Daniel Clausen's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-sage-and-the-scarecrow"
Lao Tzu’s Soul in a Bottle - A Prelude (The Sage and the Scarecrow)
Project Summary: The following is the prelude from my 2004 novel "The Sage and the Scarecrow". At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can "cure" him.
Thinking about Lao Tzu helps me understand my own situation: why I’m writing these words to you, why I feel the need to connect to someone else.
The introduction of the Tao Teh Ching says that Lao Tzu was a librarian during the Warring States period at a library in the Chou capital, and that the book was his way of expressing the accumulated lessons he’d learned throughout his lifetime, regarding such subjects as how a state should be run, human psychology, metaphysics, creation, and so forth. The book roughly translated means The Way and its Virtue. I suppose it’s a story about a general way and a general virtue. But I can’t help thinking about the book as something lonely and personal.
When I think about Lao Tzu writing these words carefully on ancient scrolls or pieces of silk paper, or whatever was the way of writing back then, it helps me understand why I’m writing these words to you. The lonely spaces and places of our existence compel us to search out others, whether it be by words or some other means.
Sometimes I think of Lao Tzu alone in a library working on this scroll, as if he could put his soul in a bottle and cast it out to sea. The bottle would drift and drift, and then finally the right person would find it years later. Magical properties of the bottle would draw it to the right person at the right time in a way that would heal and redeem that person.
Philosophy and wish fulfillment are sometimes so close that I think any philosophy is really nothing more than the expression of a desire.
Nothing is really solved, but the longing for solutions and the creative energies that produce them fabricate things called solutions that just create more longing. They fill bottles upon bottles of human existence that float in a sea. We hope that a magical property exists that will attract the right person...
The accumulation of these bottles creates something not quite wisdom. But somehow in the dark ocean of our existence they light a kind way. Who can say if this way is virtuous or not in the end?
A girl named Jennifer gave me the Tao Teh Ching. Once upon a time, she was my best friend. But what she didn’t know was that she was the best of us, of everyone.
How can I be sure? I follow the bottles of human existence.
This story is about her and me, and for this reason the book has special importance; although this story is also about other things: human psychology, how a state should be run, the impossibility of love, (no metaphysics), the problem of existence, but mostly it’s about her and me, and my love for her.
On page ninety-one the Tao Teh Ching says: “Thus, an excessive love for anything will cost you dear in the end.” A homeless man who claimed to have a doctorate in philosophy once told me something very similar.
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can "cure" him.
Thinking about Lao Tzu helps me understand my own situation: why I’m writing these words to you, why I feel the need to connect to someone else.
The introduction of the Tao Teh Ching says that Lao Tzu was a librarian during the Warring States period at a library in the Chou capital, and that the book was his way of expressing the accumulated lessons he’d learned throughout his lifetime, regarding such subjects as how a state should be run, human psychology, metaphysics, creation, and so forth. The book roughly translated means The Way and its Virtue. I suppose it’s a story about a general way and a general virtue. But I can’t help thinking about the book as something lonely and personal.
When I think about Lao Tzu writing these words carefully on ancient scrolls or pieces of silk paper, or whatever was the way of writing back then, it helps me understand why I’m writing these words to you. The lonely spaces and places of our existence compel us to search out others, whether it be by words or some other means.
Sometimes I think of Lao Tzu alone in a library working on this scroll, as if he could put his soul in a bottle and cast it out to sea. The bottle would drift and drift, and then finally the right person would find it years later. Magical properties of the bottle would draw it to the right person at the right time in a way that would heal and redeem that person.
Philosophy and wish fulfillment are sometimes so close that I think any philosophy is really nothing more than the expression of a desire.
Nothing is really solved, but the longing for solutions and the creative energies that produce them fabricate things called solutions that just create more longing. They fill bottles upon bottles of human existence that float in a sea. We hope that a magical property exists that will attract the right person...
The accumulation of these bottles creates something not quite wisdom. But somehow in the dark ocean of our existence they light a kind way. Who can say if this way is virtuous or not in the end?
A girl named Jennifer gave me the Tao Teh Ching. Once upon a time, she was my best friend. But what she didn’t know was that she was the best of us, of everyone.
How can I be sure? I follow the bottles of human existence.
This story is about her and me, and for this reason the book has special importance; although this story is also about other things: human psychology, how a state should be run, the impossibility of love, (no metaphysics), the problem of existence, but mostly it’s about her and me, and my love for her.
On page ninety-one the Tao Teh Ching says: “Thus, an excessive love for anything will cost you dear in the end.” A homeless man who claimed to have a doctorate in philosophy once told me something very similar.
Parables of Straw and Bamboo or Hollowing Out in the Apocalypse (Sage and the Scarecrow)
Project Summary: The following is Chapter 1 from my 2004 novel The Sage and the Scarecrow.
At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can “cure” him.
Chapter 1 – Parables of Straw and Bamboo or Hollowing Out in the Apocalypse
People often ask me about my beliefs: whether I believe in God, whether I’ve read the good book, and the like. I tell them I’m an English major and that I have a horrible propensity for reading too many books and having too much free time on my hands. And, although I haven’t read the Bible, I have read Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, and numerous amounts of Greek and Roman literature involving divine intervention. Religious fanatics always give me a strange look when I jokingly tell them that I’m currently forming a religion based on the revival of polytheism, the idea being that quantity over quality is the new direction in popular religion in this modern day of capitalist production.
This was the line of questioning Angie brought to me the Friday afternoon before I left school. It started innocently enough. She had called me an hour before to ask me if she could study with me at my dorm for our psychology test. I told her yes, hoping that helping her could somehow relieve some of the tension I’d been feeling over my upcoming exams. Lighten the mood, so to speak. I should have known, though. Angie never came over to study. She did what she always did -- she came over to talk about her abusive boyfriend and chastise me for not being a Christian.
*
There is a place far from the reality you know. This place is a place like many in the world you know: people are hungry, people are sad, people spend more time in fear than in love. In this place, I sit alone on the beach and watch them. They look like giant mushrooms. I didn’t know they would actually look like that, but they do. Little mushrooms start to sprout everywhere in the distance.
*
We were alone together in my dorm.
“Are you listening to me?” Angie asked.
“What?”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yeah, I’m listening. You were going to tell me about your boyfriend. You were reading him scripture and he said something like, ‘Don’t you have something better to do than read me scripture?’”
“No. What?”
“Sorry, perhaps you’d better explain it again.”
And on she explained, about whatever his name was and his abuses to her faith or her.
While she was talking I began having this conversation with myself. I found myself in some strange apocalyptic landscape. It was South Beach, but I was alone on the beach by myself and I felt myself slowly hollowing out. I found this voice in the wind whispering to me. I didn’t know what or who it was, but I began thinking about the new order and how we would build it on a world of readers, worldly philosophers who were ideologically opposed to a single book, but rather, embraced a manifold of books.
Books upon books.
Would such a religion hollow me out and make me into a straw man so light a strong winter wind would blow me away?
“Are you even listening to me?” she asked.
“To be listened to is to be loved,” I said to her. “Isn’t it?”
She smiled at me as if I had found the answer to every question known to the universe. If to listen is to be loved, then to whisper in the dark by yourself is to be the most wretched creature in the universe.
“I try Angie. I really do.”
*
Moments before she had arrived, I had been reading Philip K. Dick’s VALIS in my dorm avoiding any work that would have taken me to a productive finale to the end of my semester. Why was I studying English? Where was my life headed? How would I eat once I graduated? You’d think these were the questions preoccupying me as I sat with my book.
My maturity at the moment prior to Angie’s arrival, unfortunately, didn’t reach to these questions. Intuitively, I understood that I would need to read books for more basic reasons -- just to be able to go on. And then in the back of my mind came a sense of dread. A dread that Angie would arrive and I wouldn’t be able to go on in any spiritually significant way.
*
To see her for just a brief moment, you’d think she was sunshine. In five minute stretches she was the kind of tall athletic brunette you’d fantasize running off to Greece with. And in the first moment, when she stepped in and smiled, hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, it seemed fairly obvious that we would do just that: Abscond from finals to some romantic destination in Europe to make passionate love.
The problem was, she didn’t have her psychology book. And she never had any intention of studying psychology with me.
She asked me how I’d been, and then, without further prologue, asked me straight away whether I was a spiritual being or not, whether I believed in God, if I thought that there was such a thing as an afterlife. Then she asked me whether I was mad at her.
