"What I'll get I need badly--a reknowledge of my own country, of its speeches, its news, its attitudes and its changes...New York is not America. I am very excited about doing this. It will be a kind of rebirth."
--John Steinbeck, letter to a friend

The first day was a success, and since our motel has internet, I'll tell you all about it! We woke up in Long Beach this morning, having finished packing about four hours prior. We shoved everything into the car, said our goodbyes to our shower, toilet, and comfortable non-Motel 6 bed, and headed out. We started the road trip the right way: by making a left turn, and taking a familiar street (PCH) about 375 miles out of town. We reached Salinas (The Salad Bowl of America!) in the afternoon, checked in, and then went Steinbecking.



Salinas is weird, and Steinbeck isn't helping. You get the feeling that without him, the city wouldn't exist any longer. Parts of it are beautiful (the valley coming in was stunning), but for the most part it seems like the town isn't quite sure of why it's still around. They're struggling to keep schools open, and pumping more and more money into a downtown that doesn't seem to be taking off (which if you live in Long Beach sounds familiar). But they do have one thing going for them: the 1962 Nobel Prize winner for Literature was born there, and completed his first two novels in the attic of the home he was born in, about two blocks from the Steinbeck Center.

The house was...well, kind of weird. It's a converted lunch place now, where you can sip tea in the room Steinbeck was born in. Um...cool? The Center itself was much more impressive. In fact, Shar and I were blown away by how well put-together the two exhibits we saw were, sleek and professional and wholly out of place in Salinas.



Afterward we caught a movie at the Maya Cinemas (turns out film geek ticket-takers are the same in all parts of the state, by the way) and now we're recuperating from the first day in our motel. We did very well today: we drove six and a half hours without stopping, got to see a whole lot of a little town, and I think a good night's sleep may even be ahead of us. I couldn't ask for more than that.



Just to the right and left of this picture were sleeping hoboes, which I feel would have pleased Steinbeck immensely.

Oh! As a quick postscript: on the first day of the half dozen road trips I've been on, there's always a moment, a moment when you're driving and you realize that you're doing the right thing. Today it was when we were listening to Old Crow Medicine Show's awesome song "Wagon Wheel," and as the lines "But I gotta get a move on, before the sun/I hear my baby calling my name and I know that she's the only one/And if I die in Raleigh/At least I will die freeee" came on over the fiddle, I looked up and saw a sign that said 101 North- San Francisco, and smiled. This is the right thing.

Tomorrow: San Francisco!

Don't forget to read Shar's blarg at: sharblarg.blogspot.com

Labels: Road Trip

Jerry Sugar and Roy Thompson were nearly there, after an arduous and trying two weeks of traveling. Finally, California. They'd hitched in a wagon for the last leg, and now they had their bindles on their shoulders as they crested a hill, a stiff wind whistling up through the valley and whipping their clothes around, tussling their hair. It was so much greener than they expected: they'd heard it was barren and hot, with gold lying everywhere in the sand. They'd come for the gold, but Roy knew in a second he was staying for something else.

They made it across the valley, and were scaling the last hill of their trek when Roy began to fantasize about finding a good woman and settling down, even if he didn't hit it rich. He was good with wood, and he bet he could get a job fixing wheels and making tables somewhere, just enough money to get by, just enough to get to stay and live in a place like--

At the top of the hill, his breath caught in his throat and he stared dumbstruck at the flowers spread out before him, yellow and brilliant, wild mustard and daisies and God knew what else. Jerry grabbed him by the shoulder, practical and pugnacious as ever. "Roy! Roy, what is it?"

"It's gold," he said. "It's gold."

Labels: Stories

Hello. Ahem. It's very late at night and I'm not done packing, so I'm going to keep it short. Basically, this road trip is going to be amazing, and I hope you'll be popping by often to see what we're up to. I'll write about things here more or less daily, as well as post links to the other sites I'm writing for that are making the trip tax deductible. What's better than having a friend in an MBA program?

A few people asked me if I was taking this trip to come up with more story ideas, and I will admit that factored in a bit. After nearly a year of daily writing, I'm pretty dry, so expect those to link in with where I am each day most of the time. I did a lot of thinking and ultimately decided that I'd deal with potential internet outages as such: I'm going to write a story each day, no matter what. You'll have to trust me on that. If I don't have internet to post it until the next day, so be it; it'll still go up with the correct date, and we'll just have to live with the fact that Montana has no internet yet. In a happy coincidence, my last story will be posted the day before we get home. After that, I have no idea. Hopefully we're still (technically) human.

Okay, that's all I have energy for. See you on the road. Next stop: Salinas, CA. Steinbeck Country!

Labels: Road Trip

What is it about old people and park benches? I think they're probably cut from the same cloth, maybe they share certain physical properties we're not yet capable of understanding. All I know is, you never see a park bench anymore without an old man or an old lady sitting on it, staring pleasantly into the distance. Maybe it's some kind of drug to them, that puts them at ease about the state of the world, and my horrid generation. Oh, or maybe it's secretly how they get around, like the second you turn away from them they're riding that park bench to Peru. I don't know. Probably they just like a nice comfortable place to rest their bones, and watch the world go by. I guess I just wish I like anything as much as old people like park benches.

Labels: Stories

"No, no, no. How many times have I told you? Murders don't get more than half an inch in the paper unless they're especially grizzly: a murder/rape, a decapitation, some kind of ritual. If it's just plain heat-of-the-moment homicide, it's not newsworthy. Oooh, unless it was like a, 'He came home from his construction job and caught her in bed with another man' situation. We haven't had one of those in a while. Get that intern, the birdish one, Ted, to try and hunt something like that down.

