Why I Lift Weights

Weightlifting has gotten a bad rap, really. When people want to get into shape, they pick a fad program like P90X or some other cardio-based activity that promises results in little time. Running is very popular now, as well as Crossfit, which preaches functional training and all around fitness. All of these activities take effort and commitment, don't get me wrong. You can't get the same results running or doing Crossfit as you can with weight training, however. Endurance-based exercise burns a lot of fat, but it isn't particularly anabolic; I don't need to cite the various scientific data out there confirming my statement because all it takes is a pair of eyeballs. How many runners have you seen with a strong, muscular body? How many Crossfitters have done well in anything other than Crossfit?

The thing with weightlifting is that it's hard. It requires years of devotion and mental fortitude. It requires intelligent programming. If you succeed in getting stronger, it is because you pushed yourself. You have to add weight to the bar. Nothing else really matters. You have to see that progression; you get a dopamine fix every time you witness your squat weights go up five pounds. You can't lift four-hundred pounds in two weeks. You can get in decent running shape in as little as a month. Hell, two years ago, my father enlisted me in Cincinnati's Thanksgiving run, which is about seven miles. I hadn't ran in years, and my only exercise came from my job at the orchard. I ran about six times before the race, and I managed to finish without stopping. Cardiovascular endurance comes quickly. Strength does not.

I've been lifting seriously for almost a year and a half now, and what I mean by seriously is that I've been focusing on the four major strength lifts (the squat, the press, the bench press, and the deadlift) during that time. I remember being sore from deadlifting 135 lbs; my last deadlift workout, I did a triple with 385 lbs. My press has went from 95 lbs to 170; my bench from 190 to 270; my squat from nothing (I didn't do squats) to 305 for 3 reps. My body weight has increased from 175 to 200. The little aches and pains that I used to have (such as a sore lower back) have vanished completely. I'm stronger, fitter, more confident than I ever have been, and that's because weightlifting changes not just your body, but also your mind. I've never missed a workout in a year and a half. Honestly, my progress is not particularly great--I struggled with my squat form for almost a year, and suffered from hip tendonosis and knee pain, but I never quit.

What I really want to convey is that weightlifting is not some meathead, narcissistic activity. It might not be as hip as the latest infomercial or Crossfit. But it is honest. As Henry Rollins said, "the iron doesn't lie." I'm a better person for lifting weights, and it's my belief that there is no better way to stay fit. Strength takes years to develop, and it is the end of all things. So throw away those fancy running shoes and pick up something heavy. Our ancestors didn't prance around the woods, effeminately darting after deer. They sprang up from cover, stabbed Bambi with a spear, and lugged his heavy ass home to eat. So eat meat, lift weights, and be merry. That's my new year's advice. 

One-Hundred Obituaries

Two

Angela Lansberry passed away at two o’clock in the morning on a Thursday. Her husband did not permit her to smoke in the house; her desire to light up within the confines of the dwelling that she helped pay for was a constant source of contention between them. Angela was young, only twenty-eight, and had been married for about two years, yet she was already looking for a way to escape her marriage. She did love her husband somewhat, although not particularly strongly, for Luke (that was his name) was a peculiar man prone to silence and stoicism, which suited her just fine most of the time, since she herself was quiet and withdrawn. They both wore a lot of dark clothing and drank a lot of coffee. Luke was a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati while Angela drifted in-between jobs. She had been a secretary at a law firm, a waitress, a telephone operator. Before her untimely demise, she had made a habit of attending a writing workshop on Ludlow Street, for Angela had decided to put her BA in English to use and become a writer. The hardest part, she felt, was finding something to write about. It was hard to have a voice. It was hard to have an opinion.

            Minutes before her death, Angela exited her house, pack of cigarettes in hand, and stood for a moment on her front porch. The neighborhood was quiet, a nice mixed income suburb, although one did hear gunshots every so often from the nearby low rent homes. The houses across the street were nearly identical, varying only in color. A light was on in the house directly across from hers, and she could see a man in front of a computer screen. She had never talked to this man; he was quiet, reserved, slightly unfriendly. She liked to think that he was writing a novel, doing important work, and that one day perhaps they would be contemporaries. Luke was gone, kept away by his hours. She was lonely, feeding off of fumes and wayward ambitions, but that was okay. The concrete steps leading up to the porch glistened in the moonlight, slick and wet in the humid air. She felt cold and drew her sweater around her.

