I love my family. I adore my friends, appreciate my good health, and can’t think of anything big that’s missing from my life right now. I’m as thankful for those things as you are for yours. There, that’s out of the way. Now let’s turn this whole thing on its head and have some fun detailing what we hate about this time of year. (And by we I mean me.)

I know, I know. Before I even begin I’ll say I know. I’m supposed to be light and gay this time of year, casting asunder my cynicism for feelings of joy and wonder and heedless thanks all around. I am thankful, as noted at the outset here, but I can’t think of a single thing to name that wouldn’t be obvious. Doing so feels a little unimaginative or unoriginal. And you might call it unconscionable, but I’m focusing here forth on the things I would axe if I could, the things that leap forth like the sound of an alarm clock this time of year, the things that make me, more than anything else, thankful for a pint of Guinness in a dimly lit room bathed in the sounds of silence (hey, there’s something!), however fleeting those moments are.

My crippling inability to just state the obvious has always been my struggle in those go-‘round-the-table-and-say-what-you’re-thankful-for holiday sessions. Ever the nonconformist, I refuse to recycle the things we’ve already heard, and are implied—my family, my health, another year absent the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

I tend to settle instead on expressing thanks for things like oxygen, or making it through another year with both of my thumbs still intact. It’s not that I’m thankless. I begrudge no one their verve for shining a light on those things we all do love about life. They (you) are the normal ones. I’m the broken soul. I’m the problem.

Slate recently ran a piece in which various contributors chimed in with the holiday traditions they would do away with if they had the power. It grabbed me, as there are any number of things I wish I could flush from the social consciousness this time of year. My own list started to write itself in my head, a list that encompasses the entire months of November and December and includes the following:

• That stupid parade. I dare not even speaketh its name, but you know the one. To be fair, I hate all parades. It feels like watching a really slow NASCAR race replete with “stars” I care nothing about performing acts I care nothing about on the backs of trucks…with elaborate set pieces. Yes, it’s still better than NASCAR in every way, but that isn’t a high bar. And I didn’t even touch on how long it is.
• Horn ‘o plenty of NFL. I really hate NFL football. I’m a sports fan in general, and am looking forward to Friday when my Hawkeyes take on Nebraska. But I could not care less about the neo-WWF that is the NFL all day on Thursday. I’d rather watch Joey Lawrence in whatever Lifetime Christmas movie he’s starring in this year, which brings me to
• The Christmas movie/music/TV/advertising factory, continued. That’s one bit of manufacturing I’m fine outsourcing. In fact, my grand economic platform would effectively end the holiday ephemera industry and put the newly out-of-work hacks responsible for it back to work immediately on our roads and bridges. Many birds, one stone—you’re welcome, America.
• The Christmas movie/music/TV/advertising factory, continued. I’m not done with that one yet. That “Christmas in Iowa” song makes me want to do violent things (you know, like run home and bite my pillow!). You know what I’m talking about no matter where you live. I’ve been told it’s just boilerplate, that the state name is just filled in for whichever network of radio stations it is being played. And really, can we all just agree to do away with any holiday music that came after 1960? And don’t even come near me with that Bob Dylan Christmas album from a couple years back. I love Dylan, but that thing is rubbish. Bleck.
• The Christmas movie/music/TV/advertising factory, continued. And seriously, by Thor’s hammer, who surprises their spouse with a Lexus as a gift on Christmas morning? Really? Who are they reaching with that commercial?
• 24 hours of The Christmas Story on TBS. I used to love this movie, back when it maintained some semblance of novelty, when you saw it by happening upon it as a kid during a Saturday afternoon too cold to go outside. But I feel as though it’s become the Old Country Buffet of Christmas programming—quantity, quantity, quantity. Enough, already!
• That new Garry Marshal New Year’s Eve movie. I don’t care that I have not yet seen it; I preemptively hate it. If you aren’t privy to it, engage the old Google and take a peek. It’s the “We Are the World” of movies, minus the, you know, charity. Better yet, this is a follow up to Marshall’s Valentine’s Day from last year, which I guess really makes it more Band Aid 2.

Curmudgeonly? Probably. But for all my seeming rancor I have left you (or at least those of you exempt from spending a holiday season around me) with one honey of a gift. That’s right, when the chain ‘o thanks makes its way to you at your own holiday dinner table, you are now armed with one great response:

I’m thankful I don’t have to spend a holiday with Jacob Cummer, that sour old coot.

My 82 year-old neighbor called me a few weeks ago asking me to stop over when I had a chance. This happens every now and again, usually because he needs a hand with something or wants to meet to talk about a time for him and his friend to stop over to see our son.

Anyway, I headed over to his house after finishing dinner that night. My neighbor—let’s call him Skip—wanted to talk about three things:

1. The economy

2. Whether or not I knew two of the solar lights in my garden near the street were out

3. My interest in sharing a snowblower starting this winter

I told him the economy was “really messed up,” and thanked him for once more pointing out my juiceless garden lights. But number 3 needs a little more explanation.

To broach that topic, Skip asked me to have a seat in his living room. He then proceeded to tell me about the increase in prices for the snow removal guy he has had for years, and how he just didn’t think it was right. By this point in the conversation, I saw where things were heading. I had my “no” all prepared. There were any number of valid reasons for my feelings, not least of which the fact that I didn’t want to pony the scratch for even half a snowblower. But Skip drove a hard bargain with his opening salvo alone.

“I buy it. You keep it in your garage and do your driveway and mine. Oh, and mine can wait until the evening when it snows since I know you have to go to work in the morning.”

Ummm…sure?

Now, I like snow, and I don’t mind shoveling one bit. It’s actually kind of a nice workout during those winter months when other outdoor chores slumber until spring. But last year’s blizzard about did me in. Skip’s offer probably came at a perfect time, what with that eight-hour job from last February 1^st still fresh in my mind. I answered in the affirmative and we shook hands. He showed me the puzzles he had been working on with his friend—let’s call her Phyllis. Then he gave me his customary “Well, you be good now,” and I headed home.

Skip and I have since started up the snowblower a few times for kicks. “Let’s see if we can get her ripping with no priming,” Skip said that first day in his garage, tags still dangling from the handle of the new machine. He yanked the pull cord. Nothing. Another yank. Still nothing. A dejected shake of the head, and then Skip turned to me.

“One hit on the primer,” he said. (He really wanted it to start without priming.) He tapped the primer gingerly, took a breath, and yanked the pull cord once more. This time the beast roared to life, filling the garage and lighting Skip’s face with delight. Choke in, then out. Blade up, then down, Skip communicating each of his moves with silent gestures, unable to speak over the snowblower. I nodded my understanding, repeatedly. We stopped, chatted, started it again a few more times. He wasn’t yet ready to have me keep the blower in my garage yet.

“Uh, maybe when it gets closer to winter,” he said. Then he waved and started toward his door. “Well, you be good now.”

Since then we have tried the blower twice more, once because the temperature had dipped below 60, the other time when it fell under 50, each time a test of the blower’s performance in cooling weather.

“We’ll hit 'er again when it gets close to freezing,” Skip said.

“My thoughts exactly,” I answered. (They weren’t my thoughts at all.)

“Say, you want to take the manual with you for a read?” he said after our last trial. I agreed and he gathered it, handing it to me though not really wanting to part with it. “Well, you be good now,” he said.

In the weeks since, we’ve talked about my garage’s fitness to accept the snowblower for storage, the fact that one does not mix the oil with the gas in this blower, my garage’s fitness to accept the snowblower for storage, and the fact that one does not mix the oil with the gas in this blower. And the fitness of my garage to accept the snowblower for storage. 

When last we chatted, during a lull in the conversation, I smiled and said, “Wouldn’t it kind of be funny now if we didn’t even get any snow this winter?”

Skip didn’t think it was funny. “Well, you be good now,” he said through lips pulled tight, then made a beeline for the house. 

I’m not sure if any of this will be easier than the hours lost and the back pain endured in previous winters. I’m already having nightmares about accidentally mixing oil with the gas, or something in my most unfit garage falling on top of the blower and denting or scratching it. I can’t even imagine how difficult that conversation would be. But I also know my partnership with Skip has already yielded ~900 words, and that there is a lot of winter ahead. Blog content springs eternal.

Oh, and when I headed out to the backyard with the dog this morning, the snowblower and a brand new gas can were sitting outside the garage door, waiting for me. We have windows in our garage, and I would bet dollars to donuts Skip took a peek before leaving my gifts for me. Apparently the garage is now fit for the blower. Only thing left to do before winter is shade the garage windows. 

And find the manual for the machine. I have no idea what happened to that.

Remember Ziggy, the name for the artificial intelligence that informed Sam and Al's decisions on Quantum Leap? I promise it works in here eventually, but first we leap back a few days ourselves to the start of this past week. 

October 10^th, 2011—the day of days. Since starting my new job in the middle of July, I had earmarked that day, appropriately identified it as the carrot waiting for me at the end of the stick that was late summer (I hate late summer). October 10^th was my first day off work since starting my job, and at the end of that day, I was left with only one thought:

I am terrible at days off.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, anticipate them, circle them on my calendar when they are no closer than six months out. I approach them with joy, and wonder, and care. But that last thing—the care—may be where things go wrong with me, and not because I wield it, but perhaps because I apply it too liberally.

When I talk about days off, I’m not counting holidays here. Holidays are great in their own right, if often filled fuller than workdays (trips, reunions, the crush of everyone else with the day off at favorite haunts, etc.). I’m talking just a straight day off.

We are quickly approaching the season in which I am universally reviled (more than usual, that is).

I’m not talking about fall, which everyone seems to revere to at least some small degree. I love fall, too, I daresay even more than the next guy or gal. The leaves, the foods, the slowing cadence of that world outside—I love all of it. My love of fall, so far as I am aware, is not what inspires hatred of me. It is what follows autumn, that season that many begin cursing already now.

And I’m hated because I do not share in that fear. In fact, fall is but the warm-up for me, the appetizer for the true entrée that can only be winter.

I saw my breath for the first time on a run last week. A few days later, I stepped out for lunch under an early afternoon sun and felt almost chilly. One morning, I even had to let my car run for a few minutes to defrost the windows. On a walk with the family late last week, I wore jeans and a sweatshirt and felt perfectly comfortable. No sweat, no bugs, no need to change into the fourth t-shirt of the day upon completion of the stroll. Just crispness and chill.

I love it all, but feel pretty alone in that most days, especially at home. The hint of a smile on my face brought on by a chilly forecast inspires in my wife a murderous look. My “silver linings” make her nauseous. She is disgusted by my welcoming of daylight savings time. (In her defense, I may play up my love a bit knowing it gets a rise out of her.)

It bears noting that I really love every season. In fact, the only time I hate a season is when I am at the very end of it. Then I’m done, ready for what lies ahead, be it the gardening of spring or the battening down of the hatches for winter. Where I feel like I stand mostly alone is in not having that one-fourth of the year set aside for pure and unadulterated hatred.

I have tried for years to bring my wife around to my line of thinking with winter. We’ve made progress, sure, but still she is apoplectic by January, which is usually just when my love for winter is in full bloom. I’ve given up on trying to convince her, so I’m here to change some other minds, to urge folks to come on over to my side and embrace the unique offerings of winter. And really, those unique offerings can be crystallized in one word: torpor.

I’m not a lazy guy. Come spring, I can literally go from dawn to dusk in my yard with various projects. But there is always that part of me in those warm weather months that is torn, nights where I want to head downstairs to sit in front of the TV with the next disc of whichever show my wife and I are catching up on, but feel guilty in doing so for the daylight that remains. Daylight and warm weather conspire to shake their collective head at me, disappointed in my do-nothingness. Yard work, walks downtown, ice cream on our favorite bench—none of it will be available in those cold weather months, and that reality gnaws at me. I need to take advantage, latest season of Fringe on Blu-ray be damned. It feels like a job come August.

By late summer, I begin to covet that season that forces me indoors, that gives me all the excuse I need to bypass work and simply submit to a book or a blank Word document or a movie I would never “waste” time watching in those more active months (like Death Sentence, with Kevin Bacon!). Second cup of coffee and a delayed shower on Saturday? Sure! I’m not leaving the house until Monday anyway. (Truth be told, the delayed shower thing is total bullpucky—I need my shower within 10 minutes of waking.)

Some of my personal winter highlights follow.

TV

We’re not big TV people, but winter seems to give us the permission we need to become just that. The 2009-10 winter, for instance, saw my wife and I rip through every episode of The Sopranos, which is something I never would have been able to do so quickly in the summer. And that’s not all. We also got through Six Feet Under, Lost, and Weeds that same year. That was a good winter for television (if bad for brainwaves).

Books that always haunted me

Pynchon. Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow had haunted me since my college years, when I couldn't get more than 50 pages in. Last winter, with the help of a reading partner (and the urging brought on by being gifted the book by my step-dad), I conquered that tome. Never could have done that in the warm weather months.

Stout

The darker the beer, the better, no more so than in winter. An oatmeal stout on a blustery January day is unimaginably perfect for me. It just doesn’t taste the same in shorts and a moist t-shirt.

Clean air

I know it probably isn’t actually cleaner at all, but something about winter air just seems so damn refreshing. Cold yes, but refreshing nonetheless. I love a good morning run in winter. It’s like rebirth for my lungs to start each day after too many hours immersed in the dry artificial heat of the indoors.

Absolute silence

I may never get the deserted island I’ve always wanted, but winter gets me as close as I may ever find myself. Hikes, walks, bundled-up chill sessions on the deck—the utter stillness of a ripping cold winter’s day in Iowa is something to behold.

Young adults and their frigid morning strolls

Living in a college town, we are flush with young adults in our area. There may be no greater comedy for me than driving around town on a Saturday morning, watching the young wanderers stumble from wherever they ended up the night before to wherever they call home, sans coats and several brain cells. It’s like the saddest zombie movie you’ve ever seen, and it plays live every week!

Movies with winter settings

It’s an oddity my own, so far as I know, but I have a thing about watching movies out of season, that “thing” being that I don’t do it. Fargo, Insomnia, The Thing (John Carpenter), The Shining, Wonder Boys, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian), and so many more—all personal favorites, and all better in winter.

I can't say my silver linings will help on those worst of the winter days, but they're all part of loving winter for me...until I hate it.

I was out of town with a few good friends a couple weeks ago. We camped, partook in some great live music, and spent hours telling stories we’ve all told countless times. There was fire, and libations, and a total dearth of responsibility (save for getting to the communal showers early enough to avoid a long wait).

There were also pancakes.

Now, for the sake of context, I first need to elaborate on my most unique love affair with the flapjack. I can’t say for sure where it began, but I know that any day is made better with cakes in it. And if that isn’t true love, what is?

Some of my fondest memories from childhood are Sunday breakfasts out with my family, often to the local Big Boy restaurant. There I would order my one massive pancake, douse it with syrup, and take far too long in drawing out the pleasure of savoring it. This was the spongy style pancake, porous and absorbent and ready to drink up all the topping I could pour on it. I loved those pancakes.

My mom made some mean cakes, too. Hers were, and still are, something rather, well, her own. Each cake weighs more than my head, and they have a sturdy exterior that repels the syrup. They kind of look lacquered or bronzed until you get inside them. Once you cut those beasts open, you find a bounty of steamy, gluttonous goodness. Those suckers are dense and chewy and stick to the ribs in ways no food item should. One in the morning and you’re good until dinner.

When I moved on to college, I insisted on one day of pancakes each week with friends. I wasn’t picky. Any breakfast joint would do, and did. As long as they were hot, came with a pat of something at least slightly resembling butter, and were delivered with hot syrup (my one caveat), then I was good to go.

My taste has matured somewhat as I have aged. The butter, for instance, has to be just right. Brining me a frozen, un-spreadable little cube of yellow on the plate is a sin. “Forgetting” my a la carte cake until it has cooled irreparably on the pickup counter is the best way to shave a good 5% off your tip. And thinking I don’t want the cake in addition to my breakfast order, rather than as a substitution for the toast? We’ve got problems. To the chagrin of my wife, I have refused to return to otherwise wonderful breakfast spots if the cakes don’t get the culinary care they so deserve. It is neglect most foul, and I don’t stand for it.

Bottom line: I takes my cakes seriously.

I circle back to my weekend away now. We had some divine cakes at a little restaurant in Wisconsin each day we were there. To start, they were cooked in butter, not some lifeless nonstick spray. They were not from a box—that much was obvious. They were golden and buttery crisp on the outside, and chewy and perfect on the inside. The syrup was a bit dodgy, which was the only thing preventing me from relocating my family to that town, but it did little to sully the experience.  

And while the pancakes were memorable, I came to realize at that breakfast table that the magic of the cake, for me, is as much a result of the shared experience as anything else. Around those Wisconsin cakes, we talked about life, solved problems, shared concerns, hashed things out. I realized something. Have a cake, and your taste buds thank you. Share some cakes with loved ones, and the experience becomes transcendent, at least for me.

As a kid, I had two working parents with schedules that often had them home at different times of the day. Sunday breakfasts were sometimes the only times the four of us sat together, and always those breakfasts included cakes. In college, friends and I recounted tales of our nights-before over cakes and coffee. In the years since, my wife and I have refined some of our sweetest life plans while mopping up a breakfast with a cake in closing. And in this new parenthood thing, one of my greatest joys is griddling the perfect cake for my boy. The conversation in that last example is lacking right now, but hopefully we’ll get there.

Sam Borden, a New York Times sportswriter I read often, wrote a piece to eulogize his recently deceased father-in-law a few years back. He talked about the man’s love for cakes, and his penchant for ordering “a stack for the table” when out to breakfast with family or friends. I love that story, especially now as a father myself. That’s a guy who understood the magic of cakes.

Like any new father, I struggle daily with thoughts of what exactly I am passing along to my son, both good (awesome dance moves) and bad (mouth like a sailor). When it comes to worldly goods to pass down, I know I do not possess riches, nor power to wield for him someday. What I pass down to him will have to be created heretofore. I’ve always known that.

And it got me thinking—I love cakes, and writing, and obsessing over thoughts of what to leave the boy as my sole legatee. And chronicling the banalities of a life most ordinary? If you’ve read this far—or have read any post I’ve written in this space—you already know I dig that, too.

In that spirit, I launch a new endeavor this weekend. Starting Saturday, I slip surreptitiously into the nearest phone booth, don the cape and holstered spatula, and become The Griddler, thus beginning a one-year experiment with a new cake a week. 52 Saturdays, 52 cakes, no two the same, and all of it chronicled on my new cyber griddle. I will be passing along to my boy a legacy of flapjacks—lots of flapjacks.

And to that boy, I say: Some people fill safety deposit boxes with riches, then leave their kids with keys and thoughtful letters in envelopes to be opened only after they have died. Me? I fill a blog with mountains of pancakes and totally unnecessary drivel about those cakes. And then when you're old enough, I pass that cyber griddle to you.

You’re welcome, son.

Walgreens made me a little sad the other day. Not for any of the reasons that may be running through your head upon hearing that—their beer selection, the line at the pharmacy, the people treating Redbox like it’s a brick-and-mortar video store to peruse at their leisure—but rather because of what rained down upon me from those tinny, recessed speakers above.

The wail was unmistakable, that singular falsetto that could only be Bono. It was With or Without You, and I know what you’re thinking: raindrops out the window, a tear on Jake’s cheek, melancholy begotten by sudden nostalgia for young love. And you would be wrong. There is nothing about the nature of the song that made me sad. The sadness came instead from where the song  was being played, how it was brazenly interrupted twice by intercom communiqué, and the question of when, exactly, it had earned such a sad rotation fate.

It’s important to note I’m not a big U2 fan, and that any hopes of liking With or Without You into my adulthood were dashed by Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer’s schmaltz years ago. But there was a time when I loved that song, in my younger days, when I was above neither taping it off the radio nor playing it a few thousand times a day on my sweet Emerson boom box. I was a preadolescent when that tune was all the rage, and that shrieky, angsty, heartbreaky thing was perfect for my perpetual mindset. I had no idea in hell what I could or could not live without at that point in my life, but damn it all if I didn’t sing loud and pretend.

I should also note that my disinterest in U2 had nothing to do with musical snobbery. I was sure I would marry Paula Abdul, and thought I was the next Bobby Brown, after all. If anything, I was probably just not ready for the intricacies of U2, which is its own sad story entirely.

