Catalogue of Waking Dreams

Adrift 8: Comfort

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:44:00 GMT

Exhausted and wind blasted, I slept like the dead. No dreams came to haunt me that night.

When I awoke, Deborah’s apartment was at once new and familiar. Old incense clung to the furniture and dim sunlight filtered under the heavy velvet shades that covered the large window. Shelves lined most of the living space, filled with books, small, carved figures and trinkets. All bare space remaining along the walls was taken up by posters of old concerts and films. Candles huddled in waxy groups on any bare surfaces and the coffee table was covered with magazines. There was a large note sitting on top of the pile.

I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. In the curtained room, it was impossible to tell what time of day it was and there was no clock anywhere in sight. The note told me where the towels were, and invited me to take a shower, and hang out, she would be home by three and then I would have to tell her all about my fancy new scars. I rubbed a hand against my head absently tracing the network of scars with my fingertips.

In the tiny kitchen, I poured myself a glass of water and looked at the clock on the stove - it was almost noon. As the water went down my throat, I felt it spread across my body, like water soaking into parched dirt. I drank a second glass and then I took a very hot shower and wore a t-shirt instead of the hoodie.

The still and quiet afternoon was at odds with the noise I was accustomed to in Brooklyn, and I went to the window and pulled back the blinds. Sunlight burned into the room, driving back the velvety shadows and suddenly, the apartment became dusty and cheap, as if the light had leached it of all color and vitality. Outside, depressing suburbia sprawled all about. A small street with a traffic light on one corner and other two storied brick buildings that all looked identical, with a few businesses open on the first floor. Deborah's apartment was an island of identity afloat on a sea of mediocrity. I let the curtain back down and turned on the dim lights instead. At least they returned the space to a suitable, textured gloom.

New York felt far enough that I began to desire music again. Maybe all I needed was distance from that constant reminder, maybe a bit of space and time will be enough. I wanted to rummage through Deborah’s records and play something, but thought better of it and just played what was already in her stereo. Something loud burst through the speakers and the sound washed over me, guitar and voice overdriven with some need and an apatite began to growl in my stomach.

I was flipping through a French magazine when Deborah came through the door. “You’re up,” she said and I smiled at her. Her eyes went from mine to trace over my head and I stared back at her, waiting for her to finish. She took off her jacket and hung it up in the closet, kicked off her shoes and placed them by the door.

“So, lets hear it.”

She would never know how much it meant to me that she didn’t comment on my scars at all – did not try to tell me they were fine, did not tell me how cool I looked with them - she said nothing at all. So I told her about the fire.

I told her about the night at the bar, late at night, early in the morning, in the packed space when someone began to shout fire but it was too late by then, the stampede, the collapsing walls, the stuck doors, and then trapped inside while firemen tore the door down while my hair caught fire as I struggled to get out of there, how it licked at my skin and whispered in my ear, how I felt the heat on my face and on my back, my shoulder, how the flames licked my ear like a lover and for a second, even death felt seductive, like hot breath and tongue against my skin. Before the pain, before my skin bubbled like water and I couldn’t stop screaming.

I wanted to go on. I wanted to tell her everything.

Deborah deserved to know that I left someone behind, left her to die, even as she was crawling towards me through the fire, her whole body aflame and yet she was still moving. I saw her insides dribbling out, her fat sizzled as it hit the floor, her face surrounded by a halo of golden flame instead of hair, her mouth dribbled lava that singed the ground and her eyes were runny white tears like liquid pearls on a scorched face and she still managed to call out to me by name, called me to help her and I didn’t do a damn thing. I ran away.

Suddenly, the music could do did nothing to ease me, and New York might have been a hundred miles away but the shadows were here in the room with me, invisible but still reaching out to touch me as soon as her face floated out of memory. My mouth worked soundlessly as I tried to tell her the rest of it, and keep back the words, keep them from being spoken aloud, a charm against silence that once broken would shatter me completely.

Deborah listened wordlessly, her face gradually took on a more sympathetic tone until I finished and then she leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead, holding my head in her hands, one hand held gingerly against the scars.

“My poor boy,” she said and I couldn’t keep back a shiver, something cold that ran from her lips down my spine, and across my shoulders and a spasm made me contort like a shock had just ripped through me. “Shh,” Deborah said and hugged me and I shivered again. “I’m sorry, Zubair. I shouldn’t have asked you if you weren’t ready to talk about this.”

I stayed in her arms, and slowly, her body head leaked into my frozen skin and warmed me. A long moment passed, and my breath eased, her smell filled my nose, a familiar and safe memory that I clung to and turned away from the burning face that floated behind my closed eyes. “Stay with me,” she stroked her hand over my forehead, brushing back imaginary hair. “You don’t have to go back there.”

Spectral figures stared at us from grainy black and white images, trapped behind glass and frames, they were silent witnesses to our pact as I said, “Okay.”

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Adrift 7: Deborah

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:06:57 GMT

Deborah took me into the bar, and the night slowly took on an old, familiar feeling. I keep my hood up to conceal the scars and declined any drinks, but otherwise, I felt myself absorbed back into an old identity that didn't quite fit anymore. There were students and other faculty to greet, shake hands with, there was the repeating of names until they were audible over the music and the dozens of voices all engaged in their own conversations mingling to form a babbling din. Soon, the bar grew even more crowded as the dinner crowd gave up the street and moved in. At first, I was only glad to be out of the cold and under some shelter but slowly, I began to warm to Deborah.

The way she looked at me - with mixed amusement and a hint of something secret in her eyes – she took me in, and sent me back in time. She became a link to a past that I had all but forgotten in the last few months. A past that was full of life, and exciting ideas, of passion and possibilities. A time full of cars packed with friends driven too fast along empty, dark roads, of setting fire to things in fields and crushing stolen electronics in junk yards under steel-toed boots, of staying up with her and talking about the things you talk about after a joint has loosened all sense of propriety, of walking hand in hand over dew wet grass at dawn and leaving the campfire behind into late summer mists. She took me back to a time when the world was still just a small bubble and it was something that I could wrap my hand around and possess if I ever cared to take it, to a time when affection and friendship was enough to overcome anything, and jealousy was an unknown, unquantifiable thing.

Before the fire. Before the fire.

Hours passed and I was mute, satisfied to listen in on conversations, about classes and funding and students and studies and every so often, Deborah and I exchanged glances and couldn't help smiling at each other.

"So, what happened?" She asked me when the bar eventually began to quiet down. "I heard all kinds of rumors. Were you in the hospital or something?"

I shrugged, enjoying the flashback too much to revisit the fire. "An accident. I decided to take a sabbatical, just hit the road, see what's out there before going back to the ball and chain."

"You staying at your parents?"

I shook my head, no. Deborah narrowed her eyes, under her fringe of dark hair her kohl lines and black stare were silent instruments of interrogation and then she smirked her scarred mouth, leaned in to pat my cheek. "You can keep your secrets for now, Zubair. But if I'm putting you up, I want answers eventually."

Her hand was warm, I couldn't remember the last time someone touched me like that. "Thanks. I didn't know how to ask."

She stood up, tapped the bar top loudly with her rings and then waved to the barkeeper at the other end. He waved back, "See ya, Deb."

We walked out of the bar like it was still four years ago, me walking just a little behind her, watching her leather print shoulder bag bouncing on her thin, curving, attractive hips. The night was even colder now, and I shivered in my sweatshirt. Her small car wasn't vintage but the build and interior was setup to make it seem that way. Inside, it smelled like Jasmine and I leaned back into the seats, the tension in my shoulders softened a little with the support.

There was some old music on the stereo, something moody, textured and melancholy, and the songs did the talking for both of us all the way as Deborah took us home. The town was completely deserted this late at night, not even any cars to pass us by and let us that that we were not alone. The sidewalks were unforgiving concrete slabs, the houses dark and the businesses became dead spaces, negative spaces that offered nothing to me.

Passing a small stretch of green, I saw someone lying on a bench turned in, a humanoid shape wrapped in sheets, impossible to tell if he was alive or dead, asleep or alert, buried under the sheets and clinging to a bundle around his middle, pressed into the side of the bench as far as he could go.

