A Club Where You Don't Want to Be a Member

 I recently purchased a major purchase, and it was a bit scary. It was a computer, and though I have yet to regret it (it’s been several hours), I have had a bit of buyer’s remorse in that I didn't know if it was the right decision. You see, when my Chromebook died (RIP) after 3 years, I just…sort of…didn’t buy a new one. I didn’t see the need. I hadn’t been writing, really. I hadn’t been writing and though it was breaking my heart, I was getting pretty resigned to it. I was understanding on a wholly new and fundamentally depressing level that I was about to turn 40 and I hadn’t written anything I liked in years, years, years!

It was a dark time. I had long ago reached the conclusion I wasn’t going to write the great American novel, I had compromised with myself that I was not going to be interviewed by the New York Times for my opinion about Stephen King’s legacy to millennials. I had walked up to that door that says “Cheesemonger” instead of “Writer” and walked through it, letting myself be okay with that fact, letting myself believe it was going to be all right. But I had also met a beautiful person that made me think that I wasn’t insufferable, that I was worth trying to be with for long periods of time. She loved me, and suddenly life was okay. It wasn’t just her, it was my getting older, less angry, less outraged at the developments of my little piece of the world. Things seemed like it would be okay without the writing. Things could move forward for me without carving into the wall every childish idea about pop culture and art and whatever skittered across my cerebellum.

But then, after about two months, I started to itch way back inside of my skull where the thoughts grow and flow, fester and boil, tumble and toil. I started thinking about all those stories from my past that I had left drying in the sun along with the cut-too-short grass that feels like hard spikes when you lay on it. The itching got worse as the sun began to slide under the horizon earlier and earlier in the day. The itch got bad enough to try and write something on a tiny pad of paper during a beach visit with my girlfriend. It got bad enough to try and patch together a piece on google docs on my phone, hacking it out with swipes and thick fingers that changed every third word into something totally wrong (who sucks a duck?). By the time Autumn (well, Late September I guess—it was 70 degrees, but the sun was down by 7pm), I was actively complaining about not writing and everything else. I had no release for it, not artful content, no one who wanted to hear it (“how about coming up with solutions?” my girlfriend asks of me). I had to do something.

And then my Aunt died, I turned 40, and my grandmother died. It’s been an ugly year so far, though it had its happy times, it’s seemed to end with abrupt confrontation that all those things that made me feel that I would be fine without writing become like so much gravel on the soft shoulder of life. My Aunt died suddenly, unexpectantly, and though I don’t think I handled it well, it allowed me to reach some sort of understanding with her husband, my uncle, who I had been somewhat estranged from for years. We didn’t talk much, we didn’t really have the gift of gab when it came to conversation yet, but we connected a least a little over the tragedy.

My grandmother was a different story—we had known she was beginning to loosen at the seams a few years ago, and talking with her at the end didn’t get traumatic until the very end, but something about her passing combined with my aunts made the itch grow. It had grown in pressure, the needle starting to get into that orange space before the red. That she died on my birthday didn’t help. I did what I needed to, I called my cousins and brother, talked it over with them, cracked a few morbid jokes, and went to dinner with my favorite person. We stopped at an apothecary and then walked home in the cool dark air, laughing and loving and reveling in the beauty that the season can give you in the city when it’s still too warm to hate the outside and still cool enough to walk holding each other. I thought of my grandmother and my aunt, who had seen their last sunrise, seen their last dark sky, had finished. I thought of how my Aunt had taken me to the movies, made me dinner when my homework woes had led me to the house she and my uncle shared, quietly loving me and caring for me when I had become too much for my parents. I thought of my grandmother reading my first real story, my first published piece, and her congratulating me for being a “real writer,” and looking at me with that strange proud love that costs so little but feels so good. I remember the practical love she had for my cousins and I as we shared beers in her kitchen, helping where we could, but mostly dodging her as she whipped up dinner in the way only someone who knows every inch of a place can.

I think of them now, the last two members of the secret club of people who cared for me and hoped I did good and knew me enough to want to see it. I don’t want to think of the club, and all those people left to join it, but it’s getting to be a longer list than I think I ever anticipated. And though I can’t say that their passing led me to get back on the wagon train of Writing (and this always has it’s spurts and sputters) but shit man, I’ve got to at least admit that it made me realize that I had to at least try. 

So here I am, trying. I'll keep going as long as I can, I don't believe they'll know it, but if I can keep trying, maybe it'll show somewhere in there that I loved them, I love them, and will love them as best I can.

There's a clinical name for it, isn't there?

I don't know why the formatting is fucked up It's driving me nuts looking at it. Sorry...

"To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin."  --Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation

I haven't given up, but starting is difficult. And every time you stop and start it's like going back to school, going back to the start it feels like its a taller hill, mountain, cliff. Whatever.

