The War in the Son...

I'm used to dealing with opposites. I can deal with most of the confusion and such that rises out of it. Wasn't always that way, but I guess maturity had to take some form. Case in (professional) point - I had material for three books. Realized I'll most likely never force myself to be still long enough to write them, so condense the basic points enough to make one, fairly cohesive (if metaphor addled) novel. I still doubt if it's anything that could go big - but my views on the importance of that changes day to day, so what can you do?

Another example: My office nickname. I found it out yesterday (05.25.2011). To set the scene, my sub-boss' nickname was Flounder, from the movie "Animal House" - an eminent fuck-up whose arrogance and possibly criminal underpinnings made me feel better about myself. My nickname is "Kaczynski" as in Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski. This is because I wear a hoodie at work, as the office is kept about as cool as late autumn. While I'll admit to being an angry person, and at times a very strange person, I'm not a violent one. As I've often pointed out, I'm a (mostly) honest coward. I get it, though. Most of the folks around the office that call me that remember the Tylenol Murders, so the fear of the man (if they ever felt is) is way past the sell by date. You have to make fun of it, or it owns you. You have to wear the monsters' skins to make sure there's a zipper. If you can't mock something, you have no business taking it serious.

I work with highly experienced, well trained people. I was trained by a spineless backstabber who it appears (going over his files and records) was possibly involved in low level fraud. I can see why they need the excuse to make fun. Tiny little pissants have given birth to larger monsters before. If you think A.Anderson was bad, look at Goldman. If you think Main was underhanded, check out Haliburton. And the former always started from something smaller. You have to put on the monster's skin. You have to convince yourself that it's not you.

Recently...frankly, I feel myself beginning to lose patience with the whole wretched affair. Most of the people close to me who aren't family and know about the Trip are excited for me. Those in my bloodline - or closer to the blood line than to me...they've expressed their doubts. Most of them are the elders - guys and gals my parents age. And my parents, too. They don't see the point of it, I guess - or they do, and they don't like it.

[...]Here's a story I hate. Late summer, 1988 or 89. I'm in the backseat of my dad's old blue coup, and we go driving through Fairless Hills. That's the town where I spent my first nine months of breathing my own air, and mom and dad both liked to drive by the old house and see what the "new" owners were doing with it. I was three or four at the time - I remember this because dad retells this story from time to time. I remember the car. That's really it.

Anyway -- dad asked me if I was doing alright, since I was having nightmares. I told him that there were Asian people in the trees. And that we were shooting at them and they were shooting at us.

When my dad told me the story later (it stopped being a thing in my late teens - around 2001, of course), he went into Edgar Cayce, and reincarnation. For a First Vatican Catholic, my father has always seemed to know a lot about reincarnation - a couple of times he claimed his interest in the Titanic was because he never got off the boat, and when we went to see that stupid James Cameron flick he had to walk out towards the end. Whatever was working on him, I guess, had been working on me, too, just in a different way. When I was ten, I started reading what I could about Vietnam.

I don't remember any of the dreams my dad used to say I had. Mostly, he's stopped talking about it. Which might be for the best.

[...] I wrote that to write this: I've always gotten along better with the old-timers. So their...let's call it "disapproval" of my plans for the trip cuts a bit harder than I suppose it should. Most of all when it comes from the ex-hippies. Those that I thought might get it. But they don't. I understand why they don't:

Parents still together after thirty-one years.
Descent job.
Ok (not great) head on my shoulders.
Somewhat of a future.
A couple of romantic prospects (to them this means girls around my age).

They don't see me from thirteen until twenty-five(ish) - the unreasoned self-loathing, the pitch black anger towards the world because at least the anger made sense, the feeling that I would have been better served by life being a cruel bastard rather than a kind one. They don't see it because, fuck, I kept it hidden most of the time. All of the dark humor, all of the gallows wisdom, all of night spent reading about what was happening beyond the no-horse town. [...]I was able to shrug off the first World Trade Center attack. Oklahoma City. Columbine fucked me up a little, but not much. 9-11...shit, I used to laugh at the politicians saying we could never forget, then doing their damndest to return us to a normal mindset while making my mother go through strip searches every time she gets on a plane (once every two months). I shrugged off the horror. I had to. It was easier than admitting that it made sense to me. No one really makes friends with their shadows. Not until it's that or implode. Memories will do that to you.

