Unstuck in Time

I discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s work early in my high school years and instantly fell in love. It was the kind of love reserved solely for a great writer, or director, or musician. A love of great art. I remember reading Slaughterhouse-Five first, followed immediately by Cat’s Cradle, since those were the only two Vonnegut books in my school library. I started buying the rest as soon as I could get to a bookstore. I think I helped keep Borders afloat until I had the whole collection.

His writing was so funny and smart and just plain different than all the other stuff I was reading in school. Most importantly, he confirmed a sneaking suspicion I had that life was not always as lovely as I had been told by adults. He cemented the life philosophy that I live by today: You may be fucked, but god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

He died during my senior year of high school and I was pretty upset. My peers hadn’t read his books so I felt alone in my sadness. I had just picked one of his quotes as my yearbook quote (“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” My parents were not amused) and now he was gone. I’d never get to meet him and thank him for providing some clarity to this mad world.

So I did the one thing I could think to do: I printed out Vonnegut’s self portrait with “So it goes” underneath it and I taped it to the outside of my locker.

The school had a rule that said that we couldn’t decorate the outside of our lockers and my locker was only a few feet from the principal’s office. The picture was, unsurprisingly, torn off while I was in class. But I had printed off more than one copy, so I kept hanging them every time one was torn down. I ran out of pictures after the first day.

I now work in the very same high school I attended. I occasionally walk past my old locker and I always think about that day. I should check to see if they’ve added to their Vonnegut section…

Anyway, I wrote all of this to convince you to donate to the Kurt Vonnegut documentary on Kickstarter. I donated the little that I could, but I want this to be the best film possible. Vonnegut’s work continues to change the lives of people all over the world and he deserves to have his own story told. I’m a big fan of Bob Weide’s other work and I’m excited to see what he’ll do with such a personal story. Please check out that link to find out more information. The fundraising campaign ends on Tuesday, March 10th.

Planet of the Guerrillas

My parents raised my brothers and me in the Catholic Church, which meant spending an hour every Saturday evening or Sunday morning bored out of my mind on an uncomfortable wooden bench. I did count myself lucky that it was only one hour per week. My friends who were raised in other Christian denominations usually spent a minimum of two hours in church each Sunday. During the summer, some of those churches would leave their doors open for ventilation. I, wanting to rub it in, would ride my bike back and forth in front of the doors while my friends seethed in their seats. To the parishioners, I was the personification of why all Catholics were going to Hell.

Even one hour in church feels like an eternity to a child (and many adults). The sermons rarely held my attention. Some priests would try to keep things interesting by adding jokes, which impressed a kid like me who was obsessed with stand-up comedy. But none of the jokes were particularly memorable.

There is one sermon that, 20 years later, I still remember very clearly. I was 4 or 5 years old and the priest started telling us a “true” story about a church somewhere in South America. During a peaceful Sunday morning service, guerrillas burst in through the roof, swinging down on ropes and pointing their guns at the crowd. The leader yelled that they would take the parishioners outside one by one and shoot them if they refused to denounce God. Nobody said anything, so they started taking people outside. As each person exited, the congregation would hear a single gunshot. They continued taking people outside until only a few people were left inside. But the guerrillas didn’t come back in for another person and the gunshots stopped. The people who were left finally gathered up the courage to go outside. When they opened the doors they found everyone alive and the guerrillas had left. It was, according to the priest, a miracle that the assailants didn’t actually go through with their plan.

I was stunned.

“Holy crap!” my pre-school brain thought. “Gorillas with guns!”

I couldn’t have known what guerrillas were at that age, but I certainly knew what gorillas were. Why had no one told me how ruthless these animals were? And now they can talk and operate assault weapons? And, most importantly, why was I the only one freaking out about this? I always watched the evening news with my parents and not once had I heard about the gorilla menace ravaging South American churches.

I was basically thinking of Gorilla Grodd.

I couldn’t wait to get to CCD (the Catholic version of Sunday school) and talk to my friends about it. I confronted the teacher immediately, but the conversation was basically an Abbott and Costello routine. Every time I mentioned gorillas, she thought I was talking about guerrillas, and vice versa.

I wish I could remember when I discovered my mistake, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I lived a couple of years of my life thinking that Planet of the Apes was coming true in South America.

Memories like this make me wonder how I was the first person in my immediate family to get a bachelor’s degree.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love School Lunch

I rarely eat lunch. A small snack might be necessary if I feel my blood sugar falling, but that’s about it.

