All the ingredients, the mix and eggs and oil and sugary blue and green frosting, were fashioned with love and care by the baker at our local supermarket into the perfect cake. A rectangle of show-stopping perfection.

My wife picked it up and we hauled it to my mom and dad’s place. My mom had prepared the bestest of birthday dinners. Beef and noodles, deviled eggs, French-style green beans, heat-and-serve rolls, and her world-famous, to-die-for hash brown potato casserole with golden brown corn flakes on top. These are the delicacies that have padded my ribs for forty one years now, and they’ve never tasted better.

To top it all off was that gorgeous cake, which my eight year old insisted say “Happy Birthday Daddy.” And so it did.

Early yesterday morning, a friend of mine from Chicago sent me a note on Facebook telling me she couldn’t write on my wall so she was sending a message instead, wishing me a happy day. I changed my settings to make things easier for others, and more birthday wishes began rolling in. Some from relatives, others from older friends, and one in particular from someone I’d never met. She lives in my town and is married to another friend, a guy I used to do a lot of miniature skirmishes with at the Friendly Local Gaming Store. She’s a blogger and if memory serves we’d hooked up through that medium initially. So she left wrote on my wall and told me to save her some cake. This is not uncommon; I’ve written this myself on other walls in jest, knowing that the possibility of actually getting any cake, even via the wonders of expedited shipping, were nil.

That was her mistake, for as-of-late I am a man of action. I wrote back that we should hook up later in the afternoon at the aforementioned FLGS. She was game, figuring her husband and I could spend some time talking gaming shop, and she could eat cake. So after dinner, we packed up the three remaining pieces of cake and headed out.

The look on her face was priceless, a mixture of unhinged reticence and bafflement. And she ate her some cake, by golly. Another piece went to my old GM Steve, who also sent me a note on Facebook, and we let the gamers in the back room roll d100s for the last piece, a corner monstrosity the size of a brick. The nice thing about cake is it doesn’t leave a stain on your character sheet.

Cake with friends, old and new. That’s my kind of birthday . . .

[photo credit]

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Before I created The Cheek and began cranking out non-fiction stuff about my life, I loved to write short stories. I didn’t write many of them, but the few I took the time to sweat over and shape into cheesy little morsels of literary Camembert are to me tiny glimpses into my soul. I love to dip into the nether regions of my hard drive on occasion and give them another read. I tweak them every so often in an attempt to polish and shape them into tales worthy of my respect, worth passing on to others. The problem is that the average short story in my archives takes about ten minutes to read. Ten minutes for someone to fly through what took me sometimes months to bring to fruition.

And that hardly seems fair.

So this month, like about a zillion other people, I decided to tighten my writing belt and peck out a novel. Yes, as you can tell by the picture in this post and the little badge at the top of my sidebar, I am a participant in 2009’s NaNoWriMo competition. In case you are clueless and unaware of what NaNo is all about, here’s a blurb from their website:

Founded in 1999, this fiction-writing extravaganza encourages everyone in the world to spend November bashing out a 50,000-word novel. Not for fame or fortune. But because it’s monkey-barrels of fun.

Monkey-barrels may be just a tad hyperbolic, but it’s close. I’m having a blast. And I’m almost caught up: your favorite chronic procrastinator didn’t start until November 3^rd.

The cool thing about all this is that my two oldest kids are on board as well. Each signed up on to take part in the Youth Writers Program and made a commitment to write 20,000-word novels of their own. Nothing beats nibbling around the edges of a huge literary cookie with your kids, knowing we’re going to devour that monstrosity and ache a bit when we’re done but will have eaten the whole damn thing. Maybe when it’s over, I’ll print us out a certificate of completion like I did back when I tackled and handily defeated The Ultimate Colossal Burger at Ruby Tuesday.

So I thought I would post a little excerpt for your reading enjoyment. Ignore any typos and all the bad grammar; this month is about getting it out of my head and into the laptop. This section is inspired by my blogging buddy Pat who issued this challenge a while back. After a couple months of, well, procrastination, I finally found a place to take her up on her offer. So this is for you, Pat. And if you, Dear Tweaker, choose to skip reading my excerpt, please know that I’m cool with that. Not everyone has ten minutes to spare. And feel free to share your thoughts about NaNoWriMo or my excerpt in the comments. Are you writing a novel this month? Have you done this in the past? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Should I give up writing and get a real job? And after you comment, please, have a safe and happy weekend . . .

