Charcoal Drawings

I talked with my sister for about half an hour tonight, and after hanging up Mandy commented on the avalanche of vulgarity that was used.  "I've never heard you cuss that much.  Ever."  There was a metric fuck ton of impolite words used.  I explained that my sister taught me how to cuss, and could make a peg-legged pirate blush and plead for modesty.  I had to explain to my girlfriend that my sister, being nine years older than myself, used me for her entertainment when I was younger.  Being a little brother, I was always eager to fit in with the big kids.  When I was seven or eight, my sister told me that teenagers showed their mothers that they loved them by calling them bitches.  I promptly ran through the house, found my mom, yelled "Mom, you're a BITCH," with a gigantic she's-going-to-be-so-proud-of-me smile on my face, and then spent the rest of the evening in my room wondering why my mom would ever slap me and ground me for loving her.

It took me several years to discover the meaning of the word fuck, but that never persuaded me from mastering its usage.  While my sister never dared to trick me with this word, knowing full well that they would know where it came from, I did overhear it enough that I started to learn all of its delicate nuances.  My young ears were able to discern the staccato, piercing nature of the word, and realized that it was an excellent way to convey intense frustration of draw somebodies focus for important matters.  My mom first discovered that I knew this word because of Tecmo Bowl.  I didn't handle losing well as a child (or now, for that matter) and my friend Tim was just better at it than I was.  My mom came into the room to discover her eight year old angel spiking a Nintendo controller on the floor screaming "THIS IS A FUCKING JOKE!"  Her shock was only compounded when, after informing me that I was grounded for using that word, my response was "What fucking word?!?"  Several years later I discovered the meaning of the word and subsequently increased my usage.

The oddity of my family is that while my sister and I are as foul as soured milk, my dad never cusses.  The worst you'll hear him utter is the occasional "Aw, hell," or, his favorite, "How could you be so damn dumb?"  He has used this one quite a bit over the years.  My mom doesn't cuss, UNLESS she gets flustered.  Then she undergoes this change.  My mom is a tiny little woman standing maybe 5'2" with big, curly hair.  When she's had enough, her little fists clench up, her face gets red, and her first profanity busts from her lips like a balloon with too much air finally succumbing to the rules of physics.  Much like the balloon, once the structure has ruptured everything gets let out.  The usual result is my dad uttering a shock-faced, breathless "Jody" and my sister and I laughing at the hilarity of the scene.  Unless we're in public, in which case we assume the posture of the caricatures that you are used to seeing on streets and in bazaars.

New York

Upon arriving in New York I didn't know what to think.  I knew that I was either going to love it or hate it but that there would be no middle ground.  I had the same feeling in my stomach as you get on the up down up down sections of roller coasters; either vomit or a big smile is coming very soon.  Being born and raised in Nebraska did not prepare me for the old school feather pillow that hit me in the kisser.  I was expecting more memory foam.  I had always told myself that I have traveled.  I have been in bigger cities.  Delhi.  Mexico City.  Despite all of this I had never experienced anything so intensely urban.  I had always heard the term "concrete jungle" in rap songs and other pop culture mediums, but I never understood it to mean pavement and iron and brick so deep that it writhes around your ankles and makes your body feel over-sized and incapable of motion.  I wondered how so many people managed to walk down the street every day because I had the urge to look up at the stone and steel and glass monoliths that are everywhere.  As with everywhere, people become used to their surroundings and jaded to the impressiveness of it all.  I recently told a born-and-raised Californian he needed to move away from the ocean because he didn't even notice it any more.  He has lived here his entire life and hasn't been to a beach in at least three years.  Somewhere there is a New Yorker who thinks of his/her daily 60 floor elevator ride as annoying.  That person desperately needs a dose of Kansas.

