Cracks

The second entry today is a story I wrote as an assignment. The assignment was a two page story that uses dialogue, has two characters and one location. The location has to be symbolic of their situation, one character has to want something from the other, and it has to be in third-person objective. That means no thoughts or feelings, just what an observer could see. I wrote it in past tense at first, thinking that it'd be more traditional, but I changed it back to present tense because it felt more urgent that way. It's called Cracks:

“It's getting worse out there.”

“What?”

The boy looks at her then back at the horizon, a liquid sun in peril of drowning beneath a sea of jagged black. “I said it's getting worse out there,” she says after following his gaze. She shrugs. “That's what my mom says.”

She watches the way he chews his lip, the way the embers in his eyes die all at once. He watches the mountains turn from silhouette to coarse purple waves, like the uneven vertebrae of some great distempered beast.

“My mom says we'll be fine in the suburbs,” he says at last. “My dad's gonna move out there.” He looks at her on the wall beside him, at her little hands fiercely gripping bony knees. She looks down at the mortar between the gray cement bricks of the wall.

“I thought they didn't love each other any more.”

He shrugs. “You should tell your dad to move out there,” he says fingering a crack in the cement. “It's safer. Maybe you could live next door again. The school is really nice. You'd-”

“Do you think they'll have school next year?”

The boy looks back to find her looking down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap. He clears his throat and looks at the mountains again, pulling his knees up under his chin, wrapping his arms around his shins, and rocking gently on his perch. “I hope so,” he says. “I'd hate to think of not seeing Kim anymore.”

A light in the house behind them winks out, and the girl droops her head slightly. The boy stops rocking and rests his chin neatly between his knees. A cat in a nearby yard runs up a fence to call to the night.

The girl lifts her head. “I should go and help him with the sheets,” she says. She looks behind them at the house and thrusts her small chin out.

“Yeah.”

She looks at the older boy beside her and blinks once, twice. “Promise me something?”

“Hmm?”

“If it gets real bad, don't come back here.”

The boy bites his lip and focuses intently on the mountains, his eyes rapidly scanning the horizon. “I'm sure you'll be fine. You're not far from-”

“Promise,” she pleads, watching his face.

He looks at the house before them, turning away slightly to do so. “I promise.”

She wraps her arms as best she can about his chest and knees, then she presses warm lips to his quivering cheek. “Good night,” she whispers and climbs deftly from the wall into the yard behind them. He croaks something that sounds like a farewell and turns to watch her walk into the house, tears overflowing onto his cheeks and dripping onto his neck and shirt below.

After a few moments the shaking subsides and he drops silently from the wall and into the opposite yard. Just outside the back door he turns back to the line of cement blocks stacked high against the night and wipes his sleeve across his nose, cheeks, and eyes.

Free Association Poem

Two entries today. The first is a poem that I wrote using only phrases from the free association exercise I detailed in the last entry.

The Melody of a Life Unexpressed

Bring to life the faded sacrifice to

stretch against the steel, watch my own films,

listen to my own music for a split second.

Waking, pressing my ears closed, listening to

my breathing as the world sleeps, a room

full of the fear of success, fear of money.

Every song, my voice, the melody of

a life unexpressed, steamy breath, mint and

science, the oppression of death, feeling paranoid.

Goddamn women. Smiles, eyes, teeth,

nipples, laughter, attention, comfort, annoyance

and a possible reason for insecurity, catching them.

One-Man Media Empire

So I met Troy Duffy today; he wrote and directed Boondock Saints, a film I love. He came and spoke to my Writing the Hourlong Drama class. Actually, before I get into that, when I first arrived my teacher introduced us to Fritz Monahan, a producer at ABC, and he was INSANE. He went on a crazy tirade every few moments.

One was about how he once sold a television pilot for a shitload of money and then spent two years in Costa Rica drinking pina coladas and living with four monkeys. Another was about how he pitched a show called Middlefingerlina, which is like Thumbelina's horrible spoiled sister and the producers had him thrown out of the building. A third was about how he's working at Disney to produce an animated feature about Frances Farmer.

This guy was nuts, and he kept yelling at members of the class, telling them how they should be taking notes and that moving to Hollywood, yes, that's the best way to make it if you want to get stabbed in the back by your friends. Then he told a story about how he took way too much acid by accident and got pulled over and the cop let him go. Turns out he was a comedian named Bob Rubin that has a role in Boondock Saints 2 and he was just pulling our legs. Hilarious, but also a bit nerve-wracking.

