Washington, DC Blog

A Christmas Prince

2018-12-19T21:10:00.001-05:00

Like most people at the holiday season, I settled in to watch A Christmas Prince. I haven't made it to a royal wedding yet, but that's only because the original is a classic on par with Scrooged starring Bill Murray. And I felt like I wanted to watch it again this year, delve into the inner and outer lives of Aldovian princes and aspiring journalists. And yet, despite the harrowing plot turns and moments of cinemotographic bliss, (shouts to the film student who got them to include that quick shot of the robin and the icy waterfalls. You are still making art!) I found myself most interested in the main character's means of getting famous: a blog.

Naturally, I was reminded that I used to blog. The similarities sadly end there as I've never met a handsome and eligible Aldovian prince, in part because it doesn't exist, and in part because life is full of disappointment. However, I did wonder why her blog, titled, Amber's blog, had gone viral, while mine stagnated at roughly 100 page views, 37 of which were me checking to see how many page views I'd gotten. The answer couldn't be as simple as the fact that she'd met a prince and existed in a fictional universe. So, like the Greek philosophers of old, I tried to dig deeper.

When that failed, I decided to just review A Christmas Prince. I kid. Too many great reviews of this movie already exist https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/12/13/16769722/watch-netflix-a-christmas-prince-18-days-straight, and I don't want to spend my blogging hours retreading the same ground like a sappy Christmas movie about love. I see what I did there.

Like most people I know today, I spend the majority of my day staring at a screen of one sort or another. I'm not going to claim there is something inherently wrong with screen time, but rather, the issue is that it puts me in the passive role of consumer as opposed to creator, which exhausts me. It turns out that to be mentally passive can be incredibly stultifying. Thus, using Amber's blog as an inspiration, as well as the year 2003, I've decided to revive my blog like it's a beloved television character who was shot at the end of an episode in a cliffhanger. (In the era of peak television, more than half the time the character is actually dead. But I want you to know that a safer time to consume existed when you could always count on your favorite character surviving damn near anything, like Brett Kavanaugh at a job interview for the Supreme Court).

And what better way to revive the blog than to pay a brief homage to the movie that brought blogs back into the mainstream. Screams into void. Oh. It's just me here. Welp. I kid, of course. Reviving a blog that often focused on the quality of children's fecal matter is precisely the anecdote we need during this time of so much political divide. I can't wait to join the rich and intelligent debate we enjoy on such topics as................... Oh. Huh.

Do you guy's like A Christmas Prince or what? Let's debate in the comment section like it's an article on the NYT. I'm playing the part of troll.

This evening

2018-02-20T22:41:00.000-05:00

I made you a poster, and it told you the 130 reasons that I was in love with you. Truthfully, it was 122, but I fudged the last eight and hoped you wouldn't notice. For instance, I don't particularly like your toe nails, but I want you to know that I don't like anyone's toe nails, so you shouldn't feel offended. Nor do I like the way your arm goes rigid when you first fall asleep, and I feel the full weight of your arm, keeping me in place. I feel as though I should piece together an analogy, like the way a line of trees, jazz-handing the blued sky in winter constructs the aesthetics of a morning walk. It would be just like you to laugh at the thought of all those branches, waving at the sky. But you're asleep again, and I've run out of reasons to love you, so I'm going to rest my fingers now and listen the sound of the neighbor's baby crying faintly through the walls. I keep telling you life is full of such odd things if you stay awake deep in the valleys of night.

Rainbows

2018-01-09T23:45:00.000-05:00

I used to chase rainbows in the faint glow of a sky streaked by rain. The sky, both muted and vibrant, gathering orange and gold into itself, waving the colors together as it were a loom, not sky. Every child, or so it seems to me, has this same story, looking up from a sidewalk spattered in rain, dropping a red bouncing ball, a small metallic police car, a doll, and shouting about the colors in the sky. No doubt, I think to myself, you like me, put down the car, raced across the house, tried to trace the arc of light to its source. What were we looking for? Was I hoping to find a deep well of light from which the rainbow was created, spinning across the sky?

Once or twice, I was close enough to the source to try and find it. I was in a large field, patches of grass cut through with hard clay gone temporarily muddy after the passing rain. I'd been playing soccer with my friend, Blake when the storm had arrived. We'd sheltered beneath the eaves of the low slung buildings at McManus elementary school, waiting for the rain to pass. Most days, we went home and played the video game Contra, for hours. But today, we waited for the rain to pass, so rare in the upper reaches of the Central Valley where I grew up.

And when it passed, we saw it, a covenant from God that he'd find some other way of killing us all next time, a rainbow. We saw that its terminus must be somehow close to us, just beyond the chain link fence, falling behind a row of small ranch style homes beyond. We ran quickly through the gates and into the neighborhood beyond, past the star thistle and into the yard, but the rainbow seemed to have moved further still, and we chased it to the next block. There stood a blue house with an American flag hanging from the garage, snapping in the wind. But we couldn't see an end to the light there either.

We chased the light all afternoon, down wide streets dotted by rain, past houses with rock gardens, with small square windows, past houses where dogs barked lazily from the side yard, and down the avenues already starting to grow warm.

Sometimes I feel that though I have not seen Blake in decades that he and I must still be chasing that same light through all the corridors and back alleys of our lives, hoping to discover the source of so much glory. Tell me, dear reader, do you think we'll ever find it?

Movie Review: Columbus

2018-01-05T23:40:00.001-05:00

It's rare these days that I see something so quiet. In fact, I'm writing about Columbus, a slow movie set in the modernist haven of Columbus, Indiana because I fell a bit in love with it. In the past year, everything in my life seems to demand an argument, action, an opinion, and while I believe that 97 percent of the time. Sometimes I want to step away from the argument, from the right way to think and just to be in the quiet space of being a human being wandering about this confusing and wondrous world.
If I were to summarize Columbus, I'd say long tracking shots of beautiful architecture, reminiscent in some ways of Richard Linklater, but slower because sometimes the characters aren't talking, the spaces aren't necessarily given meaning by the character's presence or absence. Rather, the movie seems to ask if the modernist structures have a meaning in and of themselves, apart from humans, in the way that a mountain is still beautiful whether we are beholding it or not. For me, this question of aesthetics and modernism is the real heart of the film. The movie is full of long silences, light on water, on the underside of leaves, but it never quite dips into the full reverie of Terence Malik either. It just seems to delight in the details of life. I too, would like to delight in the details.

Of course, most television shows and movies are about shipping. And so the movie also centers on the relationship between a young woman, who works part-time in a library. She's a year beyond high school, far too intelligent to just be shelving books but she's also not sure if she can leave behind her mother for an offer to a study with a famous architect in New Haven. The young woman develops a deep and soothing relationship with an architects son, in town to witness the decline of his famous father after a sudden heart attack. The son of the architect, like the young woman, has a tendentiosu relationship with his father. Thus, both of the characters are temporarily bound to Columbus because of their parents, and it's in this temporary in between space that their relationship flourishes, traveling between architectural marvels and talking about their parents, their lives, or just the way that a sunken living room was designed. In short, it's slow. But it's not agonizing. Rather, it's slow in the way that it's slow to watch the subtle v that the water makes as it passes the body of a swan.

It's rare to find a movie so in touch with stillness, with the way that a piece of sky, set between two long beams can be achingly beautiful. The filmmaker, Koganda, is a video essayist, and his essay about modernist architecture and the internal struggle we have with our parents, with growth and change, is a mesmerizing one.

