THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

My power of memory has weakened a lot this year because without going back into the archives of my blog to see what I've written about things I've done, thought, felt – not all that much comes to mind… oh wait, hit the pause button for a second… i’m getting a flash of memories now, like that infamous encapsulation we are all promised to have in the moments before we die, i remember now! you know, this was actually a pretty fantastic year for me and i don’t have anything at all to complain about it. all those tweets and statuses you read about “glad this one’s over”, “hope next year’s better”… patooey! I only hope that next year is HALF as great as this one was! I got to travel three times this year! twice to Los Angeles when i got to spend a week each time visiting two of my oldest and best friends on this planet; Alan and Vicki. i got to take my life’s work to Los Angeles and  Chicago (Chicago was the third place i travelled to this year) which produced stupendous results. I g...

well, i must have bitched and moaned loudly enough in that last entry that i got the attention of someone somewhere, and my record breaking voice/phone silence has been broken. long story short, someone i’ve connected with on the internet felt interested (and comfortable) enough to get on the phone with a stranger. a really beautiful, and talented (photographer) lady that lives in South Carolina, that i’ve met through the tumblr blog system got me talking the other night (for 3 hours!). she did most of the talking, heheh, but it was sweet all the same. it’s not a love-connection by any means, which is nice too. no pressure. the really cool thing though? she loves to send text messages and she is the first person i’ve known in all the years that i’ve owned cam-phones that enjoys sending photographs back and forth!!!  you can check out her tumblr blog here: InnocentHeathen She doesn’t really show her own photography here, but just samplings of the type of art/photography that she fi...

had a bit of a reality check last night during an online chat with a friend that lives so far away (geographically) karmic odds are that i’ll most likely never meet this person in the flesh, when it hit me, i don’t talk much. and i mean that literally. spoken words do not exit my mouth except on rare occasions of being polite with shopkeepers. i don’t speak. there really is no one “special” in my life that i feel comfortable enough to have conversations using my voice with. i think it is just a phase consistent with the season, although that’s a faulty excuse, argument. it’s not just because it’s cold and wet outside that i don’t feel like talking. it’s deeper than that. i’ve crossed a line, probably many, many years ago where i transformed from an external, worldly conversationalist to a silent observer and listener. i not only do not strike up conversations with strangers at bus stops or in cafes, but i no longer feel a need to have conversations with close compatriots. i used to hav...

this is a hard post to write. i can’t figure out how to get started. it’s going to go deep and i may say some things i’ll later regret making public, but i won’t mention names and most likely anyone that i may upset won’t read this anyway. it’s all about me, anyway, not them. so i found out a few hours ago that one of the people that have most strongly influenced my personal creative instincts in this world, in this lifetime, passed away. he is someone that has been living reclusively for a number of decades now, but the art/music he created in his early/productive years is something that i consider to be of grand merit. he is the musician Captain Beefheart. his music got under my skin when i first listened to it as an 18 year old and i was fortunate enough to be able to see him perform live twice in San Francisco (1977 at The Great American Music Hall, 1978 at The Old Waldorf). The first time I saw his band play was one of those experiences that go down in your books as classic and ...

Aronofsky’s films are not easy to watch. Never have been, never (God willing) will be. The box office allure of Black Swan rides on the wings of the star power of Natalie Portman and if this is what it takes to get people to crawl out of their sheltered, watered down film going experiences, more power to Daron for choosing her for the role. In my opinion, Natalie was perfectly cast. Role of a lifetime? Umm, maybe not quite yet, but she beat the shit out of this character with such ferocity, I’m still struggling to catch my breath as images flash through my mind from last night’s viewing. Strange episode this has been, waiting for this film to open. It is one of the first films in a long time that I was ready on opening day to be first in line to buy a ticket to see. Yet the distributors chose to only release it in major cities on December 3rd, and made the rest of the smaller venues in America wait a week. In that week of waiting, a lot of my anticipatory excitement diminished. So muc...

