goals for 2010

Learn to read real literary Spanish. Learn to write in Spanish to get away from anti-poetic American thought disease. Learn basic French.

Write about myself less. Learn how to establish real characters besides good me and idiot me. Figure out what of what seems internally obvious actually needs to be expressed to make something readable. Conversely figure out what must seem pedantic to those who read it.

Delete self hate and self doubt, if impossible then channel aggressively. Get struck by lightning to become more interesting as a person. If I'm not going to drink I should probably at least smoke grass once in a while. Problem of finding that in suburbia in middle age, and navigating parent paranoia while high; possibly not worthwhile.

Try to write a story ala Keret (in the sense that it is short and sad and magical). Try to write a story ala Cortazar (in the sense that it attempts to map the esoteric worlds within the world/within the psyche that are hard to express but very real).

Ride bike to the monument to Emil Carranza out in the pines. Along the way plan a brief first novel; something like Sabato's the Tunnel in the sense that it is short, that it is inflected with darkness and beauty and philosophy. Write brief novel; around 120 pages, then wait a month and cut it to 99 before letting anyone read it.

Observe self observing son and wife; calculate emotional transformation factor in self and others. Consider other people as lab rats to be fictionalized. Consider self pre and post lightning strike; evaluate on quantitative scales with eye toward statistical significance.

Hire Ghostbusters to extract skeleton menagerie from closet. Exercise more. Hang out with friends for remaining therapy -- actual sporadic in-person conversation beyond nuclear family, as opposed to hiding behind Facebook and mutters to self and repeated refreshes of the New York Times web page... looking for dints of liberal bias past.