The Stare Down

What is it about the competition where four-figure payoffs are at stake the I feel the need to size up the opponents? Okay, what is it about competition period that makes me need to size them up?

As some of you may know, I'd signed up, in my writing rehab program (not to be confused with an actual, structured program of any sort of which I am painfully, sadly remiss), for a Short-fiction contest. One week, one story, they give you the genre and the subject. And you compete, in the first round, with about 20 other people. Naturally, the names are published, naturally, it's there for the world to see.

So yesterday, I end up hacking out about 800 words for this (max: 2,500), comedy, dog walker. Today, I push it to the end. Final is probably about 1,900 before revision, which could easily add another. What do I do to get it going this morning? If you said "Drink coffee," you get a gold star. If you said "Pace around the apartment semi-nude," you get a gold star. If you said "Masturbate until your [phallus] is raw," you can keep your gold star (I don't want to know where it's been). But I also decide to see who the competition is.

I'm flashing back now: times at whiskeys, smokey, barroom pool table, we each hate each other idyllically. To get ready for a game, I would stare at the opponent, samurai-style, eyes slits and stick piked in front, waiting to be impressed. At least, the games I almost won.

I have to say, I'm kind of a competitive jerk.

* * *

Apart from Monday's writing not being nearly so tangent-inducing, it also started with a different scenario. If you said "Reading John Gardner," you get a gold star (if you're one of the masturbation people, you can keep your own star again).

But, and this is now completely an aside, meaning it will be brief, before the blog gets taken over: I finish the story. What is it about it, that, even in its first-draft form, I feel the need to foist it on others like a cat with a dead bird?

Maybe this is part of the rehab.

manic episodes on the post post proust goals find

It shouldn't be a secret I don't like making resolutions. I marginally like making plans, so the idea of making a promise to myself that I'm supposed to adhere to on the passing of an arbitrary calendar date has never fueled my inspirational fire. Frankly, my moods/desires are based more moment-by-moment, much like a certain person acknowledges a hunger and sates it with, say, mcdonalds. Sadly, yes, mcdonalds.

But I have a goal today. And I might succeed with it. As some have seen, I've picked up the reading yen since living on subway lines, and, having spent my waking subway hours chasing John Banville with Saul Bellow, I've decided to go to their bastard, three-way love child with Jose Saramago: John Gardner.

I knoww, this will sound odd. I don't like American authors. In fact, the cult of narcissism being the only real legacy of the great (small 'g' intentional) authors from the 60s and 70s, I have no real lust for them. But for anybody who has ever taken a writing course, Gardner is a ghost that must be dealt with. Why? He wrote probably the best how-to books on what a novel, what a story, is. And, thoughts on Grendel aside, he represents something apart from it. Frankly, that represents the last novel I read that just gave me absolute, unequivocal joy. But his books are impossible to find.

So now, my quest, and I do choose to accept it, is to find him. One of his books (not Grendel). Any one.

But first, I shower. And maybe pick up some socks.

2009, redux (in a pit of sausage, cheap chianti and, frankly, some of the stuff they put in fast food soda)

I've let the year sit now. Settle. Die, rest, subside, subdue. And so my emotions for the year -- and frankly, the decade -- will not be nearly as descriptive and entertaining as probably should be. For a blog. For, what this genre is, a mock-memoir.

But really, how does one start this? The biggest thing, the happiest thing, is that I finally left San Francisco. No offense to the people back there but it was a bad fit, akin to hiring the bubble boy for a sanatorium. And when does this start?

2002, and a possible transfer. I was getting tired of what I was doing in the place I was at and was seeing someone long-distance in Maryland. There was an opening in the Boston office. Succinctly, with little ado save for the emails that met me between when I sent the inquiry (not request) to when I got into work, the thing was shot down. Not to dwell, but the seeds were planted.

Now, I'm not going to talk too much about myself. I love myself, but I understand that such vanity has led to my hopeless, quashed ambitions and desires. I have a healthy understanding of that. And yes, this is a blog and I understand that and I will work to not make this too antithetical to the nature of blogs, but I can't make this about me me me me me. That should have been in italics. I fail.

Long story in short-form: I leave the company, test life possibilities, have a nightmare roommate that makes me sleep with a knife under my pillow, rejoin to transfer, get side-tracked by authority. There should also be a capital 'A.'I fail again.

