Truth in Writing

The students in English 1010 are working on their personal essays, which means personal essays are also constantly on my mind. I just had a conversation today in which I confessed that I believe that, in general, people are cruel, selfish, and petty. I wish it wasn't the case, but I have an unfortunate (and undoubtedly prideful) view that the average person is mediocre, and mediocrity breeds pettiness. People do not aspire to be great, to transcend this mortal coil, to create beauty and wisdom and fantastic thought, they....

But then something catches me off guard. It's a thought I hadn't expected, although I've heard it before. The thought is this: of all the essays I read, I can't help but feel for every single writer. I feel a connection, some slight touch, like the spark of electricity jumping between two wires. Even for the briefest moment, we touch, like strangers in a crowd who brush together and then feel our eyes meet. And for everyone, even for the kids who only want to write about how cool that game was, or for the ones who have to be there and can't be bothered to treat me like a person, I can't help but feel a little sympathy. A little compassion.

Writing is beautiful in that. More than any other medium, it transmits pure thought. It places me into the mind, the experience of the writer. Rather than capturing the objective truth, it captures one person's truth, one particular person's imperfect memory rather than a completely factual recollection of the past. And in that imperfect memory are housed all the fears, all the hopes of a real person. If a person misrepresents a situation, leaves out the things they fear or mourn, their own actions they wish they could forget, that is beautiful, because I can feel even in the absence that shame, that guilt, that grief. If the writer admits it, embraces it, presents it to me like a gift upon a cushion, it is beautiful, because, no matter what it is, it is so wrapped up in heartbreak and truth that I can't help but pity them. Even the ones who don't see how thoughtless, absurd, or even cruel they were implicitly admit their childishness, their lack of understanding, and I can't blame that, because they don't know what they did.

If we could all write and all read, all come to understand our own thoughts and the thoughts of all others, to live not in their shoes but in their minds and memories for the space of even a few brief pages, how could we ever have war? How could we allow poverty, misery, suffering?

(And then there are those who walk in and say, "I hate writing. It's so pointless." Bastards.)

The Kings Cross Bogan rolls 20s

I played in the worldwide D&D Day game today. Near the end of the game, I decided to stop trying to play a character and just go a bit crazy. The first thing I did was, when I used an ability called Sword Dance or something, I said that my character shined her (yes, I got stuck playing the girl) sunrod into a globe of glass while she danced with her sword, all Saturday Night Fever. Later, I quoted the Kings Cross Bogan by saying, "I will call on my fully sick boys!" and I rolled a 17 to hit with my daily attack. Next, I used an ability called Booming Blade, and went "chk-chk BOOM" as I used it, and rolled a 20. Critical hit on the chk-chk BOOM? Very appropriate.

Sometims, I blog about nothing at all.

Shitty One-Ply

I used to have a friend at Ithaca College who would go on about the sad unfairness of one-ply toilet paper. While all the student dorms and the bathrooms the students used were stocked with one-ply, dry and scratchy and irritating and easily ripped, all the bathrooms in faculty areas had soft two-ply toilet paper. He used to point out how very unfair and classist this is.

I'd like to go beyond this Marxist rhetoric and speak instead to an even wider problem: the very existence of one-ply toilet paper. Why in the world do we need this product? Is there anyone out there who prefers what is universally known as a genuinely inferior product? Of course not. The only conceivable reason anyone would buy one-ply is because it's cheap (and, in the case of universities, the people who buy it won't be forced to sandpaper their asses on it). Imagine if factories only produced acceptable classes of toilet paper. I would be willing to bet that the greater efficiency involved in having fewer choices would ensure that the decent two-ply would cost as much as one-ply does now. This leaves me with the conclusion that one-ply exists only to justify the existence--and higher cost--of a separate, BETTER variety in two-(and multi-) ply toilet paper. We don't have shitty one-ply so we'll actually buy and use it. We have it so two-ply costs more when we actually do buy it.

