Speech! Speech!

Once again, my life is further proof I should not be exposed to strangers.

As part of my servitude to The Law in general and UMDLaw in specific, I must participate in the Clinical Law Program for a semester. Most of the class options involve direct representation of clients. Naturally, I opted for one of the choices where the emphasis is on writing. Thus, tobacco control, i.e. mistake number two (Mistake number one having been enrolling in law school. Amazing how mistakes compound themselves).

On Tuesday, professor K.D. tasked us with meeting with delegate J.C. in order to get him to sign on to our flavored tobacco legislation project. Note that we are against it, not for it, a mistake that several have made in the past. So, after some basic preparation, and a good hour of wasted time while it got pushed back, me and L.G. met with J.C., K.D., and K.D.’s assistant, M.S.

If I’d tried, it could have gone worse on my end, but not much worse. I coughed the whole time, the throat itch exacerbated by the stress of the situation. I initially attributed it to smoking, rather than allergy related asthma. This made K.D. cringe, since it seemed like she made me smoke for the class. It was my choice, not hers, so that shouldn’t have made her put her head in her hands (the patented cringe response).

Further, I babbled, hit all the coughs and uhs in all the wrong places, clammed up, seemed like a basic fool. It was a mess; L.G. carried the presentation.

So what is it that freaks me out about speaking intelligently to people I don’t know? I have no problem, given the right mood, to make a complete ass out of myself to strangers. But you give me a topic to speak about, and no matter how prepared I am, I just fall apart like a house of business cards.

Part of it is the fear that I’ll have to speak to these people again. Generally, when I act like a madman, its fleeting. They’ll never see me again, I can pass like wind as easily as I break wind. Ironically, even though I know a lot of the time, these people I’ll never see again, somehow, when speaking, I feel a fear that I’ll have to do it again. Yay irrational fears.

Part of it is just being the center of attention for extended periods of time. Again, though they’re probably thinking about other stuff, like grocery lists or how I look naked, it seems like I’ve got their full attention. And that’s scary. For five to ten minutes, I am, for all intents and purposes, their world. What they know is what I know. What they feel is based on what I do (and could result in severe boredom). Who wants that responsibility, live?

Note the hypocrisy, in that I want to write, and in essence, create worlds for people to experience, yet I can’t/won’t do it face to face. That live sensation is too overwhelming.
Hell, if I was telling you all this right now face to face, I’d probably be very embarrassed and blushing a bit.

Calm Down

“Follow me.”
“I’m stuck.”
“Heal yourself.”
“I’m dead.”
“Let’s retreat.”
“Let’s regen.”
“Back up.”
“This way.”
“I’m stuck.”
“Come back.”
“Still stuck.”
“Lemme level.”
“Wait up.”
“Hurry up.”
“Slow down.”
“Damn it.”
“Shut up.”

This is how we play games together, cooperative style.

***

I didn’t actually have a weekend. The person I was pretending to be (i.e. not me) had a fairly relaxing weekend. Let’s discount sleep time, since that’s special K time. During the weekend, in one way or another, I pretended to be: a massive mutant made out of metal, anoter mutant able to move objects with her mind, an elf whose horse companion is constantly threatened with death from on high, a player in the National Football League, probably a third-down/change of pace running back, maybe a punt returner. As it stood, for about three to six hours, I was actually just me, getting reading done.

People have always pretended to be something that they are not. Go watch a play. They’re like movies, only live, with better dialogue and fewer special effects. Lot more expensive, but that’s because no one ever watches them. Go watch one. Trust me, you’ll like it, or I’ll refund the money you paid for my advice (offer not valid within my lifetime). We lie to others and to ourselves, crafting simple or elaborate personae in order to make it through another day. Sometimes, I feel like I’m just a multifaceted crystal, slowly twirling in the light, reflecting different frequencies and images with each passing second.

Have our increased capability for imagination and leisure in the manner contributed to a weakening of the self and self-identity? Psychiatrists make great livings diagnosing and treating the problems of the psyche today. They might not have done so five hundred years ago, or would have just consigned someone to the asylum with a bit in their mouth. If I’d gone around telling people that I had pointed ears and my horse was in constant danger, then perhaps they would have put a bit in my mouth, told me that as long as I wanted to be a horse, I could be a horse in the dungeon.

We have more time, and yet there’s so much more to do. Any free time has to be that much more relaxing by comparison for the most part. Hence, high energy partying, high energy video games, high energy music, high energy alternatives. Becoming something we aren’t to relax. Am I trying to indict our high tempo society? Yes. Its fun to do something different once in a while, but to continually need it to calm down? Its like putting gasoline in a car to get it to work once you’ve driven it 400 miles, when all you had to do was keep adding fuel in every 200 miles.

