Friday, May 30, 2008

Your New Genre

This, my friend, my fellow writer, is why I can't wait to see you write some YA (first person or not, I don't give a shit...) This right here is magical.

"I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace."

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Waiting...

Sorry I haven't said anything sooner, but I wanted to say something about how much I was moved by your post below ("The Knife"). I was moved, haunted, floored by your honesty, the pain, how you took me right there, threw it up in front of me like someone ripping open his shirt and baring his chest. I felt like I was driving past a bad accident, horrified, but unable to turn my eyes away.


You have a gift, brother... I know you know that, and I know you struggle with that, and I know I struggle too. But don't forget, in all the craziness, that you have the gift. You do, motherfucker. You do.


So, I jumped in here to bitch and moan a bit before trying to glue my butt to the seat for a thousand words, and I saw your last couple of posts, and you humbled me, you bitch. Fucker. Goat fucker.


So... some bitching and moaning.

I am waiting. The wait swirls around in my body, mostly in my stomach and tight around my heart... an almost constant "fight or flight" feeling surges like I'm seeing police lights in the rearview mirror... sometimes it feels like I've got a fantastic poker hand and I'm about to go all in. But it's constant. It consumes me, invades my sleep, destroys any moment of serenity. Poor, poor me, to be in such a terrible situation. What a stupid, selfish mother fucker I must sound like.

Like most of my character defects, once again it all centers around not having complete control of the situation. I can't do anything about it (I can, but I've at least learned to stay the fuck out of it at this phase) and that drives me up the fucking wall. No control... all in someone else's hands right now... nothing I can do but wait, wait, wait.

I try not to complain, and I try to be mature, and I try not to lash out, and I try to use what I've learned in the program, and I try to hand it over to God, and I try not to go fucking crazy, but I do. I go crazy. I let the waiting consume me, eat me alive, take me every second, tie me to the ground and rape me...

Meanwhile, I try to work on my current project. I've finished the notes, some knock 'em dead characters, chapters outlined, ready to rumble. The characters are vibrant and alive and fresh and young and innocent and they wave silently at me from behind foggy glass, their eyes pleading with me to let them out... they've been in there for so long, for no real reason other than my childish procrastination, my neurotic need for validation... this sense that I must really, truly know that my career really has taken off before I can invest the soul energy to allow myself to be sucked into that world again. And I know, I know, I know that this is the wrong way to think, the wrong way to do. Surviving and continuing to work in this situation is where the real writers swim to the surface...

So I will try to swim... I try to do a little, a tiny bit every day, if anything just to keep the characters alive... otherwise their waving arms will slow down, they'll take out a deck of cards, or worse, plug into a video game, and when I'm finally down from my royal toddler throne, ready to act like I'm a real writer, they will have grown cold, distant, no longer interested in playing... they will have lost the magic, not even enough interest in me to look over their shoulders in disgust.

I will click "Publish Post" now and try to jump back in... desperately try to put one foot in front of the other... word by word, bird by bird... I will try to keep them alive, to nourish them, break the glass and let them free. They want so badly to share this world with us.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Hulking Up

Disclaimer: You must have, at a minimum, a passing familiarity with 80's professional wrestling for this to make any sense.

I need to Hulk Up. Remember Hulk Hogan? Not his Golden Hulk persona in Rocky III but rather the original fiction, the Hulk who wrestled in the squared circle for Vince McMahon and who now, so many years later, has a reality show where his look-alike daughter is attempting (what else?) a music career?

So back in the 80's Hulk Hogan had these wonderful wrestling matches that involved him and his opponent ricocheting off the ropes, hair flying, spangled boots raised to throats, bodies slamming canvas and then at a certain point, if this was one of Hulk's big matches, the script would settle into the most compelling stage of the Hero's Journey: defeat, death, finis. The Hulkster would be lying on the canvas or cruciformed on the ropes, or his back inverted in the dreadful "C" of the Camel Clutch (Iron Sheik nods and preens), his great blond head sagging, his musclebound corpus limp, those magnificent powerhouse-arms hanging slack from his shoulders. The referee, with a dubious and wistful expression, would grab one of those hands and, at the urging of the crowd, raise it skyward, and release. The hand fell back to the canvas with a wet plop. The crowd screamed for the Hulkster to wake up. The referee again raised the hand. Again it fell. Hulk's eyes were still shut, his heavy brow furrowed as if pricked by an invisible crown of thorns.

With a shake of his head, knowing it was hopeless but following the established protocol, the referee would raise the Hulk's hand one last time. Release. Fall. Full stop. Hand arrested before it touches canvas. Opponent's face distorted with rage and fear. Hulk's massive phalanges knitting into a fist. Fist pumping. Crowd screaming. Hulk's eyes open. He stands up! What ungodly power could've raised him to consciousness? The Hulk stands in the center of the ring and poses to restore his strength, supplementing his own power with the power of the crowd, whose roars he funnels into his ears with cupped hands. The opponent, terrified, is quickly slammed and piledriven into submission and now it's the Hulkster preening, with one boot planted on his opponent's chest, who listens to the three count.

