Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Dad, Will You Tell Story?

Mind Over Matter: The Power of Imagination » Brain World

Earlier today I had a nice conversation with a guy who has a two year old son, and who is palpably excited about that fact.  He couldn't wait to tell me about the joy of it; about how exciting it is to watch his son grasp new concepts, or develop new motor skills; about how he's excited to teach him how to fish and hunt, and to work with wood and fix machinery.

I can't help but feel like that kid is lucky to have that guy for a dad.  I am genuinely happy for both of them, it feels to me as though he's coming at this from all the right angles.  There's a lot of joy in the future for both of them, and that makes me happy.

My daughter is somewhat older than two, and I found myself reminiscing today about that age and what was going on in my life at that time.  I don't know what word means the opposite of 'regret'...  I looked it up, and am not satisfied with the answers I found; they don't seem to do it justice.  Whatever the right word is, that's what I feel about it.  There's one thing in particular that I don't regret, and that is "The Story".

Somewhere around year three, at bedtime, I'd be the one to get her tucked in and off to sleep.  For a while we'd read books; lots of Disney stories at bedtime, in fact I read Peter Pan so many times that I ended up doing a blog about an alternate version of that story since I had thought about it way too much.  "Snow White" too.  It can get a bit tedious, so I'd inevitably end up interjecting my own riffs into the stories to try to make my daughter laugh, or to catch her off guard, or make her think about something differently, and eventually I ended up just putting the books down and making up the story from scratch.

Most nights, for many years, we told the story.  As she got older, it became more and more complicated and involved, and I got to watch her mind grow and her interests and sense of humor develop faster and faster, until by now she's reading full chapter novels but still wants to hear the story and it's all I can do to come up with material.  I consider myself incredibly lucky in that I've had this opportunity.

I never have a plan when we settle in to tell it, it happens entirely extemporaneously every single time.  Both of us are characters in the story, as are our real world selves.  Occasionally we'll poke our heads into the story and give advice to the characters in real time.  Many characters have come and gone, and of course there have been some recurring themes that get revisited often and which I am constantly challenged to spin in new and interesting ways.

There are, for example, 24 baby dragons, many of which have complex backstories - there are parent figure dragons who vaguely resemble the Mrs. and me, but who are typically just along for the ride with whatever the main characters are doing.  There's a wizard named Gary, assorted superheros, a parrot named Wolfie, and dozens more.  There's a helicopter that can transform into a spaceship and travel to the moon to deliver pizzas or to the sun to run rescue operations for lava dogs.  We've driven tanks through towns, and up the sides of rainbows, and have saved the earth from alien invasions.

The plot is fluid, and it's not just up to me to advance it.  I roll with any interjection that she comes up with and build it in.  If it's taking too long for me to get the characters to a place, she'll open a portal and skip the travel.  Portals, of course, require special ingredients to open.  I've never been able to list an ingredient so obscure that the heroine hasn't had it handily available in her pocket, including a toenail from a frog that's so poisonous it has a one mile kill radius and just sits on a rock in the center of a circle of bare ground feeling lonely because he can't find a girlfriend.  She found him a girlfriend, got the toenail, and opened the portal.

The story is awesome.  It would take me about 7 years to explain everything.

Sometimes I can't do it.  Sometimes I'm too tired and I can't make my brain do it and I end up just falling asleep there with her for an hour or whatever.  But mostly I can, and when I hear those words "Dad, will you tell story?", even at my most tired and miserable and sore and grown-up and boring, I say "Heck yeah I'll tell story, let me know when you're done brushing your teeth and I'll be right up!"

I've made plenty of mistakes, but I don't think this is one of them.

I don't want to miss it.  I want to see what happens next.






Thursday, November 21, 2019

Hero

This is from a writing competition at my local library - 2000 words or less, with the jumping off point "I never should have agreed to it" - I didn't win, but it was pretty fun.

Hero 

Part 1

Superman, evidently, is terrible at Ping-Pong. If I were to speculate I might tentatively conclude that he thought about it too hard and couldn’t latch with any gusto onto that special Zen place to which I imagine athletes go when they’re in the zone. Or I might take the low road and conclude that there was some bunching taking place beneath those mysteriously external cherry-red undies and the discomfort proved too much of a distraction. Speculation aside, what’s certain is that he wasn’t sandbagging. He is legitimately terrible.