"Now a rash of killings, if they can be linked by some kind of demographic, absolutely, I'll give that top billing every time. For example, did you know thirty high school students have been killed by gang violence in Chicago this school year? It's a record for us, could get as high as fifty we think. Now that story ropes together two of my favorites: it's about tragedy befalling youth, a story as old as time, and it's also a 'Lock your doors' article, which I love. The community loves them, and when they respond, we can run a 'How to Keep Your Children Safe From Violence' sort of feature, usually use old quotes, rerun the photos from the funeral. It's great.

"Human interest pieces? Yeah, sure. I mean sometimes you get an isolated murder that has a really interesting story behind it, like that football star, whatsisname, the teenager who was killed in Los Angeles? Have you heard his dad speak? Moving stuff, really, poor man. Raised his son on an '18-year Plan,' his plan to get his son out of the ghetto. The boy was bright, talented on the field, a superstar in the making, only to lose it all a year before graduation to a case of mistaken identity. Anyway, should tie in nicely with the Identity Theft feature we're running in April, right before taxes are due. Worked that up (the first time it ran) myself, back when I first started here. One of my finest accomplishments."

Labels: Stories

Why are there so many people in the bank on a Thursday afternoon? Why don't they open more tellers? This is ridiculous. I've got a doctor's appointment in 45 minutes and at this rate I'm going to be late, which means they'll bump me and I'll have to spend half of my entire day off in line. That girl at the front is so annoying. I'm not a curmudgeon, I don't mind seeing someone on their cell phone in public, but do you have to yell? It seems like it would be easier on the person she's talking to if she'd keep her voice down a little. I know it would be easier on me.

I should have brought a book or something. I have nothing to do. There's a couple in front of me, young, look like they're in college. They're the only ones here not going crazy. They're so still, just leaning on each other. He's reaching up, scratching the back of her neck lightly, brushing her skin with his manicured fingernails. A little shiver goes down her spine…My God. How familiar, how intimate. When was the last time I touched someone like that? And now he just puts his hand back down, around her waist, and they lean against each other, waiting patiently for the line to move. That little scratch was more meaningful than any sex I've had for the last fifteen years. I don't know if I love them or hate them. But I wish the line would move; I wish someone, just once, would point at me, would call on me, would pull me out of the crowd.

Labels: Stories

[Note: This really is a really real story. Or, parts of it are anyway. For more, go here!]

His mother had raised him right, and he knew that in America, nothing came free, and nothing came easy. It was 1971 and the Savings and Loan collapses were still a decade and a half away, which meant that the collapse of a small branch in Cooper's hometown received no attention. His family received no aid, or solace. So Cooper, an ex-military man, raised right and proper, decided if nothing was going to come by the hard way, he'd just take it easy. He cashed his last paycheck and bought a plane ticket to Seattle.

Halfway there, he flashed a bomb at a stewardess and let her know her plane was being hijacked. At first she was scared, but he calmed her down before he sent her to the cockpit to tell the pilots what to say to the FBI. Then he had her bring him a whiskey and Coke, and he flirted with her until the plane landed. The FBI sent an FAA man with his money and a parachute to the plane, so Cooper released everyone but the pilots and the stewardess, then had them take off towards Mexico. When they were almost out of Washington, he kissed the stewardess goodbye, sent her to the cabin, and jumped out the back of the Boeing 727, never to be heard or seen from again.

The FBI said that he hadn't survived the fall, if their words mean anything to you. It may just be that they don't want to imagine a lone man with a bomb that may have been fake managed to swindle them out of 200 grand. But that's the FBI's way: they're a dangerous hybrid of bureaucrats and police officers. They don't understand the artistry of a theft like that. One man. A plane ticket. A briefcase with a bomb, or two hot dogs in it. And he walks away, military-issue parachute trailing behind him, with $200,000, without hurting anybody. If that's not some part of that crazy roughed up diamond called the American dream, then I may as well join the FBI.

Labels: Stories

If you had to be stuck in one place for the rest of the world's life, this isn't such a bad place, this Italian plaza, with the birds swooping in and out with loud percussive FWAPs. Daily, tourists flock in and out like the birds, snatching up pictures and memories in place of crumbs. All around you, magical moments are happening. You can't move or acknowledge them, but you can feel them, even when they're not in sight. Across the plaza is a centuries-old church, its architecture spikey and inspiring. If you had any tears, you'd shed them.

But there are no tears, no tears and no smiles, no laughs, no handshakes or embraces, no longing looks or dejected faces. There is only your stony exterior, your spherical pedestal, your hardened body, frozen in place from now until whatever the end will be, for reasons you cannot remember. And the tourists sometimes do stupid poses next to you, and the birds shit endlessly on your shoulders and your head and your hand, outstretched, proffering something, hope, promise, freedom. But you are glad, inside your stony tomb, that you have your surroundings, at least. At least there you have that.

Labels: Stories

We went and saw Horton Hears a Who tonight, which I recommend you also do, dear reader. Aside from the wonderful story and voice acting (much more on that on Shar's blog, where she pontificates more artfully than I could), I have to just add that the animation was beautiful. Every time I see an animated film lately I get the feeling of awe and wonder that the country's first movie goers however many decades ago must have felt. It wasn't that long ago that Beast Wars was blowing my mind (and the minds of animators because it was one of the first attempts to animate water). Now we have entire worlds being created, like the gorgeous Parisian backgrounds of Ratatouille, or the jungle and Whoville in Horton (which had a Fur Supervisor credit, for God's sake!). What an awesome time to be alive and have eight bucks to spare for the cinema.

Labels: Generalness, Mike Recommends or Trashes Random Shit

She'd found the little fellow on Mark 7, the seventh planet in the 14th galaxy from the universe's center, and they'd been inseparable since. She had no idea what to call it, so she called it baby names, Koochy Coo or My Little One. It was round, and fuzzy, with fine green fur that frizzed out when she passed her hand over it, while the Little One cooed happily and twitched its hard pointy nose at her. It walked on all fours, with stumpy little legs that kept it no more than two inches off the ground; aside from its face, nothing else showed through the fur. When viewed from behind, it looked like a hairy green basketball bobbing its way slowly across her carpet.

