Limping Home from NaBloPoMo

Well, at least I did better than last year.

First of all, hats off to the many friends of mine who successfully knocked off National Novel Writing Month 2009. Amanda, great job on your virgin voyage; and Jason, between work and pleasure, you somehow manage to fit more words into your day than anyone else I know. I don't know how you do it, but I bow at your feet.

As for me, my humble stab at National Blog Posting Month missed completion by just a few days. (Then again, many people who know me would tell you that I'm a few posts shy of a full blog.) Just as the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of November does in so many NaNoWriMoers, so too was I distracted by the feast and all the familial accoutrements surrounding it. Though to tell you the truth, I was really struggling at the end to come up with good post subjects. I suppose I could have free-wrote my way out of that corner, but for the most part the freewriting didn't seem to flow that well.

Looking closer at the NaBloPoMo site, I see now that they do it not just in November, but year-round. Don't worry, I'm not going to get any crazy ideas in my head. I have too many other writing projects in the work to think that I can keep posting that often. And as evidenced by some of the weaker posts from this past month, I don't want to be doing that anyway. I'd rather go back to the idea of quality over quantity.

And I'm hoping that the month of December will give me time to finishing the first draft of Son of A Saint ... which is going to take a lot of writing through some major blocks I have on certain plot points. It's frustrating to feel like I'm so close, yet so far away.

The Schedule

12:00 midnight

• Pour brine, with one gallon of iced water, into 5-gallon (CLEAN) paint bucket. Remove turkey's neck and giblets and dunk turkey into bucket, breat-first.
• Cut bread cubes for stuffing

7:00 a.m.

• Flip turkey in brine.

Morning

• Prepare Citrus Green Bean Salad (45 minutes total)
• Prep lettuce for Salad of Pears and Mixed Greens with Chevre
• Toast walnuts for Salad of Pears and Mixed Greens with Chevre
• Cut goat cheese into rounds for Salad of Pears and Mixed Greens with Chevre and re-refrigerate.
• Toast baguette slices

12:40 p.m.

• Preheat oven to 500 deg. F. and set one rack on lowest shelf.
• Turkey out of brine, rinsed and patted dry
• Fit foil breastplate.
• Set up on rack and rub all over with canola oil.

1:00

• Turkey in oven.

1:30

• Breastplate on.
• Oven down to 350.

2:00

• Prep/bake Pear Crostini w/ goat Cheese (Bo & Jen's oven)

3:00

• Serve pear crostini w/ goat cheese & shrimp w/ cocktail sauce
• Chop onions and apples for stuffing

3:30

• Prep Sweet Potato Casserole
• Assemble stuffing

4:00

• Assemble Sweet Potato Casserole

4:15

• Sweet Potato Casserole goes in Bo & Jen's oven
• 1st pan of stuffing goes in Bo & Jen's oven
• Begin cooking potatoes for Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes

4:30

• Take Citrus Green Bean Salad out of fridge

4:45

• Turkey out of our oven (depending on when temp hits 160˚)
• Add second pan of stuffing

5:00

• Remove foil from Sweet Potato Casserole
• Remove foil from 1st pan of stuffing

5:10

• Prep pears for Salad of Pears and Mixed Greens with Chevre

5:15

• Sweet Potato Casserole out of Bo & Jen's oven
• Plate Salad of Pears and Mixed Greens with Chevre
• Carve turkey

5:20

• Mash potatoes and finish Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes preparation
• Open cans of Jellied Cranberry Sauce and Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce

5:25

• Rasperry/Cranberry jello salad from Bo & Jen's fridge
• Pumpkin pie from Bo & Jen's fridge
• Pumpkin cheesecake from Bo & Jen's fridge
• Set pies up on buffet

5:30

• Change clothes
• Mangeons!

Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Back in the 1980s, Time Magazine determined—I’m not sure how—that the most owned but least read book in American households was Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I wonder how Hawking felt about this: that while he was, by all scientific literature measures, a wildly successful author, he probably ran into a number of people who praised him for a work they had never cracked. Who truly understood anything about the history of the universe, save what might have been gleaned from a Nova documentary on PBS?

Just from the title alone, A Short History of Nearly Everything begs to give Hawking a run for his money in the least-read competition, except for the fact that the author is Bill Bryson, one of the most humorous, readable, everyman-friendly writers of non=fiction ever to grace retail shelves. And while the title itself would set any merely mortal author up for fantastic failure, with Bryson you know that he will succeed—not by covering literally everything but by spinning just enough strands of webby prose via historical anecdotes and well-chosen interview subjects to let you make the connections to whatever part of the universe you want to fit into the puzzle that is our universe.

The book should come with a warning to the family of the reader, however: they need to prepare to be subjected to many bits of jaw-dropping and sometimes devastating information that will come from the quavering lips of the reader, who must share this information as a way of processing the miracle—and more importantly the fragility—of our existence in this universe. In other words, not only are the odds ridiculously infinitesimal that humankind exists in this universe at all, but the ease with which we could be extinguished from that same existence is … well, discomforting, to say the least. After reading the chapter discussing how disturbingly small the meteorite that would end civilization would have to be, and how little warning we would get for said meteor, and how little could truly be done to stop it (hint: the movie Armageddon isn’t terribly, um, realistic), I found myself lying in bed at night, staring at my ceiling, thinking: it could all end … right … now! Fortunately, Bryson also makes sure we understand what a small role we self-centered humans really play in this universe, so I don’t feel nearly as bad since we won’t really be missed anyway….

Come to A Short History of Nearly Everything for Bryson’s irrepressibly warm and droll prose, and you’ll find you’ll find the science lessons sneaking up on you. Before you know it, you’ll be ready to hold your own at that surprise dinner date with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Tricked Into Looking Into a 37-Year-Old Mirror

So after school on Friday, to celebrate Laura's return to the fold (thus healing our "broken-down family"), we headed over to Maple Park, where it has become a small tradition for other Baker students to gather and get their Friday ya-yas out, and for their parents to mill about and catch up on all the news/gossip from the Baker scene.

Among the gathered were one of Piper's best friends and her mother, and the mom shared with us a conversation she had had recently with her daughter regarding a new social aspect to the second-grade girls' lives.

"And she said, 'Mom, all the other girls have boyfriends now!'" The girl was noting a difference between the other girls and herself—she seems to be more of the "tomboy:" she is friends with these male classmates but more "another one of the boys" rather than a "girlfriend."

"Oh God," I said, rolling my eyes. "This was inevitable, but I didn't expect it so soon...."

"Wait, let me tell you what she said," continued the mother. "I asked her to tell me who had boyfriends. 'Well, there's Piper," she said. "She has three boyfriends! There's Karl, and there's Jordan, and then there's Eric.'

"And I said to her: 'Wow. And who else has other boyfriends in the class?'

"And she thought about it for a moment and finally said: 'Actually, Piper's the only one.'"

Oh. My. God.

The anecdote conjured a clear memory of my second-grade year, Mrs. Judson's class, Idyllwild Elementary School, and I realized more clearly than ever before that this kid is just a female version of me.

Mr. Mom, Day 4.

I hear another scream from her bedroom. I've learned the quality of the screams, their tonality, and I can tell that this one doesn't need my assistance. But the next one definitely will. You see, she's having another bad morning. Sometimes it's Bad Hair, sometimes it's Bad Clothes; this morning it's both.

I go find Zuzu, who is happily playing with dolls on our bed. "Sweetie, do you know what you're bringing to school yet?"

"Uh huh," she says with a sharp nod, but in my head I give a slow count to five as I pretend to put away some clothes, and before I finish counting, she pops off the bed with just what I was expecting: "Actually, I need to get an animal." And off she heads to one of the two giant baskets of stuffed animals to choose today's lucky winner in the Who Will Accompany Zuzu On Her School Day sweepstakes.

A louder scream from the other bedroom, this time followed by crying. This one is my cue.

Cracking the door: "Are you okay, sweetie?"

She's crumpled on the floor, holding her shoulder. "I hit my arm!"

I crouch, rub it. "I'm so sorry, sweetie. What can I do to help?"

"None of them fit!" she cries. Her shirts, she means. You see, she's in between sizes, and while the hems still barely reach her waist and the sleeves just touch her wrists, this is not acceptable for her. "Look!" she says as she raises her arms over her head. I can see a sliver of her tummy. For Piper, this is unacceptable.

"Okay, let's think this through," I say. "Solve the problem." I'm keeping my calm even though I know now we'll be late to school. With Laura out of town, my goal each day is that when I kiss these girls goodbye, they're smiling. This is easily achievable with Zuzu, but Piper's takes more ... let's say finesse. At her closet door, I pick some sweater dresses. "How about this one?" I propose. "I've always loved this one. We'll find some leggings to go with it." I get a furious shake of the head.

I pick another. "You know, this one would even work with jeans underneath!" I have to admit that I'm stretching for this one: I'm remembering a girl I had a crush on in 1978, junior-high days. Jeans under a skirt were all the rage then. But this is thirty years later, so I get yelled at for this bizarre suggestion. "Honey, you don't need to speak to me that way," I say, lowering my pitch but still keeping it level. "I'm helping you here." Eventually, we find a shirt in a drawer that is acceptably long. We even walk away happy because in the process, we also discovered what she wants to wear tomorrow for Mom's homecoming. I push away the thought that she'll have changed her mind by tomorrow morning and choose to live happily for a few minutes in the fantasy of victory.