And they didn't see that. They don't know about the long nights alone with just my thoughts whirring on and on behind my eyes. They see the kid who couldn't connect with people until he started acting. They don't see the kid who couldn't stop acting. They don't see the family hound ripping his mental state the shreds over the fact that he feels like he'd be stabbing his family in the back by going. They just know they might stop it. All they had to do is bring back the scared thirteen year old.

[...] I was planning the road trip in 2003. When I was getting ready to graduate. The end point was Vancouver, BC then - I've toned it down to Seattle, WA - and I was pretty much ready until life happened (as it tends to do). But that's a story for another day. When my manager at the books store asked me what I was going to do once I got there, I said, "No clue. Lots of options." I remember the look he gave me.

My nickname at work is Kaczynski. Lots of folks laugh at it. Me included. They need to see the zipper on the monster's skin. I know it's a hoodie - I wear it because they won't touch the fucking thermostat.

Evening Songs...

Entropy is the order of things. Decay feeds the next turn of the wheel. All that is well and good I guess, but it really sucks to go through it. The rebirthing process is just as painful, you see. The only thing that can really be said for either part while in the midst of it is "at least it ain't boring".

That's what's going through my head right now. I feel a change, an augmentation to my normal procedures getting ready, slowly massing like storm clouds along the horizon. It's been this way for close to a year, as I've come out of my shell and begun - for really the first time in my life - to interact in meaningful ways with people. But those clouds keep massing and I keep thinking, maybe the moment is coming, you know? Maybe the storm is getting ready to break.

I've felt it before. Usually I'm able to find someway to diffuse the situation and remain in the same rut. The process of entropy reigns over all. Because it's easy. It's comfortable. I know every nook and crease, like a well lit room I've wandered around and studied. If I was enjoying this, then I guess that would be ok - short terms, at least. Kind of like a functional alcoholic.

I can feel the depression creeping back, coupling with the fear of change. I feel myself becoming nostalgic for times that - in a clear head - I know weren't enjoyable. And I have to keep watching it because habits fit like gloves.

And I want the storm to break.

Prep-Work...

So, in late May my brother and I will be heading to Toronto for a long weekend. The major reason for this is to see the Union play Toronto FC (and hopefully not get our heads caved in by the rare "angry" Canadians). But I'm also viewing it as a test of just how much driving I can do. If the Plan is to come about, then I'm going to be facing a rump-testing amount of time in the car. So, twenty-hours in one weekend should be as good a place to start as any.

Funny bit - to me, anyway - I've been talking to a couple of old timers recently who have done the same. My list of must-sees has jumped from [approx.] twenty to [approx.] fifty, and the crooked little vein on my trip just became a kid's menu maze. This has engender more planning, and a restructuring of my financial outlook for it. For a journey that is most likely going to end in vagrancy and dereliction, there sure is a lot of number crunching involved. Also, the time table has had to get another going over due to 1) funds, 2) weather patterns, and 3) the very real possibility of needing a passport to get into AZ.

But all of that is in the realm of yet-to-pass. Currently I'm just watching my summer reading stack grow: mostly Roger Zelazny, PKD, and Alfred Bester - I figured this would work well, since RZ wrote books with both. However, I do find it odd that I keep coming across PKD stuff that I haven't read - not just recovers, but whole novels that never presented themselves before. It's going to be interesting to see if this has any affect on my own attempts at writing. I somehow merged Victorian Manners and Post Cyber-Punk styles for a few pages when I read "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" and "Cryptonomicon" at the same time - so who knows what New Wave/amphetamine intensive/Pre-Cyber-Punk Sci.Fi. will have on my wretched little book. Or the Kershaw script (see: story of R.).

In other "trying to write" news - I'm just leading with my jaw on the new bit. I'm not going to try and be artsy (Project Van Buren) or pander (three untitled bits clogging my hard-drive). I'm just letting off steam and trying to keep my interest. Which isn't easy, since everything seems like I'm trying to be Jonathan Franzen. I'm not. He's a great author, sure - I'll go so far as to say he's one of the best at this point in time and maybe, in fact, the current "Great American Novelist" - but his shit bores me to no end. I'm amazed by his skill in the same way I'm amazed by Michael Bay: he knows what he does well, he plays to his strengths, and I really find nothing there to connect with. That might just be me (and looking over the reviews, it probably is just me) but there you go.

More updates as they come.

Rapid motion in all things...

So, I've been gearing up for "the Trip" - where I'll be crisscrossing the country in the hope of seeing the other ocean at it's own level. I've been prepping, getting kitted up, and that old sensation of the synchronicity highway is back. It's a bit exciting - I've never done anything for me on this scale (usually it stops at reading a good book or buying a BluRayDisc), so it's more than a little strange. But now it's beginning to seem like it's going to happen.