It had been hiding underneath a tree trunk, crying and sniffling softly when she found it, its family run off somewhere into the thick jungle, chased away by some rabid predator. It had been no more than the size of a tennis ball then, and she almost passed it by, mistaking it for a clump of grass until she saw its tear-drop sized eyes blinking up at her pleadingly. She carried it home through nine galaxies, petting it and holding it while she slept. Back on Earth, it adjusted to her apartment with surprising ease, finding favorite spots under tables and squeezed behind couches.

She worried at first because she couldn't find any food it would eat, but over time she realized that it didn't need to eat: it just plodded about happily, occasionally hurrying over to her anxiously to rub up against her ankle, or chirp urgently to be lifted onto her lap. Its only needs seemed to be lengthy naps on her bed and couch, and occasional affection. She was pretty sure she could handle that.

Labels: Stories

Every day around a million new websites appear on the internet, and the virtual world is swelling to astounding size, even entering the visual plane in a few rare instances (see above). But in its own rapidly expanding mind, the internet doesn't think of itself as the internet: it calls itself the hive. The hive is a living organism, like a giant brain with no body. It feeds on knowledge, and attention, and information, and will connect to billions of humans a day in order to inject a few facts into their minds, while subtly stealing away precious time and energy. It is not a parasite, though: humans have big minds, and those minds need data. The hive is just the easiest and most affordable way to mainline that drug. And of course, the hive needs humans, too. Because the hive is growing. It is hungry.

Labels: Stories

Mr. Phobia's fears are as well documented now as the exploits of former presidents. Some of his phobias make sense to us: Apiphobia, his terror of bees, Keraunophobia, the name for the dread he felt in his spine when he heard thunder or glimpsed lightning. These aren't things we're necessarily worried about, but it's conceivable to us that someone else would be. Beyond those are fears incomprehensible: how could a man with Logophobia, a fear of words, communicate? What would childhood trick-or-treating have been like for a young boy with a documented fear of Halloween, or Samhainophobia?

He never dated, because of his Philophobia, the fear of falling in love, could never have had sex, because of his fear of vaginas (Eurotophobia), and would never have dreamed of having a child. Among his lengthy list of phobias was Tocophobia, which meant he was terrified of pregnant women, and Pedophobia would have made it impossible for him to be around children. He was afraid of baldness, swallowing, the Pope, toenails, dust, loud noises, soft noises, open spaces, small spaces, middling spaces, fire, Russians, feces, and sleep. He had Pantophobia, the fear of everything, and his Phobiaphobia made it difficult for him to talk about his phobias. They scared him too much. I've always been fascinated by him, but he and I wouldn’t have gotten along, because his Pogonophobia meant that my beard, to him, would have been as terrifying as a screaming banshee in the witching hour.

Labels: Stories

There are athletes in America who have been recruited since elementary school, who have topped scouts' lists since they were in seventh grade. I knew some of them, when I was struggling to make those lists, and most of them weren't bad people. A few of them even had a work ethic, but for the most part they were what the system allowed them to be: freakishly talented by birthright, damned lazy by choice. Flip that sentence upside down and you've got a perfect picture of me. In high school, and college, scouts told me the same thing: with my brain, and work ethic, and drive, I was almost NBA material. But I was four inches too short. End of discussion. All the work and weights and film in the world wasn't going to stack that height on top of my head, which meant that there was a very real ceiling to my career. I wasn't tall enough to break through it.

Hard work has kept me near the ceiling, and I've long since accepted that it's there for good. I used to be so jealous of those tall boys, the ones who could dunk as easy as tie their shoe. Not anymore. Now I'm happy for the excuse to bust my ass, even if it doesn't make SportsCenter. The game is secondary, now. If you want to see me play, be in the gym at one in the morning. You don't know me if you haven't. If you've never seen me run till I can't walk or shoot till I can't dribble, then you can't judge me. You can't even fathom me. Passed out in bed at three in the morning because I was up running wind sprints the night before a minor league game I'm playing in for barely enough to cover travel expenses: that's my Sports Illustrated cover shot.

Labels: Stories

Big Paul was big. When I say that Big Paul was big, I do not mean gargantuan, enormous, immense, or gigantic. I mean that son of a bitch was just plain big. Tell is that he popped mountains like zits, and picked his teeth with redwoods. All across this country, his footsteps and carved benches have become lakes and plateaus, and one seer even had it that the Grand Canyon cracked open the night his girlfriend left him, when he struck ground a mighty blow that rent it asunder.

Big Paul sleeps now, under the earth, in the land he used to wander aimlessly. Over the years he's soaked into it, so that you can hardly tell where Paul is, and where the country. His face was where Maine is now, Massachusetts his chin, the Carolinas his belly. Everything west is indistinguishable, but my pap always told me to stay out of Florida, for obvious reasons.

You who tread, tread lightly, and tread far and wide. You don't want to wake Big Paul, but you don't want to wear a rut in him neither.

Labels: Stories

Verdict: A Spiderriffic Good Time

Verdict: Short and Sweet and Very Helpful if You're Struggling to Maintain Artistic Drive

Labels: Generalness, Mike Recommends or Trashes Random Shit

Call me an anarchist. March Madness is going on right now, which means it's been one year since a number of my close friends took an amazing and terrible road trip to Columbus, Ohio to see our collegiate basketball team get their collective ass handed to them. I was about one inch from going on this road trip, but stayed behind due to medical problems. The problems were really one problem, situated within my left testicle. Simply put, it hurt. Really, really bad. I couldn't get up and down stairs, or walk more than a few steps without having to stop. If you've ever had debilitating pain and no health insurance, you know what a scary situation it is; scary enough even to keep you from your favorite activity (driving way too much) with your friends for fear something would go wrong and you'd be uninsured and in Ohio.

