WriteRoom - Back to the Womb

Focus and sustained concentration are the keys towards prolific writing or any writing for that matter. Some writers have an iron-clad attention span and can sit at their work for fourteen hours straight thinking of nothing else, like the infamous Honore' de Balzac. Others, like myself, have to concentrate on their concentration. Oh, the things you'll see! My mind feels like Poland and distractions are the Luftwaffe. But I think I found an underground bunker in a program called WriteRoom.

Going to school in the Eighties during the rise of the personal computer cultivated an odd sentimental feeling in me towards text-based computing. Computers were so novel and wonderful that I would kill for the opportunity in elementary school to go to the library and fire up Apple Basic and type simple code:

Ready
10 Print "I Love Quiet Riot."
20 GOTO 10
RUN


I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Love Quiet Riot.I Lov


And so on and so forth. This probably has no impact in this modern-day blog environment, but in those days it was bright white or yellow against a black background. The words were the positive glowing objects in the larger negative space, which gave them much more of a stamp on my impressionable young mind. Furthermore, the only thing that appeared on the screen was my own creation.


Some genius at Hogbays Software must have felt the same way because it is this simple concept that has been turned into an uncanny attention-keeper. By simulating this MS-DOS type situation, your focus is demanded by nothing but your own typing. Plus, there are no other buttons or windows that might draw you away from the task at hand. The only things on the screen are things that you create. It is literally like typing in the womb.

Well, now that that's all taken care of.  Balzac once wrote for forty-eight hours straight fueled by countless cups of black coffee. If you want to attempt this feat, the coffee that I find stirs the passions is this one.

It's July 30th. Do You Know This Man?

Probably not. You may see just a standard Government Issue serviceman from the Big One. But if you lived in Vanuatu and you were to see this photo, you might experience a feeling of deep calm and spiritual wellness because this man could possibly be John Frum - your most high God and Saviour.

For some odd reason that slipped through the cracks of real reason, natives of Vanuatu became obsessed with the messianic arrival of the mythical figure of John Frum, who they believed would bring all the wonderful riches of the West. They were a "cargo cult" and built fake airstrips all over the island to tempt him and make sure that he had a place to arrive with his airplane full of blessings.

Today would be the day you would awake with the most resentment towards your country because today is Independence Day for Vanuatu and independence strips John Frum Day of all its fun and cultivates a kind of embarrassment towards looking to the sky for a gigantic flying hand-out.


If you're feeling a bit Messianic and want to visit Vanuatu to indulge those feelings, I recommend you visit American WWII Rations.

Emily Dickinson Had Epilepsy, Where Does That Leave Me?

I just found out that Emily Dickinson had epilepsy- a fact that left her imprisoned in her room to singlehandedly invent modern poetry. This was a mixed blessing. The downside to this was, of course, epilepsy. But the upside was that the resulting social situation gave her the right kind of creative environment to fully plumb the depths of her capabilities. She was free to write whatever she liked at her own pleasure, answering to no one. Imagine if she had an editor constantly looking over her shoulder to tweak and revise her work.  Do you think she ever would have came up with:

    The Doom's Electric moccasin
    That very instant passed-
    On a strange mob of panting Trees
    And Fences fled away?

The answer to that question is no. Editors don't understand poetry that doesn't rhyme or make sense on a postcard. In fact, her first posthumous book had a lot of her poetry re-written to make "sense."

Anyway, I'll I'm saying is that I think I'm far too healthy to make up my own genre of anything and far too social to turn off the inner and outer critics. I think I may have a form of Body Integrity Identity Disorder only with my frontal lobe as the resented perfectly normal body part.

If you want to find out if you have epilepsy, try this:

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