’t even fit it in a tweet.

I like using big words and run-on sentences. I like to ramble, pontificate, blather, spew, and let my consciousness flow.

But lately I’m not. Not enough. With the words.

I’ve got lots of ideas. Dozens of “drafts” waving their dicks at me whenever I log into my WordPress dashboard. But I just can’t seem to pull the trigger. Can’t finish them. I read these half-formed blobs of fetal composition and can recognize the tiny ember of inspiration that made me want to expand or explore or just throw into the sky to see what happened… but that’s it. I can’t wind my brain up to continue.

And that’s where you come in.

I need this to be a blank slate again. I need to clear the expectations I’ve built up in my own head about what I should be posting. Who I’m posting for.

Like I said: It’s not you. It’s me. This is in my own head.

I don’t know if this will help, but I think it will.

I’m going to try and pretend that no body reads this thing. Not a big stretch, I know, but stay with me (or don’t… you know what I mean). This site isn’t for marketing my business, or showing off my photography, or giving soapbox speeches about the latest political travesty. I’ve used it for all these things in the past, but it never felt right. I don’t know what I have this thing for. But I do know that I enjoyed writing on here the most when I was writing purely for myself. Not worried about who was reading it or what anyone else thought, just using it as a bucket to catch the mental overflow; an open field for me to bury my kill.

So that’s it. No apologies for not posting. No explanations. No whining. No promises of future content. Just whatever the heck comes out of my head. Intentionally indecipherable. This isn’t a school project. This is MY ISLAND. My piece of Internet. To do with as I will.

/M

PS – I’m still out there. If you want to know what I’m up to: Twitter. Or, if we’ve actually met at some point: Facebook. If you want to know to what I’m listening: Last.fm. What I’m reading online: Delicious. If you want to see pictures from my adventures: Flickr. Work: The Financial Benefits Group. I’ve got a LinkedIn page too, but haven’t really got around to using it much. Aren’t I just the little social-media butterfly?

I’m messing with the site design over the weekend, so if you somehow stumble across here and things look odd or incomplete… well, they probably always have and shall continue to be, so get used to it schweetheart.

/M

One of my favourite things about my Last.fm subscription is it’s tracking of my listening history. It’s one thing to try and arbitrarily choose today what my top songs of 2009 were, but to actually look at what tracks I played the most over the year offers a more interesting (to me anyway) view.

So here’s the list of my top 25 songs of 2009, in order of the number of times I played the full track on my computer, iPod, or iPhone:

1. Joel Plaskett Emergency – Nowhere With You
2. Flogging Molly – What’s Left of the Flag
3. Hi-Standard – Wait for the Sun
4. Portal – Still Alive
5. Leonard Cohen – Waiting For The Miracle
6. Enter the Haggis – One Last Drink
7. Great Big Sea – The Night Pat Murphy Died
8. Jonathan Coulton – Mr. Fancy Pants
9. The Salads – Get Loose
10. Styrofoam and Sarah Shannon – I Found Love
11. Jonathan Coulton – The Future Soon
12. Finnegan’s Lads – Dirty Old Town
13. Da Vinci’s Notebook – The Gates
14. Semisonic – Closing Time
15. Jonathan Coulton – Code Monkey
16. Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie – The System Administrator Song
17. Dean Elliott & His Big Band – Lonesome Road
18. Corb Lund Band – The Truck Got Stuck
19. The Tossers – Altercations
20. John Coltrane – Giant Steps
21. Dropkick Murphys – The Dirty Glass
22. Patti Smith – Gloria
23. Tenacious D – The Metal
24. Rancid – Roots Radicals
25. Flogging Molly – Rebels of the Sacred Heart

Of course, the math geek in me just screams at the idea of using raw play count data that doesn’t take into account when any of these songs actually became available to me. For example, I bought Enter the Haggis in November, and they made it to #6. I bought Jonathan Coulton’s album in March, and he appears three times (four if you count “Still Alive”). And yet, bands like Flogging Molly and Corb Lund, oft-stated “favourite” bands of mine of which I own many albums, only appear once or twice. Some of these tracks I don’t own at all, but have appeared often enough as “recommendations” on my last.fm station that they make the list!

Hmm… I wonder how hard it would be to build an algorithm that could level out the initial enthusiastic repetition of a new album or song, consider the time of year it was added to the overall library, and assign an appropriate weighting as compared to those that have been in rotation for more than 12 (24? more?) months. I wonder how clear the pattern would be if I could go back and track plays of a new song from purchase, peak, trough, to plateau. What kind of timeline does there need to be for a song to stabilize into regular rotation, or just be forgotten until it gets picked up by a random shuffle and brought back into play? How much of an effect does placing the song into a playlist have versus leaving it in the overall library?

How much time can I waste discussing pattern analysis of my music listening habits before I get back to work?

That one I think I can answer.

