Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 35
March 27, 2016
Life On 1£ A Week
It is a strange thing to live in poverty when you have a job. I don't mean a minimum wage job, of course, because it's very hard not to live in poverty on minimum wage. I'm talking about the peculiar, "respectable" poverty of the underpaid professional.
As you know by now, when I graduated from college, I went to work as a parole officer -- not because I wanted to, but because it was the only game in town. I was a Criminal Justice major, none of the police or sheriff's departments were biting, and the Federal agencies were hopelessly out of reach, so when the offer floated my way I grabbed it, as a drowning man grabs a life preserver, not necessarily grasping in the moment that he is not actually saving his life but simply decreasing the speed at which he will die.
The starting salary for my job in 1997 was $19,800 a year. After taxes and union dues, that amounted to about $14,800. After deducting what I'd pay in student loans for the same period, it was $11,800. After deducting rent, it was $6,810. After deducting utilities, $5,125. After deducting my city parking permit, $4,925. Even in 1997, even in small-town Pennsylvania, even with a commute that lasted exactly how long it took me to cross the street, $4,925 a year is pretty damned tough to live on. It isn't impossible by any means, and people make do with less, but for a middle-class kid whose only experience with privation was the self-inflicted, collegiate kind, it was an eye-opener.
The first thing I noticed was the constant hunger. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that my chief memory of that time was trying to eat on a food budget that amounted to about $5 a day. Breakfast was no problem. I lived above a diner and could purchase an egg-and-cheese sandwich and a coffee for a little over two dollars. I could not afford to eat out at lunch, however, so I had to walk home and cook a very carefully measured-out portion of No Frills Brand Spaghetti. Tomato sauce and butter being luxuries I could very seldom afford, I sprayed the noodles with Pam and gave them a dusting of garlic salt, which was one of the few spices I could obtain from the 99c Store, to add the illusion of flavor. That and a glass of water constituted my midday meal. Dinner, which I ate at five o'clock, was the same thing. By seven, I was hungry again, but could not eat until the following morning. I often went to bed tormented by stomach pangs, and I have vivid recollections of waking at 3 AM to ransack my little slot kitchen, hoping to find a sauce packet or a crust of bread or even a breath mint left in a drawer by a previous tenant, and never, ever succeeding.
Because my car had broken down and I lacked the money to fix it, I was forced to do all my grocery shopping from the farmer's market down the street. In practical terms this was both more expensive and more wasteful than the grocery store, because the meat, vegetables and bread I bought from the market were free of preservatives, and if they weren't eaten in 24 - 72 hours the only thing they fed was my garbage can. At the same time, the lengths I went to ration the food I did have were in retrospect somewhat ridiculous. At some point or other I did manage to lay hands on a jar of tomato sauce, and I have a vivid memory, when it was finally empty, of refusing to throw it away but instead pouring a batch of just-cooked spaghetti into it, sealing the jar, and then shaking it for several minutes. By this method I managed to obtain a sauce coating per noodle of about 1/32 of an inch. I considered it a stroke of absolute genius.
Aside from hunger, there was a constant battle to save money in small ways. I could not afford to wash my clothes at a laundromat, so I opted for the 19th century method of filling my bathtub with hot water and dish soap, stirring the clothes with a broom handle, and then laying them on the radiator to dry. In another stroke of genius, which ended up looking suspiciously like idiocy, I tried to use a steam iron to speed-dry a dress shirt that I needed for court the following morning. Oddly enough, I managed to reduce the shirt almost to ashes without drying it, which I would have thought physically impossible. I was so convinced it was a fluke that I destroyed two more shirts, really good ones I might add, before I abandoned the method.
Poverty of this sort is not the poverty of, say, a homeless man. It is not the poverty of my next door neighbors at the time, a husband and wife with two children whose apartment was no larger than mine. It is not poverty at all, really, but rather what George Orwell called "life on 1£ a week." It is a constant awareness of the emptiness of your belly and your pockets, and of the things you cannot do and cannot have. Among the things I could not do during this period were eat at a restaurant of any kind after ten o'clock in the morning, go on a date, go for a drive, see a movie, drink a beer, rent a DVD, buy a book, travel (even by bus), attend a concert, or even enter a department store -- not, at any rate, without the knowledge that I would be leaving empty-handed. Daily life consists of sleep, work, and then a kind of idle torpor between the time you get home and the time you fall into bed, during which it is nearly impossible to do anything, since, after all, there almost nothing for you to do.
Worse than any physical suffering or mental depression
caused by life on 1£ a week is the never-ceasing taxation of one's dignity. The sole of your dress shoe comes away from the upper; you can't afford to have it resoled so you glue it yourself, but the glue doesn't hold, and now you flap when you walk. A pretty girl flirts with you but you back away, knowing that you can't afford to take her to dinner or even go Dutch at a cheap restaurant. Co-workers, not grasping the depth or your poverty and feeling snubbed by your refusal to drink or lunch with them, ostracize you as a snob. Hunger-induced weight loss requires you punch new holes in your belt with a screwdriver, but you botch the job and ruin your belt, and now you have to use a safety pin and pray nobody notices. Though it is fifty degrees outside the landlord hasn't turned the heat on yet, but you daren't complain because you are six days behind on your rent and won't have it for another three days. A close friend is getting married in the next state, and not only can't you afford to go to the wedding, you can't send a present or even a check, with the result that his newly-minted bride despises you from that day forward.
This was my experience, or some of it anyway, with "respectable" poverty, the poverty of a man who wore a suit and tie to work, had health benefits, and even carried a badge, yet who had to eat No Frills Brand spaghetti twice a day and not occasionally chowed down on rotten meat because hey, if you cook it long enough, it's not rotten, it's just burnt. There was nothing whatsoever unique about it. Millions were in the same boat. Millions more are today. And yet according to the government I was not below the poverty line, not in need of assistance, and did not qualify for special terms on my student loans.
After all, I had a job.
As you know by now, when I graduated from college, I went to work as a parole officer -- not because I wanted to, but because it was the only game in town. I was a Criminal Justice major, none of the police or sheriff's departments were biting, and the Federal agencies were hopelessly out of reach, so when the offer floated my way I grabbed it, as a drowning man grabs a life preserver, not necessarily grasping in the moment that he is not actually saving his life but simply decreasing the speed at which he will die.
The starting salary for my job in 1997 was $19,800 a year. After taxes and union dues, that amounted to about $14,800. After deducting what I'd pay in student loans for the same period, it was $11,800. After deducting rent, it was $6,810. After deducting utilities, $5,125. After deducting my city parking permit, $4,925. Even in 1997, even in small-town Pennsylvania, even with a commute that lasted exactly how long it took me to cross the street, $4,925 a year is pretty damned tough to live on. It isn't impossible by any means, and people make do with less, but for a middle-class kid whose only experience with privation was the self-inflicted, collegiate kind, it was an eye-opener.
The first thing I noticed was the constant hunger. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that my chief memory of that time was trying to eat on a food budget that amounted to about $5 a day. Breakfast was no problem. I lived above a diner and could purchase an egg-and-cheese sandwich and a coffee for a little over two dollars. I could not afford to eat out at lunch, however, so I had to walk home and cook a very carefully measured-out portion of No Frills Brand Spaghetti. Tomato sauce and butter being luxuries I could very seldom afford, I sprayed the noodles with Pam and gave them a dusting of garlic salt, which was one of the few spices I could obtain from the 99c Store, to add the illusion of flavor. That and a glass of water constituted my midday meal. Dinner, which I ate at five o'clock, was the same thing. By seven, I was hungry again, but could not eat until the following morning. I often went to bed tormented by stomach pangs, and I have vivid recollections of waking at 3 AM to ransack my little slot kitchen, hoping to find a sauce packet or a crust of bread or even a breath mint left in a drawer by a previous tenant, and never, ever succeeding.
Because my car had broken down and I lacked the money to fix it, I was forced to do all my grocery shopping from the farmer's market down the street. In practical terms this was both more expensive and more wasteful than the grocery store, because the meat, vegetables and bread I bought from the market were free of preservatives, and if they weren't eaten in 24 - 72 hours the only thing they fed was my garbage can. At the same time, the lengths I went to ration the food I did have were in retrospect somewhat ridiculous. At some point or other I did manage to lay hands on a jar of tomato sauce, and I have a vivid memory, when it was finally empty, of refusing to throw it away but instead pouring a batch of just-cooked spaghetti into it, sealing the jar, and then shaking it for several minutes. By this method I managed to obtain a sauce coating per noodle of about 1/32 of an inch. I considered it a stroke of absolute genius.
Aside from hunger, there was a constant battle to save money in small ways. I could not afford to wash my clothes at a laundromat, so I opted for the 19th century method of filling my bathtub with hot water and dish soap, stirring the clothes with a broom handle, and then laying them on the radiator to dry. In another stroke of genius, which ended up looking suspiciously like idiocy, I tried to use a steam iron to speed-dry a dress shirt that I needed for court the following morning. Oddly enough, I managed to reduce the shirt almost to ashes without drying it, which I would have thought physically impossible. I was so convinced it was a fluke that I destroyed two more shirts, really good ones I might add, before I abandoned the method.
Poverty of this sort is not the poverty of, say, a homeless man. It is not the poverty of my next door neighbors at the time, a husband and wife with two children whose apartment was no larger than mine. It is not poverty at all, really, but rather what George Orwell called "life on 1£ a week." It is a constant awareness of the emptiness of your belly and your pockets, and of the things you cannot do and cannot have. Among the things I could not do during this period were eat at a restaurant of any kind after ten o'clock in the morning, go on a date, go for a drive, see a movie, drink a beer, rent a DVD, buy a book, travel (even by bus), attend a concert, or even enter a department store -- not, at any rate, without the knowledge that I would be leaving empty-handed. Daily life consists of sleep, work, and then a kind of idle torpor between the time you get home and the time you fall into bed, during which it is nearly impossible to do anything, since, after all, there almost nothing for you to do.