James Baldwin

2017-12-15T22:34:00.003-05:00

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

Shadows

2017-11-30T22:30:00.000-05:00

Just like in Peter Pan, the summer I turned twenty-seven, I lost my shadow. He hopped on a train headed east, said he was flying out to France because he heard the women there were pretty. I was ashamed of how shallow my shadow was, who had, or so it seemed to me, been birthed from my body. But that changed things for me, for the rest of the summer, I only went out at night, avoiding light as others sought it out. I wandered the darkest alleys and began to appreciate the shades of darkness in a new way. I could see that darkness had all sorts of tones, and the large black mass of a trash can was somehow darker than the asphalt as were the branches of a large tree still hung with sickening yellow leaves. I realized that the darkness gathered in places just like the light, and I thought to stay that way forever, far away from my shadow, chasing the darkness, a decision, I have rarely regretted.

Winter

2017-11-29T22:32:00.000-05:00

Sometimes in late winter, I feel myself sinking as the leaves do, beneath a thin veil of water. And I try and pull myself up by smiling at everyone I see during the day. This morning on the bus, I smiled at an elderly woman toting groceries from the Wal-Mart that's just around the corner from my place. She looked away, and I looked away. I felt that we'd actually connected, not in the moment that our eyes locked, but when they turned from each other, watched the tattered remains of leaves in the trees, the street skimming by like memory. We spent the rest of the bus ride just like that, not looking at one another at all. I've never felt so close to anyone.

It has been a while

2017-08-22T22:47:00.001-04:00

Tonight I am certain that I don't have a writing bone in my body. I think instead of a crow, dark feathers ruffled by the wind, digging round with its velvet beak in search of flies, as I am in search of words, digging and digging.

I haven't written anything in weeks. I keep imagining that something will happen, like ice thawing, on a warm spring day, and words and ideas will come spilling out of me in a torrent.

But tonight I am tired again, and I can't imagine successfully stringing together words on a page, thoughts on the quicksilver surface of the mind, which is more like a small puddle, reflecting branches and sky, than an instrument of logic and grace.

I'm not that different than you, I think, sometimes in the dark. My daughter asks why there is a flashing light in my room. "Tell me a story," she says, "about a time when you were hurt or sick. Or someone else was hurt or sick."

I remember a different story I told her years ago, when she was three and sleep was lapping at the darkness in the bedroom. In that story, I was, as I often seem to be, tired to the bone, and she wanted to hear a story, so I started talking in that dream like way that happens just before sleep. I said that I was an octopus and that she was a fish. I told her that the fish and the octopus were swimming down and down, into the dark, dark sea. I told her about the kelp and ship wrecks, the rays of light scattering on the ocean.

And in that state, I kept saying that the fish and the octopus were going further and further into the dark. Finally, the fish gets tired, I told her, though I don't remember now if her eyes were closed. And I said, well I said something that you only say on the verge of dreams, when sleep rocks you in its gentle wake. I'll tell you that story another time though, when this scattershot mind has the grace to turn it from a story about sadness into art.

Saturday nights

2017-07-15T21:22:00.001-04:00

This was the year
that I grew tired
of arguing with
children after
bedtime.

When I feel
somehow
the weight
of the day
pressing on
me like darkness
through the window.

Even if the day
has been fine,
slight.
Even if we've spent
the afternoon
gathering service berries
purple-stained fingers.

Still, in the evening
it's all I can do
after nine to not
scream as loud as
I have ever have
that I want
everyone to be asleep.

Even the dogs,
who would otherwise
be sending up a call
about Dalmatians
across London.

But I don't
want to read
that story, nor any
story, but the one
I'm telling
right now,
in the dark
on the computer
while the children
shout and play
games well past
nine.

When I was a child, I was scared of the dark

2017-05-18T21:41:00.000-04:00

In my dream, we were galloping across the countryside, small hills, clefts of valley covered in lacy flowers. We were chasing a train and steam was rising from the train and steam from the flanks of the horses. It was a silly dream because in my actual life I'm afraid of horses. In fact, I'm afraid of nearly everything. As a child, I used to sleep with the lights on, terrified that I'd be taken by a monster in my sleep. I'd crawl into my brother's bedroom and sleep at the foot of his bed.

My mind was so active then, shadows were always nefarious, and the slight groans of a house settling were always, at least to my mind, a hand jiggling at the doorknob, someone walking along the yard checking the windows. That no one ever broke in, did nothing to dissuade my panic that someone would. I slept with pillows over my head. I lay completely still for hours, trying to hide the fact of my breathing, certain that someone was standing in the doorway of my room, checking to see if there were inhabitants. I lived my evenings and bed times in an intense. state of fear.

In early February, the United States carried out a raid in Yemen, which resulted in the death of an American solider and nine children under the age of 13, seven of whom were under age eight. I wonder, as you might now, what sorts of shadows those children saw, what they imagined hid in the dark recesses of their room, what sifnificance there was in the way the curtains bent in the window. But maybe that's exactly what it's like to be a child in Yemen, dreaming that the man in the doorway will not be a monster, but someone with a rifle. I wonder if they sleep at all, or if they lie, as I did, very still, for hour upon hour of the night, waiting for the man in the bedroom door to pass.

Back in the states: a dream

2016-12-02T13:24:00.001-05:00

Back in the states he sat in his room and watched the wind move palm trees outside his window. The wind was blowing from the Southeast, and it was warm, a fire danger. The smallest spark would send a fire raging up into the hills, threatening mansions and drawing engines from all over.

He fell asleep to the sound of the wind.

In the dream he was lying in the grass. A woman was lying next to him, her body pressing down reeds of grass, blond hair pillowed on the ground. Even though he did not know the woman in his dream; he saw in the woman in his dream something like the girl he'd been with during his first six months in Rome.

The two of them had met in a modern art class during a section on sculpture. The two of them had worked painstakingly on a tacky clay models, shaped over the course of a four hour class session to look like the naked model, an old man with age marks on his ribs and back, who stood in the front of the class, shivering and nude.

When they stepped back from their designs the teacher asked them to look at their neighbor's and comment. The two of them stepped away, eyes blurred, and stared at the sculptures. They were, even by a rough estimate, not particularly good. But how did one say this to a stranger?
As they stood there, in the cold and silent room, he started to offer a critique, complimenting the shape of the clay's right arm, some tenor of movement that he wanted to say that she'd captured.

Her lower lip started to quiver and at first he was certain that she was going to cry. She burst into a quiet laughter instead; her eyebrows lowering as she tried to contain fits of laughter. Her whole body shook with the effort. At first, he was offended and almost walked away, but then he looked again at his sculpture with new eyes. The head was like a watermelon that had been sliced open, the arms were uneven, and the legs seemed to have more in common with the legs of a very large herbivore than a human being. He started to smile and then found himself trying to control his laughter as well. The girl put a hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle, failing, and the two of them walked quickly from the room and out onto the street.

On the street a church bell was tolling and a flock of pigeons were wandering around after a boy peddling his bicycle down the alley, dropping bits of bread over his shoulder as he went.
"What did it look like?" the girl asked, pausing to catch her breath.
"Something subhuman," he said. "Like a cross between a panda bear and a cougar, in which the mating didn't go well. Like it was something they tried but called off mid-way. Like Victor Frankenstein would walk by and be appalled at what he saw."

She smiled at him, which he didn't notice because he was looking down at the cobbles, too shy to raise them. The light from the sun was making a dazzling display on the ground where water trickled down from the eaves and ran between the cobbles and towards sewers 2,000 years old.