My relative indifference aside, U2 is a pretty big deal when it comes to the bands of my generation. And the songs of theirs I love I really love. (Anything from Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby are just fine by me.) They were certainly original in spurts, and they consistently elevated the radio pop thing for our often quality-starved musical offerings. And I also have nothing against Walgreens.

Relative U2 apathy, healthy relationship with Walgreens—what’s the problem with my hearing that song, you ask? Well, you see, it’s just that in my previous visit to the store, I heard Neneh Cherry. Not that I am judging Neneh Cherry, mind you (see Brown, Bobby), but U2 she ain't. I've also had a steady diet of Eddie Money in that store, and Eddie Murphy’s My Girl Likes to Party All the Time has been known to join the proceedings as well. All of that begged the questions: Has U2 really come to this? Am I getting so freaking old that the golden music of my era is the soundtrack for folks’ errands to secure baby formula and Stetson cologne?

I know I am neither the first nor the last to experience this phenomenon. For example, I grew up sure that the song Like a Rock was written by some ad wiz for Chevrolet. The truck commercials with Seger’s voice were everywhere when I was a kid. That song was synonymous with an S-10 rumbling swiftly through mud puddles and over treacherous mountain terrain (and, apparently, with squirting cold water in your face, as the video at the link illustrates). Years later, I remember being in the car with my dad one day when that song came on the radio.

“Hey!” I said. “The Chevy song. It’s on the radio!” My dad got tight-lipped and remained silent. “And they added extra verses!” I don’t know that I ever saw him so disappointed in me. (Except maybe the time he asked me to keep the scorecard for him while he ran to the bathroom at a Yankees game. I did not do it right.) Maybe that episode in the car was a sudden, shocking moment of musical irrelevance for my dad. When I told him the song was better in the commercial, I thought he’d lose it.

My boy will no doubt blaspheme some sacred musical treasure of mine one day. In fact, he has already thumbed his nose at a few of my favorite jazz tracks. But that’s supposed to happen. That’s as much a rite of passage for a parent as the first time you’re sure you’ve killed your child with something careless you’ve done (like when one of either my wife or yours truly dropped a large kitchen knife off the counter mere inches from where our son played on the floor last week). It’s going to happen. I get it.

But Walgreens? Isn’t that a little like no one attending the visitation for the guy everyone claimed to revere in life? Ross and Rachel’s memory deserves better than that.

The boy awoke one day this week with what appeared to be a handful of chewed, dried green beans on his nose. In my stupor, I wondered, in no particular order: how his mouthful of green beans could have gotten affixed to his nose, why he didn’t bother to wipe the gob away, and which of his parents had given him green beans in his crib before bed anyway.

The haze began to lift and I gathered my senses, realizing pretty quickly the foreign body had nothing to do with green beans, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down. The boy was apoplectic. I looked at the dark green mass, unsure about exactly what to do as my wife held him and tried to console him. I considered grabbing for it, but in all honesty I was sure his nose might come with it if I did. The mass was that solid.

Long story short, yes, we got rid of it, and no, his nose did not come, too. But that isn’t the real story anyway. The real story is in the fact I was willing to grab for it at all. In fact, the real story might be that I did not turn and beeline for a safe corner of the house, as far away as possible from the effluence of infant cold secretions.

I’m the guy who went through gallons of hand soap a month when I was an elementary teacher. My kids knew not to go near their noses with their fingers, not to sneeze without covering, and not to mouth the communal pencils. They might have learned some core content subject matter, too, but they absolutely knew to keep their snot and saliva to themselves.

Many friends fretted about me as fatherhood approached. They knew well my aversion to goo. I think some expected to find me in a hazmat suit upon their first visit to us after childbirth. But a little more than a year in, I can safely say I have made some strides.

And as I reflect, I think I passed my fatherly Rubicon back in month number one. I was alone with the boy one afternoon as my wife had stepped out for some shopping. I had changed plenty of diapers by this point in the whole parenting thing, and I proceeded to do the same with a particularly full one on that day. Maybe I was cocky from the speed I had gained with the process. Maybe the lack of sleep had me off my game. Whatever the cause, I made a fatal error that afternoon.

In a misguided economical move, I tried to use a wipe one time too many. I saw that it was spent, knew it had nary a swipe left in it. But I went in anyway, sure I could summon surface area it just no longer had. 

My forefinger bore the brunt of my mistake. I felt the awful warmth immediately, my knees buckling and my hair standing on end. “Cut off the finger!” may have roared in my mind. It had happened before, but always to a lesser degree (a streak here, a dab there) and always when my wife was there for a pass of the baton while I sped off to the nearest decontamination facility.

Economy of use be damned, I used a new wipe, or ten, for my finger and powered through, literally gritting my teeth and steeling myself for that treacherous final few minutes of the change before I could plop him in his crib and run for the nearest scrub brush.

From that moment on, I have surprised myself as much as anyone. I have returned to the boy the toys he drops on the ground when in his stroller, rather than burning them. I have not dropped him when he is so untoward as to sneeze near me without covering his nose. And I have even, when bereft of a tissue, used my fingers to clear some of his incessant nose drips. (I follow this last thing by wiping what I have culled onto the back of his shorts, mind you. It’s kind of at home there anyway, and seems as far away from me as can be realistically expected in those desperate moments.)

Capping off this new me were some recent trips (note the plural form) we took to Sand in the City in downtown Iowa City this weekend. My hatred of sand, while not well documented, is well proselytized to most who know me. I abhor the stuff. I look at it and see only uncomfortable shoe litter, car crevice invader, and limitless potential for spiders or sand fleas. It’s sad, I know, for the beach is otherwise very appealing to me, and the Sand in the City participants create sculptures that are most worthy of anyone’s attention, sand aversion or not. But up until this year, I didn’t care. I found a million reasons to wiggle out of going.

But the trump card was played last weekend. “Graham will love the sculptures” was thrown out, and I could not argue that in good faith. He’s a rubbernecker, that one, keen to the people-watching and constant vigilance one finds most enjoyable downtown. Of course he would love it.

And indeed, he loved it all—the sculptures, the buzz of activity, the smell of the food vendors (like me), the sound of the live music…and the giant freaking mound of sand that had been dropped on Dubuque Street for kids to frolic upon.

Luckily for me, his appreciation for that last part was from afar yet this year, the whole not-being-able-to-walk thing the gum in the works for his plans to dig (dig and track sand through our house for no fewer than eight months hence, that is). Instead, he cooed and babbled and reached longingly from his stroller toward the slightly larger little people dotting the mountain of glorified dirt. And as much as it pains me to see him sad, I was most happy for his inability to join the others.

Despite the leaps I have taken in these other areas, I think I may need some time yet with the sand thing. Or time to plan an out-of-towner for the Sand in the City weekend 2012.

I have been diagnosed with INFZ. It turned up in a routine personality assessment at the new job. Symptomatic behaviors apparently include introverting, intuiting, feeling, and organizing.

My first thought after receiving the results from my assessment: Well, at least I have a name for it now. Some of it surprised me, sure, but the bulk of it hit me right between the eyes.

The thing that struck me most about the assessment itself was the positive spin the report narrative contains. Little attention is paid to the deficits inherent in the personality types. And I get it. We’re all important, we all bring unique strengths and perspectives, different strokes make the world go round, blah, blah, blah.

And it’s true. My new workplace does a cool thing where they map the team members' personalities so we can see where we are similar and different. We then meet with an in-house “People Development” expert to discuss results and implications on the workplace.

You get to see how different types approach the same problems in totally different ways. We talk about the behaviors stressful situations might elicit in different types. (I am supposedly the calm optimist, seeking harmony and avoiding negativity whenever possible.)

But as much as I think I have to offer to a workplace as an INFZ (and to my relationships, personally), I can’t help but think about an entirely different report, the kind that doesn’t sugarcoat things but instead gets all Dr. Phil about the ways in which one sucks as a result of their abhorrent peccadilloes.

In that spirit, I couldn’t help doing some internal revision as I read my profile. In bold are traits and characteristics I presumably possess according to my profile.

Imaginative, Inspired, Tenacious, Creative, and Inward-Looking

Translation: Yes, you have truly unique ideas, even when they’re terrible. Of course, you don’t need anyone to tell you they’re terrible. The other yous inside of you will talk you out of them if need be. Or you’ll just bang your proverbial head against any one of the many brick walls inside your own little world until you make your idea work (or die trying). What you won’t do is give an inch, you ass, to anyone else as they try to talk you out of your idea.

Ignorant of Obstacles/Outside Obstacles Mean Less Than Own Personal Standards

Translation: Some hills seriously can’t be climbed (imbecile). You might be privy to that if you weren’t so inside yourself. 17 college credit hours in a single summer session (which you did so you could still graduate in four years, like you had planned)? Was it really worth the 15 pounds you lost, or the unknown effects from the massive, long-term intake of NoDoz?

Live in a World of Ideas/Arrays of Concepts and Associations People May Never Fully Understand

Translation: Right, we know. No one understands you (eye roll). And of course you cannot be bothered with articulating your abstract thinking, introvert that you are.

Cherish Companionship but Prefer (and Excel Within) a Quiet Working Environment

Translation: And you lasted seven years teaching elementary school how, exactly?

Don’t Casually Reveal Self to Others

Translation: Remember when you sweated bullets during the thirty minutes of questions for this assessment? That was ridiculous.

Measure Friendships by Depth and Longevity Rather than Breadth and Number

Translation: You throw simultaneously exclusive, intimate, and lame parties. Your chat sessions are stellar. But your parties? Not a party guy.

And, in closing, a few funny notes from the rest of the profile:

·       I hate a lack of plans, or change for change’s sake, which should come as a surprise to no one who knows me even moderately well.

We’ve talked long enough now. I’m off to the quiet place within myself that I could never really explain to you.

I did a lot of hanging out with car salespeople tonight in search of my next sled. I saw a great many “slick rides” in my time with my new friends, and I was reminded of that most unique car lot vernacular.

I remember going to a car lot with my dad as a kid. The guy my dad worked with kept talking about how “she (whichever car was being discussed) purred like a kitten.” Who talks like that? I remember thinking. Outside of Hunter (Fred Dryer to the layperson), I had never known someone to talk so cool. That guy owned that “purr” line and trotted it out effortlessly.

And for me, that was it. It was decided. Absent a quick rise to homicide detective with the LAPD (like Hunter), I would be a car salesman one day. I wanted to talk like that. I needed a job that would allow me to do so.

It’s a good thing it never happened, really. I’m wired totally wrong for that line of work. People who do it have always amazed me with the uncertainty they accept. They have gall that I don’t. I need the security of a regular paycheck and the latitude to disengage from others for a while when I need to. That’s how I tick. It is not how that line of work ticks.

There have been other jobs throughout the years I have been convinced would fulfill my every desire. Ice cream truck driver, data entry specialist, operator of X machine in the town widget factory—my wayward want has seen it all.

But I have come to learn that few of the jobs that have, at one point or another, seemed glamorous to me actually are. The whole “grass is always greener” thing seems particularly apt when talking about work. I know this partially from trying (hotel front desk work), and partly vicariously (friend who did data entry). Right now, thankfully, I love my job, so I’m standing in the green grass already.

But it wasn’t so long ago that the world of work was my oyster. On some particularly, er, imaginative and unemployed evenings in bed, I would lie picturing myself in one of the many jobs that have always fascinated me for one reason or another.  I dedicate what remains of this post to the jobs that filled my not-so-lucid head with wonder in those moments. (I am, of course, willfully ignoring all kinds of downsides to these jobs, just as I did for the ones I mentioned above. But dreams are not to be sullied by reality.)

Tollbooth Operator

The solitude is so appealing. Yes, the line of people seems never-ending, but the exchanges rarely exceed twenty seconds. Even the most grating personality is off your radar in no time. And there have to be lulls, no? Times with nothing to do but pull out the book or zone out to the radio?

The Person Who Holds the “Slow” Sign on the Highway

Save for the imminent corporeal danger, it appears to be a low stress job. It pays well, according to the various job postings, and you’d be flush with Vitamin D. I’d have a tan like Richard Hamilton and never have to take my work home with me (except the dust, which probably never washes away).

Meter Maid

Imagine the exercise! I might be a pariah to legions of downtown motorists, but I have thick skin.

1^st Base Coach in Baseball

I would get paid well, but wouldn’t have nearly the stress of the manager, or even the third base coach. Bullpen coach might be kind of cool, too, but I like the idea of getting paid to see the ballgames up close, doing a job that consists primarily of holding players’ batting gloves when they reach base. Share what I've learned about a pitcher's move to first, tell him not to get picked off, repeat.

Hotel Concierge

Getting paid to hold doors and dispense advice on the best restaurants in town? Sign me up. And that doesn’t even take into account the employee discount on hotel stays. Score!

Assistant to the Traveling Secretary for the New York Yankees

Huge Seinfeld and Yankees fan. George’s former job is like a little slice of heaven.

Milk Man

We can reintroduce this, right? I dig the whites, and the milkmen always seem so happy in old timey movies.

So, what am I missing? Do I stand alone on these?

The idea of work is one that always fascinates me. Work is about a paycheck and personal satisfaction, sure, and hours are a huge consideration as well. But it’s those smaller components that make one person’s dream job another’s nightmare, and the differences in taste are what fascinate me most.

Obviously, as my list would indicate, I’m drawn to jobs that bring a certain solitude (I didn’t even mention lighthouse keeper in that list! Or film projectionist!). I also value jobs that put me close to things I love (like travel and baseball). The fact I love those things from afar might be all the reason I need to not work so closely to them, lest the romance be tarnished by workaday realities. Perhaps they’re better left for sleepless imaginings.

Now, where does one begin their climb to homicide detective?

My boy turns the big oh-1 this Sunday. It’s madness, I tell you. Time has flown by, the experience has changed my life, I never knew how much I could love him—all clichés, and all true. Other clichés—like how you can’t wake a sleeping baby, or that the diapers of breastfed babies smell “just like buttermilk”—are ridiculous. But the ones about the enormity of the love you feel for those little creatures, from larval stage onward? All true.

With his birthday party nigh, I have been agonizing about finding the perfect father-to-son gift for him, and I can’t seem to decide on exactly what that should be.

My favorite childhood gift is easy to recall.

I loved the Lakers as a kid, but more notably I was a huge—huge—Magic Johnson fan (even naming my first ever pet, a hamster, Magic). You could have your Jordan (cold and humorless) and your Bird (boring as all get out). I loved the court vision and artistry of Magic, the fun he demanded everyone around him have.

I remember watching the 1987 finals on a ten inch black-and-white on the patio with my dad. I went wild when the Lakers sealed it in Game 6, and continued celebrating all the way through the playing of the series closing song, “Back in the High Life Again” by Steve Winwood. Two months later I received a Lakers championship hat for my birthday and was free to relive the excitement all over again. Best. Gift. Ever.

It was a gaudy hat with a giant patch on the front peacocking my team’s triumph. But the real problem with the hat was that it was white—stark white. Add to that the fact that I grew up in Iowa, where there are summers, which are humid. Mix in an active kid and you get sweat, and lots of it. The white hat was yellow by the end of year one, and quickly became its own yellow/brown/green color. By the time the Pistons came along for the ’89 finals, that hat looked more like an oil rag atop my head. It probably smelled, though I was at that age that precluded me from noticing.

What I do know are two things: I loved that hat, and my dad quickly hated it. He would cringe at the sight of it, would threaten to burn it some night while I was sleeping (jokingly, I think). He implored me to accept a new lid, something darker, crisper, not condemnable. I resisted.

Like any good preadolescent, my fit of defiance lasted a couple of years. I wore the hat everywhere. Family gatherings, restaurants, the pool—it never left me. I became convinced that the success the Lakers were experiencing was because of my reverence for that hat. That success had nothing to do with Kareem’s aging but still dominant skyhook, or James Worthy’s movement in open space. It could not be attributed to Byron Scott’s clutch three-pointers, AC Green’s rebounding, or Michael Cooper’s defense. It had everything to do with my hat (and Magic Johnson, of course). The hat was my worship to the basketball gods, and the gods rewarded me with years of dominance.

I loved that hat the way Lenny loved the rabbits—sweetly, good-heartedly, but ultimately destructively. The bill eventually lost the ability to hold its form, becoming floppy like a piece of limp, moist paper. The smell became apparent even to me. When it started feeling waxy to the touch, even I could no longer defend it. It was time for it to go, and I knew it. (That the Pistons went on to beat the Lakers in the ’89 finals, after the surrender of the hat, is not lost upon me, by the way.)

I would not allow for the hat to be burned, as my dad insisted (maybe not so jokingly by that point). Instead, it went to the crawl space, in a box with stuffed animals and other beacons of my childhood. I can’t say where it rests now.

I’m not so naïve as to think that whatever I choose for the boy’s first birthday will hold nearly so much significance. He doesn’t really know what he likes yet, aside from Elmo singing things. Eventually he’ll dig something enough to want some symbol of it, but I have time. In the meanwhile, I don’t think I can go wrong with whatever I choose. He’s so into spatulas right now that I could probably find him something he’d love in the small kitchen aisle of Walgreen’s near our house.

Someday, though, I hope to bestow upon him his version of that Lakers hat, if only so I can torment him with threats of sacrificial burnings as he slumbers some night. That’s how I dad.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a book right now, in addition to starting my new job. I’m capable only of some random noodling this week, though I find the topic most worthy. I was always taught that modeling is the best teaching. I’ve talked about it enough. Vanilla is my cud. Now, watch me chew. (Time stamped at bottom for explanatory purposes.)

***

Is it just me, or does vanilla get a really bad rap? “He/she is so vanilla” is bandied about too often, in my humble opinion. It has come to mean boring, or in some cases worse than boring. But is the word worthy? Really? Granted, Vanilla Ice was awful. But does vanilla ice not sound all kinds of refreshing?

I love vanilla (which may not be the best endorsement for it, what with my rampant boringness and all). According to Wikipedia, it is the world’s second most expensive spice behind saffron, is good for helping to treat fevers, and is one honey of an aphrodisiac. Any of that sound boring to you? But more to the point, the word itself is nice. Vanilla. It rolls so beautifully off the tongue.

Other words earn their reputations. They’re as awful in reality as they are in speech. Phlegm comes to mind. Bunion, while it may sound like a cute little root vegetable, is anything but. Pus and snot and regurgitate and scab are all as bad as they sound.

And then you have the words that could be beautiful, if not for those pesky definitions. Curdle is one of those for me. Don’t want to see it, or smell it, or—yama hama—accidentally swallow it. But say it? I could say it all day. Imagine a Smurf named Curdle, or a new child’s toy called Curdle the Cuddly Canine. See? Not so bad.

But returning to vanilla for the moment, how did it become synonymous with banal, anyway? I would chalk it up to lack of imagination, to our culture’s obsession with bigger and better and more complicated as predictors for quality. To them, vanilla must be boring. But that may be simplifying it. There has to be a better reason. Right?

For my money, I’ll take vanilla soft serve any day over chocolate. If you absolutely have to have an artificial car air freshener (and I cannot stress have to enough), is vanilla not the way to go? And vanilla extract? Are there many better smells in the kitchen than that? Don’t even get me started on the splendor of vanilla Oreos versus the standard (and way too bitter) chocolate.

Vanilla Bean was one of the more misunderstood fragrances in a former job of mine. It languished alongside the more peppy titles like Peach Blossom (which was nauseating), Country Apple (juvenile), and even Juniper Berry (way too artificially floral). The Vanilla Bean made you hungry for cake. Cake, I tell you! But there it sat, untouched, collecting dust, curdling, as it were, in its little eight-ounce plastic prison.

My son’s first’s birthday is approaching, and the topic of late has been which flavor cake to choose. I offered vanilla as my choice. I got the “Seriously?” look immediately. The cake will not be vanilla.

I do understand the threat of vanilla-gone-bad. In my new job, my desperate need for an afternoon caffeine fix led me to the—gasp—coffee vending machine the other day. I figured it would be bad, and that doctoring it up a bit might help. I chose the vanilla flavoring for it, and instantly realized I had chosen poorly. But would the chocolate choice have been any better? Was the hazelnut even worth a sniff? Color me doubtful.

