writing snippet - phonecall (Chayla)

Chayla dialed the all the numbers but one, waited a dramatic moment, and then forcefully punched the 4.

Rr-ring. Rr-ring. Rr-ring.

“C’mon, J-hole, pick up already!” She rolled her eyes in exasperation and stretched, holding the phone out at arm’s length for the last two rings.

Hi, this is James. I’m not available right now but leave a message and I’ll get back to y….what the fuBEEP.

Chayla grinned, just like every time. She remembered what she’d been doing when he was recording that message. She started yelling at the phone, still arms-length away.

“James! James! Pick up your end of the goddam tin can, James!” He always called her phone a tin can, giving her a healthy dose of teasing for still using a landline when literally everyone else they knew had cell phones. In return, she would usually give him a healthy dose of middle finger.

“But seriously, though. Don’t call me back because I won’t be here when you get this message. I’m going to Taveston’s. Meet me there in, oh, 45 minutes or something. If you don’t, you better expect the worst. You know, like the time I stopped shaving and swore at you in French with an empty wine bottle whenever you had a girl over. Or the topless thing. Oh by the way, tell your uncle I said hi.” Chayla could barely suppress a giggle. “Anyway, see you soon!”

Now she just needed to get dressed and head over to the bar. James would be there, almost exactly on time, and she’d get huffy about how she’d waited so long for him to arrive, and he’s apologize profusely, and she’d act like she had been snubbed but would still allow him to escort her inside. She didn’t want to call it a tradition, because she wasn’t sure he’d caught on yet that the same thing happened every time, or that it was just a game.

Actually, James was a great guy, and Chayla considered herself really lucky to have a man like him in her life. As she picked through the pile of clothes on her floor for underwear and a tank top that wasn’t too wrinkled, she tried not to dwell on her secret fear that he’d get tired of her fond abuse and stop spending time with her. James was a really good friend and didn’t deserve to be treated so shitty; she didn’t know why she couldn’t stop.

A quick look in the mirror to see if she should put on a shorter skirt (nah, I haven’t shaved in days), the she pulled her hair back, tied a bandana like a headband, and drew the top card of her tarot deck to tuck in it for accent. Empress reversed? Damn, that means something but I left my stupid book upstairs.

Anywhere else, her exploded-new-age-shop couture would probably get a load of nonplussed stares, but she’d been so many times to Taveston’s, with groups or with James, that they were used to her stylistic affectations. She was pretty sure at least one of the bartenders knew her by name. Oh well, that just meant that sometime soon she’d have to shake things up by going in wearing a regular jeans-and-t-shirt outfit. That might raise a few eyebrows.

writing snippet - driving (Rob)

Those who knew him would probably say that Rob had no imagination. Those who knew him best would probably tease him about how boring he was, and he needed to start playing video games or something. Rob was simply a practical-minded man, and preoccupied himself with the things around him, rather than engaging in flights of fancy. Elizabet kept telling him he needed to lighten up a little bit, encouraging him to “exercise those mind muscles.” In return, he’d just chuckle and make sure that the equipment at the station was in good working order. 

He had a soft spot for Elizabet. He wasn’t secretly in love with her or anything, at least he didn’t think he was, but he felt a definite fondness for the dark-haired woman.  He’d noticed that she seemed a lot less of herself recently, almost seeming harrowed, and had made an effort to pick up more late work at the station so that he could be around if something happened to her. That’s where he’d been tonight, why he was driving home at 2 in the morning. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but he’d done all the regular maintenance and Elizabet had shooed him home, insisting she’d be alright. He’d still been reluctant to go, but she was very persuasive. Or maybe he’d just been very good at letting her persuade him. He didn’t think their friendship was different from any other, but he felt obliged to admit the possibility that he might let her influence him more than he let other people.

It was too late to hit up Taveston’s and he wasn’t really in the mood anyway – his work and Elizabet’s health had put him into a more somber mood. Rob guessed he’d just go home. Late spring warmth had given way to late night chill, but for some reason he felt stifled in the car so he rolled down the windows and switched on the heat. The mingling sensation of warm air from the vents and pre-dew coolness from the windows played across his skin, raising the hair on his arms. The radio was tuned low, so that he could just make out guitars and drumbeats above the noise of the wind. God, I don’t think I’ve done this since college.

Rob turned onto Old Orchard Road and his mind began to wander. He may not have much imagination, but he had plenty of memories.  Sometimes he felt like maybe his life was a sequence of memories that got replayed, over and over again. He’d certainly lived this one before, driving down Old Orchard with the windows and the heat, the radio playing low, head all wrapped up about a girl. It hadn’t been Elizabet back then of course. Her name was Erin, and she was an old sweetheart – not the first girl he’d ever slept with, but the one before.

