Joseph Grammer's Blog, page 6

Build You Up

I used to spend most of my time in a hole. No people, no messages, just my own solo brainwaves talking to themselves, and most of the time they mentioned negative things.

Now I'm about building myself up and making change -- stories, etc. -- in my own shitty, unassuming way. You won't catch me organizing communities or hustling products, but you might see me around D.C., scribbling through notebooks and speaking bad Russian with a friend.

How do you make stuff? It depends; everyone's got a skill they can work with.

Don't know yours? Don't sweat it:

Just ask 50. (Plus check out that sweet PSP.)

Daily Routine

Every day I try to do the same things over and over. Stretch, eat an egg quesadilla, exercise, write, work, talk to another human, and meditate. Whether my simple brain will allow this is a mystery, but I'm getting better at overriding that pesky limbic system (or at least managing it more smoothly) and following a structure for self-discipline.

Why do I need order? So I can just do the most basic shit I'm required to accomplish. Normally my attention wanders; I drink too much coffee and start staring at the little dots that flood down in my vision, which are really just clumps of retinal ganglion cells sloughing off like flakes of skin.

Even writing this sentence makes me want to flail like a mako shark with neurofibromatosis, because I hate sitting down long enough to string two coherent thoughts together.



So what do I do? I respond, with huge amounts of Anna's help, by organizing work in a way that's motivating to me. I put items on my to-do list into levels (yeah, like video game), then order those by difficulty.

Level One might include writing down what I'm good at (knowing stuff about Okinawan culture), and Level Two might be finding one organization that relates to that in some way (the Okinawa Kai of Washington, D.C.).

Level Three is writing a draft of a cover letter to send to someone at the Okinawa Kai, and Level Four is editing and sending that letter. In Level Five I write down questions to ask the interviewee, edit the questions for Level Six, and in Number Seven, aka the Boss Fight, I conduct the actual interview. Afterwards, if all goes well, I dance. Poorly.

I used this Level Method (err, the name sucks) to get an actual phone interview with a member of the Okinawa Kai, which will take place tonight. I'm excited to ask the representative some questions that will help my book (which is set in Okinawa), and to find out about the guy's opinions on Okinawa in general.

Maybe the system is juvenile and pathetic (if you're uptight and sneer at people who play video games). Either way, the plan works for me, so I'm more or less pleased with my quasi-routine improvement.

Just for knowledge purposes, I also use Anna's writing app to keep on with my stories, and her task app to actually accomplish stuff like changing headlights, fixing old Kindles, and going the fuck outside. Which gets at another aspect of routines, I guess, which is outside help. Use another human for your self-discipline! Or, like, don't use them as you would an object, but value them as an individual and all that, and just ask for their help in some small and concrete way (e.g., send me a sweet meme every Monday so I can get my ass to the gym).

Memes for all.

Being Okay with Your Imperfect Brain

So I didn't even want to write this post, because I didn't have a "good enough" topic to discuss -- which is bullshit. Sure, if I was some powerful blog emir with a city's worth of followers, I might need to choose my words and ideas more carefully, but I'm not. I'm a dude sitting at an Ikea table with an oversized mug of coffee.

Accepting my place in life, especially when it comes to writing, is annoying as all hell, and not only because it reminds me I have no agent, or contract, or skills, really. I have a desire to write, and I write every day: that's what I have. (Plus, you know, a wonderful support system who actually gives a shit about me, which is inestimably valuable, but I don't really "have" them because you can't "have" a human being...this semantic tangent is not important.) No, accepting my place in life is also annoying because it feels good, and feeling good with what I have runs counter to my existing system of DO MORE, NOW, SLACKER, LOOK AT EVERYONE ELSE AROUND YOU.

