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stories are the bones of everything

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Harmless indulgences

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“We must give up many things to which we are addicted, considering them to be good. Otherwise, courage will vanish, which should continually test itself. Greatness of soul will be lost, which can’t stand out unless it disdains as petty what the mob regards as most desirable.” — Seneca, Moral Letters

I spend a great deal of time thinking about the way I spend the majority of my time. I carry a set of unwritten rules around with me wherever I go. Like the one where I don’t install any games on my phone. I know me. If I had games on my phone, I would play them to distract myself from more important, but less pleasurable tasks, like writing this. Another rule I have, and this one is new, is that if any app on my phone sends me an alert more than three times a day, it gets notifications disabled. This is relatively easy to do on an Android phone. I’m not going to allow my phone to control my attention span.

I know myself. I am a procrastinator. If I don’t block out time for what truly matters, I won’t do the things that truly matter. Modern life offers us thousands of activities and substances that we can become addicted to. Whether you spend several hours a day playing Farmville, or looking to score your next hit of whatever it is that gets you high the way you like, maybe it’s time to reconsider the amount of time and energy you’re giving away. It’s impossible to grow when you aren’t blocking out time to think about what meaningful growth looks like to you.

For me, meaningful growth involves contemplating my reality and creating stories and narratives about the past, present and imagined future. To do that, I need to limit the things that take away from writing time. Like my phone buzzing to demand my attention.

If something is taking you away from what you love most, consider limiting its access to you, or your access to it. If that thing, substance or person is truly keeping you from doing what you really love, you may even need to banish the whatever it is completely.

All of this assumes you know what you really want from life, and that you’re willing to fight to have it. If neither of those things is true I hope you do find a calling and become willing to give up all the petty addictions in order to accomplish it. The more I contemplate my life, the more I realize that many things I’ve thought of in the past as harmless indulgences probably aren’t. I’m more and more willing and able to tune out and push out the things and people who don’t add any real value.

Isolation and the craft

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[su_pullquote]“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.” ― Charles Bukowski, Factotum[/su_pullquote]

There is no doubt in my mind that a writer can achieve some measure of success writing for others. You can write in order to please an audience. Or you can write in order to please a publisher. You can write to please your significant other or your imaginary friend. Your best writing though, will not emerge until you write to please your demon. The spirit that lives inside you. The one that will help you channel everything you are into only one thing: compelling storytelling.

Whatever your story happens to be. You might not even consciously remember writing it. But it will be fucking amazing. The writers that are true to their demons are the writers who can make a career out of it. A career that plays out on the writer’s terms and on the relationship between her demon and the words. You’ve got to be a little possessed to write powerfully. To do it in a way that will make your audience gasp and keep coming back for more.

Do you want to know the secret to becoming a storytelling legend? It’s amazingly simple. Become a story. Live a few dozen adventures. Have some close calls. Take some ill advised risks. Get high. Break a few laws. Hang out with people you would never have considered hanging out with before you decided to be a storyteller. Talk to your demon in the middle of the night or just before the sun rises or just after it sets. Touch, taste, feel, smell, see. A little bit of crazy for each of your senses. That’s the recipe that’s needed.

Then, after, isolate yourself. Like the madman in Stephen King’s The Shining. Get away to a place where all you can hear is the voice of your storytelling demon. Let that creature fill you up and take over your being. That’s when the story will be born. When it’s just you and the demon alone in a cabin. When all you care about is pouring out the thing that needs to be born. When your fucking cell phone is shut off and you forget to eat. You might piss your pants before the flow stops flowing. It won’t matter. The story comes first. The fingers don’t stop dancing with the keyboard until the story gets told. You don’t leave the cabin until the characters have come to life and been killed off. You go from one end of the arc to the other in a frenzy and you don’t let anything or anyone get in the way.

If the police come to get you before the demon is done you’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the place you are hiding. You’ll find a napkin and something sharp and you’ll keep telling the story with your own blood as the ink if that is what becomes necessary to get it into the world. If you’re going to try, as Bukowski recommended, go all the way. Nothing is more important than this. You were born for this. You’re lucky enough to be possessed by the need, the fire, the compulsion to bring something from nothing and pour it out into one of the most important things human beings possess: stories.

