Incite Full

My class started today.

I’m taking a writer’s workshop. not because i’m a writer. or because i like to work. Oddly enough i do enjoy shopping, but for things like power tools and computer hardware. manly things. I’m hoping through all of this to be able to express myself. From talking to my friends there are a few themes that i believe distinguish our generation from the ones prior to us. At least it’s something, anyways. it’s not a war, or a depression, or a movement. We have fractured movements, fractured wars, and great recessions.

I won’t get into it now. it’ll probably be a theme or something. But i will be sharing my writing here. You’ll see a tab soon which will point you at my worthless scribblings. I cannot promise amazing stories, I can’t even promise they’ll be complete. but i can promise you this one thing: I don’t care what you think. Ok, i kind of do, but not enough to stop me from going on with it. I’ve got 2 i’m working on. One is about soemthing that happened a long time ago, the other is a fictional short story. I’ll throw them up there when they’re as done as they’re gonna get.

Chuck P’s new book came out today. I spent $27.01 on a book. A book! I might as well have waited for a paperback for 16, the story isn’t going anywhere. But you know what, I’m ok with it. Chuck’s books are just… different. An LA times review said he has the ability to reach the young male demographic. And you know what, it’s right.  I walk by shelf after shelf of books that don’t interest me. Grandmother’s tales, romance, friendship- these are themes i can read about as long as the romance is shocking, the grandmother’s tale foreboding, and the friendships false and betraying. In short- exciting. Satirical. Something deeper than how i feel.

Snuff, the book, is about a woman who is on a quest to finish her pornographic career with the world’s largest serial fornication. We hear the story through the points of view of 3 members in said event. If you want to borrow it, you’ll have to wait until I’m finished. And it’s the next book up after No Country for Old Men.

I played tennis during High school in Washington. I was ok- not that great, but I eventually became the captain of the team. My final year we had an exchange student named Chris Geiger, and man was he awesome. He would throw out these Not-Quite-Americanisms that we’d laugh at all day long, and still say a few to this day.

He used to say “Brother F-Bomb” because he didn’t want to swear at first, but the brother part? by the end of the year this kid was so foul we gave him something called the Dirty Minute, where he could just go off and rant all for a minute and we wouldn’t bat an eye.

His other one was “Fuck my knee” for some strange, twisted reason. This comes from “Fuck my ass” who’s origin escapes me right now, but when ever I heard FMA I thought of this.

Now i think of something else, no- not Force = mass x Acceleration, how lame. Mostly how i will be attending my second physics party. SECOND! I had planned on not going to this one, they last one wasn’t all bad- but that had little to nothing to do with physics or the people there.

This is taking one for the team.

“Sometimes it seems like we’re living in a prison & the crime is how much we hate ourselves.”

I walk into the restroom at work and see, to my horror, a man using the toilet as a urinal. If that’s not enough, and i’m told it isn’t, he hasn’t put the seat up, and the door to the stall is swinging between open and half open. Honestly, man, what is going through your mind? All i can think of are the following scenarios:

1. This man loves the sound of piss hitting water. The same tactile feed back he gets from typing on his keyboard can only be matched by the reversed exponential graph of urine contacting the porcelain x-axis.

2. He is unaware of the urinals that are hidden just beyond the hedgerow of stalls. If this is true, god help us all, as we work with fucking idiots.

3. It is his goal in life (and probably second life, too) to sully the experiences of the many. There is no doubt that a certain amount of splash back occurs during his expulsion process. And by alternating toilets every 2-3 hours (I drink a lot of water) he destroys any chance of fellow bathroom patrons from having a clean experience.

4. He is just an idiot, socially unprepared to separate his troll/dungeon life from that of his work life.

And option 4, this is for whom I need to write a book. The book will help socially awkward individuals be not so weird. It won’t help them be cool, get ladies, or obtain wealth- that’s like running a 4.4-40 before you can walk, let alone run. We need to start somewhere, people, so baby step your ass to the urinal, and step away from my toilet.

Writing is hard. I don’t consider myself brilliant or talented in this regard. Admitting one has a problem is always the first step.

Sometimes when I write entries, such as the one before this, I don’t have any clear reason for writing. For that I apologize. I don’t even care about my day, except for the rare, amusing story of which you will surely hear. But other than that, sometimes I am just writing down, like a laundry list, everything that happens. That’s so fucking boring.  Who cares if i went to a bar. Get to the meat Mike.

With that in mind, I don’t plan on writing putrid or insipid shit in this thing any longer. I want to write things that interest me, and hopefully through that, you. And it’s going to start with a memory that I had from childhood that was recently brought up while walking to Old Town.

I was passing the Pasadena theater with Katie when i saw the play “Of Mice and Men.” Now I’ve never read the book, but i have seen the film with John Malkovich, when I was 9 years old (1992, for those keeping score). Being so young, innocence was plentiful and easy to come by. Things were black and white, right and wrong, and much simpler. People say times used to be simpler; I think that’s just how we remember them when there weren’t 401K’s and bills to worry about. before i go off on a tangent, let me get to the meat.

The movie opens with, if memory serves me right, the two men, Lennie and George, escaping from prison to a small depression era town. This is pretty much where my memory gives way to imagination; I recall they wanted to have there own land with rabbits and other animals. This idea always calmed Lennie down, and in turn I could relate to him. We were both children.

Anyways, the movie continues, and Lennie fatally hurts one of the girls in the town. There is a man hunt and George and Lennie once again escape the city to the country, but there is no safety here this time. So George, to calm Lennie, asks him about the rabbits. As Lennie is finishing up, George shoots Lennie in the head.

And then the flood gates open. I cried louder and harder than I can remember in any other point in my life. I remember it so vividly- salt running from my eyes for hours, my mother trying to comfort me, and my dad being out of town. I might be exaggerating, which we tend to do as children, but I cried for three days straight on this one. That gun shot completely robbed me of my innocence. I still get sad when I think about it; I’m kind of misty right now.

Poor, little Mike.

This is the one story that is as true as I remember it. There are other stories of childhood, like the one where I accidentally hit a friend with a shovel, or throwing snowballs at our neighbors cars- all of them taller tales. Probably more exciting, too. They are the kind of stories that you’d see in a kids movie, not some child crying in the theater.
What’s more interesting about this story is its rawness. Pure emotion – something I really don’t feel anymore – that left a lasting impression on me. Ever since those days it’s been more worries, concerns, and fears. Mapping out my entire life. And I’ve always fretted about that as well. Metaconcerns. Reflexive fear. But, reading something yesterday, made me think of things anew.

Life is like driving. You don’t need to see your destination to get there. All you need is the road and you go. You drive. Sometimes you see no further than 4 feet in front of your car; fog, storms, flat tires: they all happen. But we weather it, forgive the pun, and keep going. Life is the same thing. The destination might be further, we might not know exactly where we are going, but we do know the general direction we should going. All we need to do is drive.

“There ain’t many guys travel around together. I don’t know why. Maybe everybody in the whole damn world’s scared of each other.”