How I Got Here

I got here at the end of a 500-mile long drive in a 10 foot U-Haul filled with thrift store and hand-me-down furniture and with a '93 Ford Festiva in tow; no not a Fiesta—a Festiva. The Festiva I bought with the cash I saved by eating free pizza and salad while delivering pizza and salad, which made me feel a little bit greasy and a little bit dried out and somewhat colder than expected. Not exactly what I’d been promised in high school. Not exactly what I’d paid for in college. What I’m still paying for. My first car out of college, the final relic of my childhood, with continuous all-wheel drive and a turbo charger and a freaking window wiper defrost option, had started dripping oil out both ends and smoking out the right side of the hood and basically having its way with my bank account. That was why I hated red lights. I hated any time that I had time to think, any time I was still and could see the smoke rising right in my face.

For the sake of survival, I had to go back to the drawing board. I had to ask myself, did I still want to be an astronaut? Police officer? Firefighter? Park ranger? Was there some perfect occupation out there that I wanted more than anything, regardless of how difficult it would be to achieve? Were there, for instance, bears setting fires in the International Space Station, and was it up to me to stop them? Or at least to write them a citation?

At the end of that brainstorming session, I landed on electrician. I wanted a career where I could learn skills worth being proud of, that I could use to serve my community and better my own life. I wanted my days to be filled with tasks that challenged my mind while at the same time getting me out of my own head, because I spent enough time there as it was. Making that decision, and pursuing that goal, was the first time in my life that I felt motivated to do anything for more than a week-long stretch that felt like it was my idea and what I wanted to do, even when people I trusted tried to discourage me for my own good. I’m grateful for the opportunity that the IBEW has given me to learn this trade, but quite frankly, if it hadn’t been offered, I was going to take it anyway.

If These Walls Could Talk

If these walls could talk, they would mention that it seems hotter this year, but that last weekend was surprisingly cold. They would ask what kind of shoes are you wearing, and how do you like them, and are you getting enough to eat. They would talk to fill the silence, and to direct your stay into not staying, for the sake of the door jamb to the right side of the door into the garage, who bears the marks of your growth from the first year that you could stand until the first year that you had to, who is marred with the measurement of your progress now abandoned, who is waiting until you are gone to say, “I’m sorry, if I did anything wrong, and I hate you, if I didn’t.”

But if these walls could see. If only these walls could see.

James Waited Dangerously

[still going through old papers]

James waited dangerously close to the swing set for Mary Anne. All he could think about was the card in his pocket, sealed in with six chocolate hearts because seven wouldn't fit. He'd tried seven and ripped the first envelope, and almost gave up on the idea altogether. What a stupid mistake. Oh right, and Mary Anne. He was thinking about Mary Anne, and why she was pretty. Too pretty. She might say no... She might not like chocolate hearts. She might not be able to read. Oh no, what then? What if he couldn't read either? What if he forgot? What if the chocolate was melting? James went inside and threw the card away without checking, unwilling to risk getting melted chocolate on his fingers. He'd never had melted chocolate on his fingers before and couldn't imagine what it might do.

1. Hopping 2. Knee 3. Overhead Projector

[going through old papers]

After a long day of hopping, she discovered that her knee had grown an overhead projector.

"It really works," she typed into her Motorola Razor.

>send

Clarence did not reply, and immediately she knew why.

>contacts
>Home

"Hi, mom? Clarence is dead. Yeah, he probably never made it off the plane. Okay, uh-huh, alright. Okay. I'll be home by five."

Great, now she had to stop and buy milk. Already the overhead projector was weighing her down. She had trouble getting into her car. Why had she insisted on the Mini Cooper? No matter; she was in and backing out of the parking spot.

Soon she became aware of a deep aching, now an intense burning pain she'd never felt before, shooting through her...through her...what? Oh, the cord! She felt it dragging on the pavement outside, pinched by the driver's-side door. Clarence was a fool; this was no way to save money on office supplies. She was glad he was allergic to peanuts.

Writing: It's Little More Than A Gerund

[The following is an excerpt from an assigned paper I wrote in 2006. The first paragraph is borderline irrelevant, I just really like it. The rest basically dominates my current self with how much more my past self knew about writing than...I...do. I'm not entirely sure why I'm posting this here. I know in part it's because this will give me a similar level of satisfaction as posting something original. I hope it also has something to do with my whole "changing the world" kick that you don't know anything about yet.]

