Month: May 2020

I meant to finish my story, but I could not write about that this night. Tomorrow I promise myself I will switch focus, but as fires sprout across the country. In Seattle there is a 5 pm curfew to curb violence. In New York I watched a cop car ram a crowd of people. In Salt Lake City I watched a man respond to someone touching his car by pulling out a hunting bow and attempting to shoot before being attacked and beaten horribly by a crowd of men and women. His car was burned moments later as SLC cops looked on. Our country is losing its collective mind. So much for social distancing, eh? We hardly have time for the conversation in light of so much horrific violence. This is not about what it started out about. I said that before but it is awfully clear now that this thing has taken on a life of its own. A lot of it is winding up on social media and mingling with a great deal of misinformation.

This is an extremely dangerous time for America. The polarization I feared is taking place. Twice since I posted I’ve heard about or seen civilians taking matters into their own hands and striking out at rioters. We are nearing a tipping point and all the while this virus is poised to make a hard comeback. Things have not looked so bleak in a long time. I am hoping leadership is able to step up to the challenge and bring us back together.

I don’t want to get too far away from Rewind. There is a part 4 coming, and I know that if I let it sit for too long, I will move on. There is a balance to be struck there: It is fine to step away from a story to let it cool on the back burner, but if you let it sit too long it is forgotten or the energy driving the writing is utterly lost. Yesterday I needed to step back and decide how to continue (day 2 was initially deep in my mind for final act and I was supposed to write a different scene idea for day 2, but yeah. 10 minutes later…) Today I need to step back for another reason entirely. I am seeing violence in the streets. I am nervous, and I need to speak to this feeling.

A long time ago I was at Iowa State University. I was participating in the VEISHEA festival. That simple week of partying turned into senseless rioting. I mean senseless. There was nothing to riot about. I learned later that it had happened ten years prior and then it happened again in ’14. All were triggered by small groups of people angry about something or other and everyone else piled in because they had some anger on their mind and a need to express it. This is precisely how riots work. This is also how they spread. In the time of rampant social media, they spread faster and farther. In the time of Covid-19 just about everyone has something to be pissed off about. As a result, we are seeing a swell of anger and violence that started off being about the death of black people at the hands of cops or vigilantes and the clear cut difference in how black people like myself are perceived and approached vs the lack of fear surrounding white people (See Michigan armed protests and more). The NYT argues that America is a Tinderbox, and they are correct.

Now that the economy has slowed to the point where we are without distractions we are facing the reality of the polarization of this clearly crumbling nation and we are flailing. This is not the end but the beginning of a long and dangerous period in America and I am truly worried about where we go from here. It doesn’t take much for people to decide to take matters into their own hands. What happens when we decide to choose sides and that open polarization erupts into violence against each other along more than just party lines? In Ames, IA there was not much to be mad about save for clear cut boredom. In today’s America we have a great deal more to be pissed about. I don’t see it ending well.

I started re-watching Robotech as part of our in-home Covid Comicon. There is a lot that transpires in that show and for the most part, it is groundbreaking. Still, other stuff just doesn’t hold up. Going back after all these years was eye opening.

Let’s start with the implicit LGBTQ relationships. There are no spoilers here, but there is at least one implied relationship. Add to that the interracial relationship featured by mid season and you have yourself a show that pushes the boundaries.

That is not always a good thing. The female love interest (I hesitate to call her a protagonist as she always feels secondary in terms of quality of storytelling) has a very gratuitous nude scene and it is made clear both before and after that she is supposed to be a 16 year old girl.

Going beyond the ick factor, there are all sorts of odd patriarchal undertones throughout. None of these were challenged by me, and it felt very much like how anime still goes. I have to acknowledge that being a man and being nostalgic about the material did influence my thinking and understanding.

That is all I have the mind for so far.

Calloway conducted the 3rd interview. I was off duty that night and heard about it the next morning. He hadn’t been involved in the second interview. Bomb cases usually go federal, and that one supposedly being an accident didn’t raise too many hackles. In truth, my interview had only been procedure until I met her. The 3rd interview was another matter entirely. It was four years to the month after the first, and I swear she looked like she’d aged a dozen years or more. The smile lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes had deepened into crevices and the bags beneath the eyes bore the luggage of pain and suffering. He brought her into Interview 2, as he and I both had before. She wasn’t cuffed. There wasn’t evidence for that yet.

