[Ack! I thought I’d published this…turns out I’d only saved it in draft and not realized it until now. Oops!]
You are allowed by the Gods of Time to attend any sporting event in history. Which one do you see?
Sentential Links
Let there be linkage!
:: Wife is at a rock concert tonight. I’m watching cable TV at home. Thus are illustrated the differences between us. (John Scalzi, home alone, with a Lord of the Rings marathon on the teevee and a Twitter account logged in. Hilarity ensues. Really.)
:: We had a great time that summer and wrote to each other for years afterwards before losing touch. I wonder if she makes sure that her kids have comics in their backpacks when they leave for school in the morning. I like to think that she does. (OK, there’s a great movie to be made out of Cal’s story here…young love, fostered by a mutual love of comics! Great post.)
:: This is the side of me that surfaces when something grand comes from my writing. I weep for my characters. I fall in love with them and mourn the fact that I will never meet them outside the confines of my mind. This is the side of me that drinks too much wine, listens to too many love songs, and never seems to adequately express itself. Sometimes when I write, my soul weeps. (I’m the same way…the characters in my stories are real to me, as real as anyone, and even as I get to know them better than anyone, they still manage to surprise me as much as anyone in ‘real’ life. Of course, there is the odd circumstance of knowing that a certain character is going to die…but this person may manage to squirm their way out of doom’s way….)
:: Facebook. How else would I know when former high school classmates have bagged an 8-pointer or when someone I barely know is thinking of buying new boots? (Kerry lists things she’s thankful for. Somebody’s gotta be thankful for Robert Pattinson, I suppose.)
:: I’m constantly worried about reading a particularly good bit and having it worm its way into my subconscious, only to sneakily reappear later, masquerading as my own original thought. (I worry about this stuff as well…I often wonder where the line is between outright copying and employing a particularly fine bit of technique, much as I like to do when I observe a particular carpentry or maintenance technique and file it away in my memory bank for use in a project at work. Am I plagiarizing Norm Abram when I measure twice and cut once (but not measure at all if I can help it)?)
All for this week. Tune in next week. Or don’t. Your call, but I warn you not to underestimate my powers…ummm…yeah.
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And now for something completely different….
On That Day
On that day, it was bright and sunny. It was a Monday, the one just after Thanksgiving. I got up and got ready for work; I heard him breathing. I left.
On that day, I got to work and bought a bag of tiny Christmas bows, which I would use to decorate my nametag. I didn’t even get to open the bag, because I got paged about ten minutes into my shift to pick up a call on the outside line. It was too early for such a call.
On that day, I heard the words “He’s not breathing” uttered for the first time in real life, in reference to a human being. Somehow I had the presence of mind to ask if she’d called 911. A coworker drove me home. I remember two, and only two, things from that drive: passing the ambulance going the other way, and saying, “I’m not ready for this.”
On that day, I wasn’t ready. Part of me had known, since very shortly after his birth, that a day like this was almost certain to come. His life was too ephemeral; every day was too much a struggle for it to not come to a point when the struggle just had to end. But I wasn’t ready, on that day. How the hell could I have been?
On that day, The Daughter slept through it all. She missed a school field trip, but she slept through her mother’s panicked attempts at CPR, though paramedics, and through three police officers who stayed there to wait for me to get home. She slept while I let the cops leave, and while I sat in the armchair – the one where I’d often held him during feedings and naps – and waited for the phone to ring.
On that day, I discovered that when you know what the news is going to be, there is no more piercing, shattering, world-destroying sound as the phone ringing. I answered it before the ring had even finished. It was a nurse who nicely and professionally told me that she was going to hand the phone to my wife. I heard the words then, the words I’d known were coming – “He’s gone”.
On that day I learned that the words you know are coming can still blow everything in your life away.
On that day I called work and told them I wouldn’t be back in. I tried to tell them why without saying the goddamn words “He died”, but no amount of euphemism was getting through to the person I was talking to, so I had to fucking say it. That was the first time I was angry through it all. It would not be the last.
On that day I awoke The Daughter and told her that we had to go to the hospital. “Is he sick again?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. We drove down there. We had to wait at the desk for the attendant to come back to show us to the room where The Wife was waiting. There were a few other people there, a Catholic chaplain among them, being so nice and supportive and there. I finally kicked them all out. I was damned if we were doing this in front of a bunch of damned strangers.
On that day, I was pretty rude to that Chaplain. Later she offered a prayer, to which I brusquely responded, “Our pastor’s coming. He can do it.” Not a fine moment, and looking back, I don’t think I had much of an excuse. Not even that was a good excuse for snapping at someone who was genuinely trying to be a source of comfort. I realize that that Chaplain has probably seen worse, and like as not, she has no recollection now of that day. But I remember it.