I spent a disconcerting amount of my childhood trying to fit a square block through a triangular hole. As much as I’d like to say I’m speaking metaphorically, the truth is that I literally spent hours trying to fit a square block through a triangular hole. Aside from the obvious difference of shape, the square was red and the hole had a green border, but these clues were lost on my one-year-old intellect. Needless to say, I was a terrible writer. In fact, there are precious few, if any, talented writers among baby circles. Therein lies the hope of writers everywhere: writing is an acquired skill.

I know I’m not uncovering any great etymological truth when I say that writers are people who write, but that’s the truth. Memorable writers are just like any other type of memorable people. They might be cool, funny, endearing, lovely, cruel, domineering, or just plain loud, but they cannot be absent. If you want to write things that will be read, you have to read to write and write to be read. You have to do these things actively or else whatever it is you’re spending your time doing won’t be relevant to other readers or writers.

But that’s just the problem, many people say, I read all the time, but I don’t have anything to say [Ed. Not sure anyone says that ever, but the sentiment holds]. Such a comment could be taken as humble, but I take it as an insult to the human experience. Anyone who can talk has something to say. Even babies have things to say, and if they know sign language they’ll start saying it before they can talk, much less type. The image of a writer without anything to write is sadder than an artist without anything to draw. If an artist has nothing to draw, that can only mean one thing: that artist is dead.

But here I have to make a very important caution. Especially when you’re starting out, write about anything you can think of; just don’t get carried away writing about yourself. Everything you’ll ever write will in some way be about yourself anyway because you’re the one writing, so don’t make the situation any worse than it already is. Write about the world around you. Write about your friends and enemies and loves and fears. Write about the things you dream about and the things you wake up thinking about. Write about what makes you mad and what makes you cry. Write about what makes you laugh or what makes other people laugh. If you’re alone in a colorless room without windows or doors and your memory has been erased, yell for help—don’t write about yourself.

In writing about other things you will begin to uncover where your passions lie. You will discover which subjects interest you and which subjects do not. You will discover how to approach subjects that you do not care about. As you become familiar with the writing process you will learn to recognize that process in the writing of others. Little by little, page by page, you will learn how to see.

The First Two Seconds of Lord Only Knows

Daelin: "What Beck song should I buy?"

Self: "I don't know. 'Girl.'"

D: [disappointed] "Isn't there one about a devil's haircut or something?"

Self: "'Devils Haircut.'"

D: [buys "Linger" by The Cranberries]

:)

I just realized that Jack's head, from Jack in the Box, if you turn it sideways, is a happy face.

¿Happy Holidays?

This sign is up all over the place in at least one Marshalls on my route:

Merry Christmas!
Happy Hanukkah!
Happy Kwanzaa!
¡Feliz Navidad!

I've never seen anything so politically incorrect, racist, and quaint all wrapped up in one.

Let's Review

There is a Known Spider Threat at the Coach 'N' Four Motel at 628 South Auburn Street in Grass Valley, California. The first spider was waiting to greet me in the bathroom sink. I managed an absent-minded hello while assessing which of the items with me best lent itself to crushing the spider dead given the size and shape restrictions imposed by the sink. I quickly settled on Nalgene, then quickly settled Nalgene on spider. According to the spider identification chart I found online, it may have been a Black House Spider. I thought it had been a Wolf Spider. It probably hadn't been a Wolf Spider, though, since I think they're called Wolf Spiders because they hunt in packs, which is another way of saying that I don't know much about spiders. I don't really think that, but it's true.

The picture for the last spider on the spider identification chart, the Huntsman Spider, wiggles every few seconds. Therefore, I will no longer be consulting the spider identification chart.

When I've found and killed a spider in a bathroom, I feel more confident that the bathroom is spider-free than when I haven't found and killed a spider in a bathroom. What I was certain the bathroom was free of, however, was water in the tank behind the toilet, because there was a wad of toilet paper in the toilet, also waiting to greet me, and I wanted to flush it away but could not. I removed the tank cover, lifted the part you lift, solved that problem, and created a new one where the tank entered an endless cycle of slowly leaking and refilling until I gave up on a peaceful resolution and shut off the water altogether.

Engrossed as you are in reading about the toilet, you're all-along wondering about the second spider, and so am I, but I've got to tell you about the lamp first, to lay the groundwork. The lamp beside the bed was broken. Well, broken? It was and is missing the part that you twist to turn it off. There's this trick to turning off a lamp—you probably know it—where you follow the cord (with your eyes) from the base of the lamp to where it plugs into the wall, you take hold of the part going into the wall (with the hand of your choosing) and, without letting go, you pull back. This is called unplugging the lamp. On the list of things you can do with a lamp that can cause a fire, this probably isn't there.

