Morning Cup of Joe

Continuing to chug along on the novel. Feel free to comment on what I've posted so far on the blog - either short stories or the novel sneak preview. Gas prices being what they are, I've given up on my dream of owning some old 60s-era hot rod. I love a V8 motor; it's something unhealthy, really.

The job continues to amuse, amaze and annoy. I saw a great bumper sticker yesterday that could apply to my situation: "Show me someone who has a deep loathing for all mankind and I'll show you someone who works retail".

Hung out with the boy (my son) all weekend. I imagined him 3 years older than he is now and that's how I got the character (what there was) for "(Feels Like) Starting Over". I'm sure you knew that.

Sneak Preview of the Novel

I'm continuing to make progress on the novel. Following up on a tip from other blogger's who talk about creating a market for your writing, especially if you've never done it before, I wanted to skip out some previews of the upcoming novel. This is still in draft form and I've got some editors (read, friends who can be brutally honest) reading it over and giving me their thoughts.

Presented here for the first time, a sneak preview of my first novel: Flotilla

Flotilla – Chapter One

In Which Jim Starts at the End and Then Begins

Jims_log_05_05_2033

It’s about 2230 and all heck is breaking loose out there. I’m hoping that the boat can handle it but it’s gonna be a real close race. Right now we’re shipping water up to the bridge door and the wind is blowing this boat like a kite all over the ocean. I can’t hold my course to more than 2 or 3 degrees. I’m keeping his eyes on the GPS, the compass and my sister Nancy all at once. She’s sitting next to me at the map table, her eyes are as big as saucers but her mouth is nothing more than a small scar in her head. We’re both really scared.

Dad’s last words to us both, along with a quick hug, were: “If you don’t hear from me in three days, send a message to your mom. If you don’t hear from me in four, take the boat, the docks and anyone else you can and go north. There are a bunch of islands near the Puget Sound that are mostly uninhabited. You can dock there and stay for a while. If things go okay, I’ll find you there and we will be together again.”

That was a week ago. We waited three days, left a message on mom’s voicemail and waited some more. Neither of us wanted to accept what had happened but after the sixth day, I started breaking down the docks for transport. We started north early on the seventh day. My 15th birthday was two nights ago. We didn’t celebrate, we were all too scared. The talk about what was happening less than 20 miles away was all we could hear. Not that we wanted to, but it wasn’t anything we could escape from.

It was a bug, they said, a virus. Not only that, it was a coordinated and simultaneous attack. A bug released in several major cities and dirty bombs that spread radioactive material in others. The effect was catastrophic – with all of these major disasters happening simultaneously, the government was inundated and then things got really bad. First they declared martial law, then they cancelled basic services, then they started evacuating people although with this much trouble there wasn’t anywhere people could be evacuated to. Of the people who had moved away from the danger zone, they faced local people afraid that the travelers were bringing bugs or radiation with them. They were not welcomed with open arms.

We listened to it all – the riots in the Bay Area, Phoenix and St. Louis. The bug killing people in Baltimore and here in LA. The entire colony was riveted to the television as it reported on the shootings of innocent people who may or may not have been infected or dying of radiation poisoning. The right combination of bad things got together, dad said quietly. He called it a ‘cascade event’. Two weeks ago, the world was normal. Two weeks ago, we were all together on Dad’s boat - the Horner C.

- End Log

The daylight was streaming through the porthole, creating wavy designs on the bulkhead. Jim laid there in his bunk, listening to the thumps through the stateroom walls as either Dad or Nancy stirred to start the day. In a few minutes, Jim could hear cartoons and so he knew it was Nancy. Dad wasn’t so rigid about get-up times; we got started at sunup and pretty much went until the job was done. Sometimes it was only a couple of hours but other times it went all day. His bed was cozy and warm and Jim stayed there for a few more minutes, just enjoying some peace and quiet. The stateroom is the smallest on the boat – there’s a larger one but it was full of dad’s junk. Jim asked for it one time and dad said sure, just move all that stuff out and it’s yours. A few seconds at the door to that room made him realize that Jim didn’t need that much room. Jim dozed off again but was brought abruptly awake by the squawk of the intercom right next to his head. Dad’s voice rasped through the speaker.

