On Turning 30, The Inexorable March of Time, Promises, and Seeing the Success in Failure

Today is my thirtieth birthday.

Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on certain milestones, and some of them do make sense. At eighteen, you are almost completely legally an adult. You can participate in our Democracy by casting your vote. You can purchase pornography and tobacco products. You can have sex with anybody you want (who is also over the age of eighteen) and nobody can tell you otherwise (except, of course, for the other person involved, and if they say "no thank you" it's best to listen). It's the age that most Americans graduate from high school, the age at which many of them set off on their own for the first time ever. Now, sure, you can't drink yet, so, you're not fully an adult. But still.

At twenty, nothing really happens except that you're now in your 20's, which is supposed to involve some amount of maturity? Maybe? I don't know. There's really nothing special about twenty when you get right down to it. It's just a number with a zero in it. A year later, you can finally have a drink.

At twenty-five, you're a quarter of a century old, which was alarming to me at the time. Something about being able to easily quantify my age in terms of a century, albeit in terms that were fractions thereof. Also, your car insurance rates drop because apparently that maturity you're supposed to start acquiring in your twenties has kicked in notably in your driving skills. Or something.

Then what? Sure, thirty. Three-oh. Now you're really and truly a grown-up. I fell victim to this same fallacy. Now that I'm thirty, I'm a grown-up. A grown-up who is wearing a T-shirt with the name of a band I have liked since I was fifteen. Half a lifetime ago.

Thirty year olds can wear flies, right?

And I'm listening to records. Grown-ups, in all their practicality, should not own records. They take up so much space. And they're expensive. And they require archaic equipment to enjoy. Equipment that has pretty specific space requirements. I'm looking across the room at my record player, and I can see a guitar I have had since I was thirteen. It's covered in stickers. I still play this thing. Grown-ups who have guitars keep them in their cases. Grown-ups with guitars do not have stickers on their guitars. They're embarrassed by this sort of thing being leftover from their youth.

So many things about this picture scream "I'm an adult!"

But I also see pictures of my family; my wife, our daughter. A daughter who is growing up so fast. These pictures are over  a year old, and she barely looks the same now. She's a little girl, not a baby. She's currently napping. I am awake mostly through sheer force of will. In a little while, she'll wake up and come downstairs and she'll want to dance to the records I'm playing. Because I'm cultivating in her an appreciation for real music, not just music specifically marketed towards children. Side bar: why is this a thing? Music exists in the world, yes? I understand the idea that some music is not appropriate for kids. I get it. I can make that decision, I think, right? Like, if she came down here right now, I'd keep this Arcade Fire record on. Next, I'd play Broken Bells, or Simon & Garfunkel, or Fleet Foxes. I would not play AC/DC or Childish Gambino or 10cc. Not that there's anything wrong with the 10cc record I have, it just seems a little crazy for a two year old, no? I mean, I'm not sure I'd play any of the Dixieland or Hot Jazz I've got, just because she might dance too fast for me to keep up.

But Alice Cooper is perfectly fine for Jules. Right?

I guess what I'm saying is that, thirty is just an arbitrary number. Twenty-eight years separate myself from my daughter, and then thirty-one years exist in the space between me and my father. The three of us could groove to the same record at once. And we have. And we will again. Why should it matter, these designations? Now, talk to me on my 42nd birthday. That will be a whole other story. But for now, hey. So I'm thirty. Yesterday I was twenty-nine. I don't feel all that different. Okay, so at twenty I was able to spend hours at the City Museum in St. Louis, crawling around and running, and feel fine the next day. And now, having spent two hours there this past Saturday, my right shoulder could fall off at any moment. But that's fine. It happens. So I'm thirty. And a year from now, I'll be thirty-one. I'll still be long-winded, I'll still be listening to records, I'll still be writing.

Oh yeah, writing. I made a silly promise about writing and turning thirty. That silly promise was a hard deadline on completing my novel. Silly because I'm afraid of completing anything for fear of it being a failure. Silly because I would rather sleep in than get up early and work on it. Silly because I have a family whose company I enjoy far more than the self-inflicted torture of writing for hours on end. Silly because a good novel takes a good long while to complete. Silly because numbers are arbitrary (see above).