So, heretofore, vanilla shall ne’er be used so derogatorily around me. Talk about your “hazelnut” cubicle mates, if you must choose an otherwise delightful word to mean something so undesirable. Yogurt has it figured out, making a clear distinction between vanilla and plain. Be like yogurt.

Just leave vanilla alone.

Composed from 7:41-8:24 on Thursday evening.

I’m sitting outside Java House in downtown Iowa City right now, and no sooner did I load a blank Word document than a disheveled youth leaned over the railing and yelled a gay slur at me. (I had it coming, of course, since we all know there’s apparently nothing gayer than typing...outside, no less.)

Ahhh…Iowa City in summer.

Harmless ruffians aside, I love this town, no more than in the summer months. There’s a certain cadence that always heats up with the weather, a flow occluded by the thrum of student life for the other nine months out of the year. I’m not one to begrudge student life, mind you. I choose to live here, and I know that the cost of living in a youthful, progressive town is driving vigilantly so as to avoid the wayward zombies texting-and-walking into traffic (among other tariffs, like hop-scotching fresh vomit in front of the various watering holes).

I was at a reading on Monday night, and the writer is a frequent Iowa City guest. He speaks adoringly of my beloved town, and goes to lengths to describe the pulse he feels when he is here in the summer. We who live here all know that pulse exists. We talk about in terms of the glory of May graduation weekend, the impending doom of August resumption of class. To hear an outsider describe it gave that feeling a certain validity, though. It means that the feeling is not so simple as to be just about the sudden wealth of open parking spaces, the dearth of bar-hopping flocks of ne’er-do-wells. The pulse is real. You can feel it.

I’ve always had my own summer pulse, too, for years as a student, and then as a teacher, though that pulse has certainly changed the last couple years (slowed, maybe?). Before fatherhood, my wife and I had a few summers of blissful aimlessness. In the evenings, I would leave the house after dinner, racing against other like-minded folks to secure one of the four outdoor tables at Java House to settle in and work for a couple hours. Once darkness swallowed me, I would move on from my coveted spot, heading north on foot for my favorite video store. There, I would sometimes spend an hour or more, chatting the proprietor, combing the selection I had already memorized anyway.

I would load up for the night, and usually that would include grabbing the next disc or two of whichever TV series my wife and I were trying to catch up on (Weeds, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Sopranos, Lost, 24, Six Feet Under, and on and on and…), or a movie that had somehow either slipped by us in the theater, which was rare, or had never come to Iowa City for us to miss.

At 11:00, we would sleepily (and hollowly) promise one more episode. At midnight, another.  We would typically be in bed by 1:00, though sometimes even later.  That was the beauty of my job, with summers off and all. My wife would usually be left tired for her own work the next day, but it was the summer, after all, and we had to take advantage of the summer.

My daytime hours were spent working on writing, meeting friends for coffee, and deliberating about dinner options far longer than I ever should have. I knocked out a book every couple days and made friends with every last one of the Ped Mall denizens. I reveled in the endless pursuit of the perfect summer iPod playlist. Sure, I’ll miss all that now with a job that runs a full twelve months. But there was a dark side to it all, too, one I am all too happy to shake.

Around this time every summer, the inevitable end to it all became very real.  July was half over, and August loomed like the shadowy other around the corner. June was bliss, pure and simple. July was often bliss, but just as often it felt like a punch to the gut with its random, copious supply of “last day of a good vacation” evocations. July was a string artfully commanded, and I was but the yo-yo. I’ll gladly cut the tether.

And August, for me, was never bliss. It meant sacrificing the aimless wonder until the next summer, and a return to town of the 20,000-or-so students who had departed in May. It’s probably no coincidence that my birthday, on August 14^th, was never something I anxiously awaited.

It isn’t just my new job that has changed my summer status. My video store has shuttered, and my evening table at the coffeehouse is rarely still available by the time I’m able to make it there (after the boy has been bathed and put down for the night). My wife and I are lucky to get 30 minutes of something watched on the DVR before going belly-up from exhaustion. The boy doesn’t care how behind we have gotten with True Blood, after all. He’s up by six whether we like it or not.

Right now, there’s some lively swing dancing going on down the way from where I sit, something that has become custom in the summer around here. It’s almost dark, and parents are still strolling here and there with young kids. I can even see three parking spots totally open within my purview. The real, lasting, consistent pulse of the city is pounding.

And my own summer pulse? That pulse I came to know and love was from a kind of summer with a limited shelf life anyway, more the product of a schedule that was perpetually too open than anything else. It was always going to expire at some point. A little calendar balance sounds good. I hear October can actually be a fun month. 

And who knows, I may even reclaim my birthday.

Uncle Ted is one of the toughest hombres I’ve ever known.

I saw him last weekend at a wedding. We stood near the dance floor and shared a beverage, which could be the story-starter for a thousand different tales, really. But this time was different. On this night, Ted was on alert, waiting any moment for a phone call notifying him his new cornea had arrived. (Ted’s a homebuilder who, more than three decades ago, took a nail in the eye. It finally degenerated to a point where he needed a transplant.)

He sipped his drink and told me about the procedure. He described the removal of the old cornea as being like a cookie cutter going in and taking out the bad part. Then they would sew in the new cornea with thread finer than human hair. I shuddered. He took another sip and shrugged. To say I am squeamish is putting it mildly. I stiffened my entire body in an effort to not let my knees knock just thinking about it.

“I won’t be able to lift much right away, but I should be back on the jobsite by the following week,” he said. I waited for the punch line. He just took another sip.

On Monday of this week, Ted got the call that his cornea was in. On Wednesday, the transplant was performed. He’s been out of surgery for more than a day now, and something tells me he already has three houses framed, eye pain be damned.

I take you back to few years ago now, on a Sunday. I placed a phone call to my dad that day. I was just calling to check in and chat, no big deal. He answered midway through the second ring, breathless, muffling a grunt. I worried right away about a heart attack.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said.

“Gah!” he started. Then he sighed in this otherworldly, high-pitched way I still hear in my nightmares. He gathered himself. “I was taking my sock off…gah!...when the phone rang and my toenail got caught in it…gah!...and came off.”

“Came off?” I said. The sock, right? I thought.

It wasn’t the sock, but the toenail itself. He went on to detail the incident, which is every bit as bad as it sounds. Now, what may have been wrong with the toenail for it to be so, well, ripe for the picking is anyone’s guess. It’s beside the point, though.

“So why’d you answer the phone?” I said. My breathing was quickening, my blood pressure surpassing my dad’s.

“Because it was ringing. It’s all good. What’s up?” he said.

It’s all good, I thought. What’s up? The conversation, of course, suffered.

“Where’s the toenail now?” I asked. “Were you careful getting your sock off? Why aren’t you more careful? Is there blood? Oh hell, are you bleeding right now?”

He gave me his Ah, relax sigh and tried to steer the conversation other places—the state of the Yankees, the stupid weather, his golf scores for the week—but it was no use. I was done, checked out at the very mention of a toenail being hastily removed by way of a sock. Yama hama.

I called to check in on the situation later in the day, and I think every day thereafter for a while.

“I got a bandage on it,” he kept telling me.  

Case closed.

I’m too squeamish to follow up at this point, too scared to know what has become of that toe. What I do know is that, like Uncle Ted, my dad treated it like any old thing, explaining what he needed to explain—while in excruciating pain—and moving on to other topics.

Not to be outdone, I experienced my own corporeal heroism this week. On Tuesday night, I dropped a can of soy whip on my foot. It hurt like crazy. But, having taken a page or two from the books of folks like Uncle Ted and my dad, I walked bravely from the kitchen that night (straight into the bedroom to give my wife the fifteen-minute report on how bad the pain was). I took four ibuprofen this morning to help with the pain from the dime-sized bruise near my ankle. I’m recovering well, thank you. I should be back to berries and nondairy cream by next week.

Cornea transplant surgeries, spontaneous toenail extractions, soy whip mishaps—we tough guys find ways to carry on.

It’s all good.

It isn’t so much that my son bangs his head a lot that worries me. It isn’t the knocks against the crib slats or face-plants into our wood floors. It isn’t his get-the-finger-wet-and-stab-for-the-nearest-outlet routine. It isn’t even the way he rams his forehead against mine.

It’s the ease with which he does those things, and the desire he has to repeat them. Not that I should talk.

By age five, I had experienced a skull fracture and a split noggin that required many stitches. I had also, at age three, run off a dock at full speed and into a lake in Wisconsin. I went on from there to split my head open five more times—twice in adulthood—break my arm twice, and receive dozens of wasp stings from a tangle with a nest in our flowering crabapple tree around age eight. I have broken two different fingers and three different toes, and nearly ruptured a large tendon in my ankle a few years back, which required some grizzly surgery to get me running again.

And let’s not get into the details of my helium overdose (a minor balloon indiscretion) in a hotel lobby at age ten.

So how am I, with my more than three decades on him, any different from the boy?

What separates me from this savage infant in my house is that I never enjoyed a single moment of any of those instances (except maybe the balloon thing, until I blacked out, at least). I’m an “act now, think later” type whose thinking is often tinged with a healthy dose of regret. I don’t know I can say the same for the boy. He’s proving to be an “act now, repeat” type.

I’m scared.

The other day, he sat playing with some toys on the floor while I readied a snack. My wife was away for the evening. The boy was babbling, which is nothing new. Then he let out a shrieking war cry and slammed his face down against the hardwood floor. I froze, not wanting to overreact and call forth a crying fit prematurely. I waited. He stared. Then he giggled.

Then he did the same thing. And again. Wait, stare, repeat. I scooped him up before he could do it a fourth time. His face was red, but his only complaint was being denied his fun.

It isn’t that he never regrets his actions. If he hits himself too hard, pinches something, feels the burn of the area rug on his knees, then sometimes he’ll cry out for some consoling. We’ll pick him up and he’ll put his two fingers in his mouth and demur for a minute or two. But then he’ll wiggle until returned to the floor, and often he’ll do the very thing he regretted moments before.

Look, I know this is but a taste of what’s to come. My wife and I both detest the “Oh, get ready!” reply that often comes from our stories of this nature. We get it. Really.

Today’s wood floor face-plant is tomorrow’s idiotic attempt at conquering a neighborhood bike ramp of shoddy construct (the source of head-split number three for yours truly, by the way). Grabs for the electrical outlets might one day be swipes at matches or cigarettes. I also know that any of those predicted futuristic equivalencies might prove mild compared to what he actually will do. It’s cool, even if in those moments I may not be. I signed up for this.

I think what irritates me about the “just you wait crowd”—despite their best of intentions—is that it ain’t news to me. Truly. I was that kid. The sutures and casts of my childhood became, well, incidents better left unsaid in this space in my teen years. Maybe my irritation is just me projecting my fear, fear that the kid is way too much like his old man.

But is it nature or nurture? I rest my case on the nature argument.

The Nurture Counterpoint: When Graham was but two weeks-old, I lay with him on the couch one night. I had finally gotten him to sleep in my arms, and didn’t want to move him more than a foot or two lest I undo what I had done. So, I lay him gently on the couch, then cradled him between my legs as I lay back myself for a rest.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but that “rest” became “sleep” in no time. Soon I found myself in the throes of one of those dreams of falling we only seem to have in the shallow waters of sleep, and that dream begot a wake with a start. That produced a jimmy of the leg, which resulted in my kicking my son in the head. In the head!

My heel miraculously caught all hard skull, but that was little consolation in the moment. I was sure I had irrevocably hurt the little guy. I shot upright to find his eyes had come alive, staring at me with something resembling confusion. Then he smacked his lips and went back to sleep.

And me? Of course I commenced some hasty research on concussion signs in infants until the sun rose. But he slept. Then a few weeks later I held him before our bedroom vanity mirror. He wiggled out of my arms and took a dive into the top of the vanity. That one made him holler, but only for a few minutes before he wanted to be held before the mirror again, at which point he wiggled even harder. I swear he was trying to recreate the dive.

The verdict? Anyone’s guess, though it’s beside the point.

By either nature (my genes and all) or nurture (my unwitting indoctrination into the ways of dare devilishness), it’s my fault either way. And I apologize to my wife, my neighbors, and every teacher my son will ever have.

But ever the optimist, I’m trying to look for the positive spin on this all. As we approach the little beast’s first birthday, I say to him:

May you never lose your sense of adventure. May your days be filled with new frontiers that fill the senses and sate the imagination. And may the imagination grow hungry still, ever satisfied but never complacent, calling for new frontiers all the time. Oh, and quit slamming your freaking face against the floor.

Week two of unemployment is going, well, pretty much like the first.

I have tirelessly applied for the jobs that have interested me thus far, which is to say, only a few. (Relax, I have a plan to widen the net when need be.) I have shaved at least every other day. I still rise mostly with the sun, and my gardens have never looked better. My wife might say I have become a might too smitten with cleaning the house—following her around to replace everything that is moved, as I do—but I think under her teasing is some appreciation for it. (I think.) I’ve even had a chance to try a few new recipes.

Certain projects have only really presented themselves in this time I have had to be aware of them. Take our furniture, for instance. I tried a little polish one day, not realizing how much it could shine if given a little love. I also found the source of my invasive Virginia Creeper in the backyard under a cluster of Tiger Lily foliage. And in my writing times, I returned to the story I have tried to finish for months now, finding its elusive ending long after I had given up hope for ever doing so.

That last thing has been the best project yet. I gave myself over to my sudden moment of clarity and wrote the final chapter in one fell swoop. That isn’t usually my style. Often, my last chapter comes first, or at worst during the throes of those opening scenes of a story. This one hid, though, hid in a way that had me writing nervously for the last few thousand words. All that remains now are a few chapters to bridge where I was to where I know I’m going. The sense of adventure may be gone, but so too are the moments of sheer frustration with it.

I have quoted Stephen King often. I don’t even love his fiction, necessarily. But I unapologetically love him as a writer. I am in awe of his process, occasionally spotty outcomes notwithstanding. His book on writing, against all the many others I have read, is my favorite one. In fact, it stands as one of my favorite books of all time, of any kind.

Among his many nuggets of wisdom I have found useful is one I seem to ignore most often. I call it the “drawer method” of the process. As he instructs, every writer is best served by sticking a manuscript in a drawer, untouched, for a spell. Completed or not, assumed masterpiece or apparent pile of bullpucky, all manuscripts deserve some drawer time. Only then can they be given the objective look every work needs.

While Mr. King refers more to completed works for his advice, I accidentally found it works, too, with those manuscripts that have become more shroud than prism. It kind of highlights the problem with a spot of advice I have seen perpetuated far too often elsewhere. It deals with “powering through” even when the words aren’t there, to write even on the most un-writerly days.

I agree with the sentiment. For the sake of stamina and keeping the blade whetted, I think it’s crucial to write and write a lot, every day and some days twice and thrice. But what is too often left out of that advice, I think, is the issue of what to write on those marble-mouthed days. Old work you haven’t touched in eons? Give it a look. One story’s blockage could be another’s moment of clarity.

But a long work that had been going well prior to a newfound impasse? Back away and noodle with something new, something with less at stake (like a blog!). But holy M. Night Shaymalan, stay away from the nice story lest your hastiness beget incongruity most foul!

I go back to my house projects to help illustrate my point. I mentioned how well my polishing of the furniture turned out. And it did…mostly. What I left out was overuse of the orange oil, making our basement end tables more ice rink than anything else. I also got a little too happy trimming my oak in the backyard, and my picking up around the house has accelerated to absurd levels. My energetic though inartistic cleaning days may be better spent on something I can’t overdo, like cleaning my garage.

So, today’s lesson:

•         Furniture polish good! (Except when it’s not.)

•         Fouling up a good story with a bad writing day bad.

There will be no horse, no sunset to ride off into. No, today I trundle away from teaching in my aging Honda Accord under a hazy afternoon sky.

In all honesty, I will not miss my job. That’s been hard for some to hear, but I’m nothing if not brutally honest. There are things I’ll miss, sure, but the composite picture those pieces form?  That picture is one I no longer want. Period.

But I like to go out on high notes. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about two stories that kind of bookend my abbreviated “career” in teaching.

Story one comes from my first ever class of kids. It was 2003, and I was every bit a first year teacher. Socks rarely matched, my health slipped (ulcer, anyone?), I lost weight, and I had the pallor of an undertaker. I also had thirty students in my third grade class, a room without air-conditioning, and a not-so-sneaking suspicion that I had chosen the wrong career. Not a good recipe.

All that aside, it really turned out to be a pretty, well, memorable year. Among a terrific group of parents I had was a dad who routinely stopped in after school to chat about his kid. Of course, I didn't know he was terrific at the time.

In the moment, his visits drove me crazy. Every minute of that was a minute not spent figuring out what in the world I was doing the next day, all day, with my thirty students. He was exceedingly nice, and generous, and truly cared about his kid and wanted to do whatever it took to improve his learning experience. Every teacher—and student—should be so lucky as to have a guy like him around.

But still, the impromptu conferences after school drove me batty.

It pains me to admit it now, but I actually started ducking the guy after a couple months. I just couldn’t spend the time anymore. His kid was doing well, and daily meetings were unnecessary. I needed that time, and needed to protect it. I didn’t feel bad about my daily evasions until the day before my first ever winter break.

On that day, there was no ducking. The dad had been in my room all afternoon helping with our class party. As the kids filed out, I moved to my desk to appear as busy as possible, hoping to send whatever hints I could that I just didn’t have the time. He approached anyway, putting a hand on my shoulder and looking at me seriously.

Here it comes, I thought. All I wanted to do was finalize my work and head home for two weeks of not teaching. Here come the questions.

“My wife and I wanted to be sure you had somewhere to go for Christmas dinner,” he said.

Instant guilt. I am a wholly unsentimental type in so many ways, but damn it if I didn’t about lose it right there.

The guy had been not just obsessing over his kid the first half of that year, but had been paying attention to me, too. I looked like a drifter who just happened to be a teacher. I kept my private life private, so he had no idea I was with a great partner, not far from extended family, and that yes, I had many places to bounce between during the holidays. This guy and his wife saw a young bundle of nerves they assumed needed a place to eat. That is selflessness of a most particular kind.

Anyway, that proved to be a turning point for me in my larger view on parents. I have some current and former parents now who I consider close friends, in some cases years after I have taught their kids. My families are a piece of that unwanted whole I will sorely miss. I’ve learned lessons from them I will carry into my own parenting when Graham moves on to school one day.

My second story is shorter, and comes from this week.

My farewell tour with my students was last week. We shared treats and reminisced about our year (and years, in some cases) together. One student I have had for three years implored me to return this week to their school to check my mailbox. They had something they had to give me. I had not planned to be back to said school, but made the thirty-minute drive anyway to collect my bounty. Visions of gift cards danced through my head.

I got to the school to find she had left me a Ho Ho.

There is no single occurrence in my eight years of teaching that so perfectly sums up the experience of working with kids. I hate Ho Hos. The hour roundtrip in my car would have been much better spent elsewhere. But I ate the Ho Ho, and loved it, and smiled the whole time. 

I thought about using the blog today to list my favorite and least favorite endings. (No doubt the movie Signs and the 2003 American League Championship Series in baseball would have been discussed—if you know me, you know which list each would be a part of). But I have all the time in the world to fire off about those things. Right now, I owe some good memories a little attention.

There’s really nothing about teaching I’ll miss, except the things I’ll miss.

I have no idea what to say, but I’m going to say it anyway. Call it white noise, or prattle, or an assault on your readerly sensibilities. I can’t not write, though. That’s just how I was raised.

You see, my dad was a Do it anyway type of guy. Don’t want to take the garbage out? Do it anyway. Don’t think you need a coat when it’s -15 outside? Do it anyway. Because I shouldn't have to ask you is another line he’d use. It’s not gonna kill you had its place, too.

He never liked to explain his thinking. That obviously frustrated me beyond belief as a teen, back when the world was expected to explain itself to me (at least the parts I didn’t understand, which were few in my eternal teen wisdom). I was supposed to do things that I was supposed to do because I was supposed to do them. Period.

My mom, on the other hand, is a narrator. She’s the voiceover in life, and she comes from a line of folks just like her. You could put a camera on her reunions with siblings and have one honey of a reality show. It’s totally endearing, and they’re easy folk to chat with. They don’t even know what an awkward silence is. That’s a good thing.