If I hadn’t run into Deborah, would I be sleeping on the next bench up from him? Or would I have splurged on a hotel room? How many times could I get a hotel before the money ran out? I had not eaten in hours and my stomach churned, full of acid waiting to dissolve something.

A shiver raced through my body and I shook, terrified of the possibility that I would be on the road with nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat, with no friends to call on. The heating warmed my legs and I wanted to lean over and switch the heat to my upper body but I kept my hands on my knees, and stared at my feet instead and tried to keep my thoughts from the future.

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Jealousy

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:48:13 GMT

I've never had trouble writing. Never. I go through dry spells but I can sort of deal with them as some necessary time that I need to gain enough new ideas and experiences that I can sleep on and then some alchemy will produce a few stories in my head and then I can start writing them down again and contort them into a narrative.

But music might as well be an impossible task. Everything sounds dull, boring, repetitive, useless. I record, and delete. I record, and delete. I read about the composition and writing process and either it's too academic and goes over my head or it's too basic and doesn't provide me with any starting point.

So I've been on the search for a good blog or articles to read and recently found one on the Times website. A few musicians have been writing this blog about their musical writing and they talk incessantly about how hard it is to write lyrics and the melody is the easiest part, so easy, that they'd give up writing lyrics if only they didn't enjoy singing so much.

I'd like to invite them to come suck my balls.

Adrift 6: Kingston

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:15:51 GMT

Rural streets are not built with pedestrians in mind. A small footpath had been marked in the half-trampled grass walking along with the road into Kingston from the Thruway. The jagged rumble strip marked the edge of the asphalt and on the road, the drivers veered off into the other lane to keep from clipping me, sending me into the thin reeds that stretched off into the night. I walked in the trampled path over garbage flung by tired hands or careless drivers, facing the traffic - never could remember which way to walk, with or against - and the approaching glare of headlights was enough to make me night blind. When the cars passed by, my vision was clouded with yellow and white sparks that hung suspended behind my blinking eyes. I walked on facing the lights, hopeful that the view of a person moving towards them will discourage any homicidal tendencies that might slip out of a tired driver's subconscious, while a person's back might seem like a target.

I tried to imagine what I might look like from within a car driving down this road. Years ago, when I drove this same road late at night, I saw the night walkers, small specks appearing suddenly into my headlights and then gone before I could do more than drift into the other lane a bit. There was barely enough time to notice them before they were swallowed up by the night again and I never thought about them again. As I walked the road, I felt like a fish, perpetually dipping in and out of the light and thoughts of the drivers. All around me, there were buildings and houses outlined with spots of lights, like some minimal painting, civilization that grew closer and then surrounded me, but I knew I would find no shelter there. Most of the shops were closed, with only some mute lights to stand guard over them. Cars parked in driveways and lots were dark, and empty.

The temperature kept dropping little by little and I walked on, putting one foot ahead of the other. The exercise was new for me, and my breath slowly grew more and more painful. My shoulders ached with the weight of my backpack and gradually, even my legs began to ache. There was nowhere to stop, and nowhere to go. I passed another gas station - an island of bright illumination, some shade of light that invited activity - but after my last encounter, I didn't want to test my luck with any more businesses. My only hope lay in the bars and restaurants by the river.

When the number of houses increased and the neighborhood began to resemble a residential area, the road sprouted a sidewalk and I moved onto it, and felt my muscles release some of their tension. I had been waiting to be hit by a car, a truck all this time. My legs shook a little as I walked the streets, trying to orient myself on foot rather than from a car, trying to remember when the businesses shuttered up for the night. The foolishness of not having a watch began to dawn on me, and I wondered if I should spend some of my money to buy something cheap, just so I could tell the time. Without the time, I felt completely adrift, cut off from the civilization around me. The world went on, following the beat of a universal metronome that I was suddenly too deaf to hear.

Following the streets, I came to the one small strip of the town where some imitation of nightlife existed. A couple of windows glowed with the light of activity, people milled inside, and a restaurant hosted a small gathering of people outside, smoking cigarettes, talking to each other with some introverted, urgent energy.

This was where I used to come when I lived here, with my friends, and stood in bars and outside restaurants when they closed, and tried to think of places to go, things to do. I hoped some of them still followed the nightly ritual. I moved easily by the people in front of the restaurant, listening to voices, but no one sounded familiar. I stood among them, searching for a minute and then, catching the wary of one too many strangers, I moved on to the bar.

I saw her standing outside, alone, smoking her cigarettes.

Before the fire, long before I ever met Raven, there was Deborah. Intelligent, cynical, a small, ancient scar that tugged one end of her mouth up into a shadow of a smile that never manifested, addicted to nicotine and imported beer, she would go on and on about sociological inequalities and activism till the words became a lulling drone. But then again, the drone was her charm, her ticket, a professional student Deborah attended graduate school like a vocation, trading majors, arguing for scholarships and fellowships like people negotiated salaries, she became a permanent fixture until most students and staff lost track of which group she fell in.

As a freshman, I had been fascinated by her, a senior who talked endlessly about her politics and while I grew weary of that old song soon enough, I never grew tired of her attention and her taste in culture. We would gather in her apartment and listen to records, watch foreign films, flip through French and Japanese magazines. Her opinions about sexuality were also a revelation. Certain male friends of Deborah who could put up with her perpetual opinions without invalidating them became members of a select list, her friends with benefits, and I found my name on that list sometime in early sophomore year.

Eventually, I graduated and moved to New York, and she remained in school, talking to her classes, smoking her cigarettes, moving from student housing to student housing, navigating the academic bureaucracy with a practiced ease. The last time I talked to her, maybe eight, maybe ten months ago, sometime around Christmas, she was teaching Anthropology and living in Kingston. We traded a few words on the telephone mocking the season as she flew south to see her family and stuck in the airport, she dialed numbers until someone picked up to keep her company. I was number seven on her list, and the first to pick up the phone. I felt bad for her then, promised myself I'd visit her and then promptly forgot until just that moment when I saw her standing outside the bar.

She looked like she had never changed, the black skirt, the black and white striped socks and her Mary Jane shoes, the cigarette held in her red lipped mouth and the black cat's eye glasses behind which her eyes narrowed at the street. She had cut her hair short since I last saw her, a cropped bob that touched the small of her neck towards the back and became shorter towards the front until it trailed off into a fringe of bangs. She looked like someone old in a new skin. I felt bad for her immediately, standing alone outside the bar, one arm holding the other as if she was cold.

I walked up to her and pushed back the hood of my sweatshirt just enough to let the ambient street light on my face and smiled at her.

"They still let you in this place after you broke all those glasses?"

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Adrift 5: Gas Station

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:30:49 GMT

Three hours after we left New York, Tony cruised off the thruway, into the traffic circle outside Kingston. Circling around, he turned down route 28 and began to slow down next to a gas station. "I'm gonna have ta drop you off here, Zee." He wouldn't say my full name, as if it kept him from having to acknowledge my ethnicity. "Nice talking to ya - hey, take my word, man. Head back home."

I grinned at him and held out my hand, "I'm just going to crash with a friend and straighten out my head. Thanks a lot for the ride, Tony."

His hand was thick and engulfed my fingers, swallowed them whole. His skin was dry, and crumbly in my hand. I could imagine the wrinkled skin of my head, hidden underneath my hood, feeling just like this withered leathery parchment once it was exposed to the sun. "See you around," he said as I climbed out of the cab, but his voice had the sound of a farewell. I closed the door and he rumbled away.

The truck fishtailed a bit before straightening out and I had a strange out of body moment and could not reconcile having spent three hours in that thing. Eventually the tail lights vanished in the distance. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and shivered. My jacket was at the bottom of my backpack and I didn't want to unpack it here.

I stepped into the light of the gas station and tried to look like I knew what I was doing, heading for the vending machine, pretending to count change, worried that the man inside the station might be watching me through the security camera. This was familiar territory but I was still uncertain of my next step. A moment of hesitation and I skipped buying anything and leaned against the machine instead.