The only real destination I have in mind is Kutztown, mostly to fulfill a promise I made to myself of somehow befouling the campus somehow. Beyond that...well, there's tons of places I want to see, and other roadside attractions that I'll find I guess.

Still - holy crap - at some point between June and September, I'll be on the road.

While you were out...

So, since I last wrote, I've turned twenty-six, somehow managed to hold onto my job called Gun Country and the Retirement States, and started writing two novels that reached 20k before becoming uninteresting...things, not novels, more just the crusty remains of ideas that weren't vibrant as they had seemed. So, started another one.

But I've come to the somewhat frightening realization that I've lost my anger and angst. This would be fine if something had replaced it. So far, nothing has. There's this weird void left, and a lot of my personal passion seems to have vanished with the other personality quirks. It used to be hard for me to get to sleep, and I'd just lay in some electronic glow - TV, Computer, Stereo - seething with fury about something. A minor slight from a stranger, how the world works and people don't, my various failings, the various failings of others, something that would allow me to have an excuse to ground my teeth and have my pulse be way to high.

God help me - it seems I've gone suburban.

And that scares me, because I dread becoming comfortable and uninterested. I'm actively afraid of caring very deeply about the state of my lawn, and less about, say, if text messaging would be useful in intergalactic travel due to the speed of light (vision - text) being faster than the speed of sound (vocal), how many genocides are going on in the world right now, child soldiers in sub-Saharan conflicts, the vast swaths of pornography on my computer, or my violent dreams where I get to be a grim sort of wise-cracking hero - like an existential Spider-Man.

But all of the stuff I used to define myself - the unending cyclone of rage inside my head, the weird "Bad Woody Allen Flick" way through the world that I had - are gone now, seeming to have fizzled out.

I blame the sitting.

I have a job that goes completely against my nature: I must sit still for eight hours (ten if you count my time in the car) total and call people asking for money. Now, as much as I love sitting, I get antsy after five minutes because somewhere out there something is happening and I missing it. Now, it has always been such - but I could at least pace around at the other jobs. Not here. I sit here. My cheeks are making a groove in the padding. And then there is the asking for money thing - I hate asking for money, even when the reason is something like "What do you want for your birthday?" I dread it, because I hate money - love the stuff it can buy like beer, cigarettes, cancer treatment and detox clinics, but I hate money - and the idea of asking it as a kind of middle man, just a weight-station en route to its final destination in someonelse's pocket just seems really very wrong to me.

But the whole job thing seems wrong to me. Hell, I still don't like this whole "life" deal. Come in through pain and suffering, mostly get kicked around, maybe kick back, spend years waking up every morning and hauling your freight somewhere (in my case an office), sell your time for a bit of cash and are expected to be grateful for the chance, then die - it's over. End of ride. Now, that's a rip off. Why isn't my pulse faster? Why am I suddenly so beaten down?

Someday.

Shanti, shanti, shanti.

Defend the River End (On Brothers)...

After the match on 8/22, my brother and I walked to the metro station. The whole weekend had been a series of misadventures and groan inducing strangeness, and my normal habit of leaving somewhere just before it goes to hell was in full swing. We were fairly quiet on the ride back to his apartment - The Union had lost to D.C. United, and I wasn't really looking forward to the multiple state drive home. But it was a pleasant weekend all the same, as most of our meetings have been recently.

At some point, I guess, every set of siblings goes through the shift - the dislike of youth gives way to amiable companionship of adulthood or vice-versa. Yeah, there are still the moments when we look at each other and wonder how in the hell we could be related - but those are only during moments when...well, when I don't know. I know he wonders at it whenever I let some of my demons out and let the reigns the modern world slip off a little. For me, it's every time I look at him.

I am short where he is tall, slight where he is broad, and steam like where he is a rock. I have few friends, he has various groups of drinking buddies, gym spotters, and roommates he gets along with and watches shows in the company of. I don't think I'm funny or smart - he thinks he's hilarious and knows that more often than not he's the smartest one in the room (and failing that, he can fake it). He's Catholic, I'm...who the hell even knows anymore? He remembers me as the weird kid. I remember one time when he ended a brawl by sitting on my head and farting.

In our youth we fought to the point of putting hole in walls, broke furniture, and one of us threw the other off of a eleven foot gravel mound behind a neighbor's garage. We also sang together, tossed pop-culture references, and went to Phillies games. We watched each other's backs during legal and mental troubles. And we've both given up things for the sake of the other that they'll never know about.

