But before you or I judge, let’s think about that, really. I busted my hump all through school, K through 12, to get good grades, good test scores, and the resultant good scholarships. My family made it very clear to me that college was not in the budget, no matter how hard they tried, so it was loans and debt or full-ride academics for me. I continued to run myself ragged in college(1) to keep those scholarships and to graduate on time after a freshman/sophomore major change that transferred almost NO credits between the two. I got an internship in New York which started a month after I graduated college, got hired straight into my associate editor position from the internship, nearly killed myself holding down that job and doing stand-up comedy, then wandered around the country just being a bohemian bastard for awhile.

When I finally stopped moving in 2006, it was the first time I had ever actually done that. I did nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be. When people ask me how I ended up working at Wal-Mart, or Kroger, that’s the long form answer I’d like to be able to give them, if it were a question they were genuinely interested in knowing the full story behind. I wanted to do nothing for awhile. I wanted to do something I could train a monkey to do, so that I could wander into the quiet library stacks of my brain that had been gathering dust in all the commotion. Was I lazy? Yes, for the first time I indulged that side of me fully. I’ve always been what I call a “Proactive Slacker” and a “Professional Crastinator,” but this was the first era in my life when I said, “You know what? I want to be a bum. A lousy stinking bum.” Which isn’t, of course, to say I didn’t do anything at all. Just nowhere near what I had been doing.

It was a welcome reprieve from a publishing industry I was sick of, a writing career I was tired of beating my head against, a comedy career that had damn near killed me, and a corporate desk job that made fifth floor windows look very appealing(2). But sometime last year it started to wear thin. The novelty was gone, and I was starting to feel like a slug. I was putting on weight, feeling the roots start to set in, and that was never the intention. Lazy wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was just a break after 25 years of “ZOMG WORK!!1!one!”

So…January. What did I do with you?

- I lost 20 pounds. That’s my 16 pound bowling ball and my big orange cat of me that isn’t there anymore. My clothes fit better, my energy level is up, I’ve disavowed HFCS almost entirely (it’s almost too prolific to completely avoid), and all in all I’m just brighter and glowier. These things have been noted by people who know nothing of my plans and progress. I call that a victory.

- I am getting back into the habit of writing. I have produced more words this month than I have outside of NaNo purposes since 2004. The blog, while still not regular by my old standards, is practically erupting by comparison to recent years. We’re making this happen. And while I have not dedicated this renewed drive to write to any one singular project for the purpose of submission, I feel more and more comfortable sitting down at a keyboard again, and less and less critical of what comes out. So while I didn’t technically meet my resolution of three submissions per month, I did increase my production a hundred fold. We’ll call that a draw.

- I landed three job interviews, two of which went very well and will (hopefully) leave me back in a steady nine to five weekday job. Structure can only do good things for me at this point. I have to think that was part of why I was so productive in New York. There was a definitive time for everything. Except sleep. Another victory!

- I indulged my long-standing desire to teach or tutor, based on my previous experiences and the steadfast belief that I could actually do some good with someone if they were willing to give me their attention. I took on the daughter of one of my mother’s friends as a student, and after one week of work she brought home her first 100 on a biology test. Ever. Her mother actually started crying when she checked the grade online and saw that. And it made me really proud for her, too, because her main problem is confidence, not intelligence, and I can see that needle starting to tick its way up as I work with her from a place of exceeding familiarity on the subject. Victory!

- I acquired a guitar and began working on building my skills and callouses back up. I remember more than I thought I would, and I’m making a dedicated effort to actually study the theory this time, not just memorize tab. I downloaded some recording software, and if the job thing comes through I’m getting a bass. Already have a drum kit. Home studio, anyone? Aww yeah. Maybe not victory yet, but definitely win.

So far, I’m on pace for an outstanding 2011. It’s just a matter of carrying this momentum forward against the naysayers and the dream crushers and the people who just don’t understand what it means to be genuinely driven to do things other than sleep, work, and die. I think I’m going to need more bubble gum.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 – With the notable exception of my freshman year, when a deteriorating relationship and driving 1000 miles (not an exaggeration) almost every weekend drained my will to do anything but order pizza and sleep. Sometimes simultaneously. Sorry pizza guys I stood up at the door.

2 – Just an aside, defenestration is my favorite word in the English language.

“Unlucky, Richard?”

Yeah, apparently! Because it’s been my own experience, and the experience of countless kindred spirits that I have run across in my travels, that the child who wants to work at Wal-Mart and let a time clock slowly siphon away their soul is infinitely more praised than the child who boldly, openly, and proudly proclaims that they want to be a writer, or a painter, or a musician, or any of the other kinds of creative and expressive endeavors that our race collectively once gave a damn about.

And I don’t want to hear a single one of you, not one of you, NOT ONE, tell me it’s because the chances of succeeding are so small and parents are just concerned about their children’s future prospects and blah de fucking blah. You know why I don’t want to hear it? One word.

Athletes.

The chances of your kid becoming a professional athlete and making millions upon millions of dollars for him to conveniently spend on his defense team when he shoots/murders/rapes/mauls/mutilates/desecrates a corpse/jaywalks are on par if not worse than my chances of getting a book deal, music contract, or major gallery showing that breaks me into the big time. On par or worse. And yet the absolute idolatry that hangs like a urine-gold nimbus around prospective athletes, especially down here in SEC country, is indisputable. The chances are no better, the consequences of failure are far more severe, and the toll it takes on the child can be unspeakable. But it’s perfectly alright. Why? I think it’s all about what a family can relate to.

So often the creative types I have known sprang from parents that made you convinced that whatever creativity their offspring had manifested, it was either a recessive gene or a spontaneous mutation. When Creative Bob Jr. is locked in his room learning how to shred on a guitar because it makes his brain snap out of its introspective feedback loop of ever-deepening angst for five minutes, and those are the most glorious five minutes of his day, Teamster Bob Sr. is scowling outside the door wondering why his lazy asshole son won’t get a job at the factory and play football like a normal boy. There is no commonality, and so often we as adults want to believe that our own experiences make us the be all and end all on life choice advice. Because, you know, none of us never made a fucking mistake.

Even some of the kids I’ve known who HAD creative, artsy parent types have been steered away from that very same life path, which I think may even be worse, because hypocrisy trumps ignorance in my mind. Almost without fail, these are parents who never got as far as they wanted, who feel that their own choices led them to failure and misery until they were eventually forced to take that soul-crushing job, become part of the machine, and never even once entertained the notion that they could try to do both. Or they did, and they discovered they just weren’t strong enough, just weren’t determined enough. They indulge themselves in the classic fallacy of human arrogance that if they couldn’t do it, no one could. Least of all their own child. I find their lack of faith…disturbing.

If a child tells his family he wants to be a professional football player when he is five, more often than not he’s in pads the next day with an alpha male coach and an alpha male father screaming alpha male things at them in the only kind of support that alpha males understand, which looks a lot like child abuse, but you know, whatever. Because sports is American, sports is manly, sports is a cash cow, there’s some obsolete alpha male warrior mentality attached to it that lends a false sense of honor to the pursuit. We are now a society of the NFL Network and NBA Season Pass. The Renaissance, this isn’t.

I told my family I wanted to be a writer when I was five. My dad was cool with it and got me a typewriter. The rest of my family launched into a 24-years-and-counting campaign of convincing me I was eventually going to starve to death and die alone in a gutter if I kept up that crazy talk. Fuck, why not, it worked for Poe, right?

I also don’t want to hear anyone tell me that I’m just bitter about the treatments jocks got and am belatedly venting about their “opportunities” or whatnot. I was a student athlete once upon a time, okay? I got to look behind that curtain. I got offered the Kool-aid. And I was just as disgusted then, too. But this isn’t an entry to rip on athletes. It’s a way out for a lot kids that don’t have any other societally available or acceptable avenue, all those arguments, fine, whatever. This is about the families. This is about the people who perpetuate this notion that dreams are for idiots and you should conform, who praise the ones that do, and badger or belittle the ones that don’t. This is about people who honestly and truly believe that you should just know your role and stay there, because if you don’t try you can never fail.

What did treatment like this cause me to do? It caused me to wall off my family from a significant portion of my life. I could fill a book with stuff about me that my family doesn’t know. Oh wait, I DID! I stopped telling them about so much of what I was involved with that when my bio ran in a playbill recently, my mom was confused about when some of this crap actually happened. Because I never told them. Why? I didn’t feel like listening to it. I could have called home and said I just landed a lead role on Broadway, and the response both expected and dutifully delivered would be a, “That’s nice dear. You’re not going to quit your job at Scholastic though, are you?”