Today I need to Hulk Up. I am pinned below a crushing weight but my spirit, like the Hulkster's, is soaring through the arena, gathering strength.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

The Knife

The John Birch Society must've promoted my old man. We left the trailer park for Lafayette, IN, a college town about 70 miles to the southeast. My old man had rented us a house and I remember my brother and I chasing one another through the somber empty rooms. It was a shotgun house with a big cement porch and buckled hardwood floors with the bedrooms tacked along right side like an afterthought, three boxes connected by a narrow hallway. You entered the basement at the back of the house through a door in the pantry, down a cramped set of slippery stairs, past the cobwebs and the indignant spiders into darkness that was sweet with mildew. My brother and I helped carry the old man's metal boxes of weapons into the basement and then we helped carry the emergency foodstuffs and the radios and the other survival equipment. He'd picked this house specially for the basement which, due to a lack of windows and five feet of earth above its ceiling, was a perfect bomb shelter.

"It will see us through a long bad time," he'd say.
"If it comes," my mother would say.
"It's only a question of when."

I was doubtful that we could survive long in that cold cramped little room and at night I dreamed of white-hot mushroom clouds and of rustling stealthy spiders plotting to liquefy our organs, leaving behind our dessicated and web-swaying skins.

The old man felt good about the new house and the new town; he began to make the occasional grim joke about our nightmare at the trailer park. After a month he got us another German Shepherd. We named her "Madchen." He kept her in the backyard where she began systematically leaving, in glazed cups of snow, little piles of candied excrement. One Saturday my brother dared me to pick up one of these little logs and hurl it at him, but I was afraid to do so because I imagined that beyond the shellacked surface lay a warm and loamy center and that it would crumble apart in my hands. My brother, tiring of this game, went inside to finish his Alistair MacLean novel and I, drawn irresistibly as all boys are, drifted toward the street at the front of our house.

The old man's green Vega was parked at the curb, his body wedged at an uncomfortable angle, his feet projecting into a snowdrift. I did not like my old man and in fact to be near him made my stomach hurt but the dazzling emergence of the sun and the those comical protruding legs allayed my fears and I moved close enough to peer into the darkness of the car.

He was lying there with one hand clutching a pair of bright unruly wires below the dash. The stereo and CB were lying on the floorboards. Protruding from his side, just above his waist, was the handle of the short knife which he ordinarily kept in a leather pouch on his belt. The old man made rhythmic animal groaning sounds as his right hand clenched and unclenched around the handle of his short knife. I could see now that the black upholstery sparkled in the sunlight where his blood had soaked it through.

"You okay?" I said.
"Hi. Hi." He spoke in the peaceful voice of some past or future self. "Go get your mother. I've had an accident."
"What's wrong?"
He was very calm and patient. He waited until his groaning stopped although his hand continued to clench and unclench around the handle of the knife. "Go get your mother I've had an accident."
"Are you okay?"
"Go get your mother I've had an accident."

Later when they wheeled him out of the emergency room I admired him for his handsomeness and the crease along his temple where he'd been shot in the head in Vietnam and for his coolness when the knife was stuck in his side. He was wearing a shirt my mother had brought from home and one could see the bulky gauze pad below the thin fabric. My mother cried at intervals as the doctors explained the particulars of caring for the wound.

"You could have died."
"But I didn't."
"He saved your life." My mother was referring to me.
The car was quiet. My mother cranked the starter and the engine coughed to life. Madchen, wedged in the backseat between my brother and myself, flattened her ears.
"He wasn't obedient," The old man said. "I had to ask him three times."
"You can't whip him, you're full of stitches," my mother said.
"I appreciate what you did but I had to ask you three times did I not?"
I waited a long time to answer. I could feel the warm blood singing in my ears and I imagined that I was outside the car, running fast, leaping mailboxes and ditches to keep pace.
"Did I not?"
My brother punched me in the shoulder and frowned.
"Yes, sir," I said.

He gave what seemed to me a deep and contented groan. As we rolled along the frozen streets I came to realize that I'd lost a chance that would never come again and I cursed myself for walking toward the street when I could've picked up one of Madchen's segmented candies instead. My stomach began to hurt. The bare branches of oaks and maples flashed over our little car, an endless parade of switches with which little boys could be and would be whipped.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Engelbert Humperdink

Man, that Engelmbert Humperdink musta been one unhappy motherfucker in middle school. Don't ya think?

