tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87690551319899066292011-04-21T23:01:35.433-04:00My name is Dylan, and I have a problem. For most of my life I have devoted all of my idle thought to the creation and maintenance of an ever-expanding mythology, with fantastic plans to one day bring it to glorious and perfect fruition. Though I may soon lose myself completely in the welcoming folds of my own miserable creation, I would rather loosen the valve now, out myself as an addict, and in so doing prolong my existence as a relatively stable member of society.Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.comBlogger231100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-20096997521533490522008-11-26T11:02:00.005-05:002008-11-26T11:33:07.955-05:00

As I've mentioned previously, I'm somewhat obsessed with the advancement of mobile technology. Most of my mythological ponderings involve the creeping repercussions of smart phones, and what I think they represent in terms of the very nature of information and how we interact with the world. It's interesting to me to be on the wave of such rampant technological innovation, and to see how quickly

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-8848832878613542482008-11-16T16:28:00.008-05:002008-11-16T17:34:17.584-05:00

I'm not promising anything here - my time on this planet is still stratified among a million different responsibilities, creative urges and necessary expenditures of my daily energy, but I wanted to poke my head in to mention something. This is a little off-tact for my blog, and perhaps a little too pointed for my usual bipartisan call to trivialism, but I'm going to go ahead anyway and recommend

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-66525513761366833472008-09-18T14:32:00.003-04:002008-09-18T16:53:30.419-04:00

Watch now as I construct for you a complex analogy involving an octopus.I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason to whether or not something catches my interest, whether I find myself invested in someone else's mythology or not. In the end I don't think there's any one thing that I'm looking for, except maybe a balance of all the different sorts of things that typically constitute fiction.

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-69329241880248902542008-09-15T12:19:00.003-04:002008-09-15T14:12:13.819-04:00

I tend to think about the future a lot. Not in a goal-seeking, career-growth sort of way; it's really more of an abstract, pointless speculation sort of thing. Give me an entire day in a coffee shop with a notebook, and I'll come away with twelve pages of feverishly scribbled notes on the possible ramifications of the iPhone. When you do this professionally, they call it Futurology.And there's a

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-55118178198256020272008-09-10T17:08:00.007-04:002008-09-12T16:57:32.544-04:00

(Ever since renewing my covenant with you, the reader, I have adopted a much more outgoing and socially conscious tone to my entries, speaking at length about the overtly self-serious topics of politics and religion,which many of you no doubt find regretful. But take heart, my hopes and dreams are still firmly anchored in trivial minutiae, and it is to that great cause which I devote this third

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-27094094863440609092008-09-08T09:16:00.008-04:002008-09-12T17:24:57.275-04:00

In my last entry I made the brief (but oh so compelling) argument that I'd found the true difference between liberals and conservatives, the atomic philosophical point that fuels the perpetually antagonistic stalemate of partisan politics and compels the twenty-four hour news channels into unyielding fervor. It is not about gun control, or abortion, or varying emphases on the term "freedom," nor

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-437431180599058852008-09-07T01:16:00.006-04:002008-09-12T17:24:43.122-04:00

Like many people (specifically the kinds of people who also do this), I spend a lot of my time shoehorning other members of the species into neat little boxes. I’m not in any way proud of this, but when I’m interacting with people I don’t know very well I often find myself sizing them up, cataloging and indexing them for easier future reference. It comes out of insecurity I suppose, as if I need

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-11180546109293247642008-09-02T16:17:00.007-04:002008-09-02T17:58:12.563-04:00

Ah, back from my summer hiatus (pretty tidy excuse, everything considered).I've been on a bit of a superhero comic kick lately, which is as notable for me as it is decidedly not-notable for people like me, for most every other white male twenty-something bachelor who grew up in the 80's. I've never really been into comics. I'm very into the concept of comics -- I find their ADD-friendly form

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-46254532007795010612008-06-06T16:40:00.004-04:002008-06-06T18:06:59.025-04:00

Oh yeah, I have a blog. I guess I should update it.I've been incredibly drained lately, and I can't seem to figure out why. I'm worried that it might be the wearying hangover of indulging too much in my bloated and unwieldy mythology. Perhaps my brain has become so saturated with the desperate impossibility of turning my inner world into a full-time proposition that the remaining gorged pink mess

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-20700745156605685042008-05-15T15:29:00.005-04:002008-05-15T17:05:05.896-04:00

I've been traveling a lot the last couple weeks - France last week, back in Pennsylvania for a couple days and now in western Canada for a friend's wedding. Between the time zones and work thoughts I can't really tell whether I'm coming or going; without downtime to meditate on anything in particular I've been taking things more at face value, navigating life one moment at a time. Which is nice.

