Free Write Fridays

Sorry to leave everybody hanging...it was a long day at work and I just had to catch a little nap, which turned into going through the bill drawer to file a backlog of stuff that needed to be filed (we're talking maybe 6 months' worth of stuff...) and that turned into eating.

And also, I tried to stick to my guns and pick a suggestion from Wednesday's blog, but the suggestion I got on Tuesday seemed like the best one for a Free Write Friday. I will certainly take notes and jot some ideas down for other suggestions, particularly Grammar Enhancing drugs and why a guy would not tell his deep love of Star Trek...er...deepest darkest secrets until Kathy and I...uh...he and his new wife were on the way from the wedding to the reception. Also, a vanilla flavored jelly bean with a fear of being eaten sounds too complex to be anything less than a feature length screen play. So, with that in mind, here I go.

The Winning Suggestion this week comes from molly:
Short story (b/c I find reading plays annoying)
Joe "Doobie" Dubinsky - 34 y/o male
Wedding band gigs are diminishing and he's contemplating next move.

molly wins a free dinner with me this Sunday.

===

June 8th, 2007

Aaron called Joe Dubinsky from across the stage, as he had so many other nights, to kick off Proud Mary. "Doobie," he said, same inflection, the snare drum catching his voice and making it buzz. "Where've you been? I heard you moved to the citay!" As the vocalist in the band, Aaron pronounced the word 'city' that way whenever he said it or sang it, except when the band played Journey. It registered with Joe, but he didn't care, not like Vanessa, the keyboard player and lead female vocalist. It drove her nuts, and Joe suspected Aaron knew this, and did it intentionally. She ran the band, even though it had been Aaron and Joe who started it, with the help of Greg on guitar and their original drummer, also named Joe. Joe Casmus. He went by the nickname 'Skins' and had left the band all those years ago-Joe tried to remember the intervening sixteen years-just after high school, had gone on to music school, was now playing drums for Chris Isaak's tour. He had actually made it, achieved the dream to a point, even if it was playing in the shadows. Joe Dubinsky would give anything to be playing in those same shadows, even trade playing in the harsh light of the American Legion hall in...somewhere just outside of Minneapolis.

"Me? Yeah, I was in the city," Aaron responded. Greg played the progression, slowly, Vanessa accompanying on keyboard after the first phrase. This was one of the songs that she had fought desperately hard to sing, but in the end had conceded that it belonged to Joe. Not even Aaron would sing it the last time Joe had lost his voice. "I was in the city, but I just couldn't take it." This is not, Joe believed, where Tainted Batteries belonged. That had been the band's name, back in high school, and they played some battles and local hangouts, and when Skins left, they lost their conduit through which they got their gigs. Tainted Batteries had been Aaron, Doobie, Greg and Skins to the outside world, but Skins was all there was to the band on the inside of club politics. How much did the band want to get paid? Ask Skins. Where were they playing next weekend? Ask Skins. You wanted to know what the chord progression was, ask Greg. Lyrical question? Ask Aaron. Doobie stood and rocked back and forth, playing his bass. Don't ask him any questions. Anything else, ask Skins. Skins left, and the band nearly fell apart.

It was Greg who brought in Vanessa, the new found love of his life. Her brother filled in on drums, Pete, until he volunteered for the Peace Corps. They went through drummers like Spinal Tap these days. These days that had been going for fourteen years, when Tainted Batteries billed themselves as Heart Beat, a cover band that you wouldn't feel insecure announcing at a wedding. Just as a side gig, so they practiced all the standards, anything any of them could ever remember hearing at a wedding, but they kept playing their original tunes; Killed by Kind Words, Fishnets and Booze, Chronicles of the Loyal Frontiersman, just to name a few. Ask any of them to remember how those songs went, and only Skins could tell you, probably. Aaron, Doobie and Greg had long since given up hope, had put Tainted Batteries to rest. Vanessa had always added little to their existing repertoire, but had contributed a flagship gem, The Pocket Glove, which they had only played once live before the band became a strict wedding band. Now, each had separate lives and worlds in which they lived. Aaron, Greg, Doobie and Skins had lived for the band. Had lived by the band. Now Greg balanced a career in retail management with a precarious family life, including a fifteen year old daughter in trouble with the law. Aaron was a software engineer and stayed in Heart Beat out of sentiment. Doobie waited tables six nights a week and stocked shelves at a grocery store five days a week.

Doobie kicked in his bass, their drummer (their previous drummer's seventeen year old son who had a knack for rhythm but no dynamic range other than extra loud) started in with the repetitive 'chk-chk-chk-chk' of the hi-hats and the slap of rim knocks. "What are you going to do now, Doob?" Aaron asked, cradling the tambourine behind his back. Doobie began singing. "Left a good job in the city, workin' for the man every night and day..."

Aaron added his low "Rollin'" when required to, the song came to a slow halt, and the drummer did the kick in a way that would have made Skins cringe; too loud, too fast, too sloppy, too predictable. Doobie could hear Skins saying this in his mind. The band jumped in perfectly, the sync-unit that had at one time been Tainted Batteries needing little practice to maintain locked in to each other, and the song got into it's groove. This song kills at a wedding reception.

They always took a break after this song, and while Greg kept an eye on the number of trips their drummer took to the open bar, Aaron, with two open beers in hand, approached Doobie as he sat eating his lukewarm chicken dinner.

"Good set tonight, Joe." He sat down.

"Yeah. I guess." Joe toyed with his chicken, not wanting to starve and not wanting to eat it either.

"Everything alright, man? You're playing well and everything, but your eyes, man...it's like they're looking at something on the other side of the wall." Aaron handed over a bottle, and Joe took it without taking a sip.

"I got a letter from Skins," Joe said.

"Who?" Aaron asked, idly perusing the youngest bridesmaid, easily no older than 19.

"Joe Casmus. Remember, the drummer for Tainted Batteries?"

"Oh, shit, Skins! Wow. I haven't called him that...well, I haven't seen him since he graduated from Berklee or wherever he went."

"Berklee, yeah."

"Yeah. How is he?"

"On tour with Chris Isaak. He says their bass player isn't working out, and that they're coming through Minneapolis in a couple weeks. The fourteenth, I think. He sent me three tickets, wanted me to invite you and Greg."

Aaron mused on this thought. "Don't we have a gig?"

"This is our first gig in two months, man. Look, I know you and Greg are doing alright, but this gig money is pretty much how I keep gas in my car and food in my stomach. I've eaten nothing but Ramen and leftover baked potatoes from the restaurant for the last three weeks. I don't have money to go to concerts, and we don't have gigs to interfere. They're backstage passes and the price is right. Let's go see our old friend."

Aaron gave Joe a hard look. "Why did he tell you the bass player isn't working out?"

"He wants me to try out!"

"Did he say that? In his letter?"

Joe faltered. "Well, no, he didn't...look, it's a longshot but..."

"But nothing, Joe." Onstage he was Doobie, but it had been years since Aaron had used the nickname in public. "Didn't you respond to an ad last year in the City Pages for a musician wanted thing?"

"Yeah," Joe put up his defenses, knew what was coming.

"And didn't you pretty much make a fool of yourself?"

It was true; fourteen years as a wedding band musician had pushed the creativity and flexibility from his fingers. He went to the audition, played a few tunes for the band, was asked to jam and fell into the bass riff for We Are Family. He pushed the thought from his mind with a heavy sip of beer. "I didn't know those guys. I know Joe. It's Skins, man...you remember how it used to be? He and I could just jam for hours, start with one thing, take it in a dozen directions over the course of two hours, and come right back where we started, full blast, no need to review what we had done, and just power through. Man it was...electric. It was...awesome. Dare I say, phenomenal. I should have gone with him, think of the team we'd be today. We'd be...unstoppable!"

Aaron frowned, downed the rest of his beer. Vanessa was already back on stage, beckoning Greg and the drummer from the bar, where Greg was arguing with the bartender to take it easy on the kid. Their break would be over as soon as their CD they had piped into the PA system got through Paradise by the Dashboard Lights. "Do you really think that Joe Casmus, the backing drummer, is going to have that much say about who gets to play bass for Damien Rice."

"Chris Isaak."

"Whoever." The back-and-forth was playing, the speakers announcing that it was long ago and far away and so much better than it is today, and that it never felt so good, it never felt so right. Aaron stood. "Come on, we'd better get back up there."

"Not unless you promise me you'll go to the concert. Come on...he's our friend."

"No. He's our old bandmate. The one that got out and does it for a living. The one we haven't heard from in twelve years, until now that he's able to flaunt it back in his hometown he's going to rub it in our faces." With that, Aaron marched to the stage.

Joe sat there for a few minutes more, while Greg tuned up and the drummer fiddled, playing louder now than he had behind the band. Vanessa was quiet, and Joe knew that if he looked she would be boring holes into his skull with her eyes. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the letter from Skins, the letter he had been carrying for three days, and read the sentence he had underlined.

"I think we're about to fire our bass player, but other than that, the tour is going really well, and I think you should definitely come to the concert when we're playing the Excel Energy Center on July 14th." Joe put the letter back in his pocket and turned to the stage, walking up the short steps and strapping his bass to his body.

"Well gee, Doobie, I thought you weren't coming back there!" Aaron said, and the reception guests laughed politely. The bride and groom were nowhere to be seen, long gone and probably already upstairs in their hotel room. "This one's an important tune," Aaron spoke to the audience now. "Grab somebody special, pull them in close and do what the music tells you." While the people scrambled in pairs to the dance floor, the band prepared to launch themselves once more. Doobie reached into his pocket one last time, and clenched the letter, removing his hand and placing it on his fretboard at the last possible moment before Aaron said what Doobie really wanted to.