The bank of gates leading to the thruway was clearly visible, illuminated in the night, the yellow arms going up and down in an irregular dance, manned by automatic sensors, letting cars on and off. They came off the lanes and immediately entered the traffic circle, moving slowly until they took one of the three exits and I watched their graceful communication, the blinkers acting as cues to let the other dancers know which way they would be heading.

One of the cars pulled into the station and a man with tired eyes climbed out, pulling a jacket over his shoulders. He moved wearily, entering his credit card into the machine and then operating the pump with mechanical gestures as if he was divorced completely from the motions his body made. The white glow of the fueling station illuminated him like a glowing halo. The man could not be much older than me - he seemed to be in his mid twenties and dressed in slacks, good leather shoes. I wondered why he was working so late, I hoped he was going home to someone waiting up for him, watching the television till he came through the door and then they would sit at the dining room table and talk about something that did not involve his work.

The man never even glanced at me as he finished, climbed back into his car and went down the road following after Tony.

Slowly, the cold began to creep through my sweatshirt and I was grateful for my hands in my pockets, my head surrounded by the thick fabric and cut out the breeze that blew intermittently. Cars came and went, and I tried to imagine the lives of the people stopping to fill their tanks. Most of the rundown sedans and pickup trucks had the same story for me - working class heroes doing the overnight shift to earn a few extra dollars, to make that mortgage, to pay off that credit card bill - their tired, sagging features and bodies bloated with some primitive misery drained my imagination.

A gray Mercedes driven by a pretty brunette was certainly an anniversary gift from her lawyer husband. The Asian imports with ridiculously large spoilers and huge mufflers that revved like jet engines were gangs of thugs roaming the highway, pirates on the asphalt sea looking for the lone vehicles far from the safety of rest stops and exits to board and loot, stopping in port only to refuel and then continue on their criminal path. The gleaming SUV with a huge back end was full of stolen goods being transported by a lone driver - a Japanese woman to throw off any random searches. She had a cover story to tell the police about how she was moving some boxes to her cabin in the Catskills. She even had an address to give them if they were persistent.

My fantasies grew more lurid as the temperature dropped. With no way to tell the time, I could only guess that perhaps an hour had passed as I stood by the vending machine and the cars and trucks came and went. Eventually, I realized with a sharp pain, that I was waiting for someone to come pick me up. But there was no one on their way. I could stand there until the sky turned gray and then bloomed with dawn light but no one was driving to come pick me up, no one was home waiting for me with dinner in the microwave.

Just then, the door of the gas station swung open and a small man came out, heading for me. He was dark skinned, with neat, short hair in a very conservative cut and a winter coat that seemed unnecessary. His jeans were the shade of blue that brand new jeans have until they are washed a few times. I immediately guessed he was Indian or Pakistani and he confirmed this with his heavy accent as he spoke.

"You have to buy something or go, please, you can't just stand there."

I stared back at him, my throat moving soundlessly. I didn't expect to be confronted so openly, but I couldn't get over how scared he sounded of me. His eyes darted over my face within the shadow of the hood and I wondered how long he had sat there watching me before he mustered up the courage to come out and talk to me. How much I must have scared him, standing here, without moving, just leaning against the vending machine, like a drugged out drifter in my faded jeans that trailed below the heels of my shoes and my long, hooded sweatshirt.

"Please go, or I will have to call the police."

Something in me wonder if he would really do it, wondered if he was legal, wondered if I dared him, would he risk calling the cops without his working papers? If I had really scared him so much that he waited this long to confront me then maybe I could use that fear against him. The man licked his lips and blinked at me. He seemed so frightened, so alone, with his hands in his jacket, and I realized, he looked like me. A little pathetic.

The way he said the word, "please." He was begging me.

I smiled at him and held up one hand, "Sorry." Hoping that he wouldn't hold my trespass against me, I wandered into the street, walking purposefully towards the traffic circle, heading east, towards the river, into Kingston proper.

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Adrift 4: Easy Come, Easy Go

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:09:54 GMT

The cab rumbled around me, the engine growled somewhere and the wind rushed in through the gaps in the machine, louder than I expected. Talk radio blared over the speakers and the leather seats held years of smoke in their grooves and I worried about the smell soaking into my clothes. I held my bag in my lap to keep the littered floor from soiling it. My converse shoes rested on a bed of soda cans and cigarette butts. Night held the world outside in its grip and slowly, the city fell away, piece by piece. Traffic did not bother us as we headed north into the Hudson Valley.

Something in my gut rumbled, some anxiety that recognized my decision to go north was wrong but the familiar landscape would be easier to cope with than the alien and frightening South. The Hudson Valley was home, I knew its roads and towns, could find my way anywhere from the city up to Albany and back, along either side of the Hudson and I thought I could travel there, hide among its familiar sights, rather than risk the deep South.

"What's your name?" Tony reached over and turned off the radio. He told me his name back when we made our way onto the thruway but I never told him mine. Something about its foreign sound always made me frightened of giving it to strangers who might judge me for it.

"Zubair."

"Is that Greek?"

"Arab."

Tony took his eyes from the road for a moment and his features collapsed into the frown that had already written deep grooves into his forehead, "You don't sound like one of them."

"Born and raised in White Plains. I wouldn't know Beirut from Baghdad."

Tony laughed. "So what're you running from, man?"

The Tappan Zee bridge loomed ahead of us, its arches looping up and over the huge pillars strung with lights and for a second, I thought the bridge was bobbing on the water, afloat on it, about to collapse into the Hudson. From up in the cab, I could see the drop over the edge, down down down to the water where the river was lapping, with waters and shadows, at the bridge, waiting for it to collapse. "Is it that obvious?"

"You get a nose for stuff like this," Tony says, "I see lots of kids on the road. Whatever it is, it isn't worth it."

"How many of them are running away from girls?"

He made a sound like he was digging phlegm from his throat. "Man, that's the last reason to run away from somewhere. A woman's nothing to be running from, trust me on that one. Easy come, easy fucking go. You know?"

I wanted to tell him about a girl named Raven, who wore tattered black dresses with a mouth like a bruised rose. Her hair was the color of gold turning in sunlight, and her hands were thin and long and moved to some music that only she could hear. I wanted to tell him about her skin that became luminescent, translucent under the right light. Her eyes were shards of pale winter ice that would narrow at anyone trying to get something past her. I liked the way she made me laugh, I liked the way she was oblivious to the way she made me feel, she never tried to manipulate me when I would have done anything for her. She would laugh at me when I said I loved her and she would always say she loved me, but I don't think she meant it like I did. I loved her, I wanted to say, I really loved her.

I still loved her, then, as we drove over the dark waters of the Hudson.

And then the smell of charred flesh crawled out of my memory into my mouth and that took me back to the fire, and I saw a body covered in hungry flames crawling towards me, making a noise no living creature could, and as I did back then, I backed away from it, ran from the smell of burnt hair, the smoldering flesh, and bile climbed up my throat and choked the back of my mouth until I shook my head and gulped in air to keep the vomit at bay.

"You bet," I said and was grateful for every mile that passed under the wheels of the truck. "Easy come, easy go."

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A few things

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:26:13 GMT

After a months long dry spell, I feel like I'm bursting with ideas and creativity.

The Adrift series was the best idea ever. Not only does it force me to write on a very regular basis, but it forces me to write in a constrained box. Approximately 1000 words, with a beginning and a middle and an end, within the continuity of what's gone on before. If I make a decision, I have to live with it. This sort of deadline driven, continuity constrained, already-in-front-of-the-audience experience is new but exhilarating for me!
I began drawing again. Nothing serious, just some pen drawings at work, but damn, it's invigorating to know that I didn't loose what mediocre skill I had at drawing. But I like what I'm drawing! So much so that I think I'll scan some stuff and post it tomorrow.
This Friday, I'm going to series of play readings where all the other entries in the Robot Play will be performed, and I'll be given my award for being one of the 3 winning plays, Backup. It'll receive a full production in September. I can't wait to see it, and one of my goals is to finish my very long one act by then, or at least finish a decent first draft by then. I'm really enjoying it - it's called Unexpected.
And if all of this wasn't enough, I've also been working on my second book - a fantasy novel about a fairy world in which the dark fairies won. I'm really enjoying the book the more I work on it. After about a year of holding it in my head, I spilled my beans to Donna about it and she didn't think it was terrible (and she reads a LOT more fantasy than me) so maybe there's some merit to it! I don't have a name for it yet.
I wish I had some time to spare for the RPG that a few people have playtested with me - Islands. I think there's a pretty solid idea there, but I've been turning it around and around in my head. I've run it a couple of times for two different group of players and they both gave me a lot to think about, but I think I've had a breakthrough recently that'll improve the game tenfold. I'm excited to rewrite the rules and put it through another few playtests.
All of this has left my music practice a bit in the dust, but I'm hoping to catch up with it as well. Right now, for class, I'm concentrating on a medieval piece that my instructor (who's a classical guitar player) has transcribed for guitar and for myself, I'm working on learning some early Metallica songs. It's not as hard as it sounds!
On top of all this, I've rediscovered my desire to hang out with people and have drinks and eat meals and yak about everything and go to movies and shows and table-top gaming like a fiend. This sort of social interaction has done oodles for my mood as well.