I told her that I wasn’t mad at her, and that I could have no good reason since I hadn’t seen her in almost a week. She didn’t seem satisfied by this, but dropped the subject and returned to her earlier line of questioning.
“God. I feel like I need Him more than ever. I need His love. Do you ever feel sometimes that you need to be loved so much that it hurts deep inside of you?”
*
It was sometime later. How long? I’m not sure. I had abandoned my books, and I found myself lying on the floor staring up at the ceiling.
“What do you believe in?” she asked me.
“I don’t know how to put my beliefs in words. I guess it would involve explaining to you the ideas of a long list of people with German names. Don’t worry, none were involved with the Third Reich.”
Her eyes were irritated from crying now. When had she been crying? After a moment she let out a small laugh. I didn’t know where the laugh came from or what it meant. Perhaps she’d done it out of politeness.
She then went on to tell me all about her boyfriend, and how he didn’t believe in God and how he never listened to her. The subject matter wasn’t new. Every conversation I had with Angie usually cast a man as the object of some morality tale: whether it be her father, her brother, her old boyfriend, her new boyfriend, or another guy.
Eventually, the man became the villain. Such was the fate of all men in Angie’s world.
*
The Way and its Virtue has no advice that I can discern for how to deal with Angie. I whisper in Lao Tzu’s ear: “Sometimes people come to you not as people but as forces of nature that must endured. When these people enter your life, make yourself into deep-rooted bamboo and endure what must be endured.”
*
“....deep-rooted bamboo.”
“What did you say?” she asked.
I hadn’t realized I’d been talking aloud.
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make sense to her, so I just stared at the ceiling in silence.
She leaned over me the way an intimate friend or girlfriend would do. Her eyes were still red from crying, but in this intimate position, I almost felt like I could fall in love. It made me feel horrible and sick and completely inadequate for the quest ahead of me.
What was the quest ahead of me? I can’t tell you, reader. Not yet.
Was it in this world or another?
*
On the beach, I’m alone but comfortable. Instinctively, I reach my hand out to grab something. Another hand? A bottle in the ocean with a message?
Things had changed, but I still don’t know where this other me is.
I don’t know if I am straw or bamboo yet.
*
“You’re so great, Pierce. Do you know that? You’re so smart, too. I wish my boyfriend would listen to me the way you do.”
She began to stroke my hair as she said this. She did this for awhile. And I tried to suppress the discomfort I was feeling. We just sat in silence and she kept stroking my hair. Somewhere along the line, while she was doing this, I sort of shuddered.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I hesitated for an instant, thinking about how long I could stay in this awkward position.
I felt if I listened anymore, I might cease to exist. I would blow away and scatter.
“He called me stupid and said that if I mentioned it one more time he would leave me. You should have seen his eyes. They practically screamed disgust and contempt. I thought I was done with that…”
Her head was on my chest now, and I couldn’t move. Something felt so good and right about this. I felt like a could nurture someone again. Suddenly, I wanted to listen. To make her exist in a way I never could. And she would exist and exist and exist until there was nothing left but mushrooms in a background.
“You’re strange, Pierce. You’re strange and wonderful, and sometimes I wish Scott would be just like you.”
She hugged me tightly with her head on my chest. I looked up at my ceiling and thought back to my bedroom in high school. I thought back to a short girl with blonde hair who had spent an afternoon putting glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling.
“Hug me, Pierce,” she said. Who had said that? Where was I?
*
Her name is Jennifer.
In the moment, right before the apocalypse, I’m sitting with her. She holds my hand as I see these explosive clouds in the distance. She leans in to whisper something, but I don’t know what it is.
It could be a perfect sentence that will make everything okay. Or it could be an imperfect sentence spoken perfectly that will make everything okay. It could turn me into bamboo or my strawman-self could persist somewhere safe.
I don’t know because I can’t hear her. I don’t know how to listen to her yet.
*
I had managed to get myself into a sitting position. I think I’d been gentle. I think I’d moved her head off me in the most gentle way possible. Is it possible to be gentle and cruel?
She looked like she was ready to hit me, and then rage turned to tears.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hug you right now,” I said in something that must have sounded like an apology.
I felt things I couldn’t explain: Shame? A diminishing sense of being? A scattering of the soul?
She just looked at me with her eyes swollen red. I just stared at her like a dumb mute. I felt like I was staring into an abyss. Everything ended here and everything began.
“Say something,” Angie said. “Anything. I just need you to say something right now.”
She looked at me and her face seemed impossibly convex. It was almost as if there were two or three Angies struggling to gain control. Her eyes darted in various directions before finally settling on my face. Now she was smiling.
It would have been easy to give in.
“I can’t hug you,” I said again. I was surprised at how angry my words sounded. The tone of my words was so surprising that I gave out a small, crazy laugh, something that the other me who existed far away might think of as normal.
Perhaps in her mind, all she could see was another man demeaning her. Her eyes turned deep as if she were staring at something horrible in the distance. Not me, but something beyond me. I wanted to see it too. For a moment, I wanted to listen, not to her but the shadow voices that existed in her mind.
She reached out to touch me one last time, and before her hand even reached me, I was walking out the door with a room key, my wallet, and my backpack.
*
In this other place, I lose the hand and the words attached to them. I am alone again watching mushrooms blossom in the distance. My memory of her touch gives me hope, but little else.
I am alone with no way to love her.
*
In the world you know as your own, Angie was behind me, in all likelihood still crying in my dorm. I was walking away to be someplace else to find quiet and comfort. She was still crying, but I couldn’t be sure she or I existed at all.
At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can “cure” him.
Chapter 1 – Parables of Straw and Bamboo or Hollowing Out in the Apocalypse
People often ask me about my beliefs: whether I believe in God, whether I’ve read the good book, and the like. I tell them I’m an English major and that I have a horrible propensity for reading too many books and having too much free time on my hands. And, although I haven’t read the Bible, I have read Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, and numerous amounts of Greek and Roman literature involving divine intervention. Religious fanatics always give me a strange look when I jokingly tell them that I’m currently forming a religion based on the revival of polytheism, the idea being that quantity over quality is the new direction in popular religion in this modern day of capitalist production.
This was the line of questioning Angie brought to me the Friday afternoon before I left school. It started innocently enough. She had called me an hour before to ask me if she could study with me at my dorm for our psychology test. I told her yes, hoping that helping her could somehow relieve some of the tension I’d been feeling over my upcoming exams. Lighten the mood, so to speak. I should have known, though. Angie never came over to study. She did what she always did -- she came over to talk about her abusive boyfriend and chastise me for not being a Christian.
*
There is a place far from the reality you know. This place is a place like many in the world you know: people are hungry, people are sad, people spend more time in fear than in love. In this place, I sit alone on the beach and watch them. They look like giant mushrooms. I didn’t know they would actually look like that, but they do. Little mushrooms start to sprout everywhere in the distance.
*
We were alone together in my dorm.
“Are you listening to me?” Angie asked.
“What?”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yeah, I’m listening. You were going to tell me about your boyfriend. You were reading him scripture and he said something like, ‘Don’t you have something better to do than read me scripture?’”
“No. What?”
“Sorry, perhaps you’d better explain it again.”
And on she explained, about whatever his name was and his abuses to her faith or her.
While she was talking I began having this conversation with myself. I found myself in some strange apocalyptic landscape. It was South Beach, but I was alone on the beach by myself and I felt myself slowly hollowing out. I found this voice in the wind whispering to me. I didn’t know what or who it was, but I began thinking about the new order and how we would build it on a world of readers, worldly philosophers who were ideologically opposed to a single book, but rather, embraced a manifold of books.
Books upon books.
Would such a religion hollow me out and make me into a straw man so light a strong winter wind would blow me away?
“Are you even listening to me?” she asked.
“To be listened to is to be loved,” I said to her. “Isn’t it?”
She smiled at me as if I had found the answer to every question known to the universe. If to listen is to be loved, then to whisper in the dark by yourself is to be the most wretched creature in the universe.
“I try Angie. I really do.”
*
Moments before she had arrived, I had been reading Philip K. Dick’s VALIS in my dorm avoiding any work that would have taken me to a productive finale to the end of my semester. Why was I studying English? Where was my life headed? How would I eat once I graduated? You’d think these were the questions preoccupying me as I sat with my book.
