Categories
Photography Writing

August 7, Angel Moth

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I’ve decided to say what my soul sings to me. Join me on this stream of consciousness ride. It’s like a boat wafting down a river. Try not to think as you read. It helps if you let the water take you without worrying about the direction or the color of the water.

Dear Angel Moth, I have a lot to ask for;

Save the whales. Save the dolphins. Save the polar bears save the chimpanzees and gorillas and starving people in Africa with round pot bellies and bones that show through their skin, small dots of braided hair and dry fat lips and swollen cheeks hovered by darting flies taking small bites of malnourished flesh. They live in muddy huts built with bamboo sticks walled by hay with a soot smear center where they roast the food and set the fire to keep warm. Save the polar ice caps save the poor save the hungry save the ones that love first and never hate the ones that love one another save the ones that don’t need toxins and pills to love one another to feel good about each other feel good about themselves feel good about the world they live in. Save the orangutans and the Guido tan and the man in the van with the black hand who does coke deals in shady alleys in van city and Gerrard street whenever he comes to Toronto on business deals. Save the technological innovators and computer programmers and celebrity bloggers and business starters. Save the college students and the dorm room doofus and his watermelon bong and the dude with the acoustic guitar who plays that creep song on campus during exam time. Save the anti-social who gets good grades and appears humble and brags about it in a Microsoft word document on his apple computer when he gets home from a day of avoiding well-mannered strangers with good intentions. Save the short story writer who does it for the art and the peace of mind it brings to his soul, who dreams of playing with people’s moods like a pianist with a well-tempered piano during a Beethoven symphony, who sees words as more than their definition and logical function, who sees words like musical notes placed together in close proximity to invoke a range of feelings and emotions in their readers that cannot be defined in any way but the way they’ve been placed. Save the scientist working in the university bunker who mixes chemicals to create chemicals to mix chemicals that helps save people inflicted with diseases caused by the imbalance of certain chemicals in their bodies. Save the doctors. Save the lawyers who defend the good and the bad and bend truth and create fictions that no matter how false cause a truth to happen the next day when the judgments are delivered. In India, in a slum somewhere not in Bombay or Delhi or any of the big cities is a young boy who will grandfather generations of some one just like him and eventually some element will change the line in the family and one of his future ancestors will ascend to another class and change the world. In that slum is a boy drinking chai, which he takes with milk and sugar and boils in a little hut not so different from the one that houses the malnourished starving African family described above. All these things are happening and all the time the world is moving because time doesn’t stop. Time is an organizational construct that we’ve gotten so used to that if something happened that couldn’t be explained within that organizational construct, we’d be dumb founded and confused to the point of our brains cracking. Hence time dilation and black holes. Whoops I digress, Whoopee Goldberg, whatever happened to her. I can never ever ever ever ever take her seriously after I watched Sister Act two. Anyways what was I talking about, I was letting my soul sing. All I can do is sit and ponder about the world. All the time the world is moving and there is nothing I can do but move with it. There are gross inequalities and there are GROSS inequalities but who says the world was meant to be fair? Let it be. Let it be.

And now I lapse into spiritual religious thinking and this is never good. Here goes OH GOD OH GOD OH OH OOH- God is a three-legged slum dog in Mexico City who watches little kids skip rocks across the stream in a gully, hoping to see crumbs of bread sticking out of their pockets he can steal. He creeps up and licks the bread out their pockets, and skitters away before they notice. Sometimes they notice and when they do, he realizes much too late when he hears the scampering of their bare feet in the dusty pavement. And then they throw the rocks that he must dodge but there are so many that some of them hit him, causing fresh bruises to swell over old ones. He runs under a rickshaw, sits beside its wheels and eats the piece of bread then licks at his new bruises and finally watches the street vendors to catch em off guard to steal an apple or some fruit off the open stalls. If GOD is humble and peaceful and never changing, then he’s probably been fucked over so many times he’s been driven down to the innocence of a dog trying to survive a street filed with street thugs and their rock throwing sons building experience for their future resumes in crime.

By Ashish Seth

Categories
Photography

August 6, Where is Home?

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By Ashish Seth
https://twitter.com/TheAshishSeth

Categories
Photography Poetry Writing

August 5, Night Shift

It was all messsssssed up
All over the floor
The way they looked at me
Waited?
Please?

I did something
And I didn’t have to do it
I did something I didn’t have to do
Did something, didn’t have to do it
Did it anyway
Did I want to?
Didn’t want to?
Did it
I did
All over
It was all over
Nails digging in the back of my neck
Watch for cracks on the sidewalk
But it all made sense
Even with no circumstance

Could’ve just walked away
Made my escape
I wanted this?
Did something, I didn’t have to but did
I did it anyway
It was all messsssssed up
But I fixed it
Felt like breaking

Now I look at my portrait
And I wait for me
To come back the same way
Holed socks in a cabinet
Frozen ice over faces
Cold water reaches from the bottom of the lake

By Ashish Seth
https://twitter.com/TheAshishSeth

Categories
Photography Short Stories Writing

August 4, They Play Still [Plot Lines]

A man resolves to hi-jack a talk show so he can tell jokes to the nation.

A man with Asperger’s syndrome rises to the top of the mob. And he does so without lying.

