NaNoWriMo 11/12/2007 - Input Output.

I am devouring a collection of magazine stories, hungry for the words and stories of others. It is a best of anthology, so I am subconsciously measuring the wit of my prose against theirs. Their words are tight and tart, confident and succinct. A valley separates us, but one that I think can be crossed in time.

Perhaps I needed the influx of thought. Penned up as I am in this comfortable cave, I’ve struggled to flow. This should have been the ideal environment to write, but reality has been different, attention divided like an apple pie, distractions shiny and numerous. The whole point of this exercise - to get better at writing quickly, has come in spurts of consciousness, but not as steadily as I had hoped. Maybe there is only so many tricks you can teach an old dog?

These are all excuses though. Right now I am of the mindset that anything not achieved is an excuse. I must push onward, to remove the obstructions between my mind and this page. There are a handful of vaguely developed characters that could use more meat on their bones, and a couple of potential storylines to weave between and among them.

No, writing 50,000 words this month is not my singular priority, nor is it my most important one. But come December I shall not be happy unless I know that I at least gave it a decent try…

NaNoWriMo 11/06/2007 - For Michelle

For Michelle

It rained last night. In the stupor of sleep I heard the telltale signs - the pattering of drops on the roof and the hissing of car tires as they rolled on the wet asphalt. I couldn’t see very well out of my bedroom window, but I imagined a quiet, dark world coated in a sheen of water.

When I awoke the sun was up, casting a low light, sharp against the rooftops. I thought of you and how abruptly you left us. It’s wrong that someone so young and full of possibilities is taken from this world. You had such a calm and peaceful demeanor that you carried with such relaxed grace. It was reflected in everything you did and a manifestation of a deeper strength. Other people in this world have to scream in order to be heard. You were able to express your thoughts quietly, and a boisterous room would hush in order to hear you speak. This was you way.

I did not know you well but there is a void inside me where your essence once resided. For your family and friends that void must appear like a bottomless chasm. It saddens me to think that those most blessed with your presence now have to carry the seemingly impossible burden of your absence. I have no alternative but to think that you are in a better place now - all other options are karmically unacceptable. To think otherwise would lead me to think that life is some cruel joke, but I know better.

This world is filled with improbable beauty and moments of joy that can’t be explained away or quantified as a collection of atoms and molecules. A small joke that makes a group of friends laugh, the gentle warmth of the sun upon your skin, a simple smile and “good morning” from someone like you…all of these things can’t be quantified by science, and suggest this world is more complex than we can imagine and is more - much more - than our brief time on earth. Your leaving us just reinforces this belief. As you go, you leave behind memories, smiles, laughs, and the hope of one day seeing you again, someplace more beautiful than even this earth, and more wondrous than we can imagine.

NaNoWriMo 11/05/2007 - Camera Lucida

He peered into the camera and saw the city before him, the skyline, the rolling hills, the bustling freeway. High cirrus clouds streaked across a powder blue sky. A white streak, the contrails of a commercial airliner, divided the sky in two. He did not know what to think - he had come this far and overcome so many obstacles…he was expecting something more…anything more than a simple camera that he could have bought on Amazon.

Beneath his left thumb was a simple rocker switch. He rocked it to the left until it clicked softly. The image in the camera stuttered slightly. He rocked it again. Another stutter. He didn’t know what to make of it. He rocked it again and held it in place. Suddenly, the contrails of the commercial airliner shrunk as the plane seemed to fly backwards. Surprised, he let go of the rocker and the plane resumed its course. He moved the camera away from his eye and looked skyward. Yup, the plain was there and the contrail was there too.

He put the camera up to his eye again and rocked the switch left. He held it there, and once again the contrail shrunk and the plane seemed to fly backwards. Holding his breathe, he held the rocker switch and the plane continued to fly backwards. He gasped but continued and began to notice other things - the cars on the freeway appeared to move backwards, as did the ship in the harbor. He could not believe his eyes. Panicked, he let go of the rocker switch and the image in the camera returned to normal - cars moving orderly on the freeway, airplane steady in the sky, another normal day in the bay.

