100 things you may or may not know about me:
1. The biggest deterrent to me learning to drive a stick was the car my mom owned at the time I was learning to drive.
2. I eventually wrecked that car.
3. I subsequently put a dent in the bumper of her next car.
4. I still feel terrible about both of those things.
5. If I had cable, I would probably never stop watching crap.
6. I wish I could go back in time to the 1904 World's Fair.
7. I'd really miss internet and air conditioning if I did go back in time.
8. I'm a better hitter and fielder now than I was when I actually played baseball on a team.
9. If it hadn't been for Will Wilcox and John Whalen, I would have quit baseball forever after fifth grade.
10. I don't have a tattoo.
11. I know right where I'd put one if I got one.
12. I don't know what I'd get.
13. Eighteen year-old Elliot could play drums ten times better than twenty-five year old Elliot.
14. I wish that weren't true.
15. I love Acrodyl (my cat) more than Ricky (the cat I grew up with).
16. I feel incredibly guilty about that.
17. Ricky died while I was at school in Minnesota.
18. I can't remember the last thing I said to him.
19. I still have dreams that he's not dead, and that he finally comes home.
20. I've gained twenty-three pounds in a year.
21. They're not the good kind.
22. I always start on the left foot and end on the right foot.
23. I wish I knew how to tap dance.
24. I'm amazed every day Kathy puts up with me.
25. I wish I had gone straight to Webster U right out of high school.
26. But then I never would have met Kathy.
27. I play guitar.
28. I only know about three songs.
29. One of them is "Stairway to Heaven"
30. I love riding my bicycle.
31. I haven't really ridden my bicycle in over a year.
32. I keep justifying spending money on the bicycle in the hopes it will get me to ride more.
33. I know it should work the other way around.
34. If I get nudged/jostled/poked or in any other way called to attention in that twilight just-before-sleep stage, it will take me three hours to fall back to sleep.
35. My work cell phone has the only alarm clock noise that's ever been able to consistently wake me up.
36. I know I don't write enough.
37. I don't really have anybody I call to go hang out with anymore.
38. Considering we don't have cable, we have a really nice gigantic television.
39. My favorite t-shirt when I was 10 looked like a dress on me.
40. My favorite t-shirt when I was 18 was tight accross the chest and sleeves.
41. They were the same shirt.
42. I wish I had met Douglas Adams before he died.
43. In my imagination, he would love that he's number 42 on my list.
44. I have one sister.
45. I hated my sister when I was in middle school and she was in high school.
46. She was a senior when I was a freshman.
47. She was one of my best friends that first year of high school.
48. She still is one of my best friends.
49. I have four nieces and two nephews.
50. I feel guilty that I have a favorite.
51. I hate that I haven't graduated college yet.
52. I think that being an older student makes me a better student.
53. My wife cuts my hair.
54. Yesterday I thought she was going to intentionally cut it badly.
55. I am impossible to play board games with one on one.
56. Especially if I am losing.
57. I ruined one of her favorite childhood board games yesterday.
58. I can't believe that good looking retaining wall in the backyard was built by me and my family.
59. I have a bad habit of leaving my shoes in the middle of the floor.
60. I always push my chairs in at work.
61. I hardly ever push my chairs in at home.
62. I still have dreams that I work at Target.
63. Those are my second-least favorite dreams.
64. My least favorite dreams are about remembering a class I've been skipping all semester on the last day before finals.
65. I know that stems from the way I approached my first foray into college life.
66. Green is my favorite color.
67. I have lost all respect for Aerosmith.
68. My legs and torso are not proportionate to each other.
69. I still laugh at stupid juvenile things (like the number 69).
70. There's a dream catcher in my bedroom.
71. I get mad at it when it doesn't work.
72. If I lived alone, I know I would drink quite a bit more.
73. I thank my lucky stars I do not live alone.
74. But I won't turn down a 7 & 7.
75. I am a beer snob.
76. By which I mean, Budweiser is not real beer.
77. But I still was opposed to In-Bev's takeover of A-B.
78. I love the fall.
79. When I worked in retail, I hated Christmas.
80. I've celebrated it twice since leaving retail.
81. It's only been one year since I left retail.
82. Christmas in July rocks.
83. I am a night person.
84. I drink way too much Coca-Cola.
85. I've only ever left the country once.
86. I spent a week in London with my high school band and choir.
87. I had the perfect opportunity to sneak off and get a pint of Guinness.
88. I couldn't, because I had left my passport at the hotel.
89. There's little in the world better than a good book.
90. Except for a hot woman reading a good book.
91. Kathy is currently reading All the King's Men
92. That's not just a good book, it's a great book.
93. I've been pulled over four times for having a headlight out.
94. I know I could swing dance if I just did it more often.
95. In fourth grade, I was convinced I would become a starship pilot when I got older.
96. I still haven't really let that dream go.
97. I once pulled a bicycle, two water bottles, a bike pump and a cyclo computer out of poison ivy without realizing it was poison ivy.
98. I didn't get a rash or anything.
99. Pictures exist of me wearing a blue dress.
100. I was two years old at the time.
Your turn.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Signs The Housing Market is Worse Than You Thought...
This is ridiculous! We need to do something! Even the smaller houses that should be relatively affordable and safe are sitting empty! What can be done?
Seriously, this is really lowering the property values around here!
Seriously, this is really lowering the property values around here!
I know it's been two weeks, but...
I need your help. Please follow this link and sign the petition to impeach President Bush. You don't have to agree with everthing Dennis Kucinich stands for, but think hard about what the current administration has done in the seven years they've been in place. The abuses of executive power, the lack of respect for the constitution. Do it. And then I promise more diligent blogging.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
A Late Tuesday Excerpt
Kind of late, I know. But you're getting an interesting treat tonight with it. See, normally with a Tuesday Excerpt you get a short bit from a longer piece. But tonight, what you're getting is something else.
Writing is much like any other art (painting, composing, sculpting) in that sometimes the artist has a few false starts before finding a groove. Bearing that in mind, for every story I finish you can safely guess that there were three more started. So what do I do with those three unfinished stories? Well, sometimes they just sit forever, and I find them later and read what I've got and decide it's terrible. Sometimes, I come back and say, "Hey, that's not bad." The only problem is that it's normally a long time before I come back, and it's hard to remember just where I was going to take the story.
So tonight, I'm sharing with you a selection of those false starts. Some have potential (a couple are already past ten pages), some are so so, and some are just terrible. What you may notice is a similarity in theme, or character or plot elements within these false starts, because what I am doing is fine-tuning an idea. Most of what you are seeing tonight eventually became one of two stories; "Special Detail" or "Momentum." There is also one thrown in about buying a used car that I really want to revisit now and try and tweak. So, without further explanation:
===
from an Untitled work, spring 2006
Michael would later reflect on his first job out of college, at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant at the Mall of America, and wonder if things wouldn’t have been better if he had just stayed there. Not even to advance in employment, from server to captain of servers, to assistant floor manager, to floor manager, and so on, but just to remain a server, and smile, and bring people shrimp cocktails, shrimp burgers, barbecued shrimp, and so on, and earn the tips that bought him the car that got him into so much trouble.
The mob. Don’t think it disappeared. It seems now to be a Hollywood legend, a thing of the past, romanticized to no end by names like Dean Martin, Al Pacino, and so forth. Guy Richie stylized the British mafia as nothing more than a bunch of blundering buffoons. We all had a good laugh, even me and Michael. Roommates, he and I, back at good the good old U of M. That’s what we like to call the University of Minnesota, but I suppose that’s what kids who go to University of Michigan call their school. We used to spend hours watching mafia movies. He and I went as gangsters one Halloween (that’s gangsters, not gangstas). He ended up one in real life. With a capitol G.
We lost touch for a few years out of school. I was dating this girl I met at graduation, and he was using his business accounting degree to sell plates of shrimp to tourists. We got together every once in a while, reminisced annually. Six years out of school, he found a real job at an architecture firm called Ellerbee-Beckett, as their Assistant Chief Executive Accountant in charge of Institutional Projects. Basically, this meant that he was in charge of the money being spent on building more ridiculously overpriced (and ridiculous looking) structures on the very college campus he said, on graduation day, “Man, I’ve had some great times here. I never want to leave.”
As a journalist, I should have caught on quicker, but I was blinded by his new apartment on our fifth annual catching-up-and-getting-smashed meeting. The drinks were free, the food was free, the limo was free. Everybody knew Fran Levinson owned that bar. Everybody was about to find out he owned Ellerbee-Beckett, too.
It would be almost another year before I found out Fran also owned Michael Rose.
“Colin Fairmount,” I answered my phone. It was Craig Jeffries, the editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. A man with a plan. A man with vision. A man who I had been trying to avoid because I didn’t have my story done.
“Fairmount.” He started every conversation with the last name of the person he was talking to.
***
from an unfinished work titled "In Which Colin, Fed Up With His VW, Buys A Used Car" spring 2006
“No, this one isn’t going to cut it,” he said, sizing up the out of place Skoda sitting on the Volkswagen dealer’s lot. The man helping him had a thick Germanic accent that Colin couldn’t quite wrap his head completely around. The man gestured at the automobile—for that is what it was, no odd Eastern-European model could rightly be called a ‘car’ in Colin’s mind—and looked helplessly at Colin.
“What, wrong kind of color?”
Colin regarded the color, something he had been trying to avoid since he first saw it; he had so far focused on the tires, the rims, the hubcaps, the logo on the grill, the bumper sticker which read “I’m not tailgating, I’m inspecting their—“ but was ripped off and so the punch-line was missing, anything but register the sickening day-glow orange paint with the equally eye-twisting fluorescent purple detail work. “The colors are awful,” he admitted. “But that’s not the problem.”
“Custom paint job. The man who trades this car, tells me so. Custom, he said. Premium. Cost him a lot. I gave him good deal on trade in. Do you have trade in?”
“My car,” Colin inserted a sigh here. “Is in Moline, Illinois.”
Three days earlier, on a routine trip to Racine, Wisconsin to visit a friend of his from college, Colin’s car had overheated in the middle of the night. “Your water pump went out,” the stranger on the phone from Middle-Of-Nowhere, Illinois told him the morning after this happened. “So you’re timing belt is, well, you got close to a hundred and fifty thousand miles on there, it was time for it to be replaced anyway.”
“I just got the timing belt replaced. The whole engine just got rebuilt. Why didn’t they tell me I needed a new water pump?”
There was a long intake of breath from the other end of the line. “Well, it’s cause they either got shit for brains,” here he paused, as if for dramatic effect. “Or your water pump looked fine. They’ll go out on you, all of a sudden. One minute pumping water like a heart pumping blood, next minute you’re on the side of the road.” He took a breath, and Colin sensed the man would go on and on if left to his own devices.
“How much to have it repaired?” he asked.
“Shoot, new timing belt and water pump for a V Dub? You want me to do it, you’re talking at least seven hundred parts and labor, maybe more. Not to mention I can’t start today, cause I ain’t even got the parts, gotta order them from Chicago.”
Colin stared out of his hotel room window, eyes unfocused and reliving the previous evening. The check engine light, the temperature gauge buried in the red, way too hot zone, the grinding noise as his engine died. Then the state trooper stopping and calling in the tow truck. The truck taking the car twelve miles in the wrong direction, while he and the state trooper followed. The state trooper being nice enough to drive him to the nearest hotel which happened to be sixty miles away, in Moline. His room, from a four story Howard Johnson or Red Roof or something along those lines, overlooked a plethora of car dealerships, the most prominent of which was a Volkswagen dealer. “Can’t you order them from the dealership in Moline?” To which the inevitable response was that no, he ordered all of his parts from his cousin’s automotive supply in Chicago.
And so Colin found himself at the odd dealership, talking to the odd man, looking at the odd car. “It’s a 1997 Jetta, and it’s in Moline with a broken water pump and a melted timing belt.” He looked again at the Skoda. “I hate this.”
“You take better care of your car, then these things happen, well, they won’t.” The man looked again at the Skoda. “It is good car, reliable. And only used car on lot. You want a new car?”
“No.” That was something Colin found odd, more odd than the mechanic not ordering the parts from Moline, and almost as odd as the Skoda itself; six car dealerships, and not one used car aside from this, for lack of a better term, thing. “How can this be the only used car you have?”
“We a giant sale are having, all of our used cars last weekend. Super Six-Hundred Sale. Once every few months. All dealers here, all owned by same man. He gather all used cars, sells them at the fairgrounds. This is all that’s left.” Colin peered into the interior and saw a yellow and black stripe pattern on the seats, gearshift and steering wheel.
“I wonder why.”
***
from an Untitled work, spring 2006
Brandon
Every morning, when he stepped out of his room and into the hall, he gave a silent command to everybody; stay out of my way, and everything will be fine. He would never have hurt anybody, hadn’t done so off the lacrosse field and wasn’t going to start now. Actually backing up his mere presence with actions would have required more time than was given to him in a day, and that time was precious. Grades needed to be kept up to stay on the team. In the off season, trips to the gym needed to replace the rigorous practices he faced during the regular season.
He slept only four hours a night; classes began for him at eight every morning, even Fridays, and nobody else on his floor went to class on Fridays because they were on the Northeast end of campus, the school of design sector, and they never had classes on Fridays. Design students loaded their Tuesdays and Thursdays with gen-eds and took their color classes and computer animation courses on Mondays and Wednesdays, leaving Friday as an extra day of the weekend. He had deliberately chosen Pennington Hall because it was farthest from both the business college and the lacrosse field. He ignored the nearby gym, claiming the main student gym on the south side of campus was far superior. He didn’t know for sure, because he had never been to the gym attached to Pennington Hall. He ran to practice as a warm up. He rode his bicycle to class on days when it wasn’t raining. He had class until three every day, and returned to his dorm before doing anything else. Studying was done after working out.
He was glad his roommate had never shown up for school.
Nathan
“Hey, guys, we have a floor meeting tonight in the lounge downstairs. I ordered some pizza, I’ve got some soda, we’re going to talk about this semester, okay?” His residents took no notice of him, on their way out. He continued walking to his room. Opening the door, he found underwear duct-taped to his ceiling. A note, hanging from a pair of gray boxer-briefs, read “Nate, you should have locked your room when you left. Call my room when you get back. Love, Brian.”
“Son of a bitch,” Nathan muttered, as he began pulling his underpants off the ceiling, standing on his tip-toes to reach them. Somebody knocked on his door, so he cleared his throat. “Just a second.” The situation was hopeless, he decided, so he stepped out of his room and into the hall and came face to face with Brandon.
Brandon was holding a piece of paper which he shoved in Nathan’s face. “What’s this?” It was a sheet of paper with a drawing of Bart Simpson and his friend Milhouse. Underneath their picture, in bold black letters, were the names “Brandon L.” and “Cameron S.”
“It’s your new Door Decoration. Everybody’s got new ones for the new semester.” Indeed, ever door had a similar piece of paper; Mike D. and Paul T. had a drawing of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. Jeff S. and Jerry N. had Batman and Superman. Nathan himself had Huckleberry Hound.
“Okay, but what’s this?” Brandon pointed to the second name on his sheet of paper.
“Well, come to the meeting tonight at 7:30 in the downstairs lounge, and you’ll find out. Okay? And, pass the information along to any of the other guys you see, please?”
“Am I getting a roommate?”
“Come to the meeting.” Nathan tried to look intimidating, but as his head came to Brandon’s shoulders it was, he decided, probably less than impressive.
“I’ll be working out at 7:30.” Brandon walked away, bumping into Nathan’s shoulder as he passed him. Nathan watched Brandon as he strode down the hall, shoulders back, head high, effortlessly tall and intimidating.
“Shit.” Nathan muttered before returning to his room.
Cameron
Cameron Sound walked into Pennington Hall with only his messenger bag. Everything else he intended to bring along to school was still at home, a mere seventeen miles away. He approached the front desk slowly, glancing around the room; the notice board still declaring that refrigerators must be unplugged over winter break. Dates were given for people driving home, along with destinations and invitations for anyone interested to split the cost of gas. He greeted the guy sitting behind the desk. “Hi, I’m supposed to be moving in here, how do I go about doing that?”
“Student ID?” the person asked. Cameron saw “Jake” on his nametag.
“Here you go, Jake.” Cameron said, handing him the fresh ID he had been given that morning; the shadows behind him in the picture gave the impression of a mullet. Jake checked a list he had sitting beside him on the desk, running down a column with his long, thin finger.
“Okay, Cam, you’re in room E434.” Jake swiped Cameron’s ID through a card reader mounted to the wall, pushed a button on the apparatus and slid it through again. “I just activated your card so it will open the front doors,” he pointed to the doors that were propped open at the moment. “And also the interior doors leading to the east and north wings.” He pointed to doors at opposite ends of the lobby. “Front door is unlocked between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, but the interior doors are always locked, so don’t lose this.” Jake handed the ID back to Cameron.
“Which door is mine?”
“East Wing, that door there.” Jake pointed to the door closest to Cameron. A blonde girl in a ruffled skirt emerged from the door and looked at Cameron for a second before turning and exiting through the open front door. “Now, if you would just fill out this paperwork and I’ll get your key. Have you met your Resident Advisor yet?” Cameron admitted he had not, and Jake shook his head. “Sorry. You have to sign something for him before I can give you your key. I’ll give it to him next time I see him, or I can call and see if he’s in his room.” Jake handed Cameron a stack of paper Tolstoy would have been proud to turn out and vanished behind a partition.