So it's been a while since I started writing it, I guess. The full history reaches back to the spring of 2008. I wrote a short story called "North for Salvation." The following autumn, I took the same characters and general situation, and changed the name to "Before Rock Attained Perfection." Then I stretched that concept out over the next two  and a half years, changing the name to What Place to Rest the Search, a nod to a Led Zeppelin lyric from the song "Achilles' Last Stand," which figured prominently in the narrative. Then, about a year ago, I threw out what I had written in first person and changed it to third person because, as I discovered, I had one main character and a whole lot of action taking place in the past. I wanted to tell a more present story and get into the heads of the other characters (who, in the first-person narrative, were flat and boring). First person worked for the short story versions. Not, it seems, for the novel, for which I have yet to find a good title.

Then I set an arbitrary goal, to have the whole thing completed by the time I turned thirty. Today.

Woops. I guess I failed.

Or...maybe not?

I could have easily finished...the original first person version. But then it wouldn't have been as good, in my opinion. You know what I mean?

So, I'm inclined to call this "failure" a "success." But, how? Well, that's a very good question, disembodied authorial stand-in for the audience! And I'll tell you how!

Writing is a process of discovery. Discovery of the author's limitations. Discovery of the author's strengths. Discovery of those in the life of the author who are supportive, and the subsequent partial or complete fare-thee-well to those discovered to be unsupportive. It is also about the discovery of the story. Sure, I sat down with an outline and a basic idea of where this story was going to go. And for the most part, I've followed it. But it's grown, and changed, and I've had to make adjustments along the way. And though in some ways I am farther from finishing a novel than I was when I threw out the first-person version, I am also much farther along in developing a real story that might have some teeth, legs, arms, and a torso as opposed to just some very misguided feet. That's a very strange metaphor, I'm sorry, but it makes sense to me, and I had that metaphor rattling around in my head and, trust me, it did not need to ever find its way into the book. Ever.

Sure, I missed my goal. But as the goal approached and I started to panic, I felt I should take a step back and look at what I had accomplished. The fact is, pushing myself toward the goal was more important than reaching the goal. Pushing and pushing got me off my lazy ass. I don't care if it's not perfect, now. I will finish it, and if it fails to sell or whatever, that's fine. I'll just write another one. Or a play. Something else. One failure doesn't mean an end to an endeavor, or exclude success from the future (see also my first attempt at college).

I even think I could have finished the third-person version of the book by today if I had been slightly less meticulous. Though, had I been more meticulous, I'd be about half-way through the second chapter. The point is, if I had rushed to get it done, I'd have a complete novel that I was only thirty-fifty percent happy with. Right now, I've got about forty percent of a novel that I am almost completely satisfied with. That's a fantastic feeling, believe it or not. A feeling that far outweighs any frustration I may have felt at not completing it.

As Wayne Gretzky once said, "You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take." And we all know how awesome Wayne Gretzky was.

Wayne Gretzky was one of the 19th Century Russian Romanticists, right?

A (very) Short Excerpt

from a current work in progress

===

Ryan turned his eyes to me, narrowing them. "But how did you know?" he asked me in the tone he always reserved for questions to which the answers never satisfied.

"How does anybody really know?" I stalled. He didn't buy it. "She touched my arm."

Ryan's reaction was a jumble of surprise, skepticism, and confusion. I rubbed the spot on my arm, to assure one of us that the arm really was there to be touched. "Excuse me, I'm gonna need some clarification," he asked.

"We were having coffee one night, years ago, and talking about paradise, agreeing that it was completely unattainable. And then she shattered the consensus by touching my arm and taking me there." I continued rubbing the spot on my left arm where her coffee-warmed hand had wrapped around my winter-kissed flesh, just below the sleeve of my t-shirt.

"Where?"

For a second, I could smell the coffee shop, the chai tea cakes I had also fallen in love with that night, my stale frozen and dried sweat from the show, her perfume which I found out later to be called "Heaven." I could feel her hand on me, her lips against mine. Ryan asked again and I was brought back to the noise of the DC dive bar. I looked hard at the sagging ceiling tiles and the yellowing beer pitcher half empty between us.

"Where?"

"Paradise," I said. "One perfect moment. She touched my arm, and took me to paradise."