Laura is in southern states this week. Business trips like this are going to become more prevalent, and they seem to be especially hard on Piper. She broke down on the phone with Laura the other night, asking her why would she ever take a job where she has to leave her kids at home and listen to them cry on the phone. (Peach is perfecting her guilt-making skills.) Susannah, ever the calm breeze but also wanting to mimic the ways of her big sister, wrested the phone from Piper, summoned tears from her deepest soul, and bawled to her mom the same complaints (almost verbatim!) that Piper had said moments before. "On Friday," she sniffles, "every time the doorbell rings, I'll run to the door—even if we're in the middle of a TV show!" I wonder if Laura appreciates the level of that honor. The Woeful Child act continues for some fifteen minutes after we hung up ( "I hate that we're a broken-down family!" Piper exclaims at one point), but they still fall asleep in my bed remarkably quickly. I move them to their own beds later when I finally retire.

Our school mornings are nothing if not hectic, with both Laura and me handling a huge number of responsibilities. She primarily takes care of the hands-on kid duties while I handle all kitchen-related tasks, assisting on dressing and bed-making when possible. Picking up both tasks as a solo parent has meant rising earlier in the mornings and mentally preparing for the trick of getting the girls dressed and out the door. 8:10 a.m. is the goal; then we have a fighting chance of crossing the school's threshold by 8:29. We aced it the first two days. But yesterday, Piper lost it when I told her she couldn't wear the same thing she'd worn the day before—she'd been crawling all over the floor of a classroom in those clothes at a potluck the night before—and I let go of the concept of "being on-time" in favor of "being happy:" carefully working through the problem, complete with hugs and mopping up her tears. We were late, but that was okay.

And she's only 7. I can't wait to see what's in store in five or six years!

Susannah, meanwhile, skates through her morning once she gets past eating. Which, for some reason, she hates. I would eat breakfast three times a day, and I can't fathom why breakfast—heck, any meal!—is such an arduous task for her. But once we're past that, she joyously does the rest of her morning prep, and then she pretty much sets up somewhere in the house and observes the hot mess of a process getting her big sister to the door with backpack on.

At the door, girls wearing their jackets and backpacks, I check my iPod for the list of things I need to remember for today (prepared by Laura, natch): nothing on the docket but observing Piper's modern dance class tonight. Yay. No swimsuits or paperwork or library books to get to the correct destinations. I could badger PJ to feed the fish, but I decide to let that one go in the name of peace and feed them myself; she sees me doing it and pitches a fit that I'm doing her job. I hold my tongue, tempted to snap that I've already mentioned twice that she needed to do this. Susannah sings a song by Elbow.

We're ready to go, except that Piper has disappeared. I hear her scream in the bathroom. She's standing in front of the mirror, her hair mussed like a bird's nest.

"I hit my head with the brush!" she cries.

I wrap my arms around her. What's the quickest way to do this? I kiss the top of her head. "I'm sorry, honey. Would you li--"

"No, I mean I did it on purpose!"

I don't react on the outside. On the inside: Holy shit. Red flag!... We'll talk about this later, she and me. For now, I just say: "Everyone's hair looks horrible right now, honey. We're all getting haircuts on Saturday and then we'll all look great." I remember her phrase from the night before and say it to humor myself: "We'll look like a less broken-down family. Now, let's head out, you'll feel better when we play some music in the car." I don't know how, but this works. She hugs me and we're on our way.

Things do get better with a little Shantel, a little Natasha Bedingfield, a little Swell Season, all of them songs that I am more than sick of but the girls sing along, and we laugh at the trombone riff in "Disko Partizani," and by the time we're in the school parking lot, Piper is hopping out of the car, "walking as if on air," as one teacher described it in a progress report a couple years ago. When she heads upstairs to her classroom, she gives me a big kiss and a cheery "Bye, Dad!" And I feel as accomplished as I ever felt after completing anything else in my entire life.

A few minutes later, as I'm heading out of Zuzu's classroom, I hear her cry outside. A teacher is bringing her in: she pitched forward while running. Her hands are dirty, scraped. She buries her face in my shoulder, her sandy hands on the back of my neck. We gently wash them in the bathroom, I kiss them, and I carry her back outside. I do one of her favorite Daddy Tricks: I lift her higher and higher and tell her to stop it—she's floating away! She laughs and asks me to do it again and again and again. One more floating balloon and then it's time for sandwich hugs: Zuzu and her best friend Isabella trap me and squeeze until I play-choke to death.

I'm off to the car. As I sit in the car and watch her shooting across the monkey bars, I pull together my work to-do list. It's been a good week, but I can't wait to have Laura back tomorrow. And I certainly know I'm not the only one.

Book Review: Last Night at the Lobster (Stewart O'Nan)

Perhaps it’s my own memories of my first job as a bus boy at a seafood restaurant in southern California. Or perhaps it was my two summers managing a kitchen at a summer camp. Whatever it is, I find stories centered around restaurant jobs endlessly fascinating. Don’t let your lack of membership in that quirky “club” repel you: Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster has wider appeal in its everyman hero, Manny, dedicated to his managerial responsibilities at a Red Lobster branch even though the corporation is shutting it down. Whether it’s for pride or because nothing else is really going right in his life, he wants this one last night to be a success. Naturally, he’s the only one who seems to care: the rest of his staff are focused entirely on getting their paychecks, goofing off, and just getting out of the kitchen before the oncoming snowstorm makes it impossible to traverse the New Britain, Connecticut, streets.

O’Nan thanks many people from a real Red Lobster at the end of this book, and it’s clear that they taught him well the Ways of the Lobster. His penchant for detail about every aspect of the job is part of what makes this story so fun. What makes it heartbreaking is Manny’s emotional balancing act as he tries to find how to stay in love with his pregnant girlfriend but how to confirm that he still holds some attraction for one of his waitresses. In the end, Manny walks away from the Red Lobster with something resembling a kind of triumph, though it’s hard not to feel this is a tragedy: The only thing in front of him as he trudges through the snow on his way home is a future at the next circle in Hell, Olive Garden

This is a perfect small book that feels bigger than its thickness, which speaks to O’Nan’s talent for concentrating characters and plot. The challenge of holding your attention—I mean, it’s a friggin’ restaurant, how much could happen?—is so strong that you end up not being able to put the book down just because a busload of senior citizens is pouring through the front door.

Writing Exercise: After Words

The goal here is to write a scene after a traumatic event has occurred, but without writing a traumatic event. There's definitely something here; I hope to develop this one into a full-fledged story.

***

He had left the back door ajar. When Carrie came in she closed and locked it and turned off the porch light. She remembered another time, when she had had even more to drink, and she had carried a head of angry steam up the stairs intent on heaving it like a medicine ball into him. Tonight she just removed her heels and padded silently, deliberately, up the squeaking stairs. She pressed a thumb and finger to her stinging eyes in the kitchen, then studied the setting: the dirty dishes by the sink, the child’s plate covered in ketchup, the half-full half gallon of mostly melted Rocky Road. She peered beyond the kitchen to a dark dining room, and beyond to a living room, also dark, save a fluttering television glow.

Staying on the balls of her feet, Carrie moved toward the luminescence. Something deep in her chest tickled as she approached the archway. The couch opposite the television crept into view, revealing his bare feet, then his legs. Then, finally, Audrey’s legs, her small feet pressed against his stomach. They were both perfectly still, their faces lit by some Animal Planet story. The girl’s mouth was slack, open, leaking a dead sleep. Michael was the one with a thumb in his mouth. Carrie first caught him doing this in his sleep right after his father’s sudden death, and again on the nights after 9/11. He innocently denied the habit when he was awake.

Carrie sat on the ottoman, captive to the father-daughter still-life. Wisps of the little girl’s hair crossed her mouth. Her eyelashes were almost comically long, one of Michael’s most wonderful gifts to his daughter. Even in the blue darkness, Audrey’s face looked flushed, like it always did after the jubilant running of countless “loops” through the hallway, her bedroom, the bathroom, their bedroom, and the hallway again. Carrie spent a long time staring at the girl’s torso, narrowing her eyes and willing a sign of movement. Audrey’s breath always seemed so shallow when she slept, and on many occasions mother and father had watched her sleep from the bathroom doorway, whispering tense queries to each other about whether they could perceive any movement. Eventually the child would turn over, or sigh, or release that strange hoot in her sleep, and they would roll their eyes at their concern. And now, again, Carrie couldn’t help herself: she needed to see some sign of life. Audrey wore an oversized shirt, Michael’s freebie from a 10K race that was too small on him, so now it was the child’s prize “nightgown.” No matter how hard Carrie focused her eyes down the city streets of the silkscreened Chicago landscape, she could not see a rise-and-fall underneath. Just at that moment where quizzical would turn to panic, her eyes darted to Audrey’s face again, and she finally noticed the bending of the hair strands under the girl’s nose, like thin inverted palm tree trunks in a rhythmic wind. And Carrie exhaled.

