Idea MechaniX

Believing

2010-12-03T14:22:00.000-08:00

I believe in God. I'm also a bit of a leftie, in case you don't know that already. If you have a problem with any of that, it’s probably best for you to skip this one.

I spend some days running major errands between dropping my son off and picking him up from his charter school, which is over an hour away with no immediate bus service, I tend to spend that time talking to him, and the time in-between listening to my collection of podcasts from the previous week. But I’ve avoided political podcasts since the election, out of a cowardly sense that I couldn’t face them without fortified courage, to deal with the bad news. One of the political podcasts I listen to is “Best of the Left.” (No link, because Im specifically not recommending it). I listen because of the left-leaning (or I should say, forward-leaning) broadcasts which are edited into a coherent podcast for me. But, to be clear, I do not endorse this podcast.

In each podcast, the director/editor of the podcast makes a plea for spreading the word” on hos podcast to friends. But I will not. It is something that I do, because it makes my life easier, and informs me. But “Best of the Left” is not the only political podcast I listen to, nor the only political perspective I get. But I will not spread the word on that podcast, because I have a fundamental disagreement with the philosophy of the editor.

He is an atheist.

Now, that said, I have plenty of friends who are atheists, and agnostic, and it is not that view of believing alone that prevents me from recommending the podcast. It is the fact that, every so often, the editor will go into an atheistic-leaning diatribe against believing, and against organized religions (read Christianity, as I’ll go into later) that I find offensive and incoherent.

The reason I find it so, is that he presents clear negative viewpoints against the anti Islam phobia which is sweeping the nation. For the record, I agree that the anti Islam phobia is abhorrent, and disgusting, and against every American principal I know. I am not a Muslim, but, as Atheists and Agnostics, I have and have had friends who are. I respect their beliefs, as they respect mine.

What I find abhorrent about the Best of the Left’s views on religion, and their periodic shows highlighting religion, is their clear anti-Christian bent. I don’t happen to hold a prejudice against Christianity as a tenet of left-leaning politics. It seems strange to me that he would feel so comfortable disparaging Christianity specifically. It;’s as if the fact that he was raised in the religion, ad later chose to abandon it, that he feels gives him some special priviledge then to shit on the beliefs of those who did not turn their back on it, and who, in fact, find strength in their beliefs. He would never consider running a show that tore down Native American similarly mono-theistic beliefs, or showcased harsh opinions of Israel and Judaism, or allowed wholesale attacks on Islam. And I know there would be widespread outcry from his left-leaning public in each of these instances. But he feels happily content to project his anti-Christian viewpoint, and is, for some reason, encouraged by his reformed-Christian (Catholic, Protestant alike) listening audience to do so.

To put it in a nutshell, if the editor of this show periodically showcased anti-Islamic sentiment on his show, I would be offended, and listeners would never put up with it. The same with anti-semitic views, which, lets face it, you can also find on even some left-leaning shows. But for some reason, he feels completely comfortable with disparaging my system of beliefs in the shows he chooses to showcase. Most often I will skip over (or just skim) these selections, because I like some of the honest points of view. It’s his selection of putting them together, and capping with his own editorialize-ation at the end, which I find offensive, and wrong. And that is the reason I will never recommend the podcast to any of my friends.

I believe in God. It is a subject of discussion as to how much I believe the Bible is the word of God versus the word of man, written to suit a specific religious need and time. But I do believe there are parts of the Bible which are historical document, and parts which are inspirational faith. And which is which is not the point for me, at least not here. What is the point is, that I am a believer.

On one of those rides home with my son from his school, this subject came up. I can’t recall exactly why, but it was within an economic framework. I believe in capitalism versus communism (actually, now I do remember-he was saying how a friend of his was trying to subtly bring back the communist party by writing anonymous notes to local papers, which led to a discussion of communism versus capitalism). So, I went into how and why I believe capitalism is better than communism, which, in a nutshell again, is because you profit from your own hard work and the fruits of your labors more in capitalism. In Communism, you’re supposed to work toward the good of the commune. I know I’m over-simplifying here, but I’m not going into the specific discussion here, just the conclusions. I prefer capitalism because you benefit from the fruits of your labors. But capitalism should be tempered by Christianity, or some form of belief. In that combination of systems you can profit from your hard work, and still feel an obligation, and rightly so, to GIVE BACK.

This time of year is one where everyone feels the need to give something, and everyone feels more keenly aware of others who have and share less than they have. We go from a season of Thanksgiving into a season of giving. We give back. And part of what is wrong with the political discussion right now is that this latter part is not part of the discussion. There is little or no talk about providing social safety nets for the less fortunate, something that has traditionally fallen to the State and government as a whole.

Everyone is complaining about the government taking from them, forcing government to cut taxes. Government’s first step following this is to cut essential services to the underserved, and poor. And the rich and middle class are giving less than ever before to that same portion of our community.

Capitalism and Christianity functioned well when they went hand in hand—when individuals who profited under capitalist systems also had the Christian values to give back to those less fortunate, being aware that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to the kingdom of heaven. One half of that equation is just dysfunctional, at best, and criminal within a civilized society, at worst.

Maybe there are agnostics and atheists who give back a large portion of what they make, to those less fortunate, and in that instance, it is not you I am railing against. But I question every rich fat-cat capitalist who is a professed Christian who does not give back, and does not support the weaker in society, and instead rails against the “big-G” Government for raising taxes, and every secretly agnostic and atheistic fat cat who joins them, and feels not a pang of anything wrong with that. Their belief is not strong, or it would guide their actions differently.

And it’s for that reason that I would never recommend Best of the Left. Because it is wrong not to believe in something. And I’m a believer. For the record.

Thoughts before an interview

2010-09-07T07:19:00.000-07:00

I had taken the week off with my family at Cape Cod, (still responsibly checking on and applying for jobs online, I might add), when I got the call. I took the call on my cell phone, in the middle of Nickerson State Park where we were camping, and made the plans to make the interview in two days. Taking the family’s only car, and leaving them stranded with only bikes for transport, I drove the three hours back for what would likely be a two hour interview. That’s due diligence, given the fact that I needed to stop home first, dress to impress, and gather up the appropriate pages from my hardcopy portfolio. Then one stop at MapQuest, and I’m good to go.

The books all say to get to the interview early, to avoid the hazards of a bad first impression. But the worst impression is not finding the place at all. That was my concern as, after a half and hour, of driving around the same four block area, I could not find the street as MapQuest’s directed. Coming dangerously close to missing my goal of showing up ten minutes early, I finally surrendered the male gene and called for directions. So much for the air of complete competency. At least I could show I was more reliable as a designer than MapQuest was at directions. I hoped.

I began to get the sense I was out of place almost immediately. It wasn’t the usual feeling of displacement; being the only dark-skinned face in a room full of WASP-types, something I was so used to it was almost typical. No, this was an out-of-place that spoke to where I should be in his career. I am used to interviewing, not being interviewed. I am used to being sought after, not seeking.

So, I had showed up for the interview on time. This gave me the opportunity to excuse myself to the bathroom and give myself the once-over before returning to the waiting room to fill out the requisite paperwork. Tie in place, check. Hair in place, check. Facilities used, check. Hands washed, check. Face not too shiny from the August heat outside, check. And last but not least, no unwelcome hitchhikers from breakfast on my teeth. A quick stick of gum on the ride over had taken care of the coffee breath quite nicely, thank you.

I flashed a smile at the receptionist, and gave my name again through the opening in the wall. Glass pulled to the side, the window gave the impression of a doctor’ office reception area, not a design firm that handled million dollar clients. The walls all around the room were covered in light wood paneling, giving an anachronistic impression, that was a continuation of the perception outside. This was a large design studio located in an industrial complex; the kind of place I’d been more likely to go for a press check. The idea of a design studio in an industrial park seemed odd, and added to the surreality of the experience. The office, like the day overall, continued to radiate the impression of being something that it was not. Or maybe just wanting to be. Eight chairs ringed the room, incongruously. I wondered if this reception area had ever hosted more than two or three people at once, thereby making the need for eight chairs something of an overkill. Maybe it was a set. Certainly the raised coffee table in the midst of them added to the incongruity, like an area that wanted to feel like a living room, but couldn’t make it much beyond lounge. But then, we all have something to aspire to. Even a waiting room.

t took the preferred paperwork attached to a clipboard, offered by the receptionist. As had happened before, all the information requested on the sheets were covered in the resume I brought. And the fact that I had to fill out one of these forms nonetheless, again spoke to my displacement. would need to fill out before the interview,, the receptionist explained. And I had been through these hoops before. A process is a process. And it often was the same process if the company was interviewing for a shipping clerk or a new VP of Sales. Though neither was the position I was applying for, I sat the board atop my portfolio and took a seat to fill it out.

The paperwork, sure enough, asked the same questions regarding work history and education that are answered concisely and handily in my resume, I stubbornly wondered how much I should actually fill out. Certainly all the pertinent name and contact info. Certainly the work history, which I did as a mental copy and paste. But the next section asked whether I had a car or not, and how many moving violations I’d gotten in the past year, and that stopped him cold. I was applying for a design management position, wherein I would supervise design and production, and press checks, not applying for a delivery position. I was filling out a generic job application form for what I had supposed was a managerial position. The specific line of distinction between the two was clear, at least to me, and usually defined both by level of responsibility and commensurate level of compensation. That’s when it hit home that I was not necessarily filling out a one-size-fits-all application. I was filling out an application for a minimum wage job.

My eyes darted up to the receptionist, where she was busily answering phones and carrying private conversations over her shoulder with the workers seated around her. She didn’t meet my eyes. She wasn’t there for me, clearly; I was neither a client nor apparently a VIP in any way. She knew my name only because I had introduced myself, and it matched the name there in the appointment book for the CEO, with whom I had the interview. I was not yet important enough to get familiar with, and clearly not yet important enough to pay attention to. That sense added to my sense of disconnection with this place, forshadowing that this interview would not go well.

But, hell, I needed the practice for interviewing, anyway, regardless of the outcome. I needed to get used to wearing a tie into a workplace every day again, and keeping my shoes shined and being on time and ready. I needed to get out of the house, away from the blank screen that had been my visor since I lost my last full-time gig, and since I had been trying my hand at the exhausting pace of freelance life. I finished the paperwork, leaving the lines for salary inauspiciously blank. The receptionist reviewed the paperwork cursorily, then beckoned him back over.

“You need to fill out these salary history lines, “ she said.

“I’m happy to provide a range of salary, but I don’t really feel comfortable with specific history.”

“Well,” she mirrored, I know he won’t consider applications without the salary history filled in.”

And so it went.

The sewing kit

2010-08-05T15:14:00.000-07:00

I pick up a Waldorf Hotel branded sewing kit from the table, for two reasons. One, because I like the idea of the Waldorf hotel. But also, because I was intriguingly lacking confidence about what the words “repair kit” would reveal, inside the closed envelope. Maybe it’d be a tube of super glue and a swatch of scotch tape. Maybe the answers to life’s great problems lay within. I should put it back down.

Then again, I could use a sewing repair kit. I have many needs for sewing, and stitching, and repairing, or just kitting. Just kidding. There are lots of uses for it. But I don’t recommend using it for the punch line of too many jokes. There’s a needle inside of it, and some might not see the point.

The sewing kit reminds me of holes in clothes, holes in fabric, and the span of time between when something is new and when it is used, on the verge of used up. All my favorite clothes are in need of a repair kit. But that’s what defines them. If they weren’t in need of repair, they wouldn’t be my favorite clothes. And if they weren't my favorites, chances are they wouldn't be in need of repair. I have a dresser upstairs in the guest room, nearly full of old t-shirts that I want to save, or for some reason just can't throw away. And I have a closet full of clothes that I'm supposed to wear every day, that when they do need a needle and thread, I am supposed to just throw away, instead. Because dress shirts with frayed collars, worn dress clothes, soiled ties in need of stitching at the back, and pants with a fray at the back of the cuff offer the wrong professional impression. Even though that impression is more accurate. I would rather be in my old Marvel t-shirt with the frayed collar and discolored front from an unfortunate use of bleach, and in my Mickey Mouse hat with the torn brim, and my favorite shorts with the inauspicious hole near the groin that offers a hint at the color of my underwear. It just isn't done.

If only a sewing kit were magical, and could fix all the problems in a world that seems to be coming apart. We could've sent one down to the Gulf to stitch up the pipeline. We could use it to sew up old friends, or fractured families, or broken hearts, or splitting headaches, or to stitch together generally rambling thoughts that seem disconnected and too free-flowing, or just to wrap up run-on sentences that seem to be fraying at the ends. But in the end, I put the sewing kit back down. I can’t be trusted with a sewing kit. Again, there’s needles inside.

Thinking backwards

2010-07-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

It was in a book on meditation I read over twenty years ago. It recommended that at the end of a day, you review your day in reverse, putting events in reverse order. Like putting the movie of your day into reverse, rewinding from actually laying down, to what you did before bed, sucking back the toothpaste-laden spittle ad laying it back onto the brush, and so forth. You’re to do this all the way through your day, finally ending with your waking up that morning, your entire day ahead of you and behind you at once. In essence, it was and exercise in thinking backwards. The book acknowledged that it would be difficult at first, but promised that (with regular daily practice) it would get easier.

And now, twenty plus years later, I still try to practice this exercise in frustration from time to time, with the same lackluster result. I can go over the past five minutes with no problem, but my mind wants to jump back to getting up that morning, and go forward from there. The author of the book noted that this would be your natural inclination; to move backwards to a point and then go forward from there—but that you were to resist this temporal temptation. But I find it’s like walking backwards while trying to resist the urge to peek back over your shoulder to see where you’re going. It’s cheating and defeats the whole purpose.

The idea is personified in the legend of Merlin. Part of the Arthurian legend was that Merlin lived his life in reverse, so that Merlin met the child Arthur when he was an old man. The longer Arthur knew him, the younger Merlin became. This anachronistic idea baffles me. For, if you met someone that lived their life in reverse, they would know you before you met them, having seen you and known you already in your old age, and being already aware of everything that would happen to you. But the day would come, years into your future, on your last day of knowing your dear old friend, when he. Looking younger than you have ever known him, would not know you. This would be the day when, living in reverse, he would be first meeting you. And while in the present the wise old man would seem sage and knowledgeable, having lived through everything that will happen to you, the longer you know the man, the less he would know about you, and in fact, the less he would know. You’d have no shared memories, save those either you or he has not lived yet. It would therefore seem less a basis for a lasting relationship, and more like a basis for an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

And that’s the frustration of looking at life in reverse. It’s against our view of time, of our relationship to the universe, to the world, and to each other. Yet it’s supposed to be a good basis, meditatively speaking, method of reviewing your life. Maybe it’s only expanding the experience to greater than a one day that’s problematic, and makes it too big for me to wrap my head around. But, at the same time, there seems a compunction to stretch the exercise into larger, Merlin-esque, perspective. I think it was Socrates who said “A life unexamined is not worth living.” Or something of the sort. Yet everyday we make life out of overcoming our mistakes, and putting them behind us. And, to some lesser degree, forgetting, erasing and burying them as if they never happened.

In that sense, a life examined in a meaningful way is a life you have to live, in some ways, in reverse. A life examined is one that requires you to imagine not only spitting the toothpaste back onto the brush, but also squeeze it back into the tube. And that’s hard as hell to do. And, at the end of the day, it’s not a lot of fun.

Okay, so thinking backwards can be an interesting, albeit difficult, exercise. It can be frustrating. But I still feel like there’s something worthwhile in that exercise. That’s why I keep working at it, from time to time. When I remember to try. I’m trying to get better at it, certain (for some odd reason) hat there is somewhere to go with it; that there is some “there” there. But it’s something I don’t know, really, how to do.

With Drawn

2010-07-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

I pick up my pencil to draw...and put it down again. Because to pick up a pencil I need an eraser—I can’t put a line down unless know I can erase it. I can only speak with certainty those lines that I know I can obliterate.

My thin graphite line is wandering, feeling around the outside of my imagination, afraid to poke into or describe it with certainty. To describe with certainty is to commit, and that’s terrifying, because that line might be the wrong line. That wandering grey shade that held promise within its wooden cocoon could fall flat once expressed. Lying there, naked and exposed on the paper, it may want to cover itself and wish itself into another position. It may scream to be back in its comfort zone just a quarter inch to the right, or cry for the lost potential as a line with an entirely different vanishing point. Putting down the wrong line means building a false, distorted structure on the paper of my mind, creating a grotesque nightmare-scape instead of the world I intended to imagine and describe.

The wrong line then becomes all I can think about, dominating my eyes and my head and my hand until it is all I can see, and I can draw nothing else. The line that was once mine but suddenly is no more, screams about the once white surface of the page, darkening and creating chaos, trying to digging into itself for cover, and crossing over itself, in its frantic directionless-ness. Under its weight, the paper crumbles under and into my hand, and flies away, to join a hundred of its kind, wasted for want of an eraser, lost, and abandoned.

So I need my eraser. For the power to create, in me, only exists if it walks hand-in hand with the power to destroy.

The eraser is power. It eliminates uncertainty, through its magical promise of redoing. Through the grace of its forgiveness, I find confidence. Where my line was frenetic,and searching, now it is daring. Where once it was lost, now it is exploring, and trailblazing, into territory that is new, yet familiar. My pencil is transformed from a mindlessly wandering divining rod, dousing for some hint of creativity, into Harry Potters hand selected wand, casting spells that I only vaguely and second handedly connected to.

Amazingly, having the eraser means using the eraser less. Like a child who cannot sleep without his pacifier-it is not to be used throughout the night, but as a periodic touchstone of security, allowing me to drift off me to where it is safe and secure, and familiar, yet as mysterious as a dream not yet dreamt.

One day I may have the line that is confident without the promise of erasure. One day I may recognize the eraser for what it is; the false confidence of Dumbo’s magic feather, or worse, the hidden double-edged sword of the monkey’s paw. But until then, I need my eraser.

The football hold

2010-07-13T08:17:00.000-07:00

The football was old, and its leather alternately softened with age and hardened, crackled with wear and use and the dampness of its home in the garage. But as Jake took it in his hand, he didn’t grip it as he was taught on the high school football field, folding the laces into the bend of his second knuckle and curling fingers gently but firmly around the pigskin. Instead, he took it and laid it in the crook of his arm, one end of the cone held gingerly in cradling fingers, the other nestled into the crook of his elbow. And he began to rock it. It was a slow, gentle motion, like the swell of the sea on a clam lake on a July morning. And in that instant, the football was not a football, but his first born child, born just hours ago, and held for the first time.

He remembered that feeling, coming as it did after hours of labor and culminating with a ceasarean birth. She had been the first to hold the child, as was her right, after the work she put into bringing him into the world. She held him on her bare chest, touching him gently to keep him positioned at he simultaneously rooted and took in this new world. He had cried only once on entering this strange realm, where the light was white and yellow and not at all tinged red, not filtered by blood and skin and muffled by layers of skin and tissue and wrapped within the ever-present and comforting regularity of an external heartbeat.

By all rights, he should have been terrified. He had every right to scream and howl for being ushered in so unceremoniously—hours of movement and increasing constriction, enveloped by an arms-reach universe that once provided for all his needs, and now seemed determined to bind and move him against his will.

But on release, on being born, he was neither angry nor resentful, nor even afraid. He looked curious. He took in every blurry shape through eyes that had not, by any scientific standard, yet learned to see. This fresh explorer in a world he never made took it all in, and sought more.

The baby craned his head toward the familiar sound of his mothers voice, and moved it at an odd angle to try and look behind him for the newly unbuffered sound of his father. He swiveled in motions that were at once slow and jerky, robotic and uncertain, but with intent. He moved in directions this new neck, with its new and untested muscles, would allow, trying to see, to take it all in, even as the nurses bundled and wrapped, poked and prodded, and made to take him away.

His job as father, from that point, was not to hold the child, but to shadow him. With a final squeeze of his wife’s hand as they took her away to recovery, he moved to follow this fresh life that would share his name, just brought into this world,

The football brought it all back. Because that was the way he had learned to hold his son , the first time he was able. They called it “the football hold,” with the back of the infant’s head held gently in hand, and the forearm supporting his back. Stubby, fat-laden legs straddled each side of the arm at the elbow. A second hand held and steadied the bundled mass against the arm. And with the baby thus held, the father could gently rock the infant by swaying the arm, a living cradle of fleshy warmth and comfort. That was how it was described to him, and what he had practiced with the hard rubber dummy he’d held in birthing class that reminded him of the actual football for which the hold was named.

But the real thing had been quite different. The first time he held the baby, their baby, their son, it was nothing like hard leather. It was soft, and breathing, and so unbelievably light. It seemed fragile, and so delicate. He barely dared touch the infant for fear of bruising him, like an over ripe tomato whose flesh might melt and bruise and break under the pressure of tactile contact.

But Jake took the baby. The nurse handed the baby to Jake that first time gently, but with a practiced certainty that only someone who had handled many babies could manage. She moved in such a way that her hands both held the baby and also moved Jake’s hands into position to do the same. For a split second, they both held the infant. Then it was Jake, alone.

And Jake took the baby with a fear and trepidation that only first-time fathers can know. He held the head, the skull, the fragile vase at the core of this small things being. He felt the weight of the body on his bare right forearm, imagining he could feel the baby’s tiny little ribs and spine even through the layers of clothing and blanket that surrounded it. And he held his left hand atop the baby, just over the ribcage, further imaging he could feel each impossibly tiny structure of its breastbone. And Jake felt him breathe. And breathe again. And on the third breath is when Jake himself remembered to do so, as well.

“It’s called the football hold,” the nurse said, her smiling eyes darting back and forth protectively, between father and son. No dropped baby’s on her watch. “Because you’re cradling him like you would if you were running down the fifty yard line.”

Jake looked up and smiled, tearing his eyes from the baby’s puzzled, searching face for the merest fraction of a second, before returning. In another life, he would’ve corrected her, jumped laughingly on the premise that anyone would run down the fifty-yard line. You run across the fifty yard line, toward the opposite teams goal. That kind of verbal error, one which spoke to a lack of knowledge about a sport he was so familiar with, would not have been allowed to pass. But that was another life, where things like football, and the lawn, and what kinds of books you read and where you went to college were important. This was a new life. And there was only one thing of tantamount importance in this new life. And he was holding it in his arms, in the football hold.

One page autobiography

2010-07-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

The exercise: Create a one-page autobiography.

****************************************

Does it need to be a given that I was born? It’d be nice if it was a surprise. I was a surprise, coming into a family of five siblings, each of which, my mother had sworn, would be her last. After me she made certain of it, with an additional procedure she referred to as “having her tubes tied,” and the significance of which would not hit me for decades. So, I was born into a large family, as an only child. The sibling above me, a brother, was in high school when I was born. My oldest brother was a Junior in college. And by the time I was old enough to even be cognisant of having siblings, they were all gone—other states, other countries, other realities, entire.

Is it significant that I grew up, went to school? That part should be boring and trite, except for the part about my being part of a pilot program, built on the heels of the forced-bussing-into-Boston era. The METCO program allowed Springfield youth to be bussed out to the suburbs of Southwick, Indian Orchard, and in my case, East Longmeadow. So maybe that’s significant, in that I was an only child who, on top of that, did not socialize with any of the kids I went to school with. I grew up with kids around my neighborhood, friends, until they went off to local other schools, and I went off to my hour-long bus ride to a town where the only people of color were bussed in from out-of-town, on what the other kids called a “mental bus. Maybe it’s meaningful to note that my best friend and next door neighbor was lost to drugs before we were both out of high school, and how that makes me wonder to this day, who him and not me?” And maybe suspect that mental bus was at least part of the reason. Mental-ly, I recall that period as incredibly happy, because of a gift I was given that was also a curse—to be aware that I was at an age when anything was possible, and in fact, likely. Like the freedom of dreaming and knowing that you are in a dream. Nothing is frightening, and the only dark certainty is that the time is finite, and will certainly end.

Maybe it’s important to note that I went to college? Maybe not. After all, I wasn’t the first one in my family to go to college. My other siblings went to get degrees in chemistry, in education, in management, in law. But I was the first one to go to art school. That should be significant, and in retrospect seems impossible, given my family. How can someone spend that much money on an education whose stated end isn’t even guaranteed to end up in a successful, pre-ordained career? In school, I found plenty of examples of students whose families had tons of money to allow them to move majors, and even squander talent while Mom and Dad footed the bill. I spend weeks living on peanut butter and ramen noodles, or packets of hit cocoa and candied orange slices, when the budget allowed for variety. And learning art.

It’s important to try and sift through the stuff that I learned later, and that I didn’t know at the time, but it’s nearly impossible to sift it out. Like trying to distill water from kool-aid after it’s mixed. Everything is candy-colored and sugar sweetened. So at this point, I leave it mixed, and try to remember what the color of the water was, originally. Though I know I won’t capture it. And in the end, I realize I’m not really even trying to.

I should talk about the best job I ever had, and love and loss and marriage and kids and all that, but that’s so much about now that it lacks the clarity of distance the rest of my life has developed. And without that clarity, standing in the middle of the mix, I can’t even tell what is water and what is the air surrounding the pitcher. And I’m coming up to the end of the single page. And my life's not even over, yet.

Andersons Night (story start)

2010-07-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

So I'm taking a writing workshop, Thursday evenings. It's a great group, and it's a kick in the pants to produce. A kick I don't seem to be able to give myself, by myself.

So, I will be posting some of the fruits of that labor here in the next couple of weeks, as another kick in the pants. I mean, you know you're losing something when your son is more prolific in his writing than you. And he's not even out of middle school yet. Sheesh.

************

The exercise: Find a book that you like the title of. Take the first sentence from that book, and start a new story.

The book: Remember Me? By Sophie Kinsella

The first sentence: Of all the crap, crap, crappy nights I've ever had in the whole of my crap life.

Special note: I wrote the first sentence as the start of the exercise, but in the second edit of the text to come, I changed it. I loved the sentence, but it has a very specific voice that, once I got into telling the story, no longer fit the narrator. So I changed it. So there.

This is now the first part of what's developing to be a nice little crime short story.

************

Anderson’s Night.

It was a bad night.

And this morning isn’t getting any better. First, the car isn’t where it was supposed to be. I say “supposed to be,” Because I wasn’t the one who parked it. When I park a car, I make a point of getting out and spinning a quick, orienting 360, to tell where I am. I make note of landmarks, areas of the terrain, location in relation to prominent, memorable landmarks, and all that. But this time Ellen was the one driving the car, with me unconscious and sprawled in the back seat, across Reggie’s lap. It was Reggie who pulled me out, on arm under each of my pits, he swore. But by the throbbing in my head and the ache and bruises across my upper body, I couldn’t swear he didn’t pull me of the car and drag me inside, up three flights, by my ankles, my head thudding against each step and hm complaining all the way about how much weight I’d gained since he first met me three years ago. That would be Reggie.

But then, Ellen was there too, and I’m pretty sure…reasonably sure…almost positive she wouldn’t have let him do that. She would’ve lent him a hand, he at the top of my body and her at my feet. She's strong, I give her that. And Reggie, standing at every bit of her five foot five, was never much stronger for being a man. But he was never much of a man, in my opinion. But that's being snarky. And I hate snarky. That's more Reggie's territory.

The trek up to Ellen’s flat would’ve been difficult even just for the two of them. Those stairs are narrow, and the elevator non-existent. I can see her pulling her hair back with that scrunchy things she always keeps around her wrist or in her purse, or on the stick shift of my car. She's careful. She'd have carefully kept her long blonde locks free from the entangling velcro straps on my old sneakers. I may've gotten some footprints across her always-pristine leather jacket, given her significant breasts, and the awkward amble up those stairs. But no wear and tear would've been unloaded on me. And she'd've made Reggie be careful, too. She’s the responsible one. The one who said she loved me. Yeah, she would’ve made sure he was careful with me. Even though, at the time, she thought I was dead.

But then, how responsible was she really? I mean, she was the one who parked the car, and who should’ve known where I always park it when I’m at her place. Always, always, ALWAYS across the street, near the museum, where they let you park for free until about nine, when the meters, and the meter maids, kick in. But I’ve walked up and down this street four times, and I only have an hour until nine, and the damned car is just not here. And, of course, she’s not here to ask anymore, is she? She took off once the shooting started this morning. Not that I can blame her, for that. I never meant to get her into this mess in the first place.

But the car, that I blame her for.

Maybe I should go back and ask Reggie what he remembers. I’m pretty sure he’d still be able to talk. He’d said quite a bit already, before I left him. But I bet he’s got more in him. If he’s still breathing.

Continued.

Curriculum Vitae 1: The Story of Mary and Bob

2009-09-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

From my curriculum vitae, here is my teaching philosophy: All kids inherently can draw. It’s the first and ultimate form of non-verbal communication. By showing kids shortcuts to success in drawing skills, you open the door to a world of possibilities and expression. My classes are about empowerment, exposing capabilities, and developing potential.

I stand by that statement. My first class of any drawing session, be it a seminar or the full semester art course I did last year at Kiley Middle school, I start off at a blank bulletin board, and tell a story. This is that story:

“How many of you like to draw? How many of you feel like you are good at drawing? (Get one student’s name-let’s say Bob). Let’s ask a different way-who is not good at drawing? (Get a student’s name from this group-let’s say Mary). Why do you think that everyone in the room didn’t raise their hand when I asked who was good at drawing? Maybe we’re just in a class of especially modest geniuses?

“I know why. By virtue of my own personal WayBack machine, I’ve watched each and every one of your life stories from when you were babies, scooting around the floor in dirty diapers. At that time, your parents maybe put you in the corner with the sharp writing instrument of your choice—a crayon—and said go to it.” So you, being the good little genius, crawled over to a blank section of wall, and started working!

(Start scribbling on the paper. It must be scribbles, formless, messy and without reason. And it has to look fun. While doing this say: )

“And you had fun. You were just playing around, making a mess, figuring stuff out. And before you knew it, you started making something.

(Gradually, over the couse of the board, develop the scribbles into a rough loop, then a cleaner loop, and on until you get to a perfect circle.

“And being the great genius you were, you named it. “This is a (students will say “circle,’ but you should say “Mary! This is a Mary! And I’m s proud of my Mary, it will make me world famous and be an amazing thing to share with everyone and anyone who will look!”

“And before you know it, the first dsy of Kindergarten came, and you were prepared. You had your favorite writing implement, and a world of blank paper. And you walked into that class and couldn’t wait to show everyone what genius you had developed. You walked up to the board and drew a perfect Mary! (Draw the circle).

“Suddenly, a hush fell over the classroom. From the back, up came Bob. (whistle the theme from “The Good The Bad and the Ugly”)

“From the back of the class, Bob walked forward, ‘ching, ching, ching…” And he pulled his piece-another crayon. “That’s nice,” he said, “but can you make a Bob?” And right next to your Mary, he drew a Bob." (Draw a near perfect triangle.)

“Mary approached the board with a trembling hand, and tried to act like it was no big deal, “No problem,” she said. And she drew a Bob. (Draw a triangle that is only vaguely so-looks much more like another circle.) And she tried again. And again. And finally she gave up in frustration. She threw her crayon down, and walked away, and never drew again. (mimick each of these actions for effect.) And today, Mary says she can’t draw at all, and Bob considers that he’s a great artist."