My maturity at the moment prior to Angie’s arrival, unfortunately, didn’t reach to these questions. Intuitively, I understood that I would need to read books for more basic reasons -- just to be able to go on. And then in the back of my mind came a sense of dread. A dread that Angie would arrive and I wouldn’t be able to go on in any spiritually significant way.
*
To see her for just a brief moment, you’d think she was sunshine. In five minute stretches she was the kind of tall athletic brunette you’d fantasize running off to Greece with. And in the first moment, when she stepped in and smiled, hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, it seemed fairly obvious that we would do just that: Abscond from finals to some romantic destination in Europe to make passionate love.
The problem was, she didn’t have her psychology book. And she never had any intention of studying psychology with me.
She asked me how I’d been, and then, without further prologue, asked me straight away whether I was a spiritual being or not, whether I believed in God, if I thought that there was such a thing as an afterlife. Then she asked me whether I was mad at her.
I told her that I wasn’t mad at her, and that I could have no good reason since I hadn’t seen her in almost a week. She didn’t seem satisfied by this, but dropped the subject and returned to her earlier line of questioning.
“God. I feel like I need Him more than ever. I need His love. Do you ever feel sometimes that you need to be loved so much that it hurts deep inside of you?”
*
It was sometime later. How long? I’m not sure. I had abandoned my books, and I found myself lying on the floor staring up at the ceiling.
“What do you believe in?” she asked me.
“I don’t know how to put my beliefs in words. I guess it would involve explaining to you the ideas of a long list of people with German names. Don’t worry, none were involved with the Third Reich.”
Her eyes were irritated from crying now. When had she been crying? After a moment she let out a small laugh. I didn’t know where the laugh came from or what it meant. Perhaps she’d done it out of politeness.
She then went on to tell me all about her boyfriend, and how he didn’t believe in God and how he never listened to her. The subject matter wasn’t new. Every conversation I had with Angie usually cast a man as the object of some morality tale: whether it be her father, her brother, her old boyfriend, her new boyfriend, or another guy.
Eventually, the man became the villain. Such was the fate of all men in Angie’s world.
*
The Way and its Virtue has no advice that I can discern for how to deal with Angie. I whisper in Lao Tzu’s ear: “Sometimes people come to you not as people but as forces of nature that must endured. When these people enter your life, make yourself into deep-rooted bamboo and endure what must be endured.”
*
“....deep-rooted bamboo.”
“What did you say?” she asked.
I hadn’t realized I’d been talking aloud.
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make sense to her, so I just stared at the ceiling in silence.
She leaned over me the way an intimate friend or girlfriend would do. Her eyes were still red from crying, but in this intimate position, I almost felt like I could fall in love. It made me feel horrible and sick and completely inadequate for the quest ahead of me.
What was the quest ahead of me? I can’t tell you, reader. Not yet.
Was it in this world or another?
*
On the beach, I’m alone but comfortable. Instinctively, I reach my hand out to grab something. Another hand? A bottle in the ocean with a message?
Things had changed, but I still don’t know where this other me is.
I don’t know if I am straw or bamboo yet.
*
“You’re so great, Pierce. Do you know that? You’re so smart, too. I wish my boyfriend would listen to me the way you do.”
She began to stroke my hair as she said this. She did this for awhile. And I tried to suppress the discomfort I was feeling. We just sat in silence and she kept stroking my hair. Somewhere along the line, while she was doing this, I sort of shuddered.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. I hesitated for an instant, thinking about how long I could stay in this awkward position.
I felt if I listened anymore, I might cease to exist. I would blow away and scatter.
“He called me stupid and said that if I mentioned it one more time he would leave me. You should have seen his eyes. They practically screamed disgust and contempt. I thought I was done with that…”
Her head was on my chest now, and I couldn’t move. Something felt so good and right about this. I felt like a could nurture someone again. Suddenly, I wanted to listen. To make her exist in a way I never could. And she would exist and exist and exist until there was nothing left but mushrooms in a background.
“You’re strange, Pierce. You’re strange and wonderful, and sometimes I wish Scott would be just like you.”
She hugged me tightly with her head on my chest. I looked up at my ceiling and thought back to my bedroom in high school. I thought back to a short girl with blonde hair who had spent an afternoon putting glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling.
“Hug me, Pierce,” she said. Who had said that? Where was I?
*
Her name is Jennifer.
In the moment, right before the apocalypse, I’m sitting with her. She holds my hand as I see these explosive clouds in the distance. She leans in to whisper something, but I don’t know what it is.
It could be a perfect sentence that will make everything okay. Or it could be an imperfect sentence spoken perfectly that will make everything okay. It could turn me into bamboo or my strawman-self could persist somewhere safe.
I don’t know because I can’t hear her. I don’t know how to listen to her yet.
*
I had managed to get myself into a sitting position. I think I’d been gentle. I think I’d moved her head off me in the most gentle way possible. Is it possible to be gentle and cruel?
She looked like she was ready to hit me, and then rage turned to tears.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hug you right now,” I said in something that must have sounded like an apology.
I felt things I couldn’t explain: Shame? A diminishing sense of being? A scattering of the soul?
She just looked at me with her eyes swollen red. I just stared at her like a dumb mute. I felt like I was staring into an abyss. Everything ended here and everything began.
“Say something,” Angie said. “Anything. I just need you to say something right now.”
She looked at me and her face seemed impossibly convex. It was almost as if there were two or three Angies struggling to gain control. Her eyes darted in various directions before finally settling on my face. Now she was smiling.
It would have been easy to give in.
“I can’t hug you,” I said again. I was surprised at how angry my words sounded. The tone of my words was so surprising that I gave out a small, crazy laugh, something that the other me who existed far away might think of as normal.
Perhaps in her mind, all she could see was another man demeaning her. Her eyes turned deep as if she were staring at something horrible in the distance. Not me, but something beyond me. I wanted to see it too. For a moment, I wanted to listen, not to her but the shadow voices that existed in her mind.
She reached out to touch me one last time, and before her hand even reached me, I was walking out the door with a room key, my wallet, and my backpack.
*
In this other place, I lose the hand and the words attached to them. I am alone again watching mushrooms blossom in the distance. My memory of her touch gives me hope, but little else.
I am alone with no way to love her.
*
In the world you know as your own, Angie was behind me, in all likelihood still crying in my dorm. I was walking away to be someplace else to find quiet and comfort. She was still crying, but I couldn’t be sure she or I existed at all.
A Tale of Being Not Completely Useless (Sage and the Scarecrow)
Project Summary: The following is a short excerpt from my 2004 novel "The Sage and the Scarecrow". At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can "cure" him.
*This particular short comes from a part of the book I recently cut out. It's always a hard decision when to cut something out. Even though it won't be in a future edition of the book, I still wanted to share it with the world. Hope you enjoy!)
*
Phil asked me if I knew the girl.
“Kind of,” I said, “but not really.”
The angry girl was yelling at Katherine. She spouted a couple of insults involving the words “whore,” “cunt,” and such. I guessed that they had baited her into yelling at Katherine. It probably had something to do with a guy they had both dated, I thought at the time (it seemed like a jealous spat).
Eventually, the girl and the three guys left.
I took Phil into the coffee shop and bought some tea, and treated Phil to another coffee.
I went outside and sat by Katherine, even though I didn’t really know her. She was sitting by herself. She looked strong and independent, but also fundamentally shaken. She was beautiful, as most girls at my university are. But I didn’t care about how beautiful she was. Sitting there next to her, I felt like we could share something.
It felt like the right thing to do.
I asked her if it was okay to sit down, and she said sure. I talked with her and she said that she did remember me from math class. And then I asked her why the girl was so angry and yelling insults at her.
She told me that it was a complicated subject, but that she had kissed her once. “Actually, I kissed her and she kissed me back. And then things escalated from there.”
“Oh,” I said, and suddenly felt sorry that I had asked because the subject sounded like a personal one.
“Yeah, we got pretty physical. And then the next day, she blamed me very what had happened.”
I looked over to Katherine and saw her turn red.
Phil sat next to me.
“This is Phil. He’s into computers and he thinks everything wrong in the world is a government conspiracy. Then he smokes massive amounts of weed and actually becomes less paranoid. His favorite color is magenta.”
“Thanks a lot, dick,” he said to me.
Katherine laughed a little. She looked down. She took out a cigarette and began to smoke.
“It’s so fucking unfair.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Love.”
“Word,” Phil said.