Fast-forward to 2009. The transfer happens which, considering the creative differences that have rended the cohesion of the supe-staff, I let happen. It feels early. It was probably just right.

And now I ask the question: how damaging do I want to be on this? To myself, I mean. It's a blog, but, for the feeling of inprivacy with these. People will read this. I can't help it or control it. And really, how intense were the emotions towards the end? Or at least, reliably, trustworthy, soundly and foolproof...ly? I can't be certain.

I'm going to make this short, to save face. 2009 essentials: I get strep. I discover Love and Beauty (damaged as it is). I lose great friends and get strep again. Realizing the baggage and being pragmatic, Love and Beauty leaves. Gets relegated to Like and Fetching, but there's still hurt. In a fit of redemption (small 'r'), I reconnect with great friends. Damage is still done. In my fit of trying to connect, as one last hurrah, the move-out is a disaster, it's too early and I'm not ready. I feed crack habits on the last day of my existence on the west coast, so much dumping on the streets of the Tenderloin. Move. Rain. Pleasant Rain. Hills & Hastings. New office, same job. Different clients, job no longer the same. Move again, midnight. Survive and survive and survive and survive.

To be frank, it's not been a bad year. Yes, I'm essentially in the spot I was ten years ago, when the fateful decision came down between New York and San Francisco, and I chose San Francisco, what with being close to family and all. Transposed ten years later, the decision seems fraught. The family was ultimately a non-starter. The community was sorely lacking (again, this is not meant against friends, but the town of SF needs a good editor, and the ability to accept one).

Hairline receding, hypertensive, I can now say this: The year, the years, have left me with a new start with perspective. Twenty-ten. The new environs, it's the seriousness, man. People give a shit. They get their emotions into things banal trite cold but it's an honesty, a respect. I'm working on it, goddammit. I will be here.

A friend told me this place will give you energy, but will feed off your energy as well. I haven't gotten the feed yet.

But the stimulus is still sinking in. Maybe with perspective and the survive I'll do something. If not, at least I have seasons.

Staycation 2010(R) Day Two, and a bit of Day Three (or, a not so exciting thing happened on the way to the Forum)

I woke up this morning thinking about my taxes. Or rather, the Herculean feat that will be my taxes, circa 2009, circa waiting-on-the-w2-to-work-out-the-two-state-nightmare form filing season. Let me recap.

January. New Year. Living in California. The state practically falls apart fiscally. June rolls around. I roll out.

Now New York. First need to figure out the new tax system. Next need to figure out the calculations for Calif. Then need to figure out the calculations for New York. Pro-rating twice, city tax and not to mention write-offs (where to apply?) and applicable laws and debits and donations and slovenly, break-your-calculator-type worksheets and side forms.

I woke up to this today. After the nightmare of moving to Florida.

* * *

About The White Ribbon. I took the time out of my busy neuroses yesterday to view this film, running down to the Film Forum to check it out.

First off, it looks lovely. Black & white, pre-WWI farm village, slightly European pastoral, if you take European pastoral to mean a slight distrust for the more rural of settings and people to the point that everything surrounding is banal to the point of creepy. (Side note: replace banal with folksy in that sentence and you get the American version of this phenomenon.)

Anyway, the movie is a lot to digest, essentially a frame around a teacher's growing disenchantment in this village where a bunch of bizarre incidents and brutalities happen, and the weirdest bunch of kids since either Village of the Damned or Children of the Corn.

I can recommend, but don't be afraid to be disappointed.

Staycation 2010(R) Day One (or, how I literally poured my time down a slime-caked sink hole)

That was day one. Not any debauched party replete with hookers, strippers, lawn gnomes and marmots and/or ferrets. No, I played with a dirty, stopped up sink.

I am going to leave now, let the chemicals work their magic. Or sit and eat at the porcelain.

Debauched, chemical-hued stories to come (probably from the fumes now permeating the suite). The scent of failure has never smelled so...heady and bleachy? The room smells like coffee made from pool water. As in swimming pool.

UPDATE:
So apparently, during the writing of this post, the drain found itself to be responsive and subsequently, well, drained. As of yet, there are no reports of wet tracks on the wall below, the wall in the kitchen. Score one for 1970s and $40-worth of domestic technology. And if it does end up in the kitchen that will make for some interesting meatballs. I'll keep you posted.

