I’ve been telling people for twenty-plus years now that I am Superman. I offer as evidence to this claim, Exhibit A, which shows a similarity in the intended voting preference between me and The Man of Steel. If this doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what does.
With a new year upon us, I sit down and evaluate where I’ve been and where I’m going. There are some nice New Year’s resolutions, too, most of which I’m sure I will not keep.
The story I started working on yesterday, and will continue working on today, is actually a piece I wrote a few months back but was unhappy with at the time. Of course, I was so beaten down creatively by my employment at insert name of professional sports league here that I failed to finish it in any satisfactory way. That will hopefully change during the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours. In this way, the story is sort of recycled, hence the going green reference. Get it. Recycled. Environmentalism. Going green. Stay with me, folks. We like to move quickly around here.
To give you a little bit of background on the story, its title is “The Often Unheralded Affect of Burnt Bagels and Weak Coffee.” As usual for one my creations, it is not plot heavy and, instead, focuses on the inner psychological workings of the main character, Nathan Yearlman, an eighty-four-year-old man living alone, more or less waiting to die. He has peculiar habits, and the story drops in on him in bed one early morning.
An interesting tidbit to note is that during the holidays this year, a member or two of my family, echoing something I’ve heard more than a few times prior, commented that it appears the inspiration behind a lot of the themes and characters in my stories are more than a little transparent, thinly veiled references to people I know and things they’ve done. This is an astute observation, and it’s mostly true. When you’re trying to churn things out of your imagination, you inevitably turn to people, places, and events you’ve experienced. Other people fascinate me, and I’m interested in exploring the things that make them tick. And like any other artist, I draw on things I know to create sketches of characters that are as real to me as anyone else in my world, full of flaws and ugly ideas, many of them difficult to like. That is the reality I want to create and share.
But my goal has never been to comment on or judge anyone. Once I outline the sketch, I let go of the person who inspired it and try my best to give the character a life of his or her own. There’s not much more to it than that. I don’t suppose to know for sure why anyone does what they do, so I don’t bother trying to figure it out. I believe that all people are a thousand times more complicated than they let on, so it’s more interesting and effective to make up my own neuroses than it is to analyze someone else’s.
I think there is a common thread among all these characters, and that, more than anything else, is what seems to have presented itself as the unifying theme of my work lately. All of the people in my stories do the majority of their dialogging internally, with their own minds. Their internal conversations are often layered and a little dark, some would even say negative. Yet, the way they often articulate themselves outwardly is simple and stoic, a lot of times completely contradictory to the way they think and feel. If you were to go back and look at “It Helps to Watch” or “The Sounds I Hear,” that element is pretty clear. For some reason, that is where my mind has chosen to set up shop.
I can psychoanalyze myself and hypothesize that this trait is a reflection of something in me, that it somehow allows me to deal with an ability to effectively express myself to others, that it lets me share something about myself, an attempt to be understood and validated by people I don’t feel I relate to, but I’m not a therapist. I just write stories that make me feel a certain way, and I try to do that in as unique a way as possible, something akin to auteurism in film. It’s like a mirror I look into every week, and I never know what the reflection is going to look like until someone else sees it.
I want to preempt this blog post with a little disclaimer:
The opinion expressed below is intended to point out the inherent stupidity in the shock-and-awe treatment given to an actual event, as reported by several news outlets. It is not in any way intended to act as the retelling of an old and tired joke or to poke fun at a celebrity blogger who stole someone else’s joke, tried to pass it off as his own, acted the fool, and then tried to play it off like he had never heard the joke before, even though he’s apparently into comedy and older than fourteen. – Becoming Somebody management
To catch people up on what this is all about, a three-hundred pound Siberian tiger named Tatiana got out of its pen at the San Francisco Zoo on Tuesday and attacked three people, killing one and seriously injuring the other two. Police shot and killed the tiger.
As many of my readers can guess, I don’t think highly of urban zoos, most of which are filled with exotic animals that have been captured, removed from their natural habitats, and put on display, where they are gawked at and forced to live in cramped conditions that in no way replicate their natural environments or fulfill their needs. This high-stress environment, in combination with often-inadequate medical care, leads to psychological trauma and, at times, aggressive or self-destructive behavior.
But the issue here isn’t so much the prison-like conditions for captive animals (for more on that topic, here’s a link to some information, courtesy of my friends at PETA) as much as it is the typically ridiculous reaction to this tragedy by the media.
The tone of the coverage is one of shock and amazement. The questions being asked are things like, “How could this have happened?” or “What could have led this tiger to act out in such a way?” The underlying tone here is one that suggests the tiger did something wrong. Of course, this is stupid.People are made to believe that it is somehow odd that a wild animal sought to escape from its pen and then figured out how to leap across a fifteen-foot mote and scale a twenty-foot fence. The tiger was just being a tiger. If you were taken from your home and jailed for no reason, you would try to get out too. The tiger was just doing its thing. Once again, people and their arrogance are at fault here.