“…Widening the corridors, and adding more lanes…” a stray lyric made itself audible above the road noises. Damn it, Cake. That was a weird coincidence. Maybe I’ll tell Elizabet about it tomorrow. In the years since the night he had driven home from Erin's, Old Orchard had been widened. Now there were extra lanes where the honeysuckle used to grow wild.

He felt a sudden pang of sadness. It had been a couple years now since any part of this road smelled like honeysuckle. He missed it, and he didn’t know why. Rob took a deep breath, entertaining the absurd notion that maybe some of the scent was left. He knew there wouldn’t be, and there wasn’t, but he was still a little disappointed that there was nothing flavoring the night air. He pulled up to a stoplight with a sigh. This one was always red, no matter what time of day he came to it. What was the deal with that?

writing snippet - radio (Elizabet)

"It is now 12:14, and you're listening to the Witching Hour with Elizabet—the witchy woman herself—right here on WDTZ; music so good, it's spooky. That was Bjork you just heard, Regina Spektor just before it, and Lach before that. I'll start the music back after this PSA from the Center for Disease Control, and we'll see what kind of magic we can make with the next set, starting with...well, we'll just find out won't we?"

Elizabet cued up the CDC bit that Cindy and Shawn had given her earlier, and collapsed back into her chair. She'd been the "Witchy Woman" for almost a year now. She'd been delighted to take the spot, in fact, because she'd just gotten out of grad school and couldn't fathom what a normal person's sleep schedule was like, or how it could possibly apply to her. Play whatever seemed like a good idea, take requests (there were a few, but not usually too many), and make sure the studio didn't burn down. Not a bad gig at all.

A few weeks ago, she'd started getting headaches, some of them bad. Maybe they were migraines, but they never lingered like her mom's had. Just here, there, and gone all in the course of a night. Still, sound hurt. Lights hurt. No one else could take her spot for more than a night or two, though, and she was too damn stubborn to let the WDTZ go off the air during her shift. So rather than admit something was wrong, she started "flying blind" in the studio. Eyes shut unless she absolutely needed them, and blocking out as much of the music as she could. The "Witchy Woman" had always been secretive about her playlists, and that worked in Elizabet's favor now; she really had no idea what songs she was queueing until she worked up the gus to open her eyes and sneak a glance.

She'd never thought she knew the studio like the back of her hand, but she made out with minimal screw-ups (somehow), and no one had called to bless her out about her show sucking. Either she was doing alright, or no one was bothering to listen to her any more. At this point, either one of those seemed like they could be okay. Maybe she'd offer to pick up Rob's tab at Taveston's—the bar down the road—if he'd record her show one night so she could actually hear how the "blind" Witching Hour sounded.

Or maybe she didn't want to know.

Ugh, the PSA was ending. Time to get back to work. She dared a quick peek around, trying not to wince. "This is Elizabet wishing a happy Witching Hour to all you boys and girls out there, and we are back to cast a spell on you with this classic track from Beck."

writing snippet - radio (Chayla)

Chayla grinned wolfishly as the last haunting strains of music faded into the air. The DJ's voice crackled across the speakers of the 30-year old transistor radio, announcing the time. "It is now 12:14, and you're listening to the Witching Hour with Elizabet—the witchy woman herself—right here on WDTZ; music so good, it's spooky. That was Bjork you just heard, Regina Spektor just before it, and Lach before that. I'll start the music back after this PSA from the Center for Disease Control, and we'll see what kind of magic we can make with the next set, starting with...well, we'll just find out won't we?"

Chayla hated the breaks. Not that she particularly cared for the music, but the breaks were worse. The Witchy Woman put together incredible playlists, and played it like she thought of them off the top of her head. Chayla had never heard a disc jockey pull that off as well as she did, and she had listened to a lot of radio shows over the past few years. Elizabet never really played music that Chayla liked, but that was beside the point. Chayla didn't even want to try to imagine the hours she must spend going through the station's catalog. It was rarely the kind of music she liked, but it always worked. And more importantly, it always read.

The temptation to fidget with the radio dial was more and more powerful, but Chayla didn't dare - on this old junker, she'd never be able to get the station back. It was an accident she'd found this station in the first place, while looking for a local classic rock station James had told her about. One that didn't suck, he'd said. Besides, by then the PSA was almost over. That was the great thing about these little stations; they played commercials about as often as ska bands played sonatas.

The Witchy Woman's voice came back on the air, and she started to talk in the next song. Something she'd never heard of by Beck. Chayla huddled even closer over the card table, her ear trained intently to hear the opening riff while she unconsciously fidgeted with the ballpoint pen in her hand. The table was littered with scraps of scribbled paper, snack food wrappers, an torn-up cigarette pack, empty cans of diet Pepsi, and a deck of tarot cards carefully divided into seven different stacks.