Bottom line is you have no chance of shutting me up. I’m ”supposed to” and I have to all at once. Lethal combo.

And that combo is perfectly suited for the situation I find myself in right now with the word-mongering. Fact is, I got nothin’ at the moment. Zilch. Nada. Lindsey Lohan has more quality scripts being sent her way than I have sentences to articulate. Story to finish? Color me marble-mouthed. Cover letters to write? Hamana hamana hamana.

But if there is one thing I have learned over time, it is to wing it, to improvise, to play the Vaudevillian and let the good times roll, even when they ain’t so good. I mentioned “noodling” a few weeks back (not the “sport”) and its application to writing. One trick I was taught by a writing teacher in college (the one day said writing teacher actually showed up to class, that is) was to put yourself in a box when you’re stuck.

You’d think the opposite would be true, and it didn’t make much sense to me at first. My instinct always says to search the world when stuck, to set off into the wild blue yonder of inspiration and pick the low-hanging fruit when I must. But this “teacher’s” (he earned the quotes, by the way) advice was to focus on immediate surroundings, to write about what was within arm’s reach before thinking about the world beyond. You start small, and only begin pushing back on the walls when the breathing steadies. You focus on one thing at a time, performing something of a free association with each object. Sometimes the wandering leads someplace nice. Either way, you’re writing.

That teacher did not impart much, but that was a nugget I still find useful.

So…

My Totally Pointless, Marginally Coherent, Stream ‘O Consciousness Rendering of My Shrunken World (or Meet My Kitchen Workspace!)

• Red Teapot (Stove to My Left): I never really understood tea. I want to understand it. I’ve tried to like it. I feel like we’re supposed to be friends the same way I feel like I’m supposed to love camping (love nature, love campfires, love the sights and sounds and smells…hate camping). There is a tea variety or two I find helpful when I’m sick, but all in all, I have never been able to become a tea guy. Love my teapot, love the idea, love the sound of the water being poured in a cup, often love the smell…don’t love tea.

• Glass of Water (At My Side): We have these amazing glasses we bought years ago when we had neither the money nor the justification for purchasing such nice drinkware. But these glasses are something special. They’re dimpled in four thumb-shaped spots around the outside, and the hand just grips them so perfectly. They also hold a full 16-ounce Guinness, unlike my pint glasses. And the weight distribution! Ah, the weight distribution. Man, I love those glasses.

• Wind (Out My Window): It’s really windy outside right now. My little Pin Oak is bearing the brunt of it as I write, bending all hither and no thither. I hate wind. “Hang in there, Little Pin Oak!”

• iPod Earbuds (Next to Computer): Am I the only person who can’t get the stupid things to actually stay in my ears…ever?  Seriously, they infuriate me. Even while lying motionless in bed they rest for maybe thirty seconds before slipping slowly out. I can’t even work out in them like all those other cool people I see. And spare me your “go try some different sizes” malarkey. I’ve tried them all. They’re all terrible. Is it my ears? Are my ears weird? Anybody?

• Plants (On My Periphery): Our Tropical Philodendrons are stupid huge, and literally grow by the second. They started as one tiny plant in a one-gallon pot. That was about eight years ago. Now they are two (in our house, at least, as a third split was given away to a friend last year), and they literally take up about half of our living room. These plants also likely have no idea that I am the only one standing between them and the compost pile. Are they obnoxious? Absolutely. Are they going anywhere? Not if I have anything to say about it. (They’re probably going somewhere.)

• Batman (Out My Window): When we had lived in our current house a month (almost six years ago now), I was doing some landscaping out back. Buried about two feet deep along our fence line was a Batman action figure. We’re talking trendy Batman, something from the 90s, I suspect, when his renderings started looking more WWF cartoon than Adam West everyman. But still, it’s Batman. I promptly cleaned him that day and attached him to the top of the fence, and he has been there ever since, guarding the backyard. Blizzards and storms and straight line winds don’t disturb him. He’s Batman, after all.

There’s more, but you get the idea (painfully so, I suspect). My mom, her siblings, and I assure you that there is plenty to be said even when there isn’t. And my dad assures you that it really doesn’t matter anyway whether you want to do it or not.

I was talking in class with some older students the other day about the evolution of the telephone from its inception through now. We talked about the switchboards of yore, about the short tether of the ear- and mouthpiece, about how the operator who connected you to the person on the other end could hear your whole conversation if they so desired. We looked at pictures and discussed historical events that hastened innovation (like WWI did for long distance). Cause and effect, history informing the future, yada, yada, and yada. It was a good talk.

And then the kids asked about those “funny phones” they’ve seen sparingly in their lives.

“Funny phones?” I said.

“Yeah, you know, the ones where you have to…” They paused a moment before realizing they had not the words to articulate their descriptions. Instead they moved their forefingers clockwise through the air, cocking their heads at me, trying to nonverbally will some kind of understanding from their teacher.

“You mean rotary phones?” I said. The word “rotary” took them back a bit. They swapped looks of confusion. I drew one on the white board for them.

Bingo. My shoulders slumped. It was my turn to exercise some incredulousness.

You see, I feel young still. I’m healthy. I have all my hair. I’m nowhere near the age of highly recommended regular prostate checks or cholesterol labs. But in that moment I imagined salt ‘n pepper temples, crow’s feet you could drive a truck through, hair vacating follicles that would forever remain vacant. I felt, if not old, then at least not young.

Funny phones? I thought. I didn’t even ask them if they knew what a pulse-dial phone was.

I tried my best to avoid the “When I was a kid…” trap in class that day. But the students were rapt. They wanted to know more. So we hooked arms and took a stroll down memory lane.

“Zero did what?” they asked disbelievingly, before erupting into laughter.

“Zero connected you with the operator,” I said.

“And, like, you could just talk to them?” I explained they were there to help.

“And those funny spinning phones, how did you text with those?” OK, they didn’t quite go that far in their questioning. But still.

That conversation lived with me all week. I started to miss dial tones, obnoxious busy signals, the way a good rotary phone would cradle the ear and block out background noise. There was something intimate about the aesthetic. “Would kids these days even know how to unscrew a mouthpiece to bug a phone?” I asked of the air (not once realizing I had actually, earnestly, used the phrase “…kids these days…” in a sentence.)

Flash forward to that following weekend.

As is my usual wont when I find myself the only one awake late at night, I lay in bed a couple Saturdays ago watching The Twilight Zone on my computer. (Thanks, Netflix Instant Streaming!) Specifically, I viewed, again, one of my all-time favorite episodes. It’s called “Night Call,” and in it a homebound elderly woman begins receiving phantom phone calls at all hours of the night.

More than a few times as a kid, if home alone, the ringing phone would jar me, especially at night. I was convinced there would be one of those heavy breathers on the other end, or, worse, that I would have my inevitable The call is coming from inside the house! moment.

I think that’s why this particular episode has always given me the willies (in that good way). I indentify with it. It’s visceral. The woman picks up the phone, night after night, and hears a groaning, moaning, creaking, subhuman noise on the other end. That phone becomes a time bomb with an invisible fuse, a jack-in-the-box without sound cues. She knows it’s going to ring. It’s just a matter of when.

Phones could scare back then (and yes, I also just used “back then”). Don’t let anyone tell you any differently. Those funny phones were anything but at times. Not that they were inherently scary, of course. But overnight, for instance, jarring you from a slumber, screaming at you with that banshee-like ring? In real life, that usually meant bad news. In the movies, it meant heavy breathing or something of the like. Neither inspired much confidence in picking up the bedside phone at that hour.

And now? Now we’ve moved on to handheld devices, to ringtone specifications that allow us to receive phone calls from only the people we specify, if we wish to engage the feature. No more guessing games. “Hello?” doesn’t even deserve a question mark anymore.

Don’t mistake what I’m saying for lament, however. Anyone who knows me at all is keen to my pathological distaste for talking on the phone. For all of the ways my BlackBerry allows me to connect, it does more to protect me from my most reviled connection of them all—the phone chat.

But I do miss things like endless ringing (before answering machines), anonymous failed attempts to reach someone as many times as you wished to try them (before caller ID), the inalienable human right we have to prank call (before caller ID and *69). And then there were collect calls.

Collect calls!

Was there a better litmus test for how much someone wanted to hear from you than that pregnant moment in which you waited for the person to either accept or decline your collect call?

Modern day equivalencies to these things I miss will no doubt emerge. Maybe having someone actually answer a phone call is the new collect call litmus test. Maybe a string of unrequited texts is the new endless ringing. And maybe PRIVATE as the incoming number is the new heavy breathing on the other end.

I’m sure kids today (“Kids today”! I have to stop this!) will be adults of tomorrow sharing similar ahhh-remember-whens of their own. I remember when I saw the movie Scream in the theater, for instance. There was the moment when the call was coming from inside the house, which was nothing new, but it was from a cell phone…in the closet…of the bedroom where the victim was fielding the call. Maybe that’s their defining generational moment for the fear their childhood phones can inspire.

But will they ever know how scary something like my beloved “Night Call” can be? And phone booths! Will they ever know the magic of a phone booth in the rain?

“When I was a kid, you had to have change on you at all times for a call. And it was uphill to and from the payphone. To and from, I tell you!”

The wildly disparate reactions I’ve gotten to my recent job news have been fascinating. Some have been exactly what I would have expected considering the sources, while others have surprised me thoroughly. Ever the sorter, I’ve begun categorizing them for my own entertainment.

A word about my categories before you read on.

Some people have been downright rude (someone I barely know literally told me they thought I was being “stupid”), or patronizing (“Ah, I think you’ll find yourself coming back in a few years, but go on out and see for yourself”), or incredulous to the point of buffoonery (too many quotes to list) when we’ve talked about my decision. You’ll see those people overtly reflected in a few of the categories below, and my attitude toward them will perhaps be even more overt.

But much more importantly, most of the people fall into one of the more desirable categories, or into some combination of a few of them. I have had overwhelming words of support, and am drowning in well-wishes. But big news begets (many) colorful reactions, and not all of them paint a pretty picture. 

But I never doubt that even the types that drive me crazy mean well. I find it genuinely funny more than anything else.

So…

The “What’s Really Going On?” Type

I had to lead off with this, as these folks are some of my favorites. We could also call them The Assumptionists. Their sidelong glances as they ask probing questions are dead giveaways for their real intentions, and those intentions are nothing short of wanting to expose my ouster. (Because surely I was ousted from my job.)

These folks say the right things, asking how I arrived at my decision and so forth. But they always wedge a revealing question in somewhere, something like “Does this have to do with the cuts?” or what have you, the types of questions that lay bare their suspicions that I was forced out.

Great reaction for this type: Looking around frantically, then whispering, “I knew too much.”

The “What Are You Thinking? My Skin’s Crawling Just Thinking About This” Type

One person couldn’t wait to tell me how crazy I am for doing this in this economy (not the same one who called me “stupid”). “Do you have anything lined up?” they asked me. “Anything?”  It killed them.

Each time I said “no” they threw their hands up and looked for better answers in the dead air of the room around us. “Anything at all?” It wasn’t mean, and they chuckled a bit with each question. Good nature abounded. But my dunno looks chapped this person. That was obvious.

Great reaction for this type: Slumping back in chair with arms folded behind head, invoking a bit of Spicoli, and saying, “Man, I don’t need money to be happy in life. It’s just like, you know, like paper, and stuff. Paper can’t make you happy, man. I just want to be. You feel me?”

The “Hand on Shoulder” Type

A friend and I always used to marvel at President Clinton’s acumen with the hand-on-shoulder moments. Completely apolitically, you have to admire that about guys like him. They just bite the lower lip and put that hand on your shoulder, and in that moment you know everything will be just fine. It has to be.

I’ve had a few of those people so far, and they have been fortifying at just the right times. Even if they don’t mean it, it feels good.

Great reaction for this type: “You hiring?”

The “I Obviously Still Don’t Understand That Two Smalltime Works of Children’s Fiction Don’t Make You Rich” Type

We could also call this the “Ah, Moving On to Writing Fulltime?” type. Their hearts are in the right place, and they usually seem to genuinely think it’s possible. If only.

Great reaction for this type: I vacillate between showing them my royalty statements to make my point, and lighting a cigar with a ten dollar bill in front of them and just going with their assumption.

The “Pearls of Wisdom” Type

Usually, this type pulls up a chair and stays a while. They don’t really look at me so much as they expect me to be looking at them. Their wisdom is delivered in sidewinding narratives about their own careers, its trials and travails. They look at me stiff-lipped when they’re done and wait for me to nod, showing I understand. I have to understand. My very future depends upon the help they have imparted.

Great reaction for this type: “Wow, thanks. I may need to find you again for a chat sometime. Would that be okay?” (Exactly what they want to hear, which is usually the only way to shake them.)

The “Bravo” Type

These are the ones who deliver full-throated approval, and often will tell me they should have done the same thing years ago. They use words like “brave” and “courageous,” though I am quick to remind that the line between bravery and stupidity is fine indeed. They embolden me, dismissing any notion of stupidity.

I like these types. Not because I need some kind of pat on the head, but more because they reflect exactly how I feel about it.

After all, if not now, when?

Great reaction for this type: “Thanks.”

Occasional snark aside, I want to reiterate that the vast majority of people have had nothing but support to lend in the wake of my choice to move on. Sometimes writing inspiration springs from the outliers, though, and there have been many. They wrote this post for me over the last ten days.

And to close on a lighter note, while competition remains open until my final official contract day of teaching, there is a clear early favorite in the “Best Reply to My Resignation Email to Colleagues” award. It gave me junior high yearbook signing day flashbacks (like the always popular "Stay cool over the summer!"). It reads (name has been changed):

Jacob,

I don’t know you very well, but you seem nice. Good luck.

Gustav

See? Colorful.

Dear Jake,

I heard you quit your job this week. Quit. You didn’t leave for something else, laterally or otherwise. You just quit. Quit.

You know you just halved your household income, right? You do realize you have a baby at home, don’t you? Mortgage?  Car payment? Lingering student loan debt? Any of that ringing a bell for you? And what about all those kids you left behind at your schools?

I kind of knew you would do this eventually, what with your pervasive wanderlust and inability to just accept “settling” as a part of life. I guess I just hoped you’d be less of an idiot about it. You have read the papers, right? You realize there are no fewer than ten thousand other people applying for every job that interests you, don’t you? What, you think you’re special or something?

Ah, forget it. You’re like talking to a wall. Always have been. 

I know you hate mush, so this will not be that. I also know how you feel about sentimentality in general (how it’s rarely as authentic in the moment, that it needs time to marinate, that the truest sentimentality is only visible in hindsight, blah blah blah). I get it. So let me instead get some practical things off my chest. (Assuming you still have at least a thread of a tether to practicality.)

Please, for the love of employability, do the following as you begin your search for whatever awaits you:

1. If you must go, at least don’t look back. Make like DeNiro in the movie Heat and just walk away, even if it leads to Al Pacino shooting you in the chest.

2. Take “Once fouled a hit-and-run attempt off my forehead and still finished my at-bat” off your résumé. No one cares but you. (Although those bleeding stitch marks the baseball left were pretty cool.)

3. If a job posting is trying to sell you, you probably don’t want that job. Be leery of exclamation points in postings. An “Exciting career opportunity!” to one is often three-hots-and-a-cot to another.

4. Don’t apply for everything you see. You might actually get one of those jobs, and do you really want to be here again at this time next year, or (gasp) sooner?

5. Don’t ignore “place” as a component for consideration with potential jobs. Seemingly great jobs can be dragged down by dismal environs, and the reverse can be true as well.

6. Continue shaving every morning. Don’t be that guy.

7. If you find yourself with time on your hands as you search, be careful with your participation in arguments on Facebook, at least during the daytime hours. You don’t want to be that guy, either.

8. Nothing says “unemployable” like that t-shirt you’ve had your eye on. You know the one.

9. Own your decision, or others will forge a cooperative ownership of it, will define it, and will help you understand where you are in the process at every step of the way. And that is a drag.

10. No matter how stressful the search for something else may become at times, don’t stop writing. Your mind is a jungle enough. You need to purge.

11. When the stuffy, pragmatic, always-willing-to-settle types indignantly and patronizingly ask you to explain why you left such a primo job, tell them you want to take some more time to “Work on your music.” Affect a look of dewy wistfulness as they roll their eyes and stifle their lectures (or not).

12. You’re too old to “find yourself.” It’s largely what you’re doing, yes, but create different words for it. You call yourself a writer. Revise.

13. This is not the excuse you’ve been looking for to spring for that neck tattoo.

14. Remember that time you kicked a ball in the tree, then climbed the tree, then thought you saw the ball, then reached through the foliage to punch it out, only to realize the “ball” was a hornet’s nest? Sometimes your instincts are terrible. Don’t trust them unconditionally.

15. Remember that time you saw the young lady working the Clinique counter at Younkers, then learned she was already spoken for, then decided you didn’t care about that fact, and then later married her? Sometimes your instincts are spot-on. Don’t ignore them outright.

16. Remember what we’ve learned about job descriptions. Make sure one exists for anything you consider. And if they need a 49-page contract to describe your role and all of the conditions that define and dictate it, then it may not be the role for you.

17. It won’t kill you to at least try to find a workplace with air-conditioning.

18. And an employee-to-toilet ratio better than 45:1.

19. You love to write, so look for something that might include at least a little bit of that. Don’t be so quick to make the safest choice.

20. You love to write in your boxers, so don’t forget that you can’t have everything you love in one job. Don’t be so picky.

21. If the coolest thing about a potential job is the retirement package, run.

22. Don’t forget the little things: Ask about lunch. Make sure it’s longer than 25 minutes and isn’t taken in a high-traffic hallway. 

23. Returning to the résumé for a moment, no one cares that you won Employee of the Month at Target at age sixteen for cleaning up puke in the concession area.

24. Neither résumés nor cover letters should ever contain the word rad.

25. Actually, hire a résumé writer.

If you remember all that, your destination may make your launch look less stupid. Maybe. (Although the idiot who willingly jumps off a cliff and survives is no less an idiot for having done it in the first place.) Go ahead and embrace the idiocy of it all.

I will now let you send me to that nice farm upstate you've been telling me about. Write often, and don't forget me when I'm gone.

Oh, and good luck…moron.

Sincerely,

Mr. Cummer

Put...the coffee...down! Coffee’s for closers only!

I’ve always loved that line, first spoken by Alec Baldwin’s epic “Blake” character in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. It is directed at Jack Lemon’s character “Shelley” in reference to his recent failures in closing real estate contracts.

Blake is telling Shelley he is not a closer, that coffee is not for him. Coffee, in this case, is something earned, and Shelley has done nothing to deserve his cup. It’s demoralizing, and delivered with diabolical aplomb by Mr. Baldwin. And often, it is my own silent mantra.

I find myself at the threshold of the final third of a new book, which is always the point at which I experience some form of writerly paralysis. The pen gets heavy. Pages remain empty. The blinking cursor becomes a menace. Ideas come and go, though mostly they do not come at all. It isn’t a matter of knowing what to say. It’s figuring out how to say it.

The what, in fact, is usually in place before I type the opening sentence of a work, in the form of a clearly articulated final chapter and denouement. That’s my process. I’m a “forest” guy, even if that means missing a few trees. Starting a story is rarely a problem for me either, and I also manage to tread water through the dreaded middles pretty well. And although I know my final act, knowing when to pull the trigger with it gives me fits.

I’ve used all kinds of metaphors to help myself visualize the importance of appropriately closing a story. Soft and steady pressure on the break pedal before coming to a complete stop. Take the stairs instead of jumping to the basement. Ladders, not leaps. One of those usually helps me visualize.

In baseball terms, I like to think of the point I’m at in my story as the late innings. I know who my ninth inning man is (my ending). I know he’ll close out my victory. But it isn’t quite the ninth inning yet. It’s more like the sixth or seventh. The starting pitcher is up over the 100-pitch mark, still getting outs but losing a few ticks on the radar gun. It’s time to turn to the relievers who, when used well, are a primary component of any nine-inning game.

But when exactly do I pull the trigger? Which combination serves as the bridge from the starter to the closer?

I guess you could say I’m on the top step of the dugout right now with the story, ready to call in the bullpen (or at least I think I am). Like in baseball, the decision is neither right nor wrong until the outcome of the game has been decided, rightness or wrongess only visible through the 20/20 lens of hindsight. 