My joy has never been theirs. It’s always been their concern. The comedy, the writing, the acting, all things I would only ever get the most perfunctory of “yay…” for before the lectures began. And the things that always monumentally depressed me have been the things that have made them the happiest. The corporate life and being “proudly” shackled to my desk job. I wouldn’t be using this blog as a therapist on the subject if I hadn’t seen it happen to so many other people. If I weren’t actually watching it happen to a couple people right now. All accomplishments met with criticism and all triumph met with concern about what new avenues to failure they have opened. As though each step they took down the path to the one thing they have always wanted more than anything else were breaking another biblical seal. “I’m glad you got that book deal and that advance, but you know you’re just going to get eaten by insect-faced monkeys with lion bodies now, right?”

All I’m saying is, if you plan on having a kid, or you have a kid who is still in those young, formative, impressionable years? Let them be themselves. Let them dream. Please. There is no harm in letting them aim high, unless they’re actually holding a gun, in which case you may have other problems. If your child comes up to you at five and says he wants to be a dinosaur cowboy when he grows up, help him learn about dinosaurs and pick out which one he thinks he’d like to ride the most. If your daughter comes up to you and says she wants to be a musician, encourage that. Countless studies have shown a tremendous link between musical education and improved mental development. Use the interwebs, help her learn the best way to go about pursuing her career, make her aware of the realities of the situation, do what you can to protect her, but never tell her the dream is stupid. Life will be harsh enough, and the road long enough, without you piling on. You can be concerned without being condescending. You can care without crushing their hopes.

And if your kid comes up to you at five and says he wants to be a writer, buying him a typewriter isn’t a bad way to go.

Two and a Half Men:

Charlie: Alan, I have a young and possibly underage girl upstairs whose name I don’t even know but I’d really like to have vulgar sex with, so I’d appreciate it if you and your mongoloid child would stay out of my way and not ruin my life.

Alan: I have feelings too, Charlie, and it’s not my fault my ex-wife emasculated me to the point that I am now the most effeminate character on a show that features a steady parade of women!

Jake: What’s a monguhlode? *drools into his cereal a bit, tries to eat his Nintendo DS*

Girl (coming down from upstairs): Charlie, I’ve had a really good time today, but as an unexpectedly strong and progressive woman who still comes off as a cookie-cutter blanket statement feminist I’d really like to talk about my place in your life.

Charlie: Your places in my life are either in my bed or out my door. I’m getting a beer.

Rose (rappelling down from the rafters with a beer): Here you go Charlie, I brewed and bottled it myself just for you because obsessive stalker personalities are amusing.

Alan and Charlie’s Mom (arriving through front door): Hello children, I’m here to lord your horrible childhood experiences over you for awhile. By the way, I slept with five random men on the sidewalk up to your house just so you’d have to picture me naked.

***loses last shred of faith in humanity, quickly changes the channel***

CSI: (insert any city here)

Lead Detective: The victim was bludgeoned to death with his own keyboard while hacking into something using Linux. The killer repeatedly struck him in the head until massive trauma and skull fractures caused him to bleed to death.

Horatio (out of nowhere): I guess this is one hacker whose skull… *puts on sunglasses* …got cracked.

YEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

(everyone waits for The Who to stop playing)

Partner: There aren’t any fingerprints on the keyboard though, how are we going to find the murderer?

Department Tech Person: Wait, you said he was hacking at the time of his murder. Maybe I can build a GUI interface using Visual Basic to see if any of his blood got into the computer while the connection was still open, and track the IP address the blood was transmitted to.

*taps on keyboard for a moment*

Department Tech Person: There, he was hacking into this person’s bank account, his blood is all over the router.

Lead Detective: So now we have a motive. Check his hard drive for screen shots, let’s see if we can get a look at our murderer.

Partner: You’re wasting our time.

Lead Detective: No, I’m just smarter than you.

Department Tech Person: Okay, I found some screenshots from the time of the murder.

Lead Detective (leaning over the Tech’s shoulder dramatically): Now what do you see there, in the reflection of the monitor from the time of the screen shot.

Department Tech Person: I can’t quite make it out.

Lead Detective: Enhance the image. *image clears up a little for no apparent reason* Enhance. *image clears up further* Enhance! *image clears up further* ENHANCE!!! *image becomes perfectly clear, reveals photo quality picture of the killer in the reflection of the monitor from the time of the screen shot*

Partner: Now put that picture into the crime photo database and see if we can get a match! Good work everyone.

***nose begins bleeding, changes channel***

House:

(intro scene begins, five people stand around talking, one of them rubs his chest and looks uncomfortable, everyone else begins asking if he’s okay, audience becomes convinced this is the patient for the episode, suddenly one of the other four’s eyeballs randomly pop out of his head and cotton candy spills from the eye sockets while he bleeds marmalade)

(theme song)

Cuddy: House, your department spends more money than the rest of the hospital combined and you’re not even working on a case right now!

House: Yes I am.

Cuddy: No you’re not!

House: Yes, I am!

Cuddy: No, you’re really not!

House: You’re right, I’m not, but your breasts are fantastic.

Cuddy: Here’s a file for you, either do this or I’ll take your toys away.

House: This guy isn’t even sick, this could all have been easily explained if every other doctor in the world weren’t an incompetent jackass.

Cuddy: House, his internal organs are being replaced by food products!

House: It’s an auto-immune disease. But I do see he as a hot daughter, so I’ll take the case so I can leer at her while I’m not personally attending to him.

(turns to subordinates)

House: Here, this man’s really sick, differential diagnosis on bleeding marmalade and exuding cotton candy.

Foreman: Well, it could be–

House: Whatever, I already know the answer, I’m just going to make you all go run every test known to man and play games with his life while I go torment Wilson about why he had a whole grain bagel with breakfast this morning instead of a plain one. Call me in 57 minutes so I can dramatically save him.

***changes channel***

Big Bang Theory:

(Watches as four people sit in an apartment discussing something stereotypically geeky, leading into discussion about how one of them is incredibly socially awkward, with all conversations being held using dialogue that is intentionally overstated and avoids any colloquial shortcut or contraction in an effort to make it sound forced and stilted)

Sheldon: Bazinga!

(female character walks in, everyone becomes uncomfortably aware that there are breasts in the room, silence)

***sits…waits…nothing happens, changes channel***

Mythbusters:

*something explodes*

Jamie: Science!

*something bigger explodes*

Grant, Tory, and Kari: SCIENCE!

*an entire military depot full of C4 explodes, registering on nearby seismographs*

Adam (climaxing): SCIIIIIEEEENNNNCCCEEEEE!

***shrugs, watches the rest of the episode***

Let’s take it back a day or two, to begin at the beginning. Which is usually a good place to begin, as I understand. But I’m stalling, because this is kind of a personal entry.

I’ve never been scrawny, but I’ve never really been obese, either. I have a lot of lower body muscle mass from my track runner/marching band/drill team/football/soccer/field hockey legs of old, and my chest and shoulders have always been broad enough that I have to buy extra large shirts just to let the fabric reach my waist. I’m built like an Irish dude, I guess. I don’t really know how else to describe it. I am equally easy to imagine wearing a kilt and swinging a claymore over my head whilst running toward you, screaming, or slumped over a bar stool with a spiral pattern of slain Guinness around me, enabling you to count how many hours I had been there by how many rings there were. The world’s most inebriated tree.

Body image has never been a terrible problem with me, which is probably how I let it get away from me a little. In New York I was walking constantly. I had a five to ten mile a day route mapped out to relieve stress after I got out of work. During the itinerant gypsy phases I bartended, bounced, did odd jobs, stayed active, you know? Even once I settled down for Georgia, Take 1, I ended up as a stocker at a grocery store, which is more physical than you’d realize. Lately though…I mean, the writing is great for stretching the creative muscles, but it tends to involve a lot of consuming vast amounts of soda and sitting still for hours on end, staring at your prey until your eyes bleed and your bladder threatens to explode. Really, if you replaced the soda with beer, you could be a deer hunter. Or Ernest Hemingway.

As a result, the pounds slowly, steadily, quietly snuck up on me. I am reminded of the old story about the frog in a pot of water. You drop a frog straight in after it’s already boiling, he’s going to hop right back out. You slowly heat the water up once he’s already there, he’ll think he’s found the world’s first froggy day spa right up until he croaks. *drum fill* Sorry, sorry, I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped reading after that, really I wouldn’t.