This theory extends to other products. Take, for instance, optional packages on automobiles. For instance, optional passenger airbags. How many people are going to say, "No, thank you. I feel pretty confident that I'm not going to get into an accident, and if I do, I don't like my passengers all that well anyway."? This also applies to just about everything we can buy, from video games to operating systems to razors. So many of them are genuinely inferior products that it doesn't make sense to me not to offer just one product that's the very best it can be. Instead of having a $1000 and $2000 version of a computer, for example, can't we just only offer the very best at, say, $1400? The efficiency of only having to make one model would make it all the more worthwhile. What's wrong with letting everyone enjoy the very best of things? And nobody would have to put up with shitty one-ply toilet paper anyway.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I went into one of the local used bookstores, Books of Yesterday, and delved into their dungeonlike basement, where half the books are just lying around in towerlike stacks or unsorted on big shelves behind the desk I never see anyone at. In the back corner, they keep their fantasy books. I saw a copy of R.E. Howard's King Kull stories, but the book had mold in several places, and I'm not about to pay five bucks for a moldy book. I also found an Ace paperback edition of Fritz Leiber's Swords and Deviltry. Wikipedia says Fafhrd amd Gray Mouser is one of the seminal swords and sorcery series. The only other time I remember reading about Gray Mouser is when he dueled Zorro way way back as a joke in InQuest magazine. The store had two copies of the book. One had a laminated cover, and they wanted more than ten bucks for it. The book cost 1.25 in 1973. The other, the one I bought, was five bucks. It has a page loose and several pages torn, so I was going to try to talk them down, but my nemesis at the register beat me to the punch.

When they say Neanderthals would fit in with modern men, I wouldn't be too sure. This guy had a brow ridge that would do a silverback proud. He barely spoke three words to me, didn't say hello when I did, and literally threw my credit card onto the counter when he was done swiping it. Since I was worrying about whether I was going to get brained by a stone-headed club, I didn't have the audacity to question him about the quality of his product. And so I walked out, five bucks plus tax poorer, but with a book that, according to the back cover, promises "the greatest heroes in the annals of fantasy." Can't go wrong there, now can ya?

Simple Gifts

I remember learning that song in perhaps third grade and thinking it was remarkably dull. "To turn, turn will be our delight?" Sounds like a bunch of hippies. And hippies are just a step above Wiccans.

Setting aside my burning torch for a while, let's talk shop. People say it's the little things in life that matter. That's not true. It's just that the 'little' things many people overlook are the things that are really the big things. Ever since I was a wee lad, I've had a fanatical devotion to creative writing. Some novels are dearer to me than most people are.

I value reading things written by my friends. Like a child who is given a blank piece of paper by a psychiatrist and some crayons, the blank page shows the soul of the creative writer with clarity not found in anything else. In a piece of creative writing, be it nonfiction, poetry, or fiction, we reveal our inner selves, our longings and our doubts and our terrors. When we create from the heart, our veils are penetrated, and readers nestle into a private nook of our soul. Even more so than in a painting or a sculpture, which is only a snapshot, a piece of creative writing is a world in itself, with its own rules and values. It reveals if the writer is calloused or romantic, cruel or kind, petty or generous.

Flannery O'Connor believed in a just world, one where truly good people are rewarded and the sinful are punished. She then went on to demonstrate how all of her characters were flawed.

Charles Dickens wanted to believe in a happy world that is safe and good, but they always came out flawed.

Courage and loyalty were paramount to Rudyard Kipling.

Of course, you can argue any of those sweeping generalizations, but my point remains: creative writers don't write about the absolute real world, but rather the world as filtered through their hearts. It's the world as they see it, as they hope it is, as they fear it is, as they wish it was, as they are terrified of it becoming.

This is why I value the writing of my friends above almost anything else. In it, I feel like I really get to know the person. It's not just when you hold a person over a volcano (what, you haven't seen Firefly?) that you meet him, but when you read his poetry.

Perhaps a year ago, a good friend of mine gave me a chapbook of his poetry to read and critique. I never did get to critique it, but I read it every now and then, and I am amazed by both the depth of the writing and I feel like I truly meet again a person I only glimpse in 'real life.' Frankly, I feel a little guilty to hold onto this poetry and read it, but that's a part of someone's soul. It's not the kind of thing I can throw away.

Moments like those, like a sunrise over a treasured landscape I'll never see again, are as unforgettable as they are sacred.

(PS Probably fortunately for my digestive system, the bacon did stay green after it sat on the frying pan for a minute, which dissuaded me from chancing it.)

A little contentious today, aren't we?

I hate to swear. It's crass and ignorant. But sometimes I can't think of a better way to say it. So you have been warned

















*****


















Fuck the tea party. Our country keeps a torture facility open for years in Cuba, opens secret prisons across the world and makes people disappear without a trial, hands over prisoners to foreign countries because we can't torture them as much as we'd like but other countries can, and we, the people, do nothing. Then the government--rather than just curtailing our civil liberties, occupying foreign countries, and abusing our trust--imperils our MONEY, and we're up in arms.