two things are pissing me off today. the main one is that BLACK SWAN is only playing in two theaters in the entire San Francisco Bay Area. that’s a two hour ride into and out of the city on BART and then fighting the odds that every other sad-sack like me that wants to see it tonight won’t be there in line too. why the hell do they build up all this hype to get EVERYONE to want to go see it and then choke us off? freaking ridiculous. the only thing i can figure is that it’s a ploy by the movie studios to get everyone excited about seeing a movie tonight/this weekend and then leaving us to go see something else, like 127 HOURS. i know i should go see 127 HOURS but i don’t know if i’m really up for it. i mean, i should man up and just do it. RIGHT?! the other rant i have is about my cell phone company. they displeased me twice this week. firstly, they told me that i used over 5gb of data on my unlimited data plan and that for the rest of the current billing period they are going to “res...

well, i was really trying to stay separate from emotions related to being celebratory about finishing nanowrimo this year, and for the most part all i’m feeling are tiny blips on my heart-monitor. my energy has really switched into a mellower gear though. two days now with no new writing. not going to let this go on more than another day or so. going to the gym tonight for a steam and soak and then seeing the chiropractor in the morning. those things should help revive my body a little bit from all the tension i’ve accumulated in my back over the last 30 days. i do have a new photo shoot scheduled for this coming Sunday, which i’m actually pretty excited about. two sisters that approached me from modelmayhem; Just Manders and Damara Lynn . this will be a refreshing treat. i do have a lot of new ideas and ambitions for this new novel and think that perchance, the 50,000+ words i just wrote may only be one/third of what else i have in my mind to write for this story. although, after i...

it took a little bit of time and no alcohol or tobacco to figure out how to deal with this unexpected juncture that i faced yesterday. i think what is really wrong is that i'm just being flooded with the emotions of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion from pushing out this story so rapidly, and now with the project deadline approaching the normal tendencies to "finish it up quick before the bell rings" are infringing upon me. fighting these urges is taking some work because really, i've written so much now, over 47,000 words, it would be easy to just slope off in the detailed style i've been entrenched in and give you a short and easy closing. i really want to keep up the style i've started with though and take the story to it's rightful end. which will probably need another 10-15,000 words to do properly. i am not a normal nanowrimo-er though. i don't socialize with any nanowrimo-ers. i don't plan on going to the TGIO (thank god it's o...

the unexpected has happened. and maybe it’s all because i did i took yesterday off from writing. i am such a freaking creature of habit, to a fault really. i was ready to go out last night to McDonald’s of all places, to have a cup of coffee and work for an hour on the novel. but it being Thanksgiving, not even McDonald’s was open in my town. i am ahead in my word count so taking one day off from writing would not put me behind schedule. that was not the worry. so today, here i am at the library. about 40 hours since i last wrote on Wednesday evening. i pretty much knew where i was going to go with the writing today, and i did. wrote 500 words in about 20 minutes, and was quite pleased with how it sounded. up until i wrote the last paragraph. the last paragraph. oh god. something slipped. my tension that had been built up, the schedule i had been maintaining, the tunnel i was traveling through with pinpoint vision… i knew exactly where i was going. i knew all month long where i was g...

i’ve been sleeping so heavily lately. not falling asleep until 3am, finally getting out of bed at noon. i spend the hours between 4-8pm working on my nanowrimo novel. not doing any work on my backlog of photo editing because i’ve shifted so far into this verbal creative mode, i can’t see the colors properly on my screen and when i try to edit an image i feel dissatisfied. rather than put out something half-assed, i put out nothing instead. i’m just that way with my photography. thus why i stopped with the Mairead edits. the first few days after her shoot i was buzzed, and also my eyes were crisp with the vision of having just been out there with her, so i was able to excitedly burn through some samples from the shoot. there are so many more images of her yet to show you though. in due time, i hope. and this is the curse of all my shoots now. when i shoot 1,000-3,000 images of one model in an afternoon’s session there are so, so many that i never get to show anyone. i have a list of mod...

it’s late in november, that much i’m sure of. oh, and what a fantastic november she is. she’s cold, wet and howling like a banshee outside but i’ve got a roaring fire lit inside of me and we dance together like forgotten lovers. i just wanted to take a few moments away from my nanowrimo to switch up my mind a little bit, and say a little bit about how it’s going. one thing i like about writing is it’s unpredictable nature. many, many days this month i have sat down at the beginning of my daily writing time with a fair idea of where i was going with the storyline, but by the time my few hours of tapping into it’s veins is completed, i discover new elements and directions that i previously knew nothing, or very little about beforehand. this, to me, is quite rewarding and is part of what gives me impetus to continue writing and creating. it can be combinations of either finding new depth in my characters, or new directions in the storyline. but the best reward is when i am surprised by ...