Writing, to me, is about brain management. You push ahead with a story even while you acknowledge its plot gaps and awkward phrases, trusting that you're capable enough to go back later and sew up the holes with a relatively steady hand (even as I write this metaphor I'm seeing all the ways it fails to correctly describe the process, but c'est la V-neck, as American Apparel says.) You balance the crazy psycho-rush of inspiration with your mechanical outline of the book, have those two parts of your mind (emotional and logical) party together, and then choose a best path based on that mix of data.

It's a lot about integration for me: integration of the disparate, weird thoughts clanging around below my pia mater, integration of my idea of the story with what actually spills out on paper, integration of...well, the fake characters I made up and my own probably-real meat-covered human form.

Once I hit that point, it's a lot easier for me to accept that there will be huge mistakes in my book that I can't detect or fix, and that a lot of people who read the damn thing will probably hate it. Oh well. I can just move on down the path and write something new they might despise later. And for that one person who likes it, or at least thinks it was a moderately enjoyable use of her time: you're, ah, cool.

3x3: The Old Inter-Roman Boy

Over Christmas I watched Oldboy, The Interview, and Roman Holiday -- three very different movies that all helped me analyze some ideas about writing.

1. In Oldboy, a Korean drunkard is kidnapped and imprisoned in a hotel room for 15 years, for no apparent reason. When one day he is inexplicably released, he embarks on a strange and violent journey to discover why he was abducted.

2. The Interview concerns a douchy entertainment host named Skylark who lands an audience with Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea. When the CIA discovers the interview, they intercept Skylark and convince him to poison the world leader. Upon meeting the man, however, Skylark decides he is cool as shit, and has second thoughts about assassination.

3. In Roman Holiday, Princess Ann (of an unnamed country) tires of her over-scheduled life, and absconds from her family and servants while on a public relations tour in Rome. In the streets she meets a stranger named Joe, a news reporter who conceals this fact when he figures out he's encountered royalty. Joe attempts to secretly interview the princess without letting on that he knows who she is, which gets them into various slapstick antics while the princess "lets loose" on her first day in obscure, civilian life.

Summaries achieved! Now what do these three films have in common?

1. Two of them deal directly with hard-to-get interviews. I could bend the rules and say Oldboy is about a hard-to-get interview as well, since Oh Dae-Su, the protagonist, is hunting down a mysterious man who knows the reason for his abduction.

2. What's more, **SORT OF SPOILER** the movies all end on a weirdly upbeat note. Even Oldboy, which is a pretty dark movie. **END OF SORT OF SPOILER**

3. All the main characters learn something meaningful about themselves (like any good main character, I suppose). Even in a bro-comedy like The Interview, Skylark "discovers" the horrors of North Korea and chooses to do something noble for the first time in his life. Princess Ann and Joe learn about their own values, and a bit about the lives of the common man and royalty, respectively, which helps them come away with a better and less cynical worldview. Oh Dae-Su learns some pretty heavy stuff about himself and completely changes from the careless drunkard of the film's beginning.

What can these three films teach about telling stories?

1. Oldboy taught me about twists. Surprise, tension: all that stuff. The plot uses an element found in the first Sherlock Holmes story, so it is not a straight-up mystery because there's no way you can predict the ending based on the information you were given at the beginning. However, I didn't care about that; it was just a cool, unexpected movie. I learned that you don't have to follow all the rules of logic from this film, especially when you can squeeze as much shock and emotion out of the denouement as Oldboy did. Watch it at 4am and tell me what you think.

2. The Interview taught me that good comedy (which The Interview only has some of) comes less from over-the-top raunchiness and more from lovable characters being adorable. Kim Jong Un, when we first meet him, is a silly, awkward, closet-lover of Katy Perry. Since I expected him to be visibly insane, or at least a hardass, it was funny to me when he is introduced as a goofball. That goes a lot farther, amusement-wise, than a series of fart jokes or meaningless swearing, all of which were unfunny to watch in the film. However, there is a finger-biting scene that is hilarious in its unexpected extremeness (especially because extreme violence is used only sparingly, i.e. at the end).