Fuck that.

If you want to be angry, be angry about something that means more than your wallet.

One of those days

I've been down all day, but that's okay. I got up early to join my family for Easter breakfast, then accompanied them to Church. It was a good sermon, and I even got a little teary at one point, but I didn't feel the presence of anyone or any greater thing but the crowd pressing in around. I couldn't help thinking how many of them, like me, wouldn't be there next week. I couldn't help wondering how many were there just in case. I wondered again, as I often have, whether religion is all one great act of collective wishful thinking.

But that's not what I set out to write about. I set out to write about my feelings. I have no immediate reason to feel the way I do, but that's not a sin. It's a beautiful day. Not a good day for melancholy. Maybe that's why I'm writing this, deep down: on a warm, sunny day, I feel as though it's my duty to the day to feel more cheerful.

But I don't feel in any hurry to cheer myself up. I don't mind feeling down. I put a melancholy song on, sit and think. Be glad I don't have anywhere to be this minute, no one to be with. Maybe there would be that rush to try to cheer me up, and I would have to put in that effort, as though making me feel better were another task on that daily list, and I could help them get there if I only smiled a little. And of course I'd try, because I don't want people to feel bad. The worst part about feeling bad is that trying to hide it, and I'm not a bad actor. But when I'm alone, I can kick back, grab a pillow, hum along with Billy Corgan. I'm not hurting anyone and no one is hurting me. Just time to breathe between heartbeats, let it go for a minute. Just be melancholy for a while, no rush to be anything else. At least not yet.

Dream

I had a dream. I got up in the morning, walked around, started getting ready for going to the presentation today. Then I noticed that there were things in my apartment I haven't had for a while; to check to see if I was in a dream, I pinched my cheek. I didn't feel a thing; I panicked, expecting to get attacked by some horrible nightmare monstrosity in a moment. Instead, the floor opened into blackness, and I fell through.

I fell down toward the Earth from high above. I almost collided with the street, but wound up hovering over it. I was in China outside some official function. A shouting policewoman was pushing people onto a rickety bus to go to the event, screaming at the top of her voice. When she saw me, she started screaming at me to get on the bus. I told her I wasn't from around there, I was just a dream manifestation, and I didn't have to do anything she said. She just screamed louder that everyone has to get on the bus, dream or not. I didn't get on the bus. She kept screaming. I woke up and went to the presentation.

I'll leave it up to you to interpret, readers.

Razor Sharp

I teach college English (although not really, since this will be the last semester I teach it, having nothing to do with how well I did and everything to do with the fact that it wasn't ever going to last anyway, and I am supposed to pretend to be an expert when I am unemployed in three months with really no job prospects, but I'm sure I've complained enough about that before and I will again later). In my classes on Tuesday, I had the students compete to see which team could come up with the most cliches. When my students asked why cliches are bad, I explained that it's because they no longer evoke images in our heads. They're so familiar that they've lost their power, and all we hear is the cliche.

But this isn't always true. Whenever I hear the phrase "razor sharp," for intance, it puts a very specific scene in my mind.

I'm standing in the upper bathroom of our house. I am holding a pink disposable razor from my mom's sink cupboard in my hand, the blade resting against my thumb. I am fourteen, attending Catholic school, and my father won't allow me to shave my first mustache. He says it's just peach fuzz anyway and it's not a problem. It is a problem: the dress code forbids facial hair and I've been warned. My father likes to brag that he was born with a mustache, and I have never seen him without one except once, in a photo of him as a small child.

I'm looking at myself in the mirror. Looking at my mustache, the dark hairs individual and straight, brushing my lip. I hate it. I don't want to have a mustache. I don't want to get in trouble.

Then, I hear someone at the door, the door starts to open, and I grip the razor tightly, trying to make it disappear in my hand. My brother tells me to hurry up so we don't miss church, then leaves. When he is gone and I check my hand, the razor has left two deep straight cuts half an inch deep in my thumb, the skin white and puffy around them, the blood just starting to seep up.

It starts to hurt later, when I lie that I cut my hand on a knife. I only hope no one notices there are two parralel cuts, not just one.

And I learn just how sharp razors are.