Cameron began filling it out, sighing at each mention he encountered of “The University” because, he kept telling himself, he was finally moving on, finally getting away from high school. Finally, he was doing the right thing.
Jake came back and sat heavily in his chair. “Okay, your RA’s name is Nathan, and he’s having a floor meeting at 7:30 in the lounge.” Jake pointed at a room with windows all around it behind Cameron. “He says he’ll meet you there, is that okay?”
“Sure,” Cameron said. “Do you have a map of the campus? I’ll just walk around looking for my classes.”
Brandon
“I’m getting a roommate, Emily. Can you believe it?” He ground his teeth into the phone.
“Well, yes, I can; I have three roommates and I live in what used to be the floor lounge. I never thought it was fair you had a double to yourself.”
“I’m not the only one; Rob down the hall has a double, and there’s only three guys in the quad on my floor. Why single me out?”
“It’s not a conspiracy against you, you know.”
“Yeah, well, it could be. I’m going to workout, will you meet me at the gym?” He moved himself to the edge of his bed and swung his legs down. They dangled in the empty space between the top and bottom bunks.
“No, we have a floor meeting tonight, discussing what we’re doing this semester or something.”
“I wonder why my advisor never does anything like that,” Brandon mused. “Okay, well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Did you get into the comp two class I’m in?”
“I’m not sure, I have to go talk to the teacher first day of class. Have a good workout.”
“Bye.” Brandon hung up the phone and dropped to the floor. His telephone, which he had sitting on his bed, took a fall behind him.
He turned and saw that the phone had been ruined when it fell. The earpiece had broken off, the keypad had come detached. It was an ancient phone he had taken from his parents’ basement before coming to college, and he was loath to shell out money to buy a new phone. “Damn it all, now I’ve got to go to the store tonight.”
***
from an Untitled work, spring 2006
After my last gas bill, I had turned off my heater and not turned it back on, so the early January cold intruded my space, nearly freezing my extremities every time I slept. I couldn’t wait to sleep in my old room, with Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins smiling at me from my wall.
The muted television displayed an image of the vice president. Headlines scrawled along the bottom of the screen. Flights cancelled, major universities shutting down campuses, traffic jams out of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC, and Chicago. Schaumburg was only about twenty miles from Evanston, but with a traffic jam, it was likely to take me two hours or more. My phone rang.
“This is Cameron Sound.”
“Honey, it’s your mother. Are you safe?” I glanced out my window at the Northwestern Campus, watching the cars as they periodically pulled out from the parking lot, driving somewhere imaginary that was safer than where they were.
“I’m fine, Mom.” Put up a defense, don’t seem too eager; it’s not your style to be agreeable. You are still rebelling, even though you’re twenty-one years old and should, by all rights, be an adult.
“Are you sure? I’m worried about you. Did you hear that the terror level was raised?” I closed my eyes. What was she doing right now? Multi-tasking for sure. Was she playing Solitaire on her computer? Was she preparing lunch? I heard my mother take a deep breath. Was she smoking again? I saw her chain smoking, sitting in the kitchen blowing the smoke out the window.
“I don’t live in a cave.” I picked at my sleeve. My cell phone rang, but I ignored it.
“Come home.”
My cell phone continued to ring even after I had left Evanston. The sound mixed with honking and the hum of my engine. I ignored it. It rang. I ignored it. It rang and rang. I finally picked it up and glanced at the number that was calling. It was just a number, nobody in my phone book, but it was somebody in Schaumburg. “I don’t know who you are,” I scolded the phone. “I’m not picking you up.”
I set my phone on the console, sliding it underneath the parking brake lever. The Volkswagen in front of me had Missouri license plates and was emitting a rhythmic thumping which shook my mirrors. My phone rang. I set my hand on the parking brake lever and put my thumb over the button. I clicked the button several times, then moved my hand to my gearshift and pushed it from neutral to third, second, first, neutral, first, neutral, and first one more time, before slowly letting the clutch out and pushing down on the gas. The tension of the clutch pushed my foot hard; I slid backwards a few feet before the clutch engaged and inched me forward. I rocked back and forth like this until the Volkswagen pulled ahead, and I followed.
“This is Cameron Sound,” I finally gave in to the phone. Silence. “This is Cameron Sound, hello?”
“Cameron.” The voice sounded nervous. It cleared it’s throat. “Cameron, it’s—it’s Amanda.”
The booming bass from the Volkswagen stopped. My engine ran silent. All I could hear was Amanda’s voice. “Amanda.”
I heard her sigh, saw her sigh, her lips parted, phone to her left ear, left elbow leaning on a table, right hand brushing her hair behind her right ear over and over. I pulled my car forward another car length. “I’m sorry to call you,” she explained. “I’m in trouble.”
What kind of trouble could she be in that it drove her to call me of all people? “Nothing is springing to my mind,” I said aloud.
“What?”
“Nothing. What kind of trouble are you in?” The Volkswagen pulled ahead suddenly, and beyond it I saw traffic begin to flow at a quicker pace.
“Are you near home?”
“On my way,” I told her. “Leaving Evanston now. What kind of trouble are you in?”
“My flight got cancelled. Trains aren’t running, busses are running on a limited schedule and they’re all booked.” Where do I come in? “Listen, I called everybody, my mom can’t get away from work and my dad can’t get down here from Detroit, everybody else I know is in the same boat I am, nobody can head to Lawrence.”
Traffic was moving along well now, and I drove in silence for half a mile with the phone to my ear, listening to her breath on the other end.
“Cameron, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you, it was a last resort, and if you can’t take me, just say so.”
“You want me to take you to Lawrence?” Every time I had to shift, I took my right hand off the steering wheel and frantically pushed up a gear. This is a trick I used to find out if my wheels were properly aligned. I was in fourth gear now, and cruising well.
“You’re the only person who can help me. But you don’t have to.” I pushed into fifth gear, changed lanes and passed the Volkswagen, leaving the throbbing bass behind.
My mother was standing on the porch, waving and smiling and sending a thousand thank-yous heavenward for my safe arrival. I smelled charred wood and vegetable soup simmering on the stove. “I’m not staying,” I told her right away. “I’m sorry.”
“Why not? You’re not going back into the city are you?” She absent-mindedly took a cigarette from a silver case she kept in her pocket and stuck it in her mouth, lighting it with a souvenir Hard Rock Café Zippo. I stared at her.
“Where’s Dad, Mom?” I dropped my laptop bag to the floor with a thud. She took a drag and walked to the cold fireplace, reaching in and opening the floo and blowing the smoke at the burnt wood in the grate.
“He’s at the grocery store. When I told him you were coming home, he went out to buy a case of beer. Whatever that beer is you always ask for.” She flicked the ashes into the fireplace and looked at me.
“Does he know you started smoking again?” She looked at her cigarette, eyelids drawing slowly up, up, revealing the whites of her eyes in sharper and sharper detail. She took a quick puff and smiled at me.
“Stressful day, you know how it is.”
“Must be. Stressful enough to sift through all those boxes of crap in the basement and find your lighter and cigarette flask.” I walked to the bathroom. When I came out, she had thrown her cigarette into the fireplace and was preparing a fire. “Disposing of the evidence?”
“Don’t start. Why aren’t you staying?” She lit the fire starter and stood. “Make sure the fire catches while I go check on the soup.” My mother was like a cigarette herself, leaving me breathless and winded.
“No, I’m not staying. I’m taking Amanda to school.”
I watched the fireplace, the flames licking the stack of wood. “You’re taking Amanda to school?” I could smell the smoke from her clothes as she walked closer to me. “Are you two back together?” Of course not. We broke up two years ago and that was it. I didn’t answer her.
“I’m doing her a favor; she’s got to be back before class starts Thursday.”
“And you’re just going to take a couple of days to drive a girl you barely ever talk to halfway across the country?”
“You smell like cigarettes. I love you.”
She lived in one of those subdivisions which have only six houses repeated a hundred times, each off-white with a brick façade around the door. Amanda’s house had been repainted a soothing baby blue since the last time I saw it. I rang the bell and held my breath as the door opened. “Could you take this?” She shoved a suitcase at me.
“Nice to see you, Amanda.” I opened my trunk and moved my junk around to make room for her suitcase which I assumed contained her entire wardrobe. With a thud behind me, I realized I had been wrong. “Got enough clothes?”
“I didn’t pack the sweater you gave me for my seventeenth birthday,” she explained. “So yes, I have just enough clothes.” This remark was followed by a short lived smirk, which was replaced with a look of disgust. “I’m sorry, that’s really mean of me. I should be more grateful. Thank you for doing this, Cameron.”
She stood, facing me, her hair falling like a black curtain over her forehead and eyes. She wore a long sleeve white shirt underneath a light blue KU tee. Her black boots disappeared into the cuffs of her faded jeans. The left boot rocked back and forth. Her arms were raised, halfway, in a gesture that appeared to be an aborted hug. I stuck out my right hand and took hers. “You’re welcome; I won’t ask for a hug so you don’t need to offer one. Just get in.”
===
Well, there they are. Like I said, you'll notice similar themes and/or characters, not only here but it other stories I've written. Hope this makes up for my recent bad blogging skills...
"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things." -Bobby Knight
Writing is much like any other art (painting, composing, sculpting) in that sometimes the artist has a few false starts before finding a groove. Bearing that in mind, for every story I finish you can safely guess that there were three more started. So what do I do with those three unfinished stories? Well, sometimes they just sit forever, and I find them later and read what I've got and decide it's terrible. Sometimes, I come back and say, "Hey, that's not bad." The only problem is that it's normally a long time before I come back, and it's hard to remember just where I was going to take the story.
So tonight, I'm sharing with you a selection of those false starts. Some have potential (a couple are already past ten pages), some are so so, and some are just terrible. What you may notice is a similarity in theme, or character or plot elements within these false starts, because what I am doing is fine-tuning an idea. Most of what you are seeing tonight eventually became one of two stories; "Special Detail" or "Momentum." There is also one thrown in about buying a used car that I really want to revisit now and try and tweak. So, without further explanation:
===
from an Untitled work, spring 2006
Michael would later reflect on his first job out of college, at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant at the Mall of America, and wonder if things wouldn’t have been better if he had just stayed there. Not even to advance in employment, from server to captain of servers, to assistant floor manager, to floor manager, and so on, but just to remain a server, and smile, and bring people shrimp cocktails, shrimp burgers, barbecued shrimp, and so on, and earn the tips that bought him the car that got him into so much trouble.
The mob. Don’t think it disappeared. It seems now to be a Hollywood legend, a thing of the past, romanticized to no end by names like Dean Martin, Al Pacino, and so forth. Guy Richie stylized the British mafia as nothing more than a bunch of blundering buffoons. We all had a good laugh, even me and Michael. Roommates, he and I, back at good the good old U of M. That’s what we like to call the University of Minnesota, but I suppose that’s what kids who go to University of Michigan call their school. We used to spend hours watching mafia movies. He and I went as gangsters one Halloween (that’s gangsters, not gangstas). He ended up one in real life. With a capitol G.
We lost touch for a few years out of school. I was dating this girl I met at graduation, and he was using his business accounting degree to sell plates of shrimp to tourists. We got together every once in a while, reminisced annually. Six years out of school, he found a real job at an architecture firm called Ellerbee-Beckett, as their Assistant Chief Executive Accountant in charge of Institutional Projects. Basically, this meant that he was in charge of the money being spent on building more ridiculously overpriced (and ridiculous looking) structures on the very college campus he said, on graduation day, “Man, I’ve had some great times here. I never want to leave.”
As a journalist, I should have caught on quicker, but I was blinded by his new apartment on our fifth annual catching-up-and-getting-smashed meeting. The drinks were free, the food was free, the limo was free. Everybody knew Fran Levinson owned that bar. Everybody was about to find out he owned Ellerbee-Beckett, too.
It would be almost another year before I found out Fran also owned Michael Rose.
“Colin Fairmount,” I answered my phone. It was Craig Jeffries, the editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. A man with a plan. A man with vision. A man who I had been trying to avoid because I didn’t have my story done.
“Fairmount.” He started every conversation with the last name of the person he was talking to.
***
from an unfinished work titled "In Which Colin, Fed Up With His VW, Buys A Used Car" spring 2006
“No, this one isn’t going to cut it,” he said, sizing up the out of place Skoda sitting on the Volkswagen dealer’s lot. The man helping him had a thick Germanic accent that Colin couldn’t quite wrap his head completely around. The man gestured at the automobile—for that is what it was, no odd Eastern-European model could rightly be called a ‘car’ in Colin’s mind—and looked helplessly at Colin.
“What, wrong kind of color?”
Colin regarded the color, something he had been trying to avoid since he first saw it; he had so far focused on the tires, the rims, the hubcaps, the logo on the grill, the bumper sticker which read “I’m not tailgating, I’m inspecting their—“ but was ripped off and so the punch-line was missing, anything but register the sickening day-glow orange paint with the equally eye-twisting fluorescent purple detail work. “The colors are awful,” he admitted. “But that’s not the problem.”
“Custom paint job. The man who trades this car, tells me so. Custom, he said. Premium. Cost him a lot. I gave him good deal on trade in. Do you have trade in?”
“My car,” Colin inserted a sigh here. “Is in Moline, Illinois.”
Three days earlier, on a routine trip to Racine, Wisconsin to visit a friend of his from college, Colin’s car had overheated in the middle of the night. “Your water pump went out,” the stranger on the phone from Middle-Of-Nowhere, Illinois told him the morning after this happened. “So you’re timing belt is, well, you got close to a hundred and fifty thousand miles on there, it was time for it to be replaced anyway.”
“I just got the timing belt replaced. The whole engine just got rebuilt. Why didn’t they tell me I needed a new water pump?”
There was a long intake of breath from the other end of the line. “Well, it’s cause they either got shit for brains,” here he paused, as if for dramatic effect. “Or your water pump looked fine. They’ll go out on you, all of a sudden. One minute pumping water like a heart pumping blood, next minute you’re on the side of the road.” He took a breath, and Colin sensed the man would go on and on if left to his own devices.
“How much to have it repaired?” he asked.
“Shoot, new timing belt and water pump for a V Dub? You want me to do it, you’re talking at least seven hundred parts and labor, maybe more. Not to mention I can’t start today, cause I ain’t even got the parts, gotta order them from Chicago.”
Colin stared out of his hotel room window, eyes unfocused and reliving the previous evening. The check engine light, the temperature gauge buried in the red, way too hot zone, the grinding noise as his engine died. Then the state trooper stopping and calling in the tow truck. The truck taking the car twelve miles in the wrong direction, while he and the state trooper followed. The state trooper being nice enough to drive him to the nearest hotel which happened to be sixty miles away, in Moline. His room, from a four story Howard Johnson or Red Roof or something along those lines, overlooked a plethora of car dealerships, the most prominent of which was a Volkswagen dealer. “Can’t you order them from the dealership in Moline?” To which the inevitable response was that no, he ordered all of his parts from his cousin’s automotive supply in Chicago.
And so Colin found himself at the odd dealership, talking to the odd man, looking at the odd car. “It’s a 1997 Jetta, and it’s in Moline with a broken water pump and a melted timing belt.” He looked again at the Skoda. “I hate this.”
“You take better care of your car, then these things happen, well, they won’t.” The man looked again at the Skoda. “It is good car, reliable. And only used car on lot. You want a new car?”
“No.” That was something Colin found odd, more odd than the mechanic not ordering the parts from Moline, and almost as odd as the Skoda itself; six car dealerships, and not one used car aside from this, for lack of a better term, thing. “How can this be the only used car you have?”
“We a giant sale are having, all of our used cars last weekend. Super Six-Hundred Sale. Once every few months. All dealers here, all owned by same man. He gather all used cars, sells them at the fairgrounds. This is all that’s left.” Colin peered into the interior and saw a yellow and black stripe pattern on the seats, gearshift and steering wheel.
“I wonder why.”
***
from an Untitled work, spring 2006
Brandon
Every morning, when he stepped out of his room and into the hall, he gave a silent command to everybody; stay out of my way, and everything will be fine. He would never have hurt anybody, hadn’t done so off the lacrosse field and wasn’t going to start now. Actually backing up his mere presence with actions would have required more time than was given to him in a day, and that time was precious. Grades needed to be kept up to stay on the team. In the off season, trips to the gym needed to replace the rigorous practices he faced during the regular season.
He slept only four hours a night; classes began for him at eight every morning, even Fridays, and nobody else on his floor went to class on Fridays because they were on the Northeast end of campus, the school of design sector, and they never had classes on Fridays. Design students loaded their Tuesdays and Thursdays with gen-eds and took their color classes and computer animation courses on Mondays and Wednesdays, leaving Friday as an extra day of the weekend. He had deliberately chosen Pennington Hall because it was farthest from both the business college and the lacrosse field. He ignored the nearby gym, claiming the main student gym on the south side of campus was far superior. He didn’t know for sure, because he had never been to the gym attached to Pennington Hall. He ran to practice as a warm up. He rode his bicycle to class on days when it wasn’t raining. He had class until three every day, and returned to his dorm before doing anything else. Studying was done after working out.