“Jim, get up.”

Jim pretended to be asleep, “Huh? Wha, dad?”

“Knock it off…Get up.” The intercom clicked off. Jim guessed he had tried that one too many times. Kicking off the covers, he got up and stripped off his sleep attire – boxers and a tank top. Jim changed into his wetsuit and went into the lounge. Catching a look at himself in the mirror, Jim saw a kid who was about average height but a thick chest. Blonde hair that was crew-cut-short and eyes that were either blue or grey depending on the light. Jim wasn’t built to be a surfer and he wasn’t hitting the weights enough to let his arms and legs fill out like they should. In short, Jim was like just about every other teenage kid who hasn’t quite grown into his body.

Breakfast was ready when Jim walked into the lounge. He cut off a section of the scrambled eggs still in the pan and poured off the last cup of coffee in the 12-cup pot. Dad had been up for hours, the empty pot told him; Jim made a fresh pot of coffee while watching the waking-up habits of the neighbors in the next boat. This was the second summer that Jim had spent on board. The previous summer he spent by himself with his father. This time his mom agreed to allow his younger sister, Nancy, to come along.

Two older gay guys lived on the Key West Forever – they grew calamari and tuna. The younger one was still over 50; he was a short and bear-like man. Pretty friendly, he reminded Jim of Mickey Rooney for some reason. The other guy was tall, thin and had no qualms about doing naked yoga positions on their back deck, something that his dad never got used to. Jim knew that he was into the whole Eastern thing…tan as an Indian and never without the silver and turquoise pendant around his neck. He sported a salt-and-pepper mullet that he sometimes tied off with a bandanna.

An aluminum fishing boat buzzed by, but Jim didn’t recognize the passengers. There were almost a thousand people who lived in the colony and it was hard to keep track of everyone. Some people tried the fishing business for a few months and then packed up and went home. Others stayed for long periods of time and they became the nucleus of what was otherwise a pretty strange community. Dad called the gay guys The Furley’s, for some reason. They were long-timers, which in this case meant that they had lived on the colony for over three years. The life ain’t easy, Dad was fond of saying. He himself had been with this colony for over seven years, which made him almost a founding partner.

Jim ate his breakfast, eggs and sausage that didn’t come from a chicken or a hog but were culture-produced and then shipped here. Drinking off his coffee and then pouring another cup, Jim sat at the terminal in the mess area and idly looked at the daily news. Dad entered the lounge; he insisted that it was called the “mess”, a term that had nothing to do with its current state of cleanliness. It was just another one of those idiosyncrasies that Jim knew better than to discuss. Jim had been aboard for almost a month and it wasn’t the only inconsistency that drove him crazy about the old man.

“We’re losing some fish,” Dad said as a greeting. He was reading a three-week-old LA Times, eating some eggs and sausage and sipping from his too-strong coffee. He looked up over his glasses at Jim. “I thought I told you to fix those rips in Pen 3.”

Jim didn’t say anything immediately – to respond too quickly indicates guilt, he had learned. He ate eggs and the only sausage left because Nancy usually snarfed them all first. After a moment, he looked up. “I did – I fixed ‘em and checked the whole net from end to end.”

“Then why are we losing fish?” he asked pointedly.

“Who says we are?”

“My fish-finder has the whole group counted – between last night and this morning we lost like 50 of them. I think the net’s ripped – get down there and check it again.”

Jim didn’t say anything back…There wasn’t any point, anyway. Dad rarely went underwater himself since Jim came on board and his fish finder wasn’t the most reliable piece of technology in the world. Jim was going to work on Pens 1 and 2 anyway; he could check out 3 pretty quickly and then get to work on 1 and 2. Jim finished his breakfast in silence while Nancy ate delicately from one sausage as she watched her morning cartoons. She held another between her fingers like a cigar, flicking it like she’d seen dad do to one of his cigarettes.