Aloha Vegas, or Why I Almost Never Returned to Maryland

“Ten dollars. The bottle was designed by Versace.”

Ten dollars for a bottle of mineral water which poured out about six water glasses worth of overpriced liquid. G.B. stated that it tasted worse than tap. I couldn’t tell the difference. Red Square’s waitress/wine steward told us they didn’t drink tap water there. So, neither did we, until we found out the price.

Ten freaking dollars. Aloha Vegas.

***

E-mail ping pong commenced several months ago, concerning G.B.’s bachelor party. I kept up with the comings and going insofar as that I read the emails, then forgot what I read. It didn’t seem real. G.B. and N.F. were getting married. G.B. needed a bachelor party. Someone decided that it would be in Las Vegas. It sounded surreal, but I still bought a ticket on Independence Air and waited for the date.

Come Sept. 16, and I had to drive from Burtonsville to Dulles Airport (IAD) in roughly 2 hours. My mother asked me over and over if I’d taken off early (I had not). K.C., sitting to my left, called me on the appointed day, asked if I’d taken off early (I was overconfident in Google Maps time estimate). So, as I kept getting stuck in traffic, I realized that this wasn’t going to happen, my gut instinct screaming out that I wasn’t destined to go to Vegas. Of course, I arrive before K.C., meeting S.B. (the planner) in the departure gate.

The plane ride carried one amusing note. At one point, they’d distributed snack packs while I was sleeping. I awoke to the chaotic strains of unwrapped wrappers tinkling and crackling. Being awoken pissed me off, which I didn’t realize. K.C. later told me he’d never seen someone yell at a stewardess in the manner I did, asking for a snack pack, then glaring at her as she failed to get me one. He feared that I was going to go insane.

As we flew across these continental states, tiny globs of electric light scattered across the ground. That cities were visible as little more than pinhole dimes testified as to how high we were. We approached Vegas, and the sight stunned me. Granted, we’d come much lower, and the strip is filled with brilliance, but the spread of lights, like a thousand lit Christmas trees, consumed the tiny window.

Aloha Vegas.

***

Myself, K.C. and S.B. met B.F. at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. B.F., tired of waiting, unable to access the hotel room, checked his bags and proceeded to lose $120 in the casino. This theme of loss would trail throughout the weekend like cigarette smoke permeating the casino atmosphere. Since S.B. reserved the rooms in his name, his presence, and his alone, could grant access, his credit card a magical talisman exchanged for our own access cards.

The rooms embodied luxury. Soft, supple mattresses, yet firm enough to bless one’s back with comfort over the night. An expansive bathroom with a standalone tub, shower stall with glass door, and two sinks set in a marbled fixture. Giant mirrors everywhere. Even a recessed toilet with telephone so they can hear you, but can’t smell you. And the view, oh the view, of the Vegas Strip and the mountains in the background, clear as thought, precious as a newborn.

Soon after, we meet up with E.B. and G.B. The six of us decide food is a must. We wander the casino, searching for food. E.B.’s impulse led us to The Noodle Shop (read; The Wrong Answer), an Asian noodle restaurant of the type which is in vogue among the glitterati, We waited in line for half an hour, and yet another theme reared its perfect sculpted hair, taut clothing, and toned bodies.

Yes, the women. Even standing in line, exhausted and not sure of what we were doing, I could still notice the parade of beautiful women, even through the shimmer of extra oxygen pumping through the casino. All these women had bodies carved with the Greek gods as models, and the money they spent on their chests was money well spent. To paraphrase the cheesy pickup line, I hated to see them go, but loved to watch them leave. As soon as one left, two more would walk in. Vegas is little more than a female revelation.

The matron, and only non-asian employee in the restaurant, seats us after half an hour. We then proceed to wait another half hour for our order to be recorded. At one point, we flag a buswoman down, ask if we can give her the order, and she responds she will get someone more competent than her. Yeah.

The order arrives after another half hour, and our waitress distributes the food. However, when she gets to G.B., rather than a bowl of noodles, she proffers a plate of egg rolls, leading to this exchange:

G.B.: “Uh, that’s not what I ordered. Where’s my food?”

Waitress: *some unintelligible response about it not being ready*

G.B.: *shaking his head, frowning* “Oh, that’s not the right answer.”

The food wasn’t even that good. G.B., seething and uncomfortable, chose not to tip our server upon departure.

