Month: February 2022

Used to be that writers channeled reality into a form that people recognized and empathized with. I’ve long worked towards doing this by telling our stories in different worlds. I work in fantasy and science fiction, but nothing is so strange as the present reality. I wasn’t around for the cold war. I missed basement bunkers (the first iteration) and bomb drills. Now I am living through the end of a pandemic and the beginning of a hot/cold war which is likely a year away from spiraling into a much larger global conflict–one that will be impacted deeply by our own elections.

I am living through a reality where sitting congressmen are openly attending white nationalist conventions (or at least those run by the people who run those organizations and hide behind the mask of far right ideology). I am living through a reality I would’ve never guessed at and I don’t know what to do with it or what do write about it.

I used to write about characters all of the time. I used to be able to pull them down from the ether and tell their stories, and I truly believe this is a part of what made me love writing and what separated me from other writers and made me my own thing. I need to reach the ether again. I’ll start trying now…

Kaitlyn Kapshaw

When she sees ads begging people to move to Ohio, she thinks about Cleveland. She thinks about the small house she lived in with her mother in Glenwillow after her father left and before Stan. She thinks about the way she used to love hanging out with the boys at Andy’s and eating ice cream and smiling and kissing all the handsome boys. She remembers how fun it was not to care about anything. She remembers thinking about going to college and how amazing it would be to meet other girls who thought and felt the same way she did about life.

She knew liars even then. She knew girls and guys alike who would hug you and talk to you like they were your best friend and then, later, share a cigarette with another person and talk shit after every exhale. She knew girls who made up stories about her; about what it meant when she kissed the boys and say that she did other things with them. This was before she even wanted to do those things, mind you. The wanting came after the doing, but that was her fault, mostly. She thought about that too when she thought about Ohio.

Still, she missed the state. It home where Phoenix could never be. Phoenix was hot but emotionally cold. The people were distant; her campus a small city of strangers who had none of the interests she’d hoped for when she left home.

There is something very wrong with me. My sense of smell, once deadened, has become hyper-engaged to the point where I smell everything and most smells upset my stomach–a stomach which is moments from vomiting all the time it seems. I am sick. It feels like what people describe after getting Covid-19. Parasomia. What is unclear is whether or not it occurs during or after contracting the ‘rona. So, I need to figure that out relatively fast. I also need to go test, so I don’t go spreading my stuff around.

I need to do additional research to confirm, but it does seem like the symptoms I am experiencing are leftovers from having the virus. I was sick a week ago and didn’t think much of it, but it is possible that I got hit with the ‘rona and didn’t realize. That is the thing about highly transmittable diseases–you are probably gonna get hit. I think about that in terms of the Zombie conversations, the Walking Dead, etc. In that show the virus infected everyone but only when your ability to combat it is overwhelmed (bite, etc.) do you go zombie. Could be I am at a low point myself and as a result I am experiencing the damaging after effects of this virus.

I don’t like it. It is really uncomfortable to experience smells this way and even worse it appears I am experiencing phantom smells as well. That serves as an unpleasant reminder of how much our brains shape our reality. Hopefully it goes away very very fast, because it is driving me crazy.

Okay, this war has triggered some real disappointment in my soul. Not because it happened–A three year old could see that coming. What bugs me is the politicization of the war and how it reflects on the crumbling state of intra-American discourse. Sheep. We are largely sheep. Sheeple. Too many dogs leading part of the flock in one direction while the rest split to the wind with no real leadership. Scary times.

Scary people.

I’ve been thinking about a type. A type typically defined as being racist. These are the Americans stuck in the distant shadow of wars a type cast in the 80s by American flags rock bands and trans ams. Another type cast in the 10’s of Big trucks, bald heads, and long beards carved out of the image of Gulf War special forces. They are in fact the same type but entirely reflective of a highly sanitized memory of a time and what was cool about that time projected forward into a mashup of that and what works in the present social structure as cool and what works works to forward a dominant political ideology based on a unconsciously submissive working class. What is it going to look like in 20 years? Not sure. Not sure at all.

I know I should be freewriting, but this Russia situation has me twisted. Not so much what Putin is doing–you expect a dog to be a dog. However, what Fox News is doing is straight up atrocious. Yes, I get that I just said you expect a dog to be a dog, but this dog has so much power in our sphere that it is causing a large number of Americans to rethink their reality. We have quite literally gone from worrying about Russian influence to ‘Why do we hate Putin?‘ He goes on to make some pretty damning remarks, one of which is as purely anti-American as it gets.

