cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sussing Out the Book Dammit, I just realized that this GPS I bought on eBay does not allow the use of actual maps. It just does coordinates, tracks your routes and gives you an arrow pointing to the saved destination that you need to get to. As the crow flies. But that should be ok for my purposes. I didn't buy this thing to tell me what the exit numbers are on a car trip. I want it to save my life when I'm lost in the mountains and need to know which direction to walk to get straight to base camp. So long as I remember to stop and save my location at key points, this thing will do that. So I'm writing the first 2 chapters of a book this weekend. I've told several people that I am going to do this, meaning that now I basically have to do it. Sometimes it's a good idea to put one's self in that spot to make sure that one really follows through. My rule will be that I can only play Grand Theft Auto after I finish the first chapter. I will try to make the whole book about my strange year at Hampshire. However, there might not be quite enough material there for an entire book of reasonable length. If that should be the case then I could probably have it continue on into the following year after I left Hampshire because there was some strange shit that year as well. Good stories. However, I'd rather not do that if I don't have to. Despite some interesting shit that went down, 1997-1998 was not a good time for me. Horrible depression, desperate for money and so on. Aside from Trish and myself it was also mostly a different cast of characters since I was in a new city. Those couple of years were a transition. Well, every year is a transition so that's sort of a nothing thing for me to say. But it was while I was living in Richmond that I was still sort of in the college student drug world and throwing these fantastic parties while also starting out in politics. I started lobbying and wound up hanging out at the General Assembly building a lot and showing up for Committee Meetings. It was amazing - all you had to do was wear a nice suit and show up and you had a seat at the table. Sometimes literally. I would be in a committee meeting waiting for some drug bill I had shown up for to come up on the agenda and then some other bill would be discussed and it would become clear that nobody in the room had any idea what they were talking about. So I'd step up to the microphone and give my own 2 cents and was always taken seriously. At the age of 19. Yeah, that was the year when I figured out that most of getting what you want is just showing up. The Army ROTC story was that year as well. That is one of my favorites. It would be good book material because of how clearly the experience changed me. I started out taking the ROTC class as a goof. My experiences with government in the last year had been pretty awful and the idea of something so 'establishment' as joining the military seemed outrageous. It was my way of thumbing my nose at whatever federal agent might be keeping an eye on me after the shenanigans at Hampshire. But lo and behold I ended up really liking everything about being in the Army. Even the marching in formation was incredibly satisfying. Within a month I had decided that I really wanted to make a career out of this. Which didn't work out of course. I hear about the desperate need for Captains and Majors in the Army right now and I just shake my head. The promotion opportunities are amazing. Had I been able to stay in and secure a commission, I would almost certainly be a Major by now. I still think that I would have made an excellent infantry commander. Now I'm just rambling. Sorry. One of the things I can't quite figure out is exactly how much illegal activity to put in the book. I mean, I could be getting myself into a lot of trouble. I did a lot of stuff that seemed like a terribly entertaining stunt as a college student but placed in the context of, say, THE LAW, could get me into some really deep shit. Selling LSD door-to-door. Hacking a computer to make someone officially deceased. Slithering through the ceiling in the middle of the night into the dean's office to steal a master phone set that controlled the entire campus phone network. Jesus. What the fuck was I thinking? Sorry for this horrible, rambling diary entry. I'm really just sussing out how this book is going to work and what exactly is going to go into it. Writing shit down like this is always a good way for me to suss things out. That's a funny word. 'Suss.' Suss, suss, suss. Sussing out the word 'sussing.' Right. Back to work. 11:01 a.m. - 2007-10-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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