We make plans to head out to other casinos and sample blackjack. First on the list, New York New York. Single deck blackjack results in not a single win over four reshuffles. Multiple deck is not much better, and S.B. loses $20 to a dealer that does not know how to count money. End result: New York New York sucks sucks.

We walk down the strip to the infamous Bellagio. At this point, it is around 1:30 A.M., and the Strip continues pulsating with raw energy, vivaciousness, life. What the moon cannot illuminate, the artificial lights flood with thousand watt fury. Without having to strain my eyes, I can make out naked women on escort cards, scattered all across the streets. Only tiny stars hide their shame, if they have any left. Surely I do not after having been in Sin City for a few hours, as I continue to look, at the cards, at the people, at everything in sight. A buffet of sights for my law school-starved eyes.

The Bellagio in one thousand years, should it survive the millennium, will serve as a shining example of architecture. Opulence made tangible, then desiccated and distilled into its purest form, would not represent architecture quite so well as the Bellagio. I know not the terms, but I do recognize high ceilings, understated cream colors, marble pillars, everything that makes you feel poorer than you ever have, yet richer in soul for having experienced it. The $100 minimum bet blackjack tables didn’t hurt either.

They do have a Casino War table, with $10 minimum bets. This plays just like the youth card game. If your card is higher in rank than the dealer’s, you win. Lower in rank, you lose. If you tie, you either surrender your bet, or double it and go to the tiebreaker, three cards down, one card up. Win or tie here, you win the doubled bet. I chose to lose $60 in ten minutes here. Such a foolish game, and such a foolish player.

Hereafter, we need to go to sleep. We start trudging back to Mandalay Bay, all of us having incurred gambling losses. E.B. wanted to take a taxi back down the strip, but the maximum number of riders on a taxi is five, and we have six, necessitating hiring two taxis. We walk back, and E.B. is enraged. “I don’t see why we’ll spend twenty dollars on blackjack like its nothing, but we won’t spend twenty dollars for a taxi.” We were all pissed, and no one wanted to “lose” even more money.

Bed time was 5 A.M. Saturday would bring a great many more surprises.

Aloha Vegas.

***

Four hours of sleep. Four hours spent not gambling. Four hours spent not conscious in Vegas. Four hours lost, four hours too many. I wake up to the muted sounds of S.B. typing work onto his Blackberry keyboard. Nothing like dedication, except death perhaps. I stumble into the shower. The water hitting me is like a diamond stream covering me in a new, bolder skin. How the hell do they do it? Do they lace the water with drugs?

Myself, S.B. and B.F. wake up, and we go upstairs to awaken E.B., G.B. and K.C. To our surprise, K.C. awoke around 7 A.M. to start gambling. K.C. is more hardcore than a petrified eaten apple. While he proceeds to blow money on the poker tables, we go to the Bay Side Buffet (insert Saved by the Bell joke here, Hey Preppie). S.B. leads us to the V.I.P. line, which we didn’t quite belong in. They let us in, and we proceed to gorge for the next hour and a half. The most amusing aspect, when they brought out bowls of their fresh, sweet mixed berries, we converged like vultures on carrion, despite the fact that only B.F. is a vegetarian (we all like meat).

Thereafter, I retire to the room to use the toilet, and fall asleep for an hour. It would have been longer, but housekeeping kept knocking, damn their efficient hides. Still slushed in the head, I stumble out to the Mandalay Beach. Wave pool, sand, lounge chairs, even a slow floating loop. More beautiful women. Of course, there were also children and men, but I didn’t see them. I only saw women. Beautiful.

Back inside the casino, the oversaturated oxygen fools me into gambling. $40 on slots, $70 on blackjack, all in a combined thirty minutes. Damnation. If I am a gambler, it is only with the work that I put off to come to Vegas.

Somewhere during this period, J.F. arrives, having driven down from Colorado Friday night. Fourteen hour drive. With our party numbering in the sevens, we set out to commence G.B.’s bachelor party proper. After an ill-advised meal at the Border Grill (we were still full from the buffet), we head out to Sapphire, the city’s largest strip club. A converted gymnasium, it may very well be the largest strip club in the world.

The inside lobby contains several bronzings of naked women in various acrobatic poses. As with any other work of art, the need to touch the nipples is almost overwhelming. Were the large men in suits not watching us closely, I’m sure I would have violated the bronzings several times. Past them, there sits a very large wine case, much like beverage coolers in convenience stores. Very well stocked, and as we would later discover, high quality.

We exchange $30 for entrance into the club. As usual, the bouncer glances at my driver’s license longer than usual. It has to be fake, I can’t possibly be twenty-five. Inside, we find a giant room, larger than a school playground, stuffed with flesh, clothed and un-. Two circular stages equipped with poles sit astride the central elevated stage. The central stage sports a clear floor, acrylic? Glass? We cannot tell, but we do note that the seats beneath must be the most expensive in the house.