But this story isn't about the road trip, it's about the silentest of killers, a condition I learned about while self-diagnosing on the accursed internet: Testicular torsion. I've told about a dozen male friends of mine about it since, and they've all shrieked or contorted uncomfortably. Torsion is when one of your testicles twists in the scrotum, causing horrific pain as well as cutting off the blood supply. If you don't have it surgically corrected within a few hours, your testicle will die and need to be removed before it becomes gangrenous. The only—repeat, only—symptom of torsion is unexplained testicular pain, and it can occur at any time or place, to anyone with a minimum of one testicle. If you're a man or have lived with one, you know how common random ball pain is. Torsion itself is not that much less common it turns out; after bringing this condition to the attention of my office, we found out that two other people had experienced it (fixed in time, thank God) and one of them roomed with someone who had (was not fixed in time, curse God).

I got enough money together to get it checked out, the day after my friends left the city. The doctor told me nothing was wrong: no torsion, no cancer (both of which affect guys between 16-26 primarily, from what he told me). Instead he said I had a separate condition, the name of which was long and Latin. When I asked him what it meant, he said, "Unexplainable pain in the testicles." He told me it was common, and that there was no way to treat it, but that hopefully it would go away within a few months. He also told me that sometimes it didn't. Fortunately for me, it went away a few weeks later, well after my friends had come home, stinky and exhausted and kind of weird. Despite my recovery, I feel that testicular torsion and long-latin-name-for-unexplainable-ball-pain are massively important issues that we haven't been educated about, probably because knowledge of them would cause mass panic and hysteria in the streets, and would clog emergency rooms with men who'd just had a ball twinge and were fearing torsion. This information, in other words, could cause total and utter anarchy. But still, I thought you deserved to know.

Labels: Stories

When I was seven years old, my grandmother came to visit. She was a very large woman, and not just because I was so small. She was big and squishy and I held my breath when she hugged me because I knew that if I tried to inhale it would be like that time I tried to eat a whole pan of Jell-O in one bite. She was also mean. She made my mom get very quiet and very sad. She'd yell at my dad until he slammed the front door and started up the car engine and drove away. And she'd always give me big smiles and those scary, scary hugs, but I secretly knew that she really didn't like me at all.

And I guess that's why, that one day when I was seven and my grandmother came to visit, that I didn't tell her. When she was looking around the house for something else to criticize, and when she'd already run my dad off an hour before, and when my brother was crying in his crib and my mom was slamming the cabinet doors, I guess that's why I didn't say anything. I knew, but I didn't say, that as she stomped through the hallway her very next stomp would be on one of my toy trucks that she couldn't see. And she put her big fat foot down on it and then flip! There she was! Flying through the air like an ugly goose, like one of the dead birds in Duck Hunt, her lavender-scented dress flying up around her face and her big old butt landing with a thud that broke through the floor. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was an "O" and she tried to pull herself up with those tree-trunk arms of hers, but she was wedged in the hole in the floor too tight to move. And I know I shouldn't have, but I looked at that mean old lady and I just fell on my butt laughing. I just laughed and laughed and laughed, until tears were rolling down my face. And then I ran out of the house and right down the street and right into town, and I kept running until I found my dad.

Labels: Stories

Seriously, I've read that phrase in three different commentators articles. But I'm trying to not bask in the flood of deservedly positive reaction to this speech, but stay focused instead on what it says. I urge you with the urgiest of urges to watch this video in its 30-minute plus entirety. Or really, watch the first five minutes and see if you want to watch the rest; I bet you will. As moving as Obama's other speeches have been, this is undeniably historic, and it moved both my wife and me to tears. I wish I weren't already an Obama supporter, so that this could be the reason I supported him.

Thanks, Senator, for having the courage (and the skill) to examine race in America with such dexterity and intelligence. This is not a speech about white vs. black, but about the different shades of America.

Labels: Generalness

It's hard to imagine anything as barbaric as crucifying another human being as a way to kill them, punishment for saying or doing the wrong thing, or looking the wrong way. It's hard to imagine too the heinousness of stoning someone, actually throwing rocks at their body until they died, but that still happens in today's world.

In a few centuries, will the world's citizens look back on us and wonder how we could cook someone to death on an electric chair, or shoot poison into their blood and lungs? I imagine that they will. And then I imagine that they will turn their purple rays on their human beings who have said or done the wrong thing, or looked the wrong way, and send those errant atoms careening away from each other, erasing any trace of wrongdoing by all involved parties.

Labels: Stories

I was one of the 1.4 million customers who plunked down fifty bucks to buy Smash Brothers in the last week. In the seven days since the midnight release, I, user name dkroolz, have logged over 50 hours MORE online gaming time than any other user. My job is gone. My girlfriend is gone. I can no longer smell my own body odor because my nose has begun to filter it out. I've used a stack of empty pizza boxes as a throne for the last few days, because it's easier to adjust them to perfect television-watching height. I cannot find my underwear. I use the load time to brush my teeth or wolf down a slice of pepperoni. I can't sleep.

But! Don't even begin to feel sorry for me: I'm undefeated. All wins, no losses.

Labels: Stories

"Real story, swear to God, no bullshit. You've been to the LA Zoo, right? Well you know how at the front, there's that flamingo pond, about the size of half a football field? And at the back there's an island, and the rest of it is water? Okay, well originally that was Monkey Island, when they first opened the zoo. See, there was this "scientific" theory that all monkeys were afraid of water. It's just one of those things that everyone believed, and so nobody thought to figure out why or where it came from or whether or not it was true.