I haven't watched the new Game of Thrones, but I have watched The first episode of Horace and Pete (twice, technically), Breaking the Maya Code and the first half of Jaws (again). Is this why I don't write? Overabundance of Media? Or is it lack of idle time? Or is it lack of gumption, or some weird mellowing of my dreams? Or have I given up? Let's talk about something else.Pancakes are great, aren't they? Out of all the things I can have for breakfast, pancakes are definitively up there, though I must be honest in my old age I enjoy scrambled eggs and a good western/Denver omelette better on most days because they're easier to make at home. Omelette is a funny word--theres at least 1/3 more "e"s in there than I think rightfully belong there, but it's French, so it kind of makes sense that the "e"s are a bit excessive. French is an interesting language--I tried to take it as a kid (mainly because everyone else was doing Spanish and fuck that--an opinion I later pooh-poohed with the same self-satisfaction [God, I really am a monster--look at all these dashes and half-self-effacing declarations, who do I think I am, anyway? I'm so deep in this segue I'm using BRACKETS for Christ's sake!]) but mainly what I learned was that learning other languages is harder than I really want to try. Even now I make jokes about how I've flunked Spanish a bunch of times (I'm still churning my way through Duolingo and dropping it after two months only to pick it back up once the mood strikes again). Wow, this got depressing, lets back track a bit before I get too deep in this wall of self-pity.

Honestly my most normalized breakfast at this point is a bagel with cream cheese a couple times a week with a coffee. My favorite breakfast is probably the breakfast sandwich, which isn't my favorite sandwich, which I don't even know what that would be. Bacon cheese steak? Turkey Club? Cheeseburger? I mean, sandwiches probably entail a good bit of my chosen food type, but I would think most people would consider a cheese burger a cheese burger and not necessarily a sandwich (though technically, we can all agree that it is, and that the question is unarguable). I also like making grilled cheese, and would prefer that you learn how to mix your goddamn cheese when you make it, and for the love of christ use butter, you're already eating literally a fat sandwich coated in fat, why the hell would you use whole-wheat bread? Healthy eating is ridiculous when it comes to grilled cheese. For realz.

But making a real sandwich takes time and love. It's not like chasing bluegills or tommycocks. You have to toast the bread, use crisp lettuce. Get a real tomato for crying out loud--something local grown local, certainly not one of those rose-colored shitty-chemical-colored tomatoes you get everywhere else. And maybe that's why so many people just go to shitty places and let some slack-jawed idiot slap fake meat onto the cold bread they pulled out of a fridge that was loaded with wilted produce. What I mean is maybe it's also why I put it all off--the writing, I mean. Maybe it's my desire for perfection that hold me back. Maybe I'm afraid that I'm just going to make a bad sandwich.

Rant #738, Appendix B: Notes in the Margins

I have always abhorred writing in books. Not the typesets or the fonts or anything, but the physical writing in books. I don’t deny that there can be completely justified reasons for writing in books, especially by teachers and students--why take the time to write notes on a post-it or whatever and put it in when you can just highlight and/or underline, put a word or phrase, a question mark, an exclamation, whatever, especially in text books which really aren’t books at all in a sense, but are really just instruction manuals on some aspect of life--be it History, Biology, etc.  In these instances it makes sense for future discussion, homework, tests, etc. 

But, for a moment, let us consider literature and fiction and figure out what writing in a book is actually doing and why I don’t do it. I don’t want to argue my opinion is correct--I think a lot of people who think about things way deeper than I DO write in books, and freely without ever even questioning it, but I want to say why I don’t, and why I can’t fucking stand it when people do it.

First off we’ll hit the subject the easiest and most “who cares?”--it’s ugly. I know that ugliness is a terrible reason to avoid doing something to anything--especially if you’re the only one who cares. If you’re doing it to your own book, why should anyone give two shits whether or not you tagged the margin with this comment about the meaning of the candlesticks in Les Miserables or Holden’s hat in Catch in the Rye or whatever? It’s your book, do what you want with it! I am a supporter of doing whatever you want to your own things--like George Carlin said about cars--flip switches, turn dials, etc etc. and if you must break out your pen to write “Clearly adversarial to other’s opinions” in the margins, well, I’m not telling you you can’t but do yourself a favor and look at it after you’ve done it. 

Besides a few Literature books from school (The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno spring to mind) I know of two notes I wrote in a book I was reading recreationally. One was in a Chuck Klosterman book where he was arguing about Superman and Batman being adversaries (Nemeses?) and one where I pointed out an annoying anachronism in The Body (made into a movie called Stand By Me) that I considered a plot hole because I was too self-assured that I’d found a flaw in my hero’s work that I had to shout it from the rooftops. Both of these notes are in blue ink and are written in the upper left corner of the page where there is significant space to write a note of semi-importance to absolutely no-one but myself. These notes are tragic for a couple of reasons I’ll get to later but first and foremost they are UGLY. The page is set in neat, squared paragraphs and here comes my notes in jumbled, teenager/twenty year-old handwriting sloping across the page like a slug-trail, loped and sliding, slick and rude, fucking up all the symmetry and neatness of the page. It’s like when you’re painting a wall and you slip of the ladder and grab the wall to slow your fall--a big ugly swath of original color down the middle of your new, improved color. I hate it.