Sapphire is topless only, but that hardly discourages us. These women are not perfect, they dance for money, and most have had extensive surgery to achieve their current body state. However, in the dark, assaulted by pounding dance music, they are as perfect as we want them to be.

We do get fooled into buying a booth for $80. It turned out that in order to remain at a booth, we would have to purchase a bottle of wine from the house. The cheapest bottle cost $275. I dared not read the wine list, for fear that I would scream, and no one would hear me. Luckily, someone managed to get two tables next to the main speakers, so we would be deaf, but we had a place to sit.

After a couple of hours, the constant smoke and thumping music faded into the background. How could you notice it with all the naked women walking around as if this were a locker room for schoolgirls, dominatrices and whores?

K.C. gets a dual lap dance from two strippers. All of a sudden, he is following the two of them to the back room. He decided to spend an aggregate $520 to get a half hour with them, $200 for each stripper, $120 for the bartender. He returns smiling wider than the Grand Canyon.

Over the course of the night, E.B. has been refusing to receive lap dances, as he lost $600 at the roulette tables that day. Still, the environment wears away at his granite resolve, and he gives in. Somehow, this stripper places his hands on her breasts. We are amazed at his mad skills. This breaks the floodgates, and he receives several more dances, all the time doing things that the rest of us could not even hope to try without getting kicked out. This began the greatest twenty-four hours of E.B.’s life.

A couple more hours pass, and we decide to leave around 3 A.M. Right before we leave, I receive a lap dance from Miko, an Asian girl who was extraordinarily nice only until I told her I gave her my last $20. Might I say, I wanted to bring her lower body with me to Maryland, if I ever returned.

We roll out, the water alone having cost $7 a bottle. Since most of the after-hours events had cover charges and were starting to wind down, we return to Mandalay Bay. After a bit of wandering, we situate in front of the lingerie store, which is having a live lingerie show. Of course, the omnipresent cover charge is in effect, and the beautiful women entering also leave almost immediately, so we choose to sit outside and watch the people enter and leave.

One man walks by with an entourage. Nothing special in and of itself, but someone asked, “Is that A.C. Slater?” We discuss the myriad possibilities (really just yes or no), and he turns back to look at us. It was Mario Lopez. Leaving a lingerie show at 4 in the morning in Mandalay Bay. A.C. F****** Slater. If we could have made it past his bodyguards, we would have either said “Hey Preppie” or “Why did you cheat on Ali Landry you fool?” After a few more minutes, we call it another night.

Aloha Vegas.

***

Sunday, 9 A.M. Football starts in an hour. I wake up. Its time to watch football, I will not be kept from my football. I go down to the Sportsbook, for they have a sandwich shoppe, and the wall o’ sin. Forty feet high, covered in giant LCD screens, alternating television programming and updated odds. However, many of the choice seats have been taken, so I go over to the Coral Reef sushi bar, and sit at its projection screen plus four plasma televisions. Five games at once, and thankfully, Ravens/Titans not on, so I wouldn’t have to suffer to their loss. Everyone else wakes up to go to the buffet. I go meet them, and we stumble upon E.B., who has been playing slots all morning, resulting in his being up $1000. Wow.

They go eat, I watch football, and E.B. continues gambling. I get a call later, the decision has been made to hit another casino. We go find E.B., who now has a stack of $100 chips as tall as my hand from wrist to fingertip.

Aloha Vegas.

E.B.’s method is to bet on two of the three columns. Since it pays out two to one, if he wins, he gains 50% of his total bet. If he loses, he loses 100% of the bet. Statistically, the house will have an edge, since 0 and 00 don’t pay at all. However, for every loss, he wins five or six times. It doesn’t take long for me, G.B. and B.F. to put money down and start betting along with him.

Over the span of this, the pit boss is starting to notice him. She gives him a comp card, and they retroactively comp him for time spent gambling before he got the card. She asks if he wants to be a dealer, asks what he’ll do with the money. They are starting to track him like hawks.

E.B. is a bit nervous. At one point, I have my chips on the table in neat little stacks. He reaches over to place a bet, his hand shaking so hard he knocks my stack over. Later, it hits us that E.B. has been betting $1000 and more on each spin of the wheel. It merely looks insignificant due to the nature of chips. At one point, a sexy Eastern European woman walks over and places a $1200 bet on black. $1000 of it is in $100 bills, and looks damned impressive. She loses. Later, her boyfriend pulls out $1700 in $100 bills, bets on red, wins. It looks so damned impressive, then we realize that E.B. has been doing the same for the duration of his gambling.

