Dreams of Vernor's Ginger Ale

So far as you're concerned, the most fun aspect of sleep is dreams.  You by no means put the knock on other aspects of sleep, not the least of which is providing you with a fresh take on the day ahead.  If there is anything to some of the studies you've been reading about, sleep appears to be offering the equivalent of a session with a shrink.

These past few days, your dreams have been wildly vivid, focusing more often than not on something you're writing or believe you should be, because others are waiting for it.  Wild and vivid to the contrary notwithstanding, your dreams tend to be about realistic things, which adds up to a satisfying sense.  

In one recent dream, you were making a getaway from some pursuer, driving what appeared to be a 1956 VW Beetle Sunroof with an FM radio a good friend of yours called decadent.ginger ale was, while wishing you had enough   The dream was going fine as you drove down a street that began to pinch in at the sides, leaving nothing but a single rail.  Unused to so much intervention in your dreams, you had no choice but to wake up.
The one notable feature you come across in your dreams is the dialogue, which is perhaps the weirdest aspect of all to your dreams.  Only last week, before you were hit with this despicable flu bug, you were in a restaurant, attempting to finish a meal.  The manager or owner, when presenting you with the bill, said, "Mr. Lowenkopf, you are the agenbite of inuit."  

You felt the response rising in you that asked "How the fuck do you come off talking to a patron that way?"  Whereupon, you woke, thinking how nice it was in a way for James Joyce to find his way into your dreams.  This example shows the extent to which your dream mechanism goes to represent people talking.

This introduces a dream-related quandary and perhaps more than anything illustrates how the flu bug has messed with your ordinary process, perhaps feeling the need to whisk you along your way to recovery.  In your dreams later this afternoon, you had the sudden awareness of how much good a glass or ginger ale would be for your battered carcass.  Not long thereafter, you believe you dreamed of your pal, Jim Alexander, calling through your window, checking to see how alive you still were, and did you need anything.

"Ginger ale,"  you said.  "Please."

"Anything else?"

"Ginger ale," spoken with the conviction of it having come from the deepest depths of you.

"On earth as it is in heaven,"  Alexander replied.  As you tossed and turned in bed, thinking of the curative potential of ginger ale, you were the more convinced you'd dreamed the first part.  Alexander does not talk like that.  You have never heard him say,"On earth as it is in heaven."

Back to some semblance of sleep then, all the while thinking what a splendid idea  ginger ale was, regretting your own wobbly condition which you knew would not let you venture out.  But wait, here it was, afternoon already turned to darkness, and here you were, stumbling to the refrigerator for a blast of ice water.  Sitting in plain site on your kitchen table was a box of soda crackers, in effect grinning at you in the haze of reality.

The soda crackers are important because you never once thought of them, awake or asleep.  The fact of their presence meant Jim Alexander had indeed come by to see if you were still alive.  You rushed to the refrigerator to confront a large bottle of Vernor's ginger ale.

The dance between dream and reality always fascinates you, but in these strange moments of you trying to cope with this invasion, odd dreams come through that more or less have ruled themselves out for relationship to anything of immediate concern.  Also arriving, a sudden, almost chilling suggestion related to a professional connection you've been trying to effect.  You couldn't read all the print on the document, but you knew its reference point.  Stamped in red stamp pad ink FORGET ABOUT IT.

Yes, quite wise.

A reminder that you need a dog.  A reminder of one of the hundred novels you were going to pitch from your work in progress in favor of a more significant one.

Things appear to be taking an upward turn.

Vernor's ginger ale.

Parallel Lines

Parallel lines were brought into your life to stay at about the midpoint of your venture into middle school.  You'd surely heard of parallel lines before that, what with your grammar school education being an evolutionary introductions to painting, drawing, and some hints at geometry.

But it remained for Marjorie Parcells to bring parallel lines him to stay with the announcement, on one Wednesday's art hours, that parallel lines meet in infinity.

You were already into reading novels that would be roughly classified as Boy's Adventure, from which you understood that parallel lines were just as often to meet in the penultimate or last chapter,  Marjorie Parcells seemed to understand that your boyish drawing skills had pretty well exhausted themselves, particularly since you already knew they were several generations from the process known as rendering, by which a more skilled drawer than you could cause things to resemble their actual counterparts.