            As she sat and smoked, a big white car rolled slowly down the road, a mammoth Cadillac, its subwoofers booming like the heartbeat of a monster. Angela had never seen such a car, shining and magnificent in the paleness of the night, rims spinning like a hypnotist’s tool, silver, reflecting light. Its windows rolled down revealing darkness billowing smoke. It called out to Angela, this darkness, called her names in some foreign tongue, and though she recognized the harshness of the voice, she was lulled by it, sitting calmly on her steps, smoking her forbidden cigarette. The light in the house across from her flickered out; the novel was complete, the great work finished. Angela thought of her own white pages waiting inside. The car was still paused before her home. She could go back inside or she could enter the vehicle. I want something to write about, whispered Angela, looking at the white car and hearing the voice grow thick and smooth as apple butter. What have I ever done with my life? she asked, the glistening concrete steps beckoning. Something spat out of the darkness of Cadillac; Angela stood and was caught by it, reeled in as though pulled by a string, her black boots clacking on the street. The house behind her was dark, empty, silent, and stoic. It was full of white pages.

Pointless Venture's Video Games of the Year (Not Necessarily Released this Year)

Didn't play a whole lot from this year, and most of what I played were shooters, surprisingly. My best game of 2013 was Dark Souls, which I put one-hundred hours into, with only a few of those being composed of pure frustration. I loved the game world (bleak and strange), the art style (somehow reminiscent of Quake), the combat (simple yet difficult to master); yet it's one of those games that I probably won't come back to, seeing how my first play through was so thorough, and because it's a stressful game, really. Sure, you eventually come to catharsis after you beat the Four Kings or Seath the Scaleless, but every single failure builds up to that catharsis, hence the stress.The experience of playing Dark Souls is like becoming a geyser of emotion that only erupts periodically, unlike Old Faithful. 

Civilization 5 was a close second. It was the first strategy game I've played in a while, and it's certainly very addictive. The wife even liked it too, so bonus points for that. I'm not a veteran of the series, so some of the complaints others might of had didn't register. Loved that it allowed single computer multiplayer.

X-Com is number 3. The combat is great, the tech tree is okay, the random environments are a bit boring after a while, but overall an excellent game. Kind of wish that there was more to the interceptor mini-game, and that base building was more evolved. The expansion is on my wishlist.

Honorable mentions-Shadow Warrior, Metro: Last Light; Dishonored DLC; Hotline Miami.

Biggest Disappointment. Yeah, Bioshock Infinite. It's somehow too much like the previous games while simultaneously being too little like them. It wastes its wondrous floating world on a contradictory story about time travel (although all stories about time travel have similar problems). I liked the shooting, Elizabeth, and the main twist. I understand why they didn't just make it Bioshock in the sky. But we should've been able to explore Columbia, and like many others, I found the violence to be a little out of place. Still a good game and one worth playing, but still a disappointed. It was almost doomed to be.

Honorable disappointment mention. Crysis 3. Did you remember that it was released this year? All I remember about it are respawning enemies, lots of cutscenes (though thankfully fewer than the previous title) and giant guns that take up most of the screen. Why the hell did they switch the protagonist again? What the hell happened to Nomad and Alcatraz? Why can't I just run around on an island throwing turtles at Koreans?

One-Hundred Obituaries

One

Philip J. Dick died on the way home from a farmers' market while in the process of preparing to eat a cinnamon pecan roll. His attention divided between driving his car and unwrapping his pastry, Mr. Dick's vehicle drifted into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a semi-tractor trailer.  Like its occupant, Mr. Dick's vehicle, a 2003 model Chrysler PT cruiser, did not fair very well in the accident. One witness, a certain Mary Contrarian, described the scene as resembling "the meeting of a train and a cow." Mr. Dick would have been disturbed to hear himself compared to a cow, considering the amount of time he put forth trying to change his corpulent physique. His wife had just purchased one of those total gym exercise machines, this one in particular purporting to help its user drop fifty pounds in just a month when used only fifteen minutes a day. Mr. Dick had the opportunity to use the machine once before his untimely demise, though to be honest, he likely would have used it only a few times more, Mr. Dick being one of those people who detest exercise in any form. Yet his wife was constantly telling him to lose weight, which was why Mr. Dick was always participating in the latest exercise fad. He had attempted to dance off the pounds while watching videos of spandex-clad vixens throwing their lithe little bodies to and fro; he'd bought a bike, which rusted in the garage, as well as a weight set, which also rusted in the garage. He had implements and elastic bands and fat calipers and all manner of things which he had bought and discarded to the garage, which served as a sort of museum for the last decade's infomercial exercise equipment. He wife called it the monument to desire, though to whose desire the garage was a monument to was uncertain. Mrs. Dick was not particularly svelte herself; her son, a monster named Dick Jr., often called his mother "Momma Three-Bills," though her weight was not in actuality in excess of two-hundred and fifty pounds. This is not her obituary, however. We shall cease discussing Mrs. Dick.