So that's what I've been doing lately. How's everybody else? :-)

Adrift 3: Pick A Direction

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:02:41 GMT

The subway was crawling with shadows.

Train tracks stretched out of pitch darkness at one end of the platform and vanished back into them on the other end. I stood on an island of light, and I felt exposed to whatever waited beyond the boundary of light and shadow. My flight from the shadowy thing was born from shock and adrenalin – I didn't want to face it again, so I went through the turnstile and up the stairs into the city proper.

The sounds of midtown filled my senses. It was difficult to feel alone surrounded by people on all sides, crowding the sidewalks, walking urgently in both directions. I joined them, and headed north along Broadway towards the pinball–machine brightness of Time Square. This experience of drowning, becoming just another faceless person was one of my favorite things about New York. At first, the crowds isolated me, turned me into an introvert, made me afraid for my identity but slowly I came to see it as the great equalizer – a forced mingling of subcultures and races that might otherwise stay isolated in their own little words.

But that night, I felt no such connection as I walked up the blocks. People moved out of my way, and I felt like a rock that a river flowed around. My legs burned from the exercise as I walked thirty blocks north, after months of stasis, going out only once or twice a week to get money from the bank, to collect basic necessities for living. Every time a car pulled up next to me with tinted windows, I panicked and moved across the sidewalk. Whenever I passed a shuttered storefront, I was afraid of the darkness behind the glass.

The more I walked, the more the crowds diminished. Time Square dwindled behind me, the theaters with the crowds waiting to be let in dropped by one by one and then Central Park stretched ahead of me – a miles long stretch of wildness where the night crouched even in this newer, safer version of New York with a hint of threat. For me, the park held only knives and teeth. Whatever found me in the subway would be gathered in strength under the trees. Even the horses attached to buggies were nervous, tossing their feathered heads and neighing piteously while their drivers waited for fares.

To walk along the park would be an invitation to disaster, so I began to walk west, away from the park. Traffic diminished quickly until I was walking down blocks with only the occasional pedestrian while cars raced by me. Slowly, the buildings began to give way until the Hudson glistened beyond the highway, lights from New Jersey sparkling over its rippling face. Cars and trucks hurtled by between me and the water at a breakneck pace and this is when the realization hit.

I was leaving New York but I had no idea where I would be going. The prospect of being somewhere – anywhere else – in twenty–four hours and not having a place to sleep terrified me. With the little money I had, I couldn't afford to sleep in motels for more than a few nights at best. I had been so focused on mustering up the courage to leave, I never thought about where I would go. South, south, south, some inner instinct kept chanting and I followed along with it.

But faced with the highway, with the actual grimfaced people driving their cars and trucks on the asphalt, forced at last to the decision where I would have to trust another human being to give me a ride somewhere – I began to sweat. Maybe this was a mistake, maybe I should just go back to my apartment and wait it out, maybe I could take the Metro up north to Poughkeepsie and my mother would come pick me up, I could sleep in my old room again, get all of this straightened out in my head.

One of the trucks on the highway hit its breaks, the rubber screamed as it slid to a stop and then turned onto the street. It rumbled a little distance past me and then shuddered to a stop. The trailer was unmarked – a long, white surface tagged at its far end with undecipherable graffiti. Black smoke spewed from its twin exhausts behind the cab and I heard the door open and shut, the driver appeared around the front and stopped in front of the dark and shuttered building at the end of the block.

His open flannel shirt exposed a green t–shirt underneath and his jeans and boots were well worn in. He stared at it for a long minute and then looked at me. I could see the anger etched in his face, his mouth scowled amidst a scraggly beard and his eyes were squinted into a wrinkled mess above a wide nose. "I don't s'pose you work here?" The question sounded rhetorical but I shook my head anyway.

"Figures. Mother fuckers."

He reached into his pocket to recover a phone, pressed a button and began to shout into it.

He had been driving for five hours, he had called ahead and told them that he was running late, he had been stuck in traffic in Connecticut, and they said they would wait, no problem, they understood. And now the whole place was shuttered and closed and what he supposed to do with the load? Take it all the way back to the warehouse? Hell no. He was going to head back to Kingston and drop off the truck, fuck you very much. And then he jabbed another button and stuffed the phone back into his pocket.

As he spoke, I saw something moving down the block towards us. It was the shape of a man, a silhouette on the lightless block that moved with a languid, steady pace. I paid little attention to it, splitting my attention between the trucker's conversation and the highway until it passed under a lit sign halfway up the block. His features were as dark and undefined as when he was in the dark. A shudder cut through me as I felt its eyeless gaze lock onto me.

The trucker shook his head staring at the dark building and then, feeling some further need to continue venting, he turned to me. "Can you believe this shit? Assholes."

I shrugged weakly, keeping my eyes on the figure coming towards us. I gathering up what courage I had left.

"Sorry to hear that. You heading up north?"

The man nodded, "Yeah, screw it. I ain't driving back to Hartford. They want it, they can pick it up from Kingston."

Behind him, the shadowy figure stopped and slowly extended into a patch of darkness by the warehouse, turning it even darker, and waited. I licked my lips and nodded along with the words.

"You going up the thruway?"

"Kingston – why, you need a ride or something?"

"Yeah, I was hoping to get a bus but I missed the last one, and the next one isn't till the morning." The lie came easily, a gift from my panicked subconscious. I was surprised my voice stayed so calm. A tendril of shadow snaked out of the patch, began to snake its way towards me.

"And they won't let you sleep in the bus station. I hate this city," he spat on the pavement and started around the cab. "Come on."

I ran for it, the snake crawled after me laboriously, the shadow-man began to disengage from the tarry darkness, but they were both too slow. The door unlocked and I pulled it open, took a hold of the steel handle and drew myself into the cab. I pulled the door shut and though the snake and the man were both still distant, I could feel their phantom fingers and fangs closing around my ankles, pulling me into the street to drown me in their black pool.

The driver put the truck in gear, disengaged the lock and drove down the block to turn around and head back on the highway and I leaned back against the leather seat, and closed my eyes, too much of a coward to look my city in the eye as I broke up with her.

STORY INDEX

Adrift 2: Shadows

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:58:56 GMT

The subway had been my sole means of transport for all the years I spent in New York and I wanted to take it one last time before leaving the city. I went down the stairs into the dim yellow platform and took the first train heading into Manhattan. I found a seat and curled up against the wall, staring out the window at the sooty walls crawling past me. The car filled up with people and then lost them all and then the people were replaced again at the next station.

Every crawling inch brought me closer to the fire but I told myself, only this once, I would just have to get past it and then never again. The stations went past one after another and I knew them all in order - City Hall, Canal Street, Prince, Eighth street. Next would be Union Square, where I left this same train in the spring, and then there was the fire. At Eighth Street, the train stopped for a long while, the doors held open for anyone coming down the stairs, the train held back by the underground traffic lights. And I could have jumped up and ran out, avoided the next station. Walked west and taken another train there, avoided Union Square completely.

