what is this? inevitable. the struggle is over. time to find my balance to evil. my mind swings around in a circle on the end of a string. shorten the string, speed up the rotation. get rid of the string and spin in place. no choice but to be good and evil combined. i try to make too many choices. observe, react.

i don't keep my body in the same shape as my mind. it can't keep up. it can shut my mind down if it needs too. i'm not in bad shape, i'm just not what my mind needs.

frivved up by Ben at 9:17 PM

bye week ramblings.

i watch the seahawks pretty much every time they are on. i remember watching seahawks games with my dad in alaska before i even moved to seattle. i remember telling my dad during that first game that football was the best game ever because i turned my back and thought they had scored 7 times in a row while i wasn't watching. i couldn't wait for the crazy hilights ;)

it isn't like football takes much of a time investment. what else would i have done early sunday afternoons during the winter? i would be sitting on the couch wrapped up in a blanket anyways.

and now, here we go. the same excitement we all had right after holmgren was hired is back now. it took him long enough, but now we actually have a good team. we've always had talent during holmgren's years, but now we have it at every position and in our backups. i thought this was a great offseason. i was so glad to see whitsitt go. that guy was a joke. he was an idiot with a false sense of superiority he justified using someone else's money. he didn't care about the game, or the team. he cared about being the president, the number one guy.

paul allen is a rich guy i can respect. right now he is redeveloping an entire section of seattle, piece by piece. it started when he bought an entire strip of properties from the city core down to the water, and now the whole area is growing. our football team was in trouble, so he comes in and buys the team and builds a new stadium. from what i gather, he didn't even know anything about football, so he left everything to the people who did, through his intermediary whitsitt. i am guessing he knows more than he lets on, and that he was actually watching the games and talking to his football cronies enough to get a good sense of how things are going. he realized what the problem was, that our football minds were being overruled and dismissed by his representative. so before this season, after being silent about the team for years, he axes whitsitt. not just from the seahawks, from everything. all of his business stuff. i think whitsitt was gm of the trailblazers also, but no more. i think allen did the press release on the phone from his office at vulcan. cracks me up. after that, some of the football minds we let go started wandering back, and we signed a new president. Tim Ruskell made the bold moves Whitsitt wouldn't have made; master strokes like resigning our best player and our starting quarterback.

the way he handled free agency was great. we had all of these players, particularly on defense. 3 of our starting linebackers, 2 of them longtime seahawks veterans are gone. 2 of them were always injured and never played anyways. the other guy was good, but no great shakes. so we are left with the guys who played in their place last year anyways. one of our best cornerbacks signed an insane contract with some other team, and we were smart let him take it. our sacks leader signs a similar contract with less money up front than we offered to play for a division rival. fuck him then. it sounds like our team should be decimated. heh. i thought our biggest problem was losing that cornerback. he was young and talented, and the oldest guy in our super good secondary. i saw Andre Dyson's name on the free agent lists and i started drooling. but when we lost our guy ken lucas for 6 years $36M, i thought we would never be able to afford him. this guy can fly, i wanted him bad. then we signed kelly herndon for a reasonable contract for 3 years. big, physical corner. punishing, but not fast. i thought we were done, but by the end of the offseason, no one had picked up Dyson. eventually he agreed to play for us at the same reasonable contract we gave Herndon. how much did we pay for both of them combined? 6 years total at $34M. less than our guy would have been. and we have two guys, one who i think is a better pure corner in dyson, and another guy with the size lucas had with a safety's physicality. i was stunned when we signed dyson. i was so happy.

at linebacker, we made a move on a guy i thought was one of the top guys in the whole free agent pool, jamie sharper. i think he was a little overlooked since he was playing for such a crappy team last year in houston. another great great signing. i was looking forward to our linebacker situation this season already, because i thought our backups last year were better than our starters. Niko Koutavides was a monster at the end of the season at middle linebacker, especially on 3rd and 4th down in short yardage situations. he would stand people up at the line of scrimmage, and fold them backwards into the ground. it was great to watch. middle linebacker is tough though. he is like the quarterback on defense, and i don't know if koutavides was ready for that. but then we drafted this guy lofa tatupu, who was middle linebacker on that last two USC national championship teams and gave him a chance to win the position in training camp. this guy is small, and doesn't impress anyone with his speed. but he is always right there in the right spot. he sees what is happening before it happens. koutavides is good, but this guy is gifted. he has this defense playing as a unit. and now, who do we have as a backup? the guy i was so excited about in the first place.