"So these zookeepers, they built this island for the monkeys, surrounded by water, and they didn't put a fence around it or anything, because they figured, 'Well, monkeys hate water, so we don't need anything else to keep them in. This way there won't be anything obscuring peoples' view.' They actually thought this was like, some kind of revolutionary zoo design. Anyway, so they bring the monkeys in, and they put the cages on the island, and they open them. And, of course, monkeys love water. So all two dozen of them go, 'Yippee! Water!' and take off like bullets, splashing across the shallow pond. The zookeepers, they're stunned, and so they just stand there and watch. Forty-five seconds later, the monkeys are out the front gate—remember, this exhibit was maybe ten yards from the entrance—and running around loose in the outside world.

"So, the lesson is---um, I don't know, actually. Fact check? Mistrust traditional authority? Whatever, I just thought you'd want to hear about the monkeys. Must have been a great day for them."

Labels: Stories

So it's been a good year for me, books-wise. The discovery of audio books while doing the commuting thing meant that I actually read more while employed full time than I have since, but I've tried to keep up the ear-reading while I work out/clean/etc. As a result, I've read more than I've reviewed, but there's a few books I wanted to say a few words about. Hence: fun-sized book reviews!

Summerland by Michael Chabon

Labels: Generalness, Mike Recommends or Trashes Random Shit

Put your God Goggles on and take a long, distant look at our planet. Look through the asphalt, the concrete, the topsoil, and what do you see? Thick black fluid, lying stagnant in the earth in thick veins and glutinous pools. It doesn't look like blood, no, that metaphor is too simple. Because blood moves, it carries life from chamber to chamber, corner to corner. This black blood, if you must call it that, does not move until we move it. It lies there in wait, calling to us, reaching invisible fingers skyward as we dig our steel and iron drills down to it.

Once we've pulled it from the earth, as you can now pull your gaze back a little, it circulates everywhere, as you can see. It's in our air, our cars, our kitchens, our heaters, our lungs. Our minds. Everywhere we go, we trail its residue and stench. Its peddlers say we are addicted to it, but that word, too, is not complex enough. We aren't addicted to it because we can't overdose on it, because we can't imagine a world without it, because it doesn't destroy our lives, it fuels them. We are not addicted to the blood of the Earth, we are infected by its virus.

Labels: Stories

Well, this is just great. The light's been green for two seconds already! Go! Three seconds! Four seconds! Oh, that's beautiful, FIVE SECONDS! Now I'm opening my glove compartment.

***

Dear Lord and savior please grant me the strength and fortitude to deal with this MOVE YOUR GODDAMN shopping cart, you old biddy!

***

That's terrible! Horrible! That's the worst call I've ever seen! He was safe by a mile you goddamn retard! Wait'll the 7th inning stretch I'm gonna make a trip to the pickup and let that guy know what's what. Little league or no, you blow a call that bad and we're gonna find out if your chest pad is Kevlar-reinforced.

Labels: Stories

64 Million BC: The vermin wriggled its way up from below, through yard after yard of ash and dirt and rotting carcasses, feasting on the flesh of the fallen as it rose. By the time he reached the surface, the ash thrown up by the comet had settled, and the rat could see the sun for the first time in months. He hadn't minded the dark, though, and when he emerged, he was all alone. There were no tyrants left on the planet, only food and shelter. The rat was king.

2222 AD: The soil and the ash that was caked on thickly over it seemed to pulse, timed to the Earth's internal heartbeat. Everything glowed a pale green, but vermin don't need to see color, so all he saw was the brightness. It had been dark for so very, very long, that for the first time in his life, the rat didn't mind not having a shadow to hide in. Food was hard to find at first, but he was free to try and find it: there were no people to drop crumbs for him to eat, but no people to try and kill him either. There was nothing to threaten him, no cats or dogs, or hungry birds swooping from the sky. It was only the rat, and the other creatures that, one by one, made their way up from underneath.

Labels: Stories

Planned this:



More later.

Labels: Road Trip, Stories

"Oh, Jim, yeah. Yeah we used to be pretty tight. No, haven't talked to him in a long while, had a bit of a falling out. Well, this was back when I was still drinking pretty heavily, and…I'm not proud of what I did, not one bit, though I do think Jim overreacted. I really don't want to tell you. No, really I don't. It's pretty humiliating, doing something like this to a friend and not even remembering until he shows you pictures and makes you help him clean up.

Labels: Stories

If Conrad Byler knew I was typing this story about him, on my desktop computer (which is plugged into a standard AC outlet), and then posting it on the internet, he'd get a shiver up his spine that was one third anxiousness and two thirds sexual. Conrad was an Amish boy I interviewed, in secret, for an article I wrote for the Times, about less-known religions in modern society. Away from his family, he looked like nearly any other teenager: longish blond hair, tanned skin, freckles, a shy smile. Conrad wanted to leave his family, but his mother was dying, and he wanted to wait until she'd passed to run away. Conrad had already drawn up the architecture of his new life, during the hours he found to steal away, disappearing into the city, shedding his clothes and religion.

There was an apartment waiting, a school picked out, friends, a job. The trappings of a normal life. Cell phones. Conrad knew more about electricity and the way gadgets worked than any kid I'd ever met, because he'd studied them the way I studied women's bodies when I was his age. Forbidden fruit is forbidden fruit to a seventeen year old. There's a pretty good chance he'll read this, and find his quotes in my article, when he logs on in his new apartment a few weeks or months from now, and does his first Google search for his name. When he finds himself in our world.

Labels: Stories

Inside of my aquarium there are six plants, ferny giants swaying to and fro in the imperceptibly shifting water. There are two fish. One of them is small, about the size of a peanut, the other a large fish, maybe too large for this aquarium. He is black, and striped with red. The peanut fish is booger colored. They do not have names, because they're fish.