Not to mention the comment itself.  It’s never anything really life-changing or surprising--and even it it is or was, then what was the point? Superman and Batman didn’t get along? No WAY! That changes their whole dynamic, doesn’t it? No, wait, it’s practically the only reason they ever work together! To promote drama! It's the thing that makes The Justice League interesting in the early days. Batman vs Superman is seriously the reason the end of The Dark Knight Returns is so good--Klosterman wasn’t trading new or even interesting ground here, and my note (which points this out in my neatest handwriting, as if to make sure anyone else who ever read this book after I died or gave it away or sold it at a yard sale in 2025 knew that I was, like, totally as smart or even smarter than a guy who wrote some very well-thought out and sometimes very blind pop-culture commentary about the 90’s in the 2000s) only points out that I know it. Even if it was a life-changing note (none of mine were)--then I’m pretty sure I’d remember it. If anything, the actual writing of the note makes me remember it that much more--and so now I know that, for instance in page one-hundred-whatever in The Body, the pistol is discussed, and then on page three hundred whatever, everyone acts surprised when it’s there, nothing has really changed. It’s not a story about who knows about the gun, it’s a story about growing up and losing your friends and feeling ashamed of who you are and having friends who want the best for you even when you can’t see it. The Body is a great book--and yet I had to--HAD TO write that little flaw in it to prove to no one but myself that I had read that book so deeply that I could point out fuck ups no one else had ever noticed. Little did I realize that someone probably saw the flaw--and said “fuck it. What’s it matter--this is a great book.” Who the hell did I think I was?

My point being that whatever is buzzing through your head when you grabbed your pen and started scribbling notes in the margins aren’t really that important, and if they were, you probably don’t need to write it down. I have had several teachers and professors tell me I should “read with a pen,” writing all kinds of things down in the margins--how this part relates to that part, underlining turns of phrase, writing grocery lists, I don’t know--but most of that stuff turns out to be useless anyway, especially if you re-read the book. If you re-read the book there you are, reveling in your private mode, perhaps seeing things differently this time since now you know the end and can see how well the thing was put together, how tightly wound the plot is (or vice-a-versa--it’s rare but I have definitely been underwhelmed on second reads of books that were great on the first run) and then all of a sudden, you-from-four-years-ago extrapolates a point that is either totally wrong, inherently meaningless against the greater scope of the work and/or distracts you back to whatever stupid shit you were doing four years prior when you wrote that ugly note in off-color pen in the margin. And to anyone who thinks re-reading a book is meaningless--to that I say simply that you’re wrong. Books are not rides on the subway--books are vacations into other peoples thoughts, feelings and emotions, they are escapes into places that are filled with the meaning that life sometimes lacks. Because of this, they should be experienced several times, to get the points and nuances, the rhythm and the cadence, to re-experience the experience and see it from a different view. All books should be read twice--even Dune.

And this, I think, is the crux of the biscuit--When you write a note you ignore the context of the book, you ignore the forest for the trees. The rhythm is tampered with when you have thirty words written sideways on the page and it will bring back the formerly important things that you thought of before and ignore the stuff you may have missed. It pulls out four notes of the guitar solo in your favorite song and brands them as Important when really the whole song needs to be experienced from the first clang to the last note that stretches into the end of the track. When this context is lost the whole meaning of the book can be thrown into the bushes. It’s like those jokes about professors needlessly pointing out that the “Curtains are blue because the character is sad.” Though I agree that many times the curtains are “just fucking blue” I can’t argue that they are ALWAYS just fucking blue--Holden’s hat DOES mean something--the Candles-sticks DO mean something--but when looked at alone they mean much less than when the book is looked at as a whole. Holden’s hat only means what it does in the context of the book, and to point it out somewhere in the middle of the book when your 16 year-old self finally figured it out there’s no need to mark it on the calendar. Who cares when you discovered it? It's the fact that you discovered it that's important. The discovery is less important than the doors it opened. Finding the dinosaurs was great, knowing that they existed is AMAZING. 

If I make one last note before putting this overly-long rant to bed I want to say that it’s not an advocacy for ignoring great moments in a novel, or a place you can go back to. It’s not even to say all defacing of books is wrong--I’ve always been a page-folder and always will be (except with other people’s books, of course). And so when I find a line I love, a paragraph, or simply a setting that speaks to me in a voice that I rarely hear and opens up the floodgates to something in myself I hadn’t seen in awhile, or ever, I fold the page. It’s ugly, sure, but not that bad, and for me it builds an anticipatory feeling that knows I’m about to get to something that’s really good. On re-reads I sometimes land on these rare moments and I revel in their beauty and others I wonder what the hell I thought I was doing folding that page, but either way I can come to that line in a new way, and the difference can take your breath away.