In his sleep, Michael pulled his thumb from his mouth and brought his arm down around Audrey. His forearm and large hand covered all of Audrey’s torso as he pulled her into his chest like a teddy bear. The girl allowed herself to be swallowed into his body and the pair sighed in unison. Carrie’s brow furrowed. It was her name that was called in the middle of a nightmare or after a tragic sidewalk spill. But it was Michael’s presence that relaxed the child, that brought on the impromptu dances of sheer delight, leaving Carrie, smiling and biting her lip, feeling like an audience member to their performance.

Michael’s legs still turned her on. Even at rest, they barely contained their power. He had not run for the last six months, an achilles injury that would never end, or so he said. He knew the attraction his legs held, which explained the recent transformation of his running shorts from “sports equipment” to “around-the-house fashion statement.” As if physical attraction would solve things. The arm around Audrey was similarly beautiful. His hand had wedged between the girl’s ribcage and the couch. She was belted in tight against him. Carrie suddenly felt on the verge of tears.

Her eyes traveled to his face and she almost jumped when she was met with a silent stare. The sharpness pierced, and she bled color from the inside. How long had he been awake, watching her watch them? She swallowed, forcing her emotion down into her belly.

“I’m … back,” she whispered. His head nodded almost imperceptibly. “How long has she been asleep?” she asked. His shoulder shrugged gently. “Shall we move her to bed?"

He considered this for a moment. “She’s fine for now,” he said, speaking out loud. He was always louder than he needed to be. She constantly feared waking up Audrey, but he always reminded her how heavy the child slept. And he was right: to Carrie’s memory, their louder exchanges these last months had never roused her.

“So … are you coming to bed any time?” she whispered.

He seemed to consider this for an eternity, at one point closing his eyes and pressing his lips against Audrey’s tousled head. “Yeah,” he said. “Eventually.” His terseness conjured her mother on those high-school Fridays of her senior year. Carrie regularly defied curfew, and at some point in the spring, Mom seemed to tire of the haranguing and simply gave up.

Carrie turned her head toward the bright kitchen and the long, black hallway leading to the bedrooms, the optical illusion of walls narrowing to a point of nothingness. Her limbs felt suddenly heavy, and she wondered if she could make it to the bedroom. What she really wanted was to lie back and fall asleep on the big, cushy armchair behind her. But the sense that she did not belong in this room was palpable.

With a sigh that became the exhale that powered her to her feet, she whispered “Okay then,” and, shedding her sweater on the ottoman, she turned and headed toward the bright light.

If You're On Someone's Shoulders, You're Not Drowning

So I was listening to a podcast today, one of the Pen On Fire interviews with writers, agents, and publicists in the publishing industry. Sometimes these can be very informative, sometimes inspiring, sometimes neither. This particular episode was looking pretty good: it was with Michael Blake, the novelist/screenwriter most famous for penning the novel and screenplay for Dances With Wolves.

It resonated with me because Blake was talking about how difficult it had been for him to launch his career. He talked about some failed projects, including a screenplay that had been stopped by the movie studio because some exec had read the script and found it "too intelligent." That was when Blake (understandably) decided that he needed to get out of the film biz. As he was feeling around for what he should do next, he had started to study some Indian history ... and you can see where this is going: embattled writer who is apparently too good for popular culture must find a way to connect with an audience when no one willgive him a chance.

Then he says this: "... And Kevin Costner was a big star, well, was becoming a big star. I went over to his house one night just to have spaghetti with him and his wife...."

Now, wait a gol'darned second! You just up and headed over to Mr. Costner's abode and invited yourself to dinner? Or perhaps you already knew him?

Yeah, you kinda lost major points in the sympathy-for-the-starving-artist game there, Mr. Blake.

Then a few minutes later, talking about a more recent book he has written, there's this: "... And Viggo Mortenson's an old friend of mine, and we were on the phone the other day...." And he goes on to explain how Viggo's publishing concern agreed to publish this new book.

So I'm trying to decide: If you're close friends with arguably two of the most bankable stars in the entertainment industry (or at least at the time of these two anecdotes, they were among the most bankable), do you really get to play the "I started at the bottom" card?

Free Write: Return to Childhood Home

Walt has arrived back in Shelsandra, his childhood home. It is his first time back in his adult life. He is walking through the house, making his way to see his father, Kris, who he has not seen or spoken to in just as long a time.

***

He took the stairs at a deliberate pace. He told himself this was in order to collect his thoughts, but he had been trying to do that for several days now and he was no more successful now than in Chicago, on the jet, the transport plane, the private plane, the helicopter. At the time he wrote that off to the noise and bustle of the various engines, but now in the silent sturdiness of Shelsandra, the noise in his ears seemed worse than any jet turbine. These stairs—how old were they? Yet perfectly silent, not a creak as he padded on the Oriental rug. The dark wood railing, so smooth, except he was already anticipating the place near the top where his hand would encounter deep gashes in the dark chocolate wood, the result of an “experiment” performed by an 11-year-old Walt, who couldn’t resist the urge to experience the feeling of swinging the machete his father had brought him from Kenya.

More memories in store at the top of the stairs: The chaise lounge with the burgundy velvet upholstery worn down in corners to tan, where he had once found a maid sleeping sitting up and had studied her oddly bent nose too closely until she had awoken with a shriek. The small table with the exact same bowl of wax fruit, though looking pristine from regular dusting; he didn’t check to see if anyone had ever discovered the one ruined apple that his friend Roberto, having been fooled in the low light, took a hearty bite when they were nine. The lead candelabra with three thick candles that Mother always lit when entertaining, though very few guests ever came up these stairs to the Kurtzman family quarters. Noticeably absent was a portrait of Walt, done when he was almost a teenager, by a friend of his mothers who had gone on to become a successful painter in New England. He had worked from a photograph he had taken of Walt on a trip to Boston where Father had worked and Mother and he had walked the Freedom Trail when not sitting through endless lunches and dinners with relatives Walt had never met before and would never meet again. Walt had never liked the picture much because it conjured for him the anger he was filled with that day, made to sit on a porch in Brookline and listen to his mother evading questions that would get into too much detail about their faux-life in Minnesota.

His hesitation at the top of the stairs was not to reminisce but rather to remember where his father would be. When Walt last visited Shelsandra, Kris still spent his resting hours in the parental bedroom suite. But Margot had reported Kris’s increasing reclusiveness, and if it was isolation his father wanted it was more likely he’d be in the study. This was where Walt headed, down the darker of the two hallways. At the end was the closed study door. He watched the bottom of the door for any sign of light, and at first he thought it was completely dark, he was about to double back and head to the bedrooms after all, when he heard a sound of something falling, a box or large book, beyond the doorway. He approached, prepared to knock, and then decided to push open the heavy door.

“Hello?” He was surprised at the sound of fear in his voice. He cleared his throat, fighting the quaver: “Father?”

Actually there was some light, from a single desk lamp, but it was blocked from the side of the room Walt stood on by stacks and stacks of books and file boxes. The sound of papers being moved suddenly ceased as the figure on the other side of the paper wall listened. “Yes? Who is it?”

“Father, it’s Walt.”

A longer pause. Then another cleared throat. “Son! Your mother told me you were … is today the day?”

“Yes. We arrived about an hour ago.”

“Come here!” he beckoned. Kris's voice was welcoming, but weak, as if he had just woken up.

Walt studied the books and papers. “I’m not sure where …” But then he saw an opening, and he worked his way through there, stepping over more scattered tomes, some open with cloth bookmarks laid across the open pages. The flutter of fear was back again as he came around the edge and caught his first glimpse of Kris, which was in silhouette as the single desk lamp shone in his eyes.

His father laughed, and the chuckle transformed into a cough that shook his whole body. The chair bearing his weight squeaked in rhythm. Walt considered for a moment moving to his father, clapping him on the back, but his disorientation fixed his feet. Instead he asked: “You okay?” which Kris dismissed with a wave of a hand, and in short order he had regained control.

“You … look good, Nicholas,” Kris said. “Considering all the states your mother has imagined you in over the last few years, I believe she must be happy with the state you’re in.”

“Yes,” was all Walt could say, and he wanted to reply with something in kind, something superficial noting his father’s condition, something he might be able to find to say that would be complimentary, except that he still couldn’t see much other than his father’s profile. He could see that Kris was significantly balder … or no, now that he studied him for another moment, it appeared that he was wearing a beret.

“How long will you be with us?” Kris asked, studying his hands in his lap.

“I’m not sure,” Walt said, and suddenly unsure if his father had any idea why he had returned to North Center at all, he diverted the subject: “I brought somebody with me, Father. Two people, actually. Sherry, and her daughter Arden.” He suddenly felt like a college schoolboy, looking for his father’s approval via the girlfriend he had dragged home with him … an experience he had never actually had. Better late than never.

25 Specific, Carefully Crafted Things About Me

1. Not too terribly long ago, I listened to a podcast (I listen to a lot of podcasts) that informed me that the "25 random things about me" meme that permeated Facebook earlier this year generated 5 million such lists over four weeks. Thankfully, the trend has died down—I must have been tagged ten times in the course of two weeks by people doing their "25 things" list. The rest of Faceburbia moved on to other more specific memes (The Best 15 Drunk-Dials I've Made ... The 10 Orgasms That Changed My Life, etc.), so me doing my list now make me so uncool that I'm practically cool again.