I love my dog very much, but I am unhappy with her current passion for licking her crotch. I can't expect her not to lick her crotch, she's a fucking dog... that's what dogs do. But like me, my dog takes everything to the extreme, strives beyond excess... this urgent, rhythmic, desperate licking, her back bent beyond its limitations, a slurp that sounds like a glug, but muffled, over and over and over again while I wonder to what end... is it menstrual, a yeasty adventure, fantasy filled? And she only does it when she is happy and comfortable and around me... ahh... life is good, well fed, recently walked, pretty day, quiet house, close to the Alpha dude, it's time... time to lick my doggie coochie, yeah...

God, there are times when I can't take it... I look down and yelp or slam my heels on my desk or throw a paperback at her...

Maybe it's just jealousy...

And again, it's not that she does it period... or even the duration... or frequency... it's the god-damned passion... how it becomes a life or death thing

fucking dog.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Warm Up

There was this kid in my neighborhood named Andy K. He lived with his big Irish family in a rented house two down from us, on the other side of the walkway that led to the park. The house had green shingle siding and a carport covered with corrugated green plastic. When it rained, tines of clear water streamed down evenly along the length of the carport. From the window of my attic bedroom I watched this phenomena, captivated by its perfect uniformity. Then my mind always drifted to life within Andy's house.

His father listened to the opera and drank a big glass of red wine before dinner. His sister was a beauty queen who had been a finalist for Miss Michigan and held herself apart from life in the neighborhood. In the basement Andy had a Coleco Vision game system which I thought inferior to Atari but which I nevertheless condescended to play from time to time, mostly in hopes of glimpsing his sister in her rapid passages to and from her bedroom.

Andy and I were famous in our neighborhood for our series of fights. We'd been fighting since the day after my arrival in the neighborhood, and after each bout we'd agree on a winner and then mentally tabulate the overall score of the series and agree on that as well. Sometimes we fought over a disagreement, but as he was a polite boy and I was a polite boy we rarely disagreed, so we would agree to fight just to keep the series going. We always fought in his back yard. I remember the way the impact of his fist made a "chock" sound in the bones of my face, the stunning blast of pain when he bloodied my nose, and the groaning rolling clutches in the snow and the grass. He was a polite fighter and so was I. We really liked one another and always let up when the other was beaten. We were both very proud of our series and reported on it to our parents and grandparents. In all my letters to my grandmother I mentioned the latest battle and the overall score.

One day we stopped fighting. I don't know why; maybe we were too old, or too emotional now in puberty to trust that our friendship would survive, but the irony was that without the fights we had no real basis for friendship, and so we drifted apart. I became bookish and withdrawn and Andy K. began to avail himself of his brother's weights, put on fifteen pounds, and joined the football team. Andy went to the Catholic high school and I went to a Christian school but I followed his football career in the local paper. One day I saw him outside and congratulated him on his successes and he shook my hand in a massive and calloused hand and I was glad then, feeling his hand and looking at his powerful build, that we'd stopped fighting.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Sedulous

I just wanted to express my admiration for "sedulous." I like counterintuitive words. For instance, I would imagine "sedulous" to have something to do with "seditious" and would consider it therefore to express a form of disloyalty or betrayal, but of course that's not the case.

Joyce is the only writer I've personally read who has used it in a sentence:

"When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers' shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live."

I'm a big fan of Dubliners. That's probably putting it mildly. I have asked my wife to read to me from Dubliners when I'm dying. I prefer it to the Bible as an expression of reverence and as an attempt to give form to the divine.

April Fool's Session

Nobody played a joke on me for April Fool's Day, not even mother nature. We had waves. It was cool at the beach, with the sun blinking down from a milky sky, but the water was already in the upper 60's. From the sand, which was populated by bikini-clad girls posing for pictures or throwing Frisbees and petting dogs picturesquely, the waves didn't look so good but far on the outside, far, far past the end of the pier I saw a small surfer drop into a wave that was easily over his head.

It was a long paddle-out, particularly for an aging programmer who hadn't been surfing in months, but I finally made it outside and there, lo and behold, were some fairly groomed swells of 3-5 feet. What fun. What can I say? Getting on my feet the first time was a bit shaky; like trying to balance on a water ski, that wallowing back-and-forth motion as I went down the face of the wave, but I didn't care. And while I was surfing I remembered why I live here. And I remembered how rare and cool my life can really be when I make the time to paddle out.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Letter to Someone Who Moved on to a New Job

This is how short-lived my gratitude can be. I am the master of disaffection. The master of sour, of entitlement, of the glass-half-full. This weekend I was worried that I wouldn't have a job at all. And now? See below as I participate in current-employer bashing with a former employee.