Hurdles

Sometimes I am asked what I am writing currently and sometimes I have an answer and sometimes I don't. Right now I do, and this causes a few hurdles to appear: 1) my creativity comes in waves, 2) Sometimes working is like rolling a big fucking rock up a goddamned hill and 3) I get bogged down in the details and that shit kills the whole mood and sets me into the last and worst part, 4) This isn't working, this is fucked, I should just sell shoes.

Right now I'm at three and deathly afraid of four, holding it back with a sweaty forearm as it tries to gnaw my face with great big pointy teeth. The last day I worked was Sunday, and I was off yesterday and today and that means that building up to this lag in work duties I said to myself "you will write during that time, make some ground, get the ball rolling on this idea before you lose it, set it before you forget it," which of course means that I actively avoided doing any writing Sunday after work and yesterday. Yet today I felt like writing. I thought about it throughout two conversations this morning, a re-watch of the Avengers, and some basic reading and videos that reminded me of why I like writing (they were incidental, I don't have a video bank or reading go-tos to get me motivated) and so I took a shower, blasted The Faces and started writing.

Well, I say I started, and I did, but the basic plot I had before me (I felt) demanded that I describe the town layout. I'm not sure why, but I wanted to get it straight because later it might come in handy to not have a thousand street names flying around. The town setting is really basic (it's not even really a town, more like a neighborhood) and only has four or five streets and one feature that is intrinsic to the plot later (way later) in the story. So you're thinking, "draw a map and get on with it." Good advice. But I didn't want to draw it on paper, because I have a habit of losing paper left around anywhere, so I tried to draw it on the Outline I wrote for the story. And since I'm me, I used this opportunity to try and familiarize myself with the drawing function in Pages (my current text editor for my Mac). This ended up taking waaaaaaay too long and became a bit extravagant as I looked up names for the streets that had some sort of group meaning (because I named the first street Wyatt, I named them after other gunslingers. Of course I know a bunch of them but could think of exactly zero past the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday when I wanted names). It took me a few minutes but eventually I got the names, and tried to set them to the roads I had drawn. Yeah. That didn't really happen. Eventually I became super-fucking-frustrated with the map I was drawing, how I couldn't write sideways, how there was some sort of layer issue that put text boxes over each other and wouldn't allow me to write IN a circle I drew. In other words, I got bogged down in the details. My second roadblock came when I had a group of soccer players practicing for a game the next day, but my brain immediately thought "What day is it (in the story?)" and since this is a pretty important detail (only because of the fucking soccer team I just invented and how they wouldn't have a game on a weekday) the whole thing spiralled out of control into "you don't know what the fuck you're doing, do you?" thoughts that are always ridiculous and a sure-fire sign of me giving up. And that is the dangerous area right in front of 4).

The biggest problem with ANY of this is really that they aren't even important. What is important are the characters, the situations they get into and how they squirm out of them. It doesn't fucking matter what the streets are named, it doesn't matter if the events happen on a Sunday, Saturday, or some made up day like Misurgsday, just that they fucking happen and make sense. But my brain gets caught in a loop on the "make sense" part of the equation, and in the summer, most soccer games happen on a Sunday, and all towns have street names. So these things must be addressed, but unlike the feelings, thoughts, movements and processes of humans and their interactions with each other, I cannot just pluck them from the air and make them real. I get bogged down in them* and the whole process shuts down. 

So my plan is currently to decompress and relax a bit. I've got the ball rolling, I just need to figure out the stupid day-of-the-week thing and move on. And there it is, moving on. The simplest solution to the heaviest of problems. Ugh. 

The answer is keep truckin, I guess. I can't say it'll get better because I've walked away from stories because of these seemingly tiny issues, if only because it takes me out of the story and then I'm done. I cant get the flow of storytelling when I'm worried about Soccer games not happening on Wednesday--it sticks in my mind and just rusts out everything I think about. SO I'm going to go eat something and figure out the day of the week, fix it if necessary or ignore it if I can, and get back to work. I'm 760 words below my daily minimum, and since I skipped the last two days, thats really more like 2,760 but I'm okay if I can make 1,000 today. So that's it. that's the plan. Okay. Let's do this.

.

*The worst thing is names. I can't name my characters anything without long-winded conversations in my head about how I don't want them to be named after people I know, but can't all be named Oswald and Elwood and George. Luckily, this time names were cake, somehow.

In Medias Res

Okay, I know it’s been a very long time since I wrote anything here, and I’m pretty sure it started as a slight lapse in time or effort to continue writing here, but after awhile it also became an issue of embarrassment: how long can a writer not write before he has to tell everyone (and more importantly himself) that he is no longer a writer? How long can one have a blog and not add to it, how long can he say “Yeah, I have a blog, you should check it out” when he hasn’t added anything on it forever. One of the first jokes I ever heard about blogging was how everyone has one and they only ever have updates twice a year and they all start with “Hey guys, I know I haven’t been writing here, and I promise to write more...” and I know that I’ve made similar (if not wholly equal) statements in the past for this blog and others. But fuck it, man. I never start these blogs with any real intention of every-day or once-a-week use, I try to, but when push comes to shove I’m a really lazy guy who has bursts of energy and activity and slumps of inactivity and boring-ness. This is a thing I do not say with pride, and it probably has a bunch of reasons no one cars about, so we’ll just skip the pyschoanalysis for once and dive right into what I came here to talk about.

