Michael Pickell

  Song mood: Spin by Lifehouse. I saw them twice, both small venues. These days I’m not sure if I could go to a concert where it is packed wall to wall of people. I like the comfort of stadium seating. Where you can hold hands with your nearest and dearest while keeping a small distance from the other people. I still haven’t written October poems. Normally I try to write the month of October’s in advance, so then it would give me more time to write ghost stories. Usually I either write the poems to a theme or make them a serial story. This year I’m writing the poems to the theme of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Shwartz. Then I will try to write a two page horror story for each day in October on my ‘official’ website thoughtsfromtheaether.com . Scary Stories will also be useful to get ideas for the short stories. Small steps, I remind myself. So, I’m listening to music on youtube. This commercial comes up where it says I should consider marrying a Latin woman. That L

  Song mood: Somebody to Love by Queen. Which, when I listen to Grace Kelly by MIKA, I think of. I think I’m getting towards a state of balance. Which is what I want. If I am sad, people would think that I would want to be happy. I’d rather feel balanced. Happiness will come on its own time. Feeling balanced is a process. Do I get the right amount of exercise? Do I get enough sleep? Have I drank enough water? Have I eaten right? Tonight, I had a hot dog with tater tots. The potatoes are what I need to eat less of, and yet, they are the toughest thing for me to cut down. That and bread. This weekend, I will, though I say this and I probably won’t do, brainstorm on better foods to eat. I need to cut down on carbs. Not eliminate them, but cut them down. At any rate, I’m okay. I worry about other people, sometimes I want to reach out and say are you okay? Anyway. It’s been a bit stressful the last few days worrying about my mum. She went to an urgent care and then went to get an MR

As we finish 20 September, I can say that I have an obsession with numbers. Back when I lived in Korea and taught English, I helped some newly made friends with their English. And in one of these books that they used to learn, there was this guy who was getting married on 20 September. And since then, 920 was the code for marriage. The start of my obsession was with my father. He would always point out 11:11. Then my sister would make me memorize birthdays. So I will remember the birthdays. My grandmother was 829. My birthday is on 10 August. Which, more or less every handle that I have will have 810. That is my code. Most everyone I know, will have a number or two assigned to them. There’s the birthday, month and day. Then there’s month and year. So say there is someone who was born on 2/2/1996. They would have the number 202 and 296. But then 2/2 is the 33 day of the year, so then they would get the number 033. The numbers thing is something I like to use to sabotage relationships. T

  Song mood: Whole Wide World by Wreckless Eric. Because I feeling serendipitous.   Though I’m not sure if that is the right word. Something that is like a happy coincidence. Or, is it like the scene in North by Northwest where Eva Marie Saint says to Cary Grant, luck had nothing to do with it. I feel like there are a lot of happy coincidences going on lately. Serendipity. I’m thinking of Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell.  I cry every time I watch that movie. I’m beyond tired haven been waken up at 5:30am. I did some brainstorming, but it was really crap.  Which is okay. I think I just need to do it more often.  I ended up writing about what I’m really scared about: mice. They give me certain fright. I made the effort to brainstorm and that’s really what counts. Making the effort to do something you love to do. It was fun hanging out with my writer’s group.  Decisions were made about what books will be used for lessons. Part of the meetings for this writer’s group is a

There’s a show I watched as a kid I’m trying to remember the name of. I’m afraid I won’t be able to solve this mystery. It was a darker children’s show. It had puppets, and they were all darker colors like grey, blue, purple. I think there was a hotel in it. It may have been vampire themed. The story line was fascinating. I think I may have been five or six. It only lasted for like a year or two. I was sad when the series was over. Then a couple of years later, my mum, sister and I went to my mum’s village in Alaska. And programs at that time ran late, like a couple of years late. I got to rewatch the series again. Of course I can’t find the show in my research. It wasn’t a popular show because it was a bit dark for a children’s show. But that got me to thinking, when did children’s shows become all cheery? Children’s shows in my time as a child were mostly dark. There was an element of danger. I grew up on the Dot and the Kangaroo series. Dot was this girl who went missing and to hel

Song mood: Grace Kelly by MIKA. I love Ryan Reynolds’ duet with Will Ferrel on this song. It was mesmerizing. The song by MIKA is pretty cool as well. It reminds me of Freddy Mercury and Queen. I don’t know what it is about watching Reynolds and Ferrel do this song, but I’m just in a better mood after watching. It got me thinking about the power of the smaller things. Larger things, like a novel and whatnot, seem a bit overwhelming. But shorter stories, stories that are only two pages or one sentence seem a lot easier. Let’s take the one sentence story. One can think of the story and in one sentence it’s done. But the sentence may not be what you want it to be. So then I ask myself, what isn’t right about the story. How can I change the sentence so it is what I want it to be. So there, in a brief moment of time, I have gone through three areas of writing: generating the idea, writing it down, and editing. Anyway. Sometimes I get overwhelmed about things, and my breathes are short. A s

