A New Milestone Has Been Reached! (What’s Next For theCarbonFreeze?)

As of the publication of this entry, if you include all prospective blog posts that are in the editing process or already finished and scheduled to launch at a future date, theCarbonFreeze.com has officially surpassed the word count of the King James Bible with over 820,000 words! (Who knew one person could write so much about nothing? 😛 ) But more than that, I’ve reached a personal milestone. When I started the blog, I had a huge back catalog of political/social commentaries, private journal entries and forum/social media posts I wanted to share with a wider audience. As of now, that stockpile of material has been just about depleted. So, it’s all gonna be written on the fly from here on out. In light of this development, I would like to take a step back for a minute and talk about the site itself so you know what to expect going forward.

For one thing, I intend to take an extended break from writing for the next two or three weeks to focus on reading and leisure. When I return…

What Does This Mean for the Future of the Carbon Freeze?

1. If you’re not a big fan of politics, you’re in luck because that’s gonna take a backseat from now on, with the exception of my policy platform which I intend to post….at some undetermined point.
   
   I was originally planning on finishing my policy platform within the month but it’s become such an arduous task I now genuinely loathe working on, and I feel like forcing it is only going to result in a subpar effort. So, I feel the need to shelve it for awhile for the sake of my own sanity. I do want to get that up sometime, but I can’t promise exactly when that will be. Otherwise, I know there’s the Biden, Harris, Trump and Pence convention speeches to cover and I should probably go back and redo the RNC nomination addresses of the past, plus actual debate play-by-plays for the 2016 and 2020 primaries.
   
   But the problem with all that is…I just really don’t want to do any of those things right now. Life is short and I just don’t want to waste any more of it looking for new ways to say how much the vast majority of our leaders are corrupt or outright cruel people. Anyone paying attention ought to get it at this point, and I believe what I’ve already written constitutes a pretty good examination of how this train fell off the rails as it is. All that, plus those posts get the lowest amount of views, so I can tell my readers don’t particularly want me to spend more time on this subject either.
   
   You have to understand, I did all those debate/speech reactions in 2016 when I was inspired by Bernie and fascinated (if not in a good way) by the rise of Trump. They were written with the naive enthusiasm of a young woman proud of her country, warts and all. Now, I’m not proud of anything regarding the current state of the US, and any more political dissections would be done purely for completion’s sake. Since our government is worse than ever, I thought someone had to put in the work to understand how things got so bad in the first place. Not only that, but compile a list of sources regarding specific grievances as a convenient all-in-one page to point skeptics and apologists to. I felt someone needed to research as much of the political spectrum as thoroughly as possible to ascertain which ideologies we could learn from in order to improve our government, then compile this information in a simple, easy-to-follow platform. Between my Political Atlas and Sempronian Manifesto editorials, I feel I’ve finally done all of that. (Or at least, I’ve got a good enough rough draft to continue to work from going forward.)
   
   In short, while having an understanding of politics/history is important, I think it’s fair to say I’ve done all that any one private citizen can reasonably be expected to do,* along with voting, reducing my carbon footprint, and volunteering. My debt to society has been paid, and now I want to move on and pursue topics that don’t make me quite so depressed and frustrated all the time. All that said, I’ll continue to update my work with the Sempronian Manifesto as I obtain more information and solicit suggestions from my readers for improvement. If some big current event comes along where I feel the need to weigh in, I will do that as well provided I have a unique perspective to offer. But I’m not going to be a dedicated commentator on America’s ongoing political shit show, fruitlessly reiterating my ideology at regular intervals.
   
   *I’ve thought about putting my proverbial money where my mouth is and running for local office but that’d put my writing and personal life under intense public scrutiny which I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with right now. Maybe if we lived in a less judgmental society that didn’t look down upon transgender people, alternate lifestyles and consciousness expansion. Or, at least if things weren’t so ridiculously adversarial with maniacs running around saying everyone like me should get killed.
2. Updates will be less frequent going forward, unfortunately.
   
   It’s just the way it has to be, given the situation. Whereas before I had a big stable of mostly-finished writing that I could pull up, make adjustments to and send off in a matter of days, now I have to write something from scratch. I’ve already been doing that here and there over the course of this past year (for example, The Godfather, Femina Ridens, Eureeka’s Castle, To Kill in Silence, In Defense of Mother Nature, Police Brutality and several other essays were all written off the cuff.) It’s just now there won’t be anything to fill the gaps between composing brand new material. I’ll still try to get stuff out at least once a month, maybe twice if I have the time and an interesting subject to share. All that said, I do have seven written-and-ready-to-go “beautiful holiday fantasies” for the coming batch of major holidays, if you’re a fan of that series.
   
