Daniel Clausen's Blog, page 49
October 1, 2016
What is Magic Realism?
In the midst of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wonderful novel, “The General and his Labyrinth,” we get this wonderful passage about one of General Simon Bolivar’s greatest lovers:
“...she traveled in a caravan worthy of Gypsies, with her trunks on the backs of a dozen mules, her immortal slave women, and eleven cats, six dogs, three monkeys educated in the art of palace obscenities, a bear trained to thread needles, and nine cages of parrots and macaws that railed against Santander in three languages.”
Is it real? Is it magic? Surely, slave women cannot be immortal. Unless they are. Surely, monkeys cannot be trained in obscenities. That should come naturally to them, and surely in a monkey’s mind there is no different between palace obscenities and just plain obscenities. A bear trained to thread needles? Parrots and macaws that rail against political opponents in three languages?
What are the numbers? 12, 11, 6, 3, 1, 9, 3. Such specific accounting! If the bookkeeping is in such great order, then how can it not be true? (Trust me, I speak as a social scientist when I say most statistics are just magical fiction!)
Companies pay taxes, and they are nothing but useful fictions. They pay taxes to the state -- which is also a kind of fiction. They pay with currencies, which have value because of collective fantasies. So, if ghosts were real wouldn’t they pay taxes? Or, would they convince their counterparts that things like “states,” “taxes,” and “state currencies” are just fairy tales told by power-hungry storytellers?
When you think about it very carefully, our lives are both wonderfully magic and undeniably real (or is that the other way around?).
The General in His Labyrinth
“...she traveled in a caravan worthy of Gypsies, with her trunks on the backs of a dozen mules, her immortal slave women, and eleven cats, six dogs, three monkeys educated in the art of palace obscenities, a bear trained to thread needles, and nine cages of parrots and macaws that railed against Santander in three languages.”
Is it real? Is it magic? Surely, slave women cannot be immortal. Unless they are. Surely, monkeys cannot be trained in obscenities. That should come naturally to them, and surely in a monkey’s mind there is no different between palace obscenities and just plain obscenities. A bear trained to thread needles? Parrots and macaws that rail against political opponents in three languages?
What are the numbers? 12, 11, 6, 3, 1, 9, 3. Such specific accounting! If the bookkeeping is in such great order, then how can it not be true? (Trust me, I speak as a social scientist when I say most statistics are just magical fiction!)
Companies pay taxes, and they are nothing but useful fictions. They pay taxes to the state -- which is also a kind of fiction. They pay with currencies, which have value because of collective fantasies. So, if ghosts were real wouldn’t they pay taxes? Or, would they convince their counterparts that things like “states,” “taxes,” and “state currencies” are just fairy tales told by power-hungry storytellers?
When you think about it very carefully, our lives are both wonderfully magic and undeniably real (or is that the other way around?).
The General in His Labyrinth
September 27, 2016
Four Short Works of Prose
Kittens in a Storm Drain
The kittens live in a storm drain that exists in a concrete box in the ground with a metal cover. There is a crack in the metal cover where they can crawl in and out. I leave food for them every morning hoping they will survive. Then one day I notice that they’ve grown. One of them tries to squeeze out of the crack to get the food and scratches himself. So big and yet they still hide in the drain. Soon, they’ll be too big and they’ll be stuck there. I go into my office and wait. In my office, I feel protected, just like the kittens must feel. Do I cover the crack next time they come out? Am I savior, or just a person depriving some living things of their home?
Two Seats Behind, One to the Left
The view from two seats behind her and one to the left is unbearable. On some days I believe I can actually reach out and touch her. There has to be another name for the color of her hair. It can’t just be brunette. It has to be autumn or chestnut or something. And it’s straight and just perfect. What do I do two chairs behind and one to the left? Certainly not learn biology.
Imperfectly Bohemian
In Vienna for only one afternoon more. A Florida boy walked in the snow and tried to think Gothic thoughts. He tried to imagine a series of murders tied to a love affair, but ended up in a Viennese cafe eating chocolate cake and trying to keep the image of an Austrian waitress in his mind. Imperfectly bohemian, he realized he was a century too late for coffee with Freud or other artists.
