Memory

Today is My Birthday

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After a certain point in high school, I haven’t been super fond of my birthday. To be honest, I never really dissected that. I don’t know if I ever spent any energy on why I’m decidedly neutral on the subject of my birthday before today. I’m all about other people’s birthdays and throw myself into celebrating them as much as I can with my limited means and social energy. But not mine. I like to mark them, sure, but mostly by gathering my friends around me to do something like we’d do any weekend. Hang out, go hiking, play D&D, maybe watch a movie or play a game together. Hell, last year I got a cake to celebrate moving day two weeks after my birthday and otherwise pretty much forgot on my own birthday.

If I’d had to say why I wasn’t very interested in my birthday before a couple of years ago, I’d have said that I’d rather celebrate personal achievements. Sure, birthdays are a celebration of life, but I’d rather just do that as a part of living it rather than taking a day to specifically celebrate a particular life. I didn’t really want attention back then and I much preferred to do things on my own terms than try to accommodate people’s desire to mark my birthday. I wouldn’t stop them, of course, I was never that much of a Grinch, but I wasn’t about to encourage it.

Now, I see that birthdays are a chance to let people celebrate you. Structure is super nice and while we should let people we care about know that we appreciate them all year long, it’s still nice to use their birthday as a bit of an excuse to make a production of it. To kick it up a notch or do something special just for them. Which is why I’m more interested in other people’s birthdays than my own. I like letting people know I appreciate them. Any resistance I currently feel to celebrating my birthday is because August has never really been that great of a month for me and I don’t really keep track of my life in terms of years. Sure, I know my age, but that stopped being a measurement of my growth a long time ago and now I keep track of time since big events.

My life has had a lot of big events and there are definitely a few that are sort of definitive moments that I know had a big impact on my life. Looking back on them, I can see how my life would have been incredibly different if I’d made a different choice and how the choices I made contributed to me being the person I am today. There’s a wide variety of events and while reflection on my life is the purpose of this birthday post, I’m not going to go deeply into all of them. Some of them were moments I don’t want to share because they mean more to me for being private or because I don’t feel ready to share them.

The first one, and one that actually was two forks disguised as one, was my parents telling my three siblings and I that they were going to have another children who would wind up being twelve years younger than me. I fell out of my chair laughing and wound up being almost a third parent to my younger sister since my dad worked a lot and my mother was homeschooling us at the time so she needed all the help she could get. I eventually realized that this was the moment that I decided to deal with the crazy randomness of life and (mis)fortune by laughing instead of crying. There’s more behind that, but this isn’t the post to go into it. I also realized that I enjoy taking care of and teaching people. It really helped me to learn to cope positively and how to be patient and compassionate.

The second is not something I’m willing to write about in any detail online, but I learned how I respond in a crisis and that there’s a certain part of me, beneath the compassion and desire to just love people that will stay firm and act when I feel like I don’t have any other choice.

The third was the college I chose. I grew more than I thought possible, in ways I never expected, and learned things I never knew I didn’t know. I met a lot of amazing people, a handful of terrible people, and discovered that we’re all the heroes of our own narratives but sometimes that means we’re the villains of someone else’s. I made mistakes and I hurt people. I made mistakes and hurt myself. Like I said, I learned a lot. Without the place I chose, I’d have been an incredibly different person, to the point of it being useless to try to guess what or who I might have been. I’ve got no frame of reference for who that other Chris could have been, so how could I ever guess? The other side of my college choice is that it also resulted in a giant pile of student debt due which has left me feeling like I’ve been forced to put my life on hold until I pay it off. Even though I don’t regret my choice and think that the choice I made was the right one, I still struggle with the prospect of all my student loans and how much of my money I’ll have sunk into them by the time they’re paid off.

After that, there’s my move to Madison and my first job after the move. It didn’t go well, but I really figured out what was important to me and what my limits were. Tied to that is another thing I don’t want to share online, from two years ago (almost to the day), that irrevocably altered my life. There are some questions you never want the answers to and, throughout my life, I’ve gotten two of them I’d prefer to have never come across. But it reinforced my resolve and sense of self. The two experiences, my first job and the thing from two summers ago, weren’t positive influences on my life, but I learned a lot from having made it through them. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God” (Robert F. Kennedy on hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.).

It’s been a long twenty-seven years. I’ve hopefully got many more years ahead of me, but I wouldn’t mind if they were a little less eventful. I’d prefer if my next major life event was something good, like being able to write full time, getting married, or buying a house. Those would all be nice, even if there’s less to learn from the happy moments than the difficult ones.