But I didn't. Something kept me in place, petrified and suddenly the conductor was warning people to stay out of the way as he closed the doors, the train began to move up and it was too late to do anything. My fingers curled into tight fists and I squeezed my bag between my legs, staring at the floor in front of me. The car condensed until I was only aware of the small area around me, the seat underneath and behind me, the wall to my side, the floor under my shoes, and the people in the car faded away one by one. The train slowed, and then it stopped. The conductor made an announcement. I kept my eyes down, refused to look up into the station as people left their seats all around me, shuffled onto the platform. The sound of them vacating the car went on for a long time, and I waited for the footsteps replacing the ones who left but there was nothing.

The train hissed and fumed and I could feel the metal humming around me as it prepared to take off. The shuffle and press of people around me was gone, there was no conversation. A dull anxiety filled me until I looked up from my feet. The car was empty - there was no one was on the platform, nowhere in front of or behind. This platform was always busy, a thousand people climbing into trains, rushing out of them, going up the stairs, musicians on the platform, but there was nothing, there was no one, even the people from the last station had vanished.

Then there was the shadow, crawling down the stairs. It had no face, just a cloak of darkness that swept down the stairs and onto the platform and then flooded into the car, coming up to my ankles, and then the doors shut, sealing me in with it.

Something frozen and icy was racing up from my feet into my legs, infecting my blood with a chill and I stood up, swung my bag over my shoulder and ran to the front of the car. My feet were held in the stuff and it was like pulling free of tar on a soft road in the summer. The train swung around a corner and threw me into a pole in the middle of the car. I hung on to it for support, regaining my balance as the shadow swirled around my feet, fighting to get another grip. I kept moving forward, pulling myself along the seats and the door between the cars was ahead of me, warning me that it was only meant for official use.

I grabbed the metal handle and pulled it open against the spring lock. The sound held in check by the car rushed over me. The clatter of wheels on tracks, the scream of metal on metal, the roar of wind and the smell of oil and sewage and damp bricks and rat shit all mingled together into a voice and musk for the darkness. I moved forward and strained against the wind. Around my feet, the shadows tried to follow me but dribbled off the edge of the car onto the tracks. I turned around and the whole car was coated in this stuff. It was crawling up the walls, like water running down walls in reverse, it had covered the seats already and bubbled in the shallow indentations, on the floor where it pooled - it trembled and shivered and the wind roared into the car and swirled around, making itself at home.

Lost in the rush of sound, there was a snarl, an angry growl that I didn't even try to decipher. It was the voice of a mad, angry thing, and at the time, I thought it was the voice of the fire that had tried to consume me and in failing, had grown to hate me, had come back for me. The other car was just in front of me. I let go of the door behind me and it slammed shut. Moving over to the other car, I pulled the door open and stepped through, letting it close quickly behind me, cutting off the sound and smell.

People filled the car, packed shoulder to shoulder. Someone shuffled to one side to give me room and I reached up to hold onto a support bar. My nose and mouth were full of the smell and taste of the tunnel and my legs were frozen as if I had gone wading through an icy stream.

With the safety of human heat around me, I looked back through the door at the other car and it was completely dark, maybe the lights had gone out or maybe the black stuff had coated the other window, blocked out uninvited eyes, private car, serious business. No one seemed to notice a thing. We rode in silence to the next station and people pored out onto the platform. I walked out with them.

As the train passed by, I saw the darkness crawling into other cars, flooding them one by one, searching for me.

I had to get out of New York.

STORY INDEX

Adrift 1: Shedding Skin

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:05:17 GMT

The fire burned my life and scattered the ashes, but I just kept on living like a ghost inside a skin that no longer fit.

Outside my window, the setting sun set the sky alight, turning the Manhattan into a silhouette city across the East River and the clouds were like a web of smoke rising from some titanic blaze. I shivered in the empty room, my apartment had become an alien space. I looked at all of the things around me - the posters of favorite bands and films on the walls, the old couch stolen from the college dorms on the last day of school, the boxes full of old magazines where I cut my teeth with my writing - all ounces and grams of me in enough measure to weight my life. They were now, all of them, strangers.

My first memory is of words. Pushing letters together on paper to make gibberish words in some childish language. I would show them to my mother and she read them back to me. Ever since, the simple act of pushing letters and then words together has been my only ambition. Two years ago, just after college, I was writing for a living. For twenty years, I never experienced writers block. There were no deadlines that could intimidate me. As easily as I could breathe, I could write.

That was before the fire. That was before I spent all that time in the hospital. Days when nurses would come in and rub things into my skin turned an angry shade of in a world that had become a nightmare of pain. Drifting in and out of fevered sleep, I dreamed about the fire continuously and she was always there, in the fire, her skin burning, blistering, splitting and her insides spilled out. In that endless nightmare loop, she reached out to me with a fractured hand, her blood caked on her melting skin, calling my name, "Come with me, come with me, burn with me in the fire."

Maybe I should have died then, but I didn't. Maybe I should have died in the hospital, but I didn't. A month and I was home, my mother stayed with me, wept for me, and bathed the pink skin, changed the bandages. The smell was awful and hung about these rooms for days. "My poor boy," she would cry when she thought I was asleep. "Your poor hair." After she went back upstate to my father's house, after I was alone and the pain was just a memory, I stood in the bathroom and stared at the new face in the mirror.

A head without hair. Without any hair. No eyebrows, no sideburns, no stubble, and certainly no head of hair. Across the right side of my skull (the left side of the reflection) there was a large patch of skin gone bad, wrinkled and pink, raw. It ran down the side of my face, across my temple and down the front in a jagged line racing for my ear until it stopped just short of the jaw. Undead skin. I reached a finger up to touch the new geography of my head and it was like tanned and wrinkled leather. So soft, that if I pressed hard enough, my finger might go right through the new skin, like a pen through a thin plastic bag, and the insides would come spilling out and run down my face.

I touched my hand - my five fingers - to the skull, and touched the bone underneath the skin. My skeleton was exposed to the world after the fire. The doctor told me not to expect hair again, maybe never, and I tried to look at myself and see it as the new me, the future me, hairless me. I did not look like I was twenty five. I looked like I was seventy. My cheeks had sunken into my face and my eyes stared out of hollow sockets.

Back then, when I thought things were normal at last, when I was ready to go back to work, even then, I heard someone whispering from out of sight, a voice from behind the shower curtain. "Get out," it said, "Get out."

I wanted to write about all this, put it down in a journal, write a story about my survival, about my recovery, vomit up my emotions and push it together into words and examine them, divine some meaning from the jumble of letters, but nothing came. I sat in front of my keyboard for hours and hours staring at the blank screen imagining the words I would write but never typing them out. Thinking over and over again about where to begin, where to take the narrative but never committing to anything, not even a false start, not even a word to get the fucking ball rolling and eventually the days passed and hunger forced me to stop and go forage for something to stifle the growl in my stomach.

Before, I might have gone out into the city, met some friends, distracted myself, but my friends had stopped calling long ago, or maybe I stopped returning calls and they eventually gave up after too many messages unanswered, and I was too self conscious to be seen in public alone with the wounds on my skin.

In the dark of the apartment, when I lay under the sheets in the summer heat and the Brooklyn police raced outside my window blaring their sirens at the street corners to warn the drunks, I began to hear the voice hissing from across the room in the dark corners, from underneath the bed, from my closet, louder and louder as the nights went on. "Get out. Get out. Get out."

I squirmed on the bed and pulling the sweat-soaked sheets over my head, ignored the voice. Just my imagination. Just some ghost of the pain still lingering in my subconscious. When I did fall asleep, she was in my nightmares, burnt corpse girl, charred black and the skin cracked to show some inner fire glowing through, holding out her hand to me with infinite patience. Even then, it was too late, a month after the hospital, two months after the fire. Maybe if I had left after my mother moved back, maybe I could have kept from falling this far, but the longer I stayed, the louder the voice got.

Eventually, I began to saw the owner of the voice moving through the apartment, rubbing its back against the wall leaving a thin layer of soot, curling its claw around the legs of the coffee table where I found the dull hand grip standing out plainly in the dust. Get out. Get out. Get out. But I didn't. Not even then.

The sun finally sank behind the buildings and New York became a shadow city. Windows lit up in the buildings but they seemed like tiny lamps against a titanic darkness. I turned away and gathered up my courage. September was too early for my cheap landlord to turn on the heat, but the room was cold. A chill raced up my skin and then I realized it was not the weather that was chilling me.