Go easy, JB. Go easy. Some of us are not out after all. I could see the Huey dicing the air above me, could see the extended hands of the grim medics. You were behind the machine gun, your body tick-tocking in slow motion rhythm as the brass shells arced through the smoky air and I tried JB, to grab something, anything, that would pull me to freedom but the helicopter leaned on its side and shrank to a small dot while the orchestra blared a symphony of death and desertion.

I am still here. Crouched at the foot of a palm tree, eyes shifting w/murderous anxiety in my mud-painted face, strangling my sweaty gun. I am still here.

Monday, March 31, 2008

The Rebound

What a strange few weeks it's been. Since I last posted I've been given another three years until my next biopsy, which was good, and which I interpreted as a clear sign that I should take a certain job which had been offered to me and which was set to pay me ungodly sums of money.

To this kid from Flint it was an obscene amount of cash. After I verbally accepted the offer I walked around repeating the figure in my mind. It seemed like the kind of number that only one of life's real Winners would ever bring home. Yes I was one of life's real Winners.

I went to Houston on business, for my "old" company. I was just waiting for the final letter from the new job, the letter which wrapped up all the details, the letter which would serve as my conveyance to the new land of riches and professional conquest. All week I felt sorry for the people at my "old' job. They seemed slothful and ashen; they went around making mistakes. The coffee cups drooped in their hands. They had pimples and bags under their eyes and after lunch their cheeks filled, like tiny sails, with oniony belches that they stifled behind clenched fists.

Thursday came. The recruiters from the new job assured me that it was only a matter of getting the paper into an email and that the arrival of my final offer was imminent. I congratulated myself for my talent, my brilliant negotiations, my all-around pluck. I went into my boss's office at the old job and, as gently and carefully as I could, trying to spare her feelings, I let her know that I would most likely be moving along to greener pastures.

As I drove along Horatio Alger expressway to the airport, my cell phone rang. It was a strange lady from the "new" job. She wanted to know the terms of the deal I'd struck. I told her. She replied that such a job was impossible, that it didn't exist, that the deal, in a word, was off. And just like that, my new job was gone, the bright chiming fields of rotating Mario Bros. coins in which I jumped with maniac glee, evaporated. My sense of invulnerability, my understanding of the rightness of the world, gone.

Suddenly my old job became rather charming, quaint, and comfortable. I asked myself if the faults which has seemed to obvious before weren't instead shortcomings on my part. This was the first step in my long preparation to re-claim my old job before it was too late.

From one crisis to another: that's how I roll.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Birthday

It was my birthday yesterday. I turned 36. I felt 49. My birthday fell in the trough between an endoscopy and the biopsy results. So naturally I was in a reflective mood.

What did I do for my birthday? Sat in five hours of meetings. Went for a walk in the evening. Played with my son, put him in the tub and then yanked him out. Felt old and frail. Thought about the pictures of my esophagus, a pink cone whose tapering interior was etched with livid red stripes. In my mind it was something tender and beautiful, this esophagus, this place where despite my best efforts the fear and rage had manifested as fiery tendrils. It seemed like poetic justice to me that my lifelong (and mostly successful) effort to be tough had been undermined by this soft little tube inside me.

As I pushed the stroller in the blustery evening vague thoughts of transformation flitted through my mind. Now and then my reverie was interrupted by my son's emphatic nomenclature: "bird", "flag," doggie."

I fell asleep reading an essay by Pushkin about a Cossack rebel. Pushkin's prose is pretty awful but it was the only Pushkin the library had. The library also has no Grass, one Hesse, and two Nabokovs. Presumably they have an entire shelf of Steven King. So ended the 36th.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Docent

I have literally one person who on occasion reads this lousy blog and he chimed in with the correct word. It was "docent" yes, that is correct sir.

I'd been fasting today in hopes of obtaining a spiritual revelation. The jury is still out on that, but the low blood sugar sure did mangle my synapses.

So thank you, lone occasional reader!

Synonym for Guide

This is killing me. I know there's a term to describe a guide in an art museum or perhaps a neighborhood, and I know it sounds like "bosun" or "dosun" but I can't for the life of me remember what it is, and the the tenuous relationship of the word to its literal definition makes it impossible for me to look it up. Damn, this is driving me nuts. I have a story where this word would fit perfectly and I simply cannot go on until I find that word.

In related news, I'm in the library and I just annoyed a homeless guy with the sound of my fingers on the keyboard. He glared at me, snapped his paper shut, and left. Interesting on several levels. For one, I'd imagine that, if you're homeless, there are all sorts of annoyances and indignities with which you must learn to live. Rain, for instance. Or snow. Or poverty. Perhaps the unfettered freedom of the homeless life makes up for these sufferings in some way. Perhaps my companion in the library had achieved a perfect but tenuous balance between suffering and freedom, and perhaps my fingers on the keys put him over the edge?