I’m a media junkie. It’s becoming kind of an issue. I found myself thinking today about a scene that I only know from clips and such of Dustin Hoffman whacking a taxi cab (?) and screaming “I’m walkin here! I’m walkin’ here!” when it nearly runs him over. When I thought of it at first, I thought it was Kramer vs. Kramer, which was probably way off. I spoke that guess out loud, because my co-worker hadn’t any idea what I was referencing (there was cab who was doing a rolling stop while we were crossing the street), and then had to explain it. THEN I had to explain (because my brain does whatever the hell it wants anymore, but we’ll get to this later) that this incident (Dustin Hoffman yelling at a cabbie [wait, was it a cabbie? Shit.]) was actually ad-libbed, because some guy drove through the shot and almost ran Hoffman down. So I basically made a reference to a movie I have NEVER SEEN and then explained it, and then added more superfluous information to this already annotated story in order to explain why I made the reference. And it may have been Drugstore Cowboy (another movie I’ve never seen) and I’m also not sure it was a cabbie. In a second, I’m going to go onto Youtube and find out because, as previously mentioned but not discussed, I have officially lost control of my brain.

Okay, so the verdict is one of three: it was a cabbie, but the movie is Midnight Cowboy, not Drugstore Cowboy (what is that, I wonder?) or Kramer vs Kramer (was Hoffman even in that movie? Fuck I’m losing it. Concentrate, goddammit, you’ve got to get through this). The important part of this ridiculous anecdote is that I am a media junkie that does things like identify with a scene in a film I haven’t even seen and try and use it to relate to people in real life. This can’t be a healthy exercise. Really. And not only that, but that I haven’t seen Midnight Cowboy (What the hell could it be about?) or Kramer vs. Kramer (probably a court movie, which went out of style around the time Dick Wolf started making television shows) actually makes me want to see them, just so  I know the context of my own references and to know why the hell Kramer vs Kramer is famous enough to be in my brain. And here’s the fun part: I will probably watch one of those movies, and I have no idea why. Wait, back up, I do know why: it’s because my brain does whatever it wants because I am a fucking junkie for media and information.

I don’t know when it started, but I think it may have to do with embracing curiosity about the time Wikipedia became a thing. I remember back in the forum days, trolling along in the interwebs, we used to talk (write?) about the interesting places we’d start on wikipedia and the crazy places they’d take us. I can’t remember specifics, but the thread was not unlike the Kevin Bacon connect-the-people game where you can line up Charlie Chaplin to Emilio Estevez or whatever. Say you start with World War I and somehow end up on the breeding habits of red squirrels or the shelf-life of pine nuts. It doesn’t matter, the point was what a long strange trip it was getting from one link to another, starting at one place or subject and then, simply because of curiosity, being taken to another just as interesting (if not more so [who doesn’t love pine nuts?]) and never going back, or having to close 45 tabs or, at the very best, spending days going back and reviewing them after spontaneously being inundated with new information (never happens except for ALL THE TIME). 

So I’ve decided that this is and may be and definitely has been a bit of a problem that effects not only me, but the things I want to do and the things I have done and not finished. Did that sentence make sense? There’s sometimes I feel like what makes sense to me doesn’t exactly make sense to others. And that’s why I am here now doing this. Trying to finish something. Trying to make a thing whole and maybe small but at least something to be proud of, something I can point to and go, “there it is, that’s the start of something and the finish of something. It’s not pretty, maybe, but it’s mine and fuck you if you can’t handle it.”

So there are a few things that I’ve been working on, and they seem stupid sometimes and (my all-time favorite reason to stop something) too big to be real things that I can make exist. Writing projects. Like, sit-down-and-spend-some-fucking-time-writing-godammit-projects. One, I think, I want to finish before the end of November (yes, novel-writing month or whatever). I think it will be the “religion” project, as a story that I am absolutely afraid of because it deals with beliefs and madness and death and heartache and pain and somewhere, hope. It’s a story I’ve been sweating for a year? two years? Doesn’t matter. It needs to be done because I started it. The other project I have in mind is a compilation of stories based around a deli (I know, I’ve kicked this around a million times), but this would be more of a collection of short stories with a mild framing story to hold them together, like the early Treehouse of Horrors, and the stories usually have nothing to do with the deli at all, just because fuck work, it’s life that’s interesting.

So anyway. This is the plan: write. The only issue I have (other than confidence or my finishing-things issues) is fucking media. My constant cycle of switching channels, flip to Jamestown, history of; Pocahontas: Reality vs Legend; Disney movies I’ve never seen, The physics of lifting a house with balloons, That Penn & Teller Bullshit! when they take on the Boy Scouts, The Republican 2012 Platform, skip-a-few Hoovertowns and the Great Depression. I’ll do my best to keep my internet bullshitting to a minimum, but we’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed.

