This uncontrollable loneliness strikes me each night as I look at Facebook, AIM, Gchat, Tumblr, for someone to talk to. The night shift is not my friend, and any other friends I may still have are on the opposite schedule.
So I will take to writing a blog entry when these moods strike. Amazing how hard it is to sit down and write when this lethargy takes hold, midway through my shift, my energy all but gone. I know I'll be awake in four hours when I get home, and asleep as everyone wakes up.
It's now nearly 8am and I've read some Green Lantern Corp comics, looked at porn, and read my latest chapter in the Tower of Brahma. It is nearly perfect in its structure and execution. This chapter (61.i) represents me really accomplishing what I set out to do.
I wanted to take the seven deadly sins and deconstruct them, first in the abstract (superego) sense where we can refer to the masses, then I (rushed) threw some of my own personal "sins" or self-pitying guilt trips in at the end. The more personal side of my writing, the individual, needs to be better integrated into the narrative.
I also used the major chakras running down our torsos, as a way of triggering the final release of the sins of man from my body. Tossed together with a vague backdrop of a collapsing curtain of reality and the unicorn third eye spike protruding from my forehead. I went with instinct on color/animal associations and I think it paired up nicely.
The backstory for this chapter is that of the entire plot of Tower of Brahma, which is what I was writing toward. What is the point? What is the meaning of life? Why shouldn't I just kill myself right now? I wanted to know the true answer and while writing (all of this book was written stream-of-conciousness with loose outlines in my head) I decoded whatever it was that I needed to know.
Charles Crown writes a book while undergoing some sort of existential crisis. From rest stops in Jersey to Suburbia, Long Island to NYC, Colombia, LA, San Diego, San Francisco, Florida, Massachusetts, Philly, and Pittsburgh. To the brink of insanity, a psych ward, medication and alcoholism. To Freemasons and killing his father...he experiences an adventure.
To help process the information, he creates two fictional secret agents, Fenris & Spider, who are out to destroy the Universe. Spider is the mentor, the killer, the silent dark rogue ninja with a bad attitude. Fenris is the sad, sensitive, oblivious, stark raving madman novice. What is their mission? Can a coherent plot be developed by a writer who is losing his mind?
What is the Tower of Brahma? A mythic Hindu legend. 64 discs of gold atop one of three tiers. Move a tower to another tier one disc at a time, with never a larger one atop a smaller. This repititious puzzle forever occupying the hands of a monk, shuffling discs as his mind wanders.
It is a mathematical concept called recursive, developed by a 19th century mathematician who no doubt wrapped the Hindu legend around it to make it sexy. It stuck and becomes the basis for computer programming, developing the ever expanding nature of computer data processing, setting free the mind into the furthest reaches of abstract math.
What did ending the world mean? A quote from Matt Groening on the end of times is paraphrased as such: "When I die, that's the end of the world for me." No more participation in the mass hallucination that passes for reality means that reality is done. Meaning that each perspective of reality is unique and a unvierse upon itself.
There's part of Faust, De La Guarda, Beat Poetry, bad action movies, experimental films, drunken insanity, altered states of conciousness, paranoid schizophrenia, therapy, hospital visits, broken hearts, lost friendships, despair, loneliness, depression, manic behavior, ranting, raving, depraved debauchery, and on and on.
This book is the past 6+ years of my life. And in two weeks it is over and done with forever. I will get my answer.
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