“But what did Mary forget? What was she doing way way back, when she first started drawing? (Point to the scribbles. Continue to press for answers until you get someone to say, or you suggest. The answer is “to have fun.”) When she first started, she wasn’t about impressing anyone, or showing what she could do. It was about finding things out, and exploring, and having a good time doing it. And that’s what she forgot."

"But I bet with anything that Mary is good at today, she has not forgotten that. Because anything you become good at you become good at because of the encouragement, and the positive feedback, but also and as importantly, because you enjoy doing it. That’s Mary’s story. And I’ll bet it’s the story with a lot of you."

"Well, that changes today. Because in this class, it’s not about being the best at making a Bob or a Mary or a landscape or a portrait or a figure drawing. It’s about having fun, trying to figure something out, and finding what is easy and maybe not so easy, but enjoying the journey, not the destination. This is going to be about the art of getting there, not about being wherever “there” is. If you do something you like, that’s great, and I’m sure your parents would love to take a look at it if you want to bring it home. But that’s not what this class will be about. This class will be about struggling and playing and failing and starting over, and pushing past mountains and swimming over oceans and being proud of the fact that you can keep going."

“Is there anybody here that thinks they can’t do that?”

School starts (for some…)

2009-09-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

Both my sons are now back in school, my oldest at a new Middle School and my youngest still at Conway Grammar. I meet the new school year with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was really looking forward to returning back-to-school with them, as an Art Teacher (capitalization on purpose). I was enjoying the vocation. I was in a challenging school district—so challenging, in fact that I did not know how to approach blogging about the work all of last year, and consequently didn’t. The silence stretches back to last February. I started writing some ideas longhand, at lunchtime during school, but soon found that time taken up by classroom needs, outside of actually eating my lunch. And after a while, the story I would’ve told felt like it was so far into itself that the recap became unwieldy. And somewhat pointless. And was eventually abandoned.

In the name of a fresh broom sweeping clean, I then made a plan to incorporate blogging about teaching at the start of the school year. And I prepared lesson plans, and solidified methodologies and documented a lot of what I had not, before. And I called myself ready to hit the ground running.

But, sadly, that wasn’t to be. It turns out that I’m not teaching this year, due to budget cuts which, eliminated the Art teacher position from the middle school I was teaching at at the same time as it increased the class size. I feel sad most for the students at that school, as they had a time testing me, and seeing if I would stay or go. My choice and what I proved to them, was that I was going to stay. Until the district changes the game, and made a liar of me.

Okay, that sounds angry, and that’s not my intention. I’m really just a little sad. I have the work at Idea MechaniX to keep me busy in the short term, as I look to move back into publishing full time, keeping teaching open as an afterschool sideline. And, really, I have no regrets, having had a good experience at M. Marcus Kiley Middle School. I feel I made an impression, and left a mark, if only for a year. And I even helped their overall identity by doing a bit of digital design, free of charge, as well. Here is a link to the Vision and Mission statement posters I developed and designed for the school, now posted on their website. So I’m gone, but not forgotten.

And now, on the other hand, I have a bit more time on my hands. With that opportunity to do a bit of catch up, I plan to take the time to explore my own teaching philosophy in a way that I haven’t done, concretely, in a while. And in doing so, I plan to tell some of my success stories in teaching. A lot of the lessons and stories are applicable to any area of teaching. And, since this is my own subjective, personal blog, I can do with it what I will.

For the next several blog entries, I will be exploring some of my fallback introductory lessons, and the ways that I’ve used these stories in teaching. Please feel free to pass them along, and if they work for you, make them your own.

Next: Curriculum Vitae 1: The story of Bob and Mary

According to Google, Marcus needs...

2009-02-21T10:33:00.000-08:00

Another challenge received and forwarded:
Instructions: Go to Google.com and do a search. Type in your first name and the word "needs" after it. Then copy and paste what are the top ten things Google says you "need".

My results:

1. Marcus Needs A Home. (Having recently lost my home-away-from-home in Boston, I guess the one is just not enough anymore.)

2. Marcus needs a father who will guide and teach him the essential to becoming a proud and productive man. (Ouch. Any volunteers?)

3. Marcus needs to talk who he really is. (Also, Marcus needs to talk English learn.)

4. Marcus needs a hug! (Always.)

5. Marcus needs your help to promote CoSponsors for HR 8. (Because they are so unpromoted, even he doesn’t know who they are.)

6. Marcus is very sick & needs our prayers. (Wow. Way to put it out there.)

7. Marcus needs to stop handling people weapons. (No comment.)

8. (Neiman) Marcus needs work. (Well, duh.)

9. Marcus needs to get a ride by rElEAsIng mY whOlE rOstEr tO stArt AnEw tEAm I gOt. (I’m not kidding, this is how the entry came in. Google it yourself and see. I think I need some shift key withdrawal.)

10. MARCUS NEEDS TO GET HOOKED ON PHONICS. (Better than crack, and twice as expensive. And the shift key problem seems to have turned to FULL CAPS LOCK ADDICTION)

Rappin' Singapore

2009-02-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

I meant to post this bit a long while ago. Having worked with a group from Singapore, I always imagine them in this music video. Never have I seen a more inappropriate group of suits in a more believable and enjoyable setting. This should not work, but they pull this off beautifully!

Books Read

2009-02-19T15:20:00.000-08:00

I got this list from a Facebook friend. It's posted here as I copied it, but the "X"'s are all mine. Given, about seven of the titles below were read as "required" in school. But I like to read.:

According to Matthew Olson, apparently the BBC reckons most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here...

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (not thw WHOLE Bible...)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X- (Not the COMPLETE works)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tart
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My total: 42

Please pass it on!

An Incomplete Work of Fiction (3 of 3): Climax

2008-10-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

We shift back to the present.

The mother is dead. Again, it’s not unexpected, but neither is it easy. Hardy is suddenly bereft of his core reason for getting up in the morning. Felix is feeling the guilt of not having done enough, and anger at how she died. Flashback briefly to that night, where the mother dies, and Electra can’t be reached. Someone calls the police, and an ambulance comes. Although the mother has expressed her desire not to be resuscitated to each of her children, it has never been written down. Without such an order in writing, the paramedics are obligated to try. This frustrates and angers Felix, and this anger will alter manifest against Electra.

But for now, we cut to one brief shining moment, as in the face of 9/11, the disparate factions of the family come together at the mother’s funeral. It is an amazing event, and inspiring in a real sense. But in the back of his mind, Felix can’t help but hear his mothers stated (and somewhat selfish) wish not to have a funeral.

And so that brief shining moment is extinguished as, the day after the funeral, Felix demands of Elecktra that she show him the will. Electra moves from stand-offish to belligerent, and delays revealing the will for almost a year. In that interim, there are scenes of anger, and terror, and screaming, and tears as Felix seems, at times, to go out of control. There is raw emotion on all sides, the likes of which can only be explored in fiction. There is one particular scene where Felix, now sole owner of the house, screams at Electra and calls her unpardonable names. His sanity comes into question at this point, as to whether he is merely manic depressive, or truly delusional. But what is unquestionable is that the dissolution has begun.

The conflict escalates. Felix throws Hardy out of the house, his home for the past decade, and isolates himself from the rest of the family. Not that this is hard to do, as the family appears to revel in a dysfunctional disjointedness that seems to increase daily.

The next inciting incident is the filing of the will, nearly a year after the mother’s death, which is followed almost immediately by Felix’s challenge to it, and to Electra’s serving as executrix. The scene is set in a courtroom, as Felix stands on one side and Electra on the other, before a Probate and Family Court judge who clearly could not give two shits about any of the back story, and can’t even clearly hear what issues are being laid before him. It’s an indictment of the system in a sense, and a cautionary tale, but also a family drama beginning to spin out of control. Here we juxtapose the cold, dry, and almost sterile environment of the courtroom proceedings with the tensions roiling just beneath the surface, frustration, and as slow seething that, if not yet hatred, is well along the path toward it.

Maybe we add poignance to this scene by juxtaposing it in time with a family barbecue of decades earlier; a series of snapshots from a family album, committed to memory, and colored by it. Both the father and the mother are alive, and the siblings talk happily and heartily, enjoying good music and laughing conversation and the closeness of strong familial bonds.

Cut to present, as Electra and Hardy are on one side of the courtroom. Felix sits two rows before them, having entered and not even glanced at them. The judge goes through other cases of dysfunctional families, divorce, custody, and angry, bitter opponents.

Cut to the past, as the father slips his hand around the mothers shoulder, both beaming for an impromptu snapshot, showing a tender closeness that is the core of the family unity. But which will not last.

Cut to the present, where Ovid sits on the opposite side, also alone, trying to make sense of how this has all come to this. This scene is somewhat surreal, and somewhat unclean, and leaves the reader with a sense that this entire world and every surface in the courtroom is in desperate need of a shower.

Cut to the past, as the siblings all group, standing, hands on paper plates heaped with comfort food as they lean back in laughter and bask in the warmth of a summer day that will pass in time, and never come again.

The scene ends with the judge giving Felix 30 days to outline his objections to the will, thereby moving the plot forward.

A week later, Ovid is playing phone tag, trying to get Felix to drop the challenge, or, failing that, to at least put into words what his goal is in this action, besides a futile attempt to punish Electra and Oscar. Felix can’t give one, and this fact is not lost in the circular logic Felix expounds to justify his actions. And Electra is no better. In a late night phone conversation, decades of anger spill over from Electra onto Ovid. She calls him self centered, tells him that he always removes himself from taking action, that he is so damned detached as to be almost uninvolved, But at this point, Ovid is no longer in a conciliatory mood, and is willing to strike back.

The situation turns confrontational through a series of phone calls. It becomes increasingly clear to Ovid that none of this is about the stated goals. This is about who is the boss, who the best arbiter and interpreter of the Mother’s last wishes, in spirit or in action. This becomes clear by how often Ovid has to ask the same simple questions: what would it take to resolve this? What is the simple thing you want? Accountability requested on one side, autonomy demanded on the other. The goals are incompatible, and create suspicion and mistrust.

So here is the crux of the climax; what does Ovid do?

An incomplete work of fiction (2 of 3): Complication

2008-10-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

We fast-forward a few years to the household where the middle brother, (let’s call him Hardy) is the primary caregiver for the bed-ridden mother. Hardy has always seemed a bit lost—thrice divorced with five kids by the different women, and due to an incarceration for failure to pay child support after being laid off, unable to hold gainful employment without losing all his wages. Let’s make this situation sad, but serendipitous, as the act that saves the mother from having to go to a nursing home.

Let’s throw in a minor climax in this flashback, where all six siblings together agree that the house should be sold to one of their number, as a means of protecting the mothers assets should she ever be hospitalized, or forced to go into a home. The consensus is that the house go to Felix to take care of. The understanding would be that any of the siblings would have the right to buy the house from that brother for a reasonable rate—right of first refusal.

Then, let’s introduce the next twist to propel the plot. Let’s say that Felix, the lawyer, tries to get the mother to sign a power of attorney, giving the eldest authority. There’d be a lot of subtext about the eldest wanting this responsibility, but then also undertones of what the father had said about Felix before the father died. More layers, more uncertainty. Now, Felix does this while he lives far away, so leaves the papers with the mother, to address on his return.

Now, the next twist. On a visit to the mother, Oscar finds the papers and, suspicious, and more than a little angry, takes them. He has them changed, re-written so that Oscar gets the power of attorney, and mastery over all the mothers affairs. On his return, Felix is disconcerted, but does not challenge this change. Again, this is based on the mother’s stated wishes, not his own.

Okay, more back story. The eldest brother, Felix, is followed by the eldest sister (let’s call her Electra) and there is bad blood between them—the kind of bad blood that can only arise from strained familial bonds. Oscar bonds with Electra, and the same fell swoop that gives Oscar the power of attorney, makes Elektra the health proxy.

There’s an inherent conflict here amongst the key players Electra and Felix. They are the oldest male and the oldest female. As the eldest male, Felix took on the role of father to the family as a boy, when the father left the family for another relationship. When he later returned, the boy had functioned as father figure for too long to simply give the role up. Echo this with the role of Electra as the surrogate mother to the family, acting as caretaker for a mother forced to be away from home often, at work as a career woman, and sole support for the family. This is the root of their conflict, with the parents at the core. The key being that the parent’s created the problem, but never took the time or the responsibility to resolve it.

Now the stage is set for a replaying of that rivalry, surrogate father against surrogate mother, Hyper-paternalism against hyper-maternalism, both directing anger and aggression against the other, as they had seen the parents do in the latter years of their married lives.

Flash forward. Electra and Felix say they are doing this, assuming responsibility for their mothers affairs, for the mother’s sake and by her wishes, and that seems reasonable. The only problem is that the yare unwilling to provide any transparency. There is no accountability for the mother’s finances. They adopt a “my way or the highway” attitude. The mother has a monthly check for Social Security, a monthly check from her pension, and a monthly check from the father’s pension. The checks are automatically deposited into an account which the mother shares with Ovid (that is, which the mother put Ovid’s name onto). Because his name is on the account, Ovid has access to the account, but that access is limited to essentially checking on the balance regularly, and seeing the money transferred in, and the next day transferred out into a separate account maintained by Oscar. But Ovid has the ability at least to track how much money is going in. And he has a growing awareness that the money is not being spent on his mother’s care. The plot thickens. What to do?

The overwhelming undercurrent through this part of the story is the mother’s insistence that the siblings not fight. We can cap this and typify it with a heart felt one-on-one scene where Ovid tries to reach the mother, and tries to tell her that if she does not sort the affairs of her life and her children before she dies, these issues will never be sorted. It needs to read as poignant, and prophetic. Very prophetic, as it will be revealed.

At the end of the scene we see the core dilemma. With a single call to action, Ovid would galvanize to action, and be at the ready to demand accountability, and take care of the mother. But he wants—needs, really—her participation in at least the call to action. He needs her to say it is what she wants. And she will not, for the rest of her life.

And the stage is set, as we build to the climax.

To be continued.

An incomplete work of fiction (1 of 3)

2008-10-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

I sit down to write a story.

I write because fiction is so much more interesting than life. More controllable. The twists and turns of a good, complicated tale of intrigue and emotion and right and wrong, and all the moral ambiguities in-between, that’s the stuff that makes our own lives seem so much better in comparison. Or, maybe, not as good. Maybe it’s that the hope of a happy ending colors our reality, and the hope in that mirror, that our own reality might reflect those joyful colors, as well as all the complexities.

So, let’s tell a story.

Let’s just say, as a case of fiction, that a man’s mother dies. Let’s call him Ovid. She’s died of old age, as close to a case of natural causes as that vague term allows, and after a long slow mental death by inches from the ravages of dementia. That’s the inciting incident of the story, I think. That’s the event not that starts the ball rolling, but that all of the other events lead up to and from.

Okay, first we need some framework. We’d need to set up that Ovid is from a large family—three brothers and two sisters, of which Ovid is the youngest. We’d need to establish that Ovid is in his mid 40’s, and that the oldest sibling (we’ll call him Felix), one of the brothers, is past retirement age at 64. So in a sense, the mother’s death was not unexpected. But the emotions at the mother’s death are real, and repercussive.

But we need still more back-story. Rolling back the clock, we’d need to set up how the father had died nearly ten years previous, and how one of the things that the father had done before cancer ravaged his otherwise vibrant and healthy form, as to criticize Felix, as “greedy” and self-serving. And let’s make Felix a lawyer, just for the sake a plot device. Foreshadow a conflict here between father and eldest son, which Ovid can only guess at, like someone walking into the middle of a movie. Some things have happened that all the other moviegoers know, and which is key to the plot direction, but which the latecomer has to piece together as he goes. It’s a hell of a way to build a psyche.

But this can be a powerful scene, in context. Ovid and the next youngest brother (let’s call him Oscar), had gone to the fathers ancestral home in Mississippi from the family’s home in New England, to take care of the father, who was battling cancer. It was a good time for Ovid to take a break, because he’d just been downsized from his job of ten years, and while he had some prospects, needed the break. And there is an unspoken pressure of Ovid’s own family—his wife pregnant with their first child—to provide for. Family, and providing for family, is a recurrent theme in the story.

But within these scenes come an important connection between Ovid and the father, and a resolution of things often unsaid in a life, needing to be said. It ends with closeness, and warmth, and good feeling. And it’s short-lived.

Ovid leaves the recovering father to start a new job several states away, leaving him in Oscar’s care, with the understanding that the second-oldest sister (let’s call her Minerva) will be coming two weeks later for her “turn.” But this turns out to be the last time Ovid sees his Father, as the Father dies less than two weeks later. Ovid never goes to the funeral. Funeral’s weren’t his thing. He’d always wonder if he made a mistake in that.

Next, lets’ just put in, for the sake of a new plot twist, that the week before the father died, Oscar, alone, made a trip to the father’s safe deposit box, and took the fathers will. And destroyed it. Out of character? Inexplicable? Time, and our story, will tell.

Top that off with Oscar taking sole ownership of the father’s property as a result of a new will that he’d somehow had possession of, created in the span of time between Ovid leaving and the death of the father. Now we have some interesting intrigue, wouldn’t you say? We’d have to wonder at the motivation, of course, and what Oscar hoped to gain. A noble act for the benefit of the siblings, ensuring the father’s legacy almost against his will? He does make a point of delivering what he says is a 1/6th share from the sale of the property to each sibling. But he makes that delivery behind the wheel of a brand new car. But maybe it’s just cynical and mistrustful for Ovid to note that. In any event, like so many doubts and concerns he will evince through the course of the story, Ovid pushes the thought away.

To be continued.

The Page

2008-09-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

The empty page is a baby. Selfish, a pleading void of need drawing you in, demanding, wanting. It cries at you. It calls to you. It screams, “See me, fill me, make of me something great! Know me, believe in me, use me to create!"

The empty page is angry and demanding. “Make a statement, it calls, “Make Love. Make War. Make a mess.” Crying and cooing, cajoling and pleading and whining for attention. The empty page is a pain in the ass. And it’s no wonder it’s so often left, alone.

And…

The empty page is not my friend. It offers no warmth, no comfort or solace in its starkness. It does not beckon to me because, at the end of the day, it came into my grasp empty and is just as happy to pass on the same way, and billions if its brethren have in the past. It has no particular bond to me, no desire for me. It is not on my side.

But neither is it my enemy. It has nothing against me, when t has nothing for me. It is my mirror, my echo, as true or faithless a lover as I am to it.

But…

If I commit, it is no longer an empty page—it is mine. The committed page is not empty. The committed page is a coach calling out to me; “Go, go, go, give one for the team, provide, extrapolate, build!” It’s anxious for me to take the field, to commit with the fullness of my attention and passion and belief. It wants me ready to get battered and bloody, and fall flat on my face again, and again, an exercise in toughening skills and building abilities. It wants me to fail as a path to future success. Or so I believe.

So I choose to believe.

Walking Down the Road on a Snowy Evening Robert Frost

2008-09-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The Movie of Your Life: A Hollywood Curse

2008-09-25T03:33:00.000-07:00

In the initial stages, the short, exciting, but tragic (for all true stories are tragedies) story of your life, is planned as a movie.

The agent promises that you will be played by a Beautiful Person in the Movie of Your Life. As a result, no one will understand why someone who looks that good had such a difficult time of it, instead of simply counting blessings. As a result, you fear the story will play out as surreal, disingenuous, and unbelievable. So in that way, it will be reflective of your reality. So you let it pass.

The soundtrack will be hip, likely featuring songs that are not to your taste, by artists you’ve never heard of and who will not acknowledge you at the movies premiere. And in that way the music will reflect alienation and outsided-ness on multiple levels, and thereby, to you, emphasize the themes of the storyline of your life. Of course, no one else will notice this, and the soundtrack will seem entirely appropriate to them. It will hit the top ten within a week of the films release, go double platinum, and be remembered for itself, not for its place in the Movie of Your Life.

After the project is green-lighted, and after the first script rewrites, it becomes painfully obvious that the story will not be a major blockbuster. Scrapped early on is the idea that there will be multiple parts to this screen story, like a Lord of the Rings Saga, or even Planet of the Apes. The project is whittled down. The idea is floated that, perhaps, the story might be better suited for a music video, or a subplot for an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. But regardless of all of this, the Movie of Your Life will proceed.

When we get to the ending of the Movie of Your Life, everyone will predict that they saw it coming. No surprising Keyser Söze-out-of-a-hat here, no M.Knight Shyamalan twist. And you will wonder why, when everyone else could see the foreshadowing, that it so completely escaped you at the time.

Eventually the Movie of Your Life will move to DVD. While it’s largely ignored at first, it does, after a time, develop a small but loyal fan base, and an underground cult status.But it never makes a lot of money, or receive critical acclaim in the Director’s lifetime. Eventually, one day after it falls into the Public Domain, the story of your life will be slickly repackaged with impressive Bonus Features such as interviews with people who knew people, who knew people, who actually knew you. Of course, this will be many years after your death. Therefore most people will assume the Movie of Your Life to be a fiction.

The Movie of Your Life will then be transcribed onto a new generation Virtual Reality Viewing machine that will allow the VR user to experience being you. He will smell what your car smelled like, and taste what you had for breakfast. She will feel the place you first scratch when you wake up in the morning. Hundreds of thousands of people will pay for the opportunity to experience a day in your life.

And still no one will know how it feels to be you.

Roll credits.

Short attention span meets something to say

2008-09-24T18:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, as I hoped, my getting into the habit of posting has started me back into the writing habit again. So I'm interrupting my (boring, narcissistic, pointless) list of favorite poems to start posting for real. Starting tomorrow.

You Remain Arthur Symons

2008-09-24T11:45:00.001-07:00

As a perfume doth remain
In the folds where it hath lain,
So the thought of you, remaining
Deeply folded in my brain,
Will not leave me; all things leave me;
You remain.

Other thoughts may come and go
Other moments I may know,
That shall waft me, in their going
As a breath blown to and fro;
Fragrant memories, fragrant memories
Come and Go.

Only thoughts of you remain
In my heart where they have lain-
Perfumed thoughts of you, remaining
A hid sweetness, in my brain.
Others leave me; all things leave me;
You remain.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers Emily Dickinson

2008-09-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

And because I've posted this one before, here's another I love by her. Still counts as one, though.

Not In Vain

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

The Road Not Taken Robert Frost

2008-09-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

How do I love thee? (Sonnet 43) Elisabeth Barrett Browning

2008-09-23T04:10:00.001-07:00

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

IF Rudyard Kipling

2008-09-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Some of my favorite poems, in no particular order.

2008-09-22T12:18:00.000-07:00

This week, again in lieu of actually writing anything of consequence, I'll post some of my favorite poems, in no particular order.

These are my favorites because they come out of one of the several books of collected poetry that I've read since high school, and these ones have seemed appropriate to me at the time I first found them, so that they stuck with me. And the glue still holds.

When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Everybody and their sister has seen this video...

2008-09-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

...but I can't go a month without seeing it. It never stops being funny. Guess that speaks to where my head is at.

The Silence, explained.

2008-09-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

It had been over a month that I didn’t blog, and people were starting to ask me about it. The fact was that I was just overworked and overstressed. I’d fallen into a groove of getting into work early, and staying late, and through that entire process feeling that, despite the fact that I was working nearly every moment of the day and often multi-tasking several project at once, I still could not catch up, let aloe get ahead. That feeling left me exhausted in the evenings, and therefore left no creative energy for blogging, or writing, or drawing, or updating my website.

Well, now summer is over, as my kids have been lamenting, and we blew out the end of summer with a week-long camping trip to Cape Cod, at Nickerson State Park. I’ve returned rejuvenated, energized, and ready to tackle life head on. Most importantly, I’ve returned with a dedication to take time to make time. Work will take as much as you give it, and not necessarily pay a subsequent return. My mind flashes back to the old saying that no one ever expects to see on a gravestone “I wish I’d spent more time at work.”

Not sure what I’ll have wished I spent more time doing. But I’m determined to find out.

My Last Airline Rant for the Year. I think.

2008-07-14T05:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, as you can tell from these last few posts (rants) I am a not best buddy of the airlines right now. Or maybe it’s the FAA. Either way, they’ve clearly taken all the joy out of traveling. It’s almost (almost) easier to take a train, if trains weren’t more expensive and just as prone to delays (I’ll go into my train stories some other day).

Now, I used to love flying. I couldn’t wait for my next trip. I had all my frequent flier accounts in a special little wallet with my passport, and held my airline tickets like they were gold, before my trip. Now all I have is short list of things that really annoy me about airline flights, these days.

1) Delays. It’s not like they haven’t been doing this scheduling thing for several dozen years. And I’m not talking about delays due to weather. I’m talking about delays from poor planning, bad maintenance, and just shoddy customer service. But ‘nuff sad on that.

2) The rule to turn off electronic devices. The language from an in-flight magazine reads thus:

Devices such as electronic games, personal computers, and entertainment players and recorders (audio and /or video, such as iPod®/tape/CD/Minidisc/MP3/DVD players and camcorders) must be used with headsets at all times. These devices, as well as noise-canceling headphones, calculators, shavers, cameras. GPS devices, and aircraft power ports for laptops, may be used only at the gate when the main cabin door is open, or when announced by flight attendants and the aircraft is above 10,000 feet in altitude. These devices must be turned off during taxi, takeoff and landing.

Okay, for safety reasons, you should turn off your laptop and stow it. Likewise, I don’t know enough about phone service, and so could allow that some signals could interfere with the pilot’s ability to communicate with the tower. But why would you have to shut off your thumb-sized iPod shuffle that’s stuffed into a pocket on takeoff? Is there some miraculous new technology that grants the tiny MP3 player electronic control of the plane through the click wheel? I think not. It’s an example of a blanket rule that small minds adhere to, rather than actually creating a device that ensures the devices will not interfere with takeoff. Or that a slow-moving FAA megolithic system of rules that finds it easier to issue a blanket ruling than be real, and create real standards that make things easier for customers.

3) The beverage misers. What’s the deal with needing to stretch one can of soda over three passengers? Why do the stewardesses sometimes give the can with the cup, and sometimes stingily fill the cup with mostly ice to give you barely anything to drink? And on the occasion I feel I want more, if feel like I’m putting the flight attendant out if I ask them to leave the can—like that’s somehow greedy and selfish.

I recently observed a way around this that makes everyone feel better. Request the can only. Accompanied by the self-effacing line “I’m a man of simple needs,” your request for the can only (no cup, no ice) is translated from greed to caring simplicity, a desire not to put anyone to any trouble, and a concern for the environment. I use that like every change I get, now, when I order my in-flight regulars, either apple Juice of tomato Juice, my own struggle to get healthy fruits and veggies in my travel diet. And avoid the devil corn syrup. Best of all, warm apple juice is like tea, and warm tomato juice like soup. Yum.

4) The disconnection of technology. Check-in kiosks that take the place of live attendants, and which all passengers are summarily funneled toward, are not updated with the latest info on flight status. This just seems sloppy to me. If the check-in database can connect to know you are on this or that flight, and your confirmation is this, and another system is aware of the status of the flight in terms of delays, why don’t the systems talk to one another? I believe the answer is because to do so would only directly benefit the customer, not the corporation. Therefore, not a priority. Likewise, the message boards at gates are not updated. I spent half an hour with another family and another lone traveler in Cleveland, OH, waiting for the connection to Boston. It was only 20 minutes before the plane was supposed to leave that I realized there was no plane, and no update on the board above the gate desk, and no attendant. A quick check of the main boar, located quite a ways away, that the gate had been changed from the boarding pass I had been given just two hours ago, at check-in in Austin. No one had been sent to check the gate, and there was no other warning. And if I had missed the flight, how much do you want to bet that would have been my tough luck, and not the fault of the airline?

Look, I realize that airlines are hurting. But where is the underlying logic of customer service that is the cornerstone of any good business plan? Every in flight magazine and pre-flight video goes on about how happy they are to serve, and how grateful the airline is for choosing them. But that is proven to be transparent lip service as long as the actual services are so sub-standard, I can’t be the only one noticing. This lack of actual service is creating a perpetual cycle—people don’t feel like air travel is special or convenient, yet it continues to cost more; they stop flying which hurts the airlines and causes higher prices; those still forced to air travel are treated worse, while paying more, and so fly less, and so on. The slippery slope is just getting steeper.

Fear and Flying (Three of three)

2008-07-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

I was a little surprised that a system that marks every bag with a bar code, much the same as UPS or Fed Ex does, didn’t provide a subroutine by which the lost baggage lady could punch some keys and tell me where the hell my bag was. But then, I was also surprised that this woman’s hair had survived its time travel from 1978. After what I’d gone through the past several hours getting to Texas, there should’ve been little to surprise me. But it was late.

I supposed that this leg of the journey of air travel—solving the unique core issue of how to help a passenger locate lost luggage—was yet another low priority for the airline. Because I know it is possible. But maybe I assume too much. Maybe I was the first person to have this experience, that somehow my karma was disrupted that day. But a quick glance outside the door of the lost luggage office at row after row of bags, unclaimed, unaccompanied, and (despite the looping announcement over the loudspeaker) apparently not on their way to be destroyed, said otherwise. The lady, as kind as she was, and as much technology as her airline seemed to have at its disposal, was not going to be able to help me. I was tired, and if my bag wasn’t going to come in the next six hours (which she said it wouldn’t, as mine was the last flight until morning) I might as well get to my hotel and get some rest.

Half an hour and $40 to a cabbie later, I’m at the hotel. Still exhausted but still thinking ahead, I washed the clothes I was wearing, the only clothes I now have, in the sink, and hung them over the hotel room heater to dry overnight. The lobby offered toothbrushes and toothpaste and combs, all for sale. I wonder in passing whatever happened to the HoJo promise to provide that material for free to the weary traveler who “forgot something?” Then I remembered I’m staying at a more expensive, more upscale hotel than HoJo. So of course, given modern logic, at the more expensive hotel, nothing is free.

The next morning, my clothes were still damp, but a quick iron later and they were wearable. And I’m on time, and on mission for my day.

At noon, a call to the airport revealed that the bag had been located—they could deliver it to my hotel, or I could zip down to the airport and pick it up. For the latter solution, all I needed was an hour round trip, and another hundred bucks, to make up for the mistake that the airline made in the first place. Obviously, I opted for delivery. I hoped for delivery before 6, so I could run back to the hotel, shower and change into something I hadn’t been wearing for 24 hours. After calling and calling and calling again, I had the delivery time moved back and back. I finally called the hotel, and gave them my cell number, with a request that they call me if/when my bag was dropped off. I called them at 5:30, to determine whether I should go back to the hotel or not, reiterating my request that they call me if my bag came in. And they agreed. And I asked if they still had my number, to which they replied that they instead had my bag. Like it was some kind of game. It had been sitting there for an hour. Thanks for letting me know.

Needless to say, I carried-on, on my way home.

Which brings me to my most recent trip, where I wrote this past series of blogs. On this trip, I was all set to avoid my past mistakes. I had found my license, and held onto it for dear life. I carried my bag on. Then I made a mistake.