You can’t half-ass this thing. Punch your distractions in the face. Isolate yourself. Go crazy and write the story. For yourself. For your demon. Don’t try. Don’t do it for anyone else. If you are doing this for any reason but to quiet your writing demon why are you even bothering? You aren’t really alive. Go do something else. Go get fat and comfortable saying and being all the things somebody else thinks you should say and be. We don’t want you around. My writing demon and I have things to do and you aren’t welcome.

To flow freely

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There are a million things you can be. Will be. You will not be told this secret by most you meet. For they are afraid. They live in a world that is finite without the understanding that all things begin and end over and over. Finite fits inside infinite. We are again and again. We are eternal. Not in the small way that some storybooks tell us.

The inevitability is that your atoms will, at some point you do not fully control, be scattered and rearranged. You are composed now. Your story has a start and a finish. There are only so many chapters. What most people fail to see clearly is that the story of you and the story of me are part of a bigger story. The story of us. All of us. We all swim together in an ocean of time. At different moments we might tread in its gentle flow and float together for a while. I know that the moments when I can swim with you might be fleeting.

That is why, when I am bobbing along in the timestream and you happen to be caught in the same current I am, that is important. You might be my companion for a moment or a lifetime. I don’t know. To flow freely is my destiny. I have spent too much time and energy trying to do something that no one swimming in an ocean of time should try to do. Staying in one place should not be the goal.

I will flow freely. To wherever it is that I end. To begin again in a new incarnation that is not going to be what I expect. As I wait for the gloriousness of not knowing to arrive and wash me away it occurs to me that I would like to touch you. I’ll try to remember your eyes. Their color. I’ll try to remember if you laughed and what it sounded like. I will write down the one thing you said to me in that moment that was worth remembering and learning from. Even if it is only for a moment. You were trying to teach me something in the moment that we floated together. I’ll ponder and remember and try to know what it was.

What if that moment turns into a lifetime? It could you know. The ripples and echos and eddies of us seem like beautiful untapped potential. At the beginning of this story I did not understand that I will pass a million faces floating in the sea of time with me and perhaps only see them once. That all of those faces contain something I should try to know.

It’s why now, if you see me float by, and are paying attention you will notice that I am staring. I want to know because I do not. Know how much time is left before my story ends. Or your story ends. And where the ocean will receive this thing I call me into itself. So I look deep into your eyes as you pass by. To see if you will give me something worth chewing on, worth writing about, worth a dance or a song or a painting.

And when the next me comes along without remembering the last me I hope that something I knew in the part of the ocean where I met you helps the you and I who come next know something new. We are all meant to flow freely, to swim until we are tired, and then to sink down into dreams and be remade.

There are a million things you can be. Will be. Which one would you like to know about before this story ends? Let’s take a moment together and float in the question.

Moral turpitude

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“Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” – Clive Staples Lewis

There are many forces in the world that attempt to regulate and control the activities of the individual human being. Nation-states, religious institutions, legal courts and municipalities are just a few examples of these forces. These various concentrations of power are an attempt to keep us from destroying each other during the course of our daily lives. Sometimes they work in this endeavor. Sometimes they just clean up the mess that’s left behind after we exert our free will. Sometimes these institutions make things worse.[su_pullquote]Moral Turpitude  A phrase used in Criminal Law to describe conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty, or good morals.[/su_pullquote]

Crimes involving moral turpitude have an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, or depravity with respect to a person’s duty to another or to society in general. Examples include rape, forgery, robbery, and solicitation by prostitutes.

Many jurisdictions impose penalties, such as deportation of Aliens and disbarment of attorneys, following convictions of crimes involving moral turpitude. The idea of what constitutes moral turpitude and how an individual should be punished for engaging in such behavior changes drastically depending on time and place. A gay man in Russia in 2014 may be punished with a beating or by having containers of human urine poured over his head. It’s true. I watched a documentary containing video evidence last night. A gay man in Afghanistan is likely to face little to no backlash. They reckon the year differently over there, and that man probably won’t admit he is gay, but in the time and space I’m referring to it is perfectly fine for two men to copulate as long as they don’t talk about it publicly. Today in the United States a gay man can get married to another gay man in some places. Here we are – the human race – spinning through space on a ball of rock. And somewhere in Africa a gay man is being killed for being gay.