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-2663915025989781802008-05-08T04:08:00.005-04:002008-05-08T17:36:15.334-04:00

I'm in France this week, filming a promotional video for an exchange program our college has with the University of Bordeaux, and doing my best to play the role of a jet-setting photog type. I think I'd need one of those ratty Turkish neckerchiefs to do the part justice, maybe some chest hair and gold-rimmed sunglasses. Oh well. C'est la vie.I've found that the mythology usually recasts itself

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-84208447259363519522008-05-03T10:57:00.005-04:002008-05-03T17:25:58.576-04:00

"Mythology creep" is a big issue for me. I spend most of my time fostering a massive internal mythology, and this process is largely flavored by my current environment and activities; the world around me seeps into my brain's deeper mechanics and the mythology-of-the-day paces itself by this rhythm. These days I work a lot with media; my job is really just the ongoing process of funneling media,

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-34299445736873475062008-04-28T14:39:00.006-04:002008-04-28T16:50:38.648-04:00

So, that's a pretty good name for a post, eh? I think it nicely strikes the balance between obtuse and pretentious. I was looking for wording like it, and decided to go with it in honor of that being the name of the new James Bond movie, which I personally find hilarious.Anyway. One of the most prevalent themes of the mythology, which finds its way into each new iteration, is the delineation of

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-59549989557366600122008-04-26T21:47:00.003-04:002008-04-27T00:17:39.648-04:00

Work has been ramping up again lately, necessitating focused bursts of escapism while I struggle to stay on top of an untenable and ever-expanding mountain of needs-doings and needs-thinking-abouts. I’m aware on some level that the stress is all in my head, that a different person in the same situation would be much less stressed simply because they would see it differently. Maybe that person has

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-41152138166166602682008-04-21T19:13:00.006-04:002008-04-21T20:33:48.869-04:00

Just to dredge up Southland Tales one more time, about half-way through the third act some basic expository dialogue lets us in on the "crux" of the plot: a rift in the fourth dimension (space/time) has opened up somewhere near Lake Meade, and as a result, many of the characters have been traveling through time all along. This is also meant to explain the weird behavior of the movie's supposed '

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-1931989697442781552008-04-20T09:53:00.003-04:002008-04-20T10:06:44.897-04:00

I just wanted to write quickly to say that after watching Southland Tales last night, I can confirm that it really is as big a mess as I accused it of being (if not substantially bigger).Here's how it ends (spoiler alert, I guess): Two copies of a police officer are shaking hands in an ice cream van as it floats above the city of LA, the fourth dimension burbling outside the back doors. The guy

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-26086431937812893342008-04-18T17:30:00.004-04:002008-04-18T19:56:57.943-04:00

Going forward, I'd like to identify some basic thinking patterns which dictate the course the mythology takes. The ideas and characters and stories that I collect aren't completely arbitrary, nor is my decision to dwell on one area more than another. It's not like I really choose what I'm going to be obsessed with, or hand-pick what themes are going to haunt my day, but there is a loose guiding

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-68461167110563127062008-04-16T14:35:00.010-04:002008-04-20T10:28:53.002-04:00

I was reading yesterday about the new Grand Theft Auto game that's coming out at the end of this month, and it got me thinking about the difficult balance inherent in creating accessible mythologies. Even if it's not really your thing I'd recommend checking out their website, because they've basically manufactured an entire culture to support their game about running people over. They've been

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-67248936620469010402008-04-13T19:57:00.010-04:002008-04-14T08:36:02.024-04:00

I'm a little worried that this process is too satisfying. As time goes on, I'll have to be wary of allowing too much detail, of indulging in the mythology for its own sake. There's a strong temptation to turn this blog into a serialized novella about my obsessions, again letting them dictate the process on their own terms. Some might say that it wouldn't hurt to hear more about the mundane

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-36290451644102304812008-04-10T23:11:00.004-04:002008-04-11T00:12:57.129-04:00

I just realized something about the mythology that I misspoke about before. For the sake of full disclosure, I feel these sorts of little details are important. I've been talking about the Undigestible Man as though he spawned the mythology, but that isn't entirely the case. There is another character who predates the Undigestible Man, who has been around far longer - long enough, in fact, to

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-80550311992897446862008-04-09T18:55:00.010-04:002008-04-09T20:25:47.436-04:00

After leaving the oil rigs my life changed dramatically, as in, it went back to roughly how it had been before I worked on the oil rigs. At first this meant a near-complete deflation of the mythology; I had other things on my mind, and was more than happy to leave the dark destiny of the Undigestible Man behind me. This lasted for about four months. I think the first relapse after that was

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-91729021996192171342008-04-08T11:27:00.003-04:002008-04-08T16:13:09.636-04:00

When you join a twelve-step group, the first task is to find a sponsor and admit to him/her the nature of your addiction. Since I'm winging it here, the Internet will have to serve as my sponsor, and this post as the brunt volley of my first admission.So, yes, the Undigestible Man.Well, let me first say that I'm kind of a wuss in a lot of ways. I tend to mentally over-react at the tensions in my

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8769055131989906629.post-9351488894788491072008-04-07T00:57:00.001-04:002008-04-07T16:08:35.281-04:00

Enough is enough.As far as I know, there's no twelve-step group for pathological mythologizers, so I'm forced to ad lib my own therapeutic treatment. It sounds like a joke, which is honestly kind of the appeal, but realistically I have to do something about this 'habit' of mine before it makes my life unbearable. It's a thing I've always done, a thing I've always allowed my brain to do. Not

Dylan Hendrickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01352458577048846302noreply@blogger.com4