I arrived at the airport early, again—at 4:00 pm for a 6:00 pm flight that would get me in at 11:30 pm. At the check-in kiosk I registered for my flight to Austin, through a Houston connection. The computer gave me good news, in the form of a flight that would leave earlier, and get me there an hour earlier! Great! Win-Win! (There’s one born every minute, but apparently my birth stretched over three or four.) I clicked okay. Will I never learn?

I found out at the gate that my new, earlier flight was going through Newark, NJ. The flight coming in was also from Newark, and was delayed. Further, from the cheerfully helpful gate attendant, I learned all the flights to and from Newark had been delayed all day. It was just that no one bothered to inform the little hamster than ran the electronic kiosk. But, the gate person assured me, my original flight would also be a bit late, so it all evens out. But she put me onto an earlier flight to Newark that would, somehow, get me to Austin…at the same time as my original flight. Big whoop. But, no harm, no foul, right?

Except, in Newark, the flight to Austin was delayed another 2 hours. A little voice had told me that all flights from Newark had been delayed all day, but it didn’t register, as it should have, as a continuing problem that I needed to take into account. I ended getting to Austin two hours after my original flight would have gotten me in, and I got into my hotel at 2:30 in the morning. Really left me refreshed for my 9am meeting, and all-day brainstorming session.

Anyway, next time I will be older and wiser, and do all things right. Most importantly, I will be aware that the airlines are really out to get me. Sometimes, paranoia serves.

Fear and Flying (Two of three)

2008-07-10T03:38:00.000-07:00

So I made it to Boston’s Logan airport on time and on mission, ready to be patient. I mean it was my own stupid fault I didn’t have my license. So I would have to patiently explain how the expired passport that I had as a backup was valid, and hope I could make it through before y flight gave up on me.

The first hurdle was Delta, where I had to convince the counter person that it was a valid ID. She checked with someone, who told her it was not. I shook my head, and continued with my “is so” mentality, forcing the second person to check with someone who actually knew the answer to the question before answering it. You cannot use an expired passport to travel internationally (duh) but, yes, you can use it as proof of identity for traveling domestically. I successfully checked my bag, and moved on.

At the gate (where I again had to show my expired passport, and again explain that it was okay, and again wait while that was verified by someone whose job it should have been to know that already) the extra security meant going into a special booth, having a wand run all over me. Then I had to have my shoes checked in a special device for…I don’t know…special odors? Anyway, it didn’t take two hours. It didn’t even take a half hour. I got to my flight two hours early, and waited an hour for the flight to arrive. At which time I watched the ticket agent at the gate change the time to 2 hours later. With a gasp, I inquired, and found that the flight was delayed. Therefore I would miss the connection in Cleveland, and would not get to Texas that night. I was screwed.

But the helpful ticket agent came to my rescue. Either that or revealed the next link in their diabolical plan. He could get me on a flight on American, and there I could connect through Houston to get to Austin, and get there about the same time. That was the good news. The bad news was that American was in another terminal. Those meant I had to leave the terminal I was in, exit security, and then go back through security at the American terminal, with an expired passport, and accompanying “special procedures.” In less than a half hour. I thought fast, and agreed, after checking that my checked luggage (why oh why had I checked my luggage?) would likewise make the transfer. I was assured it would, and I took off running. I'm big, but I can be fast.

Airports are made for people in a hurry. Moving walkways are centered in long hallways, letting you move twice, three times as fast through their lengths, an answer to a prayer for the perpetually temporally challenged. The problem is that most of the people who take advantage of this are using the walkways as amusement park rides. They step onto the belt, and immediately stop, like it's an escalator, or a very tame roller coaster. All that's missing is their throwing theiR hands up and shouting "Wheeeee!" They're riding, without the slightest inkling that they're on a walkway. Worse, there are clearly marked signs designed for these people specifically, indicating that if they want to play statues, to keep to the right. People with somewhere to be are passing on the left. Maybe it would be clearer if they drew cobwebs on the info graphics. That day, I had no time to figure it out.

Through the terminal, to the next terminal through the line where I needed to verify a new ticket. Then off to security, where I played the “yes it is, no it isn’t, yes it is” game again, and it was every bit as much fun as the several times. And I made it to the gate on time. In time, that is, to see the ticket agent change the time, telling me that this flight also, was delayed. By now I was thirsty, and wishing I had the water that was in my checked luggage. I settled for the fountain, container-free, and you can’t beat the price. Luckily, the connection in Houston was such that it could allow for a delay, so I was still in good shape.

Long story long, I made it to Austin, and only an hour after I should have been there in the first place, at 12:30. Drama ended? No, not yet. The real drama was waiting at the baggage carousel. There, all the other bags were cleared out one by one by my anxious, exhausted fellow travelers on the last flight into Austin Bergstrom that evening, and continued to their destination. All but mine. As the carousel stopped, a fresh surge of anxiety struck as I realized that my bag was nowhere to be seen.

There’re few things as much fun as waiting to get the attention of the person at the desk in the lost luggage office at 1 in the morning in a city far from home. It was then, as I was forced to listen to her (aware that I was standing there and was the only one standing there) as she proceeded to finish a story on the phone to her girlfriend about something that had happened that day, using me as a live audience for reaction. I was too tired and baffled by that point to be anything but angry. But I was still coherent enough to realize this annoying woman was my only hope of getting my bag that night, so that I could have clean clothes for my meeting at 9 the next morning.

It was then that she killed me.

Oh no, wait, I must have dozed for a second. It was then that she asked me if I was sure my baggage had come in. I wanted to say, “well, beyond following herd of everyone else off of my flight to a baggage carousel, and then watching as they all picked up their luggage and exited, and watching the belt subsequently stop...no, I couldn’t say for sure.” But I just said “yes.” She gave me a book that identified types of bags, and asked me to look it over to give her an identifying number, so they could identify the bag if it came in. If. The bag itself would have identifying tags, would it not? Because it was disheartening to think that it could stay lost for no other reason than that I identified "basic black wheeled type D1" instead of "basic black wheeled type L7".

It was then I knew it must be a plot. No other professional industry could be as hopelessly screwed up and yet charge such exorbitant prices at the same time, and not be up to some nefarious purpose. I was becoming sure. But I still needed the proof.

Within 24 hours, I would have it.

To be continued.

Fear and Flying (One of Three)

2008-07-09T18:20:00.000-07:00

It could be bad luck. It could be poor planning. It could be fear of flying. Or it could be that the airlines are trying to kill me.

Okay, that’s extreme. It could more likely be that America’s airline industry, the economic whipping boys since 9/11 and silent victim of increased security and rising gasoline prices, have begun a slow descent into self-destruction. And it could be that I’m just witnessing it, and maybe one of the few speaking up about it. But there’s something about it that feels vaguely personal.

I’ve always liked traveling light, especially on airlines. I’d mastered the art of fitting everything into one carry-on bag. But that was before the plot to smuggle bomb-making chemicals aboard an airplane that resulted in the rule change that forbade passengers from carrying liquid onto a plane. I flew just a month after that. I brought my water, and my carry-on with more water in it. I had to dump the water I was carrying, first, then the water in my carry on. Then I bought a bottle of water beyond the checkpoint, paying $2.50 for the privilege of a 20¢ bottle of water, in a captive area. I especially dehydrate during flights, and that day I had a cold also, and was dreading the flying. My real dread came when I was informed that I had to toss the water I’d just bought, just bought, inside the airport, beyond the security gate, just outside the boarding area, before I got on the plane. This was when I first became the first of the series of outrageous rules, which the government and the FAA created to protect the flying public, and to slowly, incrementally, kill me. I mean, do they believe that small shop inside the security area had somehow smuggled dangerous chemicals into their stock, just waiting for some clever terrorist criminal to purchase it and bring it on board? If so, I should take it as a compliment to their perception of my mastery and evil genius. But if not, I could perceive it as a plot. After all, would it have killed them, or the vendor, to let me know that if I bought water, I’d need to finish it before boarding? Shouldn’t there be a discount on a bottle you only drink halfway? No, no organized system could be that devious, or that inept. It has to be a plot.

I have to do a certain amount of flying for my job, to connect with a sister office in Austin,TX. But the trips are often very fast—two or three days at most. Despite this fact, I realized that the days of carrying all in a carry on may be past me, in this new era. So, on my first trip to Texas about 2 months ago, I checked my carry-on. It was a small bag, and one that I could have carried it on, but I was unfamiliar with the exact rules of what I could carry on, so I felt better safe than sorry. I was ready to leave 3 hours early, to be at the airport the requisite (and troubling) 2 hours early. That’s when I realized I couldn’t find my drivers license. This was troubling because I knew I’d need it to get through security, which made me realize for the first time how crippling the lack of a license, and the lack of a car, would be to an individual. If you had no car, you’d need no license. But if you had no license, you could never fly anywhere. Do not pass go. I was stuck.

Then I remembered that I had an old passport. It was old-actually almost five years expired. I carried it because I used it as a second form of ID at my new job, to prove that I was a US citizen. And I kept it, as I meant to get it renewed, and never quite got around to it. But would it get me on a plane? I checked the website, and found out that yes, you could indeed board a plane using an expired passport for ID. But it would mean an additional level of security. But I needed to go, and so I hoped that 2-and-a-half-hours would be enough extra time.

Hope is a silly thing, sometimes—the last resort of the unprepared.

To be continued.

Formational Event #17

2008-05-12T06:24:00.000-07:00

This seems like a dream, but it happened. I don’t really know how or why, but it happened.

I’m seventeen, and I’m applying for colleges. There’s the Philadelphia College of Art, my first choice, and Pratt Institute, my second, and School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union, these last three all in New York City. And it’s coming down to financial aid, because I clearly get the idea that my parents cannot afford to send me to college. Whichever is the least, and offers the best package, is the one I will go with. PCA is my first choice because I went there during my junior year of high school for a pre-college program, which is where I fell in love with art school. And I’m hoping, hoping, hoping for a scholarship, because that would just make so much, so much easier. But I’m late out of the gate, and the scholarship has an essay requirement, and the deadline is two days away. I don’t remember how I got so far behind the gun, and in retrospect it feels like one of those dreams where you walk into a room without pants-—you don’t know exactly how you got there, and at the moment that seems the least of your worries. The action element is to get some damn pants.

So the action element is to write the essay. My father and I get in his truck, and drive to Philly. I bring my lined paper and start writing the essay in the car. Scribbling, really. I know the paper needs to be something highly conceptual, something that will knock their socks off and get them to cough up the dough for a scholarship. But, though I’m interested in writing from a young age, I’m not really good at it.

The paper isn’t done. So My father, who needs to be back at work the next day, gives me money for a train ticket back to Springfield, and gets me a hotel room downtown overnight. The plan is that I will write into the wee hours—all night if necessary—and complete the essay neatly and completely to deliver to the admissions office the next morning. I know downtown Philly from y pre-college experience, and know how to walk to the school, and to the train station. My dad trusts me, and cautions me, ad I know how to take care of myself, and for crissake at 17 I’m almost an adult. So, though I have no clothes for an overnight stay, I’m staying.

The room s small, an inner city special with a bed and a small bath, and a writing desk, which is where I concern myself. I’m writing into the night, when I realize I didn’t have dinner. After the third draft—one of the drafts being a simple clean copy-over of the hand written essay from my initial scribbles—seems a good opportunity to take a walk and find what food is available in the city at midnight.

The first thing I realize is how different a city can look, at street level, after dark. I’d never been out in a city in the wee hours by myself, only with friends, coming back from something or going to something. But here, ‘m totally on my own. Which is why, maybe, it doesn’t strike me as strange when the woman in a short skirt asks me if I want a date.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you want a date?”She repeats a bit more slowly, like I’m hard of hearing.

Am I that naive? Maybe not, but from the vantage of the present day I can’t recall immediately realizing that she was a prostitute, asking me if I wanted to hire her. I mean, I had the hunger in my head, and was puzzling over what I had written in my head, thinking of better ways to say something, searching for stronger hooks. So it’s not hard to picture myself puzzling over her words for a split second before realization hits. And I walk on, with a “Uh, no. No, thanks.”

For some reason, this reaction makes her laugh, and it’s that laugh that makes me nervous. In that laugh is a high-angle panorama shot of me standing on a street where I do not belong, in a situation I was not prepared for, telling me I donlt know what I’m doing or where I’m going, and that I am far, far out of my freaking element. That laugh highlights the gap between being alone, and being a target somewhere you don’t belong, which are two separate neighborhoods, in completely different galaxies. Suddenly, I was aware of having all the money I had in my pocket—the money I needed to get a train the next day. Suddenly I contemplated how long it would be if I was lost or hurt in this city, and how long it would be before anyone realized it. Suddenly, I needed to be back in the safety of that small room,

I rode back on the train the next afternoon, after dropping off the essay that would not get me a scholarship, and would therefore firmly establish my career starting at Pratt Institute. And maybe it’s that train ride then that’s reminding me all of that now, as I write this, on a train to New York City, on a trip for work.

Because here, now, as often in my life, I am alone, a stranger going into a strange land. But I’m a large black man, and I have confidence in my ability to take care of myself. I know that does not make me invulnerable, and a bullet can kill a man of any size. And these days I seldom feel more that a few fleeting seconds of the vulnerability that tried to take hold of me that night in Philly; uncertainty, mixed with a sense of weakness and unnamable dread. But it does occur to me, from time to time. I’ll be in a hotel for just one night. It’s the least expensive hotel I could find, in Brookyn, and just before I left I read some online reviews that were mixed. One actually said it was “in the heart of the ghetto.” (I mean, who uses the word “ghetto anymore?). And I’ll likely use that night to write, and contemplate being where I am, and being alive. And still, sometimes, alone.

A Mission of Hope

2008-04-24T07:22:00.000-07:00

The boilerplate text from the Relay for Life is input ahead of time, to make it easier for people to create a web presence. It reads:

My Reason to Relay is to join people around the world in celebrating those who have survived cancer, remembering the people we've lost, and supporting the lifesaving mission of the American Cancer Society.
Please make a donation to me or join my team. You are helping deliver the hope that future generations will not have to endure cancer threatening the lives of their friends and family. You have the power to fight back against a disease that affects millions.

And I could just copy and paste that and be done with it, but my reasons are not boilerplate.

My father was a dreamer who wanted great things. He came out of rural Mississippi, and traveled to another continent during World War II where he met my Mom. That alone should be a testament to wonder, that a rural farmer from Mississippi, drafted and raised to the non-com rank of Sergeant, should meet a refined, educated and professional nurse from the North, and fall in love, and have that love, impossibly, returned. The love story doesn’t read as lovely after that. It ended with my father returning to his rural roots in Mississippi after I graduated college, to farm his ancestral land, where he would die. My Mom remained in Massachusetts, in the home where she raised their six kids, and where she would die. But for a few visits back and forth, and some last time together, which included attending my wedding, they lived apart, but never divorced. They shared a bond that was not quite marriage, yet something beyond it as well.

He died in Mississippi, in the double wide he purchased and set up himself. He wanted to leave it to his kids as a vacation property, expecting that we would have some kind of tie to the land his father and father’s father had walked, but which he had never instilled a love for, in his children. We were strangers to that land. My brother sold the property after his death. But that’s another story.

My father died of cancer. He died after a long battle (is there ever a battle like that which doesn’t seem long?). He went from a robust, strong, slightly overweight man to one on whom the skin hung, and in whose face only the grim determination of his eyes remained.

I walk in memory of him, because there was nothing I could do for him, yet all I do is because of him. I walk because my mother’s mother also died of cancer, leaving my mother as the adult woman of the house before she was even out of high school. I walk because both my wife’s grandmothers were taken by cancer, a fact that still chills my children to this day, and causes them to utter the word only with some trepidation. And I walk for myself, because I still can, and because I harbor the subtle suspiscion that it will likely find me as well, one day, despite my best efforts to hide from it behind exercise and healthy eating. It’s a grim, constant hunter that's easiest to fight against before it finds you, because there is no real way to hide. Only different ways to fight.

I walk for the hundreds out there who cannot walk because they are in the middle of that fight, and for the thousands lost to it, and the hundreds of thousands who have emerged from the other side, survivors, ever changed by the battle. Them I walk for, and will walk with on the weekend of June 6-7th on the Franklin County Fairgrounds. And I walk for my Dad, because we never had that last long walk together. He had to make that trek alone. But I never take my eyes off his footsteps.

My team is the Mission of Hope, sponsored by the UCC of Conway, and I invite you to walk with us by sponsoring us through the Relay for Life website, using this link.

My weak.

2008-04-17T18:35:00.000-07:00

Earliest I’ve been up this week: 4 am on Monday to drive into Boston, my regular 2 hour commute. I leave at 5. The wind was with me-I made it in at 7. I laid down in the car in the parking lot and slept until 7:30, before going in.

Wierdest thing I’ve seen this week: An image from a Burger King commercial, with the guy in the big Burger King head and costume looking at this guy whose back is to the camera. He looks like he’s towering over him. The words superimposed on the screen: “Where is your God now?”

Most miles traveled in 24 hours this week: Western Mass to Boston on Monday. Boston to Western Mass on Wednesday, to see my two boys in their school play. Western Mass to Boston on Thursday, today.

First epiphany of the week: I will likely die in my car, from exhaustion.

Smartest thing I’ve done this week: Cancelling a business trip to NYC that I was ill prepared for, and would’ve taken me out of the office, during this strange crunch time.

Second epiphany of the week: I don’t like crunch times.

Top accomplishment of the week: Apply for several scholarships, bringing myself one step closer to my enrollment at Savannah College of Art and Design, to finally begin my Masters. That, and hug my kids.

Strange realization of the week: One of the ways I’m known at work is as “the salad guy” because I have a big salad for lunch almost every day. I do it because salad fills me up, and is low cal, and since I stay chained to my chair most of the day, I need low cal. At least until it gets warm enough to start taking walks and exercising again.

This weeks reason I am glad I don’t watch cable TV: I just watched the Flavor of Love podcast on iTunes, which gives you 20 minute versions of all the shows. I am amazed and appalled that this show could last 3 seasons, that this many women could be interested in this guy, and most of all, that any of them cry at being kicked off the show, and not becoming his third-season girlfriend. It’s like a train wreck that cars keep driving into. You just want to yell at them.

Second best accomplishment of the week: Getting my taxes done and e-filed the day before the deadline.

Thing I’m most looking forward to this weekend: Going to Comic Con in NY, with my oldest son. After another long car ride.

Thing I’m most embarrassed about this week: Getting my taxes done and e-filed only one day before the deadline. I’m usually spending the money by late February.

Hotel California

2008-03-26T04:19:00.001-07:00

I miss the days when dreams were just dreams, not windows into the psyche, or a replaying of the days events. I miss having dreams that were a form of magic and fantasy, rolled into one.

When I was a kid, I slept with the radio on, back before I was such a light sleeper, needing absolute silence. And I dreamed an entire movie to “Hotel California.” It was me and my friend (I was the sidekick, not the main character) riding our motorcycles and stopping at this hotel. It was odd, and dark, and seemed deserted, but it was about to rain, and we were tired. So we went in. It was deserted, but clearly an old hotel-like the tower of Terror ride at Disney World, although this was before I’d been. There was a plot and a subplot as I wandered off and found out the truth about the hotel, and he went off separately where he met and fell in love with this girl. The girl ended up being chained in the basement, and he was bound to free her as the building started coming down around us. I struggled with him, and had to fight him to get him out, because he wouldn’t believe what I had found out-that the girl was part of the hotel, the lure in a venus flytrap to get you into the bowels of the hotel, from which you would never leave. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. We rode away on our cycles as the house shook and convulsed and exploded on a bleak horizon behind us. A full story, in the space of that single song.

I know it’s dangerous to tell your dreams to others, especially those who know you. They know how to read the symbolism that you are blind to, and thereby fold back the banana peel, exposing your soul to light and spoilage. But I miss those kinds of dreams, and much prefer them to the ones I won’t speak of, now. I miss those days of dreams with a beginning, middle and an end; simple story arcs, excitement, and drama that was real. I like that much more real than the subtle drama that life seems, sometimes.

The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent

2008-03-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

Today, I felt great. For a time, I had all the ducks in a row, all the stars aligned. There was hope in my heart, light at the end of the tunnel. And I don’t know why, because nothing was different.

Tonight, I went out with a friend for dinner, whom I had not seen since my mother’s death. He was sorry that he had not gone to the funeral. We spoke of many things, of ships and sails and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. Of death and family and obligation, and how easily all our miniscule problems would be solved by the gift of a million dollars. Or two. Or maybe not.

And I felt like shit. My personal roller coaster was going down, and I hadn’t even noticed until he highlighted it. He mentioned that I was lower energy than he had seen me for some time. It was like the acknowledgement made it so, and despite the fact that I felt great earlier, I felt lousy. And I don’t know why, because nothing was different.

Or maybe it's that everything is different, so many times a day, so many times a week, that I don't notice it anymore.

I once read that the definition of insanity was taking the same action again and again, and expecting a different result. But an opposite allegory is the definition of frustration; taking the same action and expecting the same result, and having it be different every time. And not knowing why.

Big T's Triumph (Part 2 of 2)

2008-03-03T05:22:00.000-08:00

I'm back in the office, back at work, back into the chaos that passes for life, these days. And in the aftermath of my Mom's funeral, it occurs to me that I never posted the text of Big T’s speech, which I promised a while ago. It's especially poignant in the face of how much a support he's been for me through the funeral of his Grandma. A 10-year-old shouldn't have to hold up as emotional support for a parent. But I was glad he was there.

The only change I’ve made is to take out his brother’s name:
------------------------------------------------
A couple of Fridays ago, (Lil’ T) was sad because he lost something. He thought he was bad and that he could not do anything right. He sat down on the floor and started wailing how he was the worst person in the world and how nothing could make what he did forgivable.

I felt like I should do something. His crying made me feel sad, as well. So I told him how God could not push us away from him. God would always forgive our actions and sins. We sometimes forget that the meaning of the word sin is to push ourselves farther from God. But Jesus Christ gave us forgiveness of our sins and brought us closer to God. I told Trace that God did not make us perfect so that we could have pride in our achievements. If we were perfect then we would achieve nothing. But by learning from our mistakes, we can become better people.

When they think of God, many people think of humans or animals, but I think of a tree. Trees can live for thousands of years and are, in many ways, superior to humans. Humans depend on trees for shelter, paper, furniture, and in some cases, fruits. I have heard of trees over 900 years old, but not a human over 150 years old! From one seed can grow a forest. God is the seed who grew us, his children, his forest.
Imagine a cup. If one piece breaks off, then the rest of the cup may still be usable, but it is not as good as it was before. We are each a piece. Will we join our hands and be one? Or will we separate and leave one another alone in the darkness? If we support each other, we can hold more.

I believe that God does not control our actions physically, but does mentally. We have His voice in our heads, whenever we do something wrong. Our conscience tells us what we are doing wrong and what we can do to fix it. You can choose to listen to it or not listen to it. If we listen to it then we will feel good about ourselves. If we don’t, it will drive us mad until we tell the truth.

God’s tool of our conscience is nothing compared to what he uses to hold us together! His pride and glory, Love! Your last name does not make a family, nor does blood. It is how much one person cares for another person.

My Mother's Obituary

2008-03-02T15:56:00.000-08:00

After 89 years, Esther Beatrice Stewart McLaurin completed her life’s journey on Monday, February 25th, 2008.

The daughter of Hosea Henry Stewart and Gertrude (Grady) Stewart, she was born on September 27, 1918 in what is now Princeton, Indiana, but what was then a specifically African American township separate from Princeton, called Lyle Station. When her mother died of cancer while she was in high school, she took on the responsibility of being the homemaker for her father and her four brothers and single sister, and remained so until she graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School. At that time, she left home when her father remarried. She received secretarial training and became a legal secretary to her uncle, Cornelius R. Richardson, Esq., who was among the first Negro Attorneys in Indiana and a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Through his generous assistance, she was able to attend nursing school at Provident Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, a school created specifically for African American patients, which set s new level for care in a separate-but-equal segregated north. This chapter is seldom talked about, but you can find the history of Provident Hospital here.

She graduated with honors, a member of the first class of nurses eligible for registration, and successfully passed the Illinois state examination for certification as a Registered Nurse. This was during the start of World War II. On becoming an R.N., she volunteered to the Negro Army Nurse Corp during World War II and was commissioned Second Lieutenant. While stationed at Fort Bragg, she met the man who would become my father, Staff Sergeant Johnnie W. McLaurin. Both served at the 25th station hospital, Monrovia, Libera, West Africa, where they married.

After the war’s end, she moved briefly to Mississippi, and lived for a time in Indiana, before settling in Massachusetts. They had a total of six children; Michael, Martha, Allan, Melva, John, and myself, the youngest. In addition to mothering and nurturing her family, she obtained her Massachusetts State certification as a Registered Nurse. She then joined the Staff of Wesson Maternity Hospital (now a part of the Baystate Medical Center complex) as its first Registered Nurse of color. After over 30 years of service, primarily in the premature and neo-natal intensive care nurseries, she retired in 1983.

She was preceeded in death by her twin brothers, Denver and Henry Stewart of Princeton, Indiana, and her parents, and her husband of 53 years, my father, who passed in 1996. She leaves two sisters and one brother, Alice Williams of Pennsylvania, Marva Stewart and Felton Stewart of Illinois, and a sister-in-law, Jessie Ruth (McLaurin) Willis of Springfield, Massachusetts. In addition to her six children, she leaves behind 13 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.

My mother’s life was one of quiet pioneering, breaking gender and color barriers that we have a hard time even appreciating today. She joined the army, before women were officially accepted int the army, and achieved an officers rank due to her level of education. She became a Registered nurse, a level of education on par with a doctor’s medical degree, in order to fulfill her calling to serve and care for others. She met a man who was of a lower rank than her officers status, and engaged in a relationship that was illegal under military rules, marrying him and remaining so for over 50 years. She broke rules, stubbornly and with a purpose, through the strength of character and a firm belief that she could achieve anything she wanted through hard work and perseverance. But within ad beyond all of this, she was my Ma, the person who raised me most directly, and influenced me most. And, though I never really appreciated it as a child, she was my hero.

On my mother dying, tonight.

2008-02-26T01:23:00.000-08:00

When a parent dies, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that you expected it, or even that the parent wanted it, longed for the release of death, railing against the too strong hold of life with a body that would not surrender when called to. It doesn’t matter that you ought to have accepted it as inevitable long ago, or that maybe you did, on a surface level. It hits hard, and real, and long, and convulsively, like dry heaves at the end of a long illness. What matters in those first hours, come days, looking forward into weeks, after you find out, when the pain finds you and curls around your belly and makes itself at home. What matters is the black and red empty psychic whine that reverberates with long empty echoes off the walls of the canyons of your insides. What matters is that empty roller coaster feeling that rises and falls, making you believe that echoing twinge is the last, until another joins it, and another, and then another, and then you realize you’ve been awake for hours and it feels like the night is never going to end.

It doesn’t matter that you’re not a baby. You feel like one, as the slow, sinking realization grabs hold that you are no longer the child of anyone living. It hits you that someone who was there at your entry into this plane—whatever you want to believe this world is, a place between other places or an existential place unto itself—is gone. Someone who witnessed your entry here, and maybe the only person present there to whom that entry was significant, is no more. One last barrier between you and mortality is removed. And you feel like that baby, again; alone, and cold, and crying against the encroaching isolation.

It doesn’t matter that you’re an adult, because each adult is also someone’s child, as much as someone’s parent. It doesn’t matter that you’re supposed to understand how this whole cycle of life thing works, and that nobody makes it out alive. None of it matters, toward making you feel any better about it.

It’s because she wanted to go, I think, that I don’t feel bad that she’s dead. Or maybe it’s just innate selfishness. She wanted, and was ready, to die. And so I don’t feel sad that she got what she wanted. I just feel sad at being left behind. And that’s just silly. As silly as the tug of regret at not having said goodbye tonight. My last words to her were “I love you.” But that was over a week ago. It should have been last night.

At this point, I’m tired of crying, tired of searching for sleep that won’t come, and past a point of exhaustion that makes anything understandable. Or seem to matter.

Goodbye, Mom. I love you.

Big T's Triumph (Part 1 of 2)

2008-02-25T04:48:00.000-08:00

In my church we have a yearly tradition of lay people coming up and giving their version of a personal “Faith Journey” this time of year. But it’s a small congregation-really a small town-and we’re pretty much at the end of people willing to do so. But we have one more resource; the kids. So the 3 oldest kids have been asked for consecutive Sundays in church to give their own version of a faith journey. It can be a talk about what God means to him or her, or what they think of the church or the world and their place in either.

This past Sunday was Big T’s turn. He was at first excited about it, then nervous, then downright tearfully fearful. On the Saturday before, we went for a walk amidst the fresh fallen snow that blanketed our rural road, and we got it all out, and he talked about what was bothering him. The thing I’ve realized is that, at 10 years old, this kid has a lot going on in his head. I don’t want to seem to be bragging, but I think—and in a sense I hope—it’s more than other 10 year olds. Certainly more than I had going on in there at his age. Chaos and depth, fear and hopes, all jumbled in odd contexts of popular culture and fantasy fiction.

The gist of his concern was that he felt I was asking him—no, requiring him—to stand up in front of the church and bear his soul, telling them his most personal thoughts that he never even necessarily told me or his Mom. This came out in a dribble, then a flood of anger and resentfulness that caught me by surprise. But that’s the opportunity of parenting, isn’t it? The chance to explain our actions, what we would and would not ever require of our kids, and the hope that if those lines ever get blurred, that the child would have the strength and willingness to call us on it.
Of course he doesn’t have to say anything he doesn’t want to, or do anything in that context that he wouldn’t want to. That’s what I communicated. That’s what he heard. It’s a chance to say what he thought, and opportunity to share a story or two and reveal what he wanted to and nothing more. Not an inch more than he wanted to give, or to show, or to reveal. It’s an opportunity, not a punishment. It’s a chance, not a requirement.

After that, we went back, and he was able to, relatively quickly, put down into words what he is willing to say about God, and his belief. After a week of his really being terrified of the act, its completion (the writing at least) went so quickly as to almost be funny. He finished in about an hour.

And the thing is, he was quite proud of what he’d done. And that was the opportunity I really wanted for him.

Later this week, with his permission, I will post what he had to say.

Don't Give Up

2008-02-21T16:36:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm home sick today and yesterday, and since my fever broke, hopefully not tomorrow. But being sick brings you down, for sure. I've been listening to this video all afternoon, and it helps. It helps.

Cultcha Culcha, culcha.

2008-02-21T16:08:00.000-08:00

Massachusetts is great for the arts. The Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) was established in 1979 to provide access to cultural activities for all segments of the Commonwealth's population. The Local Cultural Council (LCC) Program, the second largest grant program of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, is a grassroots complement to the agency's centralized grant programs. Allocations are made to all of Massachusetts' 351 cities and towns to support community cultural activities. The LCC Program is the most extensive system of its kind in the nation to support arts, sciences and humanities.

It’s a unique program. No other state in the country has as many local councils as Massachusetts. Over 2,500 volunteers serve on the 329 local cultural councils that reach every city and town in the state.

I recently (okay, not so recently-more like in the last quarter of last year…but I haven’t blogged in a while, sosueme) joined the Conway Cultural Council (CCC), as one of three newbies. We had to take an online test in which we learned about LCCs and their responsibilities, and then participate in a session where we reviewed grants.