On that day, we had to talk to a county coroner’s office employee who was very professional and about as kind as he could have been as he explained to us that by County law (or maybe it was State law), an autopsy would be performed, because it had involved cerebral palsy. He said we could stop it with a court order. We didn’t have a lawyer, though, or much inclination to fight that particular battle.
On that day I learned that if you die with a breathing tube in your throat, it stays in there until the body is released. I’m sure there’s a logical reason for this. I’m not sure there’s a good reason for this.
On that day, we had to tell The Daughter that her little brother had died. I can think back on nearly every minute of his life that I remember and not cry, but this moment…I can’t think of it without tears. I was worried if she even understood death all that much, but she immediately began to cry and said, “I didn’t get to say goodbye.” She understood it just fine.
On that day, The Daughter was robbed of being a sister. We left her later on with a friend so we could do some things…or maybe this was the next day…the friend later told us that, referring to his g-tube, The Daughter asked, “Will the angels know how to feed him?” We got her a necklace a short time later, with a pendant on it that read, “Special Sister”, because she was. But as far as I know, she has never worn it. I wonder often how the scar of that day and the ones that followed will affect her the rest of her days.
On that day, I realized that I have questions that will never be answered. I came to a deep anger at a God who may not even be there. I came to questions like, “What, our prayers weren’t good enough?” and “What about your plan is so important that this was essential?” and “If this was your plan all along, then what was the point of the praying?”. I began to feel a deep contempt for platitudes such as “He works in mysterious ways.” Someone told me that maybe God put him with us, knowing that we could take care of him, with his cerebral palsy, and my immediate thought (which I had the good sense not to speak out loud) was, “Or, God could, you know, just not have him born with CP in the first goddamned place.” I still struggle with this. I don’t expect this struggle to ever end.
On that day I lost any chance to redeem myself. In truth…I wasn’t the best father for him.
On that day, the sun shone bright and clear as I drove home with a family that was smaller than it had been the day before.
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Jets 28, Bills 24
I have no idea what happened in this game, except for a couple of small details, because we chose as a family to go see The Muppets instead of watch the atrocities on the football field. Apparently the game was exciting, with the Bills holding a 24-21 lead late in the fourth, but their defense was unable to produce one last stop. Or something like that.
Also, apparently Stevie Johnson did something dumb and/or dropped a big pass, and Aaron Maybin had two sacks (big accomplishment there, racking up two sacks against the banged-up offensive line when he’s playing on a team that has the best secondary in football and only asks him to rush the passer on third downs — basically, Maybin still sucks as a player). Oh, and in his first start, according to the stats, CJ Spiller didn’t really accomplish anything impressive. Also according to the stats, Ryan Fitzpatrick managed to slop his plunge from ‘good QB’ in ‘GAHHH get him out of there!!!’.
But still, a loss. Meh. I got to see The Muppets! (Which I will write about later in the week.) Next up for the Bills: home against the Tennessee Titans. I don’t even know it it’s sold out yet. Doesn’t matter; I’ve got quite a backlog of movies ready to go for the reinstitution of “Instead of the Buffalo Bills Theater”!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!!!
:: Snark-filled comment on Twilight is always welcome, so here’s some, with scenes re-enacted with action figures.
:: Want to read some hilarious offensive parodies of The Family Circus? Sure you do!
:: Hmmmm… I wonder if writer John C. Wright is still bringing the crazy? Let’s go to his LiveJournal and find out….
Those of you who believe that republican government can exist on Earth without the prop and lantern of Christian faith, have a faith in mankind which neither history nor reason confirms, nor any authority worthy of our ears. The non-Christian democracies of the world have long since become bureaucratic welfare-states, nanny-states, and to watch their histories unfold is to watch the activities of a slave-market, where, generation by generation and year by year selfish and anile strumpets sell their liberty in return for ease, for favors, for false promises, or for nothing at all, until they are citizens in nothing but name, subjects in all but name, or wards, or cattle.
How to react to that…yeah, here we go.
(Yes, this was an excuse to use the video of J. Jonah Jameson giving the ‘belly laugh of haughty dismissal’. But few writers bring the Batshit Crazy like John C. “Within fifty years homosexuality will be considered a mental illness again, huzzah!” Wright.)
More next week!
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Saturday Centus
Well, I guess it had to happen sooner or later…I missed one. I filed away last week’s entry to mull over a bit, but then, with the busyness of Thanksgiving week, I pretty much forgot about it entirely. So, apologies to all Centusians…but maybe I can start a new streak with this week’s prompt, right?
