random ideas

whatever happens to yakuza pinkies? after they are cut off, are they just dropped into the waste disposal? or are they kept, sort of as "collateral"? not that they'd be worth much... but then again, what if there were some secret worth? i believe that in japan, an invisible red (contradiction?) thread connects a person to their true love via their pinky (in chinese medicine, the heart channel ends at the pinky). what if, even after its severance, the connection to "love" or "destiny" remains? by severing the pinky, an act of loyalty, one essentially severs one's tie to "original destiny," placing oneself in the hands of the yakuza lords...

the image resonates with me. i intended to write about silkworms. i intended was to portray silkworms and their "silk" via a very pornographic image. i could alternatively use this: yakuza pinkies being silkworms, and their invisible red thread, the "silk."

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i've also begun to rethink the "willow weep for me part two" story. i want to tie in, more explicitly, the imagined wanderings of my grandfather, before he passed on. in fact, his death is the trigger of the "unsettled discontent" that takes hold of the protagonist, his "midlife crisis." it is when he sees his grandfather's "freshly dead" body, and feels the pulse that is and isn't, that he begins to wonder about the nature of life, and in particular, his own life. and when he reflects upon the aimless wanderings of his alzheimer's-ridden grandfather, he begins to think about the failure to recognize home, and how it is analogous, oddly enough, to what he feels. i don't want to tie the two threads together explicitly, because that would make things too neat and tidy, but i would like them to occur in parallel, not precisely as the protagonist's explicit memories or imaginings, but as the retelling of an absent third perspective... we'll see.

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is there a pattern to my psychology and my stories? i suppose so. i don't believe in "simple redemption." at the very least, it doesn't make a good story. i wonder if this makes me a "muck raker" or a bitter and cynical soul. i would argue that it does not. in "practice," in every day situations, i serve people patiently, and to the best of my ability. i sincerely wish the best for people. yet, somehow, when it comes to myself, and to my stories, things cannot ever be so simple. in today's common parlance, we speak of "complexes" as psychological snarls. if a person (consciously or unconsciously) makes his life "complicated," for whatever reason, is this synonymous with inventing a neurosis?