The trouble was explaining away the odd, vaguely round welts I had accumulated during the match.
“It was Superman.” I said. “He’s terrible at Ping-Pong.”

My roommate Mike, known colloquially as ‘Grump’, or ‘Grump Chocula’, or even ‘Peter Peter the Grumpkin Eater’ depending on whichever celestial convergences are responsible for that sort of thing, was not keen to believe that I had been beaten about the upper torso and face with poorly aimed Ping-Pong balls. He wasn’t keen to believe in the existence of Superman at all, in fact. Such was the case with a certain percentage of the population whose brain-wrappings had yet to fully encompass some of the finer points that come with living in a newly amalgamated universe.

“Shut up.” He said.

But super people were coming, and society struggled to adapt. New challenges arose almost daily and were tackled by hastily assembled teams of “experts” trying desperately to normalize reality even as more and more form-fitting-body-suit wearers, sometimes with more than six abs, stumbled out of the aptly named “Fog Zone” and stood blinking at the forest of tanks and helicopter gunships that had amassed there to welcome them. The first wave was met with a knee-jerk military response and was a disaster for all parties involved. A tenuous truce was put into place, but those troops on the edge peering expectantly into the Fog Zone still positively bristled with trigger-happiness.

A few extraordinary folks had gotten through at first, despite the hail of gunfire. For a while the Incredible Hulk could be found thundering through downtown Sao Paulo making shop owners wring their hands while retailers of replacement shop windows cackled madly as they watched the news. Engineering students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were asked to solve that problem, and Hulk could now reliably be found hammering away at an industrial-sized whack-a-mole game in an inland power production complex. In one dazzling display of innovative wizardry the Hulk had not only been placated but also harnessed as a seemingly limitless natural resource as with each whack the rig generated a sizable electric current.

He never seemed to get tired of it.

There were hundreds of specially-abled individuals to account for, and while none were particularly aggressive or openly ambitious about world domination, none had presented the appropriate documentation and as such none had technically cleared immigration. This was cause for much gnashing of teeth.

“Once they have cast away their costumes and donned more inconspicuous garments we’ll never find them!” wailed the concerned faces on every television news program. Furrowed brows and furtive glances cast by those in hushed semi-circles around coffee machines and water coolers dampened office productivity by a significant margin. Stocks plummeted. Canned foods disappeared from store shelves, and the sound of heavy doors slamming on doomsday shelters startled flocks of birds into raucous agitation. Others, like Grumplestiltskin on his corner of the couch in the apartment, simply refused to believe that it was happening and shut out all stimuli suggesting otherwise.

Deliberations both long and boring occurred among world leaders, each syllable analyzed and re-analyzed by statisticians, professors, and television personalities well past the hard limit of human psychological coping capability. Prophets of either doom or salvation overpopulated the entire world inventory of sturdy boxes such that they were forced to share and stand back to back, gesticulating wildly at anyone who would listen. Prophets of status quo were, perhaps not surprisingly, left largely alone on their boxes.

At last a decision was reached: Single combat.

The world marinated on those two words. It had been deemed by the smartest people in the world to be the only peaceful way to resolve what would certainly be a long and bloody conflict otherwise. It would be a test of skill; of savvy and poise, and of unfaltering courage in the face of adversity even as an uncertain fate teetered on the brink of possibility. The registered population of pre-amalgam Earth would text their vote to choose their champion during a televised event. The cross-over community, in a similarly televised event, voted almost unanimously for Superman to be their champion even though it seemed too painfully obvious.

As a cameraman for a major television station, I was one of those lucky enough to attend the event for the choosing of the champion. I was the man behind camera six. I was a professional. I was one of the best at what I did. I was also too preoccupied about the lighting to realize that I was clearly visible through the lens of camera four on the other side of the stadium. I was wearing, as usual, my lucky Ghost Busters hat.