"You know you make me wanna SHOUT!"

===

Oh man, that was fun! Let's do it again! Let's do it again!

Actually, I would like to dedicate this to the Best Man at my wedding, Zach Hartwig. We were that rhythm section once, the interlocked bass and drums. And this was kind of a cathartic sort of emotional release. Also, to Will Wilcox, who came closer to making it than any of the rest of us...well, you guys both rock, and I'm glad we got to make some music together. And I'm very glad we didn't turn into Heart Beat.

Call For Submissions!

Ahem...I would like to ask my readers to begin contributing for this week's Free Write Fridays.

There seems to be a bit of confusion about this, so let me just explain:

I will post on Wednesdays, usually doing something other than explaining the procedures like I'm doing now...you know, like a "This is how revising works" or a "boy, editors can go screw themselves" or a "Hey, sa-weet, I got an interview at Master File on Tuesday morning, it's sounding promising and like it may work well with my school schedule next semester, tan-fastic!" followed by an explanation, rounding off with a concluding statement, then a PS in which I will ask for suggestions for that week's Free Write Friday.

Understand that at some point I intend to recieve several more than three suggestions per week, and I would like to be able to go to one place to find them, rather than to the comments sections for a couple of different posts for the suggestions.

Basically, what I am saying is, hold your suggestions until I ask for them. It may even come to pass that there will come a week in which I will not be doing a Free Write Friday (I'm looking at the last weekend in June, which may be free of all regular blog features...I'll do a clip show or rerun a classic or something), so don't jump the gun...MOTHER...although I liked your suggestion.

So yes. That is how things work around here, and I apologize, I should have made that more clear.

Hey, Steve from Master File called me today and I've got an interview scheduled for Tuesday Morning. Woot!

Please leave your FWF suggestions on this post.

So Long, and Thanks!

Tuesday Excerpts

Hello loyal reader(s), and welcome to another edition of Tuesday Excerpts.

Today, I am going to do two things I probably won't do very often on Tuesdays. Instead of posting just an excerpt, I am going to post the whole thing...and instead of posting a work of pure creative writing, I am going to post something I wrote for my media production class.

You may remember my Shoe Thief video...that was made in this class. It also sparked a nice long blog dry spell, so we'll mention it no more. But no, for the class I had to go see one of the Webster University Film Series shows, and since the Schlafly Bottleworks Film series is part of that, that's where I went, and this is what I wrote...and how I got an A.

===

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rutles!

Having considered myself not the typical American moviegoer for all of my natural life, it is fair to assume that I am among those few (yet yearly growing) folks in this country that doesn’t mind good British humor, especially if that humor is coming from a Monty Python Alum, such as the inscrutable Eric Idle. That having been said, this was my first full, start-to-finish, not-on-Comedy-Central viewing of his Mockumentary The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. I’m not proud.

But the lure of the best beer (yes, the BEST BEER) brewed in St. Louis was more than enough to get me out to the Schlafly Bottleworks Wednesday, February 7th to attend the Strange Brew: Cult Films festival. Originally tempted by beer and the MacKenzie Brothers, I was not disappointed.

The approach used for The Rutles is a distinctive dry British take on the documentary genre. While the basic idea behind such similar films as This Is Spinal Tap! and A Mighty Wind has been to make fun on the screen but not fun of the screen, within the first five minutes Eric Idle is chasing his cameraman down the street while still delivering the back story of the film’s ultimately ill-fated heroes. From the deadpan interjections of Idle as the narrator to the eerily familiar mockery of The Beatles’ rise and fall, the film is ultimately more serious and sillier than anything else like it.

Interspersed amongst these fabricated antics are included several pieces of archival footage, most notably of Ed Sullivan announcing The Beatles as they appeared on his television program for the first time; however (and this is where we have to remember that this film was produced in 1978 and not 2007) an awful job is done overdubbing “The Rutles” over “The Beatles.” Another problem with this use of archival footage is the continuity; we are led to believe that the shots of fan reaction (taken from Beatles concerts) and the shots of the band performing (Idle again, playing the Paul McCartney figure known as Dirk McQuickly along with fellow fake-band mates) are to be continuous, but the quality of film is noticeably incongruent. Idle had this cleaned up by the supposed 1965 footage of the Rutles concert at “Che” Stadium (the name of which the narrator attributes to the famous South American revolutionary Che Stadium), which uses footage from the Beatles Shea Stadium performance of the same year.

There is not much technically fancy to look at in this film; it was produced for the small screen, and truly all that works on the big screen are the jokes. Still, as we all know who The Beatles are, I now know who The Rutles were. Fans of The Beatles were, it seems, dismayed at this film when it was first released. The songs performed by The Rutles are fraternal twins to songs we all know by The Beatles, and the story arc of their rise and fall is a hilarious send-up: The Rutles were signed because they wore tight trousers, got in trouble for claiming to be better than God (McQuickly insists he meant Rod Stewart, who would not become popular for nearly ten years after the supposed remark), excessive Tea use and personal and creative tensions within the band, thrown into conflict by the sudden and unexpected removal of their manager to a teaching position in Australia (bigger than Jesus? Drug use? Manager suicide?). I do not think the filmmakers had any ill intent, but rather with their treatment of the story they seem to pay homage to The Beatles.

Cameos included Mick Jagger speaking of how bad The Rutles were and how much he wished his band were as big as they were and Paul Simon discussing how he was influenced by The Rutles (meaning, how he used to get stoned and listen to “Sgt. Rutter’s Only Darts Club Band”).

It’s a good enough film for sitting around and drinking a few beers on a Wednesday night. It may not have the draw for an American audience that a film like This is Spinal Tap or even Stuck on You for that matter because the humor is just different, but I found it satisfying. Or maybe that was just the beer.

===

A metaphor is like a simile. -Author Unknown

Teach Him To Play Monopoly, Not to Sing In The Rain: or; I Run, I Run So Far Away, I Run, I Run Both Night And Day

So the second title for today's blog is the more pertinent to the topic, but I am currently listening to Thick As a Brick by Jethro Tull (not the Agricultural Revolutionary but the Flute Rock Band) and I knew my mother would be more apt to read this if she recognized the enigmatic lyric.

No, really, I ran. Yesterday, I mean. For those of you who have kept up with me (or have spent any amount of time with me at all), you know that I don't so much run as I Ride My Bicycle. But yesterday was a fluke (not to be confused with a flute, see Jethro Tull above).

I work overnight every other Saturday, superficially to set the ad signs but pragmatically to earn an extra dollar per hour for an 8+ hour shift. It's a trade-off...I can work for a dollar extra during a shift without people shopping in the store, but I have to stay up all night to do it. Anyway, so, worked overnight, came home and slept for a few hours, then finally Kathy got me up out of bed and out the door to do some shopping...you know, the boring, every day kind, the "Hey, I'm out of deoderant and razor blades and also I think we need a new furnace filter" variety of shopping. The standard kind of shopping that becomes routine when you settle down, get married, buy a house, and decide you can't go spend money on things like a new car or a dozen DVDs in one fell swoop.

When we were done shopping, we had almost two hours before dinner with my parents, a weekly Sunday tradition. So what did we do? Nap? Shave and make ourselves smell good? Nope. Kathy wanted to do something active, and I felt lethargic enough to agree, so we were going to go for a walk along Grant's Trail. Well, except, Kathy threw on her rollerblades. I do not have any of those, and putting the bike rack on my car would have been a lengthier process than normal because I haven't actually sized it to fit on the Jetta, especially since we bought those dozen movies last weekend and have spent all our free time watching those.

So, instead, I jumped into a pair of running shorts, white tee, and the closest thing to running shoes I have. And I ran a mile.

Today, I have a dull pain in my right shin, and my Osgood Schlatter's in my knees feels like it never went away...but other than that, hell, I ran a mile! You know when the last time I ran a mile was? 9th grade, when I did that four hour workout for the track team before going to New Orleans. And when I got to N'Awlins, I couldn't hardly walk around the French Quarter because my knees hurt so bad. That's when I found out I had Osgood Schlatters, and also just about the time I decided riding a bike was more my thing.

But the fact remains that I ran, and that is something those who have known me for a long time will find shocking. My bike, sitting in my garage collecting dust, while I am yet out doing something active. Wha?

Thanks to Melissa and Molly for their F.W.F. suggestions. I'll ask for new ones Wednesday or Thursday and I hope I just get more and more. This blog is actually starting to take off!

I should think of some unique way to sign off my blog every day. You know, like Edward Murrow's "Good Night, and Good Luck," or "From New York, I'm Tom Brokaw," or "Stay Tuned for Last Call With Carson Daly Bye Everybody BYE!"

Yeah. Something cool.

Free-Write Fridays

Alright. Keep in mind this is my first try...and while Melissa's suggestion was exactly what I was looking for, my mother's suggestions were either humiliatingly useless because I already used it for real, or intensely grotesque (can any one say "Psychic Stick?"), so, having been rattled by that one, I'm going to attempt my first Free Write Friday. Maybe some day I will come up with a prize for if I pick your suggestion. Like, I'll help you load an old softlines rack into your Saturn. That sounds like a good prize for this week.

This week's winning suggestion comes from Melissa:

Short story, an older man, is afraid (I'll let your creativity come up with a reason why!) of his Nintendo Funbox.

Melissa wins the aforementioned help loading a softlines rack into a Saturn Vue.

