Lucky

It was late and snowing. I saw white patches form on the hills so I slowed down from sixty-five to thirty or forty on the highway. I was worried. I lost all tread on one of my front tires ages ago. The car wasn’t safe in the snow with so little traction. But I had a mountain to climb still. I tried to safely slip down the hills when I could, riding in the tracks of newer, better cars that zoomed off ahead. I put the music up louder so I wouldn’t get too nervous at every noise. My hands twitched anyway whenever my car lurched closer to the edge of the road. It’d be a long fall if I went over.

When I hit the bottom of the mountain, I punched it. Hit the pedal to the floor and the car slowly climbed up. I heard gears grinding beneath my feet. The engine was whining because I had to work it so hard just to keep from slipping backwards. I’m not going to lie. It was pretty frightening. I hit the pedal harder, and the car struggled. At the top, all I saw was the steep drop ahead. I had no choice, though. Stopping on the side of the highway meant waiting out hours, hoping for the snow to stop, with no help at 2 in the morning. If the snow kept falling for hours, or if it snowed even harder, then it’d be even harder.

So, I kept going. I made it to my exit with the help of someone who rushed by earlier. I rode in their tracks until I had to get off and break some tracks of my own. The car slid violently around. I couldn’t stop at any of the lights or I’d never get going again. So I skidded out a few times into the middle of the road, into the middle of both lanes, whatever I had to do. Then there was another hill, covered in snow. I punched it again.

This time, the car shook as I went up. My entire shoe was practically flat on the car floor, and the car was still moving five miles an hour, if I was lucky. I didn’t think I was going to make it as it jolted left and right. The hill got even steeper. The snow got thicker. I felt the car slipping back, or rushing forward, digging into the banks. Finally, I met the end of it. I turned onto a nearby street. Nice and flat.

And that’s when my car died on the side of the road. All the dashboard lights blinked on, and I had to shut it down. Two in the morning, I called for a ride and hoped for an answer. I left my car there. I slept for two hours before walking back to it, hoping it wasn’t towed or hit with an expensive ticket already. I walked back before the sun rose, praying it’d be there when I rounded the corner of that last street. It was. No ticket.

A few days ago, I was driving with my father whose fuel gauge broke in his car. He hadn’t gotten gasoline in some days despite some really long drives, and suddenly, his truck died. We pulled over. We knew it was out of gas. I had to walk three miles with an empty can of windshield washer fluid to fill it with gas, then walk three miles back. It’s the way my luck’s been lately, I guess.

I try to be an optimist, though. My car didn’t get ticketed, or towed. I didn’t get into an accident, or slip off a cliff on the highway. I didn’t get hit by a car when I was walking for gas. I made it back alive. The walk was only 3 miles each way. It could have been 10. I knew the area at least, and exactly where the closest station was. But there are some things that are hard, even when you try to see the bright side of life. My dog has dementia and hip displaysia. He can’t stand or walk on his own, and he’s losing his memory. He stands in the corner sometimes and barks, and whines often through the night. He’s on medication, and we take the best care we can of him to help him along. It’s difficult, though. I remind myself that he’s old, 98 in dog years, if that 7:1 ratio is to be believed, and that he’s loved. But it’s difficult.

I moved, too. Up into these mountains in a city that’s an hour and a half away from where I lived for pretty much all of my life. Out of New York. The closing is set for next week. The entire house is empty. I’m taking what will probably be my very last drive down there on Saturday, for some last minute touches. And then that’s it.

At times like these, of major transition, I find myself feeling childlike again. I’m waiting for a (sort of) new job to start on Monday, in a new house, in a new city. A new state, even. I’ve been watching lots of cartoons. Dexter’s Lab, Spongebob, Powerpuff Girls, two different (and great!) Batman cartoons… I don’t know what it says about me that I retreat to watching these things in the face of huge change. That I revert to an infantile state in the face of crisis, I guess. But I like to think of it as comfort instead.

I’m looking back into writing, reviewing old chapters and planning new ones. It’s still Valentine. Always, you know. I think of it as my own personal superhero. It’s my pride, and it feels safe to me, always. When in doubt, I have that story to think about, to agonize over. I have it to comfort me.

Times get rough. Quite often, really. But I’m glad I have some simple things to comfort me when I need them.

Here’s wishing everyone some good luck and comfort on Friday the 13^th.

Lose Yourself

There’s more going on than I care to talk about here. So much change is on the brink of rushing in. It’s hard, frightening, confusing… but I’m not here to talk about that. Christmastime also passed. I drove to work a few times past a homeless man that keeps standing alone in the cold with a long beard and dirty clothes with a sign that reads, “Will work for food, God bless” and I stopped to give him five dollars, and he thanked me kindly. His eyes were red, either from the cold, or thankfulness, and he said “Merry Christmas” and “God bless,” and I said the same thing to him, because even though I’m not a religious man, the meaning behind it tugs at my heartstrings anyway. It’s the idea behind it, I guess.

Then every day when I passed him, I felt obligated… so I kept stopping and giving him 5 dollars. So I did this three times, and now I wonder what will happen when the time comes and I drive by because I don’t have five dollars of cash in my pocket, because I’m not a rich man. But I’m glad anyway that I did what I did, and I’d do it again, and probably will.