on yeah, then our defensive line. we lost our sacks leader too a division rival. so what did we do? we signed ANOTHER division rivals sack leader. not just any division rival, the rams, our biggets rival. the guys who beat us 3 times last year. oh yeah, and this is the second year in a row we've signed their sacks leader. screw you rams! then we signed a midget, in d-line terms. he's 6'0 300, it cracks me up that he is considered small. anyways, he and our stud first round draft pick from last year Marcus Tubbs have been attached at the him ever since our signing. all during training camp, i didn't see a photo without them standing side by side, huge number 90 and shorter but still huge number 91. whenever one of them had a quote, the other had a quote right after. add into the rotation Rocky Bernard, who likes to dance so much that he is turning into a serious sack threat just so he can celebrate. we now have a bunch of crazies on our d-line. our ends are just nuts. winstrom likes to pull the quarterback down by the front of his jersey with one hand as he is getting pushed past him. he was injured last year trying to trip some guy from the bottom of a pile. Bernard's celebrations are worth their own paragraph, they crack me up. the first time (last year, the year before?) it was so spontanious and hilarious, i think it surprised even him. but now they are just as hilarious, and it is always good to see the other guy get sacked.

last year at times we had an awesome defense, and an awesome offense, just never really at the same time. it was all or nothing. this year, we have the depth to have an average offense or defense even after a few injuries or on bad days. both units don't have to play great to get the win. they can both have so so games, and we still have a chance. we are goalpost and a white jersey away from being 7-0, but 5-2 feels just as good because it feels more legitimate this year because the team is actually executing on offense and defense consistently.

in other news, i just don't really care about work anymore. i skipped 3 days last week, and i'm skipping today. it turns out my financial projections were a fluke anyways. in the end, its just another shitty job, nothing that can't be replaced. i'm not even an employee. i know i'm not going to be fired. somehow, there are other drivers that are worse than me, and not one of them ever gets fired. sometimes i wish they would fire me, just because it would set a good precident. maybe they could get their company back on track. maybe, if they knew why they had so many problems, or knew that things weren't going well in the first place. or if the owner wasn't on vacation himself right now. this is a huge portion of why i took this job. not because it is better than delivering pizzas, but because i can be invisible, a free radical. i can just float away. work should be the least of my worries, and it is. if money was a problem, work would be a higher priority. but its not, so its not. i am still coming out ahead every month.

frivved up by Ben at 9:12 AM

you know what really creeps me out? seeing irc shorthand work its way into the general public. the fact that i have seen the term pwned used outside of a gaming chatroom freaks me out. rawr, i own j00 all

frivved up by Ben at 1:09 PM

quick quick, while everyone's looking. look at me go! its words! we've got a real freaking rocket surgeon on our hands here...

so, how is the job going? well enough. faces are blurring together. i am spending every day in bellevue on a paycheck route. bellevue is now very easy. i have found all the little cracks in the town to slip through unnoticed. it is quiet on the streets i am on. there is no use speeding, so you are forced to coast from light to light. on the busy streets, i just start driving again and my muffler makes me king noisy. it is the perfect camoflauge.

i can't wait to shave my beard. i think i am going to retire jesus after this year. i am already breaking a rule by bringing him out twice. even if it is going to be a different costume, it is still the same character. half-ass i say. when did ejsus start taking requests anyways?

frivved up by Ben at 7:20 PM

it is important that i write. it is a form of public discourse. it is a way to communicate back to the screen, instead of sitting glued to a one-way conversation. it is important that we write, even if what we write doesn't always have importance. it is conceited of me to not write. so here we are.

i spend all of my spare brain power thinking about my books. so much time, i consider it a function of the actual writing. right now, the books are not very good. there are parts that are very good. the parts i have thought about. but then there is a whole world of nothing in between. I have one story i want to tell in many pieces. a story made up of 3 series, but all part of the same story. i don't want anyone to know that at first. i am telling you this because i expect you to forget. and if you don't forget, please keep it quiet when things start happening. consider it an inside joke. years down the road when (note replacement of my usual weak 'if') i write this story, i want to do it somewhat out of order. i explained the beginnings of this idea to matt, and he said it sounded schizophrenic. and it was. it still is. it is going to have to be for it to be any good.

i think i have strong schizophrenic tendancies, and i think there is a strong tie between these tendancies and my intelligence. in particular, what you might call the genius portion of my intelligence. the genius and the crazy inside of me cycle up the same parts of my brain. parts that are by definition on the edges of my control. the both can collapse into eachother at any time. worrying about the crazy keeps me from tapping it very often, but the strong respect for my own brilliance keeps it active and functioning under the surface of myself. considering how well we know ourselves in relation to how other people know us, everyone is brilliant. brilliant in ways other people don't know. but we know. i know i am a genius. not brilliant at everything, but a genius nonetheless. writing is a way to let other people know, so they can look through the window and see what i am seeing.