Ryan's right hand moved toward my left arm, his fingers twitching in response to some impulse in his muscle memory or cerebral cortex. I wanted him to feel the spot where she had touched me, to see if he could still feel her energy. Maybe he could find himself on the edge of paradise, looking in at me and Katie Mason, sitting at a Formica table, coffee cups half filled between us, her hand on my arm. Instead, he grabbed the pitcher of Stag and emptied it into our glasses. He picked his up and held it out towards me. "To one perfect moment," he said.

"To one perfect moment." I moved my glass to meet his and we drank. I wanted the juke box to be playing "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, her favorite song. I wanted her to walk through the door, look around, and find me. Instead, a group of Yankees fans in the corner belted along with "You Give Love a Bad Name." Bon Jovi never fails to ruin my best laid fantasies. "And one more, to paradise," I added.

"Wherever it may be," Ryan said, our glasses touching again. We both drained our beers and decided to go back to the hotel.

"Think Johnny and Adam are awake?" I asked.

"Johnny's awake," Ryan said, pointing past the raucous group in the corner. Johnny was sitting at a table behind them, across from a girl with dark blonde hair highlighted in pink. "Come on, let's go." And Ryan started towards the door, throwing a twenty on the table.

I lingered, watching Johnny and the girl through the laughing crowd. He was cool, uninterested, his eyes darting around the room. His glance fell on me for a moment, continued it's journey and then jolted back to me. I smiled at him, waved. He nodded nonchalantly. I wasn't sure if he didn't want the girl to know I was there, or if he didn't want her to know he wasn't really paying attention. Just as I was about to turn around and leave, I saw her reach out to him, put her left hand on his right arm, between his wrist and elbow. She laughed and pressed her hand to him, and he smiled cooly at her and looked fleetingly in her direction.

===

This will make more sense in context, I am sure, but I felt this little bit was exceptional, given the quality of my writing lately. Let's hope this becomes more the norm.

Oh, and if you think it sucks and is terrible, don't tell me. This is the best I've been able to do on the novel for a few weeks now. Be kind to the fragile writer.

Tess

In the interest of 1) continuing to write in spite of writer's block (no way out but to write through it, I've come to learn) and 2) continuing to garner interest from my readers, something I've been working on for the book.

===

When Bravo Little Gavroche would go on tour, it was always Ryan who would set the schedule. He'd be the one on the phone with the club managers, the other bands (or their agents, if they were big enough to have one), the hotels, anybody else I may be forgetting. He'd then give each of us an itinerary. "And," he would always stress, "this time, we have to follow it. To the last letter." That last summer we toured was no different. What was also no different was that thirty seconds into the itinerary, we were already behind.

Johnny and I were sitting in Bingo, our van. We were parked on Tamm Avenue in front of Adam's apartment. The van was loaded with drums, amps, microphones, two of Adam's guitars (one electric, one acoustic), two of Johnny's basses, two guitars of mine (an electric and an acoustic, merely for back-up purposes) and four of Ryan's guitars (two electrics, one electric/acoustic and a fretless hollow-body electric he had built himself). Johnny had picked the short straw the night before, so he sat behind the driver's seat drumming his fingers out of time with The Cure as they quietly played over the speakers. I sat next to him in the passenger seat, tapping my fingers in time. Johnny honked.

"Let's go, Adam!" he said, to himself. After a second or two Adam emerged from the two-story brick apartment building onto a second floor fire escape, a soft guitar case slung across his back, the better of his two electrics, and in his right hand an overnight bag which held enough clothes to last him the first three nights of our two month tour. Even as he made his way down the steps, Johnny honked again. This time he yelled out the window. "While we're breathing, Adam!"

The back door opened and Adam laid his guitar in and haphazardly threw his clothes in, then climbed up and shut the door. "Sorry, guys, the dishes were really stacked up, I lost track of time."

"You should have been doing laundry, let Amy do the dishes while you're gone," Johnny said, checking the mirror and rashly pulling out into the street before a Honda, which honked. The equipment shifted in the back and Adam lost his balance and fell against the back doors.

"Jesus, Johnny, take it easy," I tried. "I'd like to get out of St. Louis alive and with everything in one piece, right?"

Johnny laughed a short, evil laugh. He looked at me and his smile turned sour. He elongated his syllables. "Sorry."

"Amy doesn't do the dishes on Tuesdays." Adam had regained his balance and made his way onto the rear bench seat. "We divide up the chores."