Of course, all good things must come to an end. E.B. hits a losing streak, and G.B. and I stop. B.F., however, thinks that it can’t end like this. He proceeds to lose his $200 over seven or eight spins. It was a sad sight, but was the epilogue to E.B.’s ascension to V.I.P., and our ascension to entourage of V.I.P.

We break, I walk around, watch some football. We later find out that E.B. has been comped $900. At the comp desk, G.B. asks how much he has in comps, and the desk replies, “You have nine dollars.”

The front desk person tells E.B. to wait for his boss. He picks up the phone and says, “Yes, he’s back.” Juliette walks over. She greets E.B. by first name, then acknowledges the rest of us, and just ask quickly returns to E.B. Mentioning a slot tournament at the end of the month, she offers to book his room right now. He just wants to spend the money ASAP. So, we receive some menus, and G.B. is given the option of food of choice. Naturally, it is steak. We set off for Red Square, the vodka bar/restaurant.

While changing, I realize my clothes are all rumpled. I attempt to borrow a button-down shirt from G.B., and end up looking like I’m wearing an art smock in elementary school.

In Red Square, we get seated, and the waitress/wine steward tells us about the mineral water, without telling us about the price. Then, we order a round of Patrone tequila, then a $50+ bottle of wine. Appetizers, and the entrees. I ordered the filet mignon, seared to medium rare perfection, inside pink, tasting of raw meat, yet still carrying the gravy’s flavors, resting on a bed of potato puree (mashed potatoes), surrounded in a sea of gravy. G.B. and E.B. purchased the surf and turf, notable for the lobster tail and filet mignon.

I can still taste that immaculate filet mignon on my tongue.

Finally, S.B., K.C. and I had to leave for the airport. Our flight was at 11:20 P.M., scheduled to arrive at Dulles at 6:50 Monday morning. Upon arrival, I drove up to Baltimore for my 10 A.M. class, but had so much time that I was able to stop for a shower and shave, and get breakfast from Chick-Fil-A. The weekend had so spoiled my palate, I tasted the breakfast, and thought, “Well, this is swill.”

For the rest of the day, I had gibberish notes, hadn’t learned a thing, was still sick, but had had one of the best weekends of my life. Congrats go out to G.B. for the impending nuptials.

Aloha Vegas.

Topical Ointment

Has everything already been written about? No. New technological innovations enrich our lives, and science fiction will always have something new to discuss. Those historical events which have yet to come have not yet been written about. Fantastic settings yet to be created burble and simmer in the fecund minds of children and adults, bare daydreams brushing against different worlds. So long as people continue to be, there will always be something new to write about.

And yet, these will rehash the same themes. Someone once told me that there are only four things you can write about, and I only remember two: love and journeys. I suppose discovery would be three, and four might be lost love? Whatever the four overarching themes, they reflect the core of human existence, or human existence as we have come to define it over the course of our collective existence. So, yes, everything has already been discussed.

Not everything has been exhausted. People still write, contributing to the human experience. Not a rehash of the old topics, but new twists on the age old themes. Consider homosexual literature. Society has never quite accepted homosexuality. Same-sex erotica, judging by the bowed bookshelves lining small D.C. bookstores, is burgeoning and more widespread than it would have been two hundred years ago. Though the same topic (love, lost love), it introduces new facets to the jewel of literature. Has there ever been a society before that pseudo-celebrated lesbians (aside from the celebration of Sappho of Lesbos)?

We all view things differently in our lives, perhaps by necessity, for without that diversity of opinion and judgment, we would all fall into the same pigeonholes, become as vanilla as ice cream. At the same time, all of our viewpoints are quite important, for they are unique, and shall pass from the earth along with you (and yes, you will die. Having had to drive with a 16 year old who won’t die has only affirmed to me my all-too-real mortality). People sometimes think that they have nothing interesting to contribute to the canon, if there even exists a canon. Bullcrap. All of us has something to contribute if only we are brave enough to make an attempt to contribute, to write, to express, to create.

Come Together...

Belated Huzzahs go out to C.E and J.E (nee J.O.)!

Here is where I should vow to post more often, but we see how that goes.

Legalistic Regimentation

I have bucked like a wild stallion against the bridle my legal writing professors wanted to affix upon my head, and my grades reflect this. Damn their structure, damn their eyes. Legal writing’s ultimate goal is to produce a clear and concise document, one which states the information a judge or justice would require to render a decision. Legal writing succeeds, though with a caveat: once you’ve been trained in the Esquires arcane ways, only then will you be able to read one of these documents with velocity and comprehension.

