Category Archives: Non-fiction

Non-fiction

Set My Bed on Fire

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I remember mornings in Los Angeles when bugs took over my bed. It happened three or four times when I lived there. The first time was a smaller issue. My landlord called all the tenants to a meeting in the middle of the day and announced we had a bedbug infestation throughout the entire building. A friend of mine who lived on the third floor wore a bug costume for the occasion. The landlord didn’t find it the least bit funny. She said we had to bag up everything in our rooms, from clothes to books, before the exterminator came. We had to wash all of our clothes in the hottest water and dry them in the hottest temperature.

The bugs hid everywhere, even in the books on my shelf, so I had to wrap all those books up in a trash bag and tie it shut for the exterminator to turn on the heat lamps in each room to kill the bugs.

I never got bitten that first time, but the bugs returned many years later at the same apartment. And that time, they’d infested my mattress, although I never saw them. I itched everywhere and discovered the bites all on my hands and ankles. The itching was most intense in the mornings and went away after I took a hot shower. The bites would scab up and disappear in about a week, only for new ones to appear. I was in denial that they were bed bug bites because of how much of an ordeal it was to prepare for the exterminator and his heat lamp.

So I went to the doctor to have the bites checked out.

“Those are bed bug bites,” he said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because there are three of them together,” he said. He pointed at each one. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

So I knew I had to tell my landlord. I was getting bitten every night but never saw them. It got to a point where I had to move out after seventeen years in Hollywood. I moved to Culver City, and the bugs followed me there. When I discovered a single bug on my comforter, I knew then that they looked like apple seeds with legs, and they were slow. I could crush one with my fingers, and blood would squirt out. I smelled my fingers and smelled my own blood. The fatter they were, the more blood they’d swallowed.

I told my new landlord, and he sent their exterminator over to spray the apartment. That was in 2020.

I thought the problem was solved, but the bugs came back three years later. And this time it was its worst. No wonder the apartment was available for me. No one wanted to live in a place where there had been an infestation. The landlord had to warn me before I moved in, but I thought it wouldn’t be a problem.

The third time around, I actually saw them crawling throughout my apartment, all over my bed, beneath the mattress, along the boxspring where they’d dug a hole for a place to live and hatch eggs. I saw the bloody eggs and the blood stains all along the mattress. They were biting me every night and giving me nightmares. I would wake up itching all over. I thought I could handle it, in other words live with it without telling the landlord because I feared that I would get in trouble. But I was supposed to report it and I finally did after waiting too long.

The bugs had made it to my couch and my floor. It’s hard to believe that I had such a problem with them. They would crawl onto my hand, and I would quickly crush them. It was something from a horror film. The same exterminator showed up and sprayed the place, but he was cheap and used cheap equipment.

The bedbugs remained and hatched more eggs. I saw them along the floorboards and had to call a better company to spray the place down. They made me do more than what I did in the first apartment. I had to take out all my clothes and wash them, including the comforter, which I brought to a coin-op and spent over twenty dollars to wash and dry. I had to remove all furniture from the walls so the exterminator could spray along the floorboard all across the apartment.

I look back and think what hell to endure. It’s hard to imagine that I lived in such dire conditions that I had to sleep with a can of bedbug spray next to my bed, and that they crawled on my hands and along my legs for so many months.

Non-fiction

The Middle of the Week

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The sun has risen in the distance as I type this slowly, trying not to miss a key. It’s the middle of the week, and I’m hoping for the best to come before the weekend. Now that I have found a path to get there, I can gather the ability to relate to others and their passions. They seem so furtive as if I’d found them out, except I can’t. I’m not that observational.

But anyway, the middle of the week is like a dog that scratches itself. I watch him as he works his ear and shakes his head at what has gotten to him. It’s the dead of summer. I say “dead” between my gums with emphasis. The heat has weakened me. I drink my water like it’s never going to last. Just like the weekend is too short, so is water. And the heat dehydrates me. What else is there to do but stay inside until the summer ends? And that won’t be for at least another several months. September rolls along just like a train that coasts down the track too slowly. And I’ll be stuck in August with a job that breaks my back. My new supervisor told me she wasn’t a micromanager, which isn’t always good. I mean, no one loves a micromanager. Except I think we all need someone who can watch us for what we’re missing.

A lot has happened since the newest development. I’m working on a salary, not hourly. No longer do I have to punch the clock. Now some people may say that that’s a good thing, but that’s them talking. I have to hold myself accountable, except I’m a different person when it comes to my job. I go a steady pace which doesn’t work for everyone, and that can bring a lot of stress to me. I worry about what will happen next.

I see a woman with a dog in the shop who ordered coffee. Her shirt says, “All I need is coffee and my dog”. That’s like me wearing a shirt that says, “All I need is coffee and my laptop” as people see me at this table. She should wear that every time she comes in here with her dog. It’s a K-9 police dog. Yesterday she wore a collared shirt that didn’t say anything. She should buy seven shirts that say the same thing. They can be different colors. I wouldn’t be pedantic about that. I wear shirts with nothing on them, no statements, no letters or numbers, just plain shirts that don’t bring attention to me, or unwanted attention that is.

The dog is panting, and he looks around as the lady chats with the older men at the long round table. I adjust to the sun shining through the window. They pull the shades down in here to keep it away. She left with her coffee now. I have nothing to look at. The shades come down. I take a break.

Non-fiction

Encounters in the Coffeeshop

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I’m sitting in the coffee shop this morning behind a man who blows his nose too often. I know because he sits behind me every morning and talks to his little dog and sings to whatever music is playing in here. I put my headphones on so I can’t be distracted.

The other day, I think it was Sunday, a man whom I’d seen sitting on the sidewalk several times asked to use my smartphone to make a call to his wife. He didn’t look like a husband. And where was his phone? Who would marry a guy without a phone? These thoughts ran through my mind while he was in my face, and I felt pressured enough to where I let him use it, which was foolish of me. I should’ve said no, but he was desperate and forceful.

“You gonna be here?” I asked him.

“Yes, I’ll be right over here.”

So I dialed the number for him and recognized the area code as being local. He took my smartphone and used it near me. I watched him the whole time to make sure he wouldn’t do anything funny with my phone, such as walk away with it or do something malicious that would get me in trouble. I’m never going to loan him or anyone else my phone again. He had the real audacity to ask me in the first place, but I figured this was a friendly town. I’m no longer living in Los Angeles, where I was so used to shady people.

I wrote about cell phones a few weeks ago and how payphones don’t exist anymore. This dude could’ve really used one instead of asking me to use mine. This is the problem with society: no payphones anywhere anymore. So desperate people have to ask to use my phone. It isn’t cool.

He also asked me what time it was. I figure you’re in a bad place if you can’t find out for yourself, and you have to ask someone else. Decades ago, people used to ask other people for the time, and it was a polite gesture to give it to them. But that politeness doesn’t fly anymore. It’s considered harassment now if you ask someone. Like the saying goes, she wouldn’t give you the time of day. Just how many people would go through the trouble of giving the time to an absolute stranger? It’s rare. I wouldn’t have the nerve to ask someone.

I’m pretty good at guessing the time, with a highly-functional internal clock, without needing to look at my watch. I don’t even need a watch, but I wear it to count my steps. It syncs with my phone, so my phone can record all my activity. I’m married to this thing. I can’t live without it when it runs out of battery power. I get anxious. It needs to track what I’m doing all the time or my day is ruined. It has happened on multiple occasions, and I have to wait until the next day to charge it again if I forget my charger, usually on trips such as the last time I went out of town. I stayed in Santa Barbara and realized I’d left my watch charger back in Palm Springs. They didn’t use to be this way. I never used to worry about charging my watch. The batteries would last much longer than a day, which is how long this one lasts.

Non-fiction

Noisy Eaters

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If there’s one thing that I hate, it’s listening to the sounds of other people eating: the slurping, smacking, crunching for several minutes as they eat their soup or sandwiches. Some people are polite about it and eat quietly, while others can’t control the way they eat. They’re totally oblivious to how obnoxious they sound, and I have to sit there and hear it.

I used to work with a guy who ate constantly. He loved Chinese food, so he always picked up Panda Express and brought it to the office. Not only did he make disgusting sounds with his mouth–the slurping, smacking, crunching–but he also held his fork like a Neanderthal, like how kids hold their spoons when they’re eating cereal. I had to tell him over and over again to keep his mouth closed as he was eating.

“Sorry,” he would say and commence to slurp, smack, and crunch his food.

I couldn’t wear headphones either because I had to answer calls from angry people while the eating was entering my other ear. He would also comment about the food: “Mmmm, this food is so good” with a mouthful.

He didn’t have to tell us. The noises he was making were evidence enough about how much he enjoyed it.

The office was much more peaceful when he wasn’t there, but I worked with him on most night shifts, when he and I were alone, and I couldn’t stand it anymore.

But anyway, those are my thoughts on disgusting eaters. They rank right up there with people who call me “Boss” or people who say, “It’s all good,” although I don’t know if those people exist any longer. It has been years since I’ve heard that phrase. It usually comes out of the mouth of someone with a low IQ.

The annoyance factor also depends on what kind of food those savages are eating. Soup eaters are their own breed who sip from their spoons loudly. Tea drinkers are just as guilty. The aforementioned savage, whom I worked with, would eat egg drop soup from another Chinese place, and I had to hear him slurp from his spoon as his head was close to the bowl at his desk. I would hear the big slurp every time he raised his spoon to his mouth.

“Could you please not slurp the soup?” I would say.

“Oh, my bad.”

The guy thought it was funny, so he kept slurping even louder after I asked him politely to stop doing it.

Noisy eaters are as bad as people who scrape their knife and fork against the ceramic plate and make that screeching sound, or people who make screeching sounds in general. I remember having to sit in class where the teachers used the chalkboard. Every time they would rub the chalk against the surface of the board, my teeth would hurt. I know teeth don’t have feelings, but when they did that, I swear a pain would surge through them. I would picture my teeth scraping against the chalkboard. A different pain would arise every time that guy would smack his lips to the food. It was like sloshing waves in the ocean in his mouth. The wet mouth drowning the orange chicken, which is getting smaller and smaller from his saliva. Yuck. I could picture it all while he was eating.

I don’t work with him anymore, not since the beginning of COVID when we had to leave the office. Now I work from home, away from noisy eaters. But who knows? Maybe I’m one of them, and I’m not aware of it, just like other noisy eaters aren’t aware of how annoying they are either. But if I am, I would love for someone to tell me so I can correct my disorder. I really do think it’s a disorder that should be documented in a medical book somewhere. So where is that guy now? Is he annoying other people with the sounds coming out of his mouth or was it just me?

Non-fiction

Worry

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We’ve all been there. You can’t get your mind off something that’s been troubling you for days, weeks, even months. The worry machine keeps running at night in bed, where your worst fears come to life. The bed is a torture chamber of thoughts, evil thoughts that control you, and you can’t get out of it no matter how hard you try to will away the worry.

Instead of fighting it, it would be better if you accepted it and rode the worry. For example, you worry about your job and whether you’re doing it well enough, and you worry that you’ll lose your job for several reasons. Maybe in actuality you hate your job and you’re trying to get out of it, so you begin making mistakes at work so they can terminate you and give you severance pay. Rather than fighting that thought, admit to yourself that you’re trying to get out. You hate your job so much. There. The worry lessens. You’ve been honest with yourself. You’re still losing sleep though. It’s a mental struggle for what’s right.

Anyway, it’s Sunday, and I have all the free time in the world. What should I do besides worry about things I can’t control? Now when I go for walks, the worry follows me for five miles before I get back home. The only time I’m not worrying is when I’m eating a cheeseburger, a big greasy cheeseburger with onions, tomatoes, pickles, mayo, and a sesame seed bun. It takes fewer than five minutes to eat one, and after I’ve digested it, the worry comes back to life. The cheeseburger was just a brief departure from that worry. I also lose my worry when I’m eating pizza, but I can’t eat those things every day or else I’ll gain weight, and I don’t want that either. I just eat those things once a week on a cheat day.

If you don’t worry, you’ll lose control. That’s what you tell yourself, although people say it’s a fallacy, that worry really has no function. Then why does it exist? What’s the purpose of worry when people tell you that? You know fear is a real thing. If there’s an imminent threat, it’s more than natural to fear it. That’s human instinct. And worry is a component of fear. Worry is just fear looping in your head like a broken record. It drives you insane. You wish you had an answer against worry, but it’s always there. If you’re not worried about something, you’ll worry about something else. You constantly have to have something to worry about. Your mind tells you that you have to be alert to any possible danger. It torments me as I stare out the window at a fern and an empty city bench with nothing on my mind but worry.

I want to take a train to Portland and never come back, but the worry will always be there no matter where I am. So Portland isn’t a viable escape. I suppose the only way to stop the worry is to accept it. I could be wrong. People tell me to quit worrying, which is easier said than done. I grew up as a worrywart and stayed that way through adulthood. And here I am, at my age, with worry controlling what I think and feel. I wish there was an answer to this all. Otherwise I would be better off. I can’t share what I worry about. It’s private. Just know that the worry is there and as persistent as always.

I’ve tried mindfulness techniques and breath control, but worry breaks through the thin fabric. When the actual threat is resolved, of course the fear and worry dissipate from my nervous system, only for a new worry to come about. Worry is an endless radio station that Anne Lamott calls KFKD or K-Fucked. I remember reading her book, Bird by Bird, where she explains that the mind races and never shuts off. All a writer wants is mental silence, which is not easy to come by. You just stare into space and hope that the worry fades. It stays in your mind permanently like ink and overrides the capacity a writer needs to compose. I wish I had the answer to this, but all I can do is help the reader relate to what’s being written here.

Non-fiction

Space Plumbing

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It’s Saturday. Oh, what a Saturday. I played tennis with the ball machine and my mother after a rough week of work, after they laid off six people, and I remain like it’s musical chairs or something. I’ve worked for them for twenty years but not really. The company was sold to another company. So in reality, I worked for two companies, and the newer company is like the Death Star in Star Wars.

By the way, I’ve been thinking a lot about spaceships in movies or TV shows, even in books. Don’t they have a bathroom? And if they do, wouldn’t they suffer from bad plumbing, such as the toilet overflowing? I’m sure at some point Darth Vader has to take a piss, or the other form of relief that I really can’t write on here because there’s a picture of a delicate flower up above. Anyway, there has to be a plumber onboard the Death Star or the other spaceship in Star Wars that’s shaped like a slice of pizza called the Executor Super Star Destroyer, which sounds like a name an eight-year-old made up. Might as well call it the Space Destroyer Thingy. But yes, a plumber must be onboard. But if he isn’t, he must be nearby, perhaps on another spaceship, waiting for a job because he’s most likely an independent contractor who must submit a 1099 to whoever. I don’t think the IRS is in space, but I wouldn’t put it past them. And I would think if he couldn’t fix the plumbing in the Death Star, then Darth would’ve given him the Jedi mind chokehold to his death. Goodbye, Mr. Plumber.

I’m sure the Death Star has had to go through renovations multiple times, but they don’t show that in the Star Wars movies. We just assume that the construction workers, who live off of Big Gulps from 7-11, worked on building this massive spaceship that hangs in space like a planet. That or they built it on the closest habitable planet before the Death Star took off to outer space somehow. I can’t picture that large moon-shaped object fitting on another planet and having rocket fuel or the proper aerodynamics to take off. Not to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but in Return of the Jedi the Death Star is a little over half there because it blew up. I forgot what happened. It has been decades since I’ve watched those movies. But parts of it are gone from what I can remember. The good Jedis, in their spaceplanes called the Jedi starfighters, shot lasers at the Death Star to make it explode. And the Death Star can shoot lasers of its own. Why would a behemoth space station such as that shoot little lasers at the spaceplanes? You would think it would shoot space cannonballs from a space cannon, and they detonate when they make contact with one of those starfighters or anything really.

There could be other internal problems with the Death Star besides the plumbing. What happens when the power goes out? Is there an electrician nearby who can fix it? And what about the ginormous bill for electricity or water when Darth has to take a shower? Who’s paying for it? The emperor? And how difficult is it for Darth or Anakin to remove his armor before washing himself? He needs the helmet with the mask to breathe, so Darth must take showers with the helmet on. What a ridiculous visual.

These questions run through my mind as I’m watching any space movie or television show which takes place in another galaxy. For instance, Star Trek. There are so many episodes and movies, and I never once saw Captain Kirk taking a bathroom break. I assume there’s a toilet and shower in the USS Enterprise. They spend way too much time in the control room. These are just random thoughts on a lazy Saturday, and I wish I had these thoughts more often.

Non-fiction

Malls

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My sanctuary from home, when I was just a young buck, was the shopping mall in the eighties and nineties in the small town that I lived in. From what I can tell, they’re hardly around anymore. Where do kids wander to these days to escape? Where can they get away from their families when they’ve had enough of them? It was where I went with my friends through junior high and high school. We would spend a good hour at the record store, even when they didn’t sell records. They sold tapes and compact discs. I would usually buy a cassette for ten dollars before sales tax.

Then we would eat in the food court. The food court had a Taco Bell, a Sbarro, a Hot Dog On a Stick, a deli, and a restaurant that sold cheesesteaks. I usually ate at Taco Bell with my friend.

We would venture to a gag store with dirty gifts and spend about an hour in there, making fun of the items they sold.

The shopping mall progressed as we got older, with more restaurants to fit in there. I remember Red Robin sold hamburgers of all types, and a restaurant called Jolly Roger served old people. I imagine they served a lot of soup.

Anyway, we would spend hours in the mall, just walking around, looking for somewhere to kill time before we had to trek back home on the city bus that picked us up out front.

I can’t forget the Cinnabon across from JC Penney. I always felt like a huge glutton after eating a large cinnamon roll with icing on top of it, so I barely ate there.

Eventually they took away one of the music stores and replaced it with a video store where I could rent VHS tapes and DVDs. I never thought Netflix would arrive. It was long before it became a streaming service, and I definitely didn’t think it would come to that.

There was a movie theater right outside of the mall that my friend and I used to drive to at midnight when we were adults to watch movies on the first night when they came out. Or we would take the city bus when we were teenagers when the sun was out to watch cheap matinees. We did that trick where we would buy a ticket for a PG film but sneak into an R-rated theater when the staff wasn’t looking. That was always fun.

The bus stop was always a sketchy place for kids to hang out. One time, my friend had bought baseball cards, and we were looking at them in front of a lady who kept shifting her weight left and right on her hands, sitting on the bus bench. “My husband has every baseball card in the world,” she said. She looked as if she lived there. It was impossible to believe her.

I don’t know what I would’ve done with myself if the mall never existed–probably play basketball or baseball with other kids before dinner. But we preferred to go shopping and eat out, my friend and I. Malls were their own amusement parks in a way, without expensive admission tickets and huge rollercoasters, just the shopping aspect with stuff that wasn’t overpriced. Yeah, my friend and I would get lost in the mall.

There was one time when an adult followed us around. We couldn’t find a mall cop anywhere to help us. The weird man followed us into the music store and stared at us with his hand on his crotch. We figured there was something mentally wrong with him. He followed us to other shops, I can’t remember which ones, but somehow he disappeared as if he was never there. My friend couldn’t figure it out and neither could I, that he’d suddenly vanished. I never told my mother. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have let me go to the mall without being supervised, and I couldn’t let that happen. The mall was the one place to get away from her.

Non-fiction

My Mold

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I grew up at the perfect time, in the nineteen nineties. I was thirteen when the decade started and twenty-three when it all ended, and I can’t complain one bit about that epoch. The music connected genres, the films were more original than now, the presidency was just right. As a freshman in high school, I saw the Nirvana video for the first time: “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I sat in my parents’ house, on the floor of their living room when it appeared on MTV. I’d never heard music like that before. And they played Alice in Chains on Headbanger’s Ball. I was listening to hip-hop back then as well, when it was at its most classic, the golden era of the genre. Music is magic. Musicians pluck sounds out of the air and form melodies.

Yes, I had it great. I was from Generation X, before millenials took over the land. I didn’t quite understand their pop culture. The bands didn’t seem as genuine or meaningful. Everything became plastic and digital. Apple introduced the iPod. Record stores became defunct. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it, but they forced me to conform. Now I’m like one of the millenials, listening to my music on my phone.

The nineties had a type of rebellious energy against corporations. People dressed like slobs, and society accepted them for who they were. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Rage Against the Machine rebelled against the eighties attitude, which was to wear big hair and button up their clothing, to sell out as much as possible, when in the nineties you turned your back on your integrity if you sold out. I wore Cavariccis to school in the eighties with a mullet because I didn’t know any better. How was I to know that grunge music was going to take over fashion and the music industry? I was able to throw away those Cavariccis and wear basic jeans with holes in the knees and grow my hair out to a normal, respectable style (with sideburns). Grunge taught me to be my own version of normal, for as weird of a kid as I was.

Yes, I believe I was born at the perfect time, but that’s what any person would say between those years from adolescence to young adulthood, when the music sounded its sweetest, when the films were their truest, when fashion made the most sense. Maybe we look back and cringe at our clothes and hairstyles, but at the time it felt just right. I still wear jeans and cardigans. Fashion doesn’t make sense to me now, and I have no idea what the music sounds like or how the films are. I gave up. I had my time and that was the nineties. I have Jane’s Addiction on my phone, with Wu-Tang, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins…. It’s hard to believe that people from Gen-Z don’t even know those bands. It makes me feel old, of course, but anyone who’s over eighteen, who’s just now listening to those bands for the first time, should’ve known them earlier if they claim to be music experts.

But that’s just little old me, stuck in a time machine, who doesn’t want to leave it. I’ll never crawl out of the nineties. It was the best time for me. Clinton was president. There were no wars (okay, a little civil unrest, but nothing like now). There was no social media. It fit my mold, and that goes for everyone. I’ve met people, people younger than me, who swore by Blink-182 and Linkin Park, and I didn’t get the appeal. But that’s okay. That was their time for music. I’d officially gotten old by twenty-three. We don’t have to set the boundary at each decade. One movement in the nineties can spill into the two-thousands. But for the sake of this piece, we’ll keep it within those parameters because I look at my own life and feel that everything had changed for the worse once the nineties were over.

Non-fiction

My Drunken Nights

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I look back at all my drunken nights and can’t count on one finger a single one that stands out. They all come together in a blur, a long, significant blur.

It started when I was twenty-one and ended when I was forty-one. I drank almost every day from the time I was twenty-six to the day that I retired on August 15, 2019. I thought that was the date, but it was nothing official. I used to get blackout drunk with my friends in Hollywood when they were still around. We did shots of anything, and I drank mostly beers, domestic beers, not the fancy imported kind that really wasn’t imported. If you travel to Belgium and drink the Americanized Belgian beer, you’ll get ridiculed. My parents told me you’re supposed to drink a different beer over there. I’ll probably never fly to Belgium anyway.

But I drank whatever came my way like Long Island Iced Teas from a cowboy bar in West Hollywood because the cocktail came in a flower vase with a long thick straw sticking out of the top. The bar had a mechanical bull that I would never ride, and I wasn’t interested in anyone who rode the thing. All I wanted was to get obliterated because life was hard, and I wanted to make it easier.

When my friends went away when I was in my thirties, I was left alone to drink alcohol and smoke hash, mostly weed but hash sometimes. I had acquaintances, not friends. We would drink and get high together, but that was all we really had in common. I respected my time alone with my drinking but also would venture to the bar down the street from my apartment.

One night, when I was in my late thirties, I can’t remember what age exactly, I was crossing Hollywood Boulevard when a young dude on crack punched me in the mouth. It was a sucker punch. I was high already after smoking a spliff in my apartment. The kid walked away, still staring me down and cursing me. I never retaliated, which I should’ve done, but I was too dazed that a stranger would actually hit me at one in the morning on an empty Hollywood street. I continued walking to the bar because I wanted to drink into a blackout after what that kid had done to me.

I told everyone in the bar what had happened, and they were all amazed too.

“I just got punched in the face,” I said.

“By who?” they asked.

“Some kid on crack,” I said.

Of course it might not have been crack. It could’ve been acid for all I knew, or crystal meth. All the more reason not to have hit him back. The kid could’ve felt nothing and been a superhero with super strengths, and a punch to his jaw might not have even fazed him. He could’ve done something worse to me.

I told the bouncer.

“Where is he?” he asked. “I’ll take him down.”

But I couldn’t tell him. He could’ve been anywhere in Hollywood, sucker-punching other drunk fools like me, around the time when I quit drinking. I think less than a year went by when I ended up in rehab and reached an age where I couldn’t do it anymore.

I cringe at the things I’d done as a drunk, like the time I raised hell at my twenty-year high school reunion. I regret ever getting kicked out of a local bar in my hometown. I don’t talk to my high school alumni anymore, ever since that happened. It was a visceral reaction to the way my alums were acting that night, and the alcohol only freed my inhibitions to attack people the way I did. I don’t remember anything. People on social media had to inform me of what I did, and I wanted to hide somewhere for good.

I don’t have to worry anymore. Those days are behind me now. I stare reality right in the face and deal with it head-on.

Non-fiction

What a Fortune

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I used to use Tarot cards for writing. I heard Stephen King did the same thing for his books, but that could be a lie. Tarot cards are good for writing because of the imagery in the illustrations on each card. Each card has meaning, whether you pick up the Three of Cups or the King of Swords.

I remember reading a book about the Tarot and how you can formulate scenes by using the deck of cards. The four different symbols represent something different. Cups, which can hold water, represent emotion. Swords, which are sharp, represent intellect. Wands represent the arts and creativity. And, finally, the coins, as you would guess, represent money and fortune. So, if someone pulls out a Two of Coins, a King of Wands, and an Ace of Cups, you could say that character is poor because you drew only the Two of Coins from the deck, but he’s also massively creative because you drew the King of Wands, and can also handle his emotions because you drew the Ace of Cups. How would that translate in a scene? Suppose he gets into an argument with his spouse about money. He doesn’t have much, which spawns a fight. But he can handle it because he can manage his emotions, and he controls the argument in an artful way. That might be a poor example because I just thought of it, but it’s something to try if a writer feels stuck in a scene or what to write about if he wants to write a story.

I would write a scene using a single Tarot card. For instance, the Moon. There’s a Moon card. I don’t know right off to bat what the Moon card represents, nor the Tower card.

A friend of mine wanted me to give his fortune over the phone a long time ago. I did my best, and I remember I drew the Tower from the deck, and I had to read the meaning from the little book that came with it. The Tower card shows a fire at the tower, with people falling off of it. So you know it represents something dark and foreboding, something my friend didn’t want to hear. I read what the book said, and his exuberance fell off like the people on the tower. He didn’t want his fortune read any longer. I didn’t know what he was expecting.

The Tarot isn’t full of just happiness and good fortune. It could draw something completely dark. For example, let’s say you pull three cards, and they’re all lower cards such as the Two of Cups, the Three of Wands, and the Four of Swords. If you’re doing a character study, that’s a weak character. His intellect is low. He can’t handle his emotions. And he’s not very inspired. That’s all for the moment though. If you’re writing a scene with those cards, the character might make a dumb decision and lose control of his anger and isn’t motivated enough to fix the situation. Maybe he robs a bank, and he starts shooting people because his anger takes over after his plans are ruined, and he even shoots at the cops when they show up. I just thought of that example. I’m sure you can think of something better. My point is the possibilities are endless with the use of Tarot cards. I recommend them to anyone who wants to jumpstart a story or a character study, anything to get into a rhythm.