Outside on the docks, they started getting set up for some underwater work. The family had four pens that held fish – Dad was working on deploying a fifth but it would be a while before he gets the nets installed (Please see Appendix B – Dad’s Home Improvement Never Gets Done). The nets got ripped regularly – sharks trying to get in, boats that run too close. The nets need to stay tight or the investment could swim right out. So, the kids fixed them on their own…that is Pen Patrol. A basic hookah rig with a wetsuit and you’re under the water, sometimes for an hour to fix any rips or tears. The rips aren’t fixed correctly – Dad was pretty cheap – so they ended up closing them with zip-ties or industrial staples. You can spend 14 or 16 hours a day just doing some of the things that go into keeping your fish healthy and your boat above water.

Most of the rip fixing fell to Jim but he didn’t mind. It isn’t every kid that gets to spend his summer building up hours to become a commercial diver just by screwing around on his dad’s boat. Jim was in the water or under it about three or four hours a day. His fingers were permanently raisined from the water and he was becoming a very strong swimmer. Dad finally broke down and bought Jim his very own wetsuit – not a cast-off; something that had some extreme colors that Jim thought might make him stand out with some of the female peer population.

The rule was that you couldn’t go under alone in case there was a problem and you needed help. Nancy was usually his line tender and Jim swam the football-field-sized pens with a small line attached to his belt that they would tug on to tell each other what was happening. They had a system of tugs worked out – 1 tug was are you okay? One tug back meant, yeah – everything’s cool. Two tugs meant come up – you’re needed up here, three meant get your butt up here, pronto. If Jim tugged two tugs, it meant coming up soon and if Jim tugged three times, Nance yelled for dad.

Jim finished strapping on his fins and his face mask by the time the hookah rig was pumping enough air. The pens are about a football field long, about half that wide and up to 20 feet deep. They’re connected by floating docks that attach to the Horner. A small music deck pumps music through underwater speakers so Jim would have something to listen to while working. Sometimes Dad wants to listen to the news but today Jim was listening to dub and some old threshrock. Jim jumped into the water, feeling the momentary shock that comes from jumping into the Pacific that early in the morning. The rule is, just let it go numb and then you’re okay – just be sure to get out if your hands start looking like a cadavers. Peeing in your suit helps, too.

It took Jim about fifteen minutes to work his way down the entire net of Pen 3. Nope, no rips were found. The clouds of tilapia that were inside the nets swarmed around him but didn’t look any different from two days ago when Jim saw them last. Sometimes a single fish will die, float for a while and then sink to the net below. Sharks swimming below will bite at it, get it and take a chunk of net along with them; hence the rips. Jim saw a single dead tilapia and took it to the edge of the net where he reached up and out of the water to flick it over to the sea side.

“Find any rips?” Nancy asked as Jim climbed out of the water.

Jim sat down next to her on the deck, pulling off his face mask and sweeping the water from his face. “Nope, no rips,” Jim replied. “Stupid fish-finder. Why can’t he get new sensing equipment?”

“He doesn’t know it’s broke,” Nancy said.

“I don’t think it’s broke. It just doesn’t work.”

“No, it’s broke,” Nancy said. She looked over at me slyly.

Jim eyed her. “What do you mean?”

“I was playing around with it and it dropped onto the deck. You can’t tell that Jim did but I think it’s broken.”

Jim laughed. “No wonder!”

“Just don’t tell him, okay?”

“All right.” Jim laughed quietly. “Why I even bother, I’ll never know.”

“Because you don’t want Dad to know about you and Stacy,” she replied.

“Shut up!” Jim said, elbowing her gently. Stacy lived on the Seas of Cheese in a berth about a quarter of the way around the circle of boats in the colony away from us. The Seas of Cheese and the Horner C don’t officially have diplomatic relations after they dumped some of their sewage improperly near our holding pens. Jim wasn’t even around for it, it happened at least two years ago. Dad, Jim learned, can hold a grudge and it’s made the SoC a target for his ire ever since.