            During his last thirty minutes of life, Mr. Dick spent fifteen of those minutes wandering around his local farmers' market, located in the rear of a church. Not being a spiritual man, churches made Mr. Dick uneasy. His mother had been especially devout, requiring little Mr. Dick to attend Sunday school every week, a mind-numbing experience, and one that was damaging to the boy's sense of religion. The market made him uneasy as well. Mr. Dick did not like vegetables; his wife (Mrs. Dick again) called him a "meatatarian," though that awkward adjective was not entirely accurate, since Mr. Dick did love his starches, particularly when fried, as well as his sugary sweets, as we already know. The presence of so much so called "good food"—apples and beets and lettuce and roots and god knows what else—made him feel a little guilty, for he knew that he was not going to buy any of it. He entered the market on an impulse. Forty years of American life had made him an impulsive, confused creature. The cinnamon roll was all he purchased, yet he felt good when he exited, certain that he had taken a step toward slimness. Life was made of small steps, of this he was certain, and all one had to do was make a concerted effort and all of one's desires would be granted, almost like magic. The progression by steps theory had not resulted in much personal success for Mr. Dick, yet he clung to it like a warm blanket all the same. He was actually thinking of exercising right before glancing down at his crouch at the cinnamon roll that lay there, wrapped up in white paper like a Christmas present, waiting. Mr. Dick could not wait.

First Impressions

First Impressions

I tell Tristan to expect the worst, but I can tell that he is shocked. His mouth hangs open just enough to make his handsome face look stupid. I can see it through his eyes. The old dryer, sitting in the yard with a rust hole as big as a cannon ball rotting in its side. Diesel's old tricycle, twisted into otherworldly shapes, blackened with firework soot. The massive chain that lies suspended and taut over much of the refuse, its beginning and end undetectable, my favorite "relic" (which is what I call all the junk littering our yard). I usually tell guests that we have a really big dog, and it's always fun to see their eyes grow as large as dinner plates, but I don't tell Tristan this. I let him soak it in. "Why?" he seems to ask silently. Garbage, cans, broken bottles, clothes, dead appliances. Flat tires. Multiple dog houses. Enough plastic to choke every fish on the planet. There are craters spread through the junk, and I consider explaining that there aren't any landmines out there, but I can't say this with one-hundred percent conviction. God knows what my brothers have done.

            "You want to come inside?" I ask, pointing at the faded white double-wide that lies beyond. I don't think he's even seen it. He's the first boy I've brought home. I guess this is a test.

            "Yeah, sure," he says, trying to muster up some enthusiasm.

            "My mom likes to collect things," I tell him. He doesn't understand; he thinks I'm talking about the yard. I get out of his car and take him by the hand and together we make the walk. The junk doesn't bother me that much (it's kind of a statement, really). It's not that we produce more garbage than anyone else; it's that we put it on display. We don't truck it off and hide it in a landfill where it is out of sight and mind. Most of this stuff won't decay for thousands of years. Having our trash visible before us may act as a catalyst, encouraging us to consume less, although one look at my mother and one is liable to reach another conclusion.

            We reach the door and I pull it open and let him enter first. The insides of the double wide aren't really that wide, especially when there are boxes and clothes and packaged food lining the walls like an art project. There is a smell too, I am told, though I guess I am too used to it to notice. Tristan's nostrils are quivering; I guess the odor is rather pungent. If I had to guess, I'd say the trailer smells like an enormously fat woman: damp, musky, fungal. There is a closet to the right of the doorway, though you'd never be able to tell, since there's a seven foot tall heap of clothing blocking it. Tristan turns back to me, exasperation on his face. He doesn't know what to do or where to go. I squeeze past him and navigate through the labyrinth, deftly twisting my body around protruding clutter, moving like an eel. My short, slender physique was born out of developing in this environment. Maybe evolution knew the direction my mother would pursue as I gestated in her body and reacted accordingly. Tristan's clumsily running into things, making a racket. I tell him to be quiet and act a little more civilly.

            Mother is where I expected her to be. She's sitting on the couch, looking like a beached cetacean. Her arms are little vestigial things, flipper-like, dangling uselessly from her meaty shoulders. Mother is wearing one of her many muumuus, this one whitish (I say "whitish" because there are stains of many colors adorning this dress). There is a box of Cheetos next to her, and there is orange on her hands and around her mouth. This is the woman that birthed me, I whisper to Tristan, and he looks at me, amazement on his face. She is obviously the fattest human being he has ever seen.

            "Hey mom," I say. My mother turns suddenly, her baby face erupting into a smile. She's got strawberry colored hair, long and stringy, greasy and unwashed. I feel so many things looking at her that I have to turn away and regain my composure.

            "Who've you brought over, honey?" says my mom. She has a sweet voice.

            "This is Tristan," I tell her, but Tristan has left my side suddenly and gone over to her. He's tall and blonde and wide-shouldered, in the prime of life, and this perfect looking man/boy is standing over my monstrously fat mother, and they don't even look like they are of the same species. He introduces himself, extends a hand, and my mother is extremely pleased by his manners, his courtesy, and I feel sick inside, not knowing how to interpret this interaction. Her sausage fingers grip his long, lean ones, leaving orange dust on his pristine flesh, and I have a horrible premonition of Tristan as my mother, his high cheek bones encased in a gelatinous circle of blubber, his sleek form bulbous, rotund, and bloated with excess. But it doesn't spread like that, I think, examining my own skinny hands. Although it could be that I am immune.