Anyway, my shirts and pants had been getting a little tight lately. I tried to rationalize it away, starting with vaguely plausible things (this is the first time I’ve worn it since it was washed, I just need to stretch it back out a bit) and slowly sliding down the spectrum to the sorts of things the Mythbusters wouldn’t touch (it’s cold outside, fabric isn’t as flexible in the cold!). I knew it was crap, but it’s easier to explain away than it is to actually do anything about. Then I saw my family’s Christmas Eve pictures and was a little…well, terrified. I was starting to get downright fluffy! This shouldn’t have been a surprise, and it really wasn’t to my subconscious mind, but having my conscious mind drug into the harsh light of reality was a little traumatic. Then, Christmas morning, getting ready to trek over for Christmas 2.0 with my girl’s family, my pants, which are the same size I have been wearing essentially since high school, barely buttoned. I mean, I had to do the “suck in and lift and lay down a bit and stretch and hope something doesn’t explode out of a seam” maneuver. I knew there’d been less and less real estate inside the waistband for awhile now, but this was absolutely unacceptable. Not having a scale in my own house, I waited until we arrived at her grandmother’s place and…well, Da Capo al coda(1).

I weighed 230 pounds. In high school, I capped out around 190, but there was muscle on that frame. And I’m 6’1″, with no aspirations to boxing in a featherweight division. I am never going to be a light dude. With a large frame and decent muscle mass, I’m SUPPOSED to weigh about 189. But that was the heaviest I had ever seen myself, and I knew, with my current habits and lifestyle, I was moving nowhere but in the wrong direction. Now there’s a chance, because this happened even within my own family, that some of you are going to look at that 230 number and think I’m overreacting. I realize that’s not exactly out of hand yet, but the point is that I wanted to hit it now, and KEEP it from GETTING out of hand. I come from a family with a history of heart disease, high blood pressure, adult onset diabetes…weight is not something I need to be messing around with. Plus, lately, my energy levels have been in the crapper and even simple activities had begun seeming taxing. I was, quite simply, carrying too much of me around to be happy.

On December 26th, I woke up with a plan. I quit sodas, cold turkey. I didn’t realize that Coke I had the previous evening was going to be the last one for a good long while, but maybe it’s better that way. Rip it off fast, like a band-aid. I had been drinking about four a day for…um…ever. That’s about 800 empty calories a day, plus ungodly amounts of acids and, of course, the great Satan of high fructose corn syrup. I may as well have kept smoking, right? Seriously, look into HFCS sometime(2). Your body doesn’t know what to do with it, it screws with insulin, contributes directly to diabetes in almost every credible study on the subject, and the only defense, the only defense that the corn industry can come up with in their commercials is, “It’s fine in moderation!”

It’s fine in moderation?! Christ, opium is technically fine in moderation! Absinthe is fine in moderation! You don’t see me dumping either into my nephew’s breakfast cereals(3)! You’re really going to have to do better than, “Well, it probably won’t kill you right away!” I hate that we live in one of the only developed countries in the world where the corn industry ended up being more powerful and more subsidized than the sugar industry. I mean, I’m sure the latter comes with certain evils, too, like the all-powerful dentist lobby or…something. But seriously, the studies are there, the knowledge is there, the corn people just have enough money and lobbyists to keep throwing at lawmakers to prevent anything from being done about it. And since the last vote we truly have left is with our wallets, and these are still multi-billion dollar industries, nothing is going to change anytime soon. So it’s down to personal choice. I chose to replace soda with water and real fruit juices, and use Crystal Light to offset my “I really can’t take how bland water is oh god please kill me now” reflex.

I also woke up that morning determined to use the power of one of my Christmas presents for awesome. My family gave me a new XBox 360 with a Kinect, the new super-creepy yet really quite fun motion sensor attachment dealie. The first two games I acquired for it? The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout and Dance Central. Goodbye sedentary lifestyle, hello clinging to the side of my computer chair trying to remember how to breathe! Seriously, I was skeptical of the former at first, seeing as I hate all forms of reality TV and have never watched an episode of the actual show in my life. But the reviews were positive, with several sign-offs from nutritionists and fitness specialists. I gave it a try, and it proceeded to beat the everloving piss out of me.

Not only was I getting fluffy, my body had forgotten what this whole “movement” thing was like. Curse you, occupation that rewards sitting in a chair all day! Even on the moderate workout setting, after 20 minutes, I was doing my best Fred Sanford impression and fogging my glasses up from sweat and exuded body heat alone. I was literally steaming in my own juices. The next morning, I honestly wondered if I had somehow transferred my brain into the body of James Caan in the movie Misery, right after Kathy Bates did her best Gallagher impression on his ankles. My legs were sore to the point that I had to completely waive off my second day’s exercise routine, along with anything that involved moving with any more urgency than a recently unearthed mummy. I was losing foot races with glaciers. It was horrible. And they were still sore the third day, but I decided at that point the best thing to do was to push onward and work through it.

Amazingly, that helped. My muscles, realizing I wasn’t listening to reason, ended their 48 hour hostage standoff with my calves and relaxed a bit. Then a little more. After the first five routines, my breathing was becoming more regular. Exercises that had been death sentences early on were becoming a little more natural. And between the lack of soda and the return to physical activity, I dropped 11 pounds in seven days. In the next seven, I threw another 5 pounds on the pile. From December 26th to January 9th, I’ve gone from 230 and heading in all the wrong directions to 214 and really enjoying myself. I set the game up as an 8 week program(4) with a target weight of 198 pounds. Getting back below 200 would be a major psychological victory, and I can build on it from there. I can’t even really begin to describe how much better I feel, too. Energy levels are up, fitness levels are higher than they’ve probably been since I was actively participating in sports, it’s just…yeah. I’m feeling good about this.

Dietary changes have got to be contributing somewhat to that as well. I used to eat one meal a day, carb load at that meal, then snack right before bed, and wonder why my metabolism was shot all to hell. That’s not entirely true, I KNEW why my metabolism was shot all to hell, I just didn’t care. Self-preservation has never been my strong suit. Now I’m eating three meals a day, healthy stuff, there’s lots of Newman’s Own brand finding its way into the house, and I’m trying to be conscious of calories. That’s difficult, because nutritional value labels use more spin than your average Fox News broadcast. I really wish we would regulate serving sizes to a more realistic standard. One can of soda is not two servings. I have no way, on the fly, of knowing how many chips weigh 23 grams. And one oven-bake pizza is not six servings. I can put that away, by myself, in one sitting. Again, built like an Irishman, eat like an Irishman.

So…why? I mean, other than the clichéd need to lose weight as a New Year’s Resolution, why would I suddenly make this many changes to a lifestyle plan that has been in place for nigh on a decade and a half? It’s really quite simple. I have a future I can really see now. A plan in place, things I definitively want to accomplish, and someone I want to spend as much time with as I can. I see all the problems other members of my family have had to wade through because they didn’t get on this while there was still time, saw how many quality years it really robbed a few people of, and decided I didn’t want that to be me. I can be a burden on myself now, or a burden on everyone else later. I choose the former. Although I promise to try really, really hard to never become one of those super smug and pretentious people in the really tight jogging shorts that act like they are god’s gift to fitness and everyone else just isn’t trying hard enough. I’m never going to tell anyone else how to live their lives, period.

If hearing about me doing this or seeing me do this helps you convince yourself that you can make some changes, too, that’s great, I’m here if you need anything. If hearing about me doing this or seeing me do this convinces you I’m a ponce who needs to fall into a pit of broken glass and die, then…well, maybe you have some anger issues, but you’re entitled to it. I just knew that I wanted my own life to go in a different direction, a healthier direction, because the road traveled longer that way, and gave me more time to see the sights.

I’d say this must be me growing up, except I’m about to make a peanut butter sandwich then spend a few hours playing video games in my boxer shorts. You pick your battles.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 – Which is pretentious music speak for “read that thing at the beginning, then carry it forward but keep going past this point next time,” but that was may more letters, and I’m tired(P1).

P1 – And yes, I’m aware that I spent even more time and letters explaining that fact than I would have just typing that in the first place. I don’t feel the need to explain my art to you, Warren.

2 – Oh, excuse me corn growers’ associations, “corn sugar.”

3 – Although I have to be honest, that would be endlessly entertaining.

4 – The game really makes regular exercise palatable, especially if you have a hyper-competitive streak like I do. It basically drops you INTO the show. You have to do regular exercise routines, along with seven other NPCs (it’s probably higher if you opt for the 12 week program), and at the end of each week there is an exercise challenge that you get points for winning, and a weigh in, at which you get points for percentage of total body mass lost. Once the scores are tallied, the two contestants who had the least successful week are put up for elimination, and you and the other safe contestants vote on who deserves to go home. I just finished week 2, have won both physical challenges, and have been the biggest loser both weeks. Take that, imaginary peers!