3. Roman Holiday taught me an old lesson, which is to mix seemingly opposite characters together and watch them realize how similar they really are. At first glance, you have the rich princess and poor reporter. They seem unalike; but when they meet, they have a good time together, and eventually develop feelings for one another. The script didn't go heavy on sentimentality, which worked in the film's favor -- and this is useful to remember, too.

Have you seen any of these three movies? Have you learned any lessons, writing or otherwise, from them? Hit me up.

Peace and love.

Yakuza Management

So last Thursday I re-watched Outrage, a Japanese film by Beat Takeshi, for my weekly Review Day. The movie was important for me because, after the first viewing, I invented one of the main characters in my current novel.

On that note (not really), I've been thinking about managers. Good ones, bad ones, forgettable, average ones. Naturally I considered the management tactics of the yakuza in Outrage, which was one--surprise--of authority and violence. And in light of the fact that my girlfriend is reading The Art of Woo, a nonfiction book about persuasion and management styles, I thought it would be interesting to see which of the six "styles" apply to the yakuza in this film.

The six styles are these: relationships, interest, vision, politics, authority, and rationality.

The main characters in Outrage are these: Otomo, a yakuza underboss; Ikemoto, Otomo's boss; Murase, a drug dealer; Sekiuchi, the Grand Yakuza.

So.

1.) The relationship style is one of persuasion through personal connection. This was important in Outrage when a yakuza boss, Ikemoto, formed a pact with Murase, a small-time drug lord he had met in prison. The act of sharing sake cemented a relationship to make them sworn brothers, which was good; but it put Ikemoto in hot water with his sworn father, the family boss Sekiuchi, who hated drug dealing. For better or worse, though, Ikemoto gained the power to make Murase do things, because he had forged a relationship.

I noticed that many characters appealed to their bonds with others before resorting to violence. A crooked cop, for example, who is acquaintances with Otomo (the underboss), warns him when the police are tracking him, and not only because the unsavory officer takes bribes from the clan. He makes a point of appealing to their relationship to persuade Otomo to avoid trouble (although he is not a "friend" by any means).

Sekiuchi, too, relies on his network of contacts to earn money through various businesses, whether casinos, adult entertainment, or bars.

2.) The interest-based style, however, persuades by anticipating others' tendencies and desires. It reminds me of the mentalizing concept of psychology: the ability of one person to "get inside" another's head and imagine her perspective.

Sekiuchi, the family boss, plays ambitious underlings against each other because he knows their interests; he can predict their reactions in certain situations, and he uses this information to his advantage. Ikemoto, meanwhile, pledges to realize Murase's wish to join the powerful Sanno-kai by making a pact with him. Because he knows how badly Murase wants to join, and because he frames his behavior as acting in Murase's interest ("our pact will help you get rich and powerful"), he uses an interest-based management style.

3.) With a vision orientation, you must remind your team why you're here in the first place. You call to mind the values and goals of your organization, whether it's "to provide affordable healthcare in urban neighborhoods" or "to keep the Sanno-kai family the strongest gang in Tokyo." This particular style wasn't used as often in Outrage, since the next type, authority, was favored. Although, part of the yakuza vision--their values and beliefs--is rigid acceptance of the chain of command, so you could consider an appeal to obedience as evidence of vision-style persuasion.

4.) Now for authority persuaders: they tell you what to do, because they said so. It's not hard to see why gangsters enjoy this particular method, especially with tools like fists, knives, and guns at their disposal, which emphasize their commands. There's not much more to be said, other than mentioning the widespread prevalence of authoritative "management" in Outrage.