2. The idea, by the way, that your (or anyone else's) list was random is, quite frankly, bullshit. You and I both know that you spent a lot of time putting your list together. God knows I've been editing this and tweaking it for several days now.

3. Coming up with the 25 items is going to made a little more difficult by virtue of the fact that this blog already contains a list of six random items about myself, for which I only had to tag six other friends. I'm not tagging anyone this time. That's probably very antisocial-media of me, to not be more inclusive. I just can't bring myself to do it.

4. The thing is, I felt really guilty about tagging those six friends. I mean, everyone's really busy these days, you know? While it's a huge conceit to believe that people want to read six (much less 25) things about you in the first place, to ask them to take the time to come up with their own list is really pushing it.

5. So I felt better when only one of my six friends actually followed through with his list. I actually felt less guilty about tagging Jason than others, because a) I know that he kind of likes these things, and b) even though he's one of the busiest people I know on this planet, he somehow finds the time to do fun things like blogging and cool online April Fools pranks.

6. I envy Jason's organization. My organization is for crap. I'm trying all the time to get better at it, but so often in my life, I am simply overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff I have to do that I'm never sure where to start. And then when I add in the stuff I actually want to do ... fuggedahboutit.

7. Right now, at least 3.4 of you read #6 and thought: "I need to introduce him to David Allen's Getting Things Done program!" First of all: you're geeks, quit it. Second of all, I've tried GTD. I'm still trying GTD. Somedays it's great. Somedays I can't find my ass from the runway, much less 50,000 feet. Like with so many self-help programs/diets/regimes, when you're motivated to make them work they're da bomb. But they have to become a habit, and to get to that point you have to rely on shear gut motivation and faith for longer than I can usually handle.

8. But I digress. What I want to say is that no one is tagged for this list. (Well, that's not technically true: I tagged a couple of people mentioned in this over on Facebook; this is in now way meant to encourage those people to even look at this note.) No one reading this should make their own list. And if you do, don't blame me. No "Marck tagged me, so now I have to do this." Okay? You are off the hook. You can just read this, and forget it, and move on.

9. Or you can just not read it. How would I know? I don't pore over my Google Analytics and meta-stalk my readers. Hell, at this point, I assume I'm down to about three readers, since this blog is so "feast or famine." 15 straight posts, followed by months of inactivity. I'm as streaky as an overpaid baseball pro.

10. I had to look up "pore" just now to make sure that I was spelling it the right way.

11. I fear that memes like this 25-random-things is a heavy contributor to the trend away from thoughtful writing/reading. It's an easy way to say short, pithy things about oneself without doing any constructive thinking. I can't decide, though, if this has happened because we don't have the time to read longer pieces anymore, or if we don't read longer pieces because nothing we read (especially on the Internet) has much depth/substance anymore. Chicken-egg.

12. Like, take Newser, for instance. Great idea, in theory: as a battle against the information overload we face every day, the major stories of the day/hour/minute are whittled down to a two-paragraph, People magazine-worthy summary. Newser's motto is: "Read less, know more." They got half of it right, that's for sure. My fear is that people think they are informed after reading a couple of paragraphs to have an opinion on ... oh, say, a certain national stimulus package. This would explain why 58% of people polled for one poll believe that the Republicans are at fault for the package not passing faster, and in another poll 59% feel that it's Obama's fault. That 8-9% who (theoretically, I realize) voted both ways? They're the epitome of this "I don't know much but I'll have an opinion anyway" culture we live in.

13. Which is not to say I haven't read every 25-random-things list I've been tagged for. Some of them are fascinating.

14. Take John Scholvin, for instance. I know John through a softball team we were on several years ago, where I regularly watched him misplay fly balls. I got to know him a bit from post-game bar chats, but I got more information about his life and the kind of guy he is from his stupid list. And it made me wish I had the chance to know him better.

15. John gave me that chance, by the way: I have a Facebook email from him in which he invited me to lunch sometime. While I was certainly more inclined to do it after reading his 25 things list, it's still really hard for me to motivate myself to pull the trigger and reply "Okay! When?" This has nothing at all to do with John -- or the dozens of other people whose emails I haven't responded to. It has everything to do with #6 above.

16. By the way, I can make fun of John's bad defense because he has watched ground balls eat me for dinner on the crappy, stone-filled infield of the Chicago Park District softball fields more times than he ever bricked his cans of corn. Also, I feel safer doing it now because he no longer works in Evanston—he sold his company and works downtown somewhere now. This also means that I snoozed too long on the lunch invite, so I lose.

17. Right about now, I bet many of you are wishing I'd just gone with one of those "one-word-answer" memes. I considered this very seriously, but I thought it would be a lot more fun to have my 4-year-old daughter supply the answers. That meme would go something like this: "1. How would you describe yourself? POOP! 2. Where is your cell phone? POOP! 3. How do you feel today? "POOPY!"

18. In fact, both girls have been going through a major "poop/underpants" ... uh, meme these days. Bathtime has particularly horrendous: the word "poopy" and "butt" are worked into every conceivable part of speech (yes, "peepee" works beautifully if you're looking to split an infinitive or two). I do my best to not react and thus feed the fire, but at some point I have to crack down because I just need them to stop cackling maniacally so I can freakin' wash them already because I'm not down here on my knees for my health, you little twerps.

19. The "butt/underpants" bath routine also contributed greatly to my decision to transition Piper to taking showers. For some reason this feels like a watershed coming-of-age moment. "Watershed" being a strange word to use, since she takes such ridiculously long showers that the theoretical "shed" is pretty much devoid of water by the time Zuzu begins her bath. I mean, I'm seriously reconsidering this decision on environmental grounds: I would be embarrassed if it turned out that my daughter's showers were responsible for the acceleration of the drop in Lake Michigan's water level. So for the time being, during Peach's showers, I'm stationed in the bathroom with a book, dutifully reminding her every few minutes that we need to keep a move on.

20. I can't decide how to pronounce "meme." I hear a lot of techno-pundits say meem, but I had too many years of junior-high and high-school French that I can't look at the word without thinking of même (pronounced mehm), the word for "same." Maybe the word is so trendy I should just go with the pronunciation "... Meh ...."

21. I was reading a Magic Treehouse book to Zuzu a few nights ago -- an exciting story where our protagonists, Jack and Annie, travel back to the Ireland in the Dark Ages and land on a rocky island with a monastery that has taken on the task of preserving literature. (It's called Maniacal Monks at Midday or something like that.) I'm getting into the "Irishness" of it ... I mean, how can I help it? Look at my last name ... and I've given the lead character, Father Michael, this brogue that—in my head, at least—is based on what I can recall from Glen Hansard's voice in the movie Once. And I'm grooving on it ... I mean, I think I'm really channeling this Irish dude! And just as I'm getting to the climactic moment when the bad-guy vikings are spotted approaching the island on their serpent ships and Father Michael is fretting about what will happen to their austere structures, Zuzu stops me dead with: "Daddy, why are you talking weird like that?" Which is all to explain to you that I always have, and always will, totally suck at accents and impressions.

22. It's not really called Maniacal Monks at Midday. I just threw that in there as an inside joke to all you parents who read Magic Treehouse books 'cause I knew you'd really app-- OH GOD. Has it really come to THIS? *sigh* I mean, I wanted to be a rock star, fer chrissakes!

23. In fact, I sometimes think that the only way I'll "capture" that whole musician vibe again is through the Internet. I have a number of tapes off the board of my gigs from the 90s, and bits and pieces of them are pretty decent. I'm thinking of digitizing them and putting them up for all three of my former fans to hear. Who knows? Maybe it'll set off a burgeoning Marck Bailey mash-up counterculture.

24. And along those same lines: I recently discovered the first diary I ever kept. It has an entry on every day of the year of 1978. It was the year I was 12, turning 13. I am sorely tempted to post this diary on this blog, starting January 1, 2010. I can't decide if this is a great idea because it would be this document of a 12-year-old boy's life and all his awkwardness and emotion and banal daily goings-on ... or if it's the whole idea is the height of narcissism. Those of you who have actually read this far are encouraged to give me your thoughts (publicly or privately) on what I should do.

25. Well, you've reached 25. When I was a teenager, I had specific goals that I was to reach by the age of 25. They got tweaked once in awhile, but they always aimed at one thing: fame and fortune in the arts. I know, I know: laugh all you want. It's what scares me the most when I hear Piper worshiping at the Altar of Fame, wishing-hoping-praying that she can become famous. And that, combined with her perfectionism, smells like danger to me. I can stay awake at nights trying to figure out how to explain to her that her daddy had the same hopes and faults, and over here on this side of it, he knows now—and he wants her to know so that she can save herself the frustration and dejection, that the greatest things he has been involved in creating—will ever be a part of—are her and her sister. But there really is no way to tell her that; she's on her own on this one. All I can do is stand on the side and cheer her on like the insane fan she needs.