There is a new trend in legal authorship to strive for clarity over “hithertofores,” “henceforths,” “wherewithals,” and other strangulating terms. However, this trend fights the old school, those entrenched lawyers trained to construct ponderous sentences using dense language. No one knows which side will have its day. However, consider that a clear document can be understood by anyone with a passable educational history, while an incomprehensible document requires, and deserves, a lawyer trained to muddle through the verbose morass. By its very nature, legal writing eliminates much of the populace from reading it, much less enjoying it.

Legal writing is also highly structured. Introduction, where you introduce the work. Roadmap, which walks the reader through the main points you will address within the work. The body, each section dedicated to one of the main points you addressed in the roadmap. Conclusion, a summation of the main points addressed in the body. Bam, bam, bam. You are done. While this makes a document easy to search through, it also leaches a document of imagination. Though the arguments within the paper might be clever, they will generally follow the same structure. You will state your conclusion, state the applicable rule/law/statute, analyze and apple the rule/law/statute to the situation at hand, and restate the conclusion. Again, great for when you need to find information, hell on creativity.

You want to know everything up front. I don’t. I want to leave something for the reader to discover. I want to engage the reader, not spoonfeed them rotten applesauce. For them, the judge or justice has neither time nor patience, and wants information now. There is a good possibility the judge or justice may not even read the entire document, choosing instead to flip to a certain section, read a page or two, then move on. Though no one will admit it, I’m sure some of these readers don’t bother to even read some of the briefs that cross their desk, having made their minds up beforehand, only requiring the briefs for form’s sake.

For me, I hope my audience, the leisure reader, wants to have a little fun. Someday, I hope they’ll pick up my book and read it because they heard it was a good read, and will remove them from this world for a little while. I hope they’ll reread certain sections because I shocked them, or because of a deft twist of phrase, or just because they want to reread it. I hope they never even think of me, because the world I crafted was so real, to them, I don’t exist, only the world does. And if I should write starting at the end and work backwards, or if I should desire the book printed half upside-down, or if I choose to publish in binary characters, I hope they would appreciate the decision to deviate from the main road, as long as it makes sense (I would never publish in binary until our new robotic overlords overthrow the government).

Is Fluffy Bunny real?

Fluffy Bunny hopped through the forest. Fluffy Bunny felt sad. Fluffy Bunny had missed the summer fair. All his friends left him behind. Mama Bunny made him clean the entire burrow. Fluffy Bunny had enough. He hopped back to the burrow to collect his carrots to throw at everyone.

What does this tell us? Fluffy Bunny (a bunny), is sad at being left behind. His mother forced him to clean the burrow. Fluffy’s frustration will manifest in the form of flying carrots.

Big whoop.

We’ve heard this story a million times before. Hell, I think I live Fluffy Bunny’s life over and over again. Who cares about Fluffy Bunny? I’ve told you everything you need to know. There’s nothing left for you to discover.

Now, consider:

Fluffy Bunny limped through the forest, his ears drooping, not even bouncing with each hop. His once plush coat sagged, matted with dirt clumps and broom bristles. Mama Bunny wrapped Fluffy Bunny’s forepaws in soft cloth after biting out the pricking broom splinters. He couldn’t even bother to wipe away the sweat beading above his eye, or the tear welling in it. When he arrived at Grover’s Shift, it was deserted. He looked at the long tree shadows, realized he’d missed all of them, and that the fair must have already begun. Sighing, he started limping back to the burrow. As he stumped along, his ears started to draw back. Sharp breaths rushed through his teeth. Faster and faster, the soft cloth dyeing crimson, he galloped back to the burrow. He’d kept his carrots beneath his bed. They’d soon find out.

Same Fluffy Bunny as before, but at least now, he’s a “real” bunny, insofar as anthropomorphic bunnies exist. We can see his post-cleaning exhaustion, his missed-friends and missed-fair dejection, his burgeoning vengeance. We can also see that I have problems in making an angry anthropomorphic bunny. It hurts that reading contains no visual component, aside from the printed word. You may see facial expressions, gestures, appearances in your mind, translate the picture into emotion (as you do everyday), then commit it to paper. You have to disconnect those wires, just transmit what you want them to perceive. You are a conduit, telling a story. Once you get control of that, then you can start interjecting with what’s happening.