My Mind is a Battlefield

Chris Leave a comment

My mind is a battlefield:
a land ravaged by war
where the once green fields
and luscious forests
are now gone,
replaced by blasted earth
and barren, burnt wastelands
full of sad, lost refugees
who shy from everyone they meet.

My mind is a world at war:
full of brutal savagery
and the most wondrous beauty
locked in some twisted dance
that never ends
while someone wanders
searching through the misery
to find the scrap of truth
that makes this travesty
worth it.

Maybe you can understand why
I do not like to dwell on things,
why I often seem vacant
and perhaps unmindful of
the people and things around me
or why I might not be listening
when you’re talking to me.
There’s a war going on and
I don’t have much energy to spare
because I’m the general
of both armies.

While you’re talking to me,
I’m trying to navigate through my mind,
watching out for landmine memories
and avoiding guerilla anxieties,
not to mention all the other soldiers
I have sent to sabotage me.
I usually never make it out.
I know all my own tricks
and there are too many landmines
to avoid them all,
especially when the guerrillas
are chasing you.

Yet I go in, the external me
who watches this all unfolding,
and hope to find
the sepia photograph
or inspiring tale of truth
that makes enduring
this constant, ceaseless war
a viable option.
The armies leave me be
but the guerrillas will not stop
planting landmines and
chasing me towards them,
despite the call of peace
and my humanitarian efforts
to stave off the nuclear winter
the generals consider simply for the sake
of concluding.

 

Saturday Morning Musing

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Lately, I’ve been noticing that a lot of musicians I follow have been disappearing from parts of the internet. Or, at least, some of their music has been. In the past two months, links to songs I posted are now broken and playlists I’ve created on YouTube and Spotify have empty spots where favorite songs used to live. Some of these are songs I’ve listened to for years that are now gone. Some of these are the albums that got me into the musician that I can no longer find anywhere but on my iPod. Sometimes, I even begin to wonder if I’ve gone crazy. I mean, what else could I think when I have a four-track EP on my iPod of Kyle Andrews music that 20+ pages of google results knew nothing about? No one, not even the friend who first got me into the artist, remembers that album. If you’ve heard of the album “Damn Baby You’re Cold” by Kyle Andrews, please let me know. I’d really like confirmation that I’m not insane.

For the most part, though, there are traces left behind. A split second of video because the YouTube video player displays “This video is no longer available” or something similar. A listing for a song in a playlist, but the text is now dark grey and Spotify keeps telling me that “This song is not available. If you have the file on your computer you can import it.” I can’t find that song anywhere online, except I can still purchase the entire album it’s on from the author’s website or from iTunes. All of these great videos of my favorite live performer doing small shows while walking down streets in little towns in Europe are gone and my heart breaks that I can’t hear the haunting beauty of his voice echoing off old buildings in little alleyways and mixing with the bustle of people stopping to listen. Thankfully, someone else uploaded it a long time ago. Unfortunately, the quality is much lower and the greater range I could hear in the other video isn’t present in this one. Still, at least I know this one used to exist for sure.

I’ve been trying to figure out if this particular kind of artist, indie rock seems to be the only genre I follow with this problem, is in the middle of some kind of legal battle or if they’re trying to remove some of their older work from the internet. I mean, that’s a shame since I loved sharing their music, but I can understand that they probably want to get paid and having their music up on YouTube probably isn’t super conducive to a living wage as an artist. Still, I really wish I could share the majesty of Kyle Andrews singing about getting a lump of coal for Christmas from an ex-lover or about what he’s going to do with his current lover at Christmas if the world doesn’t end before then. I can’t even direct you to where you can buy it since nowhere I’ve found has it listed.

I worry, a lot, about erasing the past. Or losing it. I’ve been guilty of trying to ignore it and of hiding from it, but now I do everything I can to remember the past without getting stuck in it. When chunks of it, especially chunks that were super important to me, go missing, it makes me worry. Not because I’m concerned about falling back into my bad habits, but because I worry that time will eventually just make me forget. Unlike my iPod, life doesn’t have a shuffle setting that might let you rediscover old favorites you haven’t heard in years. Sometimes you get a prompt that reminds you of something you’d forgotten a long time ago, but it often disappears again if you don’t work to keep it around. If I hadn’t bought that album all those years ago, choosing instead to just listen to it on Soundcloud, I’d have lost it forever. Part of me wonders what else I’ve forgotten that I’ll never experience again because I never followed up on it or made a commitment.