Worse than any physical suffering or mental depression
caused by life on 1£ a week is the never-ceasing taxation of one's dignity. The sole of your dress shoe comes away from the upper; you can't afford to have it resoled so you glue it yourself, but the glue doesn't hold, and now you flap when you walk. A pretty girl flirts with you but you back away, knowing that you can't afford to take her to dinner or even go Dutch at a cheap restaurant. Co-workers, not grasping the depth or your poverty and feeling snubbed by your refusal to drink or lunch with them, ostracize you as a snob. Hunger-induced weight loss requires you punch new holes in your belt with a screwdriver, but you botch the job and ruin your belt, and now you have to use a safety pin and pray nobody notices. Though it is fifty degrees outside the landlord hasn't turned the heat on yet, but you daren't complain because you are six days behind on your rent and won't have it for another three days. A close friend is getting married in the next state, and not only can't you afford to go to the wedding, you can't send a present or even a check, with the result that his newly-minted bride despises you from that day forward.
This was my experience, or some of it anyway, with "respectable" poverty, the poverty of a man who wore a suit and tie to work, had health benefits, and even carried a badge, yet who had to eat No Frills Brand spaghetti twice a day and not occasionally chowed down on rotten meat because hey, if you cook it long enough, it's not rotten, it's just burnt. There was nothing whatsoever unique about it. Millions were in the same boat. Millions more are today. And yet according to the government I was not below the poverty line, not in need of assistance, and did not qualify for special terms on my student loans.
After all, I had a job.
March 22, 2016
Thoughts on the Decomposition of an Apple
Every day for a week now, or even longer, I’ve passed by a half-eaten apple which lies in the alley behind my house. It was one of those yellow-red apples, and had evidently been quite large, for it looked to have been sliced into sections at one point, and even as a section the owner had thrown it away only partially eaten.
It’s wintertime in Burbank, which means that while temperatures range from mild to hot during the day, insect activity is at a minimum because it gets quite cold – by local standards, anyway – at night. Because of this the normal panoply of flies, ants and what-not, which would have devoured the thing to its core in a matter of hours, never appeared. Day after day it just lay there in the sun, the rain, and the chill of darkness. The first few times I passed by it, heading to the gym or for coffee in the mornings, I wondered, because of the temperatures at night and the lack of bugs, it is still edible? If I was homeless I could pick that up, slice the dirty half-eaten part away, wash it and eat it. That got me thinking about whether or not I would have a knife if I was homeless, and whether it would be a plastic knife or a dull table knife or something with an edge, like a kitchen knife or a jack knife, and whether its edge would have blunted since I probably had no means of sharpening it except on a rock, assuming the right type of rock could be found. Then I thought about water and whether water is precious to the homeless. When I worked at Optic Nerve Studios anyone could have walked up to the hose on the side of the building and turned it on and filled their water bottle or cup or or jug or what have you full of cold clean water as often as they liked, and I imagine if you are homeless you know where the public parks are and those always have water fountains. I imagined the homeless, even when they are half-crazy, have bags of tricks and stores of knowledge for obtaining water which people who have homes with running water do not. But it any case, I wondered whether I’d have water to spare to wash the apple free of road-grit after I sliced it with the knife that I hoped I’d have with me, both for such moments as this and for other moments when it was necessary to defend myself against other homeless people or robbers or against the sort of human beings who prey on the homeless for no other reason than that they are homeless.
(As if having no home of your own was not sufficient punishment for whatever collection of bad luck and bad choices left them homeless in the first place.)
So every day I walked by the apple and every day it still looked edible until at last the mold and bacteria and the sun and the rain perhaps a possum – I saw one waddling ratlike over a wall just the other day – worried it into something which no longer resembled an apple, something only the ants could possibly want. And I thought it was a fine thing that I had a home, small as it was, with its own orange tree in the yard, and that when I was hungry and had nothing else, I could simply go into the yard and twist one of the heavy ripe oranges off its branch and take it inside and run water over it from the tap in the sink and then slice it into sections with my good knife and fill my mouth with the sweetness so keen it made my taste buds cramp. Of course I did not need to take the orange inside; there was a hose on the lawn so I could wash it right there, wash it while it still hung drowsily on the branch, and eat it without going inside at all. I could do this whenever the season was ripe for oranges, and the tree was so heavy with them that it would take a long time to run out, and some oranges would rot on the vine before I had a chance to eat them all. And this tree was mine because I paid the landlord for the little one-room house, and the yard came with the house, and so the tree and the hose, and all these things were mine so long as I kept paying the landlord. So long as I kept paying the landlord I could push the gate open every morning and walk down the alley to buy a cup of coffee, and pass the apple decomposing in the street without having to pick it up and slice off the dirty part with my dull knife and wash it in precious water that was probably needed for drinking, just so I could put something in my belly. So long as I could pay the landlord I could pay for other things and did not need that apple, and neither had the person who had thrown it half-eaten into the street. But somewhere, someone would have been glad to have it.
It’s wintertime in Burbank, which means that while temperatures range from mild to hot during the day, insect activity is at a minimum because it gets quite cold – by local standards, anyway – at night. Because of this the normal panoply of flies, ants and what-not, which would have devoured the thing to its core in a matter of hours, never appeared. Day after day it just lay there in the sun, the rain, and the chill of darkness. The first few times I passed by it, heading to the gym or for coffee in the mornings, I wondered, because of the temperatures at night and the lack of bugs, it is still edible? If I was homeless I could pick that up, slice the dirty half-eaten part away, wash it and eat it. That got me thinking about whether or not I would have a knife if I was homeless, and whether it would be a plastic knife or a dull table knife or something with an edge, like a kitchen knife or a jack knife, and whether its edge would have blunted since I probably had no means of sharpening it except on a rock, assuming the right type of rock could be found. Then I thought about water and whether water is precious to the homeless. When I worked at Optic Nerve Studios anyone could have walked up to the hose on the side of the building and turned it on and filled their water bottle or cup or or jug or what have you full of cold clean water as often as they liked, and I imagine if you are homeless you know where the public parks are and those always have water fountains. I imagined the homeless, even when they are half-crazy, have bags of tricks and stores of knowledge for obtaining water which people who have homes with running water do not. But it any case, I wondered whether I’d have water to spare to wash the apple free of road-grit after I sliced it with the knife that I hoped I’d have with me, both for such moments as this and for other moments when it was necessary to defend myself against other homeless people or robbers or against the sort of human beings who prey on the homeless for no other reason than that they are homeless.
(As if having no home of your own was not sufficient punishment for whatever collection of bad luck and bad choices left them homeless in the first place.)
So every day I walked by the apple and every day it still looked edible until at last the mold and bacteria and the sun and the rain perhaps a possum – I saw one waddling ratlike over a wall just the other day – worried it into something which no longer resembled an apple, something only the ants could possibly want. And I thought it was a fine thing that I had a home, small as it was, with its own orange tree in the yard, and that when I was hungry and had nothing else, I could simply go into the yard and twist one of the heavy ripe oranges off its branch and take it inside and run water over it from the tap in the sink and then slice it into sections with my good knife and fill my mouth with the sweetness so keen it made my taste buds cramp. Of course I did not need to take the orange inside; there was a hose on the lawn so I could wash it right there, wash it while it still hung drowsily on the branch, and eat it without going inside at all. I could do this whenever the season was ripe for oranges, and the tree was so heavy with them that it would take a long time to run out, and some oranges would rot on the vine before I had a chance to eat them all. And this tree was mine because I paid the landlord for the little one-room house, and the yard came with the house, and so the tree and the hose, and all these things were mine so long as I kept paying the landlord. So long as I kept paying the landlord I could push the gate open every morning and walk down the alley to buy a cup of coffee, and pass the apple decomposing in the street without having to pick it up and slice off the dirty part with my dull knife and wash it in precious water that was probably needed for drinking, just so I could put something in my belly. So long as I could pay the landlord I could pay for other things and did not need that apple, and neither had the person who had thrown it half-eaten into the street. But somewhere, someone would have been glad to have it.
March 19, 2016
Dumb Criminal Stories: or, Don't Take A Bag of Frozen Peas to a Sledgehammer Fight
My last blog was rather heavy stuff, so I thought I'd lighten the mood a little here by sharing a few of my favorite Dumb Criminal Stories.
I spent my mid-late 20s and early 30s in law enforcement, and during that period I encountered some of the dumbest human beings imaginable, people so stupid you had to wonder how they could get out of bed without being hit by a car. As I've said before, I stayed in the profession longer than I should have in large part because I couldn't tear myself away from the parade of idiocy that marched through my office every day. Here are a few examples, some from my own experience, some told to me by co-workers and friends in the business.