I drove through a car wash the other day. And for the first time it wasn’t one of those automated jobs where you delicately attempt to slide smoothed-out dollar bills into the seldom-functioning slot or swipe your debit card. I went to the new one out on Highway 10. Dave’s or something like that. Where someone actually greets you when you drive up and smiles when they ask you if you’d like to try the Dave’s Deluxe with the undercarriage wash and tire shine. “Sure,” I said and handed over a ten to the young lady with the retainer and pigtails held tight with strips of towel that matched the trim around the neon sign advertising Dave’s Deal cards – SIX DELUXE WASHES ONLY $50. I rolled up my window and then drove into the wash bay, inching over the front lip of the metal doohickey buried in the floor and then into the center where the pressure makes the light panel switch from green to bright red and you’d better damn well be stopped or there could be damage to your car, which Dave’s was in no way shape or form responsible for. I thought this is what it must be like to be invited over for dinner by someone who wants to get to know you a bit better and they smile when they invite you and tell you they can’t wait for you to come and then you get there and you have to do all these things like take off your shoes at the door and let them hang up your coat which you’d rather keep within arm’s reach and then eat off the fine china which they seem to keep worrying about every time you use the knife to cut your steak and then they fret when you almost forget to use a coaster when you’re sitting in the living room on the couch with the fabric that seems to change colors when you run your hand over it. Welcome, but mind your P’s and Q’s or you’re outta here. But I stop on time and there’s no new damage inflicted upon my car as I sit inside a coccoon of spinning brushes and flying soap and steamy jets of water that come so fast that they lift the windshield wipers out of their little notched holders when your window gets rinsed. And then I get to drive again but this time, unlike at the automated place, there is no blower the size of a Honda blasting my own Honda with hot air fired from cannons that do that automated twitch from side to side like eyes watching you warily as you drive through really slow in order to eke out every last puff of air that you paid ten bucks for. I wonder for a second how Dave expects me to drive safely out of this narrow hallway lined with bright red concrete with rivers of water with soap residue streaming down my windshield trammeling my vision. And my savior is a kid with a bright red baseball cap turned backwards guiding me a little to the left and then a little to the right and then waving me forward like a traffic cop at an intersection holding back the tide for a passing funeral procession. He’s not smiling quite as brightly as the young lady at the starting line but I guess I wouldn’t be smiling either is I had to concentrate so much. I pull forward until he puts his hands up suddenly, palms out, and then with an aw-shucks sauter comes alongside my door and grabs the towel draped over his shoulder. He stares at me for a half a second too long. I start to turn away from his gaze but don’t do it instead. I stare back. Our eyes locked in some sort of mutual assessment. Maybe he’s a bit self-conscious about the hat and that’s why he wears it backwards. Possessor of a rebellious streak, this one, I think. My cheeks rise, bringing my lips along in a sort of half-hearted attempt at a smile, but he doesn’t snap out of it. What began as a moment of lingering contemplation has turned into a daydream. He’s not really staring at me anymore but toward me and perhaps through me at whatever he sees that isn’t me but beyond me. Outside of me. Not even here in the car with me but trapped in his head as he just stares. I take out my cellphone and roll the ball to the camera icon and then hold it up to face the glass and think maybe he’ll come back to earth if I attempt to make contact. I press the ball and the camera makes its little faux click noise and I see him now both on my phone, frozen in pixels, and right there outside my window. I think of Hume and how he would say that I have a perception in my mind that is based on an impression, an outward sentiment if you will, of a kid standing outside my window staring at me. And how later, if he ever gets to wiping my car down with his bright red towel and I don’t have to see him staring at me anymore, I’ll have an idea in my mind of the kid standing outside my window and staring at me, because he’s not actually doing it at the time that I’m thinking about it. Right now, for instance. I remember his standing there, with his hat turned backwards and his blank stare that seemed to last longer than the director’s cut of Dances With Wolves, and it is an idea I’m entertaining based on a previous impression. But then I can take my phone out and look at his picture and experience him again just as I had when he was actually there, for I’m entertaining and outward sentiment of him, albiet on my phone. And I think about all the stuff that we think about and how much of it is just an idea based on some shitty perception through a window streaked with soapy water. And how I really butchered Hume and would have embarrassed old Professor Moore with such nonsense. Like when I’d ask him questions about God and he would hem and haw and listen to me try and elucidate what I really wanted to say but ended up on some tangent that sidetracked the class so that he had to rein it back in while giving me that look that said, “Save it for later, will ya?” but later never came because he had a meeting or a conference or needed to go and get a beer with a collegue and I wasn’t invited. But I found God without Dr. Moore. And I’m not ready to write about that yet.

This book is either really good or really bad. You decide . . .

Meet Penny.