            Mother is trying to get up off of the couch for some reason; she keeps rocking her torso back and forth, trying to build up enough momentum to defeat gravity and stand on her own two legs. Tristan watches her with the same kind of detachment one might wear while witnessing an overturned turtle struggling to right itself. I can't help Mom, because she's killing me right now. Finally, she gets onto her feet, panting, the effort having exhausted her.

            "You kids want something to eat?" she hollers. Tristan gives her a wide berth, but she can't help grazing him with her hip as she turns around and heads to the kitchen. He exaggerates and quietly stumbles into some stacked boxes, his limbs askew, his eyes closed. I don't laugh and move to the couch, but I don't sit down. My mother's left a crater where she sat; the upholstery is damp and smelling of ass sweat.   

            "I got Twizzlers, Hostess donuts, some Oreos," yells my mother, rummaging through the cupboard.

            "We'll have them all," says Tristan, moving beside me. He's looking at the sweat crater, wrinkling his nose. I know she stinks; he doesn't have to tell me. I want to go to my room, but guilt is keeping me by this couch, waiting for my mother.

            My baby brother Tripp materializes out of an alcove, a seven year-old boy clad solely in a diaper, and sprints past us, in the process smacking Tristan on the calf before hiding behind the couch.

            "What the fuck?" says Tristan.

            "He does that to everyone new," I explain. "Diesel wore a diaper till he was ten." I don't know why I volunteer this information, but I do.

            "That's weird," he says. Well, no shit, Tristan. Of course it's weird.

            My mom lumbers toward us with a plate full of junk food, grimacing because she's diabetic and her feet are always hurting. Tripp peeks out from the couch, a mischievous grin on his face, and I could just beat him to death right now, the little gargoyle.

            "Here you go, kids," she says, offering the sugary treats. Oreos are spread out in a ring, with a big handful of crumbled Doritos rising from the center like the ruins of a mountain. Tristan looks at me as if to say How can we eat this stuff? so I grab three Oreos in one hand and the Doritos crumbs in the other and stuff everything into my mouth. I chew noisily, my lips peeled back, revealing a Halloween smile of orange, black, and white. The stuff tastes awful mixed together; the urge to vomit starts coming up my throat, yet I push it back and swallow my cud. He's looking at me differently now; perhaps he sees the pretty little thing my mother once was before she succumbed to gluttony and sloth. My mother seems to think this is a stunt, some new dating tactic, for she's smiling, her blubbery lips resembling pale pink worms. Tripp lets out a howl he learned from a cartoon and jumps out in front of everyone and starts wagging his diapered ass around suggestively, and I can tell he's been watching MTV, since he imitates everything he sees. Mom's fat lips turn into a frown, and she's up and chasing the little devil as best as she can; he is, of course, far too agile and lean to be caught by my mother, and he knows his way around the litter of our lives better than any one of us. He darts and weaves behind a stack of cardboard boxes, making animal sounds as my mother reaches helplessly for him, his taunting gyrations eliciting threats of corporal punishment from her. Tristan is trying to suppress his laughter and failing. He thinks I've brought him here to laugh at my family; he thinks I've brought him to a comedy show or a zoo. Maybe I have unknowingly. It's hard for me to know anything with absolute certainty, and I can't see how that will ever change.

Faith

Faith

At night they come for us. We hide in the tunnels, in maintenance shafts, in holes carved out of concrete. We pull pieces of plywood over us as we squat and listen to the scrape of their claws, the rattle of their fangs, and their wheezing breath. They howl and grunt and speak in violent tongues as we cover our mouths with rags to muffle our exhalations. When they leave there are always a few dead. We take the remains and pile them up in great bonfires, basking in the heat and light. No one has seen the surface in fifty years. My brother's eyes are as big and white as mother's fine china, and he does not have to squint in the darkness. My hands are my gift. My fingers are long and taper into claws, and I can feel minute differences between textures, between sand and grain and dirt and stone. I know what is radioactive and what is safe to eat. It does not have to glow for me to know.

            Rupert claims that they were once rats before the fallout. He says they grew tired of eating our scraps and decided to eat us. Jeremiah says that they were dogs without homes, and that they were once our very best friends. He says we cuddled them and doled out kindnesses like they were our children, precious and loving. He says that they just wish to love us but they've forgotten how in their hunger and their torment. Little is left for them up there, he says. There is no oxygen and no vegetation and therefore little meat, so they come down into our subway system to see what their former masters have for them. We have nothing, so they eat us. He says we should have taken them with us into the tunnels instead of leaving them up top to die. They are ghosts, he insists, though this is not true, for we have killed them with firearms and blunt objects. I know what he means, though.