this is a cool little chart that is new at nanowrimo.org. i’m doing well, but not as well as i should be. i’m still managing to keep ahead of the daily minimum word requirement, but this is only day 10 and there are still 20 days to go. i forgot what a freaking marathon this task is. the content i’ve been pouring out the past two days has been really uninspired, memory work. i surprise myself by the things i’ll go into ridiculous detail about when there are other elements that could be of more interest to the reader that i’ll just breeze over. and i’m appalled on a daily basis at how poor my ability to describe a visual scene is. i am so far away from being the real writer that i want to be. i have got to start to carry this desire to write over and beyond the extent of this annual folly that is nanowrimo and start to put some serious hours into improving my word craft. i’ve been starving for visual stimulation and have been spending hours and hours surfing through tumblr for recre...

so far nanowrimo has been going excellently for me this year. it’s only day 5 and i’ve written over 10,000 words. that’s 2,000 words a day average, which exceeds the 1,667 minimum daily requirement to make 50,000 words by the end of the month. the thing that feels so good right now is it’s like a tap has been opened and words are flowing like water. certainly, i have enough story inside of me and a strong enough desire to put it down on paper to be able to accomplish this feat. what saddens me is that i do not have this enthusiasm for writing every single day of the year. what i’m getting an insight into is the lifestyle of accomplished writers that talk about going to their offices and writing for 4-6 hours a day, every day. for what i’m working on writing right now, it would take that sort of commitment to turn this into a professional piece of literature. i am just in blow-torch mode right now, blazing these words out in story fashion rather recklessly because of the regulations of ...

in a matter of hours (i’ve stopped counting – well, not really, i keep peeking at the countdown clock at NANOWRIMO’s home page about 3 times a day) the madness will begin. and i do mean madness. i feel pretty motivated for the project this year, you know, write a 50,000 word “novel” in just 30 days. have a story nestled in the recesses of my mind just waiting to be released by my fingers onto the electronic screen. and i think it will be a pretty good story too. it will be a little similar to my last successful nanowrimo attempt, Cemetery Man; Requiem for a Loner because a lot of the story will tap into real life experiences but i’m going to try to take it a little bit closer to the edge of real fiction and create a story for you that has NOT happened in my real life. my story-telling language will not be much different than my last book. hopefully that will be to the liking of my established readers, and hopefully it may attract some new readers. i’ve been thinking for awhile why ...

Today decided to find the grave site of Elizabeth Short. It was easier to find than I had previously been led to believe it would be. I brought her flowers and lit a candle which I hid from site so that the gardeners wouldn't take it away. Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.3

This is the stairway that leads to Elizabeth Short's grave site. Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.3

I hope this movie will make me cry tonight. I learned just yesterday that someone I have strong feelings for, that her mother died recently. It's a bit of a twisted story of friendship and miscommunication in the modern age that might make this am interesting story to hear, so I may take more time to tell it at length later. Right now though I need to experience some emotions for this friend, for her loss, and for her. I miss her and sort of tossed her away when things didn't go the way I wanted them to. Some may think I'm a fool, and they'd be right. I feel like I have something to make up to her. Again, I may totally be chasing a windmill but it makes me feel good to think that I might possibly mean something to her. We'll see. Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.3

hey, thanks everyone who responded to my book sale offer. all 10 copies were snatched up within a day of my announcement, which i think is really pretty cool! if there is anyone else that wants a copy, you can always just order the book directly from the blurb website. or if there are 10 more of you out there right now that want a signed copy, let me know and i'll just order another batch. so i took email announcements of my blog updates down for a few weeks. i went underground, if you will, for awhile. remember when i quit facebook? that's when i stopped email announcements here. sometimes you just feel the need to not be seen, or not be heard. you still exist, you still need to speak your mind but it's not like you always have to know that there is someone scrutinizing your every movement. and that was really what the exodus from facebook felt like. a need to have some privacy. and some peace and quiet. and it worked! i had a very nice vacation! i got some simplicity ...