The Topaz Internment Camp

One of the less wholesome legacies of the Second World War in Utah is the memory of the Topaz Internment Camp, where more than eight thousand people of Japanese descent, many of them United States citizens who had lived in the country all their lives, were taken and held for three and a half years. They were placed behind barbed wire fences surrounded by guard towers manned by soldiers with guns. All Japanese, even those with just one-sixteenth blood, were considered potentially hostile.

Today, I went to a presentation by a survivor of that camp, a tiny woman with fluffy white hair, and a man whose parents had been in another camp. He introduced a number of black and white photographs taken from the National Archives, most of them about Topaz, as he told the story. At times, he would prompt the lady to tell a little of her own story. At the beginning, I had tears in my eyes, but I pulled it together before long and listened intently.

She had been seventeen and in high school when Pearl Harbor happened. She said she remembered going to school that next Monday and sitting in the back shivering, afraid of what might happen to her. Her teacher took her aside to tell her everything would be all right. Later, when they got the order to "evacuate" to the holding area they would stay while the camps were built, some of her friends from school came to see her off. As she described that to the audience, it was one of the moments she was genuinely touched with emotion.

She said they were first kept at a former racetrack in a stable with no windows that still reeked of animals. Later, they were moved by train to Utah. She had grown up in the San Fransisco area, so both the snow and the heat were new to her, and they were particularly bad because heating was by one stove. They lived in military-style barracks, with communal bathrooms, cafeterias, and laundry rooms. At first, there were no dividers between the bathroom stalls. She laughed when she said that they finally built shoulder-high dividers with curtains; it was a very sociable experience to use the bathroom. He told the story of one elderly woman who was so ashamed to be seen using the bathroom that she put a brown paper bag over her head with holes cut for eyes.

Many of the fathers were separated from their families. Because her father was a businessman who sold miso soup, he was taken away by the FBI to another facility.

Throughout the presentation, I was struck by her good humor and good will. She didn't express any bitterness toward the government, which, as the gentleman pointed out, she had every right to feel. Many of the stories he and she told were heartbreaking. High school and college students volunteered to teach elementary school. People of Japanese descent were called on to enlist in the Armed Forces to serve in the European theater; when they returned on leave, they had to visit their families behind barbed wire.

Topaz is now mostly abandoned, with just trash, foundations, and one re-built barrack at the site. There are plans for a permanent museum in the nearby town of Delta, though, and I do hope those plans come to fruition.

In the late eighties, the government offered formal letter of apology signed by the President to all survivors, along with twenty thousand dollars. As the gentleman pointed out, however, I doubt anyone would agree to live behind barbed wire under constant guard for three and a half years for twenty thousand dollars more than forty years later.

So often I forget that the past isn't just something in books and in videos. For someone, that was their present day, their experience in the passing moment, and they had to live with it. And they still do.

My Random Bathroom

I'm convinced my bathroom has a link somewhere to another dimension, or perhaps just Narnia. It seems it has a random scent every day (and not the scents you'd think, either). Today, it was incense. Maybe I'll keep you updated about what it smells like (no, I won't mention the scents you'd think, either).

Of course, I'm aware that the bathroom fan probably just links to another apartment through the ducts, but there's more magic to it this way!

Aloisius's New Teeth

Aloisius Dell, a kindly old Southern gentleman, sat in his rocking chair on the porch of his charming mansion, watching the young people going up and down the road he rememebered when it was just a muddy cart path. He squinted his old eyes as he watched the old country doctor stop his new automobile next to Aloisius's buggy and then walk up the path carrying his black leather bag.

"What can I do for you, doctor?" said Aloisius with a smile.

"Just coming by to check up on you, Mr. Dell. Sure is a lovely little garden you have here." The doctor pushed his glasses further up his nose. "How have things been?"

"Oh, just about as fine as ever. Enjoying a beautiful day," said Aloisius, adjusting his monocle.

"I'm mighty glad to hear that, Mr. Dell," said the doctor. "You know, I have something here, just for you."

Aloisius narrowed his eyes. His eyesight wasn't as good as it used to be. "And what would that be, doctor?"

"Well, I've heard it through the grapevine that you've been having a bit of trouble chewing your food, Mr. Dell. So I thought I'd get you fixed up with some new teeth."

Aloisius stood up so quickly he almost knocked his rocking chair over. Keeping one hand on the chair's arm for balance, he shook the other at the doctor. "Now listen here! Aloisius Dell, Esquire does not need no false teeth! I'm still hale and hearty, and don't you forget it!"