5.) Politics, as defined by "The Art of Woo," is the system of deals and counter-deals, of back channels and lobbying groups, and of "appearances" that are used to effect change. Sekiuchi, the Grand Yakuza, pulls the strings on his hierarchy of clans and sub-clans to solve the Ikemoto-Murase problem. He induces Ikemoto to start a war with Murase, claiming he (Ikemoto) would receive the conquered turf, but then disavows Otomo, Ikemoto's underboss and fighter, when he actually starts killing. On a broader scale, the whole yakuza organization engages in politics by presenting a veneer of legitimate business: each clan has his own business office in a respectable part of Tokyo, complete with secretary and office furniture. You could say Ikemoto and Murase's pact is also a form of politics, since they created an alliance, and it was politics when they lobbied Sekiuchi to resolve their difficulties with one another.

6.) The rationality style, finally, relies on logic and numbers to convince people. Ikemoto uses authority more often, when speaking to Otomo, but he also touts rationality as a reason for why they must kill certain people (e.g., to not look weak). The argument is presented as cut-and-dry business: we want to expand, in order to expand we need territory and no competition, so let's kill the competition and take their territory. Of course, Otomo doesn't have much of a say even if he disagreed with the logic; he is sworn to obey, to listen to the hierarchy.

Sekiuchi tends to use both direct authority (go do this) and politics/interest (I promise you x if you do this, but don't tell y about it). Ikemoto uses his relationship (we are brothers, help me out) and authority. Otomo opts for straight-up authority and never uses politics, which makes sense because he has the least power of all three. He also kills the most people, which isn't a great thing, unless you're in a yakuza movie.

One last point: modifying these six styles are "self-oriented" and "other-oriented" domains, as well as "loudness" or "quietness." Suffice it to say that authority and rationality styles tend to reflect a self-oriented view, while relationships and interest favor other-oriented behavior. As for loud or quiet, that literally refers to one's level of volume and energy when persuading. Ikemoto, for example, almost never raises his voice; Otomo is very soft-spoken, even laconic, until he's about to kill someone: then he screams. It's a jarring effect, and one that is likely intentional, to shock or frighten the enemy before he strikes.

What are your persuasion styles? How do you get people to see your point of view, or, at work, to go do stuff for you? Hopefully you never have to do this if you make a mistake (warning, there's blood).

Gambatte!

In Review: My Deplorable Writing Career

So my girlfriend Anna challenged me to look at the last year of my life and see how I have evolved in my "business," which, for better or worse, is writing. At first my amygdala freaked out and electrified me with stress, but sitting at my desk now, with a bunch of baby saguaro cactus beside me (they never complain), I feel grateful for the opportunity.

A year ago today was October 7, 2013. During that time I was frantically writing Cocoon Kids, my self-published book of short stories, and assuming my life depended on its objective quality. I was an idiot. I am an idiot now, but back then, I am happy to say, I was a much feebler one.

Every word on the page terrified me, because it was a word someone else would read (ha) and judge to be lacking in some major category. My plots would be predictable, my characters flat, my dialogue the worst kind of daytime-TV cliche ("Pass the ham, Sally," Grant Shadow said. "Oh never mind, I love you like a farmer loves mowing hay in the crisp fall."). In short, I was a prisoner of stupid, meaningless fear: great job!

I could look back at that younger Joe (nice biceps) and scorn him for his naivete, but I won't, too much. He had his good points. He cared a lot about his stories, and he did his best to bring out the love and pain and inherent human grossness in each person. Most of the time he failed, but once in a while a sentence came through and achieved something moderately engaging.

My favorite story, and what seems to be readers' (thank you for existing, you few worthy humans) favorite story, is "A Squid for Mr. Calaway," which concerns the eponymous hero as he leaves his therapist's office in downtown Manhattan and proceeds to buy a package of squid for dinner. Only he loves the squid. In fact, it is the only thing he truly cares about. When he meets his acquaintance Barry on the street, the two trade insults and random hypotheticals until Calaway gets embarrassed and leaves. The ending is the strangest part, and I give infinite thanks to Anna for helping me tone it down from its original, more unpleasant tone.

My favorite sentence from this story (wow I am a self-indulgent bastard): "Into the dusk with my mollusks."

