The Space Between

World Building

2013-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

There are places that don't yet exist where stories happen. And because stories by name and trade are most definitely my business, mapping these worlds becomes something in between the vital and the sacred.

There are many ways to begin this kind of process. Most often, I start with a single short story, which shines a flashlight on one part of the geography, unfolds one aspect of culture. I have an anchor then. A thought to return to in strange lands.

But when I'm creating a world for others to explore, through a game? There has to be more detail from the start. People go poking their noses into all kinds of things. You can't just rope off an area with caution tape and tell your players "you can't go here yet, I'm not done making it." Well, you can. Many video games stop you from going past the borders of the map, simply as a constraint to game size and detail. It's worse when something internal to an area is closed off for no believably explainable reason. Blizzard did exactly that in World of Warcraft with Hyjal, which players couldn't access except to exploit terrain or character spawning glitches. It left the world feeling unsatisfying and incomplete. There was a sense of glee in trying to explore places you "weren't supposed to get to," like the Ironforge Airport, which you could only see flying over one of the set "flight paths" for paid air transport, simply because the players were told through the rules of travel in the world, "you're not supposed to be here." Since that time, with the revamping of the game, Blizzard has addressed many of World of Warcraft's unfinished bits, but I've not come back to enjoy them.

Blizzard has always provided me with an example of "what not to do" in world building. Not that everything they've done is wrong; there is much that they've done right in visually constructing localized landscapes that were at the same time alien, believable, and beautiful. However, the lore and history that fills their world, Azeroth, feels as slap-dash and nonsensical as their "zone" placement and transitions. Geography by variety, and history by committee. Azeroth's past reads like a history book from a century ago, listing great deeds by important people (and in this case imaginary gods and creatures), with very little space for the mundane. It strikes me that the mundane in a history is what allows a player the space for their own narrative.

So when I begin building a world, I start with a map and let the geography tell me something about the people, like this:

It's a bit of an archipelago. I like archipelagos because I like sea travel. So these people are going to be highly dependent on the sea. They don't have a lot of land, so that makes large scale farming an interesting proposition depending on the terrain of these islands, but it does not rule out livestock.

Then I fill in the names. Sometimes they all come out similar, like in this case, which suggests to me the people of this area are all of one culture and speak the same language. Either that, or the map maker doesn't care what the native populations call their lands, and the map maker's culture thrives on travel and exploration-- a future or present imperial power. Here, I think the islanders share related languages and cultural notions. I think that, despite their separate identities from each of their islands, they are more amenable to one another than to those from the mainland, who would then be viewed as outsiders. A bit on the clannish side. "Stay out of our fights and triumphs, you wouldn't understand."

From here, I have a framework. From here, it's beginning to remind me a bit of Greece. I may use ancient Greece, Japan, Scotland, and Indonesia as examples, as ways of thinking about how those who live amid so many islands have related to one another in the past. I still have to decide how close to this imagined world's equator this dappling of islands lays, and I still have to review climate, current, wind, and plate tectonic information before the shape of these lands are finalized. There is not going to be perfect precision here. Just enough to make sense. Just enough to not be a generic fantasy world map with little thought to why a desert is a desert.

It also has the feel of something only half-explored. The mainland there? It bleeds out into white space. It's unknown. There are no road blocks saying "you can't go here," but there is an emptiness to be discovered. If I started a game in this world right now, and my players wanted to go off in that direction, I would be creating the ground under their feet at this point, without a finish to the lands in that direction. Less than desirable. I have also to flesh out the remainder of this world, the placement of continents, the most likely points for cities.

But I have a start. One that makes sense. An imagined place that feels like a real place, waiting for people to fill it and tell their stories.

Which brings me to my real purpose: I want to run a game again. I want to fill this world. So I will be telling stories to help populate these maps. I will be choosing a game system to govern the expected realities of its denizens. The question is, do you want to come along for the ride?

A Congregation of Words in Silence

2013-05-09T00:05:00.000-04:00

There are a few moments just before dawn, when everything is damped down and quiet. I don't often see those moments, but a few times a year it creeps up on me, when I'm camped at a burn, after raucous partying, after play fights with friends and long talks into the night, after the thud and thunder of the music has died away. After the rush is over, and the bonfires have burned low, and everyone who is still awake is dragging themselves to sleep, not quite able to hop the fence into unconsciousness... that's the hour where a kind of quiet and solitude lives, that sits like a soap bubble in my hair, and I fear to move too much— I might pop it.

This is also where the words live. Not just any words, but the thick words, the juicy ones that lay next to one another in strips we take for verse. This is where they rest before dispersing into the day. This is where they gather.

And like I said, only a few times a year am I there to see them in this state, myself crisped around the edges from long wakeful hours. You don't catch the words here. You don't capture them. No. You sit with them, and maybe sing a few songs with them. And then, with care and respect, you invite them along with you. Usually, they'll agree, even if your singing voice is terrible.

So that's the hour you can find them, and only in the kind of quiet that follows the truly wild and uproarious. And you can't force them; no one forces a poem. It comes out wrong. But if you can learn to sit with the words in their own time, they'll often come to you in yours.

