So in an effort to put my money more in the vicinity of my mouth, I've started up a Tumblr blog where I'll hopefully be writing 2,000+ words of fiction a day. Following Stephen King's advice, that is, or at least his routine or something. I've done two days in a row now, so that's more than enough to go ahead and mention it here.

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I hear a lot of cool, trendy people use Tumblr actively, so I'm sure there's someone out there right now who totally wants to follow me on Tumblr. Go ahead, do it. I'll wait.

I can't guarantee that my writing will be any good, since in the effort of not actually putting any effort into anything, I'll mostly just be churning out 2,000 words as rapidly as I possibly can and then publishing it with little to no proof reading. (That's how I write this blog, and you're still reading it for some reason, so I can't be wrong.) As time goes on I'll either become a better writer, or you'll all become so frustrated with my typos and incoherent jumbles of words that no one ever reads anything I've written and I die cold, alone, and unread.

Yes, this post is almost entirely self-promotion. Is it really self-promotion if you don't make any money off of it? I don't know. Someone told me on the Plus that I was "a better writer than [they] expected". I thought that was a nice compliment. Sort of. In the same way that, "Wow, you only smell kind of bad, I expected you to smell like fresh dog shit," is a nice compliment.

In the last year I have finally started to feel like I'm becoming a man. I don't know if this is something most guys deal with, or if it's just something left to scrawny, awkward intellectuals who've always felt tiny and emasculated their whole lives.

It seems to almost entirely rooted in what I look like with my shirt off. Two or three years ago I'd stare dejectedly at myself in the mirror after a shower: That's the chest of a small boy, I'd think to myself. No real muscular definition, just flat chested and bony.

Now I can look at myself and while I don't necessarily look like my idea of a man---and who for that matter looks anything like what their idea of themselves should be---I look like I am well on my way. I can look at myself and think: Yes, if I was a woman, I would totally want to run my hands over my chest while I fucked the ever-loving Jesus out of myself. No homo, but that thought does bring comfort. If I'd do me, then others would, too.

Confidence is a fickle thing. I've never lacked the knowledge that I can charm, but without a feeling of genuine masculinity I would always be meek, waiting for my cue, never making the first move. There are days now where I feel like I have the ability, at even the slightest hint of interest, to pull a woman into my arms without startling her, tilt my head to kiss her, and find an eager, waiting mouth.

But the opportunity rarely arises, and I feel OK with that. I guess another aspect of the newfound mannish confidence is that I know some things are worth waiting for. Some things don't come along until you aren't looking for them. Some things don't even know to be interested until you don't express any interest in them. Some things are skittish, and entirely based in chance. Any attempt to coax them along, I think I should have learned by now most definitely, often simply ends in heartbreak, or at least a numb-headed regret. (The best advice never given to me: If you want something, stay the hell away from it.)

I've always been curious as to whether getting older is something you truly feel beyond the physical, whether you wake up one day and just suddenly feel the age you are, because I've always felt so young. Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel my age. I feel young, strong, and full of promise, yet still constrained by the fact that I am no longer a child. My bones and joints aren't rubber any longer. Almost nothing is necessarily easy, but there is a joy in the challenge. There is a joy in overcoming obstacles even if you set them in your path yourself. Maybe this is what it is to feel like a man.

I'm reading again, and that's the most important thing that I want to get across. Somehow I realized, at some point---maybe it's the motivation of a pretty girl who I want to understand better by immersing myself in the things she loves, so even though that she's far away I can feel like I'm getting to know her in some other intimate way in the absence of feel, of smell; or maybe it's the fact that I have more free thought, that the absence of the constant stress, anxiety, or onslaught of bullshit of my last relationship (an onslaught he was unwilling to admit to during the ordeal) has left my brain free to pursue other, more life altering things---that I should start doing what I love.

I guess if I was to attribute this change in me to any one thing in my life, it would be Google Hangouts. Yes, Google's new video conferencing thing has been the catalyst for genuine change. I'm not an out-going guy, particularly, and I've always found myself so exceedingly awkward that if you were to describe me in fiction you could say I was, perhaps, crippled over in the shoulders with awkwardness, or at least I always felt that way. To imagine myself on camera, in front of people at all, much less embarrassing myself on guitar with a couple of internet strangers watching, well, it wasn't something I ever thought would go well.

But, actually, it's a lot of fun. The fact that people are watching me and my friend dick around on instruments makes me want to try harder to make it sound like music, and that's encouraging, because if I try, I can. I'm not a lead guitarist, or even a decent rhythm guitarist, or maybe any sort of guitarist at all but damn, I can play enough chords to fake it.

Then there's the beautiful girl. There's this thing about distance, it makes you fantasize and fetishize every moment of your waking life, involving her in it in small ways. When you're reading, and you're trying to put yourself into some sort of writer-ly state where the world is poetry and the wind is full of hope, it's amplified something like eleventy-billion-fold. I want to write epic pieces of literature of entire lives, each one different, that her and I have lived. Some happy, some tragic, some comfortably mundane. I want to say: This is what I can give you! Take your pick, any single one, and just because I'm so awesome, I wrote one for every possible outcome and course you could ever imagine... That's how much you inspire me.

It's an amazing thing because it's all, well, just an idea. I have an idea of her. She exists in my mind as a color (a soft, light pink), a sound (one too private to mention), and a coal that burns hot in my imagination when I'm not distracting it with someone else's written word. But the feel of her is imagined by sight, and the smell of her can't be imagined at all. The important things aren't there.

I don't know what it's like to walk alongside her. Will her arm fall into mine, so that we lock arms more than we just hold hands at a bumpy distance? Maybe she's just the right height for us to walk huddled close together, like that Bob Dylan album cover I don't even have to link to because you've already imagined it. It's silly to think these things though, or play in them for very long at all, because, well, what am I? A teenager? While I'm broke, I might as well be.

But it's fun, and it's inspirational. I was reading Stephen King's "On Writing", having never actually read any of his writing before, and he talks of always having someone to write for. Someone whose opinion actually matters, the person he's trying to impress. I like to imagine she's the opinion the matters, and that's healthy. For me.

Because what I should be doing is what she inspires me to do. Isn't that the definition of a muse? I don't think I've had one in years.

I feel like that no matter what happens from here on out, there's only one direction to go in. That's a relief. To think that several months ago I was about to sign myself up for the kind of suburban horror story I just read about (in Revolutionary Road) is shocking, and sad, but ultimately it didn't happen so I guess... yay! No need to dwell on it now.

Onward and upward.

But then!

First, to not be unfair to White Denim, and use their marvelous song without saying something nice about them, let me say this: White Denim's latest album "D" might just be the best album of the year so far. I'm sure I've listened to it more than anything else. The problem with me saying anything about it is that my opinion mirrors Pitchfork's opinion, mostly, except where they get kind of backhanded and bitchy, fill that part with joyful exuberance.

"D" is a celebration, for me especially, because it does something right that almost no album ever does, and that is that it is properly paced. It starts off strong, and then it just gets stronger. If there's a lull in the middle, it's such a beautiful wonderful lull that I've never noticed at all. Then, right when most albums are really starting to wind down into the really bad, slow, crappy songs most bands tack onto the end of their albums soaking up time, White Denim releases a fucking nuclear bomb of awesome. The last two songs on the album might be the best on it, on an album of already really good songs, and that's how an album should be.

Everyone else's albums just suck ass in comparison. "D" is paced to perfection. God bless White Denim, I wouldn't change a thing about it.