In the moment when it mattered the most, when asked upon whom they should call if something was strange in the neighborhood, Earth’s voters chose me. Humanity utterly failed to take it seriously. They voted for “The Ghostbuster”.

Me.

For reasons that I will never understand, I agreed to it. I was immediately ushered forward by a large man and an even larger woman, both unsmiling. I approached the podium. I put one hand on each side of the lectern in what I hoped was a purposeful gesture. I looked up and squinted at the dazzling lights, the wall of microphones, and at my own uncertain face in jumbo relief on stadium monitors. I looked down hoping to find some note cards or at least a sticky note with “You can do it!” written on it. None presented itself. A wrapper from a bite-sized Rice Krispy treat was stuffed into the microphone cable hole. The air was still.

Then there were voices. First one, then many, then an impossible number of voices all asking the same question: “What are you good at?”

I answered honestly. I leaned toward the microphones and spoke as clearly as I could.

“Ping Pong.” I said.

Part 2

“Dude,” I said when I got home, “I have to play Ping Pong against Superman on Thursday to decide the fate of Earth.”

Grump rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I paid the gravity bill, you owe me fifteen bucks.”

“You don’t have to pay for gravity,” I said. “It’s free and anybody can use it whenever they want.”

No part of me was delusional enough to think that my words were getting through. Frankly it was worth fifteen bucks to avoid the argument every month. You just can’t convince people of things sometimes, once they’ve set their minds to believing otherwise. It wasn’t so very long ago, in the big scheme of things, that people believed it was necessary to pitch perfectly healthy young girls into volcanoes lest the harvest be lean. Fifteen bucks was easy compared to that. I needed the Grump. I didn’t have anybody else to practice with.

By Thursday morning I was as ready as I knew I was ever going to be. “Superman vs the Ghost Buster” on pay-per-view, one night only, for the sake of the human race. If I lost, the specially-abled would have the run of the Earth, and who knew what would happen then. If I won, they would willingly cross back through the fog and that would be the end of it. Earth was rooting for me, mostly. My phone rang in the cab on the way to the stadium. It was my grandma.

“Did you remember to call your uncle today? It’s his birthday.”

“Gram I’m on my way to the stadium thing literally right now, I can’t”

“Well make a little time, he was asking about you. Something about King Kong. Did you get a monkey?”

“Ping Pong.”

“That’s a nice name for a monkey. Call your uncle.”

“Okay Gramma. Love you.”

Most of the world saw me get out of the taxi and walk into the stadium. Superman was already inside. Nobody had seen him come in, he was just there. He looked confident. We made eye contact. I was pleased to note that between the two of us I was the only one who had put on my clothes in the correct order.

After much hoopla and shameless product placement, the match began. Superman won the serve and the first shot across the net resulted in increased hot dog sales while the paramedics waved smelling salts under my nose and pried the flattened ball from my forehead. When my vision cleared I raised my head and looked groggily at my opponent I noticed he was wearing a sort of nervous grimace, and for the first time the thought crossed my mind that maybe I had a chance.

“He didn’t do that on purpose” said my brain. He had screwed up. He wasn’t perfect. There was hope.

On my serve I placed the ball expertly in the corner, but Superman had nothing but time to get there and be ready for it. In fact, while it was in the air he had time to go get a hot pumpkin latte and sip it gingerly while teaching himself how to knit. This ended up working to my advantage, because when he did decide it was time to return the ball and finally swung the paddle, his aim was impeded by a large decoratively fringed afghan which had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

The ball, half-melted from atmospheric friction, struck me in the left shoulder. I decided this would be a good time to pinwheel through the air. By the time I grew tired of that activity and smashed my limp body gracefully into a row of occupied folding chairs, the scoreboard registered a commanding two-point lead. The people of Earth were, understandably, all aflutter.

This sort of thing went on for some time, and I continued to be surprised by two things: One, that it was possible to be horribly injured while playing Ping Pong, and two, that I was legitimately winning the match. He had scored a few points here and there but given the stakes of the game it was no surprise to see that Superman was visibly upset. He had the wherewithal not to let his bottom lip protrude too far out lest a pigeon poop on it, but you could have cracked walnuts in the furrows between his eyebrows.