Those were just for double-checking, though, and Chayla hardly ever used them any more. Somehow, Elizabet's playlists always gave good readings.

Excerpt: The Sun's Other Shore

And now I think I believe that the most beautiful story is the one that is never fully told. I saw you standing at the crown of that tall hill behind the old country church barefoot and empty-handed, a sun-dress sentinel at the fading of the day. The late-date breezes had whipped your loose hair into a auburn corona that caught and reflected the sun's fiery light. You raised your arms to embrace the setting sun, and in that moment I knew you held some secret knowledge that I could never comprehend; some fey union between beauty and the sun. By the next dawn I knew I was lost, had fallen hopelessly for the sun-maiden I had seen you become.

It has been a year since that day. I see the sun-maiden yet, but only in flickers and starts like a candle in a drafty place. There are secrets behind your eyes—I see them—but you blind yourself to any mirrored moment. I wonder now if your raised arms were not an adoration to the sun but a desperate prayer to be set ablaze, and ushered into the midnight bleakness of the sun's other shore. It has been a year since that day, and every dawn breaks a small portion of my heart and my breath quickens at every sunset.

Possible NaNoWriMo intro - Before the Storms Began

This morning, I saw a woman with red hair wearing a flannel shirt. She looked worried and preoccupied, like she was late to something, and the humid weather caused her wild hair to frame her face like a glowing nimbus in the morning sunlight. I saw a woman with red hair wearing a flannel shirt and the only thought I had was, "at least it's not her." That in and of itself was a virtue beyond measure...and the only reason I didn't try to smile and strike up a conversation. By the time I got to work, dark clouds had covered the sun and the still air was heavy with the thought of storms.

"If your life had a face, I would punch it"

I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World this week. I loved it.

There, movie review aside, now I can get into what I'm really thinking about.

One of the most interesting elements of the movie to me was the character of Scott Pilgrim himself. In both the movie and the graphic novels upon which they're based, Scott is portrayed generally as a loser, with a serious disconnect from reality. Rather than interacting with his environment directly the way his friends, band members, antagonists, and even his major love interest do (albeit some of them in exceptionally skewed ways - I mean, in addition to being burned pretty bad, you'd also have to be a bit touched to devote the most substantial energies of your life to pursuing revenge against someone who broke your heart), he is consistently portrayed as once-removed from real life - only filtering his experiences through a schema constructed from the debris of classic-era video games.

There's a part of me that wants to say, "What the hell, Scot Pilgrim? What the hell?" This mindset seems like a textbook display of dissociation and anomie (or is that a little strong?) adopted by someone who feels largely alienated by the world they exist in. This coupled with Scott's initial lack of meaningful personal relationships, personal property, his naivety (whether real or affected), and uncommonly bad memory (played mostly for comic effect, but also potentially indicative of greater psychosocial concerns) seem to indicate a personality who has surrendered all existential agency. The recurring videogame metaphor also serves to reinforce this interpretation by implying that Scott, like the reader or viewer, is also part of the audience - an observer of his own life.

From here, it's tempting to go into a blistering tirade about how Scott needs to break through these self-imposed illusions and face life directly, and to critique his path toward maturation across the 6 volumes of the graphic novel or the 2 hours of the movie (although this journey is less obvious on the big screen; I guess that's partly a result of the limitations of transposing a story between media!). But I have to take a breath and pause before I dive into that and remind myself that I do the precise same thing.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that while I enjoy videogames, I didn't get into them until late in my youth, so they never had an extremely high impact on the development of my personal schema. Music and sci-fi/fantasy novels were always more my thing. I should also say that Scott Pilgrim exists as an exceptional case - because of his status as a fictional character, Scott exists as an uncommonly extensive and well-crystallized example of the mindset I'm referring to. However, the fact remains that I, as a young male adult in my early-to-mid 20s, find myself commonly viewing my experiences through a lens cobbled together from themes, tropes, and symbolic constructs of the media with which I most familiar.

In many ways, this is a natural reaction - the enormous complexity of social relationships makes them overwhelming to face without some form of interpretive schema in place - the ages-old concepts of "family", "race", "nation", and "religion" are good examples of interpretive schemata people have used to make social realities into comprehensible, describable units. However, after reading the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and watching the movie, and then taking a look at my own experiences, I realize that in some instances these schemata become so comprehensive they can be used by the naive or disillusioned as substitutes for experienced reality; i.e., rather than Scott's experiences being compared to a videogame his life becomes a videogame, at least in his own mind.