And, yet, the media makes it seem as if this tiger was some kind of rogue agent, acting against the natural order, that deserved to be killed for its crime. Sure, it is always tragic when someone dies unnecessarily, but it is equally tragic, if not slightly more so, when a member of an endangered species is killed for the sake of human hubris.
I had hoped that the attention given to this event would lead people to second-guess our attitudes toward zoos and the animals in them, but after watching and reading a lot of the coverage I am once again disappointed. Until people realize that animals are not objects that can be trapped, caged, and manipulated for human amusement, these attacks will continue to occur. So blame the zoo, not the tiger.
Two more days until this heinous season is behind us and business can begin again. I’ll be back in full force Wednesday, bringing you blogs ranging from the absurd to the political. I’ll also be refocusing this project, as it has lost its way these last couple weeks. New stories, new ideas, new opinions. I’m stoked to get oh-eight underway.
If you have time to kill, you can always go back and remember what this project is all about, read my bio, click around the short story archive, watch the Becoming Somebody trailer, check us out on Facebook, or drop me an e-mail.
And for those who may have missed the brief John Lennon interview about his and Yoko Ono’s Happy Xmas/War is Over movement from 1969, here it is again. It is worth checking out, especially at this time of year, in the world we are living in. Enjoy.
I know everyone was disappointed in me for not having a story done today, but I couldn’t make it happen. To hold you over until next week, peruse the short story archive. I know there are stories you haven’t read yet, so read up. There will be a quiz.
P.S.
Simon is doing a little better today. We think he might be a little arthritic, and the cold weather bugs him and makes him achy. Thanks for everyone’s concern.
Amidst an already hectic week of last-minute holiday preparations — I always leave my holiday dealings to the proverbial eleventh hour — it appears a new obstacle to a completed short story has been lain before me. It appears my dog, the adorable little fellow pictured above, has come down with some sort of nagging shoulder injury. He hasn’t been himself the last couple of days, and he’s been favoring his front, left leg during and immediately after walks. He also whimpers a bit when we pick him up. But he’s walking around all right and seems to be doing OK otherwise. Either way, I find myself breaking down and watching his every move, challenging him to jump on the couch or run up the stairs. I look at him from every angle as he walks, trying to detect the slightest limp or hitch in his giddy-up. His paw seems fine, and he doesn’t whimper or retract it when I take a look. While I am sure he will be fine and probably just aggravated a muscle, I am perplexed by his condition.
Simon’s mystery ailment, although it pales in comparison to my rush to complete my Xmas shopping and other assorted holiday shenanigans, is simply the latest diversion in what has been an inefficient week. I had to get some other things finished before the weekend, and I had a few unexpected distractions thrown my way. By the time I looked up from it all, it hit me: Fuck. It’s Thursday. It’s four in the afternoon. What the hell am I going to write about?
To answer my question: Nothing. There will be no short story tomorrow. To be sure, this irritates me a lot more than it irritates anyone else. I hate to fail at my one-story-per-week goal. I already skipped a week around Thanksgiving. Next week is going to be rough, with Monday and Tuesday all but lost. I need to turn it up and get something done next week. I’m going to try to start something tomorrow. If I get on a roll, I might be able to finish it by the weekend, but I never can tell how quickly it will come before I start writing. I’ve been told I put too much pressure on myself, and I need to sit back and let the work come to me. I don’t want to force it. In the end, I think the work suffers.
It still pisses me off, though. It’s not like I have another job right now. If I’m not producing stories every week, then I’m just waisting time. That’s how I feel sometimes, even though I know it’s not completely true. I tried to work through everything, but there are only so many hours in a day. And pulling a story out takes a lot of mental time and energy I just didn’t have this week, still another reason to hate the holidays.
On the bright side, if I fail to meet my goals, I know who to blame: My dog and his bum leg.
Glad I got out of bed this morning. I would have accomplished more catching up on sleep.
Well, if you are me, and it’s a week before Xmas, you go to the mall and spend money you don’t have buying presents for people you don’t like but feel obligated to give something to, because you don’t want to feel like an asshole when they hand you a little box with a red bow on top and say “Merry Christmas” like they believe in holiday cheer and aren’t just in it for the Best Buy gift cards and shiny new toys, bells and whistles with sequined tassels and new-and-improved secret formulas. The most wonderful time of the year indeed.
Thirty-eight years ago today, John Lennon and Yoko Ono began one of the most ambitious, well-publicized campaigns for world peace. And though we are still plagued by violence and intolerance, their message rings true in so many of us. Here’s to peace this holiday season.
War is over (if you want it). Happy Xmas from Becoming Somebody.