Enter The Ninja

The other day, I needed to talk to my friend about this dream I had about him, this dream in which he was wrongly accused of murder because the dead person’s DNA was all over the couch in his living room, and nobody, neither the cops nor the courts would listen to him or his wife when they told them that they just bought this couch off of craigslist, that they didn’t even know the victim, and because their pleas did nothing but disappear into a bureaucratic vortex of deaf ears, my friend’s wife put on her P.I. hat and took it upon herself to solve the case. Yes, she had a hat. Then the dream went cinematic on me, cutting suddenly to my friend and I, months later after his ordeal, standing at a meat counter in a brightly-lit grocery store, and everything is quiet save the sound of his voice. “They hurt me, Travis” he tells me. “They hurt me bad.” And it’s only then as he’s looking me in the face that I realize his eyes have dimmed just a bit. I have no response for him, nothing worthwhile to say. I wanted to cry for my friend.

I was off-kilter for a good half hour after waking, sorting out the details of the dream from reality, assuring myself that my friend had not, in actuality, been accused of murder, had not been subjected to good cop/bad cop questioning or the violence of incarceration. I had an overwhelming need to tell him about this dream in which he figured so prominently, and finally did when I saw his name pop up in my IM list. We started talking about what a great story it would be, the kind of thing you might put on a stage in front of people for them to enjoy. We’ve been talking about it via email, IM, and text since then.  And as so often happens when people come together to tease the details of a story out of the ether, a ninja has appeared among the cast of characters.

This is not over.

A Bad Morning's Tweets

What's Wrong With Your Mind?

I realized a while back that the music loaded on my iPhonamapod was lacking something: good ugly brutal drill-seargent-mean workout music. Sure, I had plenty of uptempo jams in there, some of them plenty aggressive, even. But I had no individual albums loaded up that could drive me all the way through from warm-up to that final agonizing “DON’T YOU FUCKING GIVE UP YOU FUCKING PUSSY!” set and on into the cool-down. So this past weekend while I was making some adjustments to my carrying-around music, I remedied this situation by uploading one of the most perfect workout albums ever recorded, Pantera’s 1992 Texas metal masterpiece, Vulgar Display of Power.

Except for the last song because it’s a piece of shit.

Dude got punched

Understand, I was sixteen years old when this album came out, so I was at a point in my life when I was all about the blind screaming rage. As far as I was concerned, this album was the pinnacle of humanity’s creative endeavors. I don’t recall exactly what I was so very pissed off about all the time. The usual package of teenage boy woes with a crate of fat kid afflictions piled on top of it. But really and truly, the specific focus of one’s anger is of secondary importance when you’ve got power cords, double-kick drums, and demonic vocals providing the sonic backdrop for your angst. I had that shit on constant rotation.

So the other day I went to the gym, ready to give it a try. The gym I go to is in the bottom floor of the building next door to where I work. I go there because it’s free and because there’s hardly anyone there. I’ve often got the whole place to myself. As I walked over, I detected -- what is--? Is that apprehension? Nervousness? See, I had not actually listened to this collection of songs in ages. What would my beloved Vulgar Display sound like to me lo these many years later? Would the production sound shitty compared to the quality of recorded music now? Would it seem so silly as to be painful? Or, horror of horrors, would the music of my youth be too aggressive for these aged sound receptacles of mine? 

But as soon as “Mouth For War” came thundering in, all these worries went and fucked off somewhere. It was exactly what I had been looking for. I’m not going to go into the details of my exercise routine because then I’d have to punch myself in the face for being one of those people, but suffice it to say that by the time “Fucking Hostile!” rolled around, I was feeling, well, not exactly fucking hostile, but at least reasonably hostile. There was definitely some hostility emanating from my person, but in a positive sense. The blood was pumping, the music was aggro -- I was in a good place.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door open and a person enter. I turned to see who it was and damn near dropped a weight on my foot. It took a long moment to register what I was seeing, but when the synapses finally got to firing, I realized that, yes, standing in front of me was none other than my old friend Jennifer. What was she doing in town? At my gym no less? What the hell was she smiling at? I pulled the buds out of my ears and stood there breathing heavy for a moment, trying to regain the ability to speak. Between gasps, I forced out the question.