"How about we just stick with parallel lines," she told you, indicating how those, when used with a certain attention to concept, could produce dimension of a significantly greater quality.  Much as you admired art and Marjorie Parcells, you were already setting off on your own mischievous ways. 

 "Some characters in books follow parallel lines," you said.  The look you got from her was one you still remember.  "Nicely done,Lowenkopf."  You like to nurse the belief that your observation to her was the main reason your grade in Art was a C+.  Most boys were lucky to get Cs in Art.

Some years later, when you were enrolled at the university, you began using the parallel lines approach whenever a paper was due, whenever a test asked for an essay, and whenever the muse appeared before you with news that she had bright a short story into your life, you relied on the parallel lines approach to composition.  The more you did it, the more you became aware it was being used in authors you enjoyed.

When you find yourself immersed in a novel where the first chapter has ended on a cliffhanger and the next chapter begins with a different point of view, perhaps even a different locale and time frame, you are on your way to becoming impressed with the skills and daring of the author; she or he means to bring this material together in one or more scenes where the reader will be able to see how the parallel lines jump over the art boundaries and into some serious dramatic interaction.

This brings you to your latest encounter with parallel lines.  As a general rule, you get forth most days with a cheerful, dare you even say chipper attitude, aware as you go that there are a number of slight distractions from the goal of getting your in-progress book finished.  Classes to prepare for, clients with work wanting editing, and the job you could not say no to, Editor of the Cafe Luna Literary Review.  This is a parallel line of some concern to you.

Set in motion against this parallel line, notwithstanding you had the super powerful flu shot, is a mean spirited strain of the influenza virus that beggars any past experiences with flu.  Some but by no means all symptoms are a woozy, light-headed feeling, balance difficulties, various internal throbbing pain, a serious, unrelenting thirst, and a need to make sure you can bridge the gap between bed and commode with all deliberate speed.  This last works in the face of you having been able to contemplate eating for the past two days.  

The battle lines have been drawn.  The battlefield is your body.  You are already reciting Harry's magnificent panegyric to his troops on the eve of the day of battle.  Of course, Shakespeare's poetry will work on these parallel lines.  But just in case, "Fuck you, Influenza."

A Foggy Day

In the days before Internet and blogging, it was often your practice, as you lay abed awaiting sleep, to slip in a line or two of a poem, a paragraph of a short story, a line or two of an essay.  More often than not, when sleep arrived, the words vanished.  But even then, you did not mistake "thinking" for Composing.  For it to have been written, it had to have been set to paper or, as technology progressed, to screen.

Even then, composing meant getting the words down to the point where they could do something to you, embarrass, discourage, or somehow encourage you.  You were fast approaching the time and need to compose every day.  

On the rare days such as this one has turned out to be, when you find yourself invaded by a squatter virus who has in metaphor sprayed the interior of your skull with cloudy vapors, one of the few pleasures available is a return to thought composition.  But also, there is the primary bafflement then connection to a realization about your present murky condition and your overall intentions.

Being hit with what is probably a flu virus reminds you of the effect on you when your Inner Editor decides he want to have some fun, maybe throw a little party.  His goal, when he arrives, is clear.  He will be satisfied with nothing less than you pressing the delete key on your current work in progress.

Unlike you, your inner editor does not think things can be saved,  He has paid no attention to the things you've learned along the way, things which, now that you think of it, actually outpace him.  You have needed to retire to bed once in the setting down this statement of philosophy, in all possibility losing some of the narrative vector, but you note with some grim satisfaction that getting up the second time was easier, even seemed to carry with it the possibility of fun.

Having your mind clouded with flu and/or the internal editor is anything but fun, sends you reeling to a condition and place you have no wish to be.  The virus is the sort of alien you have no affection or use for, only a wary knowledge that enemies are slithering about.  

The interior editor is another matter.  He is a product of your cultural education, your awareness of standards to which you strive.but for many reasons you were led to believe were beyond you.  This is not you, in the throes of illness, blaming certain teachers because, in fact, there were other teachers no less encouraging.

Blame is a dismal thing, every bit as unfriendly as your current virus and your about-to-change relationship with your inner editor.  If you allow yourself the luxury of looking back on blame times, you may well find you pointing the finger at yourself.  There is and always has been time for growth.