The End of Veronica and Harold
After years of couples therapy James and Veronica finally felt like they were on the right track. Then after a particularly fruitful therapy session, James said, “Honey I think I love you more than ever.” Veronica smiled, looked James in the eyes and then leaned over and plucked one of Harold’s many nose hairs. “Got it. That sucker was bothering me all morning. Sorry honey, what were you saying?” At the time, neither of them knew it, but that was the end of their relationship.
The kittens live in a storm drain that exists in a concrete box in the ground with a metal cover. There is a crack in the metal cover where they can crawl in and out. I leave food for them every morning hoping they will survive. Then one day I notice that they’ve grown. One of them tries to squeeze out of the crack to get the food and scratches himself. So big and yet they still hide in the drain. Soon, they’ll be too big and they’ll be stuck there. I go into my office and wait. In my office, I feel protected, just like the kittens must feel. Do I cover the crack next time they come out? Am I savior, or just a person depriving some living things of their home?
Two Seats Behind, One to the Left
The view from two seats behind her and one to the left is unbearable. On some days I believe I can actually reach out and touch her. There has to be another name for the color of her hair. It can’t just be brunette. It has to be autumn or chestnut or something. And it’s straight and just perfect. What do I do two chairs behind and one to the left? Certainly not learn biology.
Imperfectly Bohemian
In Vienna for only one afternoon more. A Florida boy walked in the snow and tried to think Gothic thoughts. He tried to imagine a series of murders tied to a love affair, but ended up in a Viennese cafe eating chocolate cake and trying to keep the image of an Austrian waitress in his mind. Imperfectly bohemian, he realized he was a century too late for coffee with Freud or other artists.
The End of Veronica and Harold
After years of couples therapy James and Veronica finally felt like they were on the right track. Then after a particularly fruitful therapy session, James said, “Honey I think I love you more than ever.” Veronica smiled, looked James in the eyes and then leaned over and plucked one of Harold’s many nose hairs. “Got it. That sucker was bothering me all morning. Sorry honey, what were you saying?” At the time, neither of them knew it, but that was the end of their relationship.
September 22, 2016
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.
September 18, 2016
Sully Finally Buys a Drink
Jimmy wasn’t thirsty. He wanted a drink for other reasons. A beer would get him out of the cage Sully and his lot had been putting him in all night -- that cage of being a lesser veteran.
“Come on, Jimmy. Where are your stories tonight?”
Still not thirsty, all Jimmy could think to say was, “Memory can play tricks on you that only alcohol can solve. Buy me one for a story?”
Sully knew tricks. He knew that memory wasn’t something that could be fixed with alcohol like a screwdriver to a loose electrical socket.
“Actually, Jimmy, I think you owe me this one.”
Jimmy didn’t answer, only reached over the counter and grabbed some matches. He had kept matches from his time abroad, souvenirs for uneventful but patriotic times. He struck a match and thought of the one Sully had told of the crow eating the carcass of a dead soldier, so morbid and moving he’d gotten free drinks for hours.
His time in the service had been quieter. But so what. He couldn’t pretend he was in Sully’s league. But just for the night, he wanted to be the one to get the rounds.
“You know I don’t have any stories about fighting tigers to wow the crowd, Sully. But, I was a veteran too.”
The way Jimmy rubbed the pack of matches between his thumb and forefinger was making them both filthy with desire and longing.
Sully bought two bears.
“It doesn’t always have to be a competition, you know. I’ve known some vets who could talk rings around me. Too many good stories, real stories, and they build up in you like time bombs. A match like the one you’re playing with and they could explode. Sometimes, I don’t want to even compare stories. Might as well be two adolescents comparing dicks after school! No, tonight we just drink.”
Like short stories like these? Try
“Come on, Jimmy. Where are your stories tonight?”
Still not thirsty, all Jimmy could think to say was, “Memory can play tricks on you that only alcohol can solve. Buy me one for a story?”
Sully knew tricks. He knew that memory wasn’t something that could be fixed with alcohol like a screwdriver to a loose electrical socket.
“Actually, Jimmy, I think you owe me this one.”
Jimmy didn’t answer, only reached over the counter and grabbed some matches. He had kept matches from his time abroad, souvenirs for uneventful but patriotic times. He struck a match and thought of the one Sully had told of the crow eating the carcass of a dead soldier, so morbid and moving he’d gotten free drinks for hours.