Being Boring

I have a confession to make:  I am boring.  It's not something I like about myself, but it is something I've noticed from time to time while cutting my toenails or watching a movie or even when I'm talking about something that I've clearly overstated or haven't completely understood. This isn't to say I'm no fun, or even useless, but I can no longer say that I am a truly fascinating person.  That's okay, though.  Neither are you.

Teddy Roosevelt--now that was an fascinating guy.  Killed animals for fun, went with his son Kermit and explored the Amazon Basin, became president, fought in a couple wars, got shot and yet still continued his speech--this is the kind of guy that people watch with their mouths hanging open and write books about and argue about and try to find out what made him tick.  He's a fascinating guy.  Other fascinating guys include (but are not limited to) Hemingway, Lincoln, Gandhi, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Da Vinci, you know, all the people that get posted on elementary school bulletin boards.

There is a difference in fascinating people, though, and people who do interesting or fascinating things.  Frank Zappa is an interesting guy, and I think that some of his ideas were great, and he was an awe-inspiring musician, but I can't really put him up there with Lincoln--maybe you can, I don't know, but I don't think that he's so good that you'll see his name in elementary school textbooks.  Another interesting guy is Julian Assange--I don't necessarily want to read a biography of him, nor would I really like to know everything about the guy, but I do find him interesting in the work that he does, why he does it, and his ideals concerning privacy and transparency.

My dog used to make this same noble face when he was watching me eat tomatoes.

But I was just really looking at myself and I find that it's very possible no one will ever write a book about me, no one will ever want to sit me down and interview me on my ideas of the world, no one will probably ever really be interested in everything I say.  I'm not going to have fans like George Lucas or have my biography eagerly anticipated like Mark Twain.  I'm just not that special.

Here's the rub, though--it's okay.  Who fucking cares? there's really no point to trying to be any of those people, and they would be the first to tell you that.  They became famous and interesting all on their own by just doing the things that came naturally to them--Teddy Roosevelt was an adrenaline junkie and couldn't sit still if he wanted to.  He had to be off being the champion of...whatever.  Julian Assange leaked files because he knew in his heart that was the right thing to do, even if others thought it was wrong and others still thought it amounted to treason (PS I have a definite opinion on this guy, but I have no desire for politics).  These guys didn't do things because people were watching them or because people might be watching them--they did them because it made sense.  To them.

Yes.

So now I'm trying to write a book--I don't know if people will like it, I don't know if anyone will even buy it or read it.  But to me, it's an important work, and may be the first thing that I've ever written that takes me to a different place as a writer--this isn't just a story, this is something I'm writing to figure myself out--I think that this book may change me fundamentally, and that can't be a bad thing.  But there are moments when I doubt myself, when the animals in the back scream out "shut up, you're boring and no one cares what you say" and that may be kind of true--but this time it doesn't matter.  I'm writing for me and I'm going to finish the fucker, hell or high water.  And maybe that isn't that boring at all.

Calvin, McCandless, and Me

I've decided I'm going to walk the Appalachian Trail, and I'm pretty sure I want to do it in the next five years, otherwise I'll be older and smarter and full of the angst of unfulfilled dreams. Like most of the people I know.

It's really just because I love nature, and love being in nature, and pretty much sweat the whole thing. No, I'm not the guy that explores Central Park or the rest stop on the Interstate, I need to be surrounded by woods, and so far I've done decent jobs of it. Some in Alaska, a lot in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, some in Vermont (Green Mountain Range) and some in New York State (though not as much as I'd like). I've been around, but the Appalachian Trail is really what I want to do. I'm not sure when this fascination for nature came about, but I'm pretty sure it had to do with Calvin and Hobbes.

Probably the most famous of the comics from the eighties to the early nineties or whenever, Calvin and Hobbes was a mainstay in The Press of Atlantic City, my local paper when I was younger. Every Sunday (we only got the Sunday paper) I'd zoom outside and grab the paper, my feet clad in white socks with black bottoms from the wet driveway. On the way back inside I would shell the front page and sports section like a hard-boiled egg and run back into my room, to look at the only colored pages that mattered to me.

This was back before Nancy got reverted (badly) back to it's 1933 roots and when Charles Schultz was still churning out funny stuff from time time, before the Parkinson's got so bad none of the characters had straight lines. Beetle Baily still got stomped by the Sarge and Bloom County was still around (though hardly something I understood). I still read Family Circus, hoping for a funny joke here and there (although I think I mainly read them when Billy went on his adventures and a segmented line indicated his path).