Grant funds are assigned to each local cultural council each year, divvied up by the MCC (Massachusetts Cultural Council). These are then in tern divided amongst appropriate grant applications that demonstrate a local public benefit, are not part of any town budget, and are (in the case of programs that request funds for sequential years) moving toward self-sustaining status. The program is essentially a boost for a one time cultural event, or a (short-term) helping hand for a new self-sustaining public-benefiting program. All in all, it’s a very good thing.

We met on cold wintry morning, to find the town hall closed. After waiting about twenty minutes, we finally located the keys, but found the inside not much warmer than the outside. What was warm was the reception from the other members, and their willingness to walk the newbies through the process. Also as warm was the discussion of the grant proposals that we had received several weeks earlier to review and comment on at the meeting. As a result of having reviewed these in advance, we went through the list pretty quickly.

The problem with a finite pot, however, is that you have to make hard choices at the end. If we had double the allocated budget, we could have let fly all the applications we wanted. Not having the budget though, we had to re-evaluate of the basis of greatest impact and public benefit. These hard choices were eased just a bit by problems with some of the applications, which (unfortunately) caused some programs that would otherwise have been strong contenders, to be eliminated. Yes, as they taught you in school, reading the instruction and crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s does count.

Formational Event #44

2007-12-08T11:57:00.000-08:00

After reading my blog from yesterday, it amazes me how pompous I can sound sometimes, without meaning to. And honestly, I didn’t mean to. Sometimes writing the blogs is in itself an ego boost. But when the boost goes over the edge into ego-tism, it’s time to reign back, and change perspectives.

The key element of the previous formational event that I casually overlook is the fact that someone intervened on my behalf. Without my Uncle having spoken up for me, I could’ve cried ‘til the cows came home, making the others around me angrier and more upset, and setting myself up for a long and unpleasant cross country trip, I have no doubt. I inherited a stubborn streak from my mother. But the simple act of someone outside of that dynamic, made the difference.

And in fact, almost every significant achievement made “on my own” was, in careful reflection, aided by an outside party. I got my first job through a teacher setting me up with an internship, and my second major career change was initiated through my sisters actions. I went to school through my parent’s funding. And before that, I got a quality education through their actions to get me as one of the first students inducted into the Metco program, a fledgling program through which kids in urban areas were bussed out to suburban schools. Without that base, I would not have had the AP classes that enabled me to start college a year early, when the Regan administration was cutting funding. Without the funding, I would not have been able to afford art school. And so on and so on. I did the work, sure. But I got the start on someone else’s shoulders. So I wanted to take a moment to appreciate that, here.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

Formational Event #8

2007-12-07T10:21:00.000-08:00

I’m writing something that is forcing me to analyze what I call formulating events in my character. These are key and significant junctures I can identify in my past which, for good or ill, have helped formulate my world view. Thought I’d start to share some of them, here.

I’m six or seven years old, and my mother and I are making her semi-annual pilgrimage from Massachusetts to Indiana, for a visit with her sister and her father, my aunt and my grandfather. It’s a long trip by car, hours of staring, bored, at the open road while she tried to engage her sullen son in conversation. Often I’d just curl up in the back seat and sleep.

The moment in question is at the end of the trip. We’re packing up to go, and the luggage which fit into the trunk on the way won’t fit there anymore, with the addition of presents and other various odds and ends collected from family. She, my aunt, and my uncle have all tried various configurations. With each successive persons attempts, I’ve watched silently, sure of the solution to the puzzle. Finally my mother gives up, ready to be on the road. Her solution is that we’ll fit the odd bag in the back seat, rather than take up any more of everyone else’s energy. But I want my turn to try. Aside from the fact that I’m sure I know the solution to the puzzle, the back seat of her little Toyota is my domain, my respite from the road, and I’m unwilling to share it with a bulky hardtop suitcase. Besides, again, I know how to make it fit.

My mother is tired by that point, and has already given up. She’s found a solution, and is ready to go. I’m being difficult, in her eyes, wanting to play a grown up game that will waste more time. She says no, moving the bag toward the back seat.

I burst into tears, last resort for a boy too big to do so, out of frustration at not being taken seriously. I had waited for my turn. And I was certain I could solve the problem. I could make it work. But I am being refused the opportunity. After a few anguished moments, my mother is finally talked into letting me try as the lesser of two evils.

I move the bags around, like the pieces of a puzzle, and slide the last bag into place,. The lid of the trunk closes quickly, to, as I recall, the astonishment of the adults surrounding me, in less than three minutes.

It’s a formational event because it taught me some things that I carry to this day:

First, no one will ever believe you have an answer unless and until you show them. One has to prove themselves every day, even to those you assume should know better.

Second, that waiting your turn will not cut you any slack, nor gain you respect. It’s fair, but as many parents teach pretty early, the world doesn’t often reward fairness. You have to make a choice sometimes between being rude and being right. I think the corresponding axiom goes something like, “better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

Third, that squeaky wheels get greased. But as one gets older, I think how much one is willing to squeak goes down proportionally. It’s embarrassing, attention drawing, and potentially mortifying, to squeak too loudly. But when the alternative is silent frustration and turmoil, better to make some noise.

And finally, (while it’s not always the case) most often, I can do that which I believe I can do. That is to say, I will most often achieve what I set out to achieve, when such an achievement is a conscious effort, a goal. Whether anyone else believes in me, I believe in myself.

Hope to share a few more in the coming weeks. Invite others to do the same.

The End (5 of 5)

2007-12-06T05:50:00.000-08:00

Beer greases the wheels of conversation, and helps us get to truth. But too much grease makes those wheels skid all over the road. It’s like the Dirty Harry line: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” At least I think it was Dirty Harry. I kind of squint when I say it.

I was aware of what a crutch and potential hazard alcohol can be at these kind of events. At a previous reunion, I watch with fascinated horror as a few people drank too much, and a recently divorced classmate and her still-married ex-boyfriend reconnected on the dance floor, and later in the back of the room. It was a bit cringeworthy. I don’t think I saw them this time. I wasn’t anxious to duplicate that kind of performance.

I spent the first 20 minutes saying hello to people with a joy tinged with desperation as I tried to move toward the bar to get a beer. Having something in my hand just makes me more comfortable. I know what I’m doing with the hand, then, and can focus better on what I’m saying. Stupid as that sounds, I’m a keen believer in, and student of. body language. I know how to identify and project the signals that project the image I want. I didn’t need a glass for that. But also I needed the beer to give me a feeling of comfort, which in itself is a guilty admission. But I needed that familiar taste in my mouth to help me through the split second box sorting that I knew needed to occur. Which box to pull out? Which to put down? With that first glass in hand, I immediately started to feel better. I nursed that for the next hour and a half, but the immediate sensation of the glass in hand was what did the trick.

I rather thought I would have a point to this, when I arbitrarily decided there were five things I wanted to write about. But like the thoughts nearer the end are getting more random and disjointed. I think that’s because I fear getting to the point; the “what did this, or does this mean?” part. So, maybe I won't, here.

The wrap-up is this: I had a good time. It was an occasion to pause for a few seconds and see where I've been, maybe take a look at where I am, maybe get a handle on where I'm going. But mostly elements of the first. And that, I think, is the real point; to stop and look and say to all those people "Maybe you're not with me anymore, maybe we've moved well past each other, but still you should know, you are part of who I am."For all of you whom I have known in my life, all of you whom I’ve known, and yes, loved, and allowed to slip away, my apologies, my appreciation, and my continued good wishes. I do miss you. You are important to me.

Thank you for being a friend.

The flirt (4 of 5)

2007-12-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

I’m a flirt. I think I'm what I call harmlessly flirty. And, for the most part, that’s one of those things that has gone into a box. In the context of a reunion, it seemed appropriate to open that box, and take it out for a while. But it also made me nervous.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really afraid of my own actions, or afraid to overstep boundaries, as much as I was relieved to have the opportunity. I’ve always had found harmless flirting a friendly release. I think it goes back to the influence of comics when I was growing up. To me, the cute banter between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, and more, the cute (and harmless) innuendo between Peter and Mary Jane while Gwen was alive, was a model of friendly intimacy. And calling the bad guys things like “Cuddles” as he was taking them down proved the banter was meaningless, just a way of communication. That was my model of ‘cool.’

But at the same time, what’s cute and appropriate for a high school or college age guy becomes lecherous and inappropriate for a middle-aged guy, and just plain sad for an older guy. I worked at an architectural firm in Baltimore for a year, where one of the principles was a fifty-ish guy with white hair in a pony tail, whose attitude toward women and style of flirtation I found offensive. I mean, I’m a guy, and I wanted to take a shower after hearing some of his comments. It made me want to smack the back of his head and make that dork-knob fly, and yell “Grow the f*#k up!”

So, opening that box also meant being open to the fear of being inappropriate, or losing that thin edge of cool flirtation, and moving into the realm of just a little sad. I didn’t want the back of my head slapped. And awareness of that risk is what makes one nervous about being oneself.

But I’ve had this internal conversation with myself before. I think that flirting is okay, if it stays appropriate. The rules for appropriateness have changed as I’ve gotten older. But the same basic ones apply:
• You shouldn’t flirt if it hurts the person you’re with.
• You shouldn’t flirt if it hurts the person they’re with.
• You shouldn’t flirt if it hurts the other person (if there’s possibility they could misinterpret, or respond other than as intended).
• You shouldn’t flirt if it hurts yourself (if you have strong feelings that are unrequited, or unresolved, and simply masked by the flirtation).
• You shouldn’t say anything after two beers that you wouldn’t have said with no beers. That’s the hardest one to judge. And one of the most important.
• You shouldn’t flirt where you work.

Those things being addressed, I’ve always believed that harmless flirtation is a healthy expression of intimacy and friendship.

Again, these are the thoughts that went through my head in the moments between leaving my car and walking into the room full of friends I knew from High School. The box was ready. And so was I.

Boundaries (3 of 5)

2007-11-28T19:42:00.000-08:00

"You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends nose.”

For me, that goes down as one of the all time great truths. Seriously. What it says is, no matter how close you are to someone, there are still boundaries. There will always be things that keep you at arms length.

Those boundaries get more pronounced over time. Absence can make the distance greater.I’ve gotten used to that distance, and saying goodbye. I left friends in high school. I left friends in college. I left friends at Marvel, and at every job I've had since. And in so doing, I've compartmentalized a part of myself, putting it into a little box, enabling me, requiring me, to go out and reinvent myself once again. Do that many times, and you start to mix up the boxes, confusing them, not knowing precisely which part goes where, or is from when. You get lost. It’s good to look through those boxes from time to time, and put them in a context. That's another aspect that my high school reunion was good for. Through reconnection, and a reshuffling of the boxes, I got to see what parts of myself I value, and thereby what connections still remain with those parts. I got to see how strong the boundaries had become, and how difficult the connecting would be.

What I found was the joy of knowing that, between some, those boundaries dissolve at first sight. Sometimes, years fall away, and an embrace is as instantaneous as it is natural. That is true, and it is amazing, but it is not true not for many. It's a bond between a select few. You can feel it in the welcome, the level of natural warmth in the greeting, the recognition in the eye that remains unwavering and comforting and welcome.

There’s a way I like to think of it: in some peoples near-death experiences, they report walking into a light, and being greeted by dead friends, welcoming them. If life is like that in parallel, then your best friends are those you’d want behind you, alive, calling you back to them. Aside from family members, they are the people you’d most want to see and talk to, one last time.

And that was another reason that I wanted to go to my high school reunion. To see who among this mental group I would see again, and with whom that connection would still be alive. It’s pretty amazing when that bond can survive, and even a hint of it can exist.

You can’t pick your family, and hell no, you can’t even pick our high school. And when they tell you you can pick your friends, really what they mean is “from the available resources.” You make friends with those who you hang around with the most, right? It’s chance, and convenience, and the same kind of dumb happenstance like that which first brought together the raw amino acids that sparked life of a dead rock in space. Right?

Personally, I don’t believe that.

Take the idea of a soul mate. Some ridicule the idea that there’s one special person whose soul connects with yours in a way that can’t be explained; a person without whom you feel empty, and lost. Some say, even if such a thing is true, the chances are astronomical that you could find that living in your same generation, and living near enough to you and in enough time for you to meet them, and know them and connect.

But I believe in that ideal. I believe you can find that person, because there is a guiding hand involved. Whether you want to call it Fate or Destiny or God or simple hormonal chemical connection, or even invisible strings running through every living thing in the world, connecting ne to another. Whatever you choose to call it, I believe it, because it does happen. There is a reason, and an order to it.

And it works the same with friends. I believe you are led into concentric orbit with friends you are meant to know, who are meant to teach you something and share something with you. I believe you connect with people—specific people—over the course of your life because you are meant to. And connections are made that are unseen, and often unspoken, but nonetheless real. Connections that overshadow boundaries. You may subsequently be pulled in another direction, but the connection that is there means—requires—that you will reconnect one day, with those with whom you’re meant to. And when that happens, those boundaries of time dissolve, on contact, and you are drawn back into that connection, past the ideas and ideals of beauty and popularity, race and gender, to a real core of people drawn to each other because of who you, and they, really are.

Those are the people you pick.

The Shuffle (2 of 5)

2007-11-27T16:12:00.000-08:00

One of the things that bothers me about reunions is a little dance that I call “the Watchadoin’ Shuffle.” Everyone wants to know what you’ve been doing with yourself since the last time they saw you. That’s entirely reasonable. But the problem is, and always has been, how to respond. Which little dance to perform?

I mean, there’s the guy who has little success, and wants to play it up as larger than it is. Conversely, there’s the guy who’s had great success, and is out to impress, flaunting his success, rubbing their noses in it. Then there’s the guy who’s really successful, but who downplays it with false modesty. And of course there’s the guy at the end of the bar that keeps drinking, watching everyone else out of the corner of his eye, and studiously avoiding the dance, altogether. I honestly didn’t know which version of the dance, of that shuffle, I wanted to perform.

To understand my feelings approaching this, I should reveal that, from a young age, I had a sense that, being the youngest; I was my Mom’s “favorite.” I was a late life baby, in a lot of ways an only child, and her last chance at a baby. All my other siblings had to share my Mom with each other. I got her all to myself. And I came to value how important a thing that was, as I got old enough to appreciate it. That led to a constant downplaying of that important relationship with my siblings, throughout my adult life. Confident that I was in a good position, I had no need to flaunt it. But in more recent years, as my mother’s health has faded, and I’ve been farther away from her, what was a conscious downplaying of our relationship has become reality. Now I’m keenly aware of not being the favored son, a false modesty replaced by real displacement. Something was lost, through my lack of emphasis. It’s kind of jarring, making one appreciate what a stupid conceit false modesty is.

I noticed the same thing happened with my job, and my performance of the Shuffle, in describing it to others. At my first High School reunion, I had my dream job. I was working at Marvel Comics, something I’d wanted and worked toward as a dream since I could dream. I was golden at that reunion. So, naturally, I played my shuffle down. Yeah, I worked at Marvel. No big deal. No thing. While secretly, inside, I was a peacock strutting proudly, handing out those little Spider-Man business cards.

At the next milestone reunion, ten years ago, I’d been downsized from Marvel, and was working at a publisher in Western Mass that no one at the reunion had heard of. I liked the job okay, and I had as much responsibility. But what was really working in my life was that I was making as much money as I had been at Marvel, but in an area where I could buy a house and raise a family. it wasn’t New York, and I missed that, but I also appreciated it as a gift. I was living a rural lifestyle that I found idyllic. I took a lot of comfort in the simple joy of this, laying the false modesty on once again. Only by the end of the evening of that reunion, again, false modesty was replaced by real displacement. No longer did I have to downplay my success, because that success downplayed itself. The life I'd gained was too personal for comparison, and the loss of "status" was all that I felt was perceived. I didn’t have a great time.

So, at this reunion last week, time came for the shuffle, again. Now I’m actually employed at a company that my former classmates will have heard of, and more important, it’s a job that I love. It’s not my dream job, but it has a high potential of becoming such. Certainly it’s a greater challenge than I’ve had in over a decade, and a place where my contribution and my effort, is valued. And without money coming into it, which it shouldn't in the context of a tactful shuffle, it’s still more than I made at Marvel. I’m happy.

So what kind of dance would I do?

What I did was to downplay this success in the fact that, having this job means I’m away from my family for four days a week. Now I live nearer Boston from Monday through Friday afternoon, and spend four hours a week (2 hours each way) commuting to the area away from my home, where I love to live, and would like to die. The good balances the bad, but the bad is certainly there. I went with sincerity. I laid it on the table that it wasn’t ideal, but I loved what I was doing.

I started going into some detail, but after the second go through, I realized I was talking to myself, not anyone else. I wasn’t being falsely modest, I was being straight-forward, but forgot one important element in the dance—my partner. Being objective, nobody cared. At this stage of life and living, you are where you are, and you’re doing what you’re doing, and the question is asked as a point of reference more than to gain real knowledge. There were no subliminal comparisons going on. There were just people who used to know me, whom I used to know, who were just wondering how I was doing. And the answer “Fine,” was just …fine.

I suspect, as most things in life, the more you get good at something, the more natural and effortless it becomes. And consequently, the less important it becomes in occupying your mind, it’s not something you have to do, just something that you are. And the shuffle becomes as simple and natural as a walk in the park, with nothing to prove, and nowhere specifically to go. The shuffle becomes a stroll. And you finally get to see the scenery, instead of paying so much attention to your own two feet.

Five Things about my High School Reunion (1 of 5)

2007-11-26T18:04:00.000-08:00

The weekend after Thanksgiving I had my high school reunion. I’m not going to tell you what number, for fear that it’d date me more than the grey in my beard. Let’s just say it’s the kind of anniversary where, if it were a marriage, some serious money ought to be spent.

Before I went, I had some trepidation. At first, I was, “of course I’m going. Absolutely.” But that unhesitant answer was re-examined as the event got closer. Why was I going? Was there anything to be accomplished? Is a high school reunion like a distant cousin’s wedding, something you go to because you’re invited and because there'll be drinks?

Of course, it’s not. We go, or as often we don’t go, because there's an emotional investment involved. Not going is as conscious a decision, often made out of anger, or fear, or anxiety or self doubt. I know many people who, once past high school, couldn’t be paid to go to a reunion and see “those people” again. Many probably abstained from attending this one. But with either choice having internal repercussions, I’d always choose (I hope I’d always choose) the one that offers an opportunity for growth. As nervous as I got as the day approached, and as many unanswerable questions as arose, I still knew without question, that I would attend.

See, my high school experience was unique from others in a lot of ways. Some I’ll go into in the future. But the tenth-story overview is that I had a good time in high school. I had an awareness that it was a golden time in my life, a period to be savored for its brevity. From a young age, I’ve been cursed with an anti-zen knowledge beforehand of the greatest moments of my life, of being able appreciate them really and fully only just before they came, and then again just after they’d gone, but barely able to experience the moments at all as they passed. High school was like that for me. But like that experience, I looked forward to the reunion as an opportunity to be savored, but one I knew I would not be able to experience as it passed, but only afterward.

But then, that’s one of the pleasures of blogging, isn’t it? For me, anyway. Over the next week or so I’m going to post some observations from that reunion. Five seems the magic number.

The first thing I’ll note about my reunion is vanity. Specifically, mine. Vanity is like a nail. It’s imbedded early on, and driven in daily by your own perception of how others see you, hammered into your self worth as you perceive yourself through others. I once heard an expression; “I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.” That idea was formed, if not written, by someone in high school.

I was rather surprised by how many people told me I looked the same as I did in high school. I couldn’t agree less. Even when I pulled out an old yearbook that someone had brought, and saw a picture of me trying to look my coolest, and said, “See? That is not me, now.” I couldn’t get agreement. Maybe it should fall into the “take the compliment and shut up” category, but it bugs me, still. I barely recognize the guy in the photo as me. Part of me would like to be him. He looks pretty cool. But he’s not me. He’s just a fucking kid. A primping, prissy, kid. But he does look good.

I think everybody looks good at their reunion. Okay, as good as they can look in the one-month between getting notice that the reunion is coming and actually attending, anyway. The best looking guys at the reunion were the guys who looked like themselves, only older, more mature. One old friend looked great, but was taken aback when I said he looked the same, only older, like his own father. I really meant it as a compliment. But in retrospect, I can see how it would be hard to take it as offered. My point is, I don’t think I look exactly the same. And maybe that’s not so bad.

I made none of the vain primping efforts I might usually perform before big events. I didn’t get a haircut, to be as perfectly coifed as possible. I didn’t even shower and shave, just before. I had another party to go to, a friends Thanksgiving-for-friends, and after a busy day at Big T’s swim meet, I had no time. Time is at a premium these days. But I had no concerns about not being dolled enough for the reunion. I went prepared to be me, for good or ill.

That said, I should note I’m aware that I’m a reasonably okay-looking guy, I think. I mean, I like me. And I’m getting okay with how I look, now. But frankly, I think I looked better as a young guy. I had a lot more confidence in my looks, then. I guess that’s in tandem with pursuit of the opposite sex. You want to look attractive to get women, or, at that age, girls. But as I grow older, that becomes less important. As an adult, it’s most important to remain attractive to a specific person, not all people in general. With that comes a degree of laziness, sure, but also comfort. I find that comfort..well, sexy in other people. I like those with a casual elegance, who look good in any light even when—especially when—they’re not trying. My love looks most fantastic when she first wakes up in the morning, refreshed and glowing, and would fight you tooth and nail to disagree if you told her so. If you were lucky enough to see her then.

But I digress. I was told I looked good, that I looked young, and that I hadn’t changed. Is that a good thing? I think I’d more prefer the compliment that I gave, better—to look good, but older, like my own father. A look that says experience, and confidence, and a bit of self-knowledge that even the most self-actualized teen can’t claim. Part of me believes that the sexiest, coolest, handsomest thing there is, is to be able to feel good about yourself, even if you don’t believe you’re perceived as sexy, cool, and handsome. That's a nail you can hang something good on.

This was made real in a conversation with one of the most beautiful girls in our class. With flame red hair, skin like alabaster, and eyes as blue as the bluest azure, she was so striking-looking that she always had people around her in school. She traveled with an entourage. One of those in the entourage, unfortunately, was her twin brother, who perhaps kept the guys at arms length. At the party, she talked about how she didn’t have any dates throughout high school, and how she felt ugly. I found that the saddest thing to hear, and was more surprised to hear her rebuking me for disagreeing. She is still a striking beauty, and her high school picture still shows how striking she was, even then. But she herself cannot see it, blinded by a nail that penetrated her soul and makes her feel rusted, blinded to her own physical beauty. She’s coming into her own, now, developing confidence in who she is, as much as I could tell in a five minute conversation. Yet it will always strike me that the vanity we have, or don’t have, in high school can scar us ever after. That nail can strike so deeply that the most we can hope for is to heal over it, and thereby disguise it.

But the one thing we guarantee in that healing, is that the nail itself will never be removed.

What the hell I’m Doing-Summer edition

2007-07-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

Well, shut my mouth, I have not blogged in a while. The reason is that my life has again been thrown into the spin cycle, and I’ve not had the opportunity. But here’s where that changes.

I have a job.

The idyllic thing about where I lived was that it was close to a reasonably well-paying job. But having left that behind, I found that the better paying jobs that offer the challenges I’m looking for are centered at the opposite end of the state. Specifically, I found a job in Avon Massachusetts, as an Art Director for a thriving retailer of childrens recreational toys. It’s a pretty exciting gig, that I’m looking forward to getting into. Today was my first day. But that’s the topic for another blog. My point today is that this job is 2 and 1/2 hours away from where I live. Not a commutable distance. As a result, I’m living a double life.

I’m living the week in a town called East Bridgewater, which is one of the satellites of Massachusetts’ mega-metropolis, Boston. East Bridgewater is a nice town, all things being equal. There are blockbusters, and too many Dunin Donuts, but there are also bunnies in the fields, and great public libraries with free internet access, open late.

I’m renting the attic space in a house from a woman with two boys, close to the ages of Big T and Lil T. For the time being, I will be renting space nearer to work, and commuting back to my home on weekends. That’s a big change for me, and likewise, the topic for another day.

I’m withholding a lot of comment on the living arrangements as of yet, because I’ve only slept here two nights. One thing I will note though-I’m no longer a city boy.

I was raised in Springfield, on a residential street that nonetheless had significant traffic all hours of the day and night. I’d find the soft whoosh of traffic outside my window soothing. A gentle rumble that would grow to a crescendo, and fade off to the opposite corner. No beeps or honks, just the soft sounds, like waves at the beach. I think in New York my apartments were higher up, or at the back of a brownstone, so I slowly got used to not hearing the noise of traffic. Now, where I am, there is quite a bit of traffic on the road. Again, no beeping or honking, but the noise is louder than I remember, and more immediate, almost closer, even though I know that’s not the reality. The guy down the street with the motorcycle who takes off every morning at 6:30, notwithstanding. (Why do motorcycle riders need the vrmmm vrmmm anyway? I know it’s an artificial adjustment that actually interferes with fuel efficiency. And at 6:30 it’s not cool, just annoying.) But the fact is, I’m no longer enured to the gentle sounds of traffic. I miss the crickets, who, jostled too often by the competition of traffic noises, are noticeably absent from the night chorus.

I miss living in the sticks. I miss being with my family. But this is apparently not as odd an arrangement in Massachusetts as one might think. There are apparently a great number of people who live in Western Mass, and commute to Boston daily, or (for the luckiest ones), commute to Boston three days a week, and work at home two, or vice-versa. Again, nice work if you can get it. I’m hoping, in a few months, or years, to be able to explore that myself, having made myself indispensable at my new place of employment.

So, that’s what’s taking up my time. The good news is that, without having the family to be with in the evenings, I will be able to dedicate more time to writing and drawing. I wish when I wrote that it sounded like a positive, but I’m just not there yet. But I am dedicated to making the time count for something. Given the choice, I’d rather be playing with my kids. But given the choice, I’d first like to assure that my kids have great healthcare, and a great place to live and grow up, and everything else they need. Including time with Dad. Even if it’s only on the weekends.

The One He Didn't Love

2007-06-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

Over the next several weeks, I will be posting the first parts of several of the short stories I've been working on, between other actual blog entries. Any feedback is welcome.

Corin Maloney is a recurring character for me, in 3 shorts so far. I think he's interesting, and this story intro doesn't get to the interesting part. But it starts to.
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Corin Maloney stared at the pinched glass of Glenfiddich single malt 12-year-old scotch as it sweated onto the bartop. It was all he ever drank. He drank it because he liked the taste, and the familiarity, and the memories it evoked. He liked the smell as it melted the ice, and the hint of vinegar from the two olives he always requested. Mostly, he drank it because it reminded him of Alicia. He saw her soft angular face in the ice cubes, saw a sparkle of her eyes in the mix of the amber liquid. It was all he ever drank with her, she a Cosmo, he a Glen single malt on the rocks, two olives. It made him miss her with a tightening twist in his gut that the alcohol slowly loosened. And he was able to drink it slowly as it did so, so he could keep his wits about him, for what needed to be done, this night, or the next, or the next, by him, and him alone.

The door to his right opened, and his eyes alone shifted to regard the form silhouetted in the darkened bar by a blaring streetlight outside the door. His eyebrows tightened in recognition. She shouldn’t have come. His wife made her way straight to him, and stood to his right, hands on her hips, waiting for his acknowledgement. Though the seats to either side of him were empty, as were most of the seats at the bar, she didn’t sit. He motioned to her with the glass, as toasting a salute, before tipping the glass to his lips.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“Oh. Well then,” he said, a mocking gesture of response. His body seemed frozen, only his right arm pivoting down, ever in economy of motion, returning glass to bartop. His eyes stayed locked on it.

“You have two kids at home, waiting for you.” She said.

“Or you,” he said, “Who’s with them now?”

“Mrs. Laragioni next door is watching them for an hour,” she said, annoyed at the inference.”I wouldn’t leave them without making sure they were safe. I care about my family. I wouldn’t have left them at all, but to come down here and find you.”

“I wasn’t lost,” Corin said. “I told you where I’d be. Told I’d be home late.”

“Like you’ve told me every night for the last month,” she said. “You sit here and bend your elbow every night of the week, coming in at all hours and going right to sleep. I can smell the scotch and cheap cigarette smoke on you. And God knows what else. I gave up smoking for you. I don’t need you coming home smelling like it.”

Corin tilted the glass, gently. He liked to watch the ice cubes, the way the thousand tiny bubbles lay frozen at the center of the cubes, trapped until time and warmth freed them to make their way to the surface, and freedom.

“But do I come home,” he said. “Every night, I come home.”

Her lips tightened. “And I’m supposed to be happy about that?” She said, “Like that’s a big something?”

He shrugged. It was the most animation he’d shown since she arrived. It ought to be a big something, he thought. It ought to count that I’m still with you.

“What the hell do you come here for, anyway? We have bars in our neighborhood. Nicer places. Places you don’t have to take two trains to get to. So why here? Who do you come to see?” she said, scanning the darkened bar. Some of the patrons shifted uncomfortably at the review, shrinking more into the darkened corners of the booths that lined the walls. “Is it her? Does she meet you here?”

She had been the only way Mary had ever referred to Alicia, as the mysterious, disembodied her. It was a form of disdain that Corin chose to see as respect. Mary hadn’t appeared to have even known Alicia’s name. If only that were true. His head pivoted at the neck, to face her. His body remained solid and stock still. The ice in his glass was more animated.

“I come here to be alone, Mary,” he said. “Alone.”

It was a sad fact of Corin Maloney’s life that he preferred to spend most of it alone. It had almost been an aberration that he’d found a woman willing to put up with it, willing to marry and bear the children of a man who was so seldom present, and even when he was, so seldom actually available. But find Mary he had. And for ten year’s they’d been happy, or seemed so. He still had the erratic travel schedule that had him gone for days at a time with little notice, to locations where she couldn’t reach him, and she could not ask about. He said he was in sales, and that was the nature of his business. But five years in, five years ago, she’d recognized that for the half-truth it was. But in those ten years, he’d never been unfaithful. He’d tried to be a good husband, and a decent family man. He’d done the best he could. One does what one can, with the tools at hand, he’d often say.

Then, a year ago, he’d met Alicia. He never expected to fall for her, so far, so fast. He never considered himself the type. Corin was a coldly logical man, a problem-solver who examined every question from all sides, analyzing with quick efficiency. Considering all angles was what had made him so good at what he did. That, and acting with the speed of a snake. Alicia had changed all that. She made him act without thinking. She’d made him feel. She’d seen a side of him that no one else had, a side, prior to knowing her, he hadn’t known existed. It was as if being with her made him a different man, a better man. And he’d loved her for that, most of all. He missed that man, almost as much as he missed her. They’d met in a place much like this one, but not this one. He was here for a different reason, than to remember Alicia.