“Jen?”

Something about her looked strange, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. She laughed and shook her head.

“I can’t believe you’re still listening to that shit.”

While it may not have been the absolute last thing I would’ve expected her to say, it wouldn’t have been among my top hundred guesses. I’d barely started to babble out a response -- “Whahuhwhowhat’reyouhuh?” -- when the door opened yet again and in walked another old friend, my oldest friend actually. I’ve known Chad damn near my entire life, since we were just little kids having sword fights with curtain rods and watching the skies over our suburban Houston homes for UFOs. He walked in and stood next to Jennifer. They didn’t look at each other, only at me, like they’d planned this little meeting. And just as I’d noted with Jen, he looked strange somehow. He laughed too.

“I can’t believe you, man.” he said.

“What?” There was clearly a joke here that I was on the outside of. “You can’t believe -- Pete?"

And then who else should walk in but none other than my freshman year crackhead roommate, Pete. And when I say crackhead, I don’t mean he busted his skull open while diving into the wrong end of the pool; I mean that he started off our freshman year at the University of Texas as a harmless pothead and was inhaling rock through a glass tube by the next summer. Until this very moment, that was the last I had seen or heard of him.

“Hey T-man, what’s happening?” He smiled and lit a cigarette. He always was the kind to ignore No Smoking signs, then act surprised when someone in authority pointed them out to him. Oh gosh, I’m so sorry!

And there they stood in a line, all facing me, watching me pant and sweat. An odd reunion in which I seemed to be the only person surprised at its happening. These three and I, the four of us, had never been all friends together. The three of them had maybe met each other at some point or another, but my relationships with each of them had been separate. So the way they’d all gathered here, completely unsurprised to see me or each other, it was highly suspicious. I had the strange feeling I was being intervened with.

And then it dawned on me, Pete’s scraggly hair, his acne-scarred cheeks, the inch and a half long cylinder of ash at the tip of his cigarette that would crumble under its own weight at any second and fall down on his hand -- he was exactly as he was the last time I saw him over fifteen years ago. And Chad with his wide eyes, long hair, and rail-thin body, Jennifer with her jet black hair pulled back with little butterfly clips and that scent of vanilla that followed her like so many admirers -- these weren’t the people they are now; these were the people they were then, back in the day, so to speak, back when the album I currently had blaring in my headphones was one of my mainstays. Pete’s cigarette ash looked close to teetering, but if he was worried about it, it didn’t show. “Seriously man, you still listening to this metal shit?”

“What?” I was totally thrown off. Were these really my friends from over a decade and a half ago standing before me in this gym? What were they doing here? Why these three? Were there more coming? Was one of my exes about to walk through that door?

“You’re what, 30-something now dude?” asked 17, 18, maybe 19 year old Chad. “You haven’t mellowed out yet?”

“What? No! I mean, yes, I have. I haven’t listened to this in years. I--what’s your problem? You come from the past to hassle me about my music?”

“Who is this again?” asked Jennifer.

“Fucking Pantera,” drawled Pete. “Y’all, I remember this fool used to play this shit all the time. And sometimes he’d strap on that guitar of his and fucking play along with it. He’d be all--” and then he proceeded to demonstrate for Chad and Jen what I looked like when I did my dorm room rock god routine. I don’t recall being quite so spastic, but I didn’t argue. I was faintly aware of a guitar solo emanating from my dislodged ear buds. I left it alone, leaving Dimebag Darrell, R.I.P., to do as he pleased.

“Okay Pete, first of all, fuck you dude. I couldn’t listen to classic rock for an entire year after living with you. A year! You made me not want to listen to Zeppelin! And The Doors still irritate me.”

“And you’re still wearing that?” asked Chad, pointing at the ratty old Tool tee-shirt I was sporting.

“Oh my god! You had that in college!” said Jennifer.

Holeyer than thou

“He had it in high school!” said Chad. “We both got that exact same shirt when we saw ‘em in concert senior year.”

“Trav, come on.” said Jen. “I had slightly higher hopes for you than this. Buy some clothes, would you?”

“I’m just wearing it to exercise!” I protested.

“It’s like you haven’t grown up at all.” she continued.