“Show, don’t tell” plagues nascent writers. “Fluffy Bunny is angry.” “Fluffy Bunny is tired.” “Fluffy Bunny must destroy humanity.” So easy. So boring. The audience is not straitjacketed and drooling onto padded walls. They are vibrant, curious people (I pray). They want entertainment, challenge, escape. Sure, you can come right out and say that Fluffy Bunny planned to ruin the fair. Or, you can describe the twinkle in Fluffy Bunny’s eye, and the carrots bandoliered across his puffed-out chest. There’s always the danger they won’t get it, but is it not the greater danger you don’t engage them at all?

Unity!

Congratulations D.C. and M.C. (nee M.L.)!

Back to the regular stuff next week.

I'm Done

Endings are hard. They seem easy when you crap out ten pages about the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, moreso when Professor Historicalbore wanted twenty. So, you keep adding here and there, paragraph on similarities between Roman conflicts and East/West rap conflicts, paragraphs on what it means to you to be Roman, whatever. In the mix, you forget about the conclusion, or even worse, you add pages to the conclusory statement, and just struggle forward, belaboring the same concepts and ideas you just talked about last paragraph, which summarized the same concepts and ideas you discussed over eighteen pages, which in turn plagiarized different sources in the name of research. And this was a structured work.

Endings scare me. I’ve always thought of stories as long snippets from a larger context, and not the Twilight Zone episode when the child zapped his town into Limbo. You should know something about what you’ve written, beyond the boundaries delineated by your paper/computer. Think of sculptors carving out hair on statues that stand flush against a wall. Who would see the hair? They do. You’ve got to anchor your story to something, though it float freely upon the sea of ideas when someone else reads it. Then, you have to cut it out of your larger latticework, set it free to work on its own. Your ending is like saying goodbye to your baby, but it also gives your work independence, self-sufficiency. Its hard to say goodbye, but you eventually have to.

(I wanted to work in an umbilical cord metaphor here, so I googled “umbilical cord clip.” I clicked on the first link, which dealt with reworking baby dolls to appear newborn. I screamed.)

At what point should you, do you end a story? There are so many ideas to transcribe, and you’ve invested so much time, and now you want to get out? Somedays, I want to live with my little bastards. Disconnect from the real world, plug into the fake, walk among my creations. Somewhat related, climax and anti-climax. Once you achieve the high point, you should end soon, unless you want people bored for two hundred more pages. How can you ramp down everything within a short amount of text?

Sometimes, the problem might be that you don’t know where you’re going. Nothing wrong with that. It might have started with an image, maybe a cat falling from a building, not landing on its back. Then, you see in your mind a brick tied to its back, and a child laughing from the fourteenth floor. Then, the brick isn’t just a brick, but a PDA, and the owner is looking for it. Then the garbageman enters, and after a few days of research, takes the cracked device to his poor but talented hacker friend, and you rush off from there. How did you get to that from a cat falling? Who knows.

One way to end, just go home. Finish where you began. Show how your protagonists react to changes in the beginning, or how they’ve changed, and those reactions to the beginning. You might try ending everything on mundane notes, showing that there’s nothing particularly special in each ending. Give the action, and move on. You might try constant cliffhangers, keep the audience engrossed, waiting to see what will happen next, and see what happens if you end on the biggest cliffhanger of them all. (and drive them nuts). Start with the ending and work backwards, like mystery writers, so that you can leave all the clues and there are fewer untouched plot threads. Sometimes, you just have to put the pen down, say, that’s it, deadlines are tomorrow, I can’t do anymore, it ends here. Just like college papers.

Damnable resolution, damnable human desire for resolution. I say we need more beginnings. From now on, instead of wrapping up stories, just use them as opportunities for new beginnings, plain and simple. Nothing will ever end, everything continues forever. Let us all defy the natural order of things.

Speak Up

What do I sound like? I don’t remember. Probably a lot worse than I sound when I talk in the shower. In the shower, when I’m talking to myself, I sound confident, self-assured, a bit insufferable in an acceptable way, only because I’m so good. I’ve just recorded myself reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and damned if I don’t have a childish/child-like timbre to my voice. Damn.

How many of us truly know our own voice? When I was still one of The Chosen, they threw the cliché at me a lot. “Find your voice.” Thanks, that’s real helpful. They never really followed it up with anything, just “Find your voice.” Not only did we get sent off into the literary desert to find our voice, we had to determine what the hell a voice was. I love direction, especially when it’s all cardinal directions at the same time.

I liked to think that voice meant style. Find your writing style, the little hooks and tricks that bookmark your writing as exclusively your own. In effect, this meant you had to develop your own serial number, so if someone stole your work, you could readily identify your own writing with a simple comparison to past work. Finding your voice meant getting insurance against plagiarists. Problem is, the best insurance against plagiarists is crappy writing. You don’t copy off the D students, unless you were the F student.