When socks and library cards go missing, Penny took them. If the lights get left on or doors get left open, Penny is the irresponsible one. She occasionally opens the garage door in the middle of the coldest winter night, allowing the water pump to freeze, and loves to snarf down the last piece of strawberry pie, leaving a trail of crumbs and a sticky, bright red mess on the countertop.

Penny never flushes.

The Swine Flu hit our household this week, and Penny hid the thermometer. We heard her laughing about it early this morning, around 2:17am, as she went about rearranging the boxes in the attic above our bedroom. Then she silently made her way to my son’s room and turned off his alarm clock. The alarm clock he swears he set before going to bed last night. He nearly missed the bus.

Penny is dead.

The story of how we first learned about Penny – the day our suspicions were confirmed, if you will – is a bit unsettling. About two years ago, my wife was carrying a bag of garbage to the dumpster at the end of our driveway when an old man in a beaten-down truck drove by and stopped in front of the house. We live on a dead-end street, so we don’t get much traffic. The man leaned out the window and said, “You know you have a ghost in your house?” My wife laughed, but the guy didn’t. He said the ghost was of a 12-year-old girl named Penny. Then he smiled a toothy grin and drove away. We’d never seen him before, and we’ve not seen him since.

So we set to digging. And this is her story:

Penny Antoinette Irene Nelson was born during the waning moments of an early-Autumn storm in 1809. The local historian will tell you, with that smug countenance of the rumormonger plastered on her pasty-white and wrinkled faces, that it was this storm that spawned the hellacious tornado which leveled the area’s corn and soybean fields. It is that smug expression, with its tiny hint of a wink and an almost tangible plea begging the question, which leads one to inquire further for the rest of the story. And there is far more than leveled corn fields at the end of this story.

Or so I’ve been told.

It is reported that as the sun rose the next morning, struggling to penetrate the All-Saints’-Day-morning fog, the population of my small, mid-western town found their number decreased by fourteen. For found dead, lying buried in the rubble of their farmhouse on the southwest corner of Feightner Street, were the Strausbaugh family. The patriarch, one William Everett Strausbaugh, had been a shut-in for over a decade by this point. Years of plowing, planting, harvesting, and drinking had turned him into a cantankerous, scurrilous, hoary-headed bastard. But people will tolerate the reclusive sort where the scent of wealth is present, and Old Man Strausbaugh was loaded. Each year, to usher in the New Year and inaugurate its slow unwinding, he would host an elaborate party, inviting the locals over to gather around his ample hearth fires and drink his homemade sour mash whiskey. And each year, he would smooth talk some young female house guest into visiting his bedchamber for some festivities of a more lascivious nature. In late January of 1809, his willing guest was one Abigail Nelson.

Abigail settled in the region after nineteen years of wandering the highways and byways at the side of her aging Gypsy mother, Rosalyn. She saw in the fields of corn a chance to finally settle down and start a new life, but funds for seed were hard to come by. On that cold and snow-swept evening, over steaming glasses of spiked cider, Old Man Strausbaugh had made promises to young Abigail Nelson. Promises that tickled her ears. Promises he never intended to keep. He planted a seed of a different sort. And when Abigail told him that she was going to bear him a child, he cut her loose in a vengeful, threat-laden rage.

Rosalyn was furious. All those years of wandering, with not a care in the world and no ill effects to speak of, and it took them settling down for things to turn sour. So she cursed Old Man Strausbaugh. Cursed him good. And with the dawning of that aforementioned midnight hour, he found himself aloft and flying, exhilarated as though in the rapture of a dream, and then smashed back upon the ground with a dark finality. The curse had taken not only his life, but the lives of his wife and twelve children. And in their stead, a new life was born. As the fog lifted, Rosalyn the Gypsy smiled a knowing smile and settled back in her rocking chair cradling her granddaughter.

The funny thing about curses is that they seldom play out in predictable ways. Indeed, Old Man Strausbaugh and his brood were dead, but Penny inherited a bit of his wild streak. Penny grew into a beautiful girl. I’ve seen the pictures, and they are haunting. She had the most penetrating eyes I’ve ever seen, and I imagine her smile could charm the proverbial ice from the proverbial Eskimo. And from reports I’ve read, she too, after decades of sowing wild oats and no small amount of general mayhem amongst the locals, became reclusive. Each Halloween, beginning sometime after 1897, the year she locked herself inside and never came out again, neighbors would report hearing ear-splitting screams emanating from the attic of the mustard-yellow house on Washington Boulevard where Penny Nelson lived. And regardless of the weather conditions, great gales of wind would sweep down the street, generally around the midnight hour, bending the lilac bushes that surrounded the house low to the ground in their deafening wake.