“Yes I have! Seriously, look at this thing. It’s covered in holes. I only wear it to work out or to mow the lawn or -- oh! I have a lawn! I have gardens! I have kids! A wife! Chickens! See? Grown-up stuff.”

“So are you still listening to Tool?” asked Chad.

“On occasion, yeah, and so are you, I might add. Current you, I mean. In fact, you just saw them in concert not long ago.”

“Really? They’re still around?”

“Yep. You went and put the pictures up on your Facebook.”

“What’s a face book?” he asked.

“A book with faces in it?” said Jennifer.

“Why would I put pictures of a concert in a face book?”

“Maybe they were pictures of faces?”

“That sounds stupid.”

“It is stupid.” I said.

“So hey man,” said Pete, “it looks like you ain’t done a whole lot with yourself since college, huh?”

“What?!” I laughed because this had all become so ludicrous. A crackhead was standing here telling me that I hadn’t done much with my life. Three inches of ash hung precariously off the end of his cigarette. “Dude, I’ve done plenty. Probably more than you have, wherever the fuck you are. For all I know you’re fucking dead.”

“Oh now that’s just mean.” said Jennifer.

“Naw, he may well be right.” said Pete. “I ain’t exactly been walking a righteous path.”

“Still, it’s not a nice thing to say.” she said, looking at me. “Be nice.”

“Yeah,” said Chad. “It’s not our fault you’re all old and still pissed off, listening to this shit.”

“I’m not old.” I said.

“They playing Metallica on classic rock radio yet?” he asked

“He was always so angry.” said Jen. “What were so angry about anyway?”

“I wasn’t--! Look, is there something you need from me? Something you need to tell me? Or did you just travel into the future to give me shit?”

“You’re being awfully defensive.” said Jennifer.

“No I’m not!”

My hostility, it was increasing.

“You fuckers are standing here giving me shit about my life just because you happened to catch me listening to Pantera for the first time in literally years when in fact I’ve...” and I started babbling, stammering, spilling out an incoherent bullet list of my life in no particular order, things I’d done, things that had happened to me, accomplishments, failures, the most random of memories, any and every thing I could think of to prove that my life hadn’t gone on pause all this time, that I’d been living, doing. And it wasn’t until I heard myself actually say, “I’m a different person now!” It was only then, as I stood there with cool air-conditioned sweat dripping down my face, that I looked at the three of them and realized the obvious.

These stupid kids don’t know a damn thing.
 
Well, they know how to travel through time
 
I suppose there’s that.

I laughed. “You fucking kids...you don’t know shit, you know that?” And then they laughed, seemingly with me rather than at me for the first time during this exchange. The ash of Pete’s cigarette fell to the floor whole and silently exploded into dust on the industrial carpet. He didn’t seem to notice. We just stood there laughing like idiots. A gym employee passed through, but barely gave us a glance.

With the tables flipped over in my favor, I thought I’d have some fun and drop a few hints about what the future had in store for them.

“So Chad...” I started, ever thought about joining the Army? But before I put voice to the question, he disappeared. Pop. The air rushed to fill the space that had become unoccupied so quickly. Jen and Pete looked at each other, at me, then they disappeared too. Pop. Pop.

Well, I thought, that was....

By this time I was all cooled off and didn’t much feel like hopping back into the routine. I shouldered my backpack and headed out the door, slipping the buds back into my ears. It was right in the middle of a song.

....then when confronted we ask them the question
What's wrong with their mind?!?!
What's wrong with your mind?!?!

Hell if I know, Phil. Hell if I know.

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff

"I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing." - Harvey Pekar

I don't normally get all that emotional when famous people die -- they're famous, they died, I'm sorry, but so did a lot of other people, so there. That's it and that's all.

But I was genuinely sad when I read the news about Harvey Pekar's passing. Like a lot of people, I learned about him through the movie that was made of his life, American Splendor, the title of which is the same as his ongoing autobiographical comic series. By the time my first viewing of that movie was over, I had a new hero. I went out and got his books because I had to see his work and learn more about this guy. Here was a man who'd spent his life making something great out of the ordinary and the every day, just creating because he wanted to create, because he had an impulse to do something original. I was in awe. Inspired.