===

June 2007

It sat there, this little white rectangular wedge, and it perturbed him to no end. It wasn't that he was afraid of technology; not by a long shot. Even at 70, Pat McGinley was no stranger to the modern world. In an era when his grandkids were teaching his own kids how to work their PCs, he was upgrading hardware and software for the software at City Hall. He was an alderman, had been for years, and had noticed in the last two decades that as his peers moved to Florida, into homes or died out, they were replaced by younger people, not unlike he had replaced some old town elder, been on the cutting edge. He was the first on his block to own a color television, and he continued the trend long after his beloved Margaret died of cancer; he was the first to throw out his old analog television for a brand new Sony Hi-def.

No, it wasn't the technology that scared him. Nor was it the price; had he not shelled out over $2000 for the new Xbox 360 just a year before, buying one each for his children and one for himself so the grandkids had something to do when they visited? The week before, he had debated dropping a considerably larger sum on the PS3, but the man at the counter had advised him to wait.

"Come back when we launch the Nintendo," the loud youth with a buzz cut had said. "That's the one you want. I mean, the PS3 is impressive, and the graphics are a sight better than the old PS2, and even tweaked a bit over the 360, but the gameplay hasn't changed since the days of the N64, really."

"Or the Sega Saturn," Pat added, wanting to show that here was no meer old codger; here was a man who knew what it was like. His guilty pleasures had always included an engrossing foray into video gaming since the days of the Atari. Even now, his favorite thing to do after Church on a Sunday was to rip through a couple levels of Grand Theft Auto to blow off some steam.

"But the Wii," continued the clerk at the electronics counter, "is going to revolutionize the way games are played." He went on to explain the innovative new controllers, the ever present online connection, the ability to play your existing Gamecube library (Pat's granddaughter Abby loved Mario Party 6), the capability to download and play games from every Nintendo and Sega system since the NES. This pushed Pat over the brink; his Genesis had broken and he dearly missed Toejam and Earl. He thanked the man and found himself waiting overnight in front of a retailer just to buy this small, innovative device, purchased extra remotes and enough nunchuck attachments, a Wii points card and four classic controllers. He told himself he would not buy them for his grandchildren, yet. They hadn't yet gotten a full year out of the last system he gave them; no, this would be something for him, a novelty to entice his grandchildren, to make them plead, "Mommy, Daddy...let's go to Grandpa's, please?"

He had connected it, he had iserted the provided free game, and had started to play it when something started to nag at him. The people depicted on the screen, the way they were mere triangles stacked on top of each other, with bland, angular features; it wasn't the drop in quality that bothered him. He had seen the video game evolve from Pong to Gears of War and everything in between, but the people in the Wii Sports game started haunting his nightmares more than Mr. Blinky, Bowser or Covenant Death Squads ever could. He woke up in cold sweats, fearing the triangular wrath of his bowling avatar. He just couldn't get the hang of it. His golf skills, which he hadn't used on a real golf course since the release of the Sega Dreamcast, couldn't transfer to the Wii. In high school he had once bowled back-to-back 300 games, but with the remote in his hand he couldn't break 40. It consumed his days. It began to consume his nights.

When his family found him, passed out and dehydrated after four days without having seen hide nor hair of him, they took him to the home, or Florida, or buried him, and into his house moved another family, brash, young, lives stretching out ahead of them...a man and a woman and their six year old girl, all of whom could bowl perfect back-to-back 300 games with a remote in their hand.

===

Alright, that felt good. Not gonna lie. Take that, Nintendo!

...now, somebody buy me a Wii.

Also...I updated my cycling blog for the first time in forever. It's a puny update, really...but puny is exactly how I feel about cycling right now.

An Update on Some Things and a Preview of a Couple New Features!

Well, Friday I e-mailed the president of Master File St. Louis, which as far as I can tell is a legal document service based in Clayton. They need a person to do a bit of research and deliver court documents, and yesterday he e-mailed me back and today I sent him my resume. Check it out! I said I would look for a new job and I'm on it! Go me! Granted, I still have not gotten a new job, nor have I rode my bicycle once since that last [20] time[s] I said I would, but it's only been a [few dozen] week[s] so I don't feel too bad.

I feel just a little uneasy about having sent him an e-mail telling him how detail oriented I can be, then thirty seconds later having to send him another one because I forgot to attach my resume like I said I was going to. Oops. And yes, I am aware of how ironic that was, please stop pointing it out.

Alright, so, from now on I will announce on my blog when I start reading a new book I haven't read before, and the first weekend after I finish it, I will post a review. This is just a way of keeping myself reading as well as flexing my undeveloped and rusty journalism skills. Or, Skeelz, as some people call them. I still call them skills, though.

Another feature I would like to add, though I am not sure how this will work, is something I would like to call Free Write Fridays. I think what I'll do is at some time during the week, I will call for suggestions, and readers can post suggestions as comments on that post. Then, on Friday, I will select one of those suggestions and do a half hour to hour long freewrite right into the blog. We'll see how that works out. So, I'll go ahead and call for the first suggestions for Free Write Fridays!

Some guidelines:

Your suggestions should consist of three parts; type of writing, one character, and a situation. For instance:

Short story, Bob Jones, Lost his wedding ring.
...or...
Play, a UPS delivery man, a suburban hostage situation
...or...
Film script, BBQ master Bobby Slay, getting his ass handed to him by Iron Chef Japanese Masaharu Morimoto

Something along those lines. Okay. suggestion box is opened. And...GO!

Tuesday Excerpts

I had this bizarre dream last night, that I was at a modern art gallery/mall with two guys from my playwriting class, and that we were there meeting with the devil and an ambassador of heaven to discuss terms of selling our souls for success as writers. The devil was willing to give us everything on our list but, obviously, he wanted to take our souls into hell for all eternity. God, it seems, was willing to offer us eternal salvation but little else on our list of demands, so we left without committing to either offer. Odd, I know...partly it's because I was sleeping on my back (due to Acrodyl lying across my stomach) and when I sleep on my back I always have either really strange or really scary dreams. This falls into the strange category. Anyway, I wrote a thirteen page play dialogue, and it's really rough and terribly unfinished at the moment, but nevertheless, I am giving you the opening as today's Tuesday Excerpt.

===

from an Untitled Play, may 2007

PAT, 21, wearing a corduroy jacket, button up white shirt un-tucked and jeans

JOHN, 22, wearing jeans and a Van Halen tee shirt, carries a pen and small notebook in his pocket

ELLIOT, 24, wearing jeans and a black sweater over a pink button down shirt, carries a messenger bag and an open box of chocolates

BUB, the devil

VOG, the Voice of God

Scene opens in a modern art gallery attached to a busy pedestrian mall. Three young men stand alone in the gallery, staring idly at a strangely grotesque sculpture depicting nothing in particular but doing so with definite human forms.

PAT
(glancing at his watch)
When did he say he’d be here?

JOHN
I don’t know, five or so?

PAT
Well it’s almost five thirty now, where the hell is he?

ELLIOT
(picking a chocolate from a Whitman’s Sampler box)
Ha. Good one, Pat.
(John and Pat look at him)
Chocolates?
(offers the box)

PAT
(taking one)
Sure, thanks Elliot.
(pops it into his mouth)
These are damn good. I wonder where he got them?

JOHN
Knowing him, he probably stole them from Straubs.

ELLIOT
He probably gets them for free. Big, influential guy like him. He probably is responsible for the success of the Whitman’s Sampler. He probably came up with the idea of the chocolate box map.

PAT
Now you mention it, probably.
(silence)
This was kind of a strange place to want to meet us, huh?

JOHN
Well, yeah, but don’t let it get to you. I mean, you know why he did it, right? To intimidate us. It’s the kind of thing I would do.
(fond smile)
So like him.

PAT
Hey, John; did you hear Ace of Bass might reuinite?

JOHN
(distracted from his reverie)
So?

PAT
(put off)
I thought you liked them.

JOHN
Just a play, Patrick. Just a play.

PAT
But your title was “This Really Happened.”

ELLIOT
Well, only you and I actually wrote plays that actually happened. And you peed your pants.

PAT
(checking his jeans)
Again?
(silence from both John and Elliot)

JOHN
(closing his eyes in obvious pain)
No, in your play.

ELLIOT
Brilliant.
(enter Bub, unseen by our three heroes)

PAT
(relieved)
Oh, thank God!

BUB
God? God, did you say?
(the three heroes jump, startled, Pat checks the front of his jeans again)
What has God got to do with anything tonight? Surely you don’t intend on letting Him know you’re meeting me?

PAT
Don’t sneak up on a brother like that, Bub!

JOHN
Yeah, that was pretty low and sneaky. And you’re about forty minutes late.

ELLIOT
But thanks for the chocolates.
(lifts up the tray)
I mean...you’ve got to have had something to do with this...there’s a whole other layer of ‘em down here! Nobody came up with that on their own.

BUB
Thank you, yes, that was me. Unfortunately, you know, when other companies caught on, there was no legal recourse for me to stop them from using my ideas...nothing I could do to reap any of their benefit. No, I’m afraid the only person I collected from on that one was my original partner...which is why I started enlisting every lawyer that came across my doorstep to help draft my contracts. Now...gentlemen, shall we get down to business? I’ve rather a busy schedule this evening.

ELLIOT
Contracts, yeah, that’s just what we wanted to talk about. Look, I understand the whole idea and everything, right?
(looks to his friends)

JOHN
Oh, yeah, quite simple in theory, we want success and fortune and only a little bit of fame-

PAT
Don’t forget the women, John. Can’t forget the women.
(wistful look in his eyes)
All the women we could want.

