Not a Writer

· November 3, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , · One Comment

I want to be a writer. A paid writer, preferably, but I’d settle for just being a writer. What makes a writer? I’ve visited blogs about writing, read some books, and subscribed to Writer’s Digest. They all give pointers on character development, plot motivation, editing, publishing, you name it. But there is one thread that runs through all writing advice.

Writers write. I think Chuck Wendig might through a “motherfucker” at the end. Succinct, pithy, perhaps a bit simplistic. But writers write.

That’s why I’m not a writer yet. But to continue the Jules Winnfield Pulp Fiction quotes, “I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard.”

Seriously, how hard is it to write? All you have to do is sit down at a keyboard and tap, tap, tap, right? And yet… and yet…

There are a whole bunch of books running around in my head. The one that’s been there the longest is a political drama about a dark horse running for president. It’s been in there since the government class in my senior year of high school. It would have some great plot twists, a seriously flawed antihero, and might even set up a sequel where his brother becomes Governor of California. That is, if I had ever written it. But as of the writing of this blog, (let me do some math, carry the one), about 8,500 days have passed since the idea came to me. The number of words I’ve written is (okay, logarithm to the base of e, translated into base-7, carry that damned one again) zero. Zero words have been put on paper. Oh, there are pages and pages of notes, timelines, character sketches, and outlines. Well, there were all of those things, but I don’t know that I’d be able to find them if I wanted to start up again. I’m guessing they’re in storage with some cassette tapes. But in terms of actual words in the actual novel, I’ve got notihing. Haven’t even created a file named “President Book,” nor typed “Chapter One” on the center of any top line. The good news is that I don’t have to worry about that blinking cursor screaming at me, like I’ve read on many of those blogs about how to get past writer’s block.

But writers write, right? I’m already doing this blog in Microsoft Word, so all it would take is a nifty Ctrl-N and start tap-tap-tapping. But I’m not a writer. I’m a thinker. From time to time, I’m a researcher. Maybe I’m a loose plotter, but what I really am, at this point, is a guy who can think up a scene here or there.

So why don’t I write them down? Oh, I can come up with a litany of reasons, but the top two are usually confidence and time.

My lack of confidence doesn’t mean I’m afraid of being a bad writer. My use of the English language is sound. Do I still need to consult Strunk & White from time to time? Sure, but that’s hardly a count against me.

But proper verb conjugation does not the next Jack Reacher make. All those ideas I’ve had? Most of them are scenes. I know how I might start a book, but then what would happen in the next scene? Or I know the ending, but how am I going to get there? So the internal critic says there’s no use writing the scenes I’ve thought of if I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

Then there’s the whole time thing. Who has time to write? I mean, sure, I’ve got fifteen minutes right now, but how much would I really write in those fifteen minutes? So I might as well play some Candy Crush instead, because that’s a MUCH better use of my time. Just until I lose these five lives, and then, oh wait, I have five more lives in the dream world? Okay, then I just need to see if I’ve opened the new world of Pet Rescue Saga yet…

Of course, now that I have a five-month old at home, I scoff at the silly boy who thought he didn’t have time. I’m sure he couldn’t foresee a time when the laptop isn’t cracked open until after the baby’s gone to sleep, leaving a whopping hour to pay bills, do chores, and maybe shove some food down the gullet  before passing out on the couch five minutes into a DVR’d episode of NCIS.

But that inner dialogue that keeps me from writing. Let’s call her the inner nag, instead. She is the ubiquitous crabgrass that I find whenever I’m looking for the elusive Kentucky bluegrass called a muse. Why bother writing a scene, she says, if you don’t know what happens next? Why bother writing for fifteen minutes if it’s not enough time to finish the whole thing?

The logical part of me knows these are stupid points.  The next scene isn’t forming in my mind yet because the current scene is taking up too much cranial real estate. And I can’t read a book in one sitting, why would I expect to write it all at once? But if I spent the next fifteen minutes writing a hundred words now, then maybe I can write another hundred the next time I am waiting for my Candy Crush lives to reset. Then, when I’m halfway through this scene and start thinking about what happens next, maybe I’ll make more time to start writing that next scene.

Stephen King writes two thousand words a day. Given his publishing schedule, I assume that’s enough to finish a 500-page book a month, right? He tells beginning writers that they might want to just start with one thousand. He also says the first one million words are practice, something akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hours. So maybe if I had written all of those scenes I had thought about, I’d be getting close to being an experienced writer. Maybe I would have even figured out how to string a few of those scenes together by now.

Last year I discovered National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a novel in thirty days. Okay, only 50,000 words, which really isn’t a full-sized novel, but is still a sizeable chunk of one. It’s been going on every November since 2000, but this was the first I had heard of it. When all of your writing energy is potential instead of kinetic, you don’t spend much time in actual writer circles. Now that I’ve been spent a year doing some writerly type things, I don’t know how I had missed it.

But eleven months ago, an Amazon Kindle post about it on Facebook was my introduction. Intrigued, I checked out the website, and before I knew it, I had an author profile and a novel I was “working on.” I didn’t really think I’d follow through on it. First of all, it was already November 9 or 10 when  Amazon posted it. Better late than never, Kindle, sheesh! Plus I had a wedding to go to that weekend. No time, but what’s it going to hurt to say I’m working on a novel.

I already had about five thousand words of a novel written down, so that might compensate for missing the first third of the month. And if that statement seems to contradict everything I’ve said so far, bear in mind words had been written over a span of thirteen years. The book was a fictionalized account of my trip to Mardi Gras in the year 2000, so it had almost been in my mind as long as my political book. Hell, had I known about the first November NaNoWriMo , ten months after the Mardi Gras trip, I probably would’ve written the exact same book I attempted in 2013.

The night before that wedding, I dusted off the old Word doc and started typing what happened next. Only a couple hundred words. I didn’t write any the day of the wedding, but the next day I did. Then the next. Suddenly, I could find the time. And those plot holes? Some of them started fixing themselves. Some of the scenes that I had been thinking about for ten years ended up going a different way than I had always assumed. Who knew that actually forcing myself to put it on paper would finally flesh it out? Then halfway through this scene I had always thought about, I would think, “Oh, I need to throw this in here because the next scene will do this.” All those things I had heard were true. Scenes I assumed could not have more than five hundred words of content actually had three thousand words of detail, exposition, and dialogue. I thought about the characters and the plot when I was in the shower.

I didn’t “win” NaNoWriMo last year. After being spotted the initial five thousand words, I only added another 20,000 or so. Only. But if any statement should serve as an endorsement for the program, it’s me, a guy who spent thirteen years writing five thousand words (and really, twenty years writing zero words of my political thriller) finished the month and said “Dangit, I only made it to 27,000 words.”

The important thing, I realized, was that I was writing. “I’m a writer now,” I thought. And this would continue. Man, now that I knew what it took, the world was my oyster. I would finish that book by the time Christmas arrived and I had ideas for other books that I’d start up in January.

As of this moment, that book is at 38,000 words. I’ve only added eleven thousand words.

Why did I write 20,000 words in one month and only 10,000 words in the following year? I could blame it on reaching a lag in the book, damned old writer’s block stopping me from knowing what happens next. But a lot had to do with how successful NaNoWriMo is as makeshift muse. I missed the pep talks from accomplished authors. The word-count widget that satisfied my desire for meaningless accomplishments (“A badge for 5,000 words? Done!”) was gone .  During November, every time you update your word count, it tells you when you will finish your book based on your current pace, as well as the pace you have to write at to finish on time. The giddiness I felt when my finish date moved from January to December (“I’m going to finish this year!) was matched only by the dismay I felt when it disappeared on December 1. (“But I’m not done yet!”)

But the thing I missed most was the group camaraderie. We do write-ins at real-live locations, but even more helpful was an online chat-room. Chatting with people might seem to be a bad distraction for someone trying to type 1,667 words a day. But they are all in the same boat. The conversation ebbs and flows as inspiration strikes. There are word wars, where we all write for ten minutes, then report back with how many words we wrote. Then we write a little more leisurely until the next one.

When December arrived, all of those things were gone. I stopped off at Starbucks and Panera a few times that month to write, but could only manage another five hundred words a time. In November, I could get close to that number in one successful word war. Plus that old-fashioned lack of confidence came back. You skip a day of writing, you might get back on that horse, but another day or two of no writing and you start doubting you’re a writer.  Because remember, writers write.

But I also need to remind myself that the eleven thousand words I’ve added to the book since December are probably ten thousand more words more than I had written at any time prior to last November. And that doesn’t count the short stories, flash fiction, and blog entries that might or might not count toward Stephen King’s million word starting trot. I’ve also found more of those resources that had eluded me before. Writing blogs and websites, competitions, exciting new authors. I joined Storium, a very cool website that is part role-playing, part write-your-own-adventure, where you create a character and jointly tell a story with other characters. Shoot, a year ago I had no idea who Chuck Wendig was. Now I check his website daily, have written five of his flash fiction prompts, and have bought three of his books.

This blog has been part of my attempt to “keep on writing.” This post will mark the 7th Monday in a row that I’ve submitted a blog entry. I cheated and wrote most of it on Halloween.  It’s an artificial deadline, just like NaNoWriMo. If I miss a week, no hostages will be killed and I won’t miss a paycheck. But, as last December proved, if I miss one post, it will be much easier to miss the next week as well.

But now, NaNoWriMo is back, and I have to ramp up from writing two to three thousand words a week to doing that every couple days. I hope the flash fictions I’ve been writing haven’t destroyed my ability to write things longer than one scene. I guess I’ll find out with my first word war.

I will try to continue posting every Monday through November. The posts might change from my normal musings to book excerpts or check-ins. Or why there’s no way in hell I will make it to 50,000 words. Regardless, they should be shorter. Maybe I’ll just write a sentence or two.

Oh, who am I kidding? I can’t even describe a bowel movement in less than a thousand words.

And if I’m successful this year, maybe I’ll try it again next year. Maybe I’ll, gasp, try to write during the other eleven months of the year. Maybe next year, I’ll finally get around to that political thriller. Or maybe I should wait until 2016, the twenty-fifth anniversary of its residence in my head. I’ll feel like an empty nester. I wonder if I’ll solve world hunger or invent a warp drive with all of the newly vacated room in my brain.