Staycation, 2010

So I've embarked on a Staycation, having one for this entire week. A week to myself. As distressing as that will sound to anybody who has actually had the pleasure of spending fifteen minutes with me will surely identify, and as unfortunate as having to pull that odious portmanteau out does signify. But I digress. I will have a week for this.

Do I have any goals? I hear the sirens' chorus invoke. There will be a list, but I'm not about to let this post delve into the ruminative sort. The short form:
1) declare martial law in Calif (sorry, that bad breakup will not completely end, although it's a goal).
2) delete "Thanks!" from the lexicon unless a service has actually been rendered, after the fact, and adequately so.
3) spread puppies and kittens, love and joy to everyone.

And what will I really accomplish? Stay tuned. The bloody, horrific details will be chronicled. Until then, teasers from NYE:

Guilty as charged, or the language police and their glowing, throbbing nightsticks

I'm a little bit late to this post, as it comments on a list in the November issue of Esquire (if available, you can't miss it, what with Kate Beckinsale's exposed midriff on the cover).

But I digress, digression being a familiar, joyful past time for me. One of the main articles is a breakdown of things a man should and should not say. While the list of terms that need to re-enter the lexicon are noble, notable and disastrously underused (e.g., today, with the wind, it's colder than a witch's tit. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about this one: "19 Things a Man Should Never Say."

To make the viewing of the list more appropriate, I've included my personal scorecard below for derisive purposes.

The list:

• reach out (not the physical act of stretching arm in sleeve)
  
  GM's take: Thank god I don't. For the time being, I am not one of those guys. You know who you are, California.
  Score: 0


• panties
  
  GM's take: Do I admit to saying "Don't get your panties in a bunch"? Do I admit to using the diminutive of the female underthings? No. Or at least, not until there's a produced recording.
  Score: 0


• Über-
  
  Check. Though not as much as some may think. I've relegated this to the land of surferdom and Tool albums. One of those may apply to me.

Score: 0.5 (a half-point taken off for good behavior)

• mixed bag
  
  Guilty. As in, "But really, [insert the following key phrases Bellow novel, Dentist's office, my dating life, geo-nuclear Realpolitik, using a cockring is completely a mixed bag."
  Score: 1.5


• tummy
  
  I initially wrote "no" instead of this word, which should hint at my feelings for it.
  Score: 1.5


• veggie
  
  There are certain words, that, were one to fess to their usage, would completely, utterly, irrevocably resign a man to a life of solitary confinement, dick shrivel and seventeen cats in a locked room. With one litter box.
  Score: 2.5


• vino
  
  I want to say no. I want to say no and know there are no tapes out there, no audible record of me ensconced on lawn chair, pinkie finger extended, white shirt billowing while I stare into a red-ringed empty plastic cup. I think Cat Stevens was playing.
  Score: 3.5


• natch
  
  See above. And the one before it.
  Score: 4.5


• wingin' it
  
  Okay, I can take a breather. I have never used this phrase ever in all my days as a reckless mangler of language and colloquialisms.
  Score: 5.5


• nippy
  
  With the inclusion of a single letter, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ruined this word permanently. But how else would one describe the weather?
  Score: 6.5


• The first name of any female celebrity when you don't follow it with her last name, "Miley," for instance
  
  If this has happened (and note, I feign innocence at all times), it's most likely because I couldn't remember her last name. See scattered comments about my dating life (not necessarily in the post).
  Score: 6.5


• pee
  

Thus ends the "relatively unscathed" section of this list. Final score for section one: 6.5. Out of twelve. For the next stage, add one point for each phrase listed.

• belly button


• c---


• derring-do


• going forward


• It is what it is


• boobs


• folks


• teens


• slacks (the pants>


• gen

Thus ends the lightning round. Collect your prize, run home, cry to mommy, cut out your tongue with rusty pubic hair.

Score: 16.5


In my defense, how else does one say "Shortly after dropping off my folks, a little gen-y c--- with a tulip in her boobs took a pee on my slacks in a fit of derring-do. It is what it is, I have to remind myself this. I was on the way to the dentist, which is a whole other mixed bag within itself."?

I'm out of steam. And I lost count.