Thanks Harvey, for everything. Rest in peace.

"It makes you feel good to know that there's other people afflicted like you."

Auto Bio

So you may already know this if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook (funny how the old blog's always the last to know), but I've got a new writing gig over at MamaPop, which is nifty because it gives me an excuse to write about stuff that I often think about and ramble about, but rarely bother to write about. My first post went up today, a little story about a little conversation about the show that makes me laugh harder than any other in recent memory. Go, check it out, enjoy.

On top of that, I also managed to get a post in today at DadCentric. Oddly enough, it's also about a TV show -- two of them, in fact. I'm just all over the damn place.

And on top of all that, now I'm writing THIS post! Holy shit!

For both of these sites, I was asked to write a bio, a little something something about mahself for those readers who just got-ta got-ta know more about the man behind all this brilliance. Truth be told, I hate writing these things. I've had to write them for damn near every play I've ever been involved in and I never know what the hell to say. My friend Brandon, on the other hand, can write a bio like nobody's business, even if he hardly knows anything about the person he's biographizing. I've seen many a cast and crew member outsource their bio-writing duties to this clever fellow.

When it came time to hand in something for my DadCentric bio, I decided to see what Brandon would come up with. He did not disappoint:

Travis "The" Holmes is the father of two hilarious young boys. The oldest, Henry, has mastered a dead perfect Redd Foxx impression while the youngest, Simon, can play "House of the Rising Sun" on his father's banjo despite the fact that he is barely a year old. Travis is married to Governor Rick Perry's personal assistant, a lovely young woman known in some circles as Ashley and in others as Agent 434. Travis himself is an enigma. Some records indicate he was raised by inmates in a Texas state prison, hidden from the guards for eighteen years and groomed to lead the prisoners to freedom in a bloody December revolt known as Snow Day (The Kind Of Snow That Is Bloody). Other records claim he is actually the world-famous Peruvian stand-up comedian Perla Santiago. They claim she obtained gender reassignment surgery in Monaco twelve years ago in order to escape political persecution in her home country after making one too many ill-timed Sesame Street jokes. His past may be shrouded in mystery, but his present is undisputed - loving husband, devoted father, and champion chinchilla trainer, Travis Holmes is the guy your wife wishes she had married instead of you.

You see? Fact and fiction, artfully blended.

When it came time to come up with something bio-ey for MamaPop, I considered crawling back to Brandon once again, but I decided that as much as I love his work, I really should suck it up and give this a shot myself. Here's what I managed:

The Holmes is a remarkably handsome fellow living in Austin, Texas. This “pop culture” thing that you people are always going on about is something of a mystery to him; all he knows is that he likes his music loud and he likes it nonstop. He disagrees most violently with the assertion that a big-legged woman ain’t got no soul, for he has seen her soul and it is most glorious...or perhaps there’s been a misunderstanding caused by the use of double-negatives. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’s been known to rap about killing people, but only in the comfort of his station wagon after the kids are dropped safely at daycare. He firmly believes werewolves to be the most superior of the undead creatures and will gladly debate anyone who disagrees because this stuff is important. Due to a complete inability to feel guilt, he has no guilty pleasures -- only pleasures. He once wrote a play inspired by his love for Liz Phair, but she wouldn’t agree to be in it and then things between them got complicated. He writes about being a dad and various dad-related minutia over at DadCentric. He’s got himself a wife, two little boys, the best dog in the world, a coop full of chickens, and a tank full of fish.

Mostly fact, tiny hints of fiction, all of it true.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Rad

Every Friday in my oldest son's class, they have show and tell. Kids can bring whatever they like, but they're encouraged to bring something related to their topic for that week. Usually, this is no challenge. Transportation? Walk blindfolded through either of my kid's rooms (not advised) and you're likely to injure your foot on a transportation-related toy a few steps in. Space? We got that covered. Farm animals? No problem. Dinosaurs? Pshaw.

So this week, their topic is clouds, those big fluffy masses that float above our heads and occasionally dump all over creation. All week long, every chance he gets, the kid's been asking me what he should take, what he should take, "what should I take, Daddy?" and I kept repeating a slightly dismissive "we'll find something, we'll find something."