He says, “What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? “

First off, the ‘what is this really about’ is a trigger phrase. It indicates that we ought to be questioning the reasoning of everything and everyone BUT him. So, I ask you, dear reader, to question him. What is it really about? Why does he want to protect Putin and in such throw barbs at Americans or at the perception of so-called fringe Americans, or as they put it, ‘democrats’. I fear that Fox News is driving a divide into our nation because it fills their pockets and egos and quest for power and keeps those who listen afraid and docile and buying what they want them to buy and voting how they want them to vote and believing what they want them to believe and ONLY what they want them to believe to the exclusion of reality. It is more likely that a Fox News viewer believes that Clinton ran a sex ring than Trump cheated on his taxes. That level of confirmation bias driven logic is disturbing at best, criminally negligent at worst.

As a father and a partner and a citizen I am worried about our country. We can say over and again that ‘we’ve been here before’ or ‘it’s not as bad as it’s been in the past’ but we cannot neglect the power that technology has to reach people and provide them with an extremely closed off view of reality. It is easy to login to ONLY your apps and your newsfeeds and decide on your reality and when someone not from that sphere challenges that reality they INSTANTLY become the enemy. Add to that the power to generate law at the local level and we are struggling to maintain a nation that is, in fact, democratic and not Autocratic and that one who controls many tends to be the corporation with the most power to manipulate perspective.

This Tuesday is 2.2.22. crazy odd right? No, I am not going to try and work the #2 into the freewrite in some way. It doesn’t really work and feels corny even for me. Instead I am going with John Fox’s blog on magical realism. He writes, ” (6) Write about a character who can taste people’s emotions through the food they prepare.”

There aren’t a lot of jobs suited to a person with my particular abilities. The visceral reaction it causes me makes it difficult to hold what is commonly known as a ‘poker face’ It is clear how I feel about people and how they are feeling about me from the moment I encounter them. That is what made it so strange that Barner Systems would think to hire me as their HR executive. My job is hiring people. Everyone who comes through the company sits down with me first and that meeting determines whether they get hired or they don’t. If I was a better liar I could use that position to my advantage, but lying isn’t my strong suit. In fact, it gives me actual hives. That’s why when I sat down with Anette Hargreaves I was worried for my life.

My ability allows me to sense peoples emotions and intentions. It isn’t in the cool fashion–the Professor X slick mindreading. No, I taste what they want and feel. It hits my tastebuds like food entering my mouth. Anette tasted like Durian fruit.

I was working on the language base for my fantasy world today and the experience was really fun and informative. I learned more about this world I am struggling to create and more about the stories and kinds of stories I want to tell in it. There is an opportunity for me to host a D&D adventure for a conference at my college and it could be an opportunity to tell a small tale in this world. I’ve been thinking about where that would take place –though not what the tale would be. All of this is to say I did a lot today between grading and writing and I am flat burned out. I waited to the end of the eve to generate this blog and that didn’t help. I am not creative tonight folks. That’s the truth of it. Writing has to be an everyday thing, but creativity isn’t always that punctual.

Some Thoughts:

1. I also learned that my mood impacts my ability to be productive and as it shifts during the day so does my ability to create.
2. I didn’t get a lot of the stuff I needed to get done done today, so tomorrow and Wednesday need to kill, so I can finally feel like I am on track coming into the weekend. It’s a rare thing.
3. I need to get my head in the game.
4. My head spent some time in the Madden game this afternoon where I realized that my superstar team is getting older and I need to win NOW. This has to be the season–this and next. I’m considering trading draft picks during the draft instead of getting dudes this year, because I believe I have at least 48 of the 53 I want and there is little room to add first round talent expecting to play.
5. One thing I also noticed about today–a dull persistent buzz in my head reminding me just how wrecked my mind is. I wish I knew how to reset the creative energies in a holistic way. It is worth looking into via research.

Here is a prompt of my own creation: Take two people that you know decently well. Take three qualities indicative of each. Merge those six qualities together to form an entirely new person. Now, from the 3rd person, imagine them on a blind date….