It stood in the doorway to the bedroom. I could not make out any features but I could see the outline of the figure clearly against the splash of light from the street marking the wall behind it. Male or female, I could not say, but its gaze was on me. It didn't have to say the words anymore, I knew what it wanted. Get out.

Terrified to take my gaze from it, my stomach clutching tighter and tighter the longer I stared at it, I walked to the front door keeping my distance from it. From the corner of my eye, I could see its head moving, as it followed my movement. I pick up the backup that was filled with what I needed and then I opened the door into the hallway and walked out with a sudden rush, a primal fear propelling me and the door slammed shut behind me, finally blocked the feel of its sight.

All of the rest of my keys were on my coffee table. The only key in my pocket was for the door. My hands shook as I inserted it into the lock and turned it twice, hearing the tumblers roll and then I dropped down to the floor to slide the key under the door.

Shadows were moving just underneath the gap, separated from me by the inches making up the door. I shoved the key into them and the key vanished in the gloom. I scrambled away until my back came to rest against the wall and I knew it was right behind the hall maybe even staring at me through the peephole.

"Go." The voice came through the door in a distant, dull tone, as if it had pressed its mouth to the door and whispered the words, pushing them through the wood. "Go, now."

The hallway was dark and I did not want to be alone with the voice. I stood up and walked down the hall into the street. All light was gone from the sky but the light pollution left a dull stain against the clouds. The street was glowing with yellow streetlight. All of my life was locked up in that apartment and I knew I would never see any of it again. The night was cold and I knew the coming months would be colder still. Heading south seemed like the most reasonable thing to do. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head, pressed my hands into my shirt pockets and walked to the subway.

For the first time since the fire, I began to felt the skin of my old life sliding off my shoulders.

STORY INDEX

Writing Query Outcome

Wed, 28 May 2008 12:56:37 GMT

Thanks to everyone who responded yesterday!

I guess the consensus is to read it on this journal, and I think only one person objected to the idea. So I guess what I'll do is post it twice - here (behind a clearly marked cut tag, of course) and on a Blogger listing that can easily be RSSed without any personal entry chatter. Best of both worlds. I'll probably leave a future-dated entry with all the sequential entries linked as well for ease of navigation.

And don't worry about feedback - read it, hopefully you'll enjoy it, spread the links around to people and so forth. If you do have comments, I'd love to read them of course, but mostly, I hope you enjoy it.

I'm experimenting with writing for an audience without any middle people involved - no agents, no publishers, no editors - well, maybe I'll try to give it an editorial screen but no promises! If I like the way it turns out and generate a small readership, I'll probably continue with another story when this one is wrapped up.

Updates will start on Monday and appear thrice a week. The story is called "Adrift."

Writing Query

Tue, 27 May 2008 17:10:37 GMT

I've been working on some vignettes that will add up to a story and I'm considering posting them to my journal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Once finished, I'm thinking of self-printing a few copies for friends.

Is there any interest in my flist for reading serial short fic on the web? Should I post them here or start a blogger account? Your opinion matters, please chime in!

Militant

Tue, 27 May 2008 16:03:24 GMT

I find myself becoming more and more militant in my opinion lately.

Yesterday, I could barely sit through Prince Caspian. The faith based message was driving me nuts and the story aggressively antagonizes the human characters who attempt to carve out their own plans and it's not until a little twerp goes running to Aslan to beg for help does victory appear at last. Fuck that noise. Fuck this franchise. The source material is just as corrupt so I don't know why I bothered to go but the action sequences were good.

Last night I was so de-motivated and depressed I just stared at the television for hours. After Donna gave up on me and went to bed, I started watching a Gorgoroth concert on YouTube where the stage was lined with bleeding sheep skulls and three naked men were strapped to crosses with hoods over their faces. Swinging the pendulum hard into the opposite direction might have served to reset my balance.

I don't know why I've been into so much Norwegian Black Metal lately. Maybe their ultra-militant anti-religious stance appeals to me, but I can't get behind their church burnings and murders (suicides I'm ambivalent on.)

I don't want to be militant. I want to be inclusive and conciliatory, but it's difficult in the face of shit like C S Lewis. I don't even know why I went.

Also, barely any Tilda Swinton. Man, she was hot in the first movie.

Metal up your ass

Mon, 12 May 2008 14:32:57 GMT

I have been listening to a lot of metal lately, primarily from three genres. Most of the time it's Thrash - Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Pantera - followed by lots of Death - Napalm Death, Fear Factory, Cannibal Corpse with some Drone and Doom thrown in - Godflesh/Jesu and Isis, primarily. While listening to this, I've also been reading a lot about metal, particularly the genres obsession with death, genocide, satanism, black magic, vivisection, corpses and so forth.

Is there a value to this beyond camp and shock? I was recently reading an article about Black metal pioneers Mayhem (the poster-boys for the "metal is evil" agenda - these guys burned churches, aggressively advocated anarchy, murdered opposing band members (and each other), and perhaps most amusingly if Heavy Metal Legends are to be believed, made jewelry from the fragments of their singer's skull when he committed suicide by putting a shotgun to his own head.)

Anyway, so the founding member of Mayhem was described as being a complete supporter of totalitarianism. And that struck a chord with me.

Heavy Metal and many of its sub-genres are about experiencing totalitarianism. While listening to metal, one is subsumed by it, surrounded by it, led around by it and encouraged in a live environment to aggressively respond to it by thrashing/head banging/moshing/whathaveyou. It is a rally and the band is the leader and the audience is led along by them. The music is so fast and aggressive and loud that it knocks all other thoughts out of your head - it is what it is - and the band pummels the audience until it submits.

And I love it.

I really don't want to type the following dilution, but, for the sake of self preservation... I'm not advocating totalitarianism, but in this context, a sexual analogy is appropriate. The band is a dominant force that pummels and attacks the audience until a state of submission overwhelms the listener and once the audience gives in and follows the lead of the band, a state of consciousness is achieved akin to the endorphin release from a sexual submission.

Even that isn't all the way there. I don't know what I mean but I know what I feel when I listen to metal. And this is what it is.

Confused. Again.

Thu, 01 May 2008 14:19:10 GMT

Almost halfway through the year with nothing to show for it. But April/May has always been about change for me.

Two years ago: Preparing to move into my current apartment
Four years ago: Just moved into the city
Six years ago: Graduated from college
Eight years ago: Moved out completely on my own for the first time
Ten years ago: Graduated high school
Twelve years ago: Moved to US and A.

Somehow this year seems dull by comparison. Maybe it has been some subconscious anticipation on my part that has been waiting for something dramatic to happen, but of course, accidental temporal patterns are the biggest liars of all, and the longer one stretches the greater the potential for disappointment. A twelve year streak isn't bad.

I miss working on collaborative creative projects. Everything I've been doing lately has been so introverted and I haven't even shown any of it to anyone (and honestly, there isn't much to show) so I feel, like, dead inside or something. Writing sucks. Music sucks. Stifled creatively. Gaming a lot, so I'm pretty happy with the social outlets, but it's not doing much to get me to buckle down and do some real fucking work. Much of this, I think, is because I don't have other people working with me, which always lights a fire under my ass. Or it's a great excuse.

Anyway. Back to stupid job-work. Tick tock tick tock.

Nice Dream

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:04:18 GMT

I'm driving down a country road shaded by willows and oaks. The brutal summer heat is bearable only thanks to the wind blowing into the open window. Somewhere down the dappled dirt road, there is a house with a covered porch wrapped around the front and sides, where two friends sit on stools, with guitars. I park in the shade of the house and the humidity makes the cotton shirt stick to my back.

Leaning over to grab the beaten up guitar case, I climb out of the car and walk onto the porch. I open the case and take the guitar, taking the pick from where I left it trapped in the strings by the headstock and grab a stool. One of them is telling a joke but I only grab the punchline and it doesn't seem funny but the other guy laughs anyway.

The band leader waits for me to tune up and then starts to hum the bars of the song. I've heard it before but I don't think I know it as well as I should. The melody is like a ghost, a memory of a dream. He slaps his black hand against his leg to spell out the rhythm and I wish I had even a hint of the character his voice carries effortlessly.