His time in the service had been quieter. But so what. He couldn’t pretend he was in Sully’s league. But just for the night, he wanted to be the one to get the rounds.
“You know I don’t have any stories about fighting tigers to wow the crowd, Sully. But, I was a veteran too.”
The way Jimmy rubbed the pack of matches between his thumb and forefinger was making them both filthy with desire and longing.
Sully bought two bears.
“It doesn’t always have to be a competition, you know. I’ve known some vets who could talk rings around me. Too many good stories, real stories, and they build up in you like time bombs. A match like the one you’re playing with and they could explode. Sometimes, I don’t want to even compare stories. Might as well be two adolescents comparing dicks after school! No, tonight we just drink.”
Like short stories like these? Try
September 14, 2016
When You’re Young -- Write Rhymey Dimey Stuff
Lester Goran, the author and forever creative writing teacher of the University of Miami once said, “It’s okay when you’re young to write rhyme dimey stuff.” (Or, perhaps that was someone else).
What did he mean? When I was 19, I tried to write a novel about a young man who meets a handicapped British author by accident. The novel would be subtle, romantic, literary, in other words utterly impossible for a 19-year-old to write. A few years earlier, I had been writing vampire stories with lines stolen from Evil Dead. Dreadful stuff -- but pleasing to my peers who, like me, just didn’t know better.
Rhymey dimey stuff is anything with waves crashing dramatically against an alien shore with your hero, Captain Flashgasm, shaking his iron fist, vowing revenge to the entire army of internet-trollia!
A few years back, I threw out a lot of my rhymey dimey works. I didn’t hate them. If I read enough of them in one sitting, I could even see a kind of art and passion in them. I cared about my rhymey dimey cliches. There is a stage all writers must pass through when they write rhymey dimey stuff. Some writers may even learn to love rhymey dimey genres so much that they learn to to turn some money from them. That’s okay too, right? After all, there are a great number of readers who will never read past rhymey dimey stuff.
As I finish writing this sentence in a comfort of a chain coffee shop, I notice the staff starting to look longing at me. Were they just coffee shop attendants or were they creatures of the night, readying themselves for attack.
I pick up my pen.
Here’s something for the ol' pulp magazines, readers!
What did he mean? When I was 19, I tried to write a novel about a young man who meets a handicapped British author by accident. The novel would be subtle, romantic, literary, in other words utterly impossible for a 19-year-old to write. A few years earlier, I had been writing vampire stories with lines stolen from Evil Dead. Dreadful stuff -- but pleasing to my peers who, like me, just didn’t know better.
Rhymey dimey stuff is anything with waves crashing dramatically against an alien shore with your hero, Captain Flashgasm, shaking his iron fist, vowing revenge to the entire army of internet-trollia!
A few years back, I threw out a lot of my rhymey dimey works. I didn’t hate them. If I read enough of them in one sitting, I could even see a kind of art and passion in them. I cared about my rhymey dimey cliches. There is a stage all writers must pass through when they write rhymey dimey stuff. Some writers may even learn to love rhymey dimey genres so much that they learn to to turn some money from them. That’s okay too, right? After all, there are a great number of readers who will never read past rhymey dimey stuff.
As I finish writing this sentence in a comfort of a chain coffee shop, I notice the staff starting to look longing at me. Were they just coffee shop attendants or were they creatures of the night, readying themselves for attack.
I pick up my pen.
Here’s something for the ol' pulp magazines, readers!
September 9, 2016
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.
September 5, 2016
Micro-Interview - Mike Robbins (The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán)
I recently had the pleasure of finishing Mike Robbins's excellent book, The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzman. As a result I decided to do a short interview with him for this blog.
I hope you enjoy.
How have your travels impacted how you write and what you think of writing?
They have had an immense impact on what I write, I think, more than how I do it. For a start, living in poorer countries makes you less comfortable about the world. It also had an effect on my politics; I was in Ecuador for some months in 1991 and was aware that people there worried about being sucked into the violent drug economy that Colombia was fighting at the time. It made me ask whose fault that trade really was, and that partly drove The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán, which I wrote later that year – though it wasn’t to be published for many years.
But also, living in places such as Bhutan showed me that some very basic assumptions are not always shared. One example is the belief in the Judaeo-Christian world that you only walk the world once; but really, why should that be so? What is the life force that drives us, and does it survive us? This came out in my most recent book, Dog!