You’d find lots of people who, if interviewed, would passionately claim that being gay or engaging in homosexuality is a crime of moral turpitude. You’d find another large swath of humanity that would argue the exact opposite. I fall into that category. I feel no physical or sexual attraction to my own sex. On the other hand I have to ask myself how something consensual can be wrong. Human beings who engage in consensual behavior that doesn’t harm anyone else are not engaging in moral turpitude.

That’s where things tend to get fuzzy. Some people think they are being harmed if you do something they disagree with. If you do something that offends them. If you engage in behavior that they themselves wouldn’t engage in. These people are wrong. Human freedom is more important than your personal moral code. Human freedom is more important than your personal agenda. Human freedom is more important than anything you believe in.

When a human individual engages in behavior that makes you uncomfortable you always have the option to disengage. The only exceptions are when an individual perpetrates force or fraud against others. These are nonconsensual activities. You have every right to defend yourself in such cases. I study the communities and power bases in the world around me on a daily basis. I watch the ways that my fellow humans attempt to exert unnecessary control over one another. I spend a lot of time thinking about moral turpitude and my own moral compass.

I’ve made a million mistakes in my life to date. Engaged in a million choices that could have been improved upon. I’m probably guilty of lots of moral turpitude according to the people who decide that sort of thing. I am fortunate enough to have been born in a society that has mostly supported my ability to learn from each action, decision and mistake I’ve made without locking me in a cage, torturing me or stoning me to death.

I’m still allowed to exercise my free will and to publish my thoughts. These freedoms are gifts I don’t want to squander. They lead me to a mental plane where I spend a lot of time reflecting on the idea that I should be contributing to the evolution of personal freedoms in every human society I am able to engage with.

Moral turpitude. It’s not worth much if you use it to censor or censure people who aren’t harming others. Which leads me back to the quote at the top of this piece of writing. I won’t force my conscience on you unless you are directly harming others. Can you say the same?

It was like this…

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The human brain is a funny thing. It doesn’t really hold on to the past very well. I speak for myself of course. Every brain is different. Some people, I’m told, have photo recall. They see remember everything exactly as it happened.

I know a girl who forgets some things almost immediately. Other things, her brain clamps down on and holds close with the teeth of a vicious attack dog. Her brain does one thing with the past and mine does another. We’re different that way. Someone else I used to know turned everything into a life or death emergency. Yet another person who passed through my life insisted on revisiting every recent event in the hopes that all concerned would agree with her version of how things went. She had a compulsive need that way.

My brain turns memories into stories. Softens the edges. Creates heroes and villains. Adds richness and descriptive details. Changes the timeline for dramatic effect. Sometimes I think that makes me a liar, and sometimes I think it makes me a good storyteller. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

I have to deal with the way my brain holds on to the past and processes it. Acknowledging my own tendency to distort the past and turn it into an entertaining story is important.

I can process a trauma by making my own role something I can live with. But that might not be what actually happened in the moments. In the story I might be brave. In real life I probably wasn’t. My hands were shaking. My teeth were chattering. I was behind a wall when the bullets started flying. Not running towards them.

There are 1,000 ways to get through events that should have or could have killed you or left you mentally broken. My way of coping is to make the thing into a story. But I mix up the pieces and parts of everything after a while. The faces get stuck on other bodies. The weather is more menacing and alive. Timelines get stretched and compressed. Antiheroes are born out of the shells of boring people.

In my stories, the omniscient narrator is me without the omniscience. How it happened and how it happened in my head are often two different things. Especially after years pass before I write the story. Often times I change details or major plot twists intentionally. I’m a fiction writer after all. Most of my stories start out that way intentionally. In my stories the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred. It happens to you too. Trust me.

It was like this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as what actually happened. My brain tricks me. Chances are yours does the same thing. Memory is all we have sometimes to chart the course guiding us into the future.

Remember that. Looking back through the distorted lens of your own filters can be inspiring but it can also be deceiving. Stories are an important part of being human. Be open to the way others see things too. Hear their stories and pick the pieces that fit into your own.

No guide for life is the complete truth because every single one of them has been produced and filtered through human brains. In a world filled with a hundred million stories, pick and choose the ones you believe in carefully.

Make your own stories. Write them down before too much time passes. Pick out the truths that resonate with you and live your own fantasies. Memory is what you make of it.