Being me I noticed oddities that I'm sure others miss.  People keep their trash cans on the street because there's just no other place for them.  A fact of their life but a blemish on my daily sojourns.  Everybody reads.  The awesomeness of the subway is that it takes all of the commuting part out of commuting.  Yes, you spend 30-60 minutes each day riding this metal earthworm but you're only requirement is to step onto and off of the thing at the right time.  And then you read, or work, or sleep.  I couldn't help but think of how better read and better informed most New Yorkers are, even those you want to stereotype as non-readers.  The city seems to be ESL.  Everywhere I went there was a rich blend of tongues from ports the world over.  My ear became more nimble in my week outside of SoCal.  I noticed the quality of neighborhoods by taking note of the amount of graffiti on walls and the amount of gum on the sidewalk.

It was only day two when I realized I was in love.  There are certainly things that I would dislike about living there but I left the city with that same hungover feeling that lingers after a one night stand.  The next day your head hurts and your body aches but you wear this wry smile that won't go away because you lost yourself for just one night.  Dangling were the severed strings of responsibility, ambition, failure, consequence, doubt, reality, and sadness while the warm embrace of pleasure and enjoyment pushes you onward.  New York and I are not lasting companions, destined for love eternal, but I will keep my eye open for a possible fling or affair.

What I've Learned About Writing

I'm not a writer.  A writer is somebody who gets paid to write and makes a living out of it.  I just write.  I spill my life and thoughts out into journals or free websites but I've never made a penny.  Despite my amateur status, there are quite a few things I've learned along the way.  If I had all of the answers for writing I would have started this passage by saying "As you know, I am a writer."  Regardless, there are a few things that I've figured out that will hopefully be helpful.

1. Just start writing and keep writing.  This seems like dumb advice, but I struggled for the longest time writing stories because I didn't know how to start my story.  I would try to start at word one and progress forward only to find that after a page or two I came to a place that felt like a better starting point.  Then I'd scrap all of the things that I had written and start from my new starting point.   I spent an ungodly amount of time worrying about what was the beginning, middle, and end.  I stressed about it, sought feedback from my friends, and generally did everything I could think of to devise a way for figuring out where to start.  This one just came to me of my own accord.  One day I was sitting in this usual quandary when I realized that I could just keep writing.  The beginning, middle, and end only matter if the story is completed, so I learned to just keep writing until I came to the end of the story.  When I reached the end, I knew that I could work backwards to find where the story needed to begin.
2. Don't force a story.  My last sentence in the previous point says "needed to begin" because if the story ends a certain way, there are certain plot points that have to have happened.  The old theater adage says that if you show a gun in Act One it better go off by Act Three.  This makes sense because if the gun was never meant to be shot, it wouldn't be in the story in the first place.  If your main character falls in love, he/she has to meet their lover, and before that they'll have to be looking for another for one reason or another.  No matter how much we disagree, life happens as a logical progression.  If your story ends in a place that you don't like, change your main character's personality a bit.  Fire him from his job.  Have him be inside a bank when it gets robbed.  Do anything other than expect the reader to think "Well, sometimes people just snap, I guess," because they will never believe your story.
3. Revise your story.  Then go back, read it again, and revise it again.  I'm only now learning the value of revision and I hate it, mostly because I didn't do it before.  Revision allows you to tweak details to make the story better.  It allows you to catch stupid mistakes.  It allows you to get inside the head of your character and learn things you didn't even know before.  Stories are intricate pieces of construction like cars, and you'll never make them better unless you crash them on purpose and sift through the wreckage to figure out how.  Sometimes you'll find out nothing is wrong at all, but if you smash the story by telling it through another character's eyes it comes out even better.  You'll never know unless you experiment.
4. Write about your life and those of your friends.  I'm not advocating that fiction die off and everybody start penning essays, but use the things that you know.  The only things that are genuine are the things that come from you, so even if you're writing about an intergalactic war between octopus people and creatures that look like wire whisks, make one of those wire whisks a lot like you or a friend of yours.  Base its interactions off an anecdote from your own past.  If you want to make it fantastical you can do it by translating it into a weird world or starting at the same point and then exaggerating, but if it isn't grounded in reality your readers will never buy in.

