Received my Kindle today

I must say that I'm impressed. It took only 3 days to arrive. Normally  it takes more than one week to receive packages I order. More often two. The first thing I did after unpacking it was to order BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled and The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology because they're the first two publications of a friend of mine Ben Lelièvre. You can read him at Dead End Follies. He's a smart and interesting guy to read. I guarantee it's worthwhile 

I'm going to finish Gone, baby, gone by Dennis Lehane first and then I'll attack these two collections of short stories and I must say they look as promising as Ben's future as a writer.

Also, The Lost Children is for the benefit of PROTECT and Children 1st Scotland.

I'll probably blog my thoughts about them in a near future. Stay tune and get your copies on the kindle store.

By the way, the Kindle looks like a kick-ass gadget. I might had just got it out of the box and quite frankly I wasn't really informed about it when I ordered it. I just did. But man this thing is cool. It looks like a toy I had back in the days I was a kid. You know the drawing board that worked with magnets and little marbles trap behind the screen. You had to turn the two knobs left and right in order to draw something. Well the kindle sure is more precise than this crap toy but the screen feels the same. I think I'll enjoy it a lot.

Edit : My bad, I reread myself and it sounded like the whole collections were written by Ben. Actually he wrote a story in each of the book mentioned. As for all others writers, I must admit I don't know much about them and will have one or two more clues after reading their stories. 

I'm finally back

I know I know. My last post was in June and it said that a new site was coming. My apologies. I had other worries. I worked a lot, limiting my free time. On top of that, I've experienced a very frustrating and depressing period. I wasn't complaining or anything but I simply shut out. When I wasn't drunk and playing bass I was sleeping. I don't think I need to explain myself more than that but I'll add a little something.

I went through many strong emotions and you may know, if you read my blog that I often associate humans with animals. In order to survive, many animals rely on violence. Over the past few months I had many violent fantasies. Don't get me wrong I didn't fell for them. I'm civilized. I know I can't use violence to take care of my problems. You can't simply punch someone in the face, even if he deserved it but you can feel the need to be violent. To act like an animal. To let your frustrations out. 

Humans are violent in many ways other than the physical way. One of them is psychological. If you can get in trouble for using physical violence, you won't get much, in the sense of the law, about the psychological. You can fight back but for many reasons, if your attacks don't hit the target then you still feel unavenged. Why is it important? I don't know. If someone comes to me and punch me. I may not counter and call the police instead. That's still using something violent in response. Call it civilized or smart in a way to solve the issue, for me it's still retaliation. You put the other in trouble by calling the police. Look at the big and the small history and you'll notice the same pattern : someone get offended and he retaliates. That's how it goes.

So when you can't find anything within what's socially accepted to retaliate against someone who hurt you what do you do? You get over it. Well for me, it was to work long hours, drink a lot and rock by bass. 

Now I'm back and I'll have a lot more to say as this shitty phase turns out to be an inspiration. 

Smooth Criminals Reading Challenge 2012

I was invited to sign up for the smooth criminals reading challenge by Ben Lelièvre from Dead End Follies and I gladly accepted for two main reasons. The first one is for the fun of it. I've never participated in a challenge like this. Second, I really started reading more recently so I had many titles to choose from. Among the books I've read so far, very few were crime novels. I thought this challenge to be the perfect pretext to really get into it and get a feel of the intense primal violence buried deep down inside me, inside most of us.

So here's my choices

Hardboiled classic

The chill by Ross Macdonald

Noir classic

The killer inside me by Jim Thompson

Prison book

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Book written by a writer who did time

A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation by Saint Thomas More

Book with a psychopath protagonist

The Collector by John Fowles

Gothic novel

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Classic crime novel

The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon

The "Why the hell am I doing this to myself?" book

Plato: Republic by Plato

If you're interested in signing in to this challenge hosted at Dead End Follies for 2012, simply click on the image above.

Twitter and news

Nowhere Near Normality is now on twitter. Follow me @NoNearNormality. I'll use twitter mainly for three things.

First, like anyone else does with their blog, I'll tweet new blog entries on Nowhere Near Normality.

Second, I'll tweet ideas worth of sharing. I often have ideas that I don't blog about but would like to write. twitter's the place. I also want to try to express a thought in fewer words to enhance my writing skills.

Third, I want to use twitter to communicate more often with the community. Other blog writers and readers of Nowhere Near Normality.

Also, I want to rewrite and revamp my blog. When I started blogging. I did it without any expectations. I really thought I would quit after a while. On the contrary, now I want to dedicate myself more. So I'll refine my work here, shine it a little.

By the way any advice on blogging like putting pictures with each entry and make weekly/monthly "rendez-vous" with the readers is welcome. I never put much attention on making Nowhere Near Normality a good blogging experience but it'll change.

Burried frustrations of a sociopath looser

Lately, I've been feeling a bit distant from the melee. Any time I was with friends I wished I was somewhere else reading, thinking, being alone. It's been over a month now that I act like a unsocial savage hermit. A few friends expressed their frustrations about my recent behavior and quite frankly it felt like it justified my isolation buzz.

It made me think about what others acts like you owe them your presence like friendship is meant to be consumed before it burns like it's a cigarette. If you don't breathe smoke once in a while your wasting it. For the heavy smoker type I understand. But I'm not as addicted to cigarette as most people are. The very truth about this, about people having expectations about what you should do, when you should want to see them and do activities, is that I loathe the feeling it gives me. I might have been that guy at some point in my life but I remember having fights with friends about this kind of situations since a long time. What I don't get is this expectation thing. Like doing what they want is more important than doing what I want only because most people are "smokers" and it is supposed to be normal. I've been arguing with a lot of people over the last 5 or 6 years whenever I felt like doing things on my own for a while and no one had better then "we're friend I want to see you" kind of arguments. For me, it's more like using emotions to get want they want. Quite frankly I never understood this. If they were my friends, why they couldn't respected what I wanted instead of insisting to get what they wanted. 

Recently, there is one friend I keep in touch almost daily. I've been doing things with her that satisfy my social needs for the moment. I don't feel like seeing the others and that's not because they mean nothing to me. They mean something, only for now, I'm having this reading frenzy. It's taking the rest of my free time and I honestly prefer reading than seeing them. I see you coming a mile away with your balance speech. Hey I got this served a million time and I just don't buy it. I do want I want, others do what they want. When what I want is what others want then let's do it. When it don't, why do people keep on trying to convince me using questionnable manipulation techniques. 

I think that's some sort of competition to find out who the leader is. If I make you do things I want to do more often then I'm the leader. I don't think people do that conciously. I think it's an animal behavior that people can't really control ... if they haven't thought of it. If I can tell you a little about myself. At a younger age, I was a competitive, stupid asshole. As I grew up, I went from being most of the time the leader to become a forced follower. It gave me many many frustrations and that explain why I loathe this kind of competition now that I'm no longer competitive. If you're wondering, I'm still an asshole by the way. 

So I can't tell I'm better, or I understood something people don't get so I'm clever. I'm not. I'm just a frustrated looser that sometimes wants to be on his own. Man I love books ... more than real people sometimes.