There we are. Now I can properly trash myself. The rest of the book is a hit-or-miss collection that is vaguely linked by the themes of isolation and connection. A common response from people who read it was, "It was hard to tell who was speaking." Another: "I had to read it two or three times to understand what happened" (thank you for even reading it once, you fucking rad cherubim). I agree with these concerns, especially when I revisit the stories and puzzle over the dense conversations. What was I trying to accomplish?

Nothing special, really; I was just bad at writing.

And now?

Now, I can safely say, I am better, but so far away from "good" it is not yet taking my calls.

However, in the space between 10/7/13 and now, I have befriended other writers, attended an Iowa Summer Festival Writing Conference, finished my novel, sent it to agents (to be rejected), and, most importantly, I have written a ton of shitty stories. Most of them are dead in a folder somewhere, but a few hang around, waiting for me to hurl them at magazines or people (magazines are people, too, I'm not judging). I have also read up on publishing contracts, practiced and failed at marketing campaigns, and sold a few books online. I no longer feel terrible about calling my writing a "business"; it just happens to be a failing one right now.

So. The two things I have done well, in my opinion, are these: 1.) writing every day and 2.) showing my work to other people for critique.

Of the things I have not done well, I present only a small selection: 1.) watching movies all day, 2.) stressing out over query letters so much I don't send them for months, 3.) over-editing my book because I'm afraid of letting it go, 4.) getting angry when people ask me what my book is "about" because I haven't done the work to distill a good pitch for it, 5.) not telling people I'm a "writer" when they ask what I do, 6.) avoiding human interaction entirely.

Well, if you've made it this far, thank you. I hope my self-review was marginally entertaining; but if not, I leave you with the inimitable and uplifting Sly and the Family Stone.

Andre Dubus III and the Dream State Bonanza

Last Saturday I traveled to the 2014 Baltimore Book Fair with my poet and writer friend Fernando. I was lucky enough to see (and pose a question to) Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, among other novels. Simply put, the guy was engaging, helpful, and, at least to my untrained eye, he looked like he was enjoying himself.

Andre had a rough life, though: single-mom family in Massachusetts, barely paying the bills, violent neighborhood thugs who severely injured his brother and sister. His dad, one of America's famous short story writers, abandoned them early on.

To cope, and to protect his loved ones, Andre became a boxer, an attacker of lowlife predators, vigilante-style; but writing slid into his life as a valve for pent-up feelings.

At age 55, at the fair, Andre was tall and imposing, though certainly friendly. His voice was commanding but not authoritative, and his appreciation for each member of the audience was clear. A good role model, in short, especially held against the surly, iconoclast writer stereotype ("pay attention, my pain is so important"). He was a person in tune with his emotions and with the emotions of others, which, I can see, certainly lends itself to writing.

He mentioned a soft spot for troubled young men, since he was angry and violent and young once (if only towards abusers and people who hurt the weak). The way he spoke, I got the impression he had gone through at least one support group program, or therapy, or both; this was a good impression.

Of his books, I have only read House of Sand and Fog, though hearing him speak made me want to read more. The book in question, according to Mr. Dubus, was darker than he would have liked, but the ending he wrote was "the only one that would have worked." Dubus writes in an open, unpretentious style, and his use of voice in House of Sand and Fog is striking. One protagonist is a middle-aged Iranian colonel, the other a twenty-something ex-coke addict from the East Coast. Both speak from the first person perspective, and both are full and flawed characters.

Dubus read from his newest book, Dirty Love, which apparently evolved from a "sexy predator story" of a serial killer to a middle-aged woman's search for love. This was one of his examples of the "mystery" of writing: you start out with a murderer, and end up attaching yourself to the quiet, uncertain virgin and her first boyfriend. (There are three other novellas in Dirty Love, and this is only one them.)

My question to Mr. Dubus was how he chose his details while writing; as he read from Dirty Love, for example, he mentioned his character feeling the beat of a nightclub's speakers under her fingernails (I'm paraphrasing and probably getting the words wrong).