“I’ll tell you the story of a boy, Katherine. There was a boy who would go to biology class every day. He would sit three sits down and one seat over from the girl of his dreams. Every day he would have just enough of a view her watching her play with her hair. The boy works up enough courage to walk up to her and says in a voice that stutters as he speaks, ‘Will you go out with me?’ She turns around and says, ‘What? Who are you?’ I would like to say that that boy is Phil over there, but actually that was middle school. And that was my first experience with love. ‘I love you.’ ‘What who are you?’”
Katherine smiles. “And that’s why, before I sleep every night, I say, ‘Fuck love!’” She takes a long drag from her cigarette.
Phil says it too, “Fuck love!”
“Fuck love!” I say.
“The girl of my dreams turns out to be man in drag. What do we say?” I ask to no one in particular.
“Fuck love!” Phil says catching on.
“Your turn, Phil.”
“The girl of my dreams turns out to be the head of the local KKK. She’ll only have sex with me if I wear the hood.”
“Fuck love!” Katherine and I say in unison, and I see her smile.
“The girl of my dream puts herself in a hateful closet,” she says and looks as if she is about to cry. She doesn’t though. She says, simply, “Fuck love.”
I think that makes everything alright for a while.
*
I really didn’t want to stick around. I felt like Phil and I were just sort of intruding. “I guess I’ll go now. Katherine, I’ll see you around campus.”
I smiled after I said this, and she smiled back, which made me feel good. There was something about her that reminded me of Jennifer. I think it was the way she seemed out of place sometimes. There was also a gentleness to her.
*
Phil looks at me with something that could be described as pride. “You know, Pierce. Every once in awhile, you’re not completely useless.”
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can "cure" him.
*This particular short comes from a part of the book I recently cut out. It's always a hard decision when to cut something out. Even though it won't be in a future edition of the book, I still wanted to share it with the world. Hope you enjoy!)
*
Phil asked me if I knew the girl.
“Kind of,” I said, “but not really.”
The angry girl was yelling at Katherine. She spouted a couple of insults involving the words “whore,” “cunt,” and such. I guessed that they had baited her into yelling at Katherine. It probably had something to do with a guy they had both dated, I thought at the time (it seemed like a jealous spat).
Eventually, the girl and the three guys left.
I took Phil into the coffee shop and bought some tea, and treated Phil to another coffee.
I went outside and sat by Katherine, even though I didn’t really know her. She was sitting by herself. She looked strong and independent, but also fundamentally shaken. She was beautiful, as most girls at my university are. But I didn’t care about how beautiful she was. Sitting there next to her, I felt like we could share something.
It felt like the right thing to do.
I asked her if it was okay to sit down, and she said sure. I talked with her and she said that she did remember me from math class. And then I asked her why the girl was so angry and yelling insults at her.
She told me that it was a complicated subject, but that she had kissed her once. “Actually, I kissed her and she kissed me back. And then things escalated from there.”
“Oh,” I said, and suddenly felt sorry that I had asked because the subject sounded like a personal one.
“Yeah, we got pretty physical. And then the next day, she blamed me very what had happened.”
I looked over to Katherine and saw her turn red.
Phil sat next to me.
“This is Phil. He’s into computers and he thinks everything wrong in the world is a government conspiracy. Then he smokes massive amounts of weed and actually becomes less paranoid. His favorite color is magenta.”
“Thanks a lot, dick,” he said to me.
Katherine laughed a little. She looked down. She took out a cigarette and began to smoke.
“It’s so fucking unfair.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Love.”
“Word,” Phil said.
“I’ll tell you the story of a boy, Katherine. There was a boy who would go to biology class every day. He would sit three sits down and one seat over from the girl of his dreams. Every day he would have just enough of a view her watching her play with her hair. The boy works up enough courage to walk up to her and says in a voice that stutters as he speaks, ‘Will you go out with me?’ She turns around and says, ‘What? Who are you?’ I would like to say that that boy is Phil over there, but actually that was middle school. And that was my first experience with love. ‘I love you.’ ‘What who are you?’”
Katherine smiles. “And that’s why, before I sleep every night, I say, ‘Fuck love!’” She takes a long drag from her cigarette.
Phil says it too, “Fuck love!”
“Fuck love!” I say.
“The girl of my dreams turns out to be man in drag. What do we say?” I ask to no one in particular.
“Fuck love!” Phil says catching on.
“Your turn, Phil.”
“The girl of my dreams turns out to be the head of the local KKK. She’ll only have sex with me if I wear the hood.”
“Fuck love!” Katherine and I say in unison, and I see her smile.
“The girl of my dream puts herself in a hateful closet,” she says and looks as if she is about to cry. She doesn’t though. She says, simply, “Fuck love.”
I think that makes everything alright for a while.
*
I really didn’t want to stick around. I felt like Phil and I were just sort of intruding. “I guess I’ll go now. Katherine, I’ll see you around campus.”
I smiled after I said this, and she smiled back, which made me feel good. There was something about her that reminded me of Jennifer. I think it was the way she seemed out of place sometimes. There was also a gentleness to her.
*
Phil looks at me with something that could be described as pride. “You know, Pierce. Every once in awhile, you’re not completely useless.”
Call me Pierce
Call me Pierce.
Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little money and quite a bit more grief and self-loathing than was sensible, I went on a journey to find the love of my life. She would cure me of my ennui and restore my faith in humanity, I thought.
Mystical journeys -- they are a way to ward off the unhealthy habits of steady work, prime time television, talk radio, and (un)reality TV. Whenever I find myself drawn to too many hours of reading dead authors and my eyes begin to strain to see simple things, like the smiles of children or the smell of fresh salt air; whenever withdrawing from the world becomes as easy as breathing or drinking cold water in summer; then it is high time for another mystical journey.
To find another lost friend? To find another lost soul? To find the beauty in the world? Shall the first paragraph of a long-dead book become the impetus for yet another journey? The fantastic, majestic, and beautiful call to me once again.
*A heartfelt thank you to Herman Melville and his fantastic novel "Moby Dick" for providing the inspiration for this bit of writing.
The passage was written in the voice of the protagonist from my first novel "The Sage and the Scarecrow".
The book is out of print (a new edition may be forthcoming in the future).
But you can read a revised version of the first chapter of the book here:
https://www.wattpad.com/314113958-pur...
Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little money and quite a bit more grief and self-loathing than was sensible, I went on a journey to find the love of my life. She would cure me of my ennui and restore my faith in humanity, I thought.
Mystical journeys -- they are a way to ward off the unhealthy habits of steady work, prime time television, talk radio, and (un)reality TV. Whenever I find myself drawn to too many hours of reading dead authors and my eyes begin to strain to see simple things, like the smiles of children or the smell of fresh salt air; whenever withdrawing from the world becomes as easy as breathing or drinking cold water in summer; then it is high time for another mystical journey.
To find another lost friend? To find another lost soul? To find the beauty in the world? Shall the first paragraph of a long-dead book become the impetus for yet another journey? The fantastic, majestic, and beautiful call to me once again.
*A heartfelt thank you to Herman Melville and his fantastic novel "Moby Dick" for providing the inspiration for this bit of writing.
The passage was written in the voice of the protagonist from my first novel "The Sage and the Scarecrow".
The book is out of print (a new edition may be forthcoming in the future).
But you can read a revised version of the first chapter of the book here:
https://www.wattpad.com/314113958-pur...
Jennifer (Sage and the Scarecrow)
Project Summary:
The following is from my 2004 novel The Sage and the Scarecrow. At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
You can read the entire revised first chapter of “Sage and the Scarecrow” here:
https://www.wattpad.com/314113958-pur...
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can “cure” him.
*
Jennifer
In the picture that I have stuck between the pages of the Tao Teh Ching Jennifer is wearing her glasses with thick black plastic frames proudly as a testament to her geekdom. Whenever I think of her, I always think of her with those same thick black frames around her eyes.
When I’d first met Jennifer she told me that she was embarrassed of her glasses—she always told me that she wished her frames could be the thin metal ones that people could hardly see. But she never got new frames, and I never understood why.
Eventually, I think she grew to love the thick black frames because she loved the way people looked at her with them. She said to me once that the best thing to be is weird because then you have the advantage of seeing people without the benefit of the familiar: you see them at their least superficial sometimes (unless that’s all there is), sometimes surprised, sometimes inflexible, cautious, capricious, hateful, genuine, or maybe they even give you a little weirdness in return.
A year ago was the last time I’d talked to her and she told me that she had briefly considered getting new glasses. Since then, I hadn’t really talked to her and I sometimes wondered if she ever followed through with her threat.
