Zu Nord!

To the north indeed. This weekend is the annual trip to Orr, and I'm stoked. Weeks of office zombery, some really bizarre situations with friends and family, and probably the worst sleep I've been getting in two years has combined to make me one frayed-out white boy.

I'm really glad my parents took me traveling when I was little. I still think camping is fun (though I hate the spiders in some areas) and I loved canoe trips to the boundary waters when I was younger. I haven't gone on one in SO long, but it seems like an idea that will have to wait for a little while.

There's something about Sheep Ranch Road that makes me think of the time I spent as a kid out in the woods. Admittedly, we have this crazy awesome hunting cabin with actual beds and a generator (still no running water, but that's fine - we use beer) to make it cushier, but that's not what it's about. It's about all of us (maybe thirteen of us this year, phew) getting away from the cities and doing whatever the hell we want. I'm looking forward to putting my grandfather's rifle through its paces again, it's a fun little thing.

I'll never forget that first trip. All of us thought we were adults, sitting outside near a fire or in that tiny shack and playing card games, with no idea of what real life was like. Everyone was leaving for basic training/boot camp soon, the rest of us were going to college, and everything seemed big and limitless and scary. The night after we played frisbee - I've never seen so many stars, a sky so bright. It was like a sunrise, but it was just the light of the stars and the moon. I could have watched it for hours, had I not hated the skeeters and gotten creepy vibes after half an hour. Still, when I think of the first trip, I think of that night without fail. I think Brandon also fell off the bunk that time.

This trip has become a huge part of our adult life, and it started right after we graduated. Everyone has rituals that sets them apart from the world, and this one is ours. One weekend a year to just go do things that we can't do in the cities - shoot guns, play paintball, drink ourselves sick and then scarf mounds of amazing food for pennies on the dollar. Last year's trip was great, because we added quite a few more people than we ever had before. This year will be better - Pfeffer is coming out from Cali, and I plan to make sure he remembers why he's one of us.

The main question: can I hold out until friday? We'll see.

Also, I'm considering posting a journal of the life of an office zombie. I'll munch on that one for a while.

Some days.

Some days just ain't so easy.

Every day people do things they know better than to do. Whether they lie, fib, omit the truth, forget to clean the bathroom, drive on an empty tank and get stranded on the road, stay up until 3 AM on a workday because they were at a casino....

I'm fascinated by gray. That shade that isn't black and white, but that horrible real-life mixture of both that is everywhere and everything. I envy people that can see in monochrome. To be on the Hitchcock end of the television spectrum. I really, really wish that things were so easy. In Star Wars, there were characters that I found far more interesting than the others. Though Occam wants his razor to help us, the reality is that life is never so simple.

What's equally interesting is how much the phrase "hindsight is 20/20" holds true and still manages to piss you off. It doesn't matter if you should have known better, it still happened. Smug fuckers like me walk around with their heads in they air, pretending like they're helping you by being superior and telling you how you could have worked it out. Lots of people have better relationships than anyone they know, and are healthier than their friends. Opinions are like assholes - they spike their hair and drink jagerbombs. (That's how that goes, right?)


Cryptic emo bullshit. God, I'm everything I hate in the world. You know what, little blog? Let's try being honest instead of stupid. I have friends that read these and laugh, so let's just tell the truth. Someone I cared for hurt me today, and I knew it was going to happen. I'd say something jaded like "it usually does", but that's not true. I manage to stumble through life really easily sometimes, to the point where I've been told that I only succeed because I'm lucky. If this is luck, you can have it. I'm sick to death of it.

What's worse is that I can already tell that it's going to make me bitter, which is what I really need right now. I have a new job that I feel like leaving to go vomit, and I'm lying to my boss about having a migraine because it's easier than explaining things in reality. What am I, 12? (there's suddenly a conveniently placed kleenex box here. I am immediately suspicious of angelic intervention, but don't say that out loud.)

I love that I get to pretend to be adult about this, while she gets to post sad things on facebook and watch all the little boys who want to screw her try to make her feel better. If it works, great, a douchebag thinking with his penis and who lives and breathes ulterior motives are your real friends.

If I didn't have a coffee appointment after work I'd go home and get shitfaced until I had to wake up tomorrow morning. You know what? Fuck this. No one reads the blog, no one cares, and I'm a baby. I'm going to shut my trap, get back to work, and go home like a normal fucking adult. If I swear more it makes me feel better, so I'll just drop f-bombs under my breath all day, like that guy who pushes a cart down Grand Ave. full of junk.


At least I won money at Mystic Lake last night. I've never won money at a casino before. Always end on a positive note, right? That's how this works. I'm a cynical optimist, after all. Look on the sunny side of the compost heap. The glass is half empty, but that's because it's full of maggots, and no one likes maggots. Well, no one who hasn't got gangrene.

Fuck.

Islands in a Sea of Time

FILE 10012: Playback

I watch listlessly as the ships pass me by, riding the sea of Time. Graceful ladies, gliding across a dance floor that no man can touch, lest he wither and die.

Look at me. This is what happens when any sense of how normal time passes disappears. You wax poetic and weepy like some lovesick teenager. I'm not a poet, I'm a sailor of Time's Ocean who got marooned for something that wasn't his fault.

My island isn't that remarkable, considering the wonders I saw in my time as a sailor. At first the broken-down skyscrapers fascinated me, the crashed airship amazed me. A rusted geschunterlofter (whatever the hell that is) sticks its jagged "fingers" up into the sky, sheltering me from the wind when the skinny palms on my beach are too weak to. I took wonder with me into my exile, and for a few months (years, decades, seconds) it was my armor against insanity. Now I stare at the husks of a forgotten age, the remnants of tomorrow's yesterdays, and all I can think of is how cruel it was that they left me food and water to last a lifetime (week, day, epoch).

"You've brought this on yourself," the captain said. "You have only yourself to blame," the engineer told me. "It's a mercy, and one you don't deserve at that," spat the helmsman. You'd think I'd killed their mothers rather than rid them of the vicious carbuncle that was that boatswain, the way they stood in judgment of me. He'd stripped the flesh off of us in stripes that would shame a tiger, and stolen our food to boot. He'd sassed the captain, struck the engineer, and spit on the helmsman, and they were leaving me on my island in the Sea of Time to thank me.

Time's Ocean is not as beautiful as you are told. The colors that are written about do not do it justice, truly. They are colors you have never seen before, and they are terrible. You cannot describe them properly to someone who has not seen them, either. How would I describe to you the color of the distant past? The colored band that flows at the top of Time that could be either futures yet to come or futures that never will is a violent shade, an eyesore to bake your retinas and scratch your lenses. It's not a green, a red, a violet or a fuschia. It's..... monstrous.

Occasionally I hear voices pass in the night. Chronoships, cruising by, their crews giddy with excitement or heady with drink, thinking of plunder or discovery. My crew was kind enough to maroon me on the Island Closest to the Nexus, but we all know what it really is. This little prison of mine is the junk heap to the Ages, and it gets far more traffic than it should.

Every day (hour, minute, millions of years), more flotsam and refuse from Time washes ashore. On one occasion, I found an outdated portable toilet. On another, a wallet-sized computer that told me how many neurons were firing in my brain at once. Two bodies washed up (yesterday) a while ago, sailors that fell overboard. One of them had the head of a small child, the arm of a crone, and the breasts of a young woman. She must have fallen from a great height to be caught in so many Time currents at once. The other was clearly a Floater, uniformly aged beyond his years into a mummified husk by drifting on a current made solely of one timestream. He must have chosen.... poorly.

I can see the second island nearer to the Nexus from the top of the airship's crumbling frame. It's little more than a zit on Time's watery ass from here, but it still makes me giddy. It's South of my island and perhaps a bit East. Were there nighttime in this abyss I could tell for sure, but there is no sun here. Only the pulsating light of the Nexus. If my words confuse you, whoever finds this, North is any direction leading straight away from the Nexus. To find East and West, you must simply put your back to the Nexus and hold out your arms. West is clockwise from the nexus, and East counter-clockwise. Still, the island looms, tantalizingly close. If I can see it, I might be able to get there.

No, no, mustn't say it, mustn't think it. Shouldn't write it. No man, no woman, no creature can survive Time's flow unshielded. Even the great chronophobic ships that I used to sail could only protect themselves for so long. Time wounds all heels, they say, and every ship's chronofield will wear and fade if not tended to. Still, I can feel the rat that is madness gnawing its way into my heart, and the pull of Time is growing stronger. How easy it would be to leap off the cliff overlooking the condemned skyscrapers, to dive into Time as if it were merely a salty sea. I suppose I could even enjoy the experience, my body aging faster or slower by degrees depending on which currents were ravaging my frame. Who knows - I could find the legendary Static Stream and be preserved for eternity (until I reached the Nexus), a testament to the barbarism that rules a chronoship's crew.

I have no idea how long the power will last on this little device. I cannot read the glyphs on its surface, but a likely symbol seems to be half full. Of course, that could just be an indication that I'm half dead, for all I know. If it dies, it won't be my fault. No more than that bastard boatswain's death was my fault. I never meant to kill him. If I had, I would have made it clean. Not..... not like it was. No man deserves that fate.

Gasp! No, no, nonononono! How am I to survive?

Oh, wonderful. Thank you, tiny machine, for recording EVERYTHING that comes out of my mouth, rather than just what I want you to show. Too late now to make me sound less of a craven fool. As is clearly indicated by what I assume is a language scrolling across the screen of my companion (that's what I call this device now, it's the only thing here that gives a semblance of intelligence), it wrote down my panicked cries.