More likely, the space will be filled with new ideas, new plots, new characters. Then al I’ll have to do…

…is write.

Happy Hospital Hell

· October 27, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , , , , , · 3 Comments

I always assumed we were pretty far along the historical spectrum of medical knowledge. Long gone are the days of leeches and bleeding and humors. Can the days of Star Trek scanners and nanobots be that far away?

Then my wife went into the hospital six times over a four-month span. And I now realize that, while we might have progressed beyond whiskey as the primary antiseptic and painkilling tool, we’re still a long way from holographic doctors phasing through your body to grab the kidney stone before solidifying to pat your ass on the way out the door.

I’m going to try very hard to not turn the Happy Wombat blog into vitriol. Let’s see how good my fiction-writing abilities are.

Prior to the 1:00 AM wake-up call my daughter gave us a week before the agreed-upon arrival time (“Hey, what’s all this water doing in my way? Push!”), my wife had never been in a hospital. Other than “just visiting.”  And really, Monopoly needs to change the jail to a hospital. And what the player needs to roll to get out should change every turn.  “Oh, I know yesterday we were paying very close attention to the doubles, but these test results indicate that dice adding up to seven will put you back on the path to Marvin Gardens this turn.” Besides, how many people really visit jail?

The delivery went fine. An hour after they gave her some Pitocin, she was pushing, and an hour later, we had a healthy six-and-a-half pound daughter. The baby, thankfully, has been the picture of health. But once she was out of her mom, things went a little sideways.

My wife had a massive fibroid that we found during the pregnancy. “Massive” must be a medical term, because every nurse, doctor, and ultrasound tech who saw it said, “Wow, that’s a massive fibroid.” Or “I’m surprised you could get pregnant with that massive fibroid.” Or “Seriously, it’s blocking a fallopian tube, so your eggs weren’t even making it to the uterus half of the time.”

This information might have been useful when we were trying to get pregnant. Instead, I had the pleasure of, um, pleasuring myself into a cup. With that came an affidavit that probably made the last Pope resign – “I, the undersigned, promise I masturbated to produce this sample.” The rest of the rules were extensive and comical: do not collect specimen into anything other than the cup, do not put in your pocket, do not expose to light, do not pass Go!, do not slow down for any yellow lights, do not make eye contact with the tech you deliver it to.

So we knew there might be some issues because of the Massive Fibroid (trademark pending), primarily a risk of excessive bleeding. There was supposed to be extra blood on hand, but it never showed up. The baby’s fault for showing up on a Saturday when the main OB/GYN was not on call. What we didn’t foresee, which in retrospect we or someone with a day or two of medical experience should have, was that perhaps the fibroid and the placenta might not play nicely with each other.

Nobody is sure what happened next.  Either my wife tried to deliver the fibroid, which we had been warned ahead of time would be bad, or the placenta was stuck to the fibroid. The result was lots of blood and no placenta. The placenta seemed to bother the OB the most, but everyone else was concerned that the blood wasn’t stopping. This was the moment I was very happy we were not still living with 19th century medical technology, because I’m sure my wife would have bled out.

But instead, I was being asked to make some momentous decisions. My wife was going to be separated from the baby, meaning that I was in charge of the half-hour-old. Because the law and the hospital and health insurance companies don’t know what to do at this point, I could either admit the baby as the patient or having her admitted as an abandon. Naturally I opted for the former.

Unbeknownst to me, this triggered a health insurance nightmare.  The plan had been to put the baby on my insurance, not my wife’s. But once the baby became a patient at the hospital, well-baby went out the window. This double my wife’s deductible, so we had the joy of paying for much of what happened next. As far as I can tell, the baby’s currently covered on both of our plans, but who the hell knows?

Because my daughter was the patient, my next twenty-four hours were spent in pediatrics, not post-partum. This meant sleeping in a toddler bed about three inches longer than my body. I was also wearing jeans, having thought that I would have time to go home and change after the birth. Add in the two hours of sleep I was operating on, plus quickly learning why it is called a mothering instinct, not a fathering instinct. One fun part, though, was seeing the nurses not quite sure how to deal with the father in charge. They kept asking me how I was feeling and if I wanted any Jell-o or water. “No, I’m fine, my body didn’t just suffer through a live birth. Do you have any beer?”

But my day was a piece of cake next to the recipe for my wife. A dash of ultrasound, a dollop of sedative, swirl in a little radiation, and set to baste in the ICU. The radiation lab stopped the bleeding. The ultrasound checked for both the fibroid and placenta. Turns out the ultrasound needs blood flowing to the region, so the results were inconclusive after the radiation. Probably should’ve done those two things in the opposite order. Oops. As for the ICU, nobody seemed sure why she was there. But where else would you put the woman who has been awake for twenty hours, recently gave birth, and is now beside herself because she can’t see her baby, other than right next to somebody that is up all night with paranoid delusions?

The next day, my wife was allowed to move to pediatrics to actually, you know, see the baby she had birthed. Three days later, mama and baby were released. I was at work, so I missed the whole thing. Had we known more than an hour in advance, I would’ve tried to be there. When a patient is going to be released is an amorphous target, but once it’s set in motion, it’s fast. “We want to keep you here, we’re going to keep monitoring you,” changes to “you’re released, now get the hell out of here because we need that bed” faster than a Denny’s waitress. Turn and burn, baby!

Two days later, she was back in the hospital.  Her body really wanted to deliver that fibroid! When it started coming out on the toilet, she freaked out a bit, but then calmly decided to go to the emergency room. At the emergency room, they asked her a whole bunch of questions based on her medical history (“so we notice your hemoglobin was a little low after delivering the baby”) but nobody seemed concerned with the bodily tissue dangling from her lady-parts.

They also asked if she felt safe in her home. I assume this question is required by law, and that is a good thing.  However, they asked her that question with me sitting right next to her. This certainly violates the point of the question, if not the letter of the law. The comedian in me wanted to crack my knuckles, look menacingly at her, and say “Oh, you feel safe.” Fortunately, right brain convinced left brain to save it for the re-telling.

Once admitted, we stood around waiting for her OB (her actual one this time, not the on-call one) to finish office hours. One tech did take an ultrasound – a vaginal ultrasound five days after giving birth. It showed nothing, probably because the thing it was looking for was HANGING OUT OF HER. I could see it, one of the nurses could see it, but somehow the tech who stuck a wand up past it didn’t notice.

By the time the doctor showed up, we had been in the emergency room for five hours. She then, still without looking at the area in question, assumed it was the placenta and began making plans to admit my wife to the hospital for placenta accreta. Then she looked at it. Oops, turns out it’s not the placenta, it’s the fibroid, something we silly non-medical types had assumed a while ago. The doctor then decided she needed more time to figure out what she’s going to do, so she put the fibroid, which had been hanging between my wife’s thighs for a quarter of a day, back inside her. I wondered if this was the most sanitary thing to do, but again, figured I should just keep my stupid plebeian thoughts to myself.

Around midnight that night, they removed the fibroid without much problem. Bear in mind this was something we were told repeatedly, both during the pregnancy and the delivery, could not happen without so much blood loss as to potentially kill my wife. Everything we had been through that week was to keep that fibroid from coming out. And now it was out, as if nature and the human body knew better than medical professionals.

But we still weren’t done. She kept having fevers after coming home from the fibroid procedure, so she returned.  This was the only time out of the five post-partum trips to the hospital when we didn’t have to go through the emergency room. I had assumed the emergency room was for, I don’t know, emergencies.  You don’t call 911 because of a jaywalker, right? But the emergency room isn’t 911. Most of the doctors cannot admit people to the hospital. So they send you to the emergency room. And the person that’s there for a legitimate emergency, like a fibroid hanging from her hoo-ha, is just going to have to wait because Dr. Not-in-Network really wants a temperature check.

This trip, the OB decided to bring in an Infectious Disease (ID) doctor. Over the next five days, he put her on about fifty thousand different antibiotics. Thus began the hospital procedure we’ve come to know, and why I’m convinced the medical profession still doesn’t know shit. The phlebotomists come in to take your blood about 4:00 in the morning, the doctor comes in at 7:00, looks at the results, says “well that didn’t work,” changes one thing (Antibiotic #6 for Antibiotic #5), then waits twenty-one hours to see if that magically worked. If it didn’t, they change one thing and wait until the next day. Of course, they hadn’t diagnosed her with anything other than fevers. Nothing was in her bloodstream, but why should that stop them from randomly prescribing antibiotics? He’s an ID doctor, so he will use the ID treatment regardless of whether or not the patient has an ID. We don’t ask running backs to pass the football, do we?

After a few days of this, the OB went back into the uterus to make sure there was no lingering fibroid or placenta. Neither of them was there, but afterward my wife’s fever went down. While the doctor was checking around, she cleaned up the uterus with an antibiotic spray. She later explained that the uterus is, understandably, sealed off from the rest of the body. So unlike, say, the kidney or the liver, where bacteria or other contagions would enter the bloodstream and be seen in the daily blood draws, if they were in the uterus, they would stay there. This also means that no amount of antibiotic delivered through an IV would reach and cleanse the uterus. I guess the ID doctor didn’t know that. Or maybe he just thought there’d be no reason for a uterus to be infected just because it had a fibroid that had been hanging out in the open for six hours put back inside. He’s an infectious diseases dude. You wouldn’t expect a Senator from California to pay attention to what happens in Nevada, would you?

For the third time, she was released from the hospital and, this time, we actually felt like we were clear. Until she got a 104-degree fever accompanied by diarrhea and vomiting. This was new. But hey, at least we weren’t abusing the emergency room this time. And the good news didn’t stop there – this  was entirely unrelated to the pregnancy, the fibroid, and the uterus.  Woo-Hoo! Unfortunately,  it was C-Diff, which is potentially deadly. What is C-Diff? It’s when you overuse antibiotics, so you kill off all of the good bacteria in your system. Oops! Who could have guessed that randomly throwing medicine at an undiagnosed problem might have bad consequences? Well, you came in with a runny nose, so we amputated your foot. Hopefully you don’t mind.

Want to know what they use to treat a problem that was caused by overuse of antibiotics? If you answered more antibiotics, congratulations! You can be a 21st century doctor! If you answered whiskey, go back to 1860, you Neanderthal!