The following is from my 2004 novel The Sage and the Scarecrow. At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
You can read the entire revised first chapter of “Sage and the Scarecrow” here:
https://www.wattpad.com/314113958-pur...
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. The book follows Pierce through a journey to find his best friend and the only person he thinks can “cure” him.
*
Jennifer
In the picture that I have stuck between the pages of the Tao Teh Ching Jennifer is wearing her glasses with thick black plastic frames proudly as a testament to her geekdom. Whenever I think of her, I always think of her with those same thick black frames around her eyes.
When I’d first met Jennifer she told me that she was embarrassed of her glasses—she always told me that she wished her frames could be the thin metal ones that people could hardly see. But she never got new frames, and I never understood why.
Eventually, I think she grew to love the thick black frames because she loved the way people looked at her with them. She said to me once that the best thing to be is weird because then you have the advantage of seeing people without the benefit of the familiar: you see them at their least superficial sometimes (unless that’s all there is), sometimes surprised, sometimes inflexible, cautious, capricious, hateful, genuine, or maybe they even give you a little weirdness in return.
A year ago was the last time I’d talked to her and she told me that she had briefly considered getting new glasses. Since then, I hadn’t really talked to her and I sometimes wondered if she ever followed through with her threat.
The Funeral - The Sage and the Scarecrow
Project Summary: The following is a chapter from my 2004 novel The Sage and the Scarecrow.
At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
If you are interested in reading the eventual completed revised edition of “The Sage and the Scarecrow”, please email me at ghostsofnagasaki [at] gmail [dot] com
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. In his mind, there are two worlds. In one world he is a second-year college student trying to finish the semester; in another world, he roams an apocalyptic landscape searching for scraps of wisdom that will lead him to the perfect society. In both worlds, he is on a quest to find a girl named Jennifer, his best friend, true love, and the only person he believes can cure him.
The Funeral
As we sat on the beach, I told her all about my trip, about meeting Sean and meeting the homeless man with the doctorate. She looked at me almost as if I were kidding.
“I think it’s very attractive that you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not having a nervous breakdown.”
“Well,” she said. “For you, this is a nervous breakdown. I’ve never seen you this upset. It’s you at your most irrational. It’s a very beautiful thing to see.”
“I guess nervous breakdowns are a relative thing then. I have to admit, I really miss my dad. But more than that, I think I miss dealing with someone else’s problems, if that makes any sense. He died last summer. And then when I went back to school again, it was like nothing seemed to matter the way it did before. And all the people I go to school with, most of them are just focused on their own problems. They only listen to you when they want something from you. It’s kind of disgusting.”
“Oh, poor Pierce,” she said as she rubbed my neck. “I know how you feel sometimes. But, you know, I have to be the adult here. This is how the world works: give and take, superficial rituals, acting and playing roles -- it’s all part of life in the real world. You’re lucky if you ever really get to know anyone. Most of the time you can’t do anything about it. So, what you do is…you make a little space for yourself, I guess. Just enough for you to enjoy your life without hurting anyone else. Something like that,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t have any answers for you. Anyway, that’s about as much adult wisdom as I can muster up right now.”
I told her that I appreciated the effort, and I did.
Then I told her about my dad’s funeral, how I didn’t go and the family was angry. This seemed to worry her.
“See the thing is, I don’t even think that my dad wanted me to go to his funeral. We always talked about what a miserable experience my mom’s funeral was.”
“I remember you talking about it,” Jennifer said.
“I just didn’t see any real reason to go to my father’s funeral.”
She gave me that classical Jennifer look of hers (very hard to describe). “You didn’t want to mourn your father’s death?”
“It wasn’t exactly mourning.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what you would call it. I wouldn’t call it mourning, though. That would suggest that I was sad that he was dead, which I wasn’t. I was actually kind of happy, because I know he’d been suffering for a long time. When you put it in those terms, mourning his death would be kind of a selfish thing. It’s the whole Socrates dilemma -- not really knowing what death is, the undiscovered country and all that Hamlet crap: whether it’s better to exist or not to exist? How bad could death be? I mean really. Maybe the whole nothingness thing could bother some people. I don’t think it ever bothered my dad the way it did most people. And besides, isn’t death like the end of something? Why do we always mourn the end? Why not celebrate the end of something if it’s great?”
“Did your dad ever talk to you about it? Did he ever say anything?”
“Not really. There was really just that last summer. And he didn’t talk about it at all. We spent most of the time talking about what we would do when he got better. Nice things to talk about -- fishing and the next time we’d go for lobsters. We always caught lobsters in the summer, but that summer all we could do is talk about it. We’d sit around and make plans where we were going to go, and he would show me on the charts. I don’t think he ever thought he really was going to get better, though. But still, it was nice to talk about.” I suddenly felt sorry for not being in touch with her. “I’m sorry that I haven’t written,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I think I kind of understand.”
I didn’t say anything, but I think you can imagine how bad I felt, even though I’d convinced myself that not writing was absolutely the best thing I could’ve done. Sitting on the beach, talking to her, I was becoming more convinced. I felt sorry for not writing her, but mostly I felt sorry for myself.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“It depends. Usually when people ask whether it’s okay to ask a question it’s because they either think it’s a dumb question or because they think that the question is inappropriate. Which is it?”
I thought about it. “Probably both, but more of the second I think.”
“Go ahead and ask,” she said.
“No…never mind,” I said. “Forget it.”
“You have to tell me now,” she said. “You can’t ask my permission to ask a question and then not ask it. That’s even more inappropriate.” I was going to ask her whether she thought it was a bother to have people talk about their problems like I was doing. It was a dumb and inappropriate question. She was right.
I thought for a second, making up a different question. “Do you think I should have gone to my dad’s funeral? Would it have been the right thing to do?”
She shrugged. “Other people were offended and hurt, right? But who cares. Yeah, it was probably irresponsible, but you’re always responsible, Pierce, and I think that’s part of the problem. You’re one of the few responsible people left on this earth, and it’s causing you a slow and painful death. All this responsibility builds and builds until you have to do something really irresponsible. Everyone else is wrapped up in small dramas and you’re thinking about things on a larger scale. You always are. You’re obsessed with the injustices of the world and the grand flaws in human behavior. It’s what I loved about you. You have this big heart that you try to keep shielded from the world with your big convoluted logic. I know why you do it too?”
You do? I thought to myself.
“You do it because if you ever exposed that big heart to the world, it would break every day.” She rubbed my neck again. And what did I do? Try to hide my heart, maybe? Look off into the distance?
She continued, “Do you feel bad about not going to your dad’s funeral?”
I thought about it. “No, not really. But I think I should do something…not for any of my other relatives. I don’t even really know them all that well. But I should do something for my dad.” I smiled. “I just kind of want to throw the funeral he would have wanted.”
She went into one of her thinking moods. She paced and kicked sand. Then she turned to me with this part smug, part felicitous smile -- the kind of look that told me she had struck conceptual gold.
“So that’s it. We’ll have a ceremony for him,” she said. “Not a funeral. No organ music or dumb religious ceremonies. No caskets. No corpses. Just you and me, and…well, I don’t know.”
“The dead body really does ruin the entire event, especially if his eyes and mouth are open. You think they could wire a dead guy’s mouth shut. Really,” I said, and that got her laughing. “Will there be food?” I asked.
“No.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s okay. It’ll be fun. A ceremony to celebrate the end of something special, no?”
I nodded in agreement. “That sounds about right.”
I looked over at her. “You know my dad always liked the ocean. I think he would like it if we…ummm, somehow returned part of him to the sea.”
“You don’t have his ashes in the trunk of your car or something, do you?”
“No, of course not, but I do have some pictures in my wallet that we can tear and throw into the ocean. That’s symbolic, right?”
“Drama! I love it. I can also draw a picture of him,” she said.
“That’s good,” I said.
I was starting to feel a lot better, and, of course, I was happy just to be near Jennifer. And so it was settled. We both went to my car. We searched around for something nice I could wear. I was already dressed up in nice pants from the night before. They weren’t too dirty. Jennifer found a nice shirt for me to wear (one without sweat stains and sand). I had to look nice because Jennifer said this was a respectable event. Then she made me wear underwear on top of my head because she said I shouldn’t look too respectable. I took it off and told her that only superheroes could wear underwear in inappropriate ways. She told me that I shouldn’t because I looked sexy in an utterly imbecilic way. (Jennifer calling me sexy always made me feel uncomfortable, but I knew it wasn’t merely in a sex object kind of way [I think]).