I've accepted all of those things, and consider it all as needing not to be spoken between the two of us.

Which is why I was shocked all to hell when Rick said that it's nice being able to hang out. This was on 9/4, at the match between the Union and the K.C. Wizards, as we walked across PPL's parking lot to where the Sons of Ben were holding the tailgate. "It's cool, you know? We never got to do it before."

I said "yes" like I always do when someone's right. "You mean the first twenty years of your life." A cruel thing to say, I know, but go back and read the part about him farting on my head - some things leave scars. But, yes, it is quite nice, entering a stadium shoulder to shoulder with my brother, and standing in River End with him and chanting for ninety minutes along with the rest of the SOBs in the Snake Pit. There's a lot we don't say. Family, you know. It's complicated. But then, there we were, making Son's of Ben history by chanting "99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer! Peter Vermes, give us your keys! 98 bottles of beer on the wall!" all the way down to "No more bottles of beer on the wall".

During the next game we'll be wherever we are - he in D.C., myself here. We'll trade texts about the game, and the Phillies games, and the Eagles once they start back up. And then, at some later point, one of us will take a trip, and we'll end up talking about comic books, movies, and then chanting at the River End.

The Time Is Always Right...

Rod Sterling, creator of The Twilight Zone, said this about TV shows: "How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form."

I found that quote the other day, and it is eerily similar to my point whenever someone asks me why I only seem to watch TV shows on DVD. I can't stand the ads. Also, the majority of the shows don't hold much interest for me. I loved The Twilight Zone because it was how I thought the world would be when I got older - at it's core, the show deals with karma, and the episodes that stuck with me the longest (Nick of Time, Walking Distance, and One for the Angels) were the ones that weren't so much "scary" as they were meditations about choice, life, and what it means to be human. They were always the deeply personal ones - or ones that I took personally. Good gets to live a happy life - or at least a happy end - while evil is punished.

There have been several attempts to remake the series, but it never seems to work. They do the scary stories, but they're never as plausible, and they seem to focus on just scares rather than real terror. One for the Angels - the first episode I ever saw - is scary in a way that Terror at 20,000 Feet isn't. They are two distinct stories, but both come back to the same idea: normal people put in a situation that doesn't happen.

And while Terror is spin chilling (fear of the plane crash, the monster, and the Fort Worth Star Trek Convention all rolled into one), it can be applied to any future story collection. Planes, rockets - hell, even hover cars! - all of these can be applied to the formula that ends with "There's a man on the wing of this plane!" Even Doctor Who did a version of it (Midnight). You can modernize Terror at 20,000 Feet - but One for the Angels would be more difficult. These characters don't exist any more - the toy vendor has mostly vanished from popular vision and the idea of a group of kids waiting for an older man now has a sinister cast to it.

Does that mean that we'll never have another Twilight Zone? No. Of course not, don't be ridiculous! Before TV there was an anthology show on the radio called The Clock, which can be looked at as The Twilight Zone in adolescence (the episode Personal Recommendation is a bit of a sweeter version of Nothing in the Dark). And just as there were differences between the mindset at the time of The Clock and the mindset during which The Twilight Zone was born, there are new differences now. We just need one that speaks to our time. Night Visions had this to an extent - the stories were pretty much a post modern take on the Sterling classics, and more realistic in that, for the most part, the karma was all kinds of fucked up.

What does it mean about us - and if you take the shows to be art, then they must in some way speak about us? That we've grown more cynical? That we now want to guess the twist ending rather than just enjoy the story? Hell if I know. io9 had a nice article about trope chasers and good writing - but I honestly think there's a few more levels here. There's only one story - everything else is just a weird take or twist on it. "Once upon a time someone fell in a hole. Then they got out of it." That's pretty much it. We twist the depth of the hole, the length of time spent there, the number of people involved, how they are involved, and even if they fall into/get out of the hole.

We do these things, and then we have this picture of ourselves - be it creator or observer. Slasher film excess in the '80s went hand in hand with Wall Street. Torture porn flicks of the aughts along side pretty invasive reality TV and the celebrity gossip machine - one goes inside people through various violent means, and the other floats around in the images they wish to project, and neither one really gets close to the truth about people because of either market demands or the subject matter itself.

But we keep trying, bless our crooked little hearts, and for various reasons to. And maybe the only reward we can really expect is to see our own reflections in the work and smile. At least that's the lesson I learned from The Twilight Zone.