The Truth of the Matter

When the time arrives for you to self-edit and possibly revise any given manuscript you've produced, one of the first things you look for is the word "truth" and such of your favorite habit phrases as "Truth to tell--" "If the truth be known," or "The truth is--"

The habit word can range from the seemingly innocuous "and" to a word you hate with a passion, "that," and other uses you've picked up over your years, a memorable one being 'accordingly," which you tend to use at the beginning of a sentence, as in "Accordingly, there is no value in such rhetoric."  Why not get rid of the "accordingly" and get right to the point, "There is no value in such rhetoric."  

Not that you have anything against telling the truth.  You in fact learn intriguing bits of information to chew over later when, in the heat of composition passion, you reveal something about yourself you hadn't been all that aware of on a more direct level. For instance, there's the gray area around exaggerating and telling a known untruth.  

If you are reporting a thing you saw or voicing an opinion, you are giving your version and should only have to resort to exaggeration in the sense of how important the event was, to whom, and what your share of interest in it might be.

If there was any doubt in your mind before you began this platform of blogging in March of 2007,this exercise has made it clear that you are not averse to casting yourself in a positive light.  As many of the entries will show, you're pretty good about leaving in the twists and turns of detail that show you as bearing an occasional flaw.

You organize search and destroy missions against phrases with "truth" in them as well because such tropes are cliches, meaning if you did not catch the truth tropes in the specific for-truth pass, you'd likely find them in the cliche pass.This leaves you with the basic assumption that you are at all times telling the truth, even when you are writing fiction.  There are numerous times when "truth" is brought out of an abstract state and signifies what a specific character believes to be so.

You may doubt the veracity of what the character said.  So, indeed, may one or more of the other characters.  You, and the other characters, may reach the conclusion that the character who has strayed from the truth has done so with an agenda that will come forth in the story.  On the other side of the binary pathway, your dramatic purpose may be served if other characters suspect a specific character of bending the truth. 

 This gives us a mythic situation in which Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo.  Talk about gift horses in the teeth, Cassandra, either through prophetic vision or human psychology, believed the gift was offered to ease Apollo's way into her pants.  She said no to his overtures, which prompted him to exact his revenge.  Her gift of prophecy would be accurate, but no one would believe her visions.

Imagine what a dramatic character myth has given us, playing as it does on the woo-woo abilities of the gods to create cosmic mischief  and the simple binary of a woman who often knows what she is talking about, but her visions go unheeded. "Hey, Uncle Fred is going to stop by tonight on an unannounced visit."  "Uncle Fred would never so such a thing.  He's too considerate of politeness rituals."  Yeah, well, just you wait and see."

For you to say you will always attempt to tell the truth burdens you with the responsibility of investing characters who mean some harm or opposition to other of your characters with an imperative to "tell it as they see it," which is a rank cliche and will have to go in one of your many romps through the landscape of your imagination.

For you to say you will never exaggerate is another matter.  In all truth, there are times when you can't help yourself; you yield to the temptation with the clear conscience of a person who knows how story is by its intrinsic nature an exaggeration, those extra details added in the hope of making the story and its built-in fabric of exaggerations emerge as a relic of some useful value among individuals who strain to make a living in and of the world.

Character Study

 There are times such as when you are asked to provide a short bio or mini-CV where you need a few moments to consider the source of the request.  By the very use of "short bio," you feel yourself limited to a paragraph of two, perhaps three sentences.  The very abbreviation of biography into "short bio" is the major clue.

Same holds for "mini CV," by which is meant a curriculum vitae, one that can of necessity go on for pages.  "You're in academia now,"  the distinguished historian, Dwight Smith, told you as you'd progressed over a few plateaus in scholarly publishing.  "You could and should add even your short book reviews to your CV.  Mention the word length."

You wanted to know if that perhaps was going too far, but Smith nudged you.  "Keeps the door open for the reader thinking you can write abstracts of scholarly journals."

Once out of scholarly publishing, you believed you were back to the more traditional resume, but as your fortunes would have it, there were increasing needs for CVs, some of them so lofty in their direction that you began once again to despair of ever being what you'd hoped to be, wanted to be, considered yourself to be.

Whether CV, resume, or short bio, you need to look at the three most significant resting places in your career, writing, editing, and teaching.  Depending on who is asking, you have a pretty good idea of what to start with, arranging the other two to appear as though they were accidental happenstance.  