Finally, one evening on the couch, the tone of desperation in the kid's voice arced upwards towards panic levels. But still, I didn't know what to tell him. I thought surely he had a cloud-related book or a toy or maybe a picture or a...a picture! "Buddy, I got an idea."

I already had Wednesday off and was planning on spending it with him. The plan was to drive out to the summer camp where I worked during the summers of my teenage years and meet up with an old friend of mine who was out there with his son.

"Check this out, buddy. How about you take your camera out to the camp when we go, you take some pictures of clouds, and you can take those pictures to show to your class? What do you think of that?"

I liked this idea. I liked it a lot. It involved an actual activity, not just grabbing an object out of his room. And there's the fact that I thought of it. I was excited and I thought he should be too. And after I explained to him how the whole process worked, getting the pictures off of his camera, onto my computer, and printed out on paper, he was.

So that's what we did. He brought his camera and snapped some pics in the car and some out in nature when we arrived. When we got home and I was looking over the pics he'd taken, I tell you, I teared up a little. It's not that his little 3 megapixel images were especially profound. It's that they exist at all, that he made them, that he went and documented a little bit of the world as he saw it. And that I was along for the ride.

I'll be goddamned if this parenting gig doesn't toss you some nice easy slow balls sometimes. Every now and then, you get to feel like a minor genius for a couple of seconds.

The Innocent Kind

Let me tell you a story about this thing that happened this one time. One time only did this thing happen, which is good because otherwise I might be dead, struck down in my youth by a physiological reaction to artery-freezing fear, and then I wouldn’t be here to tell you about this thing that happened, and that would be sad.

First, a note to those of you who know me in real life, i.e. we’ve inhabited the same physical space and spoken face to face and been to the same parties and gone to movies together and helped each other move and all that in real life stuff. Many of you folks have probably heard this story before. Maybe more than once, even. I was disqualified in the first round of Most Interesting Man In The World auditions, what can I say? I only have so many stories worth telling that are both true and that actually happened. I tell it again here because the movie/book that is the subject of this particular story came up on the Twitterator the other day and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to make a little internet data out of it. And so....

Ninth grade was my first year of book-learnin’ that occurred outside of a religious educational facility. I attended kindergarten through sixth grade in one Baptist school, then seventh and eight grade in another Baptist school. But once junior high was over and it was time for capital-H High School, my mom decided that I had gotten just about all the benefit I was going to get out of those kinds of places. Thank any god in the book in the book who had a hand in that decision.

So there I was, a freshman in a brand new school where I knew one, count it, ONE single solitary person with whom I had ZERO classes. Because I hadn’t gone to the public elementary and junior high schools, I didn’t even know the other kids from my neighborhood all that well. And not only was it a new school, it was a whole new environment. The building was, in my eyes, gigantic. The student body was no less than ten times what I was used to, and it felt like they all disapproved of my existence. Also, I was now being taught about this thing called evolution. Up to that point, the only thing I had been taught about evolution was that it was an idea borne out of the fires of hell, conjured up by Satan’s demon imp Charles Darwin to confuse and confound the children of God and lead them astray. Evolution, heavy metal, witchcraft, Darwin, Metallica, Catholics, they all fell into the same hell-bound bucket as far as my Baptist educators were concerned. 

As you can imagine, I spent a fair amount of my school hours alone that year. I wasn’t busy socializing or vandalizing school property or having underage sex or anything, so I had plenty of time to do things like peruse the school’s enormous library. And there was this author I had heard about, one whose works were said to inspire terror and trembling, a writer who could play ever so skillfully with that feeling you get when you awaken in a dark room with the sense that your’e not exactly alone. He was, in my mind, dangerous. My interest: it was piqued. I took a look through the library’s catalog one day, and sure enough, there he was:

King, Stephen

I remember staring at that shelf lined with his work. They’re right here in front of me. I can take any of these books I like and walk out of here and nobody will stop me. They’ll encourage me, even. I don’t know if I realized it then, but something was about to change. 

Of course, the man’s name was all that I knew at the time so I had no idea which of his books I should start with. They all sounded fantastic. Then I spotted a familiar title. Hey, wasn’t this one...? Yeah, this one was a movie. So of course it had to be good, right? I pulled it off the shelf, took it to the front desk, checked it out, and that very night, I began reading The Shining.