Re: My Complicated Relationship with Poppies

I don't get it. I mean, I love to sleep. Before marriage and children, rising from bed after 12 noon was de rigeur. My family can tell you stories of days I would fall asleep in my room before dinner and not wake up until after breakfast the next morning. Great cocktail party fodder has been made from anecdotes of my ability to conk out anywhere. Two-hour nap in the afternoon? No problem! I can go right back to bed at ten that night and sleep through the night.

Those who suffer from insomnia are cursing me. But to make matters worse—and I think this is proof that God does not exist—my superpower is wasted on me. I love to sleep, but I don't want to sleep. I'm like the naturally curly-haired child whose mop is the envy of all those stricken with straight hair, yet all (s)he wants is to get rid of the curls.

A few weeks ago, I made a promise to Laura that I'd go to bed by midnight. Her concern for my well-being was well-founded: I had regularly been staying up 'til 1:00 or sometimes 2:00 a.m. and then rising at 6 a.m. to start a new day. I'd tell myself I could handle it, but the fact is that the cumulative effect by Friday meant that I was noticeably shorter with Piper and Susannah. I knew the wisdom of Laura's concern: no one can keep going like this without collapsing. I agreed.

My resolve lasted barely three weeks. Now I'm back to my usual pattern: after the girls go to bed, I am filled with energy and I find any combination of television-watching, reading, and writing that keeps my mind busy.

I know the research out there: the benefits of sleep are legion. If I just committed to 7-8 hours a night I would see vast improvement in my creativity, attention span, concentration, productivity.... But I'd have to go to sleep! I'd have to miss out on conscious life! When Laura notices that I'm trying to fit another activity into my already dreadfully overcommitted day, she tells me that "You can't manufacture time." And she's right, but when I stay awake at night, squeezing the last bit of juice from today and stealing some from tomorrow, I can convince myself that I have gained a couple of hours. I can write another blog post (gotta stick to my NaBloPoMo guns!), finish another chapter (how will the character get out of that mess?), clean the kitchen (the morning goes so much easier when I start with a blank slate ... and countertop), AND catch up on those back-episodes of Bill Moyer's Journal all before I finally wake up my wife, who has been fast asleep on the couch, and head off to bed, hoping she isn't awake enough to look at a clock and realize that it's 2:15 a.m.

Now that I’m the parent of two energetic, thoroughly exhausting children, I should be dead to the world by 10 p.m., on the couch, face pointed to the ceiling, mouth-breathing, with Jon Stewart sardonically grinning at me. I regularly implore (read: nag) my kids about the glories of sleep, about how much better the next day goes if they get their customary night’s rest (currently hovering around eleven hours … eleven hours!). But I do not even pretend to practice what I preach. "Stay here in bed, Daddy," she says. "Daddy has 'work' to do," I reply with not a small modicum of guilt, because I know what I really want to do is catch another segment of "Cheating Death with Dr. Stephen Colbert, DFA." And even after the TV itself has given up the ghost and turned to the dreamscape of infomercials, I'm still getting in one last round of Bejeweled, one last check of Facebook, fully aware that I will drag through the afternoon at work tomorrow. I will probably have to pick up a 5-minute power-nap on my floor. I will consider caffeinated tea or coffee but probably won't give in. (Yes, through all this little sleep, I have also given up caffeine.) I will stifle the yawns in meetings with my colleagues. But I'm not worried about that right now.

First, I'll need to hear Laura beg me with a sadness tinged with anger to please get some more rest tomorrow, and she'll give me the same lecture I'd given to a daughter several hours earlier. And then I'll finally close my eyes, and even as I'm losing consciousness, I'll think to myself: "God, this feels so good, this bed, this feels really wonderful, I really, really need to get to bed earlier because this just feels so--"

And the thought won't get finished, because Laura is nudging my shoulder: "Honey, it's 6 a.m." And before I'm aware, I'm in the bathroom putting on my robe. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Why I Dumped Glee

I made an off-the-cuff tweet the other night about achieving something akin to aesthetic equanimity after abandoning the Fox show Glee, and I was surprised at how many Facebook and Twitter friends had a strong reaction. Perhaps even more surprising was that the reaction was pretty evenly split between fans ("Why? Why? Why?") and people who have never seen the show ("I've heard about that show—what's wrong with it?"). Apparently 140 characters plus one follow-up tweet weren't complete enough. For those of you who asked: you have no one to blame but yourselves. You should know better than to ask me to explain.

When Glee aired its pilot episode last May, I fell "in like" with the show. The incessant promotion throughout the summer didn't bother me like it bothered others—I was enjoying my anticipation "buzz." I couldn't wait to see more of Jane Lynch, who plays Sue Sylvester the deliciously evil cheerleader coach: she was walking out the door with the show tucked underneath a sweatsuit-adorned arm in a wake of chewed-up scenery. Though the other characters all paled in comparison to Lynch's villainess, everyone seemed likable enough and I figured the writers would finagle some good story lines in between some fun production numbers.

Most of all, I was impressed with the musical elements. Glee approaches the musical in a grounded way: songs don't just break out, Fame-like, in the middle of otherwise banal, everyday circumstances; no dancing on cafeteria tables. Almost all the music happens during show choir rehearsals and performances. (One notable—and successful— exception is the hilarious episode with the football team learning Beyonce's "Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It].") Even with this limitation, show creator Ryan Murphy still manages to use music to advance storyline and character development. It was an oasis of restraint in a show that keeps forgetting to set up boundaries.

Ah, restraint. I sigh, thinking of what Glee could have been. Maybe not even restraint. Maybe just a sanity check.

My concerns cropped up during the second episode when young, quasi-nerdy ingenue Rache tries bulimia (unsuccessfully). She complains in her bathroom stall that she has no gag reflex. Standing in the bathroom is the meek and germophobic Emma Pillsbury, a teacher. Emma comments out loud (I'm paraphrasing here): "That'll be useful when you're older." As crassly cynical as that zinger is, I would have let it go if it had come from a fellow student. But the fact that this came from the mouth of the most tightly wound and straight-laced character on the show showed a complete lack of respecting the characters.

Another example: somewhat hunky Finn Hudson, the football-player-turned-performer, has a problem with premature ejaculation (or maybe just arousal, it's unclear), so when he gets into sexual situations, he falls back on the age-old trick of thinking about something non-sexual. But Finn doesn't pick run-of-the-mill subject matter—say, vegetables or baseball statistics or reciting the pledge of allegiance in one's head. Instead, he recalls the memory of the mailman he hit with a car while learning to drive. The image (and sound) of the body slamming into the car's windshield was played numerous times in early episodes ... I suppose as a point of humor. I simply found it unnerving and distracting.

The weird thing is that I'm a huge (but somewhat closeted) fan of Ryan Murphy's other show, nip/tuck, which, partly due to the subject matter and partly due to the fact that it's on basic cable channel FX rather than a traditional network, gets to be outrageous in ways that Glee will never be. The writers of nip/tuck seem to be in a perpetual goal of topping the last episode in prurience or cosmetic mutilation, reaching deeper and deeper into the dark recesses of their collective psyche for outrageous ways to humiliate, arouse, and sometimes kill its characters. (Jessalyn Gilsig, who plays Terri Schuester on Glee, played a sexually addicted character on nip/tuck with one of the most memorable deaths I've ever seen.)

But nip/tuck doesn't try to pass itself off as any kind of reality. Glee sometimes wants to be nip/tuck in its soap-opera-rageousness at times ... but then at other times it has to be a more tame, traditional 2oth-century television teen drama. This split-personality kills the show for me. It's not that it ever truly jumps the shark, but it hops over a heckuva lot of barracudas. Moments of greatness are slammed (not unlike that mailman) by insanely lame, hare-brained parallel plots. An episode where the flamboyant Kurt Hummel comes out to his father (whose surprisingdisplay of tolerance is portrayed with poetic nuance by Mike O'Malley) is a series high point; unfortunately, it shares screen time with the completely ludicrous "I'm not pregnant but I'll take that baby off your hands, little cheerleader" story of Terri and her hearthrob-worthy-but-apparently-otherwise-doltish husband Will. (I mean, really, are we to believe that Will is the "perfect husband," metrosexual in all the right ways, doting and devoted to his shrewish and materialistic wife ... yet he can't be bothered to learn anything about pregnancy?)

And I'm sorry if anyone takes this as insensitive, but will they ever find a way to gracefully work Artie Abrams' wheelchair into the choreography of any song?

And when will they stop trying to create deep, tortured significance out of incessant, aggravating throwing-the-slushee-in-the-face bits? The green slime-dumping of You Can't Do That on Television was more clever in comparison.

And ...

Ugh. I'm irritating myself, so I can only imagine how you're feeling. If you got this far.

Anyway.

To be honest, Laura and I haven't cancelled the season pass for Glee. we're still TiVoing it, fast-forwarding through to watch the musical numbers. (I just realized that it's actually the opposite way I watch nip/tuck, where I fast-forward through the plastic surgery scenes!) It gets us through the hour-long episode in a nifty, efficient ten minutes. But even watching the songs from last week's episode ("Wheels"), I felt disappointed: the duet of "Defying Gravity" never really took off (and I can't decide if Chris Colfer's near-castrato performance was awe-inspiring or creepy). The all-wheelchair "Proud Mary" was just clunky and forced. (Hey, how did they afford all those wheelchairs on a $60-a-year budge the principal put them on in the pilot? Oh alright, I'll suspend disbelief and let that one go....)