But Calvin and Hobbes was the first one I read, every time, even when we started getting the real paper during the week (or at least Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays). It was the drawing that really got to me. Bill Watterson could really get trees down. I've always liked to doodle and draw myself, though I don't think I'd win any contests since mainly what I liked drawing was stuff I'd never seen before: Mountains. I liked drawing trees on cliff sides overlooking long, flat valleys and caves built into low foothills under the Rockies or perhaps an idle tower of rock poking up like a black tooth from a desert landscape in a lonely corner of Nevada (or Utah, or Arizona. Like I said, I'd never really seen any of those things, and the internet wasn't around).

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What struck me about Bill Watterson was that he could draw those things, did draw those things, and the best part was that he captured them the way my mind saw them: as funny shapes against a stark background, or a wealth of color on a blank canvas. Calvin and Hobbes (even with the limited colors at first) spoke of an imaginary world that mimicked our own so well that no one would ever be able to tell the difference. It wasn't Utah, it was Calvin's backyard, it wasn't the foothills of Appalachia, it was the long, endless forest behind Calvin's house that he'd go traversing through, his best friend at his side, in search of hills to ride his wagon down, hidden flags for Calvinball, and cool rocks to carry back home and put on his windowsill.

I wanted Calvin's backyard, I wanted the otherworldly feeling I got from those comics, and to be perfectly honest, I still do. I've been camping many times, I've lived without electricity and powered lighting and cell phones and television, without the help of the internet, books, or even a tent. For me it was always about communing with nature, always about being free from the things that other people could not see living without. They were my Calvin trips. Sometimes I was alone (though I was surrounded by people), sometimes with my friends, but always with nature and the world. It felt good to cast all the woes and worries of civilization away with the phone in my car, left to wander for a day or so, or to leave all those things at home and go camp out for a week with little to no amenities from society.

But Appalachian Trail, man. That's where it's at, really. That's the Holy Grail for me. For some it's Alaska, like Christopher McCandless. McCandless was a kid from the East Coast who (like me) resented modern society and most of the bullshit stresses and warrantless misunderstandings of human nature. He (unlike me) however, decided to ditch the money he had, hop into his Datsun, and bail. He lived for two years on the road, never staying in one place for very long, never stopping to think too long and hard about anything. When he was tired he slept, when he felt like moving on, he did, and he let nothing tie him down (including his car after a flash flood had killed the battery). He lived month after month as a vagrant, a hobo, living off the land and needing nothing.



However, McCandless was also a little too loose, not unlike Calvin when he decided to run away to the Yukon. McCandless's dream, his Holy Grail, was Alaska. He decided to get up there, probably for one last big adventure, but unfortunately he had been reading a lot of Tolstoy and Thoreau, and not a lot of survival magazines or books concerning the biggest frontier in the United States. Five months after being dropped off with little more than a couple of tuna fish sandwiches and ten pounds of rice on the Stampede Trail just East of Denali State Park, Christopher McCandless was found dead in an abandoned bus, literally walking distance from food or help, starved to death (although some think it may have been due to poison from eating moldy seeds). He made two errors in his great journey: no map, no research. There was a line of cabins near the site where he died, but he had never found them because he thought he was in the middle of nowhere, and his return up the trail was stopped because the summer run-off from the mountains nearby had blocked his way out. If he'd had a map, he'd have found those cabins, if he had done some research (or hadn't stuck to the desert for most of his other travels), he would have realized that tiny streams in April can become untraversible rivers when the snow melts. Even Calvin read a map (though he thought the Yukon was literally inches away, because he had no idea how to read one. I mean, he's six.)

I'm not mocking McCandless, though. I totally understand where he was coming from, and agree with him on almost all points. Living on the grid does suck, it's a nuisance and worrisome and a pain in the ass. I'd love to go off and live like Calvin in the woods, alone or otherwise, finding and expereincing the beauty in the world all around us. However, though I want to, I probably won't. I like writing, I'd like to get a book out some day. I'd like to have a wife and kids and all that shit that McCandless didn't want or understand (and that Calvin didn't want to understand). I'll probably do the Appalachian Trail, or at least enough of it to make me feel accomplished, and I'll come back to the world and pay my taxes like a good automaton. Does this make me a sell-out, a grevious wretch who's going back on his ideals, cashing in on those things that make me lazy, weak, and misunderstood? Maybe. But I know that when I come back from the Trail and see my family and go back to work or whatever that I did something I had always wanted to do, gone somewhere I'd always wanted to go, and that I had accomplished something worth doing.

I think Calvin would understand.

References:
"Christopher McCandless -." Wikipedia. Web. 11 Jan. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless.
"Calvin and Hobbes -." Wikipedia. Web. 11 Jan. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_hobbes.
Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild (MTI). New York: Anchor, 2007. Print.
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What To Do, what to do

I am different from everyone.

I know everybody is different from everybody else and that somehow we are all the same decomposing material and noxious waste. I know how we're all human and alike, but really unique in our own special way, and all we have to do is find our niche.

However, I am slowly coming to the idea that I have no niche, I have no specificity, I am not obsessed over anything, and this just may be my downfall. Especially if I want to be a writer.