I wait for the other guy to begin before playing along with him. Once I get it, he lets me go on my own and begins to trade lines with the band leader. The melody sticks in my mind even though I'm only playing the rhythm, I can't remember where I heard the song, what the words were, who sang them, but it is lovely nevertheless.

A wind picks up over the stream and carries the smell of grass and water over the lawn and a hint of the afternoon sunlight with it as it rolls over the porch but the song is already flying and I barely even feel the sweat evaporating off my skin. The steel strings squeak under my fingers, leaving thick lines in the callouses.

One of them begins to sing in an old rough voice, the words of some old church song and I feel like I could hang in this fantasy version of the old south forever, playing a song that I remember from another dream, a dream the color of a faded photograph, and when I look up from the final chord, the sky is that particular, impossible shade of purple and I know that I am in another dream and any moment, I will wake up, and this life will evaporate, like so many day dreams.

San Francisco

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:30:22 GMT

I'll be in San Fran from Friday the 18th through Monday the twenty first (thank you, mosephine). If I know anyone in the area and you want to meet for lunch, please let me know and I'll give you my cell!

Otherwise, I'll see you all on the flip side.

Freedom!

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:06:45 GMT

Don't look now, but I might have gotten my citizenship papers back! I'm trying not to get too excited but if true, then I'm finally better than all those illegal immigrants assaulting our precious, precious borders and I'm ready to join Lou Dobbs in stopping those cotton pickers dead in their tracks!

Once I get my passport (in 6 to 8 weeks, expedited) I'll be able to roam the world wearing khaki shorts, an obnoxious t-shirt, sun glasses and sneakers with a camera dangling from my neck, grinning foolishly at the quaint customs of the foreigners while taking endearing photographs to share back home over cocktails, and tell everyone I meet how much better Americaland is.

f a t

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:29:37 GMT

Someone at work asked me if I gained weight.

I want to die.

:-(

A synchronicity?

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:46:19 GMT

I participated in a short-play contest recently, and my submission - a story about two people on a space-ship who are wake up from deep sleep to find the ship depleting oxygen light-years from anywhere - won third place! Which means it'll be put up as part of a weekend long show in New York later this summer, in August. I don't have any more details, but this is exciting enough news to energize the hell out of me.

Of course I'll remind everyone as we near the date of production.

On a related note, I've been developing a Role Playing Game of my own, with a few other friends who are independent game designers and have been blogging about it on their company website. The first two posts are here and here, I'll be posting the third entry probably today or tomorrow.

Also, I'm four chapters into the new book. It's a fairy tale about a princesses who has a fairy guardian and a pet unicorn.

Finding the reason

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:44:02 GMT

I wrote a book between 2005 and 2006, that I never really tried to sell. I sent it out a bit and then gave up. It sits on my hard drive, and I think about it more than I care to say. Not a day goes by when it doesn't whisper to me and remind me that it's still there, waiting to be shown to the world but I make up an excuse and move on, ignore it for another day, work on something else.

Yesterday, after working for thirteen hours, I drove home around 10:30 and the streets were wet with rain, and empty of traffic. While circling around the neighborhood looking for parking, maybe the quiet music inspired me, maybe it was the rain-soaked night when it seemed like I was the only person left alive - either way, I began to think about my book again.

And I realized, suddenly, making some logical connection with a shocking amount of fear and sadness, that the reason I never sent the book out seriously, is that it isn't a very nice book.

I don't mean it isn't well written (of course I think it is) - but rather the material is so dark and the setting so leached of meaning that I don't think it's meant for anyone but me. When I wrote the book, it was at a time in my life when I was pretty happy - I was getting married, I was just getting used to living in the city - so I don't know where it came out of, but for whatever reason, I plumbed my darkest and blackest fears, and drained them all into this story.

Finally, someone pulled out of a parking spot in front of the park and I pulled into the space and waited for the song on the CD to finish. The windows were streaked with rain and the piano notes hung suspended inside the car, while the bass line rumbled underneath them. Through the wet and refracting glass, I saw the lights of the garden leading up to my building blurred into yellow smears and I shivered in the chill.

The book was all there in the car with me - the depressed girls, the desperate old man, the alien woman, the crippling poverty, the casual indifference, the deep holes of loneliness and alienation, the red smack of terror and the occasional bursts of violence that ripped jagged holes in the story. The rainy skies and the cold autumn winds, the lonely fields full of dead grass and still brackish ponds, the endless miles of asphalt and the gray strip malls. It was all there and a year after I finished the book, I was finally able to look it in the face and understand why I was afraid of it.

It was a window into all of my insecurities and fears, a peek under the skin, an expression of the depression and loneliness I suffered through for years, days spent without speaking a single word to anyone, months under the gray going from work to school to home to sleep for six hours only to wake and do it again five days a week for two years. If I had been rolled up and twisted like a wet rag and the black mess drained out of me was collected in a clear glass and examined - it would be like reading this book.

And like anything this personal, this intimately linked to my experience, this (failed) attempt at self-exorcism, it might be inaccessible to anyone else.

This isn't to say my feelings for the book have changed - I still think it's very good and readable, but I have some objective reference towards it now. And can understand its lack of appeal to others.

The song ended and I shut off the car, took my bag and umbrella, and walked out into the drizzle. By the time I walked into my apartment, I had already begun to feel better, and thought about stories that were not quite so bleak.

Me Vs. The World

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:46:19 GMT

My cynicism is something I wear on my sleeve - I'm utterly and completely cynical about the world, about human beings and about society in general. I find it ridiculous to believe that humans have any purpose greater than biological reproduction and self preservation, and born from that genetic thrust, all human endeavors are just as shallow, dumb and meaningless. There is no difference between humans and animals but the amount of surface area our wrinkled brains allow us to have.

But logic lets us move beyond our primitive ancestry. Fine, but Economics and Politics are the worst examples of human institutions. Economics have fed us horrible products and devastated ecology and society for the sake of profit. Politicians are invariably corrupt no matter their ideals, and even if some idealist makes it to office, they're wrapped up in so much red tape that nothing changes.

(Yes, these are absolutes, I don't mean them, except, perhaps, in as much as anyone means anything in poetry which might be the most naked form of communication we have at our disposal, but never use.)

Art is the exception, it has the potential to hint at something that separates us from the animals, but art is only possible because of other, more basic human institutions - people needed society and food and shelter before they could begin scratching drawings into the walls and grunting out stories to each other. So Art feels like a privilege that we've earned on the back of work that we mock through the art, and would never do ourselves.

Yet, things are changing and improving. We care not just for our offspring but each other, because, in this modern day and age of planetwide networks, we see other human beings and interact with them, and stop from making judgments based on some blind concept of a person rather than an actual example of a person.

Institutions, however, are reckless, earning profit with no accountability, and they will bulldoze us all into the gray afterlife of the planet. Politics hand in hand with corporations will only escalate the rate of decay. Planetary death is imminent.

But such concepts are counter-profit, you need people to make money from, and people free enough to spend money in the market, so in that sense, corporations are at least better than political dictatorships which work to eliminate humanness. Corporations work instead, by exploiting humanness - greed, lust, self doubt, self pity and envy all work to their benefits, self image is easily and often targeted by advertising - and by advocating private ownership. Not a molecule of soil nor air left unowned by someone, every square inch of the planet, a commodity owned by a human being, and if you can't afford it, well, tough.

This. Sucks. Make. It. Better.

I wish I knew a way out. When I listen to songs or read books, when I see the natural, effortless, organic beauty of the planet, when I interact with human beings who are beautiful inside and out, I want to believe in some poetry written into this base and rough matter, but on the other side of the coin is the sound of mortar shells falling in crowded streets and butchered people screaming under the blows of machetes and homeless people huddling on the sidwalk as I walk by on my way to the next bar to spend an amount of money on a pleasure meal that would be enough for that man to recover himself, if only he wasn't an alcoholic.

