The Ideas of Forgotten Meaning: A Writing Challenge

So you remember how I told you a while back about how I'm writing a book?

“Oh my GAWD, Holmes, is this the post where you tearfully admit that you’ve given up on your novel and then offer up a series of lame excuses for your lameness?”

Hell naw. The book’s still bumping along, slower’n I’d like, but steady, punctuated by just a few creative freak-outs, a few moments of lost perspective, of feeling like I’ve trapped myself in a maze from which there is no escape. But it’s going, and for the most part I’m finding it...not enjoyable, exactly. Let’s go with rewarding. In summary, It Will Happen.

But this post isn’t about the novel. This is about competing creative interests that emerge while in the midst of such a long-term project. And in the end, it’s a challenge for any of you who care to take it.

You see, just because I’ve got my creative energies focused on one thing doesn’t mean that the ideas stop coming. If anything, they come faster and in greater number. Where once I might find just a few mushrooms rising up out of the soil, I now find a whole freaking village of them bursting from the earth’s surface.

Of course, they don’t all taste so great, no matter how you saute ‘em. Most of them wither and die and fall right out of memory. But some capture my notice so well that I actually pluck them up and place them in my basket to be put to use later. That is, I write them down in a list. Ideas for later.

One such idea occurred to me the other day, so I pulled up the list and added it. I realized that it had been a while since I’d read through my past ideas, so I took a few minutes to scroll through it, and I found...

“What the ffff...?”

Most of the items in the list contained enough description to make sense. In some cases, I’d even added some notes to remind my future self what past self had meant. But there were a few where I had absolutely no idea what I was thinking. Was I drunk at the time? Sleepwriting? No idea. But just because their original meaning is lost, it doesn’t mean they’re useless.

So this is the challenge part of the post. I’m going to list several of these ideas below. The challenge is to pick one or two, or hell, pick all of them, whatever you like. Take it and run with it. Write something with it. A story, a poem, a script, a comic, a Grammy-winning country song, the next club hit. When it’s done, put it out there somewhere. And if you happen to think about it, hit me with a link to it in the comments section so I can go check it out.

And now, what you’ve all been waiting for: The Ideas of Forgotten Meaning:

1. Beer: put a crazy straw in it.
2. Strawberry: you wouldn't eat a head.
3. The view out the window during some afternoon doggy-style.
4. The Fat Fuck and his sidekick Stab Face.

Youston

Memory’s tricky, you know? Even with only thirty-five years behind me, there are things in there that are plenty hazy. Half-remembered. Uncertain of their position in The Timeline, which often seems like a garden hose that’s been drug all over the yard until it’s not at all straight or linear, but instead full of loops and kinks and aw shit it’s caught on something. Sometimes I even think tiny shards of fiction have gotten themselves worked in there, like Memory and Imagination have been leaving stuff at each other’s houses. There’s the Truth of the Matter, the What Happened, and then there’s the Memory of the thing. I guess that’s why we point cameras at stuff. Why we write things down.

I don’t trust you, Memory. But like anybody else, I cling to you.

We were coming back from a place we’d been for a few days, a place that is not our home, a place with an ocean, or if you want to get all technical about it, a great big-ole Gulf. It belongs to Mexico, but they let us use it. It was Mother’s Day when we were coming back from this place, and the path from it to our home goes right through the place where my mother lives. So we made a plan for a little visit on the way back.

“Can you look at googlemaps and figure out how to get there from 45?” my wife asked.
“I can get us there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh, yeah.”

So Memory’s not all bad. Driving directions. Not so awful at those. Not yet anyway.

On the way in, we pass through the city’s core, a mass of serious towers wrapped up in ribbons of highway that bring people in from all corners to put in their hours and take home their cut. I point it out to the boys, and in their impressed silence, I can hear the gears turning, the comparisons being made to the downtown of our home city, the only other one they’ve ever seen which, by comparison, is quite meager. In this moment, I suspect, it’s occurring to them just how big things can be.

I spot the building where my mom worked for so many years. At least I think that’s it, the mid-sized white one with the insets of windows creating a stair-step effect up the side. Some architect’s contribution. When my mom worked on weekends, she would take me along with her, me with my bag of toys and, later, homework, her with her bags of...stuff. Thirty-plus floors up, there was a great view, machines that would give me all the soda I could drink, and plenty of desks to sit behind.