My mother had a dog named Fluffy. I can just remember her. She was Yorkshire terrier, and mother paid four-hundred dollars for her. I used to carry her around when I was a child. I had to be very careful with Fluffy because she was fragile. I couldn't drop her or toss her around like a stuffed toy. When the sirens went off we left her in the living room. Mother cried and cried. Father said they didn't allow dogs because oxygen and rations were limited, but still Mother wanted to hide her in her purse. I think we left a twenty-pound bag of dog food opened on the floor, the kibble spilling out. Fluffy yipped at us when we went out the door.

            I wonder if Fluffy devoured Levi Stevens, leaving nothing but the head for us to burn. That dog food wouldn't have lasted forever. More than likely, Fluffy was eaten by a larger animal. That's what I like to think, at least.

            I tell Rupert that it wouldn't be so bad to be eaten. I tell him that they probably kill you quickly, seeing how their claws and teeth are so large and sharp. Animals don't mess around, I say. They go straight for the jugular, and you probably pass out without feeling a thing. He always shakes his head and spits when I tell him that. He says they keep you alive as long as possible because they like their meat living and warm. I tell him he's full of shit, which he is. This is a shantytown, I say. We cover ourselves in rags and shit in the corner. We cough and wheeze in the smoke. What light we have is produced by the burning of dead flesh. What food we eat is scavenged. We are victims, I say, and we are consumed as such. They have no reason to make us suffer further.

            Rupert, sunny optimist that he is, claims that there are other cities out there below the earth. It's mathematics, he says, and I don't know what he means. He means to set out someday to look for others. He wants to steal a gun from the armory as well as some canned food, a gas mask, and a headlamp, and map out the subway. I tell him he wouldn't last a minute. Rupert is fresh meat, weak meat, and he's quiet and slow, easy prey for any monster. Rupert says he's a man, and that after he maps out the subway, he'll return and make me marry him. I laugh at him when he says this, for I can't see why he'd want to marry me or anyone else. I am old and mutated, though less than most, and my desire has long ago faded with my memories of the surface. I don't know if I can have children, and I don't want to try. I wouldn't want to bring anyone into a world of tunnels and darkness.

            Jeremiah says he saw his dead wife the last time they came. He took up a position in the battery, and as they fired at the monsters his wife walked unharmed, beautiful and clad in a white dress. Her hair was as black as obsidian, he says, and her eyes as green as the ooze which flows through the splintered cracks of our foundation. He stopped firing when he saw her. The monsters moved around her, foaming at the mouth, but his wife lingered oblivious. She was an angel, he says, and he regrets that he did not join her. No monster would have touched him, he says. No bullet would have pierced his flesh.

            No one wants to talk about it, but I see what's happening. They are changing. I saw my mother amongst them. She was happy and smiling, wearing that apron she always used to wear when she did work around the house. She had a feather duster in her right hand, and she was using it on the railway. I didn't say anything, but I look at others and know that they see the same. They see their loved ones when the monsters come.        

            Are they ghosts? Are they hallucinations born of the radioactive fallout? Are they projections created by the monsters? Have they tapped into our memories to use them against us?

            I was afraid that they would shoot Rupert when he tried to break into the armory, so I told the station chief of his plans. They arrested him and threw him in a cell. He won't talk to me anymore, but at least he's alive. I know he draws pictures with chalk on his prison walls. He sings old hymns and talks like the future never came to pass. He shall be released, he says. He has faith.

            I don't know why Rupert is like he is. He has grey skin like an elephant, cracking and covered in sores, and his teeth are almost all gone, yet he pretends he's a human being. I ask him about the ghosts and he doesn't respond. I think faith requires a certain disconnection from reality. It requires an imagination.

            The next time they come I do not hide and cower in a hole. I stand in the tunnel, a bright light before me, and I watch as they pass. They cannot see me; they will not touch me, and I feel the heat of their enormous bodies as they lumber toward the station, looking for food. I want to reach out and touch one, but here comes Fluffy, hairless, vertebrae protruding like spikes from her back. It's the eyes that let me know that it's her. The eyes are heartbroken—they ask "Why did you leave me?" and I start blabbering about oxygen and rations and government rules while the monster crawls up to me, shaking in the light. "I was a child, Fluffy," I say. "I couldn't do anything but follow everyone else." The eyes tell me that my explanation is not good enough. I didn't think a few words would excuse a deformed lifetime. But hell, what else was I to say?

           

                       

White Noise, Squat Tips

White Noise was Don Delillo's breakthrough novel, and it's easy to see why. It concerns a professor of Hitler Studies (yes, that's right) named Jack Gladney and his dysfunctional family. Jack and his wife Babette are both terrified of dying to the point where their fear is making life unbearable. Babette takes solace in a prototype drug called Dylar, which Jack desperately wants to get his hands on. There's a lot else going on: an air born toxic event occurs, causing a mass exodus, and Jack becomes exposed. He discusses his fears and observations on American life with his friend and fellow professor Murry,  a New Yorker who wants to "become immersed in American magic and dread." Murry says some ridiculous things throughout the book (he's fascinated with generic packaged food and the supermarket, as well as Babette's hair, which he refers to as "important") but he's also the most self-aware character. Everyone in White Noise seems to be buried by television, radio, commercials, advertising, fast food, and consumerism. Delillo wants us to realize how lost we've become in the modern world, alienated by our pursuit of pleasure and the repression of our fears. White Noise manages to be eye-opening, depressing, and hilarious. Definitely worth a read.