Then our teacher introduced Troy Duffy and he mostly just answered questions, since he said he was better at that. He was really quite clever and well-spoken, and he told us that his father made him read the classics when he was a kid and just wanted to play outside until Catcher in the Rye. He said to his father, "This book is much better than the last one, but I don't know why." His father pointed out all the symbolism to him, and that kind of changed his life.

He recommended Salinger and an author by the name of Tristan Egolf, I believe, and then he asked what authors we liked. The girl who I think is a terribly clever writer had brought her husband to class, and he was wearing a Boondock Saints t-shirt... Anyway, she raised her hand and said David Morell, and Troy Duffy said, "What is that? Like teeny-bopper type stuff?" It was kind of mean, but he's a bit of an elitist, I guess. I'm a book snob too, so I can relate.

I didn't raise my hand, but I should have. All I could think to ask him was if he was shooting on film still or if he'd converted to digital. I was nervous and everyone else was kissing his ass so hard. He clearly didn't want that though, and he had a lot of really good advice on writing and persevering in general. Apparently BS cost six million to make and made over 100 million, but he was fighting a financially debilitating lawsuit with the production company and didn't see a penny of it for five years. He got really depressed and was having second thoughts about wanting to be a writer/filmmaker. Man, I can understand those. It didn't at the time, but now it occurs to me that if Troy Duffy can do it, I can do it. I've got what it takes.

He also said that it doesn't take much to get someone to watch your film, just contact them and ask them if they'll watch it. I got to thinking that maybe I'd contact Manohla Dargis at the NY Times once The Passengers is done because she loves New American Realism. We'll see. Eventually he was done talking and more people kissed his ass, and then he signed posters for everyone. I wasn't going to get one, but I decided I might as well since I was there, and when I told him my name, he drew an arrow on mine to one of the characters. Then he told me how one of the characters in the flashbacks to the 1950s is named Noah.

I like Troy Duffy. He's a cool guy. I wished him luck with the film and then rushed off to my Creative Writing class wishing I had said more, wishing I could have said something to make him think, "Hey, this guy here's got a sharp mind." Oh well.

We had Creative Writing outdoors today, and I had a minor meltdown. We were asked to write for ten minutes about what we'd miss when we die, and it really fucked with my head. I was already feeling the familiar oppressive suffocation I get whenever I think of the long road to success in any of my desired careers, and now I was thinking about the things I love being gone. It was nearly disastrous and I almost wept openly. Here's what I wrote, verbatim and completely intact:

When I die, I'll miss shade and breezes, shaving too, because although I hate it, it provides a change. I'll miss the opportunities I've passed to lead a meaningful life. I'll miss the colors I've never been able to see fully, the beaches that I've always wanted to love as much as others seem to. I'll miss the chance to be like someone else, someone I find more useful and productive than myself. I'll miss the chance to die a glorious death whose echoes cast reflections throughout time and cause people, seeing them, to say, "Hey, there went a man who didn't seem like much, but was deep, and thoughtful, and kind, and had so much to give to a world that he seemed to have found unworthy of any meaningful contribution, but perhaps he was just afraid to be average." I'll miss the chance to be ordinary and helpful and essential, and I'll miss the people who would be proud even to know someone ordinary and essential.

Then I drew a puddle into which the above paragraph was dripping. Afterwards we had to share some of what we wrote or something that we'd miss. I just read the line about colors and beaches, since it was safe and I probably wouldn't cry reading it. Then everyone else talked about their boyfriends and puppies and mothers, and I felt even more useless and fatalistic. Anyway, after another exercise more along the lines of word association, I found my mind was occupied and my melancholy much improved, but a racing of my heart persisted.

She gave us back our poems and I got an A on Placeholder, the personal ad poem. I felt so damned relieved. I even stuck around to talk to her about it, and clarified some of the lines, and we worked out exactly how it could be perfect with only a few wording changes. She got everything about it, how it starts out with a super cliche romanticized idea of love at first sight and evolves into him eventually loving his "in the meantime girl" so much that he's ready to disappear into the desert with her and stop waiting for "the one" to come into his life out of the rain. I was so happy that my subtlety was coming across so well. Goddamn, it feels so good to be great at something and connect with people in a meaningful way with my foremost talent, even if it's poetry, a subgenre of that talent I'm not entirely enthusiastic about.

I almost blogged from my phone on my way through the parking lot I was so happy. I'm gonna revise it right now. I wrote ten excellent pages of The Passengers yesterday, I'm gonna finish Sandcastles and Red House, and I'm gonna finish another short story and try to sell it. Maybe I'll submit Placeholder to the poetry contest at school. Shit, then I have to record this song and get a band together. Maybe it's possible after all for me to succeed and be a one-man media empire.

