Journal of Fear and Hope (2016)

Office Joke
December 22, 2016

Earlier, I told you one story that happened at work. Here's another:

This happened in January of last year, winter at it's coldest and cruelest. I mention the weather because cold is brutal on my hands. My knuckles split, crust over with black, gnarly scabs, then reopen and ooze blood at random times. Moisturizer can help, but putting it on is like washing my wounded hands in gasoline, so most times I choose not to. It's embarrassing, but I have to live with it. One of my co-workers asked me about it one day. It must have been everyone's mind, because as soon as he mentioned it, everyone asked. One guy actually said, “Do you box?”

Figuring this might come up, I had prepared a snappy comeback. I said, “Well, I joined this club, but I'm not supposed to talk about it.”

The guys all cracked up, because it was a good quip, and of course they got the reference, 'cause they're guys. But the one woman on our team did something unexpected. She decided to join in on the joke.

She said, “You might not think he's capable of violence, but I've seen it firsthand.”

The room got real quiet.

Everyone found other things to look at.

She had no idea what she'd just implied. At best, she confirmed that I had joined a secret society dedicated to unfettered aggression in the basements of abandoned buildings. At worst, she just confessed to everyone at work that I beat her.

I think everybody figured out that she had an odd sense of humor. Many of her stories revolved around firearms. But she ruined one of the best comebacks I had ever managed to pull off. I had a great moment going. The guys all thought I was the funniest, sharpest, wittiest dude ever. I was Oscar Wilde with all the guys in the palms of my hands. I was like, really happy, and the moment was ruined by a woman.

Thank Yous are in Order
December 3, 2016

Novel November has passed. I worked all year on it, writing reviews on lunch breaks and late at night after my daughter went to bed. I did it to prove to myself that I could do it. I hoped to garner some readers as well, but I really did it as a challenge to myself. All together, the reviews and essays constitute somewhere around 23,000 words. That's half a novel's word count. That's something to be proud of. That tells me if I put my mind to it, I can create quite a lot even in the limited amount of time I have. As my hero Joe R. Lansdale is fond of saying, you have more time than you think. Speaking of, I'd like to give a shout out to Lansdale for sharing my reviews of his work on Twitter. Carolyn Lee Adams and the official Twitter account of Will Eisner also shared my reviews as well. All that really boosted my readership last month. I don't have a huge audience, but this project brought more to the site than ever before. So thanks also to everyone who stopped by to read. I hope you'll check out any of the books I reviewed last month, but look into Lansdale, Adams, and Eisner especially.

Now for a couple days of rest and not worrying about posting on time. Then on to the next project. Stay tuned.

Burning Bookcases
November 10, 2016

My dad made me two bookcases. I still have them. One of them has glass doors and closed cabinet beneath the shelves. He took a blow torch to the pine, kissed the wood with the blue flame just enough so the grain darkened to a beautiful black and ochre. Of course I begged him to let me play with fire, which he did. It was something I'd never seen, something I didn't know could be done. The burnt bookcase looks so much better than the other, which has an ordinary stain finish. It always baffles me, the way my dad could create so much beauty but also get drunk or high or just angry and cause just as much destruction.

At some point, the knob on one of the lower cabinet doors came off and went missing. I carried the case to all my apartments as I moved, a bit sad whenever I put the bookcase in its place and noticed the missing and lopsided cabinet knobs. So one day I did what I could have done all along: bought a matching knob at the hardware store. It was a perfect twin, except the new one didn't have the same burnt finish as the original. So I held held it over the flame of a disposable lighter. The Bic lighter, of course, wasn't nearly as hot as the prescribed BerzOmatic blowtorch, but--surprise, surprise, surprise--it did the trick. That jerry-rigged cabinet knob is still there, and you can only tell the difference if you stare at them and compare for a length of time. I'm proud of it. I solved a problem I thought was unfixable; I replaced something my dad and I did together years before with tools I no longer had available. That slightly-blacker-than-the-other knob is a testament to my genius. They ought to give a Pulitzer for Bookcase Repair.

Clever by Half
November 2, 2016

I like solving problems with items on hand, and I like getting away with things. Makes me feel clever. When I was a kid, mom passed an edict that could not stay up past my bedtime reading. If she saw my light on through the crack under the door, she'd be angry and do something horrible. Take my books away or something, I'm not sure, but the threat came from a adult, so I listened. Besides, this was an opportunity to prove myself better than Mom.

Turning on my reading lamp was right out. That sucker was bright as the sun. I considered a flashlight. Reading by flashlight under the covers after dark was television and movie shorthand for "this kid is a nerd/genius/troublemaker/rebel." But I didn't have a flashlight. Spend my hard-earned allowance and report card money on something that wasn't a book or Go-bot? That thought never entered my mind. So I made do. There was a light source already in my room and on all the time. The digital clock. It was just bright enough to read by but dim enough so as not to draw attention to my surreptitious activity. I had to hold the clock right against the pages and the book inches away from my face. It cast its faint, red glow on the text and I read until I either read my fill, I fell asleep with the clock in my lap, or I developed a piercing headache and abandoned my book for the night.