Moving on to other matters, the squat has been my nemesis, but I think I've finally figured it out. Starting Strength, a basic guide to barbell training, has helped me a lot. I heartily recommend it to anyone lifting weights, even if you've been lifting for a long time. Here are some cues that have helped me correct my form:

1. Keep your knees out, like a pregnant woman having a baby. Keep them in line with your toes. Don't let them cave in.

2. Stop your knees from moving too far forward. The barbell should be kept over your midfoot, and it should travel up and down in a vertical line. If you're letting your knees slide forward, you're wasting energy, as well as putting a hell of a lot of pressure on your joints.

3. Stick your toes out at about a thirty degree angle. Easier to engage your hip muscles this way.

4. Film yourself (this is my own tip). Not for vanity purposes, but to assess your form. You can't correct a problem if you don't know what's wrong.

5. Keep your head in line with your torso. Look down about five feet in front of you. This helps maintain your back angle.

A Short Story

This is from my current project, which I've named In the Depths of the Valley. Black Box is still looking for publishers, but why not work on something else why the query letters float in the nether regions of the internet?

...

The children called him Mario. He was short, stocky and mustachioed, and when spoken to prone to rambling unintelligibly in a voice that seemed to start in the back of his throat and resonate within the deeper regions of his nasal passages. His custodial uniform was a light faded blue, a baby's color. There was a particular mop that he treasured beyond all things, its handle worn smooth and splinterless by his own two hands. He called it "Lucinda," but nobody knew this, though he had whispered her name around the motley crew of mentally handicapped students they sent him for help. They called him Janitor Bob, as did most of the faculty except for Mr. Jameson, who was a child. His daughter, a pale girl named Regina, had explained why they called him Mario, showing him the faded illustration on a Nintendo cartridge. She begged her father to shave his mustache, but he refused. His chin looked weak and sunken without it, and he missed feeling its bristly hairs with his tongue, a habit he performed in the dark closets surrounded by disinfectants and handled tools. He'd sit in his tenebrous abbey, perched on a stool, his spine curved, tongue slithering out to clean the mustache, a rag dangling from his back pocket, the only sounds his breathing and the wet smacking of lips. Meditation, which was what he called it in his head, took place for ten minutes every period. When he was finished, he'd go out and sweep the floors. The dirt they tracked in was tremendous. Huge chunks of mud came off of steel-toed boots; grime and gum were left by their sneakers. He could read their tracks like a huntsman, identifying the various cliques by their footwear. The Rednecks were the worst, for they seemed to live in filth. No one could ignore the mufferless roar of their jacked-up trucks as they pulled into the parking lot every morning. He had forbidden his daughter to date any one of them, for what good that did. At home he sank into a bottomless recliner and let the television sing him to sleep.

            The bell rang and he awoke from his meditation. Through the bottom crack of the door he watched and waited as they chattered and stomped into the hallway, their movements as loud and graceless as a pack of wolves. He thought of them as animals, so he tried to keep his distance. After a while he came out of the closet, hauling his cart to the cafeteria where his crew waited. They were a sorry lot. Dirty Gene Wilder, with a face like a pig and no scruples about him, clad in ill-fitting jeans and a ripped shirt and a pair of hand-me-down boots. Michael Bosnick, hopelessly retarded, sometimes found walking about with his pants down around his ankles. Borne Cleaver, thin and tall like a scarecrow, with a silent mouth and silent eyes and long pale hands that always dangled around his waist, as though waiting for something or someone to throttle. Janitor Bob surveyed his crew and gestured toward the cart. They came and took their mops and began their labor. Dirty Gene harassed Michael while he worked, telling him to eat this or eat that, Michael always refusing with a loud laugh and replying no, you eat it, Gene! Borne and Janitor Bob operated quietly, each tending to the large areas the other two neglected. Beneath the tables were all sorts of garbage: half-eaten French fries, plastic wrappers, ketchup stains dripping like congealed blood. Great piles of filth sat beneath one table that he was sure belonged to the rednecks. The smell of bleach took it all away, the odor of the children. The title was worn and patterned with the stains of a lost generation. He swept the filth into a waste basket before letting Lucinda purify what they had dirtied.  