On writing mostly

2016-11-18T22:30:00.000-05:00

As far as I can tell, the world is not crying out for my opinion on things, let alone the election. Nor should my voice be a particularly loud one as I'm a white male, which is as protected of a class as you get in our current instantiation of Democracy. I should say that if you voted for Trump, willingly ignoring his racist and sexist rhetoric, then I'd be hard-pressed to see eye to eye with you. This was not a normal election. Trump just settled a suit for 25 million dollars for bilking people out of funds with a faux for-profit University, and yet we expended a great deal of energy trying to combat the image of crooked Hillary. No. Donald Trump is what it looks like when someone is crooked, and we elected him President. I digress.

I write for fun. Or rather, I write for fun because I haven't found anyone who wants to pay me for it on a regular or semi-regular basis. As such, and noting my protected class, it's maybe deeply selfish to even talk about how this election has effected my perception of the written word. I'm not taking the usual tack that I've seen post-election: we're all in an echo chamber, the media lies, we aren't listening to one another, people aren't racist except when they are. Rather, it has deeply effected my understanding of why I write.

I had an interview recently with the Sierra Nevada Review, be sure to look for that on the internet the moment it arrives (crickets), and I talked about why I write. It's this old idea I had that fiction could build empathy by allowing people to briefly jump the fourth wall and get access to someone else's thoughts. Fiction has been doing Being John Malkovich stuff for centuries now. And yet, the results of this election make me question that premise and perhaps the ability of anyone to have access to any mind but our own. Even our fictional characters might surprise us by voting Trump.

The election has briefly shattered my desire to write and create, to give small portals into these fictional characters because I have people right in front of me, every day, who I managed to know nothing about. It seems implausible that fiction could actively go about bridging that unbridgeable gap between the you and the I. So why try?

There are many arguments for the continued role of writers in a post-Trump world. However, for the time being, I'm not writing about sadness and loneliness or the way the light slants across a snowy field. I can't do that right now. I don't know anyone. Not even myself.

Here is an owl:

Ninja stars and Halloween

2016-10-29T22:28:00.000-04:00

When I was a child, I used to dress up as a ninja every year for Halloween. We didn't have enough money for an actual costume, so I just put a blanket over my face. I wanted to be like Snake Eyes, the silent ninja from G.I. Joe. I wanted to throw ninja stars around the corner of our hallway. All day I'd practice with small paper stars, taped heavily that never found their way around the corner like I wanted. Life is full of little disappointments.

One year, in fourth grade, I went with my best friend's mom to pick out a real costume. Somehow, we settled on a raccoon. I was, by fourth grade, aware that I was too old to be wearing a raccoon costume without looking like a fool. This identity, knowledge of self in relation to other selves, wasn't with me much until that year. Suddenly, I knew, acutely, that I looked foolish wearing a costume and holding out my bag and saying trick or treat to adults, who knew that I was too old to be dressed up in a hot costume.

I cut trick or treating short that night and went home with a pillow case only half full of candy, not accounting for all the crummy hard candy that some people gave out at Halloween, Jolly Ranchers and thick bazooka Joe gumballs, little plastic wrappers of disappointment. You wish, some years, maybe not often, but when you write, or in reverie that you could go back in time. and I don't mean to physically shrink myself, But rather, you wish that you could go back to a little boy standing at the edge of a hallways with a piece of folded paper in his hands, desperately, but hopefully, waiting for it to turn round the corner and make a beeline for the back door. And then you'd know, at least for that day, that you'd done something new.

World Civilization Texts

2016-10-28T22:09:00.001-04:00

Early in the fifth century, a king came to power who suggested that the Bible had been misread, and that rather than reviling snakes, they all should be collected and revered. This king ruled but a short time in Egypt before he was killed by a snake's bite on the heel of his left foot.

In roughly 400 B.C. a poet came to power and built a city based on aesthetics and beauty. Some say he was the basis or reason that poets were left out of Plato's perfect Polis. The city was made entirely of porphyry, and every staircase was adorned with Pegasus or Griffins and door handles were elaborate mouths of lions. Everyone in the city spent their time making the city more beautiful, each person, forgetting their duty to one another, as everyone sought to make even the slightest object, a shelf, a hand towel, the most beautiful iteration that the world had ever seen. As you might imagine, such a city could never last, and the city was sacked by marauding Vikings and the ruler burned at the stake.

Long before human beings had arisen from the seas, struggled onto land, climbed into and out of the trees, a prophet arose in the sea. He was a mollusk and was prone to long periods of silence, which his followers often mistook for devotion. This prophet foretold of a day when the mollusks would cease hanging onto the walls of rocks, and they would walk on two feet and play baseball and sometimes smoke a cigarette behind the 7-11 on their sixteenth birthday. He too was eventually burned at the stake, but years later, and in a city far away from here.

Hello from across the room

2016-10-26T21:28:00.001-04:00

I made you a paper airplane when we were in second grade. I wrote, "I love you," in the middle of the white page, using a yellow crayon. Back then the only shade of yellow we had was just that, yellow. I made the airplane using all the skill I could muster, but I was never any good with my hands or fine motor skills, so I botched the job. It was the first, or so it seems, though it must already have been the thousandth, of jobs I'd botch in my lifetime. But that's a story for another day.

I'd been in love with you for at least a week, maybe even two. It's hard to remember because time goes like the wings of a hummingbird when you're in love. Once, I'd seen you on the playground playing four square and your face was flushed with exertion. It was a Tuesday, and perhaps that's the day that I fell in love. Though it could have been a Wednesday. I lose track of these sorts of things.

I made the airplane that afternoon during recess, and I looked at you from across the room. You were looking at your pencil, forming perfect o's with the kind of care that characterized all of your work. Who couldn't love such a diligent worker? The plane's wings were uneven, but I thought or knew that it would soar across the room, past the blackboard and over the wooden desks to land perfectly on your desk.

I couldn't imagine, truth be told, a life where the plane didn't soar across that space and unite the two of us in love. I waited until the teacher had turned back towards the board. She was showing us the letter q, making certain that we formed the tail with a slight mark out to the right. All of her attention was focused, laser-like on the board. I remember her dark helmet of hair, rigidly cut off at the shoulders. And then I threw it.

The plane flew across the room like a thousand ships sailing across the seas. And then the shoddy job I'd done on the wings came into play and the plane spiraled, falling like a mallard from Duck Hunt towards the ground, where it alighted right on the desk of another girl, who's name I barely knew. She hesitated for a moment, looking shyly at me, her cheeks turning scarlet and then she opened the letter.

Sometimes things don't work out quite as you planned. And sometimes they do. She and I have been together now these forty years, all because of those faulty wings, that doomed flight.

Just another Friday morning in the middle of nowhere land

2016-09-02T09:49:00.001-04:00

I wish I could have bottled, like perfume, that summer we spent on the shore. Most evenings, we’d watch the sky fade to blue from a bench in the local park, laughing at nearly everything we said. You used to do a voice that sounded a bit like Donald Duck, and in that voice, you’d narrate the day’s events, becoming increasingly enraged, as Donald is prone to do, about the slightest of insults, the copy machine jamming or collating in an unsatisfactory manner. I used to stare at the shape of your lips, wondering how long it would be until I could lean over and quiet your idle chit chat with a kiss.

I read somewhere recently about black holes, an idea that perhaps we could use them to bore through time, the world’s most interesting drill. If I could bore through time and have the years fly past me like trees out the window of a train, I’d go straight back to that summer on the shore. Just when you were telling me about your boss’s boss, and her insane little Corgi, I’d lean over to kiss you, and then I’d wrap my arm around your shoulders and wait for evening to settle, for the cicadas to start humming and all the birds to come down from out of the sky, to rest their light bones on the shells of trees and rocks. Wouldn’t you?

Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker

2016-05-10T20:57:00.001-04:00

Game of Thrones is a television show. This may come as a surprise to some of you who thought it was a series of books. I'd call it an American television show, but its scope is global. Anyhow, the thing about television that's different than a book is that it relies on visuals to move the plot along. Books use words. Stick with me here just like Bran is sticking with that guy who grew into a tree. A subtle pun rests in the prior sentence because trees have sticks. Anyhow, there was a great deal of exposition this episode, a few false starts, and then the end of a watch. With GOT, I often expect a great deal to happen. Though I sometimes then criticize the show for rushing through scenes and making a mess of it. Hello Dorne plot line. This episode was satisfying, in part because it was content with things not happening. The most exciting scene, a legendary sword battle, took place twenty to thirty years prior.

We grant books their expositional scenes, though apparently Martin's are notorious for describing the exact flavor of the mead and pig's snout. In television, we often expect more. Mad Men, televisions best show for many years, was allowed to rise slowly towards a climax like an expert lover. Because GOT is so grand, it's hard not to want everything to happen all at once, and it's a relief when it doesn't. In part because the slow build of scenes and rivalries is what made the plot leading up to the Red Wedding just so good. What's Tywin up to with all those birds. Oh, I see, plotting an awful murder. Except I didn't see, which is why it's fun to occasionally linger, watching Tyrion try and coax something interesting out of Missandei and Grey Worm was delightful. My only real doubt in this regard is wondering if time lost in those lingering scenes. It wouldn’t be a problem in season one, but the viewer can start to feel the clock ticking on these final 19 episodes that need to bring us from fifty different narrative threads into one giant war with ice zombies who look like someone’s long haired grandpa. If that long haired grandpa was also a zombie who stole babies. I only had one grandpa like that. The other one was pretty normal.

The show is bookended by scenes at the wall. The rearrival of the show’s hero, Jon Snow, is spiked with some nice dialogic turns. Rather than throwing Jon back into the world raging at Sir Alliser the bastard, we get a rather nice scene of Jon, genuinely perplexed at his plight. “I shouldn’t be here,” he says, but even better, “I did what I thought was the right thing, and I got killed for it.” The Stark children have been learning that lesson for quite some time, and it’s nice that this time they could just bring the murdered child back to life. Even if he isn’t a full Stark, but part Targaryan as well. I found the scenes of him hugging the red-haired Wildling and his friend very touching, just as I found the scene at the end where he parted ways with Olly and Sir Alliser, touching. He seems genuinely troubled with what has transpired, and it’s believable that he leaves the wall, his watch, by virtue of his death, ended. However, I’m not entirely sure what Jon Snow who isn’t only doing the right thing will look like. It’s not like he doesn’t know that the ice zombies are out there taunting him, so he better walk quickly, and in a southern direction if he wants to get anywhere worth being.

Remember Sam and Gilly? What about Gilly’s baby? Bran Stark has grown three feet in the same amount of time that child has gone from being 8 months old to nine months old. That said, their relationship is a sweet counterpoint to the usual muck and mayhem of a thrones episode, though I can’t even remember the last time we had a good scene of sexposition. However, like Jon, Sam needs to get off that boat, wipe the vomit from his hair and get to reading books because the white walkers aren’t moving as slowly as that baby’s journey through life.

Since Lost ended, television has always had one rule, flashbacks are great. The second is like unto it: having a sword fight with a dude spinning two swords at once makes it way cooler. Young Ned proves to be a bit light in the swordsmanship and benefits from a stab in the back to best the best sword in the land, which leads him, though he looks about 17, up into the tower to rescue Jon before his sister dies. Or whatever you think is up there…but it’s that.

Back in the weirdwood tree, Bran carps about being a cripple, while Hodor gently rubs his lower back and asks if they can slow Bran’s growth spurt down like Craster’s baby. Alas, says the man who lives in the tree, we’re just going to hang out and look at the past. Now roll me another one Bran and let me tell you about the time I rode a dragon.

Unsatisfied, with the incredibly fast pace of the Daenyrs plot line in Mereen, (the queen raises taxes by one denari, the populous is restless…is roughly what a video game version would like. Her plot is basically leveling to the nth degree), they move her back into the Doth Rahki home..or do they? If she gets condemned to death it’s clear that Drogon is going to come down and eat the Doth Rahki like goats.

Back in Mereen, Varus finally makes some headway into solving the man in the golden masks. Those masks look heavy and make them rather easy to identify. I think they should have gone with arm bands or something. Varus, ever the kind heart, manages to buy off the prostitute and put her on a ship, though the news he delivers is virtually useless—all the other rich people are working against us. This is peppered between Tyrion trying to get Grey Worm or Missendei to say anything interesting, but I feel like that particular show could go on for 8 more seasons without ever having that happen. Theirs is a love story that can never be told, and so I hope it isn’t.

Qyburn arrives back on the scene, creepy as ever, handing out odd plum candy to children. Qyburn, everyone thinks you’re creepy. Can’t you give them some chocolate or something. Does it have to be candied plums? Nevertheless, his spy network is now out and about seeking to find anyone who doesn’t like Cersei so the purple mountain can bash their head into a wall.

As I noted at the start, some things don’t happen. Cersei and Jaime march into the small council to declare war on Dorne and the council promptly walks out. Though it was a delight to see the lady Olenna, a real treasure of the show back to throw barbs at everyone in sight.

Tommen, full of as much rage as his kitten from the books, marches into the High Sparrow’s presence and appears to have a sermon delivered to him. It was your standard three point sermon, probably learned in seminary, but Tommen seems convinced and promptly forgets why he was there and starts batting at a yarn ball.

Arya continues her “training.” And by training I mean beatings and torture. As I noted before, I’m not quite certain what she’s gaining by eliminating her identity, since it’s her identity that lead her to become an assassin in the first place. Can she not just call it quits now, like when someone is ABD and decides to become a surf instructor instead of a history professor? Can she walk now? I think she should. I think she won’t.

And finally, we get Ramsay another pair of people to torture. Like most viewers, I’m confused by the nuanced presentation of Ramsay that the show has engaged in so far. Is he horrible? The worst? Or the horrible worst? I can’t wait to see what sort of unholy things he has to unleash on Rikkon and Osha to show the viewer that he’s quite evil, a fact which escapes us otherwise. I can only hope that he’ll be eating a sausage in a few episodes while Rikkon looks on in horror. Okay. I just hope Osha stabs him in the scrotum for five minutes straight. I guess we'll see.

Game of Thrones Episode 2

2016-05-03T20:06:00.000-04:00

The second episode of Game of Thrones was back and better than ever. Well, not better than ever, but good. Quite frankly, I always feel a twinge of excitement when I see the episode is going to be a long one. My hope is that Benioff and Weiss avail themselves of HBO’s varying run times as they start to wind this behemoth down to a close. And, besides the reminder of the violence and rampant nudity, even if it’s of elderly folks, GOT is nothing if not a behemoth. The show’s cast stretches far beyond the wall that stops most television shows short, which means that we often say thing like, “What the hell happened to Rikkon?” He was presumably eaten by shaggy dog. And remember the Karstak family? Me neither. Thanks for the “heads up” on that one GOT trailer.

The sprawling nature of the narrative that has paralyzed Martin into gibbering inaction is the very thing that the showrunners are not staring straight in the face like Tyrion into the eye of a dragon. And if this episode is any indication, they might actually pull it off. I was relieved to see the mild disclaimers at the beginning of the episode, as I thought the first episode lingered a moment too long here and there on scenes of violence, people bleeding out on the floor. This was a tidy episode thanks to uncomplicated kill shots like that delivered by the Mountain onto the man of prodigious penis. That lack of violence, of nudity for nudity’s sake, helped this episode of GOT feel propulsive. And it felt propulsive in exactly the way that Martin’s books seem to have failed at. This was the first episode where you started to see that things were going to start getting tidied up for the final battle, which for years I’ve said is going to culminate with Tyrion, Jon and Dani riding dragons over a hoard of white walkers. The feeling suddenly dawned on me that this show was one day going to end.