Turns out someone figured out another way to turn it off by working loose the part right above the missing knob and right below the bulb—the part of the lamp that says Caution and Risk, and no it doesn't say "this portion of the lamp NOT to be dislodged as an alternate method of turning lamp off," but, Jiminy Christmas. Of course, the lamp shade is damaged so maybe someone just banged the lamp against the wall until it turned off, or more likely the whole thing, this whole big mess with the lamp, was the result of a lamp/surface/gravity/new surface Event.

Anyway, I suppose what I did was relodged that part of the lamp into the works position and, figuratively shocked by the sudden light in my eyes to find that the lamp had been left on and plugged in even in its broken state, I began step one of the unplugging method, looking less for the plug than for my faith in humanity, as I hoped the journey from lamp to outlet would be a long and treacherous one. This brings us to the second spider.

The cord draped over the edge of the end table and then disappeared behind the headboard: a classic hard-to-reach location, especially in a motel, where headboards are connected to the wall, not the bed frame. Except this headboard had been removed from the wall and was leaning against the bed. I looked into the dusty crevasse and located the plug hanging halfway from the outlet. The detached headboard. The half-plugged plug. The damaged lamp and lampshade. All signs of a struggle. I caught movement on the edge of the headboard. Another spider.

The spider identification chart, had I consulted it, would have said Same Friggin Kind of Gross Spider, and the description would have been "probably angry about the other spider, and also probably a scout." I went for the Nalgene. The spider was gone. It was behind the headboard. I could see it—oooh there it was there it was there it was—near the plug I wanted it dead. It wasn't on the wall behind the bed it was on the back of the headboard. Basically, it was on the bed. It was crawling on my face as I slept. I couldn't stand it. Nothing in the room could help me kill it. I looked in the crevasse again to see how much I still hated it. It was gone.

The half-plugged plug. The damaged lamp and lampshade. These spiders...how many were there? I lifted the headboard back onto it's support. Now I could pull the bed away from the wall. I imagined pulling the bed away and disturbing a whole nest of spiders. I watched them scurry and scatter about like the Huntsman Spider no doubt does, with it's wiggling jpeg. Wolf Spiders carry their young on their back, so even when they aren't moving they're still...they are so gross. Black House Spiders bite your cheek and lay eggs in there, and your cheek swells for weeks until it bursts and spiders crawl all over your face, and you know that's true because everyone's read that book. I put on my sandals. I paced. I thought about getting another room. I would never do that but, whatever, I can have thoughts. If I ever have a house and see a spider in that house, I will think about getting another house, that's all.

I saw the spider crawling on the wall next to the bed. Nalgene. Spider parts. Spider parts washing down the drain. Relief. The spider now dead. Sleep now possible. The spider...or was it...a spider? A spider, definitely dead. Was it the spider? A spider. The spider. I went out to the van to get a pair of pliers. I can turn the lamp off with the pliers. I can turn the lamp off. I can turn the lamp off and lie in the dark. Lay in the dark? Lie in the dark. Either way, with the spiders.

I've noticed in this light, there are a lot of hairs on these sheets. I've stayed here before, at the Coach 'N' Four. I liked the last room better.

Dangit, Dang It

You might be wondering what happens when you start writing a story and then you stop and delete what you've written and then you start over and then you start over again and then you start over again and then you log onto Facebook and then you comment on a picture of a pumpkin and then you start the story again and then you look up the lyrics to the song you're listening to and then you start into your story again but from a wildly different angle this time and then you delete that too and then you look at the time and then, [insert all the real cusses here], you find yourself writing this nonsense [arrows pointing every which way] and you decide this is how it has to be, that something is going to go down, something is going to get posted and that's what's up, and I'm done with this for the night and I'm not even going to work this out to a resolution more substantial than .

Oh and work sucked today, is what I'm getting at.

Build A Rocket Boys!

Dear Guy Garvey,

I don't always know what you're saying, but I always agree with how you say it. So, thanks for that.

P.S. You're welcome for buying your CDs. We're even now.

So Yeah, Friday Works

My boss called today. I almost didn't answer because I thought I knew why she was calling. I figured she must be calling in response to an email I'd sent before the weekend in which I outlined why I and my fellow employees were not being fairly compensated in accordance with existing company policy, what I thought needed to be done about it, and how I was willing to be a part of the solution. I almost didn't answer because I wanted the buffer of a voicemail to gauge her mood before putting myself in a situation where she could, you know, hear me. Then I thought that the brave thing to do would be to answer the phone like a man, or like a woman dressed as a man, or, since I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, like a woman with a beard. Then I remembered that her voicemail messages all go something like, "Hi this is ______. I need you to call me as soon as you get a chance." They are, in a word, either terrifyingly vague (when I think I know why she's calling) or vaguely terrifying (when I have no idea why she's calling), except, like I said, in one, mysterious word. I answered the phone, therefore, in the standard fashion of a man or a woman with arms and hands, but completely out of cowardice, a word which sounds like it means "female coward," and thus does not apply to me save at a great distance, but instead does not and, therefore, does, respectively.

