NZ Cocaine helpline Ad

I watched this ad a couple of years ago, but I still haven't forgotten it. Bloody brilliant concept and execution.

And that sound! Simply brilliant.

The comma of it

She sat there in the haze of the mobile light, darkness leaking in around the edges of her sanity. The earwig had warned her that it wouldn’t be easy, but who would have thought that the memories would rise up against her?

In the corner they boxed with common sense as their referee. She wasn’t doing a very good job, though. It was the Alzheimer’s that did it. It built a nest in a tree of my subconscious, always collecting the shiny trinkets that would have slipped through the cracks.

Eat, drink and by merry the cannibals told each other, but the magazines weren’t the same thing. Skin and bones were one thing, but what was the point of print, the zebra asked.

Your mind, you see, tries to connect the dots, tries to create a story, but the tale has been lost, with Eeyor asking his friends to find it. That’s what comes with depression, I explained, that’s why the tooth fairy stopped collecting outstanding payments. The medication didn’t help, it just made us think of cataclysms, nude women slick with sweat and apple pie.

Through a hole in time I peeked out at the whole of it, looking for that part which made it all tick, but it’s difficult to find the timer after the explosion. When I find him he tells me, You could have warned me about the questions. You could have told me that ruling the universe would be mainly an administrative job. I didn’t get any choice, you know, it was forced upon me.

But nobody really believes he’s a reluctant ruler, so I gave him half of my lunch. Two sandwiches with cheese and afterthought. No cigarettes, though. I need those for after I’ve given birth to reality. It’s a tough thing, forcing everything out through your mind's anus, but somebody has to do it.

Hypocrisy

I’ve heard it said that those features we hate most in others are actually features that we ourselves posses. Now that probably isn’t true, but it does sound good. Take for instance one mate of mine, he’s consistently critical of the Asian way of avoiding a situation rather than confronting it. He always laments loudly about how many Asian people do not know how to deal with confrontation.

The problem is that he is guilty of that himself. This evening, for instance, I tried to reach him to meet up, but he apparently decided that he didn’t want to talk, so he chose not to pick up his phone.

I know that, because after a few hours of him not returning my messages I said ‘never mind, enjoy your trip’ (yes, he’s leaving for a week tomorrow) and not soon after he sent back a message saying ‘thanks and I’ll see you when you come back’.

It kind of put a dampener on my whole evening, which is a shame as tomorrow I don’t have to start work till six o’clock in the evening, so I should he trying to have a good time. Go figure. Well the world is full of little disappointments.

No, that's it. If you're expecting something uplifting to follow that statement you've come to the wrong blog.

an•thro•po•mor•phism [an-thruh-puh-mawr-fiz-uhm]

n. Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.

www.dictionary.com

Sometimes you read essays that just change the way you look at things. This essay right here was one of those for me. It explained certain concepts about AI that I hadn't considered before and as such made me reevaluate what I thought about AIs and the future, both concepts that play a role in my creative thinking.

So, if you're interested in the future of intelligence and don't mind a bit of a mental slog, make sure you read it.

On Motivation

I’ve got a serious problem with my projects. I start a whole lot, but I don’t finish very many at all. When I first get started I’m always filled with enthusiasm, but then when the project moves on I start to lose interest. Soon I go down from working on it every day to working on it every other day, then one day a week, soon it slows down even more and after a while it just stalls.

Take the book I’m trying to write, for example. I have now not written a word on it for over two weeks, having got distracted with a computer game. It’s (fortunately) still banging around in my head, which means there is still a good chance that I will restart it, but it worries me. I put so much effort into these projects to begin with, but it all comes to naught.

How will I ever get where I want to go if I can’t finish anything on my own? I can’t hope for people to always push me. I must learn to be my own motivator. I’ve had enough of twenty entry blogs spread around the internet that started with a good idea but never made it any further. I have to push myself and I have to use as my motivation, if nothing else, the fact that if I don’t then I’ll be stuck in obscurity for ever.

That is something that particularly frightens me.

In the beginning

So this is how it all starts, in the end, with a sentence on a page, with time betraying itself all too readily. That’s the way of the thing, really, that's how things go. You can't escape the finality of progression, not in words, anyway. It defines us, gives us our history.

Different art forms have different limitations. Most art is confined to only showing a moment. Not so with words. Words have the opposite problem; they can't help but show the passage of time, as the reader moves across the page.

But never mind that. That is for later. Now it’s time for other things.

I feel I should explain myself, but somehow I don’t think I should. I have done it so many times before. Always explain your purpose, at the beginning, and then lose it as things progress. I believe it has been my original purpose that has always held back my work from evolving into what it could be.

So many things begun and so very few finished. That’s time for you, again. It turns enjoyment into routine and adventures into chores.

So I will leave things undefined. I will see where natural progression takes me. I aim to set no aim and to allow myself the freedom to do what I will within the restraints of the public domain.

Sometimes it’s just good to write and let this be the place where I write it.

Unexplained and unfettered.