Faithfulness, Thy Name Is Feline

2013-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

The key was in the exact spot I'd asked Em to leave it, nowhere as obvious as under a mat (it would help if I had a mat), but still accessible if you knew where to look. Being the one who had chosen the spot, I knew where to look. I ended up knocking over my bicycle to retrieve it, even after setting down the suitcase and corduroy knapsack. Once that clatter had been sounded, though, she knew. Millie. She began me-yowling at the door before I could even unlock it.

It hadn't been a week. Just a few days. But a few days was too long for my fluff ball. When the door lurched awkwardly open, she stood there, blinking up at me with her light-scrinched green eyes. Unlike most days, she didn't bolt to escape, the little Houdini-cat. No. She stood fast as I stepped over her, and then followed me as I set my bags down in the kitchen, trailed after me as I went to fetch the remainder of my luggage outside the door.

When I finally sat on the floor, treats in hand, she was all over me. She went straight for my face, rubbing her cheek on mine. I may as well not have been holding treats. She pawed and petted and purred for a good five minutes before even noticing that it was her favorite chicken liver chunks I held out for her. She took one, one, and bolted it before turning back around to head butt and nuzzle, as if afraid I'd disappear again.

That night, I flopped down on my bed to be treated to the rarest of all things: Millie curled herself into a fuzzy oval, little spoon to my big, and fell fast asleep.

Loyalty? Yeah. Don't tell me about your dog. My cat has him beat.

At Ten Past the Hour

2013-04-25T01:28:00.000-04:00

Under the formulaic trees,
one like another, repeated through the parking lot,
there are only crows 
and a girl.
     They both stand awkwardly
     on legs or shoes 
     not meant for walking.
She doesn’t say it,
     but she is waiting for someone.
They don’t say it,
     but they are waiting for her to leave.
It will go on for hours like this,
     but only the birds will complain.

Classic Tabby

2013-04-18T17:18:00.000-04:00

There is a cat who lurks by the jungle that encloses the pool here. He is a silvery brown, and his stripes wind curled butterflies over his flanks. I see him sometimes when I go out to do the laundry. He will sit and regard me if I stand and regard him, but if either of us moves, the other vanishes.

I saw him today, my laundry basket in hand.

"Hello cat," I called to him, and he watched attentively as I separated my zippered clothing from un.

"Did you know that the House passed CISPA today?"

He stares at me.

"Or that a fertilizer plant near Waco, Texas exploded after a fire? Or that there was a bombing at the Boston Marathon?"

But he is a cat, and he blinks in that way that cats have, eyes scrinched, that we could anthropomorphize into annoyance. It's more than likely contented.

"People keep talking at me about these things as if there's something else I can do about this stuff," I tell him, and he rolls over onto his side in a puddle of sunlight. I go on, "I don't have any money. I called my congressmen. I live here, not there. I try to buy local organic food so they don't need those chemical fertilizers."

My wash is in and spinning. It is a task unrelated to the rest of the world. I don't think Barnard's Star gives a fuck if I have clean things to wear.

I sit down on one of the deck chairs not far from the cat, but not close either. I don't offer to pet him, but he purrs anyway.

And that's the thing. He purrs anyway.

Little Disasters

2013-04-11T04:04:00.000-04:00

It's strange how placid you can be when bad things happen. And here's the thing: bad things happen. It's isn't you. It's not that you can't catch a break. It's that none of us do.

So my bad thing is that my computer died (this is why I am in love with libraries). I have only one, a little laptop I could only afford because of work related discounts. At first I thought it was the hard drive. It powered on, but would not boot. Simple? No. Upon deeper testing, it was discovered that in my tiny computer's Byzantine depths of etched copper and stratified plastic a different sort of failure had occurred. The logic board was apparently bad.

Interesting. Except, fool that I am, there were two important files I had not backed up. One, a recent photo poem, and two... my novel. Tens of thousands of words gone like burnt paper. The image I can possibly recreate, taking a day's labor. The novel, well, it's an awful lot of words.

Everything else? Fine. Safely on cloud services and flash drives of candy colors. The computer itself is still under warranty.

But here's the thing: my secret identity is Backup Girl, ensuring data everywhere is safe from those inevitable crashes, yet what had I done? I'd failed to preserve two pieces of the best work I'd produced to date. What kind of superhero was I?

One who out of shame blurts out Plath-like over-dramatics, that's what. I don't even like cooking with gas ovens.

The reality is this: we all fuck up like this. All of us. We make these mistakes once every few years and rebound, because what's the alternative? It's not even that other folk are suffering worse losses than I (and I assure you, they are), but that we're all bound to have our crack at it (just you wait, I'll lose everything I have to a fire the day I get my Alzheimer's diagnosis). I can look at it as if life is persecuting me, or I can see myself in others and their similar problems.

And when it comes down to it, it's like I've been saying since the weekend: at least the poetry is safe. Prose I can rewrite. It may even get better for it. But poetry only comes out that way once.

I also get to live with the teasing from my initial spasms of Plath. Well deserved.

Burnt Blueberries

2013-04-04T00:57:00.000-04:00

I was on my way to visit Dylan, that lazy fuck who always has a beer in hand and Led Zeppelin blasting. Being a writer himself, we sit down, shoot the shit, and then words tend to come out. Occasionally, even good ones. But I had a couple to errands to run first. Some things that my little studio apartment needed. Mainly a surge protector, because hell if I want to risk my computer going up in flames considering the power dynamics in that place.