Ridiculous, right? I mean, absurd past the point where it can even really be funny, because the cognitive dissonance between these two images is, in any sane person, probably too much to reconcile into the world of “reasonable but amusing misunderstanding.” Yet I’m betting, with the right connections, I could turn that into a legitimate infomercial.

I know I’ve railed against infomercials here in the past, but I can’t help it. I’m nocturnal. They are my constant companions, even if their omnipresence was diminished somewhat by the invention and proliferation of DVR technology. Now, instead of watching Ron Popeil violate a turkey with a syringe big enough to give Keith Richards wet dreams, I watch Craig Ferguson discuss sexual euphemisms with a robot. But I think they sense that their habitat is disappearing, and like any life form, they are evolving. They’ve begun flinging spores into other time slots in the guise of regular length commercials that contain the same absurd premises and the same level of production values and acting, for the same kind of products that alien archaeologists will one day unearth and wonder how we, as a species, even flirted with space travel(1).

These spores have really begun to take root in the intellectually barren wasteland of daytime talk shows, because as we all know, rational thought is the herbicide of impulse TV buying. After the ladies of The View, or The Talk, or The Conversation, or The Discussion, or The Semi-Rational Debate About Largely Irrelevant Topics Taking Place Between Four Completely Irrelevant Personalities From Comically Far Reaches of the Political and Philosophical Spectrum are done numbing your brain while trying to figure out if the Earth is round or flat(2), they strike.

“Has this ever happened to you?”

That’s their mating call. The siren song that brings the shopaholic to their treacherous rocks. The formula is quite simple. You create a problem, you convince people they have that problem, then you offer a solution to that problem ABSOLUTELY FREE(3)! And it’s a pretty tried and true formula, the pharmaceutical companies(4) have been using it for years. What bothers me so much about it is their apparent target audience, based on the “problems” they create, and the terrifying implications involved if these people actually exist. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples, only mildly exaggerated.

The Product: The Ove Glove

What It Is: A glorified pot holder

How the Commercial Begins: “Has this ever happened to you?” Woman attempts to get a hot pan out of her oven (where the heating elements aren’t even glowing, but that’s just me being a picky bastard), stands still for a moment, and proceeds to slam her lasagna down on the floor as though it had pulled a gun on her, or Garfield had just slit her throat from behind. The implication is basically that standard pot holders will immediately burst into flames on contact with hot surfaces(5). It goes on to show people wearing Ove Gloves changing light bulbs while they’re still on, proving that the product is also good for people with no understanding of the properties of electricity.

I cook a lot, and yeah, after years of service you’ll occasionally get a pot holder that’s all, “You know what, screw this noise,” and you’ll get about two inches from the oven before pain receptors start having a rave. But this product isn’t accomplishing anything that you couldn’t ask a regular pot holder or a good dish towel to do. If you’re looking for something that’s good for both retrieving your meatloaf and extracting plutonium rods from a nuclear reactor, your priorities may not be in order. But at least the lady in this commercial was operating somewhat inside the parameters of competence, unlike…

The Product: The Chef Basket

What It Is: A mutant deep fat fryer cage

How the Commercial Begins: “Has this ever happened to you?” A woman has just finished boiling some pasta(6), which is ready to be moved to the sink to be drained. Undaunted by the laws of thermodynamics, the woman grasps the handles of the pot — which has been living over high heat for 20 some odd minutes now — with her bare hands. Carnage ensues. As the metal begins melding with her skin, she screams, flinging the pot straight into the air, where it dumps onto her head. Now blinded by scalding water and covered in noodles and blistered flesh, she staggers, screaming, into the living room, where her children are watching Sesame Street. At the sound of her voice they turn, only to see this wet, bubbling, noodly monster shrieking, arms outstretched in their direction. Decades later, while in a court mandated therapy program, this is the moment her eldest son will describe as the turning point on his path to becoming “The Boiler,” a serial killer that terrorized the tri-state area by boiling his victims alive in an industrial cauldron.

…okay, I may have made most of that up. But the woman really does grab the pot with her bare hands, and then has the nerve to act surprised when it burns. Then she tries again, from a different angle in a different shot, doing everything but trying to pick the pot up with her teeth. Then the basket appears in the pot, and suddenly the world is made only of marshmallow peeps and rainbows because its handles, which have no direct line of conduction to the heat source, are somehow cool enough to touch! So this is a product which is, by all appearances, marketed toward people who don’t realize that hot things burn. Maybe they should all buy Ove Gloves instead! I hear you can paddle through magma with those things! I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea, draining pasta and such is a pain in the ass and a basket like that would probably be handy. Just maybe sell it on the clever parts, and not like your target audience was Frankenstein’s monster. “Heat baaaad! FIRE BAAAAAD!” Because colanders already exist, so you might wanna market against that. Just sayin’.

But the incompetence doesn’t stop in the kitchen, oh no, because there’s always…

The Product: Micro Touch Max Personal Trimmer

What It Is: A small piece of plastic that buzzes and occasionally removes hair

How the Commercial Begins: “Has this ever happened to you?” A man stands before a bathroom mirror, pondering the futility of his existence while attempting to remove hair from his already inexplicably clean-shaven face. Clearly suffering from some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, he reaches for a pair of full-sized scissors. Eyes darkening with the thoughts of his impending messy divorce, the scissors raise, slowly, every so slowly, until the gleaming tip of the razor-sharp rear blade rests gently against the base of one nostril. With one thrust, it could all be over. He knows this. He’s thought about this moment ever since the papers were filed…but he decides to try and trim his nose hair instead. Even that goes awry, as one snip too close results in a flash of pain, and a mild abrasion that will surely be a minor inconvenience for days to come. A look of supreme anguish flashes across the man’s face, frozen in monochromatic still frame, as he realizes that even in this, a basic hygienic function, he has failed…

Alright, fine, I’m embellishing again. But dude really does come at his own nostril with gigantic scissors and gets this horrible look on his face, which has some kind of weird Jim Carrey-esque elasticity to it, when things don’t go as planned. This shot is followed by him attacking the back of his neck with a straight razor, more grimacing, him shoving some kind of sharp implement into his ear, more grimacing…you get the idea. A man with the motor skills of a doped up chimpanzee has been given a tray of grooming implements and proceeded to injure himself in ways that I’m certain Amnesty International would be interested in hearing about.

Another flash add, this time of the trimmer, and suddenly he’s completely hairless! An alopecia areata patient on the rampage with a tray of sharp objects he somehow acquired! Not really, but I can’t stand this commercial so I’m trying to spice it up a bit! He uses the trimmer to fix his (nonexistent) unibrow, shave his (nonexistent) sideburns, and even shave his (nonexistent) beard before flashing a smug, shit-eating grin at the camera while a random woman paid to stroke his face earns her keep. It goes on to show him shaving his arms, his legs, and (I kid you not) his glory trail right on down past his waistband. The basic idea is unconditional “LOL hair removal.” Provided, of course, that like the man in the commercial you didn’t have any hair in these areas to begin with. Oh, also, it has a light! For…you know…night shaving. Except the light points straight out, on a product designed to hover above the surface that it’s working on, so…good luck with that.

Look, fine, it seems to show SOME hair that looks to have been previously affixed falling away after a pass with the trimmer, albeit one square centimeter at a time. But every review you find online says that it binds up every few seconds on even the finest of hair textures. I take this personally, because I grow steel wool. You can get the tarnish off the bumpers of classic cars just by having me rub my face against them. I can get the grease out of a casserole dish by rubbing Dawn into my beard and motor-boating the sink. I can’t even get more than two shaves out of the Gillette razors that are lined with the same industrial-grade diamonds they use to edge band saws with. My beard would yank this trimmer out of my hands and break it apart while I looked on in horror, just to send me a message.

I guess this commercial offends me more than the other two because the Ove Glove is ostensibly an improvement over a product that was shown being used properly, and the Chef Basket was a decent idea even if it was meant to replace the behavior of someone who apparently should never have been allowed in the kitchen, much less near a heat source. This thing is a downgrade from the options that already exist, with its artificial need being produced by a man all but ramming his face into an upturned lawn mower as a point of comparison. It’s hard to argue with that logic, right? “Micro Touch Max, it’s better than brutal decapitation!” Really this all comes down to my hatred of out of touch marketing, much less piss poor out of touch marketing. As previously mentioned, that’s why these offshoots of old school infomercials seem to be much more prevalent during the day. Soap operas and shrieking harpies disable your defenses enough that this might, MIGHT just seem like a good idea.