Her name was Hillary. Newt told himself this over and over, rolling it around in his head. He’d have to stand up and say it out loud, in spite of the jarring sense of apprehension of that name which had been programed into him over long hours of binge watching fringe news shows. Hillary. He wore gray slacks and a button up white shirt with the top two buttons undone and a matching gray jacket. His sister called the look ‘Understated’ and worked at convincing him the clothes would show off his smile. He suspected Hillary had already seen his smile when his sister set this thing up. Nobody went on truly blind dates anymore. The term lost its meaning shortly after the advent of MySpace. Google, Facebook, even Tinder made it much worse. By now she had a working profile of his entire professional and dating history. She knew what he did for a living, knew why he binged Fox News web-only alternatives and thusly why her name tasted like old oysters in his mouth. She knew about Emelia. She knew about Shanda. She probably even new about Christine, though he suspected his decade old fourth grade romance didn’t leak into the internet they way it would in the era of tik tok.

Most of all, he knew he was terrified. He had no idea what to say to a girl like Hillary who was born rich and had blonde hair that appeared to be natural and legs as long as corn stalks. He didn’t know what they would talk about or have in common. She didn’t look like the kind of girl to like anime or punk rock music. He couldn’t for the life of him understand why his sister would put him in this situation. She’d said, “It’s worth a try, right?”

“Playing the lotto is worth a try one time, and I think I’d have a better shot at landing a million lotto wins than a second date with a girl like that.”

“you’ll always lose if you never play.”

“I’m sure you’re misquoting that.” He said, but here he was anyway. Styled, groomed, and sipping at a glass of water at the bar. He checked his watch. He’d made dinner reservations here, at Rooney’s at 8, and his watch said 7:45. She said she’d meet him by 7:50. Five minutes felt like a very long time.

No, I’m not quitting.

Seriously. I’m not! I am taking a brief break for the duration of the day and tomorrow I’ll hit another one of these prompts. It has been quite the odd day. A lot of driving and standing on lines. I witnessed all sorts of craziness. I saw grafitti on a wall behind a memorial for a man killed in an accident. The grafitti spanned the entirety of the wall and read, “Fuck Biden. Trump 2024”

This is not the way.

Or is it? I fear the political discourse has become one of anger and disrespect at the spear of it, as opposed to the underlying emotion. Maybe it is best to put that out in front. Maybe it is best to acknowledge such things in a space where people are increasingly being fed fear-driven narratives by their very narrowly pitched and honed news services, which feed them more and more of exactly what will keep them coming back and keep them agitated and riled up. I see it on both so-called sides, which I continue to see as a fabrication. Republicans and democrats really aren’t that different when you boil down the essentials of what they actually do in office vs. what they say.

I will say this: Trump 2024 is a very very bad idea. Trump won’t be re-electable and instead will feel a need to either change that law or to put his kid in power.

Taking a pause on the freewrite to talk about TV shows and other bits of fiction I find interesting. I have been catching up on Arcane and on Boba Fett. One feels like an oddly drawn version of Harley Quinn and the other, well, it is starting to feel more and more like a vehicle for other things. Case and point: In the last two episodes Boba has had less than a minute of combined screen time and I don’t think he spoke for more than 10 seconds. That’s weird. However, it isn’t so weird if you view aspects of the show as a way to connect to the past and the future–as Boba really serves as such a connection. There is a lot they’ve worked to connect to the Bad Batch and older shows and it works, but it does take away from the show being a stand alone show. I want Boba to be about Boba. This is the way.

Arcane feels… strange. Oversexualized teens is the way of anime, but few add in the crazy of Harley Quinn. This is doing it and doing it while telling a sweeping lore that covers years of video gaming within League of Legends. It got me thinking about games and the stories that connect them. It made me feel like there will be an Apex Legends show in the near future. Of course, it also had me thinking about the concept of Open vs. Closed game realities. Arcane is purely backstory, which offers a closed plot. We know about many of the featured characters because no less than 6 of them appear as playable heroes in game. We know where they end up and this is about how they got there. Apex is Open. They are telling a story forward while the game reveals precious bits of backstory, they also move the narrative forward with each new character drop. We don’t know how it ends or if it is even capable of ending.

Just a few thoughts on story this evening. That is all.

Some Thoughts:

1. Building my Madden playbook is taking a long time and the plays are not going as well as I hoped. I’ll be rolling into the game against my kid tomorrow unprepared. Entirely unprepared.