In a perfect world, I trot out to the mound, look to the bullpen and tap my right arm to summon my guy (all while hoping I shouldn’t have gone with my situational lefty). I settle back in the dugout and watch my setup guy(s) deliver the ninth inning at my closer’s feet.

The advantage I have—which is where the baseball analogy loses its legs (if ever it had them)—is that I can replay the game as many times as I need to. I can call a do-over on any decision I made the first time through, and even then I can tinker until the game plays out exactly as I wanted.

But for the sake of efficiency, I hope to minimize that. New games deserve to be played, new story arcs need to begin their own progress along the x-axes of other story worlds. None of that can happen until this one is done. I need to turn my cup over and wait for that next cup of mud, wait until I’ve earned it.

So, for however long it takes (hopefully a couple months is all), Alec Baldwin will be on my shoulder.

Coffee’s for closers. Coffee’s for closers only. (All work and no play…)

I worked at a hotel in my hometown during the summer following my freshman year in college. I had worked front desk at the hotel—a Marriott Courtyard—my senior year in high school, and wanted something different for my summer, something with less responsibility. I wanted to be told what to do, wanted to do it, and wanted to be compensated for it.  

That desire was fulfilled in the form of an “Assistant Building Engineer” position. The only qualifications I had were a pulse, an ability to distinguish between a regular or Phillips-head screwdriver, and a willingness to work as many hours as were available. (And there were a lot of hours available.)

I think the interview went something like this:

HOTEL MANAGER: Any felonies?

ME (Hesitating a little too long): Nope.

HOTEL MANAGER: Don’t be an idiot on the clock. Oh, and don’t fraternize with the guests. Got it?

ME (Probably slack-jawed): Okay.

The questions may have been a bit more nuanced than that, but I’m pretty sure my answers were not. I started my first day home for the summer.

My work days were as by-the-numbers as they could be. I arrived at 7:30 every morning and made right for the maintenance room of the hotel. Awaiting me would be a stack of work orders. I would commence moving through them, one by one, as comprehensively as my eight-hour shift allowed. Anything I didn’t get to simply waited until the next day, all while new orders were added to the bottom of the stack.

My morning break was timed to coincide with the conclusion of the hotel’s breakfast buffet hours. What hadn’t been eaten was mine to raid. Lunch at noon. Afternoon break timed for when the warm cookies came out of the oven for check-in time. Clock out at 4:30 and repeat the next day. That next day, and every day thereafter, were exactly the same. Jazz it was not.

But the rules and routines made sense. My job was not one for which longevity was expected from its employees. Another guy would take my uniform, my stack of work orders, my predilection for salvaging breakfast meats the kitchen would otherwise toss. The job relied on a well-oiled revolving door of routine-following sorts like me looking for some quick scratch, none of us irreplaceable. “Irreplaceable” was anathema to the nature of the position. I was the job, and the job refused to be me in any way.

There were rules and routines I questioned, of course. I picked up a lot of overtime as a graveyard shift “Houseman” on weekends. The primary task for those overnight stints was an hourly sweep of the hotel grounds to weed out any nefarious goings-on, of which there were none. We had to take a flashlight and check under cars, behind shrubs, and within every nook and cranny. It was a bit much for a hotel in a nice section of a mostly crimeless suburb. But I did it. I was just renting those rules and routines, not looking to invest in them. Laissez-faire, baby.

Flash forward to my first day as a teacher, purveyor of rules and routines, defender of their veracity.

As a teacher, my colleagues and I own our rules and routines. Our students need them, in fact, and some thrive once they’re learned. At their best, these rules and routines provide the framework that defines the open spaces within which kids and teachers can roam, can try and fail, can make mistakes. In this romantic vision of the educational experience, art gets painted in those spaces, jazz composes itself.

But those rules and routines can oppress, too, and not just the kids. At a certain point, too much attention can be paid to the framework instead of what happens within it. Paintbrushes become just more hammers and nails. The rules and routines become THE RULES AND ROUTINES, reinforced to a point that squeezes out the open spaces. We become “Housemen” all. No art. No jazz. Bye-bye romance.

In a busy life that’s only getting busier, I have to build a sturdy personal framework of rules and routines to enable writing time. I have to schedule days and times to scribble, and I have to be willing to fight—often with myself—to maintain that framework. But more importantly, I have to actually create in those spaces the framework provides. That and that alone makes those spaces worthy of the time spent defining them. And it better be romantic. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Teachers—and I offer myself as Exhibit A here—seem to be especially easy prey for the trappings of THE RULES AND ROUTINES. We are romantic souls too seldom willing to fight for the art of it all, for the blank canvas that lured us in the first place. We too often refuse to fight for those spaces the way we spoil to fight for other things in our profession. Class sizes, ability levels that stretch for years both above and below “grade-level proficient” for a roster of kids, too much mandated curriculum in too little time—the list of causes for our surrender to THE RULES AND ROUTINES can stretch for miles.

And they’re all valid points. Indeed, sometimes the framework is imposed, the spaces get squeezed and the music created there sounds more boy-band boilerplate than Thelonious Monk extraordinary. But jazz can still come from those smaller spaces, and it needs to, lest the job become one anybody can do. Superiors (and parents) should be moved to want to curate, rather than evaluate, our work. The job should be the teacher, and not the other way around.

Writing is no different. Often, routine writing times are plodding, articulate sentences are a mirage. The routine seems like only that—a framework outlining spaces of dead air. More effort is spent reinforcing the routine than doing anything with it.

But defeatism? Folding to the imposition rather than fighting it? I’ve never met a teacher, or writer, without a little sass. And sassy don’t run.

I try my best to fight the blank page, my ultimate open space. In jazz, they refer to it as “noodling” when a musician plays notes that have no particular meaning to a tune. But even when it’s all noodles, they’re still playing, creating even when it ain’t pretty. In writing, I sometimes noodle monosyllabically on those days until the next passable sentence is punctuated. But if the habit formed is one of incessantly reaching for the next creative success, of utilizing every square inch of the open spaces, then the routine becomes justified, even during those times of ham-fisted painting and cacophonous trumpet work.

After all, sometimes jazz sounds like a train wreck before it sounds like perfection. 

There’s Research (capital “R”), and there’s research (small “r”). I dabble primarily in the latter, free from the restrictions of the various style guides. For me, the small “r” stuff is really “search”, as in searching the amazing interwebs to responsibly seek answers for questions undeserving of more scholarly endeavors. Of course, responsible searching is a technology literacy skill that, once mastered, can be thought of more as capital “S” Search. So, in my world, capital “S” Search is really small “r” research, which is really nothing like capital “R” Research. (You’re welcome for that.)

At any rate, the small “r” stuff is good fun. For instance, I’ve always been a fan of old film noir. Thanks to some ankle surgery and Netflix Instant Streaming a few years back, I had some unfettered days in bed to rip through as many of those old black-and-white gems as I could find. As part of a new work, I recently needed an even fuller immersion into the genre, which has led to Search and research of a most fulfilling sort. Feeling satisfied with my noir film indoctrination, I have since turned my attention to a topic that always befuddles me this time of year. It is one in need of a caped hero with interlocking capital “S” and small “r” stitched across his chest.

You see, Easter is coming. It’s a holiday that has always bugged me, even as a kid. I’m talking here about the secular aspects of the traditions surrounding Easter, and not about any religious significance. I was raised Catholic—I know the Christian significance perfectly well. But as a kid, I always wondered about this strange giant bunny dressed in human clothes hiding eggs for me to find. The giant bunny part was bad enough. Throw in the fact that there is no obvious relationship between bunnies and eggs, and my little mind would be spinning, so much so that the baskets awaiting me on Easter morning came with as many questions as calories.

But when you live in the realm of the capital “S” and small “r”, answers are merely a few mouse clicks away. And recently, I struck out across the vast virtual unknown in search of truth. What I found sometimes surprised me, and often left me with as many questions as when I began. And that is true inquiry—questions becoming more questions. Some of the original questions that inspired me (only some, lest this post approach 10,000 words), with what passed for answers, follow:

How did the Easter Bunny get here? I knew Santa Claus came from the Europeans, and that other holiday mascots came from Hallmark. And I now know that the Easter Bunny, or “Oschter Haws”, was introduced to Pennsylvania Dutch country in the 1700s by German settlers. Germany and France appear to be the countries of origin (southwestern Germany, Alsatian France).

So, no giant, prehistoric land bridge from the Galapagos, no emergence from a strange crash somewhere in the desert. The bunny just hitched a ride with immigrants. A little ho-hum for the origin story of a giant bunny.

Why a bunny? Rabbits are among the most fertile mammals, and they understandably came to be looked upon as signs of spring, ushers of new beginnings. Watch the glee with which rabbits welcome the spring weather and it makes sense. They’re good ambassadors. I approve.

But they are mammals, of course, which begs the question…

Why eggs, and why are they colored? As to the idea of an egg, I could find only the same explanation that was given for the choice of bunny as mascot—spring, fertility, newness, and all that jazz. And the coloring? The tradition was practiced in Europe for hundreds of years before the settlers arrived here, and even predates Christianity. It is thought to be left over from a Pagan tradition of giving colored eggs as gifts at the vernal equinox. Historians think the two traditions became conflated at some point along the way. Zingo. But…

Conflation you say? Conflation con-schlation, the German settlers retort. They needed a better reason, so they told kids that if they were good all year, the Oschter Haws would return on Easter Eve and lay colored eggs in a nest prepared by the child. The nests were typically prepared by boys with their caps, and by girls with their bonnets, and were placed in secluded areas of the house or barn. The bonnets and caps later became baskets, since I’m sure that question has been burning you as much as it has me.

So, to review (because I’m sure Graham will ask one day): If you’re a good tot all year, a giant bunny will sneak into your house the night before Easter to lay colored eggs in your hat, though only in some secluded corner of your house or barn.

I don’t yet know how all of these new understandings will fit into a story, but they will, as nuggets like these always do. The important thing is that my core questions have been addressed, even if not definitively so.

Other questions still abound, though, like about the gender of the Easter Bunny. We are talking a fertility symbol here, so, biologically speaking, a female would make sense, right? So why, then, “Peter Cottontail”? Was the Easter Bunny the first post-gender holiday mascot? And either way, are the creepy, clownish, schoolboy clothes on the Easter Bunnies at malls really necessary?

And how, for the love of science, could we possibly make sense of this Easter card? 

You see? Questions to more questions. But to be clear, I’m no Easter hater. (I do hate pastels, but that’s beside the point.) Any day that fosters the confluence of brunch (at least in my family), giant blocks of chocolate, and jelly beans is a day I can get my arms around. Score one for awesomeness that a Sunday in spring can provide all this gluttony.

I’m actually here to help Easter, and I have some ideas. You see, I think the Easter Bunny has a PR problem more than anything. My Search gave me ideas. Here’s what we do:

• Embrace the buff! Ace the clothes…
• …and the nuclear size.
• I can live with the eggs, but let’s make it clear that the bunny is merely delivering the eggs, like it’s the postal worker of the woodland critter world. It is but one spring symbol carrying another to the waiting arms of winter-weary humans.

So, my pitch synopsis: An appropriately sized, post-gender harbinger of spring and all its newness.

There. I’ve solved a problem I’m sure you never knew existed. Thanks, reSearch!

Too many social situations seem to have that one. That one woman that stays too late at the party. That one guy that thinks it’s OK to say exactly what’s on his mind, all the time. In teaching, there is always that one kid without whom the class chemistry would be divine. In writing, there is often that one character that just does not fit with the world of the story. The beauty of fiction is that it provides the writer with what we all wish we had in real life— the “delete” key.

In one of my completed, novel-length manuscripts I killed one major character in a later revision. In another, my revisionist’s sword fell on two with pretty sizeable roles throughout the story. The problem in each case was chemistry, and the degree to which those extracted souls were messing with the balance of the whole. They stayed too late at all the parties, spoke when they should’ve just shut up already. They refused to use coasters on coffee tables and never took their shoes off at the door. You get the point.

In one of those cases, I realized a character was only really serving me as the writer. They asked questions of the protagonist I should have just asked myself. The protagonist thus spent far too much time explaining what they were doing, instead of doing it and allowing me to show it to the reader. That one, in that case, was a copout for me, a symptom of a larger ill with the story. Once I hogtied him and mercilessly threw him on the train tracks, the story came alive in a way it had not been before.

In the other work, I had two characters who needed to become one, with a third who needed go swim with the fishes. I was exacting in my evaluation there, and again emerged with a better story in the end. As deliriously, delightfully draconian as it all sounds, it’s rarely easy to do. I don’t kill out of bloodlust. I kill because I have to. I am but a mercenary.

In some works, I have later zombified a character, rising them from the dead and unleashing them once more on my story. My reanimation was rewarded in those instances with richer stories, more interesting chemistry, and tension that practically wrote itself. My initial instinct—when I first created the character—was validated after some corrections.

But recently I toed uncharted waters. In a work that was already going quite well, I decided to introduce a new character entirely. This person was neither a retread of an earlier draft nor someone who had once shown promise in this world. In fact, he came from another world entirely, the world of a story I abandoned halfway through a couple years ago. That un-story has remained in my collection, and I have since scrapped most it for parts (descriptions here, settings there). The orphan character I pulled from it brings with him a good deal of tension. And that’s exactly his role, exactly what was missing all along.

Without this new character and the tension he brings, “the story” could hardly have been called such, no matter how well the writing of it was going. It was more of a scenario, a look at an interesting world with very little to hold interest beyond a touristic glance. This new guy is a rapscallion, a foil, a thorn in the sides of all in exactly the right ways. He might kill you for looking at him wrong. He forces characters to react, and react in ways counter to their normal behavior. And I get to hold his leash. Such fun.

I still don’t know if he’ll work. He may need some corrections of his own, or maybe the story never needed him as much as I assumed. There is also the risk of going off-leash too often with him and lessening his impact. This new draft did not replace the old one. I don’t believe in it strongly enough yet. Instead, the story now walks two paths, and lives as two drafts in my computer file. Story A and Story B, the same story but not the same at all.

It might not be the best method. A little decisiveness does go a long way in novel-length writing, assuming the goal is to actually finish works instead of starting them. But some changes are worth making. Instead of indecisive, I like to think of it as cartography of a more unusual sort. I’m mapping parallel universes with various drafts, waiting to decide which one looks like the best ride. Call it the Multiverse Theory of Craft.

So, will that one character end up filling out my story, pushing me toward a finish line that just a month ago was nowhere in sight? No way to tell for sure. My hand waits near the guillotine. 

Now, if only this Multiverse Theory of Craft had applications to real-world social situations.

I’m not exactly what the kids would call cool. Never really have been. That has never stopped me from trying, of course. I’m on the Face Page and I like to watch the internets in my free time. I have at least a smattering of 21^st century music in my collection. I try to run the color spectrum on my closetful of plaid, button-down shirts. (When I taught third grade a number of years ago, I had a kid tell me that “I really must like the color brown” one day. Thank you, little _____, for inspiring me to introduce some color into the wardrobe.) For the most part, I feel connected enough to at least know what the cool kids are doing, even if I lack the wherewithal to join them.

When fatherhood approached, I knew my already tenuous grasp on the world of cool was at risk. I was aware of all the geeky pitfalls of fatherhood before my wife and I ever took this step. I have spent a lifetime watching my own dad roll his jean shorts (not kidding), tuck hooded sweatshirts into his jeans (seriously), and take a comb from his wallet (I can’t make this stuff up) to run through what remains of his hair. I would have been foolish to assume it couldn’t happen to me. I mean, from stories I hear it sounds as though Dad was once cool. It can happen to anyone, I guess. 

As the boy's arrival neared, I knew I had spent too many years clawing and scratching my way to the edge of the same zip code as coolness to relinquish any ground without a fight. And the fight is for him, after all, to save him the embarrassment someday. Like with most worthy causes, my fight starts with awareness.

In that spirit, I made a mental list before my son was born of all the things I refused to do as a dad, keenly aware of the seductive song of dad dorkdum. My boy is eight months-old today, and, ever the teacher, I decided it was time for my first report card.

Looking Moderately Put-Together, Even After Little Sleep: B-

Save for a few hiccups, the boy has always been a remarkably good sleeper, so this has been easier in practice than it was in anticipation. Also saving me in this department is the fact I share four school buildings as part of my teaching. I find myself in a building I have not yet been in on three days each week, meaning shameless recycling of the wardrobe. Weekends are a different story. I happened upon the drugstore last week wearing gym shorts with the black socks I had worn to work. I had also forgotten my glasses and had to squint myself within five feet of my various targets. Not a pretty sight. The boy would be embarrassed if he could grasp it all.

Not Singing Songs to Him I Would Never Want Him to Think That I Think Are Cool: C

There was a Backstreet Boys incident in Month One. That’s all I’ll say.

Not Adopting an Embarrassingly Early Bedtime: B

This one requires a caveat. I came into the whole fatherhood thing with an already embarrassingly early bedtime. Any earlier would have required black paper over the windows of my house. So, I came into this one already a step behind. I’ve done well enough to maintain my B, though it’s a teetering B. It’s hugging C and has its eye on D, depending on the evening. The little guy could help with this one, of course, if he didn’t insist on rising so early in the morning. He’s so irrational sometimes.

Being Totally Mobile, Kid in Tow: C

I’m slower than I was, but I haven’t completely adopted the boy’s pace yet. My wife and I still do many of the things we always liked to do, save for the obvious omissions like long dinners at old haunts. I had expected to have the boy out more by this point in the process, though. I blame winter. And the comfort of my couch. Oh, and DVR.

No Baby Talk: B-

I’ve done well here overall, though there is plenty of room for improvement. I can’t say how it happens, exactly, but I just find myself lapsing once in a while, more in tone and style than in usage. I have not once replaced my Ls or Rs for Ws. On that I stand firm. I have also avoided gooey babble in public, which should count for something.

Carving Out Time to Finish Watching Battlestar Galactica: F

Battlestar Galactica is cool, right?

My son deserves better than a C average, so I have some work to do. Though it’s safe to say I will never carry a comb in my wallet or wear rolled-up jean shorts, I do have a propensity to over-share what Ira Flatow teaches me on Friday afternoons. I realize I am not impervious to what is starting to seem like an inevitable metamorphosis into the embarrassing parent. But I promise the boy an A for effort moving forward.    

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have forty-seven episodes of Ghost Hunters recorded that aren’t going to watch themselves.

This week has been all torpor. Inactivity with a recent work has me in a stranglehold. The thought of fixing it is no doubt worse than the fix itself. It feels like freshman PE all over again. I swear I can even smell the chlorine. (Flashback!)

Some Such Day, Any Old Month, 1993

“You swimming today, Cummer?” my PE teacher said.

My garb—oversized jeans and hooded sweatshirt, brown leather boots—should have been all the answer he needed. I hadn’t swum the entire unit, and that day was the last chance I had to salvage a passing grade for freshman PE. With too many opt-outs of swimming days, my yeomen’s work in the other units (I could Pickle Ball with the best of them) would be of no consequence to my final grade. The F would be etched by aquatic indifference.

“I choose not to swim,” I said. He shrugged, clicked his pen, and seemed all too pleased by the marking he made next to my name in his red vinyl notebook. 

I chose not to swim strictly because PE was first thing in the morning.  First thing meant a definite shower after PE. A shower after PE meant a taming of the hair. A taming of the hair without the time and tools my home bathroom would provide meant ragdoll-like disrepair for my coif. And that was out of the question at age fifteen. Among other reasons, carrying untamable tufts was no way to woo my infatuation du jour.

Forget the stereotypes. Put to rest the notion that men are somehow impervious to the sway of hair days, both good and bad. Granted, my credibility as some kind of proxy spokesman for men may be tenuous at best. (See Sales, Lotion) But I know there are plenty of men out there who have on at least a few occasions teetered near wit’s end at an unruly mop atop their own head. Just check out the behind-the-head earmuffs worn by winter-weather dwelling men sometime. Really? That’s better than a stocking hat why, exactly, if not for fear of “messing up” the do?

Complicating normal hair issues for me is that I’ve long been cursed with locks as manageable as a fistful of hay. I was that kid with a phantom finger perpetually inserted into a phantom electrical outlet. Stylists recoiled at the sight of me, and at the prospects of attempting some kind of cut for my mane. Iowa’s summer humidity was my death knell.