It took a minute or ten to find the surge protectors, and I had to fend off the flyer-bearers announcing sales. When I finally did, I was overwhelmed by the sheer glut of multi-plugged hydra-headed cable beasts to select from, everything from itty strips which looked like they might protect a flea from a stray arc of ESD and not much more, to behemoths priced at $200 guaranteed to keep your electrics from frying on the circuit even if the mother of all otherworldly lightning storms landed a direct hit on yer wires. I picked something reasonable, and proceeded out through the garden center.

I like garden centers. They are filled with plants. Not enough of the plants are edible, but that's okay, there's at least seed for such things, and after the glitz and flash of all the surge protectors, I needed something a little more peaceful.

That's when I saw them. Little gardener that I am, I have an idea of what will and will not grow in Florida. The them that I saw belonged to more northern climes: blueberries. Blueberries who need cold winter kisses and a slow blush to spring, who need a good summer and a fair light fall to produce fruit. Blueberries in Broward County, Florida.

I asked the cashier about them.

"Oh yeah, the last batch we had all died. I thought I'd overwatered them. But we even had coffee trees a few months ago."

Coffee. Which needs mountains. And less humidity.

Consumer glimmer, deck all your fruit trees and shrubs with your hundred styles of surge protector and let's hire Britney Spears to sing their praises!

I had the brief notion of buying them out of blueberries and shipping them north, where they actually stood a chance— a desperate rescue for the poor doomed bushes. But my wallet's not that fat and I can't risk doing jail time on behalf of some Vacciniums.

Early Dragon Slaying

2013-03-28T04:30:00.000-04:00

Twenty years ago, I got my first Nintendo game. For my 11th birthday I had begged for and pleaded to have and longed after Dragon Warrior (I had also pleaded for a Swiss army knife). All of the boys in my fifth grade class had been playing it. Because back then, two seemed like everybody. My best friend's older brothers were playing it. So, of course, I had to play it. It was entirely new to me. I loved fantasy. I didn't know that it had come out in the US way back in 1989. Because three years for a child is an eternity. And from 1992, '89 is waaaaaaaay back.

So it came as a surprise to me when I opened my birthday gift packaging and found a Nintendo cartridge labeled Dragon Warrior IV. Four. 4. There were four of them. After the vague initial disappointment of not getting exactly what I wanted (kids are brats), I settled in to play with the video game and my new pocket knife.

I did not stop playing. The first day I sat down with the game, eight hours evaporated. Or, they did for my parents. Me? I accompanied Ragnar on his quest to find the missing children of Izmut village, and learned that Princess Alena was so much more of a badass than any princess Disney ever portrayed; heaviest hitter in the game.

I learned the art of grinding. If there is anything that the Dragon Quest/Warrior franchise is good at, it's requiring players to grind for days on end in order to survive a single boss fight. For weeks I sat with it, picking at it, amassing power in game, and learning the score by heart. It was very good music.

All that time indoors, staring at pixels on a screen and manipulating controllers with my thumbs. And where does that leave me today? There is not one hour of the time I spent playing that game which I'd like to claim back. I can say that of some films I've seen. I can say that of a very short list of books I've half-read and then discarded. But I can't say that about Dragon Warrior. Even as an adult, I enjoy returning to these worlds, wandering through them, even if the path is linear. And I still love the music: I wake to Dragon Warrior IV's battle theme every morning, and with each text from my love, my phone levels up.

Dragon Warrior was the first game that was really mine. As much as I loved Thexder, as deeply as I enjoyed Arkanoid and Ms. Pac Man, as dear as The Oregon Trail was, these games all belonged to my father, or were installed on a shared PC. I had to ask to play. But Dragon Warrior? Dragon Warrior was all for me. It made gaming mine. The door it opened looked out on years of green 1-up mushrooms, vast future-scapes of radscorpion-filled deserts that had me looking for new water chips, lazy afternoons leaning on the sound string quartet, attempting to disprove that my character— with her fine pistols and jaunty suede jacket— was the second coming of an elf named Nasrudin, and hours engaged in exploring a volcanic island once held entirely by nomadic dark elves. These were all adventures as fulfilling as curling up with a good book. These were tales that taught me to think about strategy, timing, and above all, inference. But most importantly, I learned about message and medium.

Because most of these later games I loved were rich stories— plots with beginning, middle, and end. The best of them had morally challenging quests and brought up difficult questions which didn't have easy black and white answers. I learned that a tale should fit the method of telling. The epic sweep of these games made the player feel important, but these were not the only tales that could be told in this medium.

Because of that eleventh birthday gift and the hours conversing with the Zenithian Dragon, I want to see what tales I can coax from a bunch of pixels.

Naiveté

2013-03-21T01:57:00.000-04:00

Until this weekend, I had never let a stranger buy me a drink. It's not that it hasn't been offered on occasion, but rather that I am at least smart enough to know the vague sexual contract that drink buying can but does not always imply. I'd rather not deal with such uncomfy-making things.

I am also a junky for new experiences, large and small. So on St. Patrick's Day, after a guy elbowed me in the head, I said yes to letting him buy me a drink. He asked me what I was drinking, and I answered "hard cider." I quickly lost track of him in the crowd.

A little later, he approached me again and asked, "Can I buy you that drink?"