She put the underwear back on my head and told me that anyone who let someone dress them up like that ought to be put to death by a firing squad whose guns matched the color of their beret, or something like that.
Jennifer also said that I should give a eulogy.
“What would I say?” I asked.
“Anything,” she said.
I said, “Okay, but only if I get to take the underwear off my head.”
She agreed, and we both walked out toward the ocean. It was beginning to get dark. I looked to Jennifer for guidance. “Is this the direction I should face?” I asked, motioning toward the ocean.
She shrugged. “It’s your eulogy…ummm, just don’t face in my direction. That’s kind of creepy.”
I faced toward the ocean and said my eulogy, which I don’t really want to repeat (honestly it was kind of cheesy, but nonetheless personal). But basically I thanked my dad for the best advice he ever gave me, which was: That while a quick tongue could get you momentary fame, a compassionate ear would make you friends for life (good stuff). Then I said some really generic things about him being a great guy and a good father, a hard worker. All the cheesy things you’d expect someone to say at a funeral.
It was fitting, I guess. In the end I created the very thing I had hoped to avoid. It’s sad and ironic, but that’s the way it happened. The funny thing was I couldn’t feel too bad at the time. I felt more relieved than anything else. It was Jennifer really that made the difference.
Jennifer nodded in my direction. “Good job.”
Jennifer drew a portrait of my dad, then we started drawing mustaches and warts on him, a unibrow and the like, because that’s the way he would’ve wanted to be remembered. Then we crumpled it up and threw it into the ocean.
“Isn’t that littering?” I asked Jennifer.
“Yeah, but it’s also sentimental,” she replied.
We watched it for a moment as the waves just washed it back onto the shore.
“Some seagull is probably going to choke on it,” I said.
She looked at me, shrugged, and said, “It happens. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Eventually, after the nuclear war, there’ll be nothing left but the cockroaches and some species of microorganisms…oh, and people like me who have cockroach DNA mixed in. Us too. We’ll rule the world.”
What could I say to that? She was absolutely right about the cockroaches.
Jennifer watched as I picked up the crumpled-up portrait and soaked it in water. I took the pictures of my dad that were in my wallet and began tearing them into little pieces. I spread them around in the moist sand so that the tide would eventually wash over them.
“Okay, now I’m done.”
At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
If you are interested in reading the eventual completed revised edition of “The Sage and the Scarecrow”, please email me at ghostsofnagasaki [at] gmail [dot] com
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. In his mind, there are two worlds. In one world he is a second-year college student trying to finish the semester; in another world, he roams an apocalyptic landscape searching for scraps of wisdom that will lead him to the perfect society. In both worlds, he is on a quest to find a girl named Jennifer, his best friend, true love, and the only person he believes can cure him.
The Funeral
As we sat on the beach, I told her all about my trip, about meeting Sean and meeting the homeless man with the doctorate. She looked at me almost as if I were kidding.
“I think it’s very attractive that you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not having a nervous breakdown.”
“Well,” she said. “For you, this is a nervous breakdown. I’ve never seen you this upset. It’s you at your most irrational. It’s a very beautiful thing to see.”
“I guess nervous breakdowns are a relative thing then. I have to admit, I really miss my dad. But more than that, I think I miss dealing with someone else’s problems, if that makes any sense. He died last summer. And then when I went back to school again, it was like nothing seemed to matter the way it did before. And all the people I go to school with, most of them are just focused on their own problems. They only listen to you when they want something from you. It’s kind of disgusting.”
“Oh, poor Pierce,” she said as she rubbed my neck. “I know how you feel sometimes. But, you know, I have to be the adult here. This is how the world works: give and take, superficial rituals, acting and playing roles -- it’s all part of life in the real world. You’re lucky if you ever really get to know anyone. Most of the time you can’t do anything about it. So, what you do is…you make a little space for yourself, I guess. Just enough for you to enjoy your life without hurting anyone else. Something like that,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t have any answers for you. Anyway, that’s about as much adult wisdom as I can muster up right now.”
I told her that I appreciated the effort, and I did.
Then I told her about my dad’s funeral, how I didn’t go and the family was angry. This seemed to worry her.
“See the thing is, I don’t even think that my dad wanted me to go to his funeral. We always talked about what a miserable experience my mom’s funeral was.”
“I remember you talking about it,” Jennifer said.
“I just didn’t see any real reason to go to my father’s funeral.”
She gave me that classical Jennifer look of hers (very hard to describe). “You didn’t want to mourn your father’s death?”
“It wasn’t exactly mourning.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what you would call it. I wouldn’t call it mourning, though. That would suggest that I was sad that he was dead, which I wasn’t. I was actually kind of happy, because I know he’d been suffering for a long time. When you put it in those terms, mourning his death would be kind of a selfish thing. It’s the whole Socrates dilemma -- not really knowing what death is, the undiscovered country and all that Hamlet crap: whether it’s better to exist or not to exist? How bad could death be? I mean really. Maybe the whole nothingness thing could bother some people. I don’t think it ever bothered my dad the way it did most people. And besides, isn’t death like the end of something? Why do we always mourn the end? Why not celebrate the end of something if it’s great?”
“Did your dad ever talk to you about it? Did he ever say anything?”
“Not really. There was really just that last summer. And he didn’t talk about it at all. We spent most of the time talking about what we would do when he got better. Nice things to talk about -- fishing and the next time we’d go for lobsters. We always caught lobsters in the summer, but that summer all we could do is talk about it. We’d sit around and make plans where we were going to go, and he would show me on the charts. I don’t think he ever thought he really was going to get better, though. But still, it was nice to talk about.” I suddenly felt sorry for not being in touch with her. “I’m sorry that I haven’t written,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I think I kind of understand.”
I didn’t say anything, but I think you can imagine how bad I felt, even though I’d convinced myself that not writing was absolutely the best thing I could’ve done. Sitting on the beach, talking to her, I was becoming more convinced. I felt sorry for not writing her, but mostly I felt sorry for myself.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“It depends. Usually when people ask whether it’s okay to ask a question it’s because they either think it’s a dumb question or because they think that the question is inappropriate. Which is it?”
I thought about it. “Probably both, but more of the second I think.”
“Go ahead and ask,” she said.
“No…never mind,” I said. “Forget it.”
“You have to tell me now,” she said. “You can’t ask my permission to ask a question and then not ask it. That’s even more inappropriate.” I was going to ask her whether she thought it was a bother to have people talk about their problems like I was doing. It was a dumb and inappropriate question. She was right.
I thought for a second, making up a different question. “Do you think I should have gone to my dad’s funeral? Would it have been the right thing to do?”
She shrugged. “Other people were offended and hurt, right? But who cares. Yeah, it was probably irresponsible, but you’re always responsible, Pierce, and I think that’s part of the problem. You’re one of the few responsible people left on this earth, and it’s causing you a slow and painful death. All this responsibility builds and builds until you have to do something really irresponsible. Everyone else is wrapped up in small dramas and you’re thinking about things on a larger scale. You always are. You’re obsessed with the injustices of the world and the grand flaws in human behavior. It’s what I loved about you. You have this big heart that you try to keep shielded from the world with your big convoluted logic. I know why you do it too?”
You do? I thought to myself.
“You do it because if you ever exposed that big heart to the world, it would break every day.” She rubbed my neck again. And what did I do? Try to hide my heart, maybe? Look off into the distance?
She continued, “Do you feel bad about not going to your dad’s funeral?”
I thought about it. “No, not really. But I think I should do something…not for any of my other relatives. I don’t even really know them all that well. But I should do something for my dad.” I smiled. “I just kind of want to throw the funeral he would have wanted.”
She went into one of her thinking moods. She paced and kicked sand. Then she turned to me with this part smug, part felicitous smile -- the kind of look that told me she had struck conceptual gold.
“So that’s it. We’ll have a ceremony for him,” she said. “Not a funeral. No organ music or dumb religious ceremonies. No caskets. No corpses. Just you and me, and…well, I don’t know.”
“The dead body really does ruin the entire event, especially if his eyes and mouth are open. You think they could wire a dead guy’s mouth shut. Really,” I said, and that got her laughing. “Will there be food?” I asked.
“No.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s okay. It’ll be fun. A ceremony to celebrate the end of something special, no?”
I nodded in agreement. “That sounds about right.”