He was glad his roommate had never shown up for school.
Nathan
“Hey, guys, we have a floor meeting tonight in the lounge downstairs. I ordered some pizza, I’ve got some soda, we’re going to talk about this semester, okay?” His residents took no notice of him, on their way out. He continued walking to his room. Opening the door, he found underwear duct-taped to his ceiling. A note, hanging from a pair of gray boxer-briefs, read “Nate, you should have locked your room when you left. Call my room when you get back. Love, Brian.”
“Son of a bitch,” Nathan muttered, as he began pulling his underpants off the ceiling, standing on his tip-toes to reach them. Somebody knocked on his door, so he cleared his throat. “Just a second.” The situation was hopeless, he decided, so he stepped out of his room and into the hall and came face to face with Brandon.
Brandon was holding a piece of paper which he shoved in Nathan’s face. “What’s this?” It was a sheet of paper with a drawing of Bart Simpson and his friend Milhouse. Underneath their picture, in bold black letters, were the names “Brandon L.” and “Cameron S.”
“It’s your new Door Decoration. Everybody’s got new ones for the new semester.” Indeed, ever door had a similar piece of paper; Mike D. and Paul T. had a drawing of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. Jeff S. and Jerry N. had Batman and Superman. Nathan himself had Huckleberry Hound.
“Okay, but what’s this?” Brandon pointed to the second name on his sheet of paper.
“Well, come to the meeting tonight at 7:30 in the downstairs lounge, and you’ll find out. Okay? And, pass the information along to any of the other guys you see, please?”
“Am I getting a roommate?”
“Come to the meeting.” Nathan tried to look intimidating, but as his head came to Brandon’s shoulders it was, he decided, probably less than impressive.
“I’ll be working out at 7:30.” Brandon walked away, bumping into Nathan’s shoulder as he passed him. Nathan watched Brandon as he strode down the hall, shoulders back, head high, effortlessly tall and intimidating.
“Shit.” Nathan muttered before returning to his room.
Cameron
Cameron Sound walked into Pennington Hall with only his messenger bag. Everything else he intended to bring along to school was still at home, a mere seventeen miles away. He approached the front desk slowly, glancing around the room; the notice board still declaring that refrigerators must be unplugged over winter break. Dates were given for people driving home, along with destinations and invitations for anyone interested to split the cost of gas. He greeted the guy sitting behind the desk. “Hi, I’m supposed to be moving in here, how do I go about doing that?”
“Student ID?” the person asked. Cameron saw “Jake” on his nametag.
“Here you go, Jake.” Cameron said, handing him the fresh ID he had been given that morning; the shadows behind him in the picture gave the impression of a mullet. Jake checked a list he had sitting beside him on the desk, running down a column with his long, thin finger.
“Okay, Cam, you’re in room E434.” Jake swiped Cameron’s ID through a card reader mounted to the wall, pushed a button on the apparatus and slid it through again. “I just activated your card so it will open the front doors,” he pointed to the doors that were propped open at the moment. “And also the interior doors leading to the east and north wings.” He pointed to doors at opposite ends of the lobby. “Front door is unlocked between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon, but the interior doors are always locked, so don’t lose this.” Jake handed the ID back to Cameron.
“Which door is mine?”
“East Wing, that door there.” Jake pointed to the door closest to Cameron. A blonde girl in a ruffled skirt emerged from the door and looked at Cameron for a second before turning and exiting through the open front door. “Now, if you would just fill out this paperwork and I’ll get your key. Have you met your Resident Advisor yet?” Cameron admitted he had not, and Jake shook his head. “Sorry. You have to sign something for him before I can give you your key. I’ll give it to him next time I see him, or I can call and see if he’s in his room.” Jake handed Cameron a stack of paper Tolstoy would have been proud to turn out and vanished behind a partition.
Cameron began filling it out, sighing at each mention he encountered of “The University” because, he kept telling himself, he was finally moving on, finally getting away from high school. Finally, he was doing the right thing.
Jake came back and sat heavily in his chair. “Okay, your RA’s name is Nathan, and he’s having a floor meeting at 7:30 in the lounge.” Jake pointed at a room with windows all around it behind Cameron. “He says he’ll meet you there, is that okay?”
“Sure,” Cameron said. “Do you have a map of the campus? I’ll just walk around looking for my classes.”
Brandon
“I’m getting a roommate, Emily. Can you believe it?” He ground his teeth into the phone.
“Well, yes, I can; I have three roommates and I live in what used to be the floor lounge. I never thought it was fair you had a double to yourself.”
“I’m not the only one; Rob down the hall has a double, and there’s only three guys in the quad on my floor. Why single me out?”
“It’s not a conspiracy against you, you know.”
“Yeah, well, it could be. I’m going to workout, will you meet me at the gym?” He moved himself to the edge of his bed and swung his legs down. They dangled in the empty space between the top and bottom bunks.
“No, we have a floor meeting tonight, discussing what we’re doing this semester or something.”
“I wonder why my advisor never does anything like that,” Brandon mused. “Okay, well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Did you get into the comp two class I’m in?”
“I’m not sure, I have to go talk to the teacher first day of class. Have a good workout.”
“Bye.” Brandon hung up the phone and dropped to the floor. His telephone, which he had sitting on his bed, took a fall behind him.
He turned and saw that the phone had been ruined when it fell. The earpiece had broken off, the keypad had come detached. It was an ancient phone he had taken from his parents’ basement before coming to college, and he was loath to shell out money to buy a new phone. “Damn it all, now I’ve got to go to the store tonight.”
***
from an Untitled work, spring 2006
After my last gas bill, I had turned off my heater and not turned it back on, so the early January cold intruded my space, nearly freezing my extremities every time I slept. I couldn’t wait to sleep in my old room, with Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins smiling at me from my wall.
The muted television displayed an image of the vice president. Headlines scrawled along the bottom of the screen. Flights cancelled, major universities shutting down campuses, traffic jams out of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC, and Chicago. Schaumburg was only about twenty miles from Evanston, but with a traffic jam, it was likely to take me two hours or more. My phone rang.
“This is Cameron Sound.”
“Honey, it’s your mother. Are you safe?” I glanced out my window at the Northwestern Campus, watching the cars as they periodically pulled out from the parking lot, driving somewhere imaginary that was safer than where they were.
“I’m fine, Mom.” Put up a defense, don’t seem too eager; it’s not your style to be agreeable. You are still rebelling, even though you’re twenty-one years old and should, by all rights, be an adult.
“Are you sure? I’m worried about you. Did you hear that the terror level was raised?” I closed my eyes. What was she doing right now? Multi-tasking for sure. Was she playing Solitaire on her computer? Was she preparing lunch? I heard my mother take a deep breath. Was she smoking again? I saw her chain smoking, sitting in the kitchen blowing the smoke out the window.
“I don’t live in a cave.” I picked at my sleeve. My cell phone rang, but I ignored it.
“Come home.”
My cell phone continued to ring even after I had left Evanston. The sound mixed with honking and the hum of my engine. I ignored it. It rang. I ignored it. It rang and rang. I finally picked it up and glanced at the number that was calling. It was just a number, nobody in my phone book, but it was somebody in Schaumburg. “I don’t know who you are,” I scolded the phone. “I’m not picking you up.”
I set my phone on the console, sliding it underneath the parking brake lever. The Volkswagen in front of me had Missouri license plates and was emitting a rhythmic thumping which shook my mirrors. My phone rang. I set my hand on the parking brake lever and put my thumb over the button. I clicked the button several times, then moved my hand to my gearshift and pushed it from neutral to third, second, first, neutral, first, neutral, and first one more time, before slowly letting the clutch out and pushing down on the gas. The tension of the clutch pushed my foot hard; I slid backwards a few feet before the clutch engaged and inched me forward. I rocked back and forth like this until the Volkswagen pulled ahead, and I followed.
“This is Cameron Sound,” I finally gave in to the phone. Silence. “This is Cameron Sound, hello?”
“Cameron.” The voice sounded nervous. It cleared it’s throat. “Cameron, it’s—it’s Amanda.”
The booming bass from the Volkswagen stopped. My engine ran silent. All I could hear was Amanda’s voice. “Amanda.”
I heard her sigh, saw her sigh, her lips parted, phone to her left ear, left elbow leaning on a table, right hand brushing her hair behind her right ear over and over. I pulled my car forward another car length. “I’m sorry to call you,” she explained. “I’m in trouble.”
What kind of trouble could she be in that it drove her to call me of all people? “Nothing is springing to my mind,” I said aloud.
“What?”
“Nothing. What kind of trouble are you in?” The Volkswagen pulled ahead suddenly, and beyond it I saw traffic begin to flow at a quicker pace.
“Are you near home?”
“On my way,” I told her. “Leaving Evanston now. What kind of trouble are you in?”
“My flight got cancelled. Trains aren’t running, busses are running on a limited schedule and they’re all booked.” Where do I come in? “Listen, I called everybody, my mom can’t get away from work and my dad can’t get down here from Detroit, everybody else I know is in the same boat I am, nobody can head to Lawrence.”
Traffic was moving along well now, and I drove in silence for half a mile with the phone to my ear, listening to her breath on the other end.
“Cameron, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you, it was a last resort, and if you can’t take me, just say so.”
“You want me to take you to Lawrence?” Every time I had to shift, I took my right hand off the steering wheel and frantically pushed up a gear. This is a trick I used to find out if my wheels were properly aligned. I was in fourth gear now, and cruising well.
“You’re the only person who can help me. But you don’t have to.” I pushed into fifth gear, changed lanes and passed the Volkswagen, leaving the throbbing bass behind.
My mother was standing on the porch, waving and smiling and sending a thousand thank-yous heavenward for my safe arrival. I smelled charred wood and vegetable soup simmering on the stove. “I’m not staying,” I told her right away. “I’m sorry.”
“Why not? You’re not going back into the city are you?” She absent-mindedly took a cigarette from a silver case she kept in her pocket and stuck it in her mouth, lighting it with a souvenir Hard Rock Café Zippo. I stared at her.
“Where’s Dad, Mom?” I dropped my laptop bag to the floor with a thud. She took a drag and walked to the cold fireplace, reaching in and opening the floo and blowing the smoke at the burnt wood in the grate.
“He’s at the grocery store. When I told him you were coming home, he went out to buy a case of beer. Whatever that beer is you always ask for.” She flicked the ashes into the fireplace and looked at me.
“Does he know you started smoking again?” She looked at her cigarette, eyelids drawing slowly up, up, revealing the whites of her eyes in sharper and sharper detail. She took a quick puff and smiled at me.
“Stressful day, you know how it is.”
“Must be. Stressful enough to sift through all those boxes of crap in the basement and find your lighter and cigarette flask.” I walked to the bathroom. When I came out, she had thrown her cigarette into the fireplace and was preparing a fire. “Disposing of the evidence?”
“Don’t start. Why aren’t you staying?” She lit the fire starter and stood. “Make sure the fire catches while I go check on the soup.” My mother was like a cigarette herself, leaving me breathless and winded.
“No, I’m not staying. I’m taking Amanda to school.”
I watched the fireplace, the flames licking the stack of wood. “You’re taking Amanda to school?” I could smell the smoke from her clothes as she walked closer to me. “Are you two back together?” Of course not. We broke up two years ago and that was it. I didn’t answer her.
“I’m doing her a favor; she’s got to be back before class starts Thursday.”
“And you’re just going to take a couple of days to drive a girl you barely ever talk to halfway across the country?”
“You smell like cigarettes. I love you.”
She lived in one of those subdivisions which have only six houses repeated a hundred times, each off-white with a brick façade around the door. Amanda’s house had been repainted a soothing baby blue since the last time I saw it. I rang the bell and held my breath as the door opened. “Could you take this?” She shoved a suitcase at me.
“Nice to see you, Amanda.” I opened my trunk and moved my junk around to make room for her suitcase which I assumed contained her entire wardrobe. With a thud behind me, I realized I had been wrong. “Got enough clothes?”
“I didn’t pack the sweater you gave me for my seventeenth birthday,” she explained. “So yes, I have just enough clothes.” This remark was followed by a short lived smirk, which was replaced with a look of disgust. “I’m sorry, that’s really mean of me. I should be more grateful. Thank you for doing this, Cameron.”
She stood, facing me, her hair falling like a black curtain over her forehead and eyes. She wore a long sleeve white shirt underneath a light blue KU tee. Her black boots disappeared into the cuffs of her faded jeans. The left boot rocked back and forth. Her arms were raised, halfway, in a gesture that appeared to be an aborted hug. I stuck out my right hand and took hers. “You’re welcome; I won’t ask for a hug so you don’t need to offer one. Just get in.”
===
Well, there they are. Like I said, you'll notice similar themes and/or characters, not only here but it other stories I've written. Hope this makes up for my recent bad blogging skills...
"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things." -Bobby Knight
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Time Got Away From Me...
...and now I'm going to play a blogging game.
Answer the following questions by typing the answers into Google Image Search. Then post the picture that you like best for the answer.
My Age:
A Place I would Like to Visit:
My Favorite Place:
My Favorite Object":
My Favorite Food:
My Favorite Animal:
My Favorite Color:
Town Where I Was Born:
A Past Pet:
My First Name:
My Middle Name:
My Last Name:
A Bad Habit:
My First Job:
My Current Occupation:
My Grandmother's Name:
What Are You Doing Right Now?:
There you go! Now, blogging buddies, gopher it!
Answer the following questions by typing the answers into Google Image Search. Then post the picture that you like best for the answer.
My Age:
A Place I would Like to Visit:
My Favorite Place:
My Favorite Object":
My Favorite Food:
My Favorite Animal:
My Favorite Color:
Town Where I Was Born:
A Past Pet:
My First Name:
My Middle Name:
My Last Name:
A Bad Habit:
My First Job:
My Current Occupation:
My Grandmother's Name:
What Are You Doing Right Now?:
There you go! Now, blogging buddies, gopher it!
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Lady Mondegreen
So, the good people at Merriam-Webster released their list of new words for the 2008 edition, and my favorite from the list is the word mondegreen, a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung. Check out Mondegreen at Wikipedia.
I love this word. It's now my new favorite word. My favorite mondegreens? Here they are:
Excuse me, while I kiss this guy.
There's a bathroom on the right.
Hold me Closer, Tony Danza.
And there's a wino down the road, we should have stolen Oreos.
What have I become, my Swedish friend?
What do you do when all your enemies are French?
There are a lot more, but, well, just google mondegreen or misheard lyrics, and you'll see.
No excerpt today, I don't have the time to comb through my stuff. Tomorrow. Promise. And also tomorrow, a story about a wall made out of stone.
I love this word. It's now my new favorite word. My favorite mondegreens? Here they are:
Excuse me, while I kiss this guy.
There's a bathroom on the right.
Hold me Closer, Tony Danza.
And there's a wino down the road, we should have stolen Oreos.
What have I become, my Swedish friend?
What do you do when all your enemies are French?
There are a lot more, but, well, just google mondegreen or misheard lyrics, and you'll see.
No excerpt today, I don't have the time to comb through my stuff. Tomorrow. Promise. And also tomorrow, a story about a wall made out of stone.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Strictly Enforced
So yesterday, as I was barreling down the terrifyingly narrow lanes of I-44, Eastbound at Berry Rd in Webster Groves, I saw one of those flashing signs that gives people warnings about impending construction or lane shifts or whatever. You know the type. This particular one warned of stopping on the shoulder.
You see, for those of you who don't live in the StL, one of our major highways, Highway 40 (US 40, known to outsiders as I-64) is closed for a five mile stretch between I-270 and I-170. And Eastbound from there for five miles, from I-170 to Kingshighway, it is under construction (and that five mile stretch will close next year, all year). What this means is that the other two East/West Interstates in the area are overly congested, along with every concievable road I could normally take to go home from work (including the road on which my office sits). To compensate for this, the lanes on I-70 between 270 and 170 and the lanes on I-44 between 270 and downtown have been restriped narrower to accomodate for an extra lane in each direction. This hardly solves the problem, because now instead of just being jammed in traffic, we're jammed in traffic and it's easier to talk to each other because our cars are, no joke, mere inches apart. When traffic is moving along at the speed limit, it's harrowing when you are passing or getting passed, especially if there's a semi involved.
But I digress. I was talking about I-44 Eastbound at Berry Rd and the warning sign about stopping on the shoulder. My point was that due to the lane re-striping, the shoulder on each side of the road has virtually vanished. Nowhere to park if you have a flat tire, you just have to book it to the next exit and pray your wheel holds up.
But the warning sign made me cry. Why? Well, it had the message flash across it in two sections, the first being "NO STOPPING ON SHOULDER." No problem there. But the second part is what did it: "STRICKLY ENFORCED."
Wait wait wait wait..."STRICKLY?" What the hell does "Strickly" mean? Well, I Googled it and came up with a number of companies that have it as part of their name, but my favorite was the first link from the Urban Dictionary. The definition of strickly? "How morons spell strictly."