First he asked if I was a writer. I awkwardly mumbled, "yeah," and he gave a tasteful mini-speech about his process. The big takeaway I got was that writing was like "a dream state," at least with the first draft, so he seemed to be pretty intuitive with his choices.

The very next question (from another writer in the audience) concerned his revision process, and Mr. Dubus said he reviewed every scene "200-300 times" to ask, "Is this true? Does this character feel this way? Does this action happen like this?" The word "truth" was nice, since it implied an internal consistency of a novel, a network of rules, of the writer's own creation, that she must abide by. I found myself thinking of my own scenes and asking, "Is this true? Does the psychologist feel this way after being kidnapped?"

All in all, the trip to Bmore was a worthy one, because of Fernando, who was a great companion, but also because of Mr. Dubus's lecture. His name, by the way, is pronounced duh-BYOOSE, which the book fair announcer unfortunately butchered. Still, she said it with more kindness and effort than the kids in his middle school who called him "Doobus."

Andre Dubus III, in the flesh

The One About Francois Truffaut

So while I enjoy my undefined workplace interregnum, I've been watching famous movies on Netflix. Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows", however, is not available in Netflix's catalog, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about fifty years back, so I drove my physical form, away from the computer, to the library, and checked out the DVD. Daily human interaction complete.

What's the movie about? A misunderstood adolescent who steals a typewriter and stirs up trouble (faire les quatre cents coups, sacrebleu!) in working-class France.

There's plenty of cursing, emotional abuse, and tomfoolery, which was supposed to reflect the director's real life. I hope he at least had that sweet plaid jacket the kid wears in the movie.

After scrolling through the "French New Wave" section of Wikipedia, I discovered that this was a pretty big deal in a France where only established directors made films, which had to be drawn from "important" (famous literature, Greek stuff) themes. So Truffaut helped popularize a genre that introduced scruffy teens, cheap film equipment (like sticking a camera in a shopping cart for a tracking shot), and non-linear narrative. I'm generalizing, and apparently all these New Wavers stole lovingly from Jean Vigo, who lived in the 30s and had great hair... but don't we always steal from people with great hair?

Nothing is Illuminated (Just Kidding)

At our core, it's hard to start new habits. I realize I'm using this blog as a whiny confessional, by the way, but so be it: I'm not equipped to discuss the situation in Gaza, and I prefer to keep my opinions about the Ukrainian crisis to myself, since I actually know real humans in Ukraine.

Even slamming down these paragraphs is excruciating. The sickly white of the computer screen (oh, first world problems), the pulsing in my forehead as I fight to think of the next word or phrase. Then, editing that phrase to make it palatable to a few potential readers; it makes me want to crawl under a sofa like Gregor Samsa and click my little pincers together (not a euphemism for masturbation, I swear).

Granted, it was cloudy today, and whenever the air pressure builds up, I find myself spiraling into a weird, foggy malaise, which is when I read my old journal entries and remind myself of my true actions and values, so I don't run off and do something idiotic. I attempt to reach out to other people and say something brief, something that sends a grappling hook into another's heart or brain and convinces her to reply. Then I get all excited and happy to exist in the world. I'm basically, then, a less shaggy puppy with acne.

Baritone voice in my head, wreathed in biblical reverb: NO ONE EVER SAID WRITING WOULD BE EASY.

I know, I know, but I'm building a habit of complaining, since I tend to never do that, preferring instead to bottle my emotions and explode every few months in a fiery (not-all-that-impressive-but-still) rage, which is bad for all my neurotransmitters, and adipose tissue, and probably for my teeth as well. So here it is, complaining.

I know all this must sound like I don't do anything except wallow in my own filth, but I swear I don't. I value helping other humans and building something reasonably lasting and contributing in some miniscule way to the progress of our teeming species. Even if it's just a story about farts or something.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who wanted to make movies for a living. She was unsure, because she felt guilty devoting her life to a craft that didn't appear to have an immediate tangible benefit to humankind. Why not be a surgeon and save a countable number of children's lives?