What was the point of this post? Well, I’d be glad to tell you. Just send $14.95 to the address on your screen now, the first 500 customers will receive an extra moral lesson at absolutely no extra cost, you only pay e-shipping, act now and we’ll throw in a tote bag, all this could be yours, your life is devoid of purpose without it, all your neighbors have one! Consume! CONSUME!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 – DVD box sets of the Jersey Shore and the decaying but still relatively intact husk of an As Seen on TV store will be all they need to justify having annihilated us to their media.

2 – Not making that part up…

3 – Just pay shipping and handling and processing on each separate unit, purchase implies user has agreed to continue to receive products on a 10 day billing cycle which their credit card will be charged for on an automatically renewing basis unless all products, UPC codes, packaging, materials, receipts, shipping invoices, and a lollipop are returned to Telebrands Plaza 48 hours prior to their arriving at your home, offer not good in any state containing an S, allow 6-24 months for delivery, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

4 – I try not to stack footnotes too often, but those assholes get a blog of their own soon enough. Which may cause fainting, nausea, diarrhea, anti-social behavior, thoughts of suicide, thoughts of homicide, thoughts of regicide, thoughts of pesticide, grazing, narcoleptic fits, and uncontrollable flatulence.

5 – And provide little protection against homicidal pasta-addicted cats that are struggling to get by after ceasing to be funny about 20 years ago.

6 – Do we really still live in an age where every cooking product commercial must include only women, usually operating in an “Aww shucks, I’m barely competent enough to do that!” manner? Are we really still deluded enough to think it’s only housewives in floral print dresses who are home in the middle of the day? Why can’t a man cut his finger on a raggedy old knife, or look on despondently as the stains in his favorite shirt just won’t come out? Huh?! Equality! Equality! Yeah, I’m not sure which side of the fence this footnote was supposed to be on, either.

Writing progress. Storyboarding, plotboarding, outlining, rummaging through Duotropes, setting up an Amazon Author Central page, showering multiple times a day because it seems to be the only place I can think sometimes, abusing the crap out of an unsuspecting Keurig one cup coffee maker(1), the signs are all there.

I even finally broke down and joined this century by asking for a laptop for Christmas. I try not to ask for seriously expensive things from my family, I’m one of the lowest maintenance holiday types you could hope for(2). But with the goals I’ve set for myself this year, if I don’t get an occasional change of scenery, my brain is going to begin oozing out of my ears like toothpaste.

The main problem is motivation. As I’ve stated many times before, often to a completely empty room, I hate writing. I love the process of creating, I love seeing worlds and stories and characters come to life in my mind, and the moment they develop a firewire cable that runs from your brain stem to a USB port on your computer and allows you to mentally dictate, I am going to put Stephen King’s prolific nature to shame. But until that day comes, there is a major bottleneck somewhere between my brain and my hands. I have no greater nemesis than an empty, white Word document screen(3).

I believe we learn from history, so I began analyzing my past. My most creative period, volume wise, was during my stint in New York. As far as I can tell, this could be attributed to any combination of three factors. First, I was stuck in a cubicle all day. Without exaggeration, I wrote a book on company time. Underworld University, the first volume at least, was crafted entirely from my desk. A monthly magazine’s production schedule, after all, is two weeks of run-up, one week of unadulterated terror during the publishing window, and then a week of everyone eating free lunches on the company card and pretending they’re working. It would have been harder for me to NOT write something, hence my LJ daily post average that was pushing 4 or 5 during some months.

The second and third factors were anger and spite, kind of intertwined and capable of being boiled down a la Carlin and the Ten Commandments to “Angst.” I hit New York in a very dark place and decided to see how far down that particular rabbit hole I could go, throwing in a healthy dose of sleep deprivation to act as an emotional random number generator. I felt like I had something to prove, I felt like there were people that needed to feel sorry for discarding me, I felt like if I didn’t get certain concepts out of my head via the written word, they were likely to chew their way through my sinus cavities and burst out of my eye sockets a la Aliens in the middle of a Scholastic staff meeting. Writing was survival, a necessary regulator, the safety valve on my pressure cooker.

But age and wisdom and perspective have diminished that to nothingness. Now I don’t understand people who hold on to anger, wielding it with the expectation of hurting anyone but themselves in the long run. My emotional empathy has become attuned to the point that I can’t even be near those people anymore for the intense discomfort the roiling in their minds provides me. And I’ve stuck around long enough now to realize that all the people who tried to make me cynical have done nothing but wallow in their own ineffectualness as human beings in all the intervening years. I have progressed and grown and achieved and failed and loved and lost and explored and found home. They have…um…been angry and…and yelled at people…and animals. Or themselves. Or coffee tables. Or abused themselves to the point of breaking down, then blamed their infirmity for not accomplishing anything more than they have. The ultimate retro-active self-fulfilling prophecy(4).

So it was an effective writing fuel, but it was a finite one, and one that tainted everything that came from that era with a fine, dusty layer of hateful fallout. Recently someone else read New York Minutes for the first time, someone who didn’t even know I existed back when the experiences that formed that book were taking place. Their appraisal was that it was very honest, fairly brutal, definitely angry, and a portrait of someone that was really only marginally recognizable as me. Which is kind of the point here, I guess. My formative writing years were kind of the fossil fuel age for my creativity. Cheap, readily available fuels that polluted the crap out of everything, but during which all the basic principles for transportation as we know it were laid down. Just like our cars now transition to hybrids, complex fuels refining the concept to make it better for everyone involved, so too must my motivation. But how?

I wish I could tell you. I’m still figuring that part out. But what I do know is that the laptop and a good cup of coffee seem to be helping already.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1 – Thanks to the name Keurig gave to their one-serving cartridges, you can now Google “K Cup” and get almost safe for work results. Almost.

2 – My father used to joke that if I didn’t tell them what I wanted for Christmas, I’d end up with nothing but a box of coal, which I told him was fine, because mom kept the house unreasonably cold anyway, which got both of us in trouble. Threats have been kept to non-flammable objects since.

3 – Before any writing elitists jump on me, yes, I do most of my writing in Word, not any of the fancy designer programs floating around out there, although I do have something of a fondness for Liquid Story Binder for light work. Why am I like this, when Word is such a dubious program at best? Scan through Duotropes or the Writer’s Market, pick any 10 markets at random that accept electronic submissions, and tell me what extension they’re looking for. There’s almost always going to be a .doc floating there. Have you ever tried converting from Word to another program, or from another program to Word, or heaven help you tried to take something in both directions? The formatting ends up looking like something you ran through Babelfish. And don’t even get me started on OpenOffice. If you’ve ever submitted something to a market using OpenOffice’s interpretation of a .doc file, my condolences.

4 – I invite you to perform this same thought exercise. Think of the five most toxic people you have known in your past, be it directly to you, or just a general area of effect malaise and cynicism that followed them around. Now find out what they’re doing with themselves. I’m willing to bet at least 4 of them are exactly where you left them, no better off than if only a day had passed. People like that try to break the world down because it’s easier than building themselves up, and they don’t have the will or the ability to put forth the effort to do that. Or, generally, the stones.

A few months back I began hitting the writing hard again. For the first time in a couple years, really, since my grand disillusionment with the whole process. As expected, my first couple efforts had some trouble finding footholds, partly because I was getting back up to speed, partly because I find myself increasingly disenchanted with the fantasy genre in the face of continued praise from friends and family and complete strangers for…um…everything I write that isn’t fantasy. Anyway, around the end of November I found a zombie anthology that was accepting submissions for a dead tree collection of brain-munching fun. And as anyone who knows me well knows, I brake for zombies.

So I abandoned NaNo and set about knocking out a 5000 word story for the anthology, leaving myself a full week and a half to finish the story ahead of the deadline. Then I got sick for a week. Then had a fully booked weekend. I don’t remember the exact timeline, but the moral of the story is, I was still finishing up the first draft at 3 PM of the day of the deadline. I wrapped around 4 PM, did about 45 minutes of frantic self-editing and cutting/rearranging to get it under the word count ceiling, had time to do one continuity sweep, and out the door it went. At roughly 5:20 PM. Until I got the confirmation e-mail later that night, I wasn’t sure if the whole effort had been completely for naught, but luckily this house has dedicated folks that were manning the submission lines until midnight that night.

Time passes, as the publishing industry moves with its usual glacial enthusiasm.

Cut to today, but only by crude technicality, as this chapter of things begins at 12:43 AM. As I am drifting off to sleep, a chime. An e-mail alert from my ever diligent phone. Normally once the elusive concept of sleep has actually begun to take hold, I ignore all such things, as to lose track of sleep is to surrender another two hours to attempting to bore holes in the ceiling with eye lasers I expect to manifest any day now. Something in my mind kept jabbing me though, until I finally gave in and punched up my account. The sender is one of the dreaded “Editor@[housegoeshere].com” addresses, which suddenly makes the internet serious business.