What I wonder about is the scale and prevalence of these interpretive schemata. To be willing to accept a sufficiently complex schema as a substitute for experienced reality suggests an "experiential fluidity" stemming either from a disillusionment with the importance of one's experienced reality on one's life, or an intentional willingness to accept known fictions as equally (or nearly equally) valid as real events. Perhaps this is due to the explosion of telecommunications networks over the past 20 years, and the proliferation of easy-access news media - on a daily basis, many of us are exposed to a relentless barrage of stories we are expected to accept as true, but which fall largely outside our realm of experience (I remember how difficult it was to fathom the enormity of the Russian wildfires that have been burning through the summer until I was able to relate it to a fire-based experience from my own life, and then extrapolate outward).

Is there a generational component to this mindset? I'm in my early-to-mid 20s, as is Scott. Bryan Lee O'Malley, the author of the Scott Pilgrim series is less than 10 years removed from his protagonist. All three of us have grown up in the media environment I alluded to in the previous paragraph. However, the similarity in ages also points out the necessity for an external reference. Has this pattern of blurring the experience/interpretation line occurred in the past, and we're simply at a new iteration? This seems likely, but what social or cultural circumstances cause it to occur? Compared to past blurrings how does this iteration compare in terms of scale, or proliferation?

Speaking of proliferation, is this mindset prolific at all? There's certainly a personality type that is more likely to adopt this mindset - I think it's a safe argument to make that videogames, music, movies and television, art, and literature provides a more stimulating account than most real-life experiences (especially when you factor in special effects!), and this appeals strongly to imaginative and curious people, as well as those with high sensation-seeking tendencies. Is Scott one of those people? Am I? Is this tendency limited to people expressing those traits, or is it truly spreading throughout our culture as media outlets regularly expose broad audiences to visions of life that, even when mundane, far exceed the sensationalism of most people's experiences?

I have some suspicions on this topic, but mostly I have a handful of observations and another handful of questions. Scott Pilgrim is a character that could be given an interesting treatment from a sociological, psychological, or existential perspective (any senior English majors looking for a thesis project? =P), but that's not my intention with this post. I simply wanted to note how the Scott Pilgrim series revolves around a protagonist who's experience of reality has been replaced, in whole or in part, by an interpretive schema constructed primarily from elements of a fictional medium.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go defeat some Sandwich Gremlins so I can eat lunch!

Placeholder - The Fast Food Joint

Once in a while I get in a mood where I want to share things with people. As a follow-up to the post I did a couple months back (November, I think?) here's another short excerpt from a piece I've been working on.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sometimes it feels like the only thing that keeps me going is remembering that there's always someone out there whose life sucks more than mine. At least I'm not that guy.

The problem is, the world is full of those guys, and the list can change in a second, and nobody's exempt from it. And at block seven I knew my number was coming up. The first block in the stygian torrent had been a grim camaraderie, a mutual acknowledgment that the rain's bitter path paralleled my own. The second block began the whisperings of betrayal, and by the fifth the rain was battering me as badly as the rest of the city. Weather was a fickle bastard, and I needed a reprieve from its onslaught. I found sanctuary at the next corner, marked by a neon revelation proclaiming

"Fast Food

Open Late"

A half-dozen kids were there, none of them old enough to be out of college, some of them looking like they were still in high school. The girl with braces had a ribbon in her ponytail, and I wondered if she was a cheerleader. I also wondered why she was here. With a figure like hers she could be a hostess at a real restaurant, making twice as much for doing half the work. The guy with braces was wearing expensive glasses, and too much gel in his hair. I wondered if he was gay, or just a big fan of anime. I hadn't seen hair like that since I used to watch Dragonball Z as a kid. He was wearing a tie, so I guessed he must have been the manager. Halfback was joking around with Beanpole in the kitchen (damn open kitchens, no privacy at all), Blondie was scowling while washing things, and...

"Hi there. Can I take your order?"

...Wham. An Angel. Tall, slim, blond, a playful half-smile on her lips that made you want to break out grinning too. And that damn rain outside was puppies and cotton candy if she was a day older than eighteen.

"Er...um...not right now. I just needed to get out of the rain. It's murder tonight."

"Yeah, I can see that. I hope it lets up before too long. I have a test to study for, and I don't want to have to worry about walking home in the rain too."

"Oh...yeah. I know what you mean. I'm in the same boat. I mean, no test or anything, but I'm trying to wait it out if I can."

"That's a good idea."

Shit, THIS was the guy who's life sucked more than mine? This pretty little girl? Something about that made me very uncomfortable.

Hairgel called Angel over for something. "I'll be right back. If you decide you want anything, let me know." Her blue eyes were wide and innocent, but that playful, knowing smirk never left her lips. She turned around and bounced over to Hairgel, and I could feel an embarrassed heat crawling across my cheeks.

"Thanks, yeah..."

Halfback looked in my direction, then turned back to Beanpole. I looked for a booth in the furthest-back corner I could find and crashed in it. I could feel prickling heat rising up my neck and onto my face. I crossed my arms and lay my dripping head down on the table. What the hell, man? What the hell?...