Or it could be simpler than that. Maybe he's learned to just walk away from anything that annoys him. Maybe that very ethic, the refusal to remain in a situation that is in any way uncomfortable or negative, is in some way responsible for his current homeless state. Or maybe I'm just an idiot who is looking to reduce a complex issue to a single cause that just happens to justify my underlying prejudice against the homeless. Guilty! But it's not prejudice! It's jealousy!

I might enjoy that freedom. It might be fun out there on the streets. God knows how many times I've wondered if there's really a payoff for all my hard work, the constant egress of monies to various creditors, the stress, the sleepless nights. I might find the homeless life congenial. I might enjoy indolent days swaddled in my own funk, defecation behind trees, grass-rolling drunkenness, the furtive hammering of some leathery harridan in a creaking shelter cot.

Aagh! I still can't think of that word!

Thursday, March 6, 2008

To the New Father

So the baby is born! As George Bush once said, "Mission Accomplished!" That was really the most difficult part. As I recall it's was pretty much a walk in the park from here. Baby comes home, you giggle, cuddle, and nap together. Once in a while they cry. True. Usually when they're not asleep, which is about 12 hours a day. But it's a soothing cry. They're not really upset at all. They just kind of coo at you in this outraged glass-breaking voice while waves of panicked heat radiate up your spine and into your brain.

So, you run around in a frenzy, going through the mental checklist: What Could Be Wrong With Baby?
Diaper
Bottle
Burp
Rock them
Walk them

Something else? In your exhaustion you often forget an item on the checklist and wind up making things worse. When the situation is finally resolved you look at your spouse and the two of you break into gales of laughter and it's like the end of a sitcom episode (credits, applause, fade out) except the next episode has already begun.

So, you find coping mechanisms, which is fun, too. For instance, I got a calendar and started marking off each of the 6,570 days that would elapse before Jonathan turned 18. That got depressing after awhile, so I turned to sullen disenchantment. This felt better for me, although my wife didn't enjoy it. We had an argument at about six weeks that went something like this.

Wife: "You're not a good father."
Me (wiping face): "Yes? Why not? I change diapers, I bottle feed, I stroll the baby, I clean up the vomit."
Wife (thinking): "Yes, but you're not enjoying it!

But...but...something happens. That baby becomes the most fascinating, the cutest thing in the whole world and pretty soon, almost before you know it (almost but not quite) you're actually rather proud of the vomit stains on your shirt, you're actually okay with leaving the house having forgotten to shower, and you can't wait to get home and see them again, you can't wait to start the madness. Rock stars might have exciting lives but it's nothing compared to parenthood.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Son

Was sitting in one of those meetings that deals with one of those afflictions of balance (too much is never enough, the disease of more, etc.). A piece of approved literature was passed around the circle and each person read a page or so before passing it on to the next.

I heard something read that I'd not noticed before; a rather simple and innocuous sentence, really. Something to the effect that everyone, regardless of race, creed, color, or class, had the desire to love, to achieve and to reproduce. Something along those lines.

At first I rejected this assertion. I said to myself that not everyone wanted to reproduce. I mean surely there were those who didn't want to have children, right? And then I thought about how this applied to me, and how, before my wife and I had young son, I'd been furiously trying to reproduce myself through my writing; that is, if you stopped looking at reproduction as a purely biological act and started looking at it as building a monument to one's life, as preserving something of one's essence for posterity, then, yes, I had indeed lived up to that assertion. I'd been trying like hell to reproduce for some time, and, frankly, it hadn't been working very well.

Then we had young champion. Slowly, almost without my noticing, my writing began to change. I didn't see it right away, but now, looking back at the 1 1/2 years since he was born, I see that at some point, without my knowledge, my writing had shifted from monument-building to storytelling. That is, I was no longer trying to preserve some of my essence in words. Instead I was just telling stories. Perhaps that's because I'd already reproduced and therefore no longer needed my writing to serve this function for me.

Is it possible? I think so. I know the writing is much more fun since my son has been born, much more fun and much less of a grind. So that's all I've got. Just a thought.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Weekend Miscsellanea

Spent the weekend with my son. Wife was out of town attending her sister's baby shower which, wouldn't you know it, turned into her sister's labor and then her sister's giving birth. So a day trip turned into two days but my wife still managed to fit this entire series of events into a weekend excursion.

So, while I was home with my son, we made some trips to the beach. The first trip was rather dismal; we didn't have a stroller (it had a flat tire) so we were left to walk, or I was left to carry, my son over the sand dunes to the playground, where the dog was tied up underneath one of the slides. She barked furiously my son and I as we passed overhead on our way to one of the blue plastic chutes. Later my son got hungry and insisted on stuffing both fists with goldfish. He staggered through the sand, slipping and inevitably falling, leaving little goldfish-strewn impact craters the size of baby fists. The dog and the son competed for these half-buried morsels, leaving both with shell and sand encrusted mouths.