There's a Time Storm brewing to the North. I can see the bands raising up and outward, spiraling out of the Sea like a hand grasping at the sky. I don't even know if my little island is made of Rock - it might just be stone. If it is, I'm doomed for sure. I could be swept away and swallowed, island exile and all. If it is Rock, I may just have a chance...

Of course. The geschunterlofter. I knew I had recognized some of the plating on its "fingers". Bear with me, little companion. I may be able to build us a 'phobic shelter.

file corrupt, processing
* * *
resuming playback
-ays to me. So I kicked her down the stairs, and she never brought it up again.

Wait. Hold still, companion. Can you hear it? I think the storm is over. Yes, it is. Gods..... our island home has been torn asunder. Apparently there was some Rock to our exile after all, but not enough. We ourselves are safe, but I fear that the island has too little to sustain us. It's a good thing you reminded me to bring in the food and water (are you truly learning my language? remarkable!) when you did.

Still, most of the flotsam is gone. No more tools at easy access, no more alien devices and ancient writings to occupy my time. Not that I despise you, dear device, but I fear that if it were just you and I you would bore of me and deactivate.

My island is shredded. The sands and stone have vanished, replaced with the ravages of Time's Sea. We have but a small space left, and I'm afraid it's not enough. Look, little device, do you see? The Time Storm has left our neighbor island untouched. And this shelter of ours was malleable enough to be made into a hut, and has proven chronophobic after all. Perhaps...

... steel yourself, little pilot of the palm. Soon we shall attempt to craft a skiff to brave the currents. Our time on this little island has come to an end.

END PLAYBACK

Sisyphus had an attitude problem

Let's stop and think about this one for a moment. Sisyphus was doomed to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. The minute the boulder reached the top, it would roll back down again immediately, and he would have to start over. He could not cease his torment, nor could the boulder ever reach the top.

Zeus punished him thus for his hubris in tricking the gods. Sisyphus died not once, or twice, but THREE times because he was so sneaky. When Thanatos, the god of death, tried to chain him, he convinced Thanatos to show him how the chains worked. This resulted in the god of death being imprisoned, and no one dying for a good long while. "Consequences will be dire."

I'll bet he got pretty cut after a while, eh? Low caloric intake, constant use of stabilizer muscles, etc.

It was on my way into work today that I realized that I hate the treadmill. Run as fast as you can, just to stay in place. I don't mean a physical treadmill that you use at the gym - even that has a point. The metaphorical, sisyphean treadmill that is the job market. Everyone is scrambling to get low-income jobs to get experience in a field. The field you want requires experience, so you can't get a low-income job on the ground floor until you have experience. You go to school to get experience and a good knowledge base for your field - and by the time you're done, you have so much debt it's hard to get a place to live, let alone a career you want. Somewhere along the line, you're expected to find a partner with which to limp along with, and do it all over again with your kids.

Something is missing. Something isn't right. Life is consistently giving us lemons, and we're not doing anything about it but flooding a saturated market with lemonade. We need to break out of the mold, Cave Johnson-style.

Can the myth of Sisyphus give us perspective on this? Definitely. King Sisyphus was punished for being clever by being doomed to repeat the same action for eternity. He was literally too clever for his own good, and was stuck in monotony for all time.

If this is the outcome to be avoided, then we have to try at all costs to break out of these ruts. Change what's happening in our lives.

Viktor Frankl spoke of logos, the meaning to life. When people told him they were suicidal, he would ask "what do you have to live for?" Not in a cruel or derisive way, but in a way meant to provoke thought. It turned out that the people who were suicidal could not see reason to live. They had, in essence, become Sisyphus. Locked into the same actions, the same cycle, with no reason to break out.

Evidence of this type of psychology at work can be seen in the program in Federal prisons that gives inmates puppies to train. Inmates almost universally reported a change in demeanor, and felt that their prison time had changed in aspect during the program. Cell Dogs, giving meaning to someone without it.

Where is the meaning in your life? Does it have one? I'm still looking for a good one, but that in itself can be a logos. Something that Frankl tried to get his patients to understand was that for mankind, searching for meaning could be meaning enough to move on.

Maybe I just need to find something to do with those damn lemons. Where are my eggheads?

On beauty

There is a very famous argument between Socrates and another man, in which Socrates challenges the man to define piety. I think it was Crito, but I'm not sure. Regardless of the title, the dialogue consists of Socrates showing his opponent that merely referencing other subjects and objects is not sufficient for definition.

Which is why the beautiful is so difficult to relate if you have no common ground. What is it, anyway?

Ask an artist what "beauty" is, and you're likely to get an earful. If you ask Jackson Pollock, he might say that beauty is an event, an action that expresses something. If you were to ask Claude Monet, you might hear of a sunrise over the water. Were you to ask Louis Armstrong, you would get an entire songful. Old Satchmo made a lot of people happy just by singing about the very subject.

These days, all you need is the internet to access what others find beautiful. Regardless of the form of the content, be it audio, visual, some amalgamation of both, even written word, you can find forms of the joy people find in the world around us everywhere. Tumblr in particular is a common form of expression, as is DeviantArt.

Still, it's the curse of the writer to see beauty in places that others usually don't. The film American Beauty was based on such a book, and sticks in the minds of many a moviegoer because of the images that it evoked. Even a plastic bag, dancing in the wind. (I think this one is a bit blah, but I'm just jaded.)

A good question might as well be where isn't there beauty? I'd answer, but good questions make for depressing blogs. Socrates was executed for being a dick, after all, and all he did was ask lots of annoying questions. Since I don't want to drink hemlock any time soon, I think I'll stick to the positive.

What then, is beauty? There are some examples above, but is there more? Of course. Ask yourself what you see, hear, touch, taste, and love in the world around you. What makes it beautiful? Plato thought that the things we find beautiful were that way because they mimicked the real form of capital B Beauty off in la-la-land somewhere. In most cases, I think that Plato's idea of Forms was a bit off, but here he might have something. When put to it, I find beauty in too many things.

A little kid's evil laugh as he uses his Ninja Turtles to give G.I. Joe a beatdown, for example. When someone strange on the internet knows exactly what you do in the shower. 120 dogs howling in unison because all they want to do is run, and their brothers are out doing it while the sun is high and the wind is cold. Landscapes, canyons, caves, birds, life, and cute girls.

One of the lines from Lord of the Rings is also quite true - there are things beautiful and terrible at the same time. Tsunami, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes.... not just natural disasters. Lions hunting prey, space seen from the hubble, the cell structure of a killer virus.

There are a few people in this world uniquely acquainted with the beautiful, and we call them artists, entertainers, and the talented. Seers, oracles, and prophets, sometimes. Sometimes they are leaders, like his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Sometimes they are merely pedestrian, a strangely hirsute man who could be anyone else on the street, but writes like a god (Patrick Rothfuss, choff choff).

To Aristotle, capital V Virtue was beautiful. He believed that by aspiring and living towards Virtue itself, we would in turn be virtuous people, inside and out. The self-examined life, is how he phrased it.

Unless you find beauty in death (and sometimes there is), and insist on making things more beautiful by killing (shudder), pursue it. The more people who strive to find the extraordinary in ordinary life in this world, the better. Our lives could all use a little picking up sometimes, couldn't they? All to the better if we can do so in a way that others can see and recognize.

If you read this, I'm glad you're OK, and it was good to hear from you.

Assorted cliches

"Why do we fall down, Master Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up again."

"One step at a time."

"Take care of the outside and the inside will follow."

"Speak out, don't keep quiet."

"Time heals all wounds, or wounds all heels."

"No man is an island."

"You can do this."

"When you can't run

I hate these. I really hate them. Nothing is more condescending than a platitude given glibly to a genuine problem or hurt, with the exception of when said platitude is right.

Someone I care about is hurting, and had the courage to say something. I did my best, but does it help? I think so. I think that anything can help when people really need you. People everywhere need help every day, myself included. The human is a social animal, we can't live on bread alone, and I'm spewing out trite sayings like a broken record. How do you help? How can anyone help with problems so deep they seem like a black hole you'll never get out of?

Not even Stephen Hawking is positive what happens at the center of a black hole, take comfort in that. Some physicists theorize it could lead to different worlds, different universes. Though a black hole's gravity swallows visible light, energy can escape the accretion disk in the form of x-rays and gamma rays. The same spectrum and base energy form as visible light - it just has to change first.

Cliche's and bad metaphors aside, people need you. They need each other. Sometimes all it takes is one person listening to another because they care. One small gesture of trust can be enough to make a difference. When we're in pain, we don't just hide it. Things slip out of the cracks - all you have to do is pay attention to see it.

Something that stuck with me (I know I'm a cult nerd, get off of it) was the second-to-last episode of Firefly. It's an old saying in a new jacket but still. "If you can't run, you walk, and if you can't walk, you crawl, and if you can't crawl, well..."

"You find someone to carry you."

I know that you're brave. Orlando Jones would be proud of you.


If you read this, I know you can make it. Trust me, I was a salesman.

Swinging at things

like a bad ballplayer who never got the praise, "good eye!" when he let a ball go by.

I'm back in Minnesota, in the cities (or abouts) and in what some people call a "groove". It's strange, my grooves look vaguely like ruts.

