Journal of Fear and Hope

Digital Kid
March 27, 2020

When I can, I play Nintendo on my phone. Mostly old RPGs like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy. Inevitably, my daughter saw me having fun on the phone without her and asked to play, too.

At first, she just watched, but she quickly picked up on certain aspects of gaming: When your status bar turns red, that’s bad. Treasure chests are tiny boxes of joy. Defeating monsters is a rush. In fact, she calls it “Monsters.” “Let’s play Monsters,” she says when I get home. Gladly.

Right now, we’re playing Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. It’s probably not something I would have started on my own, as it is derided by gamers and was never seen as a “true” Final Fantasy game. But after I saw a video review, I figured it would be perfect for my four-year-old. I was right.

There is only one companion in your party at once, and you can set the game to control them completely if you want. They come and go, one replacing another as the story unfolds, and the singular aspect of someone saying goodbye is eventful for a small child. When the first companion got sick and had to leave to recuperate, my daughter kept asking about her every time we played. She wanted to return to her bedside to check up on her. When another companion was shoved off a bridge, my daughter would bring that up at random times in the day. She couldn't wait to tell her mom about it. She has empathy for these pixelated people.

Weapons and armor simply equip themselves when you find an upgrade, so you don’t have to juggle inventory or weigh the benefits of one weapon against another. It’s a simple system, yes, and if I were playing alone I would probably not enjoy it. But it’s easy for my daughter to focus on what she likes, which is vanquishing monsters. You can switch between weapons. Her favorite is the claw, I think because it makes a scratch across the monsters’ images when you attack. Of course, it’s not always the best weapon to use, and I try to get her to use the “right” one.

I encourage her to use the spells that are strong against certain monsters rather than the ones she likes. She especially likes the Quake spell. When she calls for it, she shakes her whole body and pretends to be in an earthquake. It’s super cute, but it’s not always the most effective spell to use. However, it’s her game. The player character has her name. When I hand her the phone, she’s in control, and I should let it be. That’s why I fell in love with video games in the first place. They offered a world in which I could control my own fate, my own actions. If she wants to use up all her spell points instead of swinging her axe just so she can watch meteors and fire rain from the sky to defeat the final, already weakened monster, then I say let her. Play your way, kid. Play your way.

The Spirit of Podcasts
March 6, 2020

I have a relatively small list of podcasts I listen to regularly. Of course, I get bored with the tight format and familiar voices from time to time and cast my net into the cyber sea in hopes of catching something great. I discovered a few new podcasts last year, some brand new to the world, some new to me. Here are my favorite discoveries from 2019.

Dolly Parton’s America

When I lived in Tennessee, I visited Dollywood a couple times, and I would hear her biggest hits like “I Will Always Always Love You” and “Jolene” on the radio. But I really knew nothing about Dolly Parton, other than the boob jokes. Until just last year, I had no idea she was such a goddess to so many folks, folks from around the world and a wide spectrum of cultures and ideologies. This podcast asks how that came to be, how one woman can have an almost universal appeal to such a fragmented population. Along the way, it examines Dolly’s lyrics, her history, and her absence of politics.

Her lyrics contain a deeper emotion than I knew, commenting on death and sexuality from a woman’s perspective. She says feminist things but says she’s not a feminist. That frustrating contradiction is the core topic of the series. More questions arise than answers, but the best art is always that way.

Stay Free: The Story of The Clash

The entire history of The Clash, narrated by Chuck D. That description, alone, was enough to sell me on the podcast, but the research, plotting, and content was so far beyond what I thought I would get. I learned loads about the band, from their origins (the bass player didn’t know how to play at first but was chosen because he was a good dresser), fan reactions, their experimentation with different musical styles, the creation of London Calling, to their burn out and break up. Interviews carry most of the weight, but intermittently, Chuck D. weighs in on his own personal experiences in the music industry.

The Clash were always a band I was simply aware of. Heard the hits on the radio, knew they were important to punk music, and Henry Rollins liked them. But listening to this podcast drove home how uncompromising, innovating, and, yes, important they were. They burned hot and quickly, hardly ever taking a break during their years together, and changed music for all time. When I finished the series, I immediately downloaded London Calling and Combat Rock. And my daughter danced to “Train in Vain.”

I Only Listen to The Mountain Goats

This podcast is a series of conversations between two people. Occasionally a third will drop by, but usually it’s just two guys sitting in a semi-comfortable space to talk about art. You don’t have to know who these two guys are, but it helps. They are Joseph Fink, co-creator of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, which I confess I have not gotten into, and John Darnielle, singer and songwriter of The Mountain Goats, a band I have gotten into because of this podcast.

Ostensibly, they discuss a different Mountain Goats song each episode, but they inevitably veer into other topics like literature, ancient history, or how awesome possums are. They don’t just break down what a song means or how it was created, they talk about what art can do, how to exist in this world as an artist, and how fans connect with both the creator and the creation.

One thing that makes the show interesting and lands the conversation on unpredictable shores is that Joseph is a fan of The Mountain Goats and wants to delve deeply into the tunes, but John, the writer of those songs, hates talking about his own work. You can sometimes feel the tug-of-war between them as they each attempt to steer the dialogue where they think it should go.

With each episode, you get a full Mountain Goats song plus either a demo or a cover of that song. And most of them are fantastic. Well-written lyrics sung passionately. Check out the podcast to get a taste of the music, if nothing else.

The Memory Palace

This is now officially my favorite podcast. I first heard it on a different podcast. Radiolab showcased it, and I immediately needed more. It’s a history podcast, but rather than a big-picture, Ken Burns-style generalized look at history, it zooms tightly in on individuals. The backstory of Samuel Morse, inventor of the famous code, is especially moving. Then there’s the story of the most famous lighthouse keeper in America. She was seriously badass. And the story of John Wilkes Booth's brother. And the story of the people in the box seat next to Abraham Lincoln. And the story of the only human in historical record to be struck by a meteorite. Last year’s Halloween episode about Bobby Picket is wonderful. All written and spoken by one person, Nate Dimeo.