As to what I think of writing itself, I’m not sure. Being out and about in the world made me want to be engage with broader issues. But I don’t have an opinion on what others should write. If someone wants to write a novel about the failure of one marriage, or a piece about a spider’s web in the sunlight, they should.
What’s your favorite sentence or paragraph from one of your books? What does it mean to you?
“Outside, in the Vicar’s garden, the first leaf, a freak perhaps, de¬tached itself weeks early and fluttered its way to the ground like the fragments of a letter that Paul took from his pocket on a sunny Sunday fifty years later and tore into strips, then smaller strips, then smaller yet until nothing of its substance could be divined.”
This is from my second fiction book, Three Seasons. It’s a collection of three novellas set in England, and the paragraph is from the last of the three; it is about a moment in someone’s life when the distant past suddenly illuminates the present, so that he changes his mind about a step he was about to take. Three Seasons is the most personal thing I’ve written, in which I expressed my feelings about my own country, which I had just left.
What advice would you give other indie authors starting out?
That is hard, isn’t it – everyone is so different! I suppose I would say that they should write what their gut tells them to write, not what they or someone else thinks they should be writing. There are exceptions to that, of course. If you’re writing a genre book – say, a Regency bodice-ripper – you’ll need to know what your audience wants. There’s nothing wrong with that; writing for a market takes real craftsmanship. But the very best books don’t get written that way; they happen because the writer had something they wanted to get down on paper, for their own reasons, in their own way. You couldn’t write Ulysses to order!
What are your writing quirks and habits?
Basically, I need fewer quirks and better habits. I have a problem concentrating, and tend to graze the internet too much when I should be writing. I also have a job that I am lucky to have, and which has to take priority. I should really make myself write a minimum number of words every day as soon as I get home, even if it is rubbish. Kingsley Amis always did 500 words in the morning, knowing that he would probably hit the sauce at lunchtime.
What's children's cartoon best represents your personality?
Now and then I sort of identify with Brian, the dog in Family Guy. Though I sound much more like Stewie. In fact his accent’s so like mine I could do the voiceovers.
What question would you like to see in future interviews?
Why not ask a writer whether a landscape or cityscape has influenced them?
I hope you enjoy.
How have your travels impacted how you write and what you think of writing?
They have had an immense impact on what I write, I think, more than how I do it. For a start, living in poorer countries makes you less comfortable about the world. It also had an effect on my politics; I was in Ecuador for some months in 1991 and was aware that people there worried about being sucked into the violent drug economy that Colombia was fighting at the time. It made me ask whose fault that trade really was, and that partly drove The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán, which I wrote later that year – though it wasn’t to be published for many years.
But also, living in places such as Bhutan showed me that some very basic assumptions are not always shared. One example is the belief in the Judaeo-Christian world that you only walk the world once; but really, why should that be so? What is the life force that drives us, and does it survive us? This came out in my most recent book, Dog!
As to what I think of writing itself, I’m not sure. Being out and about in the world made me want to be engage with broader issues. But I don’t have an opinion on what others should write. If someone wants to write a novel about the failure of one marriage, or a piece about a spider’s web in the sunlight, they should.
What’s your favorite sentence or paragraph from one of your books? What does it mean to you?
“Outside, in the Vicar’s garden, the first leaf, a freak perhaps, de¬tached itself weeks early and fluttered its way to the ground like the fragments of a letter that Paul took from his pocket on a sunny Sunday fifty years later and tore into strips, then smaller strips, then smaller yet until nothing of its substance could be divined.”
This is from my second fiction book, Three Seasons. It’s a collection of three novellas set in England, and the paragraph is from the last of the three; it is about a moment in someone’s life when the distant past suddenly illuminates the present, so that he changes his mind about a step he was about to take. Three Seasons is the most personal thing I’ve written, in which I expressed my feelings about my own country, which I had just left.
What advice would you give other indie authors starting out?
That is hard, isn’t it – everyone is so different! I suppose I would say that they should write what their gut tells them to write, not what they or someone else thinks they should be writing. There are exceptions to that, of course. If you’re writing a genre book – say, a Regency bodice-ripper – you’ll need to know what your audience wants. There’s nothing wrong with that; writing for a market takes real craftsmanship. But the very best books don’t get written that way; they happen because the writer had something they wanted to get down on paper, for their own reasons, in their own way. You couldn’t write Ulysses to order!