We were writers, damnit. No, excuse me, authors. We were authors. Writing is too commonplace. Anyone can write, but how many people auth? Not too damn many. I always forget that there’s something mystical about writing, something the ordinary person can’t comprehend, much less embrace. So, maybe there’s something more to voice than just mere style. Perhaps some unique quality all my own that cannot be discovered until I stop looking for it. If that’s right, then when I stop looking for it, then I’ll find my voice. For the first time.

Then, you have to take into account the vocal component. Your physical voice and literary voice are so intertwined, like the snakes on the caduceus, to develop one and let the other rot is like raising up one child by having it stand on the back of the other. Some people believe your writing should be of roughly the same quality as your normal speaking voice. Hence, the key to finding my voice is elocution lessons, and never to use slang ever again, unless it fits the story, which it might not. Unless it does.

There’s a possibility that voice doesn’t exist, and they’re justifiying our education through a snipe hunt. Maybe what no one has realized is that we all write the same, and the only difference is word choice, word order, punctuation, organization, etc.

So, we don’t know what voice is, but we don’t need to in order to find it. Just start writing, and keep writing. Write until you want to throw up on the page. Write until it your words are just vomit on the page. Keep going. You’re bound to get better. Voices may not be as unique as fingerprints, but they’re probably all special. Just keep writing, and learn from the process. Even if you’re just writing a bus schedule, or a business letter, keep on plugging away.

As I sit here trying to conclude this, I remember just how hard conclusions are. This leads me to the topic of the next entry.

A Boy and His Blog

Why “blog?” Why not “webl?” Because Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down (commence dodging to-mah-toes).

Why am I blogging? I am a functional mute (sometimes, I wish I were a literal mute, but that’s for another day). Sometimes, I need to say something, and am unable to speak the words which would express the ideas. As a result, I retreat to my notebook, shredded and compressed from the finest rain forests, and frolic amongst its leaves. Maybe that effort isn’t enough. This third novel attempt is brimming over, boiling with ideas I’ve been having for the better part of two years. How many people to date have read it? One. The net effect is the same. My words fall upon eyes glazed over, having read the words several times over already. I know what I’ve said, sometimes even before its been written.

Are my ideas so important they should be recorded in a semi-tangible state? Probably not, but that’s the miracle of the internet. It makes valuable information accessible by the masses, and devalues widespread information. Instant Publishing. Countless voices are given a digital soapbox in the digital ether. There’s a satisfying mystery surrounding the possibility the world at large might hear you. However, there’s also a strong responsibility inherent in making your thoughts available to others. It forms a pseudo teacher-student relationship with the reader, and the teacher must assume a teacher’s responsibility. While I dare not delineate firm the limits of those duties, allow me to propose enlightenment and encouragement as the two most important, at least for me.

Given that plenty of everything/nothing blogs concern themselves with everything and nothing (can that subsequently be considered concern if we treat them so lightly?), by this point, we’ve exceeded the original scope of this Hello World. Certainly, if anyone were to start a blog to enlighten and encourage, the politically-slanted blogs would be the ones, doing their damnedest to help the world see their political views are correct. I can assure you up front this will not be a political blog, for I don’t know jack about politics. To be fair, I don’t know any Jacks.

What I do pretend to begin to claim a partial proficiency in is the writing process, and even then, I’m a gardener with rusty shears, trying to prune through the briars and thatches of my own writing, hopefully producing some sort of literary topiary, pleasing to the common reader as well as the aesthete (How’s that for attempting to convince you I’m competent AND modest?).

How do I intend to enlighten you? Many of you have never attempted to write a novel, but I would hope all of you have desired something so deeply it makes you suffer. Love hurts, and the writing process hurts. Somewhere in the intersection of the two, I stand sweating blood. I’m going to make an attempt to record my insights into the “writing process.” If nothing else, it will show you a new form of suffering.

How do I intend to encourage you? Simple. I am no longer as good a writer as once I was. Oh, I may be proficient in legal writing. Introduction, roadmap, topics one, two, three, summation. I can follow the forms like a martial artist performing a kata from rote muscle memory. But the creative spark has fizzled like a candle in a vacuum. I’ve allowed my skills to lay fallow in the field for far too long, and now I reap naught but withered sprouts and too short stories. However, the field still bore crops, no matter how tiny and insignificant. As I travel along the path, attempt to rediscover my “voice,” hopefully you’ll be encouraged to also write something.

Good ship blog, with this bottle of Thunderbird wine, I christen thee Writ. Come on, would you waste expensive champagne on a ship’s hull? Ok, would you waste it on a blog?