Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Complication: Zac Probes Non-fiction

Call me unoriginal, but I hate being called unoriginal. Bending words on a computer screen to alleviate the experimental lusting within my strange and lewd cranial-scape is just too much fun. Necessary, would even be appropriate. Coloring pictures used to be all about staying within the lines, but all I want to do is see how fuzzy I can make them.

Reading "Writing for Story," by Jon Franklin, topples over writer's blocks, kicks our motors into fifth-gear, all with that Dad voice full of salt-pepper and knowing. He's reassuring but is careful to not prop writer's up on watery legs. His building blocks are solid, clear, and defined. Note-cards, structure, laptop--go out, write, keep your nose to the ground.

About half-way through the book, where he starts going on about stories involving Heroes, Dragons, and how sub focuses cannot occluded, my own focus waned. A little tick in the corner of my eye, twitching, twitching, nudged its way into the heart of the irreverent rebel--the royal ass-hole of experimentation--and would not shut itself up until I acknowledged the form Franklin was smoothly, casually introducing was too damn velvety, clean, bleached.

Franklin isn't a bad guy, nor is the book bad either. But it doesn't resolve my desire to experiment. You have to know the rules to break them--yeah, I have heard it before (any bad writer has)--but I don't know if I want the Secret to be hard work.

Is that pessimistic of me? Or just lazy?

*lights a cigarette, sips some coffee*

Ugh.



Sunday, April 21, 2013

Canned Meat: So Does that Make Process Writing Silly Putty?

Like those pieces of newspaper clips rubbed off onto gelatinous impermanence of warm-flesh like stretched rubber that smells of dust and tile shavings.

"The trial and mild inconvenience of being a privileged white male. The first in a series. I am experiencing homelessness. "

I keep saying these words. Even as their impetus comes closer to a close, script keeps blossoming out its rusted soil. During a group discussion involving the paper, I realized how uncomfortable that statement (and others in my narrative post below) made readers. 

Instead of acquiescing those uncomfortable moments and themes, however, I wanted them bolstered. Enforced with more disgust and buttressed with distrust. I know someone, somewhere, said that is a bad idea. Maybe it is. I'll admit that I made the narrator less relatable, and perhaps that makes the piece harder to enter. Better yet, maybe it makes it easier to reject. 

Rejection of a narrator would have been a great objective, though I am not sure if that is what I intended. Deliberate confusion of the reader, and provocation of their sensibilities intrigues the writer in me as much as it challenges the creator outside of me. The only thing connecting the words sometimes is the thread of incoherence, self-doubt, and slathered opacity which viciously defends the body from outside contaminants. 

See Sophism. 

Um--does it re-create a stable, healthy, stale environment with a unstable, sickened, interesting environment? No, not necessarily. But I'd like to think that it challenges readers to combat truths they want to believe in others with the reality they face, and the ideas that nest themselves in the memetic gestures as familiar as a middle finger. 

Meanwhile:

http://marcusrubio.bandcamp.com/album/h-h


2011258602-1.jpg

Oh yeah, definitely the artsy type. 


Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Second Verse, Same As The First. Final Draft On "Dependent On Independence" (Working Title)---Intended Publication: Modern Love