Early in my tenure as a parole officer I encountered a teenage boy who had been charged with such crimes as riot, causing a catastrophe, possession of explosives and all sorts of other offenses I'd never seen before. When I asked him to explain himself, he said that he and his friends had decided to build a pipe bomb and blow up the port-a-potty on a nearby construction site. One weekend when the site was deserted they activated the bomb, hurled it into the toilet, and took cover in a ditch. Unfortunately for them the bomb failed to explode. They were now left with the tricky problem of deciding whether to leave the bomb and risk it detonating beneath some unsuspecting construction worker on Monday, or fishing it out themselves. My man drew the short straw, returned to the john, and thrust his hand inside the reservoir of germ-killing fluid beneath the toilet, fishing for the bomb. At last his fumbling fingers located it, whereupon it exploded. Flung high in the air on a wave of shattered plastic, toilet deodorizer and human shit, he landed many yards away, riddled with shrapnel and with his foot hanging by a thread from his ankle (why it was his foot and not his hand I don't know, but then I don't know why he blew up the fucking toilet in the first place, either). The doctors told him in the E.R. that he would almost certainly die of infection, but perhaps the deodorizer killed it; at any rate he didn't die, didn't lose his foot, and didn't do a day in jail for his numerous felony crimes. The judge deemed him too stupid for prison. So maybe he wasn't that dumb after all.
Not long after Porta Man I met "Jenny," who'd been busted for drug possession. Taking down her basic information after sentencing, a process called "intake" and very similar to booking, I asked her if she had anything she'd like to state for the record. Her reply is burned in my brain:
"Yeah. I smoke, like, a shit-ton of weed, yo. I mean a shit-ton. Fucking MAD weed, yo. And you know, sometimes other things. A little meth. A little crack now and again. Put X in my weed, too. Sometimes PCP. So can you put it down on the form that I don't want to be drug tested?"
I stared at her for some seconds and then realized she was completely serious. So without cracking a smile, I wrote, in very large letters on the form: CLIENT DOES NOT WISHED TO BE DRUG TESTED BECAUSE SHE SMOKES MAD WEED. "Is this okay?" I asked, looking as innocent as humanly possible.
"Shit yeah!" She exclaimed joyously.
"Do you mind signing it?"
"Shit no!"
And yet somehow she had the money for all that weed.
Then there were the robbers. The first one worked as a security guard for $6/hr. One night he was up all night watching movies like "Goodfellas" and "New Jack City" and decided to hell with the straight and narrow, what they wanted was a life of crime. He promptly robbed the local 7/11, but they hadn't even finished counting the take -- about $50 in cash -- when the police knocked down their door and busted them. "How did you find them so fast?" I asked the arresting officer later on. His reply was memorable:
"Well, for starters, the moron robbed the 7/11 down the street from his house where he goes every day for coffee and everyone knows him."
"He didn't wear a mask?" I asked, astonished.
The officer laughed. "Not only did he not wear a mask, he actually wore his security guard uniform to the robbery! Which has a fucking name tag on it!"
A second robber, a street mugger, was arrested on suspicion and put in a lineup. When the victim correctly identified him through the two-way glass, he exploded with rage. "There's no way the bitch could pick me out?" he screamed.
"Why is that?" Asked the prosecutor.
"Because I was wearing a ski mask when I fuckin' robbed her!"
Then there was the stalker who obsessed over a beautiful college girl who roomed in his house. When she discovered he'd been "at" her underwear drawer on a regular basis, he beat her with a bag of frozen peas from the kitchen and shoved her into the tool shed behind the house. Promise you won't move out, he said, and I'll release you. Okay, said the girl, I promise. The stalker opened the door and promptly got a face full of sledgehammer. The moral of this particular tale is that if you are going to imprison someone, a shed full of deadly weapons is probably not the place to do it.
Or, put more simply: don't bring a bag of frozen peas to a sledgehammer fight.
I spent my mid-late 20s and early 30s in law enforcement, and during that period I encountered some of the dumbest human beings imaginable, people so stupid you had to wonder how they could get out of bed without being hit by a car. As I've said before, I stayed in the profession longer than I should have in large part because I couldn't tear myself away from the parade of idiocy that marched through my office every day. Here are a few examples, some from my own experience, some told to me by co-workers and friends in the business.
Early in my tenure as a parole officer I encountered a teenage boy who had been charged with such crimes as riot, causing a catastrophe, possession of explosives and all sorts of other offenses I'd never seen before. When I asked him to explain himself, he said that he and his friends had decided to build a pipe bomb and blow up the port-a-potty on a nearby construction site. One weekend when the site was deserted they activated the bomb, hurled it into the toilet, and took cover in a ditch. Unfortunately for them the bomb failed to explode. They were now left with the tricky problem of deciding whether to leave the bomb and risk it detonating beneath some unsuspecting construction worker on Monday, or fishing it out themselves. My man drew the short straw, returned to the john, and thrust his hand inside the reservoir of germ-killing fluid beneath the toilet, fishing for the bomb. At last his fumbling fingers located it, whereupon it exploded. Flung high in the air on a wave of shattered plastic, toilet deodorizer and human shit, he landed many yards away, riddled with shrapnel and with his foot hanging by a thread from his ankle (why it was his foot and not his hand I don't know, but then I don't know why he blew up the fucking toilet in the first place, either). The doctors told him in the E.R. that he would almost certainly die of infection, but perhaps the deodorizer killed it; at any rate he didn't die, didn't lose his foot, and didn't do a day in jail for his numerous felony crimes. The judge deemed him too stupid for prison. So maybe he wasn't that dumb after all.
Not long after Porta Man I met "Jenny," who'd been busted for drug possession. Taking down her basic information after sentencing, a process called "intake" and very similar to booking, I asked her if she had anything she'd like to state for the record. Her reply is burned in my brain:
"Yeah. I smoke, like, a shit-ton of weed, yo. I mean a shit-ton. Fucking MAD weed, yo. And you know, sometimes other things. A little meth. A little crack now and again. Put X in my weed, too. Sometimes PCP. So can you put it down on the form that I don't want to be drug tested?"
I stared at her for some seconds and then realized she was completely serious. So without cracking a smile, I wrote, in very large letters on the form: CLIENT DOES NOT WISHED TO BE DRUG TESTED BECAUSE SHE SMOKES MAD WEED. "Is this okay?" I asked, looking as innocent as humanly possible.
"Shit yeah!" She exclaimed joyously.
"Do you mind signing it?"
"Shit no!"
And yet somehow she had the money for all that weed.
Then there were the robbers. The first one worked as a security guard for $6/hr. One night he was up all night watching movies like "Goodfellas" and "New Jack City" and decided to hell with the straight and narrow, what they wanted was a life of crime. He promptly robbed the local 7/11, but they hadn't even finished counting the take -- about $50 in cash -- when the police knocked down their door and busted them. "How did you find them so fast?" I asked the arresting officer later on. His reply was memorable:
"Well, for starters, the moron robbed the 7/11 down the street from his house where he goes every day for coffee and everyone knows him."
"He didn't wear a mask?" I asked, astonished.
The officer laughed. "Not only did he not wear a mask, he actually wore his security guard uniform to the robbery! Which has a fucking name tag on it!"
A second robber, a street mugger, was arrested on suspicion and put in a lineup. When the victim correctly identified him through the two-way glass, he exploded with rage. "There's no way the bitch could pick me out?" he screamed.
"Why is that?" Asked the prosecutor.
"Because I was wearing a ski mask when I fuckin' robbed her!"
Then there was the stalker who obsessed over a beautiful college girl who roomed in his house. When she discovered he'd been "at" her underwear drawer on a regular basis, he beat her with a bag of frozen peas from the kitchen and shoved her into the tool shed behind the house. Promise you won't move out, he said, and I'll release you. Okay, said the girl, I promise. The stalker opened the door and promptly got a face full of sledgehammer. The moral of this particular tale is that if you are going to imprison someone, a shed full of deadly weapons is probably not the place to do it.
Or, put more simply: don't bring a bag of frozen peas to a sledgehammer fight.
The Beach: A Letter to Myself from 1998
Once upon a time I carried a badge. Truth be told, in a law enforcement career that spanned most of an unhappy decade, I carried three different badges, and the first was that of a Probation & Parole Officer. Believe me when I tell you that this was far from my dream job. In fact, when I was in college, studying Criminal Justice, I can't remember taking a single course on the subject. My professional aspirations were on conventional police work, followed by a glamorous stint in one of the Federal agencies: FBI, DEA, ATF. I imagined myself in a raid jacket, toting a shotgun and sporting mirrored shades, kicking down doors on meth labs or Mafia number banks, or working undercover against international gun runners, or engaged in shootouts with bank robbers in New York or Chicago. The idea of working as a probation and parole officer in a dismal, crime-ridden Pennsylvania town was not the stuff of which my dreams were composed. Nevertheless, when I belatedly graduated from college in 1997, that's where I ended up. Any port in a storm for the sailor; for the college grad, any job that fits your major.
I stayed at the Probation Department for thirty months, which was about eighteen more than I intended and about twenty-nine more than I wanted. Although I eventually became reasonably competent at the incredibly varied and demanding work the job required, I can't say I ever liked it. On the contrary, quite frequently, I hated the hell out of it. The pay was horrific, the politics Byzantine, the stress levels unimaginable. The sort of people I had to deal with -- alcoholics, drug addicts, gangbangers, thieves, wife beaters, rapists, arsonists, all-purpose thugs, and the criminally insane -- were hardly stimulating company. "No one knows what it's like to be hated," quoth The Who, but I do. Nearly everyone who walked through my door hated me with varying intensities of hatred, and even those who didn't hate me brought plenty of baggage into the room. It is no easy thing to stand up to waves and waves of resentment and anger, day after day, especially when one has as much imagination as I do. Imagination is not necessarily an asset in law enforcement: indeed, men have been debarred from the profession for possessing too much of it. Imagination lies at the root of insecurities and fears the good lawman does not possess. It also has a nasty way of forcing one to look past symptoms to causes, which in turn forces your imaginative lawman to grasp that what he is doing, while probably necessary, is also futile. I realized this futility very early in my career, and believe me, it didn't help me get out of bed on rainy Monday mornings.