Wind speed was a consideration as well. Morning efforts before the mirror were too often undone by one gusty sneeze from old man winter. On the days when I could artfully command the comb, and then somehow avoid letting the weather foil it, I wasn’t about to let PE undo my do. Vain? Absolutely, in that way only a fifteen year-old can be.

In the years that followed, I learned to turn my head hither and thither in wind gusts outside, swimming, ironically, through the swirling Iowa winds with the dexterity of a figure skater. I also no longer cared as much. By sophomore year I had already molted my freshman fragility to allow for the growth of my angsty, late-adolescent shell. No hair day could penetrate that shell.

My choice to not swim as a freshman, though, carried consequences I didn’t fully realize until the last semester of my senior year in high school. On a day in early winter of that senior year, I sat across from my guidance counselor in his office. It was my last registration meeting with him before I graduated. I think somewhere inside I knew what was coming.

“It says here you have a freshman PE credit to make up,” he said.  His brows were furrowed, his eyes full of disbelief.

“I chose not to swim,” I said more to myself than to him, and more than a bit dejectedly. I shrank in the chair across from him.

Without a freshman PE makeup credit, I wouldn’t walk the stage with my peers at graduation that spring. My freshman PE indiscretion had reared its head. The final semester of my K-12 school career would thus consist of two PE classes—one regular senior PE, and one makeup freshman PE. 

I walked to the water’s edge that first day of my final semester of high school (freshman PE was still first thing in the morning). I looked to the pool to see a few admirably uncaring youngsters ready to dive in. I glanced toward the benches against the far wall and spied a few kids in oversized clothes, obviously choosing not to swim. I could have been like the old guy in prison who tutors the new inmates, could have counseled them toward better decisions for themselves. Could have.  

My freshman PE teacher emerged from the locker room as I leaned against a diving board and waited to dive in.  He still held a red vinyl notebook and clicking pen. His smile was pure evil.

“You swimming today, Cummer?” he said between chuckles.

I chose to swim.

***

And now? I keep the mop closely cropped, setting the clippers over it every couple weeks like a good prairie-burn. And the choices I make? Still short-sighted at times, ignorant of long-range consequences.

I choose to return to that recent work now.

My iPod is wise, eerily so on some days. Just this morning, for instance, it gave me The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin in one drive around town. It knew the sun was up, knew the forecast promised 60 and sunny again, knew that getting the grill ready was atop my to-do list for this St. Patrick’s Day. It knew that I am in the throes of spring break, and knew that my Tiger Lilies began shooting through that once frozen soil this morning.

So what do Tiger Lilies, surprisingly good weather, grilling, time away from work, and my penchant for good-timey rock ‘n roll have in common (besides nothing)? Sung together, they’re the harmony that is my spring, the hymn that is harbinger of green shoots and open-window weather. They are interdependent and as vital to the onset of warmer weather as Miles Davis and oatmeal stout are to a good October. And the iPod knew.

I have talked recently in this space about my occasional (read, pervasive) rigidity with things. I’m no different with the thematic importance I force onto that sweet spot where time, place, and activity intersect. Yves Montand with the smell of the first grilled burgers of the year? Get off my deck with that nonsense. A Pynchon tome on the beach? Go jump in the deep end. Both have their place, but that place is much more likely to reside in a month ending in –ber or –ary.

Much of the acceptable combos are intensely personal, I think. I would assume they are often the result of relational memory, memories that are sometimes easy to place, other times not so much. I feel those harmonious and inharmonious combinations in a very real way, though, a way that truly gives me violent reactions to something like the suggestion of Dickens in June. (We all know Dickens is a total winter.) I’ll save the fall/winter treatise for September. This is all about the warm weather, baby, which has been signaling a return to Iowa as of late.

My own perfect, off-the-cuff, seasonal accoutrements wait below. This is not meant to be instructive, unless you possess a cultural bent that you feel might be similar to mine (stars help you and your loved ones if that’s the case). Feel free to rebut with your own must-have seasonal supplements.

Music: For my money, you can’t go wrong with a shuffle of the Led Zeppelin catalog. In a time pinch, that’s all I need. When I have time to be more surgical, I like to call on my collection of The Who and sprinkle in some of that. “Exile on Main Street” from The Rolling Stones is worthy of being played from start to finish while you wait for the coals to glow in the grill. Tom Petty, Band of Horses, Talking Heads, Jimmy Hendrix, some Pearl Jam and My Morning Jacket, and a smattering of select Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds round out my ideal grilling playlist these last few summers. My long love affair with Motown usually thrives in the summer as well. Overall, if the weather and company are both right, I’m really not picky. Anything big enough to fill the wide open space of the outdoors, without bringing its own storm system in tow (I’m looking at you, Elliott Smith) is worth a look for me.

Food: Anything grilled or ordered al fresco. One personal grilling favorite is a whole pork tenderloin marinated overnight in a maple syrup/soy sauce combo and then cooked slowly over indirect heat. Asparagus sprinkled with sea salt, dipped in olive oil, and kissed for a few minutes by direct grill heat is a nice companion. As far as restaurants, I love me the Creole Shrimp and people-watching out front of Atlas in downtown Iowa City.

Movie: Field of Dreams is a schmaltzy favorite for the warm weather months. Back to the Future is one of my favorite summer big-budget movies ever. I’m a sucker for a good superhero movie and never met an intelligent screwball comedy that didn’t go well with some summer sun. I also love to beat the heat with a thoughtful alien invasion movie (I said thoughtful, Will Smith). And I try to begin every summer with a little Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Which reminds me that, in the absence of enough Zeppelin to fill out a playlist as mentioned above, Mike Damone is totally right: Side One of Led Zeppelin IV.)

Books: The kind where my attention can wander for a few paragraphs and the semantics still hold. Plot-driven larks and dark fantasy (love the Dark Tower series from Stephen King) are great near the water for my time. Some punchy Castle Freeman thrillers have served me well during some afternoon hours in my most recent summers. Joe Hill’s short fiction always seems to scratch the itch, too. I’m also pretty indiscriminant here, though anything that inspires notes in the margins is typically better appreciated in my falls and winters.

Lists like these help me with writing fiction, especially with adding those sensory details that flesh out the atmospherics of a story. Time and place are key, and concretizing them with sensible details (get out of here with your big budget blockbuster movie in February) is a must when trying to build a believable world, no matter how unbelievable the story.  

And I apologize to all of my fellow Iowans for jinxing our nice weather by talking about it (The Unseasonable Pleasantness of Which We Shall Not Speak, as it will heretofore be called). During this writing, for instance, I have watched the sun disappear, and I see a cool wind pushing pedestrians suddenly sideways. The all-knowing iPod will probably hit me with something from “Harvest Moon” when I get in the car again.

At this time six years ago, my wife (then still my “long-time partner”) and I were spending our last days in our beloved rental home on Prairie du Chien Road in Iowa City. Bat infestation aside, that place served us better than well. We had a boss porch, interesting neighbors, and a landlord who lowered our rent after two years in the place. Seriously. What more could a couple of aimless twenty-somethings in a college town ask for?

The time came, though, for something more permanent. We knew we were in for the long hall in Iowa City, and that ownership was an eventuality we may as well just embrace. We began searching houses with a list of criteria and an “absolute maximum” price that seemed always on the rise. We eventually found a shoebox marinating in cat urine with good structural integrity, passable garden potential, and abhorrent interior color scheme. Ever the negotiators, we strong-armed the sellers into accepting our second offer, which was exactly what they were asking for the house. (Take that.)

We felt good about our purchase, even as the sense of responsibility began weighing heavily. There was also the whole “change” thing which had me approaching moving day with some trepidation. I had grown accustomed to my digs, had come to love the fifteen-minute walk to downtown and the boiler heat in winter. And then there were the nuts and bolts of it all: No lawn mower, no garden tools, and rampant uncertainty about just what exactly a “double-hung window” was.

The inspection day was especially nerve-wracking. As my copilot that day, I tapped my dad. My dad who once spent an entire weekend caulking the seams in his driveway because it “looked better” that way. My dad who loses sleep when a good rain ruins his lawn mowing plans (and who I swear brushes said lawn). My dad who mows and shovels and provides general yard labor for neighbors just “so it gets done”. My dad whose garage is nicer than most apartments I ever had.

In the tours my wife and I had taken of the house, I had tried to anticipate all the things my dad might find wrong with it. I had memorized the year of the furnace for when he asked. I had scoured the basement for any bows or cracks in the foundation. I had tested the hot water and flushed all the toilets repeatedly. Due diligence done, I was ready for the old man to pick it apart.

The inspector—the one actually being paid to tell us everything that was wrong with the house—set off with his clipboard that day as soon as we entered. My dad walked around nodding, me in tow, mostly pleased with what he saw at first glance. He, too, noticed the pervasive cat smell, but agreed that it was no deal-breaker. He expressed some concerns about the windows, but thought they had life yet in them. He insisted that one tree in back had been planted too near the house, though it was nothing we still couldn’t remove in an afternoon. All was good.

And then he moved for the garage. I froze. The garage, I remember thinking. Of course.

The garage was a mess of pockmarked drywall, poor organization, and pathetic light fixtures unbefitting the real work meant for that space. The garage door, in addition to being manual, did not seal tightly at its bottom. Cracks in the floor had not been properly sealed, the seams where the foundation met the floor were woefully bereft of blow-in insulation, and the screen door was an embarrassment. I could not even bring myself to tell him that the motion light hanging above the exterior of the garage door did not work.

“This’ll need work,” he sighed, though his face said, You can still get out of this whole deal, you know. 

To be fair, my dad is not alone. The garage is an art form for so many of the Iowa men around whom I was raised. Yes, these garages store cars and garden tools and implements all and sundry. But they also serve as multifunctional extensions of the house. I have been to more birthday parties, graduation receptions, and holiday gatherings hosted in garages than I can count. These garages are meticulously painted (and often decorated), are as clean as some rooms inside my house, and are often heated and cooled. They are paeans to alternative living spaces everywhere. Mine? As incomprehensible to my dad as my decision to major in English.

We have made earnest improvements over our first six years, however. Garage door opener? Check. Nasty screen door? History. Drywall? Still bad, but better. Organization? Well, let’s just say my dad has insisted for three Christmases in a row that he gift me a whole wall organization system. “I’ll even help you install it!” he says.

But we’re getting there. One of these days my dad will open his mailbox to find an invitation to a fabulous party being hosted in my garage. Besides, after our little pirate stole every square foot from us inside the house, I have been looking for additional writing space. We’ll see what the old man has to say about a desk and a bookshelf alongside the leaf blower. That’ll be a garage party first.

I would love to learn how to throw knives. I’ve always thought working a toll booth might be interesting. I pine to learn how to run a backhoe. I would trade my favorite food to just once backhand a ball up the middle and feed Derek Jeter for the start of an inning-ending double play.

Some of those wishes are more attainable than others. The baseball dream, for instance, is far likelier than my ever being trusted with construction site machinery. Why this topic? My son started daycare this week, and his notable step into big-boyhood has me waxing adventurous. I want to mean it when I tell him to continue being an adventurer one day. I need to lead by example.

Problem is I’m a rut-dweller. I eat the same things for breakfast every morning, run the same route at the same time on the same days of every week. I work in the same location during the same hours on every weekend morning (at the same table if Weird Sweatpants Guy doesn’t beat me to it as he has now for three Saturdays in a row). I go to bed at the same time every night and rise at the same time every morning. My time and the activities that occupy it are as unambiguous as can be. My world gets pretty familiar, pretty quickly.

My son’s world has grown from womb, to crib, to living room, to whole house, to good god where’d all these other kids come from? in seven short months. Those are more new horizons than I think I’ve tackled in the last decade. He’s done it with moxie, too, wiping the milk from his cheek with the back of his hand and giving daycare his “bring it on” look. He certainly does not get that from me.

If he can do that (and learn how to sit up without falling over backwards), then I can try some new things of my own. Just this week, for instance, I ate my first yogurt ever. Ever. The smell still churns my stomach, and I gag at least twice while eating it, but I know it’s good for me. While it is a step, simply throwing a curveball at my breakfast routine is hardly a destination. There is work yet to be done.

Following is a manageable list of earnest, if sometimes pedestrian, adventures on which I hope to embark. Some are more like goals to help break the routine, others are full-immersion rehabilitation efforts. All will certainly help transform me into that super wild and crazy guy shackled within me.

1. Master my wok: Grace Young makes it seem so easy, Lynne Rosetto Kasper makes it sound so delicious, and I plan to make it all a reality. My mom gave me a new wok for Christmas (as well as Ms. Young’s book), and with any luck, I’ll be a wizard by next holiday season. My dinners currently follow a predictable rotation, of which stir-fry is not a part. That will change.
2. Tour an ostrich farm: Yama hama. ‘Nuff said.
3. Give blood: Hate needles. Hate them. They held a blood drive in my high school library one year. I was in said library on that day, and witnessed the apparatus accidentally slipping out of a classmate’s arm, blood spurting cartoonishly onto the carpet in front of the Poetry section. The notion of ever giving my own blood sailed that day. But giving blood is one of those selfless acts I have always wanted to perform. Plus, my son took four needles at once last week during his round of shots. I can do this.
4. Wake up with only enough time to shower and ready for work: The very idea gives me heartburn. What about unforeseen events? No time cushion. NO TIME CUSHION!
5. Do something decidedly weekend-ish on a weeknight: Late movie? Dinner out? Television until all hours? The possibilities are endless.
6. Start kayaking: I almost started kayaking a few years ago, and then read the story about the kayaker who discovered a body while out on the water one morning. Then I thought about all the other things one could find while kayaking (I hate snakes). I didn’t want to kayak anymore. I do now.
7. Learn to hip-hop dance: Years ago, I tried to talk some friends in to committing to lessons for a few months, and then tearing up the downtown bar scene with our scary moves. I found no takers. (Anyone know of father/son lessons somewhere?)
8. Mow the backyard before the front yard: It just feels wrong, but I’ll try.

I refuse to set timelines for any of these items, especially the ones related to needles or large, sinister, useless birds. It all starts with yogurt, though, and I want to practice what I’ll someday preach to my son about trying new things and being flexible. So begins a lifelong competition between two adventurous men. I’ve seen the lad’s daycare and raised him “Digestive Balance With 7 Live & Active Probiotic Cultures!”

And who knows, if this whole living on the edge thing continues, I might be putting my left shoe on first by 2012.  

2:56 in the morning. Asleep, but then startled awake by a who-knows-what. I blink and bend an ear this way and that. Humidifier still bubbling, dog sawing logs next to the bed. All is right. I settle back and set adrift once more, though I have not yet reentered the waters of sleep when I hear it. A bizarre sound from my son’s room, and I don’t mean from him. It’s his horse toy, the one that neighs when squeezed. I check next to me to be sure my wife has not gone to his room. She has not. No one to squeeze the horse. Did I imagine it?

Dog wakes with a start and grumbles. In five years he has awakened overnight less than a handful of times, and only then when something is seriously amiss. My wife stirs, not sure what has awakened her, but sure something has, much like me minutes earlier. I quickly tell her what I have heard. She does not believe me. I tell her again. And then my son starts hollering. The horse is discovered to be among the other toys, where it was left, nothing having fallen on it while we slumbered.

You can’t make this stuff up. Seriously, that was all early last week, and it set us on edge for a few days thereafter. We’re pretty sensible folks, and don’t get riled too easily, but the horse brought every ridiculous horror movie I have made my wife watch over the years back to me in a rush. In the days that followed, every unexplained bump, every windswept branch that skittered across our roof, every car door that slammed down the street had us locking eyes and losing all reason for a moment. As I said, you just can’t make this stuff up. Or maybe you can. All fiction comes from somewhere, after all.

I have told this story before, but it bears repeating here. In a window seat at a café in Iowa City a couple years ago, while on a break from some word-mongering, I sat gazing out the window at a small sapling (probably seven-feet high) bending in a sneezy March wind. Into my line of sight steps a man. He sizes up the tree, kicks it once, and then forcefully bends it back and forth with a perfectly placid look on his face. The tree finally breaks free of the ground and the man carries it away, out of sight.

Now, maybe the guy worked for the owner of the grounds. Maybe that owner wanted the tree gone. Maybe the guy forgot his saw and had to make do with his person. Maybe. Maybe the tree was sick and needed to go. Maybe. Or maybe the man was commanded by some sinister and unseen force, and the tree was but the start of his arboreal rampage through the streets of downtown Iowa City. Now we’re talkin’. Why would the guy do this? Who tries to stop him? What does he do with the spent trees? The what-ifs bend the story's path, and all you can do is walk.

I had a conversation with some students recently about invention. They wondered if something that is a newer design of a pre-existing item can classify as an invention. Some items are so far removed from their source material (an iPhone from the first telephone, for instance) that they bear little resemblance. Innovation, reinvention, redesign—call it what you will. We decided that the point is not worrying about what to call it, but rather to question whether or not the end product is inventive. That’s fiction—deconstruction and reassembly, creating an original composite from rather familiar parts. Just so long as the final product works. I may need that random guy’s act of tree-felling for some larger work later. It lives now in my notebook.

And our house’s phantom horse whisperer? The affair seemed a little more ridiculous each day. The horse toy no longer seems quite as menacing as it did just a week ago. The incident now lives among the tree anecdote in my notebook, ready to be hyperbolized and distorted unrecognizably at some later date.

Raise your hand if you have, on at least one occasion, had the “names” conversation. It’s the one where you list every name you’ve ever hated or loved (but especially the ones you’ve hated). You know, those _____s and _____s and _____s (especially those _____s!) you’ve known throughout the years. “I’ve never known a _____ I’ve liked!” always seems to make its way into the conversation.

On a drive home from vacation one summer, some friends and I had that conversation in the car. It became a grand game of one-upsmanship, each abhorrent name accompanied by some ugly story. _____ was a particularly awful name on which we all found ourselves in agreement. Given the intimacy of the group, no name was off limits and irreverence only garnered bonus points. The name-hating game proved to be a spot of safe fun. A might bit snarky perhaps, but fun.

Something decidedly un-fun happened a couple of years later. In a session of that same game with some coworkers, I delivered a sidewinding admonition of _____, a name that had long been nails-on-a-chalkboard bad for me. I was still sporting the affected look of disgust when one of the coworkers told me her deceased father shared that same name. Oops. I was introduced to the dangers of the game outside the confines of a close circle of friends. (As horrified as I was, the woman was a peach about it, thankfully.)

As a teacher, my list of unacceptable names is embarrassingly long. When my wife and I found out that we would be having a boy, a whole new variation of the “names” game loomed, one with distinctly higher stakes. I mean, after my years in a classroom, I can’t even hear the name _____ anymore without having flashbacks. Pronounce _____ and I am in a fetal position on the floor while the last syllable still floats toward the ether. Saying _____ to me five times fast is like playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for Malcom McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.

And the pressure with "naming" anything is high, I think. My wife and I volleyed possibilities for weeks before settling on naming our dog Bernie. Supposedly, my grandma was livid with my parents' name for me because it was also the name of the town drunk where she lived. For every great reason to choose a name, there are five bad ones if you look closely enough, and five times that if you run the name by enough of your friends.  

Luckily, my wife and I had always held fast to a baby name that has hitherto remained untarnished. We’re not naïve, though. Someone else might hate it, might one day (gasp!) use it as the trump card in their name-hating game with friends. Or some reprehensible individual with the name may still come along at some point, making us shudder whenever we address our son. But really, I think it’s probably too late to matter for our little guy. To us, he’s Graham, and could be nothing else. It fits. It’s him.

Another awful version of this game pops up constantly in fiction writing where I agonize over naming characters. I’ll sometimes stare at my computer screen blankly, paralyzed for far too long before the blinking cursor. I can see my character and know exactly how to describe what they’re doing. But I can’t name them. Sometimes I will just put an “X” as a placeholder so I can keep writing. In more than a few books on writing, however, I have read that doing so is a nasty habit, that, especially at the beginning of a piece, a character fails to live and breathe for the author without a name. And if they fail to live and breathe in the writing of the story, your reader is unlikely to walk with them. I tend to agree.