If the first episode started the hash tag #alloldnakedbodies, (for the record, huge fan of the old naked body. Our culture is youth obsessed, though that might be true for many cultures throughout time. However, we basically shun older people and pretend like it isn’t happening. My hash tag is designed around the idea that every GOT episode should feature an old naked body. It’s time for the show to make up for all the gratuitous nudity and violence with a healthy dose of old naked bodies.) then this episode was really about the triumph of the showrunners in starting to tame Martin’s material.

The big reveal at the end, Jon's alive, was pretty much the worst kept secret this side of where Arya's wolf ran off to. I'm just kidding, where is that thing? Is it on a boat with Gendry? I'd watch that buddy comedy. However, the slow burn of Jon coming back to life after another failure by the red woman was satisfying drama. What does it mean? Beyond the fact that we get to see Kit Harrington's beautiful hair flowing in the CGI of wind? Well, it means the show has its true hero back. Of course, we don't know the form that heroism will take, if he'll be somehow reduced after having spent a couple of days with Ned and Richard Karstak and The Hound....(but he's alive, I hope). In drama, all you have is that moment, and they sold it for all it was worth, giving us the doubt of the once proud Red Woman and Jon coming back to life with just his wolf for company. One could easily make the argument that Jon coming to life is setting the final seasons of Thrones up for the kind of fantasy ending that Martin loathes. And yet, I think we know that at least 2 of these three dragon riders are going down in flames or ice in the final battle, so I'm willing to let people be brought back, if only so Martin or the showrunners can kill them off again.

If you've been staying up late at night asking yourself, "What's happened to Bran?, like I have then you should probably get a hobby or something. The show was off the air for ten months. And yet, besides now being roughly as tall as Hodor, who apparently could talk as a boy, Bran, has learned how to walk through time. And isn't it nice that he said, "They look so happy," when watching the young Stark boys having a nice sword fight with Lianna parading around and Walder being dragged around by the ear. Yes, it was idyllic, but it was a relief to watch for the viewer and for Bran. This duality provided a nice contrast to the usual parade of death and violence. Outside the weird wood tree we're reminded that Bran can't walk, a sad reminder for Hodor/Walder as well, who's back has been slowly failing him for the last month as he lies slumped against the tree chanting his fake name.

We take a quick jump to the North where, gasp, the Wildlings arrive just in time. Despite some of the predictable elements, we are left with interesting strings hanging, like Olly and Alliser being spared death's embrace. Though in the latter case I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps they give fourth chances up at the wall, or perhaps they are beheading him with Jon's fancy sword. And I am always happy to see Tormund with his wild beard, glaring at everyone around him and waiting to hew someone with an axe. He's a keeper.

Back in King's Landing, once the beating heart of the show, we get the man of prodigious penis telling stories about, wait for it, his penis. This ends, rather predictably with his head being driven into a wall by The Mountain, who looks rather blue about the whole affair. If the run up to the arrival of the High Sparrow and his faith militant was a bit clumsy, the drama surrounding the standoff has been heightened as time has gone by. The High Sparrow, played excellently by Jonathan Pryce, has a wonderful conversation with Jaime, which starts with humility and ends with a threat, which is pretty much standard fair for the High Sparrow at this point. Thus, the viewer avoids two potential boss battles as we don't get to see The Mountain against the King's guard nor Jaime against shirless mace wearing bandits, who really wouldn't be out of place in the movie Weird Science or an episode of Arrested Development as hot cops if they just smiled more. Functionally, this standoff brings Cersei and Tommen back together. And, as usual, Lena Headey plays their scene of being reunited with aplomb. It's hard not to see that she doesn't want to look at Tommen, in part because she now fears she will lose him as well, but eventually she gives in, and now the Lannisters are back together and ready to fight wars on multiple fronts. If only we could get Twyin back, we'd be in heaven.

The scene shift to Tyrion engaging in management is never a false one. Peter Dinklage is perhaps the strongest actor left on the show, and his excitement, fear and intelligence are all on display in the council meeting and as he stares into the face of a dragon. It's hard to convey as much as he does while acting with CGI, and Dinklage nails it and allows us to indulge in the fantasy of him riding on a dragon reigning fire down. Though he probably would be better suited to managing the water supply of the troops.

Arya is once again beaten mercilessly while blind. And though it serves some kind of purpose for the narrative, losing her name and her identify can only happen partially. For even though the point of the faceless men is that they belong to no one, Arya whole heartedly belongs to someone. Her whole quest and identity is wrapped up in the atrocities she's witnessed. Thus, losing herself in order to become an assassin who can't choose their target would be a rather painful plot twist.

Though many objected, rightly so, to Ramsey's scenes of once again reminding us why he's horrible, at least they were carried out intelligently. There is a long moment when it's unclear whether Roose had stabbed Ramsey or the other way around, in which the viewer is wondering if they'd just lost their greatest villian without a proper send off. Is it believable that Roose wouldn't have killed Ramsey off before? Is it believable that he would allow him within 100 yards of him? Probably not, which makes it see like a contrivance of the plot, but it was at least done with some interest. And then the painful moments when we know he's going to kill a baby arrive with that same false tension, is he going to throw the baby on the stones or in the fire? Why am I watching a show that has a dude who throws babies? However, it ends in rather tame fashion, with the child and woman being ripped apart by dogs. This is the only show on television where such a sentence could be seen as merciful.

Up north, Theon tells Lady Sansa that he's headed home. His journey towards redemption happened rather quickly in this episode, and I'd have been delighted to have watched far fewer scenes of sausage being eaten while he was tortured if it would have allowed more screen time for Theon later in the show. However what's done is done and what's been cut off cannot be reattached. This is all a lead in to remind us that the Iron Islands exist, last seen in roughly season 3. Luckily, if you are writing about the show often enough these characters haven't slipped too far from memory. Asha, who gave up when the hounds were released after sailing a thousand miles to save her brother, is fighting with her father who bears an eerie resemblance to the Frey patriarch about the continued presence of Iron Islanders on land, where they are routinely being slaughtered. She loses the battle because he is king and then walks away in a huff only to find his, probably insane, brother to play an old game with. Everyone remembers the game where you shake on opposite sides of a bridge to see who can hold on while it's swaying. Sadly, the older brother loses the game and plunges to his death. (My first order of business if I'm yara or king crazypants is to get some regular old walkways installed between the towers. I mean, are they so poor that they can only afford rope bridges last seen in Romancing the Stone? Maybe the islanders need to be taxed more heavily. Hopefully future episodes deal explicitly with the economics of the Iron Islands. Fingers crossed.

I've already written about the grand finale, sadly not oldnakedbodies. And here you can see that I've dipped into roughly 2,00i words of fantasy fan boy. And yet, the episode earned it. It wound up starting to stitch together threads that have been unraveling for three years and give us a road map to where the show could possibly go. Bravo. Now. Let's go take up a job as a stone mason in the iron islands and put some of that rock to use.

Game of Thrones: Home

2016-05-03T07:04:00.000-04:00

The most exciting show on television has returned to bring us what we’ve all been waiting for: either the return of Jon Snow or horrible scenes of violence. Okay. Okay. I kid. It brings us that amazing opening with triumphant music that makes you want to lay waste to villages and ride some dragons into your neighbor’s house for plunder. I love that music.