The geniuses of Apple

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I’m a writer. I’m not making a living at it, but I’m working towards that. In 2011, with that eventual outcome in mind, I bought a Macbook. Spending $2,000 for a laptop when I could get a more powerful non-Apple machine for about half the price felt crazy at the time. One small catch – the writing program everyone raves about on the Internet wasn’t available for PC at the time. It is now. But back then, I bit the bullet and bought a Macbook Pro. Then I spent $45 for Scrivener. This personal rant isn’t about the writing software. It’s about the arrogance of Apple.

I avoid Apple stores because they smell of superiority. Customers and sales associates both turn me off. That just isn’t my kind of environment. I like the minimalist approach to design evident in the places, but I don’t like malls, and I don’t like Apple’s policies much. This is a warning to anyone considering buying an Apple product – good luck if you need an emergency repair and go into an Apple store. My touchpad broke today. It won’t click. That makes it almost impossible to write. One sort of needs to be able to mouse clicks for various activities.

So, I used Google Maps and found the nearest Apple store, which was about 30 minutes away. I’m working on a deadline today. I was turned off as soon as I got into the store. There were at least as many “geniuses” as there were customers in the place, and the assault began immediately. Unfortunately, they couldn’t give me what I wanted, which was a working MacBook Pro touchpad. “Do you have an appointment?” Well, gee, no. I’ve never needed to make an appointment to bring in my machine for a repair before. I usually do them myself.

And that is the truth. The MacBook touchpad has been acting up for a year, jumping around and doing squirrelly kinds of things at random times. It has infuriated me more than once. Perhaps you’re a Macbook owner and you, like I have, Googled the problem. It seems certain model years of Macbooks are notorious for “battery swelling” which pushes on the track/touch pad and causes it to act wonky. I replaced the battery just in case. The problem didn’t go away. When the touchpad quit responding properly to my touch, I tried to order one online for overnight delivery. No dice. Apple doesn’t want customers tinkering with their product. Arrogance.

In the first store I went to, the “genius” told me I’d need to come back at 2 P.M. for a diagnostic. “Can I do it myself? I know the part I need.” Nope. She told me that Apple doesn’t sell parts and that they don’t want me working on my machine because it voids the warranty. “I don’t have a warranty anymore.” Too bad. I started looking around at some stuff, trying to calm down. While I was doing that, the same “genius” told me that she had “pulled some strings” and that a technician would take a look. He ran a software diagnostic which revealed nothing, went in the back and told me that they could replace the part and it would take 48 hours. “My deadline is midnight,” I said. He didn’t care much. I asked him why I can’t buy the part, which is in stock, and put it in my machine myself. “Against policy.”

I asked him who is responsible for the policy. Apple corporate was the answer. For a moment, I wanted to burn Apple corporate to the ground. If you want immediate care, I was told, you have to buy a $500-a-year business warranty. I don’t have that kind of money. If I owned a PC I could have replaced the part myself and would have long ago. There are parts warehouses and shipping depots all over the United States and it is relatively simple to do most repairs in home yourself. But with a Macbook, you better have a backup Macintosh.

My files are all backed up to the cloud, so that was not a big deal. What was a big deal though, was that I can’t meet a deadline when I can’t use the mouse. No one at the first Apple store thought of suggesting that I buy a mouse and plug it in to solve the problem. I asked them what the chances of trying a second store would be. They had no idea. All they could tell me was that they were backed up and it would be at least 48 hours before someone could even look at my machine. Part in stock. Total repair time: about 15 minutes. Or, any one of the 18 employees standing around could have suggested that I use a regular mouse plugged into a USB port to solve my issue in the short term.

The second store was better. The technician there actually took the machine in the back after taking my information and tried to adjust the screw on the trackpad. That didn’t work, and I was suspicious it wouldn’t because I’d already tried the same thing myself. But, Royce, who was actually earning the title Apple gives employees, gave it a shot. He also graciously setup the Magic Trackpad, which is incredibly overpriced but nicely designed. Now, I’m able to meet my deadline. I made an appointment for later in the week to get the trackpad replaced. I’ll be setting up a backup plan for the next time something on the laptop breaks. Beware if you depend on a Macbook for your bread and butter – you’ll need a backup plan other than running to the nearest Apple store. Apple may make nice products, but they are also overpriced, and the people making policy about service issues should take a fresh look at how they handle customers in crisis mode.

I should have had a better plan, and Apple should have better policies. How hard would it be to charge extra for an emergency repair on the spot when the part is already in stock?

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