After Jim caught his breath, they moved over to Pens 2 and 3 and started the whole process over again. Today’s pen chores took about three hours – right until lunch. After lunch they scrubbed and swabbed up as best they could – the Horner cleans up good but it is work. They finished with the chores with about two hours of daylight left and Dad took them in the launch, an old wakeboard rig dubbed Horner C Minor (yes, it’s not the correct musical term…get over it), to the Phoenix, an old decommissioned submarine tender that acted as tender for the colony.

“Remember, meet up here again at 2000,” he said, handing out some pocket cash. He’d been using military and nautical terms since they came aboard, sometimes it was annoying. Jim had to check his watch again to see what how much time that gave Jim…he was still working out telling time in 24-hour. Two hours later, they joined again for the ride back to the ship. Nancy wanted to be a fighter pilot when she grew up, she announced. Jim and Dad just sighed because that was the third career she had proclaimed her heart set on in just under a month.

All in all, they were a pretty happy crew of three as they motored back to the Horner to grill up some fish, drink some sodas and maybe play a checker game or two before bed. The sun flared brightly as it sank into the sea that night – the color of blood stayed on the horizon long after it had disappeared.

My Brother – The Keeper

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. – Proverbs 17:17, King James Version

I woke up, feeling like I had just survived my house burning down. The light was coming into the room from the big picture window, illuminating the living room. It was poorly furnished – the kind of furniture you get when you moved into your first place. I was sleeping on Aunt Sarah's old couch, the one she kept for years. Doc had it now, it was stained with beer and ranch dip and my face was numb from where it had been pillowed on the armrest.

How had the night ended? I was pretty drunk, the last I could recall. We were watching movies – an old Chow Yun Fat gunfighter from the early 90s. Lots of chop-socky dialog that I found endlessly hilarious...It was an ironic counterpoint to the implosion I had witnessed a few hours earlier. I was emotionally drained…I sat there, four or six highballs into the evening and melted into the couch like Jell-O. At some point, the movie ended. At some point, I fell asleep. At some point, one of the worst nights of my life was over. Now I was here.

Doc decorated his place like the punk house it was. The walls were layered with concert posters and fliers on top of yellowing wallpaper. Burned out black light fixtures would have lit up an intense splatterpaint mural that someone had created over the fireplace. It looked sad and pathetic in the daylight. The newer TV set sat on top of an ancient Magnavox console along with a cheap DVD/Tape combo player.

I heaved myself up to a sitting position but the effort was making my eyes throb. I saw an empty bottle of Jack and it vaguely came back to me that I chugged at least part of it. My joints ached, my mouth tasted like wet cat litter and I needed something to eat. From somewhere in the back of the house, I heard a door open.

Doc entered the room, still wearing the board shorts he had on last night. He had the genes from the good side of the family – the surfer's body and the blonde hair with blue eyes. His face was beginning to betray his age…the sun had started to give him crinkles around his eyes like Grandpa. The cigarettes had started making his voice rasp, too. In the morning, he sounded like Lee Marvin. He lit a smoke with a sigh and sat down next to me on the couch.

"I gotta quit these things," he said – staring at the mess on the wall.

"Who did the paint job?" I asked. Doc wasn't an artist.

"Sherry," he said, thinking. "No…It was Bobbie." We sat like that for a few, Doc flipped on the TV and turned it to the Saturday morning cartoons. I had a flashback from fifteen years ago of us doing the exact same thing in the exact same house – kids on a Saturday morning with a whole world of possibility ahead of us.

I found myself studying Doc, remembering how much I'd worshipped him when I was younger. Doc was my older cousin, older by 6 months; he replaced the brother I lost when I was 4. His home replaced the one that shattered around me when I was 10. My parents never got over my brother's death, he was 16 when I was 4 and died in a rollover on the highway with his buddies. In one sense, it was a completely Hollywood ending for my brother and for my parent's marriage. They never forgave each other or themselves for losing him. It was supposed to look like the freeze-frame diorama of grief and sorrow that doesn't affect you after you've left the theatre. It's a whole lot less dramatic when it's happening to you. It just sucks when it happens to you. The family lined up on each side and I found myself at the bottom of the craters, somewhere in the middle. I was the single piece that reminded everyone he knew of a tragic loss no matter where I turned. That part was very un-Hollywood.