He looked around to make sure that he wasn’t drawing attention to himself. He wasn’t - the other park visitors were caught in their own world…a elderly man walking his dog, a young couple pushing a baby stroller, teens on bikes in the skate park. He held the camera up to his eye and pointed it at the skate park. A teen was hurtling down the half-pipe, preparing to execute a trip on the opposite lip. Clearing the lip, he executed a neat 360 in mid-air before nailing the landing. He followed this whole sequence with the camera and then thumbed the rocker switch left. Magically, the sequence played in reverse in the viewfinder, the teen riding reverse up the half pipe, clearing the lip, doing a reverse 360. While the image of the teen was in mid air, his shutter instinct took over and he snapped the image. He let go of the rocker and the image returned to normal.

He took the camera away from his eye and hit the review button. There, on the LCD display, was an image of a teen on a BMX, caught in mid air as he executed a 360. He had just taken a photo of…of the past. He shook his head in disbelief.

NaNoWriMo 11/04/2007 - Writing is Jazz

Writing is jazz. Not like jazz. Not a metaphor for jazz. Writing is jazz. Got it? Or maybe I should be more specific. Writing is bebop. Words roll and spin and jive. It’s just a collection of letters and spaces. Commas and periods, but they are more. Really more. They leap off the page and stream through your optic nerve. They head to your brain to be systematically decoded into communication, but they leak out all over the place. You can’t see them in a cat-scan, but they’re coursing through your bloodstream, floating in your lungs, filling your heart. Some even come out your ass - that’s what farts are, words that your body rejects. That’s why cultured people fart when they read People magazine. You can’t hear it because they are, after all, cultured people, with anuses that they can open on command to let the words out quietly. But sometimes, in a small, poorly ventilated space - like a car or on a train, you can smell them ever so faintly. This one smells like another Britanny Spears social faux pax captured on paparazzi film. That one smells like David Hasselhoff drunk on a beach with a beer belly. That’s why cultured people don’t read People - while they can fart the bad words out quietly, other people, even other cultured people can smell the odor that comes out of their asses. It’s for this reason, and this reason alone, that cultured people read business writing.

NaNoWriMo 11/04/2007 - English Teachers

Pity high-school english teachers, week after week slogging through stacks of poorly-written papers. Poor grammar, poor spelling, poor everything. Unispired, unenthused, uninterested. What high school kid enjoys writing English papers, let alone admitting such a pathetic thing to his peers?

The kids think they have it bad, 20 page papers about a book that they couldn’t care for if they tried, hastily written in the gaps between more important things in life - friends, the opposite sex, fashion, trends, games, and themselves.

Just think about the person that they hand these malformed treatises to…the teacher, who now has a stack of papers to read in the gaps between more important things in life - friends, the opposite sex, hobbies, games, families, and themselves.

It’s all a charade of education because if you don’t care you don’t learn. Those kids in the back of the class who finished the paper last night don’t care about the words they committed to inkjet. They’ll care a little bit if they fail, but there’s no sincere effort to improve, and they’ll probably go off to college in a couple of years and struggle through and then enter the professional world and write such poorly-written emails that do more to miscommunicate than they do to communicate. And thus continues the cycle of overwhelmingly average mediocrity.

If she’s lucky, an English teacher will have one - just one - good writer in 5 years. Others will be technically proficient to some degree or another - their tenses all face in the same direction and their commas are in the right place. And they’ve learned not to start sentences with the word ‘and’. But their work will be lifeless. They’ll probably end up as technical writers or become really good business writers.