Finally, mercifully, the ball that would win me the last point of the match delivered what would later look like an extra nipple to the middle of my chest, and the match was over. I had done it. The super-folk were bummed, but they complied. As the last pair of slumped shoulders disappeared into the fog, I was both the most and least liked person in the world. The immigration crisis was solved, but I had simultaneously ruined the dreams of children worldwide and they were mad.

A new crisis arose almost immediately, as is the usual way of things. The world lost interest and it was back to business as usual for me, save for several persistent aches in my body which were later identified as arthritis caused by Ping Pong ball impacts. The condition was named after me. I also received a large envelope addressed to "The Ghostbuster" which contained a nice certificate for my efforts in the name of the human race, for which I purchased a cheap frame. I hung it prominently on the wall in the living room.

Stretch Grumpstrong, unimpressed, shrugged his shoulders, rolled over on the couch, and fell asleep.

The End

Sunday, October 20, 2019

Jupiter Has Fallen

Tonight we mourn the passing of Jupiter the Hamster.

The wheel is still. 

It fell upon my fatherly duties to enshrine the tiny furry body, curled as if asleep among his stores of food in his burrow, in a sarcophagus of cardboard along with a supply of his favorite seeds.

We committed the vessel tearfully to the earth, along the treeline in a place in view of the rising sun.

Jupiter brought joy to our whole family in the short time he was here.  He was much loved, and he will be greatly missed. 

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Thoughts and Prayers



Typically I'm not a church goer.  I have nothing specifically against it, although I did for a while rage against it and organized religion in general during periods of my youth, in the way that only young people can needlessly rage against things.  I've since grown out of that, but still the whole thing doesn't resonate with me the way it seems to resonate elsewhere.

I'm fine with that.  I have my own set of things that I believe in, and my own understanding of what's going on with existence that makes sense to me, but that's not the point here.

My wife and I have a wonderful daughter who is now nine and curious about all things in the way that both delights and frightens me; the former in that it is so much fun to experience the world again through fresh eyes, and the latter in that much of what I know she'll experience is horrible and disappointing.  This can't be helped, of course.

My wife grew up with church in a way that I didn't, and it is important to her that our daughter learn about it.  We had a few awkward conversations about this, revolving primarily around my unwillingness to tell our daughter that what she learns in church is absolutely true, given that I don't tend to believe it myself.  I do however agree that it would be ridiculous of me to tell her that it isn't true, given that what the hell do I know.  So the two of them go, and occasionally I go too in an attempt to be supportive.

If I were really adamant about this approach to learning, I would take her to every church and really get the full picture.  I'd have to include all the various denominations of every faith though.  I don't even know what they are, only that there are a lot.  Let's just say that I already feel like I'm being a responsible dad for going to just the one church, so I'll ask that you cut me some slack on this.

So we go sometimes.  I never received first communion, so I have to awkwardly sit alone in the pews while the rest of the congregation lines up for that.  That sucks and feels a bit judgy, but maybe I'm just projecting that.  I did receive communion several times at various intervals throughout my life before learning that I wasn't allowed to.  So I screwed that up, but whaddyagonnado.

Anyway.

 I say all that to say this.

At one point the little old man up front said "Let us pray" and everybody stood up, so I stood up too.  Everybody bowed their heads and so did I, but I peeked around a little.  Some people held their hands out to the sides as if to hold hands with invisible people nearby.  Some people who had non-invisible people nearby held hands with those people. 

Together we prayed that God would look after a variety of folks who need looking after.  The guy tried to cover all the bases, the sick, the lonely, the mentally ill, those effected by war, etc. etc.

Anyway, I had my head down and was listening to the guy ask God to help out all these various groups of people, and I had an epiphany moment.  Maybe it's something that has been obvious to a lot of people this whole time, but it wasn't obvious to me until that moment.

You might say that having such a moment while in a church is evidence of God talking directly to me, or working through me, or whatever.  You might say that that's what this blog entry really is. 

You might not say that, I don't know.

What suddenly made sense to me is that praying for these things doesn't cause God to show up and fix them.  It's not God who shows up and cares for sick people, it's people.  People are who can start or stop wars, people are who can visit the lonely, bring care and comfort to others, and all that.  God isn't going to look after anything.  Either we do it, or nobody does.