  Song mood: Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight by Lana del Rey. Sometimes, I get in this moment, and I can’t get past the moment. I can’t move forward. I want to write, but I don’t have the drive to engage in my own stories. And the stories change as I think of them. Then by the time I write them, they become something different all together. I do write down ideas on my phone. Kind of like writing down dreams on my phone because that is the closest thing on hand. My drive for writing could stem from me not wanting to say what I feel. I mean, I do believe that most everyone’s life would have been better had I not been a part of it in some way. Of course, I’m learning to accept that. And then I will get past this lack of drive for my writing. I will write a lot of books and with proceeds of the books, I will be able to buy a tiny house by Lake Washington and the Cascade mountains. I told myself I was going to wait before reading another Maigret novel. Then I started reading Night at th

  People are talking about what they were doing on this day twenty years ago on this day. I was sitting at my desk dumbfounded. I worked as a draftsman for a metal building company and once the story broke on the radio, we all stopped working and either listened to the radio or went to the break room to watch the news unfold on the television. I was moved by President Bush's speech this morning. He pointed out what's wrong with America. He said that the same hatred that fueled the terror attacks then is going around today within America. That the Muslims weren't the enemy, people who are different aren't the enemy. That it was the radical thinkers and extremists who was the enemy. That America has a chance of being the great country it once was. Implying that once the radicals and extremists let go of the hate. Implying once we end the racism that has taken hold of country empowered by the previous president, then America can become the great nation it once was. That m

  Six hour drives seem to sap all the energy I have. On the way north to Fargo, I finished listening to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I started that on a previous road trip. I didn't like it as much as Daisy Miller, also by Henry James. I also finished listening to Stephen Fry's Victorian Secrets . Then I started listening to the Poetic Edda translated by Jackson Crawford.  I'm enjoying it. It was written around the 1200's, it's a series of poems that chronicles the Nordic gods. The poets at times went crazy with repetition, but that's okay. The rhythm builds on the repetition. I'm not going to worry about my writing. That is, I will write and hope the momentum builds. It's not about success or failure, but legacy. I need to adopt the same attitude about my writing as I do videos: just have fun with it. For videos, I think I will start writing one minute poems. I can also read other people's poetry as well. So there is a wealth of ma

  Song mood: Wicked Games by Chris Isaak. I did a brainstorming session last night, where I wasn’t feeling it. Which lead to an hour of sitting in bed and doing nothing. I go through these periods where I don’t think I can write, or do anything at all. It was a rough hour or two on the darker path. The moment passes.  Now I’m just going through the motions of writing. Writing this blog. What I did do was write things I noticed I could do. Ask myself questions about this story. Ask questions about other stories. Let’s take The Hand by Georges Simenon, there was a portion of the story I wasn’t satisfied with. What’s to stop me from writing a story of what I thought it should be. You can change the characters but put them in the same situation. The story starts with a party. Then there’s a storm. After the storm, a body is found. Instead of having a guy go into mental decline, we can have the guy try to figure out who done it before anyone else dies. I remembered my dream this morn

  Song mood: Hazy Shade of Winter by the Bangles. I finished listening to Robert Aickman’s The Unsettled Dust . For the most part, I enjoyed it. His style of writing is difficult to follow. He doesn’t write straight forward. It’s the time period he’s from and the type of story that he presents. Like the last story in the collection, I’m sure that it’s about werewolves and he’s playing with the words ‘lichen’ and ‘lycan.’ And yet with this ambiguity, his words seem to just roll along. So he is purposely ambiguous but the words flow in a certain rhythm. Tomorrow, Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia comes out. I will be listening to that tomorrow. I finished reading The Hand by Georges Simenon. It was different than what I was thinking it was going to be. I kept expecting some sort of twist, like it was some sort of mystery with twist. Instead it was a chronicle of a man’s mental breakdown. I was disappointed that there wasn’t something to solve. It was well written though.

  Song mood: Follow Your Arrow by Kacey Musgraves. I don’t want to do anything or be anything today. I made the mistake of asking for extra spicy salsa for my tacos last night. Basically it was a diced up habanero in water. Which, burned while eating. And continued to burn through out my intestines. It upset my bowels the whole night and well into the early morning. I woke up early as well. If I had a significant other, she would have tugged on my shirt and I would have asked for something like salsa verde, or mild salsa. Currently, I’m reading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook . I think this will help out with writing different poems. Though I like The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo, I’m hoping this has more of the nuts and bolts of writing poems.  I think of Richard Hugo as my grandfather in writing poetry.  He taught Art Homer poetry and Art Homer taught me. My thoughts on my fantasy series: I’m thinking of writing a collection of short stories and novellas. I originally though

  Song mood: Yellow by Coldplay. So I start out with wanting to do nothing. But feeling I have a lot of things to do. To write. So I sit and think about what I want to do and to write. Then I read the ‘I must not fear’ litany from Dune . My Dune shirt will arrive on Tuesday and I want to be prepare to make my video. I wrote tomorrows poem. It doesn’t quite go with the picture, but I’m okay with that. Not sure what I’ll do this weekend, probably what I do every weekend and it’ll be another long holiday that I didn’t plan for. Though, the following weekend I will be in Fargo because of my mum’s birthday. I can foresee another trip to visit my mum on Christmas. That trip, I won’t be excited for, because I’m not a big fan of driving during winter. Currently, I’m listening to Robert Aickman’s The Unsettled Dust . I knew what I was getting into before listening to it, but still, it’s a bit ambiguous. One of the stories was like, write a story about vampires without mentioning vampires