“Always remember,” Bob the manager had said, “never ever ever EVER forget to suggestive sell. I want you to get to the point where suggestive selling is in your blood. I want it to be an instinct with you, more than breathing. Suggestive selling is your LIFE in this business!”
Joe certainly got the message. He didn’t suspect that he had gone a bit too far until the woman standing before him stared at him with a stunned expression when he asked “Would you like fries with that?”…
…after letting her sip from the Communion chalice.
By the way, any Centusians wondering what I’m thankful for this year (and not just this Thursday past) may refer to my partial list of thankfulness. I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings!
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Page One: 'On Writing'
Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is the writing book I return to the most often. (In fact, looking at my shelf of books on writing, On Writing is the writing book I pretty much return to at all, anymore.
It’s not a long book, by any means, but King puts so much into it…half the book is biography, in which King is not afraid to make himself look like an ass when merited (his frank discussion of his various addictions, for example), and only half the book is given to discussing actual writing. The book is half-memoir, half-craft, but the ‘craft’ stuff is so neatly folded into the ‘memoir’ that you can’t really have one without the other. And that is certainly King’s point. Stephen King is one of those people for whom to talk about their life without talking about their vocation would basically reduce to a list of times they went to McDonald’s for breakfast or popped into Target because they needed socks.
One of my favorite parts of the book deals with plot and plotting, an area where my own notions tend to line up with King’s.
The situation comes first. The characters — always flat and unfeatured, to begin with — come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it’s something I never expected. For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing. I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader. And if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak? Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere.
In the early 1980s, my wife and I went to London on a combined business/pleasure trip. I fell asleep on the plane and had a dream about a popular writer (it may or may not have been me, but it sure to God wasn’t James Caan) who fell into the clutches of a psychotic fan living on a farm somewhere in the back of the beyond. The fan was a woman isolated by her growing paranoia. She kept some livestock in the barn, including her pet pig, Misery. The pig was named after the continuing main character in the writer’s best-selling bodice rippers. My clearest memory of this dream upon waking was something the woman said to the writer, who had a broken leg and was being kept prisoner in the back bedroom. I wrote it on an American Airlines cocktail napkin so I wouldn’t forget it, then put it in my pocket. I lost it somewhere, but can remember most of what I wrote down:
She speaks earnestly but never makes eye contact. A big woman and solid all through; she is an absence of hiatus. (Whatever that means; remember, I’d just woken up.) “I wasn’t trying to be funny in a mean way when I named my pig Misery, no sir. Please don’t think that. No, I named her in the spirit of fan love, which is the purest love there is. You should be flattered.”
Tabby and I stayed at Brown’s Hotel in London, and on our first night there I was unable to sleep. Some of it was what sounded like a trio of little-girl gymnasts in the room directly above ours, some of it was undoubtedly jet lag, but a lot of it was that airline cocktail napkin. Jotted on it was the seed of what I thought could be a really excellent story, one that might turn out funny and satiric as well as scary. I thought it was just too rich not to write.
I got up, went downstairs, and asked the concierge if there was a quiet place where I could work longhand for a bit. He led me to a gorgeous desk on the second-floor stair landing. It had been Rudyard Kipling’s desk, he told me with perhaps justifiable pride. I was a little intimidated by this intelligence, but the spot was quiet and the desk seemed hospitable enough; it featured about an acre of cherrywood working surface, for one thing. Stoked on cup after cup of tea (I drank it by the gallon when I wrote…unless I was drinking beer, that is), I filled sixteen pages of a steno notebook. I like to work longhand, actually; the only problem is that, once I get jazzed, I can’t keep up with the lines forming in my head and I get frazzled.
When I called it quits, I stopped in the lobby to thank the concierge again for letting me use Mr. Kipling’s beautiful desk. “I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” he replied. He was wearing a misty, reminiscent little smile, as if he had known the writer himself. “Kipling died there, actually. Of a stroke. While he was writing.”
I went back upstairs to catch a few hours’ sleep, thinking of how often we are given information we really could have done without.
King goes on to describe the writing of Misery, which in King’s original concept would have ended very differently from the way it eventually came out: Annie would force Paul Sheldon to write the final book in the ‘Misery’ series, just for her, and then…she would kill him and use his own skin as the binding for the only existing copy of the final ‘Misery’ book.
But what happened as King was writing is that the two characters, Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes, took on new life in his mind, and the story took a new life as well for all that, eventually coming out in a very different place indeed. This wouldn’t have happened had King created a plot outline and forced the characters to act within its confines.