What are your writing quirks and habits?
Basically, I need fewer quirks and better habits. I have a problem concentrating, and tend to graze the internet too much when I should be writing. I also have a job that I am lucky to have, and which has to take priority. I should really make myself write a minimum number of words every day as soon as I get home, even if it is rubbish. Kingsley Amis always did 500 words in the morning, knowing that he would probably hit the sauce at lunchtime.
What's children's cartoon best represents your personality?
Now and then I sort of identify with Brian, the dog in Family Guy. Though I sound much more like Stewie. In fact his accent’s so like mine I could do the voiceovers.
What question would you like to see in future interviews?
Why not ask a writer whether a landscape or cityscape has influenced them?
September 1, 2016
Review of Steven Pressfield's The War of Art
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
This book is first and foremost a treatise on writing as labor. Writing is work -- much like going to the gym, fighting a battle, or plowing a field. That is the philosophy of the book -- one I tend to agree with.
Haruki Murakami talked in much similar terms about writing in his book about running. He wrote a book about running and the discipline of running; but he was also talking about the virtues necessary to be a writer.
Much of the book talks about the forces of "Resistance." Think about resistance as the accumulated forces trying to get you not to write, not to finish, to say you're a writer but to really live life as a fraud. It also tells a story -- over a course of vignettes -- about how one writer deals with his personal form of resistance.
The book is about motivation and professionalism. There are parts about other things, but mostly the book is about those things. You may also like the chapters about muses. Most of the passages are written in 1-2 page vignettes. Thus, perhaps the best way to read this book is in five to ten minute sessions before you're about to write.
This book is unrateable. It’s clear the author’s audience is himself. You may rebuke, “When is writing not?” But honestly, this time it really is for himself. It is very personally written. (I've written something very similar for myself, and it reads similarly). Thus, much of it will not connect with you. When it does, though, it will likely connect deeply.
Does that make it a two-star, three-star, four-star...it doesn't matter.
If you need this book. Read this book. I didn't need to read this book, but I still benefited from it. If you really don't need this book because you never face resistance when you write, then you don't need this book at all.
Here is the strange thing, one section in particular – Resistance and Fundamentalism -- just blew me away. I’m also an International Relations scholar and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything on Fundamentalism that rang so clear and beautiful as that. If I could take those two or three pages and make them required reading for every IR scholar, I would.
Thank you, Mr. Pressfield. Well done.
This book is first and foremost a treatise on writing as labor. Writing is work -- much like going to the gym, fighting a battle, or plowing a field. That is the philosophy of the book -- one I tend to agree with.
Haruki Murakami talked in much similar terms about writing in his book about running. He wrote a book about running and the discipline of running; but he was also talking about the virtues necessary to be a writer.
Much of the book talks about the forces of "Resistance." Think about resistance as the accumulated forces trying to get you not to write, not to finish, to say you're a writer but to really live life as a fraud. It also tells a story -- over a course of vignettes -- about how one writer deals with his personal form of resistance.
The book is about motivation and professionalism. There are parts about other things, but mostly the book is about those things. You may also like the chapters about muses. Most of the passages are written in 1-2 page vignettes. Thus, perhaps the best way to read this book is in five to ten minute sessions before you're about to write.
This book is unrateable. It’s clear the author’s audience is himself. You may rebuke, “When is writing not?” But honestly, this time it really is for himself. It is very personally written. (I've written something very similar for myself, and it reads similarly). Thus, much of it will not connect with you. When it does, though, it will likely connect deeply.
Does that make it a two-star, three-star, four-star...it doesn't matter.
If you need this book. Read this book. I didn't need to read this book, but I still benefited from it. If you really don't need this book because you never face resistance when you write, then you don't need this book at all.
Here is the strange thing, one section in particular – Resistance and Fundamentalism -- just blew me away. I’m also an International Relations scholar and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything on Fundamentalism that rang so clear and beautiful as that. If I could take those two or three pages and make them required reading for every IR scholar, I would.
Thank you, Mr. Pressfield. Well done.
August 29, 2016
Imagining Dad
Years after he died, I imagine running into my dad at some bar. Perhaps some tiki bar in the keys with coconut bowls for tropical drinks. He’s wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt; he has that weird not-even-trying haircut; and he’s dancing with a girl.