Saturday night I was trying to get the baby son to eat something and he simply refused, shaking his head back and forth while making his negation sound, a bleating cry that will soon turn into "no." I got so frustrated, just for one moment, that I took his little head in my hand and forced that last piece of gooey cereal bar into the corner of his mouth. This had a devastating effect. He broke into hiccuping sobs, his little shoulders shaking, his little hands spread helplessly on the plastic highchair table, great swollen tears rolling down his cheeks. I felt awful. It took me a long time to calm him down.

The next day was better; I took him to the church nursery in the morning and then went into the sanctuary. The sunlight through the stained-glass windows had a strange magnifying effect on all the objects within. The elaborate carvings on the lintels, the heavy iron crosses that had been implanted with electrical bulbs, the mahogany pulpit, all these things seemed as if they'd moved toward me in space, as if some invisible hand had chosen to highlight them. That strange visual distortion brought out even more clearly the watery light of the interior, and I thought that the beauty of that morning was the perfect setting for a man who has lost everything to find peace. I started imagining such a story. It did not have to be so different from my own life. The stout minister in his white, rope-belted cassock with his white cropped hair seemed like a testament to the folly of ambition, as if he'd once been the man of my story and was now on the other side, happily ever after.

Later that day the baby son and I went back to the beach. A cool wind fluttered down from the north, turning the ocean a rich blue and sending the waves in at oblique angles. The sun glittered in the cinnamon dunes; my son staggered and shrieked in his playground paradise, following a horde of bobbed little girls who teased him, dragged him across the playground, and popped him on slides in the course of their ever-changing games. He bore all this with a glad grave expression, occasionally breaking into ecstatic shrieks, which caused the girls to snatch him bodily up and stagger a few steps before dumping him unceremoniously on his bottom (he didn't mind). Eventually these play-maddened children found a gray dog the size of a toaster and proceeded to bury the good-natured animal under a pile of sand until its owner, with shouts of vexation, dug it out. My son laughed when the dog, blurred by a cloud of shining dust, shook its coat.

Oh, one last thing. I was thinking that there's nothing more boring than a boring woman. A boring man becomes rather intriguing by virtue of his sheer unwavering consistency. A boring woman, however, bores you from a thousand different angles.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Can't Stop the Dance

I was in the gym yesterday w/the iPod on "Shuffle Songs" and sometimes, I swear, it feels like the iPod is listening to my thoughts. I was working on back. Lat pulldowns. Thinking about my wife and how she's really getting worked by this life we're living, this ever-accelerating race to old age, and how I needed to stop somehow and make her know how much I love her. I was thinking these things just as "Two Hearts" by U2 came on.

I wanted to play the song for her somehow. Wanted her to feel how urgently my love still burned, how I cherished this absurd belief that we would fall together into the vortex of death only to emerge unscathed on the other side. I wanted to send it to her as an MP3. Burn her a CD. Copy the lyrics out by hand and leave them under her plate at dinner. Something to let her know that beneath the tired, cresting-the-hill fellow who trudged through her house, behind that set of masticating dinnertime jaws, somewhere deep within that deteriorating genetic machinery, the same ardent and sleepless young fool with whom she'd once fallen in love was still struggling to make himself understood, still and always undefeated by suffering or time's passage or persistent fear.

I did nothing. I listened to the song and did nothing.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Long Time Since I Posted

Man it's been a long time since I posted. The draft of the novel was out for review. The reviewer pointed out some good things that need to be changed, but I'm out of energy. Out. Don't know what to do. Have to add a scene. Just can't get with it. Hmm...

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Finished the First Draft

See title above. It was a struggle. Took everything I had. Just as I was thinking that I had it about 90% done, my eye started to snag on all sorts of awkward sentences, baffling constructions, etc. And I had to ignore these things and press on to the end, get it into a big document and print it out and hand it off to a writer friend for a first look.

It's all difficult. I wake up in the wee hours thinking about certain points in the novel, tracing the plot backward and forwards, trying to decide if it holds up. My state of mind (burnout, insomnia) is reminiscent of the state I get into when I'm writing code. In both cases, the moment I lay down to sleep my mind turns a sweeping spotlight on the work I've just done and begins a serious but seemingly random inspection. All I can do is lie there and watch as lines of dialog or subroutines leap out and me and are slowly scrolled past my field of vision.

But the novel is away. It's off to the first of several reviewers for comments etc. I can't tell if it's any good. In baseball terms the novel is a home run swing, but I'm still not sure if I'm hearing the solid crack of wood on leather or a whiffing sound (complete w/groaning catcalling crowd).