To which I replied, "Yeah, sure. Whatever."

"You have to come with me, though." Hmmm.

So I followed him to the bar. He asked for my number ("may I have the honor of getting your digits?") before ever getting my name, and then introduced himself. Apparently, he was on tour with some hardcore band, and was only in town for an hour or half hour longer, then off to Orlando and from there another state. At least, that's what he said. I countered with my fair share of lying, placing myself as a local who lived a ways away— hell if I was going to let him know I lived around the corner.

He asked for a kiss. I was okay with that. I kissed him. And then he pressed me for a place to go have sex.

"Oh honey, I'm not sure you want that."

He insisted. ("I'll call you a cab." "What about my vehicle?" "We can have sex in your car." "My car is a bike.") So I tried to scare him off with the "I'm freakier than you can handle" defense (I've had mixed success with it in the past), which— lo and behold!— backfired. He was unfazed by spanking, bondage, humiliation, or feminization.

"We have to go find somewhere to have sex right now!"

This was the exact situation I did not want to be in. Horny guy who had "accidentally" bumped into me in order to talk to me, who had the very clear notion that a purchased drink means he's getting laid, even though he'd done me an injury. All the little controls? Likely in the pick up scene. Okay. I could deal with that. I looked him dead in the eye wearing my best impish grin, and handed him back the cider.

"Enjoy your drink."

And I proceeded to rock out for the rest of the evening.

Though It Might Not Be Windy Then...

2013-03-14T16:52:00.000-04:00

It's windy today. Two weeks ago, I trawled the thrift store and found a kite. Two control lines, a stunt kite shaped like a caret, to insert itself in the sky.

It's windy today. I opened the kite packaging the day I found it. The fiberglass connectors were all there, the spools for the line, all of it. Primary colors plus green. A happy kite. I bought it.

It's windy today, but last week I was in Tallahassee, and there are so few open spaces to go fly a kite. It would have taken up too much room on the bus, anyway. So I left it at home while I dashed across the state.

It's windy today, and I suppose I could have taken my kite along with me to work, stored it in the break room while I fixed gidgets and wizmos until I was free by order of the clock. But I didn't. I didn't even take a lunch.

It's windy today. It's windy and warm, with a crisp kiss to the air. I want to be up in the air. I could have sent my kite up in my stead, but I'm sitting at a coffee shop table typing, itching for sky.

It's windy today. Maybe I'll take the kite out tomorrow.

That's how I miss all the good stuff.

In These Hills

2013-03-07T23:57:00.001-05:00

I've missed travel. Since I moved to the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area, I have barely gotten to travel just around the state, and even then, it's only been to places known and loved and longed for.

This weekend, I am in Tallahassee, which curls like a tiny sliver of rusted upstate New York embedded in in the muscle tissue of the outskirts of Atlanta. It claims to be a city. I suppose it is, but it feels like a corroded eroded shell of a town. It reeks of politics. It feels like a college wasteland.

Passing by rows of frat houses, I realize how strange my college experience was. I never had to deal with a fraternity, and even mid week, these buildings wore a halo of unkempt decay. I felt like an intruder.

Home crept in around Railroad Square, decked in yarn and spray paint. The old tumble-down warehouses all repurposed for art, it felt like the city of Megaton in Fallout 3, and in the breeze, I could hear metal creak. The red orange sun sliding below the horizon lit the red orange rust gilding the corrugated steel. But even here, except for the rock climbing gym, the dirt paths rolled up at 6pm, an artsy extension of Punta Gorda.

I admit it. I love this place in pieces. I want to carry slices in pockets to take out and devour at odd times by the railroad tracks off Himmarshee, want to crumble it and sprinkle it into forsythia strewn neighborhoods of Queens, want to wear it about Tampa under silent high rises that all close up at night. I want to carry it with me, these parts and pieces to cobble together a vision of home.

Onward, Sans Air

2013-02-28T01:30:00.000-05:00

It's raining, and everyone is moving away. A few years ago, this type of thing filled me with an immeasurable sadness, a choking feeling. My throat closed around it. It stopped me from breathing. The thought of my community disintegrating beneath my fingers tasted like ash and lack of air.

Today, the house into which I moved when I first came to the Miami area is legally evaporating, lease over and contract up. I will spend the day helping a friend who is like a brother finish packing an apartment I moved out of months ago, and I've already hugged another goodbye-- Tuesday's seen him off to another state.

And now it feels light. This is a wheel turning onward, and I have no desire to stop it, still it, make it turn back.

What changed? I did. I learned to breathe this wind. There is air here after all. It's raining, and I'm not alone.

About Doubt

2013-02-21T04:00:00.000-05:00

See, here's the problem. I started out with a goal. I mean, I also wanted to make the stories stop nagging me. That, too. I have to empty them out like a bucket that catches the leak, anyway. If I don't, they overflow. Flooded brains are less fun than you might think.

But the problem, the real problem, is that I wanted to be a writer. I wanted... the words to catch somewhere, to catch something else on fire. A pure vanity. I wanted to be a writer, and maybe wanting something like that is where I went wrong.

But then, maybe that's the only way to do it. Maybe you have to have something like that in mind in order to even set your feet to the path. So that's what I've done: set my feet to the path, wanting to be a writer.