The Road Not Taken

2007-06-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

Zig Zagging

2007-06-17T19:22:00.000-07:00

When Big T was a toddler, and we first went to the local amusement park, he had a blast. Later we also went again, after Li’l T was born, and despite the fact that 80% of the park was out of their range, again they loved it. We spent most of our time at the water park, anyway. Later, Big T would ask when we could go to “Zig Zag’s” again. I pondered it for a while, and couldn’t remember a friend or a restaurant or a playground he would’ve called “Zig Zags”. After a humorous game of “remember when we...” it finally dawned on me that this is how he heard “Six Flags,” or at least how the strange name (which, when I consider it, makes no sense to me either) made sense to him. I mean, it’s got a coaster that zigs and zags, and lots of other rides that throw you all over the place. Why not “Zig Zags?” So that became what I called it, too.

Today we spent Father’s Day at Zig Zags. It was the boy’s choice, as I had too much on my plate to contemplate the question of how I’d like to spend Father’s Day. Frankly, I was also a bit lost in my own role. I love my boys more than life, but lately, with some of my choices—namely abandoning ship on my career cruise, and unwittingly throwing my family into the same life raft—I haven’t felt like much of the provider or paternal leader. I haven’t wanted to think about Father’s Day for some time, because I felt like a Bad Dad.

And maybe they sensed some of that. Maybe an outrageously extravagant day out was what they needed to feel like the center of attention again in a family thrown off kilter. And who was I not to go along? The least I could do was follow their bliss. Mine didn’t seem to be going anywhere, too quickly.

The day was great. A big brunch on the way was followed by a non-stop day of riding and swimming and laughing. Even the long lines for some of the rides didn’t dampen the spirits of the little ones, something I remembered as soul-suckingly traumatic from my childhood. And their excitement and joy was so contagious that it soon turned my mood around as well. There was none of the whining, none of the pushing, none of the buy me that, let’s do that why can’t we do this” stuff that I saw around me, or even that I remembered from them on other days at other events, from the boys. Without my having said anything, or cautioned them in any way, they were on their best behavior. And it wasn’t the kind of best behavior that you get with shifting eyes to Mom and Dad to make sure they’re doing okay, like they’d been warned to be good. It was the joyous, happy, good behavior of happy kids having a great day, and having nothing to complain about because the sun was shining, the belly was full of good food, the energy was high, and life was good. It’s the kind of day I used to dream about giving to my kids, before I had kids. And they were giving it to themselves, with me along for the ride.

They'd already given me my "official" gift earlier this month, so the trip to Zig Zags was a bonus that I considered as much a gift to them. But this was the real gift, this day. This day. Maybe sometimes you need a little zig-zagging to appreciate that the road you’re on, however rocky and twisty and uncertain and tumultuous, has some nice scenic spots. You just have to slow down from time to time to enjoy them.

Happy Father’s Day.

Googled and Oogled

2007-06-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is a petty, selfish, whiney rant. But it’s all mine.

I’m neither seven years old, nor do I have two Moms. My parents are not a lesbian couple, I’ve never lived in Louisiana, and I know how to spell “bad word” without a “u”. But none of that stops my name from coming up with all these attributes after a Google search.

See, I share the same name as seven-year-old Marcus McLaurin in Ernest Gaullet Elementary School, in Lafayette, Lousiana. He became national news when he told a classmate that his mother way gay, and a zealous teacher made him stay in from recess to write that he shouldn’t have used that “bad wurd” in November 0f 2003. As a result of the coverage, a Google search for my name will result in equal parts location of my website and some history, and Wikipedia, but mainly multiple mentions of this kids story.

What really sucks is that this happened in 2003, and it seems since then the references to the story have multiplied, while the Google references to my career and history are thinning faster than my hair. I’m there on the first page, sure, but then not mentioned again until the sixth. And let’s face it folks, how many of us look through the Google results to the sixth page?

This whole thing started because I read an article that said, as part of a job search, one should Google oneself (which sounds slightly dirty) to see what comes up. The idea being that prospective employers are likely to do so, so it’s important to be forewarned and forearmed. But the article mentions nothing about what to do if you don’t like what comes up.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I should care, but for some reason I do. In this digital age, ones fifteen minutes of fame may well be translated into fifteen bytes which seem to live forever. And right now it feels like I’m sharing seven of them with a now-11-year-old boy with two Moms who is perpetually remembered for a punishment he received four years ago. I hope America has grown up a bit since then. Okay, maybe I should, too.

I’m sure by this point he wishes all the hype would go away, or it already has, except for the news archives that Google pulls up. Maybe for him, it’s ancient history, and would be until one day someone does a Google search for him and comes across the fact that he shares his name with an Art Director in Massachusetts who sued Google to have his name legally changed on all their internet servers to “The other Marcus McLaurin.”

And lost.

Adobe CS3 Creative License Conference

2007-06-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

The Adobe Creative License Conference is coming, and you can find out about it here.

I’ve been drooling over Adobe CS3 since it was introduced at the PhotoShop World in Boston, and anxiously await my opportunity to upgrade in a month. Now I’ll be attending the Creative License Conference in New York, June 25-26th, (that’s Monday-Tuesday) giving me more opportunity to look enviously on those who already have the upgrade. I hate upgrading early for much the same reason that I won’t see blockbuster movies the first two weeks after they come out. I want to avoid the hype and the buzz, and go to the ones that earn it, and let the rest fall by the wayside. I know it's a big hype machinewhere, unbelievably, marketers have figured out how to get consumers to pay to be sold to (but then again, what else are comic book conventions, at their heart?). That said, I’ll still take the leap for the opportunity of free training and other freebies available at cattle calls like this one. Plus, the networking opportunities are rife for me, at a time when I’m searching for more opportunities. And it is only $199 for two days, and I got a 25% discount off of that through my NAPP membership. Yet again, that membership pays for itself, and once again, I recommend membership. I just wish the old maxim of finding things to spend money on just when you have the least money, didn’t ring so true.

Now, nearly everyone I know in NY either is not interested in this conference, or not in New York anymore. Luckily, there’s a left coast version in LA as well. But if you’re going to be in NY around this time, you can drop me a line!

Snuff

2007-06-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

Dream Big

2007-06-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

Over the next several weeks, I will be posting the first parts of several of the short stories I've been working on, between other actual blog entries. Any feedback is welcome.

Here is the first part of a longer story, really a series of interlocking vignettes that connect in the final segments.
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The night was dark, and the bedroom lights had been off for a half an hour when Jay spoke. Like always, the streetlights outside the window cast just enough light through the gauze of the threadbare curtains to half-illuminate their back bedroom. So it was never pitch black, just shadowy. It was sort of like a nightlight, though at ten-years-old, he was, of course, way beyond the need for such things. Really. He kind of enjoyed the suburban half-light all night for sleeping, but he did like it quiet. But slightly more than silence, he liked getting the last word in.

“Anyway, dreaming of elephants is silly,” he said.

“Why? Why is it silly?” his little sister said, from the other side of the room. Jay heard, more than saw, Cally sit bolt upright in the pitch black as she spoke. It was for dramatic effect, he was sure. But her preschool mentality didn’t appreciate that performing in the dark cut the drama. They’d shared this room from her infancy, within the confines of their small house on the outskirts of their small town. Her bed diagonally across from his since it was a crib, Jay had put up with her crying, her nightmares, her bed-wetting, and in recent months her late night philosophical conversations on the nature of moon and why cheese was stinky, but whipped cream smelled good. He even put up with her middle of the night screams when her bed nudged out from the wall, and shed fallen into the small space between the bed and the wall, rudely awakened and terrified. Jay had been the one to make a game of it, calling that space her “hidey-hole” and making it fun to the point that Mom had to stop her from ducking into it every morning when she was supposed to be getting up. Jay had gotten in trouble for that one, too. But older brothers can only be asked so much, and it was getting to be a bit much. Still, he loved her, and acknowledged his responsibility as the oldest to educate the poor thing. Without opening his eyes, he indulged her.

“Well, you need to be careful what you fit into your dreams, for one thing,” he said. “Elephants are way, way big. You shouldn’t dream things too big to fit.”

“Elephants can fit in my dreams,” Cally said. “I can fit very big things in my dreams. I like to dream big things. Once I dreamed a whole entire house in my dreams, a big mansion!”

“Yeah, but you dream a room at a time, and really, then, only a part of a room at a time, like a dresser, or a table, or a closet. It just feels like a whole house. But you never see the whole house at the same time. So, really it’s not that big.”

Jay heard the wet smack of Cally’s lower lip popping out in an angry pout. Or maybe he imagined he heard it. Either way, he was sure the pout was there. And he heard a rustle he assumed would be her folding her arms. Through it all, he kept his eyes closed, determined that he would go to sleep before he got sucked into another late-night debate with a five-year-old.

It had begun simply enough. Tomorrow they were going to the circus, and they hadn’t been to a circus in years, not since Cally was an infant in a carrier. By Jay’s limited recollection, she’d slept through it. So when she said she was excited to see the elephants again, Jay had challenged her, saying she’d never even seen an elephant, outside of television. She argued that she had, that she’d dreamed of elephants. Jay has said no she hadn’t and she said yes she had, and Jay said she always made up stuff that she dreamed about, rather than really remembering, and she had said that she was the boss of her brain and not Jay, and anyway Jay was a stupid head, and Mom had shut down the conversation.

“You just ought to be careful, is all I’m saying.” Jay said, a bit petulantly. “Dream too big, and something might get stuck there, and you might not be able to get it out again. Remember the cowbell?”

Cally remembered the little brass bell; something her parents had said was a favor from their wedding. It had a large ring at the top of it, meant to be a handle by which you could manipulate the leaden weight inside to produce the soft tinkle, which the kids called the cowbell. The ring was much too small for an adult finger, but to a three-year-old, the cowbell ring seemed ready-made for wear. Cally had slipped it over her middle finger, and run away from Jay, to a soundtrack of metal tinkling and giggles, calling that she wouldn’t be milked, not today, not today! When it had come time for them to go to school, Cally had been terrified to see that she couldn’t get the cowbell off. She’d hid it behind her back all that morning, and on the bus ride in, so it had been her teacher who first noticed his additional appendage. The school nurse had been unable to remove it, and parents had been called. A quick trip to the emergency room, a few swipes of a metal cutting tool, and the ring atop the cowbell was no more. Now it was a crescent shape atop the thick brass bell. Cally looked at it with a hint of sorrowful remembrance nearly every day. Yes, Cally remembered the cowbell, and how her finger seemed to go in so easily, but then was impossible to get out again. She let out a heavy sigh.

“Do you really think an elephant could get stuck in my dream?” She said, looking at the dark outline of her hand before her face.

Jay finally rolled over and, finally, looked at his little sister, or rather her partial, darkened outline, with exasperation. He always had to explain the simplest concepts to her. Being in second grade was already such a burden; Cally’s late night sessions didn’t make his life any easier. Mom never had to listen to Cally, safely tucked in her own room upstairs, and never believed Jay’s stories about how chatty Cally got at night. He looked forward to next summer, when Mom had promised he’d get his own room in the basement, and be able to sleep the night through without the late night Q&A.

“Why do you think they have a thing called brain surgeons, silly?” he said, “It’s a doctor that has to operate on your brains, and try to get out stuff that sticks there. They have to saw open your skull, and sort of reach into your brains, and look for a hard spot or something moving, like a stuck elephant.

“What happens to the elephant when they get it out?”

Jay paused for a minute, eyes shooting up to the ceiling as he thought. “Oh, once it’s out of your brain, it just vanishes, like all your dreams do when you wake up. It’s only getting in there and getting too big, that sticks it. But it costs a lot of money to get it out. You remember how mad Mom got when they got the bill for getting the bell off? Well, it’s a lot more money to hire a brain surgeon. You don’t want to go there.”

With that statement putting a final period on the conversation, Jay slumped back onto his pillow. Conversation over. And the room was silent for a good minute.

“Does it hurt?” Cally asked, timidly. Jay let out another deep sigh, puffing both cheeks out. Tomorrow would never come, he was sure. He would sit up here and talk to Cally all night, and the sun would come up, and it would be the next day but without any sleep Jay would feel like it was the same day, and tomorrow would never, ever get here. And then he would fall asleep in Ms. Leary’s class, and get sent to the principles office, and have to bring a note home, and probably get in trouble, when it’s fault in the first place for putting me in the same room with Cally anyway, and it just wasn’t fair.

That’s when he heard the glass breaking.

The room was dark, and the night without even darker with the new moon and slightly overcast sky, so it was only another silhouette that Jay saw. At their window. Breaking their window. Jay saw a large gloved hand reach through bottom pane and grope for the knob that would unlock the window.

Jay rolled out of his bed and onto Cally’s, whispering a quick, quiet shsssh into her ear as she sat, transfixed. The hand found its goal, and twisted the lock open. The lower pane began to rise, slowly at first, and then once the hand found purchase underneath, quickly up. Jay wrapped his arms around Cally, and pushed her back into the corner.

“Hidey hole,” he whispered, as he pushed the bed frame away from the wall with one foot, and she slid noiselessly down to the floor. Jay slid over, nearly on top of her. But there wasn’t enough room to conceal them both. From his position, face down on the edge of her bed, looking down into the space where he imagined Cally must be quivering, Jay reached a hand down and found her face, and placed a finger gingerly on Cally’s lips. Shhhh, he said with his hand, and his mind there in the darkness, and would have said with his eyes, if she could have but seen them, if you’ve never been able to be quiet before in your life, please be quiet now.

The shape was in the room now, and moving toward Jay’s bed. Darkened hands patted at the pillow and still-warm sheets, tossing them to the side in frustration at finding the empty bed. Then it turned toward Cally’s bed. It grabbed at the sheets again, stopping when he felt Jays foot at the head of the bed, at the corner from which it protruded. An instant later Jay felt two strong hands at his shoulders lift him from the bed.

Cally, looking up from her hidey-hole saw the change of light as her brother left the opening above her. But she stayed still, moving her own hand to replace Jays, placing her own finger to her lips as Jays had been. Shhhh, she thought. Shhhhhhhhh.

Shock of the New

2007-06-07T19:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve been looking into online degrees for the past week. New, old territory. Scary stuff.

The going to school isn’t really the scary part. I can handle that, and I’ve always intended, since the day I graduated college, to return to school. I will get my Masters, before I die. The two I’ve narrowed it down to are AIG (American Intercontinental University) Online and The University of Phoenix Online. Both offer Undergraduate degrees in Visual Communication, in the specific areas I’m interested in. My plan is to get the basic groundwork in the undergrad degree, and then advance beyond that to a Masters, through my next employer. If anyone has any recommendations of one over the other, I’m all ears. I’m looking at starting with one or the other in July. So the clock is ticking.

But that’s the interesting part, the challenging part, the, let’s face it, the fun part of all this. It’s not the scary part.

The scary part is money, the single thing that’s been scary for me since I left my former position, to focus on improving my skills, abilities and marketability in the first place. Going back to school is hard enough. Doing it while working to support a family is insane. But that’s what I’m doing. I’m looking hard for freelance work, and have a few nibbles that will make life reasonable for the short term. In addition, my wife will be adding support to our family financially in addition to her continuing role as main caregiver to our two boys. We’ll both be working twice as hard, for half as much. I’m also looking hard at scholarships, fellowships, and grants in the short term. But it is a full time job looking for jobs, improving ones skills, getting an education and searching for scholarships all at the same time.

Given my competing priorities over the next several weeks, my blog entries here will be necessarily short. I want to savor the fun part, the interesting part, the challenging part. But I’ve got to get over the scary part first.

I remember a movie I saw a while ago, Holy Man starring Eddie Murphy and Jeff Goldblum. Maybe I’ve mentioned it here, before. The message it had sticks with me to this day, though—maybe especially these days. The message was about not letting fear hold you back. That letting go of fear being the greatest freedom there is.

Fear is a self-imposed mechanism, created to prevent us from doing something stupid, from petting a lion or touching fire. But as highly evolved creatures, we also have a highly developed sense of fear. We are afraid to disappoint our peers. We are afraid to be revealed as frauds. We are afraid of a dozen, dozen different things that we have no reason to be afraid of, have no reason even to consider, and which consequently and constantly hold us back. So we compromise, and stick with the status quo, and settle, and conform. We "go along to get along," and to avoid that panicy feeling one gets in the pit of ones stomach that says “Uhh…a little outside the level of comfort, here… danger, danger Will Robinson.” That’s a feeling I’ve been cultivating lately, for some ungodly reason. That’s the feeling that’s been driving me.

But just acknowledging this isn’t enough to get past the fear. Being honest, I’m living with it every day. But I’m also backing it up with the certainty that I’m heading someplace better. And maybe that’s the scariest part—that I know exactly what I’m doing; with a keen awareness of what I could gain, but also what I’m risking to get there. And I’m doing it anyway.

Split personality

2007-06-02T18:03:00.001-07:00

I’m of two minds. In rethinking what I have posted here, and what I need to have (and alternately, need not have) posted on my website, I’ve opted to develop a split personality. I want to keep this blog going. I want to have an outlet where I can discuss things with friends, and share thoughts. But I also need to have a more professional side, which is the one I put forward to the world while I’m in the midst of my job search.

Therefore, I’ve opted to create a second blog. This second blog, digital distractions (mmclaurin.blogspot.com) is the one I am linking to my website. This blog, (idmx.blogspot.com) is becoming my personal blog, and will no longer be linked from my website (though you can still go to there from here). So, I hope those of you who have this keyed to blogarithm updates can still follow. I’m trying to resist the more drastic measure of putting a password on the idmx blog, as I think that makes it all a lot more pull than I think most are willing to bear. But maybe you can let me know your thoughts.

And, for those of you of a mind to look into my more professional mind, the other blog may be an interesting read, from time to time.

Peace.

The Hush

2007-05-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

The most memorable part of an old-fashioned rollercoaster ride, in my humble opinion, is the climb to the top of that first peak. The jerking motion, the click-click-click as you rise to the top filling you with anticipation, and the momentary pause as, sitting in the first car, you feel the interminable pause at the summit, just before you plunge into the unknown. That yawning chasm of silence was often more dramatic than what came before or after. These past few weeks of silence on the blog has been an echo of that silence. And now, the last click has sounded, and I’m over the edge.

All of which is to say, after a proud association of 11 years, I’m no longer with the Channing Bete Company. I’ve left those fields for other pastures that are perhaps less green, likely more barren and rocky, but entirely my own. I leave with a very nice recommendation, and constant butterflies in my stomach. I’m following up some freelance opportunities for a bit while I scan for a new position, dealing with COBRA issues and other changeovers from being the single support of a family of four. But with the love and support of my family and friends, I’ve taken the plunge and started the next leg of the roller coaster ride.

There are uncertainties as I seek determinately for a position that is better than what I had, which is my ultimate goal, and which I was having no luck pursuing part-time. Scary uncertainties, sure. But having this time gives the opportunity of discovery. One of the things I’ve already discovered in tackling my first hurdle, reworking my resume, is that I’ve done a hell of a lot. I have a pretty solid resume, which you’re free to check out here, mostly in print media. Beyond working in comics (and I’ve worked on and directed some pretty neat books there…), I’ve designed entire magazines, and graphic identities for nationwide programs. I’ve designed logos, and am close to getting Adobe Certified Expert status in PhotoShop and InDesign. I’ve done a lot. But it’s not close to what I know I can accomplish, and that’s been a bit frustrating.

If I want to get into the new media of Flash and Action scripting and web design however, I’m not going to be able to do that part-time, around my other commitments. It’s going to require real work, full time work. It’s going to require expanding my horizons beyond Western Massachusetts, into Boston and Hartford and, yes, perhaps even back to New York. I’m just not sure yet. But I’m figuring it out, fast.

Those of you who’ve been reading between the lines of this blog for the past few months will see this as the culmination of subconscious of unconscious acts. Those of you who know me well will not see this as a big surprise. Others, about now, are giving their screen the head to the side, furrowed brow, puppy dog look. To them I can only point to a sheet of paper I’ve had tacked up beside my desk at home. I found it at Marvel, and had it where I could see it every day. Recently, I found it again in cleaning up my home office, and placed it high where, again, I’m reading it daily. It says:
"The most unfortunate thing that happens to a person who fears failure is that he limits himself by becoming afraid to try anything new. Give yourself a chance.”

This certainly hasn’t been an easy entry to write, as I typically like to feel like I end these explorations with a bit more certainty than I’m evoking here. But, sometimes, that’s the nature of the start of the roller coaster ride. You know where you get off—that’s the certainty, that it will end at point X. It’s the in-between stuff that’s scary. But that’s what you pay the price of admission for, isn’t it?

And so, the last click sounded, the ride begins.

Jumping the Shark

2007-05-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Everybody is the hero of his, or her, own life story. You run through the script every day, living up to your character, maybe throwing in some twists and turns and major and minor motivations. You try to bring the story a little closer to its conclusion—hopefully its happy ending—daily, page by page, frame by frame.

When I was a little kid, I’d look at life like that, as a Star Trek episode or an episode of The Wild Wild West, with myself as the main character. The only thing that annoyed me about every episode of those shows was how the lead would develop a love interest through the course of the story, and get her at the end, but then never see or mention her again in subsequent episodes. They’d been through so much together, how could he just let her go? That was just one of the several elements of the undefinable hero-ness that I never seemed to get. It wasn’t always and ever about just me, and frankly, I didn’t really want it to be. Series that are about just me; The Prisoner, The Fugitive, The Hulk, are inevitably depressing.

So maybe, I thought, it was better to look at myself as part of an ensemble cast. Some episodes of the Brady Bunch focused on Peter, some on Jan, some on Marsha and Greg. And though they started every episode fresh, there was also the development of relationships, and continuity. But then there was the downside of the ensemble cast-the fact that sometimes you were just there as a supporting role, and when that support became your main role, where were you left, then? Whatever did happen to Tiger, anyway?

Seriously though, when I was younger, I would wonder about that. Would I be the hero, the one whose adventures the readers wanted to follow, or would I be the sidekick, able to step forward into a solo role from time to time, but mostly the Robin supporting the Batman, the Kato to someone else’s Green Hornet, the essential, but also essentially supporting, character to the heroes quest, without a quest of my own. And I didn’t like that idea very much. It became a sort of paradigm that I’d hold my life up against, from time to time-am I the supporting character in this episode? I mean, I want to support the cast. But by the same token, I don’t want to be easily able to be written off—not without the possibility of a strong spin-off series of my own as follow-up.

Prince Valiant, the classic soap opera daily strip, continued to follow the life of Val well after he was married and had kids, but increasingly the stories began to focus around the kids, to the point of their even taking over the main plotlines from time to time. Maybe that’s the inevitable progression of the storyline, that it passes onto a new generation and they become the heroes of the piece, with our acting as support, supplanted in the feature role, and willingly so. But while there’s something life affirming in that continuity, there’s also something a little sad. We haven’t even come to the main climax, yet, the one we’ve been working toward for decades, the promised “this one changes everything” dénouement. And it is coming, isn’t it? Mustn’t it?

So this is Middle Age, years into the popular top ten hit, and we hit the point where traditionally the series will try to Jump the Shark to keep up viewer interest. All the major conflicts having been resolved, and newer subplots slower to develop, and something needs to change. This is the time when the writers who have been here from early on start scratching their heads for new direction, maybe the time to bring in a new creative team to shake things up a bit. Such a course could create brand new excitement, or it could derail a series and lose all interest. This is the time where everyone looks forward to a season retrospective, and collectively ask, what next? It’s a time when I look over the series a bit dispassionately, as dispassionately as I can in a series in which I’m so intricately involved, and ask; am I still the hero of this story? What to do, what to do?

Sometimes I wish life could be a movie adaptation of a series. In that, you can look back over the whole life of the thing, and craft a specific story, set that story up really early and start to pay it off spectacularly. Watching Spider-Man III (and I will!), you'd never know that Mary Jane Watson was an after-thought girlfriend, brought to center stage when Peter Parker's real love interest was killed tragically by bad and ill-conceived writing. That's because the movie has the entire storyline to pick and choose and pull from, discarding the meandering ideas that went nowhere, and the years of bad writing, to create a new central core of solid story that gives the illusion of intent, and meaning, and a sense of destiny. But something is also lost by eliminating the meandering. I still remember you, Gwen Stacey, and as you were, not as the revisionist current comics are painting you. I still know you were the love of Peter's life. And I still know how important that is.

Anyway, only half of this entry is tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes I really do review my life as fiction, trying to figure out what the current twist means, and working to pull meaning out of disconnected events. Because there has to be meaning in there. somewhere. There must be. Mustn’t it?

Tune in next week, for another exciting episode. One hopes.

How NetFlix is killing my soul.

2007-04-29T17:17:00.000-07:00

The place in Greenfield, Video To Go, which had the 7 movies for 7 days for 7 dollars deal I’ve gone on and on about here is going out of business, I found out yesterday. I’d done my level best to support them, but the word is that the market penetration of NetFlix is such that it’s shot their business down by 40%, and they can’t stay afloat. It’s so sad.

So, having just found out yesterday that they are going out of business today, I took advantage of their deal to rent any and all movies for just $1 each, overnight. I rented Superman Returns, which I hadn’t seen yet due to negative reviews, but knew I would see one day. I rented The Devil Wears Prada, and Art School Confidential, another movie based on the comic by Daniel Clowes (and which I anticipated finding more interesting as I bleive it's tangenetially about my art school which Clowes attended) and some computer animated kids faves (the flavor of the day for animated fare) like Flushed Away and Everybody’s Hero. Some of these we watched last night. Some of these we watched today. But since it was nice out, and I had no intention of staying in all day in front of the tube, some of them were unwatched when I had to return them this evening.

The atmosphere at the store was a bit somber, as was to be expected. It was like some great failed experiment, except that for me it was a success. What’s more troubling is that I’ve recently begun noticing this as a trend. Mom and Pop video stores are going the way of all things, even though they offer great resources for browsing and access to movies that you otherwise wouldn’t see on a NetFlix or certainly not at a Blockbuster. I mean, I miss being able to browse through an entire section of old black and white movies, or zero in on some film noir titles, or see a good romantic comedy from the seventies, or sixties. Looking through a vast list of titles on a shelf by alphabetical order is an adventure, and you find treasure that way. Stuff you’d find no other way. I mean, big box store paranoia is one thing-I think there’s room for price competition, and feel when people can pay less and they choose to, that is a free market at work. But this is marketing to the sedentary. These stores are going out of business because people can’t be bothered to interact with a human being to rent a movie, and can't get a video back into the store in the week alotted, for a measley buck. We pay more, to do less. And that’s just sad.

Maybe I’m not giving NetFlix a chance. I checked it out about five years ago, and signed up for an account, and had fun rating a lot of different movies I’d seen. I was aware that I was building a preference list in some hi-tech algorithm that I hoped that might help them to help me find titles I liked, that I didn't even know—kind of like what Amazon does. Then, on the trial, I ordered the first part of the first season of The Sopranos. And it promptly never came. The problem came when they started charging me, and I informed them that I had no intention to pay when, for the trial period, I’d received nothing to try. They zeroed me out, and I wrote them off.

So today I went onto the website again, and went looking for my five-year-old account, that I'd spent all that time indicating preferences for. And found it non-existent. And found no clear section to search for film noir titles, or films by Director, or staff picks, or any of the other intuitive (for me) ways that I’d go treasure hunting at my local store. Maybe I’m not giving them a chance. Likely I’m not, in fact. But they’re starting this relationship with two strikes against them, and the signs are not encouraging.

Video stores are becoming the new dinosaurs, the next Mom and Pops to go out of business, and I wouldn't care if it weren't for the fact that they're not offering something more, just something far less, that's just easier. And easier is killing what's fun for those of us that enjoy getting off our @$$ to hunt for something interesting to watch when we're sitting on our @$$. And that's not easy.

Making up for it

2007-04-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve been lax. I’ve been lazy. I’ve been distracted. Mostly, I’ve been elsewhere. And I am making up for it.

I’ve been involved in life for the past couple of months, and life demands. It demands a lot. And when you have nothing left to give to life, when it leaves you exhausted in a heap in the corner, wondering what day it is and how the hell all your hair all got shaved off, it’s time to take a break and get back to what makes you happy. So I’m taking that time. One of the things that made me happy is communicating, and blogging what’s going on. I’ve missed it. But I’m missing a lot of things lately.

Anyway, due to recent events, I’m trying to make a conscious effort to be where I am, at least for a while, and get back to those things I consider important. As part of that effort, I’m making the commitment to blog every day for a week. Some of that week will be weak, and meek, and with little of which to speak. But it will be something I’ve committed to, as Pharoah said in the epic The Ten Commandments, “So shall it be written, so shall it be done.” It’ll be written, anyway. There's something freeing about self-imposed constraints, calming about meeting your own imposed guidelines and expectations. It's like saying, "I don't know what else life will throw at me, but I can do this. I can make sure this is done."

A while ago, when I first started getting into this, my friend Steve wrote that one way to get people to respond to your blog was to be consistent, and post a lot. So I tried to do that, and was pretty successful. At that time, and for a while following, I had a lot to say. I mean, I always have a lot to say, and since I’d reached a stage of my life where I no longer say it, I subsequently had more to write. These days I write a lot more than I talk, though I don’t know how that’s happened. It just has. But, truth to be told, blogging is a valid means of communication, albeit one-way, There’s something terrifying, and a little sad, about sending messages out into the ether in a digital bottle that may or may not wash up on friendly beaches, and may just as easily shatter against some foreign reef, words lost to the silence of the endless deep. But I think they will reach their intended shores, nonetheless. I know they do. So at the same time, there is something freeing. If you can hear me talking to you, then they have reached their destination. These are but the first words of many, the first bottles of a legion of empties. What will these words be? I can’t be sure until I’ve written them, and read them, and finally, not erased them and begun again, as is so often the case.

All of which is to say, there’s lots I can talk about which is around and subordinate to what’s really going on in life that I can’t talk about. But I am talking. And will continue to, for the next seven days. Now, six.

Movie Night

2007-04-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

“Friday night is movie night,” Little T announced with enthusiasm.

It was something he learned from cable advertising, a pitch to encourage purchase of pay-per-view fare that was aimed at families on Friday nights. Apparently successfully. But not entirely. I turned the ploy around, as I had rented seven kid-friendly movies a week ago for Big T’s birthday sleep-over, which the kids then all unanimously opted not to participate in. The local video store has a seven movies for seven nights for seven dollars deal, and being cheap, I mean, frugal, I was determined to watch these movies rather than return them early. So, I agreed, yes, Friday night was family movie night. Pizza for dinner, microwave popcorn for optional dessert, kids all showered and pajama-ed early, we were set for Friday night family movie night.

Both Big T and Little T are on this kick about pie. It’s apparently something they saw on a cartoon on Cartoon Network, where a brainless character wanders around a cartoon muttering “I like pie” as a non-sequiter that they find irresistible and unstoppably hilarious. As a result, they’ve been muttering “I like pie” whenever they don’t want to answer a question, alternately funny and infuriating. So, what movie do they want to see first? “I like pie.”

We’d already seen Brother Bear 2, the latest in Disney’s ill-conceived factory-movie mentality assembly line offering. I became aware while I talked to a friend who worked at Disney a decade ago that this was their plan. They had the talent and the expertise on staff after years of developing each feature film offering. And they utilized the same expertise in terms of drawing. Backgrounds, color and voice for a follow up to each successful feature film. Never mind that the story wasn’t there. The story is what Disney spends years, sometimes decades developing before it comes to ink and cell reality, for each multi-million dollar feature. It’s number one for that market. But it seems more like number three for each direct-to-video sequel. Seems a shame to follow up a steak dinner with a hamburger sundae, but in their infinite (or increasingly, seemingly limited) wisdom, Disney has done so with Lion King 2, Lion King 1-1/2, Tarzan 2, Atlantis 2, and now Brother Bear 2. Ugh.