"You two are way to fucking cutesy and domestic," Johnny said. He pulled onto the highway and in a few minutes of reverent silence (you don't talk through a live recording of Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused" which had just started playing after The Cure) we were at the loft, which was close enough to the brewery that it almost always smelled of hops or barley. Not that any of us minded. Ryan was waiting for us, duffel bag in hand. We pulled up in front of the building.

"Running late, I see," he said as he lifted himself in through the side door and set his bag on the ground. "For a change," he added. I looked at Johnny, who was looking at Ryan in the rear view mirror, and I turned around to look at Ryan.

"Don't blame me," Johnny said defensively."

"Nobody was," Ryan said.

"No, that's bullshit; it's always my fault and I know that, but this time it's not. Ask Adam."

Adam leaned forward. "It's true. I had to do the dishes."

Ryan shrugged and put on a pair of sunglasses. "That's fine, Adam. I forgot it was a Tuesday."

Johnny broke a rule and turned the stereo off before the end of a Bob Dylan song. "What? So uncool! Every time, no matter what excuse I have, if I'm making us run late, you jump down my throat!"

"Johnny-" Ryan tried to say, but could get no further.

"But Adam or Elliot has an excuse and it's all, 'I understand guys. It's the third Wednesday of an even numbered month during a leap year, it could happen to anybody.' How do I get that kind of credibility?"

"Be on time, almost all the time," I said. He paused. "I know, right? The treatment sounds worse than the disease." Johnny shot daggers from his eyes at each of us in turn, faced the road and turned the radio back on. He pulled away from the curb.

"Johnny," Ryan said again, "I was trying to say that it's okay, this time, because even if you had been on time, we can't leave yet. We have to go to Eddie's."

"What for?" I asked, as Johnny maneuvered the van around a left turn.

"I'm picking up Tess."

The brakes squealed lightly as Johnny came to an abrupt stop at a red light. "Tess?" Adam asked in the following silence.

"That's what I said."

"You're bringing Tess?" I asked.

"Yes."

The first time Ryan saw Tess was at Eddie's Guitars on Manchester. This was before Adam had joined the band, and Johnny did the singing. We were all there, and though all three of us saw Tess and recognized how beautiful she was, she affected Ryan in a different way. We were fifteen, maybe sixteen, only there to buy picks and strings for an upcoming show, and while Johnny and I decided to leave and get some lunch, Ryan opted to stay behind. "So we can get acquainted," he said, motioning to Tess, who was behind him at that point. He had only taken his eyes off of her long enough to acknowledge that we were leaving and to let us know he wasn't joining, then his attention was once again riveted on her. Craig, the guy at the counter, merely nodded his head at this.

"She's good looking for sure," he said. "But not to everybody. She's charmed quite a few guys come in here. Ryan's a little young, but, well, I don't know. She may be twice his age, but they do look...nice together." We agreed, but left to get lunch anyway.

Ryan kept going back, some weeks he'd be there every other day just to see her, to be with her. We started to worry. He even showed up late for practice one day. He barged in half an hour late, which was a problem back then because we used my father's basement to rehearse in, but when my father came home we had to stop. Time was precious. Ryan was excited, though.

"You guys; I wrote this song today," he said. "At Eddie's. Tess totally inspired me." This was the first time Johnny or I had heard the name. We liked it, but we liked the song even better. That was the birth of "Welcome to the Ballroom," the song which Johnny calls our panty melter and which my father referred to the week he died as a hymn for the Church of Rock.

After a month of Ryan visiting Tess at the guitar store, he came to practice one day with her. We were amazed. We needed to know why, and how he was able to manage it.

"I've just had my eye on her for a while, you know," he said later. "And I was in yesterday, and noticed somebody else eyeballing her. It was Eric, that terrible guitar player from that terrible ska band we played with at The Hi-Pointe. I wasn't going to let that happen."

We liked having her around; she had a good voice and was beautiful and somehow gave us a little credibility. If we came to a show and the manager thought we looked a little young and started trying to back out of the show, all Ryan would have to do is grab Tess. One look at her, and it was almost instant; if we had Tess with us, we were real musicians.

The problems started, though; she'd get trashed in the middle of a show and embarrass us. Once she fell apart onstage in the middle of one of the more quiet parts of the very song she had inspired. Similar things began happening when Ryan would bring her to rehearsals. The last tour she came on with us, she came completely undone onstage and we were almost asked to leave a club in Boston.