And now, of course, I hesitate. After I've gotten a few little publications, after I've finished a few stories and I'm almost 20,000 words deep into two unfinished novels, now, now, I sit down and ask myself what the hell I'm doing. What the hell am I doing?

It's overwhelming, the little voices telling me I'll never be as good as, I'll never even make a side-living off of, I'll never be read, never be discussed, never be disliked and torn down. It isn't about the idea of fame or fortune, but spreading words around like a flu virus. It's about craft and contagion. I want to make those words contagious. I want to participate in the conversation. I want to read a thing, and write a thing, and say "Hey, I disagree. I love your words, but I disagree," with my work, and then have others to respond even to that.

Craft and contagion. And when I frame it in those terms, it all becomes maybe doable again. I just have to empty the bucket, and play with the muck that results. I just have to empty the bucket, and see where it gets me.

Futile Resistance: Your Anti-Valentine

2013-02-14T01:30:00.000-05:00

In 1969, the Feast of St. Valentine was removed from the General Roman Catholic calendar, because nothing was really known of this St. Valentine, other than his general burial location: along the ancient Roman road leading from the seat of the empire to the Adriatic Sea. And there were lots of these martyred guys named Valentine. Apparently, it was a popular name. Or sayeth Wikipedia, our treasured source for all cursory knowledge. But it's at least a place to begin. I do know that Valentine's Day was a celebration of romantic love since Chaucer's day, and that the Victorians made little paper love trinkets to exchange of lace and pretty print cutouts long before we coated it all in chocolate.

Better to know that than think it an invention of Hallmark and the chocolate companies, our modern wallet-vultures swooping in proclaiming "Diamonds! Dinner! Obligation!" Because that's what it's become, hasn't it? A bunch of outward proclamations, proof of affection through expense. Maybe that's the way love always was: "Buy me bigger things. Prove it."

I like love better than that (all the roses seem ostentatious, bred to last long, and smell not so sweet). I like to love in odder ways. I like to love everything at once. I'm better at that than pushing it all at one figure, expected to partake in a game of demands.

So I'll offer you this, a Valentine, an Anti-Valentine, since this is not a celebration of romantic love, but something broader: I love you. Planet, people, I love you, you gods-damned broken mess. I love you fiercely. I love you painfully and openly. I love you like a river loves the rock of its bed, in a cutting way. I love you like the birds love the air, born to strain against it in order move through it. I love you like these things because they are unthinking things, but dependent things. People, planet, I love you, you're messed up awful wonderful. Just like me.

Whole world, it's Valentine's Day. It's a silly celebration. So let's go celebrate. Let's go do something small and ill-advised and lovely.

A Voice Across the Room

2013-02-07T15:31:00.001-05:00

I am sitting in the library. It's supposed to be quiet. There are the bangs and buzzes of the construction, saws and hammers and glasses panes being carried by heavy-booted feet. These noises aren't obtrusive... at least to me. But remember, I'm a weird one, and the sounds of trains roaring by in the night is a lullaby. Crowds yammering, shoutings, laughing, these don't bother me either. I can't understand anything they're saying, picking out only a word here or there, sending me off on tracks after poems containing words that tumble through packed bars over the din of guitar strings and beer-fueled fights.

But no. There is one voice here in this library. One man talking loudly on his cell phone. "Yeah, he was doin', and I ain't gonna lie to you, he can go now, and yeah that's what I'm sayin', but uh... really? Them two back to back a couple years now... Cody's goin' nowhere," and he chuckles.

The clock ticks.

"Wow."

Ten minutes pass.

"Yeah, and she's holdin' on for a while, now."

Twenty minutes pass.

"That's what I'm sayin'."

Half an hour. There is no signal from his end of the conversation that it's going to end soon. I can only focus on his voice, my writing paused, my reading crossing wires with the sound of a spoken language I understand.

"Brian, he still doin' his thing."

I wish he was speaking Spanish. Or German. Or Korean. These languages I don't comprehend fade into the din of un-meaning, get lost in the background of hammer strikes and whirring saw blades. But he's speaking English, and that is one of two languages I speak. Hearing it calls my active attention. It's a reflex. I can't deny it. It's as clear as the half-understood Kreyole on the bus, pulling on the strings of my rusted French.

So I sit and watch the clock tick by, tapping fingers, reading the same lines over and over again, unable to flow down to the next paragraph for the—

"I don't know, whatta you talkin' 'bout? Ride that horse boy, ride that thing, mmhm."

—that fills the air.

So what do I do? I listen. For instance the "mmhm" is one syllable, sliding from one sound into the other.

"That's all it takes, that's all it takes, right there. You know what I'm sayin'? You know what I mean, come on."

I bend my ears. How is he saying it? Rich baritone, the dialect, noting the up tones and where they fall. I can't see him. He's obscured by the concrete library pillar. I can see his back pack: black with neon orange trim.

"Uh-huh, see I din' know that. I din' know it. He did good. Okay," and he chuckles again. "All seventy, eighty years old."

And I transcribe fragments, trying to catch an identity, a cadence, a richness of sound just in text.

"Oh, Lowd." It doesn't sound like "Lawd" or "Lord." There is a specificity to it.