We earned almost a month of reprieve after the C-Diff joy. Since then, she’s been back twice. The first time was because her gall bladder was passing stones, which allegedly is common in new mothers. Something, something, when pregnant, the body does something, something, which causes the gall bladder to something, something stones. They needed to endoscope out the gallstones, then remove the gall bladder in a separate surgery.

But nobody would touch her because she was on blood thinners. Why was she on blood thinners? Oh, did I forget to mention she had a blood clot? She got it on the C-Diff trip when they put a picc line in, which is like a surge protector for multiple IV lines. She needed it because both arms were bruised from too many IV’s.

This was also where the proprietary bullshit between the different branches of medicine reared its ugly head again. The hematologist doesn’t want to take her off the blood thinner, the surgeon won’t touch her until the gallstones are already out, the internist won’t remove the gallstones until blah, blah, blah. And a new ID doctor’s wearing a trench coat in the corner, saying “Hey, I got some great antibiotics over here for ya.”

Meanwhile my wife is turning yellow enough to get a walk-on part in The Walking Dead because a gallstone is blocking her liver. And all anybody will do is wait until the next blood draw at 4:00 AM tomorrow

Somehow the magical Oracle brought the warring factions together to remove everything gall related, and nine days later she was back home, having already missed a quarter of her daughter’s life. But dammit, that jaundiced look didn’t go away. Why the heck isn’t the liver getting better now that the evil gall bladder that was bullying all the other poor organs was gone? It couldn’t be that they had just been guessing at why the liver was overproducing bilirubin like it was cornering the market on canary-colored crayons.

One more trip to the hospital for “observation.” Once again through the emergency room. Hey, she’s already missed Fourth of July, our anniversary, and our baby’s first day at daycare, what’s one more indefinite hospital visit?

As always, the true heroes of the medical profession, the nurses, provided an answer.  The off-hand remarks made by the people that actually spend their days in and out of the patient rooms are much more helpful and enlightening than the Almighty Edicts delivered from upon high by Hugh Laurie wannabes once a day.

“They’ve got you on Xarelto while you’re having liver problems?” one asked.

Why? Is that a bad thing? Yep, blood thinners can cause liver problems. Have I mentioned “oops” yet?  So the hematologist reluctantly takes her off of Xarelto and, magically, her liver gets better. So she is released with… Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?… Another blood thinner! This one, we promise, won’t affect the liver. But it did. And as a bonus, she also had to shoot this one directly into her stomach.  Fun stuff.

So she gave herself shots for two weeks and the yellow came back to her skin. No relation, whatsoever, the hematologist assured us. I’m sure a liver specialist would blame it on the nonexistent gall bladder. And the ID Doc would have some pure antibiotics straight off the boat from his guy in Thailand.

With family photos approaching, she tried something kookie-crazy and took herself off the shots for a few days. What do you know? Her skin color faded. The hematologist actually said there was no connection. Now, I might’ve hyperbolized a few things for storytelling purposes, but I guarantee you this is legit. When confronted with a clear pattern correlating blood thinner to skin color, she assured us that there was no causality whatsoever.

Uh huh, whatever you say. Just like your body can’t deliver a fibroid. And antibiotics cure everything. Thank God we’ve come so far in our medical knowledge.

So now my wife is just going to take some aspirin to keep the blood flowing, while hopefully giving the liver a chance to get better. If that works, she might be able to go back to normal. Maybe even knock back a little whiskey. I hear that cures everything.

Pulp Fiction Turns Twenty

· October 20, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , , , · 4 Comments

Pulp Fiction just turned twenty. Wow, right after I turned forty. What are the odds? I wonder what Pulp Fiction was doing when I turned twenty.

I don’t know, but I bet I know what Quentin Tarantino and John Travolta were doing nine months before I turned twenty. Bow-Chicka-Bow-Bow!

They were probably filming a movie. Get your mind out of the gutter.

So happy birthday, with sugar on top. Now go clean the fucking car.

It’s hard for me to classify Pulp Fiction now. For a while, it was one of my favorite movies. I still think it was a game-changer in Hollywood. But I don’t know if it’s stood up to the test of time. I can’t remember the last time I’ve thought “I need to watch that movie again soon.” Part of this, I’m sure, is because so many other movies have copied elements of it, and maybe even done them better. The Matrix falls into this trap a little bit, but oddly, I don’t believe Airplane! does. The other reason it might have lost some appeal is because Quentin Tarantino might just be a one-trick pony. Why bother watching Pulp Fiction when you can check out Inglourious Basterds?

But I don’t want the film’s current status to sully how revolutionary it was at the time.

I was in college at the time, and I don’t remember if there was much buzz about the movie prior to its release. I’ve never been much of a movie aficionado, so if it didn’t have the blockbuster appeal of a Jurassic Park, I wouldn’t have known it was coming. But Pulp Fiction grew like a word-of-mouth slow burn. It feels like I overheard rumblings of this new movie, and a few outright questions if I had seen it or heard of it.

“No, what’s it about?” I would ask.

“It’s hard to, it’s just… Did you see Reservoir Dogs?” was the usual response.

“Never heard of it.”

“Oh, you should definitely go see it. Then rent Reservoir Dogs.”

(Thankfully before seeing Reservoir Dogs. I don’t know if I would have proceeded, or gone in with an open mind, had I already seen the ear cutting scene. It’s now been nineteen and a half years, I suppose, since I first saw it, and I still can’t hear “Stuck in the Middle with You” without cringing.)

I don’t know if these conversations were happening outside of college towns, but I guess they must have been or the twentieth anniversary wouldn’t make the news. It also seems that these conversations were not happening in October. Maybe closer to December or even 1995. Was this movie intended as more of a cult hit but then hit the mainstream? Was it a movie that was added to more theaters as it went along? I’m sure if I were less lazy, I could find out how many screens it was on by month.  But why do that when I can rely on spotty 20-year old memories? Crap, how did “buzz” happen before YouTube?

Truthfully, I don’t remember my exact reaction when I first saw the movie. Obviously, I loved it or I wouldn’t have gone on to see it maybe a hundred times or more in the ensuing twenty years. But it’s hard to extract my thoughts after just one viewing. How many of the scenes stuck with me? Was I confused by the reappearance of John Travolta after he had already died?

But I assume the things that jumped out at me were the same things that set it apart from so much that had come before. The pace, the dialogue, the adrenaline.

Others might say “the violence,” but I’ve always maintained that Pulp Fiction is not nearly as violent as it is given credit for. There are only a handful of deaths. The two guys in the opening scene. Then their friend Marvin. John Travolta’s character dies, but then is brought back due to non-linear storytelling. Zed and Maynard, but let’s be honest, Zed and Maynard had it coming. Plus we’re not entirely sure that Zed’s dead, Butch’s assertion notwithstanding. Only that Marcellus was about to go “Medieval on his ass.” Hard to believe that’s a phrase that did not exist twenty-one years ago.

Am I missing anyone besides those six? I don’t think I am. A few others get shot, my favorite of which was the woman who got shot in the thigh by a dazed Marcellus when she’s helping Butch after the car crash. The reason I love that particular scene is the same reason I think the movie gets credit for being way more violent than it is. The violence in Pulp Fiction is presented in a way to which we were unaccustomed in movies twenty years ago.

A person being shot, or especially killed, in a movie was supposed to be a serious, somber occurrence. Take a movie like The Godfather, a very violent movie. Almost every death in that movie is shown with a heightened sense of tension. When Sonny drives up to the toll booth and all the windows shut, the audience gasps. In war movies or life on the street movies, death is shown as the inevitable end to the unjust  struggle that is life in a pointless world. Even in campy horror movies, they are built up, a steady stream of “Ch-ch-ch, hu-hu-hu” building to a crescendo with the violin in the background. And after each death in these movies, the audience and, often, the characters are given a moment to reflect.

To contrast, when Martin dies in the back seat of the car, Vincent argues with Jules over whether or not he hit a bump. The aforementioned woman helping Butch just screams, clutches her leg and is quickly forgotten. The first murder happens when Brad is bumbling through an answer, so Jules shoots his friend lying on the couch, then quips “Oh, I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?”

So death doesn’t matter. Characters don’t even break stride when violence occurs. Even worse, the violence is often followed up with humor. We are not supposed to laugh at people being shot or killed. So when we leave Pulp Fiction, we talk about how the woman being shot was so funny. Or how awesome the “Dead N—– Storage” conversation was. And how cool it was that when Butch put the chainsaw down and grabbed the sword. This all makes us think it must have been a more violent movie than it really was – why would we be talking with such frivolity and enthusiasm about the death scenes?

Unfortunately, I think even Quentin Tarantino fell prey to the hype about how violent his movies are. While his first two movies use it sparingly, yet powerfully, it seems most of his later movies use violence (and the N word) as their focal point. The first Kill Bill is little more than violence porn. In porn, the plot is pointless, just a few minutes of dialogue to set up another twenty minute sex scene. Replace the word “sex” with “fight” in the last sentence and you have Kill Bill, Vol. 1.

So discounting the violence, I think it’s the dialogue that sets Pulp Fiction apart. The pacing, the attitude, and the violence are all portrayed through the dialogue. Few movies are as instantly quotable. Oh sure, I can run off a litany of Airplane! or Monty Python and the Holy Grail lines at the drop of a hat. But I don’t often find myself in situations where I can naturally drop a line about swallows and coconuts into everyday conversation. But “Check out the big brain on Brad?” Oh yeah, that one I can use. Even something as simple as “Mmm, this IS a tasty burger,” said with the right inflection, can bring to mind one specific scene from one specific movie. And although I don’t know if I’ve ever said “I’m a mushroom-cloud-laying mother fucker, mother fucker,” I can certainly think of some situations where I could have. I remember when my roommate bought the first computer with Windows 95 – we spent hours cuing up the VHS tape to record all of these lines and more, assigning them to every ding and ping that the computer would let us.