After the divorce, I don’t think my dad ever dated another girl. Not one other girl ever again. He had married my mom when he was so young. I think he was eighteen. When he got divorced he was then in his forties. He drank a lot. He got depressed. But I don’t remember him ever dating anyone.
And then the medical problems started. Perhaps the irregular work had started not too long after that. Too much free time, and then he drank.
I remember crushing beer cans with a big weight out in the back yard. There were always beer cans to crush. When we filled up enough bags with crushed beer cans we could go to the movies. Now that I think about it, going to the movies was expensive. One adult and two kids and maybe popcorn and a drink.
That’s a lot of beer cans.
I was probably in middle school when the very serious health problems started. It's hard to remember if there were any before that. My brother was in high school and had to take on a lot.
I do remember though that my dad helped my brother out his senior year. My brother got paid a lot of money the summer before he went into the Coast Guard. These were all subcontracting jobs so he could do that for my brother.
The stomach problems first; bad gas; hearing problems that resulted from him not taking care of his ears; and then later he had to have laser surgery for the cancerous cells on his face. This didn’t help his self-esteem. But I don’t remember dad ever dating other girls. He used to tease me quite a bit, ask whether I had any girlfriends--but I don’t remember him ever having any girlfriends.
Strange thing...I think dad and I got along well enough, but our relationship was complicated. After all, he was my part-time dad. I loved him without hesitation, but things are never simple in life. He must have thought I was a weird kid. I mean he knew that I wanted to become a writer. He knew that I liked Star Trek and science fiction. He must have known that a scrawny kid like me got beat up a lot in school. I had the reputation of being clumsy and not having a lot of common sense.
*
So I see him in the bar and he’s dancing with this girl. An older girl to be sure, just like him, but she has sass. I’m not sure what I should say or if I should say anything. If I approach him, will he just disappear again? I’ll wake up like it’s some sort of lame dream.
But I know this isn’t a dream.
What happens if I approach him? He suddenly becomes someone else and my whole fantasy collapses?
I don’t go up to him and say anything. I don’t acknowledge him but instead cast sidelong stares.
Then suddenly he looks over my way, nods, and then keeps on dancing. In his hand, he has a beer. If he did have another life, it figures he would be drinking again.
*
He quit smoking and drinking. His health depended on it and we were all grateful that he did this for us. It was probably one of the best gifts he ever gave to us.
Life could get complicated. But this wasn’t complicated.
He did a good thing.
*
The future is not necessarily a place for my dad. After all, the future has computers, iPods, and other digital crap he wouldn’t necessarily be interested in.
But also, it’s plausible that there could be a future with my dad in it. After all, there will still be thrift
stores, beaches, snorkeling, and lobster season. He would never know what to do with an iPod but he could sure rig a cooler for lobster season.
He would find old stuff nobody else wanted and build what he needed.
He was clever that way.
*
I start hanging out at all my dad’s favorite places. I hang out at the bars in Key West, the thrift stores, hoping to spot him. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of him. But usually it’s the times when I’m not even really looking for him that he appears to me most clearly.
Always I see him from a distance. Always he’s just relaxing, and always I feel like if I were to approach him he would disappear for good.
*
One day, I go snorkeling by myself. I don’t take the cooler. Perhaps by this time, I’ve thrown it out. I don’t exactly remember. I head out at his favorite lobster spot around dawn. I start swimming. I’m not looking for my dad out here. I try to just be still. I try to find a time before and past iPods and computers, before his divorce and illness but past his death. I try to just swim and see the ocean from his perspective. I try to see things his way for once. I try not to try. It’s in these moments, when nothing exists and nothing is real, that I’m most apt to feel him next to me.
This time, in the ocean, he doesn’t nod at me or wink. Instead, he grabs my hand. When I feel him I see him in his mask and snorkel. He points vigorously. Real or not, he knows where to find the lobsters.
After the divorce, I don’t think my dad ever dated another girl. Not one other girl ever again. He had married my mom when he was so young. I think he was eighteen. When he got divorced he was then in his forties. He drank a lot. He got depressed. But I don’t remember him ever dating anyone.
And then the medical problems started. Perhaps the irregular work had started not too long after that. Too much free time, and then he drank.