I tend to approach things the same way. I rarely ‘outline’ my stories, although I have done some outlining for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title). Not a lot of outlining, to be sure, but just a few notes here and there to help me kinda-sorta keep my way. But even as I’ve been writing, I find the characters saying and doing surprising things, and I find myself learning things about my own universe that I had never planned until the moment that I wrote them — including one idea that just popped unbidden into my head at once, but which I now see could very well drive the stories of a number of future volumes in this series.
Conversely, some time ago I was grinding along for several chapters, the book feeling increasingly lifeless, until about halfway through Chapter 13 I finally could no longer ignore the chorus of my characters screaming at me, “This isn’t what we should be doing! Go back, and we’ll show you what actually happened!” So I scrapped three whole chapters and went back to Chapter 10 — retracing to that missed left turn at Albuquerque, as it were. Now I’m on Chapter 18, and so far, no signs of having taken a wrong turn.
So, it’s always cool to reflect that I’m approaching things in a similar manner to Stephen King…even if I don’t have any of his success. At least the process feels right to me.
(And, like King, I hate adverbs and do whatever I can to not use them!)
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Four blokes waiting to cross a street
I’m not sure what’s so interesting about this. It’s literally just four guys getting ready to walk across a street.
(via)
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Thankfulness
My annual grab-bag of stuff I’m thankful for. This is not an exhaustive list.
Cheddar cheese so sharp it makes you pucker
Sesame crackers
Our azalea plant
Our ivy plant
Cats
Get Fuzzy
My blog
Other peoples’ blogs
George Lucas
Star Wars
My dining room table
Klein screwdrivers
LED flashlights
William Shatner
Sela Ward
Mary Stewart’s Arthurian trilogy (on the roster for a re-read)
Stephen KingThe hardware store in my old hometown
Angle grinders
My new jigsaw
The glory years of the Buffalo Bills
Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation every night at college
Surprising The Daughter with a new Webkinz
Ms. Pac-Man
Sergei Rachmaninov
The Beatles
Van Halen
Baked pasta dishes
Pizza
Cookies
Harry Potter
Guy Gavriel Kay
Space opera
Planetary Romance
Chestnut Ridge ParkBig, thick poetry collections
Jerry Sullivan, Buffalo News sports columnist
Small, artfully illustrated poetry collections
My drill
Schopp and the Bulldog (Buffalo sports talk radio guys)
Fried chicken
Italian sausage
The music of Les Miserables
That in 2012 I will finally get to see Les Miserables
That in 2012 I plan to read Les Miserables
The Amazing Race
Canada and Canadians — you folks rock!
Pseudo-ethnic cuisine that I love because it tastes good, and which doesn’t bother me for its lack of authenticityBrian and Stewie on The Family Guy
Everyone who ever acted in a Harry Potter movie, at all, ever.
Elections
Aaron Sorkin when he’s on his game
Steak
Chess
Comics
Big breakfasts that leave me full until mid-afternoon
Light breakfasts that take the edge off until a nice lunch
Firefly
The Mentalist
Tasting something good at a restaurant and figuring out how to make it at homeIce cream at the roadside place down the road
The County Fair
Libraries
JRR Tolkien
Route 20-A in the fall
Sandals
Using the scissor jack at work
Blue denim bib overalls
Hickory-striped bib overalls
Pie with ice cream on the side
Seeing a pie in the face
Receiving a pie in the face
Monty Python
Aquariums and science museums
The Origin of Species
Complete collections of Shakespeare
Thick, fuzzy socks in the winter
Two thriving ivy plants, one grown from a cutting off the original, which we’ve had since The Daughter was bornEggs
Watching the Super Bowl
Watching figure skating
Discovering new authors
Liking books on the re-read that I didn’t like the first time
Daniel Craig as James Bond
George Lazenby as James Bond
The Y
My MP3 player
My cell phone
The Burchfield Nature and Art Center
The Daughter learning the string bass
John Williams
Hector Berlioz
Toronto
Pittsburgh
Dremel rotary tool
Having already purchased The Wife’s Christmas present
Castle and Beckett
Nathan Fillion
Stana KaticDr. Sheldon Cooper
“[knock knock knock] Penny? [knock knock knock] Penny? [knock knock knock] Penny?”
A Tale of Two Cities
Thin-mint Girl Scout Cookies
Roast turkey
Chicken wings
Coke Zero
Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title.)
Anthony Bourdain
Rachel Maddow
George Carlin
Hayao Miyazaki
On balance, President Obama
Zooey Deschanel
Using my wok more this past year than all the years prior, combined
Anyone who reads this blog
Baby Fiona
Little Quinn
The Daughter
The Wife
I’m sure I’ve missed a veritable ton of stuff…but hey, I’ll add some more next year. Happy Thanksgiving, faithful and constant readers!