Did the process further weaken my already feeble vision and lead to my off-the-chart myopia? I'm sure it did. But I had a secret. I was a bad boy, ignoring the rules, doing whatever the hell I wanted. I was up past my bedtime, reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. Like a boss.

de lo Habitual
April 29, 2016

I had this ritual. Every time I got a new tape or CD, I would sit on my bed, listen to the whole thing all the way through, and read the lyrics along with the music. That's if a lyric sheet was included, of course. I can't tell you how annoyed I was to find R.E.M.'s Green album only had the words to one song printed in the booklet. Such a tease. But I could always count on Rush and Tom Waits to proudly publish their lyrics. I would carve out an hour or so to recline with a drink and do nothing but ingest their music and their words. I can't do that anymore. I don't have that much time to set aside. I listen to every new album in the car, between home and work or while running errands. Not that I buy many CDs these days. The last one I bought was Dio's Holy Diver. It hasn't left my car since day one. And you know what? No lyric sheet. Probably for the best;driving and reading are two great tastes that taste like death together.

I miss the ritual. The time became sacred because I made it so. It was a moment that could never be repeated because I could never again hear those songs for the first time. I have a new ritual now. For each book I read, I choose a bookmark appropriate to the book's subject or theme. If it's one I've read before, I have a better idea what to pick. I scour through my games and card collections, through the random actual bookmarks I picked up over the years at libraries I've visited (hey, when you go to a concert, you buy a band tee-shirt; when you go to a library, you take a free bookmark) for just the right thing. Sometimes the office floor ends up covered in open game boxes and dismantled Magic: the Gathering decks, which I then have to pick up then reorganize the game shelf, which sometime leads to completely changing how I have my games displayed, and when my wife asks what the hell I'm doing, I feel a bit embarrassed to say that all this is in preparation to read.

When we perform our rituals, we make the moment our own. The few minutes pass like all the others than have gone by in our fleeting lives, but when we enact a certain rite, a personal ceremony, we put our fingerprints, our mark, our stamp on that brief span of time. It becomes special because it is ours alone. It is a moment accounted for, a moment treasured. Some may call these customs eccentric. But they're really acts of survival, attempts to capture an instant that would otherwise flash and fade like a spark of static lightning in a dim room.

His Majesty
April 25, 2016

I'll go ahead and apologize now, but the Batman soundtrack is the only Prince record I've ever listened to. Those are the only songs of his I know. But I listened to it a lot. Partly because it was literally one of only two tapes I owned (the other being Living Colour's debut) but mostly because it was damn good. I didn't like the ballads all that much, but the rock and funk songs got me up dancing around my room playing tennis racket guitar. I can hear them now, "Electric Chair" and "Party Man" sung from the Joker's view point, "The Future" from Batman's, and of course the magnificent and massive "Batdance." That last song contains one of my absolute favorite guitar solos. In the video, Prince plays his guitar like he's masturbating. In the middle of the song, the music comes to a stop, and Prince yells at some guy to turn it back on and calls him a "son of a bitch." He says that on the tape. That my mom bought me. For Christmas. Now I need to hear it again. I'll have to find that tape. And a tape player. Can anyone give me a ride back to 1989?

Going to the Arcade
February 9, 2016>

Back in the 1980s, video games were only for kids. In fact, it was a joke that adults couldn't play or even comprehend the complexities of Pong. A local news channel ran a series in which one of the reporters was challenged by children to go head-to-head in the newest Atari offering, and the kid always trounced the adult. Joysticks were as hard to master as the flashing clock on the VCR. Grownups had no idea why that one collection of pixels wanted to move past that other set of pixels or even what any of the shapes on the screen represented. Kids laughed in their incompetent faces.

I never got the chance to play video games with my dad. The closest I ever came was when he watched me play Dungeons of Daggorath or the time his brother gave me Zelda II because he couldn't get very far, and I astounded them both by beating the game in a week. But my dad bought the line that adults had no business touching a control pad. I guess I did, too. Before my dad went off the wagon for good and disappeared into the mists of addiction, we had some good times. But we never played video games. I never got the excitement of teaching him that infinite life trick in Super Mario or going mano y mano with my old man in Bomberman II. That's a memory I missed out on. Some men grow up wishing they'd gone to baseball games with their dads. I regret not playing Donkey Kong Country with mine.

I look forward to playing video games with my daughter. You can debate all you want the dangers of violent games or what place they have in our culture. (Roger Ebert claimed they would never be true art, but Harlan Ellison worked as hard as he did at anything to make a masterpiece of electronic escapism.) But you can't deny that any sort of relaxing endeavor is better when shared with those you love. Video games are and have always been an important part of my life. I hope one day I'll blast through a level of Super Mario Bros. 3 and hand the controller over to my daughter. And I hope she'll say, "That was pretty good, Dad. Let me show you how to really do it."

Make A New Beginning
January 1, 2016

Happy New Year, all. I hope this year is better than the last, but of course that's not always possible. But I wish you some fun and some excitement, warm hugs, afternoon naps, good meals, good books, a few memories that stick. Keep this in mind: if you break any of your New Year's resolutions, you don't have to wait till next January to start over. Every day is the beginning of a new year, and you don't have to wait to change yourself. You can't stop getting older; you shouldn't stop getting better.