The family recriminations over my brother and then over my parents lasted for years. I was just a kid and becoming very tired of having to keep track of who wasn't talking to whom. I was exhausted from watching my parents fight and then not fight, talk and then not talk and then get in the habit of not being home. It helped them practice for the Really Big Goodbye. When Dad finally did leave, I lost the last shred of hope. I don't even know what I was hoping for. Even if we couldn't get Jack, my brother, back… maybe, just maybe this family could learn to be happy with what was left.

Doc still had the old house – Sarah had given it to him when she remarried. When we left the house for some breakfast, I paused on the curb and looked around. The view was full of little touchstones that I had drawn strength from in the past. Aunt Sarah's house was on the ocean in Santa Cruz and the street dead-ended into space. It marked the cliffs that dropped down to the beach and then to the Pacific. It was a popular beach access – the air was always tangy with salt and the streets were always sugared with sand.

The house and the street had always meant refuge to me, and so did Doc. Mom started letting me come over for sleepovers more often after the divorce. She would head over the mountain on the 17 on Friday afternoon – me with my G.I. Joe sleeping bag and pillow and a shopping bag full of clothes. It was a sleepover for both of us, come to think of it. She stayed in the guest bedroom and I was in Docs'. Later, she found a house in Santa Cruz that she could rent cheap and we were closer than ever after that.

Doc kept the convertible, too. It was his Dad's project car that he finally gave up on…a '63 Chevy Nova painted two-tone like a Bel-air. Doc took the top down and fired up the engine, the glass packs gave it a throaty burble. Through my sunglasses, I caught our reflection in passing store windows – we looked like something classic, like two hoods in a B-movie about teenagers from hell. Cruising up the streets of Santa Cruz in the crisp sunshine, I started to feel a little bit less miserable and started to enjoy the day.

I noticed several calls on my cell phone. One from my Dad, one from Mom, another number that had to be my Aunt Theresa. Voicemails…a text message. I tried to delete them all without reading or listening to them but the phone opened up the text message. It said "PLEASE CALL ME – DAD".

"Typical," I said to Doc. We were pulling up to a Denny's for some breakfast. "Drop the A-Bomb and then call to apologize in the morning."

Doc shrugged. "At least they apologize now."

"Well, apology for them," I said. "More like call up and act like nothing happened." Arguments in my family followed a more well-known path: allow tension to build, let said tension explode into a vicious public diatribe on all your character flaws dating back to when you wore diapers. After the conversation, feel bad but realize that admitting you felt bad would hurt your negotiating position – therefore you pretend that none of it happened and you let the other guy do the work of bringing it all up. Then, your option is to act all surprised – did the other guy really think it was such a big deal? Geeze, you clearly have a problem letting go of the past. The only thing more infuriating about it was the fact that I'd yet to come up with an effective means of countering it all.

The fight last night was sickening on a lot of levels – they couldn't keep it together long enough to finish with Grandpa's post-funeral get-together. They had to bring up a bunch of silly horse crap surrounding stuff Grandpa left to different people. That had to lead to yet another protracted "this-is-what-is-wrong-with-the-family-I'm-the-only-one-who-tries-you-all-suck" type of fight. I'm 30 years old and I feel like I'm 8 again. Mom, Dad, the aunts, the uncles – they all want to fight over how big a share of Grandpa's corpse they get. On top of it all is my Grandma: simultaneously the cause of and victim of all this pointless, partisan feuding.