Good business writers - now there’s faint praise. What does it mean to be a good business writer? You’re good enough to commit your words to company letterhead because you’ve managed to excise any shred of personality from your prose. You’re the ultimate plug and play writer, able to be one of 5 people contributing to a one-hundred word document, and produce a result so devastatingly same that a reader can’t distinguish where one writer ended and the other started. That’s not to say that you aren’t skilled, because you are, and your ability to put together a cohesive paragraph puts you in the top one percent of people who know how to write.

But the 1 in 5 student is another thing altogether. They may or may not have the mechanics down yet, but damn can they get the words to dance and sing when they have found a groove. The process is slow and with many inexorable. First, they accidentally string together a clever handful of words that float above the page. They are surprised and delighted as they read it over. The rest of the words cling resolutely to the screen and the paper when printed. They are little more than black pixels arranged in a codified pattern. But that handful of words float above the page, and when spoken they leave a taste in the mouth, like a good juicebox.

And so it grows in fit and starts. A handful of words here, a jumble there, with no apparent rhyme or reason when they appear. They can’t be conjured for while they have talent, they don’t have control. Which is ashamed, because most of the time their professions of love are as lame as the next guy’s, and at the end of the week they don’t get the girl which makes them question their gift, but also - critically - gives them more raw material to work with, and keeps them hungering for and falling deeper into this fascination with making words dance. And not having a girlfriend gives them more time alone in their room to conjure.

And so this skinny, otherwise unremarkable 1 in 5 walks for the first time into this English teacher’s class. And with the first paper, without really trying - remember, a fascination with writing doesn’t gain one friends or get one laid unless you can release them in a furious cascade of rhyme accompanied by a heavy bassline - makes a couple of words dance. The English teacher, tired from another week of school, and bored to beers (or maybe wine) by all the awful papers on “Lord of the Flies” that she has to grade nearly passes them by. She rubs her eyes in fatigue and reads the sentence again. And once again they dance. She mouths them and they leave a taste in her mouth. After hundreds of pages of mashed potatoes, she’s stumbled upon a hidden kernel of sweat buttered corn.

At this point in the story you may employ your favorite hackneyed metaphor - a young Luke Skywalker being discovered by Obi Wan Kenobe, a young Harry Potter showing early flashes of brilliance, or that movie with Sean Connery as the English teacher in an urban school. Think what you like, but this is not your story. It’s not even mine.

NaNoWriMo 11/04/2007 - Writer's Block

He sat there, psychologically paralyzed, unable to activate his fingers because he had no words to move them. Fingers are wonderful instruments, strong, dextrous, delicate, sensitive. But like any instrument, they need the skill of a maestro to move them with grace. He had none, and thus the fingers did not touch the keys which did not place letter and words and sentences upon the screen.

“30 minutes” he mutters to himself. “I’ll give myself 30 minutes to write, to put words down. Don’t be afraid, they aren’t chiseled in stone. That’s what editors are for.”

30 minutes later and the page is blank save for a handful of conjunctions - and, or, but. No editor in the world can help that pitiful collection.

He fancied himself a writer. He really did. It wasn’t always that way, of course, as his high-school english teachers would tell you. His papers in school reeked of the Jolt cola that fueled them. All first drafts that could have been so much better if he hadn’t finished them that morning, they had little or no redeeming value. Not good enough for the school paper, not good enough for a college application essay, even he was embarrassed by them. Ask him if he liked anything he wrote in high school, and he’d say he hated it all. He wasn’t alone. He nearly failed.

NaNoWriMo 11/03/2007 - death

Her death was a shock. Not an overwhelming sense of loss or consuming grief, but a shock, something so far-fetched and unbelievable that he could not wrap his head around it. She’s gone. Gone and not coming back. What does that mean? Is it like she moved far away? Is it like she went up in a rocket ship and lost radio communication? Seriously, what’s the difference between someone in your life moving away and never seeing or hearing from them and someone dying? To you, does it matter that they died the day after they moved away or that they lived a long and happy and fulfilling life and is still alive? Is that what someone means when they say, “you are dead to me.”???