ELLIOT
(impatient)
Hear hear...

JOHN
-and the women, and we get all that in return for our eternal souls, right. But, there’s just a couple of concerns.

ELLIOT
Let’s talk terms and conditions.

JOHN
Let’s talk a service plan.

PAT
Full coverage, like they got on all the new Hyundais.

JOHN
Only way more than one hundred thousand miles.

ELLIOT
Or ten years.

BUB
My friends-

ELLIOT
Just listen, you want our souls or not?

BUB
Of course, but I don’t think you’re really in a position to-

JOHN
To what? Bargain? Like you’re the only person in all of Heaven and Earth interested in collecting souls?

BUB
Well...actually, all of the people in all of Heaven and Earth doesn’t really include me, does it?

PAT
Wait...let me...
(thinks about that one)
My brain hurts.

ELLIOT
Chocolates?
(offers box to Pat)

PAT
Are there any Orange Cremes left?
(takes box, roots around)

===

And there you have it.

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -Mark Twain

I Am Also Not a Chef

But I really mean it. I am not a chef, I'm just kind of a cooking enthusiast. It should say something that my favorite television shows are Arrested Development, Boston Legal, The Simpsons, M*A*S*H and Iron Chef (the original, not Iron Chef America). All these funny, sometimes poignant shows with great writing, great character development, great gags, and...Iron Chef. A cooking competition.

Actually, right now, I am cooking. Well, not right now, really, but I am getting ready to. I'm melting butter to make a cream sauce. But that's not what's important. What's really important is my most favorite room in the house.

It could be the downstairs room, where all the books, and movies are, and the television, and the ping-pong table we never use, and the desk where the desktop computer sits. But it's not. If my favorite room revolved around the computer, my favorite room would change because I am sitting in the dining room writing this, while yesterday's was written from the living room couch, and the previous one from the comfort of my bed. Laptops and wireless internet are two great inventions.

Nor is it the dining room or the bedroom, and not the upstairs living room. Not the guest bedroom either, though the new hardwood floors look great. It is quite definitely not the bathroom. It's not the laundry room, empty/drum/litterbox room, or the garage where I keep my bike.

It's the kitchen. My friend Jenn tells me it's a yuppy kitchen. I call it classic. From the black and white checkered floor to the checkered splashback tile, the glass block window...mm. I love it. Because I love to cook. Which is why today's post is ending so abruptly; butter is melted and cream sauce is waiting to be made.

Discussed in this post:

Revising

It has been said that writing is easy, but that rewriting is hard. This is true.

One of the tricks I've picked up actually has roots in one of the problems I encountered in my writing process.

When I would sit down to write something, it would flow out of me. Words would literally rush from my pen (or fingertips if I was typing), faster than I could even think of what was going on the page. That's how I'd get a rough draft, then a real first draft would come when I'd read it through and make sure it was coherent. It was on the next revision that the problem came in.

When a sentence is sitting there on your computer screen, and you see something wrong with it, it is very easy to delete the problem and correct it. This is the marvel of modern technology. As Martha Stewart would say (if she were a prolific writer), it's a good thing.

But actually, it's not. And here is why. When you start revising like that, a story (or a play, screenplay, novel, even an academic paper of some kind) can take on a choppy sort of a feeling. It's tantamount to a film director shooting the entire film and taking the worst scenes and reshooting them to make the best scenes. The problem arises in the difference in calibre from one section to another. You have, in essence, draft 1.5 instead of draft 2. How does one avoid this pitfall? Actually, I hated the suggestion the first time I heard it. But then I was stuck revising my short story "Momentum" and as a last ditch effort, acted on the suggestion. The suggestion itself? Well...

Take your most current draft and print out a fresh copy of it. Have this copy and any other copies you or any of your peers may have made notations on (I highly reccommend workshopping anyway, for any work of creative writing, because it helps you see and hear your work through another person's eyes and ears), and lay all of them out in front of you. Maybe not all of them...but the ones with the most helpful comments (which does not always include any comments you yourself have made). Open a fresh document (load a fresh sheet in the typewriter/get a fresh pen and some looseleaf (does anybody actually do that anymore (wait, I write in a notebook all the time))), and start writing again from the top. Make the changes as you go. In this way, the revision becomes not just a revision but a rewrite, in both the abstract and physical way. This forces you to iron out any complications that may arise before a problem that add to it, in addition to helping you find any problems you may have otherwise missed by just dropping in and fixing those you saw as glaring.

This isn't always the most time-efficient method of rewriting, but the result is worth the patience. Who knew Mothers were right when they said things like, "Patience is a virtue"? Of course, in some cases, this message came mixed with the image of the mother tearing into a package of Pinwheel cookies on the way home from the grocery store when all you wanted was a handful of Cheez-Its to tide you over until lunch.

And sometimes, you really wish you could rewrite something before somebody reads it.

Tuesday Excerpts

You should all punish me mercilessly for skipping my Monday blog. Seriously.

This excerpt is from a story I wrote fall '05 for my Creative Writing class at Meramec. Based partially in fact, in that I did get pulled over for having a headlight out...twice in the same night, actually...and also there is a guy I went to high school with who got fired from a retail store for stealing lots of stuff. Actually, this is from the story I want to frame and hang (refer to the post about Art from February 17th).

===

from "Headlight" 2005

He was lying on the bench with his face to the wall when I was unceremoniously ushered into the cell. The officer shut the bars with the trademark clang and barked, “You get one phone call. I’ll be right back.”

I sat down on the bench opposite the young man and inhaled the smell of fresh paint. The cell gleamed, and the walls were cool to the touch. I looked out the small window and saw a searing orange street lamp blazing, the light strangely out of place in this clean prison. It looked exactly like prison movie jail cells don’t.

He turned over and glanced at me once, then turned back to the wall. After a few silent seconds, he turned back to me and squinted.

“Colin? Is that you?”

I looked back at him, this short dark haired kid, and recognition dawned on me. “Alex?”

A sly smile crossed his face. He got up from his bench and held out his hand to me. I took it and he attempted an elaborate handshake I couldn’t quite get the hang of on such short notice. He sat down next to me and clapped his hand on my back. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He began cracking the knuckles one by one on his left hand.

I shrugged. “That’s a good question. I got pulled over for having a headlight out and when the guy ran my license plate through, he asked me to come with him. Cuffs, back of the car, it was unpleasant. What are you doing here?”

He raised his eyebrows excitedly, cracked his right-hand knuckles and shook his head quickly. I looked him over; he was wearing khaki pants and a red polo shirt. “Stealing,” he said, “from work. They finally nailed me today with a DVD player in my cart.”

“I vaguely remember you working at some retail store. What was it?”

“Target.”

“Right. Stealing a DVD player?” At that moment, I remembered helping him with geometry when he was a freshman, how he struggled with sine and cosine.

“It’s so easy,” he said, jumping up and walking to the cell door. He walked purposefully, with his head high. He reached the bars and looked out in every direction. A smile blazed across his face as he turned back to face me. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I walked out of there with. The secret is to pile cardboard on top of it, tell them you need boxes to move into a new place or something,” he said in a low voice.

I got up and walked to the back of the cell, facing away from him. I tried to think of something else, something other than how hard he worked on that geometry, trying not to draw a comparison to how hard he seemed to have worked on stealing from his employer. I had to steer the conversation in another direction. This purposeful gait, this bragging about why he was here didn’t sit well. “How’s school?” I asked. I turned to look at him.

“I’ve kind of stopped going last semester. I just got fed up with my bio teacher and really, school interferes with my social agenda.” Alex chuckled lightly, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

===

There you have it, Tuesday Excerpt number 2. Occasionally, I revist something I've written in the past, and give it a quick revision. I'm thinking that will be a good project for the summer, and I may start with this one. Revisions always tend to make me want to write something completely different, just so I don't have to be revising, so that will certainly help get the creative juices a-flowing.

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." -E.L. Doctorow

Friday and Weekend Blog Combined...This Week Only.

I promise, I will be better about this.

I sort of ran out of time Friday, with Kari coming into town and Kathy being called back into work at 3, then going out to dinner/sightseeing and all. And then Saturday was all goofed up, because of Kari being here, the cat being a nuisance and working overnight, and today was no different, plus family dinner and celebrating Kevin's birthday a month and a half late. So, all I got is this little bit I sketched out and would have blogged overnight Saturday if I had had my computer with me at work (if there were such thing as a network to use there).

There was a time-and it doesn't feel that long ago, really, but it must be because it was before I graduated from high school and that was six years ago-when i could stay up all night. Well, let me put that in a different context, actually, because anybody can stay up all night if they just sleep all day. But that's cheating. I can still do that.

I'm thinking back to Fridays in January my senior year of high school. It's Basketball season, which is important to the story here. Prior to January of 2001, I had always gotten a ride to school with my dad. Since he had to get to work (he's a teacher in a different district) super early, and his school is a 20-40 minute drive from where I went, it was not uncommon for me to roll into school before 7 am. Amazingly, I got used to this, and often used this extra early time to catch up on reading or other homework (or going back to sleep against my locker). When my sister took an extended six month trip to Norway after the new year, she left me her car, so I could drive myself to school. Rather than taking advantage of this and sleeping in, I continued to wake up as early as 5 am to shower, eat watch the news with my dad and still leave the house at roughly the same time as he did.