I've just started temp work at a law office in the cities, helping out until they complete the laborious process of finding a new office manager. This means I'm in a job where I have a handful of experience, working eight hours a day, and handling extremely sensitive material. I'd never witnessed a will signing before as an official until last weekend. Weird experience.

The lights above the desk are NOT energy friendly, and they're hot as hell. 95% of all energy put into a normal incandescent bulb is wasted as heat, by the way. It's all beating down on my head, even though it's in the sixties outside.

I still work at a restaurant, which is...... well, it's actually fun as hell. I love the staff, and sometimes breaking up a 20 lb slab of home-ground sausage with your fingers feels satisfying. Sometimes you just get greasy, but whatever.

Still, I almost feel as if I'm flailing about in a dark cave while someone ahead of me has a flashlight, but their body is blocking most of the light. It's like those dreams where you're driving a car, only from the back seat, and you can't see over the seat in front of you and you know you're going to hit some helpless baby in the road, doing god knows what on the pavement in his spare time.

Things are bizarre. I help my parents almost daily with a workload that steadily seems to be way too large for a couple nearing their retirement. Five acres, 2-ton branches of oak, entire pine trees falling, and a god-awful amount of yard care is just the beginning. They've redone the bath, the kitchen, and are thinking of new appliances and cars. All this is going to add up to a set of things that need to be done that neither of them want to do, and you can guess how eager I am about it.

Every morning seems cold and foggy (thank you, Minnesota, for this wonderful tribute to feeling happy) except when it's cold and the sun streaks into my window to blind me awake. That's a fun feeling, waking up completely stark blind, afterimages filling your vision for half an hour while you shower and pretend like it wasn't freezing for the first five minutes.

I've been seeing some old friends lately, and it's all kind of surreal. I remember jokes they forgot about years ago, stories that we shared at the time that they think I'm making up. Only one of them, Drew, actually picked up on anything while we were visiting. He makes a great homebrew, by the way. Many different varieties. We've told him to start a business.

Top that off with incredibly warped family problems, a splash of girl trouble, and a not inconsiderable amount of debt accruing from student loans, and all my wonderful direction has been lost. Someone stepped on my sextant when I wasn't looking, and I'm hissy about it. I hope they get scurvy and lose their teeth, and have to walk around with Norm Coleman-ish smiles for the rest of their life, scaring little children with pearly white dentures.

A very good friend is starting a security company. I want to get in on the ground floor, and I have the opportunity, but it's not a joke. You need training, you need dedication, and you have to take it seriously. Because I'm so good at serious, right? If I help out and it becomes a career, what happens to my doctorate? What happens to these tiny plans I love to make? Who knows.

In the meantime, I'm applying for jobs like a down-and-out boxer trying to make a comeback. See my new resume muscles? Manly! I can't lose to these snot-nosed kids who have bigger degrees and more wins under their Gucci belts, I'm the champ. Check me out, I have real-life experience - I don't need to practice my stamina.

Remember my drunk roommate from the two blogs ago? His ghost is chasing me down. Recently I've had to cover for two people (on the same day, ironically) by bending the truth, and I don't like it. Enabling was something I was supposed to get RID of, not recognize more easily and then cave to.

Not to mention some of the weirdest dreams I've had to date have started cropping up. I had a dream that started like 2001: a Space Odyssey. Instead of the monolith towering over monkeys, it was my fridge, towering monolithian over my bed. Same creepy music, but it was my fridge. When I opened the fridge, lights spilled out around the edge in too many colors, a seizure-inducing display worthy of Stanley Kubrik. Just last night I had a dream where the frogs in my window well started to talk in normal tones of voice, explaining that they were tired of being exploited. One finally called a vote, and to my shock and terror, produced a sign reading "First National Union of Pissed Off Frogs". NUPOF. They then proceeded to picket my underground window, banging their little signs against it and shouting in tinny voices that hell no, mos-qui-to.

WHAT?

And nice guys still finish last. Doesn't that just suck. Someone I've been seeing a lot more often suddenly loves to turn that into a pun. Pun or not, it's still true.

I told myself two years ago that I wasn't going to stop swinging for the fences. It's hard not to want to swing at faces sometimes, but I promised myself the fence was the goal. That promise is one I intend to keep. Weird is not that unusual to me (still weird, mind you, just expected at this point) and I've got plenty more chances at bat before the game is over. I proved on that damn mountain that I could move anywhere, make friends, and be a success, and I'm going to beat this if I strike out 20 more times.

Time to nut up or shut up.

Charlie: a short story

It wasn't until my seven-year old grandson Nicky was using the leaf blower to puff out my cheeks that I decided to make the jump.

Three hours of monkeying with the damn thing, and I was just about to put the finishing touches on it. The blower, not my grandson. He was my cheerleader. To some old farts like me, a kid of seven yelling "Yay Grampa! You fix that! Fix that like a boss!" might have driven them batshit. It was music to my ears, and it made me all sorts of Hallmark-lifetime special on the inside.
Each time he'd come up with a new cheer, I'd put on what May always calls my "super serious face". I'd furrow my brow deep, so the wrinkles in my forehead grew cavernous. My eyes would narrow, and my mouth would compress to a tiny line beneath my slightly sagging cheeks. I ain't gonna tell ya how old I am, because there's a few things a man can keep to himself. I'd been to the war, and I wasn't no spring chicken - I can say that much. Anyway, I had to put on a good show of things. Nicky's always looked up to me, the little snotball, and I loved him to death. I couldn't let something like a dad-blasted leaf blower get the better of me with him around. So I took him seriously as I could, and pretended like he was the one driving me on. That damn blower had to be fixed.

In my defense, I hadn't been the one to break it, either. Katrina did it. People always say "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and it's true. I'd just hate to see the sonofabitch that pissed off that hurricane. That damn leaf blower was the only thing left of the garage where my son had caught my addiction to engine grease. May said I was nuts to try to pull it out of that wreck, let alone put it back together. Just move on, she said. How're you supposed to tell your wife that a leaf blower means more to you than money, time, and effort? You'd sound like a proper nutjob, if you ask me. I just told her it had to be done, put on my "serious face", and told her it had to be done. She threw her hands in the air as if tossing confetti onto some poor bloke behind her and walked away. She was mad a bit, I was mad a bit, then we went for one of our long walks and everything was ok again.
"Grampa?"
I looked over from the blower to see Nicky making what he must have thought was a proper "serious face". Don't laugh, Charlie, I thought, if you do, it'll crush the boy. "What is it, kiddo?"
Nicky took a deep breath and held it. When he started to turn red, I figured he'd just about pop. Sure enough, what he said came out all in a rush, like someone had pushed fast-forward on my old VCR. "Thatblower'sspecialtoyouisn'titcauseyouspentsolongonitandIwannaknowwhysitsospecial?"
I blinked, then started guffawing. Not laughing, not chuckling, but letting loose fit to bust a gut. That boy is just too damn sharp for his own good. My own wife of 40 years can't pick up on something that gets me riled up, but that boy knew right away. Wiping tears from my eyes, I set the blower down and picked him up with my grease-stained hands. I set him on my knee, thinking that I'd catch holy hell from his ma about it, then looked him in the eye.
"You bet it is, slugger. You want to know why?" The look he gave me clearly said, Duh Grampa, I already asked that. I shrugged. "This leaf blower's the last thing left of our old house where your daddy grew up. I figure if I fix it, maybe I can fix him and me."
This made Nicky's eyes go all misty, and I had to bite my tongue from doing the same. Damned if little kids don't hit that spot right in my gut that just makes me turn into a blubbering idiot.
"B... but Grampa... why is Daddy so mad at you?"

I thought back. I couldn't tell him the truth, not at this age. How can you explain to a child what terminal cancer is? "Sick" don't cover it, no sir not at all. "Sick" isn't waking up every morning thinking that you're on borrowed time every moment you spend next to your wife. "Sick" isn't having your skin a perpetual shade of green from all the gosh-darn chemicals and radiations that are floating around in your beat up old hide. "Sick" you get better from. Worse, "Sick" doesn't make your only boy avoid you because he's scared to death of death and can't tell an old man he loves him.
"I don't think even he knows that, kiddo. Don't worry about it too much, son. Daddy still loves Grampa, and things will work out all right in the end." He looked at his shoes, a picture-perfect little sad boy right out of Norman Rockwell.
Damned if I don't hate sad silence. That's what gets me the most about this damn cancer. People don't yell, "Hey Charlie!" anymore, or offer to buy me beers on Vet's day. The cancer had turned it all into sour-smelling pity. You really can smell it on people. All the "How are you feeling, Charlie?" and "Are the treatments going well, Charlie?" stink to high heaven of sympathy, and I can't stand it. Smelling something like that come off of my little Nicky was just too much. I had to do something, so I pulled an old trick out of my hat.
"Hey slugger," I said as my hand found his mop of blond hair, "how's about we fire this thing up and you make Grampa look funny?"
His head snapped up immediately. Nothing like the promise of mischief to put a fire in a boy's eyes. "Whatcha mean, Grampa? How can the blower make you look funny?"
I grinned in spite of myself. "I'll show ya. Let me start up the blower, and then we'll go over yonder so your Gramma don't see us being straight-up fools, kay?"
Nicky nodded furiously. He was as eager as me to get his mind off his father. Not that his father was mean, or bad to him. I'd have striped that bastard raw if he hurt my grandson - police badge or not. No, Sam was just stubborn and macho to the core (much like his old man), so he didn't want to admit that I was dying. I was just playing at it to piss him off, he said. Couldn't stop thinking about myself, he said.