When, inevitably, I was asked why I hadn't moved on and found some other job in law enforcement, or quit the profession altogether, I always repeated the answer an FBI agent had given when asked why he endured working under a paranoid, power-mad maniac like J. Edgar Hoover:
"What?" He exclaimed. "And leave the circus?"
This was my stated reason, then and now, for why I lingered so long in a job I despised. The Parole Office was a daily carnival of human fuckuppery, and I, as one of the keepers, had a front row seat. Whenever I met with old friends from school now working "normal" cubicle jobs or toiling in graduate school, I was struck by how boring their lives sounded in comparison with mine. On any given day I might be in court, or out in the field serving a warrant, or listening to the confessions of a 300-lb crackhead, or doing any of a hundred other tasks which, however frustrating or dangerous they might have been, were rarely dull. Plus, I had free tickets to the human zoo.
As I said, this was the stated, cynical reason. But today I found something startling in a (proverbially) dusty Word file which I have been (proverbially) lugging with me, computer to computer, since 1998 or so. I haven't opened the file in more than ten years, and indeed, I had quite forgotten its existence. The words contained within I composed on my office computer ( and my God, I can picture that office so clearly: a converted closet by the main entrance, average temperature eighty-two degrees) when I ought to have been conducting official business. I can't remember what prompted me to write them, or to keep them once written, but the tone of the words is unmistakably driven not by cynicism but a form of thoughtful despair. Reading them now after all these years (and take a moment to think how the world has changed between 1998 and 2016), I can see that my mind has played tricks on me. I was not anywhere near as hard-bitten and misanthropic as I remember. On the contrary, beneath the inevitable armor plating that everyone in law enforcement or social work forges to protect themselves from the torrent of abuse they are subjected to on a daily basis, I was plainly suffering emotionally. It is true that there are elements of naivete, self-righteousness, class resentment and general self-pity in my suffering, but in fairness to myself, I was only 25 years old.
Here what I wrote in its entirety, back when Bill Clinton was in the White House, a gallon of gas cost $1.06, and nobody but a few spooks in the CIA had ever heard of Osama Bin Laden.
"Every morning, as I walk down to the beach to hold back the tide, I can’t help but wonder why it is you don’t help me.
"I know you see me. The view from your shaded porch must be very good. You cannot miss me as I pass, tools of trade in hand, a solitary soldier going to a battle which is not only unsung but mostly unspoken, a struggle fought before your eyes yet which it seems you cannot see, or seeing, do not care about. I spare you more than you spare me – a glance in your direction, puzzled, a bit hurt, a bit hopeful, and then I turn away, because though the morning is young, the sun is already very hot and I am not yet where I must be to face the day.
"It’s a typical one so far. I’m tired, the glare is terrible already though the sun is barely over the horizon, and a remnant of the headache I went to bed with throbs in my temples. What little energy I have is spent shutting out a mental image of what I left behind – the rumpled bed that always looks most comforting when I’m not in it, the lunch I so carefully packed last night that I forgot to bring with me, all those homey odds and ends that seem to have no special meaning until you can’t have them. Though my brain tells me it must be Monday, my body insists that it must be at least Thursday, for nothing else accounts for this weariness that lack of sleep has nothing to do with.
"So I take another look around, trying not to feel sorry for myself, trying not to feel bitter or burned-out, because the old-timers tell me I’m way too young for either state of mind. I don’t have to do this thing I do. I could toss these tools aside and stomp back up the beach, back to my third-hand Pontiac Sunbird that just squeaked through inspection, and go home. I could crank up the computer and have my resume in someone’s personnel office by this afternoon. A year from now, six months from now, tomorrow, I could be you -- nibbling Danish and wishing that Gary Larson hadn’t called it quits. Sometimes, yesterday, tomorrow, I want to be you. But not today.
"Today, something carries me forward, invisible strings that make this shabby puppet dance his futile dance. I won’t quit, today. Today I will do what I can, and then I will go home to the girl that cares about me. I try not to think about her much when I’m here. I have pictures, but they are tucked neatly away in the flap of these torn and faded cargo pants, close enough for moral support but too far to be a distraction. No, I shan’t think of her today. But in these few minutes of calm before I go to work, I often think of you, back there on the porch in the cool shade, crisp newspaper and low-fat bran muffin in hand, not seeing me or not caring, thumbing your way past the bad news en route to the funnies. I wonder what the view is like from up there. I wonder what your expensive designer coffee tastes like – I get mine from that machine in the snack-bar, forty-five cents a cup, as bad as it comes but hot – and I wonder, and I kneel down to unbuckle the Payless sandals I can’t afford to replace, what it is like to walk in your sleek leather loafers. I wonder about it the way I wonder about sleeping with women other than my girl – not meaning to do it, but curious all the same. What is it like not to have this wearying task? What is it like to make plans and see them come to fruition? What is it like to know that you can win, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and you will see it, if not today or next week, then sometime? What is it like to be you?
"We used to know each other, you and I, and not all that long ago. We sat next to each other in college – don’t you remember? You had your plans – medical school or law school or business school or some kind of school – and I had mine. But somewhere along the way, I glimpsed this strange war that goes on in front of us every day but of which we speak so little, and when school was over, I walked down to this metaphorical beach picked up my tools and every day since, for the last two years, it is here I have been. You used to stop me on my way to work, ask a few questions, give me a word of encouragement, a word of admiration I didn’t think you felt but which I greatly appreciated, and we’d shake hands and promise to do lunch, sometime. But over time the greetings became nods, and the nods became grunts, and now your eyes pass over me and through me as if I were a one of those pathetic tramps begging for change that we can almost will out of existence simply by not acknowledging them, because they dare to make us uncomfortable.
"It’s very difficult to get a jump on the tide. It always seems that no matter how early you get to the beach, you should have gotten there just a bit sooner. When I first got this job, I made a point of playing Early Bird, making my trek when the lights on your beach house were still dark and a cool breeze tinkled the chimes over your porch. I thought, with that sort of logic which is unarguably sound in theory yet somehow false in practice, that the extra effort would produce a return that would translate into less work for me down the road. I was wrong. Every now and then, in a fit of resolve, I try the experiment again, like an ex-alchemist who sneaks into his dusty old sanctum in the middle of the night, to see if his incantations can turn that lead pot into gold after all – maybe it’s him, maybe he flubbed the Latin, maybe he’s not waving the wand right, all of this can’t be work in a vacuum, can it? A whole science can’t be crap, can it? Eight million phrenologists couldn’t be wrong, could they?
"Could they?
"After a while I realized that if you come in a bit earlier every day, you will soon reach a point where you never actually leave. I stopped coming in early. But I didn’t stop coming. Not yet, anyway.
"So here I am, bare feet in the sand, tools at the ready, me versus the tide, and the opening bell is about to ring. There will be no final bell, no championship round, no denouement, because there is no end to the struggle, no climax, no clear definition of victory nor an instrument with which to make such a measurement. It is ceaseless, this conflict, and has no objective; it conflict for the sake of conflict, warfare for the sake of warfare, forever-everlasting. If I hadn’t shown up today, if I had called in and stayed dry in bed, it would have gone on anyway, just as it did before I arrived, just as it will when I finally cry uncle and stalk off this beach for the last time, to join you for coffee and Danish and Dilbert and the AM shock-jock of your choice. God did not kill Cain, after all; He merely sent him on his sorry way. And Cain bred. And bred. And bred. Believe me; he bred well. His children are as numerous as the drops of water that make up the ocean that is rolling in, now, foaming, ice-cold on my bare feet, carrying on its salty skin the detritus of all the things it has broken, the trillion sons of Cain who want to do to me what Cain did to Abel, and then, sweeping over my still and beaten form, crash up the beach to take you as well.
"It is my job to stop them.
"I am one of Them, the group you have entrusted to keep the tide at bay. Often, you don’t like me. Sometimes, I don’t like you. I know we don’t understand each other. But here we are on the beach together, and if time permits today, I may just ask you that question after all.
"Why don’t you help me?
"This beach belongs to all of us – me, you, your kids, my girl, the neighbor who plays guitar late into the evening and the one with the yapper dog you keep hoping will drop dead. All of us. Black, white; gay, straight; male, female. It’s our beach. Together we could keep it clean, keep the waves back, make it safe. Instead we delegate. A few sorry fools do the dirty work while the rest of you sit back in ease and comfort, listening to your boom-boxes and reading your Danielle Steel amidst the smell of sunscreen and hot-dogs. Delegating is the ultimate reward for civilization, the culmination of thousands of years of unrecorded history when it was not possible to delegate, when individual responsibility for the survival of the group could not be escaped any more than gravity could be escaped, when everyone had to pull their weight or die, period, like kibbutzim or a wolf-pack. That society has evolved – perhaps that is not the right world, evolved; perhaps devolved or mutated is a better word – to a point where a tiny group, not really an elite, not really the crème de la crème but simply a small fraction of the whole, a sub-unit, is responsible for the safety and security of the rest of the tribe, is as good as an example as any of the comfortable collapse that we find ourselves in, this strange state of affairs that has me here, struggling like an ant in the sand while you sit comfortably on your porch or your beach chair, oblivious to the plight which we both share. Civilization has allowed us to stratify into specialized castes, wholly interdependent and yet at the same time estranged from each other. The distillate of eight millennia of civilization is the fence, the country club, the gated community, the ability to remove oneself from the common herd and to look down at it in utter contempt. Before civilization, after all, there were no servant’s entrances. But while you sit, perfumed and pretty, at your banquet table, the barbarians are at the gate, and it is I, not you, who are responsible for keeping them at bay. I who am not welcome at your table, or your porch, or next to you on your beach-blanket any more than the criminals with whom I struggle against every day like the inexorable tide. My fight is your fight; my victory is your victory…and my defeat is your defeat. We are bound up. Inextricably. Yet you do not see me; you do not heed me; and if you take notice of me at all, it is to take issue with the way I hold my spoon, the way I swing my bucket, the manner in which I hold back this tide that wants to drown us both.