Of course, all three of those lines are said by Samuel L. Jackson. I know the movie momentarily revitalized Travolta’s career, and put Tarantino on the map. But nobody’s career is as closely tied to Pulp Fiction as than man who created Mr. Jules Winnfield of Inglewood. Samuel L. Jackson defines badassery. When you heard he was going to be in a Star Wars movie, you thought, “Oh, there’s going to be a badass Jedi?” He even makes shilling for a credit card company kinda badass. I remember sitting through the Iron Man credits, talking with a fellow comic book guy about the “S.H.I.E.L.D.” reveal near the end, asking “I wonder who they should get to play Nick Fury?” Then the post-credit scene came on and we both nodded. “Yep, nailed it. Nobody but him.”

How impressive was it that a relatively unknown actor would steal the show against such names as Travolta, Willis, Walken, and Keitel? Today, that would surprise nobody, but in 1994, nobody knew who Samuel L. Jackson was. I’m sure he would have made a name for himself anyway. He’s too talented of an actor.  But I have to wonder if he would have carved quite the same niche if he had a different breakout role. Would we be living in a regrettable world without, shudder, motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane?

As the years have passed, though, I don’t know if Pulp Fiction stands up to the test of time.  Its impact is still noticeable, but that very impact has made it a bit more pedestrian by comparison.  You can find similar quick dialogue in pretty much any Aaron Sorkin script. Want that brazen mix of humor and action? Just watch any of those Samuel L. Jackson-led Marvel movies.

If the movie is on TV, I won’t necessarily sit through it. To me, this is the definition of a timeless movie. If Star Wars is on, I’m watching it. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is on? Put down the remote control. The Rock, which came out two years after Pulp Fiction, fits this description as well. In fact, there is very little that Pulp Fiction does well that is not one-upped by The Rock. Unfortunately, this includes Michael Bay becoming more of a “keep doing the same movie over and over” director than Tarantino could ever be.

But if I scroll through the channel guide and see Pulp Fiction, my first thought is not “Click!” but “what part of the movie is it?” If it’s the first twenty minutes, I’m probably changing the channel. If it’s near the end I might or might not tune in for the Bonnie Situation and the diner scene. But if it’s anywhere near the black hole of a middle that is the back-to-back Oral Pleasure/Cab Drive scene, forget it. And if I did tune it in to watch those early scenes, I’m going back to whatever else I was doing as soon as Uma Thurman gets the adrenaline shot in the heart.

Unless it’s the edited-for-TV version, because that is a whole nother level of unintentional entertainment. But that is a subject for another post.

So happy birthday, Pulp Fiction. Like most big birthdays, let’s focus more on the zany, brilliant days when you were setting the world on fire, and not on the bloated, middle-aged Al Bundy you have become. And the less you mention those kids, Django  and Jackie Brown, the better.

And to those of you who disagree with my assessment, allow me quote Jules… “I don’t remember asking you a goddamn thing.”

Spammerpunk Horror

· October 19, 2014 · fiction · , , , , · One Comment

Getting in the Halloween spirit, the weekly flash fiction challenge was an interesting one. We were supposed to write a horror story, but in the style of a spam e-mail. Obviously this is a short one. If you don’t have a common last name, you might not get as many of the “a relative died” e-mails, but I’ve received a few.

Dear <INSERT_NAME>,

As you may have been aware, your relative, <INSERT_RELATION_NAME>, recently perished while traveling through the Romanian Carpathians.  <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> listed you as his heir, and an extensive Internet search confirmed you as his only living relative. You, therefore, are entitled to inherit the estate of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME>, including all of his bodily possessions.

In order to prove that you are in fact <INSERT_NAME>, the legal and rightful inheritor of the body, mind, and soul of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME>, we are to be requiring you make a small deposit. Be assured that this small deposit will be returned manifold when the decedent’s estate is returned to you.

Your deposit should be in the form of one (1) body part. The body part in question must be larger than a finger, for verification purposes, but should in no way exceed the size of a forearm. Please note that the body part need not originate from you, but merely obtained and provided by you.  Internal organs will receive a premium return on investment.

<INSERT _NAME> is responsible for shipping and handling costs.

Upon receipt of requested item, the body of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> will be sent to you in fulfillment of stated contract and stated testament. While some choose to take the estate in one lump shipment, we offer another option to help alleviate problems with taxes or other law enforcement. You may opt to receive one piece of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. Please note that even if you choose Option A, the body will still arrive in small pieces.

Please do no DNA testing on any included parts.

What are you waiting for? We know <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> would not want his estate to go to waste, nor for <INSERT _NAME>, his beloved beneficiary, to miss out on this opportunity.

Sincerely,

Vladimir T, Lawyer

This is 40

· October 13, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , · No Comments

I just turned forty.

Thank you, thank you.

Polite golf applause.

And boy, are my arms tired.

Dammit, that’s not the punchline.

Maybe sense of humor is the first thing to go.

Or the ability to write paragraphs longer than one sentence.

Quite a few people have congratulated me on turning forty. They do realize I didn’t actually do anything to get here, right? This wasn’t Cal Ripken taking the mantle from Lou Gehrig. All I did was keep breathing. And this wasn’t even in the age of cholera or “the consumption.”

But I guess I bucked the odds and made it over the hill. Or is forty the top of the hill? When I was younger, forty seemed so much older. Yes, I know that sounds stupid. Wow, your parents were older than you? Welcome to the generation gap.

But I think it goes beyond that. When my parents turned forty, their youngest child was in eighth grade.  Five years later, they were divorced and empty nesters. Hence, forty meant they were on top of the hill and ready to coast down the other side.

By contrast, I am still a relatively newlywed with an infant who will graduate high school when I am fifty-seven. No time to put that cardboard under my butt and let gravity do its work. I’ve still got some climbing to do.

Which is not to say that I am not aging as nature intended. Things like gout and pre-diabetes were as distant as nuptials a decade ago. But I’m about to have a toddler running circles around me, so aging body be damned.

But I’m not here to write about aging with my whopping one week of forty-something wisdom. Instead I am here to talk of parties. Specifically birthday parties, because I’ve had some good ones and some not so good ones. Plus, the next few will likely feature bouncy houses, so indulge me.

A couple of the parties from my youth, twenty-eight and thirty, stick out.

Whoa, grandpa, did you just call thirty your youth?

Watch it, whippersnapper, patience is the first thing to go.

The only time I’ve had that “Holy shit, I’m getting old” feeling was at twenty-eight. For most people, the round numbers hit them, but not me. I think there were a few things going on with twenty-eight. From a generic number standpoint, at twenty-eight, you go from “mid-twenties” to “late twenties.” It also marked the ten-year anniversary of turning eighteen, hence a decade of adulthood. Up to that point, in my mind, I was still in “college aged,” even if I had been out of college for six years.

A more personal issue I had with twenty-eight concerned where I was in my life. I had received my teaching credential earlier that year after a failed first career, but I had not been hired as a teacher yet. With an October birthday, that meant I was still a good eight months away from the teacher hiring process. So I was waiting tables and occasionally subbing in an elongated “lost weekend.”

I’m sure waiting tables while failing to get hired for my second career had nothing to do with my focusing on the whole “late twenties, six years out of college” thing. It wasn’t so much a “mid-life” as a “pre-life” crisis.

So what did I do for said party? Got drunk, got stoned, went to karaoke with a bunch of the drunk potheads that I worked with, hit on and struck out with the cute girl from work, hit on and struck out with her friend, got frustrated, drank and smoked some more, finally learned the words to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (minor accomplishment!), then showed up very hung over for the lunch shift the next day and resolved that I wouldn’t go through the same thing when the Big Three-Oh hit in two years.

I also figured that, two years later and still striking out with pretty much any woman I faced in the batter’s box, my thirtieth birthday could replace my bachelor’s party. Who knew if or when I’d finally have a successful date, much less a full courtship and engagement. If it was forty or fifty, would I be able to have the big blow-out that every guy wants? Strip clubs frown upon men using walkers, right? “Here, missy, a dollar for your G-String. Don’t go spending that all in one place. Now where’d I put my teeth?”

Two years later, I was in a slightly better place. Still waiting tables, but now only to augment the measly second-year teacher salary. Even better, the school district that hired me featured a break between quarters that conveniently landed on my birthday.

So more money, job stability, time off, bachelor party atmosphere, and two years to think about it? New Orleans, baby!  Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Those good times might be the first things to go. Better let ‘em roll while we can.

I had been to New Orleans before – once for Mardi Gras, once for New Years. People were tired of me talking about it so much without experiencing it themselves, so I invited everyone to come along for an extended weekend. To ease the burden, I paid for two hotel rooms. Anyone willing to cram themselves in with three other people could stay for free. I even booked a couple flights for co-workers, because restaurant workers can’t be bothered with complicated stuff like that Inter-webs thingy.

Ten people ended up joining me. It was a mish-mash of people from different aspects of my life. That first, failed career donated a friend or two, the teaching credential program another handful. My cousin and her friend who I had already traveled with to England and Australia, and my mom. Yes, my mom. I mean, she was the only one that had been there thirty years earlier, right?

There have only been two or three times in my life I’ve seen my mom drunk, and my thirtieth birthday was one of them. That by itself would’ve made it a memorable trip. At one point, as I sat looking up Bourbon Street from the balcony of the Tropical Isle, the girls all decided to go to the male strip club and asked my mom if she wanted to come. Her quick response was “Oh,yeah,” before sheepishly turning to me and saying “I mean… if it’s okay with you… it’s your birthday…”

Continuing on the subject of inviting my mohter, one year later, when Huricane Katrina hit six weeks before my thirty-first birthday, the role she played in my thirtieth became more apt. Had she waited a year to have me, we would’ve had a whole bunch of non-refundable deposits to an inaccessible city.

Timing is the first thing to go. No, hold on. That doesn’t even make sense in this context.

We drank plenty (The liver is the first- oh, who am I kidding), but we also did some of the other touristy shit around town, like trudging out to the swamps for a boat tour and following the tourbook walk through the garden district.

We ate at Emeril’s restaurant the night of birthday, and that might have been one of the best dinners I’ve ever had. Not to be confused with Brennan’s the next morning, which is one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had. It was painful, though, on only two hours of sleep and still stuffed from Emeril’s (and a few drinks) from the night before. But oh, how I had to stuff myself. “No, I’m going to pass on the Bananas Foster. Oh, they cook it right in front of you? It smells so good…”

The Angels were even nice enough to clinch the division on my birthday that year, even if the highlights of that game got me in trouble from one of the girls in the group. After the male revue, she wanted to compare it to female strippers, so she found the boys and took us to a strip club. It had a big screen TV that occupied much more of my attention than the topless girls. Fewer scars and cottage cheese.