            The cafeteria had bay windows on its western side that gave a nice view of the pine trees and the track field beyond, and one could just see the edge of the town cemetery that lay behind the school. Janitor Bob stared out those windows at the headstones while his mop wiped clean the stains of careless feet. He'd smoked amongst those stones long ago when he was a child, and his mother and father were buried there somewhere, though that had been ten years ago and he'd have to wander a bit before he located the spot. He didn't feel anything looking at the stones; he only noticed that the glass was smeared from greasy hand prints and noises, so he ambled over and sprayed Windex and began to clean, moving his hand in a circular pattern. Dirty Gene snorted like a horse from somewhere behind him. The Borne kid had been mopping the same small section of tile for fifteen minutes. Time had a habit of getting away from you in this job. Every motion of the hand, every sweep of the broom or mop loosened your traction to the earth, and you saw things through the glass, old things, people, places, long stored images that once brought forth emotion but now only quivered in the disinfectant like false reflections, distorted, unwanted, and soon to be banished once more. Janitor Bob kept his hand on the glass, moving it round and round. In front of him the track looked like a course for rodents. The tips of the headstones were black, mossy, and crumbling.

            "There's zombies out there," said Borne Cleaver, appearing by his side. Janitor Bob looked at him and saw nothing but a wan face. Cleaver's right index finger was trailing on the window glass, leaving a long smear pointing toward the graveyard. His fingernail was long and dirty and bruised as though it had been smashed with a hammer. The smell of Windex twitched his nostrils, and half of his mustache quivered upward, forming the closest thing to a snarl Janitor Bob's face was capable of. The dirty finger still touched the glass; he could not look past the finger at the graveyard. Borne Cleaver, fleshless, of unnatural pallor, stinking slightly of body odor and something indecipherable but foul. That finger was little more than a bone, and that bone defied the cleanliness of the place. Janitor Bob had a tile knife in one of his back pockets, its blade curved like the talon of a velociraptor. The air had grown cold suddenly, though it was warm and humid outside. Beneath the pine trees there was a bed of needles, brown, dry, and flammable. Dirty Gene and Michael howled behind him, fighting over some uncovered treasure, Gene yelling about purple panties, but Janitor Bob paid him no mind. The wan face was not looking at him, it was looking past at the horizon or something beyond it. Ten more seconds. He started counting in his head. The finger did not move. We all have a purpose. If that were true, was it the finger's job to remain on that pane, sullying it with its juices and germs? Borne seemed disconnected from his digit; he seemed on another plane altogether as his face stayed expressionless and pale. There were red pimples on this face; some were mauled and capped with dried blood. Five seconds. There was emotion returning to his heart. In performing my duty, it is possible that I will create more filth, which it will then be my job to clean. This thought upset him. He didn't like to put himself in their shoes, for he was apart, he was of another system, and there should be no overlapping of functions. Borne's head turned toward him; the lips parted and the large teeth began to move. They are always saying something that I do not understand. One second. He moved for his back pocket.

            Dirty Gene Wilder let out a yell that shook him from his actions. He was hopping up and down like an ape, his finger pointing toward Michael Bosnick, whose pants were around his ankles. Urine flowed forth from his penis onto the tiled floor. 

            Janitor Bob moved with Lucinda, his heart in his chest, the smeared glass pane behind him. 

How Does A Book Become Published?

How does a book become published? That's a good question. This is how the process goes, or so I've gathered from reading the internet and trying to get my first novel Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere published.

First, you have two options. You can publish through Amazon and people will be able to buy your book online and through Kindle. But no one will ever read your book. 148,424 titles were self-published in 2011, and the vast majority of them were awful; too poorly-written, too weird, or just too derivative to be published in any other manner. Of course, there are success stories, like 26 year old author Amanda Hocking, who became a millionaire by selling her book for less than 3 bucks online. But most self-published authors get lost in the void. There's also the consideration that there's no paper copy of your work. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I believe books are meant to be held and read in the real world, and I think Kindles and other electronic readers are a fad that won't last. I don't know any serious readers who read solely through digital means.

The second option is the traditional method of having a publisher pick up your book. Back in the old days, you could mail a copy to a publisher and somebody would read it, but those days are gone, sadly. You have to deal with agents, and you court an agent by sending them a query letter, which is a one-page summary of why they should try to get your book published. Referrals from other writers or editors help prevent query letters from being automatically discarded, but I don't know any other writers or editors. Basically, it's a long shot getting your work published through the traditional method, because agents get bombarded with queries, and oftentimes, especially in economically tremulous times such as now, agents are looking for work that neatly fits into very specific genres; hence the rise of paranormal romance (Twilight rip offs) and the young adult genre (which started with Harry Potter).

So I'm looking for an agent for Black Box, which I've recently finished editing. The query letter writing process has yet to begin, but if anyone knows somebody in the publishing business or is in fact an agent, give me an email and I'll send you a copy of Black Box. It's literary fiction; it's funny; one of the main characters is a talking Sasquatch; its plot concerns video games and brain-washing; and there's a quest for God. I'll put my query letter on the blog when it's finished.

Four Old Poems

I haven't written any poetry for a long time, but I'd like to share four poems that I wrote during my last year of college.