All I can see in the cruel, cruel Gmail preview snippet is “Dear Mr. Jeter: Thank you so much for your submission of the short story Category Five for…”

“Crap. They only ever open with a thank you in form rejections. Don’t they? Yeah, usually. But wait, it says thank you SO MUCH. You normally don’t get that ‘so much’ qualifier. It’s usually a dispassionate ‘Thank you for wasting our time, pissant’ sort of thing, isn’t it? Dammit, it is way too late for this!”

Because…you know, I had to let all that go through my mind first, rather than just opening the friggin’ e-mail, because that would have been WAY too easy.

*sigh…poke touch screen*

“…consideration. On behalf of the editors and the publishing house, I am excited to inform you that it is one of the stories that has been selected for the anthology.”

…

I’m back, baby! And I know that, having actually done this sort of thing for a living at one point, it’s probably unprofessional to be doing a chair dance, but I’ll tell you right now. Acceptance letters NEVER get old.

So…details on the anthology I will be appearing in to follow when I have them! Right now it is scheduled as Spring of this year, with exact date to be determined by editing schedule. The cover art is already done though, and it is schmancy.

Yay zombies!

It first started happening in my early teens I suppose. My trivia knowledge base was expanding, my vocabulary was creeping through the college levels and beyond, my body was figuring out what to do with all those awkward muscle groups. Then, before I knew it, at an exponential sort of rate, the tide turned. He was having to do his level best to keep up with me at things, and although he’s as competitive as the next person, seeing me get to that point, develop into someone who could compete with him, made him so very happy. Partly out of pride, I’m sure, but also for the sake of having someone around to give him a run for his money. Because it’s always more fun when you have close competition about.

I can’t express exactly how grateful I am to him for having gone with this approach. So many people these days seem to have such a sense of entitlement, this notion that the world owes them something, that they shouldn’t have to work for anything, that it should just be handed to them on a platter. And if that were how the world worked, then this life would lose what little meaning you can attribute to it on the grand stage of things. What’s the point of gaining anything as glorious as a dream if you didn’t have to lift a finger for it. Growing up with my father taught me that, his refusal to simply let me have anything instilled in me that bloodhound mentality where my goals in life are concerned. And sometimes I do flag, and falter, as we are all wont to do, but those goals have never been abandoned. Sometimes you have to rest, recover, re-evaluate. All the better to come out of the gate faster next time.

It is for much this same reason that I am grateful for functions such as NaNo, and the group of writers that it has brought together in this area. Normally putting two writers in the same room is like putting two scorpions in a box and giving it a good shake. It is a catty sort of profession, because deep down, somewhere, we all realize that there are only so many places in the sun, and every time someone else claims one, that’s one less pool of light for us. But the authors of the Macon area are just the right mix of selflessly supportive and operating in genres that do not overlap that terribly much. They’re genuinely glad of your endeavors, both as good people, and as writers who know that you’re not really muscling in on their territory. It’s funny how that worked out.

I draw this together with the parable about my father because it is in this sort of environment that a group of writers can really push each other, not out of spiteful racing to some shared finish line, but as people who share a commonality of ambition but different destinations. We can, and I feel we do, keep each other motivated out of a healthy sort of competition. Recently, one of our own signed a contract for a novella that she has been shopping around. Rather than feel jealous of her, or try to mentally break down her style as I have found myself tending to do with “authors” I have known in the past whom I felt were totally undeserving of any accolades that came their way (which would have been a moot point anyway, as she is quite talented), I was instead simultaneously very proud of her, and spurred along in my own efforts to get back on the writing horse that I dismounted some two years ago this month. It’s my hope that any of my own successes would be perceived the same way by the rest of this group.

There is a lot of talent here, ridiculous amounts for one region. Surely we have hoarded other regions’ shares of the writerly talent pool as well, which would go a long way toward explaining some of the forums on the NaNo website. I have every confidence that any one of us who pursues this as an avenue of expression will meet with some success, if not more so than we can conceive of at this moment, because there is a surprising amount of humility floating about for a pack of creative types. And it is my sincerest hope that as each of our writing credit sheets grow, the rest of us will take up the challenge of building their own, until, inexplicably and against all rationale, middle Georgia will actually become a seat of up and coming literary talent. Who knew we could even read!

So I am thankful for my group, my Macon Mooselings, and I urge you to try and find your own pack to run with, if you can. I know it can be difficult, see also the aforementioned scorpion simile. But it’s possible. And they don’t even have to be writers, just any sort of creative types will do. Immerse yourself in that world, in that culture, feed off of each other’s desires to actually contribute something to the stage other than sparkly vampires and formulaic prose. Find a group of people who feel that art can be more than it is now, and carry each other to that goal. A good support structure can make all the difference in the world, trust me. I am more motivated now than I ever was while wandering around doing the starving, misunderstood writer bit. And I’m wagering you would be, too.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Richard, you dashing rogue of literary and conceptual playwright criticism you, how on earth can you have a story with absolutely no conflict? What would be the point?” And I would laugh heartily in your general direction before slapping you about the head and neck area with a playbill, you wanton Philistine! That is the beauty, nay, the glory of this method of storytelling. There doesn’t have to be a point! Gone are the cumbersome days of plots and narrative devices! No more must we labor under the oppressive yokes of character development and chronological progression! Because of the groundwork laid out by the play that I witnessed tonight, these are all archaic concepts, notions of a bygone era when a play or a novel or a story had to be more than simply one’s recounting of your last trip to Kroger. It is the dawn of a new era!

Take, for example, the very first ten lines of the triumphant banquet set upon the stage this evening. The first family to arrive on scene, holiday parcels in hand, are beginning to load their car for the traditional journey to their grandparents’ house, when lo, it is revealed that their oldest son has failed out of college! In a lesser play, there may be wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and bothersome vexation on the part of his parents as to how such a thing could have happened. But no! In this, the new style, the seminal moment of the Character vs. Absolutely Nothing movement, not only do they not make a big deal out of their eldest offspring’s predicament, it is not even acknowledged! The events of the play move forward, because here, in this frictionless environment, this well-oiled realm of existence where no such conflicts take place, this is not a development worthy of our time.

For when your characters face the challenge of facing no challenge at all, anything becomes possible. The fifth and final family to enter the scene–after the four previous families have both entered and performed impromptu musical numbers, triggered by nothing, about nothing, impacting nothing, and most importantly conflicting nothing–are blessed with an abundance of children. Six adorable, precocious children, who in a world without the conflict of logic versus reality are able to deliver lines one would normally expect to be delivered by a 40-year-old woman. In an effort to temporarily stymie the delivery of such lines, the mother figure instructs the family that they must now be quiet for the next 500 parsecs on their way to grandmother’s house. That’s right, their grandmother lives 1630 light years away. They have ceased to conflict with gravity, such is the power of this storytelling method.

The next scene sees everyone begin to arrive at grandma and grandpa’s house, presumably after either a long and cryogenic stasis aided journey at several times the speed of light or a quick utilization of Hawking theoretics and wormhole generation. Or at least, that’s what they would have done in a world where reasoning mattered, but in this bold new frontier where characters no longer conflict with time, this house on a distant moon orbiting a planet in the Cygni-IX cluster is as nearby as the turn of a page!

…alright, you know what, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t even pretend to satirically lend legitimacy to what I saw tonight. Everything I’ve said up to this point was true, including the parsec line, but minus me sounding happy about it. Or the grandparents being aliens. Maybe. This was a play completely without conflict, devoid of character development, devoid of resolution, devoid of build up, climax, or denouement. Everyone is, at the end of the play, precisely where they were when you found them, as though a child had been playing with their dolls and studiously returned them to their places in the toy chest when he was finished. It is a piece in which five different extended branches of a Southern family come home to spend Christmas together, and everyone gets along.

There is made reference at one point that one sister is a Democrat and her brother a Republican, and they begin to have a political discussion. Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, grandma made cookies! Yay! There is a grandchild who has brought her Indian boyfriend home from med school, but will someone with such an ethnically different background than the family fit in? Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, they’re playing football! Yay! One son and his wife have adopted three African American children to raise as their own, but will their grandmother and grandfather raised during a very different era in the South be alright with this? Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, one of them won an eating contest! Yay! One granddaughter has married a Jewish man, and is going to to Temple for Christmas instead of church (wait, what?), but will a traditional Southern family find a place in its heart for Hanukkah? Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, they’re singing a song about the menorah! Yay!