But what to do? I sat down one day and started a folder on my computer where I dump any “safe” name that comes to me. My criteria are pretty simple:

• Cannot be the name of any current student, or any student taught within the last three years.
• Cannot be the name of any close friends or immediate family members. (Our Graham was not yet even a concept when I created Graham Hintle, protagonist in The Crepuscular Crusaders.)
• Cannot be a name that is universally reviled, like _____.

My grandpa died fifteen years ago today, and I felt compelled to dedicate this space to him. I was close to my grandpa as a kid. Maybe not like the kid and the old guy in the Werther’s commercials, but my grandpa wasn’t a Werther’s commercial kind of guy. Replace the nice cardigan with a well-worn t-shirt, and the hard candy with a can of Old Style, and you start to see something more closely resembling “our” commercial. (To say nothing of replacing the nice kid from the commercials with a mop-headed little knave.)   

Grandpa was a veteran of World War II, having fought in the Philippines. He returned to the states to marry my grandma and run a tavern in their town of roughly 300 people in northeast Iowa. He would later give up the tavern and spend the rest of his work years driving a bread truck route. All of this was from a time before I knew him. My grandma died when she was young, before I was even a concept. The widowed grandpa was the only grandpa I ever knew.

My earliest recollections of my grandpa are from visits to him in his small house, knocking over his ashtray brimming with cigar leavings, overfeeding the countless guppies in his massive aquarium, and avoiding the basement like the plague (scary basement). The visit almost always included a trip up town for a soda and some candy cigarettes. There weren’t a great many rules at his house. Chief among them was to leave the TV Guide alone. We could knock his ashtray over all day, or sate guppies to death all we wanted. We could pound on his standup piano and jump holes into his waterbed. But we couldn’t touch the TV Guide. This was all Grandpa Version 1.0.

Grandpa Version 2.0 was a picture of deteriorating health in a nursing home. One story I love is of him in his first nursing home, which he hated, listening to the daily obituaries read on the local AM radio station to see if anyone from the nursing home he wanted to live in had died that day. He eventually moved to the top of that waiting list, thus winning his transfer.

By this point, my grandpa lived with the help of a pacemaker and was relegated to a wheelchair. Organs sputtered and limbs were amputated. Most days, he addressed me and my cousins using our given names, though one of us became “Larry” on at least one occasion. (There is no Larry in our family.) This war veteran, small business owner, and career working man turned whatever money he had, month after month, over to this care facility, his home. In the drawer of his nightstand, next to a bag of hard candy, was always a small stash of money that visitors would leave him for a Pepsi out of the vending machine down the hall. About the only parts of his room that were not standard issue were the 13-inch television on his dresser that he used to watch the Cubs lose every game, and the tapestry of grandkids’ artwork on his door.

These were the only versions of my grandpa we grandkids knew, but we learned over the years that they painted just a portion of the larger portrait. The other versions painted themselves slowly through our parents’ recollections of him, recollections meted out over the years at levels commensurate with our ages. That’s because some of these recollections have always been difficult to hear.

Grandpa lived with Bipolar Disorder back when it was still “Manic Depression”, in an era when so relatively little was known about it. He and his family likely suffered as much from medical misunderstanding as from the illness itself. Most doctors also thought he exhibited hallmark symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his service in the war. This version of my grandpa begot stories my mom and her siblings still struggle to recount, stories that paint a person completely alien to the grandpa I always knew.

But inextricably tethered to these stories were ones about his love for my grandma and his kids, about his undying appreciation for Patsy Cline and his mastery of Mississippi River navigation*. He had an unconditional sense of obligation to close friends and family in need. He and my grandma had little, but he would have parted with it all if it meant saving the skin of someone close to him. And, perhaps best of all, everyone seemed close to him. He just had that kind of personality.

One of the things I love about writing fiction is creating those imperfections that help round out a character. Without those quirks and peccadilloes, that character just comes across as unbelievable or trite. They aren’t really characters at all until you know the whole, and neither are people in real life. Good with the bad, highs with the lows, yin and yang and all that jazz.

I like to think of my grandpa as lucky. His skeletons weren’t tucked away in some closet, waiting to be found with or without his permission. His skeletons danced up and down Main Street, out of the shadows and in full view. They made him easy to judge, though I think that was more a blessing than a curse for him. Every part of him was out there, and those who loved him loved all of him. We should all be so lucky.

*Apparently, my grandpa used to fill his empty Old Style cans with water and let them sink into the river when he was done with them. On behalf of my grandpa, I would like to apologize to every river town south of Dubuque, Iowa.

When I was 17, I found myself at the mall one day in summer with two close friends. Or maybe it was early fall. The prism through which my youth is separated into individual memories is this block of text alone. Forgive some blurred lines.

Finer points aside, the larger recollection is undeniably true. On that day in either summer or fall, those two friends and I happened by Bath and Body Works at Northpark Mall in Davenport, Iowa. We joked about how great it would be to have jobs there. We joked about asking for applications, and about the interview we would most certainly miserably fail. Our jokes led to wild future possibilities of donning the striped apron and slinging lotion to those girls of our dreams (because certainly it would be an endless procession of them), and getting paid to do so.

And then we stopped laughing and proffered steely dares to one another. And then we collectively approached the manager on duty for applications. And then we were called for interviews.

We started work a couple weeks later.

In those transitional weeks, our impending employment was quickly the stuff of legend. We trumpeted our feat to every friend who would listen. We told our parents and any relative we could find. I remember my mom’s face as I told her. I can’t describe that face, even today. Confusion? That’s the best word I can find for it. Or maybe disbelief would be more appropriate. That was mostly because she was sure I was lying to her. She thought I was trying to soften the blow of abruptly quitting my restaurant job with this “tale” of a new gig in the lotion industry. It took me a spell to convince her, and even then I don’t think she bought it until she saw me there working, and even then maybe not until the first paycheck came.

Telling my dad was a different prospect. A factory man himself, he is the son of a farmer. My other grandfather was a World War II veteran who owned a tavern and later drove a bread truck until he retired. None of them ever wore lotion, let alone made their living on it. Born of such a staid stock of male role models, I braced myself for the lecture about “getting serious about life” I was sure would follow.

But my dad surprised me. He must have been privy to the possibilities running through my mind, must have remembered his own teen years well enough to think what I was thinking. He gave me a knowing nod and just chuckled.

I still remember my first day on the job. I was asked to familiarize myself with the products as soon as I clocked in. I walked around feigning an inherent expertise I had first peddled in my interview. (If only I could have hustled Country Apple scented sundries half as well.) I circled the products and set about squeezing bottles, inhaling deeply, frowning at some, giving the discerning so-so nod to others. “Mmm, that’s nice,” I said to a few. I sniffed and sampled, and by the end of my shift I was finally given the penultimate task. I was asked to stand at the entrance to the store and apply lotion to anyone who walked in. I bubbled with excitement, holstered a Vanilla Bean Body Cream, and took my post.

What followed was a parade of confusion. Some women would stare blankly for a moment before hesitantly accepting my offer. Others averted their eyes and pretended not to see me. A few screwed their faces into looks of disgust and walked stiffly by. Many laughed good-naturedly before, during, and after our encounter.

“Just doing my job, ma’am.”

Through the fall and winter of that year, my friends and I could not meet a girl without promptly filling them in on the most recent developments in the body-care industry, our industry. “Come see me at the store on Saturday” became the single coolest sentence-ender we could imagine. And most of them would indeed come see us, oftentimes to giggle in disbelief, but other times to give themselves over to our oh-so-professional hands for as many samples as we could pull. Did I mention we were getting paid for all of this?

We began to wear out our welcomes eventually, of course. It was an industry built neither by nor for three scofflaws barely on this side of puberty. My own tipping point was the day the Fizz Balls were released. The Fizz Balls were globular effervescence roughly the size of an orange that were dropped into bath water (B&BW may still have them now).

The idea, as corporate had told us, was to break the ball into pieces so that one ball could last for a few baths, or several in the case of hand- or foot-baths. We had a basin of water set up in the store to let people take hand-baths (thankfully no foot-baths) and test it out while we gave them the spiel. In an idle moment over the basin that afternoon, I discovered the ecstasy of a whole ball at once, and was quick to share this with my “clients”. Management might have been pleased with my salesmanship—a whole Fizz Ball per bath led to higher volume sales—but they cringed a little at my pitch. I think it started with: “If you really want an exciting bath…”

Some women may have complained. Management may have figured out we could have cared less about the product we sold. Our clumsy hands may have rendered us incapable of the hand massages befitting those who wear the apron.  Whatever the reason, we soon found ourselves more often in the stockroom than on the sales floor. The romance had faded. The job had become like any other. We still got to flirt with customer contact days, but they were too infrequent to hold our attention any longer. When our callers came on those Saturday afternoons and we had to be summoned from the stockroom—without an apron—it had somehow lost a good share of its magic. The next spring, I took a job at a hotel.

How does this all relate to writing? I think it parallels ideas v. execution. Whole stories can exist in the mind; beautiful, rich stories that yearn to be written. And then the actual writing gets in the way. The day-to-day, sentence-to-sentence reality starts throwing water on the romance. It grows difficult to keep the flame, to relish the Shea butter massage days while tolerating the stockroom days and to still believe in the composite picture they together paint. I've had a great many stockroom days lately.  

I think that job also reminds me to fill my life with as many uncommon experiences as I can, which, at the very least, serve as fodder later. It also reminds me to hit the elbows when moisturizing in winter. (Pure Shea butter is still the best for that, by the way.)

The following is a clumsy nod to one Leander Wapshot, inscrutable sea-captain, patriarch of the finest New England stock, and wordsmith of a most singular epistolary style.

Writer tired. Nights of interrupted sleep. Baby a pirate. Little time pirate. Pirating skills unmatched. Laughing pirate. Rubs hands and laughs. Pirate used to sleep all night without interruption. Writer does not doubt same will be true again. Wife even more beset by pirated sleep. Writer should keep all in perspective.

Words hard to commit to paper this week. Writing intermittent. Hours spent writing Saturday. Also Sunday. Subsequent weekdays of sporadic work times. Latest story progressing in series of hiccups. Running then crawling. Finish line not close. Continuity sought.

Writer mercifully forced indoors by conditions. Weather helping free what little time there is. Snow light. Driveway clear. Yard work not an issue for another few months. Nowhere to be but indoors. Nothing to do but write in those moments of free time. World is small in Iowa in January, so small that all corners in reach. Easy to reach. Good places to work. Nowhere else to go. Not like summer. Summer more a field. Big field. Verdant. Beautiful, but no corners. All movement. Stoppage good sometimes.

Decisions loom. Many stories. Some need moving to backburner. Not sure which ones. Writer remembers days when time was abundant. Maybe too abundant. Like summer’s field. Focus seems better in corners. Maybe fewer minutes means more efficiency.

Or maybe writer is delusional. Maybe swashbuckling time pirate stole sanity.

I don’t hate this blog. I am not mad at my website. Despite many signs to the contrary, I am still capable of sentence construction. Essentially, there is no good reason to have ignored the blog for as long as I have. Reasons, yes. Good reasons, no. I could complain about the strictures of parenthood, the demands of another school year, the torpor begotten of Iowa in winter. At the confluence of those would no doubt lay a whole bevy of valid, if easy, excuses. But fish from a barrel are rarely the tastiest.

I am working. What I’m not doing is talking about that work, which is something I usually really enjoy. Disparate conversations prove difficult, and this was always my forum to vent, trumpet, pontificate, and speculate. Lately I have been doing all of those things in my head, which is too cacophonous a place already for any more din. I need to recommit, so recommit I shall.

What I’ve been up to:

• Putting the finishing touches on a novel this fall that I will soon begin sending around. 
• Storyboarding two other novels that have lived too long in my imagination.
• Reading! This is a crucial component to any life of writing, and one I have just recently been able to revisit—not with the same level of consistency as before, but still.
• Researching some nonfiction ideas for adults. I love my state, and have long envisioned an “Iowa” project I’ve just begun exploring.  Logistics may get in the way, but it’s fun to “plan” it nonetheless.
• Assembling a collection of short fiction for kids. There really isn’t much of a market for collections of short stories for kids; I may have to look at creating my own platform for them. Maybe this whole internet thing will present an opportunity for that.

More than anything, I have been stocking the toolbox, as it were. The continuity required for creating “works” has been elusive, but that doesn’t necessarily mean inspiration has been. The well still seems deep there.  Freeing those bits of inspiration from the clutter in my gray matter is an important step in the larger process. My notebook is filling up with snippets, fragments, anecdotes, and all things incomplete. 

Perusing my BlackBerry applications the other day, I ran across the decidedly low-tech but always incredibly useful “Memo Pad” orphaned in a little-used folder. It was then that I remembered using it once or twice, like Didn’t I jot down a killer story idea or two there a while back, or was that in my old phone? I opened it to find that I had indeed jotted what was probably once a killer idea, at least in my mind.

But all it did was puzzle me…mightily. It immediately called to mind a Seinfeld episode, the one from Season 2 where George is convinced he’s had a heart attack. Early in the episode, Jerry is watching a midnight sci-fi movie. The next scene shows him asleep in bed, half waking to reach for a pen and notepad on his nightstand to write something, followed by a chuckle and a return to his slumber. Next day, he retrieves the note, and has no idea what he had written. He knows it’s an idea for a joke, but can’t connect the dots.

“Ful-hel-mo-nen-ter-val?” he says later at the coffee shop with George and Elaine. “Fax me some halibut?” 

Elaine grabs the note and studies it. “Don't-mess-with-Johnny,” she says conclusively. 

It isn’t until the final scene of the show when it occurs to Jerry what he intended to write. “Flaming globes of Sigmond!” he trumpets, and then sours. “Wait, that’s not funny at all.”

And my Memo Pad entry may be only as inspiring as Jerry’s joke was funny. I’ll have to decode before I decide. Other ideas hold more immediate promise. Depending on my mindset, entire story arcs stretch with the recitation of one simple line from my notebook. Other times, it’s Flaming globes of Sigmond! all around. In that sense, finished stories and their beginnings are both as mysterious and not as mysterious as they seem or don’t seem (huh?), which is why talking about them always reduces me to a rambling mess. If I ever give you a succinct, sensible, A-to-B answer to a question about the inspiration for a finished piece, or to a question regarding what I’m working on, I may be lying to you. Or not. See? Rambling.    

I’ve just recently been able to begin throwing down some glue for some of these ideas, and someday I hope to have an assembled whole upon which I can ineloquently reflect for you. Someday.

In the meanwhile, I will be sure to duck the cobwebs and resume spewing all the asynchronous nonsense I can right here in my very own corner of the web.           

I had a terrific day with hundreds of kids from the Quad City area on Tuesday this week. We all gathered for the Children’s Literature Festival in Davenport, Iowa, and I joined with 11 other authors to provide programming for the nearly 700 students in attendance. 

Chatting craft with readers is the best way to reset the compass, and mine feels better calibrated than it has in some time. I had just 30 minutes with my groups, and we focused on “atmosphere” in a story. We discussed mood and tone, and practiced some ways to bring fascinating places alive for a reader. I was humbled by the young writers’ ability to do so with such gusto. I only wish we had more time to continue building our ideas—adding a hero and sidekicks, concocting those antagonistic forces, talking about pacing and voice and all things stylistic.

I had many kids come talk to me after our sessions about the books they planned to write with the ideas they brainstormed in our time together. I, for one, can’t wait to read them.

I’m here still, despite all signs to the contrary. The words have not been hard to come by as of late, they’ve just been difficult to harness and process for use in sentences (or even moderately articulate fragments). My entire being has become a monosyllabic string of grunts and garbles. I communicate with white noise, soft coos, and endless hums of songs I love. I need not edit or revise, and I dare not waste what precious little time remains in my life trying to compose broadly for a variety of tastes. I have been commissioned—something that, on the surface, smacks of “arrival” for an artist. My world is small, and my audience is one.

It just took me more than a hundred words to say “I had a kid,” which probably only proves that I read way too much Henry James in college. (Seriously, have you ever seen that guy describe the turning of a doorknob over the course of a pages-long paragraph?) But my first child was born one month ago now, and I never knew how much I would miss my logorrheic ways in the frantic days since. Watch out now, because I’ve been pent up like Jack Bauer in a North Korean prison camp. And we all know what happens when you lock Jack up.

I used to always lament the difficulty in appropriating my writing time in the past. There’s something oddly freeing about having so little of it now. I no longer have time for market research, or trips to the post office, or any of the other potpourri “writing” activities I used to do. Slowly, I’ll find a way to reintroduce those pieces of the larger puzzle into my days. Right now, though, it’s all about the writing, and that ain’t half bad. I may even get a chance to move the cursor more than I did before the baby’s arrival.

So, in the spirit of these troubling economic times, I guess you could say I’m doing some belt-tightening of a different sort. The budgeting becomes more important, as does a carefully ordered list of priorities. Atop that list is the committing of words, to sentences, as part of paragraphs, within the larger context of (hopefully) many stories.

I typically try to do away with “advice” on the blog. It always seems a bit presumptuous to offer it up unless first solicited. But there is a topic within writing about which I can speak with some confidence, and it has to do with defining “work time” as a writer.

I have done some serious redefining over the years of what “writing” is, exactly. I used to think I could only call my time “writing time” if I had committed sentences to my word processor as part of a story that would at some point lead to a published work. Any ramblings, journal entries, or other seemingly insignificant bits of word-mongering were unworthy of what I thought of as writing time. “Writers” sat at their typewriters, cracked their knuckles, and let their fingers do their stories’ bidding. 

But then I realized that most of what I have been lucky enough to have had published has come from those “idle” times, and that the recording of those words, no matter how seemingly meaningless and random, is some of the most important writing I do each week. On my honeymoon a couple summers ago, my wife and I visited a giant rock quarry filled with water. On a scrap of paper that I later stuffed in my wallet, I wrote:

What creature would I not want to meet here?

I found the scrap months later, which led to some research on creatures real and imagined, which led to my discovery of the Aztec myth of Ahuizotl, which led to 30,000 words of fiction about getting the beast out of the quarry. There were missteps and revisions aplenty along the way. The novel still did not write itself. But I’m sure the story would have never begun had I not captured with that one simple question my feeling upon seeing the quarry.

Now I carry notebooks with me everywhere, and I write down everything that has any chance of either becoming a story of its own, or finding its way into an existing story. Situations, bits of dialogue, words I love—it all lands on my pages. I’m obligated to none of it, so I’m pretty indiscriminate about what I record. Something hollow in the moment can seem suddenly weighty upon further reflection, like my question with the 30,000-word answer.

I have a sturdy notebook I keep in my writing spaces, a thinner one to carry in a bag with books, and a tiny memo pad I put in my pocket when I travel light. I thumb through each of them at least once each week, just to see if something clicks. Sometimes I get that click, and very often I don’t. But looking through the notebooks and letting my mind wander, watching some ideas snowball and others melt, has become some of the most important time I spend “writing” at all. Now, if I went on to do nothing with these entries, perhaps that time could indeed best be described as retroactively idle. Some of the hardest work comes in nurturing ideas into completed works. But it all starts with the seeds, and every green thumb needs a well-defined garden.

So, my advice on getting started? Buy a notebook and fill it. There.

***That 30,000-word answer is available now for sale

I have had a months-long conversation with a dear friend of mine about “style” in fiction. This friend is a librarian, and is one of the most well-read people I’ve ever known. She teaches literature to elementary kids at a level usually reserved for people much older, and even then not for all people. It is astounding what she is able to accomplish with these bright young minds. We often chat about her sessions with the kids, since many of them are students I also teach. Our talks are some of my favorite parts of my job, and often we’ll push the snowball down the hill together until it is both unwieldy and dangerous for bystanders (in a good way, of course). When it comes to teaching about style, however, we both struggle a bit to nail down the best approach. We know it when we see it, but bottling it for public consumption is another task entirely.

In lieu of trying to find a way to most effectively teach it, I’ve instead turned my summer focus to better knowing how to wield it. I’ve read countless books on writing over the years, some terrific, some awful, and many middling at best. There are only so many ways different folks can express a certain core of fundamental, universally accepted elements of good fiction (show don’t tell, respect your reader, establish a sense of place, etc.). There are variations, to be sure, but most of them don’t stray too far from that collective norm.