"I would like to think, as the sun blisters my shoulders and the cold salt water numbs my feet, as the waves pound me down into the rocky sand, as the riptide threatens to drag me out to sea and an early death, that in my hour of need I could look back and see you there, splashing into battle beside me, a bit late, perhaps, but there, and willing, because we are all in it together. I want to believe that. I really do.
"But I don’t turn around. The tide commands my full attention.
"You have a right to ask how you could help me – you, who have your own concerns, and the sad truth is that I do not really know. I have no answers, no quick and clever solutions that will make the ravening tide slacken and threaten us all no more. Perhaps there are no answers to give. But since the meaning of what we do is not in the victory, we must find it in the struggle. Perhaps it is within the struggle, set into motion by Cain all those thousands of years ago, that we find ourselves and our redemption.
"What is it I want from you? Not very much. I want you to think of me late at night when you relax against the cool sheets and the wind stirs the chimes on your porch. I want you to say a prayer for my safety. When you see me tomorrow, trudging through the sand to the water, raise a hand to me and wish me well on my way. Hold your tongue when I drop my bucket or fall flat on my face, and remember that all human beings make mistakes, even the ones entrusted with holding back the sea. Buy me a drink sometime, and when you do, do it for its own sake, not because you think it will get you out of a traffic ticket, or help to land your son or daughter a job.
"Know this much for sure. The tide was here yesterday and it is here today, now, lapping at your feet, and tomorrow it will creep closer. Sooner than you think, you will look down and see your picnic cooler gone, and if you are not careful, one day you may wake up from your pleasant drowse in the sun to find yourself drowning. When that happens it will be too late to wish me well or ill, or to curse my name, or to lift your voice to heaven and beg God to bring you back to shore. In case you haven’t noticed, God hasn’t been taking many requests lately.
"What He did do is give you the free will to make a difference in your own life and the life of your neighbor, sitting next to you in the sand. Whether you use it, whether you stay on the porch and hope all will be well, or whether you actually do something, anything, to see that it really will be, is entirely up to you. Chance can get the best of anybody, but chance favors the prepared mind.
"As for me, I have done my bit for today. Wet and weary and sun-blasted, I gather up my things and trudge from the wet sand to the dry, away from the sunset, away from the tide, towards home. Today I neither won nor lost; I simply held my ground. No picnic coolers were swept away while I toiled, no blankets soaked, no transistor radios shorted out, and no lives lost. On that level, it was a good day for both of us. Tomorrow… tomorrow may tell a different story.
"Will I see you then?"
That was sixteen years ago, and I am now the guy sitting on the porch, eating his oat bran muffin and reading the funnies, and looking with pity at that poor, deluded son of a bitch working his way down on the beach.
Better him that me, right?
I stayed at the Probation Department for thirty months, which was about eighteen more than I intended and about twenty-nine more than I wanted. Although I eventually became reasonably competent at the incredibly varied and demanding work the job required, I can't say I ever liked it. On the contrary, quite frequently, I hated the hell out of it. The pay was horrific, the politics Byzantine, the stress levels unimaginable. The sort of people I had to deal with -- alcoholics, drug addicts, gangbangers, thieves, wife beaters, rapists, arsonists, all-purpose thugs, and the criminally insane -- were hardly stimulating company. "No one knows what it's like to be hated," quoth The Who, but I do. Nearly everyone who walked through my door hated me with varying intensities of hatred, and even those who didn't hate me brought plenty of baggage into the room. It is no easy thing to stand up to waves and waves of resentment and anger, day after day, especially when one has as much imagination as I do. Imagination is not necessarily an asset in law enforcement: indeed, men have been debarred from the profession for possessing too much of it. Imagination lies at the root of insecurities and fears the good lawman does not possess. It also has a nasty way of forcing one to look past symptoms to causes, which in turn forces your imaginative lawman to grasp that what he is doing, while probably necessary, is also futile. I realized this futility very early in my career, and believe me, it didn't help me get out of bed on rainy Monday mornings.
When, inevitably, I was asked why I hadn't moved on and found some other job in law enforcement, or quit the profession altogether, I always repeated the answer an FBI agent had given when asked why he endured working under a paranoid, power-mad maniac like J. Edgar Hoover:
"What?" He exclaimed. "And leave the circus?"
This was my stated reason, then and now, for why I lingered so long in a job I despised. The Parole Office was a daily carnival of human fuckuppery, and I, as one of the keepers, had a front row seat. Whenever I met with old friends from school now working "normal" cubicle jobs or toiling in graduate school, I was struck by how boring their lives sounded in comparison with mine. On any given day I might be in court, or out in the field serving a warrant, or listening to the confessions of a 300-lb crackhead, or doing any of a hundred other tasks which, however frustrating or dangerous they might have been, were rarely dull. Plus, I had free tickets to the human zoo.
As I said, this was the stated, cynical reason. But today I found something startling in a (proverbially) dusty Word file which I have been (proverbially) lugging with me, computer to computer, since 1998 or so. I haven't opened the file in more than ten years, and indeed, I had quite forgotten its existence. The words contained within I composed on my office computer ( and my God, I can picture that office so clearly: a converted closet by the main entrance, average temperature eighty-two degrees) when I ought to have been conducting official business. I can't remember what prompted me to write them, or to keep them once written, but the tone of the words is unmistakably driven not by cynicism but a form of thoughtful despair. Reading them now after all these years (and take a moment to think how the world has changed between 1998 and 2016), I can see that my mind has played tricks on me. I was not anywhere near as hard-bitten and misanthropic as I remember. On the contrary, beneath the inevitable armor plating that everyone in law enforcement or social work forges to protect themselves from the torrent of abuse they are subjected to on a daily basis, I was plainly suffering emotionally. It is true that there are elements of naivete, self-righteousness, class resentment and general self-pity in my suffering, but in fairness to myself, I was only 25 years old.
Here what I wrote in its entirety, back when Bill Clinton was in the White House, a gallon of gas cost $1.06, and nobody but a few spooks in the CIA had ever heard of Osama Bin Laden.
"Every morning, as I walk down to the beach to hold back the tide, I can’t help but wonder why it is you don’t help me.
"I know you see me. The view from your shaded porch must be very good. You cannot miss me as I pass, tools of trade in hand, a solitary soldier going to a battle which is not only unsung but mostly unspoken, a struggle fought before your eyes yet which it seems you cannot see, or seeing, do not care about. I spare you more than you spare me – a glance in your direction, puzzled, a bit hurt, a bit hopeful, and then I turn away, because though the morning is young, the sun is already very hot and I am not yet where I must be to face the day.
"It’s a typical one so far. I’m tired, the glare is terrible already though the sun is barely over the horizon, and a remnant of the headache I went to bed with throbs in my temples. What little energy I have is spent shutting out a mental image of what I left behind – the rumpled bed that always looks most comforting when I’m not in it, the lunch I so carefully packed last night that I forgot to bring with me, all those homey odds and ends that seem to have no special meaning until you can’t have them. Though my brain tells me it must be Monday, my body insists that it must be at least Thursday, for nothing else accounts for this weariness that lack of sleep has nothing to do with.
"So I take another look around, trying not to feel sorry for myself, trying not to feel bitter or burned-out, because the old-timers tell me I’m way too young for either state of mind. I don’t have to do this thing I do. I could toss these tools aside and stomp back up the beach, back to my third-hand Pontiac Sunbird that just squeaked through inspection, and go home. I could crank up the computer and have my resume in someone’s personnel office by this afternoon. A year from now, six months from now, tomorrow, I could be you -- nibbling Danish and wishing that Gary Larson hadn’t called it quits. Sometimes, yesterday, tomorrow, I want to be you. But not today.
"Today, something carries me forward, invisible strings that make this shabby puppet dance his futile dance. I won’t quit, today. Today I will do what I can, and then I will go home to the girl that cares about me. I try not to think about her much when I’m here. I have pictures, but they are tucked neatly away in the flap of these torn and faded cargo pants, close enough for moral support but too far to be a distraction. No, I shan’t think of her today. But in these few minutes of calm before I go to work, I often think of you, back there on the porch in the cool shade, crisp newspaper and low-fat bran muffin in hand, not seeing me or not caring, thumbing your way past the bad news en route to the funnies. I wonder what the view is like from up there. I wonder what your expensive designer coffee tastes like – I get mine from that machine in the snack-bar, forty-five cents a cup, as bad as it comes but hot – and I wonder, and I kneel down to unbuckle the Payless sandals I can’t afford to replace, what it is like to walk in your sleek leather loafers. I wonder about it the way I wonder about sleeping with women other than my girl – not meaning to do it, but curious all the same. What is it like not to have this wearying task? What is it like to make plans and see them come to fruition? What is it like to know that you can win, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and you will see it, if not today or next week, then sometime? What is it like to be you?
"We used to know each other, you and I, and not all that long ago. We sat next to each other in college – don’t you remember? You had your plans – medical school or law school or business school or some kind of school – and I had mine. But somewhere along the way, I glimpsed this strange war that goes on in front of us every day but of which we speak so little, and when school was over, I walked down to this metaphorical beach picked up my tools and every day since, for the last two years, it is here I have been. You used to stop me on my way to work, ask a few questions, give me a word of encouragement, a word of admiration I didn’t think you felt but which I greatly appreciated, and we’d shake hands and promise to do lunch, sometime. But over time the greetings became nods, and the nods became grunts, and now your eyes pass over me and through me as if I were a one of those pathetic tramps begging for change that we can almost will out of existence simply by not acknowledging them, because they dare to make us uncomfortable.