So, even on a Friday, I would get to school at 6:45, almost an hour before the 7:40 bell. I'd make it through the morning in one piece, breeze through lunch and the afternoon (because I took SLACK OFF classes my senior year for sure), and take my girlfriend home, stopping on the way to pick up my paycheck from the Rep. I'd take the check to the bank, pick up some cash for the weekend, head home and eat a snack, maybe a dinner, only to be back up at school at 5:30 to set up for the pep band, of which I was the student director.

Basketball games would last until 8:30 or later, then it would be around 9 or so before the pep band equipment was all locked up. After that, it was off to Steak 'n Shake or some other such place for some food and ice cream, maybe some coffee. Then, I'd get in touch with Zach and the Penningtons, and the four of us would congregate somewhere and watch Iron Chef until one in the morning, followed by an hours-long N64 Goldeneye tournament which would only be broken when somebody realized the sun was about to come up in an hour or so. I'd run home, jump in the shower, eat some breakfast, and then high-tail it back to school where the Jazz Band was meeting up to take a three or four hour bus trip to a competition. This would usually afford me about an hour or so of restless bus-sleep, but you can't really call that sleep anyway. The competition would last until 5 in the evening, after which was another bus ride, again affording only minimal sleeping opportunities but, because it was the subdued ride home one was more likely to actually catch some sleep.

When the bus finally pulled up in front of the school, it would be a dash home, change into some more suitable clothes and right back out, usually to a late dinner in The Loop or a nice long stay at Coffee Cartel, followed by midnight Iron Chef and more Goldeneye, only this time we'd go home around 2 or 3. And finally sleep...only for me to have to wake up at 10 (at the latest) for the Matinee at the rep...during which it was either homework during the show or nap. And I always picked homework.

How did I do it? I was sitting in the office last night, working overnight setting up the ad, and I realized that even with sleeping until one o'clock on Saturday, it was only midnight and I was already crashing hard. What made me more energetic? Youth? Caffiene? Iron Chef/Goldeneye? Or did I just have a built-in filter that made me not feel so tired? Personally, I think it's probably got something to do with the fact that, at the time, I was non-stop with both the I-Gotta-Do-It stuff and the I-Wanna-Do-It stuff. I had a nice balance of work/school and social life. Unfortunately, now I have to balance work and school against each other, as opposed to grouping them on one end and counteracting it with a social life. I have a miniscule social life. Though, the past two weeks have not been so bad, in that since I am out of school that part is no longer a controlling influence, I might have time for a social life, or at least some semblance of one. Maybe that's the secret to longevity, and to limitless energy; you have to balance out activities that require energy with activities that have their own energy. Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

Comments? Thoughts? Let me know. And hey, if you want to hang out, let me know. I'll make some time for sure*.

*If you live in Boston, NYC, MN, New Zealand, or anywhere else that is not in the greater St. Louis metro vicinity, it may be hard to live up to this promise, so, offer strictly limited in those areas.

Umm...Thursday Blog?

Alrighty, so, it being Thursday, and less than a week into my conviction to blog every day (once on weekends), here it is with two and a half hours to go and still no blog.

Well...

I would like to refer you to Monday's blog about my car.

Remember all of the little things adding up? Well, Tuesday came the straw that broke the camel's back. Or rather, the bundle of straws that broke the Toyota's back. Or, to be precisely accurate, the repair assessment that caused the Toyota's fate to be decided. Amongst the culprits:

Old battery.
Tires looking a tid bit worn.
Very dirty air filter.
Oh, and, the little problem of the exhaust leaking right into the air intake, causing exhaust to come out of the ventillation system, meaning every time I drive my car, any passengers I am carrying in addition to I myself are breathing in noxious fumes.

Problem. It would have cost around $600 to repair. And the last big repair (not the last one...the next to last one, the oil leak) cost me a lot and then it started leaking oil again, so we know what a repair to a car this old is really all about. So, Tuesday I embarked on a new mini rigid search (in addition to the rigid search to find a job-more on that tomorrow-and the overall very rigid search to find myself) to find a new vehicle. You see, this time, the issue is forced because, let's face it, a fifteen year old car with 162,xxx miles needing a $600 repair does not equal good math. So, today, after work, I officially embarked on the physical searching part of the rigid search (having done the preliminary online research Tuesday and yesterday). I was going to save a couple cars for next Tuesday, as they were 20+ miles away, but I thought I'd start with a few in-the-area curiosities. Just looking, mind you. Just looking. I started at Ackerman Toyota and from there, I was going to Lou Fusz Toyota. At Ackerman, they had a 2000 VW Golf with 115,xxx miles, sunroof, stick, and only $6000. But, upon arrival, I find that the mileage was a bit off, the car didn't sound great when I started (like, it whined at me), and it's not a stick. That in itself shouldn't be a deal breaker, but coupled with the bad start, and also the glove compartment door was falling off. Next.

I pointed my wounded Camry in the direction of Lou Fusz, hoping that they still had their 2005 Civic for $14,500. It had only 74,xxx miles. It too was listed as a stick, but I knew to be wary, and it was only a two door. But, on the way, I decided I would swing into the Dean Team in Kirkwood and see if they had any used VW's at good prices in amongst all the shiny new ones. Brian, the guy I worked with, told me he had a few in the year range I was looking for. He said he had a 2002 Jetta, but he wasn't sure if I would be interested because they were asking $16,000 for it and it was a stick.

A stick? Really? Awesome...well, okay, I figured we could take it for a test drive. That was my first mistake. It was beyond what I imagined it would be. It was...better than the Golf, for sure. He also had a 2001 GTI for $12,000, but I am not sure a tin can with a rocket launcher is the right car for me. So, whatever, we sit down to see if we can't hammer out a deal. I had low hopes.

I said, "I figure about $1000 for my trade in, no money down, what can we do? I want my payments around $200 a month. And, my wife is the boss of the money. So I may have to come back with her."

Well, they weren't about to hear that, so they said, "We'll give you $3000 for your trade-in," my eyes popped out of my head momentarily, thinking did they look at my car? really?, "And we knocked $2000 off the price, we've got you around $220 a month." Call the wife. No deal. "$210?" No deal. "$200 and we give you thirty days to get $1000 down payment?" Thank you so much for everything, really, but...it's just not a good enough deal. Then, this is the best part. The sales manager asks me if I will call my wife back so he can talk to her. And I do. And he does. And I get an extra $1200 for my trade somehow, and my payments are at $199.98 a month.

And I came home with a 2002 Jetta.

Fun fact of the day: We got $4200 trade-in for a car that I paid $3000 for four years ago. We rule.

Am I Publishable?

Devotees (both of you) may recall that in March of last year, I set a goal of being published within a year. All of you probably know that come March of this year, I had still not been published. Well, you win some and you lose some.

And some, you just have to wait a month or so for.

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from David Taylor, Faculty Advisor to Currents Literary Magazine at St. Louis Community College at Meramec, informing me that my submission had been selected for publication in the magazine. Which was all well and good, but that was a year ago that I submitted to that thing. Wow. And going back and reading it, I have to admit, my writing has matured. Like, vastly. Not that what got published is terrible, in fact I've been told it's rather good (except one person who shall remain nameless thinks that it ends all weak and wistful and is therefore self-contradictory and ultimately utter crap...I may be putting words in this person's mouth, though), but what I write now seems to reflect a change, a more grown up feeling inside that comes out on paper.

So, yes, it has been almost a month since I got published, you would think that I would have jumped right on that and told everybody, but, to be perfectly honest, I've just been so freaking busy and stressed that it almost completely slipped my mind. Plus, now I kept everybody in suspense. Somehow.

For reference, I have been published in the Currents Literary Magazine of the St. Louis Community College, Meramec Branch. It is Volume 41 (so close), and the story I wrote is titled "How to Write a Three Day Novel." It's on page 33. You can pick it up on any of the tables randomly placed throughout the Communications North building on the campus, or I can get one for you if you so choose. Supplies are not unlimited, but close. I only have two left at the moment, both of which are spoken for by a Bostonite and a friend in Middle Earth (New Zealand). But I will be getting more by the middle of next week.

Question of the day:
If there's a New Zealand, then somewhere there is a Zealand. Where is it?

Music to Blog by:
Tripping Daisy - Halo Comb

Discussed in this post:

What Tuesdays Are For Now

As I am not in school for the summer, and I do not work on Tuesdays (for the time being, and won't work Tuesdays at Target as long as I have anything to say about it), I have been trying to decide what to do with my Tuesdays.

Well, I'm going to set up a weekly feature on the blog. That's right...structure and organization will emerge as I stick to my ambitions to actually get the ball rolling on becoming a real writer. That means writing every day, which I guess could mean blogging every day. But it doesn't mean that. As I said, I will blog every other day at the very least. But, Tuesdays will be the day when I post some of my actual writing, that being, some of my non-blog material. Like this, and the previous paragraph, that's blog material. But I will always end with out of blog material.

So, for my first Tuesday Excerpt (which is what I am going to call it now), I will take a bit from my Decomposition book I carry everywhere with me now.

This little bit is something I started sketching out the other day during a break at work, so it's either a work in progress or something that may go nowhere, but we'll see. The point is, I wrote it in some down time, which is what I need to be doing. And from now on, you won't get this long winded introduction on Tuesdays. Just a short description of what the excerpt is, and then right into it. So let's finally get right into it.

===

from "It's Complicated" may 2007

My facebook relationship status changed and suddenly, people I hadn't talked to in months, some of them years rushed to my cyber side. My in-box, my virtual wall were each flooded with variations of "What happened?" "Are you okay?" "Did you get a divorce?" "I'm here for you." "Call me if you need to talk."