Last night I had a dream that turned into a perfect short story. It involved a drive in an old sedan, a dirt road, an aged and hated rival, and the interior of a white cinderblock room with no doors or windows. The climax took place in the room. It was great. I woke up and told myself to remember it all. I lay awake and fixed all the details in my mind, then I fell back asleep. In the morning everything but the few details I've salvaged (and related above) was gone, washed away by a mighty river of dream-sewage. Oh well. That's how it is these days.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The Somnolent D.O.

I've been sick, man. All kinds of sick. A sinus infection that sprinkled bits of jagged metal down my throat; an earache that's been leaking this clear substance, a headache of viselike proportions, and, to top it all off, some epic gas. It must be January, the month during which I always seem to fall apart.

So the other night I was lying in bed, trying not to choke on my own drainage, afraid to swallow for fear of the pain in my throat, slowly, with as much patience as I could stand, letting the clouds of my sweet noxious gas fill the night air. My fever was spiking and I'd thrown the blankets off to keep myself from sweating. In all respects I was a miserable man.

Then my sleeping wife, with a kind of sigh, sat up from her side of the bed, leaned across me (in the process penetrating the meaty center of my gas cloud), and threw the covers over my body. Then she tucked the bedspread tightly on either side of me, put her hand on my chest, murmured something unintelligible, and rolled back onto her side, all without waking up!

Yes, I was give the dutch oven by my wife, in her sleep. There was something so sweet about that, something so comforting, that I soon feel asleep myself.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Scrote Bite

Ye who have young toddlers, beware! This could happen to you.

I was standing in the kitchen eating my dessert from a cup, holding the cup fairly high and looking across the room at my wife. This is the setup. It's important to know how my body was positioned in light of the coming event.

As I was rather engrossed in my conversation, I was not really aware that my toddler son was hanging on my legs and whining (he'd pretty much been hanging on my legs and whining all day). Next thing I know, a stab of intense pain radiated up from my scrotum and, looking down, I saw my son's little teeth clenched down on a tab of my shorts, which just happened to contain a piece of scrotum as well. Needless to say, my reaction was animated. I roared in pain, jumped back about three feet, and, pointing my finger, said "No!" to my little son.

Shocked by all this noise and motion, my son began to cry, and so, in a roundabout way, his mission was accomplished. He was once again being held and comforted by his father. Meanwhile, with my free hand, I massaged the bag. My goodness, what a shock.

Is there anything, anything in the world, that soaks up more of your time than a small child? Anything? It's really insane. Some weekends I really think I'm going to go totally insane. If I read ONE sentence of a book over a weekend it's a miracle.

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Ducks

Something, anything, in lieu of finishing the draft of the manuscript. I've hit a kind of mini-wall and am having trouble surmounting it. I don't know if it's the head cold that makes everything fuzzy and drains my writing of its emotional content, or if the writing itself is just bad. I do know that I have to keep pressing onward, one way or the other, and write something down so that I don't get completely bogged.

So last night a package arrived for the toddler son, a brace(?) of four rubber duckies with electrodes on the bottom of their bodies which, when connected by some conducting material such as a fingertip or water, caused LEDs in the ducks' bodies to begin flashing various garish colors such as electric blue, day-glo pink, sherbert orange, etc. You get the idea. Toddler son LOVED them. He went crazy. Tossed them between his hands, clutched them to his chest, staggered all around the kitchen pressing his awkward tiny finger against the two metal buds trying to ignite the ducks. But this was just the warm-up. When we put him in the tub with his ducks, the water of course kept them blinking nonstop (part of the design I'm sure). He had a fabulous time.

Wasn't so stoked when we shut the bathroom door and turned out the light, plunging the bathroom into complete darkness. Then he was not so stoked. The wild strobing colors made him nervous and I'm sure the laughing adult faces looked rather grotesque as they flashed and faded in our disco bathroom. He, of course, looked adorable throughout as he struggled to be brave, and lost. We didn't let him cry; when we opened the door to let the light from the hallway spill in, he immediately calmed down and went back to dunking and clutching those garish ducks.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