I remember crushing beer cans with a big weight out in the back yard. There were always beer cans to crush. When we filled up enough bags with crushed beer cans we could go to the movies. Now that I think about it, going to the movies was expensive. One adult and two kids and maybe popcorn and a drink.
That’s a lot of beer cans.
I was probably in middle school when the very serious health problems started. It's hard to remember if there were any before that. My brother was in high school and had to take on a lot.
I do remember though that my dad helped my brother out his senior year. My brother got paid a lot of money the summer before he went into the Coast Guard. These were all subcontracting jobs so he could do that for my brother.
The stomach problems first; bad gas; hearing problems that resulted from him not taking care of his ears; and then later he had to have laser surgery for the cancerous cells on his face. This didn’t help his self-esteem. But I don’t remember dad ever dating other girls. He used to tease me quite a bit, ask whether I had any girlfriends--but I don’t remember him ever having any girlfriends.
Strange thing...I think dad and I got along well enough, but our relationship was complicated. After all, he was my part-time dad. I loved him without hesitation, but things are never simple in life. He must have thought I was a weird kid. I mean he knew that I wanted to become a writer. He knew that I liked Star Trek and science fiction. He must have known that a scrawny kid like me got beat up a lot in school. I had the reputation of being clumsy and not having a lot of common sense.
*
So I see him in the bar and he’s dancing with this girl. An older girl to be sure, just like him, but she has sass. I’m not sure what I should say or if I should say anything. If I approach him, will he just disappear again? I’ll wake up like it’s some sort of lame dream.
But I know this isn’t a dream.
What happens if I approach him? He suddenly becomes someone else and my whole fantasy collapses?
I don’t go up to him and say anything. I don’t acknowledge him but instead cast sidelong stares.
Then suddenly he looks over my way, nods, and then keeps on dancing. In his hand, he has a beer. If he did have another life, it figures he would be drinking again.
*
He quit smoking and drinking. His health depended on it and we were all grateful that he did this for us. It was probably one of the best gifts he ever gave to us.
Life could get complicated. But this wasn’t complicated.
He did a good thing.
*
The future is not necessarily a place for my dad. After all, the future has computers, iPods, and other digital crap he wouldn’t necessarily be interested in.
But also, it’s plausible that there could be a future with my dad in it. After all, there will still be thrift
stores, beaches, snorkeling, and lobster season. He would never know what to do with an iPod but he could sure rig a cooler for lobster season.
He would find old stuff nobody else wanted and build what he needed.
He was clever that way.
*
I start hanging out at all my dad’s favorite places. I hang out at the bars in Key West, the thrift stores, hoping to spot him. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of him. But usually it’s the times when I’m not even really looking for him that he appears to me most clearly.
Always I see him from a distance. Always he’s just relaxing, and always I feel like if I were to approach him he would disappear for good.
*
One day, I go snorkeling by myself. I don’t take the cooler. Perhaps by this time, I’ve thrown it out. I don’t exactly remember. I head out at his favorite lobster spot around dawn. I start swimming. I’m not looking for my dad out here. I try to just be still. I try to find a time before and past iPods and computers, before his divorce and illness but past his death. I try to just swim and see the ocean from his perspective. I try to see things his way for once. I try not to try. It’s in these moments, when nothing exists and nothing is real, that I’m most apt to feel him next to me.
This time, in the ocean, he doesn’t nod at me or wink. Instead, he grabs my hand. When I feel him I see him in his mask and snorkel. He points vigorously. Real or not, he knows where to find the lobsters.
August 26, 2016
Do We Let the Cat Burn?
I remember clearly something Lester Goran told me in creative writing class once. He said if your house was burning down and it was a choice between saving your manuscript and saving your cat, a real author would save their cat.
The point he was trying to make was that all good writing comes from a well-spring of humanism. If we can sympathize with our cat over a bunch of paper then we can create characters with love.
But that brings up another good question. If we begin to sympathize with our characters as real people, do we then care for them as real people?
Do we then let the cat burn?
The point he was trying to make was that all good writing comes from a well-spring of humanism. If we can sympathize with our cat over a bunch of paper then we can create characters with love.
But that brings up another good question. If we begin to sympathize with our characters as real people, do we then care for them as real people?
Do we then let the cat burn?