Yes, that is right, I just called Mo-Dot morons. First off, tell me why it takes Iowa, a tiny state without the tax base that Missouri has, five years to turn seventy miles of two-lane highway into a four-lane expressway complete with guideposts to let you know that you're still on it (I'm talking about the Avenue of the Saints here) when in the same time Missouri can only turn fifteen of its forty miles from two to four lanes. Tell me why. Because they're morons. Why is it that even though the I-64 construction project has been going on for two years now, the only visible progress I have seen is the completion of one seldom-used bridge, half of the Kingshighway bridge, worse commutes and five miles of closed highway? Because they're morons.
Lucky for them, today when I drove by the same sign, it had been corrected. Possibly some other enraged English Major with nothing better to do called in. But I'm glad it got fixed; people learn best from example, and from seeing. If Mo-Dot, a publicly funded government agency, can't spell correctly, then the general public will start to think spelling and grammar are optional. Well, just so you know, they're not.
One more thing; My Sister just recently blogged about her eyebrow. I, too, have only the one (unless I take measures against the creeping unibrow). Today, sitting on the exit ramp at I-44 and Laclede Station, I noticed a woman about my age in a Subaru station wagon (I know, this is hilarious because I drive a Jetta, we were both white, and the Stuff White People Like blog has mentioned how Jettas and Subaru Station Wagons were at one time the car of choice for trendy white people). She was applying a piece of hair-removing wax paper to her unibrow. I thought I should look away, but I understood that if she caught me looking, all I had to do was point out my own unkempt forehead moustache and she would be relieved of all embarassment. What makes this better is that this happened no more than a mile from my sister's house; see, Mo, you and I are not alone, not even in our own neighborhoods.
You see, for those of you who don't live in the StL, one of our major highways, Highway 40 (US 40, known to outsiders as I-64) is closed for a five mile stretch between I-270 and I-170. And Eastbound from there for five miles, from I-170 to Kingshighway, it is under construction (and that five mile stretch will close next year, all year). What this means is that the other two East/West Interstates in the area are overly congested, along with every concievable road I could normally take to go home from work (including the road on which my office sits). To compensate for this, the lanes on I-70 between 270 and 170 and the lanes on I-44 between 270 and downtown have been restriped narrower to accomodate for an extra lane in each direction. This hardly solves the problem, because now instead of just being jammed in traffic, we're jammed in traffic and it's easier to talk to each other because our cars are, no joke, mere inches apart. When traffic is moving along at the speed limit, it's harrowing when you are passing or getting passed, especially if there's a semi involved.
But I digress. I was talking about I-44 Eastbound at Berry Rd and the warning sign about stopping on the shoulder. My point was that due to the lane re-striping, the shoulder on each side of the road has virtually vanished. Nowhere to park if you have a flat tire, you just have to book it to the next exit and pray your wheel holds up.
But the warning sign made me cry. Why? Well, it had the message flash across it in two sections, the first being "NO STOPPING ON SHOULDER." No problem there. But the second part is what did it: "STRICKLY ENFORCED."
Wait wait wait wait..."STRICKLY?" What the hell does "Strickly" mean? Well, I Googled it and came up with a number of companies that have it as part of their name, but my favorite was the first link from the Urban Dictionary. The definition of strickly? "How morons spell strictly."
Yes, that is right, I just called Mo-Dot morons. First off, tell me why it takes Iowa, a tiny state without the tax base that Missouri has, five years to turn seventy miles of two-lane highway into a four-lane expressway complete with guideposts to let you know that you're still on it (I'm talking about the Avenue of the Saints here) when in the same time Missouri can only turn fifteen of its forty miles from two to four lanes. Tell me why. Because they're morons. Why is it that even though the I-64 construction project has been going on for two years now, the only visible progress I have seen is the completion of one seldom-used bridge, half of the Kingshighway bridge, worse commutes and five miles of closed highway? Because they're morons.
Lucky for them, today when I drove by the same sign, it had been corrected. Possibly some other enraged English Major with nothing better to do called in. But I'm glad it got fixed; people learn best from example, and from seeing. If Mo-Dot, a publicly funded government agency, can't spell correctly, then the general public will start to think spelling and grammar are optional. Well, just so you know, they're not.
One more thing; My Sister just recently blogged about her eyebrow. I, too, have only the one (unless I take measures against the creeping unibrow). Today, sitting on the exit ramp at I-44 and Laclede Station, I noticed a woman about my age in a Subaru station wagon (I know, this is hilarious because I drive a Jetta, we were both white, and the Stuff White People Like blog has mentioned how Jettas and Subaru Station Wagons were at one time the car of choice for trendy white people). She was applying a piece of hair-removing wax paper to her unibrow. I thought I should look away, but I understood that if she caught me looking, all I had to do was point out my own unkempt forehead moustache and she would be relieved of all embarassment. What makes this better is that this happened no more than a mile from my sister's house; see, Mo, you and I are not alone, not even in our own neighborhoods.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Tuesday Excerpt...and an Apology...
Friday night, instead of free-writing, I went to the Skyview Drive-In to see Wall-E and Get Smart. Wall-E was definitely the better of the two, but Get Smart did have its moments. I liked a lot of the nods to the original series but, let's face it, Steve Carell, as hilarious as he can be, is no Don Adams. But back to the matter at hand, that being the blog.
The air conditioning unit outside our house sits on a concrete slab on the side of a hill, and to our dismay we discovered last week that with all the recent rain, the concrete slab has started pitching down the hill a bit. And, of course, the rotting crumbling railroad tie retaining wall wasn't going to hold. So, we had a grandiose plan for the backyard, part of it being an overhaul of this section of the yard. I thought a quick fix was in order, but then I realized that, what the hell, why not go for it and do what we want? Well, Kathy had already come to this decision because she's much more quick-witted and right about these things. So we dropped a bunch of money on retaining wall blocks, tools, rocks, etc., everything we need to build not one but two retaining walls in our back yard, to kind of step it down on that side and level out the area where the a/c unit sits. So, for the past two evenings, we've been working on tilling, digging, moving, sweating, and singing chain-gang songs. And so far, the wall is...not even remotely looking like a wall. In fact, at this point, if we get a torrential downpour (the likes of which we have in fact seen many of since March), our a/c unit will probably end up in our neighbor's yard. But we've got clear skies until Thursday-ish, so tomorrow we will work fervently to at least get enough of a wall to actually have it retain something. This also explains why I didn't free write Saturday or Sunday. That, and the suggestions were, um...well, a murder was too general, and the other suggestion was too You Don't Mess With the Zohan. But I did like the idea of making the president go away...
Right, well, there's a lot going on that I would love to talk about, but most of it has little to do with the world of writing. So, forget it, I'll get to the excerpt.
This comes from a writing exercise I did this past semester. We were supposed to write for twenty minutes about an object that held a special meaning for us. And after we were done doing that, it was all out of our system so we could write a few pages about it with some distance, as if we didn't know all of that significance.
I chose a snare drum head from the days of The Hitchhikers. And what you're getting is part of the second half of the exercise, the distanced bit.
===
from a writing exercise, March 2008
When I arrived, Alan greeted me at the door solemnly and showed me in. I was surrounded by Rob’s family, not a familiar face in the crowd beyond Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, Alan, and Rob’s older sister Maggie, who had flown in from Boston where she was at grad school. The food all tasted the same to me, the meatballs sharing a texture with the crackers and cheese. Alan pulled me aside after an hour’s worth of nervous eating and took me up to Rob’s room. He told me to take anything, any one thing, to remember Rob by. I didn’t have the heart or desire to tell him that I already had Rob’s copy of his favorite book, One Hundred Years of Solitude and a hefty portion of his CD collection, but I wasn’t about to turn Alan down. I looked around the room and saw what for me had been an enigma for some time, but that I had never taken the time to ask Rob about. It was a circular object, about fourteen inches in diameter, made of flimsy plastic and coated with something white and scratchy. It was ringed with a metal hoop that gave it its firm shape, and it had been drawn on with markers over and over, so that barely any of it was legible as I stood in the middle of the room gazing at it. I asked Alan if he knew what it was. He said it was the head of a snare drum.
I took it home with me, saying goodbye to Alan and his parents, seeking out Maggie and giving her the hug I had wanted to give her since I was in fifth grade and I thought she was so pretty. I sat in my room on my bed with the drum head in my lap and stared at it. Up close, the drawings and writings were little more legible, as they had been drawn and drawn over it seemed countless times. I didn’t recognize any of the handwriting as Rob’s, and the drawings were altogether too straight-edged to be his. I looked at my wall, saw the poster Rob had drawn for a party we had thrown and compared the drawings. There was no similarity at all; Rob’s drawings were all lazy and relaxed, the angles coming together in acute and obtuse meetings. But the drawings on the drum head were sharp, right-angled. The lines were straight, but his tended to curve slightly inward as he drew. None of the lines were smeared on the drum head, either, but Rob’s lines were almost always smeared from his left hand moving the marker or pen across the medium. I examined the drum head closer, trying to pick out phrases or meanings from the drawings.
There was a tractor drawn on the bottom, smoke creeping from its exhaust pipe, forming the words “The Farm Team.” Next to that, somebody had copied pi out to twenty digits, but many of the later numbers were obscured by a hasty scrawling of “I Like Beth.” Somebody had at one time crossed out the word “Beth” and written above it “Skittles” but the line and the replacement word had been drawn with something less permanent than the original message. I couldn’t think of a single Beth that I knew aside from a distant cousin in Texas. Somebody else had drawn what looked like three Easter Island statues on the left side, under which the initials “B.S.H.” were set out in strong block letters. In the center, a five point star had been drawn and it seemed to provide a barrier against the rest of the marker; within the star, the head was mostly white, with a few dark spots as if something had struck it, and it occurred to me that this is probably where whoever had used the drum head had beat it with his or her sticks. I continued looking around it to see if there was anything else I could read. The same hand that had proclaimed affection for Beth also had written “Do or Do Not, There Is No Try” next to the stone heads, and then the quadratic formula followed in another hand.
===
There you have it!
"Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?" -Bennett Cerf
The air conditioning unit outside our house sits on a concrete slab on the side of a hill, and to our dismay we discovered last week that with all the recent rain, the concrete slab has started pitching down the hill a bit. And, of course, the rotting crumbling railroad tie retaining wall wasn't going to hold. So, we had a grandiose plan for the backyard, part of it being an overhaul of this section of the yard. I thought a quick fix was in order, but then I realized that, what the hell, why not go for it and do what we want? Well, Kathy had already come to this decision because she's much more quick-witted and right about these things. So we dropped a bunch of money on retaining wall blocks, tools, rocks, etc., everything we need to build not one but two retaining walls in our back yard, to kind of step it down on that side and level out the area where the a/c unit sits. So, for the past two evenings, we've been working on tilling, digging, moving, sweating, and singing chain-gang songs. And so far, the wall is...not even remotely looking like a wall. In fact, at this point, if we get a torrential downpour (the likes of which we have in fact seen many of since March), our a/c unit will probably end up in our neighbor's yard. But we've got clear skies until Thursday-ish, so tomorrow we will work fervently to at least get enough of a wall to actually have it retain something. This also explains why I didn't free write Saturday or Sunday. That, and the suggestions were, um...well, a murder was too general, and the other suggestion was too You Don't Mess With the Zohan. But I did like the idea of making the president go away...
Right, well, there's a lot going on that I would love to talk about, but most of it has little to do with the world of writing. So, forget it, I'll get to the excerpt.
This comes from a writing exercise I did this past semester. We were supposed to write for twenty minutes about an object that held a special meaning for us. And after we were done doing that, it was all out of our system so we could write a few pages about it with some distance, as if we didn't know all of that significance.
I chose a snare drum head from the days of The Hitchhikers. And what you're getting is part of the second half of the exercise, the distanced bit.
===
from a writing exercise, March 2008
When I arrived, Alan greeted me at the door solemnly and showed me in. I was surrounded by Rob’s family, not a familiar face in the crowd beyond Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, Alan, and Rob’s older sister Maggie, who had flown in from Boston where she was at grad school. The food all tasted the same to me, the meatballs sharing a texture with the crackers and cheese. Alan pulled me aside after an hour’s worth of nervous eating and took me up to Rob’s room. He told me to take anything, any one thing, to remember Rob by. I didn’t have the heart or desire to tell him that I already had Rob’s copy of his favorite book, One Hundred Years of Solitude and a hefty portion of his CD collection, but I wasn’t about to turn Alan down. I looked around the room and saw what for me had been an enigma for some time, but that I had never taken the time to ask Rob about. It was a circular object, about fourteen inches in diameter, made of flimsy plastic and coated with something white and scratchy. It was ringed with a metal hoop that gave it its firm shape, and it had been drawn on with markers over and over, so that barely any of it was legible as I stood in the middle of the room gazing at it. I asked Alan if he knew what it was. He said it was the head of a snare drum.
I took it home with me, saying goodbye to Alan and his parents, seeking out Maggie and giving her the hug I had wanted to give her since I was in fifth grade and I thought she was so pretty. I sat in my room on my bed with the drum head in my lap and stared at it. Up close, the drawings and writings were little more legible, as they had been drawn and drawn over it seemed countless times. I didn’t recognize any of the handwriting as Rob’s, and the drawings were altogether too straight-edged to be his. I looked at my wall, saw the poster Rob had drawn for a party we had thrown and compared the drawings. There was no similarity at all; Rob’s drawings were all lazy and relaxed, the angles coming together in acute and obtuse meetings. But the drawings on the drum head were sharp, right-angled. The lines were straight, but his tended to curve slightly inward as he drew. None of the lines were smeared on the drum head, either, but Rob’s lines were almost always smeared from his left hand moving the marker or pen across the medium. I examined the drum head closer, trying to pick out phrases or meanings from the drawings.
There was a tractor drawn on the bottom, smoke creeping from its exhaust pipe, forming the words “The Farm Team.” Next to that, somebody had copied pi out to twenty digits, but many of the later numbers were obscured by a hasty scrawling of “I Like Beth.” Somebody had at one time crossed out the word “Beth” and written above it “Skittles” but the line and the replacement word had been drawn with something less permanent than the original message. I couldn’t think of a single Beth that I knew aside from a distant cousin in Texas. Somebody else had drawn what looked like three Easter Island statues on the left side, under which the initials “B.S.H.” were set out in strong block letters. In the center, a five point star had been drawn and it seemed to provide a barrier against the rest of the marker; within the star, the head was mostly white, with a few dark spots as if something had struck it, and it occurred to me that this is probably where whoever had used the drum head had beat it with his or her sticks. I continued looking around it to see if there was anything else I could read. The same hand that had proclaimed affection for Beth also had written “Do or Do Not, There Is No Try” next to the stone heads, and then the quadratic formula followed in another hand.
===
There you have it!
"Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?" -Bennett Cerf
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
An Open Letter to the Theater-Going Public of St. Louis
Dear Sirs and Madams,
Whilest enjoying the Tuesday performance of Mel Brooks' Tony Award Winning Musical smash The Producers with many of you, I became irked by the behavior of a select few.
Not that your behavior was the worst I have observed at a theater; no, in fact, you were all a most gracious audience. You laughed when it was funny, you clapped when it was deserved. You gaped at "Springtime for Hitler" because there is something about seeing it actually performed that is just mind-blowing and incredible. You can't believe they're actually doing that on stage. But it was as this number was finishing that I started to notice something odd. Some of you got up and left. And, not even after the song was over; some of you left just before it ended.
Did you think that was the end of the show? It wasn't, just so you know. It was the end of the show within the show, so I can see the confusion. But then, why did some of you leave before the end of the number? This bothered me just a bit, but then the action picked up again. Leo and Max read the good reviews, Roger and Carmen walked in on them fighting, Franz tried to kill them, it was all good fun.
But then, just after Leo and Max got sent to jail, as "Prisoners of Love" was starting, something else happened; more of you got up to leave. Again, as the song was starting. And through the song, even more of you got up to leave. And then once the song ended, even more of you followed suit. The actors weren't even done bowing to you, their audience, and you were leaving. Distracting those of us who wanted to let the actors know how much we appreciated the show and, trust me, angering the actors. Look, I know most of you have nine to five jobs, but those people on the stage, this is how they eat. Imagine, for a moment, that your boss expects you to finish a project. He expects you to be finished by three o'clock. It's a big deal for him, he keeps checking up, and he's apologetic about it, he's not being an asshole. He just wants to make sure that you do your normal excellent job in a certain amount of time. Imagine that ten minutes before you finish it, he announces to the whole office that he's going home for the day, and not to bother him, he'll be in tomorrow. Well, wait a minute, boss...didn't you want to check and make sure my project is done?
This isn't a perfect example, I know. But skipping out before the curtain call is like looking at most of a Picasso. Or even more accurately, like going for the first three movements of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and then leaving halfway through the fourth. Picasso painted the whole thing. Beethoven wrote the whole thing and the orchestra rehearsed the whole thing. Don't they deserve credit for what they did? Sure, Mel Brooks wrote the musical and sure, he wasn't there Tuesday night. But the musical you saw was the particular interpretation of that play by the director, artistic team, pit orchestra and cast there at The Muny that night. How dare you walk out on them without giving them their proper thanks! How dare you leave while they were in the middle of entertaining you! And sure, you may have paid for the ticket so it's not like they're entertaining you for free (unless, of course, you were sitting in the free seats), but then you didn't get the full money's worth!