if you have not already obtained a copy of my book, now is the time to grab one! i have 10 copies for sale for $10 apiece which i will sign and pay to deliver to you. in honor of November and NaNoWriMo , whose inspiration since 2003 enabled me to write this novel. it's first come, first served. i know that most of my biggest supporters and friends already have copies, but spread the word. copies will never be this cheap again. you can either leave a comment here on the blog or email me directly if you want a copy. Cemetery Man by Daryl "Darko" Barnett | Make Your Own Book

could have fooled me. it’s hot out. not totally unheard of for mid-late October in California. it’s just that it’s when you hope for it to start to show more sings of change. we had rain last month! and now we are getting this last bake in. and no, it is not foggy outside. not even foggy at the coast side. the fog is in my head, and i don’t like it. it’s not a fog of confusion about what i want to be doing. i know WHAT things i should be busy doing, it is just a matter of making actual decisions throughout each day to do them. ideas come and flitter away before i can even make serious notation about them. the important ideas keep coming back, which is good, but to still be plagued by these feelings of inability to focus my concentration and enact a plan to fulfill what are basically stepping stones of projects is starting to depress me. i don’t blame it on the heat because it’s not THAT hot out. its just toasty and there is even a slight breeze today. no, there is something else that’...

Via: Medical Insurance

Hmmm, not a great pic so maybe you can't read the marquee, but one of the films is a horror film. Surprised? Good. You shouldn't be. This is a really great theater in Danville, California. Big screens, very comfortable reclining seats, powerful sound system, built back in the 90's for the rich Blackhawk community. And I have the whole room to myself tonight. So I'm here to see LET ME IN. really only because I want to see Chloë Moretz's performance. I'm afraid I'll otherwise be bored because the previews make it look like the remade the original Swedish film, scene for scene. RottenTomatoes gives it an 84% rating though so that must mean the director did something else right with it. I do hope I'll be surprised. Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.2

i had bigger ambitions for today than i was able to embody. it’s my dad’s birthday and i had a wild imagination that it would be great to have been able to visit his grave this year. after all, i was just in the midwest and was less than 1,000 miles away from the land of where he lived as a boy and where his remains now lay in the earth. but it was yet another act of power in this lifetime that i was unable to enact. i do the things i am supposed to do, not the things i want to do. i would have much rather spent the last 10 days in Springfield, Ohio than in the suburbs of Chicago. but my mother and i were enabled to take that trip because we were employed. it was not a trip that we made with our own monies. it is rare when i get to travel to places that i desire to visit for reasons of my own. travel is a luxury of the rich. so today, knowing that i would be home, i did have other ideas of things to do to acknowledge my father’s life, especially after the publication of my book earlie...

Our pilots flew very quickly from chicago to phoenix and got us here over 30 minutes early so we are sitting here waiting, on the plane till our scheduled departure time. 25 other passengers from chicago are going on to oakland and most of them ran into the terminal go to get some food. We're just gonna stick it out here in the hot, hot, plane. 90 degrees here in phoenix right now. Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.1

Trying to blog from my phone. Someone leave me a comment if you can see/read this? Thanks! Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.1

definitely less ambitious this year than i was last year, but that’s only because i’m a year older and have less physical energy. it just seems like i was a little more excitable last year about being here. i don’t know if that is really true though. the photo shoot i did today was unique and unusual, even for me. but i was a little bit off. i had some different ideas going into the shoot than i actually remembered to execute, which is probably ok, but i think it’s a sign of my mind and body aging. regardless, it was still an epic shoot with some remarkable models in a place where i’m pretty sure not too many shoots like this have been done before. speaking about the location, yes, Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in Midlothian, Illinois. reputed to be the most haunted cemetery in the United States. it just seemed like the perfect place to take my project to. and i think this shoot ushers in a new level of depth and commitment to my vision. my models were a couple, young lovers and i will ti...