Simply put, we had a blast. It more than made up for the twenty-eight debacle.

Since thirty I’ve still had some fun birthdays.  My quarter break still sometimes lands on my birthday, so I still travel, albeit with a smaller entourage. I’ve spent one birthday in Ireland, and one checking out the Smurf Turf at a Boise State game. I even lost one birthday entirely by boarding a plane in Los Angeles the day before, crossing the International Date Line, and landing the day after in Fiji for my Honeymoon. My wife refused to accept that she was now married to a younger man.

Speaking of honeymoon, that bachelor party that my thirtieth was supposed to replace? It ended up happening at the age of thirty-six. It was great, but I was right with my earlier assessment. It was way more low-key than it would have been in my twenties. Sure, we went to Vegas, but we opted for a minor league baseball game over the strip clubs and woke up both mornings more tired than hung over. Nobody was arrested, which is something that happened on a Vegas bachelor party I had been to ten years earlier. The worst shenanigan of the whole weekend was a little short-sheeting.

My wife tried very hard to arrange a big blow-out for my fortieth birthday. She had some very grandiose ideas. One involved a trip to Kentucky for the Bourbon Trail and the South Carolina at Kentucky football game. Ora trip to Tennessee for a Jack Daniels distillery tour and a Titans game. I’m sure there were some other ideas that included whiskey and football. Or beer and baseball. Or wine and hockey. Really, I’m easy.

The problem this time was getting other people to go.  Money wasn’t an issue, as we are all making more money than ten years ago. But getting time off is more difficult at forty than at thirty. At thirty, most of us had jobs that wouldn’t suffer from a few days away. At forty, we have careers that are more difficult to take frivolous days off from.  We also have families now. Spouses and children not only complicate travel plans, but also change the priorities for the days we do get off work.

So instead of big travel plans, we had everyone over to our place for a barbecue. Nothing extravagant, just burgers, but not the fast-food inspired burgers that a thirty year old would like. No, we’re gourmeting this shit up! We wanted to stuff the burgers, but couldn’t decide with what. Bacon, blue cheese, grilled onions, Tabasco, Worcestershire? So we made it “Build Your Own” and put about thirty ingredients out with the raw meat. It went over great, and even better, I didn’t have to spend the whole time cooking. Everyone actually grilled up their own concoctions after putting it together.

Had I attempted this at age thirty, I am sure half the guests would have ended up with salmonella. But at forty we all properly washed hands, cooked burgers to a nice medium, and survived. And half of every couple limited their alcohol intake , so that everyone could get home safely and at a reasonable hour. Back to our families. Back to our careers.

Because irresponsibility, it turns out, is the first thing to go.

Burn, Baby, Burn (Fiction)

· October 9, 2014 · fiction · , , , , · One Comment

Flash Fiction Challenge this week was to take somebody else’s sentence and make a story out of it. I started with “That bridge was burnt long ago, though I never knew if it was my match or my friend’s that started the fire.”  Hopefully I did it justice.

Burn, Baby, Burn

“If you’re ever in Vancouver, look me up,” had been the innocuous statement at the ten year reunion.

Sure, why not? Time should have put out the fire, the long burning embers we had been stoking since Freshman year. Maybe we could rebuild that bridge that had existed before.

Kitty-n-Kassie, peas in a pod. Kitty-n-Kassie, soul sisters. Kitty-n-Kassie, chasing the dragon.

So I came to Vancouver. Isn’t it just like that bitch to flee the country?

“Kitty, OMG!” I heard shouted from across the Tim Hortons. She actually said OMG!

“It’s Katherine now,” I corrected her before the whole weekend devolved into sixth grade nicknames.

“Well, la de dah, Miss Grown Up,” she said, half condescending, half joking. Not bitchy enough to get angry at, but enough to know it was there. “Katherine. I like it!”

Of course she did. Nothing ever made any difference to her. She could roll with anything.

I’m totally fine if you go for Gio. I hope he’s into you.

He wasn’t. They dated half of eighth grade.

Wasn’t that some great E last night? We’re totally in high school now.

While I buried my blues.

“Come on,Kit- er, Katherine,” she continued. “I’ll show you around. You’ll love it here. You always loved the outdoors.”

I paused, thinking back, “I guess I did.”

“Stanley Park is just like Golden Gate,” she rambled as I followed her north. “Remember our senior trip to SF? That was so much fun.”

“Nope,” I interrupted. “I was on academic probation. Heard it was fun, though.”

“Really?” She stopped her reverie for a moment. “I totally thought you were there. Who was it that snuck off to the Jamba Juice? You always loved smoothies.”

“Wow, you remember my past better than I do,” I said, not sure if I was sarcastic or serious.

But she probably thought I was one of the masses sitting behind her sanctimonious Honor Society ass in the front row at graduation. Instead, I was miles away and high as a kite with the other drop-outs.

“OMG, Kitty. I tried forever to find you. Nobody on Facebook knew you. We heard you died in a DUI or something. Where have you been?”

It got me thinking. She certainly misremembered the trajectory of our friendship, but had I been the one to leave her behind? I always assumed it was the highfalutin AP student ignoring her druggy friend.

Was I the bitch that had burned the bridge?

“Katherine?” She finally stopped her interrogation and waited for an answer.

“There was a DUI,” her questions were easier to answer than mine, “but I didn’t die. Spent the weekend in jail. But whoever was looking for me wasn’t looking very hard.”

“Isn’t this place beautiful?” Kassie returned to tour guide mode. “It’s bigger than Central Park.”

She had the attention span of a cat. The park was beautiful, though.

The talk went back to the last decade. Her time at UW. Sororities, soccer, a pregnancy scare. I added an occasional “uh huh” to keep her talking about herself instead of asking about me. Nobody needed to hear about annual trips in and out of rehab. Or how much I had blamed on her. The burning hatred I had carried for her.

“This is Lost Lagoon,” she turned back to tour guide on a small wooden bridge. “OMG, I’m totally loving this. Let’s blaze, Kitty!”

That’s when she pulled a joint out and started lighting up.

“Jesus, Kassie, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Oh relax,” she inhaled the flame, igniting the paper. “We’re in BC. It’s practically legal here.”

She coughed out the pungent smoke,  close enough to make me twitch.

“I’ve been sober for three years!”

“Relax,” she repeated, handing the joint in my direction. “Does ganj even count?”

She still said ganj wrong. Rhymed it with and, not on. That always annoyed me. Now it made the insulting offer even worse.

“Hell yes, it counts,” I batted the weed out of her protruding hand.

“OMG, Bitch! You need to chill. This is just like last time.”

“What, the ecstasy party? You never noticed that I couldn’t do drugs like you. I couldn’t just wake up and be all chipper. That night started the downward spiral of high school. Of my life!”

I gasped after my tirade, and noticed smoke. The smell of marijuana was mixing with smoldering wood.

“No, when I came back from college,” she responded. “At Jenny’s party. I said sorry for spreading all of those rumors about you in high school.”

“That I gave handies for booze? You started those rumors?”

“Uh, yeah, but I came clean. You can’t hold that against me.”

“Why didn’t I remember that?” I asked out loud, although it was a bigger question for myself. Any thought of smoke disappeared.

“Because you were drunk,” Kassie answered for me. “You flew off the handle. We did some heroin to calm you down.”

“Heroin?” I was bewildered. “That was the first time I did heroin.”

“Yeah, and we made up. Then you disappeared for eight years, just like the emo bitch from high school. And I thought we were finally connecting again. Just like today.”

“You gave me my first heroin? Do you have any idea of the hell that the next five years of my life was?”

I slapped Kassie just as flame erupted beneath her. She screamed and waved her arms.

“Help, help, the bridge is on fire” were the last words I heard as I started to trudge back to the train station.

Bridges are easier to burn than build.

The Lost Lagoon bridge would survive the small conflagration from a wasted joint.

But the bridge between us?  That bridge was burnt long ago, though I never knew if it was my match or my friend’s that started the fire.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Equal parts kindling and neglect. Play with enough fire, there’s bound to be a blaze.

Riding a Bike

· October 6, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , · No Comments

It’s just like riding a bike.

That’s a saying that they use, implying that the action to which they are applying the statement is easy to pick up once you’ve learned it. A skill that never really goes away. A relatively easy action.

The people that say it? I doubt they’ve ridden a bike in a while. Because it turns out that riding a bike is not really “like riding a bike.”

A few years ago, my annual attempt at losing some weight involved a bicycle. It had been maybe a decade since I had ridden one. Not really sure where my old bike went. How does one lose a bike? Blame it on the six places I moved to and from in the ten years after college.

I went to Target, making the initial investment of a new bike, a tire pump, and bike lock. Skipped the spandex, thank you very much. Came home, checked the tires, and jumped on without much thought.

I mean, it’s just like riding a bike, right?

Okay, balance was off a bit there.

The first problem was just getting on the bike long enough to find the pedal. Even with one foot on the ground, butt on the seat, the bike wasn’t terribly sturdy. But I finally got up on that thing and made a solid pedal forward. The tires wobbled and rubbed against the brake pads as I made it partway down my driveway.

I got off the bike and went inside to find a wrench. Spent the next half hour loosening the brakes, tightening the lugnuts that attached the wheel to the bike, and doing a general once-over on the rest of the bike. Things I rarely had to do in my youth. After much work, I was able to get back up and take the new toy for a spin.

This time I made it past the driveway and even partway down the block. It was wobbly. Oh, I suppose it would be more accurate to say I was the wobbly one. Every time I slowed, which was much more often than I remembered, I had to get not one, but both, feet on the ground to stop from falling over. My top speed could not have been much more than that of a brisk walk. The wind that had once blown in my face was now still.

I did finally make it out of my neighborhood, and in fact pedaled my way around town on a moderately regular basis that summer. Even trudged the hour-long ride to work a couple of times. But even after I got those over those initial hiccups, the youthful freedom and exhilaration that once came from riding a bike was gone. Riding a bike became a chore. And this was not just because I now had the ability to drive a car to my destination much faster and simpler. It was also because the mechanics were different.