 The trial and mild inconvenience of being a privileged white male. The first in a series. I am experiencing homelessness.
Heading West on I-94, towards Chicago on a bus—not a Greyhound bus, so excuse the apoetic tones—brings me back home. Closer to home, anyway. My parent's home. One of the places I grew up, that sort f thing. Rainbows on the ceiling of the college-brand bus stamp outward in a swooped chevron gradient that reminisces with kitsch mariachi gas-station portraits of the Virgin Guadalupe. The felt is very dazzling. Damn pattern stares at back from the seat in front of me like someone slapped a Lite-Brite onto Guillermo Gomez Pena's mustache. I'd like to think he'd like that.
Avoidance forces eye-balls to dim and brains to start along that line of musty dusty memories that shouldn't be that dank or undisturbed, hence the whole avoidance thing.
So I'm avoiding the obvious question: Why are you without house and home, but still able to type up, post, and edit these texts about your homelessness? It doesn't seem authentically homeless. Perhaps it's disrespecting the status, not giving the term its due. Although there is probably someone on a pigeon-cluttered corner who could take a dollar in their plastic, clinking McDonald's cup as a fine for the artistic liberty.
A thousand dollars, that's how much it cost. Probably. The ASUS Ultrabook with a thirtysecondstartup from slick slice of aluminum to solid-state running machine was a gift from your father who is currently spending his springs in a Dutch resort drinking mango smoothies on the flour-textured beaches of Aruba. With his younger girlfriend. Did I say your?
Let's get rid of introductions. It starts with Abby, my girlfriend. No she didn’t kick me out. In fact she and I will be coming on a year of consistent tolerance of each other’s pizza toppings come April 28th, meaning that dating her for a year has made me vegetarian and I can no longer enjoy pepperoni. I’m assured that there is a meatless alternative.
April 28th was incorrect, it was yesterday, April 16th. Still managed to find a gift though: some pink tailors measuring tape from Meijer's. Over avocado sushi and moonstone razberry sake that tasted like NyQuil, I told her to wrap it around her neck and measure out the distance with two fingers for comfort.
It's cute 'cause it's for a necklace I plan on getting her. Handmade. Really tight fitting. We're into that sort of thing.
Abby is a about year older than me with a few months in my favor. She is a senior, which has allowed her to enjoy off-campus living from the wee, prestigious liberal arts college we both attend. Typically you aren’t allowed to leave until your senior year, as underclassman are encouraged to focus on college community, which tacitly allows upperclassman to follow the higher pursuits of illicit substance abuse and undisturbed sexual activity.
With such benefits, we started living together almost a month into our relationship. Not much discussion was needed. Quickly my dorm-room was abandoned to the roommate who gave his grumbled consent to the new living arrangement with something like a “I’ll be sure to have sex with my girlfriend with this gift you have given me.”
Access to the piles of stale, smoky clothing; moldy library of paperback Hermann Hesse novels; and iron, Finnish steamer trunks that comprised my material possessions, remained within my meager college dormroom holdings. Moving out is really easy when you can leave all your crap where you left it. But, due to student conduct laws and housing bullshit, I was required to continue paying the Department of Student Living three to four thousand dollars for what was effectively my now-ex roommates single room “masturbatorium.” That's what he called it, I promise. I wasn’t there so the accumulation of tissues and ransacking of thirty dollar Target bowl chairs didn't irk me that much. I got to live with my girlfriend while having a safe back-up plan that only needed a bit of bleach to be as good as new.
Until a few weeks ago. Though this ASUS laptop is a mighty gift indeed, luxury doesn’t come naturally to my divorced parents. With my mother and stepfather working to pay off my (twin) step-sister’s college bills, and a father prone to gallivanting across floral Caribbean beaches with his girlfriend, myself developing a sense of fiscal responsibility doesn’t seem too obtuse. Well, for me anyway. His girlfriend is, like, ten-years younger than him too.
It’s not pleasant. Thinking about money doesn’t produce hives but I’d like to think it agitates my self-diagnosed psoriasis. Or I hope that is psoriasis. Either way it creates the nervous gut-busting grumble of anxiousness and dependence on others when I realize I owe them.
So when thinking about my tuition bill, and pondering on why six to eight thousand dollars added to my student loans were being poured into someone else’s sex cave, it dawned on me like a TLC special that an easy way to save money would be to just move stuff out of the dorm space.
When the official opportunity came to uncheck student living from my tuition box, I took it.
Whoa there Zachary, that's a little abrupt. You moved out once, without all your stuff, then at an undisclosed time presumably close to a year later you did so again with your stuff. Moving in with your girlfriend isn't homelessness. You had a dorm room, you chose to give it up because of money.
But being a full time student, even with two part-time jobs, finding the money and time to apartment hunt was difficult, and the soonest one I could find was ready for move-in April 28th. That left me with a month of homelessness. That's what happens on April 28th, every now and then I need a reminder.
Here is this petite, auburn-haired stage director and blacksmith with the tendency to squeak like a woodland creature when tickled telling me that she wants me to live with her. Really live with her this time—no back-up plan, unmarried, and barely able to help out with utilities. No questions asked. Any conversation went mostly like: “Are you sure?” (because she knew what I was asking about), then “yes,” then “Are you sure?” (read those italics), then “yes.” Basically paying for my housing. Cook my meals. Comfort makes me uncomfortable. I owe her.
Admittedly staying with Abby is nice, but acquiescing living space to her other five housemates can be taxing. Not to say that they don’t deserve the space, they pay rent and all, but they bump into my vintage ‘80’d speakers and scoff at my collection of Beach Boys vinyl. One of them talks to their television all day with the volume maxed out, like has a conversation with the characters on screen, her inside voice just as declarative. You can hear her and Shaggy talking about Scooby snacks through the nimbus tones of Brian Wilson's “God Only Knows.” My stuff shouldn’t be there, in their home. I owe them.
No, I’m not technically homeless. I have loving, amiable, welcoming girlfriend and friends, too, who are allowing me in their home with no real escape plan. I’m stuck there. They know that and I know that, and it doesn’t seem to cause them to break out in various skin diseases but my fingers are itchy. Though Scooby-girl did yell at me for being disrespectful and “inconsiderate of others sounds and space” the other night. “Fuck you.” is what I want to say. My gums are bleeding, even though I bought that gingivitis fighting CrestMint to “help combat tartar build-up.” Ever notice that logos, catch phrases, all these products, their names are always forced together to make them sound more catchy? CrestMint, Mike&IKe. Monstrous. I am burden, and it doesn’t matter if I am light or heavy or catchy or easy or hard. I'm verbiage; dense, confusing, and without a point. I'm pretty sure that makes me heavy, but Abby's scale says I've been losing a pound or so a week. Better start with the protein shakes come the new apartment—my new-roommate has a hook-up with some calamine that he says will “make my boobs bigger in no time.”
If I want that independence: from finance, parents, school, people; albeit for only two weeks, I have to depend on her. I hope she moves in with me afterward—I can't cook and I don't have a bed-frame. She hasn’t kicked me out, and I haven’t snuck any pork-roast into her curries so hopefully that means we’re in the green in terms of relationship status, but I’m in her hands for another two weeks.
Next time I'll fly, and maybe an A-listers' hirsute style will be baring down on me from the in-flight commercials. Maybe that will make for a better story.