When we were 10, Doc was a skateboarder and among the kids experimenting with break dancing. He taught me the moves so that I could go back to San Jose and be the coolest kid in the room – if for only 45 seconds or so. Adding to all my socialization issues, I was the smartest and least coordinated kid in our class. Calculate the velocity of a red 4-square ball as it left the foot of the biggest kid in our class to soar far into the 'outfield' as we played kickball. I could never come up with the appropriate quadratic equation to figure out how humiliated I was being the first kid out in dodgeball, the kid who never won at 'Duck, Duck, Goose' and the kid who had to sit out the Christmas crap because his parents wanted him to be in touch with his Jewish heritage.

"I hate the Dreidel," I yelled at my Dad to hurt him during an argument when I was 15. I never forgot the shock and sudden hurt on his face. He stopped yelling at me about something – something about Judaism when it all just flooded up into my throat. Being angry about being Jewish, being my Dad's son when his entire life was one long apology for not being as successful as the rest of the family. I thought it was the religion that was doing it to him and I screamed it at him. It was like watching the air come out of a popped balloon. Not an explosion, just a rapid and complete deflation. In the silence that followed, he turned and went to his room, slamming the door.

We do it to each other…we do it to ourselves, my mother told me one night. A girl with no major beliefs about anything latches onto a diffident Jewish boy studying law at Santa Clara University. They fall in love, they marry – the two halves begin the process of joining together. The families are distant, but when the boy comes along, that's got to bring everyone together...right? Like pure sodium to water – it turns out. The bright explosion that results is the two families agreeing that being around each other would never happen. The Dayton Accords were decided with less negotiation. Mom and Dad breaking up just gave them more ammunition to work with and it had been building up in a stockpile for years before.

I ordered pancakes and coffee – my stomach wasn't up for greasy eggs or hot sauce. The hangover made me hunch over my cup of nutty-tasting Denny's coffee…lotsa cream, lotsa sugar as Harvey Keitel might say. I knifed a mound of whipped butter over my cakes and frosted it with maple syrup. We didn't talk…Doc already knew what I would say and it had reached a saturation point with me where I couldn't stand to think about it all, much less discuss it.

Escaping the party last night – I found Doc outside, smoking a cancer stick and talking with a fat cousin I hadn't seen in years….Larry, I think his name was. Doc saw me come out of the rented hall like a charging bull. We hadn't been around each other for years but in a flash, he was back to being the older brother I needed and he knew his job instantly.

"Whoa!" he caught my shoulder and stopped me mid-charge. Blindly furious, I had dashed out to start chucking the decorative rocks at cars and breaking things. I wanted to break something – I wanted to break them. I wanted to take a garbage can and smash the windshield of my Aunt Theresa's Jag, slash my uncle Bob's tires and maybe for giggles set my Dad's lawn on fire. Break them, mess up their phony lives…write 'faggot' on Bob's lawn with herbicide, let it burn in and then watch him stew for a few weeks until he bought the green lawn dye. Not just 'fag'…'faggot'…The whole word. They want to see childish? We'll see who can fling the biggest booger.

Knowing them – they'd press charges. It was a kindness on Doc's part, then, to keep me from making a bigger ass of myself then they'd managed. I slapped his hand off of my shoulder and that just gave him the momentum he needed to swing around and wrap his arms around my shoulders and make me have to drag him. "Whoa, buddy," he said. "Where you going?"

"To do some damage," I said, in what I hoped would be my best tough-guy voice. The Jewish kid who looked like Justin Timberlake's shorter, less-good-looking brother wasn't gonna out-tough his skate-punk cousin, the kid who modeled his life after guys like Henry Rollins and Mike Ness. All the drugs, fighting and booze – none of the creative vision. Nothing else to offer the world but the ability to give or take a punch. Well, no – I wasn't gonna top him. But he was a prince in that moment for not rubbing my face into it.

After breakfast we turned toward the mountains and started on a long drive to nowhere-in-particular. As the miles cranked by and we settled into the drive, we caught each other up on the pieces of our lives that we had been too busy to share before. Doc was fascinated by the start-up that I was part of. I was still ruefully jealous of his Dharma beach bum lifestyle. We started slinging old jokes at each other – he plugged in a mix CD of old rock tunes we'd crank when Aunt Sarah was out of the house. I let the breeze and the sun take away all the hurt and the anger. We were two brothers again and the time and distance between us seemed to melt away.