And so we begin where last we left, Jon’s cold body lying in the snow. Wait! Why did they just leave it there? Does anyone know what treason looks like anymore. Obviously, not, as Sir Davos, one of my favorite GOT characters, probably because he advocates for not sacrificing children, stumbles on the body and takes him inside to warm him up. Who made marshamallows? Was sadly not heard that day.

Then we get a scene cut to Sir Allisir. Who has more chances than a cat. He manages to shout down the mutiny by appealing to the night watch’s sensibility. A questionable move and turn in the room. Everyone goes a murdering this episode though. He blends right in.

And now we get back to Ramsay. Who hasn’t missed Ramsay? The most nuanced villain this side of….well….Sauron? He enjoys killing puppies and then reanimating them to kill them again by feeding them to his dogs.

And then finally, we get to something happy, which is Lady Sansa sprinting through the woods with Theon. Or, the woman who was raped by Ramsay running with the man he made into a eunuch. In case you weren’t sure, he’s bad. Theon, in what I can only describe as questionable decision making, decides to hole up for the night at around 2:30. This doesn’t go so well, nor does his plan to ward off the dogs by standing there confused. He’s not much of a planner. As such, it takes the arrival of Brienne, riding roughshod over shoulders with Podrick to save Sansa. And then we get a true GOT oddity, a touching moment, Lady Sansa accepting Brienne’s request to watch over her with the help of Theon. Sansa has grown so much since season one when she was falling hard for the prancing prince Joffrey.

Theon then plans to go home. Nothing says going back home like a father who left you for dead and a sister who ran away when dogs chased after her. This can only end well.

We return to the incomparable Lena Headey waiting excitedly for her daughter to arrive home. The way her face changes as the whole scene dawns on her is damned fantastic. Strangely, she harkens back to the witch at the beginning of the last season who told her that all three of her children would die. For a moment, she’s broken, and then Jaime reminds her of that old immortal quote, “Fuck everyone who’s not us.” This Shakesperean sonnet brings the queen back to life and presumably, to war. We also get a brief moment of sand snake trash talk before they stab the prince in the back of the brain. This plot line seems to have sprung from another world, a clumsy one, a hasty one, one that I would find on channel 5 after a long day at school. Xena, warrior princess. Thus, the death of Prince Doran is promising only insofar as it moves us back out of Dorne, which once looked so promising. Or at least beautiful. It has always seemed as though only the prince and three other people live there. Now he’s gone.

Tyrion and Varus stroll around the city of Mereen, blending in with the natives. And by blending in with the natives I mean offering to eat their children and being the only dwarf who walks the streets. But still, no one notices…or do they because suddenly someone is roasting s’mores over in the ship yard and the whole fleet is gone and someone forgot graham crackers.

We briefly check in, (classic first episode check ins) with the two men who are riding for Dany’s heart. The problem is that one of them has a heart of stone, or body or whatever. Then we cut to the Khalasa comedy hour, where Dany is told that she’ll be raped. Welcome back to GOT, except, wait, she had it written in her contract that she’s not doing nudity anymore, so off to the first wive’s club she goes.

The episode moves into the trials and travails of Arya Stark. A rather tired plot line that has bogged down one of Thrones most lovable characters for far too long, but alas, her journey isn’t over yet, she has to be beaten while blind, which is pretty much just standard issue for Thrones.

And then the close, #allthenakedoldbodies. A tired Melisandre removes her necklace to reveal what people have suspected all along, she’s a witch. I think this means they need to burn her or she if she floats or maybe burn her while she floats The specifics escape me. Seeing the amazing Carrie Van Houten turn into game of crones was actually a wonderful touch. I love that the camera lingered on the old body as if it was the young body, the sags of flesh and passage of time that will come for us all. Too many young naked bodies on this show, too much reinforcement of death at a young age. What’s really coming for us is what has come for the red woman, age, and with it, silence. GOT, to make up for all its nudity should strictly show old naked bodies from now on. I can only hope that the show runners are up to the challenge. #allthenakedoldbodies

First Dates....Kind of

2016-01-15T22:54:00.000-05:00

We unwrapped our sandwiches and sat at the bench, while I picked at my food, too nervous to really eat the food, which was problematic because a pair of hornets started menacing us, and we briefly swatted at them before eventually retreating and ceding the sandwiches to them. Year later, I’d have used the joke that I always do now, running away from the bee frantically and saying, “I’m sorry that I’m so scared. I’m actually allergic to bees,” which tends to make the other person excuse your prissiness and pushing them in the lower back towards said bees. And after a while, twenty minutes or so, I might let it slide that I’m not actually allergic to bees but that I really didn’t like getting stung by them because it hurts. I didn’t have it in me back then, and who knows what sort of unmanliness she perceived in my retreat from the sandwiches.

There are stark moments in one’s life that you remember forever. Of course, there are also other bits that are like detritus, stuck in the branches of trees, an old song lyric, an afternoon at the house of an old babysitter that sit side by side with those other, seemingly full memories. As we stood beneath the Live Oaks, the heat sucking the life from the day she asked me a terrible question. She said, “Is this like a date?”

My heart started racing as it did nearly every time I spoke with, or imagined speaking with someone of the opposite sex, except, this time, rather critically, I was actually in the presence of someone of the opposite sex, who I had developed feelings for over the course of the past three months, talked to, laughed with, etc. etc. I was going to ask her to prom even, but someone else swooped in. Talking to her, spending time on the bench, was ostensibly like pulling teeth, minus the novacaine and the pulled teeth. Okay, it was perhaps not the aptest of metaphors.

And in that interim of a moment that seemed like it could last forever, I could have said anything. The echo of all the words that any two people have said to one another hung in the air, but reader, I said yes. Sadly, this was not Jane Eyre. Stomach rumbling I walked back to the bench and sat on top of it. She closed the space between us and sat next to me.

She told me that in the time between the end of school and the start of summer she’d started hanging out with someone else. The guy was the star of the football team and went on to play at the local Juco, small and quick. He was also incredibly nice and smiled and laughed often. In comparison, I had to offer the fact that I’d beaten Shining Force at least 2x already that summer. What do you say to that? I didn’t protest. I didn’t say much of anything at all. I wished her luck in dating, and I took back the parts of myself that had been exposed, and I started putting them back together.

I don’t remember if I cried. To be clear, such a state would not have been unusual. I remember the shocked disbelief when she spoke of him, the almost lightless feeling your body gets when you’re in pain. If ever I was to believe in a soul, it would be in those moments, when the words are too much to bare, and you suddenly see yourself in two places, one, still trapped in that useless body, the other, pulling and tugging to get out, and yet we are mired anyway inside ourselves, standing in the foyer of your house, an ornate lamp overhead, tan tiles, a white wall, making small talk about the guy she’s now seeing.

11th grade dates

2016-01-03T21:45:00.003-05:00

We drove the rest of the way through avenues of oaks, my hand still wrestling nervously, the pockets of shade a respite from the warmth of those mid-summer days. I drove the car slowly and inexpertly, asking for her advice on where to park, conscious of her every movement, the positioning of her left hand on the seat, her denim shorts, and the bits of white skin, pricked red by heat. As I recall it now, she blushed often too, or perhaps her complexion was just red. Who really remembers anything accurately?

She was wearing a teal t-shirt that complimented, quite nicely the blue in her eyes. If not for nerves, I could have driven forever down those darkened roads, driving in a car next to a girl I found attractive, looking for somewhere to stop. Finally, she pointed to a small pull off, and I parked the car, yanking the wheel hard to the left because the car was one of the last to lack power steering, which meant you had to pull it hand over hand like a ship’s wheel in a storm in order to turn it properly, a Toyota Eagle with a trunk that leaked in the rain, leaving the faint smell of mold in the car throughout the winter and sometimes deepened by the heat in summer months. In short, the sort of car that girls love.