Picking up the blower and walking out the garage door, I motioned for Nicky to follow me. I hoped he didn't see the way I clenched my dentures at the pain in my gut, but I couldn't help it. Cancer can be like a kid with a magnifying glass burning ants, only it's my gut instead of ants, and a hot poker instead of a magnifying glass. Bad as it was, walking outside took the pain out of me right quick.
It was the one of those storybook days, the kind where the princess has found the prince and they ride off into the sunset. The sun had gone all gatorade orange and was shimmery around the edges, like the end of one of those old westerns I like so much. Scept I was no Clint Eastwood, and that damn blower was no six-shooter. Still, it was the kind of summer evening that I hadn't known the Midwest was capable of till after the hurricane.
We worked our way around the back of the garage, where the roof and deck blocked the windows from the house. May'd probably have burst my eardrums if she caught me teaching Nicky the kind of shenanigans I had in mind. I set the blower on the ground butt-first once we were out of sight of the house, and commenced pulling at the cord.
Not pulling the cord, mind you. Pulling AT it. Pulling the cord implies a measure of success. For a good five minutes I yanked that sucker up and down with not so much as a sputter. I was about to swear up a storm and kick the damn thing to hell, grandson or no grandson, when Nicky reminded me I was a dumbass with a simple question.
"Grampa, does it have gas?"
Does it have gas. I'd seen more in my lifetime than probably you or your family has, let me tell you, but that boy was still sharper than me in seven years than all of mine. All that work on the damn thing and I hadn't bothered to fill it up.
Ten minutes later (I'd had a bit of a spell hoofing it back into the garage and getting the gas can down) and the damn thing was finally puttering out behind the house again. Nicky was crouched on his haunches, tilting the thing up towards my bent-over face. I looked him squarely in the eye.
"No matter what Grampa looks like, you can't laugh, understand?" He nodded. I was born with an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic, so I counted down with my fingers. One. Two. ....... One. This drew a giggle from Nicky, but he quickly stifled it. It was now or never.
Three.
Nicky pulled the handle, and a gust of dirty, smelly air caught me full in the face. After thirty-seven years, I heard Lt. Michael's voice again. Let's go you apes! You want to live forever? My cheeks flattened against my aging head, flapping around like the jowls on Droopy Dog. I heard Nicky gasp, then watched the fascinating process of how he tried to stifle a laugh. He won somehow, his tiny eyebrows clenched in concentration, but I could see the smile beating at his defenses. Acting purely on instinct, I opened my mouth as wide as I could, letting my whole gob blow open like a parachute. I moved my head from side to side, flattening one cheek while the other puffed out obscenely, my teeth standing out like the false things they already were. May always said that the treatments could take my teeth, but not my smile from me.
It was too much for poor Nicky. He collapsed, laughing fit to burst, and the blower died. For a moment I still felt the wind through my
(uniform)
hair, and then it hit me. I had to take one more jump.

* * *

Two days later, May was cooking dinner, and I asked her the question.
"Dear heart," I said in as simple a tone as I could, "Love of my life, are you going to burn my steak again?"
That wasn't the question, but I felt it had to be asked. One old-fashioned slap later, and May and I were sitting at our oak dinner table with our old silverware and settling into a steak that any chef would consider a travesty, but what May called "decently cooked."
"Charlie Johnson, I don't know who taught you to talk to a lady like that, but I'll have you sleeping on that couch if you sass me one more time before we're done eating." May is older than me by a bit, but that didn't keep those gorgeous grey eyes of hers from lighting up like a firestorm when she got her dander up. Even though her hair was mostly gray and thin now, she still tossed it over her shoulder in that frustrated gesture I liked so much. Gray and thin it might be, but that woman will be beautiful till the day I die.
"May, when was the last time you felt free? I mean really free, as if nothing else in the world mattered just then."
She blinked, nonplussed. "Charlie, what an odd question. What do you mean by all that?"
I shrugged. "Just tell me, if you can. It's something I was wondering about the other day."
"We-ell.... I suppose it was that last trip we took up north to ride those snow machines. I felt like I could go anywhere and do anything on that thing, loud beast that it was."
Smiling, I shook my head. "You always had the grease gene as much as I did, May. I love you for it."
She smiled the kind of smile a young girl smiles when asked if she likes you back, but said nothing for a while. She appeared to be enjoying her ribeye, but I wasn't really sure how a woman would enjoy the taste of leather. When she finally spoke up, she asked what I thought she would.
"How about you, Charlie? When was the last time your worries just flew away?"
I thought for a bit even though the answer had come to me while my grandson flapped my face about with a leaf blower. It wouldn't do to let May think I was brooding, or she'd try to poke me one in the ribs. God, how that got me going sometimes. After what felt like the right amount of time, I pointed towards the ceiling.
"You remember when Sammy graduated his police academy, May?"
Her eyes widened a bit, but she smiled. "You always said you felt best when you were jumping out of a plane. God's mercy, but you're crazy as a bedbug if that's what you're referring to."
Laughing, I pushed my plate back. My appetite wasn't what it once was with all the treatments, and leather made my gut give an angry turn sometimes. "You know me better than anything, sweetheart. You can blame the 101st for getting me to like it. Once someone yells at me to do something, I'm either gonna hate it or love it. Jumping out of a plane just happened to be something I grew to love."
Smiling with her eyes, May looked out the window into the evening. Summer nights round here are pretty as can be, especially when the fireflies are out on our porch like they were that night. Little horny lightbugs, flashing their come-ons into the darkness. Mating displays can be pretty sometimes, I guess. It was another while before she spoke up again.
"Charlie... what brought this up? You can't seriously be thinking of taking another jump. We haven't got the money, and you're in no shape to fly anywhere, let alone jump out of a plane at tens of thousands of feet."
I stood up, feeling something in me bend the wrong way as I did so, and grimaced. The pain never leaves you be, you know. It's worse than a shark with the scent of blood. Sharks will bump you a few times, then get you in their teeth and finish things. Pain is a kitten. A vicious, body-tearing kitten, playing with you between its paws. It'll bat you around, throw you in the air, and wreck you wholesale just for the hell of it before it ends you. And when it takes you down, you'll still feel every damn thing. I hissed a bit through my teeth, seeing the concern on my wife's face, and that only made things worse.
Perhaps I mentioned that my sense of the dramatic gets me in trouble. It did this time, too.
"May Parker Johnson, I have a right to do what I please. I'm dying, and if I say that I want to jump out of a plane like I used to back in the war, I will jump out of a plane like I used to back in the war. You don't know what it's like, May. To leap out into that big open sky with a grin on your face and get your laugh stolen by the wind. To have that wind puff out your cheeks like... like your grandson is hosing your face with a leaf blower. For those few seconds while I fall I could do anything, and nothing scares me. Not those damn Nazis, not cancer, and not the fact that my only boy is too stupid to tell me he loves me before I keel over and die.
"For those few seconds, I could be God Himself."
May hates it when I blaspheme, and normally she would have scolded me. Instead she burst into tears, and my rant died deader than a doornail in no time at all. I walked around the table, wincing as I did so, and pulled her into my arms. She cried like that for a while, holding me as close as she used to before the cancer, and I didn't care that it hurt like a bitch. If a man can't hold his wife when she's crying, he ain't no kind of man.
Finally she wiped her eyes and looked at me. "Where will we get the money? Who the hell would take a patient with cancer up in a plane for a jump anyway?"
I held her close for a bit more, biting my lip against my gut. She couldn't see it, so I could do it. I finally let her go back a ways, and held her face between my dry old leathery palms. I kissed her forehead, then slowly eased back into my chair at the table. Knife and fork in shaky hands, I tried to choke down a few more bites of burnt cow for her sake.
Mumbling through the ruined beef, I said, "You know who would, and you know how I'd do it. Just like the old days."

Later that night, we slept in the same bed for the first time in two years. I'd insisted on my own bed once the night sweats and vomiting fits hit, because I couldn't bear to see what it did to the woman I loved. I still think it's a gift from god that the night before I jumped those were absent, and I was able to hold my wife close one more time. Told her I loved her, and that I would always miss her. Told her to take care of my boy and my grandson, and that she'd do well to find someone else to pass the time with, since she still had those killer thighs and that laugh to drive a man crazy. She didn't say a word, just snuggled up against me. I think she cried.