Monday, April 15, 2013

Because I Am Silly...


Sometimes I forget to read the titles of articles, books, and short stories. It’s actually kind of weird for me because they are the most enjoyable part of any story to write: anything from obscure Stanley Kubrick references to multiple sentence long abstractions on the feeling of 95% cotton on a bearded face have all made it into my obnoxious headlines.

Where am I getting with this? This is a necessary self-reminder, not  a literary device--I ramble sometimes. I recently became engrossed in this article by Susan Orlean from a collection of literary journalism. She was writing about this wee 10-year old boy-- which was originally supposed to be this story about MaCaulay Culkin but she was super-sassy so that doesn't matter--generally covering the life of cooties and cartridge-based video games.

Stirring me out of my general nostalgia was this quote:

“..the collision in his mind of what he understands, what he hears, what he figures out, what popular culture pours into him, what he knows, what he pretends to know, and what he imagines, makes an interesting mess.”
The agelessness of her analysis struck me as revelatory of what narrative journalism should aspire to become. It seemed so out of the blue, in the midst of Streetfighter II ramblings and elementary school drama, but still wildly appropriate for any age at any time--this young boy just happened to be more impressionable due to his place in time. So natural! So unique! So contemplative!

Then the natural progression of my pause brought my eyes to the tip-top of the page where the title poked itself into my cornea: “The American Man at Age Ten.” Oh, well duh. It is supposed to be removed from time. It is supposed to be about his natural progression. It is supposed to be a contemplation of the beginnings of the male psyche during one such specimen’s formative years.

Now that doesn’t devalue the quote, or the gentle progression towards the general critique that Orlean jumps from the many spring-boarding ‘whats’--it just felt intriguing to have the story told without the obligatory spoiler at the beginning. It isn’t a big spoiler, but just enough to take away my ignorant a-ha moment. Oh well.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Writing Process Stuff That I Should Have Done Earlier

It is no secret to most that I am uncomfortable writing about myself. Or speaking about myself. In general. It makes me quick, irritable, and overall ornery. But mostly it just makes me rambly and boring. For this story, I made the conscious choice to turn myself into a character--or at least my narration of myself. It is also difficult creating dialogue, or "remembering" dialogue, when you don't know if their is any. My desire to entertain comes in direct conflict with my desire to be as accurate as possible. While I am sure there are ways around it, i.e. with the use of current discussions and anochronisms in the realm of the story, it was still one of my greater obstacles for writing the piece as a whole.

Finding the right amount of personal information to give, when you know you are talking about someone that is at times lounging on the same Pikachu blanket as your are while writing on that laptop, was another struggle. This is also known as "I don't want to piss you off honey, because I generally enjoy our relationship and curry Thursdays." It's interesting how invasive we can be as journalists in other people's lives, but when it came to write about myself, I became much more conservative: hidden behind a character and delicately positioning my words as to not offend anyone but an grumbling Zac Clark Sr.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Homeless In Kazoo: Dependently Independent


The trial and mild inconvenience of being a privileged white male. The first in a series. I am experiencing homelessness.