This is when I begin to question my own comfort, listening to his words, typing them out, transcribing them as I hear them. He's saying them in a public place, and I can't hear the person on the other end. They don't really give anything away, who he is, who these people are, these bits and snippets I've recorded. I may have even misheard the names. But now I feel like a voyeur, like maybe I should move, give him a little space to talk.

But where can I go on this floor away from the sound of his conversation? Other patrons are taking up the spots near outlets, the computers open, fingers clattering over their keyboards. I stick it out, listening to the strange music of his voice. I stick it out, snatching phrases from the air. And I wonder how many times my conversations in public have given others pause, half-listening.

Railway Bum

2013-01-31T01:30:00.000-05:00

My favorite coffee shop is right next to the railroad tracks— freight tracks, that run past the airport and see trains passing for most of the day and into the night. I like getting close to those tracks as the train sweeps by, even though I know a loose tie strap could whip through my body and split me wide at those speeds. Even though I know that sparks and flying debris could hit me, blind me, concuss me, kill me. It doesn't matter. I love the rumble of the earth as the train trundles by. I love the sound of the bells as the cross bars drop, and the way the train's sound drowns out all others.

I like to pretend I was born in the wrong time. That's easy to do: romanticize an era long gone, when thousands took to the rails to look for work, to get to greener pastures and places where there'd be food or a roof. I pretend I know what it's like to be roofless... but couch-surfing homeless and sky-sheltered homeless are two different beasts. I pretend I want to know what it's like to dodge bulls at the station. I pretend a lot. But that's what happens with the past, isn't it? Denizens of better days or uncertain futures, we gild the long-gone, and hold it up as an ideal. I know better, or at least, I should.

Still, there's something about the trains. Something that pulls me to their graffitied box cars and shipping containers, their rust and rumble. How many miles of track still exist in the U.S.? How many miles have been torn up and away? My fingers itch, and I find myself calculating jumps, trajectories, speeds. But instead of hopping on and letting the rails take me north to stops unknown, I crouch close, camera in hand, and snap away.

It's almost enough, sometimes.

Perspectives on (Not) Procreating

2013-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00

I have for years known that I don't want kids. I have for years whined, moaned, complained, and griped about the injustice of the medical industry, denying the agency of women who want sterilization under the pretense of "oh, you'll change your mind." Only for women under a certain age. Because it's for their own good. Because, y'know, they'll regret it. And thus, I have for years gone to many a doctor, asked about tubal ligation, and been laughed at (literally), patted on the head (metaphorically), and told that I don't know what I'm talking about (literally).

Then this magical thing happened. I hit 30. I went to see the doctor yesterday. And I discovered that all the resistance had melted away. 30 is apparently that special the age when women become adults.

The doctor didn't ask me about why I wanted to be sterile. He didn't ask if I had a boyfriend or a husband, or what I would do if I changed my mind. He just assumed I knew my mind. This was novel.

I'd say that maybe this isn't so much a case of age-based discrimination, that maybe I'd just found the right doctor, except... he had that cringing look on his face when he thought I was in my 20s. Except I brought up that I had wanted the procedure for 10 years, and he replied that the resistance was likely because there is such a high rate of patient regret. Except on my way out he made a comment, a joke, about me being 30 meant I was a grown-up now.

Now I've done my research. Regret? I've seen widely varying numbers, but even the highest (see the section on "Long-Term Complications") have it only at about 1/4 of patients expressing regret, with the average being closer to 1/10, controlling for all factors.

And the adulthood joke? Harder to interpret. I have to admit, it was well-placed, as jokes go. I'd like to look at it as a comment on how our society views younger folk as kids. In a lot of ways, American culture doesn't let people grow up until our 30s, anyway. 25? You're still just a kid. A kid who can legally enter contracts, mind you, but a kid all the same.

I know that when I was 25, I knew my birth control options. I knew oral contraceptives worked my system over in the worst way, and that doctors wouldn't put an IUD in for me. I knew that Depo Provera was scary being yet another hormonal birth control, and one I wouldn't be able to discontinue if I had the same problems that presented themselves while taking oral contraceptives. And then there was the fact that no one would believe: that I knew I didn't ever want kids.

Well, I am finally getting my way. By my next post, I will be well on my way to having occluded fallopian tubes, scar tissue forming blockages due to feathery little inserts in tiny cages in what look like coiled metal springs. Yay, Essure! Yay, technology!

But it feels like a pyrrhic victory. I still had to wait. And wait. All those pregnancy scares, all those horrid hormones placed in my body to finally get to this point. It doesn't seem fair, especially not when I knew what the outcome would be 10 years ago. I was sure then, too.

Unknowing

2013-01-17T13:56:00.002-05:00

There was a call.

"Your blood panel came back. We need you to come in for more testing."

I had just gotten off from work. I was tired. I was hungry. I didn't recognize the number of my doctor's office at first, because I was a new patient.

"Can you come in tomorrow?"

"I work tomorrow, and I cycle everywhere. It's kinda hard to get there. I know I have another appointment Tuesday. Can it be done then?"

"We need to see you as soon as possible."

"Can you tell me anything more? I mean, what's gone wrong?"

Blood panel results. This wasn't anything related to a specific disease, then, a yes/no proposition, tested-for and known. This was some other kind of indicator, something off or odd, something like a clue to a bigger thing looming in the dark.