But here's hoping that we get some more drop-dead show-stoppers like "Don't Stop Believing" and "Somebody To Love." This show needs something to tame it, because Jane Lynch can't do it all alone.

Plotting (... My Demise?)

For the good writer, nothing is easier than making up possible stories. If pushed, he can spin them out hour after hour, each one of them theoretically sound—a sequence of events leading to some climax, or, in longer narratives, an episodic sequence of climaxes.... But of the thiry plots he can think up in an hour, only one—if even that— will catch and hold his interest, make him want to write.

- John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, p. 61

I remember discovering the basic plot of Son of A Saint. I remember thinking how someone should write that novel. A couple of months later, when it suddenly dawned on me that maybe I should be the one to do that writing, it was a joyous (if obvious) revelation. Over the next several weeks, I thought a lot about it and was well on my way to filling up a notebook filled with plot points, character development, and general thoughts about how to approach the book.

All of this was shot to hell when I lost the notebook containing all this valuable information. Sometimes you can recover from losses like this: I never fretted too much when I didn't get a song melody or lyric out of my head and into some more permanent medium because I knew there were always a ton of ideas just as good to replace that one. That quote at the top of this entry, that's me to a T—when it comes to songwriting. But that notebook ... it was my Bible, my gold mine, and there was only one of them, and so much material had been poured into it while my brain was simply in "dump" mode that little of it could be remembered. I started another notebook, but I know there is a ton of material in there that could have made it into this story and probably never will.

I try not to think about this too much.

I'm digressing. What I want to talk about is plot. Unlike songwriting, where I feel expertly proficient and can create pretty decent gems from beginning to end, I have a (very typical) problem when it comes to stories, in that I can kick things off to a great premise, get things rolling, and then ... never be able to find that logical ending. Or—and this is the case with this book—I have my beginning and my ending, but connecting A to Z is a grind. I have two files on my computer: "Scenes Still to Be Written" and "Questions Still to Be Answered." And at this point, I've pretty much written everything I know is going to happen. The unwritten scenes are in that state because ... I just don't know what to do.

And the thing is, I know those unwritten scenes will naturally lead to more unwritten scenes, or, if the new material is good and should be kept, may require that I drastically rewrite other material to keep everything coherent and logical. One scene's rhythm may affect another scene's (or character's) emphasis. The philosophical implications of a moment in the first chapter may have devastating effects on a moment from an event two-thirds of the way through the book.

"All these considerations the author bears in mind, consciously or intuitively as he constructs his sequence of events leading to the climax," Gardner writes. "If his story plan is to be successful, he must rightly analyze what is logically necessary to the climax.... [I]f the plan of the story is to work, the writer's solutions to the problems involved in authenticating the climax must be credible and apt." Well, not just the climax, John; I would think that the writer would like every moment of his or her book to be "credible and apt."

When I lie in bed at night thinking about it—or when I'm driving, or walking, or pretty much doing anything, because there are days when this book completely obsesses my conscious and subconscious mind—I can so easily find myself overwhelmed. I trap myself in Walt's motivations, looking for my way out. Sadly, it's not always as easy as standing in the corner until the paint with which you've trapped yourself dries and then just walking out.

Most of the time, I cling to the idea that I can write my way out of this. Through sheer force of thinking, reading, and writing, I will find all the lost shards and glue them in the right place and make a whole masterpiece. Well, okay, I'd just settle for piece. And so I'll keep plugging away at these moments, trying to get this first draft done, and expect that when I start revising I'll be able to pull a lot of my glaring omissions and contradictions into line and make this kid march like a good soldier.

The belief that I will get this story finished, that I will end up with a story that connects all the dots ... I can't think of a better definition of faith.

An Open Letter to the Formerly Curious John Williams, WGN Radio

Hiya, John.

Marck here. You remember me, right? We've had a number of contacts over the years, though since you moved to the morning drive (belated congrats on that, by the way). I did a project for you that you seemed to appreciate: I devised a method of "scoring" a major league baseball game that centered on counting how many baseballs were used over the course of a game. I haven't been able to listen to you live since you moved to mornings, but I still catch all the podcasts and enjoy them.

That is, until I came across your discussion about the modern wing of the Art Institute and you're self-effacing monologue on not understanding the art you saw. The way you talked about your experience in the modern wing seemed so completely contradictory to everything I've come to understand about your nature that I felt the need to draw attention to it ... and perhaps defend modern art as an everyman (to an everyman) in the process.

The reason you grew to become my favorite WGN radio personality was your natural curiosity about things, about seemingly everything, whether scientific, cultural, or political. The questions you ask, the research you do, the books you read -- all of this speaks strongly to your wanting to understand the world and the characters that inhabit it. A lot of the books on your bedside table reflect this, and I have taken many cues from your reading list to explore similar ground. (A belated thank-you, btw, for putting me on to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which might have been my favorite non-fiction read in the last couple of years.)

But then you walk into the Art Institute and you completely throw your hands up in the air at the modern wing's contents -- and even went so far as to belittle the art with one caller (I'm talking about when you delivered the line "You're not educated" in a fairly sarcastic tone). You used the example of the video installation called "Clown Torture" by Bruce Nauman. (I didn't know the name or the piece or the artist, but less than 10 seconds on Google got me this information.) It's a piece I have visited myself, and was similarly confused by it at first.

Now, the John Williams I remember would look at this and would have asked one of two questions (or both):

1. "Okay -- it's in the Art Institute, so I guess it's great art -- there's limited room for stuff, and someone decided that this was brilliant enough to take up valuable real estate. Now *why* is this considered great?" The John Williams I remember, the curious one, would have actually looked for some answers to that question.
   
   
2. "How is the experience standing in this dark room watching disturbing videos affecting me? How is it affecting others viewing this?" The John Williams I remember would have explored that. And I'm talking beyond the easy go-to of "How does the security guard stand listening to the video for four hours?" (In fact, when I was there, I asked the guard stationed next to the exhibit what annoys him more -- the video or everyone asking him how much it annoys him. Guess which answer he chose?)

You claimed on the air that if you were compelling people with this description of the installation to go to the Art Institute, all the better — you were selling tickets. But I'm not so certain that you're being the least bit respectful to an artist by encouraging people to go laugh at the weird thing they don't understand. Is that even good motivation to pay admission to the modern wing?

At the risk of belaboring this, let me tell you what I, Uneducated Marck™ (at least as far as art goes), got out of "Clown Torture:"

I was there with my two daughters, ages 7 and 4. They waltzed into the middle of that dark room, sat on the ground, and started watching. In mere seconds, my kids were as transfixed by this "show" as by any of the cute, educational children's programming we let them watch at home. It didn't seem to matter at all to them that the content was disturbing, emotionally violent. All that mattered to them was that it was television.

I walked out of that thinking a lot harder about the visual images that we subject our (and our children's) minds to, and how quickly and easily we come to accept it and distance ourselves from it for the simple reason that it is on a television screen.

Now, do I think that this is what the artist intended? I doubt it. And reading his description of what he was intending (see above link), it sounds almost as if my daughters' experience was the OPPOSITE of what he was hoping for. But in the end, I don't think he'd mind. Because in the end, he moved me by his art, stirring me up and getting me thinking about things from a different perspective.

You don't have to be educated to have an a-ha moment. And the last thing an art museum needs in this day and age is more excuses for the everyman to want to avoid using his brain. Maybe the issue is that the nine-to-noon shift you're on now doesn't allow for much time to expound, though as you can see from this, it doesn't take a lot of time to have extracted a useful message from "Clown Torture." Hopefully in the future, you won't take the easy way out and just talk about all those crazy artists out there acting goofy. So much of your show is about helping people understand what's happening in this world -- mass shootings, no-interest-no-asset mortgages, the healthcare mess. You think maybe you could throw culture (other than television) a bone too?

Don't forget to play to your strengths, John -- your curiosity is one of your best. I'll continue to be a fan of yours. Even if I miss the more laid-back days of the 4-7 shift, when you could stretch segments out and let them organically grow.

Still listening,

Marck

To the Novelists of NaNoWriMo, I have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and It Involves Shoe String, a Lavender Garland, and Twelve Strong Women.

I am sad today, and a little disappointed at Sufjan Stevens, who told Paste magazine recently that his heroic endeavor to compose and record one album for each of our fifty states in America was "such a joke."

Sure, it was an insanely, overwhelmingly, awe-inspiring behemoth of a goal, especially considering the elaborate results of the two albums of the cycle he managed to put out. But if there weren't people like Sufjan dreaming up the Seventh Wonders of creativity, we the "little guys" would never have the guts to embrace dreams as diminutive as a novel.

"... Maybe I took it too seriously," he said. Well of course you did, you idjit! It's a freakin' HUGE endeavor! Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State and Illinoise (which are both sheer genius) would never have happened without that kind of singularity that requires you to not treat them as some fly-by-night larks! If I don't take Son of a Saint seriously, it's never going to get done. Which is to say, if I stop and think about it long enough, I might realize what a joke my work is.