"No point in fighting," Doc said to me, his eyes on the road. "What would it prove?" I knew the answer to that question, the same as he did. The point was that there was no point. I wanted to stop having to make a point out of everything. Losing my Granddad was one of the most pointed experiences of my life. Grandpa packs it in at 86 and the family implodes into the hateful little fiefdoms it was too afraid to be when he was around. They'll fight over a rotting cardboard box of 78s but they won't hold it together long enough to get Grandma out of sight. Stop trying to make a point out of everything – stop making sense. Doc's whole life didn't make sense, it seemed. Maybe that was why we had drifted apart. But at 30 years of age, realizing that trying to keep things ordered and sane in this family was going to be a full-time job, I needed a break from all of that. Slice the Gordian knot.

My cell signal would come back and drop off again, based on where we were. Sometimes we'd lose it behind a hill or sometimes it would be full-bars in some desolate two-lane stretch. Whenever it came back, more calls would be in the log. The kid who always called back, always returned calls, wasn't calling back. It felt great to let the burden I didn't know I was carrying go.

It was dark when we got back to Doc's. I finally scored a shower and he lent me some clothes. He broke out a bottle of expensive tequila and we got plastered again. Just like when we were kids, somewhere in the movie we were watching around 2 AM, we both fell asleep sitting side-by-side on the couch. The feel of someone else there, next to me, was reassuring in the very same way that it was 15 or 20 years ago. I didn't have to face the darkness alone and that was what I needed.

I was reaching out in the darkness to find someone or something to hold onto. Back at that time, I had a cousin who was more like a brother. He offered a shoulder to lean into and the calm strength that said "I know you're a dork – I just don't care. I love you, bro."

It saved me then and it's saving me now.

Off the Edge of my Seat

So no weird dreams last night - just a couple of shots of Scotch after the inevitable phone call to the parental unit. Still digging and chugging along with the novel..although some personal work crisis has made getting to it a hard slog. With my budding carpal tunnel syndrome (the joy of typing for years starts to come back now), I bought a very nice ergo keyboard and I can hammer out text with no discomfort.

One thing that I wanted to talk about was relationships in the context of the American white male. There are a lot of rules to being a man - most of them are unspoken and learned by trial and error. How to use these tools, especially in adverse environments is something I've thought a lot about and am doing a short story that could be developed into a novella at some point.

How do you survive in an environment where they expect you to deal; no matter what happens, no matter how they treat you?

More Weird Dreams

I'm standing by on two stories to be published - "'Zona Trash" and another, the title of which doesn't make much sense so I'll just leave that be for now. Again with the weird dreams...I honestly don't know where they come from...

I was part of some military squad sent to attack an Army base somewhere in the jungle. The base had its men along with families and children. We were sent to wipe them out - I have no idea why. The dream had elements of several video games I've played, I opened fire with a mounted machine gun on a parade ground full of Army men who somehow refused to seek cover. I used my gun, I used my knife. We killed soldiers, women and children - I even killed a cook who didn't die right away. He chased after me while throwing a full pot of soup at me...I could feel it landing on my back and shoulders.

I killed a kid who wandered near. He didn't look human, but more like a cartoon character come to life. I stabbed him over and over until he dropped. I stabbed another guy in the heart, he still struggled. I poked at his eyes with my knife and the gore took on the qualities of a scrambled egg. As we moved on, killing indiscriminately - I found a civilian and prepared him for the killing blow. It was...Anthony Bourdain? Why was the guy from the Food Network in my dreams? He handed me something he called his 'technical sword' - it looked like a straight-blade katana of some kind. I used it to decapitate Anthony and as I cut more than once to complete the kill, the meat started to look like carne asada.

Not surprisingly, I woke up feeling disturbed and depressed - I can't get this dream out of my head and it's been like, all day.