With how much I’ve forgotten about my past, some that I’ve tried to forget and some that just vanished along the way, I’ve got a bunch of half-memories I’m not even sure are true. I for-sure remember going on Hayrides with my original church’s youth ministry group. I remember the faces of the people I met there and the friends I grew apart from as we became teenagers. What I’m not sure I remember is whether or not I had a crush on this one girl in there who may have confessed her feelings for me at the end of the hayride, as I was about to walk home (I lived a few blocks away from the stables that put the event on). I know I never saw her again after that night because her family was moving away and I know that, if I’m remembering events that actually happened and not some amalgamation of dream and memory, I didn’t realize she was confessing feelings until I thought of it sometime in my last two years of college. Can you image how insane I felt? The thought randomly popped into my head, that I’d missed someone confessing their feelings, and I couldn’t tell if it was something that actually happened or if it was a dream that twisted a memory of the last fun I had before a shitty year.

I’d make a joke about getting older, but I have so many similar memories from my childhood and pre-teen years. Things I half-remember spaced throughout a bunch of time I worked pretty hard to forget. Some things come back if I did for them, but I’m always cautious when digging in that particular minefield. I’ve already been devastated by realizations I’d carefully hidden from myself. It sucked and it not something I want to do again, even if one of the therapies I’m doing with my therapist is specifically for digging up and processing these kinds of memories.

I really wish there was a way to find the answer to any question. Google used to feel like that, but I’m pretty sure that’s always been a bunch of garbage. It just seemed like it knew the answer to every question and we were too naive to question whether or not it really did. Now, I’m left wishing that everything I was taught growing up about a wise, powerful figure in an adjacent realm is true so I can eventually learn the answer to every little mystery I’ve encountered. That’d be heaven in my eyes: finally getting all the answers.

 

Morning Coffee

Chris 2 Comments

Harris woke to the scent of frying bacon, birdsong, and early-morning sunlight. He blinked his eyes, trying to adjust to the light from the window Linda had thrown open.

“C’mon, get up!”

Harris pulled the blankets over his head. Linda sat down on the bed, pulled the blanket back, and gave him a kiss on the nose. “If you wait too long, breakfast is going to get cold!”

Harris smiled as Linda pulled the sheet back, putting up only a token resistance as she hauled him out of bed. “Alright, alright.” Harris pushed himself to his feet and hugged his wife. “You win.” After putting on his bathrobe and new slippers, he followed his wife’s singing down the stairs to the kitchen. He watched as she flipped pancakes for a moment and then started making coffee. Five minutes later, they were eating.

“I’ve got a few errands to run, Harris, but I’ll be back shortly after one.”

“Alright. I’m going to work on getting our taxes filed after I clean up here. Should be done before you’re back.” He smiled at Linda.

He lifted his mug to take a sip, but the handle slipped in his hands and hot coffee poured into his lap. Even as he leapt out of the chair, part of his brain pulled at him and, instead of a coffee stain on his robe, he was looking at his bedroom.

The shades were drawn and the window was closed. The air smelled faintly of sweat. He looked around his room and tried to see it as he had when he was still asleep. He tried to remember his wife as she had looked that morning, but all he could remember was how her face had looked when she handed him the divorce papers later that day.

Tire Swing

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There was a tire swing here once, hanging from a tree on a hill.

The swing was a flying machine, carrying its passengers from the ground into the sky, captained by a laughing child as it flew so high they could touch the clouds. It was a portal to another world, used to pay the entry fee to a land no one but they ever found. It was a seat for eating ice cream on warm summer nights as fireworks exploded above the horizon, cradling its occupant in a world suspended and protected from all the problems of home.

The tree that held it was alone, but stronger for it. It was a stopping point on a speedy descent, providing a place to hide for both children avoiding baths and easter eggs in the spring. A home to birds and squirrels, it stood as a testament to nature’s ability to thrive even in difficult places. It was shade and music on windy summer days.

Now, they are gone. There is nothing left but a bit of moldy rope, a hoop of vulcanized rubber, and the rotting husk of a tree choked by creeping plants and parasites. Long before they fell into disrepair, becoming only their constituent parts, their magic faded. They could no longer be used to hide or to escape and slowly other things took them over. They became only a tire swing hanging from a tree on a hill.

Now, they are that no longer. Now, they are destined for a dumpster as their home is plowed over and prepared for a new life as something else. New seeds are planted and new life is laying its foundations.