These are the points I tried to make as Johnny drove us on surface streets (which I know he had done to buy me time) towards Eddie's. Ryan would not be gainsaid.

"Look, if you look at the law of averages," Ryan said, "she's due. She's been a problem at every show she's been to in the last three years, but I've taken care of everything with that, so she should be perfectly okay this time."

"That's only sort of a good point. I could use the same argument and say that she's ruined every show she's been to in the last three years, so the law of averages states that she'll probably be a problem this time."

"I agree with the drummer," Johnny said, and we knew he was serious. Johnny never referred to us by name when discussing matters of utmost import to the band.

"Me too," Adam said. His arms were crossed in the rear seat.

Ryan looked desperately for an ally, but he had none in the van. "Come on guys." He looked up and must have noticed Johnny driving conservatively. "Hurry up; they close at five, that's in like five minutes. And I promise, this time, it will be different. Band vote?"

We nodded our agreement for the band vote. "Good. I vote yes," Ryan said.

"No," Johnny said.

"Abstain," Adam said. Ryan and I turned to look at him. Johnny joined us as he pulled to a line of stuck traffic. "What? This is a thorny issue. I love Tess, I do. I think she could be very good for the morale of the band, but she doesn't have the best track record. So abstain."

The traffic was moving again as Ryan and Adam looked to me. "Elliot?" Johnny asked, looking at the road ahead. I joined him to give myself something to look at while I contemplated which member of the band I most wanted to be murdered by that night.

"Fine. Johnny, get us to Eddie's." I heard Ryan give a triumphant "yes" under his breath. "But," I continued. "But...one slip up. One embarrassing moment. She's gone."

"Agreed," Johnny said through gritted teeth.

"Acceptable," Adam said.

"Agreed, then!" Ryan nearly shouted. He looked very pleased.

We arrived at Eddie's just before it closed. "I'll run in and get her, then we can get on the road," Ryan said, flinging the door open and jumping out. He ran into the store.

Johnny turned the music up. "Riders on the Storm" seemed to seep from the speakers and hang above our heads in the van, ominous and foreboding. A minute later, Ryan skipped happily out the door of the shop, holding tightly to Tess. Together they skipped to the back, where he opened the door for her and picked her up, set her neatly next to the other guitars. He climbed in behind her and shut the door.

"She looks so good with the brass colored strings; it matches the volume knobs. So exciting!"

"What was she in the shop for?" I finally asked.

"New pickups, adjustment on the truss rod, the trim around the edge was coming up a bit by the neck pocket, and I got the output rewired." He giggled and carefully lifted Tess out of her case.

I had to admit, as I looked at her lit from the sunlight slanting into the driver's side windows, for a forty year old hollow body electric twelve string, she was incredibly beautiful.

===

Are We Lost Yet?

It was Gertrude Stein, supposedly, who coined the phrase "Lost Generation" to describe those men and women of the world who came of age and fought through The Great War. Of course, they're also known for living through the Great Depression and then the Second World War, some of them even making it all the way to the moon landing.

And then it was the character Tyler Durden who said of Generation X (and I'm using the movie as the quote source), "We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." And he was right about them. They came of age after the tumult of the 60's, after the disaster of Vietnam. They came of age during the Cold War, during the 80's when music was either overproduced or totally raw, when yuppies were using cocaine and Reagonomics reigned.

So who are we? Are we lost?

We don't have a great war, either. Only the war on terror. In a way, I guess it's more like the Cold War than either World War; it creates global tensions and is a fight over ideologies, though not exactly political ideologies on both sides. Except it's dragging on, like Vietnam (which is a hot part of the Cold War). But whatever.

We also don't exactly have a great depression. Except, what are we in?

Like Generation X, we were made promises. But our promises seemed more realistic on the surface; we didn't all expect to become rock stars (although with reality TV and youtube it's easier than ever for some unknown to become known), but we were given a very simple recipe for success.

"Go to college, get a bachelor's degree, and when you graduate you can get a nice office job at the very least and have the life you want." Then when we started graduating, that happened. And we very easily bought houses, nice cars, giant televisions and Playstations and laptops and iPods.

But now what?