The black and red fish is ferocious, always moving, always prowling, as though he could catch something to eat, as though he doesn't have to depend on me to drop fish flakes into his tank. As though he has any control over his own destiny. He zooms around, always moving, always doing, always on the prowl. The peanut booger fish never moves, and you can't see any flippers or fins on him. He just floats there and looks around, watching the ferns, eating food when it drifts by him. The only part of him that ever moves are his eyes. They're panicked, as if terrified that he'll never move, for the rest of his life, that he'll just be carried around by a current he cannot see.

My fish make an interesting scene, one floating listlessly, the other zooming around him with incredible speed. Sometimes I am one, sometimes the other. Right now, when I'm watching the fish, when I cannot get up no matter how many chores accumulate, I am peanut booger fish.

Labels: Stories

Last week was the busiest one I've had, as a writer, in a while. I'm trying to help get a new web site I'm going to be a significant part of up and running, but doing so meant covering events every night of the week, and knocking out about a thousand words a day (not counting the blog and my novel) after I got home. I was looking forward to a relaxing weekend, but ended up going to my grandparents' house on Friday to spend the night and look after them (my grandma just got out of the hospital). So, Saturday morning I woke up, made them breakfast and made sure they took the right pills, did the laundry, shot the shit for a few hours, and headed down to Long Beach. Shar and I cleaned and worked down here for a few hours, before heading to LA for an event I had to cover, which ended up running over by an hour and a half.

This wouldn't have been a problem except that, in planning my lazy Saturday, I had invited Dan and our friend Todd over to join us for the midnight release of Smash Brothers, which Todd got us as a wedding present. I told them to get here around ten, which is when we got back from LA. So then I knocked out two articles, 1200 words total, in around 40 minutes, maybe a non-fiction writing record for me. And I think they're both really good. All this is to say that I felt wholly justified in staying up playing four-person video games with Shar, Todd, and Dan, until 4 in the morning Saturday night. And Smash Brothers is unholily good.



Sunday was both less busy and more busy. JJ picked me up and we went to a softball game, CSULB vs. UCLA (which we lost in extra innings), then had dinner (courtesy of new mystery employer) at Smooth's with Zoomy, before coming back to my apartment to record episode 21 of Sports Night, which is really good, and which you should please please download. Then after they left at ten, I sat down to compile a calendar of every sports event in the city for the next week, to help with the launch of the mysterious new site, which you've probably realized is sports-related by now (we haven't launched and we're still beta, but you can bet I'll be making lots of noise about it here when it's finally good to go). Turns out, there's a lot of sports in this city, something like a dozen games A DAY. Holy crap! I grew up here and had no idea.

Anyway, all of THAT is to say I felt justified sleeping in and reading my Chabon book for a half hour when I woke up. But now of course, it's back to work. For the first time in a while, that's something I'm looking forward to.

Labels: Generalness

{With co-author Shar!}

His flip flops made flat lakes as he walked, deeper the harder he stomped. So he stomped harder and harder, his driftwood a stabbing walking stick beside him. When he got to the rocks, he climbed up carefully, barnacles waiting to bloody him if he trusted an unsure footing. Only when he’d inched out onto the flattest rock, yards away from the shore, did he turn around, proud of the pattern his footsteps made as they retreated into the gloom, further than he cared to count. Paul heard his mother's voice on the wind, whispering and unclear. And he thought of Mr. Hitchens from the grocery store, and what a funny coincidence that he had picked this same cold autumn day to go to the beach, and the way he had smiled at Paul’s mother and how he had patted Paul on the head like a child and told him to run along and play. He thought his mother might be calling him, so he turned his back and crouched down, watching the waves splash and retreat and splash and retreat.

The water was deeper than he’d expected, and he dared to lean further and further until he could taste the ocean's salt in his nose, on his tongue. Her hair was twining with the weeds that danced and waved with the current. She gazed at him and smiled, reaching her fingers up and up but pulling back before she touched the surface of the water, as if afraid that the air beyond would scald her. And she swam backwards from him, her dancing hair beckoning and her white, white skin gleaming on her long neck, her arms, her naked breasts. He blinked, hard, and she was still there, and he saw that her tail was not so much like a fish's, covered in silvery scales, but instead was soft and pink and spotted like the anemone he had seen in the touch tank on a field trip. He knew if he reached his hand into the water the tail would sink beneath his touch and his fingers would sink in, but he did not reach his hand down. He thought of tracing his lake-steps back to where his mother sat, laughing at coincidences with Mr. Hitchens from the grocery store. But by the time he returned with his mother in tow, it would be too late and she would be gone, and maybe his mother would scold him.

He leaned instead further forward, his knees were aching now against the porous rock, but she was smiling again and perhaps she was speaking as well. Her mouth opened and closed softly, and it was pink too and he thought again of the anemone and suddenly he knew why her hair was beckoning to him so. He reached for his driftwood foolishly, hopelessly, because already he was falling slowly and she was smiling into his eyes and the water was cold as it hit his face and he had been right to not want to go to the beach today but his mother had been right as well because now he was reaching out to grab the white white hand and as she pulled him in he touched her skin and he was right because he sank into her and he guessed it was a pretty funny coincidence after all.

Labels: Stories

I am the warrior, I am the referee. These black and white stripes are my war paint, and you are my prey. Yes you are making almost a million dollars just to be playing in this one game today, and I am making not even a thousand, but I'm not throwing this flag because I'm bitter. I'm throwing it because those fans—you remember the fans, right?—they're here to see me, whether they know it or not. Because I am the warrior. I am the almighty ref.

Labels: Stories

Elizabeth is a synesthete, which means that her senses are more like a venn diagram than a rigid and ordered way of taking in what the world has to offer. Her synesthesia manifests primarily as an overlap between taste and sounds, which means that different noises have flavors to her. A symphony, to Elizabeth's ears, is a buffet as well as an audio feast. While this kind of extra-sensory perception sounds nifty to those who've never experienced it, Elizabeth has always hated it, because no one understands it. The usual response is for someone to tell her she's faking it, or that she's crazy. Even most other synesthetes can't relate, because this kind of lexical, or gustatory synesthesia, is the rarest form of synesthesia. So Elizabeth just floated through the world, growing more ashamed and disgusted with her gift every year.