I am not saying that the family has to be dysfunctional, I am not saying there aren’t families that are tolerant and accepting out there, I think that the world would be a better place if life looked exactly like what I laid out in the paragraph above. But there is ideal, and then there is idyllic, a fantasy land that goes beyond reasonable human expectation, especially where large family gatherings are concerned. If the play contained some other sort of conflict, another point of contention on which our focus could be lain, then none of this would matter. But there is no conflict, anywhere. This entire family just crawled out of Norman Rockwell’s anus and began singing musical numbers with little to no provocation while holding hands and swaying in time to Osmond’s holiday albums.

To pretend that all of these characters are exactly the same is to do them a disservice. When you put that many diverse elements into one family, it seems a little forced to begin with, a bit of an odd coincidence. But if you made the message that they are all getting along in spite of their differences, differences that exist but do not have to be divisive, then the tone is one of hope and inspiration. This play did no such thing. The differences were never even pointed out, no one batted an eye, no one asked a single tough question all night. Now we have overshot tolerance and have gone into a ham-handed territory where the characters were obviously not written to be ethnic, or multi-cultural, or multi-denominational. They were simply cast that way, in a base and demeaning attempt to rainbow up a play that is extraordinarily Conservative Caucasian Christian in delivery and dialogue alike. It is crass tokenism at its most nauseating.

Speaking of nauseating, Norman Rockwell’s Anus is, so far as I can tell, a vanity piece project from a playwright who has essentially just had a two and a half hour long conversation with herself through the subjective consciousnesses of approximately 358092374210 different characters split into roughly 893242 family groups. They all have the same voice, they all use the same phrases, even the children and the adults could have their lines interchanged without any obvious variation. It’s as if Quentin Tarantino directed a community theater troupe in dramatic re-enactments of your old family holiday videos. And most of these characters will remain on stage at the same time. Often talking over one another as three different scenes play out simultaneously on stage. And that right there is all you need to know about this performance.

To have that much action going on at the same time on the same stage is an admission, inadvertent though it may have been in the fevered mind of the author, that absolutely nothing going on at the moment is vital. You can, and through the writer’s concession probably will, miss at least a third of all the dialogue taking place, and this will in no way negatively impact your understanding of the storyline. And since the majority of the play is delivered in precisely this fashion, one can then infer that the play, itself, is not important in the slightest.

Further consider this. In most editing courses, one of the earliest lessons they teach you when deciding what does and does not belong in a story is to ask yourself, “If I were to remove this scene from the entire work, what else would I have to change?” If the answer is nothing, then you should probably leave that bit on the cutting room floor. By this logic, I could have taken this entire play, dramatis personae to curtain call, and effectively edited it by lifting it off the desk and depositing it directly into the nearest waste bin. Though to be fair, I would likely have hired an illiterate person to carry this task out, to limit the chance of a human being exposing themselves.

While the previous figure may have been a slight exaggeration, the play does have roughly 25 characters with large enough parts to be billed. This is not unheard of for theater, though still a bit on the high side. The primary difference being that in most plays, any given scene contains a chunk of the cast, the presence of characters ebbing and flowing, their individual prominence determined by their place in the story. I’m not kidding when I tell you that all 25 characters in this play will be on stage at the same time for almost the entire show. Fun fact, the human mind can only hold five to seven pieces of information in short term memory before that knowledge is either converted to long term memory, or pushed out by another piece of information rushing in like a big, squishy Newton’s cradle of gray matter. Ten minutes after the play ended, I could already only tell you three character names. It is a sensory overload of simpering sameness.

The only thing that even begins to pass for any sort of struggle in the entire performance is the grandparents trying to decide if they want to sell the house next year and move into a retirement condo, thus bringing to an end a run of traditional meetings at their house that stretches back to the very dawn of time itself. This primary conflict is mentioned four times the entire show, and is resolved in five minutes by their son buying their house, out from under them, moving from offer to closing in 24 hours, using a realtor and bank apparently willing to work Christmas Eve night and into Christmas Day. Maybe that’s how they roll 1630 light years out. I dunno.

There was so much more I wanted to come here and scream about, there was so much more sticking in my head, roiling around, threatening me with impending aneurysms. Something in my neck actually twinged so hard when a group of the younger girls came out dressed in skin tight penguin outfits for a completely non-sequitur musical number that I temporarily lost feeling in my right hand. That’s how bad this play was. I suffered neurological damage with physically manifesting symptoms. But I can’t remember enough of it now. It’s already fading. Just a large wall of suck, a wrinkle in my brain I can never get back.

I want to write a play in rebuttal. It will have only 12 characters, because the rest of the family couldn’t be bothered to show up. Six of the characters will hate the other six, and vice versa. Someone will be addicted to drugs. Someone will be openly gay and constantly fighting with his alcoholic father while his mother attempts to keep the peace. Someone will have children out of wedlock and will be pointedly ignored by the grandmother the entire night. The police will eventually be called to break up a knife fight that erupts during the carving of the Christmas ham.

Will it bomb around here? Absolutely. But I will feel like an agent of cultural karmic balance, restoring reality to the stage.

And then I could option it out as a prime time show on the CW.

I have been in accidents before, but never as the person behind the wheel, and only in one other I’d qualify as more violent than this. I’d never actually seen the road disappear, turned a steering wheel ineffectually, had to try and go through my full defensive driver checklist in the span of 1.2 seconds, or watched as an airbag exploded directly into my head. All of these things I can now describe in minutia. Most people have always told me you don’t remember a thing. I remember every last millisecond. I can even tell you what I was thinking. Maybe I’m wired funny. Maybe it’s actually because I’m a writer. Even as the truck was spinning, my mind was furiously scribbling down notes. “If we live through this, this is going to be AWESOME detail fodder!”

I left the apartment during a break in the weather. I’d even checked the radar to confirm I wasn’t just in a sucker hole. It was still drizzly, but I do not fear the drizzle! There were papers that needed dropping off downtown, and lunch that needed to be acquired. Everything was fine, another day in the slog, until I hit the Sabbath Creek Bridge just past exit 167.

On a gray, rainy highway with a gray, overcast sky, everything runs together. Highway and heavens merge into one gloomy, monochromatic sheet, and any large collections of water become very difficult to discern if they haven’t been disturbed recently. Ironically enough, I was being the one safety conscious driver in the inclement weather that day, traveling 60 mph in the right hand lane while all of Macon shot past me in the left lane, going somewhere between 75 and Mach 3. The final car in traffic had cleared my left front quarter panel about 10 seconds before things got bad.

As I approached the bridge, I felt a sudden resistance against my tires, and knew I’d hit some standing water. I could feel it shuddering beneath my feet. The driver’s side wheels were in it, too. Lord knows how deep that meant the passenger side tires were. I made no sudden adjustments, either to direction, or to speed. Once you hit water like that, you are basically fording, and the best you can do is hold course and hope it turns out alright. On this particular day, it did not.

Ford Rangers are incredibly light back-end vehicles. If your rear tires lose contact with the road, even the driver becomes a passenger. Mine did. I hit the water, and physics said, “Haha! Mine is an evil laugh!” My truck replied, “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” and began turning sideways. The steering wheel never even moved. Tire direction meant nothing. I was a water bug at that point, skipping along the surface of a small pond without a care in the world. Except ponds have banks, which beget solid asphalt once more.

When traction returned to my tires, I was fully perpendicular to the road. The lane divider line was running underneath BOTH my front tires, which it is generally agreed is not an optimal position to be in. My rear tires were on the shoulder. The truck still thought it was going 60. And the only thing ahead of me was a concrete barrier with a 15 foot drop off the other side. The slide had actually finished taking me on to the bridge itself, almost exactly halfway across to be precise. Impact was inevitable. There was no braking distance between the nose of my truck and the wall, and speed reduction isn’t really an option without friction anyway. There was not enough space to compensate for my full turn radius. it simply became a matter of how I wanted it.

Turning the wheel right would have put the onus of the impact directly on my corner of the truck, likely causing the most damage to me but giving me some chance of maintaining control of the vehicle afterward, provided I was conscious. If I could drive it in at enough of an angle, the force would bring the side of the truck up against the wall for the secondary impact, pointing me in the right direction to drive (of a sort) the last 20 feet of the bridge and pull off into the center median. I had a hard time getting over that “most damage to me” bit.

Turning the wheel left would have deflected the bulk of the damage to the empty passenger side of the cab, but the rebound and need for immediate direction compensation would have surrendered what little control I had left of the vehicle and sent me spinning back out across two lanes of highway, on which more traffic was closing in fast. Less damage to me in the short-term, until someone not paying enough attention broadsides me on a yet-to-be-determined side of my truck, and now we’ve got a multi-car accident.

Not turning the wheel at all, while a bit of an odd choice at first blush, would distribute the force equally across the largest surface, allow the entire front crumple zone to do its work, and whatever force returned to the truck would be a little like driving in reverse. Just…you know, really fast, with compromised steering, a deployed airbag, and a little head trauma.