I cued up the tape on the laptop and then paused to take a sip of my coffee. It’d gone cold long ago, but the motion took my mind off of what I knew I was going to see–what I didn’t want to see. I steeled myself, lowered my trembling hand to the keyboard and pressed enter. The tape began as the others had.

He started with a few simple questions, asking her if she knew why she was brought in and if this was her first time here. She answered quickly, rolling her eyes and pretending to be bored at first. He changed tactics quickly.

He said, “Did you kill your boyfriend, Ms. Parker?”

She froze, unable to answer for a moment. She pursed her lips and closed her eyes and finally said, “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. I didn’t kill anyone.”

He pressed on, offering more questions, sprinkling in bits of speculation about the man who’d actively abused her all those years ago and this new boyfriend who’d disappeared two days prior. She was growing angrier, firing back answers at first and then, more reservedly answering–always that same hint of anger in her tone. Still, there was something off. You could see it faintly in the way her lips pursed before certain questions, as if she were trying to remember the answer. But how can you remember the answer to a question that hasn’t been asked?

Some Thoughts:

1. I don’t know that I’ll do a part 4 but the secret is largely exposed here in part 3. I just have to explain the how if I do a 4… we shall see.

My palms were moist when I pressed play on the second arrest. I saw myself enter the camera frame in that worn suit jacket I can’t seem to stop wearing. I was holding a file in one hand and tousling my hair in the other, trying to look disinterested in the perp. I sat in front of her, took a deep breath, and said, “Do you know what you’re here for?”

“No.” She wasn’t handcuffed this time. She was drumming her fingers and watched them move rather than meet my eyes. The scrapes and cuts on the back of her hands were still fresh. I slid the file under her fingers. She kept drumming.

“Aren’t you curious to see what that is?” I said.

“I don’t even know why I’m here. I didn’t do anything.”

“Maybe.” I leaned back in my metal framed chair, trying to look casual, but I was curious. The photo in the folder showed her looking directly at the camera. She was the only person who did that when it happened. I said, “Let me guess, wrong place wrong time?”

“Yeah, maybe. Or I’m just really unlucky.”

“I’d call you extremely lucky. That bomb went off less than fifteen feet away from you and you got away with barely a scratch.”

The drumming was a metronomic tap that filled the silence that followed my words. It went on like that for better than a minute of tape before she said, “Can I go?”

I couldn’t hold her. I didn’t have anything real. I didn’t even know about the first tape then. Once I saw the third tape I knew I had something. I just didn’t know what.

Rewind

You couldn’t tell Olivia was crazy just by looking at her. You could tell there was something not quite right. It was in the eyes. She looked at you with a sense of knowing reserved for kooks and psychics, of which she was actually neither. I went back through the tapes after her 3rd arrest. That was how I found out.

The first time she came in it had been snowing. Fat white clumps still clung to the shoulders of her overcoat, mixing with her stringy blond hair. She was smiling, showing full lips and shallow wrinkles. She didn’t at all look her 22 years of life. Her hands were cuffed in front of her. The officers had been gentle despite the pleadings of the man she beat up.

Calloway conducted the first interview and the 3rd coincidentally. The camera panned down over his head showing the bald spot that looked like a desert island in a sea of black water. He asked her if she understood why she was here and she shook her head. Then he showed her the pictures of her boyfriend. The red welts on his face leapt out at me. It looked as if he didn’t even try to defend himself, though he said he did. He said she knew what move he was going to make before he did it.

The thing was, he tried to hit her first. She didn’t so much say that, but I knew. I grew up in a house like that where pop got a little angry on the days work hadn’t gone so well and then things didn’t go so well for us. However, she wouldn’t say that. Instead she shrugged and said, “I thought I was in danger.”

It wasn’t till after the third interview that I realized she knew.

Some Thoughts:

1. Might continue this tomorrow. Out of time now, but the idea is stuck in my gullet.

As some of you know, I write stories for role playing games. Not all of those stories find the light of the page. I wanted to use today’s space to exorcise one such story from my mental garage. This one is a semi-sequel to a novel called Burning Bright by Tom Dowd. See, when you write in a shared world there is a likelihood that your character will be written up in another story by another author. This story features the protagonist of that story, Kyle Teller, and a character from my high school group of friends called Riser.

Riser was the leader of a group of assassins known collectively as the Smokers Club. He was involved in a number of underworld circles and as a result kept is personal life very secret as to avoid blowback.

In the beginning of the story we get a character perspective of detective. We see them researching a crime scene that looks like a ritualistic or serial killing. The magical energies in the space point towards one person: Kyle Teller.