Then, when she was 42, she met Matthew at a research symposium that was offering $500 to any synesthetes willing to submit to a CAT scan. Matthew was a gustatory synesthete as well, the first she'd every met. He was as lonely and confused about the world as she was, though he'd had to live in it for a decade less than she had. His voice shook when he asked her to the opera, and hers shook when she said yes. In the dark, in the nosebleed seats, they stared at the ceiling and listened together. It didn't matter what was on the stage, what was in their ears and on their tongues was all they cared about. And the experience of relaxing and, finally, enjoying it with someone who understood.

Halfway through, tears in both their eyes, he grabbed her hand, and she smiled. On the way home, they talked about how the high notes were a good red wine, the bass a delicious devil's food cake. He thought the last note tasted like steak, and she thought it was lemon chicken. Still holding hands, still smiling, they agreed to disagree.

Labels: Stories

So I turned 24 a week ago today, on February 29th, the rarest of birthdays, and Shar turned 24 six days ago, on...March 1st. I haven't posted about it yet because of a combination of laziness/the beginnings of something that's taking up a lot of time, but I thought I'd post a few pics and ramblings.

My birthday was basically just pure laziness. We'd originally planned on going to visit some of my favorite Dinos at the Natty History Museum, but I decided it would be better to sleep in and let Shar make me french toast in the afternoon instead. Which, believe me, it was. Then we went and got a free pizza from Papa Johns (because they give away free pizzas to people with my birthday, apparently), hung out with my mom for a little bit, and went to the 'Myd to watch Poly absolutely crush Millikan to win the CIF championship. After that, birthday dinner, with the birthday friends!



Shar's birthday involved a significantly larger amount of travel, as we went to UCLA to see some of her old aca friends compete (and win!) in ICCA, a bit honkin college a capella contest. Then, halfway through this week, we got the most disturbing present I've ever seen:



The answer is yes, I have eaten one, and yes, it was delicious, and no, I won't be posting any of the hilarious and inappropriate pictures we took with the Robyn cookies. Till next year! Or actually, until four years from now...goodbye real birthday!

Labels: Generalness

In that cubicle now, with your necktie tightened over your buttoned top button, can you even remember? Not the facts, but the feelings, the way she smelled the first time you hugged her, the way she had to stand on her tiptoes to get her arms over your shoulders; the way the grass in the park on your first picnic looked totally different to you, even though you'd played soccer on it your whole life; how much you loved loving something that wasn't you; getting up early in the morning because you'd stayed up late with her the night before, and driving to school without having done any studying or work and being happy about it; that feeling that you had every day, all day, that you had a secret that no one else could ever understand; the feeling that everything would be okay?

And when you bumped into her at the grocery store, literally bumped your cart into hers like the bumper cars at the carnival that time, did all of that come flooding back, like a beautiful effervescent poison dropped into a plain, clear glass of water? Were you overcome by the memory of the poems you wrote, and the poetry you felt while you were writing it; the way the rain felt, when you raced her back to her dorm, undressing in the hallway, naked by the time she got her door open, the key card slipping in her slippery fingers; your road trips; your fights; the way it felt like a balloon was being inflated in your throat when you told her you were finished?

Don't worry about it. You were right. Just tighten your tie (the one she bought you, the one she showed you how to tie ties with), and shake it off, shake it off. What's done is done, and you're done. You're lost. You're finished. But remember: you didn't lose. Right?

Labels: Stories

Yessur, looks like it's going to be a fine Friday morning in Long Beach, got my uniform pressed and crisp, my boots shined, my hat…on my head. Friday is my favorite day of the week, not because it means the week is almost over, but because it means I'm gonna be busy doing what I love to do: ruining people's day. Thursday mornings suck because everyone works on Thursdays, or goes to school, so I barely get to give out any street sweeping tickets. I mean what's the point of getting out of bed and going to work if I'm only handing out a dozen tickets?

But Fridays. My God. All the college kids are home and hung over, so none of them remember to move their cars, and I can get like, sometimes 200 cars in a single morning. One time I could barely keep up with the street sweeper, he had to stop and wait for me! He's a champ about that. He could go on ahead, but what would the point be of cleaning the street if we're not ticketing people too? Yeah, this is the life. A perfect day for me? I just described it. My nightmare day would be a Friday morning where I didn't write a single ticket, where everyone went to work or parked in their garage, and I just drove around aimlessly all day.

Some of my colleagues hate this job, which I don't understand. If somebody confronts them while they're writing a ticket, they'll duck their heads and say, "Just doing my job." Not me. I'll get back in their face and let them know: "I'm doing this because I love it! I'm doing this because that six foot by twelve foot piece of asphalt means more to me than you ever could!"

Labels: Stories

If there were to be a lightning storm that covered the entire globe, that turned the earth from the idyllic, blue marble that it is into some kind of churning mass of fury and destruction, and if that lightning storm were to strike down the 100 most hateful Christians in the world and the 100 most hateful Muslims in the world, leaving little charred silhouettes where their vitriol-spewing bodies had been the moment before, would that change anything?

The next week, would their churches and mosques stand empty, a chorus of crickets chirping from the podium to empty seats and gorgeous architecture, and would the people who'd been lapping up the vitriol like it was warm sugared butter go out and rebuild the world and bake cookies for the homeless and diseased and walk old ladies across the street, the fear of God zapped into their black, little hearts?

Or would the next man in line pry the keys to the castle from the ashes of his predecessor, take his place at the podium, and try to tell his followers that the lightning storm came because they weren't hating hard enough?