Please take heed. Having written and directed two plays, having performed onstage and in the Pit Orchestra, let me tell you this about the Theatre; we give you the show, and you get the joy of being entertained. We put lots of hard work into it, and what we get out of it is your applause and your appreciation. If we can put a smile on your face, and make your hands clap, the least you can do is wait until we're able to show you how much we appreciate it by smiling and bowing. The audience may get to interact with the characters onstage, but those characters aren't the people behind them. Stay until the curtain call and bows. It's the only true moment of interaction the performer gets with you the whole night.
Thank you.
Elliot M. Rauscher
6/25/2008
Whilest enjoying the Tuesday performance of Mel Brooks' Tony Award Winning Musical smash The Producers with many of you, I became irked by the behavior of a select few.
Not that your behavior was the worst I have observed at a theater; no, in fact, you were all a most gracious audience. You laughed when it was funny, you clapped when it was deserved. You gaped at "Springtime for Hitler" because there is something about seeing it actually performed that is just mind-blowing and incredible. You can't believe they're actually doing that on stage. But it was as this number was finishing that I started to notice something odd. Some of you got up and left. And, not even after the song was over; some of you left just before it ended.
Did you think that was the end of the show? It wasn't, just so you know. It was the end of the show within the show, so I can see the confusion. But then, why did some of you leave before the end of the number? This bothered me just a bit, but then the action picked up again. Leo and Max read the good reviews, Roger and Carmen walked in on them fighting, Franz tried to kill them, it was all good fun.
But then, just after Leo and Max got sent to jail, as "Prisoners of Love" was starting, something else happened; more of you got up to leave. Again, as the song was starting. And through the song, even more of you got up to leave. And then once the song ended, even more of you followed suit. The actors weren't even done bowing to you, their audience, and you were leaving. Distracting those of us who wanted to let the actors know how much we appreciated the show and, trust me, angering the actors. Look, I know most of you have nine to five jobs, but those people on the stage, this is how they eat. Imagine, for a moment, that your boss expects you to finish a project. He expects you to be finished by three o'clock. It's a big deal for him, he keeps checking up, and he's apologetic about it, he's not being an asshole. He just wants to make sure that you do your normal excellent job in a certain amount of time. Imagine that ten minutes before you finish it, he announces to the whole office that he's going home for the day, and not to bother him, he'll be in tomorrow. Well, wait a minute, boss...didn't you want to check and make sure my project is done?
This isn't a perfect example, I know. But skipping out before the curtain call is like looking at most of a Picasso. Or even more accurately, like going for the first three movements of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and then leaving halfway through the fourth. Picasso painted the whole thing. Beethoven wrote the whole thing and the orchestra rehearsed the whole thing. Don't they deserve credit for what they did? Sure, Mel Brooks wrote the musical and sure, he wasn't there Tuesday night. But the musical you saw was the particular interpretation of that play by the director, artistic team, pit orchestra and cast there at The Muny that night. How dare you walk out on them without giving them their proper thanks! How dare you leave while they were in the middle of entertaining you! And sure, you may have paid for the ticket so it's not like they're entertaining you for free (unless, of course, you were sitting in the free seats), but then you didn't get the full money's worth!
Please take heed. Having written and directed two plays, having performed onstage and in the Pit Orchestra, let me tell you this about the Theatre; we give you the show, and you get the joy of being entertained. We put lots of hard work into it, and what we get out of it is your applause and your appreciation. If we can put a smile on your face, and make your hands clap, the least you can do is wait until we're able to show you how much we appreciate it by smiling and bowing. The audience may get to interact with the characters onstage, but those characters aren't the people behind them. Stay until the curtain call and bows. It's the only true moment of interaction the performer gets with you the whole night.
Thank you.
Elliot M. Rauscher
6/25/2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Tuesday Excerpt
No fanfare, no glitz, glamour or paparazi. Just straight up fiction tonight. And before I get hit with a barage of questions...yes. This is fiction. Yes, I used my name for the narrator's character. But if I was going to do that and write a real story that really happened, I would have gone ahead and used everybody and their real names. A few things are based in fact, so if you want to know, ask me which bits are. But don't assume. Please. Fiction.
So, I love music. And I took an advanced fiction writing workshop this past semester at school. I wrote three stories; the first of which reflected my mood at the time, and it's dark and dreary and depressing and I hate it, especially the main character. Then I wrote my play, which tacked the same subject (the end of a relationship) in a much better way than what I had written as a story.
My second story was an attempt at working in current events; it dealt with a guy who is making a great living not by preying on other peoples' misfortunes, but by nonetheless benefitting from them: he works for a title abstracting company (sound familiar?) and spends his days researching properties that have been foreclosed on. I don't want to give away too much because it might be worth Tuesday Excerpting later this summer.
But for my third story, I took that love of music I randomly mentioned above and ran with it. I created a band, they're called Left Ventricle. It was the best I could come up with at the time, but that's not really important. What is important is that the band is based loosely on The Hitchhikers, but really, anybody who has ever been in a band will recognize something (I hope) from this. You may remember Joe Dubinsky of Heart Beat. Well, Left Ventricle belongs to the same universe, not one in which bands Come Together and Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day, but one in which there comes a day when The Music Dies. Like Heart Beat, Left Ventricle will never become the bands the members emulate; but like Skins from Tainted Batteries (aka Heart Beat), somebody may make it some day. Anyway, this is the most put-together portion of the story, and I'm still working on it, but, ah hell, I done introduced it enough. I give you...
===
from North for Salvation, April-June 2008.
“Rock and roll doesn’t necessarily mean a band. It doesn’t mean a singer, and it doesn’t mean a lyric, really. It’s that question of trying to be immortal.” –Malcolm McLaren
“When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio. If all the stations are rock and roll, there’s a good chance the transmission is shot.” –Larry Lujack
“It’s been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.” –Robert Plant
Bingo’s tires whining on the surface of the pavement, Corey sitting next to me and I can tell he’s got one ear on the radio and one ear on the engine, and he’s only got two ears, and I can’t blame him for sparing one for Grace Slick as she seeps out of Bingo’s speakers and permeates the van, but still, I wish somebody would listen to me, and Corey (whom I’ve never seen asleep) and I are the only two awake. But he’s got his other ear listening to Bingo’s engine, which he knows better than any human could know another human. He named Bingo, he says, because when he walked onto the instant credit used car lot they advertise on late night reruns, he saw the thing, pointed, and said, “Bingo.” The name stuck, and when he sold it to us, to the band, Corey stuck too.
The mix CD Ryan had put together for the tour spins, the tracks coming at us like the pavement of Interstate 70. Ryan himself, sleeping soundlessly, head hanging back, mouth open obscenely and drooling. I can’t see Johnny, except no, John now, he’s insisting, just John, Johnny is for boys and rock stars who want to mean it. Whatever that means. I can’t take it. “Corey,” I say, pausing the music.
“End of the song first,” he says, clearly willing to listen, our first real talk ever, maybe, but he resumes the music now. Normal conversations between us regard only the placement of my drums in the back of the van so they won’t get scratched up, timetables on when Bingo will be back up and running. “Coupla minutes, boys,” he always says, be it a couple of minutes or a couple of hours away from completion. I take a moment to remember if we’ve ever had a conversation not about the van, and it comes to me; once. I had asked him what he was doing one night, two years ago, on a tour of New England we booked opening for The Slip for three weeks, and Bingo was not acting up and we had the night off in Boston. “Hang out at the hotel, I guess,” he had said, and I invited him to a baseball game, Fenway Park. The Red Sox’s miraculous season but I cheered for them, not knowing they would win that game against Cleveland and go on to defeat my home team in the Fall Classic. “Thanks, Elliot,” Corey said afterwards. “I liked that game.”
He doesn’t turn the music off, just down, but I recognize the tune as Play With Fire by the Rolling Stones and now I want to wait until the end of the song, but I don’t. “Corey, do you want Bingo back?”
“Why?” he asks, his bowl cut plastered to his sweaty forehead. He runs the back of a meaty hand across it, pushes the hair to his right temple.
“Well, I mean, so you have a car, I know how much you like working on Bingo and everything, you-“
“Why the fuck do I want this piece of shit? I stick around with you guys so it keeps running, and because you guys have a good time, I get to have a good time…so fuck it. If you’re done, I’m done. But why can’t you replace Johnny?” I think of this, briefly, but the thought is replaced by the envelope from Berklee School of music in my backpack tucked behind the driver’s seat.
“It’s not that simple,” I say. “We can’t just replace Johnny.”
Which is utter bullshit, because what is Johnny? Ryan’s the poet and he’s the composer, and I mean that, he doesn’t just string chords together, he does that too but he composes and interweaves and his voice cries with the sadness Johnny’s heart has never been able to comprehend, which is why Johnny doesn’t sing for us anymore. But Ryan has no head for the business end, and while I don’t either, I’ve at least got the stomach for working out deals with club owners and I know how to answer an e-mail. But Johnny, he played the bass, and bass players are two a penny. It was his persona that was irreplaceable, but some things are better left untouched.
I want to say all of this. Corey looks at me in the flash of a passing semi, but his eyes are glazed over. He might be high, or tired, but he has no interest in Bingo beyond the van being a ticket to some fun, and now he says “Fuck it” so finally and with glazed eyes that I can’t help thinking of that song by The Slip: “He made up his mind/can’t live knowing that there’s some other world.” Like now, Corey has no purpose.
I turn away from Corey, turn the music back up. He turns it back down.
“What are you getting at?”
“We can’t replace Johnny, so Left Ventricle’s done. He moves to Kansas City at the end of the summer, he starts his fucking bank job or whatever it is, then we’re done.”
“So start another band.” And he turns the music back up.
And he’s right, we could. And he’s also right that we could replace Johnny. Two out of three ain’t bad, at least that’s what the song says. But then there’s the envelope in my backpack, the yes inside of it, the financial benefits. The song says nothing of one out of three being worth anything.
Except back in Minneapolis, on our night off this tour, before Johnny made his announcement and became John, Ryan didn’t take the night off. And neither did I. Johnny and Corey hit up some campus bars, I sat in with an old high school friend’s band because he was celebrating his anniversary, and Ryan did an acoustic solo set at a coffee shop. Maybe Ryan doesn’t need two out of three. Maybe all he needs is himself.
***
Slamming my foot down on the gas to pass a semi, and the transmission drops a gear and Bingo kicks up speed. “Easy,” Corey says, “Bingo’s not as young as she used to be,” and he’s right, because Bingo is almost thirty years old now, ancient for a Ford Cargo van that’s been converted into a passenger van. The odometer says there are four hundred and fifteen thousand miles on the engine, a testament to the previous owner’s meticulous care and Corey’s ongoing maintenance. But everything eventually goes, even Corey’s admitted this, everything eventually stops running.
Ryan stirs in the back. “Where are we?” he asks.
“Between Kansas City and Columbia,” I say. “And we need gas soon.”
Ryan looks out the window. “Hey, alright, Porn Shop and Church alley. We need to stop? Do we want to be saved or commit unspeakable acts of sin?”
“We’re going North,” I say. “This time. Last time we came through, we turned South each time. North this time.”
“Ah, come on…that’s mostly salvation.” Ryan closes his eyes again and leans back.
“We don’t need a repeat of Johnny’s Rosary,” I say, pointing to the offending object as it dangles from the rear view mirror. It’s made of a glow-in-the dark novelty cross, mint flavored dental floss and anal beads Johnny purchased on our last trip down I-70. He wears it onstage some nights, dressed in tight black clothes and eyeliner smeared on his eyelids.
Ryan looks back at Johnny. “Should I wake him up, get his vote?”
“Fuck him,” Corey says. “He’s not part of the band anymore.” Corey turns to Ryan. “You guys aren’t gonna quit just because he’s out, right? You guys are gonna replace him, right?”
“Corey, come on,” I say, “Just let it go, we’ll…we’ll figure it all out in a couple days. After the show back home.”
But Ryan’s already made up the collective band mind. “Corey, if Johnny goes through with this-“
“John, you mean. He was pretty adamant about that tonight,” I remind him.
In the rearview mirror, I see Ryan flash a sinister glance at me. “If Johnny goes through with this, then yes, we’ll find somebody new. It’s cool.”
Corey is still agitated. “That’s not what Elliot said.”
Ryan grabs his glasses from the seat beside him and pushes them onto his nose. “Really? Elliot, that true?”
“I guess I just thought that there was no Left Ventricle without Johnny.”
“Hell, Corey, face it,” Ryan leans up between Corey and I, lowering his voice. “With Johnny gone, we’d never have to find a YMCA just so he could shower again. We’d never have to track him down at some girl’s apartment in the morning and get out of town two hours late. Think of it.”
And he was right, Johnny was the one who subscribed to the Rock and Roll lifestyle most strictly; if you spent a week with Left Ventricle expecting sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll, it would suit your interest to stick close to Johnny. I could get you the Rock ‘n Roll and a few beers. Ryan could just as easily have gotten you the sex, but he’d pass on it himself. Really, for Ryan, if it wasn’t the music, there was little point. A friend of ours from another band assigned each of us an existing rock persona, somebody who had already made a name for themselves in music. Ryan got to be Conor Oberst, I got to be Max Weinberg. Johnny got to be Nigel Tufnel. “But he’s not real,” Johnny had protested at the time. “Neither are you,” Ryan had said.
Ryan leans back into his seat and rubs the gelled spikes out of his hair. “Shit,” he says. “I should just cut out with the hair product, what’s even the point? The people don’t come to look at us, they come to hear us, right?” He reaches into the back seat where I guess Johnny is lying asleep. He stabs with his hand. “Right?”
A muffled grunt comes from the back. Ryan spins around on his seat and faces back, leaning down. The gas light blinks on and I search the horizon for the beacon of a gas station.
“Are you really going to fuck us, man? I mean, really?” I look in the rear view mirror and see Ryan shift to my left as Johnny’s spectral form rises from the back seat. He’s got his shirt off and his hair is matted to the right side of his face.
“We’re not going to talk about this, Ryan.” I focus my attention back on the road but my eyes are getting tired. “Elliot, Corey, where are we?”
“About seventy miles from Columbia.”
“We got a show there?”
“Yeah,” Ryan says. “But I bet you want to just keep going until we get back to St. Louis, come back out for the show tomorrow night, right?”
“What time is it?”
“About three, Johnny,” Corey says.
Johnny yawns. “It’s just John now. Fuck. Where’s my phone?” I can hear him rummaging in his back pack.
“You’re still Johnny while you’re still part of Left Ventricle,” Ryan says, “Elliot, we stop in Columbia. I don’t want to give Mister Jonathan Avery Meyers a chance to shave and put on his business suit before we clear the end of this tour.”
“Fuck you, Ryan, um…uh…”
“Philip,” Ryan says.
“What?”
“My middle name.”
“Oh. Fuck you, Ryan Philip Creesey. What time did you say it was?”
A Shell sign appears from behind a tree-clad hill, about a mile away, and I put my blinker on and get back in the right lane. “Three in the morning,” Corey says again.
“Fuck. What day of the week is it?”
“Tomorrow is a banking day, if that’s what you’re asking,” Ryan says.
Johnny yawns again. “Fuck, Ryan, you’re not making me want to finish this tour.”
“I’m not making you do anything. I’m just asking for a little explanation, that’s all.”
“Not now,” I say. “Can we three just be civil until after Saturday night?” I make for the exit.
“Yeah, okay, Elliot,” Johnny says. “And how many days away is that?”
Ryan now: “It’s Friday morning now, asshole.”
I can hear Johnny punch a number into his phone. “I love Thirsty Thursdays.”
===
"I do not like to write - I like to have written." -Gloria Steinem
So, I love music. And I took an advanced fiction writing workshop this past semester at school. I wrote three stories; the first of which reflected my mood at the time, and it's dark and dreary and depressing and I hate it, especially the main character. Then I wrote my play, which tacked the same subject (the end of a relationship) in a much better way than what I had written as a story.
My second story was an attempt at working in current events; it dealt with a guy who is making a great living not by preying on other peoples' misfortunes, but by nonetheless benefitting from them: he works for a title abstracting company (sound familiar?) and spends his days researching properties that have been foreclosed on. I don't want to give away too much because it might be worth Tuesday Excerpting later this summer.
But for my third story, I took that love of music I randomly mentioned above and ran with it. I created a band, they're called Left Ventricle. It was the best I could come up with at the time, but that's not really important. What is important is that the band is based loosely on The Hitchhikers, but really, anybody who has ever been in a band will recognize something (I hope) from this. You may remember Joe Dubinsky of Heart Beat. Well, Left Ventricle belongs to the same universe, not one in which bands Come Together and Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day, but one in which there comes a day when The Music Dies. Like Heart Beat, Left Ventricle will never become the bands the members emulate; but like Skins from Tainted Batteries (aka Heart Beat), somebody may make it some day. Anyway, this is the most put-together portion of the story, and I'm still working on it, but, ah hell, I done introduced it enough. I give you...
===
from North for Salvation, April-June 2008.