There’s something tugging at me as we pass through the core, then beyond it through the tangle of intersecting highways and on into the the northern half of the city. I can’t put a finger or any other body parts on it. The car’s speakers are churning out songs by a band that sounds, to my ears, like they have something to say about what it is to be a person from a place. Some of the band’s members are from this city - one of its many suburbs anyway. I know this, but I can’t help but feel that even if I didn’t, their notes and words would still be perfect accompaniment to this inexplicable churn I feel going on inside. There is no particular memory I can bring to the fore, no specific image, no other bit of sensory remembrance I can grab a hold of, but for a few seconds, I feel like I’m going to burst into tears, an urge I push back because I have zero explanation for it, and bursting into tears isn’t like sneezing or cracking your knuckles where you can just do it and then not explain.

“It’s like everything’s been relabelled,” I say at some point. I’m not sure I’m explaining it right, but my wife gets it anyway. She usually does.

The place where my mom lives is the place where I grew up. The same house in the same neighborhood - a word that some shorten to its last syllable when applying it to this area - on the city’s edge, but outside of it in name only, the kind of edge that seems to extend forever. Saturn’s fattest ring, visible from thousands of miles up.

“That’s the street where Bryan and Wade lived. Wade played guitar, too. We hung out. That’s Robert’s street. He was into Morrissey, did the whole Mexican pompadour thing.”

The main through street is a narrow two lanes lined by ditches so deep they seem to have their own gravitational pull. I saw plenty of vehicles go grill-first into those ditches over the years, plenty of tow-trucks called out to give them a lift. I once ran my truck into a cow to avoid running it into one of those ditches. The cow was fine.

“That’s the trailer park where my friend Craig lived.”

This small patch of land is an odd conglomeration of urban, rural, residential, and industrial whose oddness didn’t occur to me until I was outside of it. But that’s the way, isn’t it? You live in your box and the box is The Way Things Are until one day you poke your head outside of your box and realize that not all boxes are like your box. Some of them aren’t boxes at all.

We arrive at the place that used to be My House, but is now My Mom’s House. I don’t remember exactly when this transition took place, but I suspect it was gradual. We’ve spent the last two days going between a beach and a tent, so my wife and I want to shower, but the boys want to see these old Star Wars toys of mine that they’ve heard so much about. My Mom locates the box among her storage, catching a wasp sting for her troubles. We open the box and show the boys a few pieces of their old man’s past. Various action figures. A snow speeder. A T.I.E. fighter. A blaster, which is always good to have at your side. And the crown jewel, the Millennium Falcon, which is faster than she looks. This will all be theirs one day soon, but not today.

“I thought you had a lightsaber, Daddy.”
“I did, but it got pretty beat up in all those lightsaber battles.” It’s the truth. It’s something I remember.

The visit and lunch and everything are wonderful. I usually send flowers or something, so us being here, children in tow, is an extra treat.

The route out of town carries us through more of the sprawl. Memory flares up here and there, at this corner or that, but offers nothing really solid. It’s all just vague familiarity. Maybe something happened over there one time. Maybe we went there back when it used to be. Is that the street where...? Or maybe not. It’s all different, it’s all the same. It looks like everywhere else. My wife uses a term she read in article somewhere, “secondhand suburbs.” It’s perfect.

The tears have gone back down into their ducts to wait until they are needed again. But I still wonder what it was that called them up in this instance. There’s nothing at all remarkable about these stretches of city, but they were pieces of my everyday back in a life that seems forever ago, though really it’s been less than two decades. The blink of an eye. Not even that much. The start of the eyelid’s downward sweep, the lashes still pointed upwards, not having received word yet that a blink is in progress. Maybe my Memory is mourning the stuff I’ve already forgotten.

After we get home and the car is unloaded, I upload the pictures on my camera from the trip we’ve just finished. Most of them are of my boys on the beach, headed into or out of the water lapping up on the sand. Their joy is clear and unbridled. I stood in the water with them, the camera around my neck, and captured a few moments of it. Years from now, I’ll look at these pictures and smile as tears fall down my face, and I suspect that the question of why won’t even occur to me.