A Story I Heard

He sat in his kitchen
beneath a green pop-up tent
The peyote wouldn’t let go
of his brain.
His friends put out a plate
every day, like he was
some wild jungle cat,
too wary of the daylight
to emerge from his lair,
too full of white teeth
to be approached directly.
  All the while:
        Bob Dylan sat next to him
        reeking of Highway 61
and police sirens,
        stinking of broken harmonicas
        and ancient folk-singer socks.
        The fumes burned his eyes
        and melted his own ragged garments
        into borrowed hand-me-downs.
        How he hated
        The
Voice
        of a generation.
        But etiquette was preserved
        even in this far-out barn-seed bivouac.
So he realized that
you could never tell
Robert Zimmerman
        how badly his
feet
        smell
no matter how much
        your lungs ache
                    for
                    reprieve.

Rosa Palm and Her 5 Sisters

I can’t monument a moment
Stop a glass
My photos are melting pockets
  Of gold.
We are children
  And I am a child wonder.
Progress lost to me
As love is to the birds.
What have I got
On my ancient fathers?
I’m an idle masturbator
And they were fingers in motion.
Generation after generation
We still jerk off.

Andrew Jackson, I love thee

In the foyer of the White House, you let anyone
 Eat of a two ton wheel of cheese
        How cool is that?
You started the spoils system in politics
        Were you proud of that?
        Were you proud of all the Indians you killed?
I don’t think you were a decent man
        (But who really is?)
You killed the best gunfighter in Tennessee
Your hands must’ve left blood on everything you touched
        Yet you never saw their ghosts
Why do I love thee?

My Pockets

I was cleaning out my pockets the other day and this is what I found:
3 balls of lint;
A crumbled receipt for a 6 pack of beer;
An ink pen drawing of a dinosaur;
A muddy glass eye;
The splinters of a toothpick;
A Christmas card from Jesus;
The dried husk of a raisin;
A lipstick-smeared love letter to myself;
A half-empty pack of Marlboros;
The petrified paw of my favorite cat;
3 whole years of my life, covered in bubble gum, tar-stained and wasted, left lying on the ground like a barely smoked cigarette, smoldering and useless.
At least I found enough change for a candy bar.
Ob-la-Di, Ob-la-Da.

A Game of Thrones; Straight Man

Book Reviews

Oh Sean Bean, we hardly knew thee.

I never read fantasy; I'm pretty much a literary snob. The last couple of years, I've read almost entirely heady stuff by renowned authors such as David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Julio Cortazar, and Haruki Murakami. Congrats to me, right? It's not that I look down upon anybody who reads pop fiction; it's more that pop fiction rarely concerns itself with anything besides the machinations of plot, and as a reader, I'm interested in authors who deal with life. "Fiction is about what it means to be a human being," said David Foster Wallace, and his quote essentially sums up why I read what I read. 

All that aside, my wife got me to read A Game of Thrones, and I found it both entertaining and addictive. George R.R. Martin has that pop quality to his writing that makes it hard to not turn the page, an ability that is lacking in a lot of literary fiction. There are supernatural elements, such as dragons and magic, but the book is focused on the struggle for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, and is in essence a political thriller rather than an escapist jaunt through a land of swords and sorcery. The universe itself is, like all high fantasy, reminiscent of Tolkien, but unlike Middle-Earth, you get the sense that good will not necessarily triumph over evil. The bad guys aren't all bad--Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf, is the best character--and the books ends by killing off the noblest character (which pretty much everybody knows by now). This work, however, is overly long, and it's only the first book in an unfinished five volume series. And I wonder how much satisfaction readers of the series will have if the saga is ever completed. Martin likes to kill his characters, and the eventual crisis that will resolve the story is telegraphed (the Others, a race of supernatural beings only hinted at, will certainly invade Westeros and drag everyone away from fighting over the Iron Thrones), so you have to consider why Martin has dragged out his tale over so many gigantic books. I have no problem with enormous books (Infinite Jest is one of my favorites), but if you're going to write one, make sure you have something important to say. I'm not sure if the material warrants its enormous scope. 

Straight Man is the story of William Henry Devereaux Jr., a middle-aged professor in a small Pennsylvanian town. It's a pretty hilarious novel--Henry threatens to execute a goose every day until he gets the English Department budget--centering around Devereaux's various mid-life problems. His colleagues bicker among themselves, his daughter's marriage is in trouble, and he finds himself attracted to three women, only one of whom is his wife. Among these issues, Devereaux has to deal with the return of his estranged father, a looming budgetary crisis, and his inability to urinate. Somehow, Russo resolves all these plot threads in a satisfactory manner. Henry is a funny narrator who is easy to empathize with, which is quite a feat, considering how mid-life crisis stories tend to be depressing. This is a book about coming to terms with one's circumstances, and in its own way, it's fairly uplifting. Russo was an English professor, so you have to wonder how much here is totally fabricated. All in all, a good book and an easy read.