Rather than volunteer to work in a hospital, we sign an e-protest. Rather than donate money to a clinic in Africa, we buy a new pair of shoes. Of course we do. I want my wife and I to be comfortable. To ignore her comfort would be a crime. No human being can withstand the horror without becoming numb or grasping on some pleasant artifact of the present to focus on. So, how then, can I pass judgment on others when I do nothing myself but sign the occasional check? When I buy A|X clothes and Apple products produced by the hands of child labor?

This sort of argument goes around forever. We're bound by economics and politics into a world that seldom has room for any poetry except as a quaint artifact of culture.

I would like to believe that my life wouldn't function without art. I know it can. I would miss it terribly, I would yearn for it constantly, but to go a day without food would be more terrible by far. To sleep just one night in the open without shelter or security would break many of us.

That's when jobs and money and politics and government step in, like the safe, old guards that they are, of basic, brutal living artifacts and say, "You can judge us all you like, but you cannot live without us."

And they're right.

There are small victories we can claim - and that is all any of us can achieve. Buying from smaller retailers, supporting ethical institutions and companies, conserving as much energy as we can, perhaps even living off our own grown materials, or coming together to form a community that can live in a self-sustained way outside of corporate control.

Yet, I cherish civilization, and art, and technology, but the cost is too high.

What, then, is best for us?

That we can support ourselves, we exclude the corporate interest and crimes from our lives, that we connect with our organic roots, perhaps then, we will see poetry in the way of our life - unburdened for once, and released from the blood of torn hands, and the screams of tormented animals, and a planet strip mined until there is nothing left.

Gygax

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:01:31 GMT

A lone man walks up the side of the hill. He is armored, armed and leads a horse laden down with supplies. Rope, tools, and leather bags strapped down tightly. The sun is about to set and he is racing to beat the shadows crawling up the rocks. Ahead, stark against the stormy sky, stands the ruined tower he saw four hours ago. In this wasteland between spaces, he could use the shelter no matter how ruined it may seem.

The walls are still standing at least, but it looks like some of the roof has collapsed. From the gaping doorway broken in long ago by a mighty hand, he can see the spiraling stairs hugging the wall and climbing up. No signs of life stir in the gloom, but he leave the horse outside, and draws his sword, pulls his shield from his back and dons his helm before stepping over the debris of the door.

There are only the scattered rocks from the stairs above and some weak light filtering in from the hole in the roof. Spiderwebs lie across the rocks and he drops his guard, slumps, the stiffness of his anxiety loosening in his back when a tiny metal point presses up against his side, in the gap between the links of his sleeve and vest.

A thin voices hisses in his ear, "Friend or foe?"

The fact that he can understand the voice means it is at least human, and he nods, "Friend to any who speak my tongue."

The pressure under his arm lessens and he turns around bringing his guard up again, but the man behind him hanging upside down from the gap in the wall, drop down to the ground, flipping in midair. He is the opposite of the warrior - in black, tight fitting leather that allows for flexibility of movement and stealth. The rogue slides his knives back into their sheaths and buckles them in to prevent any reflection or sound and smirks back.

"Not too many people make it out this way, unless they're after the same thing I am."

The warrior hesitates, his thoughts are still a mess, there are things he knows but is uncertain how or why he knows them. "I'm not sure, something about a name," and then it comes to him, "Goldan..."

"So you are after the Lich, as well." The rogue nods, walking outside carelessly, turning his back to the warrior, "Good. We'll need the help. Best not to leave your animal out - he'll get eaten."

Unable to strike at a defenseless man, the warrior lowers his weapon again. "We?"

"You're not the first nor the second," he laughs, leading the horse back into the tower. A slight chill fills the room and one corner shimmers as if in a haze, and then two people appear where he saw no one before - a woman wrapped in a gray cloak wielding a staff and another warrior in armor and arms, decked in the artifacts of some god.

"We could use your help," the woman says. Something about her presence is disjointed, as if she is here, and not, a body warped by its proximity to magics and the priest puts his hand on her shoulder and mutters a prayer and she seems to center again. "But if you'd rather go on your own, at least share in a meal with us."

The warrior remembers more clearly now, the line of fighters that had come before him to this place and been beaten back or not returned at all. The tomb lying open because the terrible being scuttling within are enough to prevent any incursions, and the Lich sends its unholy creations out against a kingdom that is too weak to do anything but bring down the horrors and pray it will be the last.

It is up to him, and perhaps these three, to do something about it. "A meal sounds fine," he says and removes his helm. The priest smiles and the wizard casts a spell, summoning a fire to light the gloom and give it some color. Outside, night falls and the rogue puts up small bits of cloth to hide the light, to keep them from being spotted by the predators roaming the hills while the warrior digs out some of the dried meat in his bags to add to the meal.

"I haven't seen you before, friend." The priest says, "And I thought I knew most of the renowned warrior in the land - by your arms, I see you have great wealth and skill to wield them."

The warrior pauses for a minute, unable to remember much of his past but he would rather not discuss his own confusion with these strangers, not when all of this feels... right. "I keep to myself," he says instead.

"No," the wizard woman shakes her head, "No, he's not from here, he's a traveler now, going from world to world, changing form as needed, doing what he has spent his whole life doing, he is..."

Something howls in the distance, a sound of a wolf, if it had the lungs of an animal far larger, and blood caught in its throat. The sound pierces the towers and echoes off the wall, lingering for a long moment and there is silence only broken by the snapping wood in the fire.

"What's your name, friend?" The rogue asks, turning the conversation away from the dangerous topic.

The warrior thinks back, and this is something he does know. "Gygax," he says.

--

I wouldn't be who I am without Gary Gygax's work. He died yesterday. Enjoy your retirement, sir. May your sword and spells save the day across the infinite multiverse of dungeons and kingdoms you inspired. The world is a bit less wondrous without you in it.

Ow

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:32:27 GMT

This week, I finally suffered either a minor injury or just stressed my finger muscles to the point where they're in quite a bit of pain. On Tuesday, I made a breakthrough with my playing while learning Radiohead's Street Spirit. I realized how to keep playing a series of lower register notes ringing while playing a shifting melody with the higher strings. The result is gorgeously dense while being melodic at the same time.

Of course, the downside is in holding the hand cramping chord shapes in place while moving one or two fingers to sound the melodic notes and the string skipping with the right hand. Complicated to say the least, but also physically difficult. At first the first finger on my right hand began to get sore and ache and yesterday my left hand was a bit sore. This morning, I couldn't even play an A-chord with my left hand without wincing a bit in pain. Or any sort of a barre, really.

I'm hoping laying off the practice for a bit will help and maybe some ice packs, but it sucks to be stuck here just as I learned to play one of my favorite songs and am really starting to get a hang of running bass lines with my chord shifts. I'm also worried I might have pulled or injured the muscles since I don't really do any warm-ups or cool-downs, nor am I very good at moving from the typical guitar player way of playing - mostly small movements with small muscles rather than group movements with large muscle groups.

Proper guitar playing depends on pulling the strings into the fretboard with your arm and back, rather than using your knuckles to push them down. Sounds insane, but apparently that's how you avoid the sort of pain I'm in right now.

Not to mention the fact that this could also be a sign of carpel tunnel or some other sort of repeated use muscle injury (because its not like I spend my whole day typing or anything....) Thankfully, as my guitar instructor put it, "Good thing about carpel tunnel is that it's painful but not restrictive of the motions your fingers can make."

Right. Maybe I should've studied the piano instead.

Seeking help

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:36:36 GMT

I feel like I've been waiting for something bad to happen to me. So much so that I was talking to Donna about engineering a social accident for myself by deliberately provoking people. Of course such an overt display will generally accomplish nothing. Perhaps I should concentrate instead, on my own work.

So I'm looking for people to read and comment on my writing. I'll probably send one story out every two weeks. It'll be somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 words. You'd be proof readers, and I'm looking for genuine critiques of the material so I can incorporate your feedback and send out the story to markets.

If you're interested, please write me an e-mail, or leave me a comment. I'd be very grateful for your help and will repay in any way that I can to help you with your own projects. Please only reply if you do have the time to read a story and write me a short email telling me what you thought about it, what worked, and what didn't. You don't have to do a full line by line critique or anything, just a short note will be enough for me.

Thanks!