We moved out underneath the oaks, through the star thistle and towards the old bench situated near the grill. The grill was turned up, a few spare ashes that hadn’t yet been blown away by the wind. What does it feel like to get your heart broken? The term first appears in the 1580’s, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that it originated in the last 50 years or so in pop songs. Of course, that’s simply not true as the term has been extant for nearly half a millennia. To be clear, what happens next didn’t exactly break my heart. Technically someone suffering from broken heart syndrome experiences a severe physical pain that’s somewhat akin to heart attack, though the chances of you dying from it are nearly nil. And yet, suffering overwhelming emotional distress associated with heartbreak (we tend to associate the term with lost relationships, which is perhaps the most universal, but people who have lost loved ones, parents, siblings etc. should probably be thought of right along with the typical end of relationship feeling if we’re being smart about it) is a real thing. This is all nearly a non-sequitur as I didn’t have the sorts of strong feelings for this particular girl that would result in heartbreak. Though I was quite sad, but I suppose I’ve skipped over a critical portion of the story here and should probably get back to it.

The heat was oppressive that day, withering the brown and golden bits of thistle and grass, and she had a thin bead of sweat that ran perpendicular across the top of her lip. She had red cheeks and smiled very frequently, which was useful because I was very frequently nervous and needed encouragement to keep talking and smiling at me and laughing frequently, a deep sort of throaty thing, was precisely what I needed in order to keep talking to her. If she didn’t laugh frequently and smile frequently I’d have probably blushed my way into oblivion.

I don’t remember her ever seeming particularly nervous. I think the thing that made her the most nervous was probably how nervous I was to be sitting next to her on a bench outside of her father’s math class where I was trying to blunder my way into B- by constantly asking for help. I don’t remember precisely what we used to talk about, though perhaps it was something about the contours of the day, or the people that we knew in common, things said in class. I was a junior in high school so nothing could have been of particular interest.

I was neither charming nor particularly interesting back then, primarily because I felt and quite frankly was, entirely misunderstood. Everyone conceived of me as this extraordinarily shy guy who didn’t really want to engage, particularly with girls. This was patently untrue, though it didn’t help that I was often shy, particularly around girls and didn’t really talk to them. But it was always annoying that people couldn’t see into my heart of hearts, where I was always wanting to talk, especially to pretty girls, rather than paying attention only to my outer self, who was shy and scared to talk, especially to pretty girls. I’ve always found it suspect that no one could read my mind.

So we’d sit on the bench after school, I’d quit basketball that year after realizing that the season was year round, unrelenting, and not particularly rewarding, when, at best, Icame off the bench and ran around like a chicken with its head cut off for a few minutes before a coach would pull me out of the game and ask why I hadn’t boxed out or taken a short jumper, and I’d have no answer because I didn’t play enough organized basketball to ever know why I was doing anything. I was just running around trying not to f-ck up.

That Time I went on my first date #2

2015-12-19T22:49:00.006-05:00

We sat next to each other at school that year, her hands folded in her lap, blue eyes vaguely turning towards mine, her broad ruddy face smiling at our conversation.

“How was class?”

“Class was good. It was interesting. “

“Really?”

“No. Actually, now that I think of it, it wasn’t all that interesting.”

She wasn’t the prettiest girl, but she fascinated me. She fascinated me because she was the first girl who wasn’t currently dating one of my friend’s with whom I could have a conversation that lasted more than a sentence or two. I had, since puberty, been horrified of speaking to the opposite sex. Though like everyone else who had passed through puberty I found them endlessly riveting, eyes, hair, thighs, chest, all.

Around Bidwell Park the Sycamaores start to arrive, their white bark, peeling like a sun burn, mixed with maples, Scrub Oak, Canyon Live Oak, and California Black Oak. When I was a child, I used to skip small stones across the water at odd bits of detritus, mostly soda cans, their aluminum rims reflecting back the sunlight that skimmed through the leaves of mostly oak, their cantankerous roots, exposed by the park’s river. The water in Big Chico Creek, mostly shallow, breaking at slight collections of rocks, pooling outward in ripples that are caught by the light, washing towards shore like waves from a boat, and some of the sycamores and oaks leaning down by the water, with large vines that stretch across the water, such that at many points the Creek has an awning of green. The green underside of leaves, the flickers of pale blue water, and the perfectly shaped stones made for skipping across the water that looked like sunlight. One, two, three, four, five, six skips, and up out of the water, if I’d gotten the right arm angle, pinging into a plastic cup with a satisfying sound, or, if everything had gone perfectly, dislodging the cup and sending it down the creek, bobbing and weaving through the rocks like a boxer on ESPN Friday night fights, like Mike Tyson, who haunted my childhood with is malevolent wink.

We finished driving down Mangrove and turned into the park, my mind whirring, here in this familiar place where I’d been to camp, skipped stones while my brother played baseball, swam countless times as a child, my feet slipping on the mossy underside of One Mile, a small portion of the creek cordoned off for public swimming, who’s banks were full of young families or college students passing beers and throwing Frisbees. A hippie town. A college town.

I drove through the park, kicking up bits of dust, through the small paved roads through corridors of oaks, ringed by dried grass, golden, and brittle bits of star thistle, who’s burrs got stuck in your socks and had to be removed from inside the shoe, their spiny shapes affixed to the top of my ankle.

Some years we’d hear a story about a mountain lion that had killed a jogger in Upper Bidwell Park. A large swath of land, rimmed by the rising foothills on either side, a thin line of water dotted by swimming holes, Alligator Hole, Bear Hole, where occasionally someone would wander out and get sucked down a chute of water, or get their leg trapped and drown, and it’s all we’d read about for a week in the Chico Enterprise Record, such that Bear Hole, without my ever having been there, took on the specter of some kind of person gobbling bit of water, when really it was just a swimming hole.

As a child, when I used to be driving across town to my best friend Brandon’s house, we’d sometimes see charred ashes along the side of the road where someone had tossed a cigarette into the dried grass, which must have lit like tinder, scorching the underside of the Live Oaks, sometimes raging for a few acres before the fires were put out. I was scared of fire too. Of course, I was scared of nearly everything but mostly girls.

My car chugged won the lane and eventually we reached a small stand of trees, a brown bench or two, chained in place around a solid cement block, and, off to the right, a standard issue park grill, black with long metal grates . We got out of the car, I almost made a brief run to open her door, but I couldn’t quite make it, so I got out the sandwiches, two Cold-Cut Trios that I paid for hesitantly, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t sure that she wanted me to, reaching back in my wallet, an awkward catching of her eye.

“I got this,” I said, pulling two fives from my black leather wallet.

“Are you sure?” she said. “I have money.” And I almost took it, hesitating, waiting, for her. “It’s fine, Andy.”

I got it, I said, flushing scarlet, as I’d done since kindergarten when presented with any situation that involved me talking in class or worse yet, talking to a girl. In those cases, I could feel the pin pricks rising up my neck and the flush reaching my cheeks, so I always kept my answers short, often cutting my thoughts off, staring at the ground and waiting for someone else to pick up the conversation.

“I got it,” I said, sliding the five dollars across the table to the college aged girl working behind the counter, dark hair in a pony tail, and a name tag that said Amy, her shirt, slightly stained by some of the oils, but standard issue black with a white apron. I got change for the ten and slipped the coins into my pocket. My father carried a change purse, but he was from another generation. I considered change useless and let it slip from my pocket all the time, collecting dust on the floor or showing up in the bottom of my underwear drawer next to old G.I. Joe’s with whom I’d staged vast and involved wars with as a child, outfitting my whole room in blankets and pitting them against an array of cars, a few Transformers because they were too expensive for our single parent home and a few stray dinosaurs who were led by a large black T-Rex with a green belly.