Sound and Fury

I'm so tired. I need to close my eyes for a moment, but every time I do my heart races and my mind becomes a horrific landscape. I've just seen an image of my father bleeding from his chest. I've just heard my mother screaming at me. I hear voices whispering strange nonsensical things and some part of me loves it. I can't stop writing these things down. I think maybe they're important for some reason. My brain is falling apart, and I need to write a poem.

Depressed Again

Rascal's doing better. I went on this site tonight called meetup.com where people with similar interests can join local groups that have get-togethers and stuff because my friend told me I could meet girls who write or are into video games and stuff like that. All it did was depress the shit out of me. I don't even know why. I just keep thinking, "Have I really become that guy? Do I really need to start going to 'activities' to meet people? And if so, can I actually get over my anxiety and go to any of these gatherings?" I don't know. It was awful. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want the best and most social parts of my life to be over and still have not done anything productive with my life.

Anyway, then I searched for "sex" on that site, just to see what kinds of ridiculous orgies people set up, or if that's even allowed, and sure enough there were swingers groups. And one of them was like, "only for people who can distinguish between sex and love" and that depressed the shit out of me, which was only partially my conservative upbringing's response to the state of the world. Mostly it was because I once again was confronting how far behind I am in almost everything in life. Yeah, so it's one of those days and I'm supposed to be writing a poem but I wanted to write something about a little kid, maybe because I was happy when I was little. I don't know. I think I'm going to copy and paste this whole email into my blog, because it's less of an email and more of me just feeling hopeless, desperate and sorry for myself. Sorry. Fuck.

The Little Master (Part 1)

The little master awoke and put an unsteady finger to his lips, then his cheek, then his hair. He tenuously rubbed the corners of his eyes, digging recklessly until the last of the sharp irritants were purged. The ceiling above him was gray in the dark, and the water stains cycled swiftly through their reticent routine of shapes at once familiar and abstract.

He raised his head in silence and looked down at his feet, mysteriously uncovered by the night, his tiny toes wiggling at him. He wrinkled his nose at them and let his head ease back onto the pillow. He shut his eyes and forced his head further down into the fluff, until the edges of the depression closed about his ears. The sounds of the room became quiet and oppressive, and his breathing became obscene and enveloped his thoughts like a furnace, burning away the last impurities of dream. After a few revelatory moments the maintaining of this posture became difficult and uncomfortable. He relaxed his neck muscles and the room awakened once more.

The big clock on the wall, ticking steadily, confused him, and while he knew with enough time he could understand its meaning, the hands by then would have surely moved and he would have to start over. The digital clock on his bed stand was much faster, especially in the dark. 2:08am. After some very basic arithmetic he decided that school was a long time off, even though six hours was still a mostly abstract concept to him.

The door was closed, and no light seeped in beneath it, but soft blue-gray moonlight from the large and shadeless window on the opposite wall cast a large cross-shaped shadow on the green bathrobe hanging upon it. A blue shirt with green stripes and a pair of black pants sat upon a wooden chair in front of the closet. He remembered the day before, his mother asking for his approval before removing the shirt from a plastic hanger, him nodding his head absently.

He no longer needed to check under the bed before setting his small feet upon the ground; he was much too grown up for that. He padded softly on the warm wooden planks, heated from below by the furnace pipes. A yawn yanked at the corners of his mouth and set his thin tongue in retreat and his small, sharp teeth to glinting wetly in the moonlight, as he rounded the corner of the bed.

One small finger stretched the elastic of his underwear and let it snap back audibly against his skin. He repeated this passively until reaching the door and placing one hand on the brass-colored handle and turned it. The hallway was darker, but when he reached the stairs, the light coming from the windows in the living room made traversing the wooden steps easier.

Frankenweenie

Rascal had surgery today. There is a huge incision with stitches on his eyelid, and all around the eye is shaved. He looks like the Terminator. Or Frankenweenie. Here's a bad poem that I just cranked out to turn in tomorrow and to revise extensively later on in the semester.

Placeholder

Until She walks through the front door

of my eccentric record store, exasperated

and drenched, to stand wringing

her hair onto the laminate floor

in drops and waves together, shining,

our eyes locked upon each other, I

have need of a placeholder.

Placeholder, noun: someone whom

I may tolerate, endure, possibly understand

occasionally, find typos with and engage

in repartee. Someone to cook for, whose

biological and sociological needs may come

first. Someone with whom I can completely

disappear into the desert, where it never rains.