So, still going about 55-60 mph, I drove face first into a concrete bridge barrier.

I turned the wheel to the left just as I made contact, using only my left hand to stay clear of the airbag space. The theory was that this might give the truck’s recoil a little spin in the proper direction to still be facing flow of traffic when all was said and done. Also, I figured if my tire was going to get locked in to a direction by impact, it might as well be pointing toward the nearest side of the road and a proper escape. Funnily enough, this (or sheer dumb luck) worked as planned.

I came off the wall and back into the left lane, going the right way, and was able to wrestle the truck, still very much in the throes of Newtonian madness at that point, to the end of the bridge and ten feet beyond, where it proceeded to die in the left lane and would not restart. Not four seconds later, cars were going by me on the right.

Had my accident happened 10 seconds earlier, or four seconds later, I would have taken someone with me. I lost control in the ONLY empty pocket of traffic I had seen the entire day.

The cab was filled with smoke and talcum from the airbag’s explosive release. My ears were ringing a bit, and while I was aware enough to do a quick cognitive memory test, I was also dazed enough to fail it. I knew my bell had been rung, but I was coherent, and I had things I needed to be doing. I paused for a moment and focused on my body.

I tasted blood, but spitting on a piece of paper I had with me revealed nothing but saliva. There was nothing screaming at me, there was no familiar sensation of blood loss, a full and deep breath using all of my diaphragm brought no discomfort, toes wiggled just fine, fingers OW Sonofa… Right arm was fine. Left wrist was very unhappy. But it had been the brave soul that had stayed tensed on the wheel to make the final course correction, and had thus had the most traumatic ride. Full range of motion in my neck, full swivel ability at the waist, knees cooperating. I got off light.

I needed to get out of the truck. I also needed to call 911. My phone had been in the passenger seat, serving as my mp3 player. Luckily this meant it was connected to my tape adapter, leaving a corded trail to its precise location in the floorboard. The collision itself had apparently been carrying some serious right-side lateral force with it. My glasses had flown off my face and settled in the back right corner of the cab. The drink that had been in my driver’s side drink holder was upside down and wedged into the front right corner of the passenger’s seat floorboard. It was also dumping its contents directly onto my iPhone. Crap.

I quickly recovered it from where it lay, face down in a spreading pool of dark red liquid. The symbolism of this did not escape me, even in the moment. I expected the faceplate to be shattered, or the back to be staved in, depending on which side was facing outward when its flight came to an abrupt end. There were no more scratches on it than there had been before. Physically, it was completely intact. I dried it off, hoping against hope. I pushed the home key. It lit up, flickered a moment, then stayed lit. It was as dazed as I was.

Phone in hand, I began to evaluating exiting the vehicle. One thought kept going through my head. “You are sitting in the left lane of I-75 going 0 mph, someone is going to hit you any second, and today is going to get so much worse.”

But the phone had already been wet enough to be potentially functionally compromised, and it was now pouring down rain again outside. Decisions, decisions. Using side view mirrors, I saw that traffic had already slowed to a crawl around me, the rubberneckers serving as an unexpected but welcome natural retardant to anyone who might be oblivious enough to come barreling into me, unaware of what was going on. I guess they are good for something. I decided that, natural flow of traffic sufficiently obstructed, I was good for a few moments more.

Dialing 911, I noticed that I couldn’t hear the push tones like I normally could with my volume turned all the way up. I said hello to myself, to make sure I hadn’t overlooked some hearing loss, but the old ears were good. The phone was having sound issues. Mainly in the earpiece speaker. I had to strain to hear the dispatcher, but I got my message across. She even complimented me on the sheer level of detail I gave her as to my exact location. It seemed like the sort of thing that would help my cause. She assured me that help was on the way, disconnected the call, and I turned my attentions to the driver side door.

I pulled the handle with a protesting left hand and leaned into it. Five degrees of give. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Then the screeching wail of metal on metal. Ugh. I checked the scene outside my passenger door, but that was an exit that led straight into traffic. Slowed and voyeuristic or not, I had already tempted fate once today. Instead I shoulder checked the driver door once again. Maybe another five degrees of give, and then it was done. The paneling had been compressed into the door frame itself. Luckily I’m somewhat scrawny, and definitely bendy. I wormed my way out through the gap after one last unsuccessful attempt at cranking her up, and began walking through the rain back toward the barrier I’d hit. I didn’t go to the front of the truck, because I honestly didn’t want to know.

A few people rolled their windows down to ask if I was okay. I nodded mutely at them. I think. Mine was a mind with a thousand things trying to run through it, and only ten checkout lanes open. The scene on the bridge was…vaguely terrifying. I could identify pieces of headlight housing. Shattered lightbulbs. My deer whistlers. My Ole Miss front plate. What looked like a chunk of radiator housing. Pools of iridescent fluids slowly running off with the rain water. And then my bumper. My front bumper. The whole thing. I assumed this marked my point of initial impact. It seemed to hold a place of primacy on my trail of twisted debris. And god was it twisted. The lower lip of the barricade and torn it from my truck, and the force of the impact as it carried through had turned it into a double helix of sorts, the DNA of a very bad day.

I don’t know why, standing there and looking out over the dropoff I had avoided plummeting over by the grace of a well built concrete guard rail, it occurred to me I had other people I needed to call, too. I began the march back to my truck, picking my way through my own shrapnel minefield and marveling at how fascinating I had become to the people of interstate 75. I was grateful I’d left the door open, either by remarkable bit of foresight or by complete lack of caring, venting a good bit of the noxious gray dust out into the obnoxious gray day. They would get along splendidly. Crawling and squirming my way back into the cab, now safely cocooned on the right by a completely inert line of traffic, I called my father and gave him the details. I assured him that I was fine, more relieved than I expected to be to hear a genuinely concerned voice, and asked if he could act as a buffer between myself and my mother, who I fully expected to have a coronary and try to find a way to blame me for what was, in essence, a very unfortunate physics word problem brought to life.

Then I settled in and waited. About thirty seconds later, there were blue lights in my mirror.

“That was fast!” I remarked to myself.

Haha.

This was not a police officer, but in fact a Department of Natural Resources ranger. He asked me if I was fine, parked his car with lights on 20 feet back to prevent further pile-ups, and invited me to sit in his cab while we waited, since my vehicle was not about to pass any safety inspections any time soon. He called dispatch to see if there was an ETA on the deputy. It was at this point I was informed that, due to the location of my accident, there was some argument going on between the Macon police department and the Bibb County sheriff’s department as to whose problem I was going to be. And to that effect, no one had actually been dispatched yet at all.

“I could pretend to be injured, if that would help,” I offered. Ahh, humor as a defense mechanism.

DNR officer and I had a nice little chat. I found out that he was on his way to a funeral at 2:00, and offered to let him get on his way, assuring him I’d be fine. He’d hear none of it though, and insisted on staying around until the scene workers could get there. After a few more minutes of awkward small talk, because what do you really say at a time like this, there were more blue lights in the mirrors. Hooray, the deputies were here!

Haha.

It was another DNR officer, checking to make sure everything was okay. There would even be a third before the first relevant authority figure of any sort would make an appearance. And the one that did, a member of Macon PD, asked if I was alright, helped me put my bumper in the bed of the truck, made a snide comment about the weather and how this wouldn’t have happened if I’d have had a Georgia plate instead of an Ole Miss one, and left.

Haha.

About 10 minutes later, approx. 35 minutes after the accident, the Bibb County Sheriff’s Department arrived to actually do the report. They only beat my parents, coming in from Warner Robins with about 5 minutes less warning, by a handful of moments. He did not ask me how fast I was going. He did not ask me what I thought had happened. He didn’t even go look at the point of impact. He got my license and my insurance card, sat in his car for about 10 minutes, waited for the wrecker’s to arrive, then said I was free to go. No citation, no…anything, really. Just another weather statistic.

The truck was totaled, but by a handful of variables that lined up just right, I am not. The front end was pushed back about a foot. The radiator was destroyed, the engine block cracked, the front axle bent. The battery actually came up and out over the side of the hood space, so that you could check its expiration date without moving or opening a thing. The seatbelt and the airbag both did their jobs marveously. I’m not even sore this morning, save for a left wrist that is still not happy. I got to see some of the best (the DNR guys) and worst (everyone else) of civil service. And I get another story to tell.

But you know what my first thought was, once the motion stopped? My very first thought?

“Dammit, I just changed the oil in this thing last week!”

Le sigh. Oh well. Goodbye truck, you were a loyal transport these last four years.