"But they'll be just like your own teeth! It'll make a world of difference," insisted the doctor.

Aloisius put his hands on the hips of his waistcoat. "Don't you start that with me! They still call me 'Colonel Dell' in town. Go ahead, ask me which war I fought in!"

The doctor mopped his brow with his handkerchief. He could see this was going to take a while. He rested on Aloisius's veranda and said, "What war were you in, Mr. Dell."

"Just about all of them!" said Aloisius fiercely. "I stormed Omaha Beach more times than you've had warm meals! Just you ask anyone in town."

The doctor smiled gently. "And when's the last time you've been to town, Mr. Dell?"

Aloisius scratched his head, sighed, and sat back down heavily in his chair. "Been a while, I reckon. Oh, all right. Just leave them teeth on the step."

The doctor smiled and nodded. "Of course, Mr. Dell. You just let me know if they cause you any trouble."

After the doctor's car drove out of sight, Aloisius rose and went to the strange object on his porch. He tried them in. They didn't feel so bad at all.

"Hmm," he said, scratching his white goatee. "Maybe it's time me and Jenny went to the town again. And who knows, maybe it's time I got some new spectacles, too. But first I'll see how them teeth work out."

Of course, Mr. Aloisius Dell, Esq. was a lifelong bachelor.

Jenny was the name of his rocket launcher.


*** In completely unrelated news, I bought 2 gigs of RAM for my Dell computer to bring the total up to 3. It seems to work well so far. Maybe eventually I'll get a new graphics card, too. But first, I'll see how them RAM work out.

The writer Brandon Schrand

... is much shorter than I expected. He came to the school to meet with students and read from his work. The selections he read from his work were excellent; he read a few chapters from Ender's Hotel, his memoir about growing up in the hotel his family owned and managed. He also read from a new book he's writing, which is a memoir in the form of an extended annotated bibliography. Apparently, he was really into pot and Morrison when he was younger, which he humorously insisted was fictional, since his mother-in-law was in the audience. He also seemed to like my question; I asked what he would say to young people who don't feel they've had much life experience who are looking to write nonfiction. He replied that everyone can tie their work in with the greater human experience and thereby make it meaningful. He also encouraged us to find the meaning in everyday life; just because we haven't experienced weird stuff or had great tragedy befall us doesn't mean we can't write something that speaks to the human condition.

Good on you, Brandon Schrand. Good on you.

Back to working on my essay about William Gibson. The more I write, the more I'm convinced I'm just full of it. Sigh. Excelsior!

In which the man discusses a very un-cyberpunk theme

It's surprising where cyberpunk pops up. Yesterday, I went to the Oneida River Festival on the Bear River in Idaho. The theme of the festival was to raise funds and awareness to preserve the Bear River as free-flowing, as opposed to putting a dam on it, as the plan currently seems to stand. I'm not entirely sure about the specifics, but there you have it. Damming it would be bad for the ecosystems, and therefore we should all go read poetry and listen to live music.

It was about the most folksy event you can go to without men in tight jeans and flannel standing around saying, "Yep. I reckon." There wasn't even a jitter of cell phone reception. The music included covers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, as well as an original song by a young man bewailing his change of fate since he spent his lucky quarter on buying a Coke from a machine (yes, you read that right). I wrote a poem for the event on the spot, and it seemed to be fairly well received, or at least as well as anything is received that I didn't labor and sweat over for hours. Nobody threw themselves at me.

Normally, the lack of people flinging themselves at my feet isn't a tragedy, but this one had a hint of the tragic about it. There was a lovely young woman there with beautiful bronzed skin and long, curly brown hair who danced to the band when no-one else did, in a cheap green dress and sandals. Watching her just stand there and dance with everyone watching made me think what it must have been like to watch hippies dance. She had the kind of build that makes skinny girls look sticklike in comparison, with amazing legs that had a pair of the most well-defined calves I've seen. As much as I imagine one of my characters becoming enthralled by a dancing punkette in a seedy techno club, I myself was mesmerized by this young thing. Naturally, I never talked to her. The cynic in me just kept telling me that there's no use talking to a pretty girl I'll never see again. The romantic in me just watched her dance.

But, as I said at the onset, cyberpunk did pop up. I grabbed Neuromancer to read. One of the professors from the school saw me reading and told me that she would be teaching the book in an online class in the Fall about cyberculture.

A class about cyberculture? Teaching Neuromancer? Now that is win. I'm going to have to get in on it somehow.