It’s good advice all, but I’d have to say the best I’ve gotten is that writers have to be readers. Reading, like the other bits of wisdom from above, is something that is universally accepted by all the people from whom I have read advice on writing. Like with the physical act of putting words to paper, I get nowhere near the time I’d like to have for reading. Summer is when I try to plow through as many books as possible, and I am in the throes of that right now. 

One thing I notice as I rip through my stacks is that the various story ideas start to run together in my mind. I come to appreciate just how much a role style plays in differentiating one book from the next. It might just be my approach, but the things that stand out are wordplay, or finesse with dropping an inciting incident or climax into the pot. For instance, I hate exclamation points…hate them. At least I thought I did.

This past winter I read a book—So Brave, Young, and Handsome, by Leif Enger—that wedged such an egregious amount of exclamation points into the prose that I was close to putting the book down.  I stuck with it, thankfully, and was rewarded with one of the better larks I’ve read about in a long while. The thing is, the story could not have worked in that way that it does without all the shouting and unfettered excitement. It could have been a Dickensian spot of fun storytelling, or a cloying heap of over-stylized outbursts. It took a deft hand to keep it from going cartoonish, and deft it was.

Now, could I pull it off? I doubt it, which is probably one reason I tend to have that kneejerk distaste for that breed of punctuation. The point is that I saw it could work, and I think my approach to writing in general is better for it. A month or so after I read the story, I struggled to remember the protagonist’s name. But the nuances of Enger’s style have never left my purview. Being forever stuck with his ability to artfully exclaim is why I read at all.

I once heard plotting described as clothespins, with each separate pin like a plot point. Remove any one, and the story falls apart. If that’s true, then I think authorial style is all about deciding which cloth to hang. Moreover, it’s still a work in progress once it’s on the line, with the writer reimagining, redesigning, and all around perfecting as they go. Studying the masterfully designed textiles of others is then the best way to garner stylistic inspiration.

After all, a woman can “hear traffic on the highway,” or she can “hear the highway breathing” (thanks, David Byrne!). One communicates, while the other evokes. Perhaps style in fiction is the pursuit of hanging more than just white sheets on the line.

Or maybe it’s just laundry day and I’m feeling guilty about my avoidance of household chores. 

With “fear” having now been such a central theme of the last few posts, I thought it might be appropriate to speak of a horror I didn’t know existed until recently. 

Ideas for my stories typically come from completely unknown sources. If ever I could reflect on a story and know exactly where it was born, I would simply revisit that spot time and again and draw from the well. The reality is that ideas just pop, sometimes in the form of the first sentence of a story I do not know yet, other times in a richly drawn final scene for characters I never knew existed.

After that, I derive almost all inspiration for what I write from conversation. Friends and family rarely know it, but questions I ask and problems I pose are often in research of those ideas. I suppose to this point, people have probably just assumed those off-the-wall queries were simply a function of my left-of- centeredness. I am a bizarre sort, of course, but that is neither hither nor thither. Their answers help me craft.

And since conversation gives me so much from which to build, I always thought a blog would be the ultimate tool that would allow me to run wild with ideas. Imagine, a place where the conversation is not limited to just those few with whom I spend my time, where a conversation can occur on a global scale, where I can bounce an idea off folks as far-flung as the birthplaces of the ideas themselves.

And then I hear about story ideas being stolen right out from under an author’s nose when they post too much about burgeoning stories on things like blogs. I grow terrified, sure the same will happen to me if I reveal too much. Poof—my dream of what could be with blogging is vanished. I already live in fear that my good ideas won’t get written before someone with a strikingly similar idea beats me to the punch, rendering mine a mere “rip-off.”

These are the things that hide under the beds of writers—or at least this writer—and they are things made bigger and scarier by every passing minute we can’t spend developing that newest idea haunting us. Kangaroos and ostriches have got nothing on my fear of not getting something written before the inspiration fades.

I've been in San Francisco now for about 48 hours. It’s absolutely beautiful, and my kind of town all the way. The second leg of my flight out was just under 4 hours-long, so I had plenty of “down time” on the plane.  That would have seemed like the death knell to my sanity just a couple days ago—way too much time way too immersed in my way worst fear of all. I speculated in my previous blog post that I could maybe use that fear for good, turning it loose on some new fiction. I’m happy to say it worked, though not in the way I expected. Instead, some old fiction was refurbished.

Something about being removed from my normal surroundings begot a certain clarity regarding a story I’ve been working on for a while. There had always been something slightly amiss with it, though I could never place my finger on exactly what that was. The story idea in general—or at least the inciting incident for the plot—is one that has haunted me for years, in that best of ways. I have always had trouble keeping the various characters and plot points tethered to it, however.

I’m not so sure I’ve solved it completely now, either, but I love the new path that seemed to open right before me as I revised on the plane. I murdered one of my characters—not as part of the story, rather as part of complete authorial extrication from the story—and went all Dr. Frankenstein on some chapters. The guy next to me on the plane kept sheepishly looking over as I excitedly wielded my pen over various pages, wondering what in the world I was doing. I may have been talking to myself as well, so his concerns were not completely unfounded.

It’s a well documented fact that I am a word nerd, but the creative process is also something that gets me geeky. No matter the product of that creativity—painting, fashion, music, whatever—I love to know the “how” behind it all. Those same processes I love to hear others talk about can at times bedevil me, so it was a fine moment when it all seemed to click at 30,000 feet. Perhaps somewhere subconsciously I was so sure I would die on the flight that a macabre sense of urgency (finish now or finish never!) carried my pen across the pages.

Maybe flying ain’t so bad after all.

Inspiration can come from the strangest places. On one particularly hot day of teaching back in my substitute days, my sixth grade classroom smelled like burning onions. My wife could literally smell it on my clothes when I got home. Although I did not know the kids all that well, we talked about deodorant use the next day. It was an uncomfortable, and disgusting, experience. It triggered a memory of deodorant woes, however, which inspired a scene from my first novel.

Relational memory—like the smell that brought junior high rushing back to me—can most certainly inspire, but I also use fear as my muse. Maybe it’s my way of battling back against it, letting the pen do the work of the sword I don’t own. I use those fears to create the “what if” scenarios that often become storyboards. There are those common fears everyone shares, things like the dark, clowns, and baboons (everyone does fear them, right?). And then there are the fears that are mine alone (so far as I know), which are the ones I tap for original story ideas.

For instance, I’m flying next Wednesday. Spare me your facts and figures about flight safety, your sage anecdotes about how much quicker and easier it’ll be, your insistence that more deaths occur on the road each year than in the sky. I have flown many times before, and I get it. Still, as of Sunday night, I will not sleep. I will awake there forward at various points in cold sweats, in the grips of unreasonable fears made perfectly reasonable by the syrupy (ir)rationalizations of the wee hours. It won’t matter what you tell me. Save it. I know a lot of people fear flying, but not like this. Believe me.

I guarantee it’ll lead to some fiction, though, maybe even midflight if I can make my fingers move in spite of the sedatives. The following is a partial list of other fears with which I think I walk alone, all sure to be dealt with in some such story at some point in time.

• Ostriches: They run like the wind, possess the strength of a hundred of me, and are about as intelligent as a bag of hammers. I don’t like that combination.

• Kangaroos: I read a “weird news” story a while back about a kangaroo down under that bounded out of some brush in the path of a woman and her dog on a morning walk. Roo snatched the dog from its leash, jumped in a nearby lagoon, drowned the dog, and then fled the scene. I love dogs, and my hatred for kangaroos is exceeded only by my fear of them.  Aside: My niece—who I adore, and for whom I would do almost anything—asked me to go into the Australian exhibit at a zoo a couple years back. In the exhibit were those mini kangaroo things, and I steadfastly refused, disappointing her for the first time I could remember. Just couldn’t do it.

• Storm Drain Openings After Dark: Saw a raccoon crawl into one when I was a kid. Later learned raccoons have claws, semi-opposable thumbs, and an undying hatred of humans (right?). Walked strictly on sidewalks or the middle ‘o streets (in the absence of sidewalks) after nightfall ever since.

I’m stopping there while there’s still some hope of retaining any appearance of sanity. The bottom line is that inspiration is everywhere, no more so than in the most deeply felt emotions. Fear is but one of those emotions, but hey, last night I accidentally walked past an open storm drain, so fear is all I know right now.

***A mythical creature I came to fear was the inspiration for my ghoulie in The Crepuscular Crusaders.

My dad reuses everything. When I was a kid, I thought Tupperware was a fancy name for old Cool Whip containers. I was certain every family’s medicine cabinet had spent margarine tubs full of individually packaged ibuprofen their dad pilfered from his workplace. I was sure that raiding a hotel room for everything that wasn’t nailed down was expected of a guest. I learned later that there was a fine line between “resourcefulness” and “petty theft,” and that my dad was like Baryshnikov in his ability to dance along it.

I came to appreciate the longevity of objects. We pushed things to their limits, stretched them beyond durability and into seeming indestructibility. We had a car with a wheel well so rusted out my dad had to duck tape it to hold its form. Never mind that the green spray paint he used on the “fix” was nowhere near the green of the rest of the car. There was also a hole in the floorboard of the passenger side, allowing me to watch the road zip by under us. My dad got out of that car every penny he had paid for it and then some. He ran it until it literally died, and then took a $75 check from the junkyard for it to be used for parts. An unceremonious end to a most valiant automobile.

I later married into a similar situation. My father-in-law collects hardware—nails, screws, nuts, bolts—and has for decades. Point to any rusty whatnot in his shop and he can tell you the year he found it, where he found it (which often involves the shoulder of some highway), and various other details surrounding its discovery. Remarkably, every so often he’ll find a use for one of those ironmongery relics and it’ll fix what’s broke in ways no shiny new one ever could (at least according to him).

And me? I sip water every night from a Yankees souvenir cup taken from the stadium five years ago. It’s so cracked toward the top from repeated washings that I can only fill it to half its capacity lest it leak everywhere. I have to sip strategically from one side to avoid those same cracks. I have t-shirts from baseball tournaments in 1993 I refuse to part with.  

I worry sometimes that all this sanctity of preservation has turned me into a writing monster. I tend to hold on to ideas too long, to work them again and again until they’re like flavorless, tough-as-nails chewing gum. This could diplomatically be referred to as “perseverance,” though I think "inflexible" may be a more realistic adjective.  When the paper plate is stained through, it may just be time to throw it away and start a new one. And trying to run disposable cups through the dishwasher can have terrible consequences. Just ask my dad.

Revision is traditionally one of the single most bedeviling aspects of writing. It often includes the preservation of what was originally drafted, but for me I often have to do the unthinkable—reduce. Those old ideas still have their places—that’s what notebooks and forgotten computer file folders are for. William Faulkner said that the art of inspired creativity is the ability to “murder all your darlings.” Harsh wording, indeed (though for a Southern Gothic writer, it’s pretty cheery). I get the point, though, even if I prefer to think of it as imprisoning those darlings in those notebooks and file folders. I’ve written characters for certain stories only to imprison them upon revision. Some have been sprung later for other tales, though, reformed and ready for a new society.

I have so duly named my catchall file folder “The Dungeon” now. I call those characters my little zombies when I animate them once more. Who knows, maybe that dungeon with its misfit zombies is a story all its own someday. 

***My newest book, The Crepuscular Crusaders, is available now!

My wife and I moved into our house five years ago now. It’s small, with less than 1,500 square feet in all, but it felt downright palatial our first few years. In addition to the master bedroom, we had one room for guests, one room for my wife and her sundries, and the other room—the basement room so fittingly defined by the realty listing as “nonconforming”—for me and my multitudinous sundries.

And it was my space. It was painted a color I could be proud to proclaim: Cognac Snifter. It was every bit a cave. I had mile-high stacks of old books, magazines, and newspapers, all with some nugget of truth I clung to, all at the ready should I need a jolt of inspiration. I had that writing space many dream of.

Driving through town our first summer in our home, we ran across a neighborhood garage sale. They were selling a handmade old gun rack for $2. $2! I bought it on the spot, hung it fifteen minutes later, and used it to hang my hats. Old world map mounted on foam board for $4? Sold! Free black leather couch that’s seen much better days? Perfect for the wall opposite my desk! Brass table lamp, old spittoon, and Derek Jeter bobblehead? Yes, yes, and yes! I was Ye Olde Curiosity Room in the house.

What followed were inspired, uninterrupted evenings of hunting and pecking across my keyboard whenever the urge struck. Ideas became reality in no time. I had no idea how good I had it, and in retrospect I should have used that space more tirelessly. Now, like a sinister, too-close-to-home game of Risk, our spaces are slowly but surely being repopulated. If square footage was currency, well…brother, can you spare a dime?

My wife and I are expecting our first child in August and I’ve already begun learning a valuable lesson: no space is really my space anymore. The guest room became the nursery, the nonconformer became the guest room, and our Lilliputian kitchen table became my writing space. Gone are the books and magazines, the newspapers and photocopied op-eds, the records and memorabilia and bric-a-brac aplenty. Sigh.

It should have hit when the gun rack came down. If there was any one item that embodied the manifest destiny that was our home, it was that. I should have seen it for what it was. No longer was there a place to hang my hat. Slowly, more items were lost to the mean plastic bins. My spittoon and lamp were sent to a "farm upstate." Cognac Snifter became some-such neutral.

Don’t get me wrong, though, because it’s not all bad. At the kitchen table I have a window at my left elbow, a stone’s toss beyond which sits an oak that whispers constantly. Under that is a verdant lawn where rabbits hop over one another, squirrels dig, and my weeds remind me that this writing thing is a chore my own, and not the household’s. I have great smells and food and drink at the ready. And although my time is rarely uninterrupted anymore, I even think my pallor has abated some. I also have a son on the way, and that’s most excellent. I will gladly surrender some square footage to him, pirate that he is.

Stephen King wrote many of his first novels on a desk in his laundry room. JK Rowling, before she could buy every house in England five times over, would write with her daughter in restaurants to keep warm in the winter. Countless starving artists have done a lot more with a lot less. So, with an iron will and lower standards, I strike out for new writing spaces. Who knows what I’ll find out there?

Besides, Junior’s got a nook in his room that’s totally empty. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. 

***That old cave was where my latest book, The Crepuscular Crusaders, was born. The book is available now.

Oddly enough, “writing” is rarely an act of simply putting words to paper (for most, at least). I’ve struggled with this for the last few years now. I thought I would run down the Top 5 non-writing activities that consume an inordinate amount of my “writing” time.

1. Printing/Packaging/Sending

Although most publishers and agents are moving over to the world of electronic submissions, many still require hard copies of everything. Throw in their stringent requirements—margin space, font style and size, paper bond, and so on—and there are just enough variations to require packaging every submission uniquely. It would be much easier to have a stack of submission packages (with a query letter, bio, and manuscript sample) at the ready. Alas.

2. Researching

This does not refer to the researching of a story—which is good fun—but rather the researching of market listings for appropriate places to send the work. Sometimes you find good fits that are not currently accepting submissions, and other times it’s the opposite. Rarely is there ideal synergy there. Worse, the search is of the needle-in-a-haystack variety given the multitude of publishers out there, few of which are possible matches, but all of which have to first be researched to learn that. Time consuming indeed.

3. Marketing

Some writers have entire marketing teams dedicated to this task, meaning their job is to write and only write. The rest of us undertake the marketing of ourselves and our work in addition to the writing. The good news is that marketing is much easier than it used to be, with free outlets to trumpet one’s work. The bad news is that marketing is much easier than it used to be, with free outlets to trumpet everybody’s work. It reminds me of those aerial shots of the starting line for a marathon, where nobody actually gets to start running until all the masses thin.

4. Communication

While electronic communication has given writers access to publishers and agents they never had before, it has also served as a veneer between them. Even after a contract is signed, actual conversations are few, making basic communication something of an extra task. The bright side is that email serves to document all correspondence, which can be helpful. The dark side is that every speck of communication is asynchronous, which removes the human element from the process. 

5. Time Management

Sounds simple, but this is no small task. Most writers have to have day jobs, which in turn makes writing time slim. For instance, I get 1-2 hours on weekdays to spend on “writing,” and then maybe another 2-3 per day on weekends. That’s 9-16 hours in most weeks to do all of the above, and try to actually write a little. The starving artist lifestyle may seem masochistic, but it may indeed be the only way to ever actually plunge into that which lights your fire artistically. The “management” part of this comes from knowing beforehand exactly which activity will occupy that time you get each day. 

That’s my not-so-exhaustive list. It is fluid, and I’ll add to it as I encounter more. It’s a largely unromantic life, though it does have its rewards. Now, I’m off to figure out Number 5 so I know whether to turn my attention to Numbers 1, 2, or 3, or maybe (gasp!) even actually write a little. Of course, a paper jam, a slow computer, or the torpor begotten by a long day of teaching could lead to the dreaded Number 6—staring numbly at a blank computer screen.

The following is a re-imagining of an entry from a former blog. To any previous followers, I apologize for dwelling on old themes, but some ideas, like some words, just won't let me go!

As a teacher, I harp on my kids constantly to diversify, to widen their worlds, to broaden their thinking. Unfortunately, it’s a “do as I say, not as I do” imploration on my part. You see, I find myself perseverating often, rarely more than when I fall inexplicably in love with a word.

My friends are well aware of one way in which I am totally unoriginal as a writer (hanging out in coffee shops). I've been keeping an eye out for others. The following list can be considered a work in progress. I do not claim to own these clichés as a writer; plenty of other people, from all walks, embrace them, too. They just smack of "writerly," though, as I think countless movie depictions of writers would agree.  

Anyway, my unabashedly embraced clichés are as follows:

• music few others know about
• solitude (like, off-the-planet, cabin-in-the-woods, no-contact-with-the-outside-world solitude...in doses, of course)
• tea
• micro-brewed anything
• grammar
• well-placed, intentional misuse of proper-like English 
• rain
• vinyl records
• walks at night
• vintage clothes
• antiques

AND NOW A FEW THAT I SHUN:

• scarves
• typewriters (fine for looking at, or for adorning a writing space)
• wine
• reading only "writerly" books
• obscure movies on the merit of their obscurity alone

Ah, monsters and creatures and cryptids.  And beasts and brutes and wild things all.  Those spiked, fanged, and otherwise bedeviled keepers of the shadows.  I’ve been thinking a lot about creatures lately, namely because my newest children’s book deals with the menace of one on a fictional small town.

I culled my inspiration from some Aztec folklore, and rendered it my own with a few dashes of style.  The creature’s name is Ahuizotl, and despite my personal touches, it appears in The Crepuscular Crusaders in much the same way in which it is described in the tales I’ve read about it.

I can’t say exactly what drew me to this particular creature—perhaps it was the image conjured by the descriptions I read.  I won’t reveal too much, but I think you’ll agree that, at the very least, Ahuizotl may prove to be one of the more unique monsters you’ll encounter.

There are others that have been, ahem, pet ideas over the years, planting the seeds for stories all and sundry.  But they all seemed too familiar to me if I hoped to sprout one of those seeds into a story while maintaining as much originality as I could.  I was just too close to some of the more classic creatures and their varied forms.  Maybe someday I will turn them loose on a character or two of mine.  For now, though, it was much safer to go with something completely foreign—safety in novelty.  Although I researched my little monster, there was relatively little to find.  In this, I had room to roam with ideas, and to let it terrorize my crew of misfits in ways I hatched on my own.

I’ll leave Ahuizotl to the pages of my book.  In the meanwhile, though, allow me to rattle off my “someday” list of creatures and cryptids:

1. Mothman
2. The Jersey Devil
3. The Loch Ness Monster
4. Bigfoot (I want to make it scary again, after all the cartoonish portrayals)
5. Wendigo

I've also created plenty of my own monsters, which is great fun if you've never tried it.  Any others?  I’d love to hear thoughts in the “comments” section below.

I've returned to the writing I love most with my newest book, The Crepuscular Crusaders.  My first novel, Catching Crazy, was a bit unusual in that it had me working in a genre with which I'm not all that comfortable.  It's realistic fiction, which is not usually my favorite as either a reader or a writer.  The entire thing started as a challenge to myself, really, to see if I could push my own boundaries a bit.  I kept pushing until the story started to write itself, at which point it would have been plain cavalier of me to stop providing it with the blank pages it needed to finish what it wanted to say.