It happened one night in August when we had The Fight, and I slept on the couch in the basement, our three years of marriage coming to a head with The Fight, the glow of my computer screen displaying "It's Complicated" illuminating our wedding pictures. We smiled at our complication from the past.

A week later and a total of eight nights sleeping apart, she told me she was leaving, going to her company's Chicago office because that's where her department-which consisted of her and one person in New Jersey-was being relocated to. I asked her, "What about us?" and she said "You'll be hearing from me."

===

So, there you have it, my first Tuesday Excerpt. I am not sure where to go with it, if it's a short story or (I'm leaning this way) perhaps a novel, or if I should just abandon it altogether at this point, but I think it's got some potential. The style is a bit off from what I normally dish out, mostly because I just finished reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, but he is a topic for another day.

"I'm not telling lies, I'm writing fiction with my mouth!" -Homer Simpson

Discussed in this post:

My Car

Has anybody ever seen the movie Breaking Away? Aside from being a dorky bicycling movie, and the movie that made Chase Korte and I friends, it has a bearing on this post which is, as you may have guessed from the title, about my car.

There is a scene in the movie in which the main character Dave Stoller's father Raymond is working at his used car lot. The cars are all decrepit pieces of crap, but they have special names painted on their windshields. It's set in Bloomington, Indiana, which is of course a big college town, and since Dave and his friends are all "Cutters" (locals) all the college kids hate them. But, Ray obviously sees them as a potential market for shitty used cars, and so he sells them with clever names like "Homecoming Special" or "Graduation Deluxe." Or, my personal favorite, "English Major."

Now, "Homecoming Special" is actually not a bad looking car; it's a red, two door convertible of the MG type. The "Graduation Deluxe" is not as nice, because it's a tan sedan, but it is in respectable condition. The "English Major" is by far the worst car on the lot. It is gray with rust coloration (most likely from, I don't know, the rust), and looks as if it had been saved at the last minute from being thrown into the quarry where all the Cutters like to swim.

Being an English Major myself, I would take issue with this. But, looking out of my front window at my car sitting in front of my house, I'm thinking I wouldn't mind scrawling "English Major" across it and selling it cheap, or possibly even throwing it into a quarry. From the cracked windshield, to the bent antenna, to the white paint and small dent from where I drove it into the workbench in the garage, it's certainly seen better days. In a year, my car will be old enough to get a license and drive itself. By the time I graduate from school, it will be worrying about who to vote for in the next presidential election. If some unforeseen future event holds up my school one more year (Knock on Wood and God Forbid), then at some point my car will be older than the freshman class.

What's worse is, before when something went wrong with my car, it was a big thing, something that stood out and made it impossible to drive without fixing.

There was the famous debacle with the CO2 filter being clogged, and thus the car just dying if I let it idle. When this happened, you had to wait 45 minutes to two hours to get it to start again, and then if you stopped, you just had to keep your foot on the gas to keep the RPMs up. Then there was the massive oil leak. At one point, I remember getting my oil changed in the morning, and by the following evening, my oil light came on. I had already lost a quart and a half. After that, the infamous unplanned road trip to Davenport, resulting in my third timing belt since I bought the car in 2003 and the dire need for a new water pump. These things, while hassles, were all easy enough to manage...just take it to the repair shop, fork over a bunch of money five days later and wait for the next thing to go horribly wrong.

But nothing has gone horribly wrong. Just little things. Now my car (which used to be a stubborn and whiny teenager) is now a cantankerous old man. There's the crack in the windshield, which I still haven't figured out how that happened. The bent antenna I think came from going through a car wash without first retracting the antenna. The knob that controls the fan speed fell off; you can rest it on there in either the "off" or "full blast" positions, but any of the others you have to turn it and then take it off and put it under the parking break if you don't want to lose it. Once, about a year ago, I opened my driver's side door from inside and part of the plastic handle came off. Last fall, the same door started needing a special flick and angle to unlock with the key, with the (I can only guess) following consequence of the key not being able to start the car anymore. Funny thing is, the key that I had made (from the original master, which is broken and can't go on a key chain) does not unlock any of the doors because the metal is too flimsy and will twist if trying to unlock, except for the trunk, it still does that one okay. Last summer, I noticed fluff coming out of the vents, and found out that all the seals around the AC unit had disintegrated and were being blown up to the vents themselves, thus rendering my AC useless because the seals can't keep the hot air from the engine from mixing with the cold air from the cooling unit. The front passenger door, no matter how much WD40 I apply, creaks loud enough to echo off of the neighbors' houses. At a certain RPM, right about 1700 or so, the engine makes a sickly metal-grating-on-metal noise, no matter what gear I'm in, but only when the RPMs are coming down, not going up. A year ago there was a hole in the brake line that meant leaking brake fluid, which of course didn't start until after I had it inspected but it was a relatively cheap fix, and now, to top it off, it's losing about a quart of oil in between oil changes.

This is the car of the English Major. It was once stylish, economical, the car that everybody wanted not because it was nice and flashy but because it was a Toyota Camry, and it was inexpensive and got great mileage and was a nice family car while still being stylish enough to not look like you were the boring practical type, just the practical practical type. In essence, it is the car, or at least it was back in 1992 when it was new. But when I bought it for $3,000 in 2003, it was a good buy to last me a couple years. It is now 2007. I have owned the car for four years, almost to the day now, and all these little things are starting to grate on me a little. But, it is an English Major's car, and more specifically my car, which makes it a Writer's car. And, like all things in a writer's life, it acts if nothing more than to be the impetus for an exercise in creativity, an expression of one's frustration with modern life and its unattainable cars.

Fun Fact of the Day: If it were up to me, I would own two cars, and neither of them would be the one I currently own. One would be a Volkswagen Golf TDI, with the new bio-diesel engine that the German companies are using to answer the Hybrid surge. The other would be a Scion tC in the dark blue color, with the moon roof and spoiler. They would both be sticks. The Golf could be any color but white or purple, although if we could find one in yellow that would be great. They would also both have some way for me to play mp3's in them. And I would never drive either one of them into the workbench. Ever.

Yes, Yes, I know...

All the trash talk I throw at my aunt Nora, at Mo and Kevin, and at Will-er-Alan, and all the trash talk I threw at Jerry before he decided to deblog himself, and here it's been about two months since my last post. Well, yeah. Sorry.

Lots happened. Won't go into it all. My sister had her baby, run over to her blog to see pictures. I finished up the semester (no pictures there), went to NYC for Spring Break and had a good time running around and all, met up with Joanna and Koushik, got inspired to write a play, wrote the play, added a Journalism minor to my studies, and generally had an okay time running down the clock to May where I now face a summer of drudgery at work with no school to break up the monotony.

But I pledge myself anew at this! I am about to embark on a very rigid search. Soul searching, perhaps. Perhaps a bit of job-searching as well. Somebody asked me a question last night, and it's going to stick with me until I can truthfully and one hundred percent actually answer it. "What do you want to happen?" I have to find that out, then take the steps to make it happen. I need to make it happen.

With that being said, you will be seeing a lot more of me in the Blogniverse (I know that the popular term is Blogisphere, but damn it all, I came up with Blogniverse and that is what I am sticking with!), at least in this realm...probably not so much on the bike side. Frankly, I'm embarassed to even have it exist at this point, because I am a bad cyclist. A good cyclist is one who actually rides his bike. I am not one of those.

So, this is just a "Hey, yes, I know I've been a deadbeat blogger, but I promise to be better, honest!" kind of a post. Upcoming highlights include:

Ruminations on Professor Overmann's comments on my Media Literacy paper.

Commentary on why hiding from your true self is a bad thing (and it is).

Ruminations on Sheila Hwang's grade of A given on my second to last paper of the semester, and why I think it means she wants to do bad things to me in the dark.

Excerpts from works in progress.

Explanations of my preparations for the Three Day Novel contest (in which I will be participating this year, come Hell, High Water or organized Bike Ride).

And, of course, in a month or so, another long-winded explanation of why it's been a month since I posted anything despite my insistince right now, at this moment, that I will post at least every other day the whole summer.

Music to Blog By:
Elliott Smith - Needle in the Hay

Discussed in this post:

Where Does All That Money Go, and What Does Elliot Do at School?

You wanted answers, and now you've got them...aside from the weird color effects and credits which were added without my consent, and even though my name does not appear anywhere on this...I will fill you in. Yes, directed by Sean Crowder, fine, but written by Elliot Rauscher, Carrie Shmick and Sean Crowder, Camera by Chaday Barnes, starring Elliot Rauscher and Carrie Shmick. Without further ado, I give you...

The Shoe Thief

Hang it on the wall anyway...art is art, right?

When I was younger, and in grade school, or, rather, when I was young and in grade school...no, no, younger is correct, because let's face it, as old as I feel sometimes (going to bed at 9 on a Friday night? Having a quiet Saturday at home during Mardi Gras?), I am still rather young and shouldn't be saying things like "When I was young..." because then it sounds like I'm missing teeth and have my mortgage paid off which, I assure you, I most certainly do not. So, with that in mind...

When I was younger, and in grade school, I used to try and draw. Everybody drew. The cool kids drew, the quiet kids drew, even the bullies were known to turn out some stunning Art Smart Award* winning masterpieces so, in an effort to fit in and distance myself from those other five or six kids who couldn't draw, I at least tried to draw.