And on the wind was the faintest smell of liquor.

In 1909, long after Rosalyn and Abigail had been carried away and the windows boarded up, from the inside, the house simply blew away. No body was ever found. The property, overgrown with crab grass and nettles, but with blossoming lilac bushes still firmly rooted around the perimeter, sat vacant until 2003. That’s when I bought it. And it’s where I later built my house. Upon the advice of my neighbor, the local rumormonger historian, I opted for a cream-colored siding as opposed to mustard-yellow. And I stay away from drinking. But the wind has been picking up lately, blowing the leaves across the property and piling them up at the base of the lilac bushes. We decided to keep them. And the forecast for Halloween? Stormy . . .

[photo credit]

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

~ Aristotle

Kay and I were friends. For two years, we sat side by side for an hour each day in drafting class, mechanical pencils and straightedges in hand, designing dream homes or drawing specs for bolts. We swapped erasers as often as we swapped stories about high school crushes and who we planned to ask to the prom when the time came. We airbrushed signs on whiteboards in honor of our favorite hair bands and talked trash about the fledgling basketball team, my job at McDonalds, or hers at a local pizza place. And then, in late May of 1987, during the senior picnic, having drawn all we could draw and said all we could say, having for a brief moment shared a blanket and some lunch on the high school lawn, we went our separate ways.

Jay and I used to be friends. In college, we hosted a Christian radio show together. Radio Free Jesus. Interspersed between vinyl cuts by Resurrection Band, Daniel Amos, Randy Stonehill, Petra, and the occasional Amy Grant – offered just to keep the natives from getting restless – we talked about God and relationships and Jesus Rock. He ran for some local political office as a staunch Republican and I helped him hand out buttons on street corners. He lost. Eventually he graduated, got married, and left me to solo the show. We crossed paths once or twice, back in the late 80s, before I myself moved on to another locale several states away.

Aristotle held true friendship in high esteem, for he saw within the concept a bond forged between two people whose sole interest lie in maintaining and exemplifying the goodness of the other. He wrote, “Friendship of this kind is permanent, reasonably enough; because in it are united all the attributes that friends ought to possess. For all friendship has as its object something good or pleasant — either absolutely or relatively to the person who feels the affection — and is based on some similarity between the parties.”

Were Kay and I really friends? Jay and I? I believe so. Are we still friends? We must be, for Facebook tells me so. She tracked me down. I tracked him down. I get to see pictures of their kids and know where they are headed on vacation or what they had for breakfast. I watch the numbers rise as I add more friends and feel the smile on my face widen with each accepted invitation. Each “How have YOU been?” message. This is what we do nowadays, search for friends and add them to our stream without giving much thought as to what kind of friends these people really are.

Unless you’re me, of course. I think about shit like this way too much. And wonder what it all means. To wit, I recently read an interesting passage in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel All the King’s Men . . .

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face that does not exist anymore, speaks a name – Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave – which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not happily met and boring stranger. But he humors the drooling doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said, “Gee, listen to this–’On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves–’” The Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you anymore.

And perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moonflower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant. The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he hasn’t the slightest concern with calculating his interest or your virtue. He doesn’t give a damn, for the moment, about Getting Ahead or Needs Must Admiring the Best, the two official criteria in adult friendships, and when the boring stranger appears, he puts out his hand and smiles (not really seeing your face) and speaks your name (which doesn’t really belong to your face), saying, “Well, Jack, damned glad you came, come on in, boy!”

“Sure, I’ll be your friend. We can catch up for a moment or two and share pictures and tell each other what we’re having for breakfast.” But eventually, this Friend of Your Youth gets lost in the feed, becoming nothing but a blip that gets shoved down the page as new updates pour in. And often, like Jack Burden, we’ll reach for our hat and head out the door, either disconnecting them or hiding them, wondering why we stopped by in the first place.

I’ve heard stories of people finding long lost friends and actually prolonging the reunion, reconnecting in ways that mean something so much more now than they did way back when. Romances have blossomed, hands-on physical contact taking the place of pixels and status updates. I imagine these are rare stories, however, rising to the top because we want all this to mean something. But distance and the piling up of years make any genuine connection with most Friends of My Youth impossible. And so we settle for this.

Maybe this is my “Great Sleep” rearing its ugly head, for I tend to pull away in the face of superficial contact. I find no pleasure in merely scratching the surface. To me, it seems more like pulling the scab off of a wound that could have healed long ago if I’d just refrained from pestering it so. Maybe I want more than what Facebook is giving me.

Or maybe I’m just thinking too much . . .

[photo credit]