The seat was nowhere near as comfortable as I remember it. There was often a numbness in my nether regions that I promise did not exist at the age of ten or fifteen. Sometimes in the middle of a ride I would get off the bike just to feel if my testicles were still attached.  Also, the coasting was gone. Even though I was on flat ground, I could not pedal a few times and then coast, as I used to do. Standing up on the bike, something I used to do to go faster, now became a necessity just to move. And to protect my junk. But then my back would hurt if I stood too long. The tires also had to be pumped and tightened with frightening regularity. I would not leave my house for a bike ride without a wrench in my backpack.

Hence it was NOT “just like riding a bike.”

I know most, if not all, of these changes came from the fact that my body was different than the boyish body that used to ride. My two hundred and, let’s say, thirty pounds put additional pressure on the frame and the tires. But I’m pretty sure that even if I could go back to the one ninety or so I was at the end of college, the last time I biked with any sort of regularity, I don’t think the original physics would return. Because I wear my weight like a forty year old man now.

Another pithy saying might be more apt: You can never go back.

I’ve run into this phenomenon again recently with the arrival of my daughter. My wife and I took her to the park and I attempted to take her on the swing. How hard can a swing be, right? No shifting of gears or complicated chains to deal with. Basic physics. Why, I was completely ready to officially change the saying to “it’s just like swinging a swing.” Except it wasn’t. It was exactly like riding a bike.

I sat down in the swing with my baby on my lap. My feet were on the ground, thankfully, because that strip of leather was wriggling and writhing underneath me. Adult girth was again making battle with muscle memory. My wife suggested I wrap my arms around the chain ropes, and although I initially rolled my eyes (“Come on, I think I have enough body control to lean against this swing”), it wasn’t long before I took her advice. Some semblance of stability had been attained, so I walked a couple steps forward, a couple steps back, and said “wee” to the unimpressed baby.

Then came the big test. I walked myself back as far as I could while keeping my butt on the rubber strap and arms around the chains. This was farther back than I could go as a ten year old. Woo-hoo. Score one for the grown-up body.  I let go and lurched through the air, acutely aware of the downward pressure I was placing on not only the swing and the chain, but the entire steel swing set.

I went forward, then back, and was beginning to lose momentum. It was at this point that I looked down at my legs, sitting there awkwardly beneath my daughter. I looked up at my wife standing in front of me, and asked a question that third grade might have travelled through time to make the third grade me cry.

“Wait, do I kick my feet out going forward or backward?”

How the hell could I forget something like that? Isn’t it nature? The basic physics that a three-year old knows intuitively?

What’s worse is that I still don’t know. There was no way I was going to try with a baby on my lap and the entire structure threatening to come down upon us both. I’m pretty sure you kick out while going forward and tuck your legs in while going back. But while sitting here with my laptop in front of me, that seems like it would counteract the force of the swing. I mean, you don’t step forward with the same foot that you’re throwing with, right?
“Remember when you used to swing as high as you could and then leap off?” the crying third grader just screamed back at me.

I have a feeling I’m in store for a lot of moments like this as I raise my first child. Forget riding a bike. Life is more akin to driving a car. Except it’s the opposite. Objects in the rear view mirror are farther away than they appear.

In the first week of my baby’s life, I found myself, like most new parents, trying desperately to get her to sleep. Rocking her, cradling her, putting a pacifier in her mouth. Nothing was going the trick, so I thought I’d sing her a lullaby. I went with the basic lullaby that I think is required by law to be on every mobile. I think it’s called “Lullaby and Good Night,” but it’s basically two short notes of the same pitch, followed by a longer note about half an octave higher. Except I had no idea what the words were. The best I could come up with were “Go to sleep, go to sleep, won’t you please go to sleep now.” Probably not the most soothing words a newborn has ever been sung. I switched to “Too Rah Loo Rah Loo Rah,” but only knew the part that was on an episode of “Cheers” once.

I see more of this coming. What about those nursery rhymes that exist in every elementary school? Do they still sing “Down by the old mill stream?” Right now, the only rhymes I remember from my youth start with “I like big butts and I cannot lie, you other brothers can’t deny.”

My future third grade daughter has joined in the crying of the past third grade me. But that’s parenting, right?

The few things I can actually remember from childhood have probably changed, too. She’s getting closer to sitting up now and we’re helping her by putting her in the right sitting position. The words “Indian style” were barely out of my mouth before I realized that can’t be proper any more.

My wife shook her head.

“Sorry, Native American style?” I was reminded of the time I had to tell my grandma that calling Brazil nuts “Black people toes” didn’t make it any less racist.

“They call it criss-cross applesauce now,” my wife informed me.

What the-? I know they had to come up with something, but really? I’m sure Daniel Snyder’s taking notes. Now taking the field, your 2016 Washington Criss-Cross Applesauces!

So there’s going to be some growing pains. Some things I’ll figure out as I go along. Turns out I don’t need to know any lullabies, my daughter is perfectly fine falling asleep to Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful.”

And if my daughter is the only first grader whistling Blues Traveler harmonica solos while the rest of her class sings “Rock a Bye Baby” and “Three Blind Mice” (two TOTALLY morbid kid’s songs), I’m okay with that.

Because raising a child’s just like riding a bike. It’s constantly changing. And there’s probably  gonna be a skinned knee or two along the way.

Why You Gotta Be So?

· September 29, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , · No Comments

Why I gotta be so?

I often get in love-hate relationships with elements of pop culture. Usually it’s a TV Show I keep watching only to justify the amount of time I’ve put into it. The last two seasons of “How I Met Your Mother” fit into that category. In the middle of almost every episode, I would ask myself, “Why the hell am I watching this?” And the usual answer was “Remember how funny that one episode in the first season was?”

This summer’s love-hate entry is a song. So the good news is that it should be much more ephemeral, lasting only four minutes at a time and already waning from its peak rotation. But this love-hate is different than most, in that I truly can’t decide if it is an excellent or horrible song. Yet when it’s done, I’m filled with that same “end of the chip bag” sense of introspection.

You were singing that at the top of your lungs, weren’t you? Yeah, how does that make you feel? Boy, you’re going to regret that one in the morning.

It’s just so catchy. The music is great. Just the right instrumentation, rhythm, movement. A peppy little reggae beat that I can twirl my three month old baby to. And isn’t that why we listen to music? Because of the music? So what could be wrong with it?

The lyrics. The lyrics are horrible. And dammit, it’s the lyrics that I have to sing along to whenever it pops up on the radio.

The song is “Rude,” by Magic, and although it started the summer obscure, it listed as the number one iTunes download a few weeks ago, so it now exists in the zeitgeist. If you know the song, you might even be humming it right now. Hell, if you’re anything like me, you knew which song I was talking about four paragraphs ago. I was referencing it while teaching the other day, and all I had to say was “What’s that catchy tune with the really stupid lyrics?” and two or three students offered up “Rude” before I could even describe it further.

The radio station I first heard the song on encourages people to text them if they like or dislike a song. Of course, this seems to be encouraging people to text while driving. I, ahem, have of course, cough, never texted my opinion on a song while driving. I mean, that would be illegal. And please believe me when I say none of this happened anywhere near a moving vehicle of any kind. Honestly, officers, no need to check my phone records.

The first time I heard the song, I was grabbed by the perky, upbeat rhythm and went for my phone. I had already thumbed in the word “like” when the crystal clear singing got to chorus. If one can have a spit take whilst not only not drinking but also driving (er, standing completely still nowhere near a car), I might have done just that. The lyrics, and the entirety of the song, are stupid.

I’m the first person to say that in most songs, the lyrics don’t matter. I can’t understand the lyrics for most of the songs on the radio in a given day. I’ve even karaoked a few songs only to say “Oh, that’s what he says there?” when the lyrics pop up. “Rude” is a song that might have benefitted from a bit more Eddie Vedder style mumbling.

Even when the lyrics are decipherable, they don’t need to make a lot of sense. I watched Alternative Nation at midnight through most of college, and I was fine with a song about a chick who puts Vaseline on her toast. There’s a Crash Test Dummies song that merely describes three people who had little quirks. No point to the song, whatsoever. Perhaps the point of the song was going to be explained in the chorus, but they just decided to sing “mmm mmm mmm mmm” instead. Then again, I’m pretty sure the lead singer of Crash Test Dummies can sing the Brown Note, so we best handle him with kid gloves to protect our bowels.

So I’m fine with silly, pointless songs. I’m fine with fun lyrics without a lot of depth. I’m fine with not even knowing what the guy is singing about. So what’s the matter with “Rude?”

For those of you who haven’t heard the song, the entire thing is about a guy asking his girlfriend’s father for permission to marry her. Yes, in the year 2014, an entire song is devoted to an action that was already insulting and obsolete fifty years ago.

In the first place, asking a girlfriend’s father for “permission” to marry his daughter is insulting to your future bride. It’s the 21st century and you’re implying she can’t make this decision for herself. After the father gives you permission, will the discussion turn to the dowry? Because I’m pretty sure that’s where the whole asking for permission came from. While you’re at it, go ahead and have the father sign the marriage license, because obviously your new wife can’t be trusted to sign legally binding contracts or anything.

But even more than the insulting nature, in the 21st century, the question is pointless. I think this makes it even more frustrating to have this song sung so earnestly. Honestly, what’s the father going to say? No? Chances are you’re already living with his daughter, and even if you aren’t, you’ve at least got some carnal knowledge, right? So Dad says no and you say “Gosh, Pops, you want me to keep getting the milk for free? Awesome. And just for you, I’ll throw in an extra ‘Who’s Your Daddy?’ or two when I’m shtuping her tonight.”

I do understand the desire to alert your future in-laws. You’re setting the stage for your future with your wife, and that includes her family. I found a nice way to do this was to let them know, but not ask their permission. The night before I proposed, I told my father-in-law “I’m going to ask your daughter to marry me tomorrow. I hope I have your blessing.” I was not asking permission, but I also wanted them to be prepped in case their first response was going to be “You’re marrying that loser?” they had fifteen hours to get it out of their system.