There was a tire swing here once, hanging from a tree on a hill. Now, they will become something new.

Poison Drops

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These little drops of poison dew
Collect upon my heart.
These little drops are not from you
Nor did you make them start.

No, my dear, they have always been,
So do not shed a tear.
These poison drops feel lesser when
I can hold you near.

These drips have taken no small toll
But they are not a threat.
You need not worry for my soul,
Its strength is greater yet.

I will not lie or hide the pain
Poison drips can cause me
But worry not, they leave no stain
And are temporary.

They’re little remnants of my past
That will not go away.
They do not fall upon me fast
Nor do they overstay.

I’ve lived with them all of my life
And doubt they’ll ever cease
But they are to my wit a knife,
It’s sharpness to increase.

I’ve made my peace with poison drops,
Painful that they may be,
For I have pulled out all the stops
So they may work for me.

I’ll Never Forget

Chris Leave a comment

Writing serial fiction is much harder than I anticipated and this particular story is giving me trouble. Since I don’t have that to post yet, have a bright poem about smiles to counteract the miserable winter weather I’m experiencing.

A brief little flash, a proudly-worn curve,
A tentative quirk, a break of reserve:
A twist of the skin caused by a nerve
Is all that I need to blithely observe
The mark of spirit that’s always in style,
That which we so simply call a smile.

I remember much, at least as of yet.
Though places and names, reasons I’m upset,
My first loves, injuries, and childhood regret,
Are all things that I will likely forget;
I will never lose, no matter the while,
The sight of a face creased in a smile.

Review: Stop Dragon My Chair Around

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I honestly can’t believe I didn’t hear of The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams until just last year. Well, I should say that I wasn’t really aware of it until last year. I’m pretty sure I’d heard mention of it before, I just didn’t really register it as something I should read, which is surprising. This book (and the subsequent two books in the trilogy) is actually quite famous in a lot of fantasy circles as it was one of the main inspirations for famous authors such as Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin, urging them to go ahead and write their own fantasy stories. A product of the late 70s and 80s, it followed on the tail of the Tolkien craze but took a firm step in a different direction.

While Tolkien’s works were an attempt to create a mythology for England, inspired by the Nordic cultures around England, The Dragonbone Chair is an adaption of the Arthurian tale mixed with a few popular and more-modern elements, such as politics, character development, and more swords. Everything is better with more swords, generally speaking. Armories, wars, training regimens, the list goes on and this book has them all!

The protagonist of the Dragonbone Chair is a simple kitchen scullion, Simon (or Seoman if you’re using his formal name) as he explores his castle home, rises to become the assistant to a doctor, and then is launched into the wider world by events beyond his control. Throughout it all, he acts exactly like the teenaged city boy he is. He loses track of time and has difficulties with his studies because he is too busy day-dreaming and trying to learn about great battles or magic. He struggles to survive in the wilderness as you’d expect, even though he has some basic survival skills. He is clumsy, but genuinely kind and manages to hold onto that quality as the story progresses and he encounters trouble after trouble.

Simon, and the other characters, are easily my favorite parts of this book. Simon is human, but so is everyone else in the story–even the non-humans. There is a wonderfully diverse cast–mostly in attitude as there are few female characters in this series (I’m pretty sure this book wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test). The main female character, Princess Mirimelle, is introduced later in the book, though she features rather heavily from there on. Mirimelle may make rash decisions just as Simon does, but she is much more deliberate in her choices. Her composure under pressure and in unfamiliar situations provides a calmer contrast to Simon’s more emotionally-driven actions.

All of the characters are wonderful, from the scholars to the soldiers, to the royalty. Every single one of them has their own motivations and goals, but the story does a wonderful job of weaving them all together despite that. Because most of the story is told from the perspective of a younger person, the first half has a pervasive sense that everyone but the protagonist knows exactly what they are doing. Thankfully, this illusion is swiftly dispelled as soon as you start to read chapters or sections from the perspective of other characters, not too far past the halfway point. All of them have their struggles, their failings, and their moments of doubt or weakness.

The biggest problem I had with the story was the pacing. There were a lot of wonderful characters to read about and a lot of very interesting information to take in, but it was actually difficult to sit down and read sometimes. Not because it wasn’t a fun or interesting story, but because there was just so much information imparted in the first third of the book. As short as the book is compared to the final volume in the trilogy, it felt like a much longer read because the pacing and information overload made me want to put it down after an hour so I could rest a bit.