More successful offering was Sinbad. This DreamWorks special was remarkable for a pretty cool story featuring Sinbad as a cool anti-hero. I’m a big fan of anti-heroes, guys with failings as large as their features, just as likely to disappoint as amaze and enthrall, yet somehow manage to tip the scales toward heroism at the nth hour. The only failing of this film was the voice of Brad Pitt as Sinbad. In this, I finally figured out what my big prejudice against Bad Pitt is. I’ve had a brief discussion on this, with a woman who told me why she though Brad Pitt was hot. But he doesn’t do it for me, and it’s not just because I’m not gay. Really. It’s that he doesn’t have a hero's voice-he has a punk's voice. Brad Pitt is the perfect voice for the Artful Dodger in an animated Oliver Twist, or even Peter Pan or Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But as Sinbad, he left something to be desired. He carried the right cavalier attitude, but didn’t have the strength of bravado to make me believe he could scale the mizzenmast and hoist the mainsail and avast ye hardies and all that. Sosueme.

Finally, and as a topper, was a movie with Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning in a horserace epic, Dreamer. The tagline boasts “Inspired by a True Story,” which is shorthand for “This basic idea is from something that happened, which was absolutely nothing like what you’re about to see.” It think it’s frankly hard to make an exciting movie about horseracing, as horse races are about five minutes long, and as exciting as marbles IMHO, and very difficult to sustain over an hour-long period. You need a lot of fluff over the course of an hour to make you care about that last five minutes. The fluff here was a lot of father daughter stuff, which tugs at my heartstrings as I never had and always wanted a daughter. So I snuggled up with my boys, one under each arm until the youngest abandoned me for Mom, and hugged them, and enjoyed being their Dad. I hardly get enough of that. In fact, I never do.

At the end of the movie, I quizzed Little T about what the movie was about. I mean, he was awake for most of it, right? And it had in-depth themes of family and belief in the impossible, of dreaming and achieving amid loss and tumult. Something of significance may have filtered through. But before he could answer, Big T blurted out “I like pie!,” which, of course was then all his little brother could say. So maybe I’ll never know what he really thought. I covered Big T’s mouth and tried to prod Little T further, to get a hint of what he might have said otherwise. Meanwhile Big T shouted muffled cries against my hand. Finally surrendering on getting nothing more from Little T, I released my hold on Big T, to see what gem of wisdom I’d been squelching. It may be something significant, something properly penitant, something reasonably insightful, right?

“I like pickles on pie,” he said.

Pickles on pie. Yum.

Town meeting

2007-04-10T15:24:00.000-07:00

Last night we attended town meeting. Town meeting is always a trip, and one of the unique pleasures of small town life. Once a year, around April, we get a town warrant in the mail, filled with reports and budget items for the year ahead. It’s the kind of thing that, in larger cities, town council or city council would address. But in small towns, the townspeople gather for a town meeting with the selectmen, to vote for things like the school budget, and whether or not we should buy a new snowplow, and whether curbs on development should be instituted as law.

I missed the first one when I moved to town, about ten years ago. But the second one I attended, out of curiousity, and a growing sense of wanting to be part of the community. Mostly I attended due to the hot-button topic of the day (of which there always seems to be at least one). See, the local high school had it’s football team named the Redskins, and a local Native American group had requested they change it. Being part Native American myself, I was curious about the debate, and though I saw both sides of the argument, I definitely had an opinion. I wanted the name changed too. Growing up as one of the few black kids bussed out to an all white school, I was aware of all the ways kids can be made to feel different. Before a kid gets the internal strength to embrace those differences, a key element of maturing, it’s easy to have those differences become sources of embarrassment. And having a team name that’s essentially, though subtly, about denegrating one of those differences is wrong. It’s not about political correctness. It’s about kid’s self esteem.

The town meeting is run by parliamentary procedure, with a lively moderator who keeps things moving and jokes and quips often. It’s a form of entertainment, really, a live show that also happens to be a form of government. We get past the housekeeping stuff, and the school budget approval, etc. And then we get to the juice. The school in question was shared by three local towns, in budget and responsibility. So, all three towns would need to vote for the change, for it to happen. But my town was the first to have its annual town meeting, so what we decided would likely set the tone for the others (“They didn’t vote to change, so there’s no point in our debating it…”). Several older townspeople stood up and made stands for tradition, and made arguments for how the name was an honorific, and indicative of the history of the area. Others made the case for the overabundance of political correctness, and how outsiders to the community were the ones who were asking for the change, when it didn’t even affect them. Still others spoke simply of the cost-of uniforms and banners that would have to be redone at significant expense.

The final speaker of note was one of the people who had requested the change. I can’t remember his name, but his bearing struck me. He was a large Native American man with long black hair and a western hat. He’s hung out at the back of the room for the entire meeting. As a point of order, someone in town had to recognize him, and ask the chair for him to be allowed to speak. He spoke for a very short time, telling of how he was raised off reservation in schools that didn’t teach him about his native American heritage, and raised in a world that called him a redskin as a way of putting him down, at the same time as they plastered the name across their favorite football teams. He made his case effectively, and the vote that followed elected to change the name.

At the end of the vote, an older woman, clearly a towny from way back, shouted out to the crowd in anger, that we were “changing everything. I hope you’re happy now.” I felt like saying, "Yes, I am. Thanks for asking." But I was silent. It seemed an odd end to an emotional, but until then quite civilized discussion. Weeks later, the two other towns followed suit.

So, I was hooked, and haven’t missed a town meeting since. They’ve not all been as controversial, or even internesting. But they’ve all been about how things are changing. Everything changes.

And once in a while, it’s for the better.

In Search of the Golden Egg

2007-04-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Today we trekked to Grandma's house for Easter lunch (or, as Big T would call it, Linner) and a big Easter Egg hunt outside. Okay, the Easter Egg hunt was a surprise that I wasn't expecting. We'd already had one of those yesterday, in our town, provided annually by an incredibly generous local family and families (including ours) who volunteered boiled eggs for other (older) local kids to color and hide. It's a big community effort, and one which the whole town enjoys, and costs no individual a penny, beyond the time and effort and the cost of boiled eggs. The event this morning had as it's goal the discovery of two golden eggs, which were essentially regular eggs wrapped in gold foil. Though no different than any other egg in essence, the key is that they are percieved as different. And that made them so.

The climax yesterday came when all the eggs had been found, except for one of the golden eggs. The adult in charge pointed in a general direction, and all the kids, baskets in hand full of just-counted eggs, took off in search of that final elusive prize. I took off with Lil T in tow, to his sad lament that he wouldn't be the one to find it. That made me a little sad. I know we've all been there—wanting the thing that seemed just out of reach, and, fearing the wanting too much, telling ourselves in advance that we wouldn't get it, before we're even out of the gate. It's a safety mechanism, a self-preservational tool to avoid disappointment. But it's also a trap for low expectations, and a too-easy pattern to fall into.

I pushed him a bit, trying to imagine the ego boost he'd get from finding it. "You can do it," I said,pulling his hand along, trying to transfer excitement, "You can be the one to find it as easily as anyone else. Don't give up. It's not over until it's over." He was boosted by this, and energized to run faster, look harder, and believe, just for a few minutes, that maybe he really could find it.

Until he didn't. When the cheer came up just four yards from us that a little toddler had found the egg, Lil T was deflated, but also, as disconcerting to me, justified in his own mind. He said, almost proudly, "I told you I wouldn't find it." He wasn't sad about it, just confirmed in his initial assumption, and I think that shook me a bit more than if he had been sad. I let it go at that point, planning on talking to him later about it, after the rush of the initial hunt. I mean, there were all the eggs that he did find to count and appreciate, and the significance of that was beginning to dawn on him. I didn't feel it was exactly the right time for a teaching moment, and the moment, like all important moments, passed too quickly.

Fast forward to today, this afternoon, after a fun morning and breakfast on the road to Grandma's. And a second hunt. Here, there were only three kids in the hunt, Big T, Lil T and their cousin J, but also, unfortunately, only one golden egg. When Grandma announced this, I was a little concerned. I mean, typically, when there are three grandkids, the grandparents provide three prizes. Not my rule, or even my choice, just something my wifes parent's have adopted. This can be annoying sometimes, as I'd sometimes prefer the two boys to share the same toy, rather than having them engage in parallel play constantly, and subsequently either have to deal with tracking two sets or waiting for one to break so we could get more awkwardly to the point of sharing that we should have been at in the first place. There's something bonding in taking turns.

But in this instance, three golden eggs, with a rule that you can only find one, would have been preferable. But that wasn't the plan, and it wasn't my house. And also, part of me was harkening back to yesterday, and the missed teaching opportunity—something like, "sometimes you get the golden egg, and sometimes you get the golden shaft"—came to mind. I laid back to see where it went. Maybe Lil T would find it, this time. Ah, vainglorious hope.

Again, he approached the game disarmingly, saying he certainly wouldn't find the golden egg. I've said before to him and his big brother-if you think you won't succeed at something, you'll be right 100% of the time. If you think you will, you'll be right more like 50% of the time, and increase your odds as you go along. You always have a chance to give up, but don't do it at the start. You've got to give yourself a chance. And the game started off great, with the kids scrambling for the eggs in equal measure. And then Big T found the egg. And Lil T literally fell to his knees, heartbroken.

Scooping him up amid sobs of "I never find the golden egg," I found my opportunity. We scrambled around it a bit, but I think I imparted the three bits I had sorted out for him.:
1) That sometimes you don't get what you want, but it's always important—no, more, essential—to try.
2) That sometimes you will get the golden egg, and when you did, it will feel great, but it doesn't have to feel proportionally bad not to get it. It's just this time. You just didn't get it this time. And
3) That he should look at all that he had—a bag full of eggs, a fun day at Grandma's, the love of his family surrounding him—all topped off with his Dad holding him in his arms and carrying him back to the house out of the cold afternoon. What he had was worth so much more than what he didn't. All of this was his golden egg, and, again, it's about noticing what you have not focussing on what you lack.

By the time we were back inside, the tears were dried, and he was remarking with smiles on how, after he cried, his skin felt all crinkly where the tears had been, and isn't that interesting. The sadness had evaporated with the tears, and in seconds he was excited about the eggs he had found again.

So, this all left me thinking about the golden eggs we all search for, in life. Sometimes we get it. Sometimes we just miss it. And sometimes, we see it, just a second too late, just before it's snatched up by another. Maybe, we think, we'll never find that egg. Maybe we'll always be just a little too late, a little too slow, a little too unlucky or unskilled, or unprepared. Maybe we ought to just settle for teh otehr colored eggs that life provides, and stop trying so hard for that special something. That's we've got to have that faith that it will be our turn one day, that there is a golden egg out there for us, or a turn to find it in our future. We have to believe that in order to continue, and more, in order to make that prediction truth. And it must be truth.

For A mans reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for?

Happy Easter.

60 in 6, part 4

2007-03-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, with this one, I'm caught up. See the afterword.
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2/ 12/2006 (Mon)
Hit 250 and have plateaued here for a few days, which tells me it’s a real loss. The feeling in my heart is lessened. I feel a little better.
I felt real joy this weekend, for a moment. For a moment.

Goal weight: 255 lb.
Actual weight: 250 lb.
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2/ 19/2006 (Mon)
Still on track, but still have lost no additional weight. Still plateaued, but also not trying as hard. Focussing on getting work done. Also, have a semblance of an appetite back, and have been eating more in the past week, which does not facilitate loss, but encourages maintenance (not over eating).
Goal weight: 250 lb.
Actual weight: 250 lb.
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2/ 28/2006 (Wed)
After a fantastic weekend walking around NYC, I found I lost another 5! I am renewed. I am inspired. I am reborn. Life is magical.

Goal weight: 248 lb./BMI index 33
Actual weight: 245 lb.
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3/ 7/2006 (Wed)
Half way through to the goal-achieved date. Yesterday I pulled a suit out of the closet, which my sister bought for me as a college graduation present in 1986. Nice wool 3-piece. I’m wearing the pants today. It fits well!

I want to buy some leg weights this weekend, though a friend advised me against it. Said friends in her High School messed up their backs with those. But my take is, I’m used to carrying…what, another 45 lbs on my frame? I want to keep carrying that until I’m where I want to be. I think I want the weights. But in the interest of health, I’ll research first.

Goal weight: 246 lb.
Actual weight: 242 lb.
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3/ 23/2006 (Wed)
Okay, a slight skip in sequencing here, as the past week has gone by with no significant loss. I hovered around 242, then 243, then 240 then 242 again. Very frustrating, but also acknowledging that I’ve not been focused for the past week or so. Then I got focused on Monday, really started curbing what I was eating. The problem is that I’ve been feeling so much better that my appetite has been returning, which is always a problem, because then I stop being aware of what I’m eating, or even that I’m eating. Got it back under control now, and have stayed steady at 240 for three days. However, this brings me not so far ahead of my planned curve anymore, which means its more likely that soon I might slip behind.

Goal weight: 242 lb.
Actual weight: 240 lb./BMI 31
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3/ 26/2006 (Mon)
I really want to get down to 200. I know my initial goal is 220 (60 in 6) but my firmer goal is 200. My BMI goal is 180, but I’ve never been that light and kind of fear that a bit. Don’t know yet. But June is coming. Right now, I’m yo-yoing now around 240-up to 242, down to 238.

Weekends continue to be especially hard. I find myself distracted, lacking focus and motivation, and just generally disconcerted. Anticipating this, I’ve built some flexibility around my goal weight moving forward, giving myself 3 plateaus to stay at for 2 weeks, before I start sweating that I’m falling behind. Also, as a motivator, today I posted the first part of this blog online. That will kick the pressure up, and hopefully increase motivation.

A lot of people are asking me lately how I’ve done this. I go into changing my eating habits, changing my exercise routine, the amazing burst of energy that keeps feeding this process, and my own strong desire for change. But the truth is, I made the change because I want this change. When I’d decided that, really decided it, the rest has been relatively easy. Sometimes the desire to change is the hardest thing.

Goal weight: 240 lb.
Actual weight: 240 lb.

-------------------------------------------------
3/ 31/2006 (Sat)
I am still at 240, and have been for several days, as the above shows. I still consider myself 40lbs away from my goal, but with the goal being 60 in 6, I still have 3 months to lose that last 40. And when I get the next 20 off, again, I may decide that's the place I want to be. I don't know yet. I'm having a hard time figuring out where the place I want to be, is. Or, more accurately, figuring out how to get to that place that I do want to be. The desire for change is the biggest thing, sometimes. That's the impetus for change, the inciting incident, in screenwriting terms. But the impetus to keep that change moving in a desired direction is an effort that is wearing. Like being born, or being in love, or surviving a catastrophe; it's exhausting in large doses, but incredibly necessary, compared to the alternative.

Sometimes I pray for the universe to just take over, to put my mind at ease, and just move me in the direction I'm supposed to go in, and pray that it coincides with the direction I want. Because I don't know how to accept any other alternative. I don't think I can.

In the interim, I'm still going.

60 in 6, part 3

2007-03-29T16:38:00.000-07:00

1/ 15/2006 (Mon)-MLK Day
I’ve been 260 for a few days now. The past two I’ve been sitting at the computer too long, and Friday I ate too much-a full dinner, plus two beers. Too much, with too little exercise. But I got down to 259, and just bounced back to 260. But I need to watch that if I want to reach my February goal of 250.

Goal weight: 264 lb.
Actual weight: 260 lb.
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1/ 18/2006 (Thurs)
Particularly vigorous day yesterday. I couldn’t sit down for very long. Took several walks, several workouts, lots of water. And I finally broke the 260 mark. Exhausted.

Goal weight: 262 lb.
Actual weight: 258 lb.
-------------------------------------------------
1/ 25/2006 (Mon)
Nothing to add. Feel no closer. Feel slower. At least I’m maintaining, not gaining. Still no appetite. I look in the mirror, still not happy.

Goal weight: 262 lb.
Actual weight: 257 lb.
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1/ 29/2006 (Mon)
Bad sign. No loss his week. Going to redouble again. 30 pushups five x day, and need to get back to the sit-ups. I wish there was a low impact alternative, as this hurts my back when I do them. Photoshoot this Friday. Good opportunity to burn a lot of calories running around. That will be a high caffeine day, though, as well.

Goal weight: 260 lb.
Actual weight: 258 lb.
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2/ 7/2006 (Wed)
I am holding steady, inching slowly toward a consistent 250, but not there, yet. God, I feel like I am so up-and-down and up-and-down emotionally. I’m exhausted.

Goal weight: 258 lb.
Actual weight: 252 lb.

To be continued.

60 in 6, Part 2

2007-03-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

Still nothing specifically to blog, so posting the next section of 60 in 6.

-------------------------------------------------

12/ 27/2006 (Wed)
This Christmas has been tough, and for almost a week there, I ditched my eating plan. Thankfully, did not gain anything, but did not lose, either. No exercise either. Then, WHAM-sick as a dog since Christmas, from the intestinal virus Trace brought home. Spent yesterday in the bed and in the bathroom…Sick. But as a result I’ve lost another 5 lbs. Not how I’d choose to do this…
Goal weight: 272 lb.
Actual weight: 265 lb.
-------------------------------------------------
1/ 1/2006 (Mon)
Happy New Year. I’m stuck at 265, for two weeks now. Ahead of schedule but not ahead of the progress I’ve set out for myself. I bought some hand weights and have begun building my arms. As you bulk up, muscle weighs more than fat. But telling myself that is a bit of an excuse. I can be ripped AND thin. I just need to redouble efforts, again.

Goal weight: 270 lb.
Actual weight: 265 lb
-------------------------------------------------
1/ 3/2006 (Wed)
People have begun to notice the weight loss, and especially the speed. To tell the truth, I’m losing weight faster than I had expected. Hyperactive creative desire at work. I eat normally for at least one meal a day, but in that meal I have no problem eating slowly as food just doesn’t taste the same to me. Just sincerely lost all appetite. May write more on the why of this later. Maybe not. Probably not.

Goal weight: 270 lb.
Actual weight: 265 lb.
-------------------------------------------------
1/ 5/2006 (Fri)
Been a week from hell. I lost nothing for about 2 weeks, and could not figure out why. I got some advice from a friend to start out the day with a hard boiled egg instead of, or at least in addition to, the two cups of coffee I had been going with. The protein starts a slow burn that helps break down fat. It seems to be working. Eggs two days in a row, with the escalated workout routine, have started to move me again in the right direction.

Goal weight: 268 lb.
Actual weight: 263 lb.
-------------------------------------------------
1/ 11/2006 (Thur)
I’ve slowed way down, again, and feel a little stuck. If this were summer, I’d start a running or biking routine to get another kick-start. Looking forward to the warmer weather to start biking to work. That would be incredible. Being winter, it’s hard to even get out for regular walks. But still progressing. I will give blood today, so this is my pre-donation weight.

Goal weight: 266 lb.
Actual weight: 261 lb./BMI 34.4

To be continued.

60 in 6, Part 1

2007-03-26T11:55:00.001-07:00

I've been keeping a second personal blog offline, tracking my 60 in 6 plan. That plan started as a result of my desire to lose weight, and a lot of other upheaval in my life. My original plan was to start posting once I had reached my goal. But in retrospect, that's kind of cowardly. I mean, to say, hey, here's what I wanted to do," and not tell anyone until I had done it, speaks a bit to a lack of confidence in my ability to accomplish. So,what I plan to do, over the next couple of months, is post selected entries from that blog, outlining my loss, around my other blog entries. This should 1) encourage me to post more often, lest I have to fall back on posting these entries, or 2) shame me into accelerating that goal. In any event, this may be interesting, it may be merely self-serving. Seeing where I started, certainly this will be a bit embarassing. But it is what it is.

------

12/1/2006 (Fri)
I’ve gone through a hellish month of introspection, self-deprecation and anger at myself and the world…and others, in alternating waves. It’s a kind of pain I haven’t felt in over 20 years. As with the last time I went through something like this, the only way I can make it through is to know its sparking some change, some birthing pain that makes the effort of survival worthwhile.

Therefore I’ve dedicated myself to the proposition of losing 60 pounds in 6 months. Six months from now is June 2007. I want a record of this, and I plan to post it on the blog. 60 lbs in 6 months, so sworn. So let it be done.

Starting weight: 284 lb.
-------------------------------------------------

12/ 6/2006 (Wed)
Losing weight very fast and effectively. Working out daily, and lack of appetite is playing into that. Hopefully my muscles will get larger as my girth gets smaller. 2-3 coffees a day, vitamins in the morning, soup at noon, and a light dinner. Feeling a bit light headed often, but can’t tell if I’m light-headed because I’m not hungry, or if I’m not hungry because I’m light headed. Doing pushups daily, trying to rip up my arms and chest, pushing myself to new limits that are nowhere near my limits at my peak. But I will get there. I will.

Goal weight: 280 lb.
Actual weight: 278 lb.
-------------------------------------------------

12/11/2006 (Mon)
Birthday celebration for a friend on Friday. Had the light dinner, but also two beers. First alcohol I’ve had since I started. Left me light headed, and glad I had the dinner to counteract. Eating less makes me a lightweight. Good. Was consequently hard on myself this weekend with extra pushups and ice-skating on Saturday. Pushing my limits.

I had hoped to be down to 270 this Monday, even though that would be ahead of schedule. But still shows I need to continue to push myself. No pushups over the weekend, though I did some ice-skating on Saturday. I will do pushups today, and add a walking routine to my daily schedule.

Goal weight: 276 lb.
Actual weight: 272 lb.
-------------------------------------------------

12/ 18/2006 (Mon)
Slowing down. Less diligent in eating well, and need to step up exercise routine. Doing 3-4 sets of pushups, but need to add sit ups to the routine somehow. Found out today by my BMI, I’m obese. Shit. BMI index is calculated this way:

Formula: weight (lb) / [height (in) 2] x 703
Calculate BMI by dividing weight in pounds (lbs) by height in inches squared and multiplying by a conversion factor of 703.

Actual Calculation: [weight (lb) / 5329] x 703=My BMI (My height is 6 ft. 1 in.)

The normal range is from 18.5—24.9. I’m 35. Shit. Everything over 30 is obese.
I need to keep this in mind.

Goal weight: 274 lb.
Actual weight: 270 lb

To be continued.

Yours, truly

2007-03-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

A bit of esoterica that I find interesting. Once all letters ended this way. “Yours Truly.” Even letters among friends. They shouldn’t have. I mean, if I’m a eighteenth century gent writing to one of my prep school buds (as if. How many black prep schools were there in the late 1700s?) I may have ended a letter that way. I shouldn’t have.

American Heritage Dictionary defines it as:
1. A closing formula for a letter, as in It was signed "Yours truly, Mary Smith." [Late 1700s]
2. I, me, myself, as in Jane sends her love, as does yours truly. [Colloquial; mid-1800s]

But that’s not what it ought to mean. Sincerely is much better, for this usage. Sincerely infers that all that proceeds has been heartfelt. “Yours truly” implies a promise, or ought to; “I am truly yours. I belong to you. You have but to claim me and I will be with you for all time. I am yours, truly, in every sense.” That’s what it ought to mean. Otherwise, it means less. At its core, Yours truly is indicative of giving, saying “I am yours, not only merely, not only colloquially, not only societally, or even physically, but truly.” Truly.

How often do we use this ending? Not often, which is likely a good thing. Not to give yourself away too easily is a lesson that’s hard learned. But how often should it be used might be a better question. The when is the key.

We don’t even write letters that much anymore, if at all. All correspondence is slowly sliding into the digital age, where records are transitory and somewhat depersonalized. This demands that the content be elevated in meaning, that what we write should compensate for the loss of the personal connection that would once have been communicated through the art of handwriting. We need to kick it up a notch, from time to time, to give our writing meaning, personality, and a sense of bonding beyond the standard.

And every once in a while, to someone who deserves it, someone for whom it is true, we should drop a note ending this way, to communicate that fundamental truth, that you are not merely your own. That you have given yourself, or an important, carefully considered part of yourself, to that other. That you are theirs, and hopefully, that they are yours. They are yours. Yours, truly.

Faith Journey, Part Two

2007-03-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I finished my faith Journey text that I'm supposed to read in church tomorrow. It's not the exact text, and it's not finished. But it's as close as I can come right now. Thanks to my friend Joe, for the joke.

-----------------

I thought hard about how to start this. I thought of talking about being a kid going to Baptist church in Springfield, on occasion, and falling asleep, waking up for the same main reason I went there in the first place—for the donuts at the end of the service. Because that was the deal I made—church for donuts. Because that’s what church, and my journey, has been—about making a deal with God.

Then I thought of a better way to start. With a joke.

…

Okay, so there’s this guy driving to work for the most important presentation of his life. And he’s late. When he pulls into the parking lot of the building he needs to get to, he figures he has just enough time to park and get in the building. The problem is, the parking lot is entirely full. So he’s driving around, looking for a spot, and he starts to pray. ”God, “ he says, “I’ve got to get to this presentation on time. If you get me a parking spot, I swear, I’ll give up drinking and smoking and the party life, and I will go to church every Sunday!” Suddenly he pulls around a corner, and lo and behold, there’s an empty space.

He says, “Oh, nevermind, I found one!”
…

My journey has seemed so much about making a deal with God. But the stakes were never really clear. Until the stakes were clear, until I really needed that parking space, being a human being, I never really saw the need.

I remember we had an album of Jesus Christ Superstar, the Broadway play, that I played it for my nephew when I was about eight. He was only a year younger than me, and I knew more about Christianity than he did. I knew Christs story, at least. More specifically, I knew that Christ died for us, and how. So, with the soundtrack, I took the opportunity to impress that on him, in slow and excrutiating detail, not unlike what Mel Gibson made a movie of a couple of years ago. He was horrified. In time, I felt bad about it how I’d done that. Not a good deal.

Years later, after I met my wife, and when we were about to get married, that’s when I started to go to church in earnest. The main reason was to avoid hypocrisy. See, I’m the kind of person who thinks ahead. I plan ahead a week or two, sometimes a year or two. I have goals that are far out, twenty, thirty years forward. I didn’t want to get married and then have kids and then start going to church, because of them, because that felt hypocritical. I wanted to go with them, because I was sharing a faith with them. So, my desire for church was to establish a connection that we didn’t yet have, that I knew was important. A connection of my unborn kids to Gods Unconditional Love.

See, in the Book of Virtues, edited by William J. Bennett (good book by the way), there’s an allegory of a man who says that he wants to raise his kids without religion, until they’re old enough to make their own choices on what to believe. In that story, the analogy is made to a garden, that is left to grow to its own devices, along its own inclinations, until it’s mature enough to decide what kind of garden it wants to be. As a result, in several years it’s overgrown and out of control, lost, and irreclaimable. It’s an extreme analogy, but one that has some basis. Kids need guidance. Kids need love. Kids need faith, and a belief in Truth, and an understanding that can support them when nothing else does. Kids need that, because adults need that, and adults often don’t get that, unless they get it as kids. It’s like vitamins, or good nutrition—it’s essential for kids to get so that they can grow into a faith. But it’s just as easy for adults to get sick from the lack of it. It’s just as important, for those kids, for that adult, for the world around him or her, that they have that faith, because without it, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

So that’s when I made my deal. I would follow the best that I could, the teachings of love, and belief, and trust, and sacrifice, in the name of the sacrifice that was made for me. For Love, I made a bargain with God, not for a parking space, but for Trust, and Faith. Because that’s what I think the ultimate deal is, all the deal that I hear God constantly asking—to exchange Will with a capital W for Trust, and Faith. That’s the only marker I can really say has come out of my journey, the willingness to follow something larger than myself.

I mean, maybe I could say, oh, nevermind, I found a way myself— I have the Will, I don’t need to follow. Thanks anyway! But I don’t have that level of faith in myself. I need that level of faith, and can find that level of faith, only in something larger than myself. I made the deal, because I need God. I remember a cartoon that showed graffitti on a wall, reading: "God is Dead —Nietzsche." Next to it was written "Nietzsche is dead —God." I guess I need to believe in God, in a God, in a Higher Power, a Being more powerful than muself, because I know Myself isn't going to be here forever.

And maybe at the end of the day, maybe God doesn’t really demand a deal. Maybe he just demands a journey. That we look for that spot, and trust that it’ll be there if we need it, and that we’ll do the right thing when we find it. Or trust that if we don’t find it, that there was a reason behind that. To have that Faith. That’s what I’m journeying toward. So that was my journey. Or, I should say, that’s how it started. Because I haven’t gotten there, yet. Still going. Still going.

Hope is a thing with wings...and claws

2007-03-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

And sweetest in the Gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest Sea
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb of Me.
—Emily Dickinson

How about that Emily, huh?

But there's something that Emily kept secret.
Like most creatures with feathers, Hope also has claws.

Hope speaks softly in lilting tones, making promises and demanding action. Hope cheers you and mocks you, whispering in twin tongues that you can do it, don’t give up while also berating you that you’re not trying hard enough, not nearly hard enough. Hope claims to have secret answers buried beneath its feathers, claims to be the keeper of secrets you desire, of answers that you seek, and will not give you any hints. Hope even claims to know the questions you should ask, and the reasons you should ask them, but will not offer clues. Hope awes and frustrates, inspires and disappoints. It won’t tell you clearly where you’re going, and at times blinds you with its feathers so you can't tell if you're even moving at all. And sometimes in that blinded state, wandering in a darkness self-imposed, you'd swear you could hear Hope laughing.

But Hope will not be left behind. It seems such a sweet and innocent thing, but it uses its claws. It perches in the soul tenaciously, grabbing hold of your most tender parts and refusing to loosen its grip. It uses those claws to avoid being put into in a bag, or on a shelf, or even slid behind your back when company comes. It's then that Hope cries out for attention, in a voice only you can hear.

When you would have quiet, Hope jumps up and down in a circle around your feet, anxious, requiring, demanding, making you feel the rapid thundering of it's quickened bird heartbeat as your own. Ignored, it will bite and scratch at you, until it draws blood, scream its name in your ear. Dare to strike out, and it will call its big sisters, Fear, Anxiety, and Despair, and they-will-kick-your-@ss. Don’t mess with Hope.

There is only one thing worse than the claws of Hope. That is if you should be so unfortunate as to make those claws release, and find a way to leave Hope on the road behind you. For where you leave Hope is your last marker on the road.

And from that point you shall progress no further.

And so you stroke it, and nurture, and coax breath back into its lungs. Because it is tenacious, and sometimes painful, and sometimes obstinate and willful. But it is yours, and you are its. With it the progress may be difficult, and sometimes painful, and even seemingly without point or direction. But without it you progress not at all.

And the moon will hide its face...

2007-03-04T12:18:00.000-08:00

Last night we watched the lunar eclipse, and it was pretty cool. Every time I see a celestial event, it reminds me of the macrocosm, the big picture. It makes me think how, Bogey said, that all our problems “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” (Casablanca, 1942).