* * *

My attic is a gosh-darn nightmare. Not only do I hate spiders, but the dust plays hell with my lungs. Still, I knew that if May saw what I was looking for, she'd call the cops on me, or worse, my son. Before dawn broke (she's always been an early riser), I woke myself up and slipped into some old rags. That attic staircase is unbelievably loud, but somehow I managed to pull it down from the ceiling outside our bedroom without waking her.
Ten minutes later and I was killing myself trying to stifle the sneezes. Each time I pushed one down I felt a piece of me protest, like a sack filled with too many things. I could swear parts of me bulged out. Where was that damn....
There. It was under a stack of photo albums, which didn't make any sense. They should have rolled off the crazy thing, but there they were, perched and wobbly as if they were about to drop and just didn't want to. I felt like it could have been me on that old army pack.
Forty years, and it still fit. I'd grown a belly after the war, too much beer and baseball, but it had gone the way of the dodo after my second round of chemo. Couldn't keep anything down. As the straps came over my shoulders, I could hear my lieutenant again.
Come on, maggots! You think Jerry's gonna wait for you to grow a pair? Out the door, and don't get dead! Even under fire, Lt. Michael had called us names. Goddam it, get some fire on those Krauts! Useless turds, I'll shoot you myself if you don't get a heave-ho! When he died, the unit broke up. We weren't sent to new positions or anything like that, but he was the glue that kept us together. We'd been through hell and back a few times already, so command decided we were done anyhow, and that was that. Most of my old mates were dead these days, but there were a few left. Men who would just laugh to see me wearing my old fatigues, or offer to buy me a beer. Men who wouldn't ask, "How do you feel, Charlie?"
A few I could count on like in the old days.
* * *

"Well if it isn't old double-ugly hisself. Charlie Johnson, back from the dead and looking like he could just whup my wrinkled old ass!"
Laughing so hard it hurt, I grabbed the bald, skinny man in front of me by the forearm. "Chuck Finley, you son of a gun, you look younger than the Devil! I still hate you for being the one of us who got to be Chuck and not Charlie."
There we were, two old men wheezing at each other in an aircraft hanger like a couple of kids with asthma problems. Grinning like idiots, the lot of us. Chuck truly didn't look that old to me, you know. He may have had a few more liver spots on his skin than me, and a lot more flesh around the middle, but he didn't look old. He looked like I didn't feel - alive. Finley was the squad clown before I was transferred in, always cracking wise and pushing insubordination with Lt. Michael. After I showed up, it seemed to make him more of himself. The two of us would spout dirty jokes before every practice drop, scream or laugh on the way down (he did the screaming, I swear to you), and keep everyone's spirits up in the mud.
Right now he was pulling me over to a little desk in front of his beat up old Piper aircraft. It was right in the way of the props, so I guessed he hadn't done any flying lately.
"What brings you round these parts, Charlie? Your place is what, a hundred miles away? Not that I was eager to see your ugly mug again, but spill - why you here?"
I lifted up my battered old pack and slammed it on the table. There was a silence as Finley digested what I'd fed him, and his eyes narrowed.
"I don't know what you mean by bringing your old chute into my shop old man, but you best not be thinking what I think you're thinking."
Lifting my hand up, I held it in front of his face. I had the shakes pretty bad from the walk to the hangar, and he could see it. I set my hand down on the table with a dull thud, and grimaced. "I'm dying, Chuck. You must have heard."
He shook his head. "Yeah, I heard, but I didn't believe it. You were our good luck charm, Charlie. Old double-ugly could never die, and would laugh the Devil hisself in the face when the time came. Why you bringing that old chute out here now?"
It didn't take me any time at all to reply. "So I could laugh the Devil hisself in the face, friend. I ain't going out like no cripple, no sir. I intend to go out of this world the way I want, the time I want, and that's now. You remember what Donner used to say?"
Chuck hung his head a bit, then said, "Yeah, I remember. Black bastard used to say it every damn day in the war. 'I ain't gonna be a slave to no man.' What's that got to do with your old ass?"
My hand was still shaking. I grabbed it with its twin to still the shakes, then spat, "This pain is making me a slave, Chuck. Donner and me, we think the same way. I have to do something, I have to be free again. When I'm jumping, I am."
Chuck was still mad. "That old chute may not even open, do you realize that? I'll probably be arrested for just taking you up in the freaking plane, let alone letting you jump with a chtue that old!"
"So you'll get arrested. What are they going to do, put an old vet like you in the pen? I highly doubt that. Hell, old Frank worked for the damn DA for a few years, he'd bail you out. I have to do this."
"The hell you do. That pretty wife of yours is going to be heartbroken. She'll die alone, your boy will be right about you, and those beautiful grandkids of yours you always send me pictures of will cry their little eyes out."
"You don't know that. For all you know, the chute could open and I could be fine. I could die in a bed of this damn cancer, cursing you the whole time."
"Charlie.... Charles, this is crazy. You can't do it. I won't do it."
"Charles Finley, this is the last request a dying man will ever make of you. If you won't do it for me, just think of that time when I took a bullet for you. I didn't hesitate then, and damn you if you hesitate now. I need this."
Sometimes when two men talk, things get too close to the way women do it, and we know it, and that makes us stupid. So for a moment, we didn't say nothing at all. That silence stretched, and stretched, and stretched, but didn't break. After a while, Finley looked me in the eye, and I saw his old piss and vinegar at work.
"If I do this for you - if I take you up one last time and let you jump out my plane with that old chute, I get first dibs on your wife."
I still had the tears in my eyes from laughing when we boarded the Piper.
* * *
Chuck is yelling to me over the radio. "We're at ten thousand, Charlie! Before you jump, I want to check your chute!"
I'm about to shake my head, but I realize he can't see me. "No way, old man! I packed this thing myself when we got home."
He laughs at me, loud and long. "I remember camp, you old fart. The way you pack a chute you're lucky that thing fits you." Finley rambles on a bit more, but my mind is elsewhere. I always get like this before a drop. Spacey, out to lunch, whatever they call it. I'm thinking about how good it will feel to be free again.
Finally I snap back to reality. Chuck is yelling, "Hey! Dumbass! Get that door open before I change my mind!" There should be some dramatic speech, I think. He should try to stop me at the last minute. Instead, I see that he's laughing. His eyes are all bright and shiny, the way they were when he'd curse nonsense at the Krauts, calling them sausage-lovers and stop-sign stealers. He's his old self, and so am I. I'm back, and he can see it too, so he gives me a thumbs up, just like we did in the old days, and I'm out the door.

It's called "free falling" for a reason. The laugh builds in my ruined gut, bubbles up to my scarred and irradiated lungs, and spills out of me like a kid busting through a gate at an amusement park. I can see the ground, but it's so far away... it's miles and miles down, and I'm flying like people only dream about. Old bones or not, I twist and flip, spreading my arms and legs so I can face up and look at the sky for a moment. The sun is bright, the clouds are puffy, and all I can think about is that God must have it pretty nice if he can see what I can see. Still laughing, I flip back over to see the ground getting bigger, but I don't care. All my motions are automatic, and I don't feel them. My legs are gone, my hands are gone, my pain is gone. My worries don't exist. No man but me is in control of my destiny right now, and I'm drunk on it, reeling back and forth in the wind. For these few seconds, I'm myself again, and, I'm free.

I'm still laughing as I pull the cord.

St. Patrick's day: why you have to speak up

Something about St. Patty's always gets to me. Every single one I've celebrated has been an amazing time, with one glaring error. It's like Murphy's Law, but it applies only to a specific holiday, and only once.

The day started off great. My boss, Mitch, was sick, and needed some company at the doc's, so I caught a ride into town and cashed my paycheck with him after his appointment. I've only been out to Jackson with him once this entire season, and we had been hoping to hang out more, so it was a good chance to unwind and let our beards down. We got some amazing sushi (I still can't believe Jackson's sushi is this good, it's a damn valley in the mountains) and picked up prescriptions at the local drug store. I also bought ingredients to make chianti braised beef with rigatoni, so I'm stoked for that.

Evening on St. Patty's (after a glorious nap in which I dreamt my friends Chris and Matt were putting silly-putty in slingshots and shooting people with it) kicked off pretty well with some Jameson and Guinness (a trend which continued through the night.) What really got things going was when the live music showed up.

Max Hay is amazing. He is, bar none, the most entertaining solo performer I've seen. He knew all the old irish favorites like Whiskey in the Jar and Moonshiner, but he could rip out Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, and Gaelic Storm like he was born to it. He even played a fast-kicking version of one of my favorite old Jim Croce tunes, which was awesome. Even better, he was calling all the staff by name, taking shots with us, and interacting with the crowd in a great way. If not for the one thing, I could have watched that all night.

For those of you who've been witness to drunken idiots before, things tend to go a certain way. Guys like to get drunk, swear a lot, tell jokes that only they think are funny (I'm certainly guilty of that one even when sober) and kick around. Usually after about two hours of this the alcohol works its magic and people leave. It's when they come back that it's a problem.

My roommate is an alcoholic. Usually he just sits in his room, drinks straight whiskey from the bottle, and keeps to himiself. He's full of loud opinions, angry rants about how there aren't any drugs up here to do, and stories of his life in Detroit, Alaska, and everywhere else he was an addict. I'd dismissed him as harmless for the most part; when he got drunk and angry, I'd tell him to STFU and go home. If he was belligerent in our room, I'd leave, and he'd just sit in his bed and get more drunk until he passed out.

Yesterday he'd had half a bottle of whiskey by about 3:00 in the afternoon. So, of course, he decided it would be a good idea to go to the bar. I got back from Jackson around that time, and was completely exhausted from Wednesday's snowmobile ride. I proceeded to take aforementioned nap, then get up for some dinner and head to the bar to celebrate someone else being Irish. What do I find when I'm there? My roommate, of course. Drunk as a skunk that's replaced its own blood with pure alcohol.

My roommate has told me many times about how he blacks out. Once he's drunk, he won't remember a damn thing he said or did, period. After about three weeks of telling me this, he finally admitted that he "might have a problem with alcohol, but AA is for pussies and god-lovers."

I could already tell he was blackout drunk. He had no idea what he was saying from one minute to another, you could barely understand his speech, and he would have crazy outbursts for no reason. Suffice to say, they sent him packing. That should have been the end of it. If I had been in my room reading or playing video games like I usually do on my days off, he then would have been my problem.

But hey, it's a holiday, and there's live music, so screw him, right?