(Which is not to say I can't have a fun time with it along the way. And I have.)

"I started to feel like I was becoming a cliché of myself,” he said. I worry about the same thing. And that's what keeps me going. Because if I abandon this now, if I don't get this thing to a state where I'd actually let someone else's eyes read it, then I'm back to my old cliché self.

Margot on the Doorstep (10-minute Free Write)

Hard to drop you into the middle of this, but I'll give you what I can to set this scene: Walt has been avoiding his family and their family business -- a very large charitable concern -- for many years. They live a long way away, in a remote town called North Center, and he has been moving around the United States for years avoiding their attempts to find him. What he is unaware of is that a crisis is developing back home -- one that threatens everything his father (and many fathers before him) has built. In this scene, Margot, Walt's first (and deepest) love, has taken it upon herself to find him and make a plea for his return to North Center.

***

As he crossed Sheridan from the shady to bright side of the street, he was struck by how feeble the sun’s rays suddenly felt: despite a cloudless sky and all evidence that summer was still here, it was as if the cosmos suddenly took the brightness for a hoax and in only a few weeks the warmth would be revealed for the fleeting weakling it truly is. This desperation suddenly passed through Walt like an unconscious panic and without realizing it he breezed by MightyBean, deferring caffeine in favor of the safety of his apartment. In his mind, he was already in the sunroom, kneeling on the futon to draw the blinds and see if the Weather Channel could help him sort out this sudden queasiness of the heart, to show him trends and fronts moving eastward through his life to account for this elusive feeling.

His legs working faster, pulling him across a normally busy intersection that was unusually empty the moment he crossed, which was a good thing because now his body was moving on auto-pilot toward home as he puzzled over this distant cousin to paranoia sweeping over him. He instinctively glanced around for a telltale emissary even though he knew this sense was different. He thrust his hands in his pockets. That felt safer.

Through the open gate into his courtyard, head down, shoes cracking the bush trimmings never cleaned up from that morning’s “landscaping.” The right hand in his pocket closing around his keys, two fingertips already unconsciously defining the outer door key, the process being interrupted by a soft “hi” up ahead, certainly not meant for him, except that there was no one else here.

He looked up as he pulled the keys out. A woman stood at his doorway, arms folded across her stomach as if she was bracing for an impact. In a short moment, he squinted, puzzled, recognized her, smiled, and then the smile gave way to fear. Walt stopped.

“Hi,” Margot said again, and then cleared her throat and said it a third time, trying to find the right conviction and warmth. She saw where his face was going and quickly blurted: “Everything is alright.”

He snorted. “I’d believe that, except that you’re standing on my doorstep.” She had no retort to this, just a slight shrug of the shoulders. He looked up into the empty sky for lack of a better place to gather thoughts. “Happened to be in the neighborhood?”

”I’m worried about you,” she said.

“You must be very worried. You came a long way to just check on me.”

“We’re all worried. No one knows anything, how you’re doing, what you’re doing….”

“That’s not my fault, is it?” he said, and his eyes flared. “Apparently you can’t find a decent emissary anymore to spy on me.”

“You know Fran called them off, Walt. After what you did to the last one.” Suddenly, he did know this, realizing it had been weeks since he’d positively I.D.’d an emissary. Dealing with Lu Ellen’s accident had brought his guard down. The exhaustion of helping everyone in the brownstone hold it together had freed him from that paranoia. It was strangely relieving, this trauma.

“So instead of hiring strangers to keep an eye on me, she’s enlisted you?” As he said this, Walt locked his eyes on Margot again, and he was struck now by how much older she looked. How long had it been? A decade or more, at least. She looked shorter than he remembered, and though her eyes held the same soothing warmth that had calmed him then, the skin across her face appeared more taut, the jaw and cheekbones a little more angular, gaunt. The softer face of the child was giving way to the harder face of a lifetime resident of North Center. Her hair was much darker than the blonde he remembered, duller too.

“Coming here was my idea,” Margot said evenly. “And I didn’t decide lightly, Walt. I know how badly you want to stay away from North Center. But things are getting really …” She sighed. “Things are really hairy right now. I thought you needed to know it. I mean, really know it, because I know Fran says she’s been telling you in the letters, but I’m not sure you realize how bad things are at North Center.”

“What do you mean by ‘bad?’” he asked.

“What do you mean, what do I mean? She really hasn’t told you?” Walt looked at her blankly. Suddenly a look came across Margot’s face. “Oh my God. Walt, you have read her letters, haven’t you?” And now he looked down at the ground. “Oh, Walt, please don’t tell me that you don’t….” Her voice trailed, broke, and that little crack seemed to dig under him, just as it had those years ago, and the urge to hold her came right back, except that the setting was wrong, the timing was wrong, everything was wrong to be able to actually do anything. Except get her out of this courtyard. Yes, they couldn’t just stand out here in this useless sunshine. Without another word, he slipped the key in the outer door, held it open with his foot while opening the inner door, and then held both doors open until Margot passed through both and stood at the bottom of the stairs. She followed him when he started the climb up.

Liking A Selfish Character

In my initial mapping-out of Son of a Saint and its main character Walt, I assigned his primary motivation for running from his family as selfishness. I knew that Walt had no interest in running his father's charitable concern because he didn't fully understand the value of charity: what was in it for him?

Inevitably, I injected this trait into more aspects of his life: his (ex-)girlfriend complains about his self-centeredness during a long breakup scene; he has no use for children and barely tolerates them (at first); his motivation for the work he pursues is strictly financial; and speaking of money, he extracts large sums of cash from the envelopes his mother sends him without even so much as glancing at the accompanying letters, which are increasingly urgent as they describe a crisis at home. (Walt doesn't read these letters but the reader does.)

It wasn't until after November 2007, after the flurry of NaNoWriMo, and after I was some 60,000 words into this story that I was struck by a crippling problem: How do I make an exceedingly selfish character someone who the reader will want to follow? to root for? to stick with?

(This is actually a good sign that I was doing NaNoWriMo right: my "inner editor" was definitely shut off and I was just writing, writing, writing without slowing myself down with pesky concerns.)

It's not that Walt doesn't change -- he has a major transformation over the course of the story. It's just that, well, at least the way things are constructed in this first draft, it takes awhile to see that change. A freak accident gets things rolling; Walt reacts instinctively to do something not only selfless but heroic. This moment redirects his life-path into the relationship largely responsible for his transformation -- and his eventual return to his parents' town where he confronts his issues head-on. But there are many pages before we get to that incident -- pages that still (two years after I wrote them) feel necessary to establish his character and motivations.

One solution I've considered is to introduce some strong positive traits in Walt's character -- something that can compel the reader to think: "Okay, at least he has that going for him." But my head always comes back to this: if selfishness is at Walt's core, what can be good in him?

I need to remember to steer away from the easy "black-and-white" reading of any character or situation. Nobody is 100% anything. People in real life are filled with contradictions in their personality that leave friends and family scratching their heads. What is probably required here is more delving into Walt's character and background, a greater understanding of what makes him tick, what makes him become selfish. If his selfishness isn't simply innate. (In which case, can he even overcome it?)

The key to Walt might be the genetic clock ticking inside him, the physical transformation he knows is coming (but is still a decade off) that is completely out of his control. This might compel someone to do some crazy shit to gain some semblance of control in his life.

This Old Barn (Writing Exercise)

(Oh yeah: I found the missing Gardner book. It was in Zuzu's music class bag. Thanks for asking.)

Not crazy about this one, but my eyes are crossing from working on it and I can't think anymore. Long week.

***

Consider the following as a possible exercise in description: Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son was just killed in a war. Do not mention the son, the war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing.

- John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, p. 37

From a hazy distance, the structure took on the profile of a broken battle horse making the best of desolate retirement in a pasture. The horizon of its roof line sagged. A hayloft door was missing, leaving a gaping hole like an empty eye socket. The side of the barn that received the worst beating from many summer suns was white-gray, rough, splintery. Long-abandoned bird nests unraveled from eaves. If it had ever been painted, had ever triumphed in its youth in a proud uniform of red, there was no sign of it now. But in spite of it's own state of decay, still the barn stood in defiance of its years, of nature's rout, of the oppressive, thick heat.

It had been used and forgotten, and it had long ago lost any hay-scent memory of the glee of children, the birth of livestock, the smell of motor oil, the secrets of teenagers. To peer through its dilapidated doorway, assuming one could push open the warped doors on their broken hinges, was to gaze into a darkness long ago stripped of purpose. Even the crickets and cicadas that filled the heavy air with their din seemed to fear this dank, musty interior, finding no nourishment. The particularly curious visitor might pause in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the black in hopes of spying anything that would deliver some history. But there was nothing to be learned. The barn just was.

Running in the Family

When I was in 4th grade, I decided to write a teleplay. I'm not sure what possessed me.

Oh, who am I kidding: I know exactly why I did it. This was in the mid-1970s, the apex of the fascinating (infernal? as in Towering Inferno?) disaster-movie period in our pop culture, when you couldn't walk into a theater without being subjected to an earthquake, skyscraper fire, or crisis in a tin bird at 35,000 feet. I wanted to write one of those. Except, apparently, I believed that I couldn't start at the top with a screenplay. It made more sense to me to start with a TV movie.