The story goes like this: Riser’s sister is kidnapped and as the story unfolds we discover that the person who took her is not associated with Riser’s criminal past as suspected. Instead she was snatched by a serial killer. As Riser seeks out his sister’s murderer he picks up the trail of Kyle Teller. He eventually tracks the man and captures him, hoping to get him to confess to his sister’s murder before he kills him–Judge, Jury, Executioner kind of stuff here–however it wasn’t Kyle like everyone suspects. It was someone else.

Riser and Kyle end up running from the authorities and working together to expose this terrifying murderer and together they take him down.

That’s the story. It never got written past the first scene. So, I thought it might be fun to share it and all its siblings in this space over the next few months. I’m cleaning out my mental garage.

Some Thoughts:

1. Every night I go to bed looking forward to that morning cup of coffee. It is always the little things.

We are on day 3 of homegrown comicon and I am watching Robotech (Macross Saga) while I blog. This is a callback to my childhood and the period of development when I first decided to be a writer. Back then I felt a great deal of energy around the idea of writing. I didn’t have as much going on and I was not as run down and beaten up (mentally and physically) as I am these days. Watching the show is an attempted reboot–a chance to remember what it is that fuels me and use that to get this mental engine back in a useful gear.

Back at the Robotech.com site it is clear that the operation is continuing on and growing from its own history. This is exactly what I desire from my own life. I want to go to the next level. I want to shed the shackles of my present thinking and move forward with a singular goal.

I’ve been a jack of all for most of my life, but now I am trying to shift my thinking into combination mode vs. compartmentalization. A shift in thinking and an openness to change is exactly what is needed right now. However, I wish to base that change on history and research and philosophy.

I have been writing for the same role playing game for over twenty years. I enjoy it for the most part. I get a chance to be very creative and do really great things in a world I’ve always thought of as my own. Just recently the line decided to expand into a series of novellas. I was not granted one of the many novellas offered, and for me that was a clear sign. It is time to move on. Perhaps I will do some work in the future, but for now at least I need to be focused on doing different work. I need to not pursue this line, because I am obviously no longer top shelf in the group. In truth, I think I just ran out of things to say or am writing as though a holdover from a past iteration of what the game and the game world meant. Either way, I need to move on. I am moving on.

In my heart gather stories of superheroes, rimspace, old broken worlds, and dystopian images of our old world. I have many ideas that have not received the attention they deserve. It is perhaps time for me to explore the galaxy of my own making–the Talisverse is aching to be born.

So the new plan is to begin writing the stories, lives, and histories of these worlds and from that will spring new opportunities for publication. I still feel like I have stories left to tell and I believe I have not only a right and an opportunity, but I have a ‘calling’ to tell these tales. I’ve neglected my own imaginings for so long that I fear a thick scrape of dust hangs over my mind itself. In time I will break free of that hinderance and achieve the creative level I’ve always aspired to have. Writing in the Talisverse is an important first step. It is the blank canvas.

Some Thoughts:

1. Trumpism offers a great amount of inspiration for this endeavor. I am so curious to understand the mindset there that I feel it will lead to powerful stories. The best stories are often echoes of reality.
2. No interest in non-fiction at this time.

I’m taking the next step in my life and my relationship, and it is terrifying. We have different approaches to parenting. Neither of us are capable of recognizing in the moment when we are treating some of our kids by a different set of rules than others. Both of us are rooted in routine, but there is an underlying fear that those routines are so different and centered on different things (us vs. kids for starters) that it will create conflict. In short, I am terrified of the collision of these worlds resulting in major discomfort for a long time. As a result I am making everything leading up to the joining uncomfortable.

I think part of my fear is this idea of privilege. I feel like she thinks my kids have too much of it to the point of being spoiled, and I think that creates an inclination to want that to be reigned in. I respect that, but I don’t want that feeling to color the choices we make as we move forward. I don’t want them to have less just to experience having less–especially when it creates imbalance between all the kids.

Moving forward means having more and more serious conversations and being open and honest about these feelings in a way that does not feel like an attack or feel like I am being offensive. I do not really know how to do that. I’m learning that about myself. I either say things in a way that sounds like i’m counseling or I say things bluntly and offense is taken. I don’t know the path to middle ground.

Younger me would be neck deep in books on the subject by now. Older me is apparently too lazy to think about that without some deeper reflection of the ten minute variety. So, I’ve come to this at long last. I have more to learn about relationships. Hopefully I can figure things out before I ruin this one again.