She was not calling about the email. She was instead calling to perpetuate my growing hatred for my employers. Her method for doing so was twofold—one: by calling to talk about anything other than the email and, two: by calling to talk about what she was calling to talk about.

"We're having to move some things around," she said. "And I wanted to see if it was okay if we had you start your route on Friday instead of tomorrow."

She said this, as much as I could tell over the phone, with a straight face. The opportunity for the joke was the part about "instead of tomorrow," since it implied that I was currently scheduled to start my route tomorrow, something that someone probably ought to have told me before today, but that didn't seem to be her angle at all.

The thing about my job is that I'm supposed to be on the road for 14 days and then have 14 days off. What they're doing now is trying this new thing where I'm on the road for 17 days, paid for 14, and off for six or, if it's not too big an inconvenience, eight. Only they waited until today to reveal the master plan, so what I basically heard her asking was, "would you prefer zero days to look for another job, or two?"

S.D., S.F., L.A. not so much—game face time.

Oregon, The We're Friends Because We Grew Up Together State

First Sign:
No Littering
Maximum
Fine:
$6,250

Second Sign:
Speed
Enforced
By
Aircraft

Proposed Third Sign:
So...
Go Ahead
And Litter

Moving Right Along Then

There's a setting on my dryer called "optimum dry." Why are there other settings?

In Concert

How do I get this blog off the ground? It's all gummed up. It's all gummed up for a reason. Or, because of a reason, anyway. Same reason I sat trying unsuccessfully to get lost in a crowd at a Fleet Foxes concert I thought I couldn't go to and then thought I shouldn't go to and then thought I wouldn't go to until Kyle said "You better go, so I didn't just wash my car for nothing," because going to the concert meant borrowing his car. So I tried to feel grateful for a friend like that, and I tried to laugh again about Lindsay asking "What band are you going to see?" when we could both hear before the question was all the way out that she knew she wouldn't know about or care to know about whatever band I was going to see. Then I thought maybe I should get out of my head and just listen to the show. I also thought cement was an awful thing to sit on and that I was a definite concert rookie for not bringing a blanket. And about that time the lyrics broke through—"And Michael you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime"—and Niah had asked me if I wanted strawberries and cream, which was hilarious because Niah is three, which means that her offer really just meant that she wanted strawberries and cream—and hitched to that memory the solution to a problem I hadn't realized I was still working on came to me like inspiration. It was the best way to tie the string so that Niah could wear her glow stick as a necklace. It was that waxy kind of string that always wants to break or come undone when you tie it, and it had thwarted my attempts twice, but the solution was so simple I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it when it was right there in front of me. And now it was too late. But it was no big deal, I told myself. It was just a string for a glow stick. Kyle or Lindsay could work it out. And I'd be better for it next time, I reasoned, still locked into the mood to care about such things much too deeply. And almost two weeks later I'm thinking, if it's got to be all mixed up, at least it's all mixed up together.

Things I'd Do If I Had A Time Machine: Part 1

If I had a time machine, I'd go back to Pompeii and get the hell out of there.

Hey Maya, Do Your Alpaca Impression

1: Make This Into An Iron-On Badge 2: Earn It

Just Sat Down With A Reed's Extra Ginger Brew To Write It Up Big Time

...but had to get up to find a coaster. You win, Mom. Also, this ginger beer is too sweet. You win, aging.

BIGS Sizzlin' Bacon Flavor Sunflower Seeds...

...taste like someone dumped a Styrofoam ice chest full of raw bacon off a New England pier where it bobbed in an eddy of excrement and decayed mobsters for several days before getting caught in the Gulf Stream and floated across the Atlantic for weeks, all the while being picked at and shat upon by malnourished seagulls and sneezed on by whale blowholes, before it was brought ashore by a deranged grey seal of the Farne Islands who took it as a mate for three frenzied days and nights until it was finally recovered by the good people of Thanasi Foods LLC of Boulder, Colorado, who, against the weakened seal's furious protests, disposed of the now putrid bacon and ground up the ice chest into a seasoning for the only flavor of sunflower seeds that has actually, in the course of one handful, caused me to think that I didn't like sunflower seeds at all anymore.