Ten per cent unemployment? I know they keep saying that we're going to hit that soon. But I have news; we're well beyond it. That unemployment rate you hear them talk about on the news, that's a number that is arrived at very carefully. Nine and a half per cent of the employable population currently receives unemployment insurance. That doesn't count the unemployed who never filed for benefits. It doesn't count the people who were laid off and applied for benefits and didn't receive them. It doesn't count the people who applied, received, and then ran out of benefits without finding a job (many of whom are in such despair they have stopped searching for jobs).

And it doesn't count the millions of college graduates who followed that simple advice of going to college, getting their bachelor's degree with the ultimate goal of gainful employment, and then were unable to get hired. You can't apply for unemployment benefits if you never had a job.

A friend of mine who graduated in May 2008 has been looking for a job since then. Last week, I went to the Whitaker Music Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens with a group of eight people, all of whom are either in college now or have graduated in the last five years. Only two of us had jobs. Two are still in school, three graduated and haven't been able to find jobs, and one was laid off five months ago and hasn't had so much as an interview in all that time.

Each time I think of the Lost Generation, I think of them gathering at cafes in Paris, drinking heavily, maybe to forget their reason for being lost. Perhaps that is what sets our generation apart from theirs; when we drink, we're hopeful. We toast, to the future. To what it may hold. We're waiting to be handed the reins, to shoulder the responsibility of running the world. Maybe we are drinking to forget. We're trying to forget the fact that while we hope someday to inherit stewartship of this planet, so few of us are in a position to even get a glimpse of what that may be like. They keep shutting us out.

I guess we'll all run to grad school, get our PhDs, and wait for the current leaders to fix things up for us. But let's not do that. We want a shot at helping. Somebody give us a chance. Otherwise, we'll be woefully underprepared to take over when those of us who have been where we want to go start leaving.

The Long Awaited (and delayed) Post

Well, my teacher called class a little early, because all he had left on the agenda was to screen a film he wrote that went to sundance called Dopamine, and there wasn't enough time to do so.

I am going to just do a brief little "New Years Resolutions" deal here, not recap the ones I didn't keep from last year. I have more important things to blog about tonight.

So, this year I resolve to graduate. I resolve to get on my bike at least once. I resolve to write as much over Spring Break as I will have been doing all semester (with playwriting and scriptwriting [two totally different classes; playwriting is plays and scriptwriting is actually screenwriting] it should be quite a large amount). I resolve to love more, dislike less, try new things, spend more quality time with my wife and our family (both at home with the cats and the extended groups), cook more often (because I love to cook and haven't done enough of it in the last two and a half years), publish, make contacts, sell myself as a writer. I resolve to be Elliot M. Rauscher, writer.

I want to talk about the writing process, and two pieces I wrote in the last year and a half that I think truly are me, one hundred percent, through and through. These pieces that grew from the mind but evolved from the heart, while growing from the heart and evolving from the mind. What I mean by that is that, well, I have written a great deal from my heart in the past, but my heart has always been on my sleeve whilst doing so. I have also written a great deal from my mind, which has proven ill-fated and hard to read later when I can't figure out where my sentences were going and why they took so long to get to nowhere (kinda like this sentence which I have extended even longer with the parenthetical). What I learned while writing these two pieces is that you shouldn't write from just the heart or just the mind, but both. Let the heart kick the mind up, let the mind ground the heart in reality.

These pieces-and I have excerpts of both of them on here and I'll link to them at the bottom of this post-are similar in subject matter, but approach them differently. It's sad to say that they both deal with death, which is odd, because I have the good fortune of not having dealt with much death in my life. Three of my four grandparents are dead, one of them before I was even born. It was difficult when Granny Rauscher died suddenly, but it was even more difficult six years later to watch Grandpa Rauscher die slowly. I've had three pets that I held very dear to my heart die in the last eight years; one unexpectedly, one slowly and in great comfort (I like to think that the morning she died, the last thing she did when my father picked her up was purr), and one in the cold, clinical fashion most of our pets leave the world. But this is all normal; pets do not live forever; they get old or their adventurous attitude catches up with them. Grandparents die. Parents die, too, and so do children, and brothers and sisters and friends and enemies. People die. This is nothing new. What could I possibly have to say of any value, of any profound consequence, on the subject of death? It's a theme writers and philosophers have dealt with for centuries.