Halfway through the evening, just before the music started, he came back for more liquor (he'd drunk the last of his bottle of whiskey and most of his beer.) I was sitting at a table with two male employees and one female housekeeper, a girl about my age. My roommate proceeded to sit down next to the girl and pester her, completely unintelligible. When she continued her conversation as if he wasn't there, he started playing with her ponytail and pulling on her hair. She got up, moved a seat over, and tried to ignore him. Noticing what was going on, one of our bartenders came over and put water in front of my roommate, then left to get a manager.

You kind of had to be there to get this. Here my roommate sits, acting like a child and demanding booze and attention, when out of the blue someone just puts a glass of water in front of him. It was funny to most of us. When we laughed, his expression changed from childlike glee and petulance to some kind of drunken, bruce-bannerish rage. He started dropping f-bombs and n-bombs all over the place, got up, and went outside for a smoke.

Again, we all thought "problem solved."

I got up to chat with some people, and walked out to the front desk (empty-handed and mostly clear headed) to talk with the girl working the night shift. We were joking around about how many times I got my sled stuck (twice) and how many times I fell off the damn thing (once for no reason while parked) when my roommate appeared from behind me like a drunken dracula. He slurred several phrases about how much people where we work suck, are hillbillies, and how he was going to go home. He turned to leave, and I thought that he'd finally just give it a rest.

Then he turns to the girl out of the blue, looks her up and down, and says "Nice nipples." Then he laughs, high-pitched and loudly. I tell him to get the hell out of there right damn now, and he stumbles away.

How the hell do you handle that kind of thing? I'd have taken a swing at the guy, A) I don't need an assault charge and B) I'm not getting my ass fired for a piece of trash like him. The girl was horrified, red-faced, and almost ready to die of embarassment.

For about sixty seconds, both of us just stood there in silence. We tried to talk about it at first, but nothing was exactly easy to bring up. She mentioned that he always stopped by her desk in the afternoons to bug her, and she'd warned him off before.

The level of shock I'd felt began to bleed away. He was the worst I'd seen him since the first time he drank himself into unconsciousness in our room, after threatening me, telling me never to tell a black man to kill you because you don't have anything left to live for, and then hawking a loogie onto his bed. He'd crossed a line, but we could take care of it in the morning.

Of course, that's what I was thinking when he walked back in. I'd locked the room when I left, and he didn't have a key. He swore at me a few times until I gave him the key, then threatened to lock me out. I told him to do it; I'd sleep at my bosses' cabin on the floor and get a new key from the manager in the morning. He laughed, called me a few names, then turned to leave again.

Then he turned around, with deliberate care, looked the girl up and down, and said again, "nice nipples." He laughed the same damn high-pitched, child-like laughter, and ran out the door. If he hadn't, I probably would have hit him as hard as I could. The poor girl at the desk looked not just embarassed, but hurt.

His ass is getting fired as I type this. The second time he came back to harass the desk girl, two other employees heard him.

How the hell are you supposed to handle something like that?

What's worse: he'd established a pattern of behavior before this that I KNEW would get him in trouble. Rather than tell a manager or someone else how he would sit under his covers and spout racist slurs while drinking himself asleep, I just let things slide. Who wants to be a tattle-tale? I figured as long as I was the only one he got pissed at and treated like shit, who cared?

It's only now that I realize that this is exactly the type of thinking people who suffer abuse go through. I was not abused - the worst thing that happened to me is that I'd get sick when he'd stand near me because he smelled like rotten food and alcohol and tobacco. He'd threaten me, tell me I should try mescaline, and talk about how he hoped the Japanese nuclear reactors went critical and caused acid rain to melt the jap's skin off, because humanity is a blight on our planet.

But that mindset, the idea that "if I'm the only one dealing with this, then others don't have to" is a symptom of the larger problem. I was an enabler. My silence allowed this man to continue abusing alcohol, himself, and eventually led to him sexually harassing one of my friends. If I had said one thing, just one thing, to a manger asking for help, there would have been record of his behavior. If I had allowed him to go around knocking on doors at 4 AM demanding that people give him liquor like he wanted to, there would have been consequences. By hiding his behavior, by pretending I was a nicer guy for letting him live his life the way he wanted, I didn't just hide a problem. I made it worse.

I'm lucky he didn't do anything worse than verbally harass my friend. I was stupid, and it's not going to happen again.

What makes me feel like shit even more is he's just been fired. Obviously, there's a no-tolerance policy here for sexual harassment. He just stopped by to tell me that he has nowhere to go, nowhere to live, and the job he was counting on probably isn't going to work out - it was owned by the same company that owns the business I work at. He won't be able to get a job at any of their locations, which means most of his opportunities to work have dried up.

This is not a black and white. He's not a terrible guy when he's sober, and everyone agrees that he's a damn hard worker. He's just an alcoholic who screwed up (albeit in a pretty nasty fashion). No matter how hard I try to paint things simply, it just doesn't work.

The killer? Had I spoken up earlier, he might not have hit up against the wall of zero tolerance. He might have checked his behavior a bit, kept just getting drunk in his room. Or he could have been asked to resign instead of fired, so he could still work with the company, but not up here where he has no outlet for his addiction. Regardless of what might have been, the fact remains that I dealt with the situation badly.

So for god's sake, don't be me. Don't be a martyr to someone else's problem. You won't help anything, you'll make it worse. If your spouse, loved one, or even a coworker is abusive or hurtful on a regular basis, don't keep it down. You aren't responsible for someone else's happiness, but you can be responsible for doing the right thing. If you see something, say something. Don't be as stupid as I was, for god's sake.

Oh, and Happy St. Patrick's day.

Adjectives on a typewriter, he moves his words like a prize fighter

I absolutely love the song that this title comes from. Every youth pastor I've ever known worth his salt has listened to that band.

Some nights are hell. Not because of anything that has to do with real life, but because my imagination is a slave driver. I'm not sure how your imagination seems, constant reader, but mine is a merciless bitch who loves to flog and spur. Every now and then the log burning in the back of my subconscious spits an ember into my brain, and it sits there - sizzling - until I can't sleep or think about anything else. That itchy, burning sensation some people get behind their eyes fills my head and before I go absolutely crazy I have to write something down; outlines, bare bones fillers, sometimes entire novellas of ramblings and ideas.

Thus, I have discovered my dream career. All I would do is spew forth radical ideas for someone else to write. I'd be the venture capitalist of the literary world, slinging from story to story like spiderman on a verbose rampage. Zip, swoosh, plop comes a plotline onto your desk. "Thank you literary spiderman!"

"Everybody gets ONE."

Something has been percolating for a few weeks now, and the only reason I'm mentioning it is because I know only a few people read these things anyway. I think I want to start a webcomic. Possibilities:

Parody of real life comics: There's quite a few of these out there, and they seem to do quite well. Girls with slingshots, Questionable Content, Something Positive, and others are all great reads, and have been running for years and years. Jeph Jacques, the author of QC, literally makes his entire living off of these. Least I Could Do is another good one, but stretches the boundaries of reality a bit more than the others. Believe me, enough bizarre and macabre humor occurs around my friends and I that I think I could write one of these pretty reliably for years without having to stretch my imagination to create new drama and jokes. Someone recently told me my facebook page is the written equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, sans melting clocks. I'm not sure if that was a compliment - I AM sure that it's material. The problem with doing a comic like this is that you don't have a set reader base that you can immediately zero in on easily. Readers of these comics seem (I say seem because I have no way of verifying this) to be very casual and normal people, with varying senses of the absurd. Uniformly what I've noticed about these comics personally is a genuine sense of human relationships: how they work, how they run into trouble, the absurdity of just how complicated they can get in real life. On top of that, most of the comics I've mentioned above are successful not only in the long run, but funny enough on a strip-to-strip basis that readers can get hooked easy.

Can I do any of that as a writer? I hope so... but any stand-up comedian will tell you that making your friends laugh does not equal good comedy. In fact, it can be just the opposite - you could just have really f*ed up friends.

An action-adventure comic with a unique twist:
There are quite a few webomics out there that try to pull this off, with varying degrees of success. Google searches of the title of the comics are good ways of judging this; everyone "knows" that google searches are somehow prioritized by number of hits. If the comic is popular enough, it shows up higher on the list. The wiki article on Google Bombs is fascinating in relation to this, by the way.

Some of my favorites in this category include Zap!, Spinnerette, Flipside, Gunnerkrigg Court, and Goblins. All of these have fantastic art, decently original plotlines (well.... Zap! can be generic at first, but it got more complex as time went on), more than a little humor, and truly engrossing settings. In particular, Gunnerkrigg Court mixes science fiction with Fae particularly well.

The key to these comics seems to be the key to a good story overall. Have an interesting protagonist whose traits set him/her apart from the rest of the world, with believable human personalities. You know why so many people dislike Superman? For a large portion of his comics, he's a goody-two-shoes. People enjoy conflict, characters with more than one dimension. In addition, these comics are successful because they can make you run the gamut of human emotion. Goblins has some extremely powerful scenes of heroism, and there's a strong undercurrent of sacrifice to the whole thing. I can't emphasize enough how deeply that can resonate with someone like me.

While the art in these comics is superlative, there are a few that use basic forms of representation, yet still can be remarkable by virtue of the writing. The best example of this is the Order of the Stick. By simple expedience of good writing, D & D jokes, and an interesting plot, OOTS has been one of the most popular webcomics to date. In some cases the simpler art style even adds to the enjoyment of it.

