Welcome to my world. It has been over ten years since I started blogging, and the blogosphere has swelled from a market for self-journalists to a market for anyone with cute pictures to share. My blog site had this same name, except it was on a different blogging platform, or blogform, or platblog; whatever it's called now.
I've started this blog to share stories with someone like you. So now you've entered here, the end of the space-time continuum, where braggadocio has no place. You won't leave as the same person, not at least for a couple of minutes.
I’ve never met you, don’t even know what you look like. All I know is you love your music, that thump thump thump thump techno music. I didn’t think people still listened to that stuff outside of a nightclub, especially in the comfort of his or her own home, until I was living underneath you. I was never a fan of the genre, not that it matters what genre when the music is cranked at such a volume that it booms through my ceiling when I’m trying to sleep at night. It’s not so much the music as a whole as it is the bass. Of course I’m not you, but something about it appeals to you to want to blast it into the morning.
If I had to guess, you’re under the influence of something. Otherwise, how could you enjoy this behavior? Either way, I’ve lost too many hours of sleep thanks to you and your hobby, and I’ve been forced a handful of times to call security on you in the middle of the night. It’s a convenience to call that number on my refrigerator magnet, to hear a woman answer the call, and for me to report the disturbance.
Last time, she said she would drive here and knock on your door. If you didn’t answer, she would call me back for me to call the cops.
Well, lucky for you, I missed her calls because, believe it or not, my phone happened to be set to DO NOT DISTURB. By then, you’d turned that racket off for the rest of the night, and I could fall back to sleep. My guess was that she’d knocked on your door but you didn’t answer it. You must’ve suspected it was the cops or even me, so you turned it off and kept it off for the rest of the night.
That wouldn’t suffice since last night you persisted to do it again. The thump thump thump thump had begun around 7:30 pm and endured while I was in bed.I even tried a pair of earplugs, but still, the thumping broke through the sound barrier.
Months ago, I complained about you to the manager. Rather than confront you about the disturbance, he gave me this refrigerator magnet. It’s the only defense against your delinquency.
The defense wasn’t enough. Even when it isn’t the middle of the night, I still hear that thumping when I’m making dinner or when I’m trying to read a book. Imagine trying to focus on a Kafka story, about a man who turns into an ape, with that mindless techno crap thumping in the background, as if it were taking place in a nightclub built out of cocaine.
At that hour, it’s hard to complain because it isn’t past curfew, which gives you permission to pollute the air. That said, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care what you do up there as long as I don’t have to hear it.
The disturbances go beyond the music and its volume. Why do you have to walk around up there so often? Maybe it’s the way our building is constructed, but every footstep from you sounds like Bigfoot wearing cowboy boots. Sometimes, I’m jolted by what sounds like a bowling ball suddenly dropping to the floor when it could be your dropping a shoe. I can’t complain about that either. I guess I have to put up with you living up there.
One day, when I stepped outside to get the mail, there were scraps of paper littered near my doorstep. I looked around to see where they’d come from and picked up a few scraps to try and piece the puzzle together. On one of them was the number of your apartment.
I reported this to the manager, and he said that you owed the past rent and that you’d yelled at him about it. Never mind why he would divulge such information to me since it’s none of my business; that’s how he is. Yet you’ve made it my business by littering my doorstep with your problem. Too bad for me that it wasn’t an eviction notice. I’m waiting for that day to come.
There was even the night when I’d had enough of you and marched upstairs to your door with a pair of headphones I don’t use anymore. I left them there as a hint, a nudge, for you to wear them. They were quality headphones, the Sony WH-XM0004, one of the best wireless headphones on the market. Expensive ones, too. I don’t know what you did with them. Maybe you threw them away. You didn’t get the memo, though, since almost every night, I have to suffer through this thump thump thump thump.
I can only picture you lying in bed and living your version of paradise by playing what some people would dare call music. It certainly isn’t my paradise. Your paradise is my hell.
There will come a time when I call the police. I hope it sends the message so I can find my way back to harmony. Until then, I expect to hear this garbage tonight, tomorrow night, the night after tomorrow, and so on. What perplexes me for now, while I believe you’re closer to my age than you are a teenager, is what attracts you to playing this music so loudly when all you need to do is wear headphones. The whole purpose of them is to shield the rest of the world from your shitty taste in music.
I was sitting at a desk that was covered in black cloth with my own book on display in front of me. Balloons with colors to signify which genre were tied to the chair of each of the forty some odd authors who’d come to present their books. Mine was lime green for fiction. Out of everyone, I seemed to have been the youngest. It was surreal. I was gonna sit all day and wait to leave.
One of the fiction writers, before the festival began, approached my table and sniffed my book out without picking it up. “Hmm,” he said. “I like the concept.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He walked back to his table across the way.
The festival started at 10 am, and the public entered the conference room where our tables were set. One by one, they would step up and get a feel for my book, then look at me. I got uncomfortable. Please go away.
All the while, they were giving readings at the other end of the room behind a black curtain. Each one was narrating chapters from his or her book through a microphone. From what I could sense, hardly anyone was sitting in there.
When the author sharing my table came back from taking a piss, I asked him, “Are there any people sitting at the reading?”
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s people.”
He didn’t look too assuring.
Wamp wamp wamp was all I heard through the microphone. I remained seated at my table and looked back at authors who were sitting at their tables looking back at me, looking away. Those glum faces. No one buying.
And I was supposed to pitch the importance of my book. I’d read through it so often that it was like a story I’d regurgitated too many times to too many people. Like when a friend or relative would say, “Hey Benjamin, tell him what happened at the grocery store yesterday.” Since yesterday, I’ve dished it out a dozen times. A baker’s dozen would’ve carried less flavor than the first telling. So I try to rush through it and feed them only the crucial ingredients, leaving out the quirky ingredients, which may have tickled the listener’s taste buds. It tasted that way after countless revisions. Whenever someone asks me how I can make out when a story is finished, I tell him when I hate it.
The woman who sat at the table to my right told each person who walked by about her historical novel like a pro. I didn’t do that. Most people would pick my book up from its stand, get a whiff of the cover and the back before setting it down and moving to the next table. So this is how a festival works. We sit there with our piles of books and watch the people sample our covers before they walk on.
The woman to my right came up and asked to look at mine. I gave it to her. She went back to her table and opened it to a random page.
Oh, man. How unsettling when someone near me was reading my book, as if she were reading my lab results. I thought, My god, I’ve made a mistake by writing this.
I’ve had other uncomfortable moments, like ten years ago, when a homeless man at a coffee shop kept begging to read a memoir I’d been working on. He twisted my arm enough to where I let him read it.
The next day, when I saw him, I asked him what he thought, and he told me that he hated every page, that he couldn’t make it past page forty. I never spoke to him again.
The woman returned with my book and said she wanted to buy it. Uh, what? My first sale in person. I couldn’t believe it. It sounded as if I were selling her an empty shoe box. She paid me cash, and I gave her change. And then she wanted my autograph. Oh, please. I signed it with my not-so-handsome handwriting. And after I gave it to her, I realized I’d forgotten to write the date. You’re supposed to write the date.
Then up came another writer, a memoirist who said he was interested in reading it. He wanted to pay with his card, so I used my point-of-sale to make the transaction. He walked away with the book. My second sale. No other sales after that. I ended up buying his book, too, at the same price as mine. I broke even.
The turnout wasn’t the greatest. Each of the forty authors of different genres was called into the reading room at specific times in the day. They called mine at 1:30 pm. I didn’t want to go because there weren’t enough people behind the curtain. The organizer approached me and asked me to go over there.
The person in control of the readings spoke to me like an umpire for a boxing match:
“No muttering, no reading for longer than five minutes, no words you wouldn’t use on prime-time network TV. When your time is up, ask if there are any questions. Got it?”
Yeah, I got it.
I entered the curtained room. Five people slouching in their chairs were listening to a novelist mutter his story into a thin microphone at a black podium. It was more of a group counseling session than a reading. I couldn’t follow his story because of how much I was itching. Oh, how I didn’t want to be there.
When he was done, someone else left, so the audience was down to four.
Next went an elderly woman. She was too short for the microphone. Her hands were trembling as she was reading from her book.
As she was reading, I was standing in the back where I could see around the curtain. A lady with her schnauzer pointed at me from there and told me to come over to her, so I did.
“When’re you going up?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s like two people ahead of me.”
“I’m interested in reading your book. Will you please let me know when you’re up?”
She walked away with her schnauzer.
I wondered how she was expecting me to flag her down. Was I supposed to announce it through the microphone? “Attention, you, middle-aged woman with the schnauzer, I’m reading now.”
I waited through the next one giving his reading. He was the one who’d liked my concept without turning a page, a New Yorker telling his tale about New York. His story might’ve been appetizing if I wasn’t feeling too awkward to digest it.
The boxing umpire approached him when he was halfway through his story and gestured with the old blade-across-the-throat to wrap it up. He stopped mid-sentence and gathered his pages before leaving the podium with his walking cane.
So I was up. Oh boy. With four people in the room. I went up there and said to myself, Okay, get this shit over with.
My elbows pressed into the podium as I leaned into the microphone, and I opened a copy of my book to the correct page. I had no words to introduce myself with other than, “Hi, my name is Benjamin Talbot. This here is a collection of short stories called Periscope City. It takes place in a town full of loners.”
The quartet stared at me before I began the first sentence.
“Ice cream is my abusive husband.”
I worried that the organizer would’ve pulled me because of my uttering the word “abusive.” Maybe it was too taboo for prime-time, but she let me stay up there. “He smacks me around like I’m a dirty girl.” I also breathed from the same paragraph the word “sadomasochism.” The piece, although meant as humorous, smelled of serious since no one chuckled. So which is worse? Bombing in front of four hundred people or four people? Something tells me the latter. The odds of laughter would be lesser. Plus, my parents were in the “crowd”, which made it all the more stale. They didn’t matter. They were the only ones laughing as if it were canned laughter. But I wasn’t gonna die up there.
I survived to about the third page, close to the middle of the story, when I had to wrap it up and close the book in the middle of a sentence. It was time for Q&A.
“Questions?”
Nothing.
Then one of the listeners asked me something, but I forgot. It may have had to do with where I’d come up with the characters, as if I’d discovered them at a factory. My memory has repressed whatever my answer was.
So I thanked everyone and rushed from the podium. The organizer pulled me aside with a question of her own.
“Is every story in the first person?” she asked.
“Yes, they are.”
“It must be pretty hard to write that way.”
“It is, yes.”
I hurried out of the room and returned to my table. Whew. That was brutal. I could breathe when it was over.
The lady with the schnauzer had never shown up to my reading, but she came to my table and looked over my book. And every time someone would do that, I avoided eye contact with him or her. My collection of short stories was a product that I was selling at a convention, but it was different from a vacuum cleaner in that it was made from the depths of my soul; not with screws, hoses, and plastic. With a vacuum cleaner, I would’ve described how it sucked up the particles from a floor without feeling such critical judgment. It’s put to practical use, whereas my product is for entertainment? If they had questions of what it was about, I could’ve given them a brief answer, a sentence or two. But I wasn’t like the woman to my right who kept telling each person, “It’s won two awards. It’s about dyslexia and domestic abuse.”
I was supposed to sit there until four, but by three o’clock, there had been only two sales, and they were both from other authors. I felt the obligation to buy theirs out of respect.
The lady with the schnauzer said she was quite interested, but she said she bought her books only online. I wrote my name, my blog URL, and my email on the back of a random business card and gave it to her. I don’t believe she’ll buy it, but that’s fine.
I left with the bitter aftertaste of what the purpose was. I didn’t connect with anyone. The woman to my right had mentioned that the LA Book Festival was going on that same day. How much better would that festival had been for my book? That’s if they would’ve allowed me to come there as a vendor. They may have been all filled up. And how expensive would it have been for an author to be there? Maybe next year.
I lugged my cardboard box full of books to my car. It started raining. The festival had been held inside a library, as opposed to last year, of all places, at a senior center, or so I learned. To call it a festival was misleading. A festival has the air of thousands of people, which maybe they’d expected, while this attracted a few hundred through the course of seven hours.
Anyway, it was an experience nevertheless, something to write about.
I was up for most of the night, thinking about this weekend’s book festival.
After the email she’d sent to all authors in attendance to promote their work, in which she explained this will be a “family-friendly” event, (so no descriptions or language that wouldn’t be allowed on network prime time), I’m gonna have to tell the organizer that I can’t do the reading.
How am I going to promote this book at a festival where families will be? How will I give a reading when I see a little kid sitting on her daddy’s shoulders? I assume all the other authors there have written children’s books. If not children’s books, then content just as safe. Whereas I’ve written something a tinge bit darker.
This is my first rodeo. Well, book festival. I’ve never even been to a book festival before. What’s it like? I’m picturing each author sitting at his or her own table surrounded by piles of books, waiting desperately his or her pad or phone to make transactions. I’m picturing me at my own table, watching everyone else interact without me. Maybe a handful of attendants will come and ask the dreadful question of what my book is about. At which, I’ll answer, “You know, it’s just this book, with stories and characters and like a setting and stuff.”
And then they’ll pick it up, open it, read it for a few seconds, as I watch their faces gradually curl up into snarls before they drop it back to my table and move onto the next table, never to return.
Come to think of it, I don’t know the last time I’ve been to any old festival. I’ve been to fairs, state fairs, where they sold funnel cakes and had rodeos (speaking of rodeos).
How scared will I be in front of those people, with the local media there capturing it on video and posting it on the evening news? Terrifying.
But it’ll be an experience that I can write about later. At least I can say that. Maybe I’ll even sell some copies. Which makes me wonder how the interactions will go with the consumers? This will be the first time when I won’t be the consumer but the supplier, of my own product, not someone else’s product, not the cutlery knives I used to sell when I was twenty-one (which were bought only by my parents).
I can’t begin to imagine how this is going to go. What if I get into an altercation with one of them? What if the POS I’ve just installed on my phone doesn’t work, and I get into a mess with someone who actually wants to buy my book?
What kind of questions will they ask me about it? What answers will I give? What if I have nothing to say? What if I just sit there stupidly with a completely frozen mind the whole time, with a crowd of thousands in front of me, a microphone pointed at my mouth like the barrel of a gun? What if some kid picks up my book and flips to a page to somewhere he shouldn’t? I’m not a children’s author.
Anyway, it’s still four days away. I still have plenty of time to freak out about it.
I lost my wooden bracelet at the coffee shop. I lost it because I’d taken it off and left it on the table. It always interfered with my right hand as I was writing. Why didn’t I put it on my left arm instead? I was too entrenched in deep thoughts to remember it was there.
I got home and realized I’d left it there in the morning. Oh shit. Well, someone with a good soul will see it on the table and turn it in. Surely, the kind folks at the shop will keep it in the lost-and-found. Every store has a lost-and-found, does it not?
So I walked back to the store in good faith, believing in the chance that someone had turned it in.
I’d bought it from a vendor working the street in downtown San Francisco just two months ago. This racist selling wooden bracelets, ten dollars a piece. My mother had bought it for me as a gift.
On the walk back, I placed a mobile order for my favorite iced espresso about fifteen minutes ahead of time. I always do that.
Hardly anyone was in there. A young woman on her laptop at a table and two baristas, also young women. The one who was heavy with the tattoos was making the drinks.
I was expecting my iced espresso to be waiting at the counter, but it wasn’t there.
As she was making the drink, I asked, “Excuse me, but has anyone turned in a wooden bracelet? I seemed to have left it here this morning.”
She didn’t roll her eyes at me, but the way she looked at me, I could tell she was rolling her eyes internally.
“Uh, why don’t you ask her?” She nodded at the other barista standing at the register.
So I went to her and asked her, “Excuse me, but has anyone turned in a wooden bracelet? I seemed to have left it here this morning.”
She didn’t roll her eyes at me, but the way she looked at me, I could tell she was rolling her eyes internally.
“Uh, let me check.”
She moseyed into the backroom, and maybe five seconds later came back out and shook her head. “Nah, didn’t find nothing. Sorry.”
There went that.
I waited near the one with the tattoos for my drink.
A minute went by.
Five minutes went by.
Still no drink.
All the while, one customer after the next was grabbing his or her drink from the counter.
What was happening that day?
I got the sense that I was being brushed off.
After ten minutes of standing there right in front of Tattoos, as she was making one drink after another, she never once asked if I was waiting for something. In fact, she never once looked at me.
You get to an age when you start becoming invisible. Not invincible (God, I wish) but invisible. I seriously started wondering if I was a ghost. Not a ghost in the literal sense, but like a social ghost. You acknowledge a parking sign’s existence but never once stop to ask how it’s doing today. Okay, so maybe not a social ghost but a parking sign. I’m a parking sign with nipples. And I just so happened to lose my wooden bracelet the same day. I also wondered if, one day, I would end up secluded in the mountains as a hairy Murine creature, muttering to himself, “My mama bought me that bracelet…My mama bought me that bracelet…My mama bought me that bracelet…” for the rest of my life. What horror.
And there I was, being treated like a parking sign.
At about the fifteen-minute mark, I had to say something. I was never one who blew up at workers. I always just wanted to spread peace and drink my espresso, maybe get help with my wooden bracelet.
But eventually I said to her, while clenching my teeth to muzzle my anger, “Excuse me, but where’s my iced espresso for Benjamin?”
She gave me a lost gaze as anyone would to a parking sign with a voice. She went over to the other barista, and I stood where I was, trying to cool down.
They checked their POS tablet for the mobile orders and saw the order. Tattoos started making it, while Miss Go-Fuck-Your-Bracelet gave me a card for a free drink. Yahoo. I was so pissed that I didn’t even thank her. She may have apologized, but I wouldn’t have heard her because I was listening to Your Old Droog in my earbuds.
Tattoos finally made my drink, and may have apologized as well, but I wouldn’t have heard her either. It’s best, in public, to wear your earbuds to block out the toxicity, like plugging your nose in New York City.
So I trudged home, an angry parking sign with nipples. Anger lasts for a long forty-five minutes before it simmers, and you play the scene over and over in your head the whole time. You try to look for ways in which you could’ve handled it differently.
An old friend once said, “You gotta ask for everything in this life.” It was after the Chinese restaurant hadn’t given him any forks or chopsticks. He had to stuff the lo mein noodles in his mouth using his fingers. Maybe a handful of times, you don’t need to ask for what you want; and those times are golden and sacred, some of the best times of your life. But other than that….
The second I’d entered that coffee shop and didn’t see my espresso waiting on the counter, I should’ve marched right up to Tattoos and demanded, “Where’s my espresso?”
She probably would’ve started making it right away.
That’s how the successful became successful. They didn’t stand around like a parking sign. Instead, like bank robbers, they walked into every room and demanded what they wanted.
I try to practice patience, believing what I want will eventually come. But in the case of the coffee shop, it proved false. Do I think I’ll change? Nah, not at this age. I’ll probably stay the same.
This month, I was delighted to be interviewed for the website Authors Electric, where we went over my debut short story collection Periscope City and my perspective on loneliness, how it influenced the book and such.
All these books repeat the same thing regarding showing versus telling. Someone posted their writing for critique for a writers’ group on Facebook and wanted to know which sentence worked best.
First Sentence: It was fucking cold.
Second Sentence: My bones chattered from the howling winds through my frosty open bedroom window.
Third Sentence: The howling winds brushed against my chattering bones as the midnight air bit through my peeling skin in a thunderous collision of war.
I rarely post anything on there, but I was really tempted, so I wrote: The first sentence for sure. This show versus tell madness is getting out of hand.
Sometimes, all you have to write is: It was too fucking cold.
I never heard truer advice as when someone said, “Write like you talk.” His name is Jack Grapes. I implore you to watch his three-hour interview on YouTube. It’s better to avoid sentences that begin with a participial phrase, such as:
Standing at the window, I watched the car roll by.
That’s not how someone talks. Maybe in the nineteenth century they did when eloquence was key. But nowadays, modern speech isn’t the same.
If I was telling someone, I would effortlessly say, “It was fucking cold.” Or “I stood at the window and watched the car roll by.”
People just automatically speak in subject-verb-object sentences. So when I read a story where sentences begin with participial phrases, it reminds that I’m reading something rather than experiencing it. Oh, wait. Someone wrote this. The less attention you bring to yourself as a writer, the better. It’s like if you were watching a movie, and out of nowhere, the film crew entered the frame. The director yells “Cut! ” and the scene ends.
We’ve been taught at an early age to write like a writer. It’s hard to unlearn. Unlearning it takes years of practice.
I also read a heated debate about insensitive language. This is something I’m afraid I can’t help. A frustrated writer expressed his thoughts about someone calling him out for using the word “handicap” in his story. He cried censorship. People in the group posted accusatory comments and called him an “old man yelling at the wind.” So it’s a matter of older people not understanding the rules of younger people. And what’s wrong with older men? Isn’t that offensive? I can agree that I can’t keep up with what words are insensitive these days. It seems there’s a new word that is deemed derogatory every hour. I wanted to make a comment as well, but I held back. If I’m playing golf, what should I say instead of “handicap”?
The angry old man said he refused to be politically correct. Someone actually wrote, OMG, the term politically correct is so 1990s. I didn’t even know. So what’s the word they use these days instead?
Most of them told him he could write what he wanted, that no one was censoring him, but also that the readers had a right to hate his work, and that traditional publishers wouldn’t go near him. It was an all-out assault, but I understood his point. The appropriate words should align with the character. Euphemisms remove the poetry out of a poem. The purpose of one is to remove feeling from the meaning. If “handicap” is too offensive to use in literature, depending on the context of course, we’ll have to use “person with a disability.”
They said Stephen King had even apologized for his insensitive language in his past works. I wonder if someone forced him to apologize and if he really meant it, or if he internally rolled his eyes.
I sat in the waiting room of the dentist’s office early in the morning and fidgeted over mouth cancer while the office played “Jingle Bells.” To keep my mind distracted, I read post comments on Facebook. It had a writer’s group. Someone posted about a new AI technology that could critique your story. I had never used it before. Some people said it worked for them.
A hygiene assistant called my name and asked me to follow her to a room. She led the way and walked very slowly. When we got there, she asked me why I was visiting.
“I have a mouth sore that hasn’t healed for two months,” I said.
“Let me see,” she said.
I opened my mouth and showed her.
“I don’t see it,” she said.
“Your finger’s on it,” I said.
“Oh, I see it now. Please stand over here at this machine, so I can take your X-ray.”
It was a machine I had never seen. I stood in a chamber where I rested my chin. She left the room and flipped a switch several times while I wore a vest. She took pictures of the mouth sore and sent me to another room where the dentist would come.
Another hygenist came in with another.
“Good morning. I’m going to look at your teeth and gums.”
She sat over me while the other one sat at the computer monitor. The one over me checked each tooth and gave them numbers. Two and three were good. Four was bad. “Two, two, three, two, four, four, four, four…”
I began to sweat each time she said, “Four.”
When the dentist came in, she tested me for oral cancer. She held a device over my mouth. I said, “Ahh.” The device was round with blue lights and a handle. It looked like something at the checkout lane in a grocery store. I wondered how it worked. It might be outdated many years from now. She told me it didn’t find any cancers, and she didn’t even mind the sore.
After she left the room again, I waited for some time in the chair and read more Facebook. One of the group members asked if it was okay if his character complained about his wife to his friends. His son had told him it wasn’t funny. People in the comments mostly all agreed with his son. That character is a jerk. A lot of them said it was such an old trope. A few people claimed that most readers are between 18-30, and they didn’t like that sort of character: the husband who complained about his wife. A few of them compared him to Al Bundy, and some people even compared Al Bundy to Archie Bunker. At least the two characters shared the same initials. I used to love Married…With Children. It was one of my favorite sitcoms of all time. After all that negative feedback, I wondered what the writer could do with that character if he couldn’t complain about his wife.
I stopped reading that post. The dentist said my mouth looked pretty good before she told me everything that was wrong about it, and it was a listful. Most of it was dental terminology that only her staff would understand. But I found out I suffered from bruxism and would need to wear a mouth guard when I go to sleep. I have never worn a mouth guard. I’ll probably drool a lot.
They fitted me for it with a soft plaster. I bit down on it to form the mold. They said I would have to come in to pick it up next week. I also have to switch what kinds of toothpaste and stop brushing so hard. I had been using Colgate all those years but had to switch to Crest. The dentist had told me which Crest toothpaste to use, but I forgot what it was right after she’d told me. I left the office without a clue about which one to buy. Another doctor’s visit without any resolution.
I’m always into mental hacks, I guess they’re called, little things that get me ahead. A post on Facebook was about writing longhand and if it’s effective, and people left comments about the benefits, such as how you use your whole body to draw letters on a piece of paper with pen in hand as opposed to the automatic nature of typing. I didn’t know if it went as far as that, but I did know that after writing longhand for many years every morning that it definitely slowed my thoughts because it took drastically longer to write a word than it did to type.
But one person commented that they wrote longhand with their left hand to activate the right brain, which therefore unearthed their repressed memories and their inner child. As someone who always wanted to find some new approach to my craft, I penned a page with my left hand the next morning.
What I found out at first was that my handwriting looked like it was from that of a four-year-old. The letters were very runny, like a busted yolk, almost like the objects in an abstract painting, and for the most part, illegible. And it took so long to craft each word that the sentences were overly simple. I spent a half hour composing a whole page, and the content was similar to the content I’d penned with my right hand. But what I found after that first morning was a sense of calm afterward. My anxieties were at bay. It felt like I’d just stepped away from a therapist, and I could go on with my day more confident.
Maybe it was a placebo. I googled research on left-handed writing and found mixed answers. Some people had blogged about astounding results in that they were able to channel creativity and their inner child with the use of their right brain. Other articles negated the unlocked power and said there was no scientific evidence of left-handed writing activating the right hemisphere and unlocking creativity. What a bummer. I do beg the question. Is someone who’s naturally left-handed fortunately more creative than someone who’s right-handed? Nevertheless, we can train ourselves to be ambidextrous regardless of whether the left-handed phenomenon is bogus. There’s no harm in that.
But I do believe the placebo is real. If a writer feels it works, it works. Writers can be superstitious as such that some of them wear the same hat when they write. Others keep a pet rock at their desk to invite their muse like it’s a plate of cookies for Santa Claus. After all, creativity and the imagination bloom when the writer handcuffs himself.
I once wrote a short story where I never used the letter k, so I had to be mindful to use words that didn’t contain that letter. That restraint allowed me to discover new ideas.
I’m fascinated by the Oulipo movement, which was a sixties movement of French writers who enforced such restraints. One of them, for example, was called N+7, where they took every noun from a poem, grabbed a dictionary, and chose the noun that was seven nouns down and replaced it with that. Some of the outcomes were absurd, but it was all part of the games the Oulipo movement played. One novel was completely written without the letter e. Don’t ask how that was accomplished, but I bet it forced the writer to form new ideas he’d never before imagined.
Journaling is an ancient activity. People have been doing it for centuries, yet nowadays, probably less than a percent of the human population does.
If I had a teenage daughter, and I told her, “Hey, Suzy, I want you to start journaling your thoughts and feelings,” she would look at me like I’m insane.
“Hell no, Dad. Give me back my iPad so I can play Candy Crush.”
The idea is terrifying. We’ve been taught unconsciously to avoid such a thing at a young age for whatever reason.
I first started journaling in my early twenties when my psychiatrist/therapist told me to write a page of my thoughts and feelings and bring it into my next session for those things to discuss, back when a psychiatrist and a therapist were one person. Now, a psychiatrist doesn’t want to deal with his patients’ feelings but rather just sit with them for ten minutes and ask if they’re experiencing any side effects before they adjust their medications and send them on their not-so-merry way. A therapist would need to talk with them for the allotted fifty minutes instead, which is a failing endeavor in the modern world. It has been years since I’ve paid anyone who’s any good. But that’s a subject for another day.
So I drove to the Santa Monica pier, hundreds of miles from my parents’ house, where I lived at the time, just to keep my thoughts and feelings as far away from them as possible. What I wrote was so morbid that I kept looking over my shoulder in case any beachgoers could see. I may have somehow gotten in trouble. But afterward, when I was done, the activity was deeply rewarding.
Once in a while, I’ll enter a coffee shop and notice a young woman with a pen in hand scribbling in her fancy little notebook, completely focused on her journal, and a tear will almost fall from my eye. It’s like that commercial from the seventies where the Native American was walking down the highway. A colonist’s descendant threw his trash out the window of his moving vehicle right at the Native American’s feet. Except these are tears of joy. Wow. A person is actually journaling.
It’s a therapeutic practice that occupies our minds from the fear of death, just like washing the dishes or hoeing the garden, like what we see in those prescription drug ads where people are overzealously flying a kite with their irritable bowel. They make me want to take the drug.
Anyway, I remember reading another how-to book for writers back when I read dozens of those books that preyed on a young writer’s insecurities. This one was by someone who wrote science fiction. One of the first rules was to throw the journal away because journaling was useless and rather to focus on the project at hand. I thought his advice was an insult. What’s the problem with journaling? Yes, most of it is garbage a writer would throw away. After all, Hemingway once wrote something to the effect that the first draft of anything is shit. But sometimes, a gem of a sentence is buried somewhere in the trash.
I started journaling routinely after reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. She suggested morning pages, which are three pages of journaling every morning. Writing is a practice but also therapy, like an activity of any other, unless we’re actually writing about our fear of death, in which case we’re dealing with it head-on and making it less threatening on paper.
I think everyone should journal. It feels as if young people are taught to avoid thoughts and feelings and be good little worker bees. The activity no longer scares me after doing it for so long. I’m not in the mood most mornings, but I force myself to do the lifting before doing anything else, like physical exercise. Anyone who does it for the first time might be full of trepidation. That’s okay. Their thoughts are so raw that they’re brave enough to write them on paper. I’m not saying it’s mandatory, but it’s useful. Writing longhand instead of typing is even better. Drawing each letter is comparable to drawing a picture in that it further connects the mind.
Some have argued that writing isn’t therapy at all, with which I strongly disagree. I don’t care what the person writes. It could be a textbook on kinesiology. The subtle act is enough to distract his mind from the fear of death. No matter what we worry about, it all comes down to that basic fear. Aren’t we all just sitting in the waiting room anyway, biding time before it calls our names?
My Brooks walking shoes had holes in the toes. I showed my parents.
“Let’s get you new shoes,” Mom said.
Didn’t want to go shopping. Hate shopping. Would’ve rather done something else. But went with them anyway. Assumed long lines would be at the stores.
We drove to the electronics store first to look at the new Xbox. My parents are old school, or just old, and still worry about saving money. Will go to great lengths to save fifty dollars on something. If something is so greatly expensive, what’s fifty dollars? The electronics store had a sale on the console. Its original price was over four hundred dollars, but on Black Friday was on sale for fifty dollars less with a game for thirty dollars less than its original price as well, the disc version, not the digital download version.
Dad threw a fit at the counter. The console didn’t have a DVD drive for the disc, so I would have to download the game instead. Was fine with that, but he wasn’t.
“How can we make this work?” he asked.
The store employee didn’t know.
I would’ve paid the extra thirty dollars to download the game. Wasn’t a problem with me, but to Dad it was.
“Show him the game,” he said to me.
So to cool him down, I led the associate to the Xbox section in the store. Came to find out there was no such coupon of any sort for a digital download. Didn’t bother me, but it bothered my dad.
“Let’s try another place,” he said. He had to save money on the game.
Would’ve been nice to just buy the damn thing and get it over with.
We went shoe shopping at the same shopping center. I tried on a few pairs of shoes. Didn’t like spending copious hours shopping anywhere. No more than an hour, tops. Most of the shoes were ugly. Running shoes typically are. They have those long, thick, white sides at the bottom that aren’t very attractive. The most attractive ones, ironically, are the least comfortable ones. Tried on a pair of green Adidas running shoes, not for running but for walking. Felt fine except they were size 13’s, and my heels slid when I walked around. Too big. Would’ve caused a blister. So I tried on a pair of size 12’s. A little too small. My big toe bunched up against the end of the shoe. I have weird feet. They’re average size, but my large toe is abnormally long compared to my other toes. My feet would probably fit in a size 10 without my big toe. If I could chop it off, I wouldn’t have as much trouble trying on shoes. My ideal size is 12 1/2. They make such sizes, but they’re not common enough. Would have to specially order them. Who wants to do that? Just wanted to buy the shoes and get out of there, which I did. Didn’t care too much about the discomfort of walking around with bunched-up toes.
“Why don’t you get two pairs?” Mom said.
“Two pairs for what?” I said.
“For when the other pair gets worn out. You can get the green pair and this blue pair.”
The blue pair was navy blue, not as attractive as the green pair, but it depended on what clothes I would wear them with. The green pair wouldn’t match all of my clothes. Assuming the blue color matched more clothes. I went with her suggestion.
We checked out at the front. Each pair of shoes cost about sixty dollars. A deal since most shoes today cost around a hundred.
We walked back to their car in the parking lot. When we got there, I sat in the trunk of their SUV, put on the new pair of green Adidas, and stuffed my old pair of black Brooks in the new shoe box.
“Here, I’ll throw it out,” Dad said.
I gave him the shoe box. “If you see a homeless man, why don’t you give them to him?”
“Ah, we’ll see,” he said.
When he walked off, Mom and I waited for him to come back. But after ten minutes, he was still gone.
“Where the hell is he?” I asked.
“Who knows?” she said. “Probably lost.”
Wouldn’t have been a surprise, given his age, that he did get lost somewhere in the shopping center. I’d watched the news just the other night and saw a story about an old man missing somewhere in Thousand Oaks. Some of them just wandered off and forgot where they were.
So Mom and I cruised the parking lot in the car in search of him but couldn’t find him.
“Why don’t you call him?” I asked.
Mom had her phone connected to the dashboard.
“Not a bad idea,” she said. “Hey, Siri, call my husband.”
“Calling your husband,” Siri said.
The phone rang over four times. He finally answered.
“Where the hell are you?” she said.
“Behind the store,” he said. “Couldn’t find a decent trash can.”
I saw one at the store entrance. Maybe he didn’t see it.
We drove behind the store and found him without the shoe box.
Mom pressed the button for her window to go down. “Get in,” she said.
He climbed into the backseat and groaned from his sciatica.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
“Couldn’t find a trash can big enough to fit the shoe box,” he said.
The way he thought, a trash can had to fit the shoe box perfectly not to damage the box. If I’d done it, I probably would’ve taken the shoes out of the box, ripped the box up until it would fit, and thrown it in with the shoes. That’s just me.
We waited at a stop light behind other cars to leave the shopping center. A surprise that there weren’t any lines at the stores, yet no surprise in the age of online retail. People are wise enough not to drive to these places anymore when they can have the products delivered to them.
I remember my father and uncle used to camp out in front of stores before the sun came up on Black Friday. Over twenty years ago. Sometimes, things change for the better, but not most things.