i saw a Eugene O’Neill play earlier this week. damn, but that man had vision and could write. i really loved this play and the inner journey that the stories main character, Yank, went on in the course of his experience to discover himself. it’s a writing style that i’d like to emulate and some ways think that i already do; the solo examination of the self through self-dialogue. it was good to see the play here in Danville, even though he did not write the play while he lived here. it’s one of his earlier works. as far as me not being a very good “hairy ape”, well i only say that in reference to how thoroughly complete "Yank’s” examination of his soul was. he was a very basic man, practically an animal in his sensibilities and base of knowledge of the world and God but he was determined to come to a complete understanding and resolve about who he was and what his place in the world was. he asked the hard questions and fought hard to understand the answers. unadorned, the truth bl...

the winners of the Blurb Photography-Book-Now were announced 4 days ago. and i just heard about it today. you know what that means. they did not send me a congratulatory letter. i feel like a sore loser without the emotion. i guess i knew i would not win, or place in this contest but i hoped i would. so there is a little bit of disappointment in my heart but at the same time i sort of don’t care. i blame it on not being an educated photographer. the photographers that won this contest were really good, well trained photographers. me, i’m just a homegrown hack and i almost feel embarrassed that my submission was placed in the midst of the quality of work that these professional quality photographers shoot. really, next year i don’t think i’m even going to bother entering because my work is not going to improve enough to ever reach the quality of expertise that these judges now expect. and i do think that it comes down to the fact that these photographers are art school graduates. that ...

i’m really intrigued by the popularity of tumblr and i want to participate, well i do participate. i look at what 72 other people put on their tumblr walls and like a lot of it. i don’t like it all because some of the stuff that people post i’m embarrassed to i admit liking – but tumblr is weird. it doesn’t really encourage back and forth communication. you can say that you “like” something that someone posts or you can “reblog” something that someone posts but the way the layout is set up it’s really hard to comment about what something that someone posts makes you think. i don’t like that. it makes it like a simple voting popularity contest. and the other thing that i don’t like is that its very confusing to me about where people get the content that they post on their tumblrs. a lot of the material they post is copywritten (celebrity photographs in particular). i know that they can post a direct link to where they find their material but most times i’m too lazy to follow links back....

i just started to realize over the past few days that i’m closer to living the life of my father, well, in this case my step-father. my step-father had one friend. a guy that he worked with for 20+ years but as far as i know they didn’t have any other friends than just each other. the thing that scares me is that they were not close friends. they were just longevity friends. i remember hearing their conversations. never spoke about anything but work, football, and telling bad jokes. what i have started to notice with my male friends, the few that i have left, is that my ability to have open and deep conversations with them is starting to diminish. and it’s been rapid in just the past month. one of my oldest and best friends, i have stopped talking to altogether and really think there will be no recovery. i have been the only member of that friendship that even tried to keep communication open and now i am just tired of the cold shoulder. i’m done. my other closest, old-friend is real...

if you are reading this, it is either by chance that you’ve found yourself here, or you are one of regular readers that have come here of your own volition. i have turned off the email notifications, for now at least. i need a little more privacy and freedom to be able to write just exactly what it is that i’m thinking/feeling and i can’t do that when i think everyone thinks i want them to read/watch. this is not necessarily a posting that i would normally translate into a foreign language, to hide my most open feelings, but it is one where i just need a little bit of space to think openly/freely. one thing i want to try to pull up is a description of a dream that i had about 2 days ago. it was a dream that i had in the afternoon; untimely as i have not taken an afternoon nap in quite some time. i have started to take Welbutrin recently and have not noticed any marked changes from it’s affects but it could be the reason for afternoon tiredness. i can’t even remember exactly what day i...

i had to log on to facebook one day this week to see some photos that my son had posted of his college graduation ceremony. he called me at 4am to tell me about them and asked why i was no longer on facebook. he had quit once before, so understood my frustrations with it. it was a strange feeling though, like going back to an old, deserted high school and peeking into the old forgotten hallways. i definitely had a feeling of trespassing in a place where i had set a strict rule for myself not to break. a health rule, an alcoholic rule; NO DRINKING allowed. no fraternizing. no stirring up old memories. no looking, no touching… i don’t really miss the place that much. i have regained time for myself. one amazing sign of having control of my time back is that i’ve read almost 300 pages of a book. in just the last 10 days. for me, that is HUGE. but there are other things happening. a definite “undoing”, which i hope will lead to a recreating, somehow. i’ve made a definite attitude change a...