Also, one of my best friends, David Hitchings (a 4th-grader), was many hundreds of pages into his first novel (the main characters were Gumby and Pokey -- it was my earliest contact with what we now call "fan fiction"), and I wanted a piece of that action too.

So I wrote the teleplay for Flashflood! (For those of you who experienced the Universal Studios tour in the 1970s, you know exactly what inspired me.) I lived in the mountain community of Idyllwild at the time, and up in the highest reaches of Fern Valley, on the edge of the San Jacinto National Forest, several large water tanks collected the water the town used. My disaster scenario hinged on all these tanks rupturing at once, and the escaping water rushed downhill, practically wiping out our little village.

Fortunately, my main character -- a 4th-grade boy who looked and sounded suspiciously like me -- was a fast thinker: he was able to collect his dog, throw it in the back of the family car, and drive down off the mountain to safety. I have no clue what became of that boy's family, but you can bet his dog was going to make it out alive. I remember carefully considering the issues of a 9-year-old behind the wheel: he had studied how his father and mother drove and imitated them. I delayed the flashflood just long enough to give the kid enough time to push the driver's seat up as far as it would go and adjust the mirrors accordingly. And I made sure the boy was a really bad driver at first, careening all over the road, braking and accelerating too quickly, until finally he got the hang of it and got himself down the long, winding road to nearby Banning.

I have no idea whatever happened to my teleplay. (My assumption is that it's lost amongst the papers that make up Irwin Allen's estate.) But I remember several days of dedication to this endeavor -- and I remember my 4th-grade teacher, Doris Lombard, giving me the room to "go with it" and do this to the best of my ability. Great teacher, that Mrs. Lombard. She also introduced me to Shakespeare, reading Macbeth to our class. A great lover of reading and writing. Everyone should be so lucky as to have a teacher like her.

***

Laura and I had our fall parent-teacher conference with Piper's second-grade teacher, Mrs. Fiamingo, this past week. Other than her penchant for tardiness at the beginning of the school day (this comes as no surprise to anyone who knows our family), her school year is going along swimmingly. Especially, apparently, when it comes to Piper's writing.

This doesn't surprise me too much; she has been showing a strong interest in writing from early on. When I took on NaNoWriMo two years ago, Piper picked up on that vibe and asked me if she could start writing her own story. So when I wasn't using the computer to knock out my daily word allotment, she was at plugging away on Meet Frederick the Squirrel. The process went like this: she would dictate to me a few sentences of the story and I would print them with pen on paper. Then I'd give her the paper and a blank Microsoft Word screen ... and away she'd go, transferring my writing with her hunt-and-pecking. She probably got a good 250 words into it before she changed the main character's name from Frederick to Piper, which held her interest a little better. And then finally she abandoned the story. But it was fun to watch her working on it.

Piper's class is unlike any second-grade class I've ever heard of. There is a remarkable focus on effective storytelling. They talk about theatricality when reading out loud. They talk about story structure. They have publication parties on the days that the students complete writing projects (complete with mugs of cocoa!). Mrs. Fiamingo told us how PJ struggled mightily with the concept of first drafts, how things didn't need to be -- indeed, couldn't be -- perfect the first time you hammer out your story, and that it would take several rewrites to get it a finished product. (I considered suggesting Mrs. Fiamingo read to the class the chapter from Anne LaMott's Bird By Bird called "Shitty First Drafts," but my finely honed sense of propriety figured out that this might not be a good call.)

And she talked about how much PJ is going to love a new idea they're going to introduce in the coming weeks: showing without telling. They're going to have the students act different emotions without speaking, notice the physical changes in the way they act and look, and write a character that exhibits these emotions physically and emotionally without explicitly saying the way the character acts.

Second grade, I remind you. There are college-level classes working on this idea. Hell, I'm still working on this idea daily! Would that I had this kind of exposure to the process when I was seven years old!

***

I was hurriedly ironing a shirt a couple of mornings ago as we were going through our usual, stress-filled weekday morning. (Piper would be late to school again.) Zuzu, already prepared to leave and with some free time on her hands, was creating a scene on the ottoman behind me, casting a couple of kitchen utensils with funny arms and legs as her actors. One of the absolute delights in Laura's and my life is to hear Zuzu weave one of these "scenes." Normally, there is armhair-raising peril involved -- someone is drowning in an ocean of lava (read: carpet) or dangerously hanging over a precipice (read: radiator cover), and a rescue team of Bitty Babies™ and Legos™ are needed at once to ensure a safe rescue. But this morning's scene was notable for its banality:

French Whip: Look what I found!

Spoon: What is it?

French Whip: A book!

Spoon: Wow! Are you going to read it?

French Whip: Yes! I'm going to take it home!

Spoon: You can't do that!

French Whip: Why not?

Spoon: It might belong to someone else!

French Whip: You're right! Maybe we should find out who it belongs to!

Suddenly, as if she'd forgotten something important, she threw down the utensils, boarded her Razor scooter -- who has time for walking around the house? -- and tore down the hallway to the bathroom.

"Mom!" she insisted. "You shouldn't take things that aren't yours!"

And after receiving her mother's agreement/confirmation, she re-boarded her vehicle and kick-pushed down to the living room.

I was overcome briefly with awe. It was a whole different kind of storytelling: the moral tale, acted out right in front of me (well, okay, behind me), complete with the moral stated distinctly to an audience at the end.

Susannah may not have the same inclinations toward writing that Piper has shown, but there is no question that we are a family of storytellers.

On Michael Jackson's This Is It

I caught Michael Jackson's This Is It today. I hadn't initially planned to see this, at least not in theaters. I figured I'm really over Michael and his overexposure at this point. Don't we all feel that way by now? But my mom-in-law wanted to see it on her birthday, so we took the whole family, and ... and ... and apparently I'm totally wrong about being over the MJ thing, because I was genuinely moved by the film.

I haven't been starstruck by Jackson in years. When he slipped off the deep end and became a pop-culture joke, it was hard to look at his physical appearance and not just shake your head, remembering What Once Was. But I had the same experience that so many people my age had after his death when we were all subjected -- or in my case subjected myself to -- a couple of days of nonstop Michael music: Damn. A lot of the songs from his peak in the 80s are truly amazing and just about give him the ammunition to live up to his self-proclaimed pop royalty. The nice thing about this movie is that it once again reminds you of Jackson's brand of genius, and it does it in a way that no other Jackson-related product ever has.

By chronicling an unfinished MJ product, This Is It has a quality that Jackson had seemingly become incapable of supplying: subtlety. We see where he was going with these London concerts (and when you realize the sheer scope of the spectacle, you ache for what we'll never experience), but if Jackson had lived to perform those concerts and release the inevitable DVD/movie of the concert experience, it would be glossy, slick, Teflon, and lacking in soul. Instead, we get this cinematically static (which turns out to be refreshing) series of small moments showing the sometime-banality of Jackson at work.

You sense his clear vision -- a singularity that I'm certain goes hand-in-hand with many of his other "eccentricities." He knows precisely what he wants from the concert, especially the music. He gives clear direction on precisely when a drum fill should occur (usually on his personal cue) because he has an innate sense of the best timing for the theatricality of the moment. Finding just the right feel for a keyboard line or a bass riff ... working with his backup dancers on refining a unique move ... all of it is done his way, period. No one questions him. Most of the time they bend over backwards to give him precisely what he has asked for. Jackson wielded an extraordinary amount of power on stage.

Considering that, it was nice to see that, like so many perfectionist genius monarchs, Jackson wasn't a dick to his fellow performers: all criticism and direction is imparted with love and a tender reminder that "we'll get there" or "that's why we have rehearsals." The closest he comes to an explosion is his frustration with new in-ear monitors that are causing him great discomfort.

Another key player in this movie is his supporting performers. We have always been fascinated with Jackson's fans, watching their theatrical crying and passing out in his presence. But there is no audience for these performances, save the crew and, on a number of occasions, backup dancers who are not needed on stage at that moment. From my own experience, I would expect performers on break to be doing anything but paying attention to what's going on onstage. But it's a different story at MJ rehearsals: if Jackson is on stage, those dancers are right there in the "pit," swaying, singing, screaming, hanging on Michael's every note (even though he is preserving his voice and barely whispering many passages) and move (even though he is clearly still getting a feel for his personal choreography). It's almost as if they knew that their time with him was short, and they were going to savor every moment in his presence. Watching the insanity of teenage-girl screaming in Jackson's presence never communicated to me his rapport; but the looks on these dancers' faces finally got across to me the palpable sense of Jackson's magnetism.

(It's also difficult to shake the creeping sense of devastation, knowing that these poor dancers, some of whom dropped what they were doing from halfway around the world to perform with Jackson, never got to take the stage with him in front of a paying audience.)

In this month when I'm thinking about process, perfectionism, artistry, This Is It turned out to be surprisingly relevant. To watch Jackson work is to see the devotion one needs to one craft in order to realize it as fully as possible. It also puts me square in front of the man in my mirror, asking him if he still has what it takes to guide his own vision to a finished product.