I spent every free waking moment I had with my nose buried in those pages. I snuck in chapters by the beam of a flashlight late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. This book didn’t care about my bedtime. No, it had much more important things to show me. Just one more chapter, little boy, just one more chapter.

It was during one such late night flashlight-lit reading session that The Freshman Year Heart Stopper aka My Shining Moment took place. If you’ve read The Shining or/and seen the movie (which really, if you haven’t experienced at least one of the two? You need to get on that), you’ll recall that the old chef warns the boy, Danny, not to enter one particular room in the hotel, (217 in the book, 237 in the movie, nerds). The old man doesn’t tell him why exactly, he just insists that Danny absolutely not set foot into that accursed room under any circumstances. But his warning only confirms what Danny already suspected, that there is something strange about that room. From that moment on, we know his curiosity will eventually win out. He’s going to open that door. He’s going to find out what’s in there, and so are we.

It was the middle of the night. The house was dark and quiet. My mom was asleep down the hall from my room. I was sitting in my bed, flashlight beam trained downwards on the chapter where Danny finally gets up the nerve to go against the old man’s advice. It’s been a few years, but as I recall, it goes something like this:

Danny stands at the door of the forbidden room.

Danny opens the door...or is it mysteriously open for him?

Danny enters, his curiosity momentarily trumping his fear.

Danny looks around the room.

Danny sees nothing out of the ordinary.

Danny walks into the bathroom.

Danny finds the bathtub filled with water.

Danny finds the bathtub filled with water and, oh look, it’s the bloated corpse of a drowned woman.

Danny recoils in horror.

The corpse pulls herself up out of the water into a standing position.

The corpse stands in the tub, water dripping from her grotesque form.

The corpse steps out of the bathtub and moves towards Danny.

I’m relaying this as simply a sequence of events, but King’s telling is...well, let’s just say there’s a reason the man’s name sells millions of copies. As far as my ninth grade self was concerned, the rest of the world had faded to nothing. There was only this boy in this hotel room with this drowned woman shuffling toward him. Which I guess is why I completely leaped out my skin when, at that very moment, my bedroom door suddenly slammed shut.

Had I had even one of my wits about me, I would have shone the flashlight on the door. I would have seen that there was nothing there, no corpses, no axe-wielding maniacs, no creepy little kids beckoning me to come play with them forever and ever. But the sound of that door slamming shut and trapping me in my room at the precise moment that this dead woman’s bloated veiny form stepped out of her drowning pool and made a move for the book’s horrified little protagonist effectively drove all of my wits towards the nearest exit. The flashlight, the book, they both went flying and I screamed, which of course woke up my mother. She ran down the hall to my room, turned on the light, and demanded to know just what the hell was going on, a demand that I couldn’t answer exactly. Between the scare I’d just had and the fact that part of my mind was still back in the Overlook Hotel, I don’t think I was able to stammer out anything coherent before my mom realized that there wasn’t a thing wrong with me and that I had just woken her up for nothing. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that all lights were to be extinguished and I was to get my ass to sleep.

I don’t remember if it was while my mom was yelling at me or if it was a few minutes later while I was laying there in the dark trying to calm myself that I realized it -- the air conditioner. The stupid air conditioner had come on, sending air through the vent above my door and pushing it closed. It had done it before, even, just never while I was reading Stephen King.

I said it at the start, I’ve told this story before. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years too, which seems weird considering what a small simple event it was. A lot like Danny, I was striking out into unknown territory and I ended up getting one hell of a scare out of it. I’ve wondered sometimes if this moment of raw fear followed by the realization that it’s okay, everything’s okay, just breathe, nothing to be afraid of, if it did a little something to the wiring in my brain, causing me to seek out these kinds of scares, the innocent kind where there’s nothing there that can actually do any harm because it’s all on a screen or a page. As opposed, of course, to the real scary scares, the kinds that don’t necessarily startle you all of a sudden, but instead drag on and on, the kind that involve things like waiting on test results or consulting specialists or wondering what the Gulf Coast is going to look like when your kids are old enough to take their families to see it.

So there you have it. That’s the thing that happened this one time.