“Rock and roll doesn’t necessarily mean a band. It doesn’t mean a singer, and it doesn’t mean a lyric, really. It’s that question of trying to be immortal.” –Malcolm McLaren
“When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio. If all the stations are rock and roll, there’s a good chance the transmission is shot.” –Larry Lujack
“It’s been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.” –Robert Plant
Bingo’s tires whining on the surface of the pavement, Corey sitting next to me and I can tell he’s got one ear on the radio and one ear on the engine, and he’s only got two ears, and I can’t blame him for sparing one for Grace Slick as she seeps out of Bingo’s speakers and permeates the van, but still, I wish somebody would listen to me, and Corey (whom I’ve never seen asleep) and I are the only two awake. But he’s got his other ear listening to Bingo’s engine, which he knows better than any human could know another human. He named Bingo, he says, because when he walked onto the instant credit used car lot they advertise on late night reruns, he saw the thing, pointed, and said, “Bingo.” The name stuck, and when he sold it to us, to the band, Corey stuck too.
The mix CD Ryan had put together for the tour spins, the tracks coming at us like the pavement of Interstate 70. Ryan himself, sleeping soundlessly, head hanging back, mouth open obscenely and drooling. I can’t see Johnny, except no, John now, he’s insisting, just John, Johnny is for boys and rock stars who want to mean it. Whatever that means. I can’t take it. “Corey,” I say, pausing the music.
“End of the song first,” he says, clearly willing to listen, our first real talk ever, maybe, but he resumes the music now. Normal conversations between us regard only the placement of my drums in the back of the van so they won’t get scratched up, timetables on when Bingo will be back up and running. “Coupla minutes, boys,” he always says, be it a couple of minutes or a couple of hours away from completion. I take a moment to remember if we’ve ever had a conversation not about the van, and it comes to me; once. I had asked him what he was doing one night, two years ago, on a tour of New England we booked opening for The Slip for three weeks, and Bingo was not acting up and we had the night off in Boston. “Hang out at the hotel, I guess,” he had said, and I invited him to a baseball game, Fenway Park. The Red Sox’s miraculous season but I cheered for them, not knowing they would win that game against Cleveland and go on to defeat my home team in the Fall Classic. “Thanks, Elliot,” Corey said afterwards. “I liked that game.”
He doesn’t turn the music off, just down, but I recognize the tune as Play With Fire by the Rolling Stones and now I want to wait until the end of the song, but I don’t. “Corey, do you want Bingo back?”
“Why?” he asks, his bowl cut plastered to his sweaty forehead. He runs the back of a meaty hand across it, pushes the hair to his right temple.
“Well, I mean, so you have a car, I know how much you like working on Bingo and everything, you-“
“Why the fuck do I want this piece of shit? I stick around with you guys so it keeps running, and because you guys have a good time, I get to have a good time…so fuck it. If you’re done, I’m done. But why can’t you replace Johnny?” I think of this, briefly, but the thought is replaced by the envelope from Berklee School of music in my backpack tucked behind the driver’s seat.
“It’s not that simple,” I say. “We can’t just replace Johnny.”
Which is utter bullshit, because what is Johnny? Ryan’s the poet and he’s the composer, and I mean that, he doesn’t just string chords together, he does that too but he composes and interweaves and his voice cries with the sadness Johnny’s heart has never been able to comprehend, which is why Johnny doesn’t sing for us anymore. But Ryan has no head for the business end, and while I don’t either, I’ve at least got the stomach for working out deals with club owners and I know how to answer an e-mail. But Johnny, he played the bass, and bass players are two a penny. It was his persona that was irreplaceable, but some things are better left untouched.
I want to say all of this. Corey looks at me in the flash of a passing semi, but his eyes are glazed over. He might be high, or tired, but he has no interest in Bingo beyond the van being a ticket to some fun, and now he says “Fuck it” so finally and with glazed eyes that I can’t help thinking of that song by The Slip: “He made up his mind/can’t live knowing that there’s some other world.” Like now, Corey has no purpose.
I turn away from Corey, turn the music back up. He turns it back down.
“What are you getting at?”
“We can’t replace Johnny, so Left Ventricle’s done. He moves to Kansas City at the end of the summer, he starts his fucking bank job or whatever it is, then we’re done.”
“So start another band.” And he turns the music back up.
And he’s right, we could. And he’s also right that we could replace Johnny. Two out of three ain’t bad, at least that’s what the song says. But then there’s the envelope in my backpack, the yes inside of it, the financial benefits. The song says nothing of one out of three being worth anything.
Except back in Minneapolis, on our night off this tour, before Johnny made his announcement and became John, Ryan didn’t take the night off. And neither did I. Johnny and Corey hit up some campus bars, I sat in with an old high school friend’s band because he was celebrating his anniversary, and Ryan did an acoustic solo set at a coffee shop. Maybe Ryan doesn’t need two out of three. Maybe all he needs is himself.
***
Slamming my foot down on the gas to pass a semi, and the transmission drops a gear and Bingo kicks up speed. “Easy,” Corey says, “Bingo’s not as young as she used to be,” and he’s right, because Bingo is almost thirty years old now, ancient for a Ford Cargo van that’s been converted into a passenger van. The odometer says there are four hundred and fifteen thousand miles on the engine, a testament to the previous owner’s meticulous care and Corey’s ongoing maintenance. But everything eventually goes, even Corey’s admitted this, everything eventually stops running.
Ryan stirs in the back. “Where are we?” he asks.
“Between Kansas City and Columbia,” I say. “And we need gas soon.”
Ryan looks out the window. “Hey, alright, Porn Shop and Church alley. We need to stop? Do we want to be saved or commit unspeakable acts of sin?”
“We’re going North,” I say. “This time. Last time we came through, we turned South each time. North this time.”
“Ah, come on…that’s mostly salvation.” Ryan closes his eyes again and leans back.
“We don’t need a repeat of Johnny’s Rosary,” I say, pointing to the offending object as it dangles from the rear view mirror. It’s made of a glow-in-the dark novelty cross, mint flavored dental floss and anal beads Johnny purchased on our last trip down I-70. He wears it onstage some nights, dressed in tight black clothes and eyeliner smeared on his eyelids.
Ryan looks back at Johnny. “Should I wake him up, get his vote?”
“Fuck him,” Corey says. “He’s not part of the band anymore.” Corey turns to Ryan. “You guys aren’t gonna quit just because he’s out, right? You guys are gonna replace him, right?”
“Corey, come on,” I say, “Just let it go, we’ll…we’ll figure it all out in a couple days. After the show back home.”
But Ryan’s already made up the collective band mind. “Corey, if Johnny goes through with this-“
“John, you mean. He was pretty adamant about that tonight,” I remind him.
In the rearview mirror, I see Ryan flash a sinister glance at me. “If Johnny goes through with this, then yes, we’ll find somebody new. It’s cool.”
Corey is still agitated. “That’s not what Elliot said.”
Ryan grabs his glasses from the seat beside him and pushes them onto his nose. “Really? Elliot, that true?”
“I guess I just thought that there was no Left Ventricle without Johnny.”
“Hell, Corey, face it,” Ryan leans up between Corey and I, lowering his voice. “With Johnny gone, we’d never have to find a YMCA just so he could shower again. We’d never have to track him down at some girl’s apartment in the morning and get out of town two hours late. Think of it.”
And he was right, Johnny was the one who subscribed to the Rock and Roll lifestyle most strictly; if you spent a week with Left Ventricle expecting sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll, it would suit your interest to stick close to Johnny. I could get you the Rock ‘n Roll and a few beers. Ryan could just as easily have gotten you the sex, but he’d pass on it himself. Really, for Ryan, if it wasn’t the music, there was little point. A friend of ours from another band assigned each of us an existing rock persona, somebody who had already made a name for themselves in music. Ryan got to be Conor Oberst, I got to be Max Weinberg. Johnny got to be Nigel Tufnel. “But he’s not real,” Johnny had protested at the time. “Neither are you,” Ryan had said.
Ryan leans back into his seat and rubs the gelled spikes out of his hair. “Shit,” he says. “I should just cut out with the hair product, what’s even the point? The people don’t come to look at us, they come to hear us, right?” He reaches into the back seat where I guess Johnny is lying asleep. He stabs with his hand. “Right?”
A muffled grunt comes from the back. Ryan spins around on his seat and faces back, leaning down. The gas light blinks on and I search the horizon for the beacon of a gas station.
“Are you really going to fuck us, man? I mean, really?” I look in the rear view mirror and see Ryan shift to my left as Johnny’s spectral form rises from the back seat. He’s got his shirt off and his hair is matted to the right side of his face.
“We’re not going to talk about this, Ryan.” I focus my attention back on the road but my eyes are getting tired. “Elliot, Corey, where are we?”
“About seventy miles from Columbia.”
“We got a show there?”
“Yeah,” Ryan says. “But I bet you want to just keep going until we get back to St. Louis, come back out for the show tomorrow night, right?”
“What time is it?”
“About three, Johnny,” Corey says.
Johnny yawns. “It’s just John now. Fuck. Where’s my phone?” I can hear him rummaging in his back pack.
“You’re still Johnny while you’re still part of Left Ventricle,” Ryan says, “Elliot, we stop in Columbia. I don’t want to give Mister Jonathan Avery Meyers a chance to shave and put on his business suit before we clear the end of this tour.”
“Fuck you, Ryan, um…uh…”
“Philip,” Ryan says.
“What?”
“My middle name.”
“Oh. Fuck you, Ryan Philip Creesey. What time did you say it was?”
A Shell sign appears from behind a tree-clad hill, about a mile away, and I put my blinker on and get back in the right lane. “Three in the morning,” Corey says again.
“Fuck. What day of the week is it?”
“Tomorrow is a banking day, if that’s what you’re asking,” Ryan says.
Johnny yawns again. “Fuck, Ryan, you’re not making me want to finish this tour.”
“I’m not making you do anything. I’m just asking for a little explanation, that’s all.”
“Not now,” I say. “Can we three just be civil until after Saturday night?” I make for the exit.
“Yeah, okay, Elliot,” Johnny says. “And how many days away is that?”
Ryan now: “It’s Friday morning now, asshole.”
I can hear Johnny punch a number into his phone. “I love Thirsty Thursdays.”
===
"I do not like to write - I like to have written." -Gloria Steinem
Monday, June 23, 2008
The Return of The Blog Guy
Hey all.
Well, I meant to blog this summer, and here it is almost the end of June and I've blogged, what, five times since school ended? Not a good start.
But that will end NOW! You get this little blurb today, and starting tomorrow, a return to the features you've come to know and love. Starting with Tuesday Excerpts tomorrow. Wednesday I've prepared quite a nice rant for you to all enjoy, Thursday a musing on holidays, and, everybody's favorite, the return of Free Write Fridays. Saturday I'll get on board with a super edition of Your Questions, Answered!.
On top of all of this, you'll be getting updates on the house (A/C sliding down a hill/water seeping into the basement, hey ho!), a little bit of politics (somebody's gotta take over for Tim Russert) and so little more!
Alright, I'll be back tomorrow. For now, just enjoy a little Mel Brooks:
Well, I meant to blog this summer, and here it is almost the end of June and I've blogged, what, five times since school ended? Not a good start.
But that will end NOW! You get this little blurb today, and starting tomorrow, a return to the features you've come to know and love. Starting with Tuesday Excerpts tomorrow. Wednesday I've prepared quite a nice rant for you to all enjoy, Thursday a musing on holidays, and, everybody's favorite, the return of Free Write Fridays. Saturday I'll get on board with a super edition of Your Questions, Answered!.
On top of all of this, you'll be getting updates on the house (A/C sliding down a hill/water seeping into the basement, hey ho!), a little bit of politics (somebody's gotta take over for Tim Russert) and so little more!
Alright, I'll be back tomorrow. For now, just enjoy a little Mel Brooks:
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Minneapolis Trip
Well, while not officially over, I can declare this road trip a great success!
First off, the trip itself was fairly uneventful, with a stop for gas sixty miles beyond where I used to stop in my Camry, so the Jetta's got some staying power. I know that thirty-seven miles to the gallon is nothing considering what some cars can get these days, and I'm not saying it's the Peel P50 with it's mileage, but still, being able to go more than 400 miles on a single tank of gas is a nice way to get around if need be.
But enough about cars, because I want to talk about bicycles eventually. But first, let me get to the point in the weekend where bicycles come in.
No, actually, before I met Kathy at the MetroLink station on Thursday, I drove down Hanley from Clayton towards the Jimmy John's in Brentwood, and the traffic was terrible. I was behind a girl on a really nice red Specialized bicycle, and I was busy checking out the bicycle. I had my windows down, and I was in the right lane, when this guy in the left lane says loud enough for me to hear, "Yeah, I'm checking out that sweet ass, too." I looked at this guy, perfect sleaze ball in a Mitsubishi Eclipse, and I explained to him that no, I was actually checking out the bicycle. He then said, "Yeah, but the hot ass in spandex doesn't hurt, does it?" The girl then turned and said, "I can hear both of you, you know." The traffic started up again, the Eclipse Creep rolled his window up, and the girl pulled over and waved me up. I still had my windows down, so I pulled up next to her and she said, "Were you really checking out my bicycle?" I replied, "Of course, that's a pretty sweet Specialized to be using as a commuter bike" (I only assumed it was a commuter bike because she was wearing a blouse and had a messenger bag that was stuffed to the brim), and she said, "You should see my Orbea at home." Those are pretty sweet bicycles, just so you know. I said to her, "I see you've got Shimano Dura-Ace then on there. Nice. And you must have the FSA carbon cranks." She said, "You could pick that out from behind me?" I answered, "The curve is wrong for them to be the Campagnolo carbon cranks." Her reply? "Do you have a girlfriend?" I should totally set her up with my friend Zach.
Anyway, storms in Iowa, driving for nine hours, blah blah...
Friday we had lunch with Greg rom Bailey Hall at Sally's on campus, got to check out the construction going on around campus, with the new Gopher stadium (for more in depth coverage of this project, consult Chris' Blog) and the other various additions to campus since the last time I was up there in 2005 (check out This Post for a brief rundown of our various road trip mishaps, including the ill-fated 2005 visit to the Twin Cities).
After lunch, we walked around downtown a little bit with my sister-in-law Jen, saw the construction of the New I-35W bridge, which is coming along very quickly and makes the St. Louis I-64 project look like it is just...dragging...on...forever...which it is...and then looked at the debris from the 35W collapse, which they have partially laid out underthe Washington Avenue Bridge. After that, we went to Cafe Ena for dinner with my bro-in-law Joe and his fiancee Shelley, drank a ridiculous amount of sangria, and then we went to Chino Latino for drinks and appetizers with some of our old MN friends (including the aforementioned Chris). It was nice to catch up with them. No, it wasn't nice. It was fantastic. I really truly miss Minneapolis, and as much as I love school at Webster, and I like my job, and Kathy loves her job, I can actually see us moving here sometime in the future (grad school, maybe). After Chino Latino, we ran across the street to Williams Uptown Pub & Peanut Bar where, we were promised, we could get a quiet and cheaper drink. Well, anything is cheaper than drinks at Chino Latino when you get right down to it, and almost anything is quieter, but not Williams...but their beer selection was unbelievable. It will be complete when they get Magic Hat IPA and Schlafly products on tap.
But it wasn't all drinks and peanuts and catching up...I also made a great reconnection with my friend Lisa, whom I haven't seen in something like five years, but who is very active in the theatre and film scene in Minneapolis. She asked me to send her some of my scripts, and without making any promises said she'd do what she could with them. Hell, any exposure is good esposure, right? I can't thank her enough for that. Yet another reason to want to move back, right?
Saturday, we finally got to see our host, my bro-in-law Paul (Jen's husband, Kathy's oldest brother), and we hung out with them playing Wii and eating some good food with Jen's parents until we went to the wedding, which was great. They got married, so the desired end result was achieved. And of course, Kathy got to see quite a few of her old classmates, so it was like a mini-reunion.
There was a girl there who looked incredibly familiar to me, and it wasn't until Kathy told me that I remembered why. I used to buy coffee from her at least three times a week at Laurie's Coffee Shop, which was just across the street from Bailey Hall. She, it turns out, makes handbags and messenger bags and sells them, which is cool because I actually do like me a good messenger bag. But what was even cooler was that her boyfriend builds bicycles. He designs and builds steel framed bicycles in Minneapolis. His name is Brad Capricorn, so his company is called Capricorn Bicycles. They are really nice looking bicycles, and I may buy one from him some time in the future. He was also a really cool guy. His website is mostly just a blog right now, but eventually Peter (the groom from the wedding) will finish designing a website for him. Should be awesome. I posted Capricorn's website in my links list. Check it out, some good looking bikes.
Overall, a great trip. We've got a BBQ going right now, so I should probably get to that. Hopefully (knock on wood) our trip back tomorrow is uneventful and safe. Hope everybody everywhere else had a great weekend!
First off, the trip itself was fairly uneventful, with a stop for gas sixty miles beyond where I used to stop in my Camry, so the Jetta's got some staying power. I know that thirty-seven miles to the gallon is nothing considering what some cars can get these days, and I'm not saying it's the Peel P50 with it's mileage, but still, being able to go more than 400 miles on a single tank of gas is a nice way to get around if need be.
But enough about cars, because I want to talk about bicycles eventually. But first, let me get to the point in the weekend where bicycles come in.