But I tackled it, as I said, from the heart and from the mind. My first drafts were, however, not done correctly. The first of these two pieces, a play, I began writing upon hearing of the death of a friend I hadn't seen in four years. It was too much to tackle at that point, and it poured out of my heart and came out on the page splotchy, bloody, raw, but not emotionally raw; melodramatically raw. Not the good kind of raw. It started with the protagonist (loosely based on your heroic writer) receiving a hand-addressed letter (how romantic, no?) informing him of his friend's death. Only, the audience does not know the nature of the news. It sent the character into a spiral of self-pity and then, lo and behold the (as-of-yet unrevealed to the audience) dead friend arrives. Clearly, it is all in the protagonist's head.

So I put it down for four months and worked on another play, Spice (and more on that in a moment). I thought a lot about what my friendship with this person had been, had meant. I read up a lot on what projects he was working on before he died, as he had been a terrific actor. Lots of people had a lot to say about him online in tribute groups on facebook. And in a way, reading all of that and thinking hard about him made me remember more of our friendship, insignificant as it truly was. And it got me to thinking about how lives cross paths at all kinds of angles, acute and obtuse and right and sometimes they run parallel and bend together for a short while. About how no life is really a straight line, lived from start to finish. It bends, it circles, it splits in two at times. And I wrote The Last Thing.

The second piece is sort of the opposite; I had this idea for writing about a band, traveling to their last gig because they've had it with life as an unsuccessful local band. It was partially inspired by the second ever free-write Friday about Joe Dubinsky. But I had all this stuff in my head about music, and about a band, and it all came out on the page. Actually, nothing about death in the traditional sense, merely the death of a certain musical act, which can seem like a death (believe me).

But as I said, I wrote this one from the mind, not releasing my passion for music, just some technical jargon. Which is not to say it didn't have any heart in it; the friendships were written with heart, because I had learned that with The Last Thing. But in a sixteen page story, three pages with heart do not equal anything good. This story was called "North for Salvation" and, while parts of it were good, it fizzled for me with every read.

So I got to thinking about death again as I was redrafting, thinking about it because I felt mortality creeping up on everybody I know; not morbidly, not immediately, but I feel the steady drumbeat of time, and it dawned on me that each second passed is a second less to live than a second ago. Now, this could cause some heavy breathing and angst amongst some people, so instead of dwelling on this, I just let it happen to one of my characters. Not the angst, but the final passing second. My main character's father passed away. It got me to thinking of what I would do if I were that person; how does one cope with that? It's not the same as a cat. It can be the same as a grandparent, but for me it would be more immediate. There's a generational buffer between us and our grandparents. There is no such buffer between ourselves and our own parents.

Suddenly, I found the heart of the story. Not to keep saying heart, but I found it when I started writing from the heart. The result is something more profound than four guys riding in a van trying to live out their last rock 'n' roll glory. The result is called "Before Rock Attained Perfection."

Anyway, these are the two pieces I am currently going to push forth as the heavy artillery in my arsenal. The Last Thing is very nearly polished to perfection; "Rock" still needs work but it is getting there. These are the works that are going to go out to contests, magazines, etc.

You can find the excerpt from The Last Thing here. Currently, no excerpt of "Before Rock Attained Perfection" can be found on this blog. However, you can find an excerpt from the original draft of "North for Salvation" here.

And now, to other business. Remember the debacle that was Surfacing Emerging Playwrights Festival 2008? Well, it's back, but this time in better hands. In fact, it's in the hands of the same person who rescued it from oblivion last year. And this year, rather than being commissioned to write a piece and guaranteed a spot regardless of the crap I turn out, I opted to submit work and hope for the best. I actually submitted three pieces: the aforementioned The Last Thing, a dramedy set in a restaurant called The Office Bar and Grill, and a romantic comedy entitled Spice (no excerpt posted [and none forthcoming, read on]). I had hope for The Last Thing, knew that The Office Bar and Grill was a long shot, and I submitted Spice because I knew it would play well onstage and fit in very well because there are moments of absurd comedy played against the reality of a young couple falling for each other over Thai food. I was originally going to suicide submit just The Last Thing, but Surfacing is known for selecting plays with parts for both men and women, hence the other two.

Anyway, I received confirmation last week that Spice has been selected this year! And the best part is that I won't have to direct it! Which is a big relief, because that was very time consuming and stressful. I had offered to direct a play if none of my written work was selected, and you can bet your last dollar I was doing my best to will fate to select a play so I wouldn't have to direct. I would have taken the director's chair for a play, if needed; you can't renege on a promise once you've made it, unless of course it's a promise to be more of a consistent blogger...

