Dylan Charles's Blog, page 10

Going Back to School

I miss college. Sort of. Understand, I don’t mean anything about college life or being on campus or college basketball (Go Heels) or any of that. I mean the learning new things. I miss that. More specifically, I miss learning things in a structured environment that forced me to keep learning and not just let me wander off after something new and shiny caught my eye.

My drive to do things on my own is minimal. Left to my own devices, I spend my time painting monsters and re-reading webcomic arc...

Resolutions!: An Update

After last week’s disappointing showing with regard to getting back on track with my resolutions, I am happy to report that:

1. Emily and I went running this past week. Twice, even. While I can’t say it was easy, I will say that it was nowhere near as hard as I had been dreading. In fact, there were moments where I might even say that I had fun. While running. Part of that comes from the fact that I have been slowly figuring out the correct way to run. It turns out that if you don’t do somethi...

Time Divided

Over the last month or so, I’ve been writing more and more at a steadily increasing rate. Ya’ll haven’t seen it, since ya’ll aren’t reading my new blog (and for good reason) and you haven’t seen the fragments of the short stories I’ve been working on (once again, with good reason), but the writing is happening more.

Which means, unfortunately, that I’ve had less time to spend over here. I used to write more than the quote I set for myself. You can see a few times last year when I wrote more th...

A Delay in Resolve

Considering the events of last week, I think I can be forgiven a little bit for not making any real progress on any of my resolutions. Well, except for the cooking thing. I did make some dinner. Not the most exciting dinner, but I did make it. Mostly on my own. With a lot of help.

But I’m just going to reset the resolutions for next week.

Next week, running, writing and dinners.

-D-

Lock Down

Last night, around 1am, I heard a sound. It sounded like a loud bang and, given recent events, I paid attention to it. But then it was quiet and I started to fall back asleep.

And then the second explosion.

And then I noticed the sirens and more sirens and what sounded like gunfire.

While Emily listened to a police scanner, I walked around and made sure the doors were locked, crawled back to bed and went to sleep.

This morning, I woke up to find that the MBTA has shut down completely. The police...

Resolutions? Uh-oh

So I think it’s fair to say that I have done none of my resolutions for this year yet. That’s fine. It is only April. April is…a third of the way through the year. Oh my God I have no more time to get anything that I wanted to get done and now I’m a resolution failure. And a hack, but that’s a separate issue.

I haven’t written anything. I haven’t run. I haven’t cooked anything beyond beer bread and brownies (both delicious, by the way).

My life is an unmitigated disaster.

That being said, it’s t...

Antsy

I’m starting to get a little antsy. When I was a younger, I used to get fits of wanderlust that I never acted on, but they were still always there and always driving me to pack up and go.

Eventually, I moved to Boston and that put a stop to that for a healthy stretch of time. But now I feel it coming back again in small fits and starts. It’s the desire to see something, anything new. The important thing to note is that it’s not a dissatisfaction in the current place, just a need to see a new p...

Culture Defined by Pop

Alan Lomax was a folklorist who spent the majority of his life preserving small, local folklore traditions. He believed that globalization was encroaching on the traditions of countless subcultures and slowly but surely pushing them toward extinction. He was also, potentially, a manipulative, manifest destiny toting jack-ass, but that’s not important here.

The main crux of his beliefs were that the important local traditions and stories and music of Americana would be subsumed by the mass medi...

Movie Review: Evil Dead (Remake)

Last night, I went to see the Evil Dead remake and I was less than impressed.

For those that don’t know, the original The Evil Dead is a horror cult classic that exists in its own realm of awesome. It is a frantic, kinetic, slapstick gore-tastic explosion of excess. The sequels that followed are less innovative, but far more fun and added more to the sub-layers of pop culture than the first. The first was a horror movie that was as much informed by the Three Stooges as it was by George Romero...

Spoilin’ for a Fight

Ideally

I would like to return to a point where I would write entries like:

In Defense of Eve

Isolated Moments on a Long Road

A Noir: In Three Parts

I am agood writer. Not great. Not the best. But I have my goddamn moments. I used to rage and wail and let loose a torrent of fire about subjects that mattered to me. I could get poetical and allegorical and drop some symbolism in a paragraph filled with careless vulgarity and I would relish in it.

But I’ve bound myself up in knots and ties and subject...