But the father in the song said no. I imagine he saw the litany of poems and songs this kid had written for his daughter and, understandably, felt he had no future writing drivel like that. The guy should have asked permission with the background music playing. Then the father probably would’ve said yes, because, I can’t stress enough, it’s fun and catchy music. Although if the father said yes because of the music, then the song would never be written, and I believe that’s how the space-time continuum begins to collapse.

The singer then goes on to sum up why asking a father’s permission is a pointless exercise that barely deserves a mention, much less a song. He’s going to marry her anyway. So you really weren’t asking permission, were you? Any Catholic can tell you the wonderful difference between asking for permission and asking for forgiveness. Again, my father-in-law comes into play here. He asked my grandfather-in-law permission and was told no. So what did he do? Hint: he’s my father-in-law and my wife wasn’t born out of wedlock. So even 40 years ago, it was understood that asking permission wasn’t really asking permission. Yet here we are listening to some Canadian croon on about a non-issue.

“What the hell is he singing about?” I said out loud, phone frozen in my hand, when the chorus hit. “Is this whole song about… Why, this isn’t a new song at all. It is clearly from 1955.”

I quickly thumbed a “dis” onto the front of the “like” text I had already written. I was just about to hit send when the “marry her anyway” part hit. At this point, the music goes from a 4/4 beat to a 6/8 beat. It’s subtle, a change that most people without music backgrounds might just consider a tempo change or not even notice. And it’s quick, maybe only six measures then back to 4/4, but the effect is to take a straight-forward reggae song and fuse it with something else. I still can’t tell what. Is it reggae-rockabilly? Can that even exist? So I sat there, transfixed again by the music with the phone in my hand, unable to push send on either a “like” or “dislike.”

Which is really where I still am today. I never turn the station when the song comes on. Most of the time I sing along. I’m singing lyrics I can’t stand about a subject I find insulting. But dammit, what else can I do?

Of course, listening to it as much as I have, I now know the lyrics quite well. The more I’ve gotten to know them, my initial hatred has only grown. I know I’m picking nits here, but there are two major errors that I’ve found with the song. Both are semantics, and both would barely warrant a mention if not for the catchy tune that makes me listen to the horrible lyrics.

The first problem deals with grammar. Or not even grammar, but how to write dialogue. The lead-in to the first chorus states the father’s response: “You say I’ll never get your blessing for the rest of my life. Tough luck, my friend, but the answer is no.” Okay, is it just me or does that line start out as an indirect quote, then finish as a direct quote?

“Hey, dude,” comes the retort, “you don’t understand poetry. Every word needs to count. We have to worry about rhythm and rhyme. It’s taken you 2000 words to write about a three minute song.” Touche. I can’t imagine writing poetry. Way too verbose. And I understand that poetry, and by extension songs, don’t have to follow strict language rules. But poetry or prose, you’ve got to be consistent with who is speaking. Indirect dialogue is fine, but keep it indirect the whole time.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of rhyming? No and know are homophones, I don’t think that counts as a rhyme.

The second language problem I have is the very name of the song. They could’ve gone with “Marry Her Anyway,” which is the catchy 6/8 part and captures the point of the song better. But instead they went with “Rude.” The singer’s response to the father’s denial is “Why you gotta be so rude?” This is the second worst rejoinder in history, topped only by his next line, “Don’t you know I’m human, too?” (Insulting the father’s observational skills isn’t going to win him back to your side.)

But rude? I don’t know that I would classify a man not thinking someone is good enough for his daughter as being “rude.” To be rude, one needs to be deliberately hurtful. If you ask someone out on a date and they say no, that is not rude. If they say “not if you were the last human on Earth,” that’s where the rudeness comes in.

In the song, the father was even nice enough to say “Tough luck, my friend.” That has to be one of the more polite denials I’ve heard. Maybe he just felt you had insulted his daughter by asking someone other than her to make this important decision. I don’t know if this is Alanis Morissette “Ironic” level of mis-definition, but it’s up there. SO Canadians don’t know how to define words in song titles. Is that rude? Stereotypical, maybe.  While we’re at it, Bryan Adams was only nine years old in the Summer of ’69, so Canadaian singers are bad at both math and English. Probably more hyperbole than rude, but getting closer. I’m not saying the test for rude and the test for libel should be the same, but they’re in the vein.

Canadian singers suck? That would be rude, so I wouldn’t say it. Plus if I said that, the lead singer of the Crash Test Dummies would vacate my bowels.

By the way, you asked the father for permission and then ignored his answer. Sounds like he had a justified reason for his answer.

He didn’t even bring up the fact that you tried to rhyme no and know.

See what I did there? That was intentionally hurtful.

I know, I know. Why I gotta be so…?

The Roaring Game

· September 23, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , , · 3 Comments

AKA My Introduction to “Good Curling.”

The last few Winter Olympics, I’ve become more interested in curling. You may have seen it buried on USA Network or CNBC After Dark or whatever the 75th network down the NBC depth chart is. It’s the one that looks like shuffleboard on ice with a bulls-eye at the end.

Oh yeah, it also has brooms.

I would watch these games with fascination. What the hell were they doing? Why were they yelling so much? And who the hell sweeps ice? By the time the Vancouver Olympics rolled around, I was starting to understand the basic scoring and resulting strategy. My Italian grandpa had me playing bocce ball since the age of five, so it was easy to convert – one point for every stone of yours that is closer than your opponent’s closest stone.  When Sochi rolled around, I found myself armchair quarterbacking – “Why don’t they just put the stone right there? That seems simple enough.”

I started to wonder how one gets into this crazy Scottish/Canadian creation? The fact that most of the American Olympians hailed from Wisconsin and Minnesota made me assume I’d never find out. But boy, if I ever found myself in a place with tundra as the dominant vegetation, I’d have to check it out. I mean, the Olympians don’t look all that fit, they’re not flying at 50 MPH on ice skates, they’re not cross-country skiing. They’re pushing a little rock and walking alongside it to the other end. I’ve played bocce. I’ve bowled. I’ve even swept a floor once or twice in my life. I know I’m the kid that always got stuck in right field for Little League, but seriously, how hard can curling be?

Turns out, in a few ways I was right. And in many more, I was wrong.

It’s not that difficult to find or get started in a curling club. There are actually six clubs in California alone, and others in such frigid locales as Las Vegas and Phoenix. It’s a sport that most people without knee or hip problems can probably learn and play with some ability after a few hours. But mastery? That takes much more.

Most start with a Learn to Curl class.  It starts with a 20-30 minute preview of how the game works, for those rare few who hadn’t been DVR’ing the Sochi matches from 2:00 AM. Then it goes out onto the ice rink to practice setting up and delivering the stone.

It was at this point, long before I had actually set up “in the hack,” that I realized my early assumptions were a bit off.  The distance to the target is way farther than it looks on TV. I figured it would be about the length of a bowling lane, but it’s double that. It more or less runs the length from one hockey face-off circle to the other.

After a half hour or so of practicing delivery without the rock, then with the rock but without letting go, and of course plenty of sweeping, we finally got to make a legitimate curling shot. I crouched myself down into the hack and looked toward that distant target. You can’t even see the bulls-eye, since it is on the ground. Instead, a person stands at the other end and gives you a target. In this Learn to Curl class, the target was laid down by the instructor.  Go ahead, he was showing me, shoot for the button (that’s the middle of “the house,” or bulls-eye area). I reared back, focusing on the target and remembering all thirty minutes of form practice, and let it fly.

My first shot made it just about to mid-ice. Hey, in my defense, had this been as long as a bowling lane, like I originally thought, that would have been dead on.  It took me three more throws before I could get a stone past the “hog line,” the minimum possible distance for stone to be in play. The hog line is a little bit beyond the blue line in hockey, so I had increased my throw by maybe fifty percent, but the hog line is also still a good twenty feet from the house.

With a half-hour or so to go in our two hour training, and still with only a couple of legal shots to my name, they wanted us to “play a couple of ends to see what that’s like.” We only managed to get in two ends (an end is the equivalent of a baseball inning), and each player throws two stones per end, so I only managed to throw four shots. This is the most common complaint about Learn to Curl classes – by the time you put it all together, you only get to take a handful of real shots. But that’s how they keep you coming back for more, I suppose.

And that’s how it happened to me. My final shot, with some good sweeping by my teammates (more on that in a moment) landed directly on the button.

Oh, Damn! I thought to myself. First time out and I hit the hardest shot in curling? Maybe it’s too late for #Sochi2014, but #Pyongyang2018? Here I come.

Turns out hitting the button with no other stones blocking the way isn’t really all that hard. Maybe not as easy as a free-throw in basketball, but not all that much harder. Maybe like an undefended three-pointer.

“You know what we call that?” another instructor asked when I made a similar shot at a later practice. “A target.”

So here I am, some six months later, having gone through two Learn to Curls, two “advanced trainings” (basically Learn to Curl without the first hour), a six-game league, and a bonspiel. In the league, they paired newbies with veterans, and I benefited from this arrangement to the tune of an undefeated 7-0 (counting the playoffs). In the “bonspiel” (what curlers call their weekend-long tournaments), I played one sheet over from two women who had four Olympic appearances between them. Veterans want newbies nowhere near them at a bonspiel, so we fielded a team where my ten times curling was tied for the most. From both of these experiences, I learned more about how simple, and yet how difficult, this game can be.

Each player on the team throws two rocks in a row, interspersed with the other team.  Each player should, then, have a different forte or strategy. During our season, I was the lead in all but one of the games.  The lead’s job is to intentionally throw the rock short of the house.  These “guards” can either be curled behind or raised into the scoring area later. If the lead were to throw that definitive button shot, like I had in the Learn to Curl, it would likely be knocked right out by the other team, and then we’re either back to square one or else the other team is now in a better position. I’ve actually had a team knock my own rock out of the way, then have their stone ricochet behind a guard, making it very difficult to knock out.

The strategy for the second and third team members (throwing rocks 3-6) varies depending on what the play area looks like after the two leads throw those first four stones. And, at least at the level I usually play, those first four have done some kooky, crazy things.  Rare is the game where there are four perfectly placed guards, or even three guards with a well-placed point behind them. The two basic shots for them  are a takeout, which is exactly what it sounds like, or a draw, which is an attempt to score a point closer to the button than the other team’s stones. The one game I did not play lead was quite an adjustment, as I was trying to throw harder than the lead throws.