Guitar Lessons

Guitar playing has been making more regular appearances in my life recently. Time was I played for hours every day, not because I was trying to master the instrument, but because playing the guitar is about a billion times more awesome than not playing the guitar. Simple fact.

But over the last few years, my guitars and all the stuff that went with them got shoved further and further back in various closets. At one point, I even sold my amp, the very amp with which I once stood in front of a room full of people and played a series of several of the more recognizable segments from the music of “Star Wars.” Have you ever heard The Force Theme through heavy distortion, chorus, and just a subtle, dare I say, sublime hint of wah pedal? Yeaaaah.

Probably my most rock star moment.

But aside from pulling the old girl out of the closet every now and then to blow through a few verses of “Daddy Farted,” there wasn’t a whole lot of music getting made around here other than the kind originating with magical fruit. Is there anything sadder than a neglected musical instrument? Well I guess there’s beached whales and war orphans and cancer and...so yes, lots of things are sadder than a neglected musical instrument. But still, I always let out a sigh at the sight all the dust gathered on the headstock. Dust shows up really well on black.

Nobody ever said, “I wish I’d played less music” on their deathbed.

So like George Michael, my guitar’s now out of the closet and has no plans to go back in. Next to it sits a single-speaker Marshall practice amp that, in my opinion, sounds an assload better than the old Fender I used to use. This is becoming a regular thing. As in daily. And it feels nice.

A funny thing happened while I was playing earlier. My five-year-old came down, watched me for a minute, then went and found the case with my ancient acoustic. The thing is tiny. As in, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a large ukulele. It’s still a bit large for his little hands, but the way he’s growing, that won’t be the case for long. He sat down on the bed next to me and asked me to show him how to play the guitar.

Stop and consider that: my son asked me to teach him how to play the guitar.

The first and I guess only guitar teacher I ever had was a guy named Robert that was the spitting image of David Lee Roth’s hair and smoked cigarettes in the little room at the back of H&H Music where he taught classes. He spent the first five to ten minutes of every lesson noodling around on his guitar, presumably to show me how awesome I, too, could be if I kept practicing. The first song he taught me was “Wanted Dead Or Alive” by Bon Jovi. I wasn't what you'd call a Bon Jovi fan, but I practiced the shit out of that opening bit. Props, Richie Sambora. Props.

All the same, I won’t be teaching my kid any Bon Jovi.

So I showed him a few basics and then it was time for dinner and then we did some other stuff and then later we were all over the house all doing our own thing, my thing being playing my guitar again, and the little dude came back in, sat the acoustic on his lap, and declared:

“I almost forgot, it’s time for my guitar lesson.”

Time for your....? Oh, okay, um, yeah, we can do that. So here, let’s do....

So I showed him a few more things. He struggled, mostly because he’s still a little dude and his fingers just aren’t quite strong enough. But struggle he did.

“When do I get a guitar like that one?” he asked, pointing at my electric. It’s not anything fancy, an Epiphone (i.e. budget Gibson brand) version of the SG. But it does look cool, and it sounds nice.

“Before you can get one like this, you need to practice on this one,” I told him, indicating the acoustic sitting in his lap.

“But I like yours,” he said.

“I like mine too. But this one,” I said, placing my hand on the curve of the acoustic’s wooden body, “is the very first guitar I ever played. It’s the one I learned on. I told my mom I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, so she pulled this one down out of the attic and took it to the guitar store. They fixed it up for her, put new strings on it, and then she took me take guitar lessons.”

I don’t mind telling you, I got a bit misty recounting that memory to my son. My mom did that for me. She didn’t know the first thing about guitars other than that her kid wanted to know how to play one. She could have put me off, maybe I’d have found a way on my own, or maybe I’d be walking around all these years later with a guitar shaped hole in my soul. And wouldn’t that suck? But she didn’t. She found a way to make it happen.

“Can I get guitar lessons?” he asked.

“Yes, with me," I said, feeling like I should grab a fly out of the air with my chopsticks as I said it. "And I’ll make you a deal.”

Here’s the part where I make a deal.

“If you’ll do some lessons with me and practice and keep it up over the next year or so, then we’ll see about getting you something that’s a little nicer. In your size, of course. What do you think of that?”