Well, there you have it. My long silence is broken.

I would like to take a second to ask for a moment of blog silence, to mourn the dismantlement and removal of Gerald's blog turbochubs. He assures us he will come back some day, showcasing his amazing skills of an artist. Yes, I said skills of an artist. Ten points to anyone who can recognize that reference.

Laying it On The Line

I am back on anti-depressants.

Some of you may not know that I was ever on them in the first place. Well, not in the first place. The first place was an apartment on Dale Avenue, and we moved out when I was three months old.

No no, I went on anti-depressants when I was nineteen and in danger of flunking out of college (which, eventually, did happen), and at the time I was willing to try them. It worked a bit. It helped. But after a while, I didn't like how I felt. My range of emotion was diminished. In the depths (but I don't want it to sound like they were very deep depths, because my depression was classified as "subclinical"), I was churning out between two and eight pages of writing a day. And looking back on some of it, it was emotionally raw and laced with irony and pessimism. Anger, too. Baffled confusion at a world gone mad, and me without a place in it. The medication killed the feelings. And the pages.

This time, I have not been very prolific in my pages leading up to this moment, this opening of the container and washing down the first pill moment. I've just been stressed and unhappy, but erratically so. Manic, they used to call it. Bipolar some people would say. No. Not that far. I went to the same doctor. He didn't remember me, and I remember his accent being not quite as thick. He classified me again as "Subclinical" which is a term for depression that is borderline, easily manageable but often more disruptive than full blown depression. I think last time he hit, this time he may have missed. Maybe he hit, just less solidly.

Why would I tell everybody something so personal?

A year ago last week, a good man died. He once said "There's no freedom unless you're vulnerable first." This is me being vulnerable. Being free. I just took my third pill (no no, no...I didn't just take three in a row, I got them on Monday), washed it down with the last of the Tropicana OJ, the healthy heart with Omega 3 (so I don't have to take fish oil pills), and sat down to compose this post. My cat is drinking water from his bowl, and it's time to feed him for the evening, take the trash out, and settle into bed for a little Silverblatt Chapters 10-11, Media Literacy worksheet, cuddling, and eventually, sleep. The most sought-after side-effect that I remember having from taking these the first time was that I could sleep at night. I'm looking forward to that. That's about it though.

I keep my antidepressants together; in fact, the first pill I took on Monday got washed down with my other antidepressant. I keep the pills behind the canister my coffee beans are in. I find it hilarious, the juxtaposition of these two things, but yet the power. My coffee is whole bean, organic, fair-trade. Grind it up, brew it, drink it. My pills are processed to the hilt. Developed and manufactured in a lab. Do not crush. Take whole. Yes, I started drinking coffee. A habit I am comfortable picking up. I tried smoking again. Go ahead, Mom. Call me out on it. I already called myself out. Stupid thing to do. Won't happen again. Coffee I can handle. Cigarettes belong in a fantasy version of me, the one that gets to stand in Humphrey Bogart's trench coat and punch Peter Lorre in the face with his own gun. Coffee I can handle. I have a flask. I've never used it. I don't plan on it. Cigarettes give you a light-headed buzz because they deprive you of oxygen. Alcohol impairs your ability to drive, rationalize, think, and is also a depressant. Seems like a bad idea to supplement antidepressants with booze. The drowsy eye alcohol warning should not be misconstrued as a winking eye alcohol suggestion (anyone? anyone? reference?). But coffee...coffee makes you jittery and gives you energy. It elevates the heart rate in an overabundant quantity, which I have not done since the day I found out the coffee stand in the St. Paul student center accepted flex dine (I drank FIVE chai tea lattes that day. the big ones). It is a vice that is acceptable. And, like the alcohol I restrict myself to (mostly), I have standards. That is why my coffee is organic, fair trade, whole bean. It meant I had to buy a grinder. It means I will eventually want to buy a new coffee maker. But it's there. And I use it.

To close, I will give you the lyrics to a favorite song of mine.

My antidepressant
Hope-giving Holy Mud.
If I only, if I
I
Only drink enough!
I can see clear my escape,
I can see into another
Into another state.

From Coffee Girl by MK Ultra (you should totally check them out, along with John Vanderslice)