The comic based on random absurdity:

You all know these comics, if you read any at all. They're some of the most popular. XKCD and Doctor McNinja are two prime examples. McNinja could fit in the adventure, quirky protagonist category as well, but I feel that Chris Hastings' sense of humor is more Douglas Adams than Marvel Comics. Could those two ever be used together? Yes. Chris is authoring a Deadpool comic soon, which is the holy grail of comics for me. I will definitely be ordering some off the web if possible. Hell, I'll drive to a good store in Minnesota just to pick it up. Chris's work is good enough to be worth it. Check the news at the bottom of the link I provided for more on that.

These comics are often the funniest out there. Another one that I genuinely love is Rock, Paper, Cynic. No particular rhyme, reason, or continuity (McNinja has plenty of continuity, though) are needed to enjoy these. I feel that this would be a very Zach-friendly way of going about things, since my brain is such a huge pile of absurd anyway.

In some cases, these comics can start out with vague or no direction, and end up fantastic serial pieces of pseudo-plot, like with Sam and Fuzzy. Or not - just remain true to your subject matter, like with Penny Arcade.

Ginormous, glaring problems to any of these ideas
I have no manual artistic talent to speak of. Xkcd's stick-figure comics are probably beyond me. The time it takes for the artist to color an individual ball pit might actually kill me. Playing pictionary, or pictionary telephone, with me is an exercise in abstract extrapolation. Is that a platypus, or satan's mallard? Did he actually draw "cockpit" the way I think he did?

Good webcomics have good artists, period. Just because one has a different style doesn't mean they aren't good at what they do. The difference between R.K. Mulholland, Jeph Jacques, and Phil and Kaja Foglio (their comic Girl Genius is also amazing by the way, it's won a bajillion awards) stylistically is astronomical. Talent-wise? That is a much, much tougher call. They all have huge strengths that are unique to their own particular comic.

Realistic solution? Find an artist. There are major problems with this. One, will it be the right kind of art for what I want to do? Two, do I even have a RIGHT to be picky about it? Who am I to judge an artist by his work if I can't do anything anyway? Three, and this maybe the worst of the lot, they would have to work and put up with me on a regular basis. I'm a nice guy, but I can get crazy about my work sometimes. Hell, I can get just plain crazy. How do Sohmer and DeSouza do it? They must just be saints. If we do have artistic differences, how do we get through it?

Getting the word out. I'm not terrible at this. I'm a pretty good salesman, even when it comes to things that not every consumer needs. I was a friendly neighborhood Culligan man for a while, and did pretty well at it. Fund-raisers came decently quickly to me also. But, like any good entrepreneur will tell you, the internet is crazy different. Just because you HAVE a product doesn't mean people will like it or tell their friends about it. A lot of extra work is required to promote your craft. Jeph Jacques probably spends more of his time working on promos and merch total than anything else he does. Not that he doesn't spend huge amounts of time drawing his comic, but you know what I mean.

I always feel like a cad-when self-promoting. In high school, I thought my writing was the epitome of talent and refinement. After college, it was easy to see I'm a low-budget hack compared to most of the people out there. How can you promote your work if you don't think it's any good? >.< In a nutshell: crazy levels of dedication. I've been a reviewer for an online magazine before. Regular updates are harder than they look. Nothing is more irritating to me than a webcomic that updates once in a blue moon. (Dresden Codak anyone? Also, I'd KILL for some continuity to that one.) Too many good ideas are derailed by a lack of commitment.

Still, this is real life. My sister just got married. My folks aren't getting any younger. I have an education to finish, a career to plot out, and (eventually) a family to start, somehow. My good friend (author) Justin has started his career as a professional author, and I honestly don't know if I've got the guts to make it doing that. I would love it to death, explode from the sheer joygasm of it, yet somewhere in that pile of pathos that sits in my chest I can't tell if I'm cut out for it. Nerves, man. They kill.

I have nothing but admiration for webomics artists who set an update schedule and stick to it religiously. Even when Jeph Jacques is dying from the plague, he'll update his comic with a yelling bird spewing obscenity. Hell, some of those yelling bird comics are some of my faves anyway.

Failing would blow goats. No joke, the goats would be the only ones happy about this. Still, dealing with a crushing fear of rejection is something we all have to deal with sometime.

Right?

My brain is its own worst enemy. I have too many ideas to count. If I decide on a format, how do I solidify things into a coherent whole? Do I have to? Oh, what about this new idea? Can I work that in? Should I work it in? Am I ripping off someone else's work without knowing it? Am I going to get sued? Is any of this marketable? What should I do if my ideas don't pan out? Can I start a new thread, or should I just move on with my life? Can I turn a webcomic into a novel?

You can see the problem here.

There are massive, massive techincal considerations. And by that I mean difficulties. Do I pay for webhosting? There is no FREE webhosting, really anyway. How do I update the comic regularly? What barriers are there to getting started? Is there a CLASS on this sort of thing? Would it be conceivable for me to email some of my most admired artists and ask for advice?

If I do have webhosting (and can afford it), how do I troubleshoot? If the site goes down, am I screwed? How do you handle security so you don't get hacked while hosting a webpage? If the comic takes off (unlikely), how do I expand my database to handle server load?

And my imagination is still flogging me to death.
Somehow, I have to get this stuff out of my head. As of right now, it's all sitting in tiny little appleworks files on my old ibook (gosh I love that thing). Still, writing this blog has helped me realize something: no one does this stuff alone. If they do, they're some kind of demigod spat from the head of Zeus himself.

In the meantime, those embers are kindling something still. One in particular is about to start a fire. If anything remains after everything burns down, I'll put some of it up here.

Can't put it down. Blasted income.

My good friend just published his third book, and it's killing me. I need to be reading it on my kindle right now, but I can't. Work to make money to buy the kindle and pay for the books. There are worse addictions, I suppose.

A synopsis of his book, The Legend of Ivan so far:

Ivan is, obviously, a legend. Too much of one. Everyone in the galaxy appears to have heard of this man, and it is the job of Archivist Sid to find out whether there is fact in the fiction. Sid, under the employ of one of the numerous super-corperations that influences the galaxy, is compelled to seek out information in the worst of places in order to verify Ivan's existence. Given a few shreds of (suspect) information, he has to dig deeper in ways that threaten his very life.

The book is quickly paced, well-detailed, and hilarious. The beginning of chapter 2 starts with the sentence, "Ivan punched a dinosaur."

What lends genius to Kemppainen's writing is the format of the story. Given the prior knowledge that Ivan is a legend and that every tale is bound to be only a partial truth, it enables the author to craft the most magnificent and outrageous vignettes dealing with Ivan. Some say he's a robot, others say he's human, and some people claim he's destroyed an entire planet by himself. After every second-hand story about Ivan, Sid evaluates the information in a "report" that sums up the important details. Through Sid, the reader begins to gain an appreciation for what Ivan actually is, and just how much of the stories about him we can trust.

As with all of Kemppainen's books, the characters are well-fleshed out, distinct in every way from one another. There aren't cookie-cutter archetypes like you'll find in some space-opera novels, no token aliens who are only different from humans on the surface. Instead we get even bit characters with unique and believable personalities (yes, even the crazies that Sid gets his information from).

And, as usual, Kemppainen doesn't fail to immerse the reader in a different time and place. Rather than dumping large amounts of exposition onto the reader all at once, as some novels tend to do, he allows details of the galaxy that Ivan and Sid inhabit to bleed through in the stories and narration of the characters. Through Sid we learn of the Archivists, and the strange process that creates them; why they are so rare in the galaxy, and how horrible their interactions with their own kind are by nature. Through various denizens we learn of the corporate-controlled planets, large industrial espionage budgets, and weapons divisions that make up the ruling powers in the galaxy. Through Sid's contacts and familiar acquaintances, the reader is introduced to the methods of intergalactic travel without being bogged down in mechanical explanations.

Rather than focus on these mundane details, as so many science-fiction authors are wont to do, Kemppainen takes us on a journey with a very specific focus: the people and places in his world. And, just like any real human could tell you, it is through people that we learn the most about culture and history. It's refreshing to see authors who don't want to spend hours coming up with convoluted explanations for tiny details that don't really matter to plot. Yes, we are impressed with the amount of effort you put in. No, it doesn't enhance your story to spend two chapters on a starship drive.

Though all of Kemppainen's books are novels I enjoy a great deal, this one is my favorite so far. Hopefully the ending of Ivan is as good as I think it will be.

If you don't have it, Get it. It's less than 3 dollars online.

Speaking Visually

While completely blinded by the snow glare off the mountain today at work, it occurred to me just how keyed into our sense of sight our entire lives are.

One of the more famous examples of philosophy that I love to quote is the old "blue" challenge. Describe to someone the color blue, in a manner they would understand, without referencing another color, or something (like the sky) that IS that color.

I haven't done it yet. I don't think I've met someone that can, either. Scientifically describing "blue" as a certain frequency of reflected light comes close, but the inevitable question of "Yes, but what does that frequency LOOK like?" brings us back around to the beginning.

Stop and think a moment. When first challenged to describe something, what is your first instinct? Reference, probably to something similar that you've seen. Even our feelings are described this way. Anger, lust, other powerful and usually negative emotions are described in books as red, dark, or black. "Green" with envy? So full of it your eyes are turning brown?