back to the schizophrenic story thought. i want to write this story in three parts. i want each part to seem completely seperate at the start. i want them to appear to be completely different entities when they begin. i am very excited about this idea. i want to write this story for those moments of shock, the moment recognition that will instantly add the other stories as background source information and change the reader's outlook on the story. right now, i am watching all the pieces fall into place while you are reading this story years in the future. i am grinning, because this is how the story was formed in my head. three seperate stories that evolved into the one story i had always dreamed of, the story that could encompass anything. for the past few months, pieces have been falling into place in my head. on the surface it looks like the laziest and the least successful period in my life. but it hasn't been. it has been of huge importance to me, and it has been exciting to watch the pieces swirl together and rearrange themselves in the proper order.

alright, time to spill out the plan for the story. this is the plan for the 3 parts. we start with a prequel for part 3. inauspicious and unassuming. it will leave some clues, one major one tying it to the first series, but hopefully will tie itself off well enough to seem complete with one major loose end that ends up hopefully forgetten the midst of the climax and the conclusion.

after the prequel, go directly into part 1. the dragons. this one we leaves serious questions about the fates of the two main chacters. the arcs of the story come to their dramatic conclusions, but there will be major questions about the ultimate fates of the main characters. part one is going to be brutal and animal. it is about dragons. these dragons need enough realism to have them fit into the story, which is told from human vantage points. to fit in, this part is going to need to be brutal. this is going to work to my advantage, because it will help gloss over the fact that things are left hanging. people will accept the close of the stories, because it is going to come to a fairly distinct ending point. i'm thinking 3 books or so, leaving two loose ends, one seemingly minor, one fairly major as it involves the ultimate fate of the dragon species

part two starts out with no relationship to either the prequel or part 1. it stays that way through the main story arc through the first 3 books. this time, i plan on leaving no loose ends. i want to make it look like i am closing out an action packed trilogy. then, at the end of book 3, i want to drop the bomb. the last loose end, the loose end left from the very start, in particular what happened in the 2 hours before book one starts is tied off, and opens up a whole new box of crazy, including the reemergence of the dragons. the main character of part one about the dragons makes an appearence by the end of book 3, which ties off one loose end from part 1 and explains what has happened in the very lengthy period of time between the two series. heads explode, book 4 comes out and answers the question about the fate of the dragon species, the second loose end. i'm thinking 5 books total, with the 5th book left completely open, essentially opening the entire world of this story.

which leads us back to the third story. we pick up 15 years after the end of the prequel. it isn't explained that this is part of the main story, but by now if you have read part one and part two, you should know what is happening. eventually, it will be explained and anyone who didn't get it will be clued in. the main character is the loose end that was left from the prequel. this third part is the story i thought would be the launching pad for all of my future stories. it was supposed to be the one that made everything possible. but now, it is only one layer, one world within the greater world. this world will have its own problems that relate back to the larger world built in part 2. we will see the main character of part 2 (who i consider to be the main character of the story as a whole) play a role in the series, at first indirectly and by the end of the series in person. i'm thinking 3 books, plus the prequel

after this, i can go back to any part. i can write about the dragons and what happened to them after their series. i can write about the main character and his exploits across the world after the end of part two. or i can write about the one world i built in part three and its characters. or i can build brand new worlds to send the other main characters from part 2. or i can go back and write the stories of what was happening to these other characters during the first 3 books of part two, when they weren't even a factor yet. i have more than i can write in my lifetime. i don't even have to worry about where to start or where to stop.

now that i have the story, and the three series, i have been thinking about the books themselves. if you counted, this story is looking like 12 books. all 12 have basic plotlines, some more developed by others. books 1-3 of part two are developed from start to finish, with all the major plot points i want to hit seperated into tenative chapters. part 1 has 3 distinct books already planned out. i have been planning part 3 since before the other two parts existed, but it has been changed by the other parts for the better, so there are still a bunch of details that need to be worked out. which is where i am now. reworking part 3 so i can rework the prequel without creating any glaring inconsistancies that will handcuff the main part 3 trilogy before it starts.

then i write the prequel, which i hope will start with the kind of planning i have put into the first 3 books of part two before i write any more. i actually already started the prequel, years ago, so it will be more of a continuation. in the end i will probably throw out everything i have written so far, but that remains to be seen. i don't have much written, but it is there. text on the page. and there you have it. check the bookstores about 10 years from now :)

frivved up by Ben at 4:55 PM