"It’s very difficult to get a jump on the tide. It always seems that no matter how early you get to the beach, you should have gotten there just a bit sooner. When I first got this job, I made a point of playing Early Bird, making my trek when the lights on your beach house were still dark and a cool breeze tinkled the chimes over your porch. I thought, with that sort of logic which is unarguably sound in theory yet somehow false in practice, that the extra effort would produce a return that would translate into less work for me down the road. I was wrong. Every now and then, in a fit of resolve, I try the experiment again, like an ex-alchemist who sneaks into his dusty old sanctum in the middle of the night, to see if his incantations can turn that lead pot into gold after all – maybe it’s him, maybe he flubbed the Latin, maybe he’s not waving the wand right, all of this can’t be work in a vacuum, can it? A whole science can’t be crap, can it? Eight million phrenologists couldn’t be wrong, could they?
"Could they?
"After a while I realized that if you come in a bit earlier every day, you will soon reach a point where you never actually leave. I stopped coming in early. But I didn’t stop coming. Not yet, anyway.
"So here I am, bare feet in the sand, tools at the ready, me versus the tide, and the opening bell is about to ring. There will be no final bell, no championship round, no denouement, because there is no end to the struggle, no climax, no clear definition of victory nor an instrument with which to make such a measurement. It is ceaseless, this conflict, and has no objective; it conflict for the sake of conflict, warfare for the sake of warfare, forever-everlasting. If I hadn’t shown up today, if I had called in and stayed dry in bed, it would have gone on anyway, just as it did before I arrived, just as it will when I finally cry uncle and stalk off this beach for the last time, to join you for coffee and Danish and Dilbert and the AM shock-jock of your choice. God did not kill Cain, after all; He merely sent him on his sorry way. And Cain bred. And bred. And bred. Believe me; he bred well. His children are as numerous as the drops of water that make up the ocean that is rolling in, now, foaming, ice-cold on my bare feet, carrying on its salty skin the detritus of all the things it has broken, the trillion sons of Cain who want to do to me what Cain did to Abel, and then, sweeping over my still and beaten form, crash up the beach to take you as well.
"It is my job to stop them.
"I am one of Them, the group you have entrusted to keep the tide at bay. Often, you don’t like me. Sometimes, I don’t like you. I know we don’t understand each other. But here we are on the beach together, and if time permits today, I may just ask you that question after all.
"Why don’t you help me?
"This beach belongs to all of us – me, you, your kids, my girl, the neighbor who plays guitar late into the evening and the one with the yapper dog you keep hoping will drop dead. All of us. Black, white; gay, straight; male, female. It’s our beach. Together we could keep it clean, keep the waves back, make it safe. Instead we delegate. A few sorry fools do the dirty work while the rest of you sit back in ease and comfort, listening to your boom-boxes and reading your Danielle Steel amidst the smell of sunscreen and hot-dogs. Delegating is the ultimate reward for civilization, the culmination of thousands of years of unrecorded history when it was not possible to delegate, when individual responsibility for the survival of the group could not be escaped any more than gravity could be escaped, when everyone had to pull their weight or die, period, like kibbutzim or a wolf-pack. That society has evolved – perhaps that is not the right world, evolved; perhaps devolved or mutated is a better word – to a point where a tiny group, not really an elite, not really the crème de la crème but simply a small fraction of the whole, a sub-unit, is responsible for the safety and security of the rest of the tribe, is as good as an example as any of the comfortable collapse that we find ourselves in, this strange state of affairs that has me here, struggling like an ant in the sand while you sit comfortably on your porch or your beach chair, oblivious to the plight which we both share. Civilization has allowed us to stratify into specialized castes, wholly interdependent and yet at the same time estranged from each other. The distillate of eight millennia of civilization is the fence, the country club, the gated community, the ability to remove oneself from the common herd and to look down at it in utter contempt. Before civilization, after all, there were no servant’s entrances. But while you sit, perfumed and pretty, at your banquet table, the barbarians are at the gate, and it is I, not you, who are responsible for keeping them at bay. I who am not welcome at your table, or your porch, or next to you on your beach-blanket any more than the criminals with whom I struggle against every day like the inexorable tide. My fight is your fight; my victory is your victory…and my defeat is your defeat. We are bound up. Inextricably. Yet you do not see me; you do not heed me; and if you take notice of me at all, it is to take issue with the way I hold my spoon, the way I swing my bucket, the manner in which I hold back this tide that wants to drown us both.
"I would like to think, as the sun blisters my shoulders and the cold salt water numbs my feet, as the waves pound me down into the rocky sand, as the riptide threatens to drag me out to sea and an early death, that in my hour of need I could look back and see you there, splashing into battle beside me, a bit late, perhaps, but there, and willing, because we are all in it together. I want to believe that. I really do.
"But I don’t turn around. The tide commands my full attention.
"You have a right to ask how you could help me – you, who have your own concerns, and the sad truth is that I do not really know. I have no answers, no quick and clever solutions that will make the ravening tide slacken and threaten us all no more. Perhaps there are no answers to give. But since the meaning of what we do is not in the victory, we must find it in the struggle. Perhaps it is within the struggle, set into motion by Cain all those thousands of years ago, that we find ourselves and our redemption.
"What is it I want from you? Not very much. I want you to think of me late at night when you relax against the cool sheets and the wind stirs the chimes on your porch. I want you to say a prayer for my safety. When you see me tomorrow, trudging through the sand to the water, raise a hand to me and wish me well on my way. Hold your tongue when I drop my bucket or fall flat on my face, and remember that all human beings make mistakes, even the ones entrusted with holding back the sea. Buy me a drink sometime, and when you do, do it for its own sake, not because you think it will get you out of a traffic ticket, or help to land your son or daughter a job.
"Know this much for sure. The tide was here yesterday and it is here today, now, lapping at your feet, and tomorrow it will creep closer. Sooner than you think, you will look down and see your picnic cooler gone, and if you are not careful, one day you may wake up from your pleasant drowse in the sun to find yourself drowning. When that happens it will be too late to wish me well or ill, or to curse my name, or to lift your voice to heaven and beg God to bring you back to shore. In case you haven’t noticed, God hasn’t been taking many requests lately.
"What He did do is give you the free will to make a difference in your own life and the life of your neighbor, sitting next to you in the sand. Whether you use it, whether you stay on the porch and hope all will be well, or whether you actually do something, anything, to see that it really will be, is entirely up to you. Chance can get the best of anybody, but chance favors the prepared mind.
"As for me, I have done my bit for today. Wet and weary and sun-blasted, I gather up my things and trudge from the wet sand to the dry, away from the sunset, away from the tide, towards home. Today I neither won nor lost; I simply held my ground. No picnic coolers were swept away while I toiled, no blankets soaked, no transistor radios shorted out, and no lives lost. On that level, it was a good day for both of us. Tomorrow… tomorrow may tell a different story.
"Will I see you then?"
That was sixteen years ago, and I am now the guy sitting on the porch, eating his oat bran muffin and reading the funnies, and looking with pity at that poor, deluded son of a bitch working his way down on the beach.
Better him that me, right?
March 18, 2016
Writing Violence (II)
In my last blog I examined the mistaken belief that skill at writing violence is not needed by writers of supposedly "nonviolent" genres like (for example), young adult fiction, romance, erotica, cozy mysteries, etc. and so on. My argument rested on the actual definition of the word violence -- "a state of highly excited action, whether physical or moral." I tried to demonstrate that achieving the state of highly excited action was, in fact, the central purpose of every fiction writer, regardless of genre. Therefore writing violence well, even if it is not "violent" as we generally use the word, is crucial to an author's success and, correspondingly, to a reader's enjoyment.
Having covered the "what" in that post, I now want to address the "how" -- as in, "How the hell do I write 'violence' effectively?"
To start, let's look at common types of violence as they are found in fiction. The first six we'll call "conventional violence." They are:
1. The fistfight.
2. The gunfight.
3. The knife-fight.
4. Torture or physical abuse.
5. Damage or destruction of physical objects.
6. Pursuit (chasing or hunting)
You will notice all these types of violence conform to the of the word "violence" -- that violence means hurting someone or breaking something, or at least attempting to do so. But as we have seen, violence -- highly excited action -- does not have to involve either. Very common forms of violence in fiction ("unconventional violence") also include:
1. Verbal argument/disagreement.
2. Confrontation.
3. Psychological abuse (can include verbal abuse).
4. Violence of the mind, heart and soul (highly excited thoughts: mental anguish, emotional upset, grief, lust, hatred, insanity, hallucination, delusion, paranoia, etc.)
5. Consensual sex; intense flirtation.
6. Competition of any kind, athletic or not.
7. Dance.
8. Physical tasks or labor.
Contrary to what you might think, describing either type of violence -- conventional or unconventional -- requires only one set of literary techniques. Obviously each author possesses their own style, but I believe really effective description of action must use some, or all, or these methods to engage the reader. The genius of these methods lies in their utility: they can be used to describe anything from a sex scene to a world war, from a teenager's tantrum to an inner monologue.