Statements like that might lead to some rather inquisitive questions, like:

Well, Zac, if you are homeless, how the hell are you accessing the interwebs to make such a statement?

To which I’d gladly respond:

Why, I am using my ASUS Ultrabook with a touch-screen and SATA drive that allowed me to create the post from boot-up to word-processing program in less than 30 seconds.

Alright, so the question is being slightly avoided with the shifting of shoulders and waving hand gesticulations, but it is a flushingly embarrassing question: Why are you without house and home yet provided with a $1000 dollar laptop by your father who is currently spending his springs in a Dutch resort drinking mango smoothies on the flour-textured beaches of Aruba?

It's explained by Abby, my girlfriend. No she didn’t kick me out--in fact she and I will be coming on a year of consistent tolerance of each other’s pizza toppings come April 28th, meaning that dating her for a year has made me vegetarian and I can no longer enjoy pepperoni. I’m assured that there is a meatless alternative.

She is a year older than me, and her being a senior and me being a junior, has allowed her to enjoy off-campus living from the wee, prestigious liberal arts college we both attend. Typically you aren’t allowed to leave until your senior year, as underclassman are encouraged to focus on college community, tacitly allowing upperclassman to follow the higher pursuits of illicit substance abuse and undisturbed sexual activity.  

With such benefits, we started living together almost a month into our relationship. Quickly my dorm-room was abandoned to the roommate who gave his grumbled consent to the new living arrangement with something like a “I’ll be sure to have sex with my girlfriend with this gift you have given me.”

But access to the piles of stale, smoky clothing; musty library of paperback Hermann Hesse novels; and iron, Finnish steamer trunks that comprised my material possessions, remained within my meagre college student powers. Due to student conduct laws and housing bullshit, I was required to continue paying the Department of Student Living $3000-$4000 dollars a quarter for a glorified storage space. My now-ex roommate referred his new single room as his “masturbatorium.” I wasn’t there so the accumulation of tissues and ransacking of $30 dollar Target bowl chairs didn't irk me that much. I got to live with my girlfriend while having a safe back-up plan that only needed a bit of bleach to be as good as new.

Until a few weeks ago. Thought this ASUS laptop is a mighty gift indeed, luxury doesn’t come naturally to my divorced parents. With my mother and stepfather working to pay off my step-sister’s college bills off, and a father prone to galavanting across floral Caribbean beaches with his girlfriend, myself developing a sense of fiscal responsibility doesn’t seem too obtuse.

It’s not pleasant. Thinking about money doesn’t produce hives but I’d like to think it agitates my self-diagnosed psoriasis. Or I hope that is psoriasis. Either way it creates the nervous gut-busting grumble of anxiousness and dependence on others when I realize I owe them.

So when thinking about my tuition bill, and how those tens of thousands of dollars added to my student loans are being poured into someone else’s sex cave, it dawned on me like a TLC special that an easy way to save money would be to just move stuff out of the dorm space that was currently converted into my slap shack

So when the official opportunity came to uncheck student living from my tuition box, I took it.

But being a full time student, even with two part-time jobs, finding the money and time to apartment search was difficult, and the soonest one I could find was ready for move-in April 28th. That left me with a month of homelessness.

So here is this petite, auburn-haired stage director and blacksmith with the tendency to squeak like a woodland creature when tickled telling me that she wants me to live with her. Really live with her this time--unmarried and barely able to help out with utilities. Basically paying for my housing. Cook me meals. Comfort makes me uncomfortable. I owe her.

Admittedly staying with Abby is nice, but acquiescing living space to her other five housemates can be taxing. Not to say that they don’t deserve the space, they pay rent and all, but they bump into my vintage ‘80’d speakers and scoff at my collection of Beach Boys vinyl. Though my stuff shouldn’t be there, in their home. I owe them.

So no, I’m not technically homeless. I have loving, amiable, welcoming girlfriend and friends, too, who are allowing me in their home with no real escape plan. I’m stuck there. They know that and I know that, and it doesn’t seem to cause them to break out in various skin diseases but my fingers are itchy. Welcoming dependence, and realizing I don’t have a choice, changes the dynamic of Abby and I’s relationship. I am burden, and it doesn’t  matter if I am light or heavy,

She hasn’t kicked me out, and I haven’t snuck any pork-roast into her curries so hopefully that means we’re in the green in terms of relationship status, but I’m in her hands for another two weeks. But, if I want independence: from finance, parents, school; albeit for only two weeks, I have to depend on her.