I took the change and the bag of sandwiches and we headed back towards the car. I walked around to her side and opened the door, and she smiled at me.

That Time I went on my first date

2015-12-18T22:56:00.004-05:00

That summer I asked a girl out on a date for the first time. I was 17 and hadn’t gotten past laying down a sacrifice bunt, which is to say, once a girl had put her hand on my arm to explain something to me in a Health Science class. The state of affairs was embarrassing yes, but I’d spent the last few months talking to her on a large square bench after school. She called me Andy, as everyone called me Andy back then, though I hated the name and won’t let anyone call me it to this day.

We bought sandwiches from Subway. The conversation on the way over was stilted.

“What have you been doing this summer?”

“Oh, not much, a few odd jobs, here and there for people from church.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

The sun was hot that day, beating down on the asphalt as we drove across town on Mangrove, past Mountain Mike’s where I’d had countless soccer parties as a child and past Blockbuster and La Comida, the cheap Mexican restaurant where my family had occasionally gone out to dinner when we wanted to be at a sit down place that wasn’t McDonald’s.

She was working odd jobs as well, and I could tell, in the car that something between us was off, but I imagined that it was just that this was it felt like to be on a date. I assumed that you felt nervous, didn’t make eye contact, suffered through rather long swaths of silence, in large part because a date was making the implicit explicit. I’d wanted to be with a girl since around the end of seventh grade, which meant four years had passed without that desire ever being made explicit. And now we were driving through long arcs of sunlight that pounded the black pavement and reflected the heat back. On that day, you could smell the tar starting to melt, a strong scent. We drove past the Baskin Robbins and Safeway parking lot, a long line of non-descript bushes, lined the road side with some small bits of red gravel on the ground around them. Down and down we drove.

I had a horrible sense of direction and was trying to focus on the conversation, which wasn’t going well. I was very aware of the positioning of her knee, which was, though not close at all to mine, sort of close to my hand, which was resting occasionally on the automatic clutch, which was a nervous gesture I had, and I’d sort of tap the top of my fingers on the clutch before removing it, adjusting my body, leaning back into the seat, taking my left hand off the wheel and sliding the right hand underneath, driving with my bottom two fingers, though I wasn’t doing the latter on this particular drive. On this drive, I tapped the automatic clutch, nervously moved my hand back to the wheel and then down again to the clutch.

Ninth Grade

2015-12-01T22:23:00.000-05:00

In ninth grade I transitioned over to the high school, twelve hundred students and solid brick buildings, connected by covered walkways and small piazzas, a minor miracle of intelligent building design in CA, which tends to specialize in low squat buildings, space on space on space, without any sort of design towards public spaces.

In ninth grade my friends started playing football, waking up for practice at 5 AM to beat the sweltering August heat that pounded into the northern CA valley. I’d been playing football since I was a kid, throwing the football to friends and my brother, flooding our back yard with a hose and playing punt return tackle football for years. And yet, when it came time to actually play football I decided it wasn’t for me. Back then, I’d have said that it was because I didn’t want to and was an independent sort who didn’t want to wake up in the morning, but preferred waking late in the last weaning weeks of summer, playing video games all afternoon, searching for the Trident or Dragon Spear on long gridded maps of Dark Wizard as opposed to learning how to run a proper slant route.

The truth of the matter, if such things can be gotten at decades later, is that I was scared because I am scared of nearly everything, plane flights, roller coasters, speaking in class, any sort of wild animal, a task that I don’t immediately feel like I excel at. And it was precisely this fear, which dogs me today, that lead me to stay indoors, wrapped in a blanket, wearing a pair of shorts and trying to decide if my HP was enough to engage the War Lord perched atop the castle. And this fear of not being excellent and therefore avoiding things runs through me like a subterranean river carving out a hole in a bit of rock, such that I appear as though I am confident and sure of myself, when precisely the opposite is true—I doubt myself and wonder if I’m really good at anything beyond pleasing people, which isn’t a skill so much as it is an adaptation. And, to be honest, I also wasn’t too keen on getting hit. I had to work myself into a rage in order to run the football or tackle someone aggressively, and I didn’t want, or couldn’t imagine, walking around in a blind rage all the time just to be good at football.

On one of the first day of classes I was walking in to school with a friend, long hair, parted down the middle, tall and skinny with a pair of front teeth that were not entirely straight. I was wearing a red flannel and jeans, walking down one of the long shaded corridors, behind the gym and just beyond the cafeteria, which wasn’t really used, when I was stopped by a pair of girls, bounding along arm in arm as girls were wont to walk through the halls. “What’s your name?” the girl on the right asked. She had long dark brown hair, her body was rail thin, almost bird like, and she had a quick and easy smile. “Me,” I asked, incredulously. She had her arm looped through another girl’s who’s face and name I don’t remember at all, Jessica maybe? “Andrew,” I said, and then she smiled at me, turned, still arm in arm, and walked down the hallway.

“What was that?” my friend asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

My heart was racing, as I watched them walk quickly down the hallway. Those moments in life, they pass. You are only young enough for a short time to be surprised by a girl walking down the hall and asking for your name. All that day, I wondered what her name was, and whether I’d given her my correct name, whether I should have. Whether she was pretty. Whether I was handsome. What it meant that she had asked me what my name was.

“She likes you, dude,” my friend said, which didn’t seem like a totally unreasonable conclusion. Except that I didn’t remember ever seeing or meeting this girl before, which put our budding relationship on fairly unsteady grounds. What if I’d had a ridiculous named like Philip? I was only a couple of weeks away from getting braces and what would she think of me then?

I don’t remember most of my classes that year, but I do remember having Mrs. Smith. I think I remember her because she had unusually short hair and perhaps because she occasionally wore a beret. We read plays, so many plays. Why are English classes endlessly reading plays? Is it because there is an assumption that they are meant to be read in large groups? That the only way to read Romeo and Juliet, (and oh, god, there it is, another memory. The actress who played Juliet in the old version we watched, set in Italy, leaning over the window sill, her breasts, so full. My friends telling me before the class that I should watch closely that there was a moment when she is completely topless—the stuff of dreams—the tense moment, a fleeting glimpse of her breast, someone somehow knowing that the actress who played her was only 15 at the time of the filming and all the strangeness and wonder of being an adolescent boy, watching intently to see if Juliet was going to fall out of her dress).

But you see I have been side tracked by the memory of a woman, born in 1951, playing Juliet in a movie when she was fifteen. What strange times we live in, yes?

I Song of the twenty first century

2015-11-30T10:06:00.002-05:00

I woke up this morning feeling like Whitman. I-song and such, though the sky is low and spitting rain. Outside the kitchen window the maple has turned red, and the ivy that climbs the back fence. Everything is changing again, and I see, in the lines in my face, in the slight bits of grey at my temples that I too, am changing. Downstairs, the children are asking for breakfast, and it is somewhere between receiving the grocery list and the people to call about the gutter that I forget about Whitman, about reshaping the contours of the world, or even this day. I button a coat. I fix a sandwich. I wrangle and hector until they are sitting in the car.

In Trader Joe’s, I buy a box of dark chocolate covered oreos that I love. Perhaps this is the I song of the twenty first century, buying a box of cookies, taking it home, and sitting on the couch, eating one after another, in the dim light given off by the lights of the tree. Soon the box will be gone. Then the tree. Then the whole season itself. I can feel it in my bones that things are always changing.