1. ENGAGE THE SENSES. Humans have at least six senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and a sense of time. When a person writes a "violent" scene, they should engage as many of these as possible, if only because this method allows the reader and not the author to do the intellectual heavy lifting. After all, is it really possible to "describe" anything? Don't all descriptions depend on the reader being able to make associations based on experience? Damn right they do. It's possible for us to select words which trigger a stimulus-responses in the human brain. Words have evocative power, and words related to the senses provide almost infinite power to the author who uses them skillfully. The senses are our bridge to what's happening in the moment. One can write that Joe Friday fired his pistol, or one can describe the feel of the recoil, the sound of the gunshot, the smell of the gunpowder. In both cases the event has been "described," but their quality relative to each other can be measured by the extent to which each of them has implanted visual imagery in the reader's mind.
2. COMBINE THE SENSES. An extremely effective technique in describing anything is to ascribe to one sensation the characteristics of another, or to relate the senses to the emotions. Examples:
A. "Disappointment clung to him like yesterday's cigar smoke." (Emotion is likened to a smell)
B. "The greasy mist clung stubbornly to the river." (The sight of the mist is given a physical property.)
C. "A dirty yellow smell filled the room." (Odor is described as having a color.)
D. "A great red agony tore through him." (Color is again employed, this time to describe a sensation, i.e. pain.)
E. "The medicinal taste of boredom." (Taste is used to describe the dullness of the passage of time.)
3. COLOR IT. It has been said that amateur writers don't use color, professional writers use lots of color, and great writers use color like a hand of cards: they know when to hold it and when to fold it. Strategic use of color can enhance a violent paragraph by making it more vivid within the reader's mind. The pallor of skin, the redness of blood, the contrast of hair color with flesh color, or with clothing -- whether writing a sex scene, a murder or a morning jog, color engages the mind. On the other side of the coin, the absence of color, skillfully employed, can also create or enhance the mood of an action sequence.
4. RUN, SENTENCE, RUN. One of the most effective ways to convey action of any kind is with the use of the run-on sentence. It is arguable that this method was coined by Hemingway, but its origins are not important. What matters is that in a scene of excited action, particularly one which comes on suddenly, it is incumbent on the author to separate the violence from the "ordinary" passages through the use of a stylistic "change of gears." Run on sentences do this quite effectively, because they accelerate the pace of the reading, creating a kind of blurry, breathless prose which conveys speed, itself an integral part of most violent acts.
5. STOP. SENTENCE. STOP. Another very effective technique for action, precisely the opposite of the above, is the use of extremely short, punchy sentences stripped of every extraneous word. "He crawled. Three more yards. Six. Stopped. Prayed. Started forward again. Teeth clenched. Muscles tightened. Heart hammering. You can do this, boy, he thought. You can do this."
6. S.A.M. Some people will tell you that the line, "His nose shattered like a fortune cookie under a boot heel" is over the top. Don't listen to them. Similes, analogies and metaphors are an excellent way of achieving our central object, which is to tie the readers to the familiar and thus access the mental images lying dormant in their brains, so that the action passages in question will stand out more vividly and be more compelling to read. The most obvious ones ("Tight as a drum," etc.) ought to be avoided, however, unless they can be rephrased in a more pleasing or original manner. Just remember that S.A.M. are highly effective at achieving sharp imagery in a single, often very short, sentence.
7. GALVANIZE YOUR PROSE. One of the most common flaws in writing violence is the use of ordinary, basically boring words when more unusual ones would do better. Let us say we have a scene where a woman has just discovered her husband is not only a con-artist out to take her money but is sleeping with her best friend. Even as internal monologue, this is a violent scene -- that is to say "a scene of highly excited MORAL action." So does it do to say, "Without a word, she hung up the phone while the private investigator was still talking, and catching her own reflection in the mirror, began to cry." No, it would be better to say that "the phone slipped nervelessly from her fingers to the cradle, cutting the snoop off in mid-sentence. She didn't realize she was backing away from it until the doorframe bumped into her shoulder. Involuntarily, her gaze shifted to the mirror in the hallway; it revealed a face as white as a death mask, the eyes full of shock and unbelief, the underlip aquiver. And it was this sight, even more than what she had just heard, which brought the first tears."
Viewed broadly, a description of highly excited action is not a mere chronological relation of events, but an attempt to put the reader, physically, into the scene. It hardly matters if that scene involves an argument between two teenagers, a couple making love, a bear fighting a wolf, a man contemplating suicide, or the erosion of a cliff-face by pounding waves.
There is, of course, no real formula or set of rules one can apply to write "good violence" or "good action." It is possible to apply one, some or all of the techniques I've described and still produce something which is aesthetically ugly. Differing principles will guide different writers, and no one system is the "right" way for everyone. In relation to the task of writing effective violence, there are, however, a certain body of facts that I believe we can all agree on. They are:
1. Violence, in one form or another, is a key element in all fiction.
2. When it's handled badly by the writer, the story suffers.
3. It is handled badly when it fails in its object, which is to
raise the reader's level of interest in the story and otherwise facilitate that story.
4. In order to handle it well, it is necessary to write vividly, to engage the reader's senses, and to be shrewd with word choices, regardless of the other techniques employed.
A final check against writing stale, lifeless and unimaginative action sequences is to ask yourself this question: if a reader chose to base the decision of whether or not to buy your novel solely on the most violent passages in your book, would you feel confident of a sale?
So much for writing violence. I'll be back with an entirely different subject tomorrow. One for readers, not writers.
Having covered the "what" in that post, I now want to address the "how" -- as in, "How the hell do I write 'violence' effectively?"
To start, let's look at common types of violence as they are found in fiction. The first six we'll call "conventional violence." They are:
1. The fistfight.
2. The gunfight.
3. The knife-fight.
4. Torture or physical abuse.
5. Damage or destruction of physical objects.
6. Pursuit (chasing or hunting)
You will notice all these types of violence conform to the of the word "violence" -- that violence means hurting someone or breaking something, or at least attempting to do so. But as we have seen, violence -- highly excited action -- does not have to involve either. Very common forms of violence in fiction ("unconventional violence") also include:
1. Verbal argument/disagreement.
2. Confrontation.
3. Psychological abuse (can include verbal abuse).
4. Violence of the mind, heart and soul (highly excited thoughts: mental anguish, emotional upset, grief, lust, hatred, insanity, hallucination, delusion, paranoia, etc.)
5. Consensual sex; intense flirtation.
6. Competition of any kind, athletic or not.
7. Dance.
8. Physical tasks or labor.
Contrary to what you might think, describing either type of violence -- conventional or unconventional -- requires only one set of literary techniques. Obviously each author possesses their own style, but I believe really effective description of action must use some, or all, or these methods to engage the reader. The genius of these methods lies in their utility: they can be used to describe anything from a sex scene to a world war, from a teenager's tantrum to an inner monologue.
1. ENGAGE THE SENSES. Humans have at least six senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and a sense of time. When a person writes a "violent" scene, they should engage as many of these as possible, if only because this method allows the reader and not the author to do the intellectual heavy lifting. After all, is it really possible to "describe" anything? Don't all descriptions depend on the reader being able to make associations based on experience? Damn right they do. It's possible for us to select words which trigger a stimulus-responses in the human brain. Words have evocative power, and words related to the senses provide almost infinite power to the author who uses them skillfully. The senses are our bridge to what's happening in the moment. One can write that Joe Friday fired his pistol, or one can describe the feel of the recoil, the sound of the gunshot, the smell of the gunpowder. In both cases the event has been "described," but their quality relative to each other can be measured by the extent to which each of them has implanted visual imagery in the reader's mind.
2. COMBINE THE SENSES. An extremely effective technique in describing anything is to ascribe to one sensation the characteristics of another, or to relate the senses to the emotions. Examples:
A. "Disappointment clung to him like yesterday's cigar smoke." (Emotion is likened to a smell)
B. "The greasy mist clung stubbornly to the river." (The sight of the mist is given a physical property.)
C. "A dirty yellow smell filled the room." (Odor is described as having a color.)
D. "A great red agony tore through him." (Color is again employed, this time to describe a sensation, i.e. pain.)
E. "The medicinal taste of boredom." (Taste is used to describe the dullness of the passage of time.)
3. COLOR IT. It has been said that amateur writers don't use color, professional writers use lots of color, and great writers use color like a hand of cards: they know when to hold it and when to fold it. Strategic use of color can enhance a violent paragraph by making it more vivid within the reader's mind. The pallor of skin, the redness of blood, the contrast of hair color with flesh color, or with clothing -- whether writing a sex scene, a murder or a morning jog, color engages the mind. On the other side of the coin, the absence of color, skillfully employed, can also create or enhance the mood of an action sequence.
4. RUN, SENTENCE, RUN. One of the most effective ways to convey action of any kind is with the use of the run-on sentence. It is arguable that this method was coined by Hemingway, but its origins are not important. What matters is that in a scene of excited action, particularly one which comes on suddenly, it is incumbent on the author to separate the violence from the "ordinary" passages through the use of a stylistic "change of gears." Run on sentences do this quite effectively, because they accelerate the pace of the reading, creating a kind of blurry, breathless prose which conveys speed, itself an integral part of most violent acts.
5. STOP. SENTENCE. STOP. Another very effective technique for action, precisely the opposite of the above, is the use of extremely short, punchy sentences stripped of every extraneous word. "He crawled. Three more yards. Six. Stopped. Prayed. Started forward again. Teeth clenched. Muscles tightened. Heart hammering. You can do this, boy, he thought. You can do this."
6. S.A.M. Some people will tell you that the line, "His nose shattered like a fortune cookie under a boot heel" is over the top. Don't listen to them. Similes, analogies and metaphors are an excellent way of achieving our central object, which is to tie the readers to the familiar and thus access the mental images lying dormant in their brains, so that the action passages in question will stand out more vividly and be more compelling to read. The most obvious ones ("Tight as a drum," etc.) ought to be avoided, however, unless they can be rephrased in a more pleasing or original manner. Just remember that S.A.M. are highly effective at achieving sharp imagery in a single, often very short, sentence.