“Good.”

So who knows where it’ll go. He might forget all about the stupid guitar tomorrow, or he might decide after a few lessons that guitars are for chumps.

But not before he learns how to play a power chord.

It Was So Nice Of Me To Make This Mix For You

When you put headphones in your ears and hit play, you're basically saying, "This is my bubble, and I am going to be alone in it for a while, just me and this music." Sometimes when I make this bubble, I like to be extra alone. That is, I don't want any other voices in there with me. Particularly when I'm writing and trying to make something happen with words, I just want a little soundtrack, nobody else's words rattling around in my head. When I'm in this mood, I turn to this mix that I made in my iTunes that has several days worth of instrumental music of all kinds. Super mega nice person that I am, I thought it would be fun to make a randomish mix of it for you....just me shuffling through until I picked out a nice dozen. Go listen if you want to. Below is the track list along with tweet sized, er, not sure what you'd call these....responses? that I came up with for each of them while listening. Enjoy. Or don't, whatever. 

Tipsy - "Nude on the Moon" from the album Trip Tease

You can either look up at the moon and be entranced or ignore it altogether, kind of like this song.

Blockhead - "Tricky Turtle" from the album The Music Scene

Sidewalk strolling, sun rising over rooftops, casting the city in blinding shades of beautiful. Everybody wake up.

Madvillain - "Do Not Fire!" from the album Madvillainy

Long hallway, narrow, lit only by blinking fluorescents. Unlocked rooms on either side housing the insane. The exit is chained.

Holy Fuck - "SHT MTN" from the album Latin

Awake. Up. Move. No time for mistakes. Go time, motherfuckuuuurk SKRONK! urk urk SKRONK SKRONK!

Curtis Mayfield - "Think" (Instrumental) from the Superfly soundtrack

"Everything's gonna be all right" is a lie, but there are brief periods where all is right with your little world.

Tom Waits - "Knife Chase" from the album Blood Money

Our people are everywhere, friend. Hide at the bottom of the ocean, we got a shark with our logo on his fin ready to eat you right up.

Medeski, Martin, & Wood - "Bloody Oil" from the album End of the World Party (Just in Case)

This desert's never going to let us out alive.  

The RZA - "Afro's Father Fight" from the Afro Samurai Soundtrack

*Looks up at ceiling* "Did you hear that?"

The Gaslamp Killer - "Ruskie Electric" from the album My Troubled Mind

We are at the bottom of the ocean in enemy waters and it would appear that the entire crew has been dosed with LSD. Your orders, captain?

RJD2 - "I Really Like Your Def Jux Baby Tee" from the Definitive Jux Presents II compilation

At the start of each day, she held a tiny funeral for the previous one.

El-P - "Jump Fence, Run, Live" from the album Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3

You were allotted three badass moments for this life. You’ve used none. You have ten minutes to live. Care to set up a combo?

Explosions In The Sky - “Catastrophe And The Cure” from the album All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone

My favorite thing about this band is the fact that they attempt to recreate their name in every song.

Let It Be Known That From This Day Forth, I Am A Fan Of Kanye West

I've never been a huge Kanye West fan. Nothing against the guy, it's just not my preferred brand of hip-hop. I tend to like things a bit, I don't know...grimier. But I'm a fan now because last South by Southwest, he did this:



That band behind him is from Austin's very own Reagan High School, the Soul Raider Marching Band. Reagan, by many standards, is considered to be one of the worst high schools in the city, and hilariously enough, it's where our kids are zoned to go based on where we currently live (hint: not exactly the best area of town). My wife and I are all over the map as to the question of whether we're willing to send the boys there when the time comes. The school's got plenty of problems, the stats don't lie. But that's the thing about statistics: as honest as they may be, as much of a story as they may tell, they don't quite manage to tell the whole story. It's so cool to see these kids get an opportunity like this.

So I'm Writing A Book

So like the title says, a book, I am writing one. A novel. Fiction. There, I said it. It's on the blog, so it's official. I started it about ten months ago and have carried on with it with increasing levels of seriousness ever since then. It started out as the thing I dabbled with here and there and gradually -- wait, back that shit up. It actually started out as a play, a thing to put on a stage with lines for actors to speak, mangle, forget, or ask me to cut, and stage directions for them to interpret, ignore, rewrite, or ask me to cut. But it seemed like every time I sat down and tried to make something happen on paper, it was like I was trying to walk through a brick wall. I'd try taking a run at it, only to be knocked back on my ass with maybe a few pages of crap to show for it.