Now, my mother, being the consummate politician, adored all of my drawings that I brought home from my art class and I, being ever-ready for validation of my (seemingly) limited number of skills, brought each and every one of them home, laminated, with the expectation that she would display them on the wall of our dining room with with the help of sticky-tack putty. She put some horrid drawings, paintings, colorings and sketches up there. I think I only passed art classes in grade school because we were graded on effort, not on degree of skill or quality of masterpiece. Masterpieces, well, that was a stretch for anything I ever turned out in those classes...with the exception of some of the more abstract modernist styled art projects we were assigned (I can't remember, I could ask my wife she'd know...or it's in one of her art books downstairs and I don't feel like going down there because I am blogging/cooking dinner...), such as the one where there were a series of black, straight lines, and wherever they made a shape (triangle, rectangle, some sort of polygon) I filled in the shape with a primary color. They were all there the bad and the worse, on the dining room wall, alongside my sister's much more polished efforts (however, she did the same art projects three years ahead of me, so by the end of fifth grade we had some very suspiciously similar works of art. I promise I never once intentionally copied one of hers).

Strangely enough, as bad as I was I did not limit my drawing skills(?) to the confines of the arts annex** but instead flexed my puny art muscle during free period or indoor rainy-day recess. This did not improve my drawing to say the least, and it just made those cool/quiet/bully kids laugh at me because I thought I could draw. This did not deter me (and I did suffer for this, amongst other things, but suffering is part of being an artist, is it not?), and in 4th grade I began reading Calvin and Hobbes and also The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I had become a writer (to a point) as well, because I enjoyed writing assignments so much that I had started writing along with my drawings...I had turned my childhood stuffed animals into comic strip characters. I'm older and not afraid or ashamed to admit that (I was, for a time, too old and ashamed to admit such a thing had ever happened, but that was middle school and that is a chapter of my life that shall happily remain closed for the time being). The drawings were crude. I mean, they were awful. I mean...they were possibly the worst drawings to ever have been labelled as a comic strip (with the possible exception of Ziggy, but it's not my job to be a comic page critic, unfortunately). But what kept them interesting to those I showed them to, including not only my best friend Jesse Fournier*** but also my parents (again, they were obliged to like them but something about the way my mom liked them suggested she wasn't just being nice) and my teacher was not the crappy drawing but the story lines and the dialogue that drove them. There was the easter series, where Ricky the cat got a white chocolate easter bunny in his basket, and it was the envy of all the others. In the middle of the night, Sneaky Feak, the mischevious yellow rabbit of the bunch, snuck into the kitchen to steal the white chocolate bunny from the refrigerator, only to find that it was not being kept in there. Concluding that it must have been stowed in the basement refrigerator, Sneaky Feak turns to see the refrigerator door close, his world plunged into darkness and he unable to reopen the door (this was a relatively easy panel to draw). The very next line of panels told of Furry Guy's pursuit of Ricky's coveted white chocolate easter bunny (Furry Guy being Ricky's older-by-seven-seconds brother). Furry Guy, like Sneaky Feak, searched in the main refrigerator and what does he find? He finds it! So, he takes it out and sinks his teeth into the bunny's ears. And a loud howl emits from the rabbit's mouth. The next set of panels shows a room full of animals (Ricky, Furry Guy, Sneaky Feak along with Octoplus the Octopus, Snowy the white cat, Sneaky Feak's mother who's name I can not for the life of me remember anymore, and Mr. Guy Man, a microscopic alien with the strength of thirty men, who was often indicated only by a tiny dot on the page from which a dialogue bubble seemed to pop out of). Sneaky Feak is being attended to by his mother, who is bandaging his wounds. Ricky is furious with both Sneaky Feak and Furry Guy, and Snowy, Octoplus and Mr. Guy Man want to know how Furry Guy could have made such a mistake. His excuse? "Hey, come on, I'm a cat, how am I supposed to know white from yellow? I'm colorblind."

A rudimentary joke, perhaps, but one that intrigued my teacher, Mrs. McFadden**** to the point that she encourage me to write more...and implied that I should draw less.

Cut to the present, I am now a writer, unpublished yes, but nonetheless a writer of sorts and I am married to an artist who has, in her lifetime, had work displayed in galleries and won contests and such. She can draw. I still can't. I can, however, work a camera, which is the only way I get to hang anything I had a hand in creating on our walls. You see, we have some of her drawings, skethes and paintings about the house, and they're not laminated or held on with sticky-tack putty either, but I mean they are framed and hung on nails we've pounded into our walls. This is a way of displaying her talent to any who visit our home. "What's this?" They'll ask, pointing to a particular block of wood with a rose burnt into it that hangs in our bedroom. "Oh, that," I'll say nonchalantly, "That's just one of Kathy's pieces of artwork. Like this other one, this drawing of a rose, and over in this other room, this sketch of the baby elephant and this one of the child with his hands on his cheeks. Yeah, Kathy did them all."

Just once, I want Kathy to point to a series of, say, fifteen frames, all containing 8 1/2" by 11" sheets of paper, in a specific order left to right, and say, "This is one of my favorites; a short story Elliot wrote about two years ago about a twenty-something spending the night in jail with an old friend.***** It's quite good, I'll leave you to read it."

Now if only I could find a long, bare enough wall in our house that gets plenty of light.
______________________________________________
Notes:

*An Art Smart Award was a small piece of paper the grade school's art teacher would tape to the back of your piece of art. Your artwork would also be displayed in the hallway. I earned very few of these in my grade school academic career.

**A temporary classroom trailer dropped off on my school's blacktop playground for temporary use in 1989 which is, of course, still there to this day. It contained the art classroom and music classroom. What had been the art classroom in the building became a first grade classroom and, to my knowledge, there had not been a music classroom for some years as the music teacher used to go from individual classroom to individual classroom with a portable electronic keyboard.

***Pronounced Four-Knee-A, I later attended an intro to psychology class with his younger sister, Valerie at St. Louis Community College at Meramec. While I was in 4th grade, I was the tender age of ten and Valerie was the even more tender age of eight. Having fallen out of best-friendship with Jesse round about two years later, Valerie remained permanently eight or nine in my mind, even when she cropped up in high school my junior year, so it was very hard for me to reconcile little Valerie Fournier with this scantily-clad college freshmen none of the other twenty guys in my psych class could keep their eyes off of. Aside from being engaged to Kathy at the time, I just couldn't stare at her. She was, like, a little kid. Ew. And my best friend's off-limits sister. And I'm sorry, but once you are diagnosed with weird-little-sister cooties, they do not ever go away. Ever.

****Mrs. McFadden had in fact been Miss Derby just three short years before when she was my sister's fourth grade teacher. She was my sister's most favorite teacher at Avery Elementary and mine too. It was she who taught my sister...well, some things, I'm sure, you'd actually have to ask her, but the main point is, it was she who first introduced me to Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and for that, I am forever in her debt.

*****This particular piece is called "Headlight" and is based on two separate incidents, one in which I was pulled over twice in the same night, five minutes apart, for having a headlight out and one in which a very smart old friend of mine confided in me that he had been fired from my current employer for stealing close to four thousand dollars worth of electronics.

Discussed in this post:

Playwright

With an e-mail, I found today that while my friend Chris' play got selected for Surfacing One Act Festival, and an as-of-yet unwritten play also got slected (commissioned by the artistic director, to be written by a guy I know will do a good job and all, but still...), my one act was not selected. I could gripe about this but...

I wrote it very quickly. I wrote it for the deadline, not for the play. It's rough. It's got some major flaws. It's better than "In 500 Words Or Less..." was, but it's not yet as good as "500 Words..." could have been if I had crafted it better. Nevermind that they're both about students who are using almost superhuman powers of slack to not write papers. This is something I am good at. See, I wrote for the deadline.

Unfortunately, if I want to be serious, and be taken seriously, I can't submit shit like that. People expect a crafted product. I'm handing them a work in progress. It might be bold, awesome and impressive as a work in progress, but they assume I've done all the work I could on it, or that if it took me a long time to get it where it is it's probably not worth the hassle, and so forth, so they pass. I'm a master of the awesome first draft I've decided, and for years I had teachers who were willing to accept an awesome first draft as a finished product. I've never been happy with that, but it worked so I let it work. Angela tried to help me with that. No, scratch that; Angela did help me with that. I am sure my writing instructors at Webster will be equally as helpful. I just need to help myself.

And so it comes to this; I have turned in a play with potential, but have failed to unlock it enough for the reading committee to accept the challenge of unlocking it more. I obviously need to do more work on it. The e-mail said they won't give criticism on the works that were not selected due to the sheer volume of work submitted, which could give me false hope (and it has given me a small amount of this) that mine would have been good enough if not for one or two slightly stronger candidates. But I have to be pessimistic, which goes against my earlier New Year's resolutions. But, I have to be a better writer, which means I have to believe I can always do better than I have done.

I have to start writing another play now. This one for class. And I was without an idea, until I idly clicked on Memory Machine's blog over in my links (Urban Exploration). I figured it out. My uncle Dennis is in town. I could e-mail this guy. I don't want to go Urban Exploring, I just want to know what it's like. What is it like to go to one of these places? What kind of thing could happen there? The amunition plant interests me; my father once worked there. What could I do with that?

A lot.

Music to Blog By:
The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt

Discussed in this post:

Yes, You Heard Me, My Cousin Chris Farley

I was using "cousin" in a very loose (I almost said "relative" but thought that might be too much of a pun) sense. You see, my mother's sister Nora is married to Chris Farley's actual familial first cousin. Thus, though not by blood and many times removed, Chris Farley was indeed my cousin.