Sometimes it’s important to step back, and look at what’s important. For me, it all comes down to people, and passion, and love. You love the people who are important to you. You love your passion, be it what you do, or what you feel about what you do. And if you’re lucky enough to find all three-people, love and passion—within the span of a lifetime, you can count yourself among the luckiest sum’bitches on this little satellite. But you only count yourself, if you realize it. Like so many things in life, you can see what you have only two ways; either the fortunate way, through periodic, and careful introspection, or, less fortunately, just after you lose it.

Sometimes it’s important to shift perspectives from the intense minutia that surrounds our everyday lives and seems so important. But in a hundred years, who will cares if that deadline is missed, or that homework assignment is late, or that dinner was a little overcooked? How then, can we consider any of that important? And if that’s not, then what could be?

From space, from the rose-colored face of the moon, I imagined the view as a hundred points of light freckled over the shadowy face of the Earth. Each light represented a building, but in my imagination each light represents a person. In cities seen from space, (again, in my imagination) the cities and the streets and raods and highways that make them up appear as little spider-webs of moving light, vibrating and throbbing with intensity. The lighted lines connect the smaller lights, and from that far off vantage of the darkening moon, we can see how we are all connected. Every one of us is apart of another, the separation illusory. We’re all stuck on this tiny blue marble floating amidst other tiny dead marbles, and we’re all on it together.

That’s what I thought about as the shadow of the Earth caressed the face of the moon, making it blush at the intimacy. It felt somehow like a holiday, like something that ought to be celebrated. Then again, maybe that's the point of every day, and we just need the excuse to remember that.

The saddest season

2007-03-02T18:51:00.000-08:00

(This isn’t meant to be sad, but it’s about being sad. Fair warning.)

They say that about this time of year is the saddest season. There is the most discontent, frustration and depression, due in part (in these northern climes) to the onset of cabin fever from the cold, and lack of vitamin D from that sweet-feeling sun, and the shortness of the days. The increase in darker hours gives power to the darker sides of our souls, or perhaps just makes us more aware of them. Suicides go up this time of year. It's an important thing to keep in mind, if you start feeling erratically.

I'm typically immune to the negative effects of this season. I'm never one of those complaining "I've had enough of the snow. I'm ready for warmer weather." To the contrary, I love the snow, even when I've got to shovel it alone. On top of that, so many elements of my life have been feeling like they're coming dramatically, miraculously, dramatically, amazingly together, this season. I’d been starting to succumb to something that I couldn’t quite name, and then just sort of stepped out of it into a patch of sunlight that seemed to go on forever. Coming back from New York, I was on a high. It made me invulnerable. The perception of invulnerability makes you stupid.

The other day I was burning a CD of some music, and started making (what I called) liner notes, talking about what the music said to me, and what it brought to mind. Some of the songs were pretty sad, and I kind of bummed myself out. Before I realized what I was doing, in accessing recollection, I didn't merely recall, but brought myself there. Big T says it often, knocking his hand to his head, "Oh, why do I have to have such a big imagination!." And he's only half kidding. For me, a vivid imagination and the ability to transport myself somewhere else, and somewhen else, is something I treasure. But it's like the Animorphs book series that Big T was into couple of years back—where kids can transform themselves into animals, as long as they don't stay in that form for more than an hour. If they do, they could be stuck there.

I may not love the blues, but I sure as hell understand them. I get why someone would write a piece of music so sad it’d break your heart, and more, I understand why someone else would listen to it. Sad music, for some reason, can have a countering effect on sadness. The heart can be like a filled balloon,pulled down into a cold ocean of sadness, down, down, by the music. Then, suddenly, at it's lowest point, it's released, and the heart flies toward the surface, not just to it but beyond it.The heart floats, and then it soars. It's like that old joke of hitting yourself in the hand with a hammer, because it feels so good when you stop. There’s something cathartic about sadness, something soothing in knowing you can still feel, from one end of the gamut to the other, that all the emotive faculties are still there and primed and in working order. I think, therefore I am; I feel, therefore I am more.

But it's not a healthy place to live. It's a tropical beach you fall asleep on, that's a desert on awakening-disorienting, and full of constantly changing perspectives. The heart's like a fine piece of old porcelain, with intricate and delicate patterns etched along its lines. When it breaks, it shatters. And being too precious to leave that way, you pick it up, and meticulously work at repairing it, searching the floor for each minute shard, carefully glueing and removing the excess and letting time and care do it's work, until it's repaired. Good as new. But, as careful as you are, there are still those hairline cracks along its form, still those edges of white where the glazing has been lost, revealing the fracture beneath. It's strong, repaired, renewed, but still changed through the experience. Blue music is about tracing those lines, and remembering the experience of shattering and renewal. And somehow, sometimes, that commisseration with evocative emotion aids recovery.

But, again, it's not a good place to stay. A long evening drive (pardon my greenhouse gasses) and listening to a new William Shatner CD actually shook me out of it pretty effectively. I stepped from the car at my house, and looked around at the trees and the black, starless sky. Instantly, I'm high again, breaking the surface to rise into the air, and the sky is a bright, dazzling, golden white, and warm and crisp,smack in the middle of the saddest season.

Sure, I'll go back there again, to that dark place, that place that calls to memory and demands recognition. It's a nice place to visit.

But I don't want to live there.

The Other Side of the Table.

2007-02-28T06:50:00.000-08:00

(Please pardon the battling analogies in this one.)

The first and last comic book conventions I had ever attended were as a representative of Marvel. Growing up in Mass, I never was exposed to large organized comic book gatherings, and even after I’d come to NYC in college, they never seemed to have much draw for me. Though I loved comics, I loved the stories and the art, but didn’t have great need to meet the writers or the artists. So I just never went.

But when I did go with Marvel, I realized there are two basic types of attendees. There are the exhibitors and professionals and sellers who populate one side of the table, showing their wares and reviewing portfolios and describing upcoming projects. They are the Purveyors. On the other side are the Receivers; those who paid to get into the convention, which I never had, and who were there to soak it all in. Don’t get me wrong—I loved conventions. They were pure fun that, like so much of my job at Marvel, I felt privileged to be able to call a part of my job. But it was part of a job. I tried to take it seriously, to deliver on what I was being paid to be there for. I would go into the convention and go straight to the Marvel booth, unload my coat and other detritus of comic book salesmanship (which included a ad of tracing paper for overlays in reviewing portfolios, and copies of my own upcoming books to build excitement) and knuckle under to review portfolios and push the titles I was editing. I’d review the rest of the floor in chunks, during the periodic breaks, so that by the time the convention ended-and in many cases conventions went on for two or three days—I’d have reviewed the whole floor. That was then.

This time, I was on the other side of the table. This was the first convention I’d paid to get into, and for some reason that was intimidating. On top of that, I had been out of comics, out of Marvel, for ten years. I felt like I had made a significant contribution, helping to launching careers of key individuals such as Alex Ross, Kurt Busiek, Larry Wachowski, Steve Skroce, and stop me if this is becoming too obscure or whiney… My point is, I felt like I did something over ten years, then jumped overboard and spent the next ten years on the shore of the river, watching the boat move slowly on, and I tracked alongside on the shore. I looked up from time to time, but mostly kept to my path at the side. If I went back in, who would the boat be populated by now? Would anyone remember me? Would that time aboard have counted for anything, aside from worn initials carved into the railing?

I wandered several tables, trying to take in the whole Con with my son. That part was so special, able to introduce him, feeling the pride and the closeness of this shared experience. I mean, it was my first con, too, really.

The thing that amazed me most was how few friendly, familiar faces I saw. Self publishers Stick and Kyle Baker, embedded publishers like Rob Tokar at TokyoPop, and Whilce Portacio at the DC booth, were fantastic to see. I heard others were present, like Don Hudson and Carl Potts, but couldn’t find them and didn’t see them that day. The only table I couldn’t get close to was, ironically, the Marvel table. There was a roped-off line for people wanting to get signatures from the Dark Tower creative team. I waved to some people I knew like Chris Eliopolous, who was my intern and who therefore credits me with getting him into comics (don’t tell him it was his own enormous creative talent and drive that did it, and that I was just pleased to have worked with him-I need the extra credit). But for the most part, I stayed off the grey carpet that defined the booth area, staying instead on the maroon of the pathway surrounding it. It felt somehow portentous. Given my feelings about Marvel expressed in the last blog, this was where I was; not just on the other side of the table, but outside the carpet, away from the action, on the outside waving in. I started to wonder if I was grasping at something in sad desperation, and more, wondering what that something was.

After lunch was when I headed upstairs to the Artists Alley. That was, I realized after getting some food in me, where I was most likely to see people who would see me, with recognition. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

And I was right. I can’t name all the people I saw there, or express the sadness at those I missed, their chairs sitting empty under nametags that read something like war memorials to my tired mind. I heard more than once from those I wandered past that it was like “old home week” at this convention. It was then I realized, it wasn’t the job I missed, or even the other side of the table. It was the people that made the experience what it was. It was the people I missed. And this past year for me has been about reconnecting with those people, and realizing we’re all still on the same side of the table. With some notable exceptions for those amazing people I met who influenced me in untold wasy, like Jack Able and Mark Greunwald, the people are all still there.

The best greeting was from Paris Cullins, who embraced me like a long lost brother. He’d been my first pick for the regular artist on a title called HyperKind in the tragically short-lived BarkerVerse, and remains to this day the one person I would trade talent with, as I thought his drawings were amazing, though his work ethic maddeningly inconsistent. There was ten years worth of change in the faces and the forms and the hair of the players. But there was also a sense of shared experience, of veteran camaraderie. We remembered when, back in the day, (in my best buzzed Robbie Carosella impression; “old Marvel…”). Marc, Dave, Steve, Sara, Mike, Darrel, Don, Hector, Renee, Kenny, and a host of others I didn’t see and/or who weren’t there, flooded back to mind. We were young kings (and queens), funky Tuts, big fish in a small river that was really a big one, once you left our little inlets.

But Time is that river, and it keeps on flowing whether you’re on the boat or walking alongside on the shore. And on the shore, you’re just one of the hundreds watching it flow. I could be a little sad at that, but not for too long. For me, there wasn’t enough room on the boat for all that I wanted to be, all I needed to experience. I never would’ve left if I hadn’t been thrown over into the life raft, but the raft was comfortable, and helped me make it to a safe shore. The ride was fun, but I like the land.

This side of the table suits me just fine.

Dark and Gritty and Sad...

2007-02-27T11:09:00.001-08:00

Maybe Danny Glover was right. In Lethal Weapon, his recurring line is “I’m getting too old for this s#*t.” Maybe that’s my problem. But I feel sad for Marvel.

I spent a few hours reading through my friend’s collection of recent Marvel Comics, specifically all the issues of the series-changing Civil War, pitting hero against Hero in a story of super hero power registration that’s supposed to be evocative at once of the Patriot Act and the movie The Incredibles, on acid. It was more evocative of my belief that editors are not doing their job.

When I was at Marvel, part of the editors job is to shepherd great stories; to hire great artists and writers, brainstorm with them to produce brilliant and beautiful stories that thrilled, entertained, provoked thought and provided excitement. But another important duty was to safeguard the characters. You could have a great idea, where Captain America lost both his legs and had to learn crime fighting from a wheelchair, and say, man wouldn’t that shake up the status quo? Sure it would. It might even run for 12, or let’s be generous, 24 issues, a full 2 years. And when the writer with the great idea gets bored, and wants to move on, and has fully exploited his great ideas, it’s up to the next writer to figure out how Cap regrows his legs so that we can tell stories that return to the core. Editors had to make sure at the start that they weren’t knee-jerking into a no, and would let creators creative latitude to play with a character, But editors also needed to play through the idea, and assure that that the idea of cutting off his legs wasn’t just stupid, and short-sighted, if it was, to be strong enough to say no. It’s the editors job to make sure, in terms of story, that there’s an inherent strength to the story, and something real to be explored, and also that there was out built into every storyline, a plan to get back to the core, however far afield the story may seem to go. The better that built in is, the more believable it is, and the smoother the transition back to the core, the better the editor.

What I’ve noticed with the latest storylines in comics is that the core seems to have been abandoned. Thor is dead. Iron Man has been transformed into a manipulative fascist. Spider-man’s identity is revealed to the world. Speedball, the lightest, funniest of the Marvel characters outside of MadCap, has been transformed into Penance, a character who has spikes that torture him as he moves, built into his costume. And a host of characters have been killed, last resort of the hack. People read stories for the specific purpose of finding out how the heroes survive. The death of heroes might’ve been daring fifteen years ago, but now its just desperate. I could go on and on, but all these so-called character developments add up to two problems, IMHO.

One is that the core is violated. Comics, like movies, have the strongest concepts when they can be boiled down to a few sentences. An eccentric candy millionaire sends out golden tickets in candy bars to kids across the world, as a device to pick his new successor. Charlie Bucket wins one, as do a group of other kids. One by one their greedy, mean spirited attitudes remove them from the tour, until Charlie is selected at the end, and becomes the successor to the Chocolate factory Empire; Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and assumes the powers of a spider including strength agility, and an uncanny spider sense. By not stopping a robber who would later kill his beloved uncle, he learns that with great power comes responsibility, and becomes the Amazing Spider Man; Last survivor of the doomed planet Krypton, Superman, with the ability to leap tall buildings, bend steel in his bare hands, bla bla bla, and who disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper, fights a battle for truth, Justice and the American way. Short. Clear. What Civil War has done is add two or three sentences onto the core, and done so in such a way that it cannot be undone. They’ve betrayed the core, and while for some that’s exciting in the short term, in the long term they’ve ripped all the fun and the hope out of the stories.

So, two is that the comics are darkened. And how dark and gritty can comics become before they’re no substitute for watching the freaking evening news? I don’t know if there is one mainstream Marvel comic I would want my 9-year-old to read. Happily, his favorite is Sonic the Hedgehog, published by Archie Comics, one of the last mainstream bastions of comics for kids. There, the hero faces desperate circumstances, maybe even faces a devastating loss, but finds a way. He finds a way. That’s what it’s about, people. Life is about finding a way, and getting somewhere better. And if it’s not, then isn’t that the reason we turn to escapist fiction in the first place? The idea that there are no “fun” comics in at Marvel anymore is the saddest element of all. Putting on the geek hat now. In past years, there’s been ThunderStrike, and Speedball, and a host of others that worked to fill a need for light, happy, wacky fun stories of high quality. Okay, hat off.

In talking about this to others, the subject of self publishing, or going to a smaller publisher comes up. This segues into analogy two; you could create the best car in the world, and build your own factory to produce it. Your Tucker could be the best car since the original Tucker, and you may even sell one in every state. But that’s still fifty. Fifty cars won’t change the world. Many of the people who might want a Tucker would never even hear about it, let alone see it. Your dream car, high in quality and potential, will nonetheless be doomed to obscurity. If you could’ve gotten your car to Ford, or GM, or Toyota, or Honda, your car may have changed the way cars are made. But going with the big guys you key into the major distribution and connections nationwide that come standard with larger outfits. That would have made a difference. Marvel and DC and the big car manufacturers. But it seems (outside of Vertigo) like they’re not interested in anybody’s Tucker. Tuck that.

I hope attending the convention will change my mind.

The Ride

2007-02-26T06:10:00.000-08:00

Frame: I just got back on Sunday night from a trip to NYC for the big NY Con, with Big T. This was my first time back in the city in several years, and my first foray back into the comics world in about 10 years. I blogged through the weekend, writing longhand, and will transpose some of those notes here over the next few days. So the days blogged here will not correspond to real time.

Yesterday Big T and I took a ride from Mass down to NYC, my old stomping grounds. Actually those stomping grounds consisted mostly of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, and where we’re actually staying is on the upper West Side, but it’s the same idea. Okay, it’s not at all the same. But I’m here nonetheless.

The ride down was notable as it allowed some Dad-Son talk time, but also notable in the fact that there wasn’t a lot to talk about. We touch base a few times a week at bedtime with the typical “How are things at school?” “How’s your Teacher Mrs. M?”, “How’s your buddy D doing?” “How’s your writing going?”. It’s a crap shoot, where sometimes he’s waiting to unload, and at other times ever ready with a ubiquitous “fine” at every turn. But without setting up the scenario now, I’m going to get less-than-“fine” when he turns into a close-mouthed teen whose annoyed at those kind of questions. Anyway, because we talk, we found here that there wasn't a lot to talk about. The ride then became all about anticipation of going into the city, which Big T had done more recently than I had. So I guess the anticipation, and the trepidation, was all mine.

I never had those kind of talks with my Dad, and just really started to in the weeks before he died of the big C. We had a strange relationship growing up as I was the last child, and clearly unplanned, and I think coming at a time that he had assumed he wouldn’t be having anymore kids. We talked about, but never achieved, some father-son hunting trips (I’ve never been hunting and don’t think I missed much), some father-son fishing trips (we managed two of those and I was never the kind to get up before the sun to go out in the cold to fish. I still love fishing while camping, and I think Big T and Lil T also both enjoy it.

The biggest thing that my Dad did for me was, when I was at a pre-college program at the Philadelphia College of Art in the summer of my Junior year of high school. I was going out to see a movie with some friends, two girls and a guy I didn’t like very much. He was about two years older than we were-again the others and myself being sophomores and juniors in High School, and he being old enough to have graduated, but nonetheless in the same summer program. The key to the story here is that he was old enough to buy, and unbeknownst to me had bought a bottle of wine to drink before we saw the movie. I believe it was Quadrophenia, playing at a revival house. So we took the train, and got off near the theater, and he led us into a local neighborhood to get buzzed before the movie. Something about drinking cheap wine out of a paper bag sitting on a curb didn’t fit into my self image, so I opted out. It seemed somehow desperate, and sad. But at the same time I didn’t have the self possession to just walk away from them or tell them how stupid I thought it was. So as a result, I’m standing a few feet away while they drank, and the guy got rowdier. An old lady kept peeking out of her curtains at the group, and the guy got the brilliant idea to flip her off. Minutes later is when the cops showed up.

We were all brought into the local station, and the guy, being of legal drinking age, was the only one who was released. I had to call my parents in Mass, three states away, and explain in a “I barely believe myself, so there’s no way you’re going to buy this” voice that I got picked up for underage drinking when I hadn’t even actually been drinking, or even touched the damned paper bag. The point of this story is, my Dad came down, and got it straightened out, and I never had to appear in court. The charges were dropped. I was never sure how, or if he did it, but in a town as racist as Philly was in those days (my experiences with that are another story) it felt like an accomplishment. And the best part was, he never questioned whether I was telling the truth. I never lied to him, and he never doubted me. And that said something, to me, at the time.

Anyway, there we were, riding through the Bronx toward Manhattan. I suddenly had this tremendous sense of Deja Vu, from my first ride into town with all my belongings for my freshman year of college. The city was odd, like riding into a foreign land, and trying to recognize your position by the road signs was difficult, feeling almost like they were in another language. There was a large lot of city busses lined up, looking to me for some reason, like cattle ready for some bizarre slaughter or rodeo show. I had an almost overwhelming sense of other-worldiness, which let me know how far I’d come from my first days in the city, and how far I’ve grown from this city which felt like the home of my soul. I glanced back at Big T, and he was interested in the surroundings, but I didn’t get a sense of awe from him that I felt and recalled. It wasn’t alien to him at all.To the contrary, he piped up with an excited point at his first spotting of a bit of graffiti on a nearby building, before the colume of it shredded the novelty. I guess the experience of television had made this all already real for him.

I guess it’s just becoming so, for me.

More to come.

What the hell I’m doing-President’s Day Edition

2007-02-19T19:55:00.000-08:00

Just Completed—A website update. I haven’t updated since the start of January, so ugh-akk! –owww! This was painful. I added a section for holiday cards, so (next year) you can get your Valentine card, and St. Pattys Day card, et al, which I’m too lazy to mail, and get your love delivered for the price of an internet connection! Plus, new pages from the children’s book that I’m due to show an agent this week in NYC. Also, a new experimental feature-favicons that change every month! Favicons are those little icons at the far left of your url window, above. These can be standard with your browser (the little globe), or you can create unique ones. I created one with the Idea MechaniX logo, but now have added some neat seasonal ones as well that I will change out monthly, because it’s easy and neat and fun, and I clearly don’t have enough to do. This will all go live on Wednesday, when I have access to a high speed connection for updating.

Just Seen—and would recommend, Down With Love, with Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor . I have no idea when this came out, but I missed it completely, and it is fantastic on video/DVD! Not a lot of people are fans of romantic comedy, and I would count myself among their number, but this was a nice exception. I literally have picked this up and put it down for a year, avoiding and attracted to it at the same time. But it turns out it’s like a Doris Day/Rock Hudson style romantic comedy set in the 60’s but with some modern sensibilities and a fun sense of nostalgia. It made me want to dress like Frank Sinatra and roll a hat off my head into my palm, baby! Also saw several other movies via the local video stores deal. They have a 7 movies for $7 for 7 days deal that I try to take advantage of from time to time. Often I’ll pick out movies that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and occasionally find a gem. My list of wanted to see but didn’t fall in love with: Crank (though I typically love Jason Statham), The Great Raid (based on a true WWII rescue of POWs from a Japanese camp near the end of the war), Blast (a typical blow ‘em up and shoot em after, set on an offshore oil drilling platform) Zoom-school for Superheroes (which I expected to like more than I did), Fear X with John Turturro, a quirky thriller that relied a bit too much on dream sequences and allegory for my taste.

Just Heard—The Naked Brothers Band on Nick. This’s a pretty well done show. I like it. What I’m impressed with most is the caliber of songs written by one of the main characters, a ten-year-old boy. The performance is his, and each episode also credits him for writing the songs. Some are silly, a lot are prepubescent, but some are really insightful and feel real. Catch Up With the End was the one tonight, a song about people rushing through their lives to hurry and catch up with death. That a kid can write a song that feels as…genuine…as that is pretty impressive to me. It made me want to write songs again. If I ever learned to read music.

Just Discovered—A great site for tracking blogs. Blogarithm.com lets you create an account so that you get an e-mail whenever a blog you’re following is updated. That way you don’t have to keep wasting time checking (Sara) blogs to see if they’ve been updated (Steve) when some people don’t update their blogs as regularly (Sara). I’ve added the blogs at the lower right to my account. Check it out, and add me!

Just painted—three pages of my children’s book, which are not yet part of the aforementioned website update, which, again, will be live by mid-week. I’ll provide a link at that time.

Still alive here, and trying to get some sleep. Hope our holiday was great.

Evening at Elmer's

2007-02-18T11:34:00.000-08:00

Elmer’s labels itself as a General Store—it says it proudly in big letters out front, Elmer’s General Store—but it’s a lot more than that in it’s mixture of ye olde tyme small town and Modern Big City influence in these hill towns of Western Mass. We spent last evening there at a musical venue supporting our friend Jo, a folk/blues singer who lives in our town and whose son (we’ll call him Lilo) is in Li’l T’s Kindergarten class. Jo and her partner Kay are one of many lesbian couples in town, brought here in part due to the fact that this is one of the few states where same sex marriage is recognized, but mainly because they really like the area, as we do. And one of the things we all love about this area, outside of the people, is places like Elmer’s.

Elmer’s serves breakfast, and in the evening hours has coffee house type musical performances with local musicians. But the way the place is set up, it’s almost like they can’t handle success. There was a large crowd there last evening, and we needed to pull in extra chairs from a side room as every small table was filled. The coffee bar was hopping, and Jo had to stop a couple of songs so she wasn’t competing with the cappuccino maker's FROSSHHHHH. At another point, she had to delay a song to allow kids by to get at the penny candy jars (now 10, 15 and 25¢ candy for the millenium) she’d set up in front of.

The environment is a hodgepodge of small town and big city. It feels like an old fashioned general store, with wooden floors and an open plan and a cash register behind a brightly painted wooden counter. But the items for sale tend toward the organic, or to be made by local artisans/craftspeople. No shovels or seed or Domino’s five-pound bags of sugar, but plenty of Blue Agave organic cactus sweetener. "4.5x sweeter than sugar, so you use less!" (Okay, seriously, the stuff is pretty good, but how do you measure 4.5 times sweeter?) And there’s a little sign in one corner reminding breakfast patrons that the menu is limited so that they can get a breakfast to everyone expeditiously—so no three egg white omelet requests, if you please. But count on the fact that the eggs will be from local hens, likely laid the day before. The walls are decorated with framed artwork from local artists, each with a tiny tag at the lower right with the price and artist, and in sum total representing an extremely eclectic mix from primitive to realistic. Yet all of them seem to "go" with the setting.

And last evening, the mix in the room was just as eclectic. There were lots of kids there from our town and the town that Elmers is in, from Lilo’s class and from Big T’s class, so everybody had someone to hang out with. Me, I came for the music. She writes some damn good songs.

Jo’s sexual orientation isn’t really relevant to our relationship, or this story, except that it flavors her songs. One of my favorites of those that she wrote, which I know also is a favorite of Kay, is “Annette”, a funny love ballad on her love affair with Annette Funicello of the Mouseketeers. I love that song. I’ve only heard it three times, so I can’t quote it here, but take my word for it, it’s touching and hilarious at the same time. She writes a lot of her own songs, which is, I think, one of the motivations for people to become accomplished musicians—to write songs about stuff they want to talk about. Which ties into Marcus’s Theory of Musical Relevance in Songwriting (tm): If you’re lucky, you hit a set of lyrics that stick in someones head, and thereby become a part of their mental landscape. Become part of enough landscapes, and you influence culture. And if you’re skillful, you do this without the person, or the culture, even being aware of this goal. Of course, this power can be used for good or evil, as evidenced by how many of us, even now, can quote five words of the Macarena. Shudder.

I developed this theory as I used to write songs in high school. Mostly love songs. I still remember them, as I used to practice them, though I never learned to read or write music. I’d write the tune in my head, and then on paper, and I had pretty good pitch in an empty bathroom or attic. But not knowing music is a crippling detriment to a songwriter, and I never shared the songs with anyone. Eventually I gave up singing as a career goal (your loss, American Idol blooper reel…), but not writing songs. I now just call them poems. I still love reading poetry, mostly classic stuff. Romantic stuff. Stuff written by people who were dead before I was born. Sometimes I still wish I played something beside the harmonica, and that I could read music. And that I could fly and time travel, but that’s another story. Maybe two.

Anyway, the evening went late for us. With the kids bedtime at 9, late only means it went until 9:30 before we turned into pumpkins and turned to hit the icy roads home. Jo’s last song was the one Carol Burnette used to sing at the end of her show. Leaving to the strums of “So Glad We Had This Time Together", I went out to warm the car while everybody else bundled up inside and prepared to face the dark cold. That left me outside, alone, looking up at a nearly starless sky lit by the few streetlights on Main Street in the town of which Elmer’s is a hub. It’s a nice old town. It’s a dark old night. It’s a quiet street, even at 9:30. It’s a good place to be.

And not even a bottle of organic Blue Cactus syrup could make it any sweeter.

Birthing pains

2007-02-17T06:07:00.000-08:00

I started having migraines in Junior High School. The harbingers were these little swirlies in the middle of my vision, followed by holes in my vision where, for example, I wouldn’t be able to see a person’s right eye when I was looking at them. I could see their whole face if I looked away, but then the hole would be somewhere else. My mind would kind of stitch the face together, so it looked like the person I was looking at just was missing an eye—no hole or anything, just a face with one eye and a nose and then an ear. I’d need to make my way around by turning my head from side to side to get a full range of vision. It was pretty disconcerting, but that was the nice part. All I could do when these harbingers appeared was wait for what came next.

About ten minutes after that the pain would begin. It always started in the top left of my head, just above my eye. It was the kind of pain that would completely knock me out. Now, I have a high threshold of pain. I won’t go into how I know that, but I do, with confidence. But having a pain that shot through my brain, my mind, the seat of my being, was nearly impossible to take. I couldn’t think of something else to take my mind off the pain, because the pain was in the organ that I used to think. Thanks goodness it went away in high school, and didn’t come back for many years.

The migraines came back, of all times, on our honeymoon. A combination of planning and executing and paying for a wedding on our own finally caught up with me at its first opportunity. Also, I was launching a new line of comics under Clive Barker’s banner, and I was kind of leaving right before the launch, in order to be back in time for the launch, so that added a bit. We were in Aruba, which is a beautiful island and hot as anything in April, and oh, gosh, just the perfect place to get knocked out by a migraine. The first came two days in, and then about a half a week after that, and the next two days after that and the next the next day, and the next. Daily. Of course, by then I was back in New York at my job, and recognizing this was going to be a problem. Getting the migraines every day meant I could only get about a half a days work in. For many comic book editors, (Ralph Macchio, I hope you’re listening) that’s pretty average. But it wasn’t good for me—I had stuff to get done.

Anyway, that problem is long solved. I mean, I still have them about every six months, but I have a medication now that zonks me out and makes me a bit stupid, but saves me from the pain. The reason I’m writing about it now is as a segue to birthing pains. See, I’d describe the migraine as one of the the worst pains I’d ever felt, an excruciating twist and throb that would literally knock me out from its intensity. Years later, after the birth of Big T, that description made my wife think of labor. She’s never had a migraine and I’ve never given birth, so I don’t know how comparable they are, but my point is the way she put it. She could go through the intense pain of natural childbirth, and have a sort of reward of a healthy kid afterward. And she felt bad for me that I’d go through the migraine and have only the relief of not having it anymore, and the dull throbbing ache that would be left for about 12 hours in aftermath. I think I’m not explaining it right, because it was a sweet thing to say. It was sympathy, of a sort.

Obviously, this one is taking the long way ‘round, here.

My real point here is that I feel like I’ve been having some sort of birthing pains, lately. Not migraines, nor contractions, but clearly a feeling of disquiet that has been coming to a head, expressing itself in exhaustion, and met with a steadfast refusal to rest, because it’s not rest I’m in need of. I feel like my head is exploding with so many ideas that I can’t give any one of them effective focus. I feel like something fundamental is changing in my head, and I can’t exactly pinpoint what that change is, or what its effecting, besides everything. Something’s being born, and I think the anxious exhaustion is in anticipation of the pain. The exhaustion is the swirlie equivalent, harbinger of what’s coming. And all I can do now, is wait.

Gestures and Overtures

2007-02-13T19:10:00.000-08:00

I’m big on romantic gestures. I like to think I’m the kind of guy who can make someone special, feel special. I think that’s part of why my wife, who shall remain nameless in these pages, married me. In high school, they used to sell Valentines roses to support school sports, and you could buy a rose and have it delivered. In my senior year, I think I bought twenty-five roses. Part of that was because I was a flirt, and part of it was to disguise the fact that one of those twenty five really was special to me, and I couldn’t say it, and I couldn’t show it, but I also couldn’t not show it. So I bought twenty-four others. But that’s another story.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, my wife and I have been talking about romantic gestures from past VDays. And since she never reads these pages (she’d not big into modern media, preferring watercolors to PhotoShop and snail mail to e-mail) I feel free to talk about some of them here.

I think a Valentine’s Day gesture is important. This year I’m giving my wife a small potted live flowering plant, and a pile of books wrapped in a red ribbon. Not much, beyond a gesture, but the gesture is about what it means, not about size. In past years, depending on how busy our lives were, we’ve exchanged chocolate, a stuffed elephant rocking horse (before we had kids), the usual satiny undergarments, music, and handcrafted redeemable cards, in addition to the stuff I'll go into below.