I looked over at her. “You know my dad always liked the ocean. I think he would like it if we…ummm, somehow returned part of him to the sea.”
“You don’t have his ashes in the trunk of your car or something, do you?”
“No, of course not, but I do have some pictures in my wallet that we can tear and throw into the ocean. That’s symbolic, right?”
“Drama! I love it. I can also draw a picture of him,” she said.
“That’s good,” I said.
I was starting to feel a lot better, and, of course, I was happy just to be near Jennifer. And so it was settled. We both went to my car. We searched around for something nice I could wear. I was already dressed up in nice pants from the night before. They weren’t too dirty. Jennifer found a nice shirt for me to wear (one without sweat stains and sand). I had to look nice because Jennifer said this was a respectable event. Then she made me wear underwear on top of my head because she said I shouldn’t look too respectable. I took it off and told her that only superheroes could wear underwear in inappropriate ways. She told me that I shouldn’t because I looked sexy in an utterly imbecilic way. (Jennifer calling me sexy always made me feel uncomfortable, but I knew it wasn’t merely in a sex object kind of way [I think]).
She put the underwear back on my head and told me that anyone who let someone dress them up like that ought to be put to death by a firing squad whose guns matched the color of their beret, or something like that.
Jennifer also said that I should give a eulogy.
“What would I say?” I asked.
“Anything,” she said.
I said, “Okay, but only if I get to take the underwear off my head.”
She agreed, and we both walked out toward the ocean. It was beginning to get dark. I looked to Jennifer for guidance. “Is this the direction I should face?” I asked, motioning toward the ocean.
She shrugged. “It’s your eulogy…ummm, just don’t face in my direction. That’s kind of creepy.”
I faced toward the ocean and said my eulogy, which I don’t really want to repeat (honestly it was kind of cheesy, but nonetheless personal). But basically I thanked my dad for the best advice he ever gave me, which was: That while a quick tongue could get you momentary fame, a compassionate ear would make you friends for life (good stuff). Then I said some really generic things about him being a great guy and a good father, a hard worker. All the cheesy things you’d expect someone to say at a funeral.
It was fitting, I guess. In the end I created the very thing I had hoped to avoid. It’s sad and ironic, but that’s the way it happened. The funny thing was I couldn’t feel too bad at the time. I felt more relieved than anything else. It was Jennifer really that made the difference.
Jennifer nodded in my direction. “Good job.”
Jennifer drew a portrait of my dad, then we started drawing mustaches and warts on him, a unibrow and the like, because that’s the way he would’ve wanted to be remembered. Then we crumpled it up and threw it into the ocean.
“Isn’t that littering?” I asked Jennifer.
“Yeah, but it’s also sentimental,” she replied.
We watched it for a moment as the waves just washed it back onto the shore.
“Some seagull is probably going to choke on it,” I said.
She looked at me, shrugged, and said, “It happens. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Eventually, after the nuclear war, there’ll be nothing left but the cockroaches and some species of microorganisms…oh, and people like me who have cockroach DNA mixed in. Us too. We’ll rule the world.”
What could I say to that? She was absolutely right about the cockroaches.
Jennifer watched as I picked up the crumpled-up portrait and soaked it in water. I took the pictures of my dad that were in my wallet and began tearing them into little pieces. I spread them around in the moist sand so that the tide would eventually wash over them.
“Okay, now I’m done.”
Sage and the Scarecrow- Speaking of Jennifer
Project Summary: The following is a chapter from my 2004 novel The Sage and the Scarecrow.
At the moment, I am revising the chapters from this book into 3-4 page short stories for posting on my blogs and in literary magazines.
If you are interested in reading the eventual completed revised edition of “The Sage and the Scarecrow”, please email me at ghostsofnagasaki [at] gmail [dot] com
The Novel in Short: Six months after his father has died from cancer, Pierce finds himself in a state of anxiety and crisis. In his mind, there are two worlds. In one world he is a second-year college student trying to finish the semester; in another world, he roams an apocalyptic landscape searching for scraps of wisdom that will lead him to the perfect society. In both worlds, he is on a quest to find a girl named Jennifer, his best friend, true love, and the only person he believes can cure him.
Speaking of Jennifer
or
Sympathy and Anonymity
I was in a rotten mood. I couldn’t understand how I could shiver and shake on a perfectly comfortable December night. Perhaps I should have gone home. Perhaps I should have slept. I should have thought of this one bad night as a dream I could wake up from easily, a cold shower would wash all the trivial drama away like the gunk that accumulates in your eyes when you slept.
And I would have, except I thought that Brian or Angie or someone I knew might be waiting for me when I got to my dorm room.
If I stayed in the park any longer, I was sure I would conjure up some mythical nihilist monster who would swallow me whole. So, I walked ten minutes around the campus settling for my university pool hall to just shoot around for a little bit—mope, I guess, over the shitty day I’d been having.
I couldn’t tell you exactly why I chose the pool hall. Perhaps it had something to do with the way I felt about the place. When I was a high school student, I used to sneak in there with one of my friends Sean and talk philosophy.
*
I find myself taking pages from unknown books in my bag. I don’t look at the title...I don’t want to. As I eat page after page, I think to myself, literature tastes just like chicken, literature tastes just like chicken.
The next thing I think is how lonely I’ve become.
*
At the pool hall, I watched these two punk rockers try to pick up on these three girls who spoke with what sounded like British accents. I can tell you, train wrecks in slow motion don’t look this bad -- wait, no, that’s a cliche….It was like watching Gilbert Gottfried sing melody for Boys to Men (I owe you one good simile, reader).
One of the guys in particular was really awful. He had the unnerving habit of laughing for no reason whatsoever. The other guy just watched as the kid said all this outrageous stuff. He tried to get involved a little, but his partner’s outrageous comments were sort of nullifying his own attempts. I felt bad because I had the feeling that if he could be around anyone else at that moment he would’ve been, and that if he knew some way to make him stop, he would have.
It was pretty obvious that the girls with the British accents just wanted them to go away. But the one kid kept going at it. At one point, when the scene had gotten really awkward, the guy who laughed too much said: “Come on, what’s the problem? We should just go back to my place. I promise I’ll be gentle”—some crap like that. The kid was feigning being high. He wasn’t high, though, just an idiot. At that point, one of the girls flat out told him to leave.
Eventually, the other guy said to him, “Come on, we should get going,” effectively putting the three girls, and one reluctant observer, out of their misery. I had the feeling that he was pretty embarrassed by his friend. He actually seemed like he wasn’t that bad of a guy (guilty by association, of course).
When they had both left, the three girls began bad-mouthing them. They went through the obvious: their dopiness, them being young and stupid, how they were rude. Then they began making comments about Americans. They called Americans arrogant and egotistical.
Somehow, though, the conversation turned. One of the girls, the thin girl with the pale complexion, said she liked the bondage pants the quiet one was wearing. Another one of the girls said that she thought the quiet one was attractive. Then the three of them agreed that they would like to fuck the quiet one. Suddenly, the guy’s association with the laughing fool seemed to make more sense, in a disturbing sort of way.
I just kept playing pool, trying to keep my mind on the game, and sort of tuned out the conversation for a while.
*
Little by little, I begin to see signs of civilization. Af first, what I think are thumb-twitchers, mindless and stupid, start demonstrating signs of intelligence.
One notices me.
“Oh,” one of them says to me, “You look a bit different from the rest.”
It has been quite a while since I’ve had a conversation with anyone but myself.
“Thank you,” is all I can think to say. “Thank you for not being a thumb-twitcher.”
*
It wasn’t too long before one of the three girls said something to me. She introduced herself and their group and asked if I wanted to play some pool. I agreed, even though I had originally come to get away from people. I didn’t consider strangers always to be people in the negative sense of the word. I forget their names. I do remember how they looked, though: one was a little chubby, another was skinny with fair skin, and another, the most attractive of the three in my humble opinion, was redheaded with a slightly darker complexion than the other two.
I asked them where they were from.
“South Africa,” the redhead said to me. “Know anything about South Africa?”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s all something, something apartheid in my mind.”
The redhead smiled. “Funny. You have a cute way of talking.”
They informed me that while English was their main language, South Africa also had a heterogeneous mix of tribal languages as well.
We played pool. I was teamed up with the redhead. They explained to me how they were on a study abroad program and how they found America different from South Africa.
