the north end

i don't know why i never write this goddamn blog. i guess in my heart of hearts i am waiting for my brand new very compelling website to be finished before i commit to the blog. but i was reading rose polenzani's blog which she keeps regularly with all manner of poetic and intellectual essays and i got jealous of her blog, i'd say i got inspired but it was more like jealousy. tanks rose. i'm in boston. the friends i'm staying with have these real jobs where they really do have to wake up early and so they've gone to sleep. i'm wide awake on the couch, it may have something to do with the leftover treats i had just now from mike's pastries in the north end, full of cream and sugar they were and chocolate crumblies on the outside. it was a beautiful cold day to walk through the north end. we were forcibly dragged into a restaurant which was low on ambiance but high on food quality. "come in, come on, yes, follow me, i remind me of you, into the dining room, here, these are my cousins" said the friendly proprietor as we were drug inside. i remembered the first time i realized that national geographic was weird. all my childhood i'd read articles about namibia and sri lanka and okay, i didn't REALLY read the articles, but enough to get a sense, and looked at the pictures. i always thought it was a perfectly objective magazine, but then they ran this article about the north end, where i had actually been, and i saw how those guys had melodramatized it up and down, and i can only assume it was the same with namibia and sri lanka but that i was none the wiser.
i've been re-reading robert mckee's book "story" which is a screenwriting textbook i got in college. it starts off brilliantly all about the story as a veryvery old, pre-aristotelian form of cultural catharsis, but then it gets very specific and a little compulsive for me. but i'd recommend it to any writer. look at this passage: "a culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. when society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. we need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. if not, as yeats warned, 'the centre can not hold'."
well now i've made myself sleepy. catch you on the flip.