The topics vary considerably, but all are told with great attention to detail. More than just a list of facts, the host connects the stories of the past to our present. History is not a dead thing of the past, but a living organ of the current body. On first listen, I was hooked and spent the next two months binging all one-hundred-forty-odd more. Now I wait on baited breath for a new story every two weeks. I want more all the time.

This podcast has also stricken me with an unshakable urge to make my own. I always thought podcasts had to be two people gabbing at each other or a cast of many recreating the old vibe of radio plays. But now I see it can be one voice, talking about whatever it wants. I will never be able to top the brilliance of this podcast, but damn it, I want to try. That’s the greatest compliment any writer can give to another.

In the Grip of a Nameless Possession
February 21, 2020

I got this journal for my birthday last year:

My wife wrote a wonderful message, and my daughter drew shapes on the inside-back-cover. After a month or so of hemming and hawing, I finally opened the thing and put pencil to paper. That was an important moment in my life.

I set my goal to write about something good that happened each day, something that made me happy. Which I did. Sometimes I missed a day. Sometimes I missed several. But I filled that journal up last year. Then I kept writing journal entries in digital form.

Today, I reached page 100.

Last year, along with the paper journal and the digital, I wrote a book of poetry (coming soon), an album and a half of songs (Quiet Lions and another coming later this year), a couple of essays, and a short story. I did all that because I had to. If I don't write, I fail. That's my motivation. But I found the strength and dedication by writing something in that Snoopy journal almost every day. I have a journal entry for every day of this year. And since the turn of the decade, I have written something else, usually a few paragraphs in the new story, every single weekday.

I established a habit. That's how you learn anything new, by forcing yourself to do it till you do it automatically. That's how I wrote 25 pages of a new story this year, and that's how I'll finally finish the book I started a decade ago.

Before and After
February 7, 2020

Six years ago, I sat in the cafe of a Barnes and Noble, on my lunch break, and started writing a short story in pencil on loose leaf paper. Slowly, a few paragraphs or sentences at a time, I wrote seventy-five pages. I was just about done with the first draft of the longest thing I’d ever written by hand when my life changed, and my focus shifted away from that story. I was fired from that job, which turned out to be a godsend because I then found the best job I’ve ever had--but it was a scary month of free falling. Then my daughter was born.

The story has been in my notebook and on my mind ever since. I wrote other things, songs, poems, a few stories to accompany that long one in a book. As the years went by--sorry I automatically sang the beginning of this sentence because it’s a line from a Rush song. I’ll start again. In time, the story became a hulking beast I couldn’t face, a snarl of vines I couldn’t untie. But this year, I made the commitment to get it done.

At first, I thought I would pick up a freshly-filled mechanical pencil, write the ending, then transcribe it into type. But reading from the start, I realized the story needed serious rewrites. The beginning, as might be expected, was an unfocused, rambling mess. I had no idea when I began what the story wanted to say, where it wanted to go, who the characters were or how they related to each other. So I started writing, this time with a keyboard.

I knew what would come later in the story, so I was able to set some of that up in the beginning. I knew who the characters were, so I was able to write better dialogue between them. The writing felt good and, most importantly, it was fun. A week or so later, I had a scene that didn’t exist in the first draft, but it had been seeded by what I had done six years ago.

I was having the other half of a conversation that I had started, with myself, in that Barnes and Noble cafe. A lot of what I wrote in the original draft I now recognize as pretty dumb. I wrote a lot of bad prose back then. This is not going to be a case of simple transcription. My characters over explain everything. They’re surprised by things quite obvious in the story. They make stupid decisions. However, when I wrote this mess years before, I thought I was doing a great job. I was proud of it. I guess it’s a sign of growth that I can spot the mistakes in my own writing, but I am proud of what I’ve written in this new draft. Am I blind to new mistakes? When I look at this years from now will I be just as disappointed?

There are some good lines, though, that I was able to lift and drop into the updated version. Like this one: “He grinned like a magician who had just successfully fooled you into believing he conjured an elephant out of thin air when all he’d done was merely pull it from his sleeve.” I like that one. Maybe I wasn’t a complete blockhead back then.

It’s inevitable that I’m a better writer now than I was before. I’ll be a better writer six years from now. The one thing I know that won’t change is I will always hope, but never know, that I’m good enough.

Celebrating 45 Years of Sobriety
January 24, 2020

I try to avoid thoughts of what my life might have been had I been dealt better cards or rolled better stats. That kind of thinking is pointless. I'm not where or who I thought would be when I was a child, but I got exactly what everyone gets, a lifetime. And in that lifetime I got to do some pretty great things with some pretty great people. If that means swallowing an ounce of depression for every cup of comfort, then I say bottoms up.

There's no guaranty my life would have been better. With my father as role model, I might have been a drunk, a junkie. I could have died on a waterfall that one time had I not been lucky. Any number of things could have gone wrong and ruined or ended my life. I got what I got, and I try to sift out the broken glass and hold on to the gold. There's a lot of gold in your life if you look for it.

--More Journal Entries--

"Too many flames with too much to burn, and life's only made of paper" --Ronnie James Dio

"Words are flowing out
Like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away
Across the universe" --John Lennon

"Bow to the paper Gods in a world that is paper thin
The fools in town are ruling now" --Duran Duran

"Here I sit writing on the paper
Trying to think of words you can't ignore"
--Alice in Chains

"Working for paper and for iron
Work for the right to keep my tie on
Working for paper and for iron
Work for the unicorn and lion" --XTC