This is a sound logic, and one I often employ when I'm berating myself at my current standing in life. "You used to have ambition!" I say, preferably wagging my fist in a mirror. "You wanted a Ph.D, or an M.D., and you dreamed of creating a cool theory about schizophrenia!"

What, then, do stories give us? The stock answers are hope, knowledge, entertainment, deeper understanding of the human condition. The fact that a group of words could potentially have any of those effects on another person is astounding, and a beautiful reason to learn the craft. What's more, I believe it's possible to help someone else through writing, if only by distracting her from delinquent taxes.

Uplifting, right? The humanities have some human worth. That said, however, I certainly feel a discrete selfishness when I write. A little needle of power or comfort, a push to have it all my way, if only on paper. This reminds me of a nonfiction Milan Kundera book I read a while back, in which he said (I'm paraphrasing and bastardizing here) that an author must lash himself to the pole of his monomania as he writes, by the mere fact of trying to express himself.

Now, I think there's a spectrum here; Bret Easton Ellis disclosed in an interview that he writes his books only for himself, and about his current place in his own life. There's one end. Then you have Upton Sinclair, who fought to change unfair living conditions and labor laws with his novels.

So is my book for me or you?

I'm no Upton Sinclair. I wrote my novel about the power imbalance in Okinawa, Japan, but I can't imagine it will do more than raise a mild amount of awareness about that particular region of the world. I would, of course, be happy if this occurred; more humans know where Okinawa is! But I also wrote it for myself. I wrote it because I walked around that island and felt sorry for myself as a confused 23-year-old, and because I felt the jittery hope of wandering inside a country I had never before visited. I wrote it because I forged a stupid, brief connection with that place, and thought about the work I was doing there (which I think was important), and thought about my father and grandfather being stationed there, on the U.S. military bases in the region, and thought about my future and old patterns of behavior and sleeplessness and drug abuse and suicide and a litany of other me-centric events, as well as the imagined lives of all the other people on Okinawa, the musicians and cooks and laborers and children and politicians, and I made myself talk to someone in Japanese every day, in order to make myself uncomfortable and experience a modicum of the discomfort he or she must feel living in the shadow of American military installations, and I felt a joy at meeting the people in the bases themselves, because those people were cooperative and kind and cool, and I felt a deep love for the world while I walked around the pristine beaches at night. I loved buying vegetables by myself at a market tucked away in an alley off Heiwa Street, and I loved walking into a guitar shop and asking, "Might I play one of your instruments, please?" in my stuttering, choking Japanese, and then strumming a few chords in a soundproofed room with a bowl of yakitori in my distended belly, imagining what it might be like to be one of the ghosts said to haunt the Air Force base at night.

There are more well-traveled people than me. There are more capable and determined individuals. At heart, I am just a meandering, wide-eyed kid who wants to observe and know what is foreign to him, who wants also to preserve a meaningful connection to that world (I have no desire to be apathetic and numb, thank you). I know this post degenerated into meaningless impressions, but I thank you for reading to the end, if in fact you are reading this. Because the reason I write is to toss out one of those mental grappling hooks and catch it in your face (painlessly, for the most part). Then I can drag my way over so we can start a conversation.

I hope we exchange hooks until our cells commit mass apoptosis. Peace and love, world.

Writer's Block

I'm stuck! My book is languishing, even though it's (basically) done. What do I do now? Keep tweaking it until my eyes disintegrate? Send it out to another indifferent agent? Send it to a small press and pray I get paid anything? Or leave it forever in a folder?

I'm having separation anxiety with this novel, especially since I know it has problems. What about all that scene-blocking I have yet to do? Do I let certain exchanges of dialogue stay confusing? Did I explain too much instead of subtly showing what I want to say?

Who knows. An editor will come along and chop it up anyhow; I think I need to be a little more detached. Easier said than done, though.

Here's Tainted Love.