Then there is the skip, the captain of the team, who spends the first six shots providing the target at the far end of the sheet before taking the team’s final two shots. I skipped during the bonspiel because of my huge experience advantage of having curled one more time than the rest of my team. Skipping is a very lonely life. All the other curlers hang out with each other, walk back and forth while sweeping, even chitchat with the opposition. The skip stands at the far end, calculating and permutating  the constantly changing game. And particularly with a team of newbies, he must think of what might happen if (nay, when) the shot is missed. What is Plan B? Or Plan G? Or what is the worst possible thing that can happen with this shot?

Then, when the skip gets in the hack to take those final shots, the “what’s the worst that can happen” strategy is much more noticeable. I can’t count the number of times my final shot knocked a couple of my opponent’s stones into the house, raising their score from two to four. The lead is like the kickoff return guy. Can a good kickoff return help the drive? Absolutely. Can he fumble or lose ground? Sure. But most of the time, he’s not going to affect the game much. Set up a guard or return the ball to the 25 and the other players on the team are in position to do their thing. When you’re skipping, you’ve become the kicker attempting a 50-yard field goal to tie or win the game. You’re Dennis Eckersley facing Kirk Gibson. Except I was never Dennis Eckersley. At my best, I was in Byung Hyun Kim territory. I can’t count the number of times I made the long walk toward the hack only to tell my teammates, “Well, if I can draw around those five stones with a perfect button shot, we might be able to salvage one point.”

Why does the skip tell his teammates what he’s aiming for? Because they are the sweepers. When someone first watches curling, the first question is usually about sweeping. What is the purpose of it  and does it really make much of a difference? The simple answer is yes, sweeping matters. In my league team, the other rookie and I didn’t always hit our shots, but we were two of the stronger sweepers.  Our ability to salvage a short shot into a guard, or to raise a guard into the house, made us partly responsible for some of that undefeated season.

The curling ice is not clean like in hockey.  No glassy Zambonied surface here.  Instead, the ice is “pebbled” by tiny droplets of water, delivered like an exterminator spraying for bugs.  The pebbles do two things to the stone – slow it down and cause it to curl.  Sweeping flattens out those pebbles for a short time, allowing the stone to both go farther and straighter.  Sometimes the stone is light and you need to sweep like hell just to get it over the hog line.  Sometimes you need to sweep it straight until it gets past a guard, then you stop to let it curl behind the guard.  What happens if you want it to go farther but also curl? Or if you want it to go straight but slower? Well, then you’re screwed and that’s when everybody is quickly assessing plan B. It might be better to keep it straight so that it misses everything instead of curling into and raising the other team’s guard into the house. If you ever watch curling and hear them alternate between on and off, usually they’re trying to make it go further but curl. Or the skip might say “off, off, off,” then all of a sudden, scream “Yes, Hard, yes.” That means the stone finally curled in the right direction and now it needs to be swept as far as possible. Or it could also be an indecisive skipper, but that’s not likely at the level that is on TV. Plus the indecisive skip will say things like “Off. Shit, no. On. I mean… shit… Hard, I guess?”

The one thing that sweepers can’t do, that nobody can do once the stone leavers your hand, is to slow it down. Imagine if you were bowling and instead of throwing your ball through the pins, you had to make it stop right at the five pin. That’s the finesse part of curling, and that (plus the other team getting in your way) is really what makes it difficult. After the first few throws in a Learn to Curl, pretty much anybody can throw the stone hard enough to get through the house. So what’s constantly on your mind as you throw is to try to “take a little off.” Better to be a little short and have the sweepers get it where it needs to go than to send a meaningless stone flying through into the hockey goal. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been worried about it going too far and end up hogging the stone. And then on the next throw, I over-compensate and sail right through the house.

So while I’m far from a grizzled veteran, I guess I’m no longer a raw rookie. In some ways, my initial thoughts were accurate. It’s a game that can be learned quickly. And after three or four shots, most players can at least line up and play a game. And most of the leagues I’ve encountered or heard of have spots for these new players, and these new players can be competitive. However, there’s also an upper level of competition that takes years to reach. The Olympians that were on the same ice as me never called shots with Plan B or C in mind. They make their shots.

Although sometimes I pity their accuracy – there’s nothing as entertaining as watching an awesome cascade of unintended ricochets that steal some points. In the one game we won in the bonspiel, we were up by three and were playing a very conservative final end. On the other team’s final shot, we had one point on an outer ring, and there were about ten stones of various colors clogging up the area in front of the house. With no other option, she threw a stone at full force up the middle, knocking three of her stones in, one of which knocked mine out. We then had to take one final shot each on an empty sheet, with the closest to the button winning the game. That’s curling for you.

And if you don’t score any points? Still no big thing. After the game comes broomstacking, when  you shake hands, say “good curling,” and grab a drink. Oh, did I mention the winning team buys drinks for the losing team? So that 1-5 record my Team o’ Rookies compiled at the Bonspiel? Hell, we pretty much made our entrance fee back in free libations.

Nothing beats sitting around with the team you just spent two hours competing against and re-hashing the game. Man, I can’t believe you missed that shot by an inch. Did you see when that stone lost its handle? Why’d you call for that one shot? Do you think I called off the sweepers too soon?

                 Followed by the line repeated by curlers everywhere.

“If it was easy, they’d call it hockey.”

Yellow Snow (Fiction)

· August 22, 2014 · fiction · , , , , , · No Comments

This week’s flash fiction challenge was to start with a color in the title. Shocker that I went with…

Yellow Snow

Cold.

Wet.

Salty.

My numb tongue retracts, attempting to absorb nutrients from the frozen froth.

Who ordered the sunflower seed Slushee?

My right eye flutters open to a vast expanse of white. A glaring, blinding white.

Snow? Makes sense.

Not sense like remembering an Arctic sojourn in my recent past. But logical sense – the cold, the wet.

The salty?

My left eye struggles open through resistance, hindered by the frozen drift. The radiance becomes blurry , tainted by my dominant eye’s limited range of vision. The white becomes more muddled with each blink, mixing and merging with shades of yellow. Canary blinks to ochre blinks to tan.

The snow isn’t white, my viscous brain processes. It’s yellow.

Yellow snow!

I start the rest of the way awake, spitting. Reflexes bolt my body upright and my hand to my mouth at the same time.

Pain. A splitting headache, but more than that. My legs feel weak, my stomach feels raw. Groping beneath me in a failed and flailed attempt to stand, I finally settle for a kneel. Eyes drop down from the reflected sunlight to the shadow of my body.

The snow beneath my body’s divot is a pool of faded yellow. Another smaller pool of creamy off-white is to my left. Another and another, smaller splotches trail away in regular intervals

If your stream is losing strength, you may have an enlarged prostate, pops into my head as I trace the tainted drippings. Oh joy, I face planted in the latrine.

“Ahh-woooooooo!”

The reverie is broken by a blood curdling sound. Something between a scream and a howl pierces through the crisp air.  My neck rotates still dilating eyes around searching for the source direction amidst countless echoes

No luck. The field lay as vast and barren as before. No prehistoric  animals, no smoky apparition of a beheaded goddess, which seemed the only two things capable of such a cry.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!”

A glance behind me, in the direction of the trailing off yellow snow, sees a copse of trees fifty yards distant.

“Woooooo!”

Certain that the sound is coming across the snowy field, I take one unsteady step toward the trees.  My ankle buckles under my weight, and I plummet back toward the snow. I’m unsure if my ankle is twisted or if this is just a city slicker attempting to cross country in tennis shoes, but instinct dictates I shuffle to safety before finding out. Using my calves and knees like a snowshoe, my hands reach forward and pull through the frozen sea, half swimming and half crawling, toward safety.

I refuse to look back as the sound gains on me. A gusty wind blows upon my back, except the unnatural heat in this frozen tundra makes me sure it isn’t wind. The howls become deafening as I lurch through the thin green line.

The wailing stops. I close my eyes and curl up behind the cylindrical wooden forcefield of an ancient oak. After the horrifying sounds of the run, this blanket of silence is serene.

Until the smell hits my nose. Musty. A car left in the rain with the windows cracked. Rancid. That car had some leftover McDonalds. Putrid. That old McDonalds is in the trunk next to a dead opossum.

Eyes open to a drooling mandible of matted grey-brown fur. A glistening black nose twitches above an open mouth of sharpened canine teeth. Atop it all are two black eyes, intense yet toying at the same time. My ears register the satisfied, guttural growl that has replaced the howls of the hunt.

Whatever energy I have left forces me up the tree. Halfway up, I learn the extent of my injuries. Stomach is indeed raw. Rough bark bites through two layers of cotton clothing, scraping skin that feels like this is not the first tree it’s encountered. The legs feel chaffed and punctured as they attempt, but fail, to find traction around the shaft. Wounds I was unaware of open anew.

The furry harbinger of doom below me skulks around the base, sniffing and attempting to climb. Growls transitions back to howls, but a different howl than before. More of a whine.

Or a call to action. Other howls respond from the thicket of woods. A prey has been treed. The pack is coming to dine. I look back out to the snowy open field, still vast and empty, virgin minus a few splotches of yellow.

They can’t leave the woods, screams my brain, or perhaps my instinct. Whether through reason or intuition or blind hope, I know I must leave the tree before the other creatures arrive.

A leap of faith vaults me over the hunter. I tweak the other ankle upon landing and pitch forward yet again, a position to which I am becoming quite adept at and averse to. But no time to consider my current plight nor position as the canine makes a final dash toward his escaping prey. Claws scrape through denim, shredding the legs beneath, as I revert to the familiar crab-swim into openness.

The howling returns, this time behind me for sure. Energy fading, I stumble out as far as I can go. The blood from my legs drips past the constricting jeans just as I get to the urine spot. Another two steps, with bright crimson drops merging with faded tan drips.

Three steps forward, I fall for the final time. The stomach wounds open as a bloody pool forms right where the yellow snow had been.

As consciousness wanes, it occurs to me that blood fades over time. Wash out a white shirt, the blood will turn brown, then tan. Eventually a creamy yellow.

What about in snow? Would it turn yellow? Probably.

And it sure tastes salty.

At least I wasn’t lying in piss.

Then white and red and yellow fuse together to become black.

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