The Dream

So the dream started off on an old and venerable drawbridge spanning two Florida islands. Below me was a strip of bright-blue water. I was second in line at the drawbridge, behind a truck with a white Topper. I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the drawbridge to watch the various sailing vessels hurrying through the gap. As each boat passed, I swung somehow from its rigging and described these crazy loops, wild kiting swings above the bridge and water. As I descended from each of these euphoric leaps, I re-entered the crowd of people who had gathered on the edge of the bridge and every time I'd hit this dirty-looking, ponytailed redneck guy in the back. He had a maroon face and small round spectacles screwed into his fleshy cheeks.
Eventually the bridge went up, preventing one last hurrying sailboat from making its passage, and then the dream shifted to the sandstone dungeon of a Spanish Fort from the 1500's. The scenes were all exceptionally vivid and bright. The camera panned downward to a man in a khaki shirt, then ran behind him as he turned, and I realized it was me in the dungeon but with Robert Redford's body and that perfect Robert-Redford wing of blond hair sweeping across my forehead.
I was elated to be so handsome (and to have such perfect hair) but a bit mystified by this sudden transformation. I was let out by the jailers and found myself on the sidewalk of a modern city. I was heading home, feeling absolutely no worries. I was joined by a man in a dark suit who began to tell me that I had another "assignment"
I asked him if it was top secret (the POV had exited my body again and was tracking us as we walked along the street, the stranger a little ahead of me on a narrow sidewalk) and he said of course it was, handing me a slip of paper. I didn't understand the instructions on the slip of paper so the man took me to an outdoor cafe where we sat across from one another near some small pine bushes. While we were waiting for drinks, he began carving some kind of occult symbol into the wooden table with a meat cleaver
I found the stranger and his movements to be ominous and oppressive. The dream had turned from light to dark. I told my handler that I did not want to be in his employ, that he had the wrong man, that I was nobody's spy.
He said, "Don't you remember?"
My dream shifted to a little room, POV facing a small fire grate set at the base of a cinderblock wall. A head appeared in the fire grate. It was mine, but my features were coarse and aged and I was bald. Not the resplendent Redford, but just another grimy schmoe. Then the POV rushed back into my body and I saw, looking into the cinderblock room, that my wife (who happened to be Barbara Streisand don't ask me why) had been pinned to the wall. Her flesh was peeled off her bones. I thought she was dead, then I realized that there was something alive inside her, inside the spread-open cavity of her body, some entity that was roughly five feet long and worm-shaped, and this creature looked at me and began (to my horror, of course) to manipulate the slack facial features like a puppet master while making mewling sounds that I knew I should understand.
Cut to a small room with many shelves full of masks, prosthetic hands, fake legs, etc. and there I am in the center of the room, revealed as a wormlike creature now that I've shed my Redford-ness. I'm hooked to some kind of machine that injects a current of blue electricity through my body and I'm saying (while furiously smoking a cigarette w/my wormlike mouth) "I can live forever. I can live forever."
The predominating feeling was one of horror and loss. I woke up but was too afraid to move. I could not be sure I was no longer dreaming. It was 1:22 in the morning. I lay there asking for guidance. I was afraid to leave the room for fear of what I'd see. Some aspect of myself externalized, some indigenous secret horror. I continued to ask for help. Finally I was told to get up and go to the bathroom, and I did.
I came back to bed, still sweaty and oppressed. After about five minutes I delivered myself of a tremendous fart and immediately began to feel better. The spell dissolved with my flatus and I felt that I had again entered my "right" mind. Soon afterward I fell asleep.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

My Wife

My wife just imitated me while I was on the phone. When I hung up with someone she repeated the last few phrases with a kind of salacious twist, as if to imply that I was trying to seduce the woman with whom I'd been speaking. I get tired of that sort of thing; it's a drum she never tires of beating, even though I've never slept with another woman in our 453 years of marriage.

So, she became aware pretty quickly that I didn't find it funny and is now trying to make it up via a series of rather mindless comments designed to force a response from me. It's fine. I've responded. Set her mind at ease; why not? What the hell difference does it make to me? I'm a fucking husband and father, come on over here and trample on me, please. Don't worry a thing about it.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Random New Year Thoughts

Hate Ed Harris. Why does he appear in so many movies? Can we please get someone else to do the steely-eyed, head-slightly-cocked thing? So tired of Ed Harris.

Last night my wife and I both had gas. Her flatuses smelled like the beach and mine smelled like burned meat. Together we had a sort of Luau going.

This morning we walked on the beach. We always see a man and woman in their 50's walking in the same direction; the man is usually wearing only shorts, his barreled, white-haired chest thrust manfully upward toward his shoulders, his short arms dangling over his hips. He looks vaguely apelike. His woman is the complete opposite. Where he is practically naked, she's completely clothed. She wears a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, sunglasses, and a floppy woven hat tied under her chin which completely obscures her face. Connecting these two wildly disparate persons is an old swaybacked German Shepherd with tufted fur. The dog always walks directly between the couple, never to one side or the other. We like to think of the dog as an equation. That is, that the dog represents an obscure formula which somehow unites the ape-man and the English gardener woman.

Also this morning, on the beach, my wife said that she likes to whisper things to into my baby son's ears, little sweet nothings which she imagines will become lodged in the nodes and whorls of his brain, and these whispers will wait there, packed tightly in their little nooks, until one day some emotional or physical cataclysm will shake them loose and then, in a time of crisis, he'll hear all those loving whispers as they trickle back out.