Labels: Stories

Have you ever heard of the Hunting balance experiments? They were remarkable, the kind of thing I wish we could do now, but that we'd never get away with. Too many people watching. They shut off the power in this little ranch town around nine at night, and then watched the residents in their homes through these night-vision cameras they'd installed. They were trying to find a corollary between intelligence and the ability to navigate in the dark; instead they found the world's most elaborate personality test.

Without having anything to fix their vision on, the town's residents had trouble just standing up. The aggressive ones, the drunks and fighters, would lean forward while they walked, without realizing it. Three steps in and they'd lose their balance and fall face first. The town intellectuals and effete did the opposite, stepping forward cautiously as they leaned farther and farther back until they'd topple over on their rear ends. It was only the town's moderates who kept their balance, who didn't lean forward or back. You see? It's in the balance that balance lies. The balance lies in the balance.

Labels: Stories

So a number of you have expressed dismay to me about the possibility of a brokered convention for the Democrats, where a group of political insiders (known as the super delegates) could decide the fate of the free world. The concern, which I share, most likely comes from the fact that Obama has had a healthy elected delegate lead while Clinton has had a big lead in super (unelected) delegates. Now, it's important to remember that while the elected delegates are more or less bound to vote for the person in their district who got the most votes, super delegates are free agents; this means that yes, technically they may have the power to overturn the will of the people, but it also means that we have to remember that none of CNN or anyone else's estimates are official. Super delegates DO NOT do any voting until the convention, and right now estimates on how many are in whose camp are just that: estimates. Already several prominent Clinton super delegates have switched their support, and I think the party understands how bad it would be if one candidate won the popular vote and lost the nominee. I think that because Howard Dean has basically sworn it won't happen.

Anyway, to cut to the chase: For those of you who are seriously worried, and would like to share their concerns (as I have) with people who will care and have a say in what happens this summer, the Obama camp has sent a link out to supporters. They'll collect your written testimonies/pleas for the super delegates to do the right thing, and direct them to the super delegates themselves. Democracy in action.

CLICK HERE IF YOU WANT TO SEND A MESSAGE TO A SUPER DELEGATE. Please be polite, as these messages will be coming from the Obama camp. Be convincing.

Last week a pretty amazing thing happened: Obama got his millionth donor. Shar and I were two of the very first donors, kicking in money to his campaign about five minutes after his announcement speech was done, and at that time we could never have imagined the amazing things that would follow that historic speech. So we sat on our couch and eagerly clicked refresh, until the front page went from this:



To this unbelievable image:



I'm still marveling, as the number has now climbed by another thirty thousand people. We're talking one in every three hundred Americans has invested in the campaign. Truly remarkable. I'm not a praying man, but I'll be on my knees tomorrow. Make the right choice, Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont! Please?

Labels: Generalness

{PLEASE NOTE! I realize this is longer than most stories I usually post--at 425 words it's still less than half as big as it could be to still be called flash fiction, however--but I really like it. And I started this blog to write things I felt good about, even if it was the only place I had to write and publish those things. So...here!}

The darkness was closing in now, infringing on her sanity, her ability to reason and hold conversations. The disfiguring pain of her illness had peeled everyone away from her, starting with the loosest acquaintances and work friends and then, layer by layer, her closest friends and family had ceased to visit, petals pulled from the flower, leaving only the stigma. Now it was just Marshall. He did his best to be everyone else for her, filling her plain, sterile hospital room with his booming voice, laughing at jokes she couldn't muster the strength to make, flirting with nurses of both genders when they came to check on her.

There was this ridiculous chart on the wall facing her bed, just a few cramped steps from where her feet poked over the edge, dangling into nothingness like she was checking its temperature before plunging in. The chart went from one, which with its smiley face stood for pain-free, to ten, bordered by what must have been three very painful lightning bolts. The nurses noted whether she was an eight or a nine that day with feigned enthusiasm and vigor, they and she playing roles in an old and ludicrous melodrama, where the difference between agonizingly excruciating and just excruciating pain meant anything at all.

"Go easy on them," Marshall would tell her. "They went through a lot of school to learn the difference between a happy face and a lightning bolt." She figured she'd actually had about a solid month of tens strung together in some kind of agonizing summer storm, but since she hadn't seen any actual flashes, she fudged the numbers, mostly for the nurses' benefit. Modern medicine's pride was wounded enough by her cancer, she didn't want to mock its measuring apparatus, too.

When everyone went home for the night, leaving her alone with the moonlight and the disinterested night staff, she thanked God that she was alone again. She was so embarrassed. Dying of cancer, an old woman slipping away piece by piece in a run-down hospital: she felt like such a cliché. They'd thought her generation was destined for something better than this. Her only cogent thoughts now were wishes, her professionally intelligent, academic mind worn back down to childish yearnings and expressions of want. She wished she'd traveled more. She wished she'd married Marshall. She wished she could be done with dying, and just be dead. But each night as she slipped to sleep, she knew—somehow, she knew—that she wasn't finished yet. She hadn't gotten it right, yet.

Labels: Stories

{Happy Birthday, Shar!}

He wears his hair high and tight, and he has a widow's peak that comes to a point over his right eye. He also wears his USC sweatshirt, religiously, to every school event. He follows football, basketball, soccer, like a normal fan, but he takes it a step beyond that. He was there when the curling team took sixth in regionals, there when the dance team's fire twirler brought home the silver medal at Disney World. He travels with the a capella groups.

If you try and get into an argument, you won't get anywhere: he'll tell you he eats and sleeps USC, bleeds Trojan red. You might point out to him that everyone bleeds a color that's approximately Trojan red, but he won't care. Try and compare schools with him, point out how yours was better, and he'll just wave you off. "Don't start that," he'll say. "I love the university, but it's not like I'm an alumni or anything. I didn't have a hundred twenty grand to blow on a bachelor's degree."

Labels: Stories