as a matter of introduction

Well, where to begin?
Where did the name SkaRat come from?

Long ago, a friend sent me a letter on some kind of cute staionary featuring cartoon rats.

He was a bit bored with this motif, and started to decorate each rat character..
he drew some clothing atop the cartoons... graffetii-ing a little personality into each rat..

first he drew a punkrock rat.. wearing a DK tee shirt.. with the caption "punk rat" and the balloon "got any beer" ...
Here my memory fails me.. I am not sure what the other few permutations of the rat character were ... but it inspired me to draw a tiny cartoon of a rat wearing a rude boy suit... "SkaRat" was born.

I liked the idea.. and it stuck with me. I had no idea that it would come to take over most of my post highschool journal writing activites.

It became it's own thing, like a journal in code, or a story you tell yourself ..
in the end it became a novel like collection of writing. With illustrations, and lots of snippets of my popculture diet all wrapped up together.

Now... it is many years later... I have 200-300 pages of typewritten stuff.. 50 plus illustrations... and a plot structure that would make Joyce cringe...

And yet.. I can't seem to quite let go of it.
People really liked something about it.. I liked something about it... so here I go again

The plan is to post some pictures and text here..maybe some soundclips mixed into the background.. as a way to get some feedback..

Some questions..
Is it worth editing... will editing kill it? Should it be a macromedia multimedia production..?
It it just cheap nostalgia for the magic of selfindugent writing....
well that is what I am here for.

I have an idea of making a second life object with this material...
if only as a monument to the great selfindugent novels of our precollege years..
a cartoon book about a cartoon world imagined by a kid pretending to be a cartoon character.

Also...

I liked the uncensored, uncut.. unkempt holding nothing back feel of my writing back in the olden days... Enjoying it for it's own sake.

A friend once coined the word "spew" for journally / bloglike writing that holds nothing back.. the raw material .. written as if the audience did not exist....

I perhaps latched onto that idea a bit too much.. wrote like hell confident that it would take me somewhere worth going...

so be warned, posting this stuff is alot like posting old love letters, or that videotape of me drunkenly singing Pogues songs on the Saikyo line..

what was I thinking.. but before you log off...

let me tell you a little of the plot of this story.. written citra 1983-198?

Ska Rat is a story of the dialog between Reality and our Imaginations...

the main character is a generic guy "the student" who imagines a world that is cooler than his own. He populates it with some anthropomorphic animals who are too cool to be quite human.
More specificly SkaRat and his manic companion Fuzzy Bunny....

I think many will find that this story resonates with second life in many ways.
Many would just dismiss this writing as being about drugs, or just drug addled nonsense..
but the questions in the book were important to me once upon a time.
Who are these people on record jackets.. how much of this media world is in our minds...
how much of this world do we recreate anew... a collaboration of people who show up and take part.. each and everyday.

~~~

I belive that if something is worth doing, it can become the source of an obcession-
which can .. produce a focus, so intense..
that can blot out the rest of the universe..
and at the same time become your metaphor for everything else.

Well stay tuned for my prosepoem, spew, journal whatever you want to call it...
selfindugent or not.

I feel a little like the first time punk rock kid.. climbing up on stage.. about ready to go apeshit in public.. but not knowing how it is going to go over.

Well enough apologizing before I say anything.. I am going to start by posting the half written monstrosity .. as it is ...

I invite all comments and input.