It was probably fifth grade when I started having an adverse reaction to the midday meal. Public school lunch was not something to be celebrated. At best, it was tolerated. The kids who brought their own lunch were the kings and queens of the cafeteria. Lunchables were worth more than gold.

We were given two meal options to choose from, which occasionally helped. PB&J was offered as a last resort, but you had to make a special request for it during the lunch tally at the start of school. They only made the exact number of PB&J sandwiches that were requested that morning, and god forbid some asshole who didn’t order PB&J took your sandwich instead of the choice they had actually signed up for. There would be no sympathy from the ladies behind the counter. Pick something else or go hungry. This was a particularly harsh dose of reality for a 10-year-old. And I’m absolutely not still bitter about this 15 years later…

You may ask “Why didn’t you just bring food from home if you hated school lunch so much?” That would require a level of preparation that I’m not sure I had back then.

Anyway, here were some of our meal options:

“Totally Tacos”: I never liked how they needed to convince us in the name that the food was real. “No, they’re totally tacos. Definitely, definitely tacos.” As far as I can remember, they were just tacos. Hard shells, a bit of warm hamburger, and some mozzarella cheese. Maybe some lettuce or something. Totally.

Spaghetti and Meat Sauce: Meatballs were unavailable on this menu. Honestly, the mention of any kind of sauce is generous. The sauce consisted of whatever bits of hardened tomato paste managed to stick to the noodles.

Hamburg and Gravy: One of the few meals without an exaggerated name. A hamburger-gravy mixture was ladled onto the trays in the same way that it would be in prison (I assume). Usually accompanied by a roll that, if you were lucky, only had one or two hairs in it. No, hairnets were not required for lunch ladies at my school. This meal solidified my skepticism of USDA standards.

Pizza: This is the only pizza I’ve ever refused to eat. One of the few things I learned in public school is that it’s somehow possible to make a pizza so bad that it’s inedible. I am the least picky person when it comes to pizza, but I couldn’t even stand the smell of this rectangle of rubbery breading. The worst part is that they served this every Friday and the second option was always something like Egg Salad Sandwiches. America has an obesity problem, but I don’t think that making kids throw up every Friday is the right way to fix it.

The Salad Bar: I’m not sure if it can legally be called a “bar” if it only has three options, but we always let that slide. I normally skipped this part, since it was usually just lettuce, another veggie, and some condiments. I mostly remember this as the location of the cranberry sauce during the turkey lunch before Thanksgiving break. Oh man, I love cranberry sauce.

Normally a blog like this would end with the author encouraging schools to make changes, but I like this system just the way it is. Suffering through school lunches is an exercise in bonding. I asked my Twitter followers about their lunch experiences and their stories were all pretty similar, despite coming from all different parts of America. Hamburgers made of mysterious gray meat seem to have been served country-wide, for example. And now that we’re adults, we can collectively laugh at how ridiculous some of those lunches were.

So, future generations, enjoy your bad food as much as you can. We’re all in this together.

The Name Game

One of the hardest things for me as a writer is coming up with names. I have spent days trying to come up with the perfect name for a character. There were even a few stories that I finished writing before I actually named the main character.

Naming a character is not much different than naming a baby. At least one character in every book (usually the main character) is an extension of the author, so it’s not a stretch to compare a story to a child. If you’re lucky enough to write a story that captures the public’s attention you’ll have to hear that name the rest of your life. And at that point there’s no changing it. Granted, these aren’t life or death dilemmas, but these are the kinds of worries that cause a writer to get stuck in their own head for days at a time.

This is also why I could never write sci-fi or fantasy. The authors in those genres need to come up with original names for characters, races, locations, and technology. You can’t have an alien named Greg. I rarely even read full sci-fi and fantasy names anymore. My eyes start glazing over by the time I hit the fifth vowel in a row and I just hope to keep track of the characters based on the first letter of the name. On the odd occasion that I’m playing a tabletop game with my friends, I name characters after European hockey players.

Jaromir Jagr is a Stanley Cup winner *and* a badass half-elf.

 

This problem isn’t new to me. It’s plagued me since I was a kid. I can’t think of any reason why something that should be simple becomes the toughest part of writing. Here’s a good example of the trouble I had as a kid: I had two favorite stuffed animals that I would sometimes carry with me when I was four or five years old. I specifically remember the incredulous look on the face of the lady who asked me what my toys’ names were.

“That’s a nice raccoon you’ve got. What’s his name?”