   In the immediate future, I still want to finish up my review of Bojack Horseman considering that’s my all-time favorite show and got me through a lot of rough patches in life.
   
   I’d also like to discuss Lolita since that’s by far the best book I’ve read since The Great Gatsby in high school.
   
   I’ve been meaning to do a companion piece for my Blue Poems with a “Red Poem” series focusing on another Japanese character, this time Asuka Langley Soryu from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
   
   I’ve wanted to analyze Mr. Robot, Belladonna of Sadness, Barbarella as well as It’s a Wonderful Life for awhile now; I just haven’t had the time to put my thoughts to paper on these topics just yet. And Mr. Robot will probably require a close rewatch with diligent note taking now that I’ve seen the finale, in order to get everything out of it.
   
   I thought it might be fun at some point in the future to go back and watch Nickelodeon’s Oh Yeah! Cartoons as well as Cartoon Network’s What a Cartoon! Show to determine the best pilots which ought to have been given a chance.
   
   In addition, I’ve accrued a list of recommended Italian giallo movies in the vein of Femina Ridens which I want to check out, and if any of them should strike my fancy, they’ll be covered in the months to come as well.
   
   Finally, I’ve got a bunch of books on my queue, from classic literature like A Confederacy of Dunces to some highly recommended Neon Genesis fanfiction. Just the other day my copy of Things I Can’t Explain came in the mail. For those who don’t know, it’s the creator of Clarissa Explains It All, Mitchell Kriegman, writing a novel about her post-college years. I’ve been looking forward to reading it for awhile considering how much I admire the character of Clarissa Darling, and if it’s a worthy sequel (or notably flawed) I’ll be sure to review that as well!
   
   In general, any time I discover an interesting new piece of media which few have already covered, or I have a fresh perspective to add to the conversation for something more well-known, you can expect a blog entry on it.
3. I want to focus more on my own creative writing in the future.
   
   I’ve been kicking around a few ideas for stuff I want to write outside of just critiquing other people’s work. Primarily, I want to do an epic poem about modern America, perhaps chronicling the last fifty odd years or so. I feel that’s a significant period which hasn’t been told yet in that particular medium. Ever since I first saw the Altamont documentary Gimme Shelter I felt it might be interesting to describe the scene in the same grandeur and dignity with which the Homeric epics immortalized the Trojan War. What’s more, after reading so much about McGovern, I would like to frame him as another great tragic hero struggling for a lost cause, like Hector of Troy or Hannibal of Carthage before him.
   
   Besides that, my boyfriend and I thought it might be fun to collaborate on a series of short stories depicting various apocalyptic scenarios one after the other, and showing how humanity would solve and/or be destroyed by them. So it might begin with climate change then go on to a supervolcano, then an asteroid, then plants stop being able to photosynthesize, the sun engulfs the Earth…etc on until the Big Rip and vacuum decay. It’s a rough working idea at least 😛
   
   Since college, I have played around with a rough idea for a novel (possibly novella) consisting of various characters who would each represent one school of thought from every major philosophical movement in Western history. Basically, it would be Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales meets Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy. In those young, stupid, carefree days I would work on this whenever I got stoned (in the spirit of my then-hero, Brian Wilson, and his magnum opus, SMiLE). The result was a Word document that consisted of 200+ pages of rambling, largely incoherent ideas and a sprawling narrative of self-contradicting plot points. (I tentatively named this work-in-progress, The Voynich Chronicles which ended up being a more fitting omen than I could have foreseen.) I’ve scrapped all of that material, but I do feel as though the kernel of an idea which started the misbegotten project still has merit.
   
   I have one more idea for a novel, but I’m gonna keep information on that particular project pretty close to the vest for right now, considering how personal the subject matter is. Basically it would be semi-autobiographical and semi-fictitious.
   
   Finally, I’ve thrown out one or two ideas for fanfiction earlier on the site. I specifically mentioned a story about the Kanker Sisters from Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy after they’re older as well as an alternate universe where Trixie Tang follows up on Timmy’s big gesture from “The Boy Who Would Be Queen.” I’ve also felt that someone ought to tell the story of Filburt and Dr. Hutchinson’s kids from Rocko’s Modern Life for years. So, I may sit down and take a crack at those writing prompts too.
   
   As work progresses on these, or any other new creative writing ideas I come up with, I might post incremental updates and completed sections on the blog if I’m happy with them and they’re not too personal. We’ll see how things go.