Essentially I felt as though all the people praying around me were doing it wrong.

Here again I'll admit that it's entirely possible that I've just been stupid about this the entire time and that everyone but me has understood this, and weren't doing it wrong at all.  Maybe not though.

When you pray for something, it's not so much calling out to some higher power to come and fix your problems; it's calling out to your own power to fix them.  It's calling your own consciousness to focus on that problem and to do something about it.  It's drawing your attention to it, and if you're praying collectively it's drawing a collective consciousness to it.

Asking God to fix things and then expecting that they'll be fixed is  a bit of a cop-out from having to do them yourself.  That's not the point of prayer at all.  It doesn't even make sense to think about it that way, now that I consider it.  It's not like all these people are suffering out there, and God is somewhere doing nothing and just waiting for a room full of mumbling white people in New York to ask for intervention before swinging in on a vine and fixing everything.

We're it.  We're him.  He's us.   

So it's one thing to decide you're going to help someone and then physically go and do it.  The message from every church I've ever been in has included that sort of overarching theme, that you should go forth and be a do-gooder.  This is true of lots of religions, not just Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Taoism or Hinduism or whatever, they all (in my experience) seem to have a common thread of basic do-goodery embedded in them.  It's one thing to walk yourself to a place where there are people who need help, and to help them.  .

It's another thing to consider that we can effect change remotely, and to endeavor to do that.

There are lots of ways that people throughout history have described humanity's ability to effect change from a distance, including prayer, astral projection, positive vibes, you name it.  To me it seems like evidence of a universal interconnection of all things.

It begs the question:  Can focusing on something and drawing positive consciousness towards it can effect a change, despite great distance? 

Clearly we already collectively believe that it can, which is why why people send hugs, good vibrations, thoughts, prayers, etc.  We must believe that we're able to make a difference just by thinking about these things.   

With that in mind, here's something specific to think about:  How many school shootings have happened in the U.S. in the last few years?  What happens every single time?  Thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends, to those who were killed or injured, an outpouring of love and support from the greater community as it becomes aware.  This outpouring diminishes after a while, until the next time it happens.  Then we get a whole fresh outpouring of prayers and hugs and thoughts.

What about this:  If we can in fact effect change from a distance with this or that variety of projected consciousness,  maybe right now is the time for those thoughts and prayers, and maybe we should aim them at the troubled individuals who have not yet followed through.  Right now, they're the ones who need it. 

We can't physically intervene, as we can't know who or where these tormented people are.

But we can be proactive instead of reactive.  This epidemic of school shootings is a heartrendingly frustrating problem to try to solve.  The best we can seem to come up with is to try to put obstacles in the way of those who would perpetuate these atrocities.

That leaves us with thoughts and prayers.

If we can agree that there is such a thing as universal interconnection that transcends distance and physicality,  however we choose to go about establishing that connection, isn't it worth a try?

And what's the message we should try to send?  Any thoughts on that?

Friday, August 24, 2018

Music


Part 1

Wolfgang sat motionlessly in front of his piano.  A barely discernible draft of air tickled the single dancing flame of a small oil lantern nearby, causing the shadows to slip across the worn hardwood floors and dance across the walls and high ceiling of his home in silent pendulum against the light.  Outside, the darkness permeated everything but the small globes of light from the lamp posts which kept their quiet vigil over the empty streets of Vienna.  Even more invasive than the darkness was the absolute silence which crept into even the tiniest corners of the city and took hold, daring anything to disturb it.  Nothing moved. 

At last, the hunched figure began to show signs of life.  His eyes opened, and he flexed his hand before lifting a brimming wine glass to his lips and taking a long draught.  Turning, he reached to a small table and set the glass down.  It made a small thump as it touched the table and he cringed ever so slightly at the sound.  He turned back to the piano and ran his hands carefully and slowly over the keys.  He felt the familiar touch of ivory beneath his fingertips, felt them welcome his caress.  For a long moment he sat in silence.  Then he began to play. 

