I have created a monster

And it is alive, eating people out there.
He crushes dogs, with his bare fists and then,
he tosses them to the streets, as if they were a consumed cig.
Then, he sings all nigh long, old fashioned songs.
He prefers jazz & blues, while he is bathed in moonlight.
Ray Charles never sounded so creepy.

He dances, from dawn till dusk.
And yawns, and says meow as if it was an elephant.
His name is Ernest, and eats little children,
with catsup and a little bit of salt.

I really tried...

I really, really, reaaaaally tried to sleep. But I couldn't.
Now it's 5 in the morning and I bet my ass that I will get sleepy about 8 or 9 AM.

So I checked my options, I could do some stuff I consider "important" or I could turn left, turn right, look at the ceiling or twist my myself in the bed until I get really tired.

Yeah, the second option (and derivates) is wiser and more entertaining than the first one, but trust me... I'm still an insomniac bastard.

So, what am I doing here, you might ask?

Um...
Missing my girlfriend, that's one.
Releasing blogs of my friends to the public, that's two.
Wondering what can I do about the ridiculous amount of entries in my spanish blog, that's three. (I can't even export them! the connection crashes before it finishes).
Still reading Dostoievsky, that's four.
And wondering if I should start reading blogs in other languages to learn from them... not english, but german, italian and french blogs, that's five. (Heck, I even considered japanese for Christ' sake!)
Ummm, listening music, but that's... common, yeah, count it as zero.

Hell.

His brother's keeper

A pulsating vibration. You wonder, I wonder.
I wonder what I want to say this time.
What I want to write, or what should I tell this time.
I do not have, really, anything interesting to say.

Ummm, maybe, should I talk about that I will return to school soon?
That I do not really want to, because... ummmm, I am afraid!
Neh, I am just a lazy cheap.

Should I talk about about my girlfriend?
She is wonderful, simply put.

I am out of words, but I am doing this because it needs discipline.
I need to remember how to think and speak. And I should write something longer, to prove myself I can still do it. That I can improve it.

My girlfriend bought me, this weekend, a great edition of "Quijote". I really love it, I have been wandering through its pages. I can not wait to read it. But still, I am stuck with Dostoievsky ("The Karamazov Brothers"), and I want to finish it before I start reading something else. I have always found classics very difficult, mainly because I respect them. I eat classics very slowly and avoid doing that "400 hundred pages in a couple of hours" crap, because I want to learn from them.

How and why. Why and How.

That is important.
That is what counts in a book, always.

Do not go gently into that good night

Have you heard Dylan Thomas reciting his own poem? It is simply amazing. Lately I have his voice ringing in my ear: "Do not go gently into that good night". As I walk, as I sip my coffee, as I am silent, just staring at nothing. He had a powerful voice, and his poems show a complex mind in work. Could it be a bluff? Could it be that he knew how to put the words so people like me ask and think what I have just said? Yes, I bet he knew.

In the last two weeks, I checked out the texts in my spanish blog and corrected mistakes in some of them. It's weird, I do not tend to edit myself. Lack of discipline? Maybe it is. Blogging taught me that a text must be well written, no matter how superficial or stupid it is. Editing myself has shown me a little bit of who I am: my flaws and the good stuff I might have. I also saw what lacks and what is exceeding in past texts.

That's how a writer should be (thanks to Carver and Hemingway): Be brief, be concise, do not exceed, do not tell what people does not need to hear.

Before I felt asleep

I found out that I was excited about this new project. In this book I have created for myself, I discovered that I could write about anything, perhaps everything, that has been going to my mind. When I went up to my room, to try to sleep (i'm an insomniac bastard), a rush of thoughts went through and I felt like I could write anything. I know the reasons of that sudden "discovery". Everyone reads me in my other blog (the spanish one). Family, close friends, co-workers. I struggle everyday with what I can write.

English opens another door, not everyone reads it.

And also, not everyone looks for every blog that a person has.

Yeah, this will be another journal for my pleasure. And it's going to be a difficult one, because I have stopped thinking in another language. Today, I tried to practice it: When I went to the bank, while I was walking, I tried to think every sentence in english I could use. When I saw a red car in the street, I thought about it, who might be in it (a famous tv-star, a lonely teenager, or just a regular guy returning to work from lunch time). I saw the trees, I respect them. How they grow to reach a polluted sky and their branches extend to reach every point of clean air they could get.

City trees could survive, along with the cockroaches, a nuclear bomb. (Neh, that's over-reacting, over-romantic and over-ridiculous).

It's not hard to write in english... as soon as you start to think it. Now I have to improve my language, I remember a teacher who gave me the advise to read essays. I might do that, that way I'll improve my grammar and syntaxis. Also, I'll acquire new vocabulary with that. And then... who knows?, tomorrow I could write poetry with a sense of aesthetics and something interesting to tell.

So I guess this is it...

To think and express in other language (english), turned out to be very difficult to me. The main reason for this is that I'm studying english literature at UNAM. Somehow I got lost, and whenever I try to create or write something in this language, I put myself in hold because I know I'm not so good as some writers I have read. I lack discipline, I lack a lot of vocabulary and also I'm aware that I don't have the elegance or facility as an english, american, scottish or irish man.

When I read a poem in english, I'm often amazed by how they sound when someone reads them and a poem in english usually presents interesting images in my head. It's discovering that something different can be made, can be written or can be felt. It's wonderful. I ask myself if I'll ever be capable of writing something like it, to watch my own enviroment like Auden watched England or to preach like Dylan Thomas. I wonder if I could write an Eliot's Wasteland of my onw land.

Wether someone reads it or not, like it or not, despise it or not... it doesn't matter...

So I guess this is it, like the title above reads... this blog is a test. A test of skills, creativity, intelligence or to leave a fear behind. It's also my own playground, and an opportunity to tell the story of a common guy who mostly writes in spanish. The purpose is to feel free in this language, to learn how to handle it and also, to learn how to play with it if that's ever possible. Another thing I would like to accomplish is to be at peace with both worlds (english and spanish), to end this struggle and mix the split persona, make it a whole.

This should be a fun ride... I hope someone enjoys it as much as me.