There’s so much to discuss about the book that I’ve had to re-write this review four times to make sure I actually focused on reviewing it rather than geeking out over the mythology and how this story has influenced other stories that I love. I’d rather do that in person, over a beer or a cup of coffee, anyway. I suggest reading the book and then convincing other people you know to read it so you’ve got someone to discuss it with.

NaNoWriMo Day 16 (11/16)

Chris 3 Comments

I took yesterday off as planned. Got my extra sleep, got my errands run, took the time to make myself some delicious healthier food (hotdogs are super easy to make in a toaster oven and they taste alright if you buy the good ones, but they’re not exactly a good meal to eat four out of seven days a week), and then sat down to write around one in the afternoon. Twelve hours later, I’d written a few hundred words, play Destiny for a couple of hours, and finished reading the entirety of “To Green Angle Tower.”

I want to just say “whoops” and laugh it off, because that would be easy and I’m already stressed enough knowing I’ve got 15 days to write 39,000 words, but that would be a disservice to myself and the book I read. One day, once NaNoWriMo has ended and I’m trying to keep the daily updates to my blog going, I’ll write a full review of the book and then probably a reflection on it. Heck, I’ll probably do the entire “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” series. There’s so much to unpack and talk about in the series!

Anyway, I honestly don’t regret taking the entire day off to finish reading this book. While I had planned to write and I do also wish I had spent more time writing, this reading break came when I really needed it. That last book I’d finished, aside from a couple of comics here and there, was John Green’s “Turtles All the Way Down” and that, being a highly emotional read for me, had been skewing my perspective. It had me very focused on the things my own story would say and how that it might be read by people. Finishing “To Green Angle Tower” was an excellent reminder that what a book says relies so heavily on the reader that the writer can only tell a story and see what comes out at the end if they want it to be any good. Every so often, I remember a famous book that I strongly dislike because it was written to make a point about something specific. It’s the literary equivalent of a guard standing outside a town in a Super Nintendo game: it has only one thing to say and will mindless repeat it every time you try to engage it.

I don’t want to write a story like that. While I wasn’t so far gone that I had already scripted the story’s message, I’d invested too much into what it was “supposed to” say that it was making it hard for me to write. Today’s writing is going to focus on stepping back from that ledge and getting back to figuring out the story I want to tell. I’ve already done a lot of productive thinking about it while I was staring at my ceiling, waiting for the roiling emotions stirred by the end of a beloved book to calm enough for me to sleep. I think I know what I’m doing, now. I can’t wait to get back to work!

 

Daily Prompt

Sometimes, the most important details can be the ones we don’t know. We see it often in fantasy novels, in stories using the “hero from humble origins” trope. A low-born young woman or man rises up to overthrow the cruel king or lord, stumbling from failure to success as they grow from a child into an adult. They learn wisdom, gain strength, and ultimately triumph, seeking no reward for their efforts but the chance to return to the peaceful life they once knew. Then, as the story wraps up, they learn of some hidden nobility or royal blood in their family tree and are called upon to take the place of the leader they overthrew. The clever part of this that we see in good stories is when the author hints at their background, foreshadowing the moment when they would rise to power. For today’s prompt, write about something similar for your character. Show a the moment that the learn the truth about their hidden past and come up with a few ways to hint about that you could insert into an earlier part of the story.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today’s inspiration is “To Green Angle Tower” by Tad Williams and will be the source of a lot of future quotes and references. I cannot count the number of times I stopped reading, went back, and reread a passage because I enjoyed it so much. The characters, some of whom still felt remote and unknowable through the middle of the book, had become alive and real by the time I reached the appendix. If you want to read a good high fantasy book that is incredibly clever with its references and inspirations, I cannot recommend the “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” trilogy emphatically enough. I suggest getting the recent reprints because I love tall books, even if they’re a bit harder to shelve. Not having to read a couple thousand pages of tiny text will be super helpful.

 

Helpful Tips

If you are feeling particularly stuck at a scene that just refuses to move along, there are a lot of ways you can make progress happen. The easiest would be to kill someone. Nothing progresses a story and gets characters moving like a nice injection of death. If you’re looking for something with a lower impact, have a character lose something. It can be a possession, a companion, a source of comfort, or even a limb. If you’re still trying to build things and not yet ready to start taking them away, introduce someone or something. Adding a new character or location can refresh the existing dynamic between your characters, giving them a nudge to start progressing toward their goals again. Adding things or removing them is easily the fastest way to get a story progressing again, so don’t be afraid to make liberal use of your power to move things on or off stage as you’re setting the scene.