For the record, my personal feelings on 2009 in general:

…………………./´¯/)
………………..,/¯../
………………./…./
…………./´¯/’…’/´¯¯`·¸
………./’/…/…./……./¨¯\
……..(‘(…´…´…. ¯~/’…’)
………\……………..’…../
……….”…\………. _.·´
…………\…………..(
…………..\………….\…

Hey.

I’m currently sitting in my dear sister’s apartment in Melbourne, Australia, waiting for my girlfriend to appear on Skype so I can look into her deep brown eyes, and likely flash her inappropriately.

These sort of bloggity activities take a bit of a back seat when travelling, so for everyone out there in the InterTubeLands, have a swell couple of weeks.

(There, did I offend anybody THAT time??)

I love this quote so much I want to keep it here to remind me in the future:

At least half of all writing involves just sitting and staring into space. Letting your brain out to hunt down ideas, bringing them back all warm and bloody between its teeth.

That’s from Warren Ellis, one of my favourite authors, shared by Wil Wheaton, another one of my favourite authors (and people in general).

So I got the Big Bad Flu that everyone who’s anyone has been enjoying this lovely autumn season. The first disease that sounds like an HTML tag:

<H1N1>me</H1N1>

Got knocked on my arse the very day they released the shots. And yes, I would have got mine. If you don’t get yours, you’re an ignorant selfish asshole. I’ll go off on that rant another day.

The worst part of it is I’m still too sick to do anything for Halloween, my favourite holiday of the year. I’ve got no costume, no parties to go to, I can’t even hand out candy to the kids. Just sitting in the basement watching horror movies (ok, that part’s not so bad).

A toast to the demons: May your jack-o-lanterns burn bright, may your trick-or-treat’s ring loud through the night, may your candy arm stay strong, and may you have glorious nightmares ALL WINTER LONG!!

This H1N1 is worse than I thought

Now if you’ll excuse me, Rocky Horror Picture Show is starting, and I need to make some toast.

Just posted another story on Ficly; I wanted to write something suitably spooky for Halloween. I wrote about 90% of it around 2am this morning (couldn’t sleep), and finished the rest this afternoon. You can read it here.

Unfortunately my original draft was over the character limit for Ficly (1024), so I had to cut it down quite a bit. Here’s the story in it’s “unabridged” form:

Always wear comfortable shoes when driving at night

Run.

Keep running. Run faster.

Don’t stop. For anything.

Run.

RUN!

…

Turn right. Down that alley.

NO!!

BACK TO THE STREET!

Right. Go. Stay in the streetlights.

Why are all the houses dark? Why isn’t anybody home?

Where is everybody?

…

I don’t know where I am. I don’t recognize anything, no buildings or street names.

I don’t know where I left my truck. I don’t know what I hit. Hard enough to crush the steel bumper and snap off a wheel.

I know there wasn’t anything there when I got out to look.

…

I don’t know what’s chasing me.

…

Can’t scream anymore. Hard enough to breathe.

Tried calling for help. No answer.

Tried pounding on doors. No answer. Not a light or sound from any of these houses.

Haven’t seen a single other car drive by, or person out for a walk, or even a stray cat or squirrel.

Just row after row of the same three models of some developer’s idea of suburban paradise.

…

Have to keep running.

I can hear them. Chasing me. No idea how many.

Can’t see them, but I can hear them.

They’re getting closer.

Keep running.

…

Left. Wait. Haven’t I already been down there?

Every street here looks the same.

There has to be a way out. A way back to the main road. With other cars, other people.

Just keep running. Left. Go. GO!

…

Is that a light? Is that a light on in that house?? It is!

HEY! HEY!! HELP!!

THERE’S SOMETHING CHASING ME!

PLEASE! HELP!

…

…

The light’s out.

…

I can’t hear anything. They’re gone?

No.

They’re here. They’re h

I’M SORRY I’M SORRY IT WAS AN ACCIDENT I DIDN’T SEE YOU I’M SORRY IT WAS AN ACCID

Let me know what you think!

Drove far past where the roads turned to gravel, then dirt.  Parked by a tall tree with bright leaves, flanked by a twisted spruce with dead red needles.  Put one mountain peak at my back, a beckoning finger raised, and mark another in the distance.  A sheer rock face at the end of a curving ridge, like soup pouring over the edge of a spoon.

(I’m already thinking of food.)

It takes me the rest of the day to reach the foot of the mountain face.  Had to cross one small stream, trying to forget about it.  Any foreknowledge of the area is against the rules.

I gather some wood, start a small fire (the easy way) and get some water boiling in a metal pot.  Some goes in a foil pouch labelled “Chicken Enchillada”, the rest gets mixed with hot chocolate powder.  I savor the taste of spice and sweet, eating and drinking at a pace to hold the memories on my tongue.  I sleep in a tunnel of blue nylon held up by army surplus paracord.  Tonight I am warm, dry, and full.

I don’t sleep.

(To be continued…)