“One,” the redhead said, “Americans are a lot ruder than people from our homeland. People in our homeland are raised with better manners: they always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ And another thing, in South Africa, you don’t have to be twenty-one to drink. People spend a lot more time in the pubs in South Africa. And three, we have an early curfew because we have to watch out for rhinos and lions and things.”
I was pretty sure she was kidding about the last part, but you can never be too certain…
They were surprised I didn’t know too much about their country. I told them that the American public school system was very poor and that I didn’t know much about any other countries besides my own, except the names of three of them: Britain, Germany, and Russia, but only because America had beaten them in major wars—and, also, that it was my job to kill all communists (a joke of course). They suggested that I should travel one day. I said that I planned to once I had the money.
“Your country seems awfully self-absorbed,” the skinny one said.
I nodded my head in agreement.
*
I don’t realize it, but the woman has been talking to me for a while. She looks so different that at first I don’t know what to make of her. I spend a great deal of time not listening to her speech, but instead just looking at her face.
Finally, I blurt out, “That’s what’s different! You don’t have shit all over you.”
“Well, yeah, that’s because I wash myself occasionally.”
*
The redhead and I won our first game and we gave the other two girls a rematch. We talked for a while about nothing in particular. We talked about our various subjects of study. Then we tried to think of common books that we had read. We actually shared quite a few.
The redhead asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I told her that sadly I didn’t have time for one, but that even if I did, most of the girls I knew were kind of shallow, even if they were smart. Funny how that works at university.
“I’m curious. Do you have any pictures in your wallet,” the redhead asked me.
“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours,” I said.
I looked at her pictures and saw that she had a picture of herself with a guy by her side—I guessed that this was her boyfriend. “Boyfriend?” I asked.
She responded that it was.
“Tell me about him,” I said.
The other two girls had sort of stopped paying attention to us and were shooting around by themselves.
“I’d rather not,” she said. “We got into a bit of a fight before we left. I still feel kind of bad about it, actually. He’s going to London to continue his studies, and I’m probably not going to see him for a while.”
I asked her whether she thought the time and distance apart would help or hurt their relationship.
“The way I see it,” she said, “if the relationship is strong enough, two people will either come out of it loving each other even more or....”
“Or?”
“Or, I’ll never want to see his fucking face again!”
I chuckled involuntarily at the second part. It was actually a very rude thing to do, but she didn’t seem too mad.
“It’s an ugly thing to go through or watch. I’ve known a couple of people who’ve gone through breakups because of the distance,” I said. “I think the reason so many long-distance relationships fall apart, well…I guess people have needs. They want things from relationships…I think an individual’s needs are stronger than abstract concepts like love and duty.”
“You’re way to polite. Are you sure you’re American?” she said. “You should just say that people are animals, and just like animals we want to fuck!”
“Fair enough,” I said with a smile.
She rummaged through my wallet and showed me her picture of choice. “Who’s this?” I’d kept a small picture of Jennifer in my wallet since high school. The two of us were standing on Miami Beach.
“That’s Jennifer,” I said. “She was a friend of mine back in high school.”
“Not a love interest?” she asked.
I had to think about that one. “Yeah, maybe for a little while, but it wasn’t really like that. It was strange. I couldn’t really describe to you what we were.”
“Did you sleep with her?” she asked.
“Ummmm,” was all I could say. I was taken aback by the straightforward nature of her question.
“Then she was your girlfriend.” I hadn’t responded in the affirmative, but she assumed I had.
“No,” I said. “We never really did any relationship stuff. We never celebrated anniversaries or went on formal dates. Sometimes we were physically involved and sometimes not, but we never stopped being friends…and we never got into any fights or anything. Not any real fights anyway. We got into arguments often, but they were always pretty civilized. And they were always about abstract subjects like art history or ethics or something--she was probably the single smartest person I’d ever met, and not in a shallow way either.…” No, nothing shallow about Jennifer. “I don’t know. I’d say no, though. I always thought of her as a friend. I think she saw me the same way.”
“Do you talk to her anymore?”
“Not anymore,” I said. “It’s complicated, though. I’m a much different person than I was a year ago...”
“A year isn’t so long,” she said. “You should get in touch with her if she means so much to you. You should write her a letter or something. A long letter should do the trick.”
*
“I want to bring you to my tribe. Maybe we can clean you up a little, but I need something to call you. Do you have a name?”
I just stare at her.
“My name is Sympathy,” she says.
*
I did writer Jennifer. Then I stopped.
And so, I had to explain to her (and you) the reason I stopped.
The reasoning goes something like this: The day Jennifer left for college she was fine. There was no crying, none of the emotional stuff that usually came with saying goodbye; and, in a way, I was glad, because there was nothing more painful in the world than seeing Jennifer suffer; she wasn’t like that anyway, she never really got that emotional; but, still, even the thought of it gives me shivers.
The redheaded girl from South Africa smiled at me. “You have a nice way of talking, do you know that. Go on.”
She told me that she would write to me and that I could come visit her as often as I wanted to. A little while later (about a week) I talked to her mom who told me that Jennifer was having some kind of nervous spell—perhaps she was just adjusting to her new environment, was her explanation. It was something she eventually grew out of, but still, it was serious enough to warrant her mother’s concern. I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar shortly after and nearly lost my mind with guilt.
The redhead looked at me. “I think I skipped reading The Bell Jar. But I think I can guess what kind of book it was.”
Although I don’t attribute this episode directly to myself (I’m not exactly sure what caused it), she did tell me in a phone call that it had something to do with me. What exactly? I’m not sure. It was subtle the way she said it, but more or less she said it. We wrote one another for a year. Since that time, Jennifer got used to her life. From her letters I gathered that she was happy. When I went to visit her last winter, I realized that she was the happiest I’d ever seen her, and further, that the life she now lived had nothing to do with me.
I was sure that the best thing for Jennifer was to keep myself out of her new life. At the time it was just a thought, but the more I thought about that weekend, the more I became sure that I was right.
“Maybe your letters were a big reason her life was going so well. Did you ever stop to consider that?” the redhead was earnest as she said this.
Something you should understand, though: I always thought I was the benefactor of the relationship. She may have gained something from it too, but not the way I did. She was the greatest person I’d ever met, and there was nothing I could really offer her except a kind of clumsy dependence (if that makes any sense). Whenever I had a problem, she was always the person I went to see—it was never the other way around, because Jennifer never really had problems, and if she did, she was always smart enough to solve them on her own. In short: I was the privileged one.
I don’t remember exactly what the redhead said, but maybe she said something like this. “Perhaps you both were privileged. Your clumsy dependence, as you put it, might have been a creation of your imagination.”
Maybe, I replied. But eventually, after the visit, my problems started piling up: my dad’s illness got worse, my schoolwork was more difficult than I had anticipated, and I was working more to help my dad pay the bills. It wasn’t an easy time. All I could think of the entire time I was working and caring for my dad was how happy Jennifer was somewhere else; and it seemed that the cruelest thing I could do was respond to her letters, and bring my world of problems to hers. I didn’t want to tell her what was going on, but I didn’t want to lie to her either. So my idea to stay out of her life seemed to make pretty good sense. I responded to a few of her letters with some pretty superficial letters of my own, and then just slowly stopped writing her.
The girl with the pale complexion just looked at me. “You poor pathetic loser. She was in love with you. It was nothing more complicated than that. And distance turns love to poison.”
*
The girl next to me now had a name, but I was still anonymous. An anonymous no one. And that’s how I preferred it.
*
“Anyway, I hope it makes sense to you now.”
The redhead told me, unequivocally, that no, it didn’t make any sense.
“Why not?” I asked. At this point I realized that the other two girls from South Africa had been listening while playing pool.
“Because,” the skinny girl with the light complexion told me, “if she really loved you, she would have wanted to help you with your problems.”
“That’s exactly what I thought, and that’s why I didn’t write her. I knew she would want to help me out with my problems. I didn’t want her helping me out with my problems. That would be awful. Just because she would’ve wanted to help me out with my problems, doesn’t necessarily mean that helping me out with my problems would’ve made her happier. She’d probably be happier not knowing that all that stuff was going on in the first place,” I said.
“Even if you didn’t write her back at the time,” the redhead said, “you should probably write her now and let her know how you’ve been. She’s probably wondering what’s happened to you.”
“Yes, I think you should at least call her and talk to her,” the skinny one with the light complexion said.
*
For the first time in a while, I feel as if I have a path and a purpose.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ll find a name for you.”
“Thank you, Sympathy,” I say as we walk together.