No, actually, before I met Kathy at the MetroLink station on Thursday, I drove down Hanley from Clayton towards the Jimmy John's in Brentwood, and the traffic was terrible. I was behind a girl on a really nice red Specialized bicycle, and I was busy checking out the bicycle. I had my windows down, and I was in the right lane, when this guy in the left lane says loud enough for me to hear, "Yeah, I'm checking out that sweet ass, too." I looked at this guy, perfect sleaze ball in a Mitsubishi Eclipse, and I explained to him that no, I was actually checking out the bicycle. He then said, "Yeah, but the hot ass in spandex doesn't hurt, does it?" The girl then turned and said, "I can hear both of you, you know." The traffic started up again, the Eclipse Creep rolled his window up, and the girl pulled over and waved me up. I still had my windows down, so I pulled up next to her and she said, "Were you really checking out my bicycle?" I replied, "Of course, that's a pretty sweet Specialized to be using as a commuter bike" (I only assumed it was a commuter bike because she was wearing a blouse and had a messenger bag that was stuffed to the brim), and she said, "You should see my Orbea at home." Those are pretty sweet bicycles, just so you know. I said to her, "I see you've got Shimano Dura-Ace then on there. Nice. And you must have the FSA carbon cranks." She said, "You could pick that out from behind me?" I answered, "The curve is wrong for them to be the Campagnolo carbon cranks." Her reply? "Do you have a girlfriend?" I should totally set her up with my friend Zach.
Anyway, storms in Iowa, driving for nine hours, blah blah...
Friday we had lunch with Greg rom Bailey Hall at Sally's on campus, got to check out the construction going on around campus, with the new Gopher stadium (for more in depth coverage of this project, consult Chris' Blog) and the other various additions to campus since the last time I was up there in 2005 (check out This Post for a brief rundown of our various road trip mishaps, including the ill-fated 2005 visit to the Twin Cities).
After lunch, we walked around downtown a little bit with my sister-in-law Jen, saw the construction of the New I-35W bridge, which is coming along very quickly and makes the St. Louis I-64 project look like it is just...dragging...on...forever...which it is...and then looked at the debris from the 35W collapse, which they have partially laid out underthe Washington Avenue Bridge. After that, we went to Cafe Ena for dinner with my bro-in-law Joe and his fiancee Shelley, drank a ridiculous amount of sangria, and then we went to Chino Latino for drinks and appetizers with some of our old MN friends (including the aforementioned Chris). It was nice to catch up with them. No, it wasn't nice. It was fantastic. I really truly miss Minneapolis, and as much as I love school at Webster, and I like my job, and Kathy loves her job, I can actually see us moving here sometime in the future (grad school, maybe). After Chino Latino, we ran across the street to Williams Uptown Pub & Peanut Bar where, we were promised, we could get a quiet and cheaper drink. Well, anything is cheaper than drinks at Chino Latino when you get right down to it, and almost anything is quieter, but not Williams...but their beer selection was unbelievable. It will be complete when they get Magic Hat IPA and Schlafly products on tap.
But it wasn't all drinks and peanuts and catching up...I also made a great reconnection with my friend Lisa, whom I haven't seen in something like five years, but who is very active in the theatre and film scene in Minneapolis. She asked me to send her some of my scripts, and without making any promises said she'd do what she could with them. Hell, any exposure is good esposure, right? I can't thank her enough for that. Yet another reason to want to move back, right?
Saturday, we finally got to see our host, my bro-in-law Paul (Jen's husband, Kathy's oldest brother), and we hung out with them playing Wii and eating some good food with Jen's parents until we went to the wedding, which was great. They got married, so the desired end result was achieved. And of course, Kathy got to see quite a few of her old classmates, so it was like a mini-reunion.
There was a girl there who looked incredibly familiar to me, and it wasn't until Kathy told me that I remembered why. I used to buy coffee from her at least three times a week at Laurie's Coffee Shop, which was just across the street from Bailey Hall. She, it turns out, makes handbags and messenger bags and sells them, which is cool because I actually do like me a good messenger bag. But what was even cooler was that her boyfriend builds bicycles. He designs and builds steel framed bicycles in Minneapolis. His name is Brad Capricorn, so his company is called Capricorn Bicycles. They are really nice looking bicycles, and I may buy one from him some time in the future. He was also a really cool guy. His website is mostly just a blog right now, but eventually Peter (the groom from the wedding) will finish designing a website for him. Should be awesome. I posted Capricorn's website in my links list. Check it out, some good looking bikes.
Overall, a great trip. We've got a BBQ going right now, so I should probably get to that. Hopefully (knock on wood) our trip back tomorrow is uneventful and safe. Hope everybody everywhere else had a great weekend!
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Fox News Declares Rachel Ray a Terrorist...?
Okay, so I read this story about a Rachel Ray/Dunkin Donuts iced coffee ad on MSN yesterday, and at first I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, leave it to a Fox News political pundit to coin a term like "Hate Coture." I mean, I've seen this type of scarf on many many people, not just radical Islamic Terrorists.
In fact, I would guess that the majority of the people who wears scarves like this are not radical Muslim Terrorists, and of the Mulsim people who wear them, I would bet dollars to donuts that the majority of them are in fact peaceful people of faith, and not Radical Terrorists who hate America. So to say that Rachel Ray (or, to look at some other people mentioned in the article, Colin Farrel, Kanye West and Howard Dean) is a terrorist simply for wearing it is like saying anybody who wears shiny black knee-high boots is a Nazi, or anybody who uses white sheets for anything is a member of the KKK. Sure, some people who wear black boots might sympathize with the Nazi party. Some KKK members likely sleep on white sheets as well as wear them around. And some terrorists wear these scarves. But, seriously? Are we going to condemn everybody? Maybe we should scour the internet for pictures of Michelle Malkin and find out some of her fashion mistakes. Ten bucks to the first person who can link her to North Korea!
But I think the best part of this story is that on the MSN site, the screen capture from the ad in question shows Rachel Ray holding the coffee (like a microphone?) in her left hand while gesticulating, forefinger raised, with her right hand. You will see why that's funny below:
And now why it's funny:
In fact, I would guess that the majority of the people who wears scarves like this are not radical Muslim Terrorists, and of the Mulsim people who wear them, I would bet dollars to donuts that the majority of them are in fact peaceful people of faith, and not Radical Terrorists who hate America. So to say that Rachel Ray (or, to look at some other people mentioned in the article, Colin Farrel, Kanye West and Howard Dean) is a terrorist simply for wearing it is like saying anybody who wears shiny black knee-high boots is a Nazi, or anybody who uses white sheets for anything is a member of the KKK. Sure, some people who wear black boots might sympathize with the Nazi party. Some KKK members likely sleep on white sheets as well as wear them around. And some terrorists wear these scarves. But, seriously? Are we going to condemn everybody? Maybe we should scour the internet for pictures of Michelle Malkin and find out some of her fashion mistakes. Ten bucks to the first person who can link her to North Korea!
But I think the best part of this story is that on the MSN site, the screen capture from the ad in question shows Rachel Ray holding the coffee (like a microphone?) in her left hand while gesticulating, forefinger raised, with her right hand. You will see why that's funny below:
And now why it's funny:
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Giving Up the...Golf?
I know I'm about a week behind on this story, but I wanted to give everybody a chance to catch the video before it got bumped down.
So, according to this story on NPR's All Things Considered, our Commander-in-Chimp, the Great Divider (I could keep going but I won't) has made the tremendously heart-warming and self-punishing sacrifice of giving up playing golf in solidarity with the troops fighting in Iraq. According to the original interview with Mike Allen at Politico.com, Bush stated, "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” Hmm...
Geez, you know, Mr. President, if playing golf sends the wrong signal, what about taking time off from your schedule as President of the United States of America to go down to your Crawford Ranch and relax? Is that the right signal? I mean, if we're worried about what it looks like if you play golf...
I mean, geez, if you really wanted to show solidarity with the troops, shouldn't you, I don't know, go overseas and eat only C-rations? Or shouldn't you spend fourteen months away from your friends, your wife, your daughters? At the very least, shouldn't you quit your job to put your life in danger, defending freedom while bullets are being fired at you? I mean...if you want to do that last one, I'll bet your approval rating would shoot straight up.
While we're showing solidarity to our troops by giving up golf, why don't we just show solidarity with the millions of workers who have lost their jobs due to the failing economy by giving up watching movies in whatever gigantic room with a large screen exists in the White House (and don't say there is no such room, there's gotta be)? How about, as a show of solidarity to everybody who struggles to fill the gas tanks on their Honda Civics, you give up premium gasoline for the presidential stretch SUV? How about, in support of the uninsured people in this country, you give up serving Dom Perignon at State Dinners? Yeah. This could be the start of a whole new President Bush...
Seriously. The president is giving up golf. What an inspiration.
Actually, though, this is quite a strategy for setting up a lasting legacy that might illuminate him in a positive light. Imagine that I am president (as a Democrat, or at the very least not as a Republican). Let's pretend that I am elected and war erupts, and American men and women are fighting and dying overseas. That is not to say that if I were elected, I would run is into a war lickety split, but, you know, sometimes, war is unavoidable and even necessary (I am thinking of something on the scale and magnitude of World War II, not, you know, Operation Mission Re-Accomplished Again for the Third Time, or whatever we're calling it now). So imagine I am elected and we get involved in a WWII-style conflict, and I don't play golf, but this is a hypothetical universe, so in this hypothetical situation, I am a golfer. And in this particular hypothetical situation, in which I am a golfer and president during a time of unnavoidable global conflict on the scale of WWII, complete with a Nazi-like enemy who is seemingly unstoppable and ruthless and all of that and only our perseverence and sense that what we are doing is not an offense but purely a defense for all free peoples...wait, I got lost somewhere.
Imagine, if you will, that in several years' time, I am president. The country gets attacked and it hearkens back to Pearl Harbor, there is a global conflict that we now find ourselves entering to defend our freedom. Also, I am a golfer. Here we are in this war, and I go out and play golf. My Republican detractors can look back on the Legacy of Bush the Second and say, "Aha! President Rauscher is not showing solidarity with the troops! Why, the Great George W. Bush gave up golf when he took the country to war!" See? So it is a good move for the Bush administration, at least as far as long-term PR is concerned.
But what signal does this really send? Not to our country, but to our enemies...and yes, I will admit that we have enemies. They exist. We may have created some of them through our country's ridiculous and unforgivable foreign policy, but still they exist and wish to disrupt our every day lives. All they will see is that they have disrupted the life of the president to the point where he no longer plays the silly Imperialist Capitalist Infidel Great Satan game of golf. It's a victory for them, and it's a bit demoralizing on the home front.
Look, I'm not saying that President Bush shouldn't have given up golf, but to think that this gesture is a real sacrifice, to even imply that it's even remotely equal to the sacrifice of our men and women who are putting their lives on the line? No. Absolutely not, Mr. President. My opinion of you would have at the very least stayed the same if you had never given up golf. Now, you've only succeeded in lowering it.
So, according to this story on NPR's All Things Considered, our Commander-in-Chimp, the Great Divider (I could keep going but I won't) has made the tremendously heart-warming and self-punishing sacrifice of giving up playing golf in solidarity with the troops fighting in Iraq. According to the original interview with Mike Allen at Politico.com, Bush stated, "I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” Hmm...
Geez, you know, Mr. President, if playing golf sends the wrong signal, what about taking time off from your schedule as President of the United States of America to go down to your Crawford Ranch and relax? Is that the right signal? I mean, if we're worried about what it looks like if you play golf...
I mean, geez, if you really wanted to show solidarity with the troops, shouldn't you, I don't know, go overseas and eat only C-rations? Or shouldn't you spend fourteen months away from your friends, your wife, your daughters? At the very least, shouldn't you quit your job to put your life in danger, defending freedom while bullets are being fired at you? I mean...if you want to do that last one, I'll bet your approval rating would shoot straight up.
While we're showing solidarity to our troops by giving up golf, why don't we just show solidarity with the millions of workers who have lost their jobs due to the failing economy by giving up watching movies in whatever gigantic room with a large screen exists in the White House (and don't say there is no such room, there's gotta be)? How about, as a show of solidarity to everybody who struggles to fill the gas tanks on their Honda Civics, you give up premium gasoline for the presidential stretch SUV? How about, in support of the uninsured people in this country, you give up serving Dom Perignon at State Dinners? Yeah. This could be the start of a whole new President Bush...
Seriously. The president is giving up golf. What an inspiration.
Actually, though, this is quite a strategy for setting up a lasting legacy that might illuminate him in a positive light. Imagine that I am president (as a Democrat, or at the very least not as a Republican). Let's pretend that I am elected and war erupts, and American men and women are fighting and dying overseas. That is not to say that if I were elected, I would run is into a war lickety split, but, you know, sometimes, war is unavoidable and even necessary (I am thinking of something on the scale and magnitude of World War II, not, you know, Operation Mission Re-Accomplished Again for the Third Time, or whatever we're calling it now). So imagine I am elected and we get involved in a WWII-style conflict, and I don't play golf, but this is a hypothetical universe, so in this hypothetical situation, I am a golfer. And in this particular hypothetical situation, in which I am a golfer and president during a time of unnavoidable global conflict on the scale of WWII, complete with a Nazi-like enemy who is seemingly unstoppable and ruthless and all of that and only our perseverence and sense that what we are doing is not an offense but purely a defense for all free peoples...wait, I got lost somewhere.
Imagine, if you will, that in several years' time, I am president. The country gets attacked and it hearkens back to Pearl Harbor, there is a global conflict that we now find ourselves entering to defend our freedom. Also, I am a golfer. Here we are in this war, and I go out and play golf. My Republican detractors can look back on the Legacy of Bush the Second and say, "Aha! President Rauscher is not showing solidarity with the troops! Why, the Great George W. Bush gave up golf when he took the country to war!" See? So it is a good move for the Bush administration, at least as far as long-term PR is concerned.
But what signal does this really send? Not to our country, but to our enemies...and yes, I will admit that we have enemies. They exist. We may have created some of them through our country's ridiculous and unforgivable foreign policy, but still they exist and wish to disrupt our every day lives. All they will see is that they have disrupted the life of the president to the point where he no longer plays the silly Imperialist Capitalist Infidel Great Satan game of golf. It's a victory for them, and it's a bit demoralizing on the home front.
Look, I'm not saying that President Bush shouldn't have given up golf, but to think that this gesture is a real sacrifice, to even imply that it's even remotely equal to the sacrifice of our men and women who are putting their lives on the line? No. Absolutely not, Mr. President. My opinion of you would have at the very least stayed the same if you had never given up golf. Now, you've only succeeded in lowering it.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
We Are (Almost) Back In Business!
Well, see, silly me and my wanting to maintain a higher video quality...what was I thinking? So, I had to compress it into an mpeg2 (mpeg4 w/mp3 audio was still too big), which is just a suck, but the point is it will soon be posted to Google Video, which means once it goes through review, I can post it on the blog. Yay! A month later!
Right, so, a few new updates to the blog. First off, a new poll is coming for all of you to vote on. And then, there is of course, the updated links list. And in the interest of interesting you all, I am going to go through the links one by one and tell you what they are all about.
NPR
If you don't listen to NPR, you should, and if you do, good. My local station KWMU just came under a bit of fire for what their general manager likes to call her management style, but that doesn't change the fact that NPR itself is great. Sure, sometimes it can be a little, um, ear grating (Diane Rehm's voice), some of the hosts can get a bit sycophantic (hello Terry Gross), but all in all, it's a good source of news and entertainment. I like to play the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me online quiz every day to keep up with odd news.
...But I Am a Cyclist
You see, it's funny because I actually am a writer and not much of a cyclist. But there's a small amount of posts on there, I update very infrequently (even moreso than on here) but I get some good rants in on the state of affairs in cycling. There's also a list of links on that blog, but I won't go into them.
Turbochubs
Formerly the link read "Gerald Has Returned" but he's been returned for a while now, so I figured I'd retitle the link. Gerald's a designer, into hockey and is probably the most politically liberal of all of my friends, which is no bad thing. He's got a healthy mix of NHL, politics, and Daily Show clips interspersed with other tidbits and hilariousness. Check him out, yo.
Whiskey Tastes Better When You Have Problems
My former roommate from college, Chris and I rioted after the U of MN won hockey nationals in 2002. We also drank cheap vodka (read: he drank cheap vodka and I spent money I didn't have on Smirnoff, which I know, is cheap vodka, but if I considered that splurging, just imagine what he was drinking...), played simultaneous Dark Forces (Chris on PSOne, me on PC), pondered rearranging our room once, and he also took a video of me riding my bicycle down the hallway (at a terrifying-for-indoor-riding 26 miles an hour). But, through all of that, it seems we kind of forgot about going to class every so often, and I ended up leaving and he ended up in a little bit of trouble. But hey, you live and if you're lucky (like Chris and I), you learn and you move on with life and you stay friends and such. Check out his blog, he talks a lot about sports in the Twin Cities. Proving once again that all the sportswriters out there with their degrees in Journalism have nothing against a fan with a dangerous amount of time on his hands and a gift for the written word. Check it out.
mGk
Formerly titled "Mo and Kev and Maddy," I liked the simplicity of the look of the mGk, so I went with it. For a while, it was a blog about my sister, her husband, their house and their cat, and then it was about how my sister was dealing with her husband, house and cat while she was pregnant, and then, about a year ago (May 4th, actually, of 2007), it became all about my niece Madeline. She's adorable. Except she watches American Idol, which I just can't get down with. I gotta help that girl out with some serious Good Television Marathons. Mo, Kev, send Maddy over. We're gonna spend the weekend watching Arrested Development.