There is yet another aspect of your life, from about the age of twenty-five through present times ,you would like to use, but can find no way to do so.This is the frequency with which you are mistaken for someone else.

To be sure, you have no trouble being recognized, either, a fact that often clouds your memory of the times when you were recognized as someone you were not.  You are not, and have not been for some time, the sort who blends into the background, nor do you have any reason not to enjoy being recognized.  

You are, in fact, so fond of being recognized that you've developed over the years a form of response to not being recognized.  This is all long and deliberate prologue to being told by someone who is in a position to hire you to do things related to your editorial and teaching skills, quite possibly your writing skills as well.

"You are fast on your feet, aren't you?"  this individual asked recently, not really expecting an acknowledgment because you'd just given him one.  For a promotional video to be placed on the web site of an institution that pays you to teach courses, you were sat before a live camera operated by an earnest looking man in his early fifties who seemed to you the most uncomfortable gum chewer you'd ever seen.  

You were asked to identify yourself, name the courses you taught, throw in a short bio, then tell whoever should watch this video of you something they would remember whether they took courses from you or not.

"I'll be darned," the person who set up the video taping said when you were finished.  "You gave them two things."

"Three," you said, which was true, but in another sense demonstrated the effects of your work experience on you, and which may in some significant degree explain how it is that not only do people you know recognize you, persons who do not know you are tempted to conflate you with someone they do know. 

Within recent weeks you were approached by a man who detached himself from a group to address you.  When he said "McHenry,"  you supposed he was digging out a name of a rare and venerable single malt Scotch whisky, whereupon your communication problems began in earnest.  "Laphroaig,"  you said, already enjoying the exchange.  It has been some time since your admiration and drinking of single-malt Scotch whisky, but you were beginning to remember the smoky, hint of malt taste.

"Same old McHenry,"  the man said.  "I knew it was you, the moment I saw you.  Haven't changed a bit."

"The hair,"  you said, running a hand through a thatch of finger-width gray.

"Always were a kidder."

At which point, you regard this individual and realize he is so convinced that you are who he thinks you to be that you now have the opportunity to add yet another occupation to your CV, impostor.  You also know he will be embarrassed if you insist you are the you better known to you.  "Still see any of the old gang?" you ask.  "Miss those guys."

"Wait,"  he says.  "Wait till I tell them.  Same old McHenry."

The Long and Short of It: Buried Meanings and Revealed Truths

William of Occam, a fourteenth century English Franciscan author of philosophical tracts, is best known for his admonition of simplicity, "Universes must not be unnecessarily expanded."  His approach, often referred to as Occam's Razor, has been extended to mean the simplest solution is the best solution.

While not an engraved-in-stone, irrefutable thesis, nevertheless, simplicity does have an innate beauty.  This beauty challenges more elaborate, orotund detail to stand up and defend itself, perhaps even asking, "What are you trying to hide in all that detail? 

In the same investigative process, inherent truths may appear to emerge from simplicity that are not always so easy to find in vast networks of complex braiding.

You most often think of Occam's razor and of simplicity when looking at your desk and the floor surrounding it, even though much of the clutter did serve some welcomed purpose, a line from a poem, a memorable phrase from a story or essay, perhaps even the forgotten name of an antagonist in some eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel.  

Your thoughts of the venerable monk often emerge when you are in the process of revising your own work or editing the work of another, causing you to depart from your natural tendency to add phrases and clauses to an already occupied sentence, which, in turn, cause you to recall the legions of freight trains you see, crossing the desert in parallel to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where you venture at about this time of year to spend Thanksgiving with family.

To your way of thinking, there is an inherent challenge in extending a short, declarative sentence into something as extensive as those great, long, graffiti-splashed trains plying the desert with tons of cargo.  You want to see how many words you can attach, yet still deliver the emotion-laden punch of dramatic cargo.  

When you worked for the Associated Press, you were informed on some kind of regular basis of the results of expensive and expansive tests where a sentence with more than seventeen words was found to be, for want of a better word, clunky, leading to confuse rather than inform the reader.

When you first began to concern yourself with the kinds of short stories you wished to produce, a length of five thousand words was the standard length, which in fact allowed you even as you wrote to think about structure in four five-page segments.  This led you to avoiding such publications as you'd discovered in The Writers' Markets and Novel and Short Story Writers' Markets, where there were calls for stories of twenty-five hundred or three thousand words.