There was a shuffling, a moment's hold, and one of the doctors was on the line.

"Is there anything you can tell me over the phone?"

"We found some dangerous abnormalities and need you to come in for more testing."

"Okay," I said. I knew saying that was a mistake— that word, "dangerous." One doesn't say things like that without a resolution, more information. Dissolve the narrative tension. But this was a new doctor there, a likable guy, obviously learning.

I am a creature prone to infections of the nighttime whatifs. Shel Silverstein observed them well: "Whatif I flunk that test?/ Whatif green hair grows on my chest?/ Whatif nobody likes me?/ Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?" My ears crawled with them. Night was not friendly.

I woke one final time at 8:15am, and took a shower. A very long shower, and my stomach lay at the bottom of the tub, the hot water unable to ease its knots. So I sat next to my stomach on the floor, letting the water run over me, long after I had finished washing.

"Okay," I toweled off and said to my cat. "Okay, I should go." She looked up at me with her green eyes and petted my leg with her paw while I pulled pants on. And I went.

The road shoulder along my southbound path was littered with debris. The first pop made me worry for my tires. The next pop made me look harder, and then there was a third, a seventh, a tenth.

They were snails. Hundreds and hundreds of snails, covering the bike lane, the white lines, trails glimmering their mucous glitter.

Pop. Pop pop pop.

My passing was a massacre, my bike wheels heavier than my worry. If there had been anything in my stomach, I'd have been sick.

By the time I arrived at the doctor's, my tires were with slick with the corpses of snails, and there was no more weight of guilt or fear.

"How are you feeling today?" asked the receptionist.

"I'll live," I said. "Until I don't."

Epilogue

Narrative tension should be dissolved. High potassium was the test result. Everything else was normal, including my heart. Retesting was ordered.

Something to be monitored. Something that could be bad. Something that might be explainable by my water consumption habits (or lack thereof). Maybe. Maybe.

But maybe is enough of a flashlight, and I'm used to a number of uncertainties.

With, Without

2013-01-10T03:36:00.000-05:00

I am no Luddite, but I'm not a tech slut, either. Having just moved, I have been doing without something I used to hold very dear: my own internet connection. It is a financial sacrifice. It is a strange inconvenience.

So many writers make a big deal about experiments in doing without. This trend vaguely annoys me. Every day, all of us make choices, sacrifices, clean-living pacts. Change like this is ordinary. So what's the big deal?

Well, you notice things. Like how much harder it is to be social and arrange things when I have to hop online only at the library and coffee shops. Like how much more care and timing I have to put into my submissions. Like how much less I dick around online, and how many little projects I am more likely to complete, whether they be repairs, artistic little things, or making utilitarian items (like the origami crane catnip toys; a friend had recently told me about it, so I set out to make my own... hey were loved and shredded).

The root of it, I think, is that we marvel at how one break from our routines can change so much. It changes everything. We make a spectacle of our transformations, write about them, film them, document them not so much because we're peacocks preening in the public eye (though I won't deny that may be a part of it), but because it astounds us what a simple change can do, and we are wont to share tales of strange journeys... even small journeys through our everyday.

I am getting used to this internet-less state. I am building new routines around it. I like how I've had to adapt. I think I might just keep it this way a bit longer.

Love and Library Shelves

2013-01-03T14:45:00.000-05:00

The library is under construction. There are barriers set up in every direction, turning the open layout into a mouse-maze, with a reward greater than most that I know: books.

Everyone knows what a book hound I am. I make no secret of it. I take full advantage of inter-library loans, World Cat, borrowing from research libraries. Access. Academia. A merry-go-round of graphic novels and craft books, novels I've waiting years to read. But Broward's Main Library blows me away.

Years ago, I'd come here, took out books on my boyfriend's card, children's books in French. Today, I have my own card, and the stacks seem vaster than the public libraries I've known in New York. I fell in love with the libraries of New York, paging through copies of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, lolling through older editions of Tolkien. Here? There are floors and floors and just as many spines to run my fingers along.

This, and everywhere ants. Not insects, but workers... construction, hard hats: ants. The fountains are silent and the escalators are stopped. I am in the bowels of a beast rebuilding itself, scaffolding enfolding terraces, cranes still as wading birds rising high into the sky. The shelves have been shuffled in order to allow the workers passage.

I like the feeling of incompleteness this creates. I like the sense of movement and renewal. I like that the open floor plan with seven landings to look over allows me to see it all in progress; five foot cubicle dividers can't hide the bustle and shift when I'm peering down from two floors up.

I can't wait until it's finished. I never want it to be complete.

Power Dynamics

2012-12-27T01:16:00.000-05:00

This is my 21st move. I am 31 years old, and my first move occurred when I was 10. They have not been regular moves, one a year, every year. They have come in stuttering starts and halts, two or three a year in college when my dorm space was my only residence, a few before and after into odd spots, filling the in-betweens, until I settled in with a boyfriend in a small town that slowly strangled me.

This week, I am uncurling into a small studio in a city I love, sorting through objects which may or may not have meaning to me. The books are the most burdensome. They are the hardest to let go of, even the ones I don't need.

I fell in love with this little place: the overgrown garden with its clothing-optional pool where I do yoga every morning, my little kitchenette where I cook big and save leftovers for the week. They are things I love, even though I do not yet have internet of my own. And when I signed? I was careful. I tested the water. I tested the lights.