I have more tiny nuggets of wisdom but it's two in the morning and my eyelids are pressing down on my eyelids and my will to write any longer.  Hopefully these points are useful.  Hopefully they make some manner of sense because I will certainly be skipping point three tonight.

Things I've Learned While Driving in California

I've lived in California for just shy of five months and have had quite a few adjustments to make since I moved.  Aside from the different culture of people and the cost of living, the biggest adjustment has been driving.  I've always considered myself a pretty savvy driver, being knowledgeable of traffic laws (and how to break them without getting busted), but there are a different set of rules when driving in California.  I have no idea why some of these things are the way that they are, but here are some things that every visitor or new resident should know about driving in California.

1. Traffic - By my best estimate, the road system in California was designed somewhere in the 60s-80s, when there were substantially fewer people here.  Additionally, the culture of California is style over substance.  Why would I share a car or use public transportation when I could show everybody the new Benz that I can afford if I skip my rent payment every other month?  These are numbers in an equation that adds up to stupid amounts of traffic, at all times, for no reason.  Do you want to go shopping on a Sunday at 3pm?  You may cruise along unimpeded and cover the ten miles in ten minutes.  Or it could take 45.  I was driving to LA one night to visit my girlfriend.  Friday night, 9pm.  Traffic was 5mph at best for about 45 minutes and I kept telling myself that there had to be some horrific accident.  I kept my head on a swivel looking for burning nuns frantically running around or random body parts scattered about BUT IT WAS A FUCKING TRUCK TIRE.  A two-foot piece of rubber standing on end had crippled tens of thousands of drivers.  Not an actual wheel/rim combo that fell off, your standard chunk of exploded tire.  I can't even think of a ridiculous metaphor for the rage and hate that went through my body.  It changed me.  In that moment I knew that I am superior to every Californian.  That is a fact.  A supporting piece of evidence for this is that...
2. Rain Shuts Down California - There's this myth that since it never really rains here and that there are so many cars, oil builds up on the freeway.  When it does rain the water beads on this oil and causes carmaggedon.  The reality is that real, actual rain causes power outages and landslides and the bullshit mist that they call rain causes the clueless shell people that reside here to play thirty-six car bumper cars.  And they do this even though they're only driving 22 miles an hour.  If any of these people actually saw real rain they would drown to death.  From their own feces that would fill up the inside of their car.
3. Traffic Lights - The light directly in front of your lane most likely has no bearing on what you are actually supposed to do.  There is a four lane road that leads toward my house that has an additional turn lane at a light.  Five total lanes.  There are two lights at this stop.  One light is in front of lane 4 (the left turn lane being lane 1) and the signal for the left turn lane is actually in between lanes 2 and 3.   My best guess here is that the state is too bankrupt to afford an acceptable number of traffic signals.  Even if they had one signal per lane it still wouldn't matter because...
4. There are Secret Lanes in California - I know it says Bike Lane, but that's really just code for Right Turn Lane.  That thing on the side of the highway for Bimmer's that run out of gas because the owner can't afford to keep the tank full?  That's not a shoulder, that's just an extra exit lane.  Anywhere a car can squeeze becomes a lane.
5. Speed Limits - ...don't matter.  If there's bad traffic, the speed limit becomes this mythical thing like a unicorn or a girl who actually wouldn't cheat on her husband with Brad Pitt, if given the opportunity.  If traffic is good, there are still too many cars for a cop to radar you in any manner that would hold up in court unless he's right behind you.  Motorcycle cops are a concern, but only because...
6. You Will Kill a Biker if You Drive Here - I've just accepted this fact.  California allows lane-splitting, which means that good people who are eagerly ready to volunteer (their organs) can drive their motorcycle on the dotted lines BETWEEN cars.  This will scare you shitless the first month or so that you drive here.  Putzing along at 38 mph in a 65 will have you frothing with hatred until you get blasted by motorcycle exhaust 3 inches from your open window.  You spend the next couple weeks paranoid, looking out for bikers when you're crawling to and from work, even trying to scoot over to give them more room.  Until one day you just accept fate, like a stage 4 cancer patient, and resume whipping back and forth between lanes to gain those extra 3 feet each time the tiniest of gaps appears.  One of these lane changes will eventually lead to a biker witnessing his own death in my rear view mirror, and I'm okay with that.
7. The Fast Lane is Not the Fast Lane - Everybody in California is original.  That's why they all dress alike, drive the same cars, and think that In-N-Out is better than any other fast food burger on the planet.  They all also think that the far left lane is the fast lane, which is why it isn't.  The second lane from the left is the fast lane well over 50% of the time.
8. Turn Signals - Aren't used.  This seems counter-intuitive because it is.  There are more cars here than 99% of places on the planet yet nobody feels compelled to tell the other motorists where they intend on going.  You do get used to it after awhile.  If it would be massively dangerous for that car in the right lane to cut in front of you with no warning, they almost certainly will.  They're not really concerned that they're going 45 and you're blasting along at 80 as this is a detail for you to work out and can't possibly affect their day at all.  While lanes are usually pretty clearly marked and there aren't as many people on their cell phones while driving, I still have that self preservation instinct that forces me to move my middle finger three inches every time I want to turn or change lanes.
9. Cell Phones Are Not Recommended While Driving - They're actually illegal, punishable by a minimum $325 fine, but it's more of a recommendation since all of the people that you don't WANT using a cell phone while driving still do.  Trophy wives, douchey business guys with slicked back hair, and high school girls still yack away while tailgating you and mysteriously looking to their left, but when I lived in Omaha it always infuriated me that roughly 75% of drivers had their talk box glued to their face at all times while operating a car.  The law knocks the number down to probably 25%, but that's still an improvement.
10. Road Rage Doesn't Really Happen - This is another one of the positives.  Everybody wants to get home as quickly as possible and be out of the awful Royal Rumble that is rush hour traffic, so when you nose your way in front of somebody shaving 2 more seconds off of your commute the person behind you reacts more to the tune of "Well played you wily bastard" than "I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND FUCKING MURDER YOUR THIRD COUSIN!"
11. I'm getting bored with this, so I'll just lump these all together: You hate the fact that every day you see somebody, who is obviously a prick, driving your dream car; Toyota sells more Priuses here than anywhere in the world and the drivers do, indeed, sniff their own farts out of smugness; Carpool lanes are fantastic ideas that nobody uses because carpooling isn't very cool; and gas costs a dollar more per gallon here than anywhere else in the country, at all times.

