This morning I got up

September 26th 2002 at 2:12 am

This morning I got up butt-early to go have my trusty Celica’s brakes looked at. With a slight nip in the air, it has occurred to me that winter is on the horizon, and that even, strong braking pressure is a good thing to have around. The Celica’s been coming to a stop with a grinding and shaking motion that indicates uneven rotors and worn pads, and on ice might lead to a bit more sliding than I want.

So $170 dollars later I can whale on the brakes and come to a quick, smooth, stop.

Human nature is amazing. All this time I’ve known that the brakes needed replaced thanks to the slight chirping, as well as shaking. But how much of a difference this has made on my stopping ability wasn’t really evident until I went out today and whaled on the brakes some. Big diff!

Only yesterday I had the tires rotated, and made sure they were all filled with the right amount of air. Another big difference. My turning radius has been slowly creeping outwards with more worn-out front tires. But I now have a leaky tire up on the front left, instead of rear right, which means the car is still a bit unstable if I’m not up on keeping that tire filled.

Maybe I’ll sell a story sometime before winter and roll that into a new set of tires
**********

I’ve been working, as I may have mentioned earlier, on a story about a dwarf. I’m not sure yet if it is horribly cliched, or a lot of fun. Time will tell (and those funny slips of paper with kind, but final, words on them, that usually begin ‘Dear Mr. Buckell, thanks for sending us your latest story, but…’) The interesting thing is how much mood has gone into this story. More importantly, mood influenced by music:

Music is often a soundtrack for me, and I use it to push myself into ‘character’ for writing. Lately I’ve found a ‘hard rock/heavy metal’ format station that just started up. Okay, it’s hardly on the edge of the genre (godamn Clear Channel monopoly), as just about every channel I can get now is part of the Clear Channel hegemony, and it has driven me nuts. But now at least I can flip from Top-40, to the other Top-40 (maybe they’ll be playing different songs! Except Sundays, when both stations become one), to the College Radio Station, to the Kenton Radio Station (which plays anything from mid 80’s easy listening, to Top-40, to country, and occasionally Ace-Of-Base).

If this all sounds like some sort of audiophile’s hell, it is because it is. I’m saving pennies for a CD player. One day yet!

I never thought I would be so excited about a hard rock station, but there it was. And after 12 midnight, when no one is listening but me, they play some pretty funky stuff.

So the story idea I had started out with some generic stereotypes (I think it was Soldiers-Of-The-Future TM) getting stuck in a certain situation underground. Mostly my thing was to deal with agoraphobia and claustrophobia. At least a little bit.

But driving home, listening to some crazy Metallica inspired, hoarse-voiced, screaming nut, that music started to set the mood for the story as I mulled it over.

In my head, I started tossing my SOTF stereotypes, hunting around for some other fun character that my idea affected the most. And as I was driving, for some reason, the bad heavy metal I was listening to suggested only one possibility that made perfect sense to me, hitting my stride on the home stretch to Kenton, OH, on rt 309.

Dwarves.

Yes, only dwarves could listen to really bad Metallica rip-offs snuck onto the radio-waves in the wee hours of the night.

Now the kicker is that I can’t have lyrics in my soundtrack music or I get distracted while writing. What this means is that while writing this story during dinner break, or at home after work, is that I’ve sought out the truly most obnoxious, unintelligible, heavy metal there is.

The story is coming along well, I’m over 4K into it.

I think the next time someone asks me where I get my creativity from, I’m going to have to bite my tongue not to say “Dwarf Metallica Rip-offs.”

Why are you staring at me like that, man?

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