The music rippled gently through the night air, making its way casually through the room, parting the awed silence as a returning hero through an adoring throng, slipping easily through thin panes of window glass and poorly insulated walls and out into the world.  Sleeping creatures in dark alleys lifted their heads and perked their ears to better witness the unexpected parade, as each note made its grand arrival, then stepped delicately back into its carriage and rolled away into the darkness. 

Two walls away, Emma Bardeau stirred in her bed.  She had been trying to fall asleep for nearly an hour but had been unable to slow the endless flow of thoughts in her head enough to do it.  The whirlwind of images had just begun to dissolve themselves into the surreal experiences of dreams when a small part of her suddenly realized that the music she heard wasn’t coming from inside her head.  The gently rising and falling melody that embraced her dreams and massaged away her worries was coming from outside the confines of her small but tidy room.  So rare and so welcome was the occasion to hear it, it was all she could do to bring herself back to the waking world, determined not to let so much as a moment of the music go unheard. 

Emma nudged the sleeping figure at her side. 
“George!” 
George, already invested in his own adventures, stirred noncommittally in his sleep. 
“Wake up George, he’s playing again!” 
“Hmm?”  George turned his head was suddenly awake. 
“Oh....” 

The pair lay quietly together in the bed, letting the gentle waves of music lap at the shores of their consciousness long into the night, until at last they allowed themselves to slip beneath it, into the most deep and restful sleep either of them had enjoyed in a long, long time. 

Part 2

Two hundred and twenty years or so later, on the other side of the Earth, I make my way carefully up the lightly creaking stairs to my room.  A fresh cup of coffee (made with a little Irish cream) threatens to overflow with each step and I keep careful control of it as I make my way to the chair and sit down.  I press a key on the keyboard and a screen flares to life, casting a steady white glow into the room.  For a while, I sit motionlessly at my desk, staring vacantly at it.  The constant hum from the fans inside my computer tower has become a part of my night, and I barely notice it.  The carpeted floors and textured paint in my small apartment are excellent noise dampeners; I can’t even make out the sound of the humidifier in the next room, humming its own hum in the dull red rhythmic pulse of the two blinking dots on the alarm clock.   Another clock in the corner of my screen reads 3:12 AM. 

With one hand, I bring the coffee cup to my lips and take a long pull.  With my other, I manipulate the small wireless optical mouse smoothly across the frayed blue mouse pad until the arrow on the screen hovers expectantly over the appropriate place.  Click click.  With a few more barely perceptible motions of my wrist, I highlight a selection on the screen.  This I drag and drop into a waiting playlist portion of my media player program.  I check the volume of my speakers, ensure I haven’t left the sound muted, double check that the green plug is in the green receptacle and put on a set of headphones.  For a second I wonder what I want to listen to. 

“Today,” I think to myself, “I’ll let fate decide.” 

I click the mouse again, this time instructing the program to play all 6000 or so songs in random order.  I never know what I’m going to get next, so each time I go through this ritual I have the opportunity to be surprised.  But I’m not surprised tonight.  Tonight a familiar beat and a familiar voice pumps its familiar melody into my ears, drowning out even the hum of the fans.  I’ve heard it before. 

I’ve heard them all before.  Music is a constant presence in my life.  The alarm clock played music to wake me up this morning.  I listened to reedy sounding music coming from the bathroom, squeaking from the waterproof shower radio and tickling my eardrums as I lay stubbornly in bed while my fiancĂ©e Jen took her morning shower.  I heard it coming up the stairs from the TV as she made her breakfast, tuned to one of the hundreds of music channels available through the cable box.  I listened to it in my jeep as I went to class.  Everywhere portable media players and stereos blast music into my head until I know all of the words to every song. 

Fast forward.  Fast forward.  No... Click... heard it... click... heard it... click... oh what’s this?  I pause, and close my eyes.  A smile creeps onto my face as I let my consciousness become flooded with the music.  I sit back in my chair with my coffee and glance at the name of the artist whose music had softly struck my mind into peaceful contemplation and tucked the rest of the night firmly out of sight.  The name scrolls across the screen and I nod my head unconsciously when I see it.  Wolfgang... Amadeus... Mozart.  I can almost see him.