Let me explain. I love music. Music is great. Music is something that can get inside your brain and twist it into bows or knots, fold it into an oragami swan or crumple it into a wet ball and toss it in the wastebasket. Music is the one thing that I'd have to say 90% of the world at least can handle on some kind of level. Some people love punk rock, blues, metal, emo, hip-hop, r&b (do they even call it that anymore?), soul, "classic" rock, 80's hair metal, pop, grunge, country, bluegrass, &cetera &cetera &cetera I could go on for fucking days. Some people like one kind of music and THAT'S IT. SOme people have a mixed bag. But me (and a lot of people I know) like ALL KINDS OF MUSIC. And that's where I sit. Somewhere on the gray line between all genres. I like almost everything. Our mixed bags are bigger than most (like those who just like blues, jazz, and swing and big band and...oh sorry), but that doesn't make us any better than those who like trance, house, techno and industrial. We're just different, and I get that.

But here's my problem: can I write about just music? Fuck no. I see what that does to people. Before you know it, I'll hate music. I'll hate the morons who don't listen to the music I've had on heavy rotation the last four months. I'll start looking down my nose at musicians who didn't affect me with their songs when I can't even play a fucking instrument (no hand-eye coordination, and I'm REALLY fucking lazy) .Look at Rollingstone's David Fricke. That guy fucking sucks. There are people out there (me included) who don't believe he EVEN LISTENS TO THE MUSIC HE REVIEWS. I mean, the guy rates an album like Nevermind three stars when it comes out and then retro marks it with five ten years later because he's afraid to look like he didn't know what he was talking about. Of course anyone worth his salt isn't going to Rollingstone's Music-Industry-Spoonfed-Music-"Reviews" anyway, but that 's beside the point. That can't be me. I can't be that egotistical (he said, writing an article about how different he was from everyone). I can't take a job that demands I focus and analyze music as if it was a frog on a rubber plate, it'll kill the whole reason I listen to music: to get away from analysis and get to where I feel good again.

Not only that but I don't know enough. I don't know when Nevermind was released unless I look it up. I don't know how many albums Tool has, I don't know how many bands Jack White is in (3?4?). I don't know my stuff. I can't convince you I know what I'm talking about unless I have that knowledge, and I'm certainly not going to fake it, because then I'm a fraud and have no value whatsoever.

Same thing with movies. I can't review movies, because I have little to no interest in telling people about a movie before they go see it. A preview is enough, but personally I think I'd be a much better person if I didn't even watch them before I walk into a movie. Previews ruin things, they ruin the magic before the movie--they build expectation (which can lead to disappointment) and kill the idea of honest intake. How many times have you watched a preview or read a review that a) gave away key plot points that would have been better left out or b) looked so stupid that you would never see it in a million years or c) got you chomping at the bits to go see that movie only to have you walk out of the theater twenty minutes into the film?

There's no way to solve this, really. Without promotion you can't have movies but that's why I can't review movies: I don't want to give away major plot points and I certainly don't want to take four thousand words and trash something I found no value in that you might really like. Everyone is different. Transformers 2 did really well at the box office, but the movie had no artistic or asthetic value. Yet it made billions (and I saw it in the theater, don't ask). But the key problme I have in reviewing movies is the same as music: I don't know my stuff. I like movies, but that doesn't give me the right to talk about them in anything but vague, compromised terms. I can talk about the thematic elements of The Dark Knight, but the only people who want to read that are decent film teachers and friends who don't mind listening to me ramble at length about morality plays when they really need to take a shit. I can't write a forty-thousand word review and submit that shit to the Times.

Many authors try to stick to one genre of writing: something that they're really good at or know a lot about; Stephen King is versatile, but he watched a ton of movies when he was a kid, mostly the badly made sci-fi/horror flicks made in the fifties and sixties. Dude obsessed over those, hitchhiking back and forth from a neigboring town to watch film versions of penny-dreadfuls. Crichton was a medical student obsessed with technology and the weird relationships of it's advancement and nature and how humans and technology really mean terrible things for each other. John Grisham worked in a law firm and knows his shit when it comes to law. He loves it, and he loves to show the morality between the decisions people make and the law that represents them. He's a beast. Clancy does military stories, Anne Rice does Vampires, Mark Twain did rural South in the 1800's, Fitzgerald did the rich youth of the twenties (well, the white ones anyway), and Steinbeck did the Depression-Era common man. These people all know their stuff and so their art drove them in that direction, they wrote what they knew and they knew what it was about their lives that was interesting.

My thing is, I don't know what I'm into. I know a lot of trivial information about books and movies and music. I don't have a career to use for material. Plus what I do know is boring: I know how to paint a garage and play video games and put off writing a paper. I know how to eat too much and play too hard and how to roll my ankle on a porch step and limp for a week. But is that enough to try and write and sell stories on? Is what I have that churns in me enough to live on so I don't have to worry about stupid shit anymore (something I know too much about)?

I guess I'll just have to do what I can with what I have and hope for the best. I suppose it's something I'll have to learn to do, just like everything else.