The biggest gestures don’t require big bucks. Anything costs money, but it’s all relative. Show me someone who needs to buy the dozen long stemmed reds on Vday, and I’ll show you someone with either a big disposable income, or very new in a relationship. Not being either, I’m kind of over the long stemmed reds.

Okay, a digression here for a second—I never buy roses on Valentine’s Day. Late in college, coincidentally around the time I couldn’t affort them, I identified this as a scam, and refused participation. Roses get their prices jacked up for this one day, and become priceless in their scarcity. For a while, just to have roses though, I would purchase them, but the week after Valentines Day. They last just as long—often far longer because you’re not scratching the bottom of the barrel for them. And my wife prefers pink roses to red ones, so that just makes it all the easier. If you can get your mate to identify the same and you can do your romantic part after the fact, you’ve got something golden.

The biggest gesture I ever made on Vday didn’t involve reds. When we lived in Park Slope, there was a Korean grocery down the block from us that always had a large assortment of tulips, seemingly year-round. Alongside these they had the usual accoutrements, baby’s breath, fern, and the ubiquitous roses around Vday. But, as I said, I don’t buy roses on Vday.

But I think it is important to celebrate. I saw a scene in a movie with Christian Slater (I can’t recall the exact flick, but the scene stays with me) where he has a room full of red roses delivered as a gesture. Now, early in our relationship we were DINKS (double income, no kids-do they use that term anymore?) but I was still cheap, though big on gestures. So what I did early on in our relationship, was buy out their stock of tulips, of every color from red to yellow to white. It took several trips, but again, it was down the street. When my wife-to-be walked into to a living room brightly lit with every lamp in the apartment, and a rainbow of tulips filling every vessel in the place capable of holding water.

The most expensive Valentine’s gift I ever got was my wedding ring, which we picked out at a local craft shop in Brooklyn. It’s crafted from the pattern of an antique New England scroll, and is thick enough (I thought at the time I got it) so that I’ll know it’s something. It’s less a ring than a bracelet on my finger. It’s created a permanent ridge on my left hand. But it’s the only piece of jewelry that I wear regularly, or that I’ve worn at all this long. I got my wife her ring at the same place, crafted by David Virtue, which is a name that she knows and people say like I ought to. I just like it because, with its vine scrollwork and flowers, it matches mine, and isn’t the standard gold band.

My favorite Valentine’s gift was something else. My wife is a painter, and when we were dating, she had a set of oil sticks that I really liked. Oil sticks are partially solidified oil paints, held together b a cardboard tube that you slowly peel away. The oil comes out semi-liquidy, but not like paint from a tube-closer to oil pastels, but big and chunky and juicy and fun as hell. But oil sticks, like crayons, wear away noticeably with use, so they’re not the kind of thing you can share. It’s sort of like sharing a lollipop—sure you can do it, but it gets gross and messy after a while and just ruins the enjoyment for both. And at the time I was an illustrator, and not really a painter, in the sense that color scared me to death. But I liked those paint sticks, because they combined painting and drawing. I could build up layer after layer in oil, and their nature was such that they’d dry quickly, They’d be workable for a day or two days, then set, and I could work over the top of them completely. Man, I wanted some of those, but not being a “painter”, and being cheap, I couldn’t justify the expense. I had a full set of student grade oil paints that I’d bought in art school that were just going to waste. So, for Vday, she bought me a full set (okay, there’s no such thing as a full set, because these are paints, and you can always get more colors, but a large set nonetheless) of oil sticks. That was the start of my serious painting period. I still have several pieces that I finished over the next two years, until the paint sticks were less than a half inch long. That was a turning point for me and color, and today I don’t have the same stigmas. We’re the best of friends, and occasional lovers. Of course, I’ve developed entirely new ones. I realized the other day when I pulled several of these old oil paintings out of my Mom’s attic, that I miss those oil sticks. I may get myself a set when I go into NYC next week. I may just go into another painting frenzy.

But I digress.

I tend to like Vday, and always have, though I suspect I'm just barely in the majority. But, given my race, my viewpoints, and the last two elections, it's a position I'm getting used to. But, nonetheless, I think I’m a romantic guy at heart, as Jewel sang, "I'm sensitive, and I'd like to stay that way." That kind of stuff has always been important to me. But wearing your heart on your sleeve tends to get it dirty, so I don’t often show it. Not often. Maybe just once a year.

Have a great Valentine’s Day.

Faith journey

2007-02-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

I’ve been asked to write a short something (maybe you’d call it a testimonial) about my faith journey for church. It’s kind of an annual thing they ask three of four people to do around Lent, where they tell personal stories around the subject of their "faith journey." For some people it’s about an event that tested, or proved faith. Some people have spoken about turning points or epiphanies. For one man last year, it was a literal journey, describing his experiences in Buddhism, and Tao, as well Catholicism and various other branches of Christianity.

My problem is that, just at this point in time, I’m having a difficult time identifying my faith. That’s a whole other long story, not really appropriate for here. Suffice it to say it’s a struggle that I deal with regularly, between humanist understanding and belief, and ultimately what I have to leave up to faith. But that’s not exactly the kind of thing I feel comfortable standing up in church proclaiming. So I’m thinking what I might write about, and subsequently talk about, are certainties of what I believe, and maybe get to something of my journey that way. Below isn’t what I plan to talk about as much as a framework from which I can work out what I want to say. At least I hope I can work it out. I only have a week.

I believe in right and wrong. I believe that when you’re doing something you know is right, you feel it, the same way as when you’re doing something wrong, you know it. But I also acknowledge that sometimes the feelings get mixed. Sometimes we feel shame at doing the absolute right thing, and sadness at pursuing the course we know we ought to. Sometimes we feel joy in doing the absolute wrong thing. So we can’t always draw faith from these emotions, with assurance. But I believe that emotional turmoil is most often a sign of working hard against the flow of where one ought to be going.

I also believe in shades of grey; that there can be a right series of steps, capped by a wrong step, or a wrong series of steps corrected by a right one. I believe that, though everything can be simplified, that doesn’t mean there are any black-and-white easy answers. Accepting this can mean constant questioning examination of your mental state and motives and conclusions. And that can lead to…what’s the corporate expression?…paralysis of analysis. I personally hate that. I’m much more of a from-the-gut kind of guy, and that requires an inherent faith in ones motives, and confidence in ones emotional state to help guide action. I believe in Trust. And I believe that one has to know oneself well enough to be able to trust oneself, and that voice within, whether you want to call it a conscience, or the universe, or the voice of God. I believe one has to trust oneself. With the old Reagan caveat, Trust but verify. But ultimately, I believe there is an intelligence and a design and a reason to the world. I believe this is a caring universe. I believe people are meant to be happy. I believe that, while there is life, there is always a way. Always.

I believe in Love. Love is the greatest motivator in the world, and absolutely something you either “get”, or don’t “get.” (“Get” as in “understand,” not “get” as in “deserve.”) That’s made obvious by the universal understanding of nearly instantaneous love for a child. We look aghast at those who could abandon their children, or worse, harm them. It’s alien to this instinctual concept of connection to our young. I believe that people who don’t “get” love are missing something that is as inexplicable as trying to describe blue to a blind man. You can talk around it, but you can’t ever effectively communicate the true concept. And I believe that many don;t "get it, that most people only half "get it," and that even those who fully "get it" only "get" it half the time. So the majority of the time, we're all lost in a fog, without realizing how close we are to touching one another.

I believe in Joy. I believe we experience the potential of joy every day in a hundred ways, coming at us like those fluffy dandelion seeds in mid-summer, falling on our hair and clothes as we walk, but we’re too busily aimed at imaginary goals to be aware of it, instead brushing it off before we can experience its richness. I believe these moments have to be sought, and held fast. And I believe this is the second hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn.

I believe in passion, real, raw, intense, magenta-colored passion. I believe in this quote from Bull Durham (edited for PG rating, and for my own purposes, but otherwise unchanged from the movie): I believe in the soul, …, …, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. … I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. I believe in most of that. I mean, I’ve never read Susan Sontag (sue me). But I believe in love, and sex as one expression of that, albeit the highly prized and most dangerous one. I believe that self-sacrifice is another expression.

I believe that love can kick your @ss. “The Trouble with Love is,” Kelly Clarkson sings, “it can tear you up inside, / Make your heart believe a lie, / It’s stronger than your pride.”

I believe that one can change anything in the universe, really anything, except another person. I believe that figuring that out was the hardest thing I ever had to learn, and that I haven’t finished learning it.

I believe in what Margaret Mead said once; “Never doubt that a small, committed group of people can change the world,…indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” I believe in friends, and connection through common experiences and common goals.

I believe the key to finding faith is abandoning Fear in favor of Love, because Love and Hate aren’t as diametrically opposed as Love and Fear. Love connects you to trust, and belief, and hope as surely and certainly as Fear separates you from them. Hate can connect you to a different kind of trust, Anger to a different kind of belief system. There are hate groups across the country, across the world, and throughout history that bear this out. And at the core of each is the simple reactionary instinct of Fear. They’ll take our jobs. They’ll take our kids. They have what’s ours. They’ll change our way of life. I believe the world is rocked by fear, and healed by love. I believe that every faith there is in the world holds love at its core, and I believe that’s what binds us as human beings. But I believe that fear is always ready and waiting, presenting itself as a viable alternative, in neon lights and with free parking validation.

I believe in having faith, not as a backup for when all else fails, but as a stalwart proclamation that all else won’t fail.

And I don’t believe this really got me anywhere, yet. Yet. Guess my journey's not over.

Zombies, and other minorities

2007-02-05T10:13:00.000-08:00

Big T likes to play on the computer. Like his Dad. Like his friends at school. Now, I’ve gone strictly over the rules for connecting to the ‘net. First of all, he goes through the computer we keep off the kitchen, so we can check what he’s doing. Second, we go on through AOL, which has safety measures that require us to okay any new site he surfs to. Third, once we’ve approved a site, he can't enter any personal info about himself or where he lives. He can talk to his friends through IDs that we've verified over the phone, so he knows whom he is talking to. So we feel like he’s covered in that regard. But we also want him to be able to play in new media, albeit safely.

The last fad was a Runescape craze. Runescape is an online sword-and-sorcery Role Playing (RP) game a la Warcraft, where you play a character and go through an imaginary realm on quests, collecting items and depositing them in your “bank.” I checked it out for a week, first. The only violence you get into is occasionally other players will jump in and kill you and take your stuff. Not fun, but there’s a good object lesson somewhere in there. And he’d have fun after school playing with specific friends, exploring and interacting, and, all importantly, have something to contribute to the conversation at lunch the next day.

Some of Big T’s friends had “paid” accounts, which was the object of the whole deal to begin with, at $5/month. That was right out, at the start, but where’s the teaching opp in just saying, “Awww, he## no!”? Here we did the math together: $5/month = $60/year. $60/year = 2-3 GBA or DS games, or 60 ipod songs, or a day at Six Flags. And with those things, at the end of the year, you have something of significance, while at the end of a year of Runescape you were left with the pleasure of having paid them. Oh, what fun.

Even after he came to the logical conclusion (or at least the one I hoped to teach him was logical), he’d often come home with envious stories of two friends who had such subscriptions, and how they could get thousands in imaginary riches, and weapons, and all kinds of treasures. But when pressed, he admitted that he didn’t think the imaginary freebies were worth the actual outlay of cold, hard cash.

A month ago, this paid off when he noted that one of his friends had cancelled his subscription, (or rather his parents had), and he was out all his accumulated loot before he had had a chance to give it to anyone else, such as free players like himself. And he was out a years worth of real cash. Also, by that point, a once-a-weekend fun exchange with kids he knew online turned into once a month, and then not at all. Problem solved. Until the next problem.

The latest drama came in the form of a question. On the way to my dropping him off to school on one of those deliciously synchronicitous days where he was late and I was delayed, and we could therefore share the ride in, he asked, “Dad, if there was a game where you killed zombies, would that be bad?”

It’s a simple issue. I mean, zombies aren’t people, right?

On one level, I really do believe the concept of cartoon violence not being real to kids. I don’t buy that old Tom and Jerry cartoons encouraged kids of my generation to drop rocks on the heads of cats. I really don’t buy that, in the absence of stronger societal elements normalizing violence in other ways, and in that event the cartoon violence is neither the inciting impetus or a supporting element. Itchy and Scratchy don’t make kids behave badly. Itchy and Scratchy give bad kids-or at least, unsupervised, and misguided kids—ideas on how to perfect their craft. I knew those kids. I grew up with those kids.

My answer to him was to ask what he thought my answer to that would be. As a friend pointed out to me, sometimes kids ask questions because they expect and want the answer to be “no,” and they’re looking for the reassurance of consistency. And he came back with the expected answer that he thought I wouldn’t like it, but that it ought to be okay, because zombies weren’t people.

I was straight with him, or at least I felt like I was. We’ve talked about how some things I thought he might be okay with when he was older I didn’t think were appropriate for right now, just like some things that are appropriate for him now aren’t okay for his little brother. What I worry about is the idea of his being trained to attack realistic humanoid figures, safely labeled as “not really people.” We talked about how slavery in this country was justified because the Africans were "not really people." We talked about the Native Americans who also make up part of our ancestry were also massacred under the banner of their being “not really people.” We talked about how some wars, even into today, have been made palatable by making the enemy “not really people.” Even in the Iraqi war casualties, someone pointed out, victims are given in American lives, not Iraqi lives, as if the lives have a specific distinction and difference in value in death. It just bothered me that the graphics go to such lengths to make it seem real, in scenarios that are designed to kill the zombies, piled up against the arguement of this not being really people.

Am I over thinking this? It wouldn’t be the first time, and Big T is usually the first to let me know. But, as in all things, the point is the discussion rather than the final outcome. If I can get him thinking about the symbolism, and making connections in new ways, I honestly don’t have a problem with the zombie thing. It’s the action without the thought that makes for trouble, IMHO. For now, I take the rolled eyes that tell me maybe only 1/10th of this is actually getting through, and leave the discussion tabled for another day. This is the kind of thing that needs to percolate, for both of us.

So what’s the final verdict? Stay tuned...

Addendum

2007-02-02T18:20:00.000-08:00

After I published the blog below this evening, the snowstorm that threatened the photo shoot earlier this week, but was then pushed back until this evening, hit. As a result, a long day got longer, with slow going home through streets either over salted or not yet plowed. Thank goodness for All Wheel Drive.

Anyway, I made the usually 20 minute ride home in just under an hour, and the snow, of course, hadn’t yet been plowed on our street. So I had the privilege of making the first (discernable) set of tire tracks through it.

It’s nice to be the first set of tire tracks through fresh snow. You get the sense of trekking through something special, untouched and unspoiled. Putting aside the fact that once I’ve driven through it it’s touched and spoiled, it’s a pretty nice feeling. Big snowflakes swim at your windshield like starfields in some bizarre science fiction movie, like stardust in the wake of a fairy I'm chasing through the darkness. It's a magically continuous three-dimensional experience of rushing forward. Zoom.

I’ve been home a few hours now, and the snow hasn’t let up. I’ve finally gotten the snow I’ve been asking for (again). It’s snowed. And it’s done so right before a weekend, which is extra special because it means I get to play with my kids in it tomorrow.

All things come, just not necessarily on my timetable.

Just thought I’d share. The first shot is through my front door onto the deck, and the latter image is through the back door onto the deck. The single set of footprints are from me coming home about four hours ago.

It snowed.

Another one bites the dust

2007-02-02T14:20:00.000-08:00

We had another photo shoot today. We number photo shoots, for our own records, so this is shoot number 25. The first year we did these I believe we did 3, then the following year 5, then the following year 7, then last year 9. That makes this our 5th year doing these, and we have 11 scheduled for this year. Eleven. More than any year before. Ugh. And if I pull this off, how much do you want to bet next year is 12?

The photo shoots, obviously, take a lot out of the team of five assigned. We rotate the roles for each shoot out, and as the shoot planner and coordinator, hiring person for the models, and Art Director, I’m the only one who is assigned to each shoot consistently. The shoot prep starts weeks before with the confirmation and re-confirmation of models and photographer, and props, and storyboarding of scenarios. The actual shoot, for me, begins the night before with shopping for final props, and food for the next day. The day starts at 6, when I get into work early to help gather the supplies for the shoot. I collect lunch for the day, and then stop on the way to the shoot to pick up the coffee and donuts. Thank heaven for Box O’ Joe. We get to the shoot at 8:30 and the rest of the team is typically there as I arrive, or arrive shortly thereafter. We unload and set up in about 15 minutes, and are usually ready by the time the first models arrive at about 8:45. And we start shooting images promptly at 9. Our first session, with about 4-6 models, goes from 9 to 12, and the second session from about 12:30 to 4:00, with the half hour in between provided as lunch for both sets of models, the team and the photographer and his assistant. By 4:00 each shoot day, I sense everyone is pretty exhausted. I know I am.

This shoot was particularly intense in that it featured parents and young kids. All the kids were aged 5 to 7 years old, with one parent each. This is arranged so that we can get realistic affection between parent and child, something that, with kids, it can be difficult and to some degree feels a bit wrong to expect from strangers. Adults can make the choice for false, forced, performed affection, but with little kids, who haven’t yet learned to “fake it” (though plenty know how to ham it up) it’s easier, and I think better, to get real emotion with real connection.

So the thing about this shoot that sort of left me a bit more exhausted than usual is the high energy level that kids require. The way this shoot worked was that I asked the kids each to mirror me. Sometimes I was directly behind the photographer’s head, so when they looked at me they were looking at the camera, sometimes off to the side when looking in that direction was more appropriate. They mimicked whatever position, expression, emotion I portrayed for them. See, what that requires is an adult who's willing to jump around, look ridiculous and silly in front of his colleagues, and just generally have fun with kids in order to get the solid gold shots that captured exactly what we needed to capture. Of course, I’m the first to volunteer. I thought of adding the line "willing to act silly" to my resume, but thought better of it.

I don’t know why I’m so staid most of my day, so introspective about 90% of my time, and then can seem to make such a complete personality change. It feels like this me at the shoots is a throwback to a me I used to be, a me that is so uninhibited and so willing-no, so anxious, to get out there and act silly without thought to consequence. But I enjoy the hell out of it.

My heart goes out to teachers. When I teach (I’ve taught various Saturday school programs through the years, the most recent last year) it’s usually just for three or four hours at a time. The way I teach is highly animated and involves a lot of jumping around, like I did at the shoot today. By the end, I feel like I’ve run a marathon, but I know I’ve had, and the kids have had, a lot of fun. I’ve also done something similar for each of my kids birthday parties, in one doing a drawing class, and in another providing large scale caricatures of each kid as a super hero of their own design, with their own unique powers. Again, draining, but fun.

Anyway, an interesting thing happened at todays shoot. Two of the kids shared a mother whom I had to convince to model for us. She has one older daughter who turned pro model after her first shoot with us, and now gets 2 to 3 jobs a month. She was a central model for TJ Max’s in-store Christmas imagery. (Maybe you saw it if you shop there-she was a girl in the middle of a winter wonderland, blown up to larger than-life, and looking up at snow falling down on her.) So she’s had a lot of experience around models, but had never been one herself. I talked her into modeling because her two kids were so perfect, and again I wanted them with a real connection to a parent. She was nervous at first, so, though typically I would have a parent start modeling to show the kids how to do it, in her case I tried the opposite. Her two kids each went first, and she relaxed as she saw what we needed. But again, the way I work with kids is I act silly, crack jokes, and ask them to mirror me. I’ve never done that with adults.

And when it was her turn, she wanted me to. “Just do what you were doing for my kids,” she said, as she looked to mirror my moves the same way they had. So suddenly, I’m dealing with an attractive adult woman my age, really in great shape for a mom of three kids, and I’m asking her to mirror me. Why was it so weird?, I keep asking myself. Maybe it’s that the idea of asking a kid to act like me puts me in the role of a kid, and I can be comfortable with that, but being asked to be an adult woman was a bit much? What's my role in that? Maybe I felt self conscious because she was good looking, and I had to overcome my own machismo to allow myself to be willing to look feminine, and maybe funny, to get her to feel comfortable? And maybe my own machismo isn't really fond of being overcome. (Picture a 6'1" black man with a beard with a hand on his hip, leaning back to look coy with his lips pursed. You picture it, because I can't. Yikes. Thank goodness there were no real mirrors there. And no video cameras for America's Funniest...) Maybe I was tired. I don’t know. But it was odd for a bit there, until I myself loosened up and was thereby able to let her do the same.

So, another one down. And with that I start planning my next shoot on March 16th, with one a month after that until the end of the year. And I find the ones I’m really looking forward to are the ones with little kids.

And maybe cute moms.

Two souls

2007-01-31T07:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve been talking a bit to others about integration of different parts of ones life, or ones work, into your overall Life with a capital “L.” That’s brought back to me the concept of two souls, an aspect of Kabalistic mysticism I read about years ago, and really believe. Disclaimer: I’m no theologian, so this is representative of my understanding, and my own thoughts. That’s the best I can offer.

According to Judaism, we’re all born with two souls, and operate throughout our lives on two levels of consciousness. One is the divine soul, striving toward selflessness and truth, seeking peace and, ultimately, seeking God, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it—thereby propelling our spiritual life. The other is the animal soul that is motivated by self-preservation, self-gratification and a whole bunch of other self stuff, that thereby propels our physical life. Life is spent then as a constant struggle between these two souls, one seeking to impose its will and its way on our lives. Or, in a more positive sense, life is spent in interaction with the two souls, trying to integrate them into a whole.

But it’s not as clear cut as the good devil and the bad devil sitting on your shoulders, “Man I looooove my divine soul and wish my animal soul would stop trying to f#çk me up.” The animal soul is actually more powerful in us, and not all bad. Though more concerned with the physical, and housing our urges and desires, base and otherwise, the animal soul is also responsible for creativity and passion. It lights and fans an internal fire of desire that provides motivation. It is more intense, and more closely tied to what we would, in Western culture, assign as positive emotions; again, creativity, drive, strength and desire to achieve. The animal soul is what drives progress in the world.

But that’s assuming those passions are checked, and guided by the divine soul. Without that guidance and discipline, the animal soul can become a destructive force. On the other hand, the divine soul, by my understanding, is more pure but not as strong. By that, I mean it’s more comfortable with introspection than action; with working within than on working without, in the world; on studying and self-improvement than on changing ones situation. It is strong in that it is “of God” (hence, 'divine') and represents thereby a spiritual connection to…well, everything.

Okay, bad analogy number one (that, embarrassingly, shows how my simple mind likes to break down intense concepts into smaller chunks that I can chew). I like to think of it as Tarzan being the animal soul, with Jane as the divine soul. Jane is what Tarzan loves, and what drives him to nobler acts, and channels his inherent power. But Jane wouldn’t survive a day in this jungle without him, because he can kick @$$. And sometimes, there’s quite a bit of kicking to be done. Jane needs Tarzan, Tarzan needs Jane, both making the other stronger, better, and possible.

I don't know how cheetah fits into all this. :-)

The thing I liked best about this concept is that it acknowledges this struggle, and makes it okay. It’s not about saying, “You’re bad because you have a strong animal soul, and you should look more to your divine soul you skanky so-and-so.” It’s saying everyone has this struggle, and everyone shares this struggle. Everyone. And that acceptance is like welcoming home a long lost part of yourself, a lost child you cast out, unknowingly and have missed without remembering. You can let him in, and make a place for him. You may need to maybe move the china to a higher shelf and add some safety locks to the knife drawer and the gas stove (okay, bad analogy number two) but let him know, he is home.

You're home.

Now wipe your feet.

Soup questions

2007-01-30T09:34:00.000-08:00

Fair warning disclaimer: This one is in search of a point. I kept thinking I would get there, but at the end of the day have failed miserably. But I want to post it as I haven’t posted in a few days, and I’m trying to get back to an every-other-day schedule.

I think Finding Forrester is one of the best films ever made. I watched it again, last night. It’s absolutely one of my all-time favorites, and one of those I can watch over and over again, still maintaining rapt interest. Some people do this with many films, but I’m sorry, three times was it for Star Wars with me, and once is enough for most others. But I happen to love Finding Forrester with Sean Connery, Rob Brown, Anna Paquin and Busta Rhymes, for so many reasons. It’s about writing, and finding a voice, and dealing with criticism. It’s about overcoming expectation is an essentially racist and sexist society where there is, nonetheless, real opportunity for someone willing to put in the work and display the talent and aptitude. It’s about demanding more of oneself, even when those around you have lower expectations. And it’s also a quintessential New York movie to me, in that it feels and looks like the New York I lived in for 12 years, and still miss, and which very, very few movies ever successfully capture.

My favorite expression from the movie is one that peppers my conversations from time to time, and that no one who doesn’t love that movie as I do (read: no one) ever gets.

Forrester: You better stir that soup.

Jamal: What?

Forrester: Stir the soup before it firms up.

Jamal: Why doesn't ours get anything on it?

Forrester (looking out of the window through his camcorder): Come on. Closer. Now.

Jamal: You got someone doing that kind of yelling? (a reference to an earlier conversation where Jamal describes his neighbors yelling during sex)

Forrester: What I have is an adult male. Quite pretty. Probably strayed from the park. (Jamal looks at him quizzically, until Forrester shows him the image on the camcorder-a close-up of a bird) A Connecticut warbler.

Jamal: You ever go outside to do any of this?

Forrester: You should have stayed with the soup question. (getting angry) The object of a question is to obtain information that matters only to us. You were wondering why your soup doesn't firm up? Probably because your mother was brought up in a house that never wasted milk in soup. That question was a good one, in contrast to, "Do I ever go outside?", which fails to meet the criteria of obtaining information that matters to you.

Jamal: All right. I guess I don't have any more soup questions.

Later on, they’re talking in Forrester’s apartment, amid his endless volumes of books and papers, and the theme comes up again.

Jamal: Did you ever get married?

Forrester: Not exactly a soup question, is it?

At the end of the movie, after Jamal makes a stand and proves he’s more than just a black pair of hands on the basketball court, he and Forrester are walking and talking outside the school. This is significant because the reclusive Forrester has panic attacks, and, before Jamal came into his life, would never leave his apartment, and had never left, without Jamal. This last time, to help Jamal, he left on his own.

Forrester: I'm thinking you'll make your own decisions from here on.

Jamal: I thought you'd say something like, "I always could."

Forrester: No more lessons. I have a question, though. Those two foul shots at the end of the game…did you miss them or did you miss them?

Jamal: Not exactly a soup question, is it?

So, I’ve picked up the expression, “That’s not exactly a soup question” as a way of saying, “I’m not sure that’s really any of your business” in a polite, if puzzling way. Now, you might get it and thus be part of a select group in the non-sequitur know.

Part of my problem with small talk in general is that it’s made up of questions masquerading as soup questions. People who are the best conversationalists are, IMHO, those people who can get people to talk about themselves. Get someone to talk about himself, and you’re guaranteed a five minute conversation with little more than slight pushes to get it rolling and with little effort you can keep it moving easily for another five minutes. Snippets along the line of answering the old joke, “But enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”

But the flip side of that is when you’re genuinely interested in someone, in what they think, in their experiences. Then those questions become soup questions, as they help you form your opinion of and expand your interest in the person, thereby establishing or strengthening your bond with that person. I miss those kinds of conversations. It seems I have less and less of them, replaced by something else. That something else is party conversations-those intermingling discussions that are designed mainly to fill the empty void between two people who likely aren’t going to see each other again for months or weeks, if ever. I find myself drifting in those, thinking I’d rather be drawing, or I’d rather be writing. Sometimes, I just plain drift over to a quiet corner and pull out my notepad or my sketchbook, and do.

What this blog has become is a place to have those conversations-to answer the unasked soup questions, if you will. This is a place to talk about some stuff that matters. To ask some questions that, perhaps, give some insight into information that matters to me. To whom? To whoever wants to read. And to some (selfish) degree, to myself.

So, ask more soup questions, friends. Make them count.

Feel better.

2007-01-26T08:55:00.000-08:00

How do you make someone feel better? Is such a thing even possible?

I’ve been recalling an early Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schultz. In the first panel, Charlie Brown is sitting on a curb looking sad, and Violet and Lucy notice, and decide to walk over and cheer him up, in a spirit of altruism that seems very unlike them. So they walk over and stand for a beat, then Violet says, “Be of good cheer, Charlie Brown.” And Lucy adds, “Yes, Charlie Brown, be of good cheer.” Then, mission accomplished, they both walk off, feeling infinitely pleased with themselves, leaving Charlie Brown still sad, but now also puzzled as to what that was supposed to accomplish. Ha ha.

I remember reading that cartoon in a collected paperback book in elementary school, and thinking not that it was funny, but that it was true. That’s what we do. We see someone sad, and we want to fix it. (As usual, when I say we, I mean me, unless you can relate…)
We hate to see it. It hurts us to see another’s pain, or (maybe pain is too strong a word, though it’s sometimes appropriate) we hate to see another’s discomfort. Maybe it’s from the nobler inherent need to help others, to empathize with their pain and want to alleviate it. Maybe it’s from somewhere more selfish; seeing someone in pain strikes an internal chord that makes us begin to feel our own pain, and want to heal the other, at least cover it up in the other, before the infection can spread to us. I’m not sure if it matters which it is, and I suppose it depends more on your World View.

I choose to believe the former. I hope I choose to care. But that said, is there anything we really can do? When a person feels sad or bad about something, we may want to say or do something that makes it okay, but is there anything really, that we can do, except be around and watch as they go through it? Can any words fill the emptiness of loss, alleviate the terror of uncertainty, and stop the echoes of heart-wrenching tremors that rattle around in that empty space inside? We want to, sure we want to, but what can one really do?

Listening is often at once the least and the most we can do, and encourage someone to talk, to facilitate that. Not responding is sometimes the most we can do in response. That, and maybe hope that when and if they get through to the other end, that our mere presence and willingness to endure, was enough to help in some way.

Me, I like laughter. If it were me walking up to Charlie Brown, I might point to a spot on his shirt and ask him “what’s that?” and then bop him on the nose with my finger as he looked down, and hope that would amuse more than annoy. Because I happen to think the best way to feel better is to think of something that makes you happy, or has made you happy, or could make you happy. Again, maybe that’s too simplistic, but I’ve found if I can think of something good that’s more important than the bad thing I’m feeling, that sometimes helps me feel better. But by the same token, I’ve found talking to others and trying to get them to go through the same process, or to give them the gift of something to feel better about doesn’t always work. It’s more fifty-fifty. And the fifty that fails can fail pretty miserably. But I had a teacher in college that always said, "If I'm flying an aiplane and it's going to crash into a mountain, I hope it explodes in midair with tons of fireworks, seconds before it hits." In other words, if your going to fail, fail dramatically, and spectacularly. Well, sir, I do try.

So I’m left with no answer to this one. I don’t know if it is really possible to make another person feel better, really. The most we can hope for then, is that we can help ourselves to feel better, and that we can be there for the other person to help them find their own path to that place. And hope that, on occasion, you can get to that place together. Either that, or get tons of fireworks.