7. GALVANIZE YOUR PROSE. One of the most common flaws in writing violence is the use of ordinary, basically boring words when more unusual ones would do better. Let us say we have a scene where a woman has just discovered her husband is not only a con-artist out to take her money but is sleeping with her best friend. Even as internal monologue, this is a violent scene -- that is to say "a scene of highly excited MORAL action." So does it do to say, "Without a word, she hung up the phone while the private investigator was still talking, and catching her own reflection in the mirror, began to cry." No, it would be better to say that "the phone slipped nervelessly from her fingers to the cradle, cutting the snoop off in mid-sentence. She didn't realize she was backing away from it until the doorframe bumped into her shoulder. Involuntarily, her gaze shifted to the mirror in the hallway; it revealed a face as white as a death mask, the eyes full of shock and unbelief, the underlip aquiver. And it was this sight, even more than what she had just heard, which brought the first tears."
Viewed broadly, a description of highly excited action is not a mere chronological relation of events, but an attempt to put the reader, physically, into the scene. It hardly matters if that scene involves an argument between two teenagers, a couple making love, a bear fighting a wolf, a man contemplating suicide, or the erosion of a cliff-face by pounding waves.
There is, of course, no real formula or set of rules one can apply to write "good violence" or "good action." It is possible to apply one, some or all of the techniques I've described and still produce something which is aesthetically ugly. Differing principles will guide different writers, and no one system is the "right" way for everyone. In relation to the task of writing effective violence, there are, however, a certain body of facts that I believe we can all agree on. They are:
1. Violence, in one form or another, is a key element in all fiction.
2. When it's handled badly by the writer, the story suffers.
3. It is handled badly when it fails in its object, which is to
raise the reader's level of interest in the story and otherwise facilitate that story.
4. In order to handle it well, it is necessary to write vividly, to engage the reader's senses, and to be shrewd with word choices, regardless of the other techniques employed.
A final check against writing stale, lifeless and unimaginative action sequences is to ask yourself this question: if a reader chose to base the decision of whether or not to buy your novel solely on the most violent passages in your book, would you feel confident of a sale?
So much for writing violence. I'll be back with an entirely different subject tomorrow. One for readers, not writers.
Writing Violence (I)
When I was in graduate school I was known for using violence in my fiction, so much so that I eventually ended up teaching a class on the subject. Do not think this endeared me much to the audience. Many of the writers in the program worked in genres where no blood was shed, no battles fought, no murders committed. Even a good old fashioned slap to the kisser was a rare commodity. So, when asked why those who wrote in "nonviolent" genres should give a damn about their ability to write violent sequences effectively, I had no immediate answer. After all, if you're a pastry chef it hardly matters if you know how to butcher a fish, and if you keep Kosher the process of curing a ham is hardly useful knowledge. I felt in my bones this attitude was wrong, but I couldn't immediately explain why. It turned out that the answer to their question -- and mine -- lay in the definition of the word itself.
Turning the pages of various dictionaries, I discovered no less than 19 definitions for the word "violence." This came as quite a surprise, since it seemed to me no concept could be simpler or easier to define; and yet the various sources I examined yielded an almost unending series of descriptions, from "rough unwarranted force" to "injurious treatment, profanation, rape, infringement, (and) unjust assault." Words like "fury," "injury," "wrong," and "compulsion" were also tossed around, all of which seemed to me to muddle rather clarify the issue at hand -- just what in the hell is violence, anyway? At last, however, I stumbled upon the definition which herded all the others into line and made sense of the whole confusing mess. It was (drum roll):
"Highly excited action, whether or physical or moral."
If one defines violence by these words, it becomes immediately obvious that violence exists in every genre and subgenre of writing. A state of highly excited action is precisely what writers should aspire to produce, regardless of genre. Whether you're writing a battle scene, fistfight, or temper tantrum, the methods you employ and the tone you set are crucial to the success or failure of the scene you are writing -- and ultimately, to your book itself.
Why is this? Because "highly excited action" is the thing which will most likely get the reader's attention, no matter what they are reading. In young adult fiction, it might be an argument between a mother and her bulimic daughter. In erotica, a sexual encounter. In adventure, the escape of an explorer from a pack of ravenous wolves. The actual form of the action doesn't matter any more than the setting. The point is that without this action -- this violence -- the reader is not properly engaged.
We all like good description and clever dialogue, we all enjoy well-written internal monologues and scenes in which point of view is cleverly or imaginatively handled, but if we're truly honest with ourselves, we have to say that in many novels -- especially novels that are basically nonviolent -- the action sequences are what we're most likely to remember.
It is said that all tigers are cats, but not all cats are tigers. So to is it with violence. All battles, fights, murders, torture sequences, suicides, rapes, etc. that have ever been described in prose are violent, but not every violent scene contains any bloodshed or even any physical action. As our definition states, the action can be "moral" as well as physical. It may occur in a memory, a flashback, a dream, a hallucination, an argument, a voting booth, a car, an ordinary conversation, or even within a glance between two characters. The forms "moral" violence can take place are infinite. To exemplify, I'll use two seemingly disparate sequences from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The first is Caesar's murder in the Senate by the conspirators. The second is Anthony's speech to the mob. Of these, only the first involves what we would normally consider violence or even action. Yet Anthony's "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech is, even moreso than the assassination sequence, considered the most memorable scene in the play. This is because Shakespeare's skill as a writer allowed him to create a state of highly excited action in the audience simply by virtue of Anthony' choice of words, and by the crowd's verbal reaction to those words. Under our definition, the speech is every bit as "violent" as the murder. It is therefore every bit as memorable.
The stark fact is that violence, whether or not it is "violent" in the sense we generally use the term, sets the plot in motion and keeps it moving. It keeps, by its presence or the threat of its presence, the audience interested. And in most cases it brings the story to its conclusion.
So in the end it's quite simple. Achieving a state of highly excited action, "whether physical or moral" is the key element in storytelling. It doesn't matter what genre ring in which you throw your hat, violence is your friend.
In my next blog I'll examine the most common types of violence encountered in fiction, the difference between badly and properly written violence, and the importance of point of view. I'll also relay the six techniques I use to create states of "highly excited action" in my own work.
Turning the pages of various dictionaries, I discovered no less than 19 definitions for the word "violence." This came as quite a surprise, since it seemed to me no concept could be simpler or easier to define; and yet the various sources I examined yielded an almost unending series of descriptions, from "rough unwarranted force" to "injurious treatment, profanation, rape, infringement, (and) unjust assault." Words like "fury," "injury," "wrong," and "compulsion" were also tossed around, all of which seemed to me to muddle rather clarify the issue at hand -- just what in the hell is violence, anyway? At last, however, I stumbled upon the definition which herded all the others into line and made sense of the whole confusing mess. It was (drum roll):
"Highly excited action, whether or physical or moral."
If one defines violence by these words, it becomes immediately obvious that violence exists in every genre and subgenre of writing. A state of highly excited action is precisely what writers should aspire to produce, regardless of genre. Whether you're writing a battle scene, fistfight, or temper tantrum, the methods you employ and the tone you set are crucial to the success or failure of the scene you are writing -- and ultimately, to your book itself.
Why is this? Because "highly excited action" is the thing which will most likely get the reader's attention, no matter what they are reading. In young adult fiction, it might be an argument between a mother and her bulimic daughter. In erotica, a sexual encounter. In adventure, the escape of an explorer from a pack of ravenous wolves. The actual form of the action doesn't matter any more than the setting. The point is that without this action -- this violence -- the reader is not properly engaged.
We all like good description and clever dialogue, we all enjoy well-written internal monologues and scenes in which point of view is cleverly or imaginatively handled, but if we're truly honest with ourselves, we have to say that in many novels -- especially novels that are basically nonviolent -- the action sequences are what we're most likely to remember.
It is said that all tigers are cats, but not all cats are tigers. So to is it with violence. All battles, fights, murders, torture sequences, suicides, rapes, etc. that have ever been described in prose are violent, but not every violent scene contains any bloodshed or even any physical action. As our definition states, the action can be "moral" as well as physical. It may occur in a memory, a flashback, a dream, a hallucination, an argument, a voting booth, a car, an ordinary conversation, or even within a glance between two characters. The forms "moral" violence can take place are infinite. To exemplify, I'll use two seemingly disparate sequences from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The first is Caesar's murder in the Senate by the conspirators. The second is Anthony's speech to the mob. Of these, only the first involves what we would normally consider violence or even action. Yet Anthony's "friends, Romans, countrymen" speech is, even moreso than the assassination sequence, considered the most memorable scene in the play. This is because Shakespeare's skill as a writer allowed him to create a state of highly excited action in the audience simply by virtue of Anthony' choice of words, and by the crowd's verbal reaction to those words. Under our definition, the speech is every bit as "violent" as the murder. It is therefore every bit as memorable.
The stark fact is that violence, whether or not it is "violent" in the sense we generally use the term, sets the plot in motion and keeps it moving. It keeps, by its presence or the threat of its presence, the audience interested. And in most cases it brings the story to its conclusion.
So in the end it's quite simple. Achieving a state of highly excited action, "whether physical or moral" is the key element in storytelling. It doesn't matter what genre ring in which you throw your hat, violence is your friend.
In my next blog I'll examine the most common types of violence encountered in fiction, the difference between badly and properly written violence, and the importance of point of view. I'll also relay the six techniques I use to create states of "highly excited action" in my own work.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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