As a species, our visual acuity has brought a remarkable sharpness that other things can't necessarily match. The human visual range, in terms of spectra seen, is one of the widest in the animal kingdom. True, we can't see into the ultraviolet, like insects, and our low-light vision is pretty abysmal, yet the range of sight that we are given is still quite astonishing. (As is the range of our other senses. There's a fascinating essay on this by Neil DeGrasse Tyson that everyone should read in his book.)

Does this explain our tendency to assosciate everything with the property of sight? In my opinion, no. Look at some of our favorite pasttimes: movies, videogames, card games, etc. All share a key visual component; one can argue that the experiences are fundamentally changed for the worse if they cannot be experienced visually. (Trust me, Devil May Cry sucks blindfolded.)

We are convinced in sight as a fact in and of itself. First priority in a murder case? Eyewitnesses. Outlandish claims by a cryptozoologist? "Many witnesses...." "I saw the monster myself." Trust is implicit in this sense of ours, despite the urgings of card sharks, magicians, and effect artists to the opposite.

Fantasy writers, Japanese Myths, and even comic books seem to believe that removing our sense of sight can somehow empower our other senses. Notions of "the blind sage", zen, and even Yoda's "letting go" into the Force all have strikingly similar meanings. IS there something to be gained by relying less on our primary method of evaluating the world? One author described being blind as not sharpening her other senses - just forcing her to use them smarter than others would.

A writer's challenge, then: go an entire day without referencing something visually. Continue about your activities as normal, but try to actively separate your sense of sight from your conscious thoughts, words, and actions. If asked to describe something, attempt to do so with non-visual language. "What did it look like?" "Like a hangover feels."

As a writer, I think this will help me a great deal with descriptive language. Metaphor, simile, and those terrible symbols that somewhere fall in between. If I can do it with the way I speak, hopefully the way I write will improve. If you are or know an aspiring author, have them try this. It'll be interesting to see how things turn out.


.... that's a joke.

Cynical upswing

Today is one of those days where I begin to hate people. Optimist that I am, it's not always easy to maintain a sunny disposition.

My biggest beef (pork, lamb, calamari) with society today is actually a problem that I myself tended to suffer from before I went to college.

Anecdotal evidence should not outweigh statistical in real life as a matter of course. Too many people I work with, or know, attribute more weight in an argument to a personal story or experience than to statistical fact. This is not an ideological difference, this is a problem.

Fine, it's an ideological difference in that I feel that it's a problem. This is not to say that I am of the opinion that it's a problem, this is to say that I'm tired of it an a much deeper level than an opinion. It has GOT to stop.

Someone I know, who probably won't read this but who I tend to think of as a friend, told me that his reasons for opposing abortion aren't just theological (which I can respect). His evidence is that all of the divorcees he's met while working in a job that involves lots of people in high-income brackets who have had abortions are terrible people. (According to him.) In his mind, having an abortion ruins your soul, because you've taken a life. It's also indicative, according to him, of their lifestyle. Things to these people are to be used and thrown away, hence the lack of compassion with having a baby aborted. When I mentioned that not all women act like that, he further argued that all the GOOD women he knows that have had abortions regretted it. Hence, no one should have the right to abort.

This is not an argument over abortion; that's not going to be what this is about. Not once did my friend mention a statistical fact, other than personal experience. It's unfortunate that in your particular experience you have not met with well-adjusted individuals who conform to your behavioral norms.

This is not a representative slice of America; it's a lodge for rich people to spend money. Take that into account.

Other subjects which are slowly killing off pieces of my soul as they're argued about:
A) Unions
B) Abstinence only education
C) Torture
D) Diet
E) Human Rights
F) Healthcare
and probably twenty others that I don't even want to think about.

Let me restate this as clearly as possible: Know the facts. Too many times (myself included in here) people will argue about something based solely upon opinion. Telling me that almost half of America disapproves of a politician means nothing to me, considering that it means that MORE than half DOES. (This was a percentage of the group that responded, not of all of America, either.) Give me a number. Back it up. Prove to me that what you're saying is true.

This isn't the burden of proof, either. I loook up things I'm told constantly. This is why I'm a cynic - belief only takes me so far.

80% of statistics are made up on the spot. Numbers mean little, context means more. Everyone knows that flying is safer than driving. This does not mean you should get in a plane and try to fly it, because you're statistically more likely to crash your car. More men are hit by lightning than women. This might have more to do with behavior than biology - like that horrible Mountain Dew commercial.

If you know someone who has a sad story; they've suffered in socialized healthcare, they had an abortion, they have an addiction - I'm not bad mouthing you or your friend. I'm telling you to think harder if the one person you know influences your opinion on a bigger issue that could impact a lot of people. Don't vote against unions because a guy in a bar told you that a union fucked up his construction job. Get the facts.

Optimistically, my friend looked up statistics on abortion after we talked. He quoted some to me. I was impressed. If given the right nudge, sometimes people can surprise you. Most of my friends take the time and effort to examine their motives and facts.

Call me on this. If I quote something that I say is a fact, ask me how I know. I'll do my best to stay up to date.

And dammit, read the hyperlinks at the top.

/endrant

The last word

What's with the last word game at shops and restaurants? I'm serious, this is real. Try it for yourself. It's like a Dane Cook sketch.

You wrap up your business, whether it be buying merchandise, eating a meal, or even just shooting the breeze. Things are pleasant, calm, and in no way hostile. Yet most service staff HAVE to have the last word. It goes something like this.

"Thanks for shopping/eating/talking to my face for a while. Have a nice day!"
"You too."
"Any time."
"Tell me if you have any sales/coupons/drink specials."
"Can do, take it easy."
"Thanks again."

It ends when the patron leaves and gives up. I've seriously had this go on for almost two minutes. It was excruciating.

Seriously, what's with this? Is it a contest of wills? Some weird, leftover dominance thing from our days as apes? And why do I always lose? If I'm a customer, the shopkeeper/waiter/monkey has the last word. If I'm working, the customer gets the last say. I don't understand this at all.

It's like bowing in Japanese culture. Whoever bows lower is the subordinate, so men who don't know each other will take turns bowing lower and lower until one decides that there's enough.

From now on, I'm going to have the last word in shops/restaurants/church. Resolution set, game on.

A contradiction in terms

That's what the name of the page sounds like, right? A cynical optimist?

Eh, maybe. Maybe it doesn't make any sense to tell people that you expect reality and are always pleased to find out that you're wrong. Maybe I'm a fool to laugh at funerals and play music that no one can hear.

Prove me wrong. No seriously, do it. I'd like to think I've got enough of a training in logical deduction after four years of college that I'd be able to sit back and objectively say, "I have no right to laugh at the things I do, to giggle when the ketchup bottle makes fart noises in public, or to expect that people will always surprise me." If anyone can provide an argument good enough to change my mind, I will, and say I was wrong the entire time.

On the other hand, let's shift the burden of proof. Suppose I tell you why I'm a cynical optimist instead of a rose-colored-glasses skeptic.

Skepticism has its place in our society. If people aren't asking questions, challenging conventions, or willing to throw out that they think that something is wrong, then we're in trouble. I will never dispute this, but I probably won't end up filling the role of the hardcore skeptic. Here's why:
There's a concept in sociology called "social loafing." Given a certain size population, any number of people with jobs to do are going to say "Someone else is capable of doing this, I don't want to." There's a direct relationship between the size of the population and the number of social loafers, i.e. the larger the group, the more lazy asses you have. I, proudly, am one of those lazy asses when it comes to the world of being a true skeptic.

Yes, you can try to prove to me that I'm not sitting in a freezing basement two days before my sister gets married and flexing my creative muscle. Yes, it might make you a dick. Do I want to be that dick? Only some of the time. I want to ask questions, to seek out new life (in the form of thought), to boldly go where probably several chill dudes have gone before. Or to quietly listen.

Philosophy, my chosen crutch, is something that I think has changed me for the better. It taught me to listen. Not to hear words, or give comfort. It taught me to think as I received the input, to stretch out past my physical limits and process on a higher level. Or a lower one. Something like that.

Listening to the world, to the voices in your head (within reason), to your growling stomach, to the birds, the sound of the pine forest, a blasting good rock song, or to a friend in need - all of these things are needed. We all want them - nature, friendship, a damn good rock show once in a while. What happens to them if no one asks where they've gone?

So this is my cynicism - the acceptance that some of these things change without me, or with me, or to spite me. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, I'm the most insignificant thing in the universe in the big scheme of things.

To the optimism, then. It doesn't matter that I'm small. It doesn't matter that I'm mostly uneducated, or inarticulate, or actually really uncoordinated and funny looking. I find that happiness can be a choice, a process, or a goal. That you can be happy given the worst situation in the smallest ways. Stuck in a snow drift? Good! You can listen to the radio for a while. Call AAA, of course, but get a chance to listen to something good on NPR or the Current. Got dumped? Ah, that's a tough one. How do you get back to happy after something's over? There are a few ways, steps, whatever, but I find the best was this: just do it.

These are still at odds, however. A true cynic and a true optimist are oxymoronic in most ways. The Tao teaches that nature is balance. Keeping these two halves of myself together allows me to deal with everything that comes up. Two parts, working together, assorted bad metaphors and similes to follow.

Call me a catch-22, or something that wasn't a fantastic novel. Call me a Yeti, it's happened before. But the day I stop believing that it's going to turn out with a happy ending, the day that I no longer ask why something is, or just give up in general - that's the day I stop being who I told myself I am.

Who knows? That could be fun too.