Death equals loss. And when that death happens to someone so young, someone just beginning their adult life, the loss is devastatingly profound.

When someone older dies, you can try to find words that console, that make some kind of cosmic sense.

“He lived a full life”
“She touched so many lives”
“He is at peace”

But this death, this ending of a short life, what do you say? What can you say that would make any sort of sense?

What can you possibly say to the husband, whose last name she just recently made her own, who not so very long ago recited vows - till death do you part? What can you say the can possibly help make sense of the huge void - the emotional chasm that he now faces? There are no words in any dictionary in any language that mean anything.

And what can you possibly say to the parents? Their daughter? The physical manifestation of their love for each other, the next step in the cycle of life, now broken? Dead. This is not how life is supposed to happen. This is not how life is supposed to end.

Still, there is the matter of the wake and the funeral - occasions where words cease to work, where we’d all just be better off quiet and mute, not awkwardly searching for something to say to make sense of this. Because, at the end of the day, there is no making sense of death. It’s just too big for us to fathom. A dog can’t begin to fathom Shakespeare. We can’t begin to fathom death.

The insidious thing about death is that it makes you question life. Even more insidious is the fact that death gives meaning to life. Without death, what is life but an endless succession of days? What would you do when you are 4,000 years old that could possibly be interesting? What fun would thrill-seeking activities like rock-climbing, sky-diving, and bungee-jumping be without the sweet risk of death.

Conversely, death is defined by life.

NaNoWriMo 11/03/2007 - Revs

“There’s a ritual to this madness.” he says to himself as he sets the torque wrench for 18.5 pound-feet and tightens the brake caliper bolt. He’s been in the shed all night. As his neighbors slept and snored and made love and dreamed and got up to take a late night piss, he worked on the bike, his only companion the cat and the dj on the transistor radio.

“It’s 3:12 and time for the traffic report…the roads are totally clear because everyone is asleep as they should be. If you are awake, then, like me, you are not well.”
The carbs are off the bike and are on the workbench.

“It’s 4:42 and time for the traffic report…there are about 2 dozen people on the road, delivering the morning paper and other everyday pre-dawn activities that the rest of the world takes for granted.”
The radiator is drained and refilled.

“It’s 5:00 and your listening to W.R.A.P. It’s time for Old Skool at 5! Here’s MC Hammer’s ‘You Can’t Touch This.’”
The front forks are removed, each leg emptied of it’s oil and refilled.

“It’s 6:30 and time for the weather. It’s going to be another spectacular day, high in the low 80s with low humidity. It’s going to be bright sun and blue skies with just a few clouds high in the sky. Take advantage of the day, because there’s a storm coming our way. It should arrive by the weekend, bringing high winds and plenty of much-needed rain.”
The front brakes are removed, pads changed, and fluid changed.

The cat’s had a more interesting evening than either him or the disc jockey. It started out normally enough, sitting there at the end of the workbench, near the old gooseneck desk lamp because it gives off a nice warmth. The radio played an eclectic mix, which she didn’t mind - it was the mind-numbing (even for a cat) late night commercials that repeated and repeated and then repeated some more. There she sat, warmed by the gooseneck lamp in the cool evening in the shed, getting sleepy slowly, eyelids (all 4 of them) gaining weight and mass until they closed shut. Every once in a while he’d make a sound - dropping a spanner wrench on the workbench or making the ratchet clickclickclick - and her eyes would open suddenly. Her ancestors may have been domesticated thousands of years ago by the Egyptians, but she did have some primal instincts left like awakening to a strange sound. But upon seeing that nothing was wrong, her eyelids would thicken once again and asleep she went.

At about 5:15am she was startled by a squeal.