“Raccoon.”

“It’s not Rocky or Robby?”

“No.”

“Well what’s your bear’s name?”

“Bear.”

At this point she stopped asking me questions. I no longer name things after their respective species (naming every character “Human” would get confusing), but I haven’t gotten much better.

Most writers name characters after people they already know. This always made me feel awkward. I would hate if a friend or family member were offended by any actions that “they” committed in a fictional world. It’s easier to not take that risk.

Lately I’ve taken to using names of other fictional characters. Fictional characters can’t yell at me for using their name, and it’s a nice homage to some of my inspirations. I’m not sure how much longer this can last though. Having the same four or five names in every story might start getting old for the reader.

Thankfully, this isn’t something that keeps me from writing altogether. I’ll either leave a blank space where character names appear or I’ll insert a temporary name, hoping that a name surfaces as I flesh out the character.

So, fellow writers, how do you come up with names?

Inspiration in Dreams

A couple of years ago I started writing down my dreams. Almost all of my dreams involve some kind of big adventure, which I hope speaks to my level of imagination.

One night, I had a series of dreams that were not connected, so instead of writing detailed descriptions, as I had for past dreams, I wrote short “poems” that give enough information for me to remember them. Each stanza is a different dream. The first one is my favorite.

Even the Devil has demons

They wait for him in his kitchen

And haunt his dreams at night

 

The blue sky disappears

As the streets get thinner

Until there’s nothing left but blackness and a grocery store

 

The theatre fills up quickly

As the masses hunger for entertainment

But they leave starving

 

Hunting ghosts in the school

Haunted by a shadow

Never able to escape

I have more of these, but I’ll save them for another day. I’m posting this at 2 a.m., so this song is for all of you out there about to go to sleep. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written and I like to end my night with it. Enjoy.

What To Expect

This isn’t my first blog. I have lots of writing samples online to choose from. But this will be my first personal blog. It’ll be a mixture of new writings, old stuff I’ve found on my hard drive, nonfiction, fiction, songs, jokes, and whatever else I can come up with.

Please leave comments and any topic suggestions below.

The Screen Door Slams

I’ve never been satisfied in my life. Ever since I knew there was more to the world than my neighborhood, I’ve wanted to live all of it. But I grew up in a fairly isolated area, and I didn’t have many opportunities to go much further than the county limits.

In high school, there were many warm summer nights when I would get out of work at the grocery store after nine o’clock. I had a ten mile drive back home, and since the community trends toward the elderly side of the age bracket, there were never many cars on the roads that late.  As I left the parking lot I’d reach for my CD case and pop in the album with the scruffy young dude leaning up against a saxophonist of Biblical stature.

As the piano and harmonica began, I was already cruising down the dark, empty road. I was no longer alone. Bruce grabbed the wheel, Mary had taken the empty passenger seat, and I was just along for the ride.

Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night

You ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re alright

And that’s alright with me

Every time I heard Thunder Road, these lines would always get me. There was magic in the night. I was experiencing it. I was suddenly energized after, only a few hours earlier, I had wondered if time had stopped in the middle of my shift. The night is filled with potential.

And good Lord, this man had the biggest balls of anyone I knew. Try telling your significant other that you don’t find them that attractive, but you’re okay with it. I guarantee they won’t be clamoring to go on a vacation with you.

Roll down the window

And let the wind blow back your hair

Well the night’s busting open

These two lanes will take us anywhere

In that moment, the darkness wasn’t a hindrance. It was freedom. I have to turn down this street to get home, but I could keep going. I can go on all night. I think I can do anything.

But I’d always take that turn and end up parked back in my driveway. I’d go to bed, wake up the next day, and practice the same routine, always wondering what lay past my turn-off.

A few years later, I got to see Bruce in concert. It was like an old fashioned revival. Bruce preached to 20,000 screaming fans, and his sermon was far more powerful than any I had experienced on any given weekend at Mass. While the weekends of my first 18 years on Earth were filled with lessons about redeeming ourselves in the eyes of the Lord, Bruce sang about redemption of a different kind. Who says I can’t keep driving through the night? I had been held back by the restrictions I placed on myself. Those restrictions are the only demons we have to fear. Go for it. Redeem yourself.

There was no going back after that. I may have had a few mechanical problems along the way (including my current engine failure), but I’m still behind the wheel.

And that’s where my mindset is as I begin this blog. I can’t settle for small things when I know I can go bigger.

I’m pulling out of here to win.