But I’m not writing a post about that, either, necessarily. I wanted to write very briefly about something that’s pretty near to my heart. I want to write briefly about it, because I’ve been doing a whole lot of thinking about this book that I’m (still) writing called VALENTINE, and what to do with it, and how to fix it… and all these lingering doubts I had about the way I wrote it after getting what constructive criticism I did from readers. There’s one thing that bothered me more than anything about the book, and it was a big one: the message, the theme… it got muddled by the end.

I don’t want to spoil the book, and I don’t plan to talk that much about the changes I want to make to fix it, either. Because obviously, no blog post will do justice to what I’m trying to say, exactly. That’s what the book is for. Instead, I wanted to share a video that summarizes an important lesson that I want to put into this book. It’s also been extremely important to me, in my personal life, and something that was really rough for me when I was a teenager. I think it’s rough for most everyone when they’re young adults, and something most of us still struggle with…

This is part of an interview with famed psychologist Erik Erikson who proposed eight stages of psychosocial conflict in the human life. He says there are great battles that we wage in our minds, and with our personalities, and the outcome of each defines who we are as human beings, and how successful we’ll be in understanding ourselves and one another. It determines how happy we are with who we become, how positively or negatively others might see us, if we live a life of love and well-meaning and die happy, or if we look back on our lives alone and filled  with regret. The one that struck me the hardest was one of the hardest battles I had with myself, to figure out who I really am, and it was called intimacy versus isolation. Erikson, the psychologist who designed the theory, explains a little bit of it himself in this video.

“Intimacy is really the ability to fuse your identity with somebody else’s without fear that you’re going to lose something yourself… to be intimate, you have to [sic] have a very firm identity already.” – Erikson

As much for me as it is for you

I am so happy today. I have the house to myself, and I was just letting music ripple through the walls and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a yogurt for lunch, thinking about this book that I’m writing, VALENTINE, and loving life. Nothing special happened, but it’s just one of those times where things feel magical for no great reason.

I haven’t talked about this before. I’m planning a regularly updated web comic with one (or two) friends of mine. The details are still up in the air, but the current pitch is heavily inspired by Calvin & Hobbes. Right now, it’s planned to be slightly darker and based around adolescence, rather than childhood. I’m designing it to purposefully make it as least cynical as I can. I’m sort of bothered by the trend these days where characters are all misanthropes and mock one another much of the time just to hide their true caring underneath. This comic is going to be different, assuming all goes well. I’m really excited about it. Once we have a strip prepared, maybe I’ll share it here as a preview of it. We plan to make a website and release a new strip a few times a week for free.

It started to rain today, and I stood out on the deck under the rain drops eating an apple. I could hear my music clearly through the open window. It was beautiful.

This is one of the songs that I’ve been listening to. It’s by one of my favorite bands, called Cassino, an indie folk type band built from the remnants of Northstar. I don’t know if I could have nailed the tone of VALENTINE and wrote it as well as I (think I) did without their phenomenal, dreamy music.

Man Overboard

I lost electricity for 6 days. It was thirty or forty degrees all week with no hot water, heat, lights, or anything to do. Today, I got power back.

This is a conversation I had:

me: im so in love with electricity right now i want to cut open a live wire and lick the sparks. its been a long week.

friend: that may be hazardous so keep in mind that in order to enjoy electricity, you must be alive or conscious

me: ah i better put my pants back on then. thanks for the tip.

friend: don’t go overboard now. pants can stay off.

Yeah, we’re both males.

A Theory of Infinite Energy

A friend and I debated tonight on the theory of gravity and how scientists can’t explain it, and the probability of black holes ending in a singularity, and how the “infinite mass” proposition as predicted by Einstein would require an infinite amount of energy to create such an event… and then I said, “Okay, but I don’t either of us are as smart as Einstein.”

What I’m saying is, I have wild Friday nights.

Just a few days ago I was complaining about not being able to write. Well, that night I did write. I rewrote the first chapter of the book, and tonight I’m going to look at more writing. And hopefully write more. I needed things to change that night, and I’m so happy they did. It was sort of a turning point for me to just start it and get back into it. This story is still the best thing I’ve ever written, and it deserves even more attention to make it shine like it needs to. And simply the act of writing again has made me a lot happier in general. I know it’s a great form of expression, but it’s also something I believe I’m quite good at… and I get anxious when I go for long periods without practicing or just doing it.

I’m seriously considering trying to find fellow writers to only exchange pieces of books at a time. For instance, sharing somewhere between three chapters at a time, and critiquing and editing them a section at a time instead of reading the entire thing and responding to it in that way. Like real writer’s groups do, in other words, share pieces at a time every week. Tackling sections at a time could allow for more “big” advice that could restructure stories as you go through them instead of reading an entire book and trying to explain a saggy feeling “somewhere in the middle” etc. It could be a good idea, I think?

I was going to write more in this post, like maybe ramble about how I’ve been watching The Matrix movies a lot after reading a philosophical article about it and becoming re-obsessed with the first movie and remembering just how mind-blowing it was when I first saw it… or about my recent passion for Apple Cider, or any number of other things, but I think I’m going to write some more fiction, because I have so much energy lately, and I don’t want to slack with this story again until it’s published somewhere.

Here’s hoping.