Idealism Never Goes out of Fashion
A new addition to the list, Becca is another of my Minnesota friends. Memories of her always included either Fiona Apple, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Piggly Wiggly, or her stealing various items from my room and then kicking me in the ding-ding. She's working on her Master's Degree in (appropriately enough) Middle Earth itself, New Zealand. Let's see if I can get this right...she was a clothing design undergrad, and is getting her masters in textiles? Yes? Becca, feel free to correct me if I am wrong (which I almost never am). Her blog is about life in New Zealand, with a fair amount of an emphasis on living a greener life and even, it seems, a bit about clothing design and textiles. Hey alright! Check it.
Auntie Maine
My mother's youngest sister Nora lives in Maine with her husband and two children, and there's not much to do up there in the long winter months, so they find ways to entertain themselves and, sometimes, the readers of their blog. Updates are few and far between, but sometimes you don't need an update, you can just keep reading her old posts and the comments that pop up there from, say, my mother and my other aunt. So click the link; let it never be said that "You can't get theah from heah."
TGSeale.com
A friend of mine from Webster, Tanya Seale is a fellow writer who is a bit further along in her writing career than I am. But what we both have in common is that we both got plays produced at Surfacing 2008. I really liked hers quite a bit, and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work next semester when we have our fiction workshop together. A word to those with slow interweb connections: her site is a bit of a slow loader because it's got a lot of stuff on it. But check out her blog anyway, she writes the same kinds of things that I do, only, you know, more frequently, like, you know, a good blogger.
JMG Design
Like Gerald, John is a friend from my days working in Retail. Of the four of us represented here (Gerald, John, Colleen, me), John was the first to escape to work on his garden, a passion of his which he has turned into a small business of designing gardens for people. Check it out, he's full of information about what to plant where and when, plus he's got recipes for great dinners and drinks.
These Walls Are Paper Thin...
Colleen escaped the drudgery of retail toil only to experience the drudgery of office toil. But, be that as it may, she still finds plenty to keep her mind occupied elsewhere. Lately, she's been doing the Apartment Cure, which is interesting to read about, because she divulges some secrets about how high off the ground to hang pictures and other strange tidbits you didn't know people wrote books and made websites and did bad reality TV shows about.
Annie Get Your Blog
While the link text is not the official title, I will never change it because it came to me in a moment of clear thought, and to me it seemed clever. But "What I Do Not Understand" is one of my favorite blogs; Annie's got a sweet touch to her writing style that makes me forgive her for being a Cubs fan, which is no small feat. And of the bloggers I've linked to, aside from family members Annie is my oldest friend, seeing as how we've known each other since we were like, twelve (oh my God, Annie, we've known each other more than half of our lives. That makes me feel kind of old). And what doesn't Annie understand? Well, actually, she understands quite a bit. I think it's the fact that we live in a world where so many things are understandable that shouldn't be that makes it hard for her to understand the world. If that makes sense. Also, she claims to be married to Yadier Molina, but I haven't confirmed that with either Yadi or Annie's boyfriend.
The McGrath Family
My uncle Dennis is nine years older than my cousin Brian, who is nine years older than me, and I am nine years older than my cousin Maggie. Maggie is the only one who's never lived in Minneapolis. So you know what that means? She better move there to keep up tradition. But in the meantime, you can check out the blog about Dennis' family, maintained mostly by his wife Laurie. It centers mostly on their two beautiful daughters, Mia and Mazlin, both of whom were adopted from Guatemala. Laurie's posts are often hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking (but the good way, not the bad way), occasionally laced with anger (check out the recent post about Teleflora and the Today Show calling adopting mothers "Non-Mothers"), but always written from that cozy spot in Laurie's soul where she keeps her children. Ask her if she is an innie or an outie.
Post Secret
If you don't know what Post Secret is yet, you will be addicted soon.
Stuff White People Like
Um...let's see, how many items from this list have I mentioned on my blog? Well, just in this one post, public radio, the daily show, bicycling and Arrested Development. Let's see, um, we used to like Jettas but now we like the Toyota Prius (but we do still like Jettas). I think I've mentioned Free health care before. If I haven't mentioned Wes Anderson Films, I should have. Arts Degrees, Kathy and I both guilty (or rather, she is guilty and I will be guilty). Microbreweries, I love those. Writing workshops, had plenty and will have more. Coffee, I've talked about coffee. Oh, I talked about Organic Coffee once, and white people love organic food! I have Trader Joe's bags in my car, that's grouped with Whole Foods/Grocery Co-Ops as well...see? White people love being white.
The System is Down
Homestar Runner Dot Net. "It's Dot Com!" Seriously, you guys gotta check it out. Strong Bad E-mails and Teen Girl Squad are a must. And the absolute musts are Strong Bad E-Mail Dragon, Japanese Cartoon, Rock Opera, and...Tape Leg? Seriously.
Daryl Cagle
Okay, I know there are people out there who only get their news from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report (another thing white people like), but I am not one of those people. I get my news from NPR...and also from Daryl Cagle's professional cartoonist index. See, when you look at over a hundred artists' editorial cartoons, you get to see positions from each side of every major story/issue in a very quick, concise way. It works for me.
That's about it for now. Look for the video in a day or so, just gotta let it load up through Google Video and go through the process. Have a wonderful rest of your week all!
Right, so, a few new updates to the blog. First off, a new poll is coming for all of you to vote on. And then, there is of course, the updated links list. And in the interest of interesting you all, I am going to go through the links one by one and tell you what they are all about.
NPR
If you don't listen to NPR, you should, and if you do, good. My local station KWMU just came under a bit of fire for what their general manager likes to call her management style, but that doesn't change the fact that NPR itself is great. Sure, sometimes it can be a little, um, ear grating (Diane Rehm's voice), some of the hosts can get a bit sycophantic (hello Terry Gross), but all in all, it's a good source of news and entertainment. I like to play the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me online quiz every day to keep up with odd news.
...But I Am a Cyclist
You see, it's funny because I actually am a writer and not much of a cyclist. But there's a small amount of posts on there, I update very infrequently (even moreso than on here) but I get some good rants in on the state of affairs in cycling. There's also a list of links on that blog, but I won't go into them.
Turbochubs
Formerly the link read "Gerald Has Returned" but he's been returned for a while now, so I figured I'd retitle the link. Gerald's a designer, into hockey and is probably the most politically liberal of all of my friends, which is no bad thing. He's got a healthy mix of NHL, politics, and Daily Show clips interspersed with other tidbits and hilariousness. Check him out, yo.
Whiskey Tastes Better When You Have Problems
My former roommate from college, Chris and I rioted after the U of MN won hockey nationals in 2002. We also drank cheap vodka (read: he drank cheap vodka and I spent money I didn't have on Smirnoff, which I know, is cheap vodka, but if I considered that splurging, just imagine what he was drinking...), played simultaneous Dark Forces (Chris on PSOne, me on PC), pondered rearranging our room once, and he also took a video of me riding my bicycle down the hallway (at a terrifying-for-indoor-riding 26 miles an hour). But, through all of that, it seems we kind of forgot about going to class every so often, and I ended up leaving and he ended up in a little bit of trouble. But hey, you live and if you're lucky (like Chris and I), you learn and you move on with life and you stay friends and such. Check out his blog, he talks a lot about sports in the Twin Cities. Proving once again that all the sportswriters out there with their degrees in Journalism have nothing against a fan with a dangerous amount of time on his hands and a gift for the written word. Check it out.
mGk
Formerly titled "Mo and Kev and Maddy," I liked the simplicity of the look of the mGk, so I went with it. For a while, it was a blog about my sister, her husband, their house and their cat, and then it was about how my sister was dealing with her husband, house and cat while she was pregnant, and then, about a year ago (May 4th, actually, of 2007), it became all about my niece Madeline. She's adorable. Except she watches American Idol, which I just can't get down with. I gotta help that girl out with some serious Good Television Marathons. Mo, Kev, send Maddy over. We're gonna spend the weekend watching Arrested Development.
Idealism Never Goes out of Fashion
A new addition to the list, Becca is another of my Minnesota friends. Memories of her always included either Fiona Apple, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Piggly Wiggly, or her stealing various items from my room and then kicking me in the ding-ding. She's working on her Master's Degree in (appropriately enough) Middle Earth itself, New Zealand. Let's see if I can get this right...she was a clothing design undergrad, and is getting her masters in textiles? Yes? Becca, feel free to correct me if I am wrong (which I almost never am). Her blog is about life in New Zealand, with a fair amount of an emphasis on living a greener life and even, it seems, a bit about clothing design and textiles. Hey alright! Check it.
Auntie Maine
My mother's youngest sister Nora lives in Maine with her husband and two children, and there's not much to do up there in the long winter months, so they find ways to entertain themselves and, sometimes, the readers of their blog. Updates are few and far between, but sometimes you don't need an update, you can just keep reading her old posts and the comments that pop up there from, say, my mother and my other aunt. So click the link; let it never be said that "You can't get theah from heah."
TGSeale.com
A friend of mine from Webster, Tanya Seale is a fellow writer who is a bit further along in her writing career than I am. But what we both have in common is that we both got plays produced at Surfacing 2008. I really liked hers quite a bit, and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work next semester when we have our fiction workshop together. A word to those with slow interweb connections: her site is a bit of a slow loader because it's got a lot of stuff on it. But check out her blog anyway, she writes the same kinds of things that I do, only, you know, more frequently, like, you know, a good blogger.
JMG Design
Like Gerald, John is a friend from my days working in Retail. Of the four of us represented here (Gerald, John, Colleen, me), John was the first to escape to work on his garden, a passion of his which he has turned into a small business of designing gardens for people. Check it out, he's full of information about what to plant where and when, plus he's got recipes for great dinners and drinks.
These Walls Are Paper Thin...
Colleen escaped the drudgery of retail toil only to experience the drudgery of office toil. But, be that as it may, she still finds plenty to keep her mind occupied elsewhere. Lately, she's been doing the Apartment Cure, which is interesting to read about, because she divulges some secrets about how high off the ground to hang pictures and other strange tidbits you didn't know people wrote books and made websites and did bad reality TV shows about.
Annie Get Your Blog
While the link text is not the official title, I will never change it because it came to me in a moment of clear thought, and to me it seemed clever. But "What I Do Not Understand" is one of my favorite blogs; Annie's got a sweet touch to her writing style that makes me forgive her for being a Cubs fan, which is no small feat. And of the bloggers I've linked to, aside from family members Annie is my oldest friend, seeing as how we've known each other since we were like, twelve (oh my God, Annie, we've known each other more than half of our lives. That makes me feel kind of old). And what doesn't Annie understand? Well, actually, she understands quite a bit. I think it's the fact that we live in a world where so many things are understandable that shouldn't be that makes it hard for her to understand the world. If that makes sense. Also, she claims to be married to Yadier Molina, but I haven't confirmed that with either Yadi or Annie's boyfriend.
The McGrath Family
My uncle Dennis is nine years older than my cousin Brian, who is nine years older than me, and I am nine years older than my cousin Maggie. Maggie is the only one who's never lived in Minneapolis. So you know what that means? She better move there to keep up tradition. But in the meantime, you can check out the blog about Dennis' family, maintained mostly by his wife Laurie. It centers mostly on their two beautiful daughters, Mia and Mazlin, both of whom were adopted from Guatemala. Laurie's posts are often hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking (but the good way, not the bad way), occasionally laced with anger (check out the recent post about Teleflora and the Today Show calling adopting mothers "Non-Mothers"), but always written from that cozy spot in Laurie's soul where she keeps her children. Ask her if she is an innie or an outie.
Post Secret
If you don't know what Post Secret is yet, you will be addicted soon.
Stuff White People Like
Um...let's see, how many items from this list have I mentioned on my blog? Well, just in this one post, public radio, the daily show, bicycling and Arrested Development. Let's see, um, we used to like Jettas but now we like the Toyota Prius (but we do still like Jettas). I think I've mentioned Free health care before. If I haven't mentioned Wes Anderson Films, I should have. Arts Degrees, Kathy and I both guilty (or rather, she is guilty and I will be guilty). Microbreweries, I love those. Writing workshops, had plenty and will have more. Coffee, I've talked about coffee. Oh, I talked about Organic Coffee once, and white people love organic food! I have Trader Joe's bags in my car, that's grouped with Whole Foods/Grocery Co-Ops as well...see? White people love being white.
The System is Down
Homestar Runner Dot Net. "It's Dot Com!" Seriously, you guys gotta check it out. Strong Bad E-mails and Teen Girl Squad are a must. And the absolute musts are Strong Bad E-Mail Dragon, Japanese Cartoon, Rock Opera, and...Tape Leg? Seriously.
Daryl Cagle
Okay, I know there are people out there who only get their news from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report (another thing white people like), but I am not one of those people. I get my news from NPR...and also from Daryl Cagle's professional cartoonist index. See, when you look at over a hundred artists' editorial cartoons, you get to see positions from each side of every major story/issue in a very quick, concise way. It works for me.
That's about it for now. Look for the video in a day or so, just gotta let it load up through Google Video and go through the process. Have a wonderful rest of your week all!
Friday, May 02, 2008
We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties
Because I likes my quality, I uploaded the video to my computer as high quality as I could. So in addition to being seventeen minutes long (too long for youtube or Blogger video), it is also three gigabytes in size (way too large for most video hosts).
I thought I had solved this issue by finding Google Video. They have no file size or length limitations. What they do suggest, however, is to use this thing called the Google Video Uploader if your file happens to be over 100 megabytes. So, I downloaded the sucker. Tried to upload the .avi of my play. More than 48 hours later, it still hadn't uploaded onto Google Video's server from my computer. So, I tried to troubleshoot.
Google Video is telling me I should convert the file to an mpeg-4 with an mp3 audio layer, and that it should not have been shot/imported in widescreen. Suck. But, it goes on to note, it should still work. Only, it hasn't, and there has been no further help. So, for the time being, no video of my play just yet.
But, this whole looking-and-trying-to-find-a-video-host thing got me thinking; I looked at three options; Blogger Video, YouTube and Google Video. Each has distinct characteristics, advantages. For instance, Blogger Video keeps all of my content right there together. The video is not imbedded in my blog from somewhere else like YouTube, it's part of the disk space my blog takes up. For free! YouTube has the recognition, the easily-navigable website we're all very familiar with now, and high traffic for such things to become nice and viral. While Google Video has the advantage of being limitless in regards to file size and length. But the strange thing about this is...all three of these options are owned and controlled by Google. I hate to make this comparison, because I love my gmail and I dig Blogger, but Google is becoming the Internet's equivalent of Rupert Murdoch. In fact...I'm not sure, but...does Rupert Murdoch own Google? Or does NewsCorp have some sort of partnership with Google? I know NewsCorp owns myspace.com, and I know Google and myspace have partnered in the past...well, that sounds like some research I will never do. Oh well. Anyway, I guess the question I have is this: Why does one company have to offer three different brands of video hosting? It just seems silly.
Anyway, if anybody out there has any suggestions for the video, let me know. Thanks for staying tuned!
I thought I had solved this issue by finding Google Video. They have no file size or length limitations. What they do suggest, however, is to use this thing called the Google Video Uploader if your file happens to be over 100 megabytes. So, I downloaded the sucker. Tried to upload the .avi of my play. More than 48 hours later, it still hadn't uploaded onto Google Video's server from my computer. So, I tried to troubleshoot.
Google Video is telling me I should convert the file to an mpeg-4 with an mp3 audio layer, and that it should not have been shot/imported in widescreen. Suck. But, it goes on to note, it should still work. Only, it hasn't, and there has been no further help. So, for the time being, no video of my play just yet.
But, this whole looking-and-trying-to-find-a-video-host thing got me thinking; I looked at three options; Blogger Video, YouTube and Google Video. Each has distinct characteristics, advantages. For instance, Blogger Video keeps all of my content right there together. The video is not imbedded in my blog from somewhere else like YouTube, it's part of the disk space my blog takes up. For free! YouTube has the recognition, the easily-navigable website we're all very familiar with now, and high traffic for such things to become nice and viral. While Google Video has the advantage of being limitless in regards to file size and length. But the strange thing about this is...all three of these options are owned and controlled by Google. I hate to make this comparison, because I love my gmail and I dig Blogger, but Google is becoming the Internet's equivalent of Rupert Murdoch. In fact...I'm not sure, but...does Rupert Murdoch own Google? Or does NewsCorp have some sort of partnership with Google? I know NewsCorp owns myspace.com, and I know Google and myspace have partnered in the past...well, that sounds like some research I will never do. Oh well. Anyway, I guess the question I have is this: Why does one company have to offer three different brands of video hosting? It just seems silly.
Anyway, if anybody out there has any suggestions for the video, let me know. Thanks for staying tuned!
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