But a week in, the main light overhead began to flicker. The power company came out late one evening and shut off electricity to the house. After they switched it back on? The fridge rumbled oddly, and the AC labored when the lights were on. This is without anything of my own being plugged in. And I haven't much to plug in. Just a phone to charge, a grinder for my coffee, and my computer: a little laptop.

The peculiarity of my situation came clear today: I plugged a strand of lights into a surge protector, and the the strip popped in my hand, threw off sparks, and filled the air with smoke and ozone.

I think this is something to laugh about. On move 22.

The Sky Is Falling in a Rain of Radiation

2012-12-20T01:30:00.000-05:00

Good morning, stars. Good morning, Geminids, streaking even this light-polluted dingy sky with sparks and the fire of atmospheric entry.

I didn't go to sleep, so I didn't have to wake up. The south Florida air was crisp, too chill for sun lizards like me. I brought my own heat rock: a rainbow leopard print blanket. Armed with naked eyes, I stared up into the vast night.

And I saw them. Falling embers from off our world, burning up on entry. I said hello to Orion (as is customary), and crouched down, face skyward, laughing like a little girl until I started crying, big wracking sobs of relief and joy and wonder.

I stayed out there until my nose ran. I stayed out there well past the time I'd spotted any bright debris lighting the night in its fall. I stayed out there feeling small and safe and insignificant. Insignificance is a great form of safety.

When I was ready to creep back in, I wiped my nose on my jeans and choked out another laugh. It sounded more like a bark. What do you do after that? After watching the heavens rain down upon your blue bubble so fragile, so temporary?

You hug yourself, huddled in your rainbow blanket, and compose love letters to the sun and the far arms of the Milky Way.

The Selkie and the Lynx

2012-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Lynx is a top-sail schooner. It has two masts. Its deck is made of Douglas fir. It is anchored along River Walk in Fort Lauderdale right now, and I know this because I am given to night wanderings, and I wandered by.

It's too much to bear, the rigging there like bodice lacings. I want, have wanted since I was a girl, to sail. But sailing is a rich kid's hobby, and there are no more wooden sailing vessels like fluyt ships and frigates... only there are, and there's one here: Lynx. Schooner. And I am sitting in front of it, numbly, dumbly trying to take pictures in the half-dark, the sodium arc gilded dim of Fort Lauderdale's downtown night-stirrings. I want, and that wanting feels the way I'd always imagined seasickness must feel, but I have never been sea sick, even out on small ships in rough waters in the Gulf.

So I make a pact. In a year, I will run away to crew a tall ship. In a year— I will give it time, you see— if I have not cobbled my life into something more stable, I will throw stability to the wind. I've lived without it this long.

Because I am a selkie without a skin. What's really stopping me from going home?

Parade Day

2012-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

I am sitting and writing at the kitchen table. It is not my kitchen. I am looking after cats who are equally not mine. There is no curtain, and the light is bright tumbling through open blinds. It feels warm. It makes the world inviting.

I am watching a parade, a shadow parade. The power lines are dark stripes of blocked light on the wall of the building next door. There are seven squirrels, maybe more, running back and forth over them. Their shadows fascinate the cats more than any toy ever could. They travel in shooting gallery rows. They travel like camel caravans. They flash movement and my eyes are drawn away from my screen.

This is probably a turf war, not clowning. But I don't speak their language, so I don't know for sure what it means when one scurries out, and stops dead in the middle of the line, shadow paused, and another comes up from behind, pounces and races back the way he came. The victim only follows for an instant. Then he resumes in the original direction, finishes his tightrope walk as I finish my text, and he'll never know that I was watching, hidden inside.

Arts and Crafts

2012-11-29T00:30:00.000-05:00

She said I had a gift. That is, my mother said this of my writing. She said I had a gift, and that it would be wasteful to pursue my art when it was only mediocre, and my writing was so good.

Here's the thing though: writing is a skill that has to be practiced, just as art is. And I don't have a gift. Honestly, truly, and you know this, having read so many of my mediocre posts, my writing is only as good as my practice. My first practices at writing were not actually holding a pen in hand, or sitting at a keyboard typing: they were the times my mother and my grandfather and my father read to me. They were Serendipity books, Ping the Duck, and Ursula K. Le Guin's Catwings. These were my first practices, rolling sounds around in my ears, hearing the words from weak voices and strong, and then learning to read them myself.

I could have been that way with my art, but I chose to follow bad advice. I want you to pay attention to the agent there in that statement: I chose. Me. Yes, I was given bad advice, but I was the one who took it.

Now? I practice my writing. I occasionally practice my art. In my writing, I feel like a craftsperson. There is a certain joy when I know a piece is well-constructed. In my art, I am still a learner at 31. I feel like I'm lagging behind. But image is important. And I'll get there one day. I will be a craftsperson there, too.

I will never claim to be an artist, at least in the sense of mastery in my chosen crafts. I think that's something for readers and viewers to decide. That's something that has to be determined by the person wrangling with a work once its maker has finished it. But as a craftsperson, I strive to perfect technique. I strive to experiment with new modes. I strive to make my work better. I fail often. That's the point, right? It's practice. You're allowed to mess up. Just keep doing it. You'll get there. I'll get there.