"I don't remember this being so hard," I kept mumbling to myself.

"You should write it as a book," my wife kept telling me.

"Yeah! A book! Make it a book!" my gut said, echoing my wife.

"Don't you dare write a book! It'll be terrible! A huge disgusting failure! They're all going to laugh at you!" said that mean little voice in my head. Yeah, you know the one. He's a dick.

Why does it feel weird to be writing a post about this particular project? I post about plenty of the other shit I do, so why should this be any different? I don't know why, but it does, like it'll come across as  bragging, which is silly since I hardly have anything to brag about. But anyway, there it is. Weirdness acknowledged. Moving on...

So I started this novel about ten months ago, and I've now reached the point where I write more days than I don't. I lay awake nights thinking about it, trying to fit the pieces together, to understand the  connections that aren't immediately apparent. Which is kind of cool. Here are a few more cool things about it:

• Seeing faith pay off. The idea for this book started with just a few words. Three words, in fact. Sure, I churned on it a lot before I started, but I hardly knew where it was going to lead. Even now, while I can say with certainty that I know what the last moment of the book will be and I know a few of the big milestones between here and there, I hardly know every twist and turn. But I'm growing increasingly comfortable with that feeling of not-knowing. Coming to relish it in fact, because without that feeling, I couldn't experience the moments of epiphany when things become clear, the next few yards of the path are revealed, and I get a glimpse of another pixel in the big picture. 
• Research! The idea of doing research to write fiction used to make me bristle. "I'm an artist! I make things up!" But what is fiction but fact with the names changed, a few details rearranged and, in some cases, the rules bent a wee bit? So it became clear pretty early on that some research would be in order if I was to get certain elements of this book right. This meant reading a lot about slavery, researching the nuts and bolts of dogfighting, listening to a lot of hip-hop (gosh, how awful), reading up on Austin history, etc. My knowledge: it has increased. 
• Writing a lot is a good way to learn about writing. 
• Werewolves. Motherfucking werewolves. 

And here are a few things that are not so cool about writing a book:

• It brings out the asshole in me. I'm a busy guy, so my writing time is sacred. But there are times when something else has to take priority over it and it just can't be helped. And when that happens, Captain Dickhead emerges. 
• It kind of cuts into the blogging time. 

You know, I had a few more bullet points to add to that second list, but they all sounded like whiney bullshit, so I'm gonna leave it at that. Two lovely complaints. Ah ha ha ha.

So that's what I've been up to, aside from the work and the family and the chickens and the beer consumption. Provided that I don't die in the next couple of years, I have a pretty good feeling I'll finish the damn thing. Then y'all can read it. Sound good? Cool. 

Me At Indie Ink

My wife had surgery on her poor shoulder back in the first week of January. And since she was somewhat down for the count in the weeks to follow, and since we provide shelter and care-taking for the two hellions that we conspired to bring into this world, I spent a couple of weeks or so working from home. The thing is, I ran into a few technical difficulties, and I was unable to get either my MacBook or my Windows laptop to connect to my work machine. To do that, I had to bring the old dinosaur desktop out of retirement. Though it be slow and clunky and in great need of updates, it still manages to handle the job of connecting to my office's network and allowing me to remote desktop in relatively well.

If any of you IT folks care to give me an assist so that I don't have to do that again, that'd be awesome.

Anyway, while I was puttering around on the old beast, I ran across some of my old files, particularly, some old pieces of writing that I had forgotten about. Most were scripts, some of which dated back as far as 1999. But aside from pieces meant for the stage, there were also a few short stories, one of which I had completely forgotten about. If I remember right, it came about because of a writing prompt that asked you to start a story with "Where Were You Last Night?" Or something like that. I fixed a couple of typos and was about to pop it up here when I remembered something about the Indie Ink folks looking for submissions. I sent it their way and they were kind enough to put it up. So pop on over, if you would, and give it a read. Hope you enjoy it.