There are cultures that value family so much, that even if you're four times removed from both sides of the family and once removed from society at large, family is family, and family deserves respect, affection, and recognition. And no, family is not a one way street, and no, Chris Farley never actually got around to respecting/recognizing me as a member of his (far-removed) extended family, but I am confident that he would have gotten around to it at some point in the future if his future had not been so unexpectedly and unfortunately taken away from him. I like to think that Chris Farley would have liked the idea of having somebody like me claiming to be related to him.

So, to those few who have suggested that I am out of line with my particular portrait of my family tree, I say this: I am aware of just how far removed Chris Farley and I were from each other. But, I feel like I know him better than I know some of my more geographically (and mentally) distant cousins to whom I am actually blood-related (sadly). Or, to make a better point...I am often told that I share much in common with my great-grandfather, whom I never met and thus have nothing but family stories told through the ever-thickening haze of history, while I have documented (and often re-run on Comedy Central) footage of Cousin Chris (as I fondly refer to him). Should I just leave my great-grandfather out of my family tree because he is just a handful of obscure stories? Of course not!

So, why would I leave Cousin Chris out?

Music to Blog By:
Red Right Hand - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Discussed in this post:

SNL's Golden Age...Remember That?

Of course, the first few seasons are out of reach. The cast, the writers...everything they were doing was fresh. They were inventing a genre which has yet to be truly rivaled. It enjoyed a great run through the 80's, and a cast in the early nineties (including Dana Carvey, Mike Meyers, my cousin Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, and Kevin Nealon to name a few) that came a close second to the legendary early cast members. But nowadays...

The problem isn't with the cast, so much as it is with the writers. Being a creative writing major, I can't really criticize too much I suppose, but...comedy writers learn what works in sitcoms and dramas and movies, and so they write what works. They don't invent. They're not on the cutting edge, because the cutting edge doesn't pay the bills.

You see that a lot these days. I'll go ahead and be a total dork and play into the hands of everybody who knows where I'm going with this...

Take, for example, a television show like Arrested Development. For anybody who hasn't seen it that is too bad. If you have seen The Office, and you enjoy it, well...that's too bad. NBC is in a great position these days when it comes to their weeknight programming. As NBC is near the bottom as far as ratings go, they're less afraid to give something new a chance. The Office, Studio 60, My Name is Earl, Scrubs, and Heroes are all shows that a network like ABC or CBS may have considered but passed on, or given a small chance but given up before it really caught. Fox is great at giving a chance to something new, but bad at retention. Arrested Development...think The Office but with a narrator and about a disfunctional family instead of just an office. Great writers on both shows, but Fox killed AD after two and a half seasons.

A show like SNL endurs because it has a legendary past. It can get away with being sub-par because viewers still cling to the glory days...but not forever. It needs to get better soon, or it will start losing viewers. How can it get better? Get better writers. I'm not saying they need to hire writers off the street, but they have got to hire some writers who aren't afraid to think. Right now, even if the skits begin well, they drag on and end abruptly, as if the writers realized it's a sketch show and they've got to keep it under a certain amount, and the people in charge say, "Well, if it's all we've got..." It's just bad comedy to lose your audience halfway through a sketch. Make it punchy. Bring back the slapstick of Belushi and Chase. The ridiculous dialogue of Wayne and Garth. SOMETHING!

It's sad to think that the world writers my age are entering is one in which you have to prepackage your work...suddenly, you shouldn't write manuscripts, but McManuscripts. Everything is homogenized, sterilized, and easily consumable. The George Lopez show is King of Queens for the Latino market. Break out. Do something different.

On a side note, I completed my play for the one act festival, printed it out, took it to the office to turn it in...and nobody was there to take it. The door was locked. So...it didn't get turned in. So what the hell am I supposed to do now? The student in charge of Surfacing hasn't answered me. My friend Kathleen, who is affiliated with the contest, suggested that the deadline may have been extended to Wednesday, but I haven't received confirmation. CRAP!

Music to blog by:
Miss Murder (with bad sound mixing) - AFI
(because I was watching SNL and they were the guest, silly)

Discussed in this post:

The Year in Review, and Resolutions

Well, 2006 was an interesting year. Work: I started out shaky at work, getting pulled into the office and being put on counseling, then turning things around to the point that I was Great Team Hero for the entire group (which happened in July but didn't get into the magazine until November), only to end the year pissed off and stepping down from my position because of school schedule conflicts. I went through three team leads and two ETLs, made some new friends (some of which promptly left...Natascha I'm looking in your direction...), said goodbye to many people who took off for bigger and better things including Jerry, Colleen and Beth, and decided that listening to your employee's concerns and actually doing something to address them are a lot farther apart than some people think.

As far as cycling goes...well, let's not talk about that. Check out my Cycling Blog for more info on that...

2006 was a productive year for my writing. I have a nice stack of work, including my one-act that I completed prior to Christmas. I'm not done editing it, but I am counting that amongst last year's output. Though I was happy with having written outside of my Colin/William/James group in 2005 with "Momentum," and then again this year with two stories in that same timeline called "Kissing Girls" and "Look at How Ugly the Stars Are," I did start writing a story that connects Colin, William and James with Banning and Cameron. School certainly helped with the output, and so...

School is awesome. Yes, I could have done better this past semester with being on top of deadlines and such, but nonetheless I am happy at Webster University. Good times had by me. At school. But let's not forget that I started the year still enrolled at Meramec, which I hated my first semester as friends will recall. But with the summer 2005 session, I found a teacher I really enjoyed. And then I made friends fall 2005 (including a great writing instructor), and in the spring 2006 semester I made some friends that, though I haven't seen or even communicated with them for months, I will always remember them and count them as my peers and great friends.

All in all, a good enough year to forget for the most part.

And so to resolutions for 2007.

Write more.
Ride more.
Stress less.
Love more.
Save more.
Enjoy more.
Live more.
Drive less.
Workout more.
Spend more [time with friends and family].
Reconnect with life.
Dance with my wife more.
Watch more Star Trek.
Smile more.
Laugh more.
Be the best Elliot M. Rauscher I can be.
Try to walk in my mother's vibrating slippers.

And I just did two of those. Let's see who can guess which two!

Music to blog by:
Frank Sinatra - As Time Goes By

Discussed in this post:

And...We're Back.

Sorry all, my computer went into the shop and when I got it back, it had been so long since I had logged in that my blogger password needed to be re-entered, and I couldn't remember it, and I was too busy with school to care enough to set it back up. So...I just got to it. Just now. Right now.

Let's see...I finished the semester, I have no idea what kind of grades I got except that I'm sure they're okay, although I'm afraid my group project might not have turned out well...I'm not sure that anybody turned in our analysis paper for A Streetcar Named Desire, but I did turn in the biography for Tennessee Williams. Hmm. But I know I got a good grade in my Human Rights class, and I already know I got an A in my Film Noir class and a B+ in math. Possibly a B of some kind in Modern Drama (thank my group project to counter-balance my final paper), but again, the group project grade for US Writers might bring me down a bit. Hopefully not, though.

Spent a weekend in Vegas. Did the usual Vegas things, you know, all-you-can-eat buffets, all-you-can-drink bars, fountain at the Bellagio, puked on Wayne Newton, won a fortune at the tables, got chased by gangsters, lost a fortune at the slots, married a floosie, and danced with the Chippendales on the Hoover Dam. Although, now that I come to think of it, that may have been a vodka-tonic induced dream.

I wrote a new play! It's short, needs a bit of work, but with the Surfacing deadline coming up, I should totally get on that and finish it. Plus, the Green Fuse deadline is coming up, so I need to either polish off an old story from Meramec or write something new...I guess, though, that I can either edit a play and a story or write a new story, and since I want to submit to both, I should focus on revisions.

For those of you unaware, Surfacing is the student written-directed-acted-in festival at Webster, and the Green Fuse is the student literary magazine. Oh, I forgot...I've also got a submission into Currents from last spring. Currents is the Meramec student literary magazine. I could be published twice and produced once in the same calender year! That would be awesome! Let's aim for that...although, all I can really do is submit, after that it's out of my hands.

Oh, speaking of things being out of my hands, I stepped down from my specialist position at Target. Most of this has to do with school scheduling, classes and workstudy you know, but part of it has to do with (to use Will Wilcox's famous New Year's 1997 quote) "large amounts of bullshit" that I have put up with recently, the most recent being the reaction of my executive team leader when I told her the news. She lacks tact. She lacks compassion. She lacks the capacity to be a decent person. Just for the record, it has nothing to do with me "bailing out" on my department or the store. Jerry will be leaving, and they need somebody to take over ad prep, and preferrably somebody who knows how to do it, so no, I am not bailing out on the store. I have offered my services to do the early morning return scans for the Entertainment department and help out with street date when it is needed, so I am not bailing out on my department. I feel awful that I am stepping down because Melissa will have trouble without me. It will be hard to train a new specialist, even if it is who we think it's going to be. I even offered to train my replacement. I feel a little bit like I am letting down Melissa, Cleo, my old ETL Katie who battled so hard for me, and Jackie and Shelly who always listened, and Jeff who I'm pretty sure wouldn't have let me step down a year ago when I was first thinking about it. But I think the only way to let my current ETL down would be to continue in my position. This way, it's like I'm playing into her hands.

Except that I'm not playing into her hands, I'm stepping down because my academic career depends on it. But try telling her that. She won't hear it because she doesn't listen to me, and never has. And that is one of the reasons I am stepping down. Not the main reason, but it certainly played a role.

So there we go.

Music to Blog By:
Christmas Music because it is December 17th after all.

Discussed in this post: