Tag Archives: family

Storytelling details

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , • Leave a comment

Any writer who has based character backstories/details upon the lives of friends and family understands that fudging facts helps keep reality from interfering with storytelling (unless autobiography is your preferred mode of narration).

What if the facts are so much more interesting than the fictional narrative?

What then?

I’ve been here before and decided to seek forgiveness later rather than ask permission to borrow from friends’ lives to make a story more believable.

So what’s the question?

The issue is the contradiction between the lives of those who read my writing and my friends whom I want to write about.

Time to start a new blog?

I’ve done it before and will do it again, I’m sure.

I’m a little rougher around the edges than I’ve usually let this online blog personality imply.

Know Venus, Know Mars

Posted on by • Tagged , , , • Leave a comment

image

image

Signs of life. Actions without words.

That’s what she showed me.

A love song about life in life with life.

Like, love, affection.

The long view, not just instant gratification.

For her, everything is not enough.

For it never was about her.

Her body bore the future, constantly held in her thoughts, waiting for when she was ready.

Love and happiness.

A walk in the woods on a cloudy cold winter day clears out the past.

Saying goodbye means giving someone else the chance to say hello.

We grow older, wiser but remain youthful.

image

Leaning on friends, part two of…?

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

At my age, I trust my instincts now more than ever, accepting that what feels like a higher than normal use of one social media product (Facebook) has…not a purpose or meaning, exactly…but fills a gap between two points, or connects me to a place further up the  mountain I’m climbing after encountering an uncrossable chasm of doubt and fear.

The same goes for real/physical life.

I have the goal of getting to Mars two hundred years from now and am leaning on the two friends who can get me there whether they want me to or not or whether they want to go with me.

No matter, the goal’s the thing and the friends are both the means and the motivation for moving me off my keister, buttocks, arse, tush to get there.

I love my wife dearly — she is an integral part of who I am from before I started dating girls/women, thus more aware than anyone other than my sister or mother of what/who I am.

At the same time, I worry that she is not interested in more than settling down in this suburban life for good, with the occasional vacation trip to other parts of the world, prepackaged excitement, well under control.

I am a wild man and would be dead now if it weren’t for her.

I’ve spent so long tempering the madness behind a shield that protected me from my father’s disciplinarian personality that I almost became a permanent automaton for the sake of a subculture that nourished and raised me but does not completely satisfy me.

My Christian friends have told me through the years to quit sitting on the fence and, presumably, to join them in their pastoral lifestyle that they see in me which makes them happy.

Little have they seen the real me who has no permanent happiness in weekly Bible studies going over the same material again and again as if there’s something in there they hadn’t noticed before.

By age five, I had my fill of the Bible and spent the next fourteen years nodding my head and feeding back to them their good feelings that they affirmed in Bible passages associated with their inadequacies and falling short of the perfection of an unseen deity.

But I found no relief in the religious text, hoping upon hope there was something else besides ritual, dogma and diatribes to cause endorphin and adrenaline rushes.

So it is that I find myself here, after getting an ego boost from nice words and phrases people give me on Facebook for the fourteen years of bliss I reflected back to them in my childhood and early adulthood.

They rarely if ever saw what was truly under the hood, what really powered my engine.

My wife knew.  So did Monica and Mike.  My sister barely had an inkling.

No one else knew the multiple personalities that begged to be released into society.

It’s time to give them full rein.

Abi understands more than I expected her to what lies within.

With her, I am learning to control the beast, to find the place between the madness and social dancing to make me someone better than I am.

With Jenn, well…a new storyline is emerging that changes my approach to the future.

What, if anything, they expect out of me, I do not know.  I can only trust my instincts that tell me to keep heading toward Mars.

Where my wife fits into all this, I can’t say.  I love her no more or less than before.  She has been so much an integral part of me that I trust her more than life itself.  If what people describe to me is the love of Jesus, then Janeil is my Jesus and of that kind of love, she is all I’ve known without fear of being rejected.

No one can make the next important decisions in my life except me.

These decisions include what the start of this blog entry was supposed to lead to earlier than now; that is, I’m beginning to see that Abi and Jenn are helping mold me such that my business side — the cold, calculating engineering project manager — can actually exist side-by-side (even happily so!) with my wild side.

Would that it be so!

It almost makes no sense to schedule my time to give my wild side room to grow but I think it’s time I do.

I practiced the idea when I built a desktop robot in dedication to Jenn’s father.

And, by golly, it actually worked!  I got to make a presentation on the Internet about the robot, explaining not only how it worked but also the theory behind it…and people were interested!

Therefore, thanks to the encouragement of Christina W., I’m putting together my engineering skills, my madness and my project management skills to branch out from this lab-within-a-study-within-a-bedroom-within-a-cabin-in-the-woods-within-a-suburban-subdivision and, should plans work out, open up a shop selling my wares, objects made with my hands from my imagination, all to raise funds for a trip to Mars.

How exciting is that?

We shall see how much my short story writing is affected — the quality as well as the quantity — may have to keep posting historical entries, a la Boing Boing, to keep readers interested.

Thanks to everyone for their support!

The Joy of New Discoveries

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

There is a sweet spot in my thoughts where recording a blog entry feels just right.  Unfortunately, after spending time winding down this evening scrolling through friends’ Facebook posts, the sweet spot has passed by.

Time to put Facebook away and concentrate on more concrete actions to solidify the future!

Going crazy again

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

In my life, I have lost my sanity a few times:

  • at age five, when I realised I was alone in the universe and had to create my own version of something to make sense of the cluelessness around me
  • at age ten, when my best friend/girlfriend died, leaving me more alone than ever
  • twice in high school, when my girlfriend broke up with me and, more significantly, after I suffered a head concussion in a car wreck
  • at age 23, when I, against all the teachings of my youth (especially the one about coveting a married woman), made love to a married woman
  • at age 27, when I cracked under the pressure of having to appear on television to promote a community project I created, sensing a number of contradictions within my personality that was perceptible on live TV and out of my control once it was broadcast to whomever was watching
  • at age 44, when my brother in-law died

I return to a familiar place on this path through life — a crossroads that branches off to unknown destinations.

I feel like I am being ripped apart, with tendrils/roots from my past pulling on me to give people I’ve known the affirmation that the lives we shared contained and shall continue to create happy times.

I’m always looking for an easy escape route from every moment I spend with other people, knowing that eventually the internal insanity that has defined me since I can remember will show itself — the disjointed, at-odds-with-itself set of thoughts that have kept me alive and in touch with people who, God help them (I’ll get back to that last phrase in a moment), are probably just as fucked up as I am but I sure as hell don’t want to know, allowing myself the illusion that other people have it together.

One girlfriend said knowing me was like peeling back layers of an onion and she was never sure what she’d find next, as protective I was in controlling people’s access to the “real” Rick.

Do I always know what I’m doing?  Rarely.  But I know where I want to be and have plans to get there.

Otherwise, the “real” me is an illusion, changing moment by moment to passively accommodate people’s perceptions of me so I can reach my goal while giving them whatever makes them happy.

What if giving them whatever makes them happy contradicts certain parts of me that are partially set in stone?

I know I am insane to think I am alone in this universe which, God help me (okay, time to address that last phrase — if I alone in the universe, then, by extension, there is no deity other than myself for myself, leaving others to find the deity belief sets in them that satisfy their needs for self affirmation?), leaves me with zero friends because if friends are merely sets of states of energy to bounce against like pinballs to get us moving again, well…

I am caught between seeing that I am a nice-enough looking guy who makes many people feel comfortable in my presence and thus able to believe I will help them affirm their beliefs, and seeing that what I want may not make many people happy.

One girlfriend, when I finally was able to share with her the dystopian visions that haunt me and chase me constantly, wondered why I was such a joyful guy on the outside but such a hard-nosed, scared-to-death conservative type on the inside.  We discussed the whole fight-vs-flight concept and, despite my best (worst?) efforts to want to control the conversation, I let the girlfriend dissect my view against my deepest desires not to hear what she saw in me.  She finally agreed that I was more fucked up than she was, taking strange theories, mixing them up in a cosmic comic worldview and applying them to my own fears and aspirations without concern that they made no sense in the real world.

It didn’t stop her from wondering what having a child with me would be like, able to compare the two kids she already had against one we could have.  A couple of days after we agreed to stop seeing each other (after all, I was banging her best friend, too (the aforesaid married woman), which made the both of us feel a little guilty (okay, maybe not too much; more like we should do the decent thing and call it off before her best friend found out)), she had sex with a guy she’d just met and ended up pregnant.  Because the guy professed his love for her without question and he was one of the heirs to a bread company fortune, she told me that even if the baby was mine, she was going to call it his; I happily agreed because it was sure going to be an affirmation of my worldview that nature-vs-nurture is a false dichotomous construct about childrearing and I didn’t have to worry about paying child support (I was a broke college student at the time).

As an opportunist looking for escape routes living in my thoughts, I recently plotted out a course of action whereby the possibilities of hitting the eject button on my current marriage might be facilitated by solidifying relationships with a dance partner; thus, I saw the person I liked laughing and dancing with the most, heard her say that her beau was looking for someone to join a fraternal organisation with and told myself, well, if it makes him happy that I join the organisation with him then I might get more time to dance with her and from there, who knows.

Damn it if the fraternal organisation’s requirements, including a main one about hosting a belief in a deity hasn’t put a burr in my side and, in the process, turned me into my father and his more conservative/religious views.

I know that portions of my personality were formed from contact with my father and I have fought tooth-and-nail internally to reject those portions because of the compromises I had to make to protect myself from his passive-aggressive treatment of my mother, sister and me, hearing from his colleagues, friends and family, however much I don’t want to, how kind and considerate but opinionated my father was and how so many people from my past want to welcome me into the fold now that I, as a legacy, have joined my father’s fraternal organisation and cemented my place in that subculture.

I am a mixed-up dude and I know it.

I’ve never been forced by a child of mine in my household to construct a consistent view of the universe in an effort to give that child the best opportunities for success with an easily-repeatable narrative about how/why life is.

I have been able, instead, to successfully slide through life, hopping from one better-paying job to another, accumulating wealth along the way without giving the shirt off my back, to arrive here in this comfortable middle-class hovel in the woods, always having an escape plan at the ready should something I had imagined happen (for the unexpected, I am probably completely unprepared).

I don’t know what my very next step will be, except to take the bathmat out of the clothes washer that the cat had pooped on and hang it up to dry (the bathmat, not the cat (or the poop)).

I still want to get to the Moon and then on to Mars and dance in low-gravity conditions with my literary characters Guin and Bai.

Whether I join reality or whether reality gets in the way, I cannot say.

If I don’t even know if sanity is an illusion, how can I know if reality is real?

The luxury of recounting one’s dreams

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

In these past few days (weeks?) where I have asked myself if self, family, community, subculture, planet, galaxy are or are not more than symbols, I make no quick, foolish or foolishly quick decisions.

In a dream last night, my dream personality chased myself up into consciousness sprawled across the sleeping sofa, on which I turned and scribbled these notes in the moonlight:

16 Jan 14

I’m finished with touching another body on the dance floor or having to look into a person’s eyes because so much sexual tension builds up in me without a way to relieve the tension…. not fun anymore.  I’ve become used to the separation of reality from wishes, it just loses interest.  Reducing desire to pursue partners. Need to thank my instructor for wanting to dance competitively with me but it’s not going to happen unless there are serious changes in my life.

As of tomorrow, it will have been a year since I started attending dance workshops with my wife.

In dance workshops, my wife and I initially start out holding hands and dance together before dance leaders or followers are asked to rotate, meaning that I get a new dance partner for 10, 15, 20, 30 or 60 seconds to attempt a new dance formation; with that dance partner, I meet a new person, a new set of life’s experiences to ask about, a new wider/narrower/taller/shorter body shape to adjust to, a new hair colour to physically look down on (although, occasionally I’ve danced with women my height or taller), a hand to grip gently or firmly, new eyes to hold my attention.

For the majority of the dance partners, the new dance formation occupy my thoughts, learning how to move my body to make my dance partner’s moves look amazing and lovely.

For a few of the dance partners, a certain fluidity of energy passes through our fingers, as if unspoken desires are literally at our fingertips.

I enjoy the flirtatious nature of dancing, no doubt about it.

But for those few dance partners, the flirtatiousness feels more electric, bordering on lust, knowing that my partner and I are setting up a situation with foreplay that doesn’t necessarily include us.

The understanding between myself and a dance partner has ranged from the almost regimented rigid cold upper body sentiment of an Irish “River Dance” jig to the glued-together warm sensuous flow of a blues dance.

If it were only Irish jig dancers I encountered during workshops, my manly arousal wouldn’t be a problem.

Instead, the one or two out of a hundred workshop participants who turn up the heat drive me insane and, as even my dream self has chased out of me, I have no satisfactory outlet to make those future encounters enjoyable.

Thus, to keep my marriage intact and my sanity in check, I’m trying to figure out how to get across to my wife that our current arrangements are unsatisfactory.

All while my niece and nephew’s grandmother is dying…

All in the luxury of a middle-class lifestyle, snug and warm in a heated home.

After a year of “blue balls,” so to speak, I can’t take it anymore!  I refuse to attend another dance workshop or group dance lesson or I SHALL GO MAD!!!

Dolmen

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

In the subculture I was raised, children were expected to behave and think like ladies and gentlemen — be kind to others, do not curse/swear or act vulgar, treat elders with respect by listening to their advice, stand/sit up straight, get good grades in school and be mindful of your neighbours’ expectations of you and yours of them — for any vice you choose to exhibit, do so in moderation and you will be forgiven for minor character flaws.

Parents were expected to instill a sense of social allegiance in their kids, smoothing the rough edges, redirecting psychological anomalies toward the greater good of the subculture — those who rejected the subculture were welcome to leave and visit for the holidays or other brief encounters.

By having the pressure relief valve of a clear exit plan for those who rejected or were rejected by the subculture, internalised anger issues were kept to a minimum.

Even within the subculture, tolerance was a variable that allowed for acceptance of some whose initially rejected character flaws were deemed redeemable.

For years, I’ve lived in a kind of purgatory, wanting to make people in that subculture feel as if I, too, desire nothing more than to perpetuate the unwritten rules and relationships of the subculture, while at the same time holding beliefs that run counter to the subculture or don’t bother to recognise human culture as more significant than the role of any Earth-based lifeforms in the universe.

Simply by reading the posts in social media of the friends/acquaintances from my childhood can I quickly ascertain how well I have maintained my pushme-pullya life in purgatorial self-exile.

There is something to be said about the happiness I feel when I hear that people still consider me loving, compassionate and a ham (having a sense of humour).

In no way do I want to deter that feeling in myself or the thoughts of others in that regard.

At the same time, I want more than what that subculture has provided me in the general sense of the WASP life.

Because I want nothing more or less than to ensure we devote sufficient resources to [re]establish Earth-based lifeforms on other celestial bodies, I know what I want does not directly conflict with what my childhood subculture desired for me.

A strong pull within me aches for the safe, secure life of a parent with happy children whose spouse also wanted offspring and looks forward to [great[great]]grandchildren, if we should live so long to see them.

Statistically, safety and security is not guaranteed but can be financially prepared for if less than safe, secure conditions interfere with planned happiness.

What if my dreams and aspirations interfere with the safe, secure life I have right now?

How important is an imaginary comfort zone compared to that last sentence?

Tomorrow is one more day of rest before, on the sixth sol of this marsyear, I prepare plans for my next creations, whatever they may be, to put life on Mars, on the Moon and elsewhere in the inner solar system.

Of course, we have a simple question to answer once again: what is life?

A life not my own, a dream my own

Posted on by • Tagged , , , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

Two lives intersected at a restaurant — a patron and a server — sharing their autobiographical information with the freedom that social etiquette did not suppress.  This is an approximation of their conversation:

Patron

I got pregnant with my wonderful daughter when I was 13 and had her when I was 14.  You want to know why?  Because my mother was a whore and my father was a perv.  I remember when my husband and I were in Egypt.  He hired a Turkish maid for the trip.  I say “maid” because she didn’t do a lot the whole trip but sit on his lap, if you know what I mean.  By that time, she and I were the same age, 19.  My husband, when I complained about his relationship with the maid, told me he was comparing the two of us to see which one of us he was going to leave in Egypt.

Server

That’s cool.  When I turned 19 I took off with a friend to Israel.  We lived on what we made.  I worked as a bartender for a while.  Once, my friend and I decided to go to Sinai in Egypt on a whim, sneaking across the border.  We had a great time.  My friend was better-looking than me and one of the men we met offered 100 camels for my friend.

Patron

An Egyptian general, who told me that he was supposed to kill me because he had talked to me alone in the dinner tent without my husband present, offered my husband 100 camels for me.  My husband said he would have taken the offer if he knew what to do with 100 camels.

Server

You’re lucky.  If you’re not a good prize, they only offer 10 camels.  I said the same thing to the man — I had no use for one camel, let alone 100.  We stayed and played [لعبة الطاولة?], or backgammon, and had a great time.  My mother about died because I didn’t talk to her for several days — there was no cell service in the part of Sinai we were in — she thought I’d been kidnapped.  After two years of bartending, I got bored and saw my life was going nowhere so I came back here, got an associate’s degree in engineering technology, and am working on my mechanical engineering degree, hoping to graduate with a 4.0 GPA.

Patron

Good for you. I’m proud of what I did.  I raised three kids on my own while working at Columbia Records.  You can do anything you want if you have the determination.

= = = = = = = =

People’s lives are innately unique no matter how much they may be led to follow social trends.  After all, the patron and the server were inside P.F. Chang’s, a chain restaurant located at an outdoor shopping “mall” with other franchise stores.

How many of us do what I’m doing right now, cocooning myself with thoughts directed at a computer screen, talking about our lives or playing computer games rather than living our lives?

If I decided that I no longer enjoy dancing with my wife, that listening to her voice now that I have hearing aids has enhanced my desire to escape to this computer screen, that her desire to spend more time with me is not reciprocated, where does that leave me?  What determination do I have to do anything I want?  What do I want to do to accomplish a goal 13271 sols from now?

When I heard the conservatory students of Robert McDuffie describe what they’d accomplished as musicians, I realised that when I decided to marry my wife, I had given up on what I wanted to accomplish when I was a ten year old boy who had just viewed his dead girlfriend in a coffin — honour her life through my writing, turning my thoughts into action, conquering the known universe or as much of it as I could before I died.

In the Earth year of 2014, half of the marsyear I’m labeling Marsyear One, it is time for a new beginning, sol number 4 of 668.

It is time to determine if I move out on my own, perhaps sharing a place with friends, increase my number of labour/investment credits and give a little attention to the dreams and aspirations still cooped up inside the happy, hopeful boy who’s part of me.

I am responsible for making my dreams come true.