An investment banker is forced to visit a shady part of town where he realizes money actually does buy happiness.

By Ashish Seth

Categories
Photography Short Stories Writing

August 3, Chocolate Pacman [Plot lines and Quick Synopses]

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This morning, I decided to write up one sentence plot lines to ridiculous stories. Some of them I may actually write. I found this an interesting exercise in concision. It’ll help when I get to my elevator pitch for my first novel. I find if you write a one sentence plot line for your novel, it helps you get excited about the prospect of writing it. Here are my exploits:

A mob boss, trying to connect with his son, goes to his Grade 5 career day class and has to explain to them what he does for a living. He stays vague and discreet but lets slip a crucial piece of information that keeps the kids talking. They gossip about him on Facebook and the information spreads like wildfire. Eventually it reaches the ears of a rival mobster who puts a price on his head.

A hitman discovers a victim’s wardrobe and has a makeover that changes his life.

A man with a broken heart falls for a closeted bisexual woman. She falls for him. They get engaged. Everything’s dandy. Then he introduces her to his ex-wife, who left him because she came out of the closet as a Lesbian. The bi-sexual falls for the ex-wife who reciprocates. For the first time she sees a chance to come out of the closet. But will she do it at the expense of his already tortured heart?

The evil Terrormite seeks to flood Queen City. When good men will do nothing, a hero will carry twice his weight to save the people he loves. He is Ant Man.

“The National Anthem”. The tale of a love song that united the world. And the band that hated itself for writing it.

A cop. An ex military soldier. A Black Ops sniper. A mob doctor. A drug cartel enforcer. A serial killer… And a baby.

A couple, dangerously in love, suffer a serious case of amnesia after a car accident. Not knowing who they were and not used to this lack of love, they become each others nemeses in a plot to suck up all the love in the world.

A writer discovers a cube that sucks creativity from other writers and cures him of his writer’s block. At first he questions the moral implications of using this device. Are these ideas he gets after using the device really his? Is it really fair to feel better off of someone else’s misery? Out of desperation, he starts to use the device on writers who he deems unworthy of having what they have. Eventually things get out of hand. Even with all that creativity, he still can’t reach the measure of success he wants. He becomes jealous of his girlfriend’s success and fears she’ll leave him if she surpasses him. He uses the device on her. This puts her in a state of depressed vulnerability and keeps her from leaving, but at the cost of happiness. How far are you willing to go for your passions? Are you willing to hurt those you love?

By Ashish Seth
https://twitter.com/TheAshishSeth

Categories
Photography Quotes Writing

August 2, Meeting Places #3

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If you can’t win her heart, win your’s back. If you can’t breathe around her, drown yourself in music. A cure for love is just the sharpening of your vision at the optometrist’s. Sometimes reality switches focus.

The danger in risking it all is a drug. Gets stronger with repetition. Siphoned emphasis.

By Ashish Seth

Categories
Philosophy Photography Writing

August 1, Writerhead – Why I Write

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Why I Write. Here’s why.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmerFuzRNZ4&feature=youtube_gdata_player

This scene is one of Will Smith’s highest achievements. It was all improvised. And he has a great relationship with his father. I think about that and it marvels me. How does someone give a performance like this without having gone through something like that? How is this just improvised? Some art is magical in how it mimics life. I saw this scene when I was very little. Fresh Prince had a lot of scenes that were very formative for me. This one felt like real life. This is the most powerful scene I’ve ever watched. Nothing has ever really come close. This scene reminds me of what the essence is of what I’m trying to do with my writing. It may all seem dark. It may all seem twisted and creepy and messed up. It may all seem like it’s a plot unfolding. But I’m honestly trying to get to the underlying humanity of why people are the way they are. That has always been my aim. Like Will Smith in this scene, the goal has always been to reach a cathartic depth that transcends the fact that you’re reading a book, a depth that all people can connect with even if they can’t, and to do so all with a crazy handful of nothing.

By Ashish Seth

If you can’t win her heart, win your’s back.

Categories
Photography Poetry Writing

July 31, Scatter Plot

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Wherever we have to go we don’t want to go.
Wherever we want to go we aren’t welcome.
Wherever we end up we work to accept.
Wherever we are we never want to leave again.
Lost paradigms lie in sweet nostalgia.
We put in the work and the time.
We never miss the bad parts whenever we think back.
We always live the bad parts whenever we go back again.
Your posterity lacks good posture.
You’ve been down this road before.
Do you ever think the gravel will turn to paved road?
You’re like that scatter plot graph
Where the curvy line never reaches a point.
The closer you get, the older you get.
There’s no end to this trek but death.
But maybe we aren’t meant to reach a point.
Maybe there really is no end to this road.
If we believe the end isn’t meant to be reached,
We will always have a place to go.

By Ashish Seth
https://twitter.com/TheAshishSeth

Categories
Photography

July 30, Doggie Drumstick

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Look closely, it’s a dog.

By Ashish Seth
https://twitter.com/TheAshishSeth

Categories
Photography Quotes Writing

July 29, 8-Bit T. Dot

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“Never judge a book by its cover. Judge it by the author’s picture at the back.”

By Ashish Seth
https://twitter.com/TheAshishSeth