Your argument then was that you were scarcely out of the starting blocks at two thousand words.  Soon enough, you ran into an editor who had the effect on your sensitivities similar to a doctor, removing swaths of adhesive tape that had been applied to your chest.  While not as hairy as some chests, your chest has enough hair for the adhesive tape removal to leave you with a response. "Any long work can be shortened,"  the editor told you.  "All you have to do is start taking out words."

"But, but--" you said.

"The fact of you even thinking to protest,"  he said, "makes you a prime candidate for cutting.  Look up William of Occam."

"William of who?"

"You'll see."

You did.

In your reading of those contemporary writers you so much favor, you can't help noticing the remarkable effects of the apparent complexity of the simple nor indeed of the simple elegance resident within the complex.  Although far from the Hemingway fan you once were, you still carry the effect of simplicity in two of his stunning examples, "The Killers," and "Hills Like White Elephants."  And you can not stray from your fondness for William Faulkner's "Spotted Horses," which, only after you have finished reading through it, are you reminded of his sentence lengths and complexity.

And of course, there is this:

"Tom!"

No answer.

"Tom!"

No. Answer.

"What's gone with that boy, I wonder?  You TOM!"

No answer.

Ahh.

The Games Your Characters Play--with Themselves and You

 Eric Berne's 1964 study, Games People Play, set your early mind into a whirl, offering as it did a magnifying glass enlargement of relationships with which you could eavesdrop in much the same way you did when attending a play or watching a feature film with some pretense at seriousness of intent. Berne spoke of transactions among and between people, some of which--people and transactions--were quite functional, others which were quite the opposite.

Even without the emergence of a psychological firestorm of discovery, you knew you wished for functional transactions with others, understood how the success of these transactions, in particular those you initiated or wished to initiate, began somewhere within terrain you wished to explore as one of your childhood heroes, Admiral Richard Byrd, explored the South Pole

You could--and did--look at your own relationships with those about you.  You were at an age where you were still afflicted with a symptom you liked to think of as psychological hypochondria, from whose murky depths you sought and often found evidences of trespass into terrains from which you hoped to retire.

This brought you into contact with other works, often shelved in bookstores as Self-Help, such as I'm Okay--You"re Okay, Men Are from Mars--Women from Venus, and the more humorous than psychological works of Stephen Potter such as Gamesmanship and a work you wished you'd had when your university minor subject was political science, One-Upsmanship.  

For at least a semester in political science, you were determined to be first in your non-English-major classes, actually were, and found a temporary regime of faith in the notion that political science was the art of getting what you wanted from people and making them like it.

You read all these titles, took copious notes on and in them, and, as a result of a conversation between you and a potential editorial client, folded into the mix the sense of martial arts being a form of political science.  You were encouraged to see martial arts as a means of having your opponent perform in the courses of action you dictated.  

Well, you were tall, well-built, and young.  You actually had a job that resulted in you being requested to give speeches of one sort or another to individuals with whom you had the fondness of reading and of writing in common.  In the interests of brevity, you'll leave those times with the awareness that you felt they--and you--were somehow manipulative, a thing you did not wish to be.

"There is a difference,"  an associate told you, "between being charismatic and being manipulative."  You agreed with his thesis, but in the interest of distancing yourself from being manipulative and connecting charisma with the kinds of ego you did not have nor wish to acquire, you moved away and onward to a point where you wished to establish a healthy and cordial relationship with characters.  

You wished that relationship to apply with the characters about whom you read, the ones you encountered in manuscripts you were called upon to evaluate as an editor, and most important of all, the characters you hoped to bring to your life in works you hoped to bring to life.  

In effect, you've begun to essay your own parallel study to Dr. Berne's, thinking of yours as The Games Characters Play:  Partners in Dramatic Confrontation.  This is not so much a book as a philosophy, where you enter with as complete an articulation of your personal narrative as possible.  

The next step is to bring characters into your terrain who may not be well prepared for it or you.  They should have their own agendas, their own Grail to seek, their own inner gasp of despair at the discovery that some apparently safe platform has given way under their weight.

The toxicity or health of your characters goals are not yours to decide, rather their actions in pursuing or avoiding them become the determining factors.