NaNoWriMo 11/02/2007 - drunken

He’s drunk again, blathering and stammering and yelling and gesticulating. He’s drunk and he’s trying to use his crutches. At first it’s mildly entertaining as he plants his crutches and takes a giant leaping step, his whole body momentarily suspended in mid air as he arc towards a landing. But what’s entertaining at first becomes tiring the fifth or sixth time and downright droll the tenth or eleventh time. He, being drunk of course, doesn’t immediately notice the loss of levity that spreads among his companions, eventually fanning out to the periphery of the room.

He’s oblivious to the pallor he’s cast up all that watch him with horror and pity as he wobbles and flails and curses and falls and cries. There, lying on the beer-soaked floor, half of his shirt untucked, his glasses barely clinging to his nose, his cast dented and dirty, he cries, at first modestly, and then with each sob releasing another grain of self-loathing into his beer-soaked brain, the cries rise, head hanging, shoulders heaving, chest hyperventilating.

“Someone help this poor man up.”

NaNoWriMo 11/01/2007 - Awakened

He opens his eyes and sees the sky, powdery blue and streaked with high cirrus clouds. A white streak, the contrails of a commercial airline divides the sky neatly into two completely equal, completely interchangeable halves. The sun, the light source for this abstract illusion, is beyond his field of vision.

He blinks and then he blinks again, each reflex action triggered by the muscles in his face. These simple twitches re-awaken the sense of his physical self in a way that looking at the sky did not. In incremental steps, his consciousness multiplies from “sky” to “I am looking at the sky” to “I can feel my chest rise and fall rhythmically” and so forth and so on like some kind of logic tree. I am breathing. I am lying down. I can move my eyes and see things other than the sky. I can see the corner of a building. I can a powerline sagging between poles. I can see poles. I can hear my breathe as I exhale through my nose. I have a nose. I have a mouth. I can open my mouth. I can breathe through my mouth. I can see a man in a blue jacket standing over me…

These observations cascade in rapid succession, one following right after the other without prompting, each infinitesimally and inexorably expanding his known universe.

…I am warm. I see a woman with a similar jacket. There is a man over there in a white shirt. If they are standing over me, then I must be on the ground….

If…then. The first step beyond observation into logical reasoning. The explosion of observation and thought continues.

…I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know what just happened. I have images in my head, but they are fleeting, not like the blue sky, not like the corner of the building, not like the guy in the blue jacket….SHIT!…

His consciousness extends through his body. It flows down his neck, down his arms, down his torso, and down his right leg, where it meets searing, scalding, abject pain.

“…SHIIIIT!…FUUUCK!!…OWWWWCH!!!!”

His body convulses in pain, his mouth bursting open, not with breath but with sound. Eyes shut tightly and wince against this sensory flood. His head tilts back, his body….HIS BODY arching as he gasps for air that his now furiously-beating heart will use to awaken him even further to the pain that makes the sky and the clouds and the powerline and the corner of the building and the guy in the blue jacket not all that interesting any more.

“FUUUCK!!!!”
breathe breathe breathe
“My foot!!!!”
breathe breathe breathe
“FUUCK that hurts!!!”
breathe breathe breathe
“Owwww!!!!”

His eyes flash open again, big, wide, crazed. The pain has been replaced momentarily by his panicked response to the pain. The relief is only temporary, as the next wave of sensory overload hits the shore.

“SHIIIIT!”
He clenches his hands into fists.
The next wave arrives.

“ARGHHHH!”
He twists and contorts.
The next wave arrives.

“FUUUUCKKKK!!!!”
He tries to shake his head from side to side
But his head won’t move.

He has the attention of the man in the blue jacket now, who turns, calmly drops to one knee, and says, “Hi. You’ve been in an accident. Do you know what day it is?”

He responds, “Friday.”

“Do you know what month it is?”

He responds, “October.”

“Do you know your name?”

He responds, “No.”

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month

I’m giving it a try. A good excuse to let my mind wander. And I may as well fill this empty vessel called my blog with material. Watch this space, and don’t question where the story is going. I don’t know either, because I’m not writing a story - just a bunch of words, pictures of ideas...