Notes on Discordia

There's only about forty pages of Discordia left and that project will be over. I haven't cross checked what I'm posting here with the sloppy mess at Angelfire. I am posting from the original draft, which I had not had until I returned to Arkansas last fall. This isn't so much a restoration thing as a portage.

The Angelfire lesserdevil site was thrown together in three days what seems like a long, long time ago. It was done without the benefit of any formal training in web design, as if any professional wouldn't know that just from looking at it. With very little knowledge about presentation points, cascading style sheets, frames or graphics what came into existence looked childlike and simple. That was the best it could be for the knowledge and money available for the project.

The entire motivation for creating the Angelfire website was to have a safe place to keep all of the writing that had been transferred from paper to disc. Windows has always been, and continues to be, an inferior product with inherent design flaws affecting it's function and longevity. It started and stayed that way because of profit from software applications that addressed Windows' flaws. Anyone without expensive security software was doomed to have an OS that slowed down until it was barely usable, or could not be used at all.

Windows cost me hundreds of pages of new material, vanished, poof, into thin air. Eventually the backup ritual became a necessary religion, because without constant backups material and work would be lost. Then backups would stop working.

Online backups became extraordinarily important, and were used as much as possible. Angelfire was just what was available one day. I never expected the writing to be found, much less discussed or disseminated among the art world. I lived off the grid close to 16 of the last 20 years, entirely because of poverty. That meant the digital revolution among all forms of art and information that took place on the Internet happened without my knowledge. It wouldn't have meant much if I had known anyway.

Discordia was written about five years ago. The book was supposed to be a lot longer. The plan was to keep working on it through the end of 2004. It did not happen that way. In fact the project was cut short by about five months and never finished. That requires a little explanation.

Discordia's writing took place while I worked at a local factory in Northwest Arkansas. I was here to help my parents survive, because they were both disabled. They were only getting one disability check though. There was really no way to help them from South Louisiana. That was not just because good jobs were harder to find, but also because in South Louisiana all my earnings would wind up going to drugs, mostly Coluvoa. Even while paying rent here there was still plenty of money left over, and I gave my parents as much of it as possible.

Still suffering from serious back pain, from the original pinched nerves at in my lower back, the work became more and more difficult to do without either debilitating pain or lots of pastillas (opioids really are the best ones, and they don't seriously register on the DEA schedule). On top of that my spinal condition had been gravely exacerbated by Tribcorr 16, months earlier. The work was also dehumanizing. The day my mother got her disability check I quit the job, moved out of the bungalow I was renting and split.

Work on Discordia ended very abruptly. I tried to throw an ending on it, and it came out fairly bizarre. It's almost weird enough to say it was supposed to end that way, but it really wasn't. It was a preemie novel, weighing only about 3 ounces, but with a goatee and pierced eyebrows. It's never going to be finished. I don't even know what I was doing with it anymore. I know it would have been better in 4 more months, but it never got there.

And that's all I have to say about Discordia.