I hope this has been informative.

The Shanks

I had a computer science professor in college that constantly chirped the adage "Garbage in, garbage out."  Computers are stupid and do what we tell them, so when we tell them to do dumb things, they oblige.  I've pushed this saying to the outer bounds of what Dr. McClung ever thought possible.  It turns out, nearly any system in life spits out garbage with cartoon smelly lines and flies swirling around when we provide it with half-assedness and stupidity.  My writing habits lately are an example, as is the bulk of the productive things that I'm attempting.

My writing hasn't totally flat-lined, and I'm not suffering from writer's block because I'm still lucid and seeing the world in this patchwork quilt of words and phrases, but some of the phrases are in Tagalog and I can't tell which one starts the damn quilt.  I should change things up and go into editing mode to polish things that I've written and don't presently hate, but I don't want to take an up and coming bit of writing and introduce it booze and women and easy money and sully it before it's prime.  My sentences are running on like a marathoner that picked up smoking.  Premises of pieces are lost like droplets assimilating into the ocean.  I used to be able to know how long to drag on a sentence, how many flowing phrases to string together before punctuating it all with a little five word staccato.  Now words are piling in before periods as if they were some sort of horrific train accident moving from right to left.

Of course this all assumes that I had a manner of swagger with a pen that may not have existed in the first place.  A slump isn't a slump if it's normal.  As with all things I will persist, head down, crooked jaw clenched in concentration.  I will fight the urge to backspace all of these words out of existence because if I can't stare down my garbage writing in the mirror and pluck out the edible bits like some sort of homeless author then I won't get through the winter.  And the humble writer has no conclusion so he merely stops writing for now.

Disappearing Into the Hollow

I only ever write beginnings
because I don't know how it
ends. I can't see over
that hill because the trees
are old growth and overdue for
a fire. The crackling would be
horrendous
and a generation of larks
wouldn't learn to fly.
The fire would bring new
plants but the old ones
probably won't give a shit,
casting charred, shrill looks
upon the new buds.
The new beginnings.
The ozone would catch the brunt
of the fire smoke like that huge mat
that catches pole vaulters each time
their vision turns
from ground to sky.
Deflating but not quite rebounding
all the way.

Some of the smoke particles would float out
into space, assuming an orbit
that takes them into the far reaches of
the cosmos, where trillions of crumbs are
gathering.
Sucked into a black hole,
crushed together into what scientists call a
singularity.

And then their knowledge stops.
They don't know if inside that dense abyss lies
a universe's graveyard,
bleak and without flowers,
as if the groundskeepers have been by
several nights after Memorial Day.
It could be the void like a canon fuse
disappearing into the hollow
of the launch tube before
propelling the artillery shell
skyward with a big
bang.

The thud reverberates between the houses,
the shockwave making itself known against my chest.
My favorite ones are the shimmering
fingerlings that slowly shower
down, blurring the line between night
and dream.
I've always wondered what happens
to the embers.

Ding Dong, Reality

A friend of mine was arrested today for something that, if true, is despicable.  I'm not ashamed to call him my friend because the version of him that I know is kind and selfless, constantly struggling to fit in but always feeling like an octagonal peg trying to fit into a round hole.  So very close, which makes the separation that much more frustrating.

I have an empathy for him, for a lot of people, that is hard to understand.  When I received the news via text the witch-hunt began.  "I always knew that something was wrong with him," was thrown around.  I didn't.  If I had I would have distanced myself from him.  I try to make a habit of avoiding people who are sinister or at minimum have broad swaths of evil painted across their soul.  I prefer to dabble in mischievous and the occasional misdemeanor.  Felony is too far.  Yet I understand, in a way, because I know that good people can do bad things for good reasons.  Sometimes people aren't equipped to play the hand that they're dealt at all and choose to throw their cards away.  I can't say that I blame them.  The reaction is where I differ but I also feel like that is more to chance than any of us really care to admit.  Apparently most of my wires connect to where they're supposed to which makes me laugh.  If sanity were a horse race I would not put my own money down on Bret Londer.  Things could be so very different though.  When I'm confronted with a reminder like this I can't help but think back to what would have happened if I would've stood up in that restaurant and flipped the table like I wanted to.  Or opened that second bottle of Evan Williams.  Or skipped the meeting with the professor.  Or, worse, what if I had just rolled with the punches, cramming it all down inside, rotting from the inside out.  Some cosmic coin flip made all of those decisions for me.  God knows I didn't.  Any one different decision could have turned me to the paving stone path that led a couple of police officers to my door.  I would have opened it and had that same rush of terror; that the upward trajectory of my life had just been cut short, that I had caused it, and that there was no way to fix it.  Self-created helplessness.  Real despair.

I feel bad for the victims.  Even the most benign tornado ruins farmland and tears down trees.  The land will never be the same but over time new plants will grow and the new trees will regain most of the height of their forebears.  If I'm being honest my hurt for them doesn't outweigh my hurt for faces that are familiar and shamed.  Other people's problems are never quite are as potent.  It's harsh, but it's true.  For my friend, I hope it's all an awful dream.  I hope he was an unwitting participant in a game that he wasn't aware was occurring.  Even if that turns out to be the case he'll always have that film of doubt and mistrust on him.  Even in the best of scenarios, life will be a hike up a steep mountain made of mud.  